A lot of people still treat "keeping savings in fiat" as if it’s the default that doesn’t need justification. But if you compare what fiat actually gives you against what ETH on Aave gives you, the gap is too large to ignore, and I think it justifies recommending to your friends and family to switch to it. ETH sits at the center of the only decentralized financial system that has scaled without giving up security. Ethereum now runs high-throughput execution layers like MegaETH and high-bandwidth data layers like EigenDA while still letting anyone run a full node on consumer hardware. That combination — performance without centralized hardware — doesn’t exist anywhere else in crypto. It’s the foundation the rest of the sector has consolidated around. Most tokenized assets already live on Ethereum: treasuries, bonds, funds, stablecoins. BlackRock’s entire tokenization push is happening here. Developers, liquidity, and settlement infrastructure have all migrated to the same place. ETH is the asset that secures it. Its monetary structure is also simple: EIP-1559 burns fees and pushes issuance down whenever the network is busy. Even under extreme assumptions, inflation stays below 2%. Under normal conditions, ETH trends toward net deflation. It has a predictable monetary profile that fiat doesn’t attempt to match. Aave adds a practical layer on top of that. Supplying ETH earns roughly 2% yield without running validators or dealing with slashing. The remaining risk is smart-contract risk, which — given Aave’s history and scale — is small compared to the yield, I would put it at around 0.1%. When you frame it in risk-adjusted terms, the position is cleaner than anything in traditional finance. Liquidity is another advantage people underestimate. ETH can be converted rapidly and permissionlessly. With self-custody, you can swap to USDC through a decentralized exchange at any time, even during market stress, without relying on a brokerage, a bank, or a centralized trading venue. If you hold equities, you depend on your broker being functional, solvent, and willing to process your sell order. We’ve seen cases where brokers halt trading during volatility. With crypto, execution is permissionless. Once you’re in stablecoins, off-ramps have multiplied. On-ramps now exist in most regions, and peer-to-peer settlement systems like @zkp2p make it possible to exchange stablecoins for fiat directly through payment apps like Zelle or PayPal, permissionlessly. That gives you a form of instant convertibility you simply don’t get in equities or legacy banking infrastructure. So when you combine all of this — Ethereum’s settlement dominance, ETH’s monetary properties, Aave’s low-risk yield, and frictionless liquidity — you end up with a long-term savings position that’s structurally stronger than fiat by most objective measures. The only reason most people still default to fiat is inertia. They haven’t compared options in a world where open, permissionless financial systems now exist. This is the kind of shift people only recognize in hindsight, long after the advantages were obvious.