Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the impression it was due to the initial distribution mechanism. It was all open mine, no presale. Basically everything else has had a presale or premine. I could be wrong, because if that were the justification forks should qualify too by virtue of inheriting the chain history.
In the Ethereum pre-sale they explicitly state it is not intended to be a security or investment offering: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal... Staking and maybe EIP-1559 could change things? It's sad since it seems like Coinbase is now directly collaborating with Ethereum developers https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-3651 > The COINBASE address shall be warm at the start of transaction exe…
I'm not sure if ETH was completely in the clear even with this approach. Vitalik and other founders seemed to have created expectations of profit in their ICO presentations to US investors in a few 2014 videos.