Author: Ganesh Swami Source: coindesk Translator: Shan Eoba, Jinse Finance
Could Ethereum lose its focus and become ineffective by trying to meet everyone's needs? Ethereum needs to refocus on its original grand vision - to become a global computer, says Ganesh Swami, co-founder of Covalent.
Since its launch in 2015 under the "Frontier" codename, Ethereum has come a long way, evolving from a grand idea into the foundation for thousands of decentralized applications today. However, as blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana compete for Ethereum's developer and user base, Ethereum's ecosystem has begun to appear unstable, lacking a clear direction, and gradually drifting away from its original goal. Even Ethereum's value has seemed somewhat lackluster. The price of Ethereum's token has yet to surpass the $4,700 all-time high it reached in 2021.
This raises the question: has Ethereum lost its way? If so, how do we get it back on track?
As Confucius said, "He who tries to do two things at once, loses both." While chasing Solana's faster execution speeds, Ethereum has also tried to compete with Bitcoin's "hard currency" concept, gradually forgetting its goal of becoming a "global computer." Ethereum team lead Péter Szilágyi stated that "Ethereum has lost its way." Even its status as an "ultrasound money" has been questioned, as Ethereum's inflation rate has reached 0.74%, related to decreased transaction activity and lower ETH burn rates. Although some advocate for ETH to maintain its deflationary nature, we must remember that "ultrasound money" was never the goal of Ethereum.
Ethereum's Infrastructure Progress
Ethereum is more than just a currency; it has never sought the highest TPS (transactions per second) or the lowest gas fees; its mission has always been to build a truly decentralized future. Vitalik Buterin and his co-founders created Ethereum to build it into a "global computer" - a worldwide network of thousands of computers where anyone can build decentralized applications at any time. However, in pursuing accessibility and interoperability, the ecosystem has been distracted by various emerging trends and lost its focus.
With the price dropping below $2,500, many believe Ethereum's poor performance is related to the applications built on its network. Today, many dApps (decentralized applications) developed on Ethereum often only achieve short-term hype, but their usage is limited and user growth is slow due to clunky user interfaces and underdeveloped platforms. Furthermore, these applications often only attract the same user base scattered across different L2 (Layer 2) networks. Without practical applications, Ethereum will not be able to achieve its goal of becoming a global computer.
Ethereum's primary focus should be on building a strong infrastructure, not applications. Decentralized computing and the secondary and tertiary networks supporting Ethereum are actively being developed, indicating that Ethereum's infrastructure is continuously progressing. Even enterprises are now starting to prefer permissionless networks like Ethereum over private enterprise networks, as developing on permissionless chains has become cheaper.
However, despite these advancements, Ethereum's pace of improvement remains relatively slow, currently in the middle stage of its expansion roadmap, a rather lackluster period as Merkle Trees, zkSTARKS, account abstraction, and the integration of different L2s are gradually being implemented.
Short-term thinking needs to be reduced. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum will eventually emerge from its current seemingly sluggish trough. Ethereum is in its "lightning moment" and needs to abandon the "ultrasound money" narrative, no longer chasing Solana. For those following its progress, Ethereum has a clear path of correction. For example, we have yet to see how people will utilize "Blobs," other than as storage space for fraud proof challenge windows.
Future Outlook
After the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, Pectra will be Ethereum's next major upgrade, expected to be launched by the end of 2024. And on Ethereum's long-term roadmap, there is the "The Purge" upgrade. This upgrade will help Ethereum keep pace with other blockchains and handle the influx of activity that will come with wider adoption of the chain. The Purge upgrade will simplify the protocol by cleaning up old historical data, eliminating technical debt and reducing the cost of participating in the network.
While removing historical state brings many benefits, it also risks Ethereum's chain becoming dominated by centralized entities controlling the data, turning Ethereum into a data-centric chain and reducing its trustless properties. This problem hinders the next stage of the "global computer" development, as downstream activities like multi-agent AI systems and decentralized computing cannot scale without data availability. This issue needs to be addressed through a solution: decentralized long-term data availability.
Currently, Ethereum is indeed in the middle stage of its expansion roadmap. However, Ethereum can get back on track by shifting its focus to infrastructure. This is the key to allowing the network to truly fulfill its role as a "global computer." As Ethereum completes its roadmap in the coming years and achieves decentralized computing, the global computer will run smoothly on a robust global infrastructure.
