Author: Christine Kim, Vice President of Research, Galaxy Digital; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou
What is Ethereum? Ethereum is the world's most decentralized, valuable, and mature general-purpose blockchain. While Ethereum is ultimately a technology, this year's Ethereum Developer Conference Devcon focused on Ethereum as a concept, focusing on how much the principles and values that drive the development of the Ethereum protocol have changed over the years.
1. Ethereum had a bad year
2024 is an extremely challenging year from the perspective of ETH price and market sentiment.
Many critics of Ethereum believe that over time, the decentralization, trusted neutrality, and anti-censorship cypherpunk values of the Ethereum community have diminished, or even been completely abandoned. Even within the Ethereum community, disagreements over values have sparked debates in the decision-making process of the Pectra upgrade and led to heated discussions on topics such as blob fee markets and issuance.
Although Devcon 7 showcased a wealth of technological innovations and announcements, none of them could provide the community with clear information about Ethereum's long-term value and narrative. So far, the most anticipated announcement shared by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake this week was the launch of Beam Chain, a radical proposal to overhaul Ethereum's current consensus protocol, Beacon Chain.
Although Drake detailed several new technical features aimed at enhancing Ethereum and L2 capabilities, the proposal lacks broad community support and failed to provide a 'North Star' (a forward-looking goal) that excites stakeholders in a way similar to the Ethereum transition to proof of stake during the Ethereum Merge.
For years, the Merge has been the North Star of Ethereum. It is a technical upgrade rooted in the environmentalism and decentralization values that are almost universally recognized within the community. Since the Ethereum Merge, there has not been any technical upgrade that aligns clearly with Ethereum's values, which in turn has led to confusion and disputes among Ethereum stakeholders about how Ethereum as a technology should develop.
2. What is Ethereum?
Apart from a series of technical announcements, the ideas proposed at Devcon about how to build Ethereum and how to build Ethereum in a way that promotes decentralization and trusted neutrality greatly inspired the attendees. Although all speakers presented slightly different ideas about Ethereum, they shared a common fundamental belief that Ethereum is about improving human welfare by pursuing the creation of permissionless, trust-minimized transparent systems.
If you have ever doubted the cypherpunk values of Ethereum that inspire innovation, the talks at Devcon 7 emphasize that these values remain at the core of Ethereum's philosophy. When asked about the trade-offs between decentralization and performance, all four members of the panel on 'Ethereum Values and Ethos Alignment' reiterated that the importance of decentralization should be prioritized above performance and scalability.
Philip Daian, co-founder of Flashbots, talked about the four characteristics of 'Ethereum 3.0' in his keynote speech, which are non-negotiable. They include: permissionless, distributed, geographically decentralized, and truly neutral builders. Daian urged the Ethereum community to refocus on promoting and strengthening geographical diversity and permissionless design across all verticals of the Ethereum tech stack, rather than placing all emphasis on other goals like promoting mass adoption through improved user experience.
"The problem is, if you solely focus on user experience, that would be very bad. I think that's the reason for ETH's value going to zero. It would destroy the decentralized system we have carefully created, making us vulnerable to exploitation and reforming the systems we are trying to avoid," Daian said in his keynote. Martin Koeppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, introduced the concept of 'native rollups' in his keynote, which are rollups built in accordance with Ethereum's values like decentralization and trusted neutrality. Practically speaking, for Koeppelmann, this means not using multi-signatures to control key rollup features, deploying multiple rollup proof systems, and rigorously testing the rollup codebase (i.e., 'having thousands of eyes reviewing every line of code'), just like Ethereum.
Finally, the full-day programming at Devcon was dedicated to exploring the concept of defensive acceleration or 'd/acc'. In the words of creator Vitalik Buterin, 'd/acc is an idea, a set of technologies and protocols for building technologies that make human agency both the means and the end. Every technology we create should point towards the collective freedom and happiness of humanity.' Many Devcon attendees received a booklet on the d/acc concept as part of the conference swag, and on the last day of the conference, they also received a booklet about the future development of the Ethereum protocol, both of which were authored by Vitalik Buterin.
The handbook and programming of Devcon 7 emphasized a shared vision among Ethereum developers, rather than a shared technological roadmap. Compared to any innovations, upcoming upgrades, or development teams in the Ethereum ecosystem, the most striking 'North Star' presented at the conference was the establishment of permissionless, trust-minimized transparent systems aimed at improving human welfare, which was a common aspiration among attendees.
