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Why I’m Still Structurally Bullish On $ETH And Express It Via $sfrxETH

Over the last few months, the market went bloody for most majors and seems to have shifted its full attention into ecosystems like NEAR Protocol or Hyperliquid, which are increasingly framed as the new investment standard for token representing purpose built onchain applications and economies.

Meanwhile, Ethereum has spent most of this cycle totally underperforming price expectations. Even the relative performance versus $BTC and $SOL looks mad, and a growing part of people is saying that Ethereum is not what they thought it would be, the ultimate playing ground, the chain of thriving DeFi and that it makes no sense to hold $ETH anymore because now it’s finally being replaced by these more promising emerging tokens and systems.

But still, as purpose ecosystems gain huge traction, the title of dominance is still owned by Ethereum in most categories.
Especially as the largest and most battletested venue for DeFi protocols, the chain also provides settlement for the majority of all stablecoins that exist today.

•$USDT (Tether): ~$58B
•$USDC (Circle): ~$38B
•$DAI (Sky): ~$5–6B
•$frxUSD (Frax Finance): ~$128M

Besides the fact that a massive amount of collateral and security still ties back, even if it gets abstracted away through rollups and other layers, the basis in most cases is still Ethereum.

And historically, when an asset this fundamentally important and so tightly tied into the system is getting dragged down this much, it doesn’t usually resolve by disappearing; it resolves by the price catching up.

From that perspective, the thesis becomes almost boring in its simplicity.
Ethereum is still the place where capital goes when size matters, when the time horizon is genuinely longterm, and when trust assumptions or counterparty risk are actually evaluated.

If you believe that stablecoins continue to scale, that onchain finance keeps getting more serious, and that increasing pools of capital will keep moving onchain over time, then you also have to ask where those flows ultimately want to settle.

At the same time, we’re moving into a world where AI systems and agents start to interact with value onchain, and where privacy isn’t an afterthought for most participants anymore.
Ethereum is one of the few places where serious work on verifiable AI coordination (agents that can settle and interact onchain) and on privacy via zero‑knowledge tech happens directly on top of the main existing economic hub, instead of being outsourced to some side feature.
That doesn’t mean privacy is “solved” on Ethereum today, it’s not, most activity is still transparent, but it means the core research, standards, and infra for private or semi private onchain activity and for AI native flows are being built around the same settlement layer that already secures the majority of DeFi and stablecoins.

So the real question isn’t whether Ethereum is still relevant. It’s whether the market is currently underpricing just how important it still is.

Holding idle ETH captures this potential growth but leaves opportunity on the table, because it ignores the yield generated through staking, which at the same time helps securing the system.

That’s why sfrxETH makes sense, you hold a claim on liquid staked ETH that compounds inbuild over time.
At around 2.96% right now, you maintain exposure to the asset, and your position grows as the Ethereum network continues to operate.

But remember, this adds another layer of risk, smart contract risk, protocol risk in dependency on Frax Finance. That may not be a big deal, since Frax is completely battle tested so far and has never been exploited or hacked, but it is still another layer of risk.

In short, the idea is, that the economic center of crypto hasn’t actually moved.
It’s been mocked and treated like crap, sometimes very deserved, but if Ethereum’s role becomes more clearly recognized again, the upside could be just historical.