History Rhymes? Ethereum Sentiment Matches Pre-Rally Conditions
Ethereum’s social buzz has cooled to levels some analysts compare with the period before last year’s powerful rebound, but experts say that doesn’t automatically mean another big surge is imminent.
Network Activity And Staking Interest
Quinlivan also highlighted on-chain signals he finds positive. According to his view, activity on Ethereum’s network has been rising, and staking has drawn more attention from users.
Increasing bandwidth is safer than reducing latency
With PeerDAS and ZKPs, we know how to scale, and potentially we can scale thousands of times compared to the status quo. The numbers become far more favorable than before (eg. see analysis here, pre and post-sharding…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 8, 2026
Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin has joined the public conversation about technical upgrades. Buterin said in an extended X post that PeerDAS, which arrived with the Fusaka upgrade, along with zero-knowledge proofs and sharding, will push Ethereum toward much higher throughput.
He added that layer-2 networks like Base, Polygon, and Optimism will still be needed because many use cases demand speeds that are even quicker than mainnet.
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Institutional Views And Market Positioning
Based on reports, Coinbase Asset Management president Anthony Bassili said in November 2025 that investors tend to view Bitcoin first and Ethereum second when building a core portfolio.
That stance reflects how many large investors now treat Ether as the default number-two market cap asset rather than as a fringe bet. With that status, downside expectations can be smaller than for riskier tokens. Still, sentiment can remain low for long stretches, and being ranked highly does not remove volatility.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
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