The author once wrote an article titled “Wealth Effect Severely Lost, Can Ethereum Survive the ‘Midlife Crisis’?” detailing the huge challenges faced by Ethereum in this cycle, such as lack of innovation, loss of direction, and an oversized team, which have led to severe criticism from the community. Vitalik has also been pulled down from his pedestal and has been criticized harshly. However, after extreme pessimism, the market welcomed a rebound. In April this year, ETH rose from 1400 USD to nearly 2800 USD.

Is the fundamentals of Ethereum getting better? What noteworthy changes have been happening recently with Ethereum, which has been heavily criticized?

Ethereum spot ETF continues to see net inflows

Once upon a time, Ethereum spot ETFs were in a long-term state of net outflow. However, since April 22 of this year, market funds have been continuously flowing in. As of June 5, there was only a seven-day net outflow, with the rest being net inflows. There were even four days with a single-day net inflow exceeding 90 million dollars, and a single-day net inflow exceeding 60 million dollars occurred seven times.

SoSoValue data shows that the cumulative net inflow of Ethereum spot ETFs in the United States has risen to $3.23 billion, and there is still no sign of a slowdown.

Negotiating cooperation based on Ethereum with major sovereign wealth funds.

Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensys, stated on Tuesday that his company is negotiating with the “major sovereign wealth funds and banks” of a “very powerful” country regarding potential developments based on Ethereum, involving layer one and layer two infrastructure. However, the details of the collaboration have not yet been disclosed, and the market’s reaction to this news is primarily based on expectations. If this news is ultimately confirmed and announced, it will undoubtedly play an important role in boosting market confidence.

In addition, Consensys served as the lead investor in SharpLink Gaming’s $425 million financing, and Joseph Lubin will serve as chairman of the SharpLink board after this round of financing is completed.

Bitcoin has a strategy of continuously accumulating, and then more companies follow suit, driving strong buying pressure on the coin price. Ethereum should have companies to drive purchasing power.

As a Nasdaq-listed company, SharpLink plans to use the proceeds from this financing to purchase Ethereum’s native asset ETH and will use it as a primary treasury reserve asset.

According to Bloomberg, Joe Lubin stated that about six months ago, under the influence of the most prominent advocates of digital asset accumulation, he decided to establish a company to invest in Ethereum’s native token. “I was having dinner with Michael Saylor at the time, doing some research, and started discussing with colleagues how cool this idea was,” said Lubin, founder and CEO of the Ethereum software infrastructure company Consensys, in an interview. “No one in our company had delved deeply into this direction before. Later, we found that this strategy seemed to have no particularly dangerous aspects.”

Ethereum Foundation lays off staff and cuts operating expenses

The Ethereum Foundation has been criticized for its bloated team. On June 3, the foundation finally took action to lay off some employees and restructure its research and development team, renaming it “Protocol” to focus on the core challenges of protocol design. This adjustment aims to address the ongoing criticism from the community regarding the foundation’s management and strategic direction. The foundation stated that the restructured Protocol team will work on three key priorities: expanding the scalability of the Ethereum underlying network, advancing blobspace expansion in data availability strategies, and improving user experience.

The foundation mentioned in the announcement that “some members of the R&D team will no longer continue to stay,” and encouraged other teams to absorb these talents. The number of layoffs was not disclosed. In addition, the foundation stated that the restructured team will be committed to improving the transparency of the upgrade timeline, technical documentation, and research. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Weng stated on social media X that he hopes the new structure can drive core projects forward more efficiently.

However, some have pointed out that key issues remain unresolved. Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani commented on Twitter, saying, “Please note that the definition of the word focus usually means less, not more, especially when the goals should not conflict with each other. But when we look at it from the perspective of Goal 3 (i.e., L1 and L2 network scalability, improving user experience), Goal 1 (i.e., layoffs) is contradictory to Goal 2 (i.e., clear division of responsibilities).”

The Ethereum Foundation announced a new financial management policy in June 2025, aimed at ensuring long-term financial sustainability. According to the official blog, the Foundation has set its annual operating expenses to not exceed 15% of total assets, with plans to gradually reduce this to 5% over the next five years. Additionally, the Foundation will maintain a 2.5-year operating expense buffer and regularly assess whether to sell ETH to replenish fiat reserves. This policy reflects the Foundation’s prudent approach to its treasury management, especially in a market environment with significant ETH price fluctuations.

The foundation also emphasizes that on-chain funds will only be deployed in audited, decentralized DeFi protocols, focusing on low-risk strategies such as staking and lending. This initiative not only reduces capital risk but also resonates with the Ethereum “Defipunk” principles and the concept of privacy protection.

In the past, the Ethereum Foundation’s actions of selling coins often drew dissatisfaction from the community after being monitored and reported. Now, the Foundation has finally chosen to adopt a more prudent approach to respond to expenditure issues. These measures indicate that the Foundation is laying the groundwork for the long-term development of Ethereum by cutting operational costs and optimizing resource allocation, while also providing a sense of reassurance to the market in terms of alleviating selling pressure.

Gas limit adjusted to 60 million

Recently, Ebunker tweeted that with 15% validator support, Ethereum is expected to raise the block Gas limit to 60 million. The higher the Gas limit, the more transactions the block can process, and the network speed will also improve accordingly. Among the many scaling paths, increasing the Gas Limit can be said to be the most immediate way. Moreover, increasing the Gas Limit does not require system upgrades or code modifications; as long as PoS nodes continuously “signal” support during block production, it can promote the network to gradually adopt this change.

Although Ethereum has historically scaled through L2 and Rollups, it has also generated significant problems. “L2 greatly weakens ETH value capture, easily leading to a situation of feudal lords competing for power,” said Pi Ma, the founder of Continue Capital, in a voice conversation.

Scaling the mainnet has become imperative. At the ETHGlobal Prague conference, Vitalik stated that Ethereum will increase its L1 scale by about 10 times within a year, and then “take a breather” before the next leap.

Ethereum’s current TPS peak has been raised to about 60, and it will be interesting to see how much further Ethereum will improve.

Summary

Ethereum is currently undergoing a period of multiple transformations in technology, finance, and ecology. The financial reform and R&D restructuring of the foundation lay the groundwork for its long-term development, while the collaboration between Consensys and sovereign wealth funds indicates a new role for Ethereum in global finance. Adjustments to Gas limits and the inflow of ETF funds inject vitality into network efficiency and market momentum.

Despite short-term selling pressures and cost disputes, Ethereum’s technological advantages and institutional backing still give it a leading position in the crypto market. In the future, Ethereum needs to continue to focus on technical optimization and community governance to meet the challenges posed by competitors like Solana. 10x Research recently analyzed ETH’s performance and stated, “Although we anticipated a pullback a few days ago, the actual trend is much more resilient than expected. From a technical standpoint, Ethereum is approaching the apex of a large triangular consolidation structure, with the eventual breakout direction potentially pushing the price towards $2000 or $3000. This trend will be very critical and may be triggered by changes in fundamentals or simply the entry of a large buyer.”

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