Ethereum is narrative driven. The ICO bubble pumped it up in 2017, it rose massively on the back of the ICO bubble.

Then when people realized ICOs were illegal securities, and everyone started to realize that ETH is not money the way Bitcoin is money, they sold continually, down 95%.

In 2020 when the DeFi bubble ignited because of the crypto whales putting honey pot liquidity into yield farm schemes, it reinvigorated the Ethereum narrative. It rose modestly on the back of DeFi, but most of the gains went to the DeFi coins.

In 2021 after Bitcoin entered a real bull market, that gave the signal to all of the whales & VCs to deploy into Ethereum DeFi. The Ethereum trade became the utility DeFi trade, and then it actually had a double bubble with the NFT narrative boosting it as well, which saved the ETH bull run because DeFi had already popped. Most DeFi coins were down 90% by the time the NFT narrative picked up.

In 2022 we entered a bubble pop situation for most of the defi ponzi schemes like Ohm which were driving big retail volume to ethereum DeFi, but the NFT bubble kept going longer than most of us imagined it would.

From Jan 2022 it became clear the macro environment was not going to sustain the crypto bubble anymore, and after the Terra LUNA ponzi scheme blew up, it represents contagion to the rest of the DeFi yield schemes.

Ethereum value narratives of “DeFi” and “NFT” utility will slowly die off this bear market just like they did last bear market.

I’m sure ETH will get a pump when it does the POS merge but that will be a sell the news event.

I expect ETH to be $500 as people realize:

1) There’s better smart contract chains that are not broken like Ethereum (ETH gas is too expensive, too centralized and MEV is a real problem…if DeFi continues anywhere it should happen on other chains that are faster/cheaper/MEV protected)
2) ETH the asset is not ultrasound money, but it’s the same 2 digit shitcoin in 2022/2023 as it was in 2017 & 2019. ETH does not have the sound money properties of Bitcoin .