When you are connected to all the retail investors in the crypto industry, you inevitably become the infrastructure of this industry.

Author: Zuoyeweb3

Cover: Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

Shang Zhongyong · Plotting Intrigue · Old Oil Stick

Ethereum has no dreams, Vitalik refuses to become a lifelong benevolent dictator;

Solana has no bottom line, the only active conspiracy group in the blockchain world;

BNB Chain has no future, with only extreme marketing left after Binance's traffic diversion.

Why Study Public Chains?

When you are connected to all the retail investors in the crypto industry, you inevitably become the infrastructure of this industry. To date, only BTC/ETH as public chains and Binance, Coinbase as exchanges have achieved this, one decentralized and the other centralized, doing one type of business, and developing to the point where they can interact with everyone.

By 2025, there will no longer be L1, non-EVM, and market-influential public chains. L2, Move VM, and Sonic/Bear Chain are just doing drills around tokens, and the struggle between Solana and Base is more like a commercial consortium dispute, with little to do with technical standards and roadmaps.

Based on this, I summarize three themes of this article, which is also a historical perspective on public chains, just like the new Edge choosing to be compatible with Chromium to start over, a wild era has come to an end.

1. The background of the birth of finance is to hedge business risks, but since its birth, finance has become the main source of risk, from the burial of the Qing Dynasty empire by the Railway Protection Movement to the erosion of the fiat currency system by Bitcoin, none can be excluded.
2. The development of the Internet is the history of browser kernels, products, and search engines. Translated into the public chain system, it is EVM/SVM-->ETH/L2, EVM compatible L1-->PoS node system+super dApp.
3. Public chains are still built on the most basic Internet protocols, and after the Wild West and the Age of Discovery, the course of human civilization is the migration from rural to urban areas. The death and life of super public chains reflects the direction of developers.

What You Have to Go Through Before Becoming Bitcoin

Seeing off the successors of Bitcoin, welcoming the rebirth of Base?

The Ethereum system is an era of anarchism and individual free will, an era of decentralization, counterattacking the fiat currency system and the world computer, and it is also a dedication to this era.

After a year of cold mockery, Vitalik chose to promote Aya to the position of Ethereum Foundation (EF) chairman, after all, Vitalik himself said he could decide everything in the EF.

However, there is no need to have more expectations for Vitalik, Vitalik is an extremely nostalgic person, Aya is the "drifting mother" he met while sleeping on the floor at Kraken, the twilight of the heroic era, is the softest place in his heart.

I do not want to list various data and charts to prove the problems with Ethereum, because Ethereum itself and the EF, EVM ecosystem actually do not have any problems, and BNB Chain and Base will not switch to SVM for the time being.

Referring to the development history of browsers, the most "halal", orthodox and free FireFox did not continue the brilliance of Netscape, but was incorporated under the combination of Google's open-source Chromium and the commercialization of Google search, with 90% of FireFox's revenue coming from setting Google as the default search engine, becoming Google's de facto "loyal opposition".

Today's ETH/EVM system is the same, with each dApp, each L2, each Dev, each VC, each KOL that makes up the EVM circle evolving through a natural selection process in a unique historical trajectory and a different ecological environment.

ETH, L2 and EVM are interlinked, forming the public chain system with the most "network effects" at present, and the continuous positive feedback mechanism inherent in the network effects will make the ecological connection doubled, which is the fundamental reason why everyone curses but cannot leave.

Temporary rest will not enjoy eternal peace, Trident IE will also be replaced by Chromium Edge, and the root cause of the current predicament is that Vitalik himself has problems, and the collapse of the governance system.

Vitalik's parents are Soviet immigrants, and Vitalik himself is extremely opposed to authoritarianism, centralization and autocratic systems, which contains the seeds of the DAO system, but as mentioned before, he also said he alone can decide everything for the Ethereum Foundation, and the rollback after The DAO incident has proven: Absolute decentralization will lead to absolute centralization.

Referring to Satoshi Nakamoto's disappearance, Vitalik is clearly in a state of chaotic neutrality, neither wanting to legitimately lead all of EF, nor wanting to give up the final decision-making power over EF, unfortunately, in the governance system, this is the worst.

After Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Max Weber's summary of bureaucracy plus Taylor, the most efficient organizational model in human society is the company, and the tech right-wing in Silicon Valley, such as Musk and Peter Thiel, believe companies should take over the state, rather than bureaucratic management of society, DOGE is a direct product of this.

But for organizations that are not so "capital efficient" oriented, such as the technical geek community, how to govern and collaborate without receiving salaries and across the globe, becomes the social demand for foundations or DAOs, the Linux and RISC-V foundations are exemplary, but not enough, the community will always have contradictions, and people's hearts are not always in harmony.

For Linux and Python, their founders still serve as benevolent dictators for life (BDFL), but it's still not enough, Linus Torvalds did some bad things last year on October 24th by banning Russian administrators, and Python announced in 2018 after the PEP 572 controversy that it would no longer serve as BDFL, which has a certain beauty like Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh resigning and several AVAX directors running away.

But one thing must be admitted, in the early development of technical organizations, the founder's hard nurturing is indispensable, but the complexity of EF is not here, the company-oriented efficiency only needs to be responsible to shareholders, the technology foundation oriented to social effects only needs to be responsible to the project itself, programmers are always free, they can choose and freely fork in different organizations.

But EF is not equivalent to the above two, EF can disregard profitability, the ETH in the treasury is sufficient, but the EVM ecosystem needs to consider profitability, this is the awkwardness of Vitalik--EF--EVM, Vitalik is doing the BDFL's job, but refuses to take on the corresponding duties, the downstream of EF is the hungry ETH Hodlers and the huge economic system, but they have to operate under Vitalik's personal will.

Understanding this, one can understand that Aya's Infinite Garden route is absolutely correct, this is the only choice to ensure that the people of EF can follow Vitalik's will, the master of patching the EVM empire, the lady in charge of the central military affairs.

Vitalik is like a child holding gold, the young hero who became famous cannot maintain balance in the complex world, so he introduced external help, but layer by layer of external progress, the external groups are more concerned about profitability, Vitalik can neither govern EF/Ethereum/EVM like a company, nor does he want to actually assume the nominal role of BDFL like a technical organization, after the DAO was temporarily falsified, Ethereum is now in a strictly low-speed out-of-control state, either slowly fading away or being possessed.

The Ethereum community is now discussing the Pectra upgrade, but its attention has already dropped to a terrible level where no one cares, this is a harbinger of fading, believe me, this cannot be solved by ETH pumping or a few Meme big gold dogs, now Ethereum has to answer whether it is Vitalik's non-financialized decentralization experiment field, or Aya's Infinite Garden, or the real "world computer".

Vitalik personally has the dream of persisting in decentralization, non-financialization and non-sovereignty, but EF does not, and the entire EVM ecosystem is also hard to say so, the scale effect is both an advantage and a curse.

And chains like Base have already proven that ETH L2 can indeed balance efficiency and low cost, the OP/ZK L2 parallel route is absolutely not wrong, but Base can run without a token, more like an advanced version of the consortium chain, if this is the bouquet that the EVM system offers to the real world, it's a bit hilarious.

Family, let's take a look at Solana and BNB Chain in the distance, at least they are seriously doing the coin price thing.

The Only Conspiracy Group Left in the Blockchain Camp

Willow catkins, misty and scattered flowers drooping.

Why choose Ethereum, Solana and BNB Chain as the comparison of super public chains?

BTC doesn't need comparison, Ethereum's EVM is the de facto industry standard, just like Chrome has the highest market share, Solana is more like Safari, the extreme smoothness behind it is centralization, BNB Chain is the only surviving relic among the old coins like ADA and XRP that has real on-chain activity.

If there is a palace struggle in the crypto circle, then Solana is like Huan Huan, after the Ling (FTX) Cloud (Peak) was robbed, it can still stage the grand drama of Xiu (Coin Price) Fei (Rise) Hui (Ecology) Gong (Recovery), just to give two examples, as of February, Solana's DEX trading volume has exceeded Ethereum for 4 consecutive months, in March, Solayer's market value exceeded EigenLayer, in the midst of the Meme downturn, Solana still proved itself.

Especially the latter, the staking/restaking system is Ethereum's original creation, and is also the most important content of the PoS system, and here I'll also explain that the corresponding search engine is PoS nodes and super dApps, Google is essentially an advertising company, its profitability comes from selling the traffic of Google search to advertisers, while the income of PoS chains is the Gas Fee of node staking, and super dApps are also the generators of public chain fees, this is the root cause of the two being benchmarked.

Therefore, the prosperity of public chains is actually pointing to the transactions on the public chains, and SOL's coin price and cheap Gas Fee can balance the stimulation of nodes and the encouragement of user transactions, of course, the price is to become a "machine room chain", but it can be said responsibly that Ethereum is still decentralized enough, even with Lido occupying about 30% of the staking share.

So I really like the term "coin issuance group", Solana has been closely associated with conspiracy since childhood, from Jump and SBF's high degree of control, to the small DeFi team of Jupiter in the Meme era, it is closer to the color of PayPal gangsters in terms of community and DAO - pursuing the ultimate capital efficiency.

In terms of the absolute scale of the ecosystem, Solana/SVM is much smaller than ETH/EVM, but Solana has found the most suitable approach for itself: embracing any conspiracy group. If you think the token issuance group will destroy Solana's image, then please take a look back at Jump, SBF, and the current Trump family - I can't say they are not good people, but they are definitely not good apples.

The Labs and Foundation are divided, with Labs focusing more on technological progress, and the Foundation actively marketing under the leadership of Lily Liu, in contrast to Ethereum's Vitalik's personal dominance and the EVM's attraction of the ecosystem. This is not to say that the EF should transform into the SF, but rather to emphasize that Vitalik's name and reality should match - either he should take charge himself, or he should completely empower others and focus on being a spiritual leader, as trying to have it both ways will clearly get him nothing.

Solana has been growing in the dark side since its inception, embracing extreme capital efficiency, in the name of decentralization, returning the original tokens to the token issuance group, and a 20/80 split with the retail group.

From this perspective, Solana is the opposite of the scale effect, the relationship between the public chain's net income and total assets relative to its number of people: Web2 and industrial companies have more assets as the number of people increases, but this is not the case for Web3 with the boost of token prices. BTC has no employees, while the EF and the large personnel of Linux have already caused bloat, and Solana has amplified its economic value to the extreme under a relatively small control system.

If we were to evaluate the people-to-efficiency ratio, Solana would undoubtedly be number one, deserving a small red flower. Solana, with a developer base of only 1/4 the size of Ethereum, has surpassed Ethereum in active addresses and dApp revenue, and has done so even while significantly lagging behind in DeFi TVL and stablecoin issuance.

In fact, this is mainly achieved under the circumstance of PumpFun occupying the vast majority of memecoin issuance, and it cannot be considered that Solana DeFi has completely surpassed Ethereum, as Ethereum's huge scale is also reflected in the L2 and EVM ecosystem, which we will use BNB Chain to illustrate.

On-chain meme paradise, the big brother Miaoyu Studio

The key problem is not the size of our brains, but having the right concepts.

EVM is Chromium, and the best way forward for BNB Chain is to become Edge, with Binance playing the role of Microsoft, an absolute industry-leading traffic entrance. Earlier we said that Solana has the highest people-to-efficiency ratio, but BNB Chain's active addresses crush everything, with 4.4 million, far exceeding Solana's 3 million and Ethereum's 300,000.

Perhaps it is Binance's past glory that crushes everything, and most people still refer to BNB Chain as BSC, seeing the small to know the large, all the highlights of BNB Chain are in the past, how to strive for the future is not something that Meme can undertake, because BNB token is the entity, not the ecosystem, and this is the wonderful part of BNB Chain.

To criticize, the evolution of the BNB Chain name highlights the big company disease, it must have experienced more than one person in charge, and it is obvious that BNB Chain's focus has been completely different in the industry's hot cycle.

The chaos of the name is the external manifestation of entropy increase, entropy can kill people, whether it is genius, technology or money, everything will move towards disorder and chaos.

Especially the strange name of BNB Chain, it's as strange as ETH Chain or SOL Chain, overly focused on the token price rather than the ecosystem. From the experience of Solana and Ethereum, moderation is the true gentleman.

If we were to summarize the development strategy of BNB Chain, following the strategy would be the best evaluation. From early imitation of Ethereum to now "copying" Solana, please note that this is not criticism, everyone likes useful things, AMM DEX sweeping everything, it can't be said that everyone is copying Uniswap, in fact Bancor was the first.

But the biggest problem with BNB Chain is the continued use of the exchange mindset, which is actually very different from the public chain mindset, and even more serious is the confusion of the two.

We can sort out the mixed bag of the current BNB Chain ecosystem:

• Ethereum mindset: DeFi/Staking/RWA/DePIN/DeFAI/Meme
• CZ mindset: AI First/DeSci/Meme
• Solana mindset: Payments/Stablecoins/Meme

In fact, Meme is not the focus of BNB Chain's current development because it is the "newest", but more because it is the consensus area after the game. Although CZ/Binance have stated that they do not own or manage BNB Chain, their influence is still huge.

Especially after CZ was banned from managing Binance, BNB Chain has become his main battlefield. We can understand the value of BNB and BNB Chain according to the split Binance ecosystem.

The dual identity of BNB, as both the Binance platform token, empowering the Binance main site ecosystem, and then BNB as the value support of BNB Chain, meeting the needs of "old" large node holders' income and new users' high-speed low-fee Meme.

If the Binance's own shares are 9:1 between CZ and He Yi, then the rise in BNB price and node income is the only way for it to reward node users, so that the large holders' willingness to hold BNB can be guaranteed, so the retail Gas Fee must be consumed through blockbuster.

As long as the pump (ecosystem building cost) is lower than the user's contribution of fees, then BNB is a cash cow, especially with CZ starting to sell his own shares, the stability of BNB is crucial. After all, when Binance was launched, it was BNB that was sold, not Binance shares, maintaining the unity of BNB value and price.

Only in this way can we understand the meaning behind BNB Chain's frequent offering of liquidity subsidies, BNB Chain needs to become a barrier to the cash flow of Binance's main site, rather than a bleeding outlet.

But now the flowers don't last a hundred days, and the river has 103 palms, the Binance that is completely close to the existing US political system, whether it can still maintain the status quo in the mid-term elections and 4 years later, only God knows.

Because Base and Solana are more American, Ethereum and BTC are more global, the development path of the current public chains has only two options, 99% belong to the US, 1% belong to all mankind, there is no middle ground.

Conclusion

FireFox, the spiritual successor of Netscape, has nurtured the Rust language, which has become the harbinger of Solana and Move VM, and this is also a kind of bond between Web3 and Web2.

Vitalik once wanted to intern at Ripple, almost becoming Sun Yuchen's colleague, it's not clear whether it was lucky or unlucky, Sun Yuchen didn't manage to inject Eastern philosophy into Vitalik, and also let Tron bear the reputation of plagiarizing Ethereum.

In comparison, Solana's story is not as legendary, and BNB's story is more like a commercial company, but now everyone's focus is on Vitalik himself, he "defeated" Ethereum's 7 co-founders and became Ethereum's main spokesperson, this is a historical opportunity, but also a heavy responsibility.

Milady!

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