穿透Ethereum「退化」喧嚣：为什么「以太坊价值观」是最宽的护城河？

Written by: imToken

Over the past period, if you’ve been consistently following the Ethereum ecosystem, you may have developed a sense of fragmentation.

On one side, there are intensive discussions on technical topics like scaling roadmaps, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, Slot shortening, and so on;

On the other side, there are debates surrounding “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant,” “Why not be more aggressive,” “Token prices are languishing,” and so forth, even evolving into emotional confrontation;

These discussions actually repeatedly point to the same deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum want to become?

In fact, many controversies don’t stem from technical disagreements, but rather from different understandings of Ethereum’s “value premises,” so only by returning to these premises themselves can we truly understand why Ethereum has made choices that many now view as “untimely.”

1. Ethereum’s “Seven-Year Itch”: Is Ethereum Degenerating?

The recent Ethereum community has not been at peace.

From reflections on the Rollup-centric roadmap, to debates over 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.

As other public chains continuously refresh TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum keeps discussing architecture decomposition, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality issues, which seems both non-intuitive and inelegant.

This has also brought a sharper question to the surface: Is Ethereum in “decline”?

To answer this question, we cannot just look at the technical roadmap of the past year or two, but must expand our perspective to a longer time dimension—back to what Ethereum has truly persisted with over this decade.

In fact, over the past few years, many emerging high-performance public chains have chosen a more direct path: trading extreme performance and user experience for reduced node counts, higher hardware requirements, and centralized sequencing and execution.

From the Ethereum community’s perspective, such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing antifragility.

An overlooked yet highly illustrative fact is that over its nearly decade-long operational cycle, Ethereum has never experienced a network-level shutdown or rollback event, maintaining uninterrupted 7×24×365 operation.

This is not because Ethereum got “luckier” than Solana, Sui, and others, but because it chose from the beginning to place the question of whether the system can continue operating in the worst case before performance metrics.

In other words, Ethereum seems slow today not because it cannot go faster, but because it keeps asking a more difficult question—when the network scales larger, involves more participants, and the environment becomes more hostile, can this system continue to work?

From this perspective, the so-called “seven-year itch” is not Ethereum degrading, but rather it actively enduring short-term discomfort and skepticism for a longer-cycle survival.

2. Understanding “Ethereum Alignment”: Not Taking Sides, But Setting Boundaries

Precisely because of this, the first step in understanding Ethereum is accepting an unappealing yet critical fact: Ethereum is not a system with “efficiency maximization” as its sole goal, and its core objective is not to run fastest, but rather to be “trustworthy even in the worst case.”

Thus in Ethereum’s context, many seemingly technical questions are essentially value choices: Should speed be pursued at the cost of decentralization? Should throughput be increased by introducing permissioned nodes? Should security assumptions be entrusted to a minority for better user experience?

Ethereum’s answers are often negative.

This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive wariness of shortcuts, and “can we do it” always yields to “should we do it.”

It is precisely against this backdrop that “Alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts in recent times, with some worried it could evolve into moral blackmail or become a tool for rent-seeking.

In fact, these concerns are not unfounded. 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 rather be decomposed into a set of auditable attributes:

Technical alignment: Do you use Ethereum’s secure consensus? Do you advocate for open source and open standards?

Economic alignment: Do you promote ETH value capture in the long term, rather than unilaterally extracting value?

Spiritual alignment: Are you pursuing public interest, rather than merely predatory growth?

From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test, but rather a reciprocal symbiotic social contract.

The Ethereum ecosystem allows chaos, permits competition, and even tolerates fierce competitive dynamics between L2s; but these activities should ultimately benefit the parent body that provides them security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.

3. The Dialectic of “Decentralization” and “Censorship Resistance”

If “alignment” defines the value boundary, then what truly supports this boundary’s validity are two pillars Ethereum has long upheld: decentralization and censorship resistance.

First, in Ethereum’s context, “decentralization” does not actually mean more nodes the better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node, but rather that the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.

This means the protocol should not depend on any single 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 follows the rules.

Precisely because of this, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware requirements, bandwidth demands, and state bloat, even if this slows certain short-term performance metrics (see related reading “ZK Route ‘Dawn’: Is Ethereum’s Ultimate Roadmap Accelerating Comprehensively?”).

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 frequently misunderstood value is censorship resistance.

Ethereum does not assume the world is benign. On the contrary, from its inception it defaults that participants may pursue profit, power may concentrate, external pressure will definitely emerge, and so forth. Therefore, censorship resistance is not about “never being censored,” but rather ensuring the system doesn’t fail even if someone attempts censorship.

This is why Ethereum places such emphasis on proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, and economic incentive design mechanisms—not because they’re elegant, but because they can continue functioning in the worst case.

In many discussions, people ask: “Does such an extreme situation really happen in reality?”

But frankly, if a system is only secure in an ideal world, then it doesn’t deserve to be entrusted with value in the real world.

Finally, ending with an interesting data point: Ethereum PoS’s staking exit queue has nearly cleared, yet the entry queue continues to grow (exceeding 1.57 million ETH).

Amid controversy and skepticism, a substantial amount of ETH continues to choose long-term lockup in this system.

This perhaps speaks louder than any manifesto.

Written in Closing

Many critics will say Ethereum is always “discussing philosophy after others have already started running.”

But from another angle, these very discussions have allowed Ethereum to avoid repeated reconstruction—whether it’s the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or routes like Interop, fast confirmation, and Slot shortening, they essentially unfold under one premise:

All performance improvements must be incorporable into existing security and value assumptions.

This also explains why Ethereum’s evolution often presents the characteristic of “seemingly conservative, actually robust,” and at its core, it’s not that Ethereum doesn’t pursue efficiency, but rather it refuses to trade systemic future risks for short-term advantages today.

And this is precisely the underlying spirit sustaining the Ethereum ecosystem through a decade—and in an era of “efficiency/TVL supremacy,” it is the rarest and most worth protecting thing in Web3.