Is Ethereum facing market skepticism due to the prevalence of corporate illness and a fictional narrative

Coin World News Report:
“Narrative excess” is the natural outcome of the market, and narratives will change but will always exist.
Authored by: Haotian
I do not agree with the notion of Ethereum as a “big company” and the criticism of narratives. Here are some perspectives to consider:
1) Ethereum is an experimental product of decentralized governance in the crypto space, not controlled by centralized companies or organizations. It involves the participation and contributions of developers, researchers, node operators, ETH holders, and others globally.
The collaborative approach of open-source code, community-driven decision-making processes, and transparent governance mechanisms, in the long run, will surpass any centralized organizational structure, despite being slower in efficiency. Ethereum’s mission is to address the “centralization disease,” so it is unlikely to suffer from the “big company disease” before achieving its mission.
If Ethereum truly fails, the choice of a decentralized architecture would be to embrace “forking” and let it die, as there will always be a more powerful new “Ethereum” emerging. The fact that Ethereum is the center of the entire crypto world is evidence enough.
2) From a public chain technology perspective, Ethereum has smoothly transitioned from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) in recent years, from the Sharding strategy to the eventual implementation of the Rollup-Centric core strategy, and the subsequent realization of the roadmap step by step. The security, stability, and engineering quality delivered throughout this process have been within expectations. The shift from sharding to Rollup is also a result of market trends.
The problem lies in the fact that the technological iteration of public chains cannot resonate with market cycles. There is a disconnection between infrastructure development, application implementation, and the pace of market profitability, or it is difficult to establish strong correlations.
Layer 2 is indeed affected by the mainnet gas fees and bandwidth performance, but even with the successful London upgrade, it did not bring about the expected prosperity of Layer 2. Ideally, there would be a burst of Layer 2 chains and exponential breakthroughs in user ecosystems, and Ethereum would achieve deflationary effects through “taxation” and “gas burn.”
However, the reality is that the threshold for launching chains has lowered, and the narrative of RaaS has fermented, but the ideal of mass adoption is still far away. Honestly, this has already exceeded the constraints of Ethereum’s technical framework.
The NFT Fomo wave in 2021 brought dividends to Ethereum, objectively speaking, it is a market effect that emerged from decentralized architecture, not directly driven by Ethereum’s “core” developers.
3) “Narratives” are the evolution of development trends and derivatives of business thinking on top of technology.
For example, the narrative of Restaking emerged with the introduction of the @eigenlayer protocol, the modular narrative emerged with the introduction of the @CelestiaOrg DA chain, and the narrative of ZK-Rollup emerged with the introduction of @Starknet.
In the future market, the @ParticleNtwrk chain’s charge into the forefront may bring the “chain abstraction” narrative to the forefront, and the unified liquidity trust ecosystem that protocols like @ProjectZKM ZK want to build may eliminate the boundaries of blockchain. There are too many topics related to “narratives.”
Objectively speaking, “narratives” are the result of an excess of developer power and hot money FOMO, and narratives allow for imagination in technology, although excessive narratives can give a sense of virtuality. However, the excess of narratives is the natural outcome of the market, like blowing bubbles, narratives will change but will always exist.
In other words, narratives that do not generate FOMO will lose the appeal to attract all these “resources, talent, and funding,” and it would be better to stay in the Web 2 world without the burden of being associated with scams. Of course, MEMEs are also a form of narrative, but if the market becomes bearish on all narratives that have a building process and underlying business logic, MEMEs will lose their fundamental basis.