[Digital Today reporter Yoonseo Lee] Ethereum (ETH) has fallen by about 65 percent versus bitcoin (BTC) since the Merge, with some pointing to the Ethereum Foundation’s failure to execute as the reason.

On May 31 (local time), blockchain outlet BeInCrypto reported that Reid, an Ethereum ecosystem participant, recently argued that Ethereum’s weakness was not due to market cycles or price corrections but the result of accumulated product misjudgments and delayed execution.

Reid said he has been involved with Ethereum since the early days of initial coin offerings and continues to develop on Ethereum. He said he also holds Ethereum, stressing that his criticism is not an outside observer’s assessment but an issue raised by a participant inside the ecosystem.

He cited the ETH/BTC ratio as key evidence. The Merge was a major 2022 upgrade that shifted Ethereum from proof-of-work (PoW) mining to proof-of-stake (PoS) validation. The ETH/BTC ratio rose to around 0.085 around the time of the Merge in September that year but fell to around 0.028 by late May. Ethereum is currently trading around $2,000 and is down about 21 percent over the past year.

Reid said the Merge’s core promotional message of a 99.95 percent cut in energy use did not match institutional money or user demand. He said institutions wanted yields, developers wanted faster finality and users wanted cheaper transactions, but Ethereum put more weight on an eco-friendly message than on those demands. Around the same time, Solana put processing speed front and centre.

He also cited the lack of a staking product as a major problem. Reid said one of the biggest issues is that Ethereum still has no native staking app even though 3 years have passed since the Merge. He said the official route is close to a method that requires depositing at least 32 ETH and running a validator directly. As a result, many users moved to Lido, which accounts for about 24 percent of staked ETH even as developers continue to warn about centralisation concerns. Reid criticised the stance of saying, "We don’t pick winners," calling it something an organisation that does not want to compete would say.

He also raised a roadmap issue. Reid said a rollup-centric strategy weakened the revenue base of Ethereum’s base layer. After EIP-4844 was applied in March 2024, blob fees fell to levels close to 1 wei for most of 2024 and 2025. As a result, Ethereum’s quarterly transaction-fee revenue was presented as down about 95 percent from a peak of $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021.

By contrast, layer-2 networks built separate revenue structures, he said. Arbitrum touted margins of 90 to 98 percent from operating its L2, and Base was mentioned as taking about 70 percent of rollup profits as of mid-2025. He also said that as major layer-2 networks issued their own tokens, fund flows within the ecosystem became more dispersed.

Reid contrasted that structure with Solana. He said Solana, through an integrated layer-1 structure, showed fee value accruing directly to the native token. He also said the PoS transition was on the roadmap from 2015 but took 7 years to ship, while Solana rolled out mainnet beta and quickly built wallets, decentralised exchanges and money markets.

Recent posts by Vitalik Buterin (비탈릭 부테린), Ethereum’s co-founder, also came under criticism. Reid said Buterin’s posts in 2024 and 2025 put more emphasis on themes such as pluralism and network states than on a competition-focused stance. He interpreted that less as a culture that responds actively to market competition than as a cultural stance of an already established Ethereum.

A key question going forward is how much the Ethereum Foundation can change product execution speed and strategic direction. Reid said the trajectory of the ETH/BTC ratio over the remaining market cycle would be an indicator to gauge that. The criticism is notable in that it attributed Ethereum’s weakness not to the macro market but to problems in product strategy, revenue structure and channels for capital inflows.

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