Written by: Haotian
I do not agree with the views of Ethereum as a 'big company theory' and 'narrative being theoretical'. Below are several perspectives of thought:
1) Ethereum is an experimental model of decentralized governance in crypto, not controlled by centralized companies or organizations. Developers, researchers, node operators, ETH holders, and others globally participate and contribute.
The collaborative approach of open-source code, community-driven decision-making processes, and transparent governance mechanisms are overwhelmingly superior to any centralized organizational structure in the long run, even though it may be slower in efficiency. However, it wins in openness, transparency, and the emergent innovation singularity effect. Ethereum addresses the 'centralized company disease', so how could it suffer from 'big company disease' before achieving its mission?
If Ethereum really fails, the choice of decentralized architecture will embrace 'forking' and let it die; there will always be a stronger new 'Ethereum' emerging. Ethereum remains the center of the entire crypto world, which is enough to illustrate the point.
2) In terms of public chain technology, Ethereum has steadily transitioned from POW to POS over the past few years, from Sharding strategies to finally implementing a Rollup-Centric core strategy, and then gradually executing the subsequent roadmap. The security, stability, and engineering quality delivered throughout this process have been in line with expectations. The strategy shift from sharding to Rollup has also responded to market trends.
The problem is that the technical iteration of public chains does not resonate in sync with market cycles. The rhythm of infrastructure and application landing, or even market profit effects, has become disconnected or is difficult to correlate strongly.
Layer 2 is indeed affected by the mainnet Gas fees and bandwidth performance, but the Cancun upgrade, even if very successful, did not bring about the anticipated prosperous scene for Layer 2. Ideally, Layer 2 would see a multitude of chains launching simultaneously, with user ecosystems achieving exponential breakthroughs, and Ethereum could achieve deflationary growth through 'taxes' and 'Gas Burn'.
But the fact is that the threshold for launching chains has lowered, and the narrative of RaaS has also fermented, while the ideal of Mass Adoption still seems far away. To be honest, this has already exceeded the constraints of Ethereum's pure technical framework.
The NFT Fomo trend in 2021 brought benefits to Ethereum. Objectively speaking, it was a market effect emerging from decentralized architecture, not directly driven by Ethereum's 'core' developers.
3) 'Narrative' is the evolving development context, a derivative of business thinking layered upon technology.
For example: The emergence of the @eigenlayer protocol led to the narrative of Restaking, the emergence of the @CelestiaOrg DA chain led to the narrative of modularity, and the emergence of @Starknet led to the narrative of ZK-Rollup.
In the future market, @ParticleNtwrk's charge could bring 'chain abstraction' narratives into the spotlight again. The unified liquidity trust ecosystem that ZK layer protocols like @ProjectZKM aim to build might also eliminate the boundaries of blockchain, and there are too many 'narrative' topics to discuss.
Objectively speaking, 'narrative' is the result of an excess of developer power and hot money Fomo. Narratives allow technology to have imaginative space, although 'over-narration' can give an impression of being overly theoretical. However, 'over-narration' itself is a natural outcome of the market, much like blowing bubbles; narratives will evolve but will always exist.
In other words, narratives that do not Fomo will lose their appeal in attracting 'resources, talent, and funds' to engage in all of this. It might be better to stay within the Web 2 internal competition without bearing the stigma of fraud. Of course, MEME is also a type of narrative, but if the market is bearish on everything that has a building process and underlying business logic, the existence of MEME loses any fundamental basis.
