What is Ethereum Worth?

This essay revisits John Pfeffer's 2017 paper on native blockchain assets, using Ethereum as the base example, and concludes that ETH is difficult to justify as an investment on a long-term, risk-adjusted basis. The authors say Pfeffer's core thesis largely held, since competition and fragmentation are compressing rent toward zero. They note, however, that Ethereum's lock-in and network effects proved more defensible than Pfeffer expected, with scaling activity such as rollup kits like Conduit, Caldera and Altlayer building on Ethereum rather than forking away from it. The piece adds that Uniswap has been forked 791 times, Compound 142 times and Aave 63 times, citing DeFiLlama.