Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
In the past century, humans have redefined the form of computers several times.
From the huge computers created for rocket navigation in the middle of the last century, to IBM pushing mainframes into enterprises, to Microsoft and Apple bringing personal computers into thousands of households, and then smartphones put computers into everyone's pockets.
Every leap in computing power has reshaped the way people and the world connect.
In 2013, when 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin was playing "World of Warcraft", because Blizzard arbitrarily weakened the skills of the warlock, he seriously thought about a question for the first time: In the digital world, who will ensure that the rules are not arbitrarily rewritten?
If there is a "world computer" that does not belong to any company, is not controlled by a single power, and can be used by anyone, can it become the starting point of the next computing form?
On July 30, 2015, in a small office in Berlin, dozens of young developers stared at the block counter. When the number jumped to 1028201, the Ethereum mainnet automatically started.
Vitalik recalled: "We all sat there waiting, and then it finally reached this number, and about half a minute later it started generating blocks."
At that moment, the spark of the world computer was ignited.
Starting point and spark
Ethereum had less than a hundred developers at the time. It embedded smart contracts into the blockchain for the first time, providing a Turing-complete stage, making the blockchain no longer just a bookkeeping tool, but a world-class public computer that can run programs.
Soon, this new world computer went through severe tests.
In June 2016, a major security incident occurred in the Ethereum-based decentralized autonomous organization "The DAO". Hackers took advantage of smart contract vulnerabilities and took away about 50 million to 60 million US dollars of ether. The community had a heated discussion on whether to "roll back history" and finally chose a hard fork to save the assets, which also split another chain - Ethereum Classic.
This incident put the governance issue of the world's computer on the table for the first time: should we insist on immutability or correct errors to protect users?
The ICO wave from 2017 to 2018 pushed Ethereum to a climax. Countless projects issued tokens through Ethereum, raising a total of billions of dollars, pushing the price of ETH to soar. But the subsequent bubble burst caused Ethereum to enter a trough. The price of ETH fell by more than 90% from its high point at the end of 2018, and network congestion and high fees were criticized. During that period, the popularity of CryptoKitties even caused the main network to be congested to the point of almost shutting down. For the first time, this world computer exposed the limitation of insufficient computing power.
In order to cope with the performance bottleneck, the Ethereum community began to study the on-chain sharding solution as early as 2015, trying to increase throughput by splitting the node verification load. However, the implementation of sharding technology is complex and progress is slow. At the same time, developers are also exploring off-chain expansion paths, from early state channels and Plasma to the Rollup solution that emerged in 2019. Rollup significantly improves processing power by bundling a large number of transactions and submitting them to the main chain for verification, but it requires the main network to provide sufficient data availability support. Fortunately, around 2019, Ethereum made a breakthrough in the field of data availability and solved the problem of large-scale data verification.
Since then, Ethereum has gradually formed an expansion route of "main network security and second-layer execution", and the world computer has begun to be disassembled into a multi-layer collaborative system.
In the following years, DeFi exploded on Ethereum, and decentralized lending, trading, and derivatives sprang up like mushrooms after rain; the NFT craze pushed digital art into the mainstream, and Beeple's work sold for $69 million at Christie's. Although the network boom was accompanied by the problem of high fees, Ethereum began to respond by improving the protocol. In August 2021, the EIP-1559 upgrade implemented a basic fee burning mechanism, destroying the basic fee of each transaction in ETH, thereby reducing inflationary pressure during periods of high demand. This reform caused ETH to experience a brief net deflation during the 2021-2022 bull market, driving its price to a historical high of nearly $4,900.
On September 15, 2022, The Merge was completed. The core energy of the world computer was switched from the power-hungry PoW to PoS, reducing energy consumption by 99% and the new issuance rate by 90%. ETH holders began to participate in the network through staking, and the energy system of this world computer was completely replaced.
Data from one year after the merger showed that the net supply of Ethereum had decreased by about 300,000 ETH, which was in sharp contrast to the amount that should have been issued under the PoW mechanism. This deflationary feature strengthened the market's expectations of ETH's scarcity.
After the above changes, by the end of 2023, the performance and economic mechanism of the Ethereum mainnet had improved, but new challenges also emerged. In order to reduce costs and encourage the development of Rollup, Ethereum implemented the "Dencun" upgrade (Deneb + Cancun) in March 2024, introducing EIP-4844, the so-called Proto-Danksharding technology. This improvement adds special "data blob" transactions for Rollup to submit batch transaction data. Since blob data is only stored briefly, the cost is much lower than ordinary call data, which greatly reduces the cost of submitting data from the second-layer network to the main network. The successful launch of Dencun marks a significant reduction in the cost of Rollup, and the world computer is one step closer to the goal of sharding.
Ten years later, this world computer has gone from an ideal in the white paper to an irreplaceable infrastructure in reality.
However, behind the brightly lit nodes, new dilemmas have quietly emerged...
Middle-aged fog
Entering 2024-2025, the dilemmas faced by Ethereum are concentrated.
Layer2 has a significant diversion effect
The Rollup-centric route that Ethereum has embraced in recent years has relieved the pressure on the main chain, but it has also caused a large number of transactions and values to remain on the second-layer network and fail to flow back to the main network. Standard Chartered Bank bluntly stated in a report in early 2025 that the rise of the second-layer network has eroded the value capture of the Ethereum main chain. The report estimates that the leading Ethereum second-layer, Base, launched by Coinbase alone, has "taken away" about $50 billion in Ethereum ecosystem market value.
Transactions and applications that might have been conducted on the mainnet have been transferred to the lower-cost L2, and the mainnet's transaction fee income and on-chain activities have decreased accordingly. This trend has become more obvious after the Dencun upgrade. EIP-4844 has greatly reduced the cost of submitting data to the mainnet for Rollup, further increasing the attractiveness of L2 shared transactions. In recent years, the number of daily transactions of Rollup such as Arbitrum and Optimism has repeatedly matched or even exceeded the main chain, which verifies the picture of "Ethereum outsourcing transaction execution."
In other words, the parts of the world's computer are running efficiently outside, but the value capture ability of the host is eroded.
Competition in external public chains is becoming increasingly fierce
Due to the performance and cost shortcomings of Ethereum in its early days, many competitors have tried to provide faster and cheaper alternatives.
For example, Solana, which focuses on high throughput, attracts a large number of developers. Most emerging projects and MEME projects in this round of bull market are mainly deployed on Solana; in the field of stablecoins, Tron, with its transmission advantage of nearly zero handling fees, carries the massive issuance and transfer of mainstream stablecoins such as USDT. The USDT circulating on the Tron chain has now exceeded 80 billion, surpassing Ethereum in scale to become the largest stablecoin network, and its turnover is also much higher than Ethereum. This means that in the key track of stablecoins, Ethereum has given up its dominant position.
Not only that, public chains such as BNB Smart Chain also share some of the traffic of GameFi and altcoin transactions. Although Ethereum is still the largest ecosystem in terms of the number of DeFi protocols and TVL, accounting for about 56% of the industry's DeFi activities as of July 2025, it is undeniable that under the coexistence of multiple chains, Ethereum's relative dominance has declined compared to its peak period.
Governance and security concerns
After the transition to PoS, the issue of staking centralization has caused community concerns. According to the rules, participation in Ethereum network verification requires a 32 ETH stake, which has prompted retail investors to participate through staking pools or exchange delegations, leading to a situation dominated by a few large staking service providers. The largest decentralized staking pool, Lido, once occupied more than 32% of the staking market share of the entire network. As more competitors joined, Lido's share dropped slightly to about 25%, but it is still far ahead of entities such as Binance (about 8.3%) and Coinbase (about 6.9%) that ranked behind it. The community is generally concerned that if any single entity holds more than 1/3 of the verification weight, it may affect block consensus and even network security.
Vitalik has called for limiting the proportion of a single verification entity through the handling fee rate, for example, below 15%. However, in the 2022 Lido governance vote, the proposal to set a self-limiting cap was rejected by more than 99% of the votes. Currently, according to Dune data, the Ethereum network has more than 1.12 million validators and a total of more than 36.11 million ETH participating in staking, and the staked ETH accounts for 29.17% of the total supply. How to promote the diversification of staking participants without sacrificing network security remains an unresolved issue.
The role of the foundation is controversial
For many years, the foundation has been accused of lacking transparency in ecological funding and fund management. The community often questions its sale of holdings at ETH highs and lack of public explanation. In the view of some early developers, the foundation's "hands-off governance" has led to the continuous accumulation of ecological divisions and narrative confusion, and it is difficult for the governance system to form effective guidance.
At the same time, the voices of opinion leaders have gradually faded. Vitalik and several early developers still have great influence, but rarely make clear statements on key directions. They choose to restrain themselves, avoid influencing market sentiment, and avoid intervening in governance disputes. In the long run, this restraint has brought another vacuum: the community lacks consensus, no one is willing to take decision-making responsibility, and many proposals lack promoters. Open discussions have decreased, and technical routes and ecological strategies have turned to closed-door discussions.
Without a clear helmsman, the world computer is running, but it lacks a sense of direction.
Application layer gap and unsatisfactory market performance
If Ethereum hopes to become a world computer on the chain, its value should not only stay at the bottom layer of providing computing power and security, but also whether it can carry a steady stream of new applications and new experiences, so that developers and users can see the boundaries of imagination being constantly broken.
But after ten years, the only applications that have been truly verified by the market and successfully scaled are still DeFi and NFT. After that, the application layer seems to be quiet.
Social, games, identity, DAO and other directions that were once highly expected have not yet produced phenomenal products comparable to DeFi and NFT.
Friend.tech, Lens and other Web3 social networks were once popular, but the popularity quickly faded, and the retention rate was extremely low; on-chain games were once frequently discussed, but most of them remained in simple token economic experiments and were difficult to enter the mainstream; decentralized identity and DAO governance are still more in the technical exploration and small-scale experiments.
On-chain data confirms this lack. In July 2025, the number of ETH destroyed by the Ethereum network per day was less than 50, setting a new historical low. Compared with the average daily destruction of nearly 1,000 ETH during the frenzy of 2021, it is almost incomparable.
During the same period, the average number of active addresses in 7 days dropped to about 566,000, and did not even reach the high point since March 2024; the number of new addresses per day was about 120,000, and the number of monthly on-chain transactions was about 35 to 40 million.
For a network that claims to be the world's computer, this means a lack of sparks that can ignite a new wave of large-scale applications.
Ethereum has the largest developer community in the industry and is not short of technical reserves, but it has not yet found the killer application that can attract tens of millions of new users and change their usage habits. Ten years later, this machine is still powerful, but it is still looking for its next mission.
This stagnation at the application layer is also reflected in market performance. ETH was close to its all-time high of $4,900 in November 2021, but has not broken through for many years. The boost from technical benefits such as mergers and fee reforms is limited, and the price trend from 2022 to 2024 continues to lag behind Bitcoin, Solana and even BNB. Entering 2025, other crypto assets have frequently set new records, while the price of ETH is still hovering around $3,000. In April, the ETH/BTC ratio even fell below 0.02, hitting a multi-year low. ETH, once regarded as a fuel in the field of smart contracts, is losing its wealth effect in the market.
Recently, strategic allocations by listed companies and institutions have brought some support to ETH. Companies such as Sharplink Gaming and BitMine have publicly disclosed treasury strategies, issuing convertible bonds, preferred stocks, market-priced offerings and other products, and using the funds raised to increase holdings of ETH. Unlike Bitcoin, ETH can generate protocol-layer income through staking and re-staking, becoming an "interest-bearing" digital asset in the corporate treasury. This native income feature makes it attractive. Within a few weeks, the price of ETH rebounded from a low point to above $3,600.
However, some analysts pointed out that this round of recovery is more from the active allocation of funds. The on-chain ecology itself has not seen a significant leap. The price rebound is not accompanied by developer innovation and user influx, but more like a stopgap option when market funds are looking for targets.
Technological progress and the entry of institutions cannot replace applications that can truly change user habits and release new needs.
Ten years later, Ethereum still needs to answer the original question: As a world computer, what kind of program should it run to ignite the world's imagination again.
Unfinished Road, the Direction of the Next Decade
Faced with the mid-life test of internal and external difficulties, whether Ethereum can get out of the trough depends on whether technology and ecology can open up new growth space.
Technology: Making the world's computers faster and more unified
The community has drawn up a blueprint for upgrading in the post-merger era.
Vitalik explained in his article "Possible Future of Ethereum: The Surge" that the core goal of the next stage is to increase the overall throughput of the main network and the second-layer network to 100,000 transactions per second while maintaining the decentralization and robustness of L1; at the same time, ensure that at least part of L2 can fully inherit the core characteristics of Ethereum (trustlessness, openness, and anti-censorship); and make the experience of the entire network more like a unified ecosystem, rather than 34 fragmented blockchains. This means that in the future, cross-L1/L2 transfers, capital flows, and application switching will become as simple as operations within a single chain.
EIP-4844 in 2024 is just the starting point, and data sampling and compression technologies will be introduced later.
With the maturity of zero-knowledge proof technologies such as ZK-SNARK and ZK-STARK, performance bottlenecks are expected to be broken, and users who have spilled over to other public chains and L2 in the past may return.
Governance and Economy: How the Main Chain Regain Value
Not only performance, Ethereum is also thinking about how to allow the core of the world's computer to continue to capture value.
In July 2025, the Ethereum Foundation launched a new architectural reform called "The Future of Ecosystem Development", trying to move from behind the scenes to the front and become the helmsman guiding the development of the ecosystem. The Foundation has proposed two long-term goals, one is to maximize the number of people who directly or indirectly use Ethereum and benefit from its underlying values, and the other is to enhance the resilience of technical and social infrastructure.
To this end, the Foundation reorganized into four pillars around "acceleration, amplification, support, and long-term dredging", reorganized the internal team, established modules such as corporate relations, developer growth, application support, and founder support, and strengthened the team's content and narrative to enhance community cohesion.
The foundation also promised to increase transparency, emphasize more targeted public product funding, launch Launchpad to support governance and sustainable operations, while reducing the proportion of operating expenses and setting up a funding buffer of about 2.5 years.
The outside world generally regards this series of actions as a substantive adjustment of the foundation to respond to criticism of inaction, and is also seen as a boost for its next decade.
In community discussions, new ideas have also emerged: Can we extract some of the benefits from the prosperity of Layer2? Or optimize the protocol fee and MEV distribution mechanism so that the main chain can also share the growth dividend in the Rollup era. These plans are still being explored, but they reflect a common concern - if no active adjustments are made, the main chain may degenerate into a simple liquidation layer, and its value and vitality will be continuously diluted.
Standing at the crossroads to find new sparks
Technology and funds are not enough.
Every climax of Ethereum in the past was ignited by new applications and new narratives. Now, the entire blockchain industry is in a period of innovation silence, lacking phenomenal breakthroughs.
Perhaps blockchain itself needs to undergo a self-revolution, giving rise to new narratives and applications in the fields of social, identity, and AI. Some people also believe that the next round of breakthroughs may come from the impact of the external ecosystem.
Vitalik once further reminded in his speech "The Next Decade of Ethereum" that Ethereum developers should not just copy Web2, but should face future interactive forms, including wearable devices, AR, brain-computer interfaces, and local AI, and incorporate these new entrances into the design vision of Web3.
Looking back over the past decade, Ethereum still has the largest developer community, the richest applications, and deep technical accumulation in the industry. But it is facing bottlenecks, competition, and the intersection of new births.
As Vitalik said: "The past ten years of Ethereum have been a decade of our focus on theory. In the next ten years, we must change our focus and think about what impact we will have on the world." In his view, the next generation of applications must not only have different functions, but also retain shared values. At the same time, these applications must be useful enough to attract those who have not yet entered the encryption field.
The world computer, ten years of itch. It has not stopped running, it is just looking for a new direction.
The next decade belongs to it and to everyone who still believes in this dream.
But as Vitalik said, "Everyone who speaks out in the Ethereum community has the opportunity to participate in the process of building the future together."
