Ethereum’s New Valuation: Why It’s Becoming the World’s Digital Public Utility

Forget the price charts. Ethereum's real story isn't on the trading floor—it's in its quiet evolution into global infrastructure.

### The Public Good Paradigm Shift

Analysts and traditional valuation models are scrambling. They're built for companies, not for a borderless, open-source protocol that no single entity controls. How do you value a digital highway? A global settlement layer? The math gets fuzzy when the asset is also the foundation.

### Bypassing the Old Guard

This shift cuts to the heart of finance. Ethereum doesn't ask for permission. It bypasses legacy gatekeepers—the banks, the clearinghouses, the slow-moving institutions that take their cut. Value moves peer-to-peer, code-enforced, 24/7. It's a system that works while Wall Street sleeps.

### The Cynic's Corner

Of course, the old guard isn't thrilled. Watch traditional finance try to slap a familiar 'stock-like' valuation on it anyway—a comforting but fundamentally flawed exercise, like valuing the internet based on Cisco's router sales in 1995.

The bottom line? Ethereum's value is becoming intrinsic, woven into the fabric of how the world coordinates and transacts. It's not just an asset you hold; it's a system you build upon. And that changes everything.

From Information Protocol to Value Protocol

Mougayar’s report also draws a layered comparison between the Internet and Ethereum.

While the Internet operates primarily as an information protocol, Ethereum is increasingly emerging as a value protocol—a neutral settlement LAYER upon which large-scale economic systems can be built.

At the base level, both operate as public goods, allowing global participation without exclusion. Higher layers, however, support private goods, institutional applications, and commercial activity.

This layered architecture helps explain why Ethereum’s systemic importance cannot be measured solely by transaction throughput or fee revenue.

A New Framework for Valuing Ethereum

To address this gap, the report also introduces a three-part framework for valuing Ethereum as a public good: captured value, FLOW value, and trust surplus.

Captured value reflects traditional financial metrics such as fees and token economics. Flow value measures Ethereum’s broader economic contribution across decentralized applications, financial markets, and institutional use cases.

Trust surplus—the most novel component—captures the economic value generated by reducing friction across global transactions, writes Mougayar.

The Trust Dividend Compounding Globally

According to the Ethereum thread, trust surplus emerges through “reduced settlement friction, reduced verification cost, reduced counterparty risk, reduced fraud, and reduced reconciliation overhead.”

This “trust dividend,” as described in the report, compounds over time as more users and institutions rely on the network. Importantly, this reframing shifts Ethereum’s competitive environment.

Rather than competing directly with other blockchains, Ethereum is “competing with the status quo of global coordination.”

Competing With the Status Quo, Not Other Chains

Just as the Internet reorganized information flows, Ethereum is reorganizing how value moves, settles, and is trusted across borders. As a result, the report argues Ethereum’s long-term strength lies not in maximizing short-term revenue or raw transaction speed, but in enabling trust minimization, economic settlement, and institutional adoption at a global scale.

“If you want to understand Ethereum’s value to the world,” the Ethereum account wrote, “look at dependency, flows, and trust minimization. That’s where public-good value accrues.”