The average Fortune 500 internal software upgrade probably has more real revenue on the line than an Ethereum update.
Imagine that this update fails and Ethereum goes down. Who’s going to actually notice? Traders on exchanges like Coinbase or Binance wouldn’t be affected. The price would crash, sure, but their actual trades aren’t on Ethereum. Crypto is all about perception of decentralization. It’s a story, not a product.
But for the record, there's more than $100B in USD-backed (cash and equivalents-backed) assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Plus billions of dollars worth of on-chain organizations and applications that exist (Uniswap, Aave, Compound, GMX, etc). More than $28B moves on chain every day: https://money-movers.info/
This is a common crypto talking point but it makes no sense.
Companies are regularly acquired at a premium to their market cap, often in cash. For instance, Elon Musk signed an agreement to pay $44 billion to take Twitter private. Assuming the deal goes through, every single shareholder of Twitter is going to receive cash in exchange for their shares.
There's no such process for cryptocurrencies. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to acquire every instance of a coin. Coins don't pay dividends. They don't represent any kind of underlying assets. It's just weird to pretend that they have a market cap in the same sense as stocks.
Would you apply same reasoning to NASDAQ stocks? Or Gold market cap?
The old chain will continue to exist anyways because some people dislike Proof of Stake.
