Hasu Dialogue with Su Zhu: The Future of Ethereum and the Opportunities of the New Public Chain
Su Zhu (now known as Zhu Su on Twitter), the founder of Three Arrows Capital, one of the most powerful men in the crypto world, now has an additional identity label, and was selected by Cryptobriefing as the top ten "villains" in the crypto world in 2021, It all stems from the previous controversy between Su Zhu and Synthetix founder Kain Warwick on Twitter around the Ethereum\L2\new public chain. Almost most of the well-known KOLs participated in it, and gradually evolved from a personal quarrel to a public chain structure dispute.
Su Zhu, who questioned Ethereum and L2, suddenly stood on the opposite side of the Ethereum community. Thousands of people pointed out what Su Zhu’s real thoughts were, why he changed from a staunch supporter of Ethereum to a doubter, and where are the opportunities for the new public chain? ?
This dialogue will answer your questions. This article is compiled from the podcast audio "Ethereum vs. Alt L1s" between Paradigm co-researcher Hasu and Su Zhu.
The content of this article was compiled and compiled by 0xz, a volunteer in the TechFlow community.Salute to the great and noble comrade 0xz, Resbye.
Deep Tide TechFlow compiled and compiled with the authorization of Su Zhu
TL; DR：(too long, didn’t read)
Su Zhu：
1. One of the mistakes that early bitcoin and ethereum players like me are likely to make is to become extremists.
2. The current situation of Ethereum is very similar to that of Bitcoin in 2017. New users do not necessarily have to choose them, even if they are indeed the best public chain. For the public chain, the acquisition of new users is very important, and Ethereum cannot do this now.
3. It is a fact that a large reason why people enter the encryption field now is to enjoy the benefits of early Bitcoin and Ethereum holders, so they will actively participate in those new public chains, but the current Bitcoin and Ethereum are for him It's like a philosophical coin.
4. When the price of gas keeps rising, no one has the ability to defi on the chain in the end, and then the price plummets, and people stop using it. This negative effect can also be verified on nft. When the price of nft continues to rise, no one buys nft in the end, so people stop using it.
5. In my opinion, Ethereum is now more ignorant of users and developers than ever before. And the current Ethereum community has an arrogance similar to that of the Bitcoin community back then, but this arrogance will be present in every community that develops. Because when people become billionaires, the idea is usually how to stay, not how to change.
6. Ethereum and Bitcoin are two ancient currency technology representatives. Everyone knows that only holding these two tokens cannot make people really rich, and only the old people hold these tokens. But there are a lot of new tokens out there, and people can get very rich by participating.
7. At present, due to over-optimization, Ethereum has become a money-first public chain, and it is also the only target that can compete with Bitcoin in value storage. But the biggest difference with Bitcoin is that it has a permanent inflation model with a security model.
8. The new public chains start from scratch, they have no technical debt, and they don’t need to think about how to surpass Bitcoin like Ethereum. The only thing they need to do is how to attract more new users, which makes them grow faster .
9. Once Ethereum loses its innovation, the only thing left in Ethereum is EVM, and those L2 things, their methods are not worthy of the name.
10. When Web2 investors come to the encryption field, one of the indicators they value most is the network growth rate. If they have invested in Ethereum, they will think, why is this happening? If Ethereum is waiting for its own expansion, then Ethereum sounds more like Bitcoin, so they will consider hedging and choose to invest in new public chains.
11. Although many of the current new public chains cannot be decentralized, we must understand that even now, Ethereum is not considered decentralized by some big figures.
12. My biggest concern is that in the end game of crypto, it's likely not people like you and me who decide where the game goes, there are a lot of Web2 people coming into crypto who don't care about decentralization at all.
13. They overlooked the point that new users have no need or patience to wait for Ethereum to be truly perfect. In addition, projects like Starkware do not belong to Ethereum, they only belong to themselves. I don’t think they intend to contribute to Ethereum Pay rent, the conclusion is that all Layer 2 do not intend to pay rent to Ethereum, they also want to gradually develop to Layer 1.
14. In a previous community discussion, someone asked why the Ethereum Foundation is not worried about the lack of network effects in Ethereum. The people in Ethereum said that they are waiting for zk-rollup to become large enough, and then they will have zk-rollup to solve this problem. But the problem is that zk-rollup is not exclusive to Ethereum, it can exist in any public chain.
15. Everyone should keep an open mind, but there are currently too many Ethereum extremists active in the Ethereum community, which is very dangerous.
16. The dragon slayer will always become a giant dragon. When the pioneers become giants, they will ask the latecomers to follow their rules, but there will always be endless challengers. It is difficult for them to meet the challenges of the latecomers, because the latecomers will always There are various shortcuts.
17. When I chatted with Arthur and talked about LUNA, my attitude at that time was that LUNA is not built on the Ethereum chain, so it is not worth paying attention to. But the fact is exactly the opposite. At the beginning, I thought that only Ethereum was the real and only smart contract public chain, so I made such a wrong judgment, so I had to admit that I had cognitive blind spots, and at the same time, I had to bravely break through them.
18. However, the current attitude of Ethereum extremists towards other public chains is no different from the attitude of Bitcoin extremists towards Ethereum during the bear market. I hope people can think about this issue.
19. For me, any point of view is neither to persuade people to sell ether nor to persuade people to buy ether, I am simply pointing out the huge gap between what ethereum should be and what ethereum is currently.
Hasu：
1. The ideas and practices of Bitcoin extremists have not led Bitcoin to a better network and better investment.
2. These new public chains can be understood as centralized databases at a certain moment, but it also means that they may be like this from the beginning, so the worst case is that these new public chains will have nothing; but if the last Good things happen, given that they have a very similar roadmap to Ethereum, there could be a very good sharded database, going the same way as Ethereum.
3. At present, the development of new public chains is mostly maintained by high incentives. This is not a sustainable development. In addition, even if they can develop, they will encounter problems similar to those of Ethereum. I don’t think so. They can do better.
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Hasu:Suzhu, congratulations on winning the title of Cryptocurrency Villain in 2021. Your article reading volume recently ranked first, which is amazing. Do you have anything to say to your fans?
Suzhu:This is really interesting. Over the years, my image has been shaped by the media. Around 2019, I was a very professional believer in Ethereum and Bitcoin. With the development of the market in the past two years, my fans have grown After a 20-fold increase, I gradually entered other fields.
Now I like to analyze and especially like to make predictions, which express bad views on BTC and ETH, and many times are not liked by others, so I am now described as the same as the villain.
For example, I now think that Ethereum’s GAS is a big problem, but those early entrants in the Ethereum community,They believe that the high GAS of Ethereum should be an eternal and sacred truth.
Then, I sent some tweets criticizing Ethereum GAS. These tweets received 15,000+ Likes, which shows that many users, especially new users, agree with this point of view. It also shows that these new users think that the encryption field is not It should belong only to the patriarchs of the community, but it should belong to all.
We will discuss this in detail later.So is the high GAS of Ethereum a sacred truth? What exactly is the sacred truth in the field of encryption?
Ethereum and Bitcoin have many similarities. First, Layer 1 needs to be as decentralized as possible, and then expanded through Layer 2, such as Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Ethereum’s Zk-roll up and Optimism Rollup. This is because While users value the decentralized public chain infrastructure, they also value the network quality and community quality of the public chain. So, I don't mean to say that those holy truths of high GAS claimed by the elders of Ethereum are wrong, I just want to say that maybe they are right, but there are many other truths that are more correct at the same time.
Recall that in the bear market, institutions like Multicoin had different views on cryptocurrencies from most funds and investment institutions at that time. At that time, most people thought that the two chains of Bitcoin and Ethereum were enough, but Multicoin firmly Invest in new public chains, invest in those public chains that can be used by billions of people at the same time, such as Solana, they invested in many things that seemed incomprehensible at the time, but in 2021 they obtained extraordinary returns.Looking back at last year's market, the current price is compared with April, Bitcoin and Ethereum are basically the same, but those public chains, such as SOL and AVAX, have risen dozens of times.
So, I read some article analysis and saw the problems that new institutional investors were thinking about last year, and I was finally shocked by a kind of cognitive dissonance. I think that in the current market, old players and new players think about encryption There is a very big split in the way and the way projects are approached. An obvious data, more than half of the users who currently use Metamask only use BSC, which largely shows that people are more willing to participate in the new network, because they can enjoy the dividends of the early development of the network.One of the mistakes that Bitcoin/Ethereum players like me are very likely to make is to become an extreme Bitcoin/Ethereumist.
As a member of the Ethereum community, I very much agree that ETH is the asset we should grow bigger, and I also think that Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most reliable currencies in cryptocurrencies, they have the best distribution version and the most decentralized power . But this is not very helpful for the introduction of new users to the network, which is why the market value of Ethereum was able to gradually approach Bitcoin last year. At the same time, this is also the reason why the market value of those new public chains can gradually approach Ethereum.
From the perspective of the number of addresses, the current active addresses of Ethereum are not much higher than those in 2017, and they have not even reached 2 times. We have analyzed it before, and the reason given is thatWhales will choose Ethereum. Because of its good security and stability, whales hold a large amount of Ethereum; but at the same time, this also leads to new users choosing to go to Layer 2 or other new public chains.
The current situation of Ethereum is very similar to that of Bitcoin in 2017, that is, new users do not necessarily have to choose them, even if they are indeed the best public chain. If new users don't come, I'm not sure that Ethereum will eventually beat other public chains.There is no doubt that users will pay rent for the public chain they choose, but from a business logic point of view, users are not willing to pay too much rent. I do think Ethereum can compete with Bitcoin because Bitcoin has a very different trade-off pool. But I don't think Ethereum can be used by most people as a network, because they don't need a highly decentralized network like Ethereum.
Given that most users do not value decentralization and are unwilling to pay for decentralization, more than half of Metamask users use BSC, which is really a very impressive number to me. But this does not mean that they love this network, but that new users now want to enter the new public chain as soon as possible, so as to enjoy the early dividends.
This is actually in line with the utopian encryption spirit. For example, if you are an early Ethereum or Bitcoin veteran, and you hold a lot of Ethereum or Bitcoin, you certainly hope that other people will come in and buy your coins; But if you are a new user, you will most likely choose a currency that does not have so many veterans. To develop encryption, you need a steady stream of new users.
The performance of this round of bull market is very different from what many veterans of mainstream currencies predicted. For example, many people predict that Bitcoin will exceed $100,000 and Ethereum will exceed $6,000. But this is not the case. Since April, SOL has risen 8 times, and AVAX has risen 6 times.
The fact is that a big reason people are entering the crypto space now is that they want to enjoy the benefits of early Bitcoin and Ethereum holders, so they will actively participate in those new public chains.The current Bitcoin and Ethereum are very similar to philosophical coins. If you're a normal person with $1000 or $10000, you haven't touched the basics of the public chain, heard what Bitcoin is from others, and then just bought it in a Coinbase trading account, but never Conducting on-chain transactions is like philosophy, which is understood only because of hearing, but without actual participation.
However, holders of tokens such as BSC, SOL, and AVAX are different. These tokens have attracted many new users, and most of the token holders have also conducted corresponding on-chain transactions, so new users of these public chains The number of active addresses is increasing very fast, growing by incredible multiples every month.
Some people think that the user growth on the new public chain comes from those defi Ponzi schemes, but in fact there are also defi Ponzi schemes on Ethereum in 2019-2020, isn’t it?
The current development of Ethereum actually makes me feel a little disappointed. I think Ethereum has fallen into a founder’s dilemma situation, that is, the veterans of Ethereum occupy a large part of the market share. They also proved the market, but in the end they did not win the market. I still think Ethereum has a good chance of winning the market and sharing it with Bitcoin, but not right now. becauseFor the public chain, the acquisition of new users is very important, and Ethereum cannot do this now.
Multicoin pointed out the negative effects of the network in the last cycle, and now it really happened:When the price of gas keeps rising, no one has the ability to defi on the chain in the end, and then the price plummets, and people stop using it. This negative effect can also be verified on NFT. When the price of NFT continues to rise, no one buys NFT in the end, so people stop using it.
I think that in the future, there may be a lot of public chains, because Ethereum has good times and bad times, and they have not expanded to the extent that people need. andI think Ethereum has become a money-first public chain due to over-optimization, and it is also the only one that may compete with Bitcoin in terms of value storage. It is very different from Bitcoin in that it has a permanent inflation model with a security model.
There are a lot of developers on new public chains such as BSC, because there are many users there, and many innovative projects this year originated from new public chains.
Now many Ethereum holders have a bad mentality,It is that I am already so rich, so new users must understand why I became rich, and must follow the path I have walked.And in fact, holding Matic is not the best answer, because when new users ask why they choose to hold Matic instead of holding the new public chain, we cannot give the answer.
Ethereum has indeed made efforts. Through EVM, developers can quickly deploy applications to where users need them. If it was last April, I would say that Ethereum will benefit a lot from this multi-EVM, because it can Bring ether to different bridges and use it as collateral. But the performance of doing this is much lower than directly using other public chains. I think performance is very important, because high performance can attract more people to participate. So it can be seen that the Ethereum defi project has depreciated in the past time based on the US dollar standard.
The early participants in the Ethereum community were indeed committed to using Ethereum as a network, but when the network developed, the early participants owned a large number of tokens and became very rich, so the motivation to build declined A lot. Most people also choose to cross-chain instead of acquiring new users.
Many Ethereum developers I know are masters of cross-chain and are very proficient in cross-chain. I asked them why they chose to cross-chain. They said that I am too rich, so I think cross-chain is right. Cross-chain The cost is very low for me.
In fact, the current projects on Ethereum are not the most innovative,Many Ethereum projects are replicating what LUNA has done, such as ecosystem airdrops.
I think the current Ethereum community has a kind of arrogance similar to the Bitcoin community back then, because of the founder’s dilemma. In fact, this kind of arrogance will exist in every developed community.
to some extent,
Hasu:to some extent,I think you're making the same mistake as you warned me a few months ago, that the ideas and practices of bitcoin maximalists are not making bitcoin a better network and a better investment.
Suzhu:I do think the issues that were warned last time are important, and the main issue right now is investment direction, if you can look at what kind of things are being hyped in Ethereum right now, and you can see that they're doing poorly on those things, we're totally A whole list could be drawn up for this.
In this way, we can find many commonalities, the biggest commonality is that these things are considered to have to be performed on Ethereum.
For example, we have invested in a project called Monaco, whose founder is like an Ethereum believer. In order to help the project develop and even provide full gas subsidies for everyone who minted the NFT of this project, it took a lot of money. The cost is so low that we finally decided to issue Token on BSC and AVAX.
And people like AC, he has long understood this, so users only need to pay a small Gas fee to get a good experience when using Phatom and Solana to interact. AVAX is also trying to do this. it's easy to see,At present, the pressure of Ethereum on other new public chains is gradually fading.
The fact is that culture does matter, and this is the philosophy that every smart contract community needs to convey to new users and new developers.
Starkware is an interesting example, and as the dark web grows larger, a problem arises,That is, does it need to pay rent to Ethereum, does it owe anything to other public chains?
The answer is of course no, but it also introduces another point of view, that is, people will continue to develop along the technical route that is useful to them. Players pay rent to continue to use their technology. This view is very popular in the current Ethereum community, partly because EIP1559 proved its correctness, EIP1559 benefited Ethereum holders a lot, and EIP1559 was copied On other chains, such as BSC.
But just because the current idea of the Ethereum community has been verified by EIP1559, I think that the challenges facing Ethereum are getting bigger and bigger.The main reason is that the current state of Ethereum has lost enough network effects, cannot attract new users enough, and does not have good scalability.
At the beginning of the year, I communicated with many people in the Ethereum community. They told me that Optimistic roll-up can become very huge, and it can be done once and for all, and it will definitely win the entire market.
But what I see now is that it takes seven or eight days to build a bridge, and what market makers can do is also greatly limited.What I can see now is that there is a huge gap between Ethereum's ambitions, goals, and its actual execution.
Although compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum is still doing better. But it also gave birth to a lot of dangerous views in the community, the biggest is to flip Bitcoin, I think if Ethereum wants to beat Bitcoin, Ethereum has to become more valuable than Bitcoin, and there is still a long way to go.
And it is very likely that while both coins are retreating, other coins are advancing.
This situation is like the max payne scenario of cryptocurrencies. Ethereum and Bitcoin are two ancient currency technology representatives. Everyone knows that just holding these two tokens does not make people really rich. And only old people hold these tokens, and there are a lot of new tokens, people participate and can become very rich.
Hasu：I see why you say it's a cultural issue, and it makes a lot of sense, but what I'm trying to say is that, as a basic argument for a technical argument, culture doesn't make sense because, at worst, other companies What the chain is doing is only to calculate the integrity of a part of the transaction, or to propose some kind of blockchain accountability, so as to obtain better performance and better throughput of the public chain. In fact, it's not really scalable, it just allows them to grow very well for a while, but after a while, they will have the exact same problem, that is, their capacity will also reach the upper limit, which means Public chains like AVAX, BSC, and SOL need to selectively abandon some of their users. These new public chains can be understood as centralized databases at a certain moment, but it also means that they may be like this from the beginning.
In the worst case, these new public chains will have nothing. On the contrary, they may have a very similar roadmap (the old road) with Ethereum, becoming a very good sharding database, becoming like Ethereum, but this also means that it will be a high Gas model.
Suzhu：This is a way we agree that the ultimate roadmap of all public chains may be very similar, but the question is which public chain is willing to faithfully implement this roadmap.
If Ethereum were only trying to surpass Bitcoin, then I think it would fail in executing its roadmap.
While other public chains start from scratch, the only thing they need to do is how to attract more new users, they don’t need to think about how to surpass Bitcoin, which makes them grow faster.
as you know,After the recent upgrade of AVAX, the gas fee has dropped significantly. Assuming that Ethereum and AVAX implement the same roadmap, who will implement it more thoroughly, and who will be more likely to provide new users and new developers with better, faster, and lower-cost services? I think that's the point.
If it is a competitor in the same field, there has never been a saying in the world that the one who starts first has a higher winning rate. In fact, it is very likely that the latecomer has a greater winning rate.
Taking the operating system as an example, Blackberry was born earlier than IOS and Android, and Blackberry also dominated the mobile operating system market for a period of time, but the result was that IOS and Android won the market.
First movers often have many constraints. For example, previous technologies limit the direction of subsequent development. This is what we call technical debt. But latecomers don't have any technical debt, they have a completely different mentality, they don't need to serve existing users, but try to acquire more new users.
I firmly believe in the significance of value storage in the encryption field, which is why I think Bitcoin and Ethereum are better than other tokens in terms of value. But if you look at the implementation of the roadmap, which network can better absorb new users into the encryption field according to the implementation of the roadmap, I don’t think Bitcoin and Ethereum can really do this.
I firmly believe that the price of Bitcoin will continue to rise, because Bitcoin, as the leader of value storage in the encryption field, is worth investing in.
But I also see more and more people like zamani's point of view:At some point in the future, BNB will have billions of users, even though it is a centralized database.
And Bitcoin holders need to persuade new users to buy Bitcoin as a store of value, and not let new users buy a new public chain that benefits people cannot refuse. Once Bitcoin investors say this, in the eyes of new users, it is Like a cult.
So, we really, really need to think about how to attract more new users into the crypto space, and we need to think about what new users think when they interact with cryptocurrencies, instead of thinking that it's wrong for them to think that way. It's also one of the biggest problems that drives brutal price swings in cryptocurrencies.
Hasu: yesYes, I do think for any new user, if you are just a user and only have $1w, you should not use Ethereum, but BSC, SOL, AVAX. Because a layer of Ethereum is not going to scale for any normal user, because that's not necessary.
So, if we fast forward two years, we can see that there will not be any normal users on Ethereum, and there will be some whales on the Ethereum layer. Ordinary user interactions may be through Roll-ups. Roll-ups send their proofs to the first layer, and then they update their database like dydx, so that decentralized applications and decentralized trust can be achieved.
I think the above model is a roadmap applicable to all layers of public chains. You can say that having a larger scale and higher throughput attracts more new users, but I think you said it yourself, such a network effect will not bring anything beneficial in the long run, because the total There will be all kinds of new public chains, and those new public chains don't even need to do anything new and different technically, they just need to provide incentives to attract more new users, so other new public chains will also Follow suit to provide more rewards.
This is why I am not interested in participating in the new public chain, because the current development model of the new public chain is not a reliable way to expand the chain.
But Ethereum is a global, reliable and highly decentralized public chain with a sharding mechanism. If we start from the calculation reliability of the first layer, I think Ethereum is the only one that is trustworthy. And I'm interested in any public chain that adopts a development model similar to Ethereum, but for other public chains, I think they are short-sighted.
Suzhu：But what I think is that you lack an objective attitude. What you said above is too sure, you must XXX, you must XXX, so you are only interested in XXX. You know, what you've said above are some bad ideas about SOL in the early days. But the fact is that SOL has attracted a lot of grassroots developers and a lot of application interest.
Also, I would say that of the last 20 apps we invested in, more than 15 were non-Ethereum apps, mainly we prefer to invest in places that can do better with a large enough number of users program of.
For many funds, even those that strongly oppose SOL, they are trying to invest in new public chains. So I hope you can jump out of a purely technical point of view and change to a more objective perspective.
Now I see that the development model of the encryption industry is more pragmatic, which means that I want to join users and think from the perspective of ordinary users. So I think that the Ethereum community really needs to give ordinary users more respect now, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
You can argue that this is not necessary, after all Ethereum is currently scaling in another powerful way. But in the case of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, while you can do whatever you want there, the Bitcoin network does lose its strong network effect.
Although people can make profits by buying Bitcoin and Ethereum as a value store, as far as the Ethereum network is concerned, given that Optimistic Roll-up is not so competitive, the Ethereum network is being challenged by the new public chain, and we should pay attention to it. , the Ethereum network will not have newer network extensions in the short term.
And the builders of other public chains started to do better, because since they chose the new public chain, it means that they want to reach more users, so Luna is currently developing very well.
This factual situation is actually against the culture of Ethereum to a large extent, because Ethereum currently cannot provide space for such builders to play.
I remember in the AC conversation, maybe last March, he said that if you are an evm builder today, you should go to BSC immediately, and a lot of people went to BSC after that.
I think from the perspective of users and developers, going to the new public chain is indeed the future.I do miss the defi era last year and feel nostalgic for its departure, while hoping that it can get better.
But I also think that in the future, the mistakes that happened to the Bitcoin maximalists will be repeated with the Ethereum maximalists. But the problems that arise on Ethereum are not so important for Bitcoin, because we will not use Bitcoin to do anything, but we need to do things on Ethereum.
When developers move to any other better public chain, this is a red flag, because in the next period of time, Ethereum cannot say that it can have more and better innovations.
Once Ethereum loses its innovation, the only thing left in Ethereum is EVM, and those two-layer things, I think their solutions are not worthy of the name.
Hasu：I think Vitalik said that he has 5 cents of Bitcoin, which shows that he still wants to develop Ethereum better.
Suzhu：I also think that I even own more Ethereum than anyone I know, but what I said above is a very red flag for Ethereum.
Hasu：But I think Vitalik is a very smart guy.
When BCH claimed to sacrifice certain decentralization to achieve an efficient network and failed, vitalik made the same statement, but he also failed. But now I understand that such statements are very short-sighted and will eventually fail. I have now seen that these new public chains are doing the same thing repeatedly, so I think these new public chains will also not succeed, and will fail like BCH and Vitalik.
This is why I look at the problem from a technical standpoint.
Although from a technical point of view, purely technical public chains have limitations in expansion, and when gas fees rise, if there is no reliable roadmap, then the story surrounding this public chain cannot be told, and a death spiral will occur.
But for me, I have seen many times what the new public chain is doing. It has not been successful before, and it will not succeed now.
Suzhu：I'll give the shortest possible rebuttal.
You just look at the network growth rate of other networks and assume they hit a scaling bottleneck, and assume they solved the growth problem in some way that the Ethereum community didn't accept.
Although the way Ethereum scales is also completely unacceptable in the eyes of the Bitcoin community. But I think the current competing public chains are more suitable for the market. The core is that I see that these teams are more motivated to integrate with users, so I predict that all first-tier public chains will develop better and better.
When I was talking with Web2 investors, it confirmed the correctness of this prediction.
When Web2 investors come to the encryption field, one of the indicators they value most is the network growth rate. If they have already invested in Ethereum, they will think, why is this happening? If it is because Ethereum is waiting for its own expansion, then Ethereum sounds more like Bitcoin, so they consider that they need some hedging, and they will choose to invest in the new public chain.
Although many new public chains cannot be decentralized at present.But let’s understand that even now, Ethereum is considered not decentralized by some big names.
The above is my prediction. Fortunately, I formed such a view during the bear market, and found that many first-tier public chains are greatly underestimated, such as DOT, KSM, AVAX, and NEAR. Like Ethereum's rapid development, they have also been rapidly developed this year.
Moreover, the interaction between real-world applications and blockchain is still at a zero stage. For example, XTZ has recently cooperated with Ubisoft to provide Ubisoft users with 10 million wallets and deposit some Tokens in it. This is the interaction between the blockchain and real-world entities, which means that it can be developed in the future better.
Although the new public chain may have sacrificed some decentralization, it is considered healthy for a wider interaction with the larger world.From this perspective, the dominance of Ethereum’s public chain has indeed been challenged. If Ethereum can achieve the 2025 roadmap ahead of schedule, its status will be consolidated and it will be able to challenge the market value of Bitcoin.
In today's world, I see more and more copycats of Bitcoin or Ethereum, and their gains are very high, not to agree, but to point out this phenomenon.
Hasu: yesYes, Ethereum also experienced extreme growth in the early stage. For a period of time in the past, we believed that Ethereum was more suitable for value storage than Bitcoin. Better than Bitcoin, but time has proved that Bitcoin is still more suitable for value storage. Isn’t the challenge of the new public chain you mentioned now just like when Ethereum challenged Bitcoin? I don't think they will succeed.
Suzhu：The growth of these new public chains has been much faster than Bitcoin and Ethereum, and their growth rate can even be faster, because they do not have any technical debt. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have very huge technical debt.
In addition, almost all of these new public chains have completed POS, but Ethereum has not yet completed POS, and it is estimated that it will take several months. Even if Ethereum really completes POS, it is estimated that there will be many problems at that time, so it is very important to have no technical debt.
Another very important point is the community atmosphere. The early community atmosphere is very easy to arouse people's interest in participating. But at present, Ethereum has both huge community debt and no early community atmosphere.
The community atmosphere of Ethereum was very good in 2019. For example, I participated in ENS very actively in 2019, registered to use it, and the experience was very good, just like some products at the end of 2020. In the end, there were about 2000-5000 people from this project. benefit from.
But looking back now, because of the high amount of Gas, the user growth of Ethereum on the first layer is basically 0.
Although, you will say that Ethereum will do roll-ups and get better, but my rebuttal is,If you think Roll-ups will really succeed, then the growth rate on other public chains will be faster than this, because people don’t have time to wait for your Roll-ups to be finally successful, they need to participate in the encryption field all the time.
For me, the growth rate of the number of users and transaction activities on other public chains must be faster than Ethereum.
Calculated in US dollars, SOL has risen 1,000 times, and we are also trying to calculate a question: what is the reasonable proportion of the market value of Ethereum?
But when it comes to the number of user accounts, when it comes to how active developers are in new developments, and especially when it comes to the number of developers who want to create a multi-billion dollar project, I think SOL continues to expand in proportion to market cap It is reasonable, and it is also reasonable for the market value of other public chains such as AVAX to continue to expand. And compared to the first layer of Ethereum, developers are more willing to deploy on the second layer.
The conclusion is that Ethereum has indeed lost the network effect, and it is difficult to attract new developers to develop on the Ethereum layer, and I admit that I realized this a bit late,If I had realized this sooner, I would have sold all of my ETH holdings to buy SOL, AVAX.
I know a lot of young people who play crypto with small money, many of them hold 50 SOL or AVAX, but they rarely hold Ethereum, these people never think about why it is better to hold Ethereum and Bitcoin, hold What is the meaning of Bitcoin and Ethereum? They just think that buying these new public chains will pay off better.
This is what I need to remind myself all the time:Young people do matter, and every crypto cycle brings new people, and I respect those young people. But your point of view is very different from mine, and you feel that they should follow the path we have traveled.
Hasu：I don't think so, I also see the fact that newcomers who enter the market now will not buy Bitcoin and Ethereum. But in the long run, it's not the right thing for newcomers to do.
For those newcomers who have not even come in for half a cycle, there will be an obvious cognitive ranking problem. They will overestimate the new things and underestimate the long-standing things. This is too idealistic.
I consider myself a pragmatist, far from an idealist. As far as the current roadmap of Ethereum is concerned, the addition of Roll-ups will greatly improve the experience of users and developers, and Ethereum will continue to suppress other public chains in the future. This is just a conclusion that can be drawn from pragmatism, without any subjective color.
Suzhu：For someone like me who invests heavily in applications, what I'm seeing right now is that the most performant applications today aren't built on Ethereum.
If you had communicated your conclusions to me a year ago, I would have wholeheartedly agreed. But things are different now. Right now I feel bad for Ethereum, it's not going the way I thought it would be.
My biggest concern is that in the end game of crypto, it probably won't be people like you and me who decide where the game goes, there are a lot of Web2 people coming into crypto who don't care about decentralization at all, they choose There are many centralized chains, and some people even told me that they don't need encryption, they only need tokens.
They believe that tokens are important because tokens can motivate anyone and can get rid of the constraints of the blockchain. If the existing Ethereum cannot make some feasible expansions to absorb enough new users, it will be difficult to issue new tokens. Without enough token incentives, those newcomers may give up Ether square.
The encryption field itself is a balance game. There is no doubt that the market has a role, new users have a role, and new builders also have a role.
Therefore, I think the approach of the new public chain is a correct prediction of the future development of encryption, and the market will move forward in their way.
Hasu：I totally agree.
Your view can be simplified to this: If you fast forward five years into the future, people will not interact with the chain, they will interact with the chain through applications such as Web2 now, and although they also know that those applications in the future will be It's decentralized, but they don't know which chain those applications are running on, and they really don't need to.
Users do not have any preference for public chains, and it is entirely up to developers to decide which chains will win. If there is a public chain that can attract better developers and retain them for a long time, I will definitely choose that chain.
But unfortunately, I have not seen such a public chain now. andI don't think the current development of new public chains will last. The core is that their high-speed development data comes from huge incentives, not how good the chain itself is.
Suzhu：My biggest counterargument to your point is that what you call short-sighted incentives has been going on for months now. This can already partly prove that our point of view a year ago is wrong. And your question should be, when will our view a year ago be correct in the future.
I know that most people in the Ethereum community think that it will be right when Ethereum has a Layer 2 extension that can greatly improve the user experience.
But they overlooked the point that new users have no need or patience to wait for Ethereum to be truly perfect.
Another question is,A project like Starkware does not belong to Ethereum, it only belongs to itself, and they do not intend to pay rent to Ethereum.And I don't think all Layer 2 intends to pay rent to Ethereum, they also want to gradually develop to Layer 1.
With or without incentives, the execution layer is the environment that provides the best experience for the application. Once there is a good execution layer, coupled with a user-added flywheel, the public chain will become very powerful.
A fact is BSC, you can see how well BSC has developed this year. Even though BSC's technology roadmap is not that good, it has attracted the largest number of users.
That's why all new GameFi projects are released on the BSC, because the users are there.
In my opinion, ethereum is more ignorant of users and developers than ever before.Of course, I also admit that if Ethereum's second-layer Roll-ups can be really perfected, users may return, but I really don't believe that this is easy to do.
Hasu：If we think that developers just choose the chain they think has the lowest cost for development, and improve the reliability of the user experience as much as possible, I really think it is best for developers to choose Ethereum Layer 2 for construction, such as dydx, in In the dydx environment, the cost is really low, even cheaper than SOL on average. We'll see more of these apps in the future.
Suzhu：dydx itself is a very good application, the example you gave is not very suitable.
Like Antonio said, they initially built the application on Starkware and eventually settled on Ethereum, and if they had the opportunity to choose another chain, they would definitely do that.
And I think the current OGs of Ethereum don't seem to want to have roll-up, they don't want to have zk-roll-up.The Ethereum Foundation did fund these projects when they first started, but they didn't own their ideas at all.
In a previous community discussion, someone asked why the Ethereum Foundation is not worried about the lack of network effects in Ethereum. The people in Ethereum said that they are waiting for zk-rollup to become large enough, and then they will have zk- rollup to solve this problem. But the problem is that zk-rollup is not exclusive to Ethereum, it can exist in any public chain.
Hasu：What I find interesting is that there are facts that support both your point of view and mine.
Suzhu：Because your point of view, your assumptions, are supported: those who leave Ethereum will eventually return to Ethereum, just like you are optimistic about Bitcoin.
But my point is,I'm not sure what the future holds. I'm not sure users will go back to Ethereum, because other new public chains are emerging with a large number of users and a large number of innovative applications.
After all, for me, owning something with a certain future is more dangerous than owning something with an infinite future.
Hasu：Just to clarify, I absolutely agree with you, I don't think everything is necessarily going back to Ethereum.
I am a person who firmly believes that the future is a multi-chain world, and cross-chain is very important in the future;In addition, I also agree that in the future, people will not directly interact with the blockchain, but through applications. The application is the only interface for people to contact the blockchain in the future. Users have no right to decide which chain to use, only developers I have the right to decide this matter; finally, I also agree that the existing public chain will be split, and it is very meaningful to split different steps such as computing database, because after the split, a highly optimized layer can be built resulting in faster execution.
I also think that ethereum does not yet realize the importance of unbundling, they think ethereum can be stored as a high confidence data layer, but I don't think so. So I agree that the activity of Ethereum will gradually decrease, and other optimized Layer1 or Layer2 will become more and more active. But it seems that other public chains are currently in a worse situation in this regard, so I will be cautiously optimistic about Ethereum.
Suzhu：Is such that. I do agree with all your previous points, but your last criticism is a bit like the original Bitcoin maximalists.
Almost half of their tweets at the time were about how centralized Ethereum was.During the last bear market, Ethereum was almost dead, and people agreed at the time that Ethereum entered a death spiral.
But at that time, there were many staunch holders of Ethereum, and they had a good community culture. They believed that they should defend the assets they thought were valuable. This was one of the reasons why I was very interested in investing in Ethereum at that time.
At that time, Ethereum was only a little over $100. As a public chain, it was really far underestimated.
Hasu: But at the time people lost most of their money.
Suzhu：Even so, people in the community were still working hard to build it, and I was at all the Ethereum meetups available in Southeast Asia, and I really realized that I was at a turning point in the history of Ethereum.
But now, I see the same energy in the new public chain, and it scares me.
There is a phenomenon in the world: once you become rich, then everything you say is right.
When Bitcoin holders became rich, they hoped that those who came after them would learn from them, and some even became Bitcoin maximalists. I think that there are some people in the Ethereum community who are also very extreme Ethereum extremists.
We need to realize that not everyone in the Ethereum community is right, and need to realize that if the current cultural climate continues to deepen, then Ethereum may eventually become the same route as Bitcoin.
I think everyone should keep an open mind, there is a danger of too much ethereum extremists being active in the ethereum community right now.
Hasu：I totally agree, I also see these trends you said, although I am not involved in these trends, especially the trend of Ethereum extremists expanding, I generally mute them. But I think it's fortunate that the community culture of Ethereum is still more open than Bitcoin at the moment.
Suzhu：In fact, the culture of the Bitcoin community is becoming more and more open. Recently, when chatting with our mutual friend LEO, he said that in the Bitcoin community, there is a great impetus to add scripts and make Defi there become possible.
Then, when I chatted with another person in the bitcoin community, he said that he proposed to provide funds for bitcoin developers through nfts, but it was not passed in the end, but he thought nfts was very interesting, he was an anonymous bitcoin Coin billionaire.
I think the current culture of the Bitcoin community is gradually recovering, which is a good thing.Although they say they don't recognize NFT and DeFi, they really want to try the right things to promote development. The current trend of more and more extremists in the Ethereum community is indeed forcing new users to enter other public chains.
This may indeed be a simple repetition of human civilization. Dragon slayers will always become giant dragons. When the pioneers become giants, they will require the latecomers to follow their rules, but there will always be endless challengers, and they are difficult to deal with. A challenge for latecomers, because latecomers always have various shortcuts.
In general, when a community moves too fast, it does run the risk of becoming disconnected from what the market really wants. An example where there is no disconnect is Optimistic roll up, they want to be market makers to bridge the gap, which is pretty good.
Therefore, I think Ethereum still has a great opportunity to stay connected. Fundamentally speaking, people in the Ethereum community are very eclectic, and there are many different people working on different solutions. But I think the growth of new users is indeed neglected in the community at present, and I have no other bad intentions.
Hasu：It can be heard that when you criticized Ethereum before, you had at least a little guilt in your heart, hahaha.
Suzhu：I have explicitly discussed SNX before, that was my first defi project that was discussed publicly, and I introduced SNX to people. But the current situation is that SNX has really not become as good as I said at the beginning, let alone LUNA. It's basically the same thing as LUNA, except that LUNA performs better.
I wonder why this happens?
In the past, I also owned a lot of LUNA, but I sold it and replaced it with many other defi things. I don't have a clear answer. But at least it proves that my choices are not all right. I have also made wrong choices and misled people into DeFi.
I remember that when we chatted with Arthur, we talked about LUNA. At that time, our attitude was: LUNA is not built on the Ethereum chain, so it is not worthy of attention. But the fact is on the contrary, the market value of LUNA is higher than the market value of all defi things combined.
So, I admit that when I look at things, I do have blind spots. The main reason for this blind spot,At the beginning, I thought that only Ethereum was the real and only smart contract public chain, so I made such a wrong judgment. Looking back, it was also because of this factor that I made a wrong judgment on SNX.
This is why optimistic roll-up is currently favored by everyone except Ethereum maximalists.
At present, what is the difference between the attitude of Ethereum extremists towards other public chains and the attitude of Bitcoin extremists towards Ethereum during the bear market? There is no difference, and I hope people will think about it.
There is a huge difference between whether Ethereum can become a good investment asset in the future and whether it can become a good network. There is a big difference between these two things.
I have doubts about whether Ethereum's dominance in the future of smart contracts can be maintained. In terms of assets, I am not sure that it will perform better than Bitcoin in the future, but generally speaking, its future performance will not be worse than most currencies, because there is a broad consensus and huge liquidity.
All my points are not to persuade people to sell ether, nor to persuade people to buy ether. Just simply pointing out what Ethereum should be? And what is Ethereum currently? huge gap between them.
Hasu：We all love crypto, and even though we’ve been in crypto for a long time, we’re still pretty divided on how the future should go. But I think this is also the most interesting place in the crypto space, it is like the most intelligent space in the world, and it is also the most interactive market in the world. I am so grateful for our honest conversation today, thank you.
