Author: imToken
If you've been following the Ethereum ecosystem closely lately, you might have experienced a sense of disconnect.
- On one hand, there is intensive discussion on technical issues such as scaling routes, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, and slot shortening;
- On the other hand, there are debates surrounding issues such as "Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant?", "Why not be more aggressive?", and "The price of the coin is sluggish", which have even escalated into emotional confrontations.
These discussions actually point 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 a choice that many people now consider "inappropriate".
I. Ethereum's "Ten-Year Itch": Is Ethereum Degrading?
The Ethereum community has been anything but calm lately.
From reflections on the Rollup-centric approach to debates on the concept of "Ethereum Alignment," and horizontal comparisons with a host of high-performance public chains, a subtle yet persistent "Ethereum anxiety" is spreading.
This anxiety is not hard to understand.
While other public blockchains are constantly refreshing their TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum is repeatedly discussing architectural decomposition, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality issues, which seems neither intuitive nor clever.
This also brings a more pressing question to the forefront: Is Ethereum "degrading"?
To answer this question, we cannot just look at the technological roadmap of the last year or two, but must shift our perspective to a longer time dimension—back to what Ethereum has truly adhered to over the past decade.
In fact, in the past few years, many emerging high-performance public blockchains have chosen a more direct path: to achieve ultimate performance and user experience by reducing the number of nodes, raising the hardware threshold, and centralizing the ordering and execution rights.
From the perspective of the Ethereum community, such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing antifragility.
An often overlooked but highly telling fact is that in its nearly ten-year operating cycle, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide outage/rollback event, maintaining uninterrupted operation 24/7/365.
This is not because Ethereum was "luckier" than Solana, Sui, etc., but because from the very beginning, it chose to prioritize the system's ability to continue operating under the worst-case scenario over performance metrics.
In other words, Ethereum appears slow today not because it cannot be faster, but because it is constantly asking a more difficult question—can this system continue to function when the network grows larger, has more participants, and the environment becomes less friendly?
From this perspective, the so-called "ten-year itch" is not that Ethereum is degenerating, but rather that it is actively enduring short-term discomfort and doubt in order to survive for a longer period of time.
II. Understanding "Ethereum Alignment": Not Taking Sides, But Recognizing Boundaries
Therefore, the first step to understanding Ethereum is to accept an unpleasant but crucial fact: Ethereum is not a system whose sole objective is to maximize efficiency. Its core goal is not to run the fastest, but to remain trustworthy in the worst-case scenario.
Therefore , in the context of Ethereum, many seemingly technical issues are essentially value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce strong-authority nodes to increase throughput? Should we entrust security assumptions to a minority for the sake of user experience?
Ethereum's answer is often no.
This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive wariness of shortcuts, with "can it be done" always giving way to "should it be done".
It is against this backdrop that "alignment" has become one of the most controversial concepts recently, with some worrying that it will evolve into a label of moral blackmail or even become a tool for rent-seeking.
In fact, this concern is not unfounded. Back in September 2024, Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out this risk in his article "Making Ethereum Alignment Legible":
If "alignment" means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has failed.
Vitalik's solution is not to abandon alignment, but to make it interpretable, deconstructable, and debatable. In his view, alignment should not be a vague political stance, but should be broken down into a set of examineable attributes:
- Technology alignment: Does it use Ethereum's secure consensus mechanism? Does it support open source and open standards?
- Economic alignment: Will it promote value capture for ETH in the long run, rather than a one-way withdrawal?
- Spiritual alignment: Are we pursuing the public good, or just predatory growth?
From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test, but a mutually beneficial social contract.
The Ethereum ecosystem allows for chaos, competition, and even intense infighting among L2 servers; but these activities should ultimately give back to the parent system that provides them with security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.
III. Reflections on "Decentralization" and "Censorship Resistance"
If "alignment" defines the boundaries of value, 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 context of Ethereum, "decentralization" does not mean that the more nodes the better, nor does it mean that everyone has to run a node. Rather, it means that the system can still function normally without trusting any single participant.
This means that the protocol should not rely on a single sorter, coordinator, or company; it also means that the cost of running nodes cannot be so high that only professional institutions are required, so that ordinary people can still verify whether the system is operating according to the rules.
This is why Ethereum has long exercised restraint in terms of hardware requirements, bandwidth demands, and state expansion, even though this may slow down some short-term performance metrics (further reading: " ZK Route 'Dawn': Is Ethereum's Endgame Roadmap Accelerating Across the Board? ").
Ethereum believes that a system that runs very fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has essentially lost the meaning of "permissionless".
Another often misunderstood value is resistance to censorship.
Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. On the contrary, it is designed from the outset to assume that participants may be profit-driven, power may be concentrated, and external pressure will inevitably occur. Therefore, censorship resistance does not require "never being censored", but rather ensures that the system will not fail even if someone attempts to censor it.
This is why Ethereum places such importance on mechanisms such as proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, and economic game theory design—not because they are elegant, but because they can continue to operate in the worst-case scenario.
In many discussions, people ask, "Would such an extreme situation really happen in reality?"
To put it bluntly, if a system is only secure in an ideal world, then it is not worthy of being entrusted with value in the real world.
Finally, let's end with an interesting statistic: the Ethereum PoS staking exit queue is almost empty, while the staking queue continues to grow (over 1.57 million).
Despite the controversy and skepticism, a large amount of ETH has chosen to be locked into this system for the long term.
This perhaps explains the issue better than any declaration.
In conclusion
Many critics would say that Ethereum is always "discussing philosophy after others have already gotten it up and running."
However, from another perspective, it is precisely these discussions that have prevented Ethereum from repeatedly starting over – whether it's the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or the approaches such as Interop, fast confirmation, and slot shortening, they all essentially unfold under the same premise:
All performance improvements must be incorporated into existing security and value assumptions.
This also explains why Ethereum's evolution often exhibits the characteristics of "seemingly conservative, but actually robust." Ultimately, it is not that it does not pursue efficiency, but rather that it refuses to exchange future systemic risks for short-term advantages in the present.
This is the underlying spirit that has supported the Ethereum ecosystem for over a decade—and in an era where "efficiency/TVL is paramount," it is the scarcest and most worthwhile thing for Web3 to protect.
