• The Ethereum Community Foundation is set up to support the institutional adoption of Ethereum’s infrastructure.
• The multi-year suffering of ETH holders was visible on its price chart against Bitcoin.

A newly launched organization, called the Ethereum Community Foundation, was set up to help the growth of the Ethereum [ETH] ecosystem and drive institutional and government adoption.

In an address at the Ethereum Community Conference in Cannes, France, Zak Cole justified the aim of boosting ETH’s price.

Zak Cole began his speech with a bang.

“Ethereum is the backbone of decentralized finance and stablecoins. It’s the future of monetary premium. The Ethereum Foundation got us here, but strategically, economically, culturally, it’s gone off track.”

Reiterating his point, he continued,

“The gaps are too big to ignore, and we are here to help fix it. We are the Ethereum Community Foundation. We say what the EF can’t, we do what the EF won’t. We serve ETH holders because you deserve better.”

He explained that people were afraid to talk about the price, asserting that they shouldn’t be.

“The ticker is $ETH, that’s the mandate. ETH isn’t an experiment anymore. It settles billions of dollars in stablecoins. It backs sovereign capital, LSTs, DAOs, and treasuries. It is the monetary base layer of the internet…ETH to $10k isn’t a meme. It is a requirement. A benchmark.”

This speech earned praise from crypto investor and entrepreneur Ryan Sean Adams, who called it

“The spiciest presentation I’ve seen from an Ethereum event.”

How is ECF going to achieve its goals?

The ECF will do this by funding credibly neutral, immutable, tokenless infrastructure that drives value to ETH stakeholders.

The ECF will focus on funding infrastructure that burns ETH and will fix the mispriced blob space, keeping with their mandate of driving price appreciation.

As the website succinctly stated,

“The ECF will provide grants to projects that increase ETH burn, contribute to the public goods, advance core infrastructure, and scale Ethereum.”

The ECF’s first initiative will be the “Ethereum Validator Association.” It aims to give Ethereum validators a say in development, using staked ETH to signal their preferences.

Ethereum has the lead in DeFi, but its price has indeed struggled

Ethereum faces sizeable competition for market share from other L1s such as Solana [SOL], Binance Smart Chain [BSC], and TRON [TRX].

In terms of both market capitalization and total value locked for DeFi, Ethereum has a commanding lead. Its TVL share is 55% of the entire market, with Solana the second with 7.55%, according to DefiLlama.

The ETH/BTC chart highlighted the woes Ethereum investors have undergone since 2023. While Bitcoin skyrocketed in value from $16k to $110k, Ethereum had only gone from $1.6k to $2.6k.

This meant that the ETH/BTC chart has been in a downtrend for nearly 30 months now.

Whether the ECF can help change the course of ETH/BTC remains to be seen.

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