Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author: Wenser (@wenser 2010 )
Despite the recent poor performance of Ethereum market prices, Ethereum’s “soul leader” Vitalik has entered the “Next Level”.
On September 11, when Vitalik was communicating with Brantly.eth, a former core contributor of ENS, about the value of ENS, the former once again showed his "rebellious side" - he first fabricated a commentary tweet in a rather sarcastic tone, saying "Look, Mr. Buterin. Here are those who think that only PoW is decentralized. Here are those who don't appreciate your support for synthetic wombs. Here are those who don't like vaccines. What happens when they all try to cancel you together?" (Odaily Planet Daily Note: The picture is the doctor's diagnosis screen in S 11-EP 12 of The Simpsons, which is very ironic). After an X platform user posted a malicious comment "What A D*ck", "Brave Little V" responded with a post without hesitation: "No, it's a d*ck." It was accompanied by a picture of a big yellow duck holding a sign that said "PoS is more decentralized than PoW."
It has to be said that after the completion of milestone events such as the "10th anniversary" and the approval of the Ethereum spot ETF, as a blockchain network ecosystem with a market value of nearly US$284 billion, Ethereum inevitably began to face its own "minor crisis" - can the Ethereum ecosystem continue to prosper? What problems exist now? How to solve the existing problems?
Odaily Planet Daily will use the perspective of the "Seven Deadly Sins" in this article to talk to you about where Ethereum is headed for readers' reference. (Note: This article is the first in this series)
Ethereum also has the "seven deadly sins": when the price performance is poor, everything you say is wrong
Everything starts with "price".
Ethereum has been criticized in recent months, and even many of its loyal supporters have been silent, all due to its weak price performance. On January 1 this year, the price was around $2,280. Since then, Ethereum has risen to nearly $4,000 on March 13 as Bitcoin broke through new highs. Then it fell all the way, and on September 7, the price fell to around $2,223. It is now quoted at around $2,360, and the year-to-date increase is only 3.5%.
The current situation, upon closer examination, is mainly due to the following reasons (Note: the following "charges" are only meant to be ridiculed, not to the extent of personal attacks):
Coingecko data interface
The first sin: Greed - Ethereum Foundation frequently crashes the market
As the cryptocurrency with the second largest market value after Bitcoin, the promoter of the ICO craze, and one of the most successful cryptocurrency projects in history, Ethereum has grown into a towering tree in the crypto industry. Along with it, the Ethereum Foundation, as an "official organization", owns a large number of ETH tokens and has a very "legitimacy" voice. However, the Ethereum Foundation did not live up to many people's expectations - just like traditional equity companies are cautious about selling stocks, but the "dumping" in the bull and bear cycles is the most eye-catching, which can be called "one of the necessary operations to show presence".
According to LookonChain's previous statistics, as of the end of August this year, the Ethereum Foundation has sold 239,000 ETH since January 1, 2021, equivalent to approximately US$654 million. According to Spot On Chain's monitoring at the end of August, ETH has experienced two sharp declines in the past month (a cumulative decline of 23.5%). Among them, the Ethereum Foundation alone sold 35,400 ETH (approximately US$95 million) and still held 275,000 ETH (approximately US$677 million) at the time.
Subsequently, the "dumping" continued. The most recent operation was on September 9, when the Ethereum Foundation sold another 450 ETH (worth about 1.03 million US dollars). This address alone has sold a total of 3,066 ETH (worth about 8.68 million US dollars) on the chain in the past eight months, with an average selling price of 2,830 US dollars.
It has to be said that despite the "righteous name" of "supporting ecological development", such an exaggerated market-smashing behavior still makes people sigh: Why is the Ethereum Foundation so greedy?
Ethereum Foundation "Dumping" Record
The second sin: Arrogance - Ethereum's development path is "determined" and the vital forces of ecological development are ignored
Ethereum’s current status is also related to the arrogance of the “official forces” including co-founder Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation. It is a bit of a “success and failure are both due to Xiao He” kind of helplessness.
The specific manifestation of this point, in addition to the "L2 development route" designated by Vitalik himself and the core developers of Ethereum, there are also clues in the relevant speeches of the 12th AMA of the Ethereum Foundation that just ended. In response to the question "If blob fails to reach the target average, should the target be lowered to ensure fee price discovery?" in the AMA, Dankrad Feist, a core researcher of Ethereum, said: "Ethereum is currently creating a new market for rollups - the data availability (DA) market. Many alternative solutions hope to take market share away from Ethereum - Celestia, Eigenlayer, Avail, etc. But they can't compete on security, so they hope to compete on price."
For the already flourishing Ethereum ecosystem, it may have always been in a state of “not paying attention to any other chains”.
Not only that, Vitalik’s own “disregard” for the DeFi track is also a major reason. Previously, he had written an article expressing his “concern about the use case of cryptocurrency DeFi”, believing that DeFi would lead people to excessively pursue financial hype and speculative value. In this regard, Arthur Cheong, founder and CEO of DeFiance Capital, said, “The worst view is that the founder of the largest L1 public chain does not really understand the use cases and industries that drive the price of ETH and make its market value as high as 330 billion US dollars. The price of ETH may be seen at $0.03.”
Arrogance may indeed be the original sin of progress.
Arthur diss Vitalik
The third sin: Jealousy - Ethereum Foundation researcher "Restaking" himself
In the still wild world of cryptocurrencies, sometimes, being in a high position does not mean you can make a lot of money. People need to eat and drink, so making money is not a shame.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why some Ethereum Foundation researchers choose to "Restaking" themselves into a specific project - after all, compared to the Ethereum Foundation, which has a stronger academic research atmosphere, projects that can directly receive salaries and token returns may be a better choice.
In May of this year, Dankrad Feist, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, became an advisor to the Ethereum re-staking project EigenLayer after Justin Drake, and also emphasized that "I joined the company in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the Ethereum Foundation, and focused on risk and decentralization." In addition, he also said: "It is true that a large number of tokens have been received from EigenLayer, but I do not think this will change or affect its position on the way the core protocol is developed. If Eigenlayer is completed by people with high integrity, it will bring significant benefits to Ethereum. I believe that the current leaders intend to do this and plan to help them take responsibility for it. If I think this is no longer the case, I will not hesitate to speak publicly and resign from my position."
Listen, what a righteous expression! He even found a way out, saying "I joined because I thought the project was good for Ethereum. If it's not, I will resign immediately!"
The fourth sin: Anger - Ethereum Foundation’s transparency is frequently questioned
There has always been a lack of effective ways to display the Ethereum Foundation’s internal management, personnel changes, and expense expenditures.
As early as 2019, EthHub founder Eric Conner raised "community concerns about the transparency of the Ethereum Foundation." At that time, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake responded that "the foundation has about 100 employees and spends about $20 million a year." Vitalik said that "questions about Ethereum governance have not delayed the development of Ethereum 2.0." Now it seems that he has somewhat changed the concept and evaded the main issue.
Recently, the Ethereum Foundation protocol support team added two new employees responsible for funding support. This is the team’s first recruitment. The source of this news is a personal tweet from Ethereum core developer Tim Beik.
In August this year, regarding the Ethereum Foundation address depositing 35,000 ETH to Kraken, Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, said, “For a long time this year, they were told not to conduct any financial activities because the supervision was complicated, which prevented them from sharing plans in advance. And this transaction does not mean selling. From now on, they will sell gradually and in a planned manner.”
In addition, in such an unpredictable market environment, members of the Ethereum Foundation also failed to hide their gaffes. Péter Szilágyi, head of Geth development at the Ethereum Foundation, previously wrote that he "often wondered if he had chosen the wrong industry." He believed that compared to SpaceX, the crypto industry was simply a "casino for fools" and had made no contribution to humanity. Everyone wanted to be the next Vitalik, but no one wanted to build something useful. Everyone just wanted to extract value. Only Bitcoin tried (although it failed) to become a safe-haven asset, while the others were selling shovels, and there was no sign of a gold rush at all.
To some extent, perhaps he also feels disappointed and angry with the Ethereum ecosystem, which can be described as "pitying its lack of struggle and being angry at its misfortune."
The fifth sin: Inertia — The Ethereum Foundation fails to provide a coherent roadmap and leadership for the ecosystem
In this regard, the criticism of Zhu Su, the former founder of Three Arrows Capital, may be just right. When the addresses related to the Ethereum Foundation frequently charged huge amounts of ETH to exchanges in August, he bluntly said: "Although the Ethereum Foundation sold 30,000 bitcoins raised in the early days when the price of Bitcoin fell from $600 to $300, Ethereum still became one of the most successful projects in the encryption field. The problem with the Ethereum Foundation is not the early "dumping", but the current inability to provide a coherent roadmap and leadership for the ecosystem."
This can be seen from the fact that Vitalik once advocated SBT (Soul Bound Token). The Ethereum ecosystem-related projects that were once keen on chasing hot spots are now "overgrown with grass."
In addition, the statements made by people related to the Ethereum Foundation are also confusing: At the end of August, Hudson Jameson, a former employee of the Ethereum Foundation, wrote that the Foundation’s annual budget of $100 million is not unreasonable. He mentioned the “salary part: I don’t have the latest data on how many people are ‘working’ at EF (those who receive regular payments as contractors or employees). If I had to guess, I would say that so far, the number of people in various regions is at least 200, but this is just a guess.”
After the Ethereum Foundation’s spending was questioned, Ethereum Foundation member Josh Stark also stated that the Ethereum Foundation will soon release an updated report covering 2022 and 2023, which is expected to be announced before Devcon SEA (to be held from November 12th to 15th this year).
Regarding the Ethereum Foundation’s $100 million annual budget, Anthony Sassano, founder of The Daily Gwei, even thought that this matter was “insignificant” in terms of the ETH market value.
But in contrast, the Ethereum Foundation may not pay as much attention to "legal issues" and "privacy issues" as we imagined: in April 2023, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, revealed that the IP addresses of ETH stakers were monitored as part of the metadata set. At that time, the crypto community regarded this as a privacy issue for Ethereum.
In 2019, Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zamfir issued a clear warning at Devcon 5: developers need to start considering the legal status of Ethereum, rather than just hoping that Ethereum will grow so large that the government will have to accept it. He believes that the government will not allow this disruptive revolution to happen, and Ethereum now needs to adapt.
Although, Hudson Jameson, a former employee of the Ethereum Foundation, also mentioned in the previous article, "Key expenses that may be overlooked by the Ethereum Foundation also include global trademark protection legal fees to prevent scammers from using the Ethereum name or logo."
At the recently concluded 12th AMA of the Ethereum Foundation, in response to the question "Where is the value of ETH today? Has the rollup ecosystem hollowed out ETH and made it lose its value?", Dankrad Feist, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, said: "Ethereum is building a financial platform that will be the most neutral platform to date. It allows the issuance of financial assets, allows the trading of these assets, and can create new financial products based on them without permission, which are all very valuable activities. It is possible to capture value from it, but it is not clear through what mechanism... I personally think that it would be best if we focused on building an ecosystem on Ethereum that generates value, and I think value capture will eventually happen naturally. This doesn't mean that I don't consider it, but it is a big mistake to focus on it when the value generation part is still insufficient... The highest value transactions will continue to occur on Ethereum L1, and rollups will expand the pie by providing users with enough space to trade on Ethereum."
To some extent, the Ethereum Foundation is also crossing the river by feeling the stones.
The sixth sin: Gluttony — Ethereum’s ecosystem throughput limit has not yet been reached
In response to the same question above, Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, gave a "more ambitious" answer. From his speech, we can feel his full confidence in the Ethereum ecosystem and his development ambitions.
He said: "ETH is money. The accumulation of ETH value is crucial to the success of Ethereum. I believe that if ETH fails to become the programmable currency of the Internet, Ethereum cannot become the settlement layer of the value Internet. The accumulation of ETH value comes down to traffic and currency premium. The important metric is the total fee, not the fee per transaction. The ultimate goal of Ethereum's success is 10M tx/s, which can provide billions of dollars in daily revenue even if the fee per transaction is less than 1 cent."
In terms of transaction throughput, Ethereum is also a "gluttonous beast".
It is worth mentioning that the Ethereum block browser Etherscan previously stated that on September 1, despite the continued decline in gas prices in recent weeks, Ethereum's daily gas usage still hit a record high of 109,140.14M. From this point of view, the Ethereum ecosystem is still the most active blockchain network in the cryptocurrency industry today. This can be seen from the fact that Yu Xian, the founder of SlowMist, said that "the hottest ecosystem that the top phishing gangs are involved in is the EVM ecosystem" - after all, only ecosystems with high ecological value and active ecological transactions will attract a large number of phishing attacks.
It can be said that the "gluttony" symptoms of the Ethereum ecosystem are still continuing.
Ethereum throughput is still amazing
The seventh sin: lust - Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, is accused of being obsessed with love and not paying attention to his career (ridiculous version)
First of all, I would like to state that the last crime is not a personal attack, but just a joke.
As the co-founder of Ethereum and the "soul leader" of the Ethereum ecosystem, unlike the disappeared "Father of Bitcoin - Satoshi Nakamoto", Vitalik's every move is particularly concerned by countless people in the cryptocurrency industry: his views are regarded as the norm, the technical standards he proposed are regarded as the "designated route", his on-chain operations are regarded as platform endorsement, and even his personal life and emotional experiences are placed under people's magnifying glass for careful observation and as a topic of conversation.
Previously, Vitalik’s photos with different girls have attracted “excessive attention” from many people. In a sense, for many people, Vitalik has become a symbol, and many people even have unrealistic “alternative demands” on him - similar to “Vitalik should not fall in love, but should focus on his career”, “Vitalik should post more tweets to promote Ethereum”, etc.
Vitalik was forced to "call orders" for Ethereum
Vitalik should be quite helpless about this. He once posted a tweet saying, "Someone told me that I need to do less philosophical thinking and post more content to promote the rise of Ethereum, so I am going to post an Ethereum bullpost."
In this regard, I can only say that even if he is the helmsman of an entity with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars, Vitalik is just a person, not a "god", so give him less expectations and more freedom. After all, no one wants his words and deeds to be placed under the "magnifying glass" of the onlookers and over-interpreted.
As for dating, it is his personal freedom. Even if it is lustful, what's wrong with that?
Suspected Vitalik dating photo (online photo)
Summary: It's called "Seven Deadly Sins", but it's actually "Seven Dragon Balls"
Finally, as mentioned in the previous article, "When prices perform poorly, everything you say is wrong." Ethereum's "seven sins" seem to be accusations and criticisms. In fact, the point the author wants to make here is that these problems are more like "Dragon Balls" - after collecting them all, you can summon a "dragon" and make a wish come true.
When the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum ecosystem are able to face up to the existing problems, perhaps we will be able to see a more prosperous blockchain network ecosystem.
In the next article, we will discuss in detail the more fundamental problems currently facing the Ethereum ecosystem based on the specific details mentioned today.
After the introduction, the main course of this series of articles comes, so stay tuned.
