Following this discussion, I would like to add my thoughts on Ethereum Vitalik’s current dilemma, as follows:
1) The "ivory tower" mindset constrains innovation: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has an elitist cultural orientation that is out of touch with the market during the period 2020-2024, constantly stacking technical concepts while ignoring the real needs of users.
Faced with overwhelming criticism and direction, EF management chose to “ignore” it, which caused them to miss the critical time window to fix the problem, allowing high-performance chain competitors such as Solana and Sui to break away from the oligopoly effect of the Ethereum ecosystem and grow wildly;
2) Excessive stacking of technological narratives causes market fatigue: From DeFi, NFT to various Layer 2 expansion solutions, the Ethereum ecosystem is like a narrative production factory, constantly launching new technological narratives but failing to capture effective value.
This has led to users gradually becoming tired of this purely technology-oriented development path that does not reflect the ecosystem and coin prices. Ethereum has always hoped to stimulate the market building boom by raising the technical threshold, but it has been proven that relying solely on technical narratives is difficult to support sustained market prosperity;
3) Layer 2 strategy leads to ecological division and liquidity dispersion: Although Layer 2 projects such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base have technically solved certain expansion problems, such as reducing gas fees to an imperceptible level and significantly increasing TPS, they have caused complex abstraction of user experience and excessive dispersion of liquidity.
The compatibility issues of cross-chain standards between OP Stack, ZK Stack, and Ethereum native camps, as well as the interoperability barriers, have turned these market darlings into vampires that issue coins just for the sake of issuing coins. Instead of bringing effective nourishment to the Ethereum ecosystem, they have caused the Ethereum ecosystem to continue to stagnate.
4) $ETH value capture model fails: After the implementation of the EIP-1559 destruction mechanism, the value capture effect of ETH failed to continue to work as expected. ETH lacks a value accumulation mechanism directly linked to network usage, and the transaction fees from the prosperity of the layer2 market have not been fully transmitted to the main network. The idea of modular architecture advocates the separation of the basic layer and the application layer, resulting in ETH becoming a basic infra settlement layer rather than a necessary "value hub".
Therefore, while competitors such as Solana have achieved several times growth in a short period of time, ETH has still not been able to effectively break through its historical highs;
5) Geek community culture is out of touch with the mainstream market: Ethereum’s geek-dominated community has long embraced technology purism, which has separated it from the mainstream players in the current market. It refuses to embrace seemingly “low-level” innovation forms such as “Meme culture”, resulting in a cognitive gap between it and the new generation of users.
In contrast, the Solana ecosystem has successfully attracted a large amount of fresh blood and market attention with its attitude of inclusiveness, diversity and innovation, forming a positive cycle of development effect.
above.
But just like many friends who love and hate Ethereum, even though they can see the various problems that exist in Ethereum, they still feel that Ethereum’s current predicament is not irreversible. It is undeniable that its active developer ecosystem and accumulated DeFi infra security consensus are still the strongest.
When the main theme of the market, technology narrative + long-termism, is set, Big Ether will still occupy a core position. For most Ethereum enthusiasts and Hoders, giving up the excessive expectations of "the second largest in the crypto universe" and looking at ETH from the perspective of a pure decentralized network asset target from the overall market perspective may be a more correct choice.
