Analysis: Ethereum is in a "Narrative Vacuum Period," Institutional Capital and Privacy Models Becoming Key Future Variables

Odaily According to industry insiders, Ethereum is currently in a "gap between narratives." When the market lacks a clear long-term value logic, it tends to price uncertainty first. Over the past few years, the mainstream market narrative has been that scaling primarily occurs on Layer 2, with the mainnet maintaining security, decentralization, and a lean architecture. This path successfully attracted capital and development resources in the past. However, the current market focus is shifting towards zero-knowledge technology and privacy capabilities returning to the base layer, leading to some investors who built valuation models based on the old roadmap experiencing expectation misalignment. Full on-chain transparency presents practical obstacles for institutional capital; large corporate treasuries or funds are unwilling to have their trading strategies tracked in real-time. If Ethereum hopes to attract trillions of dollars in institutional capital, protocol-level privacy capabilities will become a key competitive variable. Furthermore, the expansion of the options market around spot ETFs is also changing Ethereum's price formation mechanism, with the influence of covered call strategies and market maker hedging behavior continuously increasing. (Forbes)