Cutting Through the Noise of Ethereum's "Degeneration": Why Are "Ethereum Values" Its Widest Moat?

If you've been following the Ethereum ecosystem lately, you might have felt a sense of dissonance.

• On one side, there are intense discussions on technical topics like scaling roadmaps, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, and slot shortening;
• On the other side, debates rage around "Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant?", "Why isn't it more aggressive?", "Why is the token price so sluggish?", often devolving into emotional confrontations.

These discussions repeatedly point to the same deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum ultimately want to be?

In fact, many of these controversies don't stem from technical disagreements, but from different understandings of Ethereum's "value premises." Therefore, only by returning to these premises themselves can we truly understand why Ethereum makes choices that many now consider "untimely."

1. Ethereum's "Ten-Year Itch": Is Ethereum Degenerating?

The Ethereum community has not been calm recently.

From reflections on the Rollup-centric roadmap, to debates over the concept of "Ethereum Alignment," to horizontal comparisons with various high-performance public chains, a subtle yet persistent "Ethereum anxiety" is spreading.

This anxiety is not hard to understand.

While other public chains constantly refresh metrics for TPS, TVL, hot narratives, latency, and user experience, Ethereum seems stuck discussing architectural splits, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality issues—appearing neither intuitive nor appealing.

This leads to a sharper question surfacing: Is Ethereum "degenerating"?

To answer this, we must look beyond the technical roadmap of the last year or two and adopt a longer-term perspective—returning to what Ethereum has truly adhered to over this past decade.

In fact, over the past few years, many later high-performance public chains have chosen a more direct path: sacrificing decentralization by reducing node count, raising hardware requirements, and centralizing sequencing/execution rights in exchange for极致 performance and user experience.

From the Ethereum community's perspective, such speed often comes at the cost of antifragility.

A frequently overlooked yet highly illustrative fact is that throughout its nearly decade-long operational history, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide outage/rollback event, maintaining uninterrupted 7×24×365 uptime.

This isn't because Ethereum has been "luckier" than Solana, Sui, etc., but because from its inception, it prioritized the system's ability to continue operating under worst-case scenarios over raw performance metrics.

In other words, Ethereum appears slow today not because it can't be faster, but because it persistently asks a harder question—can this system continue to function as the network scales, participants multiply, and the environment becomes less friendly?

From this angle, the so-called "ten-year itch" isn't Ethereum degenerating, but rather it proactively enduring short-term discomfort and质疑 to ensure its survival over a much longer cycle.

2. Understanding "Ethereum Alignment": Not About Taking Sides, But Defining Boundaries

Precisely because of this, the first step in understanding Ethereum is accepting an unappealing yet crucial fact: Ethereum is not a system designed solely for "maximizing efficiency." Its core goal isn't to be the fastest, but to remain "trustworthy even under the worst conditions."

Therefore, in Ethereum's context, many seemingly technical issues are, at their essence, value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce powerful, permissioned nodes for throughput? Should we hand security assumptions to a few for better user experience?

Ethereum's answer is often "no."

This also explains why within the Ethereum community, there's an almost instinctive wariness towards shortcuts, where "can we do it?" is always subordinate to "should we do it?"

It is against this backdrop that "Alignment" has become one of the most controversial recent concepts, with some fearing it could devolve into a moral shaming label or even a tool for rent-seeking.

This concern is not unfounded. As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out this risk in "Making Ethereum alignment legible":

If "alignment" means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has already failed.

Vitalik's proposed solution isn't to abandon alignment, but to make it legible, decomposable, and discussable. In his view, alignment shouldn't be a vague political stance but should be broken down into a set of inspectable attributes:

• Technical Alignment: Does it use Ethereum's security consensus? Does it embrace open source and open standards?
• Economic Alignment: Does it promote ETH value capture in the long term, rather than being a one-way value extractor?
• Spiritual Alignment: Is it pursuing public good, not just predatory growth?

From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test but a mutually beneficial social contract.

The Ethereum ecosystem allows for chaos, competition, and even fierce infighting among L2s; but ultimately, these activities should feed back into the parent chain that provides them with security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.

3. Reflections on "Decentralization" and "Censorship Resistance"

If "Alignment" defines the value boundary, then the two pillars that truly support this boundary are decentralization and censorship resistance, which Ethereum has long upheld.

First, in Ethereum's context, "decentralization" doesn't simply mean more nodes are better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node. It means the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.

This implies the protocol should not rely on any single sequencer, coordinator, or company. It also means the cost of running a node cannot be so high that only professional institutions can afford it, ensuring ordinary people can still verify the system is operating by the rules.

This is precisely why Ethereum maintains long-term restraint regarding hardware requirements, bandwidth needs, and state bloat, even if it slows down certain short-term performance metrics (Further reading: "The 'Dawn' of the ZK Route: Is Ethereum's Endgame Roadmap Accelerating?").

From Ethereum's perspective, a system that runs blazingly fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has essentially lost the meaning of being "permissionless."

Another frequently misunderstood value is censorship resistance.

Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. On the contrary, its design assumes from the start that participants may act in self-interest, power may concentrate, and external pressure will inevitably arise. Therefore, censorship resistance isn't about demanding "no one will ever censor," but ensuring the system does not fail even if someone tries to censor.

This is also why Ethereum places such importance on mechanisms like proposer/builder separation, decentralized block building, and economic game design—not because they are elegant, but because they can continue to function under the worst conditions.

In many discussions, people ask: "Will such extreme situations really happen in reality?"

But put simply, if a system is only safe in an ideal world, it's not worthy of entrusting value in the real world.

Let's conclude with an interesting data point: the exit queue for Ethereum PoS staking is almost cleared, while the queue to enter staking continues to grow (exceeding 1.57 million ETH).

Amidst controversy and质疑, a significant amount of ETH is still choosing to be locked into this system for the long term.

This perhaps speaks louder than any宣言.

In Closing

Many critics say Ethereum is always "discussing philosophy while others are already running."

But from another angle, it is precisely these discussions that have prevented Ethereum from repeatedly starting over from scratch—whether it's the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or routes like Interop, fast confirmation, and slot shortening, they all essentially unfold under one premise:

All performance improvements must be integrable into the existing security and value assumptions.

This explains why Ethereum's evolution often exhibits characteristics of "seemingly conservative, yet actually稳健." Ultimately, it's not that it doesn't pursue efficiency, but that it refuses to trade future systemic risk for present short-term advantage.

And this is the underlying spirit that has supported the Ethereum ecosystem through a decade—and in an era of "efficiency/TVL supremacy," it is also what is most稀缺 and most worth protecting in Web3.