Why should I continue to hold ETH after a 40% drop in 2026?

Thoughts on ETH

Lately, I’ve been seriously contemplating ETH—why do I hold it? Do I want to keep holding it? Why do I believe it has value?

From friends and colleagues, I’ve heard three main perspectives on ETH:

• “Bitcoin +” — a store of value against currency devaluation, but “better” because:
  • It can deflate when needed, inflate when necessary
  • It has native programmability, enabling use without relying on third parties
• “System Equity” — ETH is like a stock in a decentralized computing platform: more users → higher demand for block space → higher fees + more ETH burned → greater scarcity
• “Digital Oil” — a commodity view that sits between the first two

These perspectives are not mutually exclusive; they are just different angles on the same thing.

My view relates to them but is slightly different: ETH is a cyberpunk currency, and cyberpunk is reflected in the current environment.

Cyberpunk vs. Crypto-Punk: Why This Distinction Matters Now

In works like Neuromancer or Cyberpunk 2077, currency is less a moral concept and more a “routing tool”: credit chains, corporate accounts, street cash, social capital—value flows through channels that are not fully monitored by any system. The real power lies with those who can complete transactions under pressure.

Money is everywhere, but the key question is: when big corporate systems turn against you, can you still transact? Identity verification, access rights, executing trades, exiting markets—all boil down to one question: can your transactions be confirmed, settled, and recognized as valid?

This is the correct perspective for understanding Ethereum.

ETH is not narrowly “crypto-punk currency” (like ZCash, which emphasizes privacy). It is a cyberpunk currency: in a world that is both adversarial and interdependent, it is an anonymous credential.

The crypto space has long had a false dichotomy: either you build liberating tech to oppose institutions, or you build enterprise infrastructure—“betraying the ideals.” Reality is more complex and interesting:

• Large companies are building and using crypto rails—they are already doing so
• Crypto pathways bypass rigidity, exploitation, and censorship

Crypto-punk is a product of cryptography: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, resisting centralization through mathematical tools. It essentially excludes “corporate actors” because companies are reluctant to trade in fully unregulated spaces.

Cyberpunk, on the other hand, is broader and more inclusive: it involves system hacking at the boundaries of institutions—blending technology, law, finance, identity, social engineering. Here, style is strategy, and rules are written in code and smart contracts. Companies can operate here because compliance, enforcement, and accountability are possible, but “outlaws” can also exist—making cyberpunk a universe where all participants can interact freely, connect, and subvert.

Ethereum’s positioning is here: building protocols that allow conflicting institutions to operate together, while preserving true exit rights and property rights for anyone who can sign and pay. Using ETH as currency in that “city of the future”—that’s cyberpunk.

ETH as a Cyberpunk Currency

The value proposition of ETH as “currency” is often simplified into a “digital gold” narrative, trying to persuade Bitcoin holders and gold enthusiasts. But they are already fully convinced by BTC or gold and won’t switch to ETH.

BTC and gold themselves do not “carry” anything—they are memecoins, hedges against fiat inflation and central bank policies. Personally, I believe that in the new deflationary normal brought by AI and robotics, this hedge will become less relevant.

The vision of ETH as a cyberpunk currency is grander and more immediately appealing because ETH always transmits exercisable “system rights” within the Ethereum network. ETH is tightly bound to smart contract environments, enabling “trustless” commerce, which sustains its value even in a deflationary environment because:

• It is backed by real economic fundamentals
• In an increasingly extreme, tech-dominated society, both enterprises and individuals need an “economic autonomous zone”

ETH’s Fundamentals

Under proof-of-stake, ETH is not just a “representative” of value; it is a resource used to buy the ability to have your transactions executed, included in the blockchain, and participate in consensus:

• With Ethereum’s Hegota upgrade including FOCIL, paying ETH at current market rates guarantees your transaction will be included in a block and executed
• 32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware can activate a validator to propose/attest blocks and (roughly) vote on protocol upgrades

These network powers within the protocol are ETH’s fundamentals. In practice, they are enforced by explicit state transition functions and penalty mechanisms.

This is also why PoS better supports a cyberpunk currency than PoW:

• ETH grants native operational rights within the protocol: staking is a threshold, and staked assets can be penalized or slashed
• BTC relies on scarcity and durability supported by belief; mining requires specialized ASIC hardware, which has no intrinsic link to ownership, and block inclusion is basically a bribe market without protocol-level guarantees

A deeper difference: negative contracts. Because staked assets can be slashed and ASICs cannot, PoS chains can enforce bans via protocol—PoW cannot:

• You cannot “equivocate” on fork choices without penalty
• You cannot be offline too long without penalty
• You cannot censor without penalty

A true social contract involves both “what should be done” and “what should not be done.” PoS can encode both with enforcement; PoW mainly encodes “what should be done” and hopes economic incentives align. If not, look at the Bitcoin community’s debate over BIP-101, where they argue about punishing miners who include “spam.”

ETH can be a good currency because its monetary properties are not based on Ponzi economics or Lindy effects of a fixed supply, but on systemic “property rights”: the ability to buy execution/inclusion rights, participate in the system, and be recognized as a first-class citizen in the core protocol—all reflected in the ETH asset.

Ethereum’s Value Cycle: Utility → Security → Trustless Neutrality → More Utility

Ethereum operates in a cycle that is both economic and constitutional:

• Exercisable rights → broad participation: low hardware barriers and permissionless staking make security reliant on widespread participation
• Participation → usage and demand: trusted settlement attracts developers, users, high-value use cases; demand for execution manifests as demand for ETH (fees, collateral, settlement)
• Usage → fees: the system prices scarce block resources in ETH
• Fees → validator rewards + burns: fees go to validators; high usage tightens supply via fee burns
• Rewards + burns → ETH demand: ETH becomes an asset linked to yields and security, with scarcity increasing with usage
• ETH demand/price → network security: PoS security is proportional to staking value and cost of attack
• Security → trustless neutrality: the harder it is to compromise consensus, the more credible the rule enforcement
• Trustless neutrality → value and complex logic migration: important assets and serious contracts flow to the most resilient settlement layer, feeding back into usage

If any link breaks, the entire argument weakens. Ethereum’s design ensures these links stay tightly connected within a true circular economy.

Maintaining Trustless Neutrality in a Corporate-Driven World

This is the turning point for cyberpunk: you should expect powerful institutions—exchanges, brokers, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, even governments and quasi-government entities—to emerge. They will build rails, optimize their incentives, sometimes coordinate, sometimes coerce, sometimes coerce others.

The question isn’t “Will companies use Ethereum?”—they already are. The real question is:

Is there any company—or alliance—that can tilt the system to put everyone else in a structurally subordinate position?

This is what “trustless neutrality” in a cyberpunk framework is actually about. It’s not about moral purity but engineering constraints:

• A trustless neutral base layer enables interoperability among adversarial participants
• Without trustless neutrality, the strongest players will eventually dominate through policy, censorship, or subtle market structures

Ultimately, this points to blockchain’s superpower: greatly increasing societal scalability.

Ethereum becomes the only real “no special channels” economic zone, allowing counterparties to engage in large-scale commerce with low trust and minimal legal recourse.

Containment and Censorship Resistance: Foundations of Digital Property Rights

Property requires enforceable rights. If you “own” an asset but cannot transfer, exit, collateralize, or revoke it under pressure, you do not truly own it.

On blockchain, this enforcement boils down to:

Can you, at will and for a reasonable price, get a valid transaction included in history within a limited time?

This is why censorship resistance is key to property rights. It’s also why Ethereum research continually pushes to strengthen inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions—like FOCIL (fork choice with enforced inclusion list), explicitly reducing potential censorship freedom.

Speed alone cannot solve censorship. The key variables are:

• Distribution of block production power
• Protocol incentives/penalties
• Clear inclusion mechanisms when under threat

If enterprise stacks can blacklist you at the settlement layer, then that “currency” is fake. ETH’s valuation depends on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.

Ethereum as a Programmable Legal Foundation: The Powerful Computing Public Domain

A useful mental model: think of Ethereum as a programmable legal foundation—a reliable computing commons even when participants are adversarial.

This introduces a new primitive:

• Deploying code that represents or enforces protocols, markets, registries, rights
• Committing to execute according to protocol rules, not platform operator preferences

In other words: making commitments that are harder to break than those of ordinary institutions, even if the breaching party is wealthy, experienced, and willing to litigate forever.

You pay for this with system-native assets: ETH.

ETH is cyberpunk currency because it is a blend of:

• Computing credit
• Performance collateral
• Neutral jurisdiction member token

The importance of the cyberpunk framework is that we are building a world that is not an “infinite garden.” It is the boundary layer between old and new regimes, where law and code mesh like mismatched gears. Ethereum’s advantage is its resistance to change, making it a shared foundational architecture.

L2 Scaling: Don’t Let the Plot Deviate

Rollups are necessary. The roadmap centered on rollups is rational: keep L1 slow enough to maintain decentralization and verifiability, and extend execution via L2 that inherits L1 security.

But the cyberpunk risk is clear: L2 could become corporate fiefdoms:

• Centralized sequencers could censor or reorder transactions at the user level
• Token economics could shift value away from ETH
• Alternative data availability solutions could reduce economic coupling with L1

Therefore, future ETH-backed rollups should:

• L2 activity must pay settlement/data fees to L1 proportionally to usage (so ETH burns/revenue stay coupled to adoption)
• L2 neutrality must converge over time to L1 neutrality (decentralized sequencing, trusted exit, minimal governance attack surface)
• ETH remains a gravitational asset—fees, collateral, staking/deposits, inevitable exchange paths

If L2 can maintain economic coupling and inherit neutrality, they benefit ETH. Otherwise, they become fragmentation engines: lots of activity, value drained, guarantees weakened.

In cyberpunk terms: corporate complexes can exist—but they must not quietly override the settlement constitution.

Tokenized Assets: Crypto-Native Assets and Blockchain Theater

Tokenization only truly strengthens ETH’s narrative when it becomes crypto-native property, not just tokens with admin keys and termination clauses.

The dividing line is simple:

• Is the chain’s state transition function itself an authoritative transfer mechanism (or just a trigger that traditional institutions must follow)?
• Or is the token merely a UI pointer to an off-chain registry that can be ignored when inconvenient?

If Ethereum is to become a key settlement layer for important assets, it needs:

• On-chain events regarded as decisive (or at least presumptively authoritative)
• Execution minimized to objective cryptographic standards
• Human/legal interventions narrow, explicit, and for handling exceptions—not routine discretionary control

Ethereum’s inclusion guarantees again come into play. The validity of tokenized rights depends on your ability to exercise them under pressure. We need cyberpunk tokenization protocols on Ethereum.

Conclusion: ETH as a Cyberpunk Currency

Crypto-punk has given crypto its moral core: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But Ethereum’s real-world stage is cyberpunk: corporations and new powers coexist on the same track, opposing yet interdependent, each creatively wielding technology and attempting to tilt the system.

In that world, currency is not just a store of value. It is:

• An execution credential
• A settlement resource
• A security tool
• A primitive for property enforcement

So, “ETH as a cyberpunk currency” ultimately hinges on a constitutional settlement argument: if Ethereum maintains trustless neutrality, trustless inclusivity, and keeps its economic coupling with layer 2s, then ETH’s value is not just because people believe in it.

Its value lies in being the only scarce credential in the entire tech stack that neither corporations nor new powers can control or manipulate.