Strange! While everyone is arguing whether $ETH is digital gold or system equity, an overlooked "cyberpunk" narrative is becoming its only moat.

Recently, I have been repeatedly pondering a question: why do I hold $ETH and plan to continue holding it? Market analysis usually offers three explanations: it is a “better $BTC,” a programmable inflation-resistant asset; it is “systemic equity,” whose value grows with network usage; or it is “digital oil,” a functional commodity.

All these views have merit, but they seem to overlook something. My perspective is slightly different: $ETH is cyberpunk currency. This positioning is especially important today.

Cyberpunk differs from cypherpunk. In the world depicted in “Neuromancer,” currency is a “routing tool,” and the core issue is whether you can complete transactions when large corporations exclude you. $ETH is precisely this kind of anonymous credential in such an environment. It’s not a pure privacy tool like ZCash, but a scarce resource that allows enterprises and individuals to operate and retain exit rights in a world of coexistence and dependence.

The crypto space often falls into the misconception that building enterprise-grade infrastructure is a betrayal of decentralization ideals. Reality is more complex: large companies will use cryptographic rails, and the cryptographic pathways will bypass rigidity and censorship. $ETH’s positioning is exactly here—building protocols that enable interoperability even among opposing entities.

Simplifying $ETH’s value proposition to “digital gold” to persuade $BTC holders is futile. $BTC and gold are social philosophical hedges against fiat systems. But in a new deflationary normal driven by AI and robotics, this hedge’s relevance may diminish.

The vision of $ETH as cyberpunk currency is grander. It is deeply tied to smart contract environments, with its value supported by real economic fundamentals: in a society dominated by technology and increasingly extreme, it provides an “economic autonomous zone.” Under proof-of-stake, $ETH is not just a store of value; it is the resource itself.

Paying with $ETH grants you the right to execute and include transactions in blocks. Staking 32 $ETH makes you a validator, participating in network consensus. These native network powers enforced by state transition functions and penalty mechanisms are the fundamental basis of $ETH.

This is also why proof-of-stake better supports cyberpunk currency than proof-of-work. $ETH directly grants native participation rights in the protocol, with staked assets subject to penalties; whereas $BTC’s mining rights are unrelated to coin holdings, and transaction inclusion is more like a bribery market. A key difference is the “passive contract”: PoS chains can protocolically prohibit malicious behavior through penalties, while PoW mainly relies on economic incentives.

Therefore, $ETH can become a good currency not through a “fixed total supply” narrative, but through its inherent system properties that produce a “quasi-property right.” These rights are encapsulated within the $ETH asset.

Ethereum’s value cycle combines economics and constitutionalism. Enforceable rights enable broad participation; low-threshold staking enhances security; trusted neutrality attracts developers and high-value use cases; transaction fees paid in $ETH generate revenue for validators; when usage is high, base fees are burned, tightening supply.

This, in turn, increases demand and security for $ETH as an interest-bearing asset, and stronger security further reinforces trusted neutrality, encouraging migration of more significant assets and complex logic onto it. Any break in this cycle weakens the entire argument.

The key turning point in cyberpunk is the expectation of strong institutional entry. The issue isn’t whether they will use $ETH—they already are. The core question is whether any single entity or alliance can systematically tilt the rules to subordinate others.

This is the engineering significance of “trusted neutrality”: it is a constraint layer that enables interoperable participation among adversarial actors. If the base layer isn’t neutral, the strongest participants will ultimately prevail. Ethereum’s superpower lies in greatly enhancing societal scalability, creating an economic zone where participants can interact at scale without special channels or counterparty trust.

The foundation of property rights is inclusion and resistance to censorship. If you cannot transfer assets under pressure, it’s not true ownership. On blockchain, this boils down to: can you, after paying market price, have your transaction included within a limited time?

Thus, resistance to censorship is critical for digital property rights. Ethereum’s research directions, such as fork-choice rules that enforce inclusion, aim to strengthen inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions, reducing the scope for potential censorship. If enterprise stacks can blacklist you at settlement layers, such “currency” becomes invalid. $ETH’s valuation depends on Ethereum making such blacklisting structurally difficult.

A useful mental model is to see Ethereum as a programmable legal foundation—a reliable compute commons even when participants oppose each other. It introduces new institutional primitives: deploying code to execute protocols that are harder to breach than traditional commitments. The native asset used to pay for this execution is $ETH.

$ETH is cyberpunk currency because it combines three attributes: computational credit, performance collateral, and membership credentials in a neutral jurisdiction. The world we build is not utopian but a boundary layer where old and new systems intersect. Ethereum’s advantage is its resistance to change, making it a shared underlying architecture.

A rollup-centric scaling approach is rational, but carries cyberpunk risks: Layer 2s could become corporate enclaves, with centralized sequencers capable of censorship; tokenomics might drain value from $ETH; alternative data availability solutions could weaken its economic coupling with $ETH.

Therefore, a future-proof $ETH ecosystem should meet these criteria: Layer 2 activity must pay increasing settlement fees to Layer 1; Layer 2 neutrality must converge toward Layer 1 over time; $ETH must maintain its core role as fee, collateral, and inevitable exchange asset.

Tokenized assets only truly reinforce $ETH’s narrative if they become native crypto property, not IOUs that can be frozen by admin keys. The key is whether on-chain state transitions are authoritative transfers. For Ethereum to serve as a settlement layer for major assets, on-chain events must be decisive, execution objective, and human intervention limited to narrow exception handling.

The cypherpunk movement has given the crypto space a moral core: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But the real stage Ethereum is building is cyberpunk: corporations and new powers coexist, oppose, and depend on each other. In that world, currency is not just a store of value.

It is an execution credential, settlement resource, security tool, and property primitive. So, “ETH as cyberpunk currency” ultimately is a constitutional settlement argument: if Ethereum can maintain trusted neutrality, trusted inclusion, and be economically coupled with layer 2s, then $ETH’s value is not just based on faith.

Its value lies in being the only scarce credential in the entire tech stack that neither corporations nor new powers can control.

Follow me for more real-time analysis and insights on crypto markets! $BTC $ETH $SOL

#Celebrating the New Year at Gate Square