Ether’s value against Bitcoin has dropped to its lowest point in nearly five years, triggering sharp criticism from some investors who now consider the cryptocurrency a “completely dead” investment. At press time, the ETH/BTC ratio stood at 0.02260, according to TradingView, reflecting Ether’s deepening slide in relative strength.
Ether is also trading at $1,894 — down 5.34 percent over the past week and 17.94 percent in the last 30 days, according to CoinMarketCap data. The decline marks a significant departure from last December, when the token reached $4,000, buoyed by investor hopes of a $10,000 price point by 2025.
Critics Blame Layer-2 Networks and Token Inflation
The downturn has intensified scrutiny of Ethereum’s internal structure. Nic Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures, attributed Ether’s decline to “greedy Eth L2s siphoning value from the L1 and the social consensus that excess token creation was A-OK.” In a March 28 post on X, Carter wrote, “ETH was buried in an avalanche of its own tokens. Died by its own hand.”
His comments were in response to Quinn Thompson, founder of Lekker Capital, who labeled Ether “completely dead” as an investment. “A $225 billion market cap network that is seeing declines in transaction activity, user growth and fees/revenues,” Thompson wrote. “There is no investment case here. As a network with utility? Yes. As an investment? Absolutely not.”
The concerns over layer-2 networks are not new. In September 2024, Ethereum’s fee revenue reportedly collapsed by 99 percent over the preceding six months. The drop was attributed to “extractive L2s,” or layer-2 networks, which pulled users and transactions away from the Ethereum base layer while contributing little back.
Revised Forecasts and Diverging Opinions
Standard Chartered added to bearish sentiment with a March 17 client letter that slashed its end-of-2025 Ether price target from $10,000 to $4,000 — a 60 percent reduction. The bank had originally issued its bullish forecast in the same month that Bitcoin reached $100,000 and Ether hit $4,000.
Some industry voices, however, have pointed to potential solutions. Adam Cochran, partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, said that Based Rollups could reverse the effects of revenue loss to layer-2s by altering Ethereum’s incentive structures. He described the technology as a way to “directly impact the monetization of Ethereum.”
Not all traders are abandoning Ether. Pseudonymous traders like Doctor Profit and Merlijn The Trader continue to describe Ether as the “best opportunity in the market,” despite the recent downturn.
