Piercing through Ethereum's "Degeneration" Hype: Why is "Ethereum's Values" the Broadest Moat?

Article by: imToken

In recent times, if you’ve been paying close attention to the Ethereum ecosystem, you might have experienced a sense of disconnection.

• On one side are intense discussions about scaling solutions, Rollup architectures, Interoperability, ZK, PBS, Slot shortening, and other technical topics;
• On the other side are debates around questions like “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant,” “Why isn’t it more aggressive,” “Why is the token price sluggish,” and even emotional confrontations;

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

In fact, many disputes are not rooted in technical disagreements but stem from different understandings of Ethereum’s “value premises.” Therefore, only by returning to these premises can we truly understand why Ethereum has made choices that many now consider “untimely.”

1. Ethereum’s “Ten-Year Itch”: Is Ethereum Degenerating?

Recently, the Ethereum community has not been peaceful.

From reflections on the Rollup-centric roadmap, to debates about the “Ethereum Alignment” concept, and comparisons with high-performance public chains, an undercurrent of “Ethereum anxiety” is spreading and fermenting.

This anxiety is not hard to understand.

While other public chains continuously improve TPS, TVL, popular narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum keeps revisiting architecture splitting, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality issues—appearing neither intuitive nor clever.

This also raises a sharper question: Is Ethereum “degenerating”?

To answer this, one cannot just look at recent one or two years of technical developments but must zoom out to a longer timeframe—returning to what Ethereum has truly persisted with over the past decade.

In fact, over the past few years, many emerging high-performance public chains have taken a more direct route: reducing node counts, raising hardware thresholds, centralizing ordering and execution to achieve extreme performance and experience.

From the Ethereum community’s perspective, such speed often comes at the cost of fragility.

A often overlooked but highly illustrative fact is that, in nearly ten years of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown or rollback, maintaining 7×24×365 uninterrupted operation.

This is not because Ethereum is luckier than Solana, Sui, and others; rather, it is because, from the outset, it chose to prioritize whether the system can continue to operate under worst-case scenarios over raw performance metrics.

In other words, Ethereum today may seem slow, not because it cannot go faster, but because it is always asking a more difficult question—when the network scales up, with more participants and a less friendly environment, can this system still keep running?

From this perspective, the so-called “Ten-Year Itch” is not Ethereum degenerating but actively enduring short-term discomfort and doubts for longer-term survival.

2. Understanding “Ethereum Alignment”: Not about Picking Sides, but About Boundaries

Precisely because of this, the first step to understanding Ethereum is accepting a somewhat unappealing but crucial fact: Ethereum is not a system with “maximum efficiency” as its only goal. Its core aim is not to run the fastest but to remain “trustworthy even in the worst case.”

Therefore, in the context of Ethereum, many seemingly technical issues are fundamentally value choices: Should decentralization be sacrificed for speed? Should strong permissioned nodes be introduced for throughput? Should security assumptions be handed over to a few for better user experience?

The answer from Ethereum is often no.

This also explains why within the Ethereum community, there is an almost instinctive caution towards shortcuts—“Can we do it?” always takes a backseat to “Should we do it?”

Against this backdrop, “Alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts recently. Some worry it might turn into a form of moral coercion or a tool for power rent-seeking.

In fact, 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 is not to abandon alignment but to make it explainable, decomposable, and discussable. In his view, alignment should not be a vague political stance but broken down into a set of attributes that can be scrutinized:

• Technical alignment: Does it use Ethereum’s security consensus? Does it support open-source and open standards?
• Economic alignment: Does it promote ETH’s value capture in the long term rather than unilateral extraction?
• Ethical/spiritual alignment: Does it pursue the public interest rather than predatory growth?

From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test but a social contract of mutual benefit and coexistence.

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

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

If “alignment” defines the boundary of values, then the two pillars supporting this boundary are Ethereum’s long-standing principles: decentralization and censorship resistance.

First, in the Ethereum context, “decentralization” does not mean more nodes are always better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node. Instead, it means the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.

This implies that the protocol should not depend on a particular sequencer, coordinator, or company; at the same time, node operation costs should not be so high that only professional institutions can participate, ensuring ordinary users can verify that the system is running according to rules.

Because of this, Ethereum has maintained long-term restraint on hardware requirements, bandwidth, and state bloat—even if this slows down some short-term performance metrics (see also “ZK Roadmap ‘Dawn of the Age’: Is Ethereum’s Finality Roadmap Accelerating Fully?”).

In Ethereum’s view, a system that runs extremely fast but cannot be verified by ordinary users essentially loses the meaning of “permissionless.”

Another often misunderstood value is censorship resistance.

Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. On the contrary, from its design inception, it assumes participants may seek profit, power may concentrate, external pressures will arise, etc. Therefore, censorship resistance does not mean “no one will ever censor,” but rather ensuring that even if someone attempts to censor, the system will not fail.

This is why Ethereum attaches great importance to mechanisms like proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, and economic game design—not because they are elegant, but because they enable continued operation under the worst conditions.

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

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

Finally, to close with an interesting data point: currently, the ETH staking withdrawal queue on PoS is nearly cleared, while the queue of new stakers continues to grow (over 1.57 million ETH).

Amid controversy and skepticism, a large amount of ETH still chooses to be locked in this system long-term.

Perhaps this speaks louder than any declaration.

A Final Word

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

But from another perspective, it is precisely these discussions that have helped Ethereum avoid repeated rebuilds—whether it’s the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or interoperability, fast finality, and Slot shortening—all are based on a fundamental premise:

All performance improvements must be compatible with existing security and value assumptions.

This also explains why Ethereum’s evolution often appears “conservative but steady.” Ultimately, it is not that Ethereum does not pursue efficiency, but that it refuses to exchange current short-term gains for future systemic risks.

And this is the underlying spirit that has supported Ethereum’s ecosystem to survive over ten years—also the most scarce and valuable aspect of Web3 in an era obsessed with “efficiency / TVL.”