Author: Haotian
These days, interspersed with conference lectures and a lot of Social, the information capacity is a bit large, in which there is the helplessness of Builder entrepreneurs about the market's lack of recognition of the technical narrative, as well as the excitement and joy of the secondary FOMO MEME achieving results, and of course more of us who, like me, have 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 gathered a large number of people, and there were presentations on various aspects, but it was actually mediocre, the only one that was a bit eye-catching, "Beamchain", was misinterpreted by the market. Apart from the emotional entanglement of everyone's disappointment in the secondary market, Ethereum has indeed reached the "delivery period" for a series of Roadmap and technical innovation narratives, which means that mediocre innovations are ignored, and even the smallest problems are magnified geometrically into FUD.
2) Although this is the largest Devcon in Ethereum's history, there were one or two hundred small events in Bangkok these days, without a main line at all, Ethereum became the stage, and the "performances" on the stage were ignored, with more people putting their enthusiasm into vertical technical sharing on the sidelines, as well as other social and entertainment Side Events such as partying and barbecuing. I basically set my main line on directions such as ZK, chain abstraction, and BTCFi. The harvest was much greater than what I heard in the main conference.
3) The wind of MEME-izing everything is blowing up, which is understandable, and I will also listen to the cultural attribution behind some MEME coins. I often say "eliminating meaninglessness itself is a kind of meaning", so when many technical narratives cannot be delivered and there is no wealth effect (meaninglessness), the community's choice of MEME is the greatest meaning, isn't it?
I am very certain about the value of MEME in carrying community emotions and attracting incremental users, but the mainstream VC investment, Builder investment time, and Holder investment MAXI's innovation theme cannot be interrupted, otherwise, the project party VC will come to the market to manipulate MEME, completely falling into 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" who occupy the core resources but cling to the closed-off, and the "left-wing" who have always been on the edge but are fighting hard.
Ethereum has always been 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 emerged based on the 4337 standard, but after getting the Grant and doing a lot, they found that the multi-chain era has arrived, and a batch of chain abstraction solutions have emerged, 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 is also the core Primitive. This is what I call the internal troubles of Ethereum, and similar situations exist in directions such as AVS and zkVM.
5) The "external troubles" of Ethereum, which I put in quotation marks, because I think this is not a real trouble, but is actually the potential disruption point of Ethereum's delivery of a stable period. For example, Optimism has been slow to launch the Fraud Proof system, and hastily launched it only to find that some chains are still unable to 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-ified optimistic proof to accelerate its landing; and Verge's stage-by-stage SNARKs upgrade is also important for Ethereum, but in fact, even before that, there have been various zkVM generalization solutions such as Risc-V and zkMIPS. And 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 shout out the AVS mechanism appropriately, which essentially does not deviate from Ethereum's decentralization, and on the contrary, AVS can integrate most of the peripheral innovative development forces into the Ethereum ecosystem. In my view, zkVM, chain abstraction, and PayFi are three emerging "rebel" forces on the edge, and they are firing at the high walls built by Ethereum. This is what I call the internal troubles and "external troubles", if these innovative forces are treated as external troubles, then what is Ethereum guarding?
6) I see a lot of people don't understand Ethereum's alignment and contraction strategy, indeed, when a decentralized organization body reaches such a scale, everything should be left to the Community to confront, conflict, and evolve on its own, 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, which 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 but meaningless meetings held by two departments that are blaming each other in a company, the result is only a sense that everyone is doing something.
When will this interoperability within the walled garden be able to balance the interests of various parties internally, be suitable for real implementation, and when will it benefit application developers and users, are all 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 and become the new darling of exchanges, the complex behind-the-scenes of fundraising, liquidity exit, and cost-effectiveness, etc., I won't go into details, but essentially it's all about interests.
Exchanges are facing the daily expansion of on-chain TXs, facing 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 friends won't become the cannon fodder of this on-chain and off-chain behind-the-scenes organizational confrontation.
That's all.
That's all I have to say, although each content can be expanded on at length, after a few days of wandering, the expansion of my vision and the fatigue in my heart coexist, positive feedback and negative Emo, 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".
