Ethereum is a network for running programs, not just recording payments. Anyone can write a smart contract, a small program stored on the network that carries out an agreement automatically once its conditions are met, and once it is deployed, no one, including Ethereum's own creators, can change how it behaves. Nearly every major decentralized finance product, stablecoin, and NFT marketplace in crypto runs as a smart contract sitting on top of Ethereum. Ethereum itself is the settlement layer underneath all of it, not any one of those applications.

Ethereum has been running continuously since 2015, longer than all but one other network in existence. In 2022 it completed a change called the Merge, switching from proof of work, where miners burn electricity to compete for the right to process transactions, to proof of stake, where validators lock up ETH instead and take turns processing transactions based on how much they have staked. The core software that runs the network, go-ethereum, is open source and actively maintained, with 51,072 people having starred the project and 21,931 having copied it to build on.

What this page assesses is ETH, the token, not the technology underneath it. Ethereum's original 2014 design document describes a proof-of-work network and does not mention any of what it runs on today, so nothing about current, everyday mechanics comes from it. Every current-state fact on this page instead traces to a short public summary of the network, not to Ethereum's own detailed documentation, which is a real limit stated plainly rather than papered over.

Every action on Ethereum, sending a payment, trading on an exchange, minting an NFT, costs a fee paid in ETH. That fee is called gas, and it exists to stop the network from being flooded with free transactions that would otherwise slow it down for everyone.

That fee splits into two pieces. Part of it, called the base fee, is destroyed the moment it's paid, permanently removed from existence. The rest, a tip, goes to the validator who processed the transaction. Validators are required to lock up ETH as collateral before they're allowed to do this work, and that locked ETH is what they stand to lose if they try to cheat the system, which is what makes proof of stake secure.

Both of these give ETH a real reason to exist that has nothing to do with anyone hoping its price goes up: it is destroyed by simply using the network, and it is the collateral that keeps the network honest.

Over the most recent twelve months, people paid $227,120,447 in fees to use Ethereum. That number is unusually solid: it is measured with complete, gapless daily data for the entire year, not estimated or partially covered the way many networks in this assessment are.

Every one of those dollars went to one of two places, and the split is exact to the cent. $76,410,251, about a third, was burned: destroyed the instant it was paid, benefiting no one directly but permanently shrinking the total amount of ETH that will ever exist, which very slightly increases the value of every ETH still around. The remaining $150,710,196, about two-thirds, went to the validators who did the work of processing those transactions and keeping the network running.

Zero dollars, at any point in Ethereum's eleven-year history, have gone to a company, a foundation, or anyone with a name on a checking account. There is no protocol treasury collecting a cut. This is not a claim from Ethereum's marketing. It is measured directly, at every time horizon this data covers, and it comes to exactly zero every time.

Divide Ethereum's yearly fee income by its market value and the result is a take rate, a measure of how much of the economic activity happening on top of a network the network itself actually charges for. Ethereum's comes to somewhere between 0.047% and 0.094%, depending on whether the last three months or the last twelve are used.

For comparison, an app store typically takes fifteen to thirty percent of what happens on it. An advertising platform takes close to all of it. Even other blockchain networks, whose fees already tend to run far lower than either of those, typically take somewhere between one and two and a half percent. Ethereum sits one to two orders of magnitude below even that low bar.

A network that charges almost nothing for what it does is not necessarily one that earns almost nothing overall; a very small percentage of a very large amount of activity can still add up. But on the specific question of how much Ethereum itself extracts from every dollar that moves through it, the honest answer is: very little.

Ethereum's fee record goes back to within days of the network's own launch in 2015, one of the longest continuous records of any project this framework has assessed. Across that entire history, people have paid $20,561,660,813 in fees. Only about 1.1% of that total, the $227,120,447 already described above, arrived in the past year.

That is not a sign of decline so much as a sign of scale: Ethereum's heaviest period of fee activity happened years ago, during a period of intense speculative trading and NFT activity in late 2021, when a single month's fees briefly exceeded what many networks earn in several years combined. Activity since then has settled to a much smaller, steadier level.

That does mean today's fee income is well below Ethereum's own historical peak. Whether that reflects Ethereum losing relevance, activity migrating to cheaper networks built on top of it, or simply the end of an unusually speculative period, this pack does not say, and this page does not guess.

Ethereum's market value, the price of every ETH in existence multiplied together, is $241,664,474,820. Its fees, annualised from the most recent three months, come to $114,229,637.56 a year.

Divide one by the other and Ethereum is priced at roughly 2,116 times its current yearly fee income. That is a real gap between price and earnings, and it is worth being direct about: a project trading at over two thousand times what it earns is priced on what it might become, not on what it currently takes in. For comparison, a wireless network project this framework has previously used as its example of an extreme, speculative valuation traded at roughly 87,000 times its own fees. Ethereum's multiple is about forty times smaller than that, clearly on the same side of reasonable rather than at the extreme, but it is not a business valued like one earning what it currently earns either.

This comparison leaves real things out. It does not price the ETH that validators are newly paid for securing the network, which is a cost to no one but also isn't counted as revenue here. It does not price activity happening on the many smaller networks built to run on top of Ethereum and settle back to it, which this pack has no data on at all. And the two numbers being compared are measured about twelve weeks apart, so the comparison is closer to a snapshot than a single clean measurement.

Unlike some other networks, Ethereum has never had a maximum supply. New ETH is created continuously to pay validators for securing the network, and burned continuously through the fee mechanism described earlier; which force wins in a given period determines whether the total amount of ETH is slowly growing or slowly shrinking. Some data providers publish a projected supply figure for a future date, but that number is a model of where supply might land under current conditions, not a hard ceiling anyone has committed to.

What has already been allocated is fixed and finished. Of all the ETH that exists, 47% was sold to the public in Ethereum's original 2014 crowd sale, and 37.3% was paid out as mining rewards to the people who secured the network under the old proof-of-work system, both effectively public in the sense that anyone could participate. The remaining 15.7% split between Ethereum's founding organisation, the Ethereum Foundation, at 9.3%, early contributors to the project at 4.7%, and 1.7% paid out as staking rewards since the move to proof of stake. Combined, the closest thing to an insider share here is about 14%, against 47% that went to the public.

There are 277 recorded token-release events tied to this allocation, and every single one has already happened. Nothing remains scheduled, and nothing remains pending. Whatever ETH exists today that is not already circulating is not waiting on some future unlock date; it is simply new issuance still to come, the same ongoing process that has been running since genesis.

Beyond the base network, a much larger set of applications runs on top of Ethereum: lending platforms, exchanges, stablecoins, and every other kind of financial product this ecosystem is known for. The total value of the crypto held inside those applications is one common way of judging how much active use they're getting.

At its peak, those applications held $107,449,681,996 worth of funds. Today, that figure stands at $41,774,272,576, a fall of about sixty-one percent from the peak.

This does not mean Ethereum itself is failing at what it does. The network continued processing transactions and earning fees the entire time, as the previous sections show. It does mean the layer of financial activity built on top of Ethereum has, so far, not held onto the scale it once had, in the same way that a shopping mall can keep its lights on and its rent collected even while several of its stores are smaller than they used to be.

Nobody owns Ethereum, and no single company decides what happens to it. The network is maintained by validators, tens of thousands of independent participants around the world who have each staked ETH and taken on the job of processing transactions in exchange for a share of the rewards described earlier. Removing or replacing any one of them does not stop the network; it keeps running as long as enough of the rest keep participating.

That said, "no one owns it" is not the same as "risk is evenly spread." Validators run one of a small number of different software programs to do their job, and if too many of them end up running the same one, a bug in that one program could affect a dangerously large share of the network at once. How concentrated that risk actually is right now could not be pinned down for this assessment; see what could not be answered, at the end of this page.