The hottest topics in the market over the past week seemed to be related to Ethereum. One was that Vitalik Buterin shared Ethereum’s current predicament, problems and some solutions in the community AMA, which sparked a lot of discussion; the other was the sudden theft of more than 500,000 Ethereum from Bybit over the weekend. The impacts of these two events were completely different, but both made Ethereum the focus.
In the past two years, the industry's evaluation of Ethereum's performance has often been a very sarcastic statement, "If you buy Ethereum, all the debts you owed in your previous life should be paid off", in order to satirize the price of Ethereum. After all, the current situation in the industry is that the price itself will greatly reflect its development, such as Solana next door.
So, back to reality, what challenges has Ethereum encountered that has caused the overall market value and community reputation to be shaken?
After some discussions with several core community members who have been paying close attention to Ethereum for a long time, they gave a lot of seemingly good feedback, including that the Ethereum Foundation has been in a state of "existing in name only", often doing nothing except selling ETH; or that the explosion of Layer2 has weakened the value of Ethereum itself; and that the new narrative popular in the market has basically not exploded on Ethereum.
The descriptions of these problems seem to hit the mark, but the author believes that this may just be a superficial presentation, and the substance lies elsewhere.
Regarding the topic of why large companies fail, there is a best-selling book called "The Innovator's Dilemma", which is also known as the 20 most influential business books in the 20th century. The conclusion of the book is: excellent large companies fail because small companies have made disruptive innovations, thereby encroaching on the market of large companies, while most of the innovations made by large companies are "continuous innovations" and cannot prevent small companies from "destroying" the market of large companies.
This is the real challenge Ethereum faces today.
Looking back, it has been almost 10 years since the birth of the Ethereum mainnet. 10 years is not young for a company, especially in the rapidly developing Web3 industry.
Although in the latest interview, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin did not admit that Ethereum is a company. He said, "I think Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, not a company. If Ethereum becomes a company, we will lose most of the meaning of Ethereum's existence."
But if Ethereum’s development over the past 10 years was not the result of corporatization, it might have been a different story. After all, in the blockchain field, there is only one project that truly achieves “de-corporatization” - Bitcoin, and there is no other.
Therefore, the challenges Ethereum is currently facing are actually similar problems that all large companies will encounter: overall innovation is hindered, and the management (Ethereum Foundation) is "old-fashioned" and inefficient.
Therefore, in the interview, Vitalik mentioned that the core way for Ethereum to get out of the current predicament is to have a new story, and this new story is actually innovation. He also talked about "the Ethereum Foundation has started a lot of internal reforms in recent months", and this reform is aimed at the problem of organizational efficiency.
Although Vitalik Buterin denies that Ethereum is a business, when organizational problems are exposed, changes can only be made in the way that businesses are managed.
Therefore, another challenge for the future development of Ethereum has emerged: Is Vitalik ready to become a manager?
Although Vitalik was the first to speak out in the face of many challenges, what he is facing now is the transformation of a large enterprise. After several years of wild growth, Vitalik also needs to transform from a technical expert to an "entrepreneur" who does not look like an entrepreneur, and even rethink or balance "decentralization". Is he ready?
After reading the entire interview, I am very curious about whether Vitalik will face a huge psychological struggle in transformation. After all, it is not only Ethereum itself that needs to be reshaped, but also the soul figure himself. Or maybe he had already made up his mind when he changed his profile picture more than a month ago. I don’t know and I don’t understand. After all, the "Dragon Slayer" is no longer young, and there will always be changes after experiencing the collision of the world.
Finally, if you want to ask me whether Ethereum can overcome the challenges and what I think about its future development, perhaps it would be more practical to summarize it in one sentence: ETH still has a market value of 330 billion US dollars and is still the second largest Crypto project.
