5/29/26 Roundup: The Quiet Funeral of the Native Token

This week David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless and one of Ethereum's most visible advocates, sold all his ETH and wrote a careful case for it. He was writing about Ethereum. His admission exposes the whole altcoin complex, and the value-accrual story that was always marketing.

Below we unpack why the rotation never ends, why TradFi is absorbing the rails while leaving the ethos behind, why centralization wins the jobs these networks were sold to do, and why it all points back to the one asset that was never part of the argument. Followed by our standard Chart, Quote, and Podcasts of the Week.

The Quiet Funeral of the Native Token

Every so often a "crypto believer" walks to the edge of the same admission and stops short. David Hoffman is the latest. The Bankless co-founder spent nearly nine years building a career and a public identity on Ethereum, and on May 26 he published a careful case for selling his ETH, "Why I Sold My ETH."

What he gave up was narrow. He still believes a public-chain token can capture its network's value. He has only decided that ETH is not the one that will. So he turns to the tokens he thinks capture it better, Solana and NEAR and the chains priced on fees and burns, convinced there is a contest to win and that Ethereum lost it. The contest is the fiction. That is the part he has not reached.

Look at what capturing value means for the tokens Hoffman now prefers. A token priced on the fees its chain collects is equity on throughput. It moves with how much the chain gets used, the way a share price moves with a company's results, but there is no company underneath and no claim on earnings. It trades as if those things existed anyway. Ethereum giving its value to its ecosystem and Solana keeping more of its own ultimately come to the same conclusion. Neither coin is money. Hoffman wrote an essay refining his position inside a premise that was never true.