Blockchain has no ideals?
It's 2025, does blockchain still have ideals? What we see is that fewer people mention "Blockchain" and more people mention "Web3".
The "Ideal" compiled in 2019 is a collection of Vitalik's papers at that time. He is 31 years old this year, and Ethereum is 10 years old. Whether it is the cry of "Let Ethereum return to cypherpunks again" or his thoughts on expansion, decentralized governance, etc. in the past five years, it is worth asking at this time: Is the ideal still there?
ETFs are here, and the market is getting bigger and bigger; but looking back at the projects from 2017 to 2019, there are almost no projects that can continue to stick to their original intentions, and even fewer that can survive to this day.
People are chasing new narratives, creating new wheels, and chasing various memes with additional meanings: one PUMP after another, 7×24 hours of chasing ups and downs, and overwhelming exhibitions and side events around the world. In such an increasingly mature market, people share joys and sorrows, but few have their original intentions.
After thousands of battles, CEX's market share and rankings have begun to stabilize, and eye-catching product innovations continue to emerge. DEX no longer needs to use trading ranking competitions to educate users on how to use on-chain transactions and wallets.
RWA is once again covered with a layer of US debt. The non-coin blockchain has almost disappeared.
Is this market only left with trade fees.
From trade bots, to various pumps, various fun and points.
The Fall of an Ideal Project
Grin's Mining Machines Grow DustMimbleWimble's privacy dream once made Grin a breath of fresh air in the blockchain circle. But by 2025, the miners have gone silent, the official website and forums are no longer updated, and the group of idealists who once vowed to do so have also turned away.
Vite's "Letting Go of Myself"Vite originally boasted of zero handling fees and high-speed transactions, but after Binance was delisted, it turned into a meme coin incubator. The official Twitter account is constantly updated with messages like "Viters, find the next 100×meme!" - the bold statement of "efficient decentralization" can no longer be heard.
Commercial survival of infrastructure
Cobo: From a white wallet to an institutional powerhouseIn its early years, Cobo focused on PoS node assistants, allowing novice users to easily stake; today, it has become the leader in institutional-level custody and DeFi as a service, serving hundreds of hedge funds and asset management teams, with monthly transaction volumes of hundreds of millions. Although the ideal is there, it must be worthy of the pursuit of real money.
MakerDAO: Ideals and CompromisesDAI once claimed that "anyone can participate", but in order to operate stably, it had to accept a large amount of USDC collateral. When the community voted down the proposal to ban USDC, it was more like a default of "reality first" - when ideals collide with compliance, ideals are often forced to give way.
The dilemma and lessons of DAO
Yescoin and 3WW3: Ideals are difficult to implementThe Telegram P2E project with 13 million users, the points and punch-in incentives have made the popularity soar.3WW3 tried to incubate and support grassroots projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but fell into internal friction due to unequal resource distribution after the emergence of YESCOIN. DAO can incubate projects, how to balance between driving force and fair distribution?
Aragon: From Star to DisfavorOnce a powerful tool for DAO construction, it is now more of a negative example of "low voting rate and slow proposals". The multi-chain expansion plan was quietly shelved, and the team eventually returned to the daily maintenance of the Ethereum mainnet, but it is difficult to see the hot ecological expansion of the past.
Semi-relaxation of the Ethereum Foundation
Partial decentralization of powerThe Foundation has set up a new "Community Autonomy Department" and allowed 20 regional committees to participate in the review of key proposals, which can be regarded as a "surgical" reflection on the centralized decision-making of the past.
Game of technical routesDanksharding and Proto-Danksharding have repeatedly become the focus of debate. The tug-of-war between community representatives and core developers reflects the eternal contradiction between technical ideals and implementation efficiency.
Transparency and allocationFaced with the question of "the foundation uses huge resources but lacks a clear purpose", the team began to publish quarterly funding reports and let the community vote to decide the next round of research funding. The semi-autonomous and semi-managed model is both a compromise and a gentle protection of ideals.
Market and retail investors: Trading comes first
Retail investors are no longer users.
In addition to BTC, how long will users hold a new asset? Or will they become part of the points army?
Retail investors no longer read long white papers, but only focus on the ups and downs of the market; VC-endorsed projects are also difficult to retain people's hearts, and more people are like the "points army", sweeping up airdrops and earning the difference. Only Bitcoin is still a beacon of faith and is regarded as digital gold; other tokens are like fireworks, blooming and quickly dissipating.
Hot money represented by $TRUMP and the route of listing on the US stock market are accelerating the tearing apart from native Crypto.
DEX transaction volume remains at a new high, and Raydium and Uniswap have attracted more on-chain users; but fiat currency channels, leveraged trading and derivatives are still the forte of CEX. The two not only compete with each other, but also coexist in division of labor and cooperation.
Track and Interpretation
How far can the RWA track go?ONDO and CFG venture capital support, the underlying and compliance continue to play a game, will institutional funds really continue to pour in, or is it just a gust of wind? STO did not take off, what about RWA?
Will SOL be the next ETH? SOL was once expected to become the "next ETF target". What comes after pump? Is ETH "old"? Who can truly challenge and replace SOL, or the next emerging large chain that has not yet appeared?
WLD, Loot, FIL, NUTSCan WLD leverage the new generation of identity and privacy markets? How high can the market value go? Can those ridiculous "text NFTs" of Loot have a second spring? Can Filecoin's storage imagination reproduce prosperity?
Do composable assets like NUTS still have a chance?
The answer seems to be no: narrative is dead.
TON, OrdiThe emoji NFT of the TON ecosystem has been popular for a while, but it is difficult to hide its controversy as a privacy platform - except for traffic data, there is no real landing value. As the first leading Ordinals project in the BTC ecosystem, can Ordi still take off in an all-round way?
Blood and Tears of L2"Just as most L1s disappeared in the previous two cycles, most L2s will also fall in this cycle, and only three or five will really have the last laugh."
Liquidity and value will gather again. Which L2 do you think has the best chance?
DePIN 和 SocialFiDePIN projects emerge in an endless stream, from shared charging piles to IoT nodes, all of which boast "on-chain governance + incentives". SocialFi's mechanism design is remarkable, but there is no industry benchmark yet. Perhaps this track does not have the soil to exist.
Others
AVAE Ecology X
COSMOS Ecology X
Task platform and DID projects are just runners-up for ENS
In the long run, payment projects like OMG are all dead ends
ETH Still focusing on financial applications and security
RGB+ ecosystem is still deserted
Focus on HYPE ecosystem
When Grin mining machines are covered in dust and Vite's dream is broken, when the DAO management of Yescoin and 3WW3 is repeatedly frustrated, when Aragon falls out of favor after its grand success, when the Ethereum Foundation tries to semi-relax its power, and when $TRUMP and regulatory threats tear the industry apart - we see that ideals are so fragile in the face of business and speculation.
But ideals have never really left the market. They are just waiting silently: those laboratory teams that are still obsessed with the limits of cryptography, those grassroots developers who stick to community autonomy, and those entrepreneurs who are willing to stick to their original intentions in the wind and bubble.
Blockchain has no ideals, but ideals will eventually be reborn.
Weiliang
Miyuki
Brian
Alex