Consensys: How will Ethereum, as a trusted software system, reshape the global digital economy?

Author: Consensys

Compiled and edited by: LenaXin, ChainCatcher

Every financial transaction involves an element of trust. Ethereum’s digital trust enables the digitization of massive assets, capital, and financial transactions, greatly improving the efficiency of the global financial system and benefiting everyone from institutions to businesses to consumers.

On July 30, Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary. On this occasion, Consensys released the Industrialization of Trust report, a detailed report outlining the investment case for Ethereum 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 research and analysis shows that Ethereum has become the dominant blockchain platform, supporting more than 50% of non-Bitcoin digital assets, including 60% of stablecoins, 60% of decentralized financial capital, and 80% of tokenized "real-world assets" such as stocks, money market funds, and bonds.

Ethereum’s Breakthrough: Digital Trust and Trusted Software

Trust software is the infrastructure that enables the upgrade of analog concepts of trust, such as notes and ledgers verified by human agents and auditors and guaranteed by human insurers and regulators, to equivalent digital concepts of trust 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, auditors, and legal systems. While these systems have enabled cooperation and economic growth, they come at a very high cost. It is estimated that humanity spends more than $9 trillion per year on trust-related costs, including insurance ($8.0 trillion), legal systems (over $1.0 trillion), and audits ($290 billion). This massive expenditure highlights a fundamental problem: current trust models do not scale effectively in the digital age. They are analog—slower, more expensive, and more fragmented than the always-on, highly automated, and rapidly evolving digital economy that relies on them.

Trust software, through a completely algorithmic process, gives ordinary data the essential qualities of trust: validity and finality. Validity ensures the consistency and correctness of data and has mathematical certainty. Finality ensures the permanence of data and cannot be changed unless a huge price is paid.

Ethereum allows these properties to be added to data in a scalable way, without constant human intervention, thereby enabling trust at near-zero marginal cost. In this way, Ethereum, with its powerful public network and groundbreaking cryptoeconomic algorithms that generate digital trust, enables financial transaction verification to achieve significant improvements in speed, cost, security, and scale simultaneously.

Investment Case

For years, investors have thought of ETH as the “second-largest cryptocurrency.” That was true, but not very meaningful. Today, they understand that ETH represents an explosion of stablecoins and other tokenized assets that they see discussed daily in business channels and may even already use in their daily lives.

They learn that ETH underpins the prediction markets they see online, and that ETH underpins the new tokenized stocks that Robinhood is launching. With landmark legislative proposals like the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, this wave of innovation is only going to intensify. Ethereum is gaining more and more attention as the platform that will power the future global economy.

Ethereum was born for this moment from the beginning. In terms of safety, security, and resilience, Ethereum is first-class. The 10th anniversary of the Genesis Block is also to celebrate its unparalleled brilliant achievements in the field of digital and traditional asset technology over the past decade.

• Economic Security: With over $100 billion in staked capital and over 1 million validators, Ethereum has built a strong defense capability to effectively resist attacks.
• Network Effect: Ethereum has the deepest liquidity, the most developers (twice as many as the next closest blockchain), and the richest application ecosystem. The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) standard dominates the development of smart contracts, and all major stablecoins use Ethereum as their primary platform.
• Proven adaptability and continuous upgrades: Through complex upgrades such as Merge (transitioning to proof-of-stake, reducing energy consumption by 99.95%) and Dencun (reducing rollup fees by 90%), Ethereum has demonstrated resilience and continued improvement throughout 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 more than 1 million validator nodes are spread across more than 80 countries, with more than 67% of nodes running outside the United States, proving its anti-fragility and reliable neutrality.
• Institutional Validation and Adoption: Global institutions such as BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Visa and Franklin Templeton have begun to use Ethereum for tokenized assets, payments and private equity investments, which has verified its security model and reliability. The total amount of tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum has exceeded US$13 billion, with a monthly growth rate of 6.75%.

Despite the maturity of Ethereum technology and the continued consolidation of the digital asset infrastructure market, its economic potential is still in its early stages. The total market value of cryptocurrencies accounts for only 0.3% of global wealth, and tokenized securities account for only a small part of the capital market.

However, increasing regulatory clarity, especially in the United States, is accelerating its adoption of cryptocurrencies, moving from resistance to embracing digital assets. The convergence of AI and blockchain has created an unprecedented need for trustless infrastructure: As AI agents begin to transact at machine speeds, they will require machine trust. Ethereum is the only infrastructure ready for an economic environment that requires algorithms to trust each other.

For institutions, holding Ether (ETH) means owning the digital economy infrastructure at a price far below its ultimate value. ETH can be used to pay for network transactions and act as a store of value. Unlike Bitcoin, ETH can also generate cash flow through staking. And, like stocks, as the popularity of the Ethereum platform increases, the value of ETH will also increase. It combines the properties of commodities, currencies, and capital assets into a unique and attractive asset.

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

Trust Machine Built

The trust machine is built. It keeps running, improving itself, creating more value, and attracting more users. The question is not whether to trust Ethereum, but whether to trust the digitization of trust. If you do, then the investment case for owning part of the future global economic base layer is self-evident.