Source: Ethereum is the trustware to power a digital world economy

Organized & Compiled by: LenaXin, ChainCatcher

Every financial transaction contains an element of trust. Ethereum's digital trust enables the digitization of vast assets, capital, and financial transactions, significantly enhancing the efficiency of the global financial system, allowing everyone from institutions to businesses to consumers to benefit.

On July 30, Ethereum celebrated its tenth anniversary. On this occasion, Consensys released the report "The Industrialization of Trust," which outlines Ethereum's investment case and the emerging technology category of "Trustware." "Trustware" is an infrastructure that industrializes the production of trust, allowing trust to be encoded in the form of digital goods.

Consensys's research and analysis indicate that Ethereum has become the dominant blockchain platform, supporting over 50% of non-Bitcoin digital assets, including 60% of stablecoins, 60% of decentralized finance capital, and 80% of tokenized "real-world assets," such as stocks, money market funds, and bonds.

Ethereum's Breakthrough: Digital Trust and Trustware

Trustware is an infrastructure that upgrades the simulated concept of trust—such as notes and ledgers verified by human agents and auditors, guaranteed by human insurance companies and regulatory bodies—to an equivalent digital trust concept that can be generated algorithmically.

For centuries, human civilization has relied on various forms of trust infrastructure, from tribal kinship to large institutions like governments, insurance companies, auditing firms, and legal systems. While these systems have facilitated cooperation and economic growth, the costs have been exorbitant. It is estimated that humans spend over $9 trillion annually on trust-related aspects, including insurance ($8 trillion), legal systems (over $1 trillion), and auditing ($290 billion). This massive expenditure highlights a fundamental issue: the current trust models cannot effectively scale in the digital age. They are analog—slower, more expensive, and more fragmented than the always-online, highly automated, and rapidly evolving digital economy that relies on them.

Trustware imbues ordinary data with the essential qualities of trust: validity and finality. Validity ensures the consistency and correctness of data, possessing mathematical certainty. Finality guarantees the permanence of data, making it nearly impossible to alter without incurring significant costs.

Ethereum allows these attributes to be added to data in a scalable manner, without ongoing human intervention, achieving trust at near-zero marginal costs. In this way, with its powerful public network and groundbreaking cryptoeconomic algorithms capable of generating digital trust, Ethereum significantly enhances the speed, cost, security, and scale of financial transaction verification.

Investment Case

For years, investors have regarded ETH as the "second-largest cryptocurrency." While this is true, it is not particularly meaningful. Today, they understand that ETH represents explosive growth in stablecoins and other tokenized assets, which they see discussed daily in commercial channels and may even use in their daily lives.

They realize that ETH underpins the prediction markets they see online, and ETH also supports the new type of tokenized stocks that Robinhood is launching. With landmark legislative proposals like the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act emerging, this wave of innovation is only set to intensify. Ethereum's role as a platform driving the future global economy is increasingly gaining attention.

Ethereum was born for this moment from the very beginning. In terms of security, assurance, and resilience, Ethereum is top-notch. The tenth anniversary of the genesis block also celebrates its unparalleled achievements in the fields of digital and traditional asset technology over the past decade.

• Economic Security: With over $100 billion in staked capital and more than 1 million validators, Ethereum has built a robust defense capability to effectively resist attacks.
• Network Effects: Ethereum boasts the deepest liquidity, the most developers (twice as many as the next blockchain), and the richest application ecosystem. The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) standard dominates smart contract development, with all major stablecoins using Ethereum as their primary platform.
• Proven Adaptability and Continuous Upgrades: Through complex upgrades, such as the Merge (transition to proof of stake, reducing energy consumption by 99.95%) and Dencun (reducing aggregation fees by 90%), Ethereum has demonstrated resilience and continuous improvement in its first decade without any downtime.
• Global Neutrality and Decentralization: Unlike other centralized blockchains, Ethereum is not controlled by a single company or entity. Its over 1 million validator nodes are distributed across more than 80 countries/regions, with over 67% of nodes operating outside the United States, demonstrating its antifragility and reliable neutrality.
• Institutional Validation and Adoption: Global institutions such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, Visa, and Franklin Templeton have begun utilizing Ethereum for tokenized assets, payments, and private equity investments, validating its security model and reliability. The total amount of tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum has exceeded $13 billion, with a monthly growth rate of up to 6.75%.

Despite Ethereum's technological maturity and the ongoing consolidation of the digital asset infrastructure market, its economic potential remains in the early stages. The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies accounts for only 0.3% of global wealth, and tokenized securities represent only a small portion of capital markets.

However, regulatory clarity, especially in the United States, is accelerating the adoption of cryptocurrencies, shifting from resistance to embracing digital assets. The convergence of artificial intelligence and blockchain has created an unprecedented demand for trustless infrastructure: as AI agents begin trading at machine speed, they will require machine trust. Ethereum is the only infrastructure prepared for an economic environment that requires algorithmic mutual trust.

For institutions, holding Ether (ETH) means owning a piece of the digital economy infrastructure at a price far below its ultimate value. ETH can be used to pay for network transactions and serves as a means of value storage. Unlike Bitcoin, ETH can also generate cash flow through staking. Moreover, like stocks, as the Ethereum platform becomes more widely adopted, the value of ETH will increase. It uniquely combines the attributes of commodities, currencies, and capital assets into a highly attractive asset.

As the Trustware report points out, ETH serves as economic bandwidth, ensuring the assets expected to be issued and traded on the platform in the coming years, which will drive its value to grow robustly.

The Trust Machine is Built

The trust machine is built. It operates continuously, self-improving, creating more value, and attracting more users. The question is not whether to believe in Ethereum, but whether to believe in the digitization of trust. If one believes, then the rationale for owning a part of the foundational layer of the future global economy is self-evident.

Disclaimer

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