Over the past period, if you’ve been continuously following the Ethereum ecosystem, you may have developed a sense of fragmentation.
On one side, there are intensive discussions about technical topics like scaling routes, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, and Slot shortening;
On the other side, there are debates surrounding “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant,” “Why aren’t they more aggressive,” “Why is the coin price sluggish,” and so on, even evolving into emotional confrontation;
These discussions actually repeatedly point to a deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum ultimately want to become?
In fact, many controversies don’t stem from technical disagreements, but from different understandings of Ethereum’s “value premises.” Therefore, only by returning to these premises themselves can we truly understand why Ethereum has made choices that many now consider “untimely.”
Ethereum’s “Seven-Year Itch”: Is Ethereum Degenerating?
The recent Ethereum community is not peaceful.
From reflections on the Rollup-centric route, to debates about the concept of “Ethereum Alignment,” to horizontal comparisons with numerous high-performance public chains, a subtle yet continuously fermenting “Ethereum anxiety” is spreading.
This anxiety is not hard to understand.
While other public chains keep refreshing TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum is repeatedly discussing architectural decomposition, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality problems—appearing neither intuitive nor pragmatic.
This has also surfaced a sharper question: Is Ethereum degenerating?
To answer this question, one cannot merely look at the technical route of the past year or two, but must extend the perspective to a longer time dimension—back to what Ethereum has truly adhered to over this decade.
In fact, over recent years, many emerging high-performance public chains have chosen a more direct path: trading ultimate performance and experience for reduced node counts, higher hardware thresholds, and centralized sequencing and execution authority.
However, from the Ethereum community’s perspective, such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing antifragility.
A commonly overlooked yet highly illustrative fact is that over the past decade of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown/rollback event and has maintained uninterrupted 7×24×365 operation.
This is not because Ethereum has been “luckier” than Solana, Sui, and others, but because from its inception, it chose to place system continuity under worst-case scenarios before performance metrics.
In other words, Ethereum appears slow today not because it can’t be faster, but because it consistently asks a harder question—when the network is larger in scale, more participants are involved, and the environment is more hostile, can this system continue to function?
From this perspective, the so-called “seven-year itch” is not that Ethereum is degenerating, but that it is actively enduring short-term discomfort and skepticism for a longer cycle of survival.
Understanding “Ethereum Alignment”: Not Taking Sides, But Drawing Boundaries
Precisely because of this, the first step in understanding Ethereum is accepting an unlikeable yet critically important fact: Ethereum is not a system with “maximum efficiency” as its sole objective. Its core goal is not to run fastest, but to be “trustworthy even in the worst case.”
Thus, in Ethereum’s context, many seemingly technical questions are essentially value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce privileged nodes for throughput? Should we entrust security assumptions to a minority for user experience?
Ethereum’s answers are often no.
This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive vigilance toward shortcuts—“can we do it” always gives way to “should we do it.”
It is precisely in this context that “Alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts recently, with some worried it could evolve into moral coercion or become a tool for rent-seeking.
In fact, these concerns are not without foundation. As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out this risk in “Making Ethereum alignment legible”:
If “alignment” means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has already failed.
Vitalik’s solution is not to abandon alignment, but to make it legible, decomposable, and discussable. In his view, alignment should not be a vague political stance, but should be decomposed into a set of scrutinizable attributes:
Technical alignment: Does it use Ethereum’s security consensus? Does it champion open source and open standards?
Economic alignment: Does it promote ETH’s value capture in the long term, rather than extracting unilaterally?
Spiritual alignment: Does it pursue public interest rather than just exploitative growth?
From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test, but a form of mutually beneficial symbiotic social contract.
The Ethereum ecosystem permits chaos, competition, and even fierce internal competition among L2s; but ultimately, these activities should all feed back into the entity that provides them with security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.
Reflections on “Decentralization” and “Censorship Resistance”
If “alignment” delineates value boundaries, then the two pillars truly supporting these boundaries are what Ethereum has long upheld: decentralization and censorship resistance.
First, in Ethereum’s context, “decentralization” doesn’t actually mean more nodes the better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node. Rather, it means the system can function normally without trusting any single participant.
This means the protocol should not depend on a specific sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means node operation costs cannot be so high that only professional institutions remain, ensuring ordinary people can still verify whether the system is operating by the rules.
Precisely because of this, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware thresholds, bandwidth requirements, and state bloat, even if this slows certain short-term performance metrics.
In Ethereum’s view, a system that runs blazingly fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has essentially lost the meaning of “permissionless.”
Another commonly misunderstood value is censorship resistance.
Ethereum doesn’t assume the world is benevolent. On the contrary, from its inception it defaults to the possibility that participants may be profit-seeking, power may concentrate, and external pressures will definitely emerge. Therefore, censorship resistance doesn’t require “never having censorship,” but ensures that even if someone attempts to censor, the system won’t fail.
This is also why Ethereum places such importance on proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, economic game design mechanisms and more—not because they’re elegant, but because they enable continued operation in the worst case.
In many discussions, people ask: “Would such extreme situations really happen in reality?”
But the truth is, if a system is only secure in an ideal world, it’s not worth entrusting value to in the real world.
Finally, an interesting data point to wrap up: Ethereum PoS’s staking exit queue has nearly cleared, while the queue to enter staking continues growing (exceeding 1.57 million ETH).
Amid criticism and skepticism, vast amounts of ETH still choose to be locked into this system long-term.
This perhaps says more than any manifesto could.
Written in conclusion
Many critics say that Ethereum is always “still discussing philosophy after others have already gotten it running.”
But from another angle, it’s precisely these discussions that have enabled Ethereum to avoid repeated overhauls—whether the Rollup-centric roadmap, incremental introduction of ZK, or routes like Interop, fast finality, and Slot shortening, they’re all essentially unfolding under one premise:
All performance improvements must be capable of being incorporated into existing security and value assumptions.
This also explains why Ethereum’s evolution often exhibits the characteristic of “appearing conservative, yet actually robust.” Fundamentally, it doesn’t resist efficiency; it refuses to exchange future systemic risks for present short-term advantages.
And this is precisely the underlying spirit supporting the Ethereum ecosystem’s journey through a decade—and in an era of “efficiency/TVL supremacy,” the scarcest and most worth protecting thing in Web3.
イーサリアムの「退化」騒動を突き抜ける：なぜ「イーサリアムの価値観」が最も広い堀なのか？
Written by: imToken
Over the past period, if you’ve been continuously following the Ethereum ecosystem, you may have developed a sense of fragmentation.
On one side, there are intensive discussions about technical topics like scaling routes, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, and Slot shortening;
On the other side, there are debates surrounding “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant,” “Why aren’t they more aggressive,” “Why is the coin price sluggish,” and so on, even evolving into emotional confrontation;
These discussions actually repeatedly point to a deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum ultimately want to become?
In fact, many controversies don’t stem from technical disagreements, but from different understandings of Ethereum’s “value premises.” Therefore, only by returning to these premises themselves can we truly understand why Ethereum has made choices that many now consider “untimely.”
The recent Ethereum community is not peaceful.
From reflections on the Rollup-centric route, to debates about the concept of “Ethereum Alignment,” to horizontal comparisons with numerous high-performance public chains, a subtle yet continuously fermenting “Ethereum anxiety” is spreading.
This anxiety is not hard to understand.
While other public chains keep refreshing TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum is repeatedly discussing architectural decomposition, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality problems—appearing neither intuitive nor pragmatic.
This has also surfaced a sharper question: Is Ethereum degenerating?
To answer this question, one cannot merely look at the technical route of the past year or two, but must extend the perspective to a longer time dimension—back to what Ethereum has truly adhered to over this decade.
In fact, over recent years, many emerging high-performance public chains have chosen a more direct path: trading ultimate performance and experience for reduced node counts, higher hardware thresholds, and centralized sequencing and execution authority.
However, from the Ethereum community’s perspective, such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing antifragility.
A commonly overlooked yet highly illustrative fact is that over the past decade of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown/rollback event and has maintained uninterrupted 7×24×365 operation.
This is not because Ethereum has been “luckier” than Solana, Sui, and others, but because from its inception, it chose to place system continuity under worst-case scenarios before performance metrics.
In other words, Ethereum appears slow today not because it can’t be faster, but because it consistently asks a harder question—when the network is larger in scale, more participants are involved, and the environment is more hostile, can this system continue to function?
From this perspective, the so-called “seven-year itch” is not that Ethereum is degenerating, but that it is actively enduring short-term discomfort and skepticism for a longer cycle of survival.
Precisely because of this, the first step in understanding Ethereum is accepting an unlikeable yet critically important fact: Ethereum is not a system with “maximum efficiency” as its sole objective. Its core goal is not to run fastest, but to be “trustworthy even in the worst case.”
Thus, in Ethereum’s context, many seemingly technical questions are essentially value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce privileged nodes for throughput? Should we entrust security assumptions to a minority for user experience?
Ethereum’s answers are often no.
This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive vigilance toward shortcuts—“can we do it” always gives way to “should we do it.”
It is precisely in this context that “Alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts recently, with some worried it could evolve into moral coercion or become a tool for rent-seeking.
In fact, these concerns are not without foundation. As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out this risk in “Making Ethereum alignment legible”:
If “alignment” means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has already failed.
Vitalik’s solution is not to abandon alignment, but to make it legible, decomposable, and discussable. In his view, alignment should not be a vague political stance, but should be decomposed into a set of scrutinizable attributes:
Technical alignment: Does it use Ethereum’s security consensus? Does it champion open source and open standards?
Economic alignment: Does it promote ETH’s value capture in the long term, rather than extracting unilaterally?
Spiritual alignment: Does it pursue public interest rather than just exploitative growth?
From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test, but a form of mutually beneficial symbiotic social contract.
The Ethereum ecosystem permits chaos, competition, and even fierce internal competition among L2s; but ultimately, these activities should all feed back into the entity that provides them with security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.
If “alignment” delineates value boundaries, then the two pillars truly supporting these boundaries are what Ethereum has long upheld: decentralization and censorship resistance.
First, in Ethereum’s context, “decentralization” doesn’t actually mean more nodes the better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node. Rather, it means the system can function normally without trusting any single participant.
This means the protocol should not depend on a specific sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means node operation costs cannot be so high that only professional institutions remain, ensuring ordinary people can still verify whether the system is operating by the rules.
Precisely because of this, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware thresholds, bandwidth requirements, and state bloat, even if this slows certain short-term performance metrics.
In Ethereum’s view, a system that runs blazingly fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has essentially lost the meaning of “permissionless.”
Another commonly misunderstood value is censorship resistance.
Ethereum doesn’t assume the world is benevolent. On the contrary, from its inception it defaults to the possibility that participants may be profit-seeking, power may concentrate, and external pressures will definitely emerge. Therefore, censorship resistance doesn’t require “never having censorship,” but ensures that even if someone attempts to censor, the system won’t fail.
This is also why Ethereum places such importance on proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, economic game design mechanisms and more—not because they’re elegant, but because they enable continued operation in the worst case.
In many discussions, people ask: “Would such extreme situations really happen in reality?”
But the truth is, if a system is only secure in an ideal world, it’s not worth entrusting value to in the real world.
Finally, an interesting data point to wrap up: Ethereum PoS’s staking exit queue has nearly cleared, while the queue to enter staking continues growing (exceeding 1.57 million ETH).
Amid criticism and skepticism, vast amounts of ETH still choose to be locked into this system long-term.
This perhaps says more than any manifesto could.
Written in conclusion
Many critics say that Ethereum is always “still discussing philosophy after others have already gotten it running.”
But from another angle, it’s precisely these discussions that have enabled Ethereum to avoid repeated overhauls—whether the Rollup-centric roadmap, incremental introduction of ZK, or routes like Interop, fast finality, and Slot shortening, they’re all essentially unfolding under one premise:
All performance improvements must be capable of being incorporated into existing security and value assumptions.
This also explains why Ethereum’s evolution often exhibits the characteristic of “appearing conservative, yet actually robust.” Fundamentally, it doesn’t resist efficiency; it refuses to exchange future systemic risks for present short-term advantages.
And this is precisely the underlying spirit supporting the Ethereum ecosystem’s journey through a decade—and in an era of “efficiency/TVL supremacy,” the scarcest and most worth protecting thing in Web3.