How cheapETH will stay cheap

First, a goku1997 original poem about speculators:

one day speculator will buy all the air
not to breathe, only for hodl
and everyone will suffocate
and finally speculator will be sad


Bitcoin is a speculative asset. It has value far exceeding its actual use, and in that respect is like gold. It's making about 8M in transaction fees per day, which translates to $3B in revenue per year. It has a market cap around $1000B, giving bitcoin a revenue multiple of 333x, clearly a speculative asset.

For Ethereum, it is less clear. The average transaction fee is $21.41, and it's doing 1.3M tx/day, giving a total of about $10B in revenue per year. With a market cap of 226B, it's trading at a much more respectable 23x revenue multiple, on par with a company still in a growth stage, which Ethereum certainly is.

So what's the problem?


The problem comes in with the amount of money to be made on speculation. I argue that most of that 10B in revenue isn't true value being created by the Ethereum chain, but rather a zero sum game of speculators driving the price of transactions up.

And these speculators are moving around huge amounts of money, so to them, the transaction fees are quite cheap. The transaction fees on Ethereum do not scale with the amount of money moved, where if there was a way to apply different amounts of security to them, they should.

That's where cheapETH comes in. It's just as capable of doing all the same compute and contract operations, but it's not capable of securing all the value. It's a home for fast in and out high value, lower value, or no value transactions. We estimate 99% of the Ethereum transactions require nowhere near the security of the entire Ethereum blockchain, yet they all pay for it and get it every time. cheapETH lets you not pay for it if you don't need it.

The crowning jewel will be the bridge, with the L2 to L1 bridge secured by a governance token on L1. Token holders will charge fees for using the bridge. Once it launches, its market cap will show how collateralized cheapETH is. Before the token launch, cheapETH relies on miners just like Ethereum, and there's already a budding economy trading cheapETH at about 1/10th of the soft peg 1/1000 ETH price.

As for the price of cheapETH itself, if it's below 1/1000 ETH, great, it's super cheap and we are happy! Cheap we aren't worried about, only expensive. The "cheap ethereum foundation" will apply downward pressure if it greatly exceeds 1/1000 ETH. cheapETH is not a speculative asset, it's a place to do compute with 0.1% of mainnet Ethereum's security, which is still way more security than almost everything needs.

It's also a great place to learn and play around with the Ethereum ecosystem, without the insane prices of the mainnet, but without the boringness of the testnet. 


In conclusion, cheapETH is not for hodling, it's for using. If you want safer and better exposure to the price of cheapETH, just hodl ETH.

cheapETH is a place for compute, not for value.
cheapETH is for utility, not speculation.