Big company disease, empty narrative, is the market beginning to predict Ethereums decline again?

Original author: Haotian (X: @tmel0211 )

I disagree with the view that Ethereum is a “big company” or “narrative nonsense”. Here are some perspectives:

1) Ethereum is an experiment in Cryptos decentralized governance architecture. It is not controlled by any centralized company or organization. Project developers, researchers, node operators, ETH Holders, etc. from all over the world participate and contribute to it.

The open source code collaboration method, community-driven decision-making process, and transparent governance mechanism will crush any centralized organizational structure in the long run. Although the efficiency is slow, it wins in openness, transparency, and the emergent innovation singularity effect. Ethereum solves the centralized company disease. How could it suffer from the big company disease before achieving its mission?

If Ethereum is really not working, the choice of decentralized architecture will be to embrace the fork and let it die. There will always be a more powerful new Ethereum. Ethereum is still the center of the entire Crypto world, which is enough to illustrate the problem.

2) In terms of public chain technology, Ethereum has smoothly achieved the transition from POW to POS in the past few years, from the Sharding strategy to the final implementation of the core strategy of Rollup-Centric, and then to the implementation of the next Roadmap step by step. The security, stability, and engineering quality delivery results of the whole process are all within expectations. The strategic shift from sharding to Rollup in this process is also the result of catering to the market trend.

The problem is that the technological iteration of the public chain cannot resonate with the market cycle. The rhythm of infrastructure infra and application landing and even the markets money-making effect is out of sync, or it is difficult to have a strong correlation.

It is true that Layer 2 is affected by the mainnet gas fees and bandwidth performance, but even if the Cancun upgrade is successful, it has not brought the expected prosperity of Layer 2. Ideally, all Layer 2 chains will be launched simultaneously, and the user ecology will achieve exponential breakthroughs. Ethereum can also achieve deflation by taxation and Gas Burn.

But the fact is that the threshold for launching a chain has been lowered, the RaaS narrative has also fermented, and the ideal Mass Adoption is still a long way off. To be honest, this has exceeded the constraints of Ethereums pure technical framework.

Objectively speaking, the benefits that the NFT Fomo trend in 2021 brought to Ethereum were the market effects emerging from the decentralized architecture, and were not directly driven by Ethereums core developers.

3) “Narrative” is an evolved development context and a derivative product of business thinking superimposed on technology.

For example: The emergence of @eigenlayer protocol led to the Restaking narrative, the emergence of @CelestiaOrg DA chain led to the modularization narrative, and the emergence of @Starknet led to the ZK-Rollup narrative.

In the future market, @ParticleNtwrk chains charge may make the chain abstraction narrative shine again, and the unified liquidity trust ecosystem that ZK underlying protocols such as @ProjectZKM want to build may also make blockchains have no chain boundaries, etc. There are too many narrative topics.

Objectively speaking, narrative is the result of the excess power of developers and the Fomo of hot money. Narrative will give technology room for imagination, although over-narrative will also give people a sense of empty talk. But over-narrative itself is the result of the markets natural development. Like blowing bubbles, narratives will be replaced, but they will always exist.

In other words, narratives without Fomo will lose the appeal of being involved in all these resources, talents, and funds, so it would be better to stay in the internal circulation of Web 2 without being branded as a fraud. Of course, MEME is also a narrative, but if the market is shorting all other narratives that have a building process and are supported by underlying business logic, the existence of MEME will lose any fundamentals.

Original link