The most valuable assets in an economy are often the hardest to price. In the 1990s, the business world misjudged the Internet. This wasn’t a failure of imagination; it was a failure of frameworks. Analysts tried to value the web by tallying up the revenues of companies like AOL and Netscape, missing the deeper significance of the open public infrastructure beneath them. The visible companies were easy to price. The invisible protocols powering them were not.
In those early days, the market could price a modem, but it couldn’t price the ability to send an email to anyone on earth for free.
Today, we are repeating that mistake with Ethereum.
Most investors understand Bitcoin, but they still categorize Ethereum as a cryptocurrency, a tech stock, or merely “one blockchain among many.” In reality, Ethereum is emerging as the next foundational layer of the Internet, this time not for information, but for value. And once again, the market is radically underestimating the utility of a public layer it cannot control.
To understand Ethereum’s economic significance, we must remember what the Internet actually did. It did not invent content or commerce; it created the open, neutral foundation that allowed anyone to build them. Its greatest contribution was permissionless innovation. Ethereum serves the same role, but in the economic realm. It makes value move the way the Internet made information move.
If the Internet produced universal communication, Ethereum produces universal economic coordination.
Quiet Infrastructure Just as no one thinks about TCP/IP when sending an email, few users think about Ethereum when using a stablecoin. Yet Ethereum quietly settles trillions of dollars annually. Stablecoins alone now move value at a volume that rivals traditional payment networks like Visa or Mastercard, and the vast majority of this liquidity relies on Ethereum’s architecture.
This is how network effects take hold: quietly, invisibly, beneath recognizable brands. In the 1990s, investors priced dot-com companies but barely understood the protocols that enabled the digital economy. Ethereum is trapped in this same narrative gap.
The core misunderstanding is simple: Ethereum is not a business. It has no CEO, no revenue maximization strategy, and no shareholders. It functions as a public good, more like a global settlement court or a digital electricity grid than a tech company.
Public infrastructure almost always looks undervalued in its early decades because it generates surplus rather than just revenue. The Internet’s protocols captured almost none of the trillions in value created on top of them. Electricity grids never captured the full value of the industrial economy they powered. Ethereum is the same: it enables far more economic activity than it directly monetizes.
This is why traditional metrics, fees, token price, and transaction counts are such poor indicators of Ethereum’s long-run importance. They measure the toll booth, not the economy.
The Trust Dividend Eventually, economists realized the Internet’s biggest impact wasn’t ad revenue, but consumer surplus, the enormous benefit users gained from open access. Ethereum offers a similar, yet unpriced, benefit: the “Trust Dividend.”
Because Ethereum settles transactions, validates ownership, and enforces agreements transparently and automatically, it collapses operational costs across finance and commerce. Everything from compliance to reconciliation to fraud management becomes cheaper when the underlying ledger is shared, standardized, and verifiable.
Businesses aren’t adopting Ethereum because they want to “use blockchain.” They are adopting it because it lowers friction. It introduces reliability. It reduces counterparty risk. It offers a global settlement environment that no competitor controls and no jurisdiction can unilaterally shut down.
This Trust Dividend,- the removal of the “middleman tax”, is where the real macro-level value lies.
The Settlement Layer for the Machine Age The global economy is becoming more digital, tokenized, and machine-driven. Major financial institutions are issuing tokenized funds, running digital treasuries, and using stablecoins for cross-border settlement. Perhaps most importantly, we are entering the age of AI agents, autonomous software that will need to transact. AI agents cannot open bank accounts. They will use the only permissionless, programmable settlement layer: Ethereum.
Just as the Internet created the conditions for modern communication, Ethereum is creating the conditions for programmable global value exchange. It is not competing with payment apps or banks. It is enabling an entirely new category of economic infrastructure.
It took decades for the world to understand the true value of the Internet’s public protocols. By the time the significance was clear, the transformation was already complete. Ethereum is following a similar trajectory, but with one key difference: this time, the infrastructure itself is investable.
The businesses and institutions that recognize Ethereum not as a speculative asset, but as the Internet’s settlement layer, will be the ones shaping the next era of digital business.
William Mougayar has 4 decades of experience in the tech industry and is the author of The Business Blockchain.
