# Valuing Ethereum as Public Infrastructure: The 2026 Edition *An update to last year's methodology, and a live simulation dashboard* By [William Mougayar's Blog](https://wamougayar.xyz) · 2026-11-13 valuation, eth, internet --- Valuing blockchain projects has been a focus area of mine for a long time, and I’ve written about it at length. Last year, I developed a model for valuing Ethereum as public infrastructure, inspired by the way we value the Internet: [The Internet’s Blueprint for Ethereum: A Trillion-Dollar Public Goods Valuation Framework](https://ethmrc.com/the-internets-blueprint-for-ethereum-a-trillion-dollar-public-goods-valuation-framework/). It built on ideas I explored in [Valuing the Digital Trust Dividend](https://wamougayar.xyz/valuing-the-digital-trust-dividend), where I argued that the biggest benefit of a trust network doesn’t show up in its fees. It shows up in benefiting from the costs that disappear everywhere else. The premise of last year’s report was simple. Nobody can buy shares in TCP/IP, yet the Internet is the most valuable infrastructure ever built. Its protocols charge almost nothing, and their value shows up everywhere except in their own revenues. When you add up the companies built on the Internet, the economic activity it carries and the free value people get from it, you land somewhere between $100 and $300 trillion. Ethereum sits in a similar position. Valuing it by its fees, or comparing it to a company, misses most of what it does. This year, I took the model further by refining it, anchoring every assumption to a published benchmark, and putting it online where anyone can test it. The result is [Valuing ETH: 2026 Edition](https://www.ethmrc.com/valuing-eth-2026/), published at the Ethereum Market Research Center website. ### What changed Four things matter most. First, ETH’s market cap is no longer part of the total. Last year I counted it inside “captured value,” which double counted part of what the other buckets measure. Now it’s the benchmark: the model compares what Ethereum enables with what the market pays for ETH. Second, every rate is tied to something real. Ethereum is credited with Visa’s take on the payments it carries, about 0.3%, which is a ceiling rather than an average, since Visa is the richest settlement business there is. The trust cost removed is 25 basis points, weighted toward wholesale settlement rather than expensive retail payments. And everything is capitalized at 7%, assuming Ethereum’s activity never grows from today’s level. For a network that has grown every year, that’s deliberately conservative. Third, the model now credits companies that depend on Ethereum, such as Robinhood, Coinbase, Circle, Securitize and Tether, in proportion to the share of their revenue that runs on it. It also gives a small credit to chains that use Ethereum’s EVM standard without settling on it. Fourth, it’s a snapshot of the present, not a set of scenarios out to 2035. ### What the numbers say As of November 12, the model estimates that Ethereum enables about $5.7 trillion of value for the economy built on it. Most of that comes from two places: the activity it settles, about $70 trillion a year of flows, mostly stablecoins, worth $3.0 trillion; and the trust costs it removes, worth $2.6 trillion. Today, the market prices ETH at roughly $246 billion. That’s 4.3% of the value Ethereum enables. Put differently, for every dollar the market pays for ETH, Ethereum generates about $23 of value for the ecosystem built on it. My favorite number is the one that doesn’t depend on any multiple: Ethereum enables about $389 billion of value every year, 1.6 times ETH’s entire market cap. ### What ETH can capture ETH shouldn’t be worth all of that value. Part of it belongs to others, and public goods never capture everything they enable. That’s the point of them. So the real question is what share ETH can reasonably claim. The Internet offers a reference point: the companies built on it are worth roughly 10 to 20% of the value it creates. Apply the midpoint, 15%, and ETH would be worth about $7,000. Today the market credits it with less than 5%. That’s not a price target; it’s a measure of the gap between what Ethereum enables and what ETH is credited with. ### Test it yourself The part I’m proudest of is the [live model](https://valuation.ethmrc.com). Every figure refreshes hourly from public sources, and every input and formula is on the page. If you disagree with an assumption, change it in simulation mode and see what happens. I’d rather have this debated in the open than accepted on faith. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/a622d7f3c696e2d299e9b8e9c7017662cc63a26211b553bd8621669f64d910de.png) An expanded version of this work will appear in my upcoming book, [Trustshift: Ethereum and the Reinvention of Trust](https://trustshiftbook.com/), in early 2027. _This post is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice._ --- *Originally published on [William Mougayar's Blog](https://wamougayar.xyz/valuing-ethereum-as-public-infrastructure-the-2026-edition)*