What makes ETH a "Cyberpunk Currency"?

Author: _gabrielShapir0

Translation: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Original Title: “Cyberpunk Currency” — Why Do I Still Hold ETH?

Thoughts on ETH

Lately, I’ve been seriously pondering ETH—why do I hold it? Do I want to keep holding it? Why do I believe it has value?

From friends and colleagues, I’ve heard three main perspectives on ETH:

• “Bitcoin +”: A store of value against currency devaluation, but “better” because:
  • It can deflate when needed, inflate when necessary
  • It has native programmability, usable without relying on third parties
• “System Equity”: ETH is like a stock in a decentralized computing platform: more users → higher demand for block space → higher fees + more ETH burned → greater scarcity
• “Digital Oil”: An asset view between the first two

These perspectives are not mutually exclusive; they are just different angles on the same thing.

My view relates to them but is slightly different: ETH is a cyberpunk currency, and cyberpunk is reflected in the current environment.

Cyberpunk vs. Crypto-Punk: Why This Distinction Matters Now

In works like “Neuromancer” or “Cyberpunk 2077,” currency is less a moral concept and more a “routing tool”: credit chains, corporate accounts, street cash, social favors—value flows through channels that systems cannot fully monitor. Those with real influence are those who can complete transactions under pressure.

Money is everywhere, but the real question is: when big corporate systems are against you, can you still trade? Authentication, access, executing transactions, exiting markets—all boil down to one question: can your transactions be confirmed, settled, and recognized as valid?

This is the correct perspective for understanding Ethereum.

ETH is not narrowly “crypto-punk currency” (like ZCash, focused on privacy). It is a cyberpunk currency: in a world both adversarial and interdependent, it’s an anonymous credential.

The crypto space has long had a false dichotomy: either you build liberating tech against institutions or you build enterprise infrastructure—“betraying the ideals.” Reality is more complex and interesting:

• Large companies are building and using crypto rails—they are already doing so
• Crypto pathways bypass rigidity, exploitation, and censorship

Crypto-punk is a product of encryption-driven innovation: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, resisting centralization with mathematical tools. It largely excludes “corporate actors” because companies are reluctant to trade in fully unregulated domains.

Cyberpunk, on the other hand, is broader and more inclusive: system hacking within institutional boundaries—blending technology, law, finance, identity, social engineering. Style is strategy here; rules are written in code and contracts. Companies can operate because compliance, enforcement, and accountability are possible, but “outlaws” can also exist—making cyberpunk a universe where all participants can freely interact, connect, and subvert.

Ethereum’s positioning is here: building protocols that allow conflicting institutions to operate together, while preserving true exit rights and property rights for anyone who can sign and pay. Using ETH as currency in this “city of the future”—that’s cyberpunk.

ETH as a Cyberpunk Currency

The value proposition of ETH as “currency” is often simplified into a “digital gold” narrative, trying to persuade Bitcoin holders and gold enthusiasts. But they already believe in BTC or gold—they won’t switch to ETH.

BTC and gold themselves do not “carry” anything—they are memecoins, hedges against fiat inflation and central bank policies. Personally, I think in the new deflationary normal brought by AI and robotics, this hedge will become less relevant.

The vision of ETH as a cyberpunk currency is grander and more immediately appealing because ETH always transmits exercisable “system rights” within the Ethereum network. ETH is tightly bound to smart contract environments, enabling “trustless” commerce, which sustains value even in a deflationary context because:

• It is backed by real economic fundamentals
• In an increasingly extreme, tech-dominated society, both enterprises and individuals need an “economic autonomous zone”

Fundamentals of ETH

Under proof-of-stake, ETH is not just a “representative” of value; it is a resource used to buy the ability to have your transactions executed, included in the blockchain, and participate in consensus:

• With Ethereum’s Hegota upgrade adding FOCIL, paying ETH at current market rates guarantees your transaction’s inclusion and execution
• 32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware can activate a validator to propose/attest blocks and roughly “vote” on protocol upgrades

These network powers within the protocol are ETH’s fundamentals. In practice, they are enforced by explicit state transition functions and penalty mechanisms.

This is why PoS better supports a cyberpunk currency than PoW:

• ETH grants native operational rights: staking is a threshold, staked assets can be penalized or slashed
• BTC relies on scarcity and durability supported by belief; mining requires specialized ASIC hardware, which is not intrinsically linked to ownership, and block inclusion is essentially a bribe market without protocol-level guarantees

Another profound difference: negative contracts. Because staked assets can be slashed but ASICs cannot, PoS chains can enforce bans protocol-wise—PoW cannot:

• You cannot “equivocate” on chain splits without penalty
• You cannot be offline too long without penalty
• You cannot censor without penalty

A true social contract involves both “what should be done” and “what should not be done.” PoS can encode both with enforcement; PoW mainly encodes “what should be done” and hopes economic incentives work as intended. If not, look at the Bitcoin community’s debate over BIP-101—discussing how to penalize miners including “spam.”

ETH can be a good currency because its monetary properties are not based on Ponzi economics or Lindy effects of “fixed supply,” but on systemic “quasi-property rights”: the system rights to buy execution/inclusion, participate, and be recognized as a citizen within the core protocol—these are embodied in ETH.

Ethereum’s value cycle: Utility → Security → Trustless Neutrality → More Utility

Ethereum has a cycle that is both economic and constitutional:

• Exercisable rights → Broad participation: low hardware barriers and permissionless staking make security reliant on widespread participation
• Participation → Usage and demand: trusted settlement attracts developers, users, high-value use cases; demand for execution manifests as demand for ETH (fees, collateral, settlement)
• Usage → Fees: the system prices scarce block resources in ETH
• Fees → Validator rewards + burns: fees reward validators; high usage tightens supply via fee burns
• Rewards + burns → ETH demand: ETH becomes an asset tied to yields and security, with scarcity increasing with usage
• ETH demand/price → Network security: PoS security is proportional to staked value and destruction costs
• Security → Trustless neutrality: the harder consensus is to break, the more credible the rule enforcement
• Trustless neutrality → Value and complex logic migration: important assets and serious contracts flow to the hardest-to-attack settlement layer, feeding back into usage

If any link breaks, the entire argument weakens. Ethereum’s design aims to keep these links tightly connected within a true circular economy.

Maintaining Trustless Neutrality in a Corporate-Driven World

The cyberpunk turning point: you should expect powerful institutions—exchanges, brokers, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, even governments and quasi-government entities—to emerge. They will build rails, optimize incentives, sometimes coordinate, sometimes coerce, sometimes coerce others.

The question isn’t “Will corporations use Ethereum?”—they already are. The real question:

Is there any company—or alliance—that can tilt the system to place everyone else in a structurally subordinate position?

This is what “trustless neutrality” in a cyberpunk framework is actually doing. It’s not about moral purity but engineering constraints:

• A trustless foundational layer enables interoperability among adversarial participants
• Without trustless neutrality, the strongest players will eventually dominate through policy, censorship, or subtle market structures

Ultimately, this points to blockchain’s superpower: greatly increasing societal scalability.

Ethereum becomes the only real “no special channels” economic zone, allowing counterparties to engage in large-scale commerce with low trust and limited legal recourse.

Inclusion and Censorship Resistance: The Cornerstone of Digital Property Rights

Property needs enforceable rights. If you “own” an asset but cannot transfer, exit, mortgage, or de-pledge it under pressure, you don’t truly own it.

On blockchain, this enforcement boils down to inclusion:

Can you get an effective transaction included in history within a limited time if you’re willing to pay the settlement price?

That’s why censorship resistance is key to property rights. It’s also why Ethereum research increasingly focuses on mechanisms that strengthen inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions—like FOCIL (fork-choice enforced inclusion list), explicitly reducing potential censors’ freedom.

Speed alone cannot solve censorship. The key variables are:

• Distribution of block production power
• Protocol incentives and penalties
• Clear inclusion mechanisms when under threat

If enterprise stacks can blacklist you at the settlement layer, then this “currency” is fake. ETH’s valuation depends on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.

Ethereum as a Programmable Legal Foundation: The Powerful Computing Public Domain

A useful mental model: view Ethereum as a programmable legal foundation—a reliable computing commons even when participants are adversarial.

This introduces a new set of institutional primitives:

• Deploy code representing or executing protocols, markets, registries, rights
• Commit to executing according to protocol rules, not platform operator preferences

In other words: make commitments that are harder to breach than those of ordinary institutions—even if the breacher is wealthy, experienced, and willing to litigate forever.

You pay for this execution with system-native assets: ETH.

ETH is a cyberpunk currency because it is a blend of:

• Computing credit
• Performance collateral
• Neutral jurisdiction member token

The importance of the cyberpunk framework is that we are building not an “infinite garden” but a boundary layer between old and new regimes, where law and code interlock like mismatched gears. Ethereum’s advantage is its resistance to change, making it a shared foundational architecture.

L2 Scaling: Don’t Let the Plot Go Off-Track

Rollups are necessary. A rollup-centric roadmap is rational: keep L1 slow enough to maintain decentralization and verifiability, and extend execution via L2 that inherits L1 security.

But the cyberpunk risk is clear: L2s could become corporate enclaves:

• Centralized sequencers could censor or reorder user transactions
• Token economics could shift value away from ETH
• Alternative data availability solutions could reduce economic coupling with L1

Therefore, future ETH-supported rollups should:

• Require L2 activity to pay settlement/data fees proportional to usage (so ETH burns/revenue are coupled with adoption)
• Converge L2 neutrality toward L1 neutrality over time (decentralized sequencing, credible exit, minimal governance attack surface)
• Maintain ETH as a gravitational asset—fees, collateral, staking, and inevitable exchange pathways

If L2s can keep economic coupling and inherit neutrality, they benefit ETH. Otherwise, they become fragmentation engines—lots of activity, value drained, guarantees weakened.

In cyberpunk terms: corporate complexes can exist—but they must not quietly override the settlement constitution.

Tokenized Assets: Native Crypto Assets and Blockchain Theater

Tokenization only truly strengthens ETH’s narrative if it becomes crypto-native property, not just tokens with admin keys and termination clauses.

The boundary is simple:

• Is the chain’s state transition function itself an authoritative transfer mechanism (or just a UI pointer to an off-chain registry that can be ignored when inconvenient)?
• Or is the token merely a pointer to an off-chain registry that can be disregarded under pressure?

For Ethereum to serve as a settlement layer for important assets, it needs:

• On-chain events regarded as decisive (or at least presumptively authoritative)
• Execution minimized to objective cryptographic standards
• Human/legal interventions narrow, explicit, and exception-handling—not routine discretionary control

Ethereum’s inclusion guarantees again come into play. The validity of tokenized rights depends on your ability to exercise them under pressure. We need cyberpunk tokenization protocols on Ethereum.

Conclusion: ETH as a Cyberpunk Currency

Crypto-punk ideology gave us privacy, autonomy, resistance. But Ethereum’s real-world stage is cyberpunk: corporations and new powers coexist on the same track, opposing yet interdependent, each creatively deploying technology, each trying to tilt the system.

In that world, currency is not just a store of value. It’s:

• An execution credential
• A settlement resource
• A security tool
• A primitive for property enforcement

So, “ETH as a cyberpunk currency” ultimately hinges on a constitutional argument: if Ethereum maintains trustless neutrality, trustless inclusiveness, and remains economically coupled with its layer-2 extensions, then ETH’s value is not just because people believe in it.

Its value lies in being the only scarce credential in the entire tech stack that no one—neither corporations nor new powers—can control.