jakiro
Author: Haotian
Why do the market always keep its voices of criticizing Ethereum?Simply put: the Ethereum ecosystem is indeed facing the anxious situation of internal and external troubles. It has been unable to stand up to its backbone with expansion plans such as layer2, and killers such as Solana have always been killed.Ethereum is facing a difficult moment under the pressure of innovation and competition.Next, let me briefly talk about my opinion:
1) The large and small ecosystem of Ethereum Rollups has been formed. After Cancun upgraded EIP-4844, the short-term technical benefits of Ethereum have been settled.Longer-term shard chains are no longer expected under the impact of Rollup, and upgrading such as reducing node costs, simplifying protocols, and underlying ZK-SNARKs are just icing on the cake.The entire blockchain industry is waiting for Long Er Ethereum to deliver a satisfactory layer2 answer sheet, but as of now, layer2 does not carry Ethereum’s “growth” expectations.
2) To be honest, Rollups can stand out from a variety of expansion solutions such as Plasma, Validium and even parachains. It is entirely because Rollups adopts a primary and secondary chain combination interaction paradigm for hierarchical processing such as execution and state and settlement.Under normal logic, after layer2 establishes a security consensus on interacting with the main network, it should strengthen and amplify the performance processing advantages at the execution layer and input incremental users and ecosystems to the Ethereum main network.
However, the fact is,Most layer2 choose to conduct commercial narrative level stacked leverage nesting kids, adopt the Stack strategy to attract alliances, share components into the layer3 application chain, and also Rollup as a Service, DA as a Service, and even AVS as a Service, etc.At first glance, these strategies that can infinitely amplify the commercial and narrative imagination space of layer2 can only superimpose the market’s expected leverage for a longer time, and will not be immediately effective in expanding the application ecosystem and empowering the coin price.
(The top article on the home page I wrote “Hundred Links Competition Second Half, Where to Go BTC layer2?” The response is pretty good. I will write a text system to expand my thoughts on where to Go Ethereum layer2. Stay tuned, but Xiaoling will pay attention)
3) For a long time, people always mocked Ethereum Gas fee of 1Gwei to ridicule the failure of Ethereum layer2’s strategic direction, but from another perspective,Isn’t this a phased success in Ethereum’s reliance on layer2 to solve problems such as congestion and high gas fees?However, the bad thing is that layer2 not only did not bring the expected huge ecosystem and transaction volume Ethereum, but even diverted some of the traffic and left.
In fact, layer2 is considered successful in solving the lack of Ethereum performance capabilities. The competitive inversion between OP-Rollup and ZK-Rollup camps has also reached a white-hot level, but choosing the camp to infra instead of pure application innovation has exposed Ethereum development.A very embarrassing situation in the community:Excessive reliance on VC financing to drive the issuance of coins rather than real value innovation.
Although this is the direct result of the intensification of competition in the web3 industry with more developers and the inflow of capital from VCs.Although the high threshold for entrepreneurship could have been a manifestation of the market’s maturity, in the early stages of Crypto, excessive inversion became the initiator of high FDV stifling innovation.Just imagine a project with a huge FDV, and all efforts are just for fast Go to Market. How can there be time to accumulate value innovation?The most effective thing about to VC is to stack the commercial narrative on the B-end, and the use of such urgent but not sexy directions on the C-end has always been lukewarm.That’s why the market can feel the imbalance of infra> application.
4) Although the sexy narrative of the Ethereum killer has been falsified in the last bull market, in this round, high-performance public chains such as Solana, Sui, Aptos, and Sei are directly poking the “low-performance” soft spots of Ethereum EVM.Although they no longer shout to kill Ethereum, it is undeniable that their performance high concurrency and special Move language security mechanisms can indeed impact Ethereum, especially it may become a fertile ground for the breeding of the new generation of web3 application ecosystem.: DePIN, large-scale games, intent transactions, AI Agents, etc.
This is the biggest opportunity for the new generation of high-performance public chains. It will no longer stack infra expectations and directly declare war on Ethereum based on its rise in applications.
Or there is no need to declare war at all. Use modular thinking to place Ethereum on the thin narrative of the “settlement layer”, use the new modular execution layer, the DA layer, the Unified liquidity layer, etc. to establish the discourse rights of Ethereum in the past.Isn’t the system reconstructing also a successful competition?For other chains, it is not the same for Ethereum. However, this is the trend I have seen on other high-performance chains or modular and chain abstract chains, but it seems that Ethereum is just a “passively beaten” attitude, even if it isWith such a predatory and favorable condition as ETF, it has not been able to put aside its airs to deal with it.
5)Many people are still looking forward to another DeFi Summer, but reflecting on the lack of expectations of Ethereum layer2, I reluctantly accepted the fact that DeFi Summer may never come again.@VitalikButerin I am also very clear that the biggest dilemma of Ethereum may be excessive financial attributes. DeFi, a perfect carrier that carries financial attributes, past successful experiences and the infinite doll attributes of DeFi combinations, make it naturally fit people’s speculative preferences..What the Ethereum ecosystem needs to consider at this moment is not to reshape DeFi Summer, but to get out of the haze of pure DeFi culture.
The NFT that emerged in the last bull market has not been completely nested into the DeFi framework from prosperity to decline, but this does not affect NFT leading Ethereum out of a super bull market. This round of PolyMarket decentralizationThe prediction market is valued. Although it is not a new way of playing, I don’t know if it can bring about new vitality. Fortunately, it is not pure DeFi, or it has been expanded and reconstructed.How to integrate Ethereum into the web2 world at its best and move from virtual to real is the new Summer that everyone should truly expect.
