By imToken

Over the past period, if you’ve been following the Ethereum ecosystem closely, you might have felt a sense of fragmentation.

On one side, there are intensive discussions about technical topics like scaling roadmaps, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, and slot shortening;

On the other side, there are debates surrounding “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant?” “Why not be more aggressive?” “Why is the token price sluggish?” and so on, even escalating into emotionalized confrontations;

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

In fact, many controversies don’t stem from technical disagreements, but rather from different 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 now consider “untimely.”

I. Ethereum’s “Seven-Year Itch”: Is Ethereum Deteriorating?

The Ethereum community hasn’t been peaceful lately.

From reflections on the Rollup-centric roadmap, to debates about the concept of “Ethereum Alignment,” and to horizontal comparisons with numerous high-performance blockchains, a subtle yet continuously fermenting “Ethereum anxiety” is spreading.

This anxiety is not hard to understand.

While other blockchains constantly refresh TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum keeps discussing architecture decomposition, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality issues. It seems both unintuitive and inelegant.

This also brings a sharper question to the surface: Is Ethereum undergoing “deterioration”?

To answer this question, we can’t just look at the technical roadmap of the past year or two, but must pull back the lens to a longer time dimension—back to what Ethereum has truly persisted with over this decade.

In fact, in recent years, many emerging high-performance blockchains have chosen a more direct path: exchanging extreme performance and experience for reduced node counts, higher hardware requirements, centralized sequencing, and execution rights.

However, from the Ethereum community’s perspective, this kind of speed often comes at the cost of antifragility.

A fact that’s often overlooked yet extremely revealing is that throughout its decade-long operational cycle, Ethereum has never experienced network-wide downtime or rollback events, maintaining uninterrupted 7×24×365 operation.

This isn’t because Ethereum is “luckier” than Solana, Sui, and others, but because from its inception, it chose to place the system’s ability to continue operating under worst-case conditions before performance metrics.

In other words, Ethereum appears slow today not because it can’t do faster, but because it has continuously asked a harder question—when the network scale grows larger, participants increase, and the environment becomes less friendly, can this system continue to function?

From this perspective, the so-called “seven-year itch” isn’t Ethereum deteriorating, but rather it actively enduring short-term discomfort and skepticism for survival over a longer cycle.

II. Understanding “Ethereum Alignment”: Not Taking Sides, But Boundaries

Precisely because of this, the first step to understanding Ethereum is accepting an unpopular yet extremely critical fact: Ethereum is not a system whose sole goal is “efficiency maximization.” Its core objective isn’t to run fastest, but to “remain trustworthy even in worst-case scenarios.”

Therefore, in Ethereum’s context, many seemingly technical questions are essentially value choices: Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed? Should we introduce privileged nodes for throughput? Should we entrust security assumptions to a few for better user experience?

Ethereum’s answer is often no.

This also explains why the Ethereum community maintains an almost instinctive wariness of shortcuts. “Can we do it” always yields to “Should we do it.”

It’s precisely in this context that “Alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts recently, with concerns that it might evolve into moral coercion or even become a tool for power seeking.

In fact, this concern is not unfounded. Back in 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 solution wasn’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 examinable attributes:

Technical alignment: Do you use Ethereum’s security consensus? Do you advocate for open source and open standards?

Economic alignment: Do you promote ETH value capture long-term, rather than unilateral extraction?

Spiritual alignment: Are you pursuing public interest, not just exploitative growth?

From this perspective, alignment isn’t a loyalty test, but rather a reciprocal symbiotic social contract.

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

III. Reflections on “Decentralization” and “Censorship Resistance”

If “alignment” defines value boundaries, what truly supports this boundary’s validity are two pillars Ethereum has long upheld: decentralization and censorship resistance.

First, in Ethereum’s context, “decentralization” doesn’t actually mean more nodes the better, nor does it mean everyone must run nodes. Rather, it means the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.

This means the protocol shouldn’t depend on any one sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means node operation costs shouldn’t become so high that only professional institutions remain, ensuring ordinary people can still verify whether the system operates by the rules.

This is precisely why Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware requirements, bandwidth demands, and state bloat, even if this slows certain short-term performance metrics (see extended reading “ZK Route ‘Dawn of the Times’: Is Ethereum’s Final Route Map Accelerating Fully?”).

From Ethereum’s perspective, a system that runs incredibly fast but can’t be verified by ordinary people has essentially lost the meaning of “permissionless.”

Another frequently misunderstood value is censorship resistance.

Ethereum doesn’t assume the world is benevolent. On the contrary, from its inception it defaults to the assumption that participants may be profit-seeking, power may concentrate, external pressure will definitely occur, and so on. Therefore, censorship resistance doesn’t mean “never anyone censoring,” but rather ensuring the system doesn’t fail even if someone tries to censor.

This is why Ethereum places such importance on proposer/builder separation, decentralized building, economic game design mechanisms, and so on—not because they’re elegant, but because they allow continued operation in worst-case scenarios.

In many discussions, people ask: “Will such extreme scenarios really happen in reality?”

But frankly, if a system is only safe in an ideal world, then it’s not worth entrusting value to in the real world.

Finally, let’s end with an interesting piece of data: currently, Ethereum PoS’s staking exit queue has nearly cleared, while the queue for entering staking continues to grow (exceeding 1.57 million ETH).

Amid controversy and skepticism, vast amounts of ETH continue to choose being locked into this system long-term.

This perhaps speaks volumes more than any manifesto.

Closing Thoughts

Many critics say that Ethereum is always “still discussing philosophy after others have already gotten going.”

But from another angle, it’s precisely these discussions that have prevented Ethereum from constantly rebuilding—whether the Rollup-centric roadmap, gradual introduction of ZK, or routes like Interop, fast finality, and slot shortening, all essentially unfold under one premise:

All performance improvements must be subsumable within existing security and value assumptions.

This explains why Ethereum’s evolution often manifests as “seemingly conservative, actually robust,” fundamentally because it doesn’t refuse to pursue efficiency, but rather refuses to trade systematic future risks for short-term advantages today.

And this is precisely the underlying spirit that has carried the Ethereum ecosystem through a decade—and in an era of “efficiency/TVL supremacy,” it’s the scarcest and most worth protecting thing in Web3.