Toronto – Ethereum just finished its most significant upgrade in more than a year, but the milestone comes after a turbulent stretch for blockchain. The price of Ether (ETH) has fallen, developers are migrated to rival platforms, and the Ethereum Foundation – a nonprofit -Steward for the project – has been criticized for a lack of coordination and vision.

When we spoke at a panel at Coindesk’s Consensus Conference in Toronto, Paul Brody – Global Blockchain leader at EY and chairman of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance – and Josh Stark from the Ethereum Foundation offered a more optimistic view of the way in the future.

There are two things that the community is looking for, Stark said. First, “The ecosystem needs stronger management … stronger management on the roadmap, to execute this roadmap and really help coordinate the ecosystem to tackle the major challenges.”

Secondly, the network needs better messages. “Ethereum’s basic elements are incredibly strong, but few people get up to tell the story of the ecosystem and to increase the incredible things that are being built,” Stark said.

For all its recent matches, Stark and Brody maintained that Ethereum remains the most innovative and forward -looking project in crypto.

Brody suggested that concerns about the foundation of the foundation are particularly exaggerated, giving the Ethereum Foundation’s former CEO Aya Miyaguchi, top marks for her tenure, which began in 2018 and ended this year.

“Ethereum is a proof-of-stake chain with more than 120 LAG-2 networks,” Broday said. Network capacity, he added, is near “300 and 450 million transactions a day.” In addition, “Transaction fees at L2 level – they average below a penny per transaction in the last three months,” Brody said. “If I step back and look at [Miyaguchi’s] The period of employment is very objective in terms of the results, I would say a plus. “

Miyaguchi passed to the Ethereum Foundation President in March 2025 and installed Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as its new Co-Executive Director-a part of a leadership structure aimed at improving the strategic focus of the foundation.

Some critics have claimed that Ethereum’s timetable has been dependent on too strong LAG-2-rollups-independent blockchains, which treat transactions cheaply and quickly before “runs” their story of Ethereum’s head chain. Brody defended the network’s Rollup-centric timetable: “I’m very happy,” he said.

While LAG-2s as optimism, Arbitum and Coinbase’s basic network have lowered users’ fees-generally considered the headwind of wider networking skeptics say they also introduce new security risks and fragmentation barriers that threaten Ethereum’s basic value proposition.

“Ethereum is to be Ethereum,” Brody said. “Which is, identify a problem, solve it and move on to the next problem. In terms of the biggest problem we were dealing with in the last few years, it was a scale, not being able to make a million transactions a day to 450 million network capacity is great.”

“All ecosystems will end up with something like an L2 timetable with modularity and specialization,” Stark added. “We are just those who have gone farthest down this path, and we found twists and turns and challenges on that path, and we are dealing with them.”

Ether (ETH), the network’s original token, has long been considered a blue-chip crypto-active. But in recent months it has underpinned compared to some competitors. The network tokens is often considered a power of attorney for the general health of an ecosystem.

Bitcoin, noticed Stark, has successfully placed itself as a reliable value of value, which helps it to weather the market more favorably than Ethereum. “Ethereum has a more complicated tale,” he said.

The city expressed Stark confidence that the market would eventually reflect the deeper value of Ethereum.

“The world will not stop learning about these technologies and these systems,” he said. “The world wants an appetite for a slightly more complicated, but equally real value proposition. And I think we’re starting to see it now. So I think the markets eventually priced. And I think Ethereum is the most important project in crypto and has always been.”