Well, these two things happened simultaneously on the same chain.

The on-chain activity of ETH just hit an all-time high.
But the price of ETH has dropped 30% in six months.

CryptoQuant released a weekly report yesterday, and I flipped through it; there are several numbers that are quite counterintuitive.

In February, the daily active addresses of ETH approached 2 million, surpassing the peak of the 2021 bull market. The daily number of smart contract calls exceeded 40 million times, also a historical high. The number of token transfers also set a record.

I guess many people might be thinking: this isn't right. More people are using it than during the bull market, so the price should be soaring.

I looked at the data from 2018 and 2021. In those two cycles, on-chain activity increased, and prices rose almost in sync. This is the market's default causal relationship: more users → high demand → price increase.

But this time, that relationship has broken.
CryptoQuant's scatter analysis directly shows: the current data point falls within the 'high activity + low price' range. The growth in on-chain usage can no longer explain ETH's pricing.

The unexplainable reasons are hidden in the flow of money.
The inflow speed of ETH on exchanges is faster than that of BTC, which means more people are selling. The one-year actual capitalization change rate of ETH has turned negative, in a net outflow state.

But the most outrageous thing is not the price drop, but that ETH hasn't even earned its own ecosystem's money. According to DefiLlama data, ETH's fee income in the past 30 days is about $10.3 million, ranking third, behind Tron and Solana.

Protocol income? $1.22 million, ranking fifth. Its own L2 — Base, has protocol income three times that of ETH's mainnet.

The son earns more than the father. This is the side effect of EIP-4844.

The cheaper L2 is, the more users there are, but the less value the mainnet can capture. ETH has become a chain that is 'less profitable the more prosperous it gets.'

This might be the first time in crypto history: the usage and value capture ability of an asset are moving in completely opposite directions.

The last time a similar decoupling occurred was in early 2019. At that time, ETH was hovering around one to two hundred dollars, with about 1.2 million active addresses on-chain, and the market was completely pessimistic. Everyone knows the subsequent rise.

But the decoupling in 2019 was due to a lag in market sentiment. This time, the decoupling may be real; value is genuinely migrating from L1 to L2.

To be honest, I don't know if ETH is being severely underestimated this time, or if the logic of value capture has truly changed.

However, every time the combination of 'everyone being pessimistic + on-chain data improving' appears, the historical win rate seems to be quite high.

It's not to say that it will definitely rise. It's to say that if you want to bet, the odds are in this direction.$ETH