Blockchain Network Report:
Author: Haotian
I do not agree with the arguments of “big companies” and “narrative fiction” regarding Ethereum. The following are some perspectives to consider:
1) Ethereum is an experimental product of decentralized governance in the crypto industry and is not controlled by centralized companies or organizations. It involves the participation and contributions of project developers, researchers, node operators, ETH holders, and others worldwide.
The collaborative nature of open-source code, community-driven decision-making processes, and transparent governance mechanisms, in the long run, will surpass any centralized organizational structure. Although the efficiency may be slower, Ethereum’s advantage lies in its openness, transparency, and emergence of innovative breakthroughs. Ethereum aims to solve the problem of “centralized company syndrome,” which is different from the “big company syndrome” that it may eventually develop.
If Ethereum fails, the choice for decentralized architecture would be to embrace “forking” and let it die. There will always be a more powerful new “Ethereum” emerging. The fact that Ethereum remains the center of the entire crypto world is sufficient to illustrate this point.
2) From the perspective of public chain technology, Ethereum has smoothly transitioned from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) in the past few years. It has progressed from the Sharding strategy to the final implementation of the Rollup-Centric core strategy, and is now gradually implementing the roadmap. The security, stability, and engineering quality of the entire process have met expectations. The shift from sharding to Rollup is also a result of market demand.
The problem lies in the fact that the technological iteration of public chains cannot resonate with market cycles. The disconnection between infrastructure development, application implementation, and market profitability becomes evident, or it is difficult to establish a strong correlation.
Layer 2 is indeed affected by mainnet gas fees and bandwidth performance, but even with the successful upgrade of London Hard Fork, the expected prosperity of Layer 2 has not been achieved. Ideally, Layer 2 should have seen exponential breakthroughs with the emergence of numerous chains, and Ethereum could benefit from “taxation” and “Gas Burn” to achieve deflationary effects.
However, the reality is that the barrier to entry for launching chains has decreased, and the narrative of “RaaS” has intensified, but the ideal of Mass Adoption remains distant. To be honest, this has already gone beyond the scope of Ethereum’s technical framework.
The NFT FOMO wave in 2021 brought benefits to Ethereum. Objectively speaking, this is a market effect that emerged from decentralized architecture, rather than being directly driven by Ethereum’s “core” developers.
3) “Narrative” is the evolution of development, a derivative of business thinking overlaid on technology.
For example, the narrative of Restaking emerged with the introduction of the @eigenlayer protocol, the modular narrative emerged with the establishment of @CelestiaOrgDA chain, and the narrative of ZK-Rollup emerged with the introduction of @Starknet.
In the future market, the charge of @ParticleNtwrk chain could bring the “chain abstraction” narrative to the forefront, and the unified liquidity trust ecosystem to be built by underlying protocols such as @ProjectZKM could eliminate the boundaries of blockchain. There are too many topics related to “narrative”.
Objectively speaking, “narrative” is the result of excessive power and hot money FOMO among developers. Narratives provide room for imagination in technology, although excessive narratives may give a sense of emptiness. However, the excessive narrative itself is the result of natural market progression, like blowing bubbles. Narratives will be replaced, but they will always exist.
In other words, narratives that do not attract resources, talent, and funds will lose their appeal. It is better to stay within Web 2 and avoid the burden of being accused of fraud. Of course, memes are also narratives, but if the market is bearish on narratives that have a building process and underlying business logic, the existence of memes will lose its fundamental basis.