Odaily News Zhu Su said that the rise of CeDeFi (centralized + decentralized finance) is the biggest challenge facing Ethereum (ETH) because it turns the business logic that was originally supposed to run on decentralized smart contracts into closed centralized server code.
Zhu Su recalled his change of opinion. Initially during the DeFi Summer, he believed that the combination of Bitcoin (BTC) and DeFi applications could bypass the existence of ETH. For example, users could use WBTC directly in protocols such as Aave, and BTC's own growth would squeeze ETH's market space. However, he later realized that the demand for protocol-native stored value assets (SoV) was still strong.
He believes that Ethereum must embrace applications that truly benefit from global distributed computing and censorship resistance, such as privacy-related cypherpunk projects and low-hanging fruit applications that are currently not fully developed.
In addition, Zhu Su emphasized that if ETH itself cannot succeed, the DeFi ecosystem will also be difficult to recover, because if the market demand for decentralized verification and smart contracts decreases, many transactions and operations can be completed completely off-chain, saving time and costs.