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What exactly is ETH? Is this a question many people haven't deeply explored? Many people say it is a public chain, a smart contract platform, and a settlement layer. But more and more, I feel these are just functions, not their true value. What truly determines ETH's long-term value may not be how much gas is burned daily or how high TPS it is, but whether it can become the reserve asset of the entire on-chain financial system. Many people have long discussed that L2s have taken gas and application layers have taken profits, so ETH's value capture is getting weaker. I believe these discussions are not wrong, but may still be stuck at the first level. The real question should be: In the future, will the entire on-chain financial system really need to hold ETH? For example. Many people think the US dollar is strong because of SWIFT, Visa, and the Federal Reserve. But what truly supports the dollar's status is not these payment instruments. Instead, global trade, commodities, foreign exchange reserves, and international settlements almost all revolve around the dollar. People hold dollars not for daily transfers, but because the entire financial system needs dollars. Will ETH follow the same logic? If DeFi matures further, RWA is launched on a large scale, stablecoins continue to expand, and more assets are issued, traded, lent, and collateralized on-chain...... What really matters is not how much ETH is consumed daily, but whether more and more people in the entire on-chain financial system must hold ETH. Today, ETH is already the most important collateral asset in many DeFi protocols and the core asset of the entire network security, with a large amount of ETH staked long-term. If on-chain finance continues to expand in the future and ETH remains the core collateral and reserve asset of the entire system, then its value will no longer be limited to Gas, but to the entire on-chain financial ecosystem. Of course, the biggest variable here is precisely here. If DeFi, RWA, and stablecoins become increasingly prosperous in the future, but these values ultimately do not flow back into ETH, or if holding ETH becomes less and less necessary, then today's market valuation of ETH may be reasonable. So I increasingly feel that the future of ETH will not be determined by whose TPS is higher or whose fees are lower. Instead, it's a deeper issue: As on-chain finance grows larger, will ETH become increasingly irreplaceable, or will it become more dispensable? I believe the answer to this question is what truly determines ETH's value over the next decade. $ETH $ETH $BTC