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Author: Ganesh Swami Source: coindesk Translation: Shan Oppa, Bitchain Vision
Is it possible that Ethereum will lose its focus and end up accomplishing nothing because it tries to meet everyone’s needs?Ethereum needs to refocus on its initial ambition to become a global computer, said Ganesh Swami, co-founder of Covalent.
Since its launch in 2015 under the code name “Frontier”, Ethereum has gone a long way from a grand idea to the basis of today’s thousands of decentralized applications.However,As blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana compete for Ethereum’s developer and user base, Ethereum’s ecosystem began to appear shaky, lacking a clear direction, gradually deviating from its original goal.Even the value of Ethereum seems a bit dull.Ethereum’s token price has so far failed to break the all-time high of $4,700 set in 2021.
This raises the question: Is Ethereum lost its way?If so, how can we get it back on track?
As Confucius said, “If you have one mind and two use, both things will be lost.” While chasing Solana’s faster execution speed, it also tries to compete with Bitcoin’s “hard currency” concept.Ethereum has gradually forgotten its original intention of becoming a “global computer”.”Ethereum has lost its direction.” Even the status of “ultrasonic currency” has been questioned, as Ethereum’s inflation rate reaches 0.74%, which is related to reduced trading activity and ETH burn rateRelevant.Although some advocate that ETH should maintain its deflationary nature, we must remember that “ultrasonic currency” has never been the goal of Ethereum.
Ethereum’s infrastructure progress
Ethereum is not just a currency, it has never pursued the highest TPS (trading volume per second) or the lowest Gas fee; its mission is always to build a truly decentralized future.Vitalik Buterin and other co-founders created Ethereum to build it into a “global computer”—a global network of thousands of computers on which anyone can build decentralized applications at any time.However, in the pursuit of accessibility and interoperability, the ecosystem is distracted by various emerging trends and loses its focus.
As the price drops below $2,500, many people think that the reason Ethereum is underperforming is related to the applications built on its network.Many dApps (decentralized applications) developed on Ethereum today tend to only get short-term hype, but due to a clumsy user interface and underdeveloped platforms, these applications have limited usage and slow user growth.Furthermore, these applications tend to attract only the same user groups scattered across different L2 (Layer 2) networks.Without practical applications, Ethereum will not be able to achieve its goal of becoming a global computer.
Ethereum’s primary goal should rely on strong infrastructure, not applications.Decentralized computing and the secondary and third-level networks that support Ethereum are being actively developed, which shows that Ethereum’s infrastructure is constantly improving.Even enterprises are now starting to prefer permissionless networks like Ethereum rather than private enterprise networks, as development on permissionless chains has become cheaper.
But even with these progress, Ethereum’s improvement speed is still relatively slow, and it is currently in the mid-term stage of the expansion roadmap. This is a relatively dull period. Merkle Trees, zkSTARKS, account abstraction and integration of different L2 technologies are gradually being implemented.
Short-term thinking needs to be reduced.Like Bitcoin, Ethereum will eventually emerge from the current low period of seemingly little activity.Ethereum is in its “lightning moment” and it needs to abandon the “ultrasonic currency” narrative and stop trying to catch up with Solana.For those who are following its progress, Ethereum has a clear path to correction.For example, we still haven’t seen how people can take advantage of “Blobs”, except as storage space as a window for summary fraud proof challenges.
Future Outlook
Following the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, Pectra will be the next major upgrade for Ethereum, expected to be launched by the end of 2024.There is also an upgrade on Ethereum’s long-term roadmap.This upgrade will help Ethereum keep pace with other blockchains and handle the influx of activities that come with it as the chain achieves wider adoption.Purge upgrades will simplify protocols by cleaning up old historical data, eliminating technical debt and reducing the cost of participating in the network.
Although removing historical state brings many benefits, it also puts the Ethereum chain at the risk of monopolizing data by centralized entities, thus turning Ethereum into a chain in a data center.Ethereum may therefore be more like a billboard, reducing the attribute of trustlessness.This problem hinders the next phase of “global computers” as downstream activities such as multi-agent AI systems and decentralized computing cannot scale in the absence of data.This problem needs to be solved by one solution: decentralized long-term data availability.
Currently, Ethereum is indeed trapped in the mid-term phase of the expansion roadmap.However, Ethereum can get back on track by turning its focus to infrastructure.This is the key to getting the network to truly fulfill its role as a “global computer”.As Ethereum completes its roadmap and implements decentralized computing in the next few years, global computers will operate smoothly based on a strong global infrastructure.
