Analysis: Ethereum is currently in a "narrative vacuum," with institutional funding and privacy models becoming key variables for the future.

Industry insiders believe that Ethereum is currently in a "gap period between narratives," where the market tends to price uncertainty when a clear long-term value logic is lacking. In the past few years, the mainstream narrative has been that scaling primarily occurs at Layer 2, while the mainnet maintains security, decentralization, and a streamlined architecture. This path successfully attracted capital and development resources. However, the current market focus is shifting towards zero-knowledge technology and privacy capabilities returning to the base layer, leading to misaligned expectations among some investors who built valuation models based on the old approach. Complete on-chain transparency presents a real obstacle for institutional funds; large enterprises or funds are unwilling to have their trading strategies tracked in real time. If Ethereum hopes to attract trillions of dollars in institutional funds, protocol-level privacy capabilities will become a key competitive variable. Furthermore, the expansion of the options market around spot ETFs is also changing Ethereum's price formation mechanism, including the increasing influence of covered call strategies and market maker hedging behavior. (Forbes)