Ethereum: It’s hard to keep the original intention, where to go

Since launching the network in 2015 under the codename Frontier, Ethereum has grown from an ambitious vision to the solid foundation for thousands of decentralized applications around the world today.

However, with the rise of blockchains such as Bitcoin and Solana , vying for Ethereum's developer and user base, the ETH ecosystem began to waver, seemingly forgetting its original goals, and its price performance has been lackluster, and it has not yet successfully broken through the historical high of $4,700 set in 2021.

This raises the question: has Ethereum lost its way? And if so, how do we get it back on track?

As Confucius said, “He who chases two rabbits catches neither.” Between chasing Solana’s faster execution speeds and its narrative of competing with Bitcoin for hard currency, Ethereum has forgotten its original vision of being the world’s computer.

Péter Szilágyi , head of the Ethereum team, once said that "Ethereum is losing its dominance." Due to the decrease in transaction activity and the decline in ETH consumption rate, Ethereum's inflation rate has reached 0.74%, and Ethereum's "Ultra Sound Money" status has also been questioned. While others advocate that ETH retain its deflationary nature, it is important to remember that Ultra Sound Money has never been the goal.

Ethereum is more than just a currency. It has never been about having the fastest TPS or the lowest gas fees; it has always been about building a truly decentralized future. Vitalik Buterin and other co-founders created Ethereum to become a world computer - a universal network of thousands of computers that anyone, anywhere can build decentralized applications. While building to enhance accessibility and interoperability, the ecosystem was disrupted by the latest trends and lost focus.

As the price fell below $2,500, it was believed that the reason for ETH’s poor performance was related to the applications being built on the network.

Many dApps on Ethereum today have gained short-term hype, but imperfect user interfaces and suboptimal experiences have led to limited user adoption and slow growth. In addition, these applications often attract the attention of the same users scattered across various L2s and fail to attract new blood. Without usable applications, Ethereum cannot achieve its goal of becoming the world computer.

Ethereum’s primary goal is to build a strong infrastructure, not applications. Decentralized computing and secondary and tertiary networks that provide data to Ethereum are being developed, indicating that Ethereum’s infrastructure is showing signs of progress. Now that it is much cheaper to develop on a permissionless chain, even enterprises are beginning to favor permissionless networks like Ethereum over private enterprise networks.

However, even with these advances, Ethereum’s improvements are still slow, with the network stuck in the middle of its expansion roadmap, while the technologies of Merkle trees, zkSTARKS, account abstraction, and a unified and hopeless L2 have yet to be implemented, and it is stuck in a development bottleneck period.

It’s time to give up short-term thinking. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum will come out of its seemingly low activity slump. Ethereum is having its “lightning moment” and it needs to give up the Ultra sound Money narrative and stop trying to catch up with Solana. For those who are paying attention, Ethereum has a clear path to solve this problem. For example, we have yet to see how people will use Blobs beyond just a window into the Rollup fraud-proof challenge space.

Following the Dencun upgrade in March, Pectra is the next major Ethereum upgrade scheduled for the end of 2024, and the next step on the Ethereum roadmap is "The Purge". This upgrade will play an important role in keeping Ethereum in sync with other chains and handling the influx of activity once the Ethereum chain gains wider adoption. The "Purge" will simplify the protocol by clearing out old history, which will remove technical obstacles and reduce the cost of participating in the network.

While removing historical states has certain benefits, it also makes the chain vulnerable to the threat of centralized entities swallowing up data, making Ethereum a data-centric chain. This makes Ethereum more like an "advertising sign" than a trusted platform. This problem hinders the next stage of development of the world computer because downstream activities like multi-agent AI systems and decentralized computing cannot scale without data to refer to. One way to solve this problem is decentralized long-term data availability.

Yes, Ethereum is currently stuck in the middle of its scaling roadmap. However, Ethereum can get back on track by shifting its focus to infrastructure. This is the path that will truly enable Ethereum to fulfill its role as a world computer. As Ethereum completes its roadmap and achieves decentralized computing in the coming years, the world computer will be able to operate efficiently with the support of a strong global infrastructure.