Author: imToken
Over the past period, if you've been following the Ethereum ecosystem, you might have experienced a sense of disconnect.
On one hand, there's been intense discussion about technical issues such as scaling roadmaps, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, and Slot shortening;
On the other hand, there's been debate surrounding issues like "Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant?", "Why not be more aggressive?", and "The sluggish price of Ethereum," even escalating into emotional confrontations;
These discussions actually repeatedly point to the same deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum ultimately want to become?
In fact, many controversies do not stem from technical disagreements, but rather from differing understandings of Ethereum's "value premises." Therefore, only by returning to these premises themselves can we truly understand why Ethereum has made choices that many consider "untimely." I. Ethereum's "Ten-Year Itch": Is Ethereum Degrading? The Ethereum community has been anything but calm recently. From reflections on the Rollup-centric approach to debates about the concept of "Ethereum Alignment," and horizontal comparisons with other high-performance public chains, a subtle yet persistent "Ethereum anxiety" is spreading. This anxiety is not difficult to understand. While other public blockchains are constantly pushing the boundaries of TPS, TVL, trending narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum is repeatedly discussing architectural decomposition, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality issues—a process that seems neither intuitive nor appealing. This leads to a more pressing question: Is Ethereum "degrading"? To answer this question, we cannot simply look at the technological roadmap of the last year or two; we must shift our perspective to a longer timeframe—back to what Ethereum has truly adhered to over the past decade. In fact, in the past few years, many emerging high-performance public blockchains have chosen a more direct path: **trading reduced node counts, higher hardware requirements, and centralized ordering and execution power for ultimate performance and user experience.** However, the Ethereum community believes that such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing antifragility. A frequently overlooked yet highly telling fact is that, in its nearly ten-year operational cycle, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide outage/rollback event, maintaining uninterrupted operation 24/7/365. This isn't because Ethereum is "luckier" than Solana, Sui, or others; rather, it's because, from its inception, it prioritized the system's ability to continue operating under worst-case conditions over performance metrics. In other words, Ethereum may appear slow today not because it can't be faster, but because it consistently asks a more difficult question—can this system continue to function when the network grows larger, has more participants, and faces a less friendly environment? From this perspective, the so-called "ten-year itch" isn't Ethereum regressing, but rather it actively enduring short-term discomfort and skepticism for a longer-term survival. II. Understanding "Ethereum Alignment": Not Taking Sides, But Recognizing Boundaries This is precisely why the first step in understanding Ethereum is accepting a less-than-ideal but crucial fact: Ethereum is not a system solely focused on maximizing efficiency. Its core objective is not to be the fastest, but to remain trustworthy even in the worst-case scenario. Therefore, in the Ethereum context, many seemingly technical issues are essentially value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce strong-authority nodes for throughput? Should we entrust security assumptions to a minority for the sake of user experience? Ethereum's answer is often no. This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive wariness of shortcuts; "can it be done?" always gives way to "should it be done?" It is against this backdrop that "alignment" has become one of the most controversial concepts recently, with some worrying that it will evolve into a label of moral blackmail or even a tool for rent-seeking. In fact, this concern is not unfounded. As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin pointed out this risk in "Making Ethereum alignment legible": "If 'alignment' means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has failed." Vitalik's solution is not to abandon alignment, but to make it explainable, deconstructable, and debatable. In his view, alignment should not be a vague political stance, but should be broken down into a set of examineable attributes: Technical alignment: Should Ethereum's secure consensus be used? Does it uphold open source and open standards? Economic Alignment: Does it promote the long-term value capture of ETH, rather than a one-way withdrawal? Spiritual Alignment: Is it pursuing the common good, not just predatory growth? From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test, but a mutually beneficial social contract. The Ethereum ecosystem allows chaos, competition, and even intense infighting among L2 servers; but these activities should ultimately give back to the parent system that provides them with security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.
III. Reflections on "Decentralization" and "Censorship Resistance"
If "alignment" defines the boundary of value, then what truly supports the establishment of this boundary are the two pillars that Ethereum has long adhered to: decentralization and censorship resistance.
First, in the Ethereum context, "decentralization" does not actually mean that the more nodes the better, nor does it mean that everyone has to run a node. Rather, it means that the system can still function normally without trusting any single participant.
This means that the protocol should not rely on a single sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means that the cost of running nodes cannot be so high that only professional institutions are allowed to ensure that ordinary people can still verify whether the system is operating according to the rules.
It is precisely for this reason that Ethereum has maintained long-term restraint regarding hardware barriers, bandwidth requirements, and state inflation, even if this slows down certain short-term performance metrics.
From Ethereum's perspective, a system that runs incredibly fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has essentially lost the meaning of "permissionless." Another frequently misunderstood value is censorship resistance. Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. On the contrary, it is designed from the outset to assume that participants may be profit-driven, power may be concentrated, and external pressure will inevitably arise. Therefore, censorship resistance does not require "never being censored," but rather ensures that even if someone attempts to censor, the system will not fail. This is why Ethereum places such importance on mechanisms such as proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, and economic game theory design—not because they are elegant, but because they can continue to operate under worst-case scenarios. In many discussions, some people ask, "Would such an extreme situation really happen in reality?" But frankly, if a system is only secure in an ideal world, then it's not worthy of being entrusted with value in the real world. Finally, let's end with an interesting statistic: the Ethereum PoS staking exit queue is almost empty, while the staking queue continues to grow (over 1.57 million ETH). Amidst controversy and skepticism, a large amount of ETH remains locked in this system for the long term. This perhaps speaks volumes more than any declaration. In conclusion, many critics say that Ethereum is always "discussing philosophy after others have already gotten started." However, from another perspective, it is precisely these discussions that have prevented Ethereum from repeatedly starting from scratch—whether it's the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or the approaches of Interop, fast confirmation, and slot shortening, they all essentially unfold under one premise: All performance improvements must be incorporated into existing security and value assumptions. This also explains why Ethereum's evolution often exhibits a "seemingly conservative, but actually robust" characteristic. Ultimately, it's not that it doesn't pursue efficiency, but rather that it refuses to trade future systemic risks for short-term gains. And this is precisely the underlying spirit that has supported the Ethereum ecosystem for a decade—and in an era where "efficiency/TVL is paramount," it is the scarcest and most worthwhile thing for Web3 to protect.
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