Ethereum has no dreams, and Vitalik refuses to become a lifelong benevolent dictator;
Solana has no bottom line and is the only active conspiracy group left in the blockchain world;
BNB Chain has no future. Apart from the ultimate marketing, the only thing left is Binance traffic diversion.
Why study public chains?
When you are connected to all retail investors in the cryptocurrency industry, you will inevitably become the infrastructure of this industry. So far, only BTC/ETH as a public chain and Binance and Coinbase as exchanges have achieved this. One is decentralized and the other is centralized. Can they develop a business that can connect with everyone?
In 2025, there will no longer be L1, non-EVM and public chains with market influence. L2, Move VM and Sonic/Bear Chain are just building a stadium around tokens. The struggle between Solana and Base is more like a battle between business consortiums, and has little to do with the dispute over technical standards and routes.
Image description: The development history of public chain and browser, Image source: @zuoyeweb3
Based on this, I summarize three main themes of this article, which is also a summary of the public chain from a historical perspective. Just like the new Edge chooses to be compatible with Chromium and start again, an era of rapid development has ended.
- The background of the birth of finance is to hedge business risks, but since its birth, finance has become the main source of risks, from the Railway Protection Movement that buried the Qing Empire to Bitcoin that eroded the legal currency system.
- The development of the Internet is a brief history of browser kernels, products, and search engines. Converted to the public chain system, EVM/SVM-->ETH/L2, EVM compatible L1-->PoS node system + super dApp.
- The public chain is still built on the bottom layer of the Internet protocol. After the Wild West and the Age of Discovery, the course of human civilization is the migration from rural areas to cities. The death and life of super public chains reflect the aspirations of developers.
You always have to go through this before you become a Bitcoin
Say goodbye to Bitcoin’s successor and welcome the rebirth of Base?
The Ethereum system was conceived for an era of anarchism and personal free will, an era of decentralization, an era of fighting back against the fiat currency system and the world computer, and it is dedicated to this era.
After a year of ridicule, Vitalik chose to promote Aya to the position of chairman of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). After all, Vitalik himself said that he could decide everything about EF.
But there is no need to have more expectations for Vitalik. Vitalik is an extremely nostalgic person. Aya is the "wasting mother" he met when he was sleeping on the floor at Kraken. The hero's humble days are the softest part of his heart.
I don’t want to list all kinds of data and charts to prove the problems with Ethereum, because there is actually no problem with Ethereum itself and the EF and EVM ecosystems. BNB Chain and Base will not switch to SVM for the time being.
Referring to the history of browser development, the most "halal", orthodox and free FireFox did not continue the glory of Netscape, but was incorporated into the combination of Google's open source Chromium and Google search commercialization. 90% of Firefox's revenue comes from setting Google as the default search engine, making it the de facto "official opposition" of Google.
The same is true for today's ETH/EVM system. Every dApp, every L2, every Dev, every VC, and every KOL that makes up the EVM circle has evolved through the process of natural selection on a unique historical trajectory and in a unique ecological environment.
ETH, L2 and EVM are closely linked, forming the public chain system with the most "network effect" at present. The continuous positive feedback mechanism inherent in the network effect will double the ecological connection, which is also the fundamental reason why everyone curses but cannot leave.
Temporary rest will not bring eternal peace. Trident IE will also be replaced by Chromium Edge. The bottom layer of Ethereum is precisely Vitalik’s personal problems, and the collapse of the governance system has led to the current predicament.
Vitalik's parents are both from the Soviet Union. Vitalik himself is extremely opposed to centralized, autocratic and authoritarian systems. The seeds of the DAO system are buried here. However, as mentioned earlier, he also said that he can decide everything about the Ethereum Foundation. The rollback after the DAO incident has proved that if there is no decentralization, there will be absolute centralization.
Image caption: I am the one who decided the new EF (Ethereum Foundation) leadership team. Image credit: @VitalikButerin
Referring to Satoshi Nakamoto's departure after his mission was completed, without revealing his achievements and fame, Vitalik is clearly in a chaotic neutral state, that is, he does not want to lead everything in EF legitimately, but he also wants to retain the final decision-making power over EF. Unfortunately, this is the worst governance system.
Since Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Max Weber's summary of bureaucracy plus Taylor's summary, companies are the most efficient organizational model in human society. The Silicon Valley's technology right, such as Musk, Peter Thiel and others, believe that companies should take over the country rather than bureaucrats managing society. DOGE is a direct product of this.
But for organizations that are not so "capital efficiency" oriented, such as technical geek groups, how to govern and collaborate unpaid programmers across the world becomes a social need for foundations or DAOs. The Linux and RISC-V Foundations are both role models, but it is not enough. There will always be conflicts in the community, and people's hearts are not always the same.
For Linux and Python, their founders will also assume the role of Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), but that is not enough. Linux founder Linus did the ugly job of banning Russian administrators on October 24 last year. After the PEP 572 dispute in 2018, Python announced that it would no longer serve as BDFL. This move is quite similar to the resignation of Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh and the escape of several AVAX directors.
However, one thing must be acknowledged. In the early stages of the development of a technology organization, the hard work of the founders is indispensable. However, the complexity of EF does not stop here. A capital efficiency-oriented company system is only responsible to shareholders, and a social impact-oriented technology foundation is only responsible to the project itself. Programmers are always free and can choose and fork freely in different organizations.
However, EF is not the same as the two. EF can ignore profitability as there is enough ETH in the vault, but the EVM ecosystem must consider profitability. This is the awkwardness of Vitalik--EF--EVM. Vitalik does the work of BDFL but refuses to assume the corresponding position. The downstream of EF is the hungry ETH Hodlers and the huge economic system, but they have to operate under Vitalik's personal will.
Only by understanding this can we understand why Aya's Infinite Garden route is absolutely correct. This is the only choice to ensure that everyone in EF can follow the will of Vitalik, the master of patching in the EVM Empire and the most capable lady in the Central Military Affairs Bureau.
Vitalik is like a child with gold in his arms. The famous young hero cannot maintain balance in the complex world, so he brings in external helpers. However, with each level of help, the external groups are more concerned about profit issues. Vitalik can neither govern EF/Ethereum/EVM like a company, nor does he refuse to actually assume the nominal role of BDFL like a technical organization. After the DAO was partially falsified, Ethereum is now in a strict state of slow out of control, and it will either slowly fade away or be possessed by someone else.
The Ethereum community is now talking about the Pectra upgrade, but its attention has dropped to a terrible level where no one cares. This is a precursor to silence. Please believe that this cannot be solved by ETH pumping up the price or releasing a few meme large MC memecoin. What Ethereum needs to answer now is whether it is Vitalik’s decentralized testing ground for practicing non-financialization, Aya’s infinite garden, or the real "world computer."
Vitalik personally has a dream of adhering to decentralization, non-financialization, and non-sovereignty, but EF does not, and it is hard to say that the entire EVM ecosystem has it either. The scale effect is both an advantage and a curse.
Public chains such as Base have proven that ETH L2 can indeed strike a balance between efficiency and cheapness. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the OP/ZK L2 parallel route. However, Base can run without tokens and is more like an advanced version of the consortium chain. If this is the bouquet that the EVM system offers to the real world, it would be a bit hilarious.
My friends, let’s take a look at Solana and BNB Chain in the distance. At least they are serious about the price of coins.
The only remaining conspiracy group in the blockchain camp
The yellow willow branches are swaying, and the misty flowers are hanging down.
Why choose Ethereum, Solana and BNB Chain as comparisons of super public chains?
There is no need to compare BTC. Ethereum's EVM is the de facto industry standard. Just as Chrome has the highest share, Solana is more like Safari. Behind the extreme smoothness is centralization. BNB Chain is the only orphan among old coins such as ADA and XRP that actually has on-chain activities.
If there is a palace fight in the crypto, then Solana is Huanhuan. After Ling (F) Yun (T) Feng (X) was robbed, she was able to play the heroine's drama of Xi (coin price) Fei (rising) back to (ecological) palace (recovering). To cite just two examples, as of February, Solana DEX transaction volume has surpassed Ethereum for four consecutive months. In March, Solayer's market value surpassed EigenLayer. In the decline of Meme, Solana still proves itself.
Especially the latter, the pledge/re-pledge system is an original creation of Ethereum and the most important content of the PoS system. Here I would also like to explain that the corresponding search engine is the PoS node and the super dApp. Google is essentially an advertising company, and its profit source is selling Google search traffic to advertisers. The income of the PoS chain is the node pledge in exchange for the public chain Gas Fee. The super dApp is also the generator of public chain fees. This is the root of the comparison between the two.
Therefore, the prosperity of the public chain is actually directed towards the transactions of the public chain, and the SOL coin price and cheap Gas Fee can strike a balance between stimulating nodes and encouraging users to trade. Of course, the price is to become a "computer room chain". It can be said responsibly that Ethereum is still decentralized enough, even when Lido occupies about 30% of the pledge share.
So I really like the name of the coin issuance group. Solana has been closely associated with conspiracy since its childhood, from the high control of Jump and SBF to the Jupiter DeFi group in the Meme era. It is closer to the color of the PayPal gang than words such as community and DAO - the pursuit of extreme capital efficiency.
Image caption: Solana’s unyielding half-life, Image source: @zuoyeweb3
In terms of the absolute scale of the ecosystem, Solana/SVM is much smaller than ETH/EVM, but Solana has found the best strategy for itself: embrace any conspiracy group. If you think that the coin issuance group will destroy Solana’s image, then please flash back to Jump, SBF and the current Trump family. I can’t say that they are not good people, but they are definitely not good people.
Labs and Foundation are divided. Labs is more concerned about technological progress, while the Foundation is actively marketing under the leadership of Lily Liu, which is in contrast to Ethereum's Vitalik's personal leadership and EVM's attraction to the ecosystem. This does not mean that EF should be transformed into SF, but more to emphasize that Vitalik should live up to his name. Either he should do it himself, or completely delegate power and concentrate on being a spiritual leader. Obviously, you will get nothing if you want both.
Since the day it was born, Solana has been growing in the dark side, embracing extreme capital efficiency. In the name of decentralization, it returns the original amount to the issuing group and takes a 20:80 share from the retail investor group.
From this perspective, Solana is the opposite of the scale effect, the relationship between the net income and total assets of the public chain and its number of people: in Web2 and industrial companies, the more people there are, the larger the company's assets are, but this is not the case with Web3, which is supported by the coin price. BTC strictly speaking has no employees, while the large number of personnel in EF and Linux has caused bloat. Solana has maximized its economic value under a system with relatively few controllers.
Image description: SOL ETH comparison, data source: CMC/Defillama/Token Terminal/Chain spect
If we evaluate the labor efficiency ratio, then Solana deserves the first place and deserves a little red flower as an award. With a developer scale of 1/4 of Ethereum, Solana has surpassed Ethereum in active addresses and dApp revenue, and it is even more rare that it lags far behind in DeFi TVL and stablecoin issuance.
In fact, this was mainly achieved when PumpFun occupied the vast majority of memecoin issuance. It cannot be considered that Solana DeFi has completely surpassed Ethereum as a whole, because the huge scale of Ethereum is also reflected in the L2 and EVM ecosystems, which we will illustrate with BNB Chain.
On-Chain Meme Paradise is transformed into the cousin's house
The key is not the size of our brains, but having the right perspective.
EVM is Chromium, and the best way out for BNB Chain is to become Edge. Binance happens to be Microsoft's role, and it is definitely the industry's top traffic entrance. We just said that Solana has the highest labor efficiency, so BNB Chain's active addresses crush everything. BNB Chain has 4.4 million active addresses, far exceeding Solana's 3 million and Ethereum's 300,000.
Perhaps it is because Binance’s past glory overwhelms everything, most people still call BNB Chain BSC. As the saying goes, all the highlights of BNB Chain are in the past. How to make progress in the future is not something that Meme can take on, because BNB coin is the entity, not the ecosystem. This is also the wonder of BNB Chain.
Image caption: BNB Chain evolution, data from Binance Academy, image source: @zuoyeweb3
To be honest, the changes in the name of BNB Chain all highlight the corporate disease. It has definitely gone through more than one person in charge. It is obvious that BNB Chain has completely different focuses during the industry's hot cycle.
The confusion in names is a manifestation of increasing entropy. Entropy can kill people. Whether it is genius, technology or money, everything will move towards disorder and chaos.
Especially the weird name of BNB Chain, which is as strange as ETH Chain or SOL Chain. It focuses too much on the price of the currency rather than the ecosystem. Judging from the experience of Solana and Ethereum, moderation is the right thing to do.
If we summarize the development ideas of BNB Chain, then the following strategy is the best evaluation. From imitating Ethereum in the early days to "copying" Solana now, please note that this is not a criticism. Everyone likes useful things. AMM DEX sweeps everything. You can't say that everyone copied Uniswap. In fact, Bancor was the first one.
However, the biggest problem with BNB Chain is that it follows the idea of running an exchange, which is actually very different from the thinking of running a public chain. What’s more serious is that it confuses the two.
We can sort out the mixture of the current BNB Chain ecosystem:
- Ethereum Thinking: DeFi/ Staking/ RWA/ DePIN/ DeFAI/ Meme
- CZ Thinking: AI First/DeSci/Meme
- Solana Thinking: Payment/Stablecoin/Meme
In fact, Meme has not become the focus of BNB Chain development just because it is the “latest”. It is more of a three-party consensus zone 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 became its main battlefield. We can understand the value of BNB and BNB Chain according to the split Binance ecosystem.
BNB has a dual identity, that is, as the Binance platform currency, it undertakes the empowerment of the Binance main site ecology. Then BNB serves as the value support of BNB Chain, while meeting the needs of "old" large node income and new users for high-speed and low-cost Meme.
If Binance's own shares are CZ/ He Yi 9:1, then the increase in BNB prices and node revenue are the only ways for it to give back to node users. In this way, it can ensure the willingness of large users to hold BNB, so the Gas Fee of retail investors must be consumed through explosive products.
As long as the price increase (ecosystem construction fee) is lower than the transaction fee contributed by users, BNB is a cash cow, especially at the moment when CZ actually starts to sell his shares, the stability of BNB is crucial. After all, when Binance was launched, it was BNB that was sold, not Binance shares, which maintained the value and price of BNB.
Only in this way can we understand the meaning behind BNB Chain's frequent liquidity subsidies. BNB Chain should become a barrier to Binance's main site's cash flow, rather than a flood outlet for bleeding.
However, nothing lasts forever, and Trump has 103 palms. Only God knows whether Binance, which is completely in line with the existing political system of the United States, can maintain the status quo after the midterm elections and four years later.
Because Base and Solana are more American, and Ethereum and BTC are more global, there are only two development paths for public chains at present. 99% belongs to the United States, and 1% belongs to all mankind. There is no middle ground.
Conclusion
FireFox, the spiritual sequel to Netscape, gave birth to the Rust language. Rust became the forerunner of Solana and Move VM. This is also a bond between Web3 and Web2.
Vitalik once wanted to intern at Ripple and almost became a colleague of Sun Ge. Fortunately or unfortunately, Sun Ge failed to instill Eastern philosophy in Vitalik, and also made Tron bear the notoriety of plagiarizing Ethereum.
In comparison, Solana’s story is not so legendary, and BNB’s story is more like a commercial company, but now everyone’s focus is on Vitalik personally. He "defeated" the seven co-founders of Ethereum and became the most important spokesperson for Ethereum. This is a historical opportunity, but also a heavy responsibility.
Milady!
