Why Continue Holding ETH After a 40% Drop in 2026?

Thoughts on ETH

Lately, I've been seriously thinking about 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 monetary debasement, but "better" because:
• It can be deflationary when needed and inflationary when necessary.
• It has native programmability, allowing use of this currency without relying on third parties.
• "System Equity" — ETH is like the stock of a decentralized computing platform: more users → greater demand for block space → more fees + more ETH burned → higher scarcity.
• "Digital Oil" — A commodity perspective somewhere between the first two.

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

My view is related but slightly different: ETH is cyberpunk money, and the cyberpunk element is present in the current environment.

Cyberpunk vs. Cypherpunk: Why This Distinction Matters Now

In works like *Neuromancer* and *Cyberpunk 2077*, currency is less a moral concept and more a "routing tool": lines of credit, corporate accounts, street cash, favors—value flows through channels that systems cannot fully monitor. The ones who truly have a say are those who can get transactions through under pressure.

"Money" is everywhere, but the real question is: Can you still transact when the corporate system is against you? Identity verification, access, executing trades, exiting markets—all ultimately boil down to one question: Can you still get your transaction confirmed, settled, and recognized as valid?

This is the right lens through which to understand Ethereum.

ETH is not a "cypherpunk currency" in the narrow sense (like ZCash, which focuses on privacy). It is cyberpunk money: a bearer instrument in a world that is both adversarial and interdependent.

There's always been a false dichotomy in crypto: either you're building liberatory technology against institutions, or you're building corporate infrastructure and "betraying the ideal." Reality is more complex and interesting:

• Large corporations will build and use crypto rails; they already are.
• Crypto bypasses rigidity, exploitation, and censorship.

Cypherpunk is a crypto-driven product: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, using mathematical tools to resist centralized control. It essentially excludes the "corporate side" because corporations are unwilling to transact in completely unregulated spaces.

Cyberpunk is broader and more inclusive: system hacking at institutional boundaries—blending technology, law, finance, identity, social engineering, where style is strategy and rules are written in a mix of code and contracts. Corporations can operate here because compliance, enforcement, and accountability are possible, but so can "outlaws"—making cyberpunk a universe where all actors can freely interact, couple, and subvert each other.

This is where Ethereum positions itself: building protocols that allow adversarial institutions to interoperate while preserving genuine exit rights and property rights for anyone who can sign and pay. And using ETH as the currency in that "future city" is cyberpunk.

ETH as Cyberpunk Money

The value proposition of ETH as "money" is often simplified into the "digital gold" narrative, trying to convince 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 don't "carry" anything—they are a memecoin, a hedge against a specific social philosophy of fiat inflation and central banking systems. Personally, I believe this hedge will become increasingly irrelevant in the new deflationary normal brought by AI and robotics.

The vision of ETH as cyberpunk money is grander and more intuitively appealing because ETH always carries exercisable "system rights" within the Ethereum network system. ETH is tightly bound to the smart contract environment, enabling "trustless" commerce, which gives it enduring value even in a deflationary environment because:

• Its value is backed by real economic fundamentals.
• In an increasingly polarized, technocratic society, both corporations and individuals need an "economic autonomous zone."

The Fundamentals of ETH

Under Proof-of-Stake, ETH doesn't just "represent" value; it is the resource used to purchase the ability to have your transaction executed, included in the blockchain, and to participate in consensus:

• With Ethereum's integration of FOCIL in the Hegota upgrade, paying validators ETH at the current market rate guarantees your transaction's inclusion and execution in a block.
• 32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware activates a validator, allowing participation in proposing/proving blocks and (roughly speaking) "voting" on protocol upgrades.

These network powers of ETH within the protocol are its fundamentals. In practice, they are enforced by explicit state transition functions plus slashing mechanisms.

This is also why PoS better supports cyberpunk money than PoW:

• ETH grants you protocol-native operational participation rights: staking is the barrier, and stake can be slashed.
• BTC relies on belief-backed scarcity plus durability; the mining barrier is specialized ASIC hardware, which has no intrinsic link to BTC ownership. Transaction inclusion is essentially a bribery market with no protocol-level inclusion guarantees.

There's another profound difference: negative covenants. Because stake can be slashed while ASICs cannot, PoS chains can protocol-enforce prohibitions, which PoW cannot:

• You cannot equivocate on fork choice, or you get slashed.
• You cannot stay offline too long, or you get slashed.
• You cannot censor, or you get slashed.

A true social contract has both "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not." PoS can encode both with enforcement; PoW mainly encodes "thou shalt" and hopes economic behavior follows. If you don't believe it, look at the Bitcoin community debate over BIP-101, arguing about how to punish miners who include "spam."

ETH can become good money because its monetary properties are not manifested through the Ponzi economics and Lindy effect of a "fixed supply," but through the "property-like rights" generated by the system's intrinsic attributes: the "system right" to purchase execution/inclusion, the "system right" to participate, the "system right" to be treated as a first-class citizen in the base protocol—all embodied in the ETH asset.

The Ethereum Value Cycle: Utility → Security → Credible Neutrality → More Utility

Ethereum has a cycle that is both economic and constitutional:

• Exercisable rights → Broad participation: Low hardware barriers and permissionless staking allow security to come from a wide range of participants.
• Participation → Usage and demand: Credible 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 + burn: Fees go to validators; high usage burns the base fee, tightening supply.
• Rewards + burn → ETH demand: ETH becomes a yield-bearing, security-linked asset, with scarcity intensifying with usage.
• ETH demand/price → Network security: PoS security is proportional to staked value and cost to attack.
• Security → Credible neutrality: The harder it is to break consensus, the more credible the claim that rules apply uniformly.
• Credible neutrality → Migration of value + complex logic: Important assets and serious contracts flow to the settlement layer hardest to subvert, feeding back into usage.

If any link breaks, the entire argument weakens. Ethereum's design lies in keeping these links tightly connected in a genuine circular economy.

Maintaining Credible Neutrality in a Corporate-Dominated World

The cyberpunk twist is here: You should expect powerful institutions to emerge—exchanges, brokerages, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, even governments and quasi-government entities. They will build rails, optimizing for their own incentives. Sometimes coordinating, sometimes coerced, sometimes coercing others.

The question isn't "Will corporations use Ethereum?" They already are. The question is:

Can any single company—or corporate alliance—tilt the system, placing everyone else in a position of structural subordination?

This is what "credible neutrality" actually does within the cyberpunk framework. It's not moral purity; it's an engineering constraint:

• A credibly neutral base layer enables interoperability for adversarial participants.
• If not credibly neutral, the strongest players eventually win through policy, censorship, or subtle market structures.

Ultimately, this points to blockchain's superpower: dramatically increasing social scalability.

Ethereum becomes the one economic zone where you can realistically have "no special access," allowing counterparties to interact commercially at scale with low trust and lack of legal recourse.

Inclusion and Censorship Resistance: The Cornerstone of Digital Property Rights

Property requires enforceable exercise rights. If you "own" an asset but cannot transfer, exit, collateralize, or unwind it under pressure, you don't have true ownership.

On a blockchain, this enforceability boils down to inclusion:

Can you get a valid transaction included in history within a finite time, if you're willing to pay the clearing price?

This is why censorship resistance is key to property rights. It's also why Ethereum research continuously trends towards mechanisms that strengthen inclusion guarantees under adversarial conditions—like FOCIL (Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists), explicitly reducing the degrees of freedom for potential censors.

Speed alone doesn't solve censorship. The key variables are:

• The distribution of block production power.
• Protocol incentives/penalties.
• And explicit inclusion mechanisms when the threat model demands it.

If corporate stacks can blacklist you at the settlement layer, that "money" is fake. ETH's valuation depends on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.

Ethereum as Programmable Legal Infrastructure: A Computational Commons with Powerful Force

A useful mental model: think of Ethereum as programmable legal infrastructure—a computational commons that remains reliable even when participants are adversarial.

This introduces a new institutional primitive:

• Deploy code that represents or enforces protocols, markets, registries, rights.
• Commit to execution following protocol rules, not platform operator preferences.

In other words: the ability to make commitments harder to break than those of ordinary institutions, even if the breaching party is wealthy, sophisticated, and willing to litigate forever.

You pay for this execution with the unique asset natively recognized by the system: ETH.

ETH is cyberpunk money because it is a hybrid of:

• Computational credit.
• Performance collateral.
• A membership credential to a neutral execution jurisdiction.

The cyberpunk framework matters because the world we're building is not an "infinite garden." It's a boundary layer between old and new institutions, where law and code mesh like misaligned gears. Ethereum's advantage is that it is hard to change, thus able to serve as shared foundational infrastructure.

L2 Scaling: Don't Let the Plot Go Off Track

Rollups are necessary. The rollup-centric roadmap is rational: keep L1 slow enough to preserve decentralization and verifiability, scale execution via L2s that inherit L1 security.

But the cyberpunk risk is clear: L2s could become corporate enclaves:

• Centralized sequencers can censor or reorder transactions at the user level.
• Tokenomics can divert value capture away from ETH.
• Alternative data availability choices can reduce economic coupling with L1.

Therefore, an ETH-supportive rollup future should be:

• L2 activity must pay settlement/data fees to L1 in a way that scales with usage (so ETH burn/revenue remains coupled to adoption).
• L2 neutrality must converge over time to L1 neutrality (decentralized sequencing, credible exits, minimized governance attack surface).
• ETH remains the gravitational asset—for fees, collateral, staking/margin, the inevitable exchange path.

If L2s maintain economic coupling and neutrality inheritance, they are net positive for ETH. Otherwise, they are fragmentation engines: lots of activity, value siphoned away, guarantees weakened.

In cyberpunk terms: corporate complexes can exist—but they must not be allowed to quietly overwrite the settlement constitution.

Tokenized Assets: Crypto-Native Assets vs. Blockchain Theater

Tokenization only strengthens the ETH narrative if it becomes crypto-native property, not a tokenized IOU with an admin key and a terms-of-service kill switch.

The dividing line is simple:

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

If Ethereum is to be a settlement layer for significant assets, you need structures where:

• On-chain events are treated as definitive (or at least presumptively authoritative).
• Execution is minimized to objective cryptographic standards.
• Human/legal intervention is narrow, explicit, and for handling exceptions—not routine discretionary control.

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

Conclusion: ETH as Cyberpunk Money

Cypherpunk gave crypto its moral core: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But the real stage Ethereum is building for is cyberpunk: corporations and new powers coexisting on the same rails, adversarial yet interdependent, each creatively using technology, each trying to tilt the system.

In that world, money is more than a store of value. It is:

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

So, "ETH as cyberpunk money" is ultimately an argument about constitutional settlement: if Ethereum remains credibly neutral, credibly inclusive, and economically coupled to its scaling layers, then ETH is valuable not just because people believe in it.

Its value lies in being the one scarce credential in the entire tech stack that no one—neither corporation nor new power—can make others subordinate to.