Ryan and David, the two founders, ended up arguing with each other right from the start. One said that if ETH has no value, Ethereum can’t succeed; the other said that the architectural path linking growth to value hasn’t been fully connected yet. In reality, they’re both asking the same question: can ETH actually capture value? This debate is far more interesting than crypto call-outs.

Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams believes that “being bullish on Ethereum but not on ETH” is a logical contradiction. As a store of value and a core DeFi collateral, ETH is important to the ecosystem; if ETH cannot accumulate value, Ethereum will be hard to succeed. Another co-founder, David Hoffman, said that ETH is not fully equivalent to Ethereum. Ethereum’s architecture has not yet provided a clear path to convert network growth into ETH value, so it can become a global store-of-value asset.