Ladies and gentlemen, I am the kind of analyst who always places a risk disclosure document in front of everyone when they are experiencing FOMO. Today’s topic is out: Can Ethereum break the 10,000 yuan mark by 2026? The atmosphere has already been hyped up enough; it seems that not going all in would be out of place.

But do you know? I have seen too many stories during these bull and bear cycles. Today, I want to sit you down and point to the fine print at the bottom of that shiny "invitation"—the line everyone sees but pretends not to see—and translate it for you. This is the real dividing line that determines whether you end up attending the feast in a tuxedo or losing all your clothes.

**Does the ceiling of growth really not exist?**

Network effects are not perpetual motion machines; this needs to be carefully unpacked. "Ethereum has the strongest development ecosystem and network effects, so its value must grow infinitely"—that sounds reasonable, but the danger lies precisely in the second half of that sentence you haven't finished reading.

Network effects do exist, but they come with two hidden "reflexivity" bottlenecks, which are crucial.

**The first bottleneck: value capture vs. value spillover tug-of-war**

Ethereum’s success has directly spawned a massive Layer 2 ecosystem. But this creates a dilemma: when the vast majority of transactions and active users move to Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and other L2s, and ETH only becomes an asset used occasionally for cross-layer settlements, will its "fuel" demand be diluted? Is Ethereum’s ability to capture value from the entire ecosystem quietly weakening?

From another perspective, this is like a powerful central government facing vassals holding the economic lifeblood— the power structure has never changed, but the actual transfer of power happens every day.