jakiro
Written by: Yanz & LiamEditor: Liam
“I really sold this time!”
On April 22, the ETH/BTC exchange rate fell to 0.01766 for a short time, continuing to hit a new low since 2020.
Lin Feng, who has continued to invest in fixed investment and firmly held Ethereum for 4 years, could no longer stand it and issued a heartbreaking declaration on his circle of friends.Compared with simple cuts of flesh, this is more like a collapse of faith and a farewell to dreams.
Also on this day, institutional investors also took action.
Galaxy Digital has changed ETH to SOL, and encrypted VC Paradigm also transferred 5,500 ETH (approximately US$8.66 million) to brokerage platform Anchorage, suspected to be prepared for sale.
The most ironic thing is that there is an institution that joins the coin selling army – the Ethereum Foundation.A wallet associated with the Ethereum Foundation deposited 1,000 ETH (about $1.58 million) into Kraken.
Ethereum, a project once regarded as the flagship of the blockchain revolution, seems to have come to its darkest moment.
Behind this collective escape are stories of being forced to say goodbye to your ideals, and are also difficult choices of faith and interests again and again.
And all of this is recorded, witnessed, and remembered in the group chat called “Ethereum Asylum”.
Ethereum Asylum
“Our group name was not actually ‘Ethereum Asylum’ at the beginning, but ‘I was wrong, I regret buying Ethereum’.”
On February 3, 2025, the cryptocurrency market fell collectively, and Ethereum once plummeted 25%, reaching a low of US$2080.19 per coin, catching many Ethereum Holders off guard, including oranges.
Orange, who worked for venture capital institutions (VCs), entered the crypto market in 2021, and its research on Ethereum technology laid the foundation for his belief in entering the circle.
However, the price of Ethereum fell to $3,300 and made Orange feel bad. He repeatedly muttered, and the group chat “I was wrong, I regret buying Ethereum” came into being.
On February 3rd, Orange suddenly panicked—“I can’t even escape, what should I do, brothers?”
In order to seek psychological comfort and to keep warm, this small group with only 6 friends began to welcome more “wrong people”: super big players like Dachengzi and Du Jun, as well as VC senior executives, everyone gathered here to heal each other and seek psychological comfort.
As Ethereum continues to decline, the number of “patients” has increased day by day, gradually expanding and stabilizing to 250 people in just one month – Orange said:“Buying Ethereum is ‘two-five’”, this deliberately controlled number has a bit of self-deprecating meaning.
“At first, some people called for a bottom-up at $3,000, but later it fell to $2,500 and $2,100, and the bottom-up was getting smaller and smaller. In the end, everyone started to joke that the person who wanted to buy the bottom asked Teacher Yang Yongxin to call. So we changed the group name to “Ethereum Asylum” because everyone felt that they were crazy.”
Source: Big Orange @0xVeryBigOrange
As the group leader, Orange witnessed it all.He is an observer and a member of the asylum that is firmly locked up in a madhouse.But he had no choice but to say,Most of the people who stayed in the group had no choice.
Oranges can’t help but miss the summer of 2020.
That summer, Uniswap’s trading volume exceeded Coinbase. Compound’s hot liquidity mining made countless people rich overnight, and the concept of decentralized finance DeFi swept the entire cryptocurrency world.
DeFi Summer is like a fanatical technology feast, Ethereum is the protagonist of this feast,It has attracted the attention of countless investors and developers.
For traditional Web2 VC practitioners like Orange, this is not only an opportunity to make money, but also an enlightenment and baptism of ideas.
“We really did a lot of research at that time,” Orange recalls. “Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation (EF) drew a lot of ‘big pie’, such as sharding technology, zero-knowledge proof (zk) … I thought that was the future at that time.”
Similarly, Lin Feng also bought Ethereum in the midsummer of 2020. At that time, he was full of hope and expectation and was excited about Ethereum’s vision of “world computers”.
“As an Ethereum holder at that time, I was very proud that this was the real value investment, innovation at the level of human civilization.”
In addition to individuals like Orange and Lin Feng, a large number of traditional VCs also entered the emerging land of Web3 that summer with curiosity and longing for the New World.
As the founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, Vitalik’s every word and deed have attracted wide attention, and everyone follows Vitalik’s guiding investment layout.A large number of VCs are paying a lot of money to bet on Ethereum ecological infrastructure. Vitalik is optimistic about the valuation of ZK and Layer2 tracks soared, Scroll is valued at US$1.8 billion, zkSync is valued at US$2 billion, Starknet is valued at US$8 billion… All kinds of capital have entered the market, betting on Ethereum’s dream of expansion.
However, after the DeFi Summer craze faded, in the new cycle, the technological narrative was abandoned by investors and replaced by the opposite of technology, MEME, as if it were a ridicule.
“We were very firmly convinced that Solana would not become an ‘Ethereum killer’, but now it seems that the market does not care about the core issues of privacy and security at all.” This divergence made Orange feel helpless, but what really put him in trouble was his deep feelings for Ethereum.
As a loyal believer, he not only held Ethereum in a large amount of time in the bull market, but also chose to pledge ETH in exchange for long-term gains.However, when the market entered a cold winter, the price of ETH plummeted, and the pledged assets could not be taken out, Orange, like many members of the asylum, was in a dilemma.
In fact, most of these trapped people are not speculators with the mentality of “get rich overnight”, but are long-term holders who have experienced many rounds of market fluctuations and have a certain understanding of Ethereum, commonly known as old leeks.
The paradox of this cycle is fully reflected here – Paper Hand PVP is rewarded, Diamond Hand is punished, and constantly experiencing the double torture of reality and cognition.
For them, Ethereum is both a symbol of hope and a shackle that cannot be escaped.
They love Ethereum because it represents innovation in technology and future possibilities; they also hate Ethereum because the pain and dilemma caused by falling prices are real.
For Lin Feng, the pain of selling Ethereum comes from real financial losses on the one hand, but more of it is “damage to the heart of Tao”.He has entered the crypto world because of Ethereum and claims to be a value investor.He used to be proud of investing in Ethereum, but now reality makes him deny his former self.What made him even more ashamed was that he found that his belief in boasting to the outside world was not firm. In the face of the continuous decline of the K-line, he could not do anything without looking at the price, and finally chose to give up.
Lin Feng sold Ethereum and his former dream.
However, most patients are still waiting in the “ward”.Not only are they eager to return to their capital and discharge from the hospital, the dreams they planted in the story three years ago are also waiting for another hot summer.
There is no new story on Ethereum
“There is no paradigm innovation in Ethereum this year!”
The well-known KOL Big Orange is also a member of the Ethereum Asylum. On Twitter, he is the “E Guard Head” in the eyes of everyone.
On March 21, 2024, Big Orange tweeted thatFrom today on, I am the dead bull in Ethereum. Ethereum was not a record high before May, so I eat shit.
Despite the passionate love, Big Orange also admits that Ethereum lacks innovation at present.
“There is no new thing that makes people shine,” Yuan Jie, co-founder of the public chain Conflux, called himself “Web3 Investment Director”, and was determined to build an “Ethereum Killer”, which also witnessed the rise and decline of the Ethereum ecosystem.
The craze of DeFi, NFT, and GameFi in the last cycle is still unforgettable. “At that time, there were a lot of new things to learn every day, and in the process of learning, participation could also get good returns on wealth.”
“The Golden Age”, Ethereum has had the best stories.That year, the on-chain ecosystem grew explosively, and Ethereum’s “Cult of God” was pushed to a climax. Capital, developers and users’ attention was highly focused on certain specific directions (such as Layer 2, DeFi, ZK technology, etc.) and once blindly expanded, investors came and went and were bustling.
The narrative three years ago nourished the prosperity of the previous cycle, but now, such a story is over.
Just like the land loses its fertility due to excessive cultivation, when talking about the present, Yuan Jie saidShow,“Vitalik has participated too deeply in the guidance and route formulation of the industry direction with his personal charm, which has led to the ineffective resource allocation of Ethereum.”
Whether it is a breakthrough at the technical level or a new ecological application, Ethereum has not provided enough freshness to attract the attention of the market.
Boiling a frog in warm water, the Ethereum main chain is facing the dilemma of a “gradually barren land”.
“The on-chain transaction volume and activity are very low, and the entire ecosystem has become cooler, which has led to the deflation mechanism of Ethereum (EIP-1559) not working well.” In Big Orange’s view, the deflation mechanism of EIP-1559 is like a beautifully designed irrigation system, but in the absence of sufficient “water source” (liquidity), this system can only be just a measure and cannot provide real nutrients for the Ethereum ecosystem.
What’s more complicated is that “blood-sucking flowers” bloom on such barren land.
Layer 2 carries the dream of expanding Ethereum, and the whole world is dominated by it. Each Layer 2 regards Ethereum as orthodox, but each has its own country. The value of the blood-sucking Ethereum main network has continuously weakened Ethereum’s control over its own ecosystem.
“Everyone is scrambling to cross Ethereum’s assets to their chains, because they have more spans and high points, and then they will get more airdrop tokens,” Yuan Jie seemed a little excited. He attributed these “blood-sucking flowers” and the current ecological homogeneity results to the “prisoner’s dilemma” of human nature driven by the short-term profit-seeking mentality.
Yuanjie believes that this may not be Vitalik’s original intention, but in the process of using Layer2 to expand the Ethereum ecological boundaries,Ignoring the human nature of “everyone wants to get rich quickly and compete for the same property”, and eventually “falls into a cycle of inclination and self-destruction.”
The Layer2 network is highly fragmented, separating user experience and on-chain liquidity. The composability advantage that Ethereum mainnet once proud of in DeFi Summer has disappeared. Instead, Solana has become a habitat for many consumer applications with the simple feature of “fast”.
“For ETH now, I think of ATOM, and I am really afraid that ETH will repeat the mistakes of ATOM.”
Lin Feng believes thatThe dilemma of ETH is similar to the dilemma of ATOM, both of which are experiencing a “value transfer to the upstream”.
In the Cosmos ecosystem, various sovereign application chains (such as OSMO, JUNO, etc.) are interconnected through the IBC protocol, but they capture the value of their own ecosystem, and ATOM, as a central hub, fails to effectively capture value from these chains.
After the rise of various types of Ethereum L2, relying on the sorters, they obtained a large amount of MEV and transaction fee income, which greatly reduced the value of the return to the Ethereum main network and weakened the value capture ability of ETH.
“If EthereumMain chainOnly when the upgrade is successful and the carrying capacity is greatly improved will Ethereum truly usher in a new peak of development.”, Big Orange thinks so.
How to reshape greatness?
On April 22, when many institutions sold ETH, F2Pool WangChun once again exchanged 50 WBTCs to 2,794 ETH, worth about 4.36 million US dollars, bringing a little thought to those who still hold ETH today.
Ethereum, a land that once nurtured countless innovative fruits, seems to require a long “fallen period”.
When fallow, some people cut their flesh and some people stick to it.
Big Orange chooses to stick to it.The bull market in 2021 gave Da Orange a lot of rewards, and his feelings for Ethereum have long surpassed simple investment relations.To him, ETH is more like a belief.
Among the “E Guards” that still exist, everyone has turned into non-staff consultants of the Ethereum Foundation and made suggestions for Ethereum. According to their respective “reform measures”, they can be roughly divided into two factions.
One faction is right, and advocates drastic reforms, believing that Ethereum should pursue “practicality” and should comply with regulations and be “close to authority.”
For example, Orange believes that Ethereum needs to “stop pretending to be dead” and actively embrace compliance.
“Some things have been doomed since the birth of human beings. You cannot compete with the state machine. If you want to survive well or show your own functions, you should not compete with the entire state machine.”
The Ethereum Foundation needs to balance between ideal and bread.Yuanjie does not deny that the Ethereum Foundation focuses on the purity of academic discussions and technological innovation, but a pragmatic business sector is necessary.
“If Trump is in power and we need Trump to accept Ethereum, then there are people who don’t hate Trump to get him done. If Vitalik can’t do it yourself, then you can let others do it. A good foundation, as a non-profit organization, should be able to tolerate all kinds of decisions.”
Lin Feng even believes that the Ethereum Foundation has paid too much attention to ideology in the past, ignored real creation and construction, and was too “weak”.The Ethereum Foundation needs a Trump-like reform figure to completely reform the atmosphere.
Another faction is the left, believing that the greatest value of Ethereum lies in its “decentralization, which is the last “idealist place” in the crypto world besides Bitcoin.
The well-known KOL Blue Fox Notes said that he only reads a little bit on Ethereum.“Will we continue to maintain decentralization, security and no need to trust these core values in the future? If we keep it, continue to support it, and if the price changes, we will leave directly no matter how high the price is.”
“The crypto world needs an internationalist fighter. No one can compare to Vitalik except for the disappearing Satoshi Nakamoto.” Investor Jacob invested in Ethereum. Despite facing huge financial losses, he still agrees with Ethereum’s values of not compromising with authority.
“SOL and other emerging high-performance public chains are essentially capital-driven corporate stock logic, and high efficiency is naturally more likely to cause market heat.But Ethereum is a new form of human civilization.”
Behind this battle between the left and right is a different understanding of blockchain priorities—Is it pragmatic, pursuing efficiency and business success, or adhering to the spirit of decentralization and freedom?
In the darkest moments, confidence is more important than gold.
IOSG founder Jocy called for“Ethereum will not die. It is the most successful decentralized organization in the Web3 industry. Looking to the future, please cherish the Ethereum in your hands and look at its value and innovation in a decade.”
Back to that “Ethereum Asylum”, the refuge that was originally born of panic, has now become a corner that witnesses history.
Whether it is the moment Lin Feng pressed the sell button, the day Big Orange insisted on holding, or every emotional fluctuation that Orange saw in the asylum, they are recording and shaping the history of Ethereum.
No matter what the future is, regardless of the current departure or persistence.Those who once went crazy about Ethereum will always remember that hot summer and the Ethereum that once made them believe in the future.
