Ethereum’s outlook has been improving its case. After a prolonged period of underperformance and skepticism, the network is starting to exhibit signs of renewed structural and fundamental strength. While BTC continues to anchor the market as the primary store of value and digital gold, conditions are emerging that could allow ETH to outperform BTC over the coming period. Why The Ethereum Narrative Is Gaining Strength Ethereum has been seen outperforming Bitcoin. In a recent post on X, Walter Bloomberg revealed that Standard Chartered says that the ETH outlook has improved, and now ETH might outperform BTC, citing rising institutional demand and stronger fundamental positioning across key on-chain sectors. Related Reading: Altcoin Season In Q1? Bitcoin, Ethereum Breakdown Maps Out Performance While weakness in BTC has weighed on the broader crypto market, ETH has continued to benefit from institutional-driven demand, and its dominance in stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi), and real-world assets (RWA) tokenization. Standard Chartered also points to the increased throughput and potential US regulatory clarity that it could provide additional upside. In terms of valuation, the bank forecasts ETH at $7,500 this year and $30,000 by 2029, reflecting the expectations of sustained network growth. The Co-founder of PinkBrains_io, a DeFi Creator Studio, DefiIgnas, has highlighted that Ethereum could outperform Bitcoin this year, and the reason is roadmap execution. While BTC will likely keep facing recurring waves of quantum FUD into 2026, ETH has a clear roadmap to prepare for future cryptographic risks. Furthermore, ETH is actually scaling. Gas limits on layer 1 keep rising, and zkEVMs will get full production readiness, making ETH cheap and fast enough for high-value transactions, while layer 2s will handle most of the trading and high-frequency activity. Related Reading: Bitcoin And Ethereum Market Structure Points To Crypto Winter – Details These upgrades are incremental, which means there’s no breaking news moment for ETH, but progress is happening fast. Early in the cycle, a lot of Degens loaded up on ETH before the bull run, but many got disillusioned and sold their ETH for BTC. “It would be fun to see the playbook reverse higher,” DefiIgnas noted. A Different Liquidity Cycle Than Previous Bull Markets Crypto liquidity quality witnessed a change in 2025. A technical analyst and show host of Crypto Banter, Kyledoops, reported that Wintermute noted that capital in 2025 stopped rotating broadly across the market. Instead, liquidity is concentrated into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a small group of large-cap tokens. As a result, the long-anticipated wave of altcoin-wide liquidity never really arrived. Meanwhile, the rise of spot ETFs and crypto treasury vehicles created a new, highly structured inflow channel that funneled flow into the top of the market. These vehicles break the crypto’s oldest playbooks. Price action is no longer driven by broad market expansion. It’s driven by where new liquidity can actually enter. Featured image from iStock, chart from Tradingview.com
In an era marked by rising inflation, Bitcoin was framed as a radical experiment in digital cash. However, as the global economic landscape has shifted, the narrative around BTC has changed. It is now being discussed as a modern savings tool designed for a world where traditional savings are steadily losing their purchasing power. Normalisation Of Bitcoin As A Savings Asset A common framing of Bitcoin today is that it is a savings technology, digital gold, and something to hold, rather than use. According to Ben SAN’s post on X, that framing has become incomplete and ultimately wrong. This is because BTC is not meant to sit alongside fiat as another savings vehicle, but to replace fiat as a monetary base and a financial base that cannot be used or function as money. Related Reading: Bitcoin Supply Is Being Absorbed By Powerful Financial Players — What This Means However, for BTC to operate as a form of finance, it has to be usable at scale. That usability at scale implies execution, settlement abstraction, fast interactions, and cost-efficient transactions. BTC layer 1 is designed for finality and neutrality, not to satisfy these requirements, and it shouldn’t be. This is why BTC needs layer 2s to operate as money. “Once you accept that Bitcoin needs L2s to be usable as money, you stop asking whether alts are competing with Bitcoin and start asking whether they are serving Bitcoin,” the expert stated. If acceptance of altcoins is ever possible in the BTC-first community, it won’t come from alternative monetary assets. Instead, the acceptance of the altcoins will only come from systems that keep BTC as the unit of account and native asset, while extending its usability crucially without weakening its guarantees. In these cases, auxiliary tokens may be introduced, but only where BTC is structurally incapable of performing the required coordination or incentive functions around expressiveness and yield. Furthermore, any non-BTC asset that has a legitimate chance of being accepted within the community will earn that legitimacy by filling those gaps in a way BTC itself cannot fulfill. History Shows What Happens After These Bitcoin Buys Crypto analyst Mattertrades highlighted that Bitcoin is trading above the weekly resistance, and the path is slow and clear. This setup is a result of Michael Saylor stepping in this week with his largest purchase since July, acquiring $1.5 billion worth of BTC. The last time he did this, BTC surged to $126,000. Related Reading: Bitcoin Demand Remains Weak: Setting The Stage For Long-Term Accumulation At the same time, the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI)-related news for Strategy was very bullish, and it actually attracted more buyers. Mattertrades concluded that this is how a bullish case quietly forms. If Saylor’s purchases bring in more buyers, reflexivity will begin because when he starts accumulating such large amounts again, other players will follow suit. Featured image from Getty Images, chart from Tradingview.com
CoinDesk sat down with Robinhood’s head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, to get an update on its upcoming layer-2 network, its tokenized stocks program, and its staking offerings.
Downtime can have knock-on effects across decentralized finance and other onchain applications.
In a recent report, the data aggregator CoinGecko has unveiled the leading crypto narratives of the year, with the Real-World Asset (RWA) sector emerging as a major contender with notable returns RWAs Lead Crypto Market Growth The report highlights that RWA has become the standout narrative in 2025, boasting an impressive average price return of 185.8% year-to-date (YTD) across key tokens, such as Figure Heloc, Chainlink (LINK), Stellar (XLM), Tether Gold (XAUT), and BlackRock’s BUIDL. This surge in the RWA sector can largely be attributed to the performance of specific platforms. Notably, Keeta Network has skyrocketed by 1,794.9% YTD, while Zebec Network and Maple Finance have recorded gains of 217.3% and 123.0% respectively. Related Reading: Bitcoin Correction Timeline: Analyst Predicts Potential Bottom In October 2026 Current statistics show that the crypto RWA sector boasts a Distributed Asset Value of $18.88 billion, reflecting a 2.56% increase over the past month. However, the Represented Asset Value has seen a slight decline, standing at $407.93 billion, down 2.36%. For context, RWA’s approach facilitates asset managers and projects the digital transformation of tangible assets, such as real estate and commodities, creating a solid foundation for trading, managing, and securing these assets. Layer-1 (L1) solutions have emerged as the second most profitable narrative this year, achieving an average price gain of 80.3% YTD. The success of this narrative can be attributed to the performance of privacy-focused blockchains such as Zcash and Monero, which have seen rallies of 691.3% and 143.6%, respectively. Another noteworthy crypto narrative, “Made in USA,” is also on track to end the year positively, with average gains of 30.6% YTD, primarily driven by Zcash’s performance that mitigated the moderate losses of other tokens in that category. Top Meme Tokens Suffer Heavy Losses Despite their popularity, narratives such as memecoins and artificial intelligence (AI) have struggled this year, with average returns of -31.6% and -50.2% year-to-date, respectively. Leading memecoins in the crypto space, such as Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), have demonstrated the volatility of this sector by suffering significant losses of over 60% year-to-date. Similarly, the report notes that many artificial intelligence-focused crypto assets have recorded declines between 49.8% and 84.3%, with only Alchemist AI and Kite performing relatively better. Related Reading: Ethereum Fails To Surpass $3,000: Predictions For The Final Days Of The Year Lastly, the decentralized finance narrative faced a challenging year, experiencing average returns of -34.8%, which is consistent with the returns seen in the memecoins segment. The decentralized exchange (DEX) narrative has mirrored this decline with average losses of -55.5%, while layer-2 (L2) solutions have also struggled, recording average returns of -40.6% for the second year in a row. At the time of writing, the market’s leading crypto, Bitcoin (BTC), was trading at $88,960, having recorded losses of 10% year-to-date. Featured image from DALL-E, chart from TradingView.com
The company framed the move, happening in early 2026, as a planned sunset.
At the center of the upgrade is PeerDAS, a system that lets validators check small slices of data rather than entire “blobs,” reducing both costs and computational load for validators and layer-2 networks.
The goal of the upgrade is to enable Ethereum to handle the large transaction throughput from the layer-2 chains that use the blockchain as their base layer.
Two traders captured more than $1.3 million in profits by exploiting Base’s new “flashblocks” system during the debut of the network founder’s creator coin.
Dromos Labs announced a major overhaul of its decentralized exchange infrastructure with the launch of Aero, a unified trading system that will merge its existing platforms across its networks.
The move comes as RISE’s acquired BSX Labs, a perp DEX on layer-2 Base, whose technology will underpin RISE’s new global markets offering.
Also: Monad Tokenomics Unveiled, Anchorage Dabbles in BTC DeFi and Injective’s Native EVM.
The proposal, called “UNIfication,” would activate protocol fees, burn millions of UNI tokens and consolidate the project’s key teams under a single strategy.
The creator behind the layer-2 has unveiled a proposal to transform its $ZK token from a governance instrument into a token with real economic utility.
The move kicks off the countdown to Ethereum’s second hard fork of 2025.
As part of the partnership, Mythical will build Mythos Chain, the first layer-3 blockchain atop World Chain, the layer-2 network built on top of Ethereum.
The high-speed Ethereum layer-2 drew nearly nine times its target as over 14,000 investors rushed in.
Also: BOB Unveils BTC Vault Liquidation Engine, Ledger’s Major Overhaul and Google Weighs In on Quantum Computing.
The October AWS outage took down some of crypto’s most prominent companies and networks. Many in the community pointed out their lack of decentralization.
CoinDesk sat down with Monad Foundation’s Head of Growth Kevin McCordic to talk about the architecture behind the blockchain.
Also: Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade on Holesky, DoubleZero Goes Live and Bee Maps Raises $42M.
Fusaka – a blend of the names Fulu and Osaka – consists of two simultaneous upgrades to Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers, respectively.
The exchange’s new token launchpad lets users create and trade tokens in minutes, expanding the ecosystem around Gate Layer, its recently launched OP Stack–based blockchain.
The on-chain ecosystem of Ethereum has recently been rocked by a wave of scams and rug pulls, creating a period that many are describing as a bloodbath. While the underlying technology of the ETH blockchain remains robust and secure, the sheer volume of malicious projects and deceptive schemes is taking a significant toll on retail investor confidence. Is Ethereum Still The Home Of DeFi Innovation? The Ethereum on-chain ecosystem has been plagued by scams and rug pulls, resulting in significant financial losses and, more importantly, a decline in retail investor confidence. Analyst known as Fat Tony on X has expressed deep frustration that BOOE hasn’t gotten more support from Ethereum’s own community, possibly due to the wave of malicious acts on the ETH ecosystem. Related Reading: Bitcoin Weakness Vs. Ethereum Strength: On-Chain Data Reveals Divergence He highlighted the Book of Ethereum (BOOE) as an exemplary project that embodies what ETH is supposed to stand for and distinguishes itself through several key characteristics. No Paid KOLs as the project has not relied on paid crypto influencers for promotion, which is a common tactic used by fraudulent projects to pump their tokens. With a resilient community, BOOE has built its foundation on a strong and organic community, a sign of a project with genuine, grassroots support. A generous team, which he praises for its generosity and ethical approach, stands in stark contrast to the greed of scam artists. Furthermore, Tony notes that numerous high-profile ETH founders and accounts are interacting with the project, which, in his view, is becoming expected at this point. Thus, he encourages the ETH community to support BOOE, which actually stands for something, and to move away from a speculative mindset of max extraction with zero vision. How The ETH Ecosystem Must Fight Back While scams and rug pulls are eroding retail confidence, investor Sassal0x, founder of Thedailygwei, has also revealed a scathing critique of Ethereum’s competitor chains, accusing them of engaging in a desperate strategy of lawfare to stifle the growth of ETH’s Layer 2 solutions. In his view, this is not a sign of strength but a clear admission of weakness. Related Reading: Ethereum At The Core: Where Every Major Crypto Trend Converges According to Sassal0x, the overwhelming adoption of ETH L2s demonstrates their superiority in the free market, a reality that has left competitors with no viable path to challenge ETH’s dominance. The analyst notes that this new, underhanded strategy comes after a long period of failed FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) campaigns. Since misinformation has proven ineffective in slowing down L2 growth, competitors are now resorting to using nation-state governments to kill their competition. As a result, Sassal0x concludes with a powerful call to action for the Ethereum community. Instead of being complacent, the ETH ecosystem must fight back against this as much as we can. Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from Tradingview.com
Ethereum is in the midst of a paradox. Even as ether hit record highs in late August, decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on Ethereum’s layer-1 (L1) looks muted compared to its peak in late 2021. Meanwhile, layer-2 (L2) networks like Arbitrum and Base are booming, with billions in total value locked (TVL).
At the BaseCamp event, Jesse Pollak revealed the Layer 2 network is considering a native token, though plans remain in early stages.
According to EY’s Global Blockchain Leader Paul Brody, only companies that can aggregate significant transaction volume into the network, and whose customers can't make their own direct connection to Ethereum, would benefit from creating their own layer 2.
The project is one of over 30 layer-2 networks working to scale Ethereum.
The initiative marks a strategic pivot: after years spent scaling throughput and lowering costs, the protocol team is now zeroing in on interoperability as the key to user experience.
Linea’s updated roadmap introduces ETH-native staking on bridged assets, a protocol-level ETH burn mechanism, and the allocation of 85% of its token supply to ecosystem development.