Ethereum faces market challenges and community divisions in 2024, but Devcon 7 reaffirms the core values of decentralization and trusted neutrality, calling for philosophy-driven technological development for the benefit of all mankind.
By Christine Kim
Translation: Blockchain in Vernacular
Ethereum is the world’s most decentralized, valuable, and mature general-purpose blockchain. While it is essentially a technology, this year’s Devcon focused on Ethereum as a philosophy, and how the principles and values that drive the Ethereum protocol have changed over the years.
1. Ethereum’s tough year
In 2024, judging by ETH’s price and market sentiment, this year will be particularly challenging for Ethereum.
Many critics believe that the Ethereum community’s cypherpunk values of decentralization, trusted neutrality, and censorship resistance have been weakened over time or even abandoned altogether. Even within the Ethereum community, disagreements about these values have sparked contention during the decision-making process for the Pectra upgrade and sparked heated debates on the X platform around topics such as the blob fee market and issuance.
Despite the large number of technical innovations and announcements presented at Devcon 7, these have not provided the community with clear answers about the long-term value and narrative of Ethereum. One of the most anticipated news this week was the release of Beam Chain by Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. This is a radical proposal to overhaul the existing beacon chain consensus protocol.
Title: Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake’s keynote at Devcon 7
Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)
Although Drake detailed a series of new technical features designed to enhance Ethereum and its Layer-2 capabilities, the proposal did not gain widespread support from the community and failed to provide an exciting "North Star" forward-looking goal to motivate stakeholders like Ethereum's merger from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).
For many years, the merger has been the "North Star" of Ethereum. This technical upgrade not only embodies the values of environmental protection and decentralization, but also has been recognized by almost the entire community. Since the merger, no technical upgrade has been so clearly aligned with Ethereum's core values, which has also led to confusion and disagreements among Ethereum stakeholders on the future direction of technology development.
2. What is the essence of Ethereum?
More thought-provoking than the technical announcements, the discussions at Devcon about how to build and develop on Ethereum emphasized the values of decentralization and trusted neutrality, which deeply touched the hearts and minds of attendees. Although all the speakers had slightly different philosophical views on Ethereum, they all agreed that Ethereum pursues the creation of permissionless, transparent, and trust-minimized systems for the benefit of humanity.
If there was any doubt about the cypherpunk values that drove Ethereum’s innovation, the Devcon 7 discussion showed that these values remain core to Ethereum’s philosophy. When asked about the tradeoff between decentralization and performance, the four members of the “Values and Philosophy Alignment of Ethereum” panel unanimously reiterated that decentralization is more important than performance and scalability.
Title: Ethereum Values and Philosophy Panel Discussion at Devcon 7 Speakers from left to right: Ahmad Bitar, Mark Tyneway, Nixo, Peter Szilagyi and Phil Ngo
Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)
In his keynote, Philip Daian, co-founder of Flashbots, outlined four non-negotiable features of Ethereum 3.0: permissionless, distributed, geo-economically decentralized, and efficient neutral builders. Daian implored the community to refocus on promoting and strengthening geographic diversity and permissionless design at all levels of the Ethereum stack, rather than prioritizing mass adoption through improved user experience.
Title: Flashbots co-founder Philip Daian's keynote at Devcon 7
Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)
“The problem is, if you combine ‘sloppy research’ with ‘user experience drugs,’ it’s a very bad situation. I think this is exactly how ETH went to zero. This combination of sloppy research and user experience drugs will erode the decentralized foundation we have carefully built, expose us to the risk of being controlled, tampered with, and ultimately rebuilding the systems we are trying to escape from,” Daian said in his keynote speech.
Gnosis co-founder Martin Koeppelmann introduced the concept of "native Rollup" in his keynote. These Rollups are designed with Ethereum values at their core, such as decentralization and trusted neutrality. For Koeppelmann, the practical implications are that these Rollups do not rely on multi-signature mechanisms that control their key functions, have a Rollup proof system with multiple implementations, and rigorous testing of the Rollup codebase (i.e. "thousands of eyes looking at every line of code"), just like Ethereum itself.
Title: Gnosis co-founder Martin Koppelmann's keynote at Devcon 7
Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)
Finally, Devcon's entire day was devoted to exploring the philosophy of defensive acceleration ("d/acc"). Its founder, Vitalik Buterin, described it this way: "d/acc is a philosophy, a set of techniques, and protocols for building technology that uses human autonomy as a means and end. Every technology we develop should be dedicated to achieving common freedom and happiness."
Many Devcon attendees received a booklet introducing the d/acc philosophy as part of their admission, and on the final day of the conference, they also received a booklet on the future of the ethereum protocol, both authored by Buterin.
Title: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s opening keynote at Devcon 7 “d/acc Discovery Day”
Source: YouTube (@EthereumFoundation)
The Devcon 7 brochure and agenda emphasized a shared philosophy among ethereum developers, not just a common technical roadmap. More than any innovation, upcoming upgrade, or development team within the ecosystem, the most compelling “North Star” of the conference was the attendees’ shared desire to build permissionless, transparent, and trust-minimized systems for the benefit of all humanity.
Link to this article: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/11/5552.html
Source: https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/learnings-from-devcon-2024/
