Bankless co-founders Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman are clashing over one of Ethereum’s biggest open questions: does the network’s success actually need ETH to become a global store of value? Their disagreement comes just weeks after Hoffman publicly sold his ETH while saying he remained bullish on Ethereum itself.
Adams: No Strong Ethereum Without Trillion-Dollar ETH
Ryan Sean Adams argued that being bullish on Ethereum but not ETH is a “mental fallacy.” He said, “There is no strong Ethereum without an ETH worth trillions,” and warned that the network should be seen as “a failed project” if ETH never becomes a global store of value.
Adams frames ETH as money, collateral and “economic bandwidth for DeFi.” He says Ethereum’s economic success should stay tightly linked to ETH’s monetary premium. By tying Ethereum’s fate to ETH’s store‑of‑value role, he puts the project in direct competition with Bitcoin. He sees Bitcoin as the dominant digital reserve asset.
He also rejects the common stance of “bullish Ethereum, not ETH,” and argues that if builders, apps and users can thrive on Ethereum while routing around the token, “something is broken in the design.” For Adams, a world where ETH does not hold a large share of global value would mean Ethereum underdelivered on its promise as a credibly neutral, internet‑native money system.
Hoffman: Ethereum is a “Giver, not Taker”
David Hoffman takes the opposite view. He said he sold his ETH because he no longer expects a big new “ETH is money” rerating, even though he remains “massively bullish” on Ethereum as base infrastructure.
Hoffman argues that Ethereum’s design minimizes explicit value capture at the L1 level and acts as a “giver, not taker” to layer‑2s, stablecoins, apps and tokenization platforms. In his view, the network can keep growing while only a “marginal amount” of that success appears in ETH’s price.
He says no one has yet demonstrated a clear, durable mechanism that tightly links Ethereum’s growth to sustained value accrual for ETH. Instead, he describes Ethereum as a kind of non‑profit protocol where most of the upside accrues to builders on top, leaving “crumbs” for the base asset compared with rivals like Solana or NEAR.
The split between Adams and Hoffman highlights a core risk for ETH holders. Ethereum can keep winning as neutral infrastructure while ETH behaves less like a dominant store of value and more like a utility asset in a crowded, competitive market.
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