Author: Haotian
These days, interspersed with conference lectures and a lot of Social, the information capacity is a bit large. Here, there is the helplessness of Builder entrepreneurs about the market's lack of recognition for technical narratives, as well as the excitement and joy of the second-level Fomo MEME achieving results. Of course, there are more of us who, like me, cherish the faith in the comprehensive development of technology, market, and products, but are increasingly unfamiliar and at a loss about the "industry climate".
To be honest, I really want to find an answer to this contradiction, division, and sense of powerlessness, but I know it's impossible. Let me share the scattered thoughts that have been floating in my mind these days.
1) The Ethereum main conference attracted a large number of people, and there were all kinds of sharing, but it was actually mediocre. The only one that caught people's attention, "Beamchain," was also misinterpreted by the market. Apart from the emotions of the market's underperformance of the secondary market, Ethereum itself has indeed reached the "delivery period" of a series of Roadmap and technical innovation narratives, which means that mediocre innovations are ignored, and the tiny problems are amplified geometrically by FUD.
2) Although this is the largest Devcon in Ethereum history, there were one or two hundred small events in Bangkok these days, without a clear main line. Ethereum has become the stage, and the "performances" on the stage are ignored, with more people pouring their enthusiasm into the vertical technical sharing on the sidelines and other Social entertainment Side Events such as partying and barbecuing. I have basically set my main line on ZK, chain abstraction, BTCFi, and other directions. The harvest is much greater than what I heard in the main conference.
3) The wind of MEME is blowing, which is understandable. I will also listen to the cultural attribution behind some MEME coins. I often say, "Eliminating meaninglessness itself is a kind of meaning." Since so many technical narratives cannot be delivered and there is no wealth effect (meaninglessness), isn't the community's choice of MEME the greatest meaning?
I am very certain about the value of MEME in carrying community emotions and attracting incremental users, but the mainstream VC investment, Builder's time investment, and Holder's MAXI investment in innovation cannot be interrupted. Otherwise, if the project party VC comes to openly manipulate MEME, it will be completely trapped in financial nihilism. Do you think the Crypto industry will not collapse?
4) The Ethereum community is severely divided. On the surface, it is the emotional tearing caused by the unsatisfactory coin price, but essentially, it is the anxious confrontation between the "right-wing" that occupies the core resources but adheres to the closed-off, and the "left-wing" that has always been on the edge but is fighting hard.
Ethereum has always been committed to maintaining the strength of the Monolithic single-chain, so the technical iteration and standard optimization have natural legitimacy, but it is also slow. Take Abstract Account as an example, a large number of AA Wallets have emerged based on the 4337 standard, but after getting the Grant, they did not accumulate much user base, and found that the multi-chain era has arrived, with a batch of chain abstraction solutions challenging with more flexible, more extensive, and more user-centric construction concepts.
What to do? Can only rely on Vitalik's appointment and technical orthodoxy to protect, euphemistically called contraction and guarding the purity of technology, but in fact it is unwillingness to make progress and refuse new challenges. Don't forget that most of the chain abstraction solutions, the AA standard, are also core Primitives.
5) The "external troubles" of Ethereum, which I put in quotation marks, because I think they are not real troubles, but are actually the potential breakthroughs in the stable delivery period of Ethereum. For example, Optimism has been slow to launch the Fraud Proof system, and hastily launched it only to find that some chains cannot synchronize the OP Stack.
What to do? There are so-called external troubles based on AVS security consensus and ZK underlying technology to do ZK-based optimistic proof to accelerate its landing; or like Verge, which can only be launched in the stage of SNARKs, but in fact, there have been various zkVM generalization solutions such as Risc-V and zkMIPS before that. Or Eigenlayer's AVS security consensus paradigm, although it is unknown whether it can be landed, its overlapping financial attributes are exactly complementary to Ethereum's current serious delivery difficulties.
I don't understand why Vitalik doesn't appropriately call for the AVS mechanism, which essentially does not deviate from Ethereum's decentralization, and AVS can actually integrate most of the peripheral innovative development forces into the Ethereum ecosystem. In my view, zkVM, chain abstraction, and PayFi are three "rebel" forces gathering sparks on the edge, and they are bombarding the high walls built by Ethereum. If Ethereum treats these innovative forces as external troubles, what is it guarding?
6) I see a lot of people don't understand Ethereum's alignment and contraction strategy. Indeed, when a decentralized organization reaches such a scale, everything should be left to the Community to confront, conflict, and evolve, and Ethereum only needs to sit back and enjoy the results.
The current situation is that the Ethereum ecosystem ship is difficult to turn around, lacking flexibility. This means that everything Ethereum is facing, and everything it is solving, can actually be found corresponding solutions in the market. I am particularly interested in the interoperability conference of Ethereum L2, and I really want to know how these L2s, each with their own positions, will "align." But as expected, this kind of discussion is like the long and meaningless meetings held by two departments that blame each other in a company, and the result is only a sense that everyone is doing something.
When will the interoperability within this walled garden be balanced to accommodate the interests of all parties and be truly implemented, and when will it benefit application developers and users, are unknown.
7) Regarding CEX exchanges, the conspiracy theories I heard at the offline gatherings, I rarely analyze problems from the perspective of conspiracy theories, maybe I'm too naive. But from the perspective of business logic, I can roughly understand why MEME can replace VC coins as the new darling of exchanges, the complex behind-the-scenes of fundraising, liquidity exit, and cost-effectiveness, and so on, I won't go into details, but essentially it's all about interests.
Exchanges are facing the daily expansion of on-chain TXs, and the shrinking trading volume and user loss of their own mainstream circulating coins. Naturally, they will make some choices that cater to their own interests. At this time, the call for exchanges to lead the industry's value orientation is powerless and useless. Anyway, the market's choice is always right. If it's wrong, it will correct itself. I just hope that most of my friends won't become the cannon fodder of this on-chain and off-chain behind-the-scenes organizational confrontation.
That's all. Although each content can be expanded upon, after a few days of wandering, the expansion of my vision and the fatigue in my heart coexist. Positive feedback and negative emotions, who can win? I tend to let them cancel each other out, so that my Crypto faith should come into play. Oh, it's been a long time since I've heard anyone say the word "faith".
