Author: imToken
If you have been following the Ethereum ecosystem over the past period, you might have felt a sense of fragmentation.
- On one side, there are intensive discussions on technical topics such as scaling roadmaps, Rollup architectures, Interop, ZK, PBS, and slot shortening;
- On the other side, there are debates around "Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant?", "Why not be more radical?", "The token price is sluggish," and so on, which have even escalated into emotional confrontations;
These discussions actually point repeatedly to the same deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum want to become?
In fact, many controversies do not stem from technical differences 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."
I. Ethereum's 'Ten-Year Itch': Is Ethereum Degenerating?
The Ethereum community has not been calm recently.
From reflections on the Rollup-centric roadmap to debates over the concept of "Ethereum Alignment," and to horizontal comparisons with various high-performance public chains, a subtle yet persistently brewing "Ethereum anxiety" is spreading.
This anxiety is not hard to understand.
While other public chains continuously refresh metrics like TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience, Ethereum is repeatedly discussing architectural splits, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality issues—seeming neither intuitive nor appealing.
This has led to a sharper question emerging: Is Ethereum "degenerating"?
To answer this question, we cannot just look at the technical roadmap of the last year or two but must pull back to a longer time dimension—returning to what Ethereum has truly adhered to over this decade.
In fact, over the past few years, many emerging high-performance public chains have chosen a more direct path: by reducing the number of nodes, increasing hardware requirements, and centralizing sequencing and execution rights in exchange for extreme performance and experience.
In the view of the Ethereum community, such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing anti-fragility.
A frequently overlooked yet highly illustrative fact is that in nearly a decade of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide outage/rollback event and has maintained uninterrupted 7×24×365 operation.
This is not because Ethereum has been "luckier" than Solana, Sui, etc., but because from its inception, it chose to prioritize whether the system can continue operating under the worst conditions over performance metrics.
In other words, Ethereum appears slow today not because it cannot be faster, but because it consistently asks a harder question—when the network is larger, participants are more numerous, and the environment is less friendly, can this system still continue to function?
From this perspective, the so-called "ten-year itch" is not Ethereum degenerating but rather it actively enduring short-term discomfort and质疑 for the sake of survival over a longer cycle.
II. How to Understand 'Ethereum Alignment': Not Taking Sides, but Defining Boundaries
It is precisely for this reason that the first step to understanding Ethereum is to accept an unappealing yet crucial fact: Ethereum is not a system whose sole goal is "maximizing efficiency." Its core goal is not to be the fastest but to be "trustworthy even in the worst cases."
Therefore, in Ethereum's context, many seemingly technical issues are essentially value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce powerful permissioned nodes for throughput? Should we hand security assumptions over to a few for user experience?
Ethereum's answer is often no.
This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive vigilance against shortcuts, where "can it be done" always yields to "should it be done."
It is also in this context that "Alignment" has become one of the most controversial concepts recently, with some worrying it could evolve into a moral绑架 label or even a tool for rent-seeking.
In fact, such concerns are not unfounded. As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin 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 was not to abandon alignment but to make it interpretable, decomposable, and discussable. In his view, alignment should not be a vague political stance but should be broken down into a set of examinable attributes:
- Technical alignment: Does it use Ethereum's security consensus? Does it uphold open source and open standards?
- Economic alignment: Does it promote ETH value capture in the long term, rather than unidirectional extraction?
- Spiritual alignment: Does it pursue public good, not just predatory growth?
From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test but a mutually beneficial social contract.
The Ethereum ecosystem allows chaos, competition, and even fierce internal competition among L2s; but these activities should ultimately feed back into the母体 that provides them with security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.
III. The Reflection on 'Decentralization' and 'Censorship Resistance'
If "alignment" defines the value boundaries, then what truly supports the establishment of these boundaries are the two pillars that Ethereum has long adhered to: decentralization and censorship resistance.
First, in the Ethereum context, "decentralization" does not simply mean the more nodes the better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node. Rather, it means the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.
This implies that the protocol should not rely on any single sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means that the cost of running a node cannot be so high that only professional institutions remain, ensuring that ordinary people can still verify whether the system is operating according to the rules.
It is precisely for this reason that Ethereum maintains long-term restraint regarding hardware requirements, bandwidth needs, and state bloat, even if this slows down some short-term performance metrics (extended reading: "The 'Dawn Moment' of the ZK Roadmap: Is Ethereum's Endgame Roadmap Accelerating Comprehensively?").
In Ethereum's view, a system that runs extremely fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has essentially lost the meaning of "permissionlessness."
Another frequently misunderstood value is censorship resistance.
Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. On the contrary, it assumes from the outset that participants may be profit-driven, power may be concentrated, external pressure will inevitably arise, etc. Therefore, censorship resistance is not about demanding "no one will ever censor," but ensuring that even if someone attempts to censor, the system will not fail as a result.
This is also why Ethereum places such importance on mechanisms like proposer/builder separation, decentralized building, and economic game design—not because they are elegant, but because they can continue to function in the worst cases.
In many discussions, some ask: "Will such extreme situations really happen in reality?"
But put simply, if a system is only safe in an ideal world, it is not worthy of entrusting value in the real world.
Finally, let's end with an interesting data point: the exit queue for Ethereum PoS staking is almost cleared, while the entry queue for staking continues to grow (exceeding 1.57 million ETH).
Amid controversies and质疑, a significant amount of ETH is still choosing to be locked into this system for the long term.
This perhaps speaks louder than any宣言.
In Conclusion
Many critics say that Ethereum is always "discussing philosophy while others are already running."
But from another perspective, it is these discussions that have prevented Ethereum from repeatedly starting over—whether it's the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or routes like Interop, fast confirmation, and slot shortening, they are all essentially展开 under one premise:
All performance improvements must be incorporable into the existing security and value assumptions.
This also explains why Ethereum's evolution often exhibits characteristics of "seemingly conservative, yet actually稳健." Ultimately, it is not that it does not pursue efficiency, but that it refuses to exchange future systemic risks for short-term advantages today.
And this is the underlying spirit that has supported the Ethereum ecosystem through the past decade—and in an era of "efficiency/TVL supremacy," it is also the rarest and most worthy thing to protect in Web3.
