Written by: Haotian
I do not agree with the views of Ethereum as a 'big company theory' and 'narrative emptiness'; here are some perspectives to share:
1) Ethereum is an experimental model of decentralized governance architecture in Crypto, not controlled by centralized companies or organizations. Developers, researchers, node operators, and ETH holders from around the world participate and contribute together.
The collaborative method of open-source code, the community-driven decision-making process, and the transparent governance mechanisms are long-term superior to any centralized organizational structure; although the efficiency is slow, it wins in terms of openness, transparency, and emergent innovation singularity effects. Ethereum addresses the 'centralized company disease', how could it possibly suffer from the big company disease before achieving its mission?
If Ethereum really fails, the choice of decentralized architecture would be to embrace 'forks' and let it die; a stronger new 'Ethereum' will eventually emerge. The fact that Ethereum is still the center of the entire Crypto world is enough to illustrate the issue.
2) From the technical aspect of public chains, Ethereum has smoothly transitioned from POW to POS over the past few years, from the Sharding strategy to the final realization of the Rollup-Centric core strategy, and then to the step-by-step implementation of the upcoming roadmap. The security and stability, as well as the quality of engineering delivery results throughout this process, have all met expectations. This strategic shift from sharding to rollup is also a response to market trends.
The problem is that the technological iteration of public chains cannot resonate synchronously with market cycles; the rhythm of infrastructure and application landing, even the market's profit effect, has become disconnected or is difficult to correlate.
Layer 2 is indeed affected by the mainnet's gas fees and bandwidth performance, but even if the Cancun upgrade is very successful, it has not brought the expected prosperity of Layer 2. Ideally, Layer 2 would launch thousands of chains, and the user ecosystem would achieve exponential breakthroughs, allowing Ethereum to obtain deflationary boosts 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 Mass Adoption is still far away. Honestly, this has exceeded the constraints of Ethereum's pure technical framework.
The NFT Fomo wave of 2021 brought benefits to Ethereum; objectively speaking, it was a market effect emerging from decentralized architecture, and not directly driven by Ethereum's 'core' developers.
3) 'Narrative' is the evolutionary development context, a derivative of commercial thinking layered on top of technology.
For example: the emergence of the @eigenlayer protocol gave rise to the Restaking narrative, the @CelestiaOrg DA chain led to the modular narrative, and the emergence of @Starknet brought about the ZK-Rollup narrative.
In the future market, @ParticleNtwrk's charge may once again make the 'chain abstraction' narrative shine, and protocols like @ProjectZKM that aim to build a unified liquidity trust ecosystem may also eliminate the boundaries of blockchain. There are too many narrative topics existing.
Objectively speaking, 'narrative' is the result of an excess of developer power and hot money Fomo. Narratives create imaginative space for technology, although 'excessive narrative' can also give a sense of emptiness. However, 'excessive narrative' itself is a natural outcome of the market, like blowing bubbles; narratives will be replaced but will always exist.
In other words, the non-Fomo narrative loses its appeal to attract 'resources, talent, and funds', so it might as well remain in the Web 2.0 spiral, and one wouldn't have to bear the stigma of fraud. Of course, MEME is also a kind of narrative, but if the market turns bearish on anything with a Build process supported by underlying business logic, then the existence of MEME loses any fundamentals.
