jakiro
Author: Mu Mu, vernacular blockchain
Recently, because it has been less than expected for a long time, there have been more criticisms of Ethereum. In addition, the Ethereum Foundation has been caught in a “shipment” storm at this time.It can be said that the wall is falling and everyone is pushing it, which makes people worry again that Ethereum’s “future” comes. So this time, can Ethereum successfully overcome this “hindrance”?
01Defend: Ethereum’s “Seven Deadly Sins”
It seems that every round of market conditions will be bad, and some projects or institutions will be used to “operate”. This time, I didn’t expect that it was the turn of “Ethereum”, which has always been the second largest in the market value.Recently, when social media has been opened, there are many well-known institutional partners, well-known KOLs, etc., who have made various “complaints” about Ethereum, and some of the loyalists of Ethereum.Today we will take a look at the right and wrong of Ethereum’s “Seven Deadly Sins”:
1) Is the wrong route to develop Layer2?
The development of Layer2 has reduced the handling fee of the Ethereum ecosystem and also reduced the price of Ethereum. This seems to have been unexpected by many people. After all, I was so excited and looking forward to it when I promoted the Layer2 route a few years ago., Blockchain has finally solved the scalability problem and broke through the technical bottleneck.
Solved old problems and new problems came. A number of critics pointed the core reason for the sluggish Ethereum price to the mistake of the Layer2 route, believing that Layer2 “parasitic and blood-sucking” in Ethereum, and divided Ethereum liquidity but only providedFew value captures feed back to Ethereum, resulting in the loss of Ethereum liquidity and on-chain transactions, ETH naturally fails to recover.
This point should have been discussed more than once. In fact, if you only look at the surface, it is indeed Layer2 that has seized the Ethereum market, causing the Ethereum chain to temporarily fall into a deserted situation, but this just proves the success of the Ethereum Layer2 route., because the Ethereum main network and Layer2 are actually included in the Ethereum ecosystem.Most users and liquidity have always been unabated within the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, Layer2 is becoming more and more attractive. We will find that there are almost no new public chains emerging to “compete”.
To give a simple example, due to traffic congestion in a city, several companies came to dig several subways, and people were diverted to take the subway, and then suddenly one day there was no traffic jam on the road. At this time, the road traffic operators will definitely collect it.Influence, taxi drivers will definitely jump out to oppose the establishment of subways, but soon the entire city began to benefit from these new infrastructures, with increasingly competitive strength, talents and investment flowing in, and the expansion of underground transportation in the city made itShow new vitality and usher in new development.The city is getting bigger and bigger, and everyone is a beneficiary.
By the same token, the reason why Ethereum needs to expand is to lay the foundation for the large-scale adoption of the entire ecosystem in the future.At the same time, the cost of capital flow between Layer2 is also very low, and the interoperability problem is only temporary. The temporary price sluggishness is not enough to deny the idea of layering and modular expansion that has been studied for so many years.
2) Intensified inflation?
EIP-1559 originally deployed by Ethereum greatly reduced Ethereum’s inflation rateEven after the POS was transferred, the inflation rate of Ethereum was still negative for a long time, but later the activity on the Ethereum chain decayed, Gas Price fell to a low level, and the concepts of Stacking and Restaking made the POS staking rate soar, causing destruction.The number of ETH is lower than that of POS issuance, so Ethereum has begun to enter a state of inflation not long ago.According to ultra sound money data, Ethereum issued 70,000 more units in the past 30 days, with an annual inflation rate of 0.713%.
Now it’s “good”, critics have found evidence that Ethereum is about to “death”, believing that Ethereum has begun to inflate and may fall into a “death spiral” in the future…
However, people did not notice that another data displayed by ultra sound money is at a time when Ethereum prices are sluggish and the chain is extremely deserted.Ethereum’s annual inflation rate is still lower than Bitcoin, which claims to be “low inflation”. This data seems to be a small gap, but you should know that Bitcoin’s current market performance and ecological vitality seem to be higher than Ethereum at this time.
In essence, the problem that arises on Ethereum today is that Layer2 has successfully implemented and solved the expansion problem. At this time, it coincides with the sluggish market and on-chain activities. We cannot ignore the great benefits that will be brought by the construction of infrastructure in the future..
3) The foundation shipped and fled the top?
Since the Ethereum Foundation shipped several times in history, some people set the “Ethereum Foundation Shipping” event as a shipping indicator.It is precisely in this context that the deposit of 35,000 ETH into Kraken on August 24 was considered a shipment escape, which caused “criticism” among many crypto users for a time.Many KOLs and self-media also followed up on the incident and released the FUD information about the Ethereum Foundation’s shipment and escape.
In response, Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, posted on X, saying, “This is part of its fund management activities. The Ethereum Foundation’s annual budget is about US$100 million, mainly composed of grants and wages, and some recipients onlyCan accept fiat currency. For a long time this year, we have been told not to engage in any funding activities because the regulation is complicated and we cannot share plans in advance. Also, this transaction does not equal to selling. From now on, we will have plans” (As a non-profit foundation, the Ethereum Foundation previously planned to withdraw 15% of the funds (fiat currency value) each year for various support within the ecosystem.)
Simply put, the Ethereum Foundation’s response is that 35,000 ETH is a normal fund management, and transferring to the exchange does not mean that it will be sold immediately, but that it will be sold gradually with plans.
On August 30, the Ethereum Foundation released its fund allocation usage statement for the second quarter of this year.A total of about US$8.5 million was used to fund nearly 100 community activities and projects, including several major categories related to community education, technology research and development, innovation projects, developer tools, research, and ecological development, clearly marked project categories and names., description URL and other detailed information.Click these funded project websites at will, including community and ecological technology conferences held in various regions around the world, research projects by technical research professors/teams, and tools to improve the development experience of Ethereum ecological developers.All of them make people feel the active and serious technical research atmosphere of the Ethereum ecological community around the world.This is completely invisible in many communities.
So, do you think the 100 million budget spent by the Ethereum Foundation every year is worth it?It depends on one’s opinion.
4) Are spot ETFs useless?
Previously, after the Bitcoin spot ETF was passed, the price of Bitcoin reached a big step, and the passage of Ethereum spot ETF did not seem to bring much benefit to the Ethereum price.
I remember that two years ago, Vitalik Buterin believed that spot ETFs in crypto assets may not be a benefit.He believes that we should not enthusiastically chase large institutional capital, and that the ecosystem needs time to mature before we get more attention.
Perhaps although the mainstreaming of Bitcoin and Ethereum has brought new capital entrances, it will also bring more stringent centralized supervision.
One thing is certain that there are currently many US stock investors who allocate spot ETFs with crypto assets. These institutions are not “good men and women”. The size of ETFs is getting bigger and bigger, and will gradually affect the crypto market, regardless of whether it is.Positive or negative,If the crypto market is good and they see the potential for value-addedness, they will make large allocations, and otherwise they will also significantly crash the market.Therefore, spot ETFs will only follow the trend. At present, spot ETFs will find it difficult to play a positive role in the short term.
5) Inadequate innovation?
Previously, the “Ethereum Killer” project community proposed that Ethereum’s innovation has stagnated, with little development and very slow development.For this matter, we can only say that Ethereum is too unfair.The truth is that over the years, the Ethereum community has been the “leader” of technological innovation in crypto community. Whether it is the economic and technological innovation of Tokens such as EIP-1559, Staking, Restaking, Layer2, ZK, DA, and layered modularization.From the Ethereum community.To date, whether it is the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Solana ecosystem or other public chains, we have benefited from the solutions and open source technology innovation brought by the Ethereum ecosystem over the years.
6) God V is engaged in a “one-man show”?
There are always people who regard V God as the “dominate” in Ethereum. It is undeniable that Vitalik’s prestige in the Ethereum community as the founder is quite high, but it does not mean that the Ethereum community has only one voice, as decentralizedCommunity, open and transparent operation,Although Vitalik’s opinions and suggestions have received high attention and attention, the final decision still needs to be achieved through extensive discussions among the community’s developers.,This is the result of a large number of community members’ collaboration.If we compare most crypto project founders, except for the disappearing Satoshi Nakamoto, most other founders may not be as low-key and indifferent to fame and fortune as Vitalik.
At the end of August, Vitalik Buterin replied in a comment when an update on the Ethereum Foundation’s spending information said its salary was S$182,000 per year.This is a drop in the bucket compared to the salary of a leader of a large international enterprise that can often earn hundreds of millions of dollars.
In addition, the US SEC has long conducted a long-term investigation on institutions such as the Ethereum Foundation. The survey subjects naturally include Vitalik. In the end, the SEC gave up the investigation this year, which indirectly proved that the Ethereum Foundation organization and this project were decentralized enough as the founderNaturally, it is impossible to “dominate one person”.
7) Turn to POS to fall into centralization?
This old growth talks about topic, and there are still people who are arguing about it now.Of course, after nearly two years of merger of Ethereum POS, we look back, the smooth operation of Ethereum is enough to prove the security and reliability of POS.
02Summary: The overall environment cannot do, it can only be consumed internally
The world is always so strange. When Ethereum was strong during the bear market, it was shouting “Awesome, invincible in innovation, and optimistic about the future.” Now the market is sluggish, and everything you do has become a mistake.
In fact, since the birth of Ethereum, from the DAO hacking incident to the falsification of DApps to the rise of DeFi, it has been caught in various endless debates. The reason why every controversy is so fierce,This just shows that the development of Ethereum is highly valued, and it has long represented the Web3 and crypto markets becoming an indispensable backbone force.
Today’s situation may be mainly caused by insufficient external liquidity caused by the US dollar interest rate hike. In this case, you can see the traditional Internet companies that have long been deeply trapped in the quagmire, even the unicorn in the AI star track.Companies may also go bankrupt due to lack of liquidity, and today’s crypto market is already very good compared to the bear market period in the previous two years.
The lack of liquidity has led to not much new money entering. Even though the “old money” who has more professional research on crypto assets advocates Ethereum, the concept of digital gold in Bitcoin is more in line with the current environment, and the Meme trend is exploded., one of the few new money will naturally be diverted in large quantities, making Ethereum even more difficult.
Whether the recession of the overall environment or the shortage of liquidity will eventually pass, and the innovation and application of encryption and Web3 will be accelerated and everything will be back on track.
