The chain remains, but the people are gone! Ethereum veteran of 10 years: the middle layer has been completely wiped out, and in the future, there will only be heaven and earth left.

Ethereum developer Chen Pin reflects on a decade of industry change, pointing directly to the disappearance of the middle layer, and says blockchain will head toward one of two extremes: a trusted, neutral ideal, or complete toolization.

Ethereum developer Chen Pin (artistic709) recently published an article reviewing his ten-year journey since first getting into Ethereum in 2016, and offering deep observations on the current state of the blockchain industry. He believes that the industry’s middle-layer application explorers have almost all been wiped out, and that blockchain’s future will move toward two starkly different extremes.

The vanishing of the middle ground

Taking his own classmates as an example—of the 50 people in his cohort, more than 10 work in areas related to AI, while only 3 are working on blockchain. He notes that blockchain is no longer a first-choice career target, nor is it the focus of hot money. More worth attention is that among the “founders and power users” who were once active across waves such as ICO, DeFi, NFT, and GameFi, the middle layer is now almost gone.

“Stories of boy heroes have not appeared for a very long time,” he wrote. The surviving big brands repeatedly frame milestones in terms of asset management scale or transaction volume, and actively embrace governments, regulation, and conglomerates, describing it as a “financial revolution.”

Blockchain’s non-replaceability: trusted neutrality

Chen Pin believes that if there is any unique value blockchain still has, the answer is “Credible Neutral.” Ethereum nodes are distributed across jurisdictions worldwide, with no single country or entity able to fully control them—this is the fundamental reason stablecoins like Circle and Tether choose to issue on-chain.

He further uses USB Type-C as an analogy: when two giants compete, whoever compromises and adopts the other side’s standard first has to pay the migration cost first and thus ends up at a disadvantage. Blockchain’s neutrality makes it a neutral platform that all sides can jointly accept—something that “enables migration”—not because it is stronger, but because it doesn’t belong to anyone.

A historical look at three phases

Chen Pin divides the decade of blockchain into three stages: 2015 to 2019 is the “try-everything” era, when various combinations of decentralization were tested one by one, mostly ending in failure, but helping latercomers map out the terrain; 2020 to 2023 is the grassroots wave driven by DeFi Summer, with NFTs, GameFi, and Layer 2 arriving in succession—an extremely unusual level of attention and funding supported an unsustainable prosperity; after 2024, coin prices and TVL are still rising, but “the user base has disappeared”—the chain remains, but people are gone.

Two paths ahead: naive idealism, or pragmatic toolization

Looking to the future, Chen Pin believes blockchain will head toward two extremes. One is a return to an earlier, more idea-driven approach—using blockchain to challenge social issues such as voting, public goods, and digital identity—an area where the spirit of cryptopunk still lives on. The other is complete toolization: making blockchain directly compete with existing solutions in scenarios such as stablecoins, RWA (real-world assets), and enterprise applications, serving users who don’t care whether the underlying infrastructure is actually blockchain.

“I can’t say which direction is better,” he admits. “Those who are still here—what I want to make is useful and has real applications. The difference is whether it solves people’s problems today or the problems from a few years from now.”

• This article is reprinted with permission from: 《Chain News》
• Original title: 《Ten Years of Blockchain Veterans in Review: The Middle Layer Has Been Wiped Out; Ethereum’s Future Only Has Heaven and Earth》
• Original author: Elponcrab