Original author: Haotian (X: @tmel0211)
I do not agree with the views of Ethereum as a "big company theory" and "narrative fiction." Here are some perspectives to share:
1) Ethereum is an experimental product of decentralized governance architecture in Crypto, not controlled by centralized companies or organizations. Developers, researchers, node operators, ETH holders, and others from around the world participate and contribute together.
The collaborative approach of open-source code, the community-driven decision-making process, and the transparent governance mechanism will, in the long run, outshine any centralized organizational structure. Although the efficiency is slow, it wins in openness, transparency, and the emergent innovation singularity effect. Ethereum addresses the "centralized company disease," so how could it suffer from "big company disease" before achieving its mission?
If Ethereum truly fails, the choice of decentralized architecture would be to embrace "forking" and let it die; there will always be a stronger new "Ethereum" emerging. The fact that Ethereum remains the center of the entire Crypto world is enough to illustrate the point.
2) From the technical perspective of public chains, Ethereum has steadily transitioned from POW to POS over the past few years, from Sharding strategies to the final implementation of the Rollup-Centric core strategy, and then to the gradual realization of the upcoming roadmap. The security stability and engineering quality delivery results throughout this process have met expectations. The strategy shift from sharding to rollups is also a response to market trends.
The problem is that the technical iteration of public chains cannot resonate in sync with market cycles; the rhythm of infrastructure and application implementation, and even the market profit effect, has become disconnected, or it is difficult to establish a strong correlation.
Layer 2 is indeed affected by the mainnet gas fees and bandwidth performance, but even a successful Cancun upgrade did not bring about the expected prosperity of Layer 2. Ideally, Layer 2 would see a multitude of chains emerging, and the user ecosystem would achieve exponential breakthroughs, allowing Ethereum to benefit from "taxation" and "gas burn" for deflationary uplift.
However, the reality is that the threshold for launching chains has lowered, and the narrative of RaaS has also fermented, while the ideal of mass adoption remains a distant dream. Frankly, this has already exceeded the constraints of Ethereum's pure technical framework.
The NFT FOMO wave in 2021 brought benefits to Ethereum; objectively speaking, that was a market effect emerging from decentralized architecture, not directly driven by Ethereum's "core" developers.
3) "Narrative" is the evolving development context, a derivative of business thinking layered on top of technology.
For example: The emergence of the @eigenlayer protocol gave rise to the narrative of Restaking, the appearance of the @CelestiaOrg DA chain led to the narrative of modularity, and the emergence of @Starknet created the narrative of ZK-Rollup.
In the future market, the charge of the @ParticleNtwrk chain may once again make the "chain abstraction" narrative shine, and the unified liquidity trust ecosystem that @ProjectZKM aims to build may eliminate the boundaries of blockchain, among many other narrative topics.
Objectively speaking, "narrative" is the result of an excess of developer power and hot money FOMO. Narratives can provide imaginative space for technology, although "over-narration" can give a sense of being impractical. However, "over-narration" itself is a natural outcome of the market; like blowing bubbles, narratives will be replaced but will always exist.
In other words, a narrative that does not FOMO loses its attractiveness to draw in all "resources, talent, and funds." It might as well stay within the Web2 environment, without the burden of being labeled as a scam. Of course, MEME is also a form of narrative, but if the market is bearish on everything that has a building process and is supported by underlying business logic, the existence of MEME loses any fundamental basis.
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