Ethereum turns 11 — cheaper and busier than ever, with one big question about its coin

Ethereum, the second-largest crypto network, turned 11 on July 30, the anniversary of the day its very first block came online back in 2015. It now holds about $149 billion in dollar-pegged stablecoins and settles ordinary transactions for pennies. But its birthday arrived with an awkward question hanging over it: as the network gets cheaper and more useful, does its own coin, ETH, still capture that value?

Ethereum launched as a blockchain you could program, not just send money on. Over its first decade it survived an early hack crisis, switched in 2022 to a far more energy-efficient design known as the Merge, and became the main home for stablecoins, lending apps, and tokenized real-world assets. In short, a lot of crypto activity now lives on or around it.

Here is the twist. Fees have collapsed — the typical transaction on Ethereum's main chain fell from more than $2 to under two cents between 2024 and early 2026, and fees on the faster "layer-2" networks built on top of it dropped by more than 95%. Cheaper transactions make the network far more usable. But they also shrink the fees that get permanently destroyed, or "burned," a mechanism that had supported the popular idea of ETH as "ultrasound money" — a coin whose supply barely grows.

Co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said plainly that Ethereum must make sure ETH keeps accruing value "even in an L2-heavy world," where most activity happens on side-networks that only settle back to the main chain occasionally. His proposed fixes lean on ETH becoming the main form of collateral and money across all those layers. The Ethereum Foundation, which cut 54 jobs in June as it reorganized, is meanwhile pushing to raise how much the network can handle.

For a beginner, the useful lesson is that a busy, cheap network and a valuable coin are not automatically the same thing. Ethereum's next chapter is a genuine experiment in whether the two rise together or drift apart. None of this is a reason to buy or sell anything — it is a clear window into how these systems actually make money, or fail to, which is worth understanding before you judge any token by its price alone.