Ethereum’s Real Crisis Isn’t Tech—It’s Terrible PR (And Wall Street’s Laughing)
Ethereum's devs keep shipping upgrades—but the narrative is stuck in 2021. While Solana memecoins and Bitcoin ETFs hog headlines, the smart contract pioneer battles FUD with... more GitHub commits?
The Perception Gap
Vitalik's brainchild processes 30% of all DeFi TVL yet gets framed as 'slow' and 'expensive.' Never mind that L2s now handle transactions for pocket change. The chain that birthed NFTs can't even claim credit for the current bull run.
Marketing Failures 101
Meanwhile, VC-backed chains throw yacht parties for crypto influencers. Ethereum Foundation? Posts another technical explainer even devs skim. The 'ultrasound money' meme died faster than a metaverse startup's funding.
Wall Street's Silent Treatment
Goldman Sachs just launched a 'Blockchain Infrastructure' ETF—zero ETH holdings. Because nothing says 'institutional adoption' like getting snubbed by the same suits pushing tokenized RWAs on your own network.
Wake up, Ethereum. The tech works. Now hire someone who knows what a press release is before Coinbase lists your irrelevance as a tokenized asset.
All tech is media now
The protocols that are winning right now aren’t necessarily better; they’re just louder and more media-friendly. Solana (SOL) turned memecoins into a cultural movement, and Avalanche (AVAX) did a better job selling Wall Street partnerships than Wall Street did.
Ethereum, meanwhile, dropped the Merge, one of the most significant infrastructure upgrades in tech history, and explained it to the world with an animated panda video. For anyone outside the bubble, it looked like cosplay.
There was no front-page op-ed about how Ethereum went from energy guzzler to 99.95% greener overnight. No mass education campaign to show climate-conscious investors that this was the greenest money on the internet. The headlines we could have owned got swallowed by NFTs and energy FUD a year earlier, and no one followed up.
Impact is still trapped in dev land
Let’s talk about the use cases that never make it to the front page. In Nigeria, freelancers routinely get paid in USD Coin (USDC) on Ethereum because local banking restrictions make PayPal and Wise unusable.
In Turkey, during last year’s inflation spiral, Ethereum-based stablecoins helped families preserve purchasing power when the lira collapsed.
In Ukraine, DAO-based crowdfunding provided life-saving support to civilians and frontline medics.
In Palestine, journalists from Gaza have used Ethereum wallets to receive donations after traditional payment rails were cut off. Those stories are real and urgent, but they are terrible at marketing themselves.
What are we going to do about it?
Trust in centralized institutions is eroding globally. Inflation is no longer a “developing world” problem as censorship, surveillance, and frozen bank accounts are now dinner-table issues in democracies. This is a prime moment for Ethereum to communicate what it’s capable of to address those issues.
The task at hand is not as difficult as it may seem. We don’t need to convince the world of the ideology behind crypto; we just need to show them that Ethereum works. People need to understand that Ethereum is essentially a neutral LAYER for financial dignity, one that doesn’t care about your passport.
But to do that, we need to stop acting like the whitepaper publishing is going to do the job. Ethereum needs to own the narrative, building a pipeline of documentary-style content. Partnering with storytellers who don’t speak Solidity and highlighting community devs in Manila and Nairobi, not just San Francisco.
A new communications layer
Ethereum has scaled computation and is in the process of scaling throughput. Now, it needs to scale the belief that it works when people’s bank doesn’t.
To become accessible as a concept, Ethereum needs to adopt storytelling as infrastructure as resilient as the chain itself, one that amplifies the truth of what’s already happening on the ground.
Ethereum is no longer an idea. It’s becoming a lifeline for many, solving real-world problems. It deserves a voice that can carry beyond the echo chamber.
Pauline Shangett serves as the chief strategy officer at ChangeNOW, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange platform seeing $1 billion volumes per month. Since joining the crypto space in early 2018, Pauline has been instrumental in driving ChangeNOW’s platform strategy and fostering its growth within the blockchain community.
