Ethereum (ETH), which has reclaimed the $3,000 mark for 2026, is the real story. The true story lies in the radical technological and philosophical transformation of the platform.

The network finally reached the "holy-grail" of scalability after the activation of Fusaka on December 3, 2025. PeerDAS, or Peer Data Availability Samples (Peer Data Availability), has enabled Layer-2 networks scale exponentially while not congesting mainnet. Ethereum is now the global financial settlement layer with high speed.

On January 2, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, released a 2026 “manifesto”, framing Ethereum's "rebellion" as an "opposition" to the increasingly centralized internet.

He said that the network was evolving from a blockchain to a "civilizational architecture" that can resist censorship and interference by third parties. This shift is reflected in the 2026 roadmap, which promises two major hard forks annually--Glamsterdam and Hegota--to accelerate the transition to "statelessness" via Verkle Trees.

Despite a 40% drop from the all-time August 2025 high, institutional "whales", like Bitmine, are aggressively accumulating. They added over 44,000 ETH just in the last seven days.

Technical analysts agree that Ethereum's move towards Enshrined Proposer/Builder Separation will solve the centralizing forces of MEV (Maximal extractable value), and solidify its position as the most decentralized computer in the world.

Ethereum's integrated rollup system will support 100,000 transactions per second by the end of 2026. This will make traditional banking rails redundant.