Beijing News reports:
Author: Haotian
I disagree with the notion of Ethereum being a “big company” or a “narrative vacuum.” Here are some perspectives to consider:
1) Ethereum is an experimental product of decentralized governance in the crypto industry. It is not controlled by centralized companies or organizations. Developers, researchers, node operators, ETH holders, and others from around the world participate and contribute to its development.
The collaborative nature of open-source code, community-driven decision-making processes, and transparent governance mechanisms will eventually surpass any centralized organizational structure, despite being slower in efficiency. Ethereum aims to solve the problem of “centralized company syndrome,” so it is unlikely to suffer from the same issues.
If Ethereum were to fail, the choice for a decentralized architecture would be to embrace “forking” and let it die, as there will always be a more powerful “Ethereum” emerging. The fact that Ethereum is still the center of the entire crypto world is evidence enough.
2) From a technical standpoint, Ethereum has smoothly transitioned from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) over the past few years. It has gone from Sharding strategies to the eventual implementation of a Rollup-Centric core strategy, with the roadmap being gradually implemented. The security, stability, and engineering quality of the entire process have been as expected. The shift from sharding to Rollup is also a response to market trends.
The problem lies in the fact that the technological iteration of public chains does not necessarily resonate with market cycles. The pace of infrastructure development, application implementation, and market profitability can become disconnected or difficult to correlate.
While Layer 2 is affected by mainnet gas fees and bandwidth performance, even the successful Cancun upgrade did not bring about the expected prosperity of Layer 2. Ideally, with Layer 2, there would be exponential breakthroughs in user ecosystems, and Ethereum would benefit from “taxation” and “gas burn” to achieve deflationary pressure.
However, the reality is that the barrier to entry for launching new chains has lowered, and the narrative of RaaS has fermented. The ideal of mass adoption remains distant. Honestly, this has already exceeded the scope of Ethereum’s pure technical framework.
3) “Narratives” are derived from the evolution of development trends and are derivative products of business thinking overlaid on technology.
For example, the narrative of Restaking emerged with the introduction of the @eigenlayer protocol, the narrative of modularity emerged with the @CelestiaOrgDA chain, and the narrative of ZK-Rollup emerged with the introduction of @Starknet.
In the future market, the @ParticleNtwrk chain’s spearheading efforts may bring the “chain abstraction” narrative to the forefront, and the unified liquidity and trust ecosystem that underlying protocols such as @ProjectZKM aim to build could eliminate the boundaries of blockchain chains. There are too many narrative topics.
Objectively speaking, narratives are the result of an excess of developer power and FOMO-driven hot money. Narratives allow for imaginative possibilities in technology, although an excessive focus on narratives can give a sense of emptiness. However, the excessive focus on narratives is a natural result of market forces. It is like blowing bubbles; narratives will evolve but will always exist.
In other words, if the narrative does not attract the allure of “resources, talent, and funding,” it will lose its appeal. In that case, it is better to stay within the confines of Web 2.0, without the burden of being associated with scams and fraud. Of course, memes are also a form of narrative, but if the market bears a negative view on narratives that have a building process and underlying business logic, the existence of memes would lose any fundamental basis.
