In a few weeks, Ethereum will celebrate its tenth anniversary. However, this milestone has not been accompanied by applause and glory. Instead, internal fragmentation, chaotic development directions, and increasingly fierce external competition have plunged Ethereum into its deepest crisis since its inception.
Following last week's exploration of cultural issues in Ethereum, this article continues to analyze three more practical core issues that directly affect its future direction: talent crisis, fragmented user experience, and governance failure. Each is enough to shake this once-mighty public chain giant.
1. Talent crisis: Ethereum is losing its most valuable asset.
Since 2017, the Ethereum Foundation's failure in talent recruitment and retention has become the biggest hidden danger to ecological development.
Industry insiders who have participated in the foundation's operations point out that the foundation is rife with relationship-oriented and interest-group phenomena, where truly capable talents are often marginalized for lacking a 'network.' This non-merit-based selection mechanism has severely undermined team morale and destroyed Ethereum's appeal to top talents.
In this environment, many talented engineers and researchers either choose to go independent or switch to competing projects. The emergence of public chain projects like NEAR and Monad is essentially a direct result of Ethereum's own talent loss. These projects not only realized the technical routes originally planned by Ethereum ahead of time, but also surpassed Ethereum's mainnet in terms of performance and user experience.
The most alarming thing is that Ethereum's current talent advantage is rapidly dissipating, and relying solely on the 'Ethereum halo' can no longer retain the best builders.
If you wish to systematically evaluate the dynamic changes in talent reserves and development activity between Ethereum and competing public chains, you can utilize Mlion.ai's on-chain developer activity analysis module to grasp the true development trends and innovation directions of each ecosystem at the touch of a button, allowing you to adjust your investment perspective in a timely manner.
2. Fragmented user experience: The UX disaster caused by the proliferation of Rollups.
Ethereum has long been hailed as a pioneer in smart contracts and decentralized applications, but now it is gradually becoming a labyrinth that ordinary users find daunting.
In the current Ethereum ecosystem, users have to face dozens of different L2 Rollups, each chain having its own independent wallet settings, gas tokens, bridging tools, and liquidity pools. The complexity of managing asset migration across different chains has far exceeded the average user's understanding and tolerance threshold.
Worse still, cross-chain bridges are not only expensive and slow but also frequently expose security vulnerabilities, leading to a user experience akin to the awkwardness of using traveler's checks during international travel 20 years ago.
Essentially, all of this stems from the failure of Ethereum's foundational layer expansion strategy.
The early promised sharding roadmap was abandoned halfway, and the market was allowed to spontaneously generate dozens of heterogeneous expansion solutions, ultimately leading to today's fragmented and disjointed situation.
To monitor the activity, asset distribution, and bridging data changes of various Rollup chains in real-time, and accurately assess the cross-chain ecological landscape, you can use Mlion.ai's L2 ecological monitoring and cross-chain data integration tools to make complex data clear at a glance, quickly identifying real growth points and potential risk points.
3. Governance dilemma: The foundation's issues under Vitalik's shadow.
The Ethereum Foundation was once seen as a model in the industry, but today it increasingly resembles an obstacle to ecological development.
The foundation lacks transparency and accountability mechanisms, with power concentrated in the hands of a few, especially with Vitalik having de facto single-point control over major decisions.
This governance structure not only leads to inefficiency and unfairness in internal resource allocation but also causes the entire ecosystem to become slow and chaotic in technical route planning, funding support, and crisis response.
More critically, the 'power games' and 'nepotism' existing within the foundation have led to the marginalization or exclusion of the talents that can genuinely drive Ethereum forward, severely weakening the momentum for ecological innovation.
Although the 'dual executive director system' has recently been implemented, appointing Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-wei Wang to co-lead, there are still significant doubts about whether this can reverse the decline from an organizational deep mechanism perspective.
Compared to the well-developed transparent governance systems of other large open-source projects (such as the Linux Foundation and W3C), the structure of the Ethereum Foundation seems extremely primitive and closed.
If you want a more systematic analysis of the governance transparency, community participation, and funding allocation efficiency of various public chain ecosystems, you can use Mlion.ai's on-chain governance analysis module to quickly quantify the health of each chain's governance ecosystem, providing a more scientific basis for investment decisions.
Conclusion: At the tenth anniversary, it is a time for reflection and self-rescue.
Ethereum remains one of the most important projects in the blockchain industry, with the most developers and the highest total value locked (TVL) in DeFi, as well as the birthplace of the most NFT and DAO projects. However, the problems it faces cannot be ignored:
Talent is draining, and innovation momentum is declining.
Fragmented user experience, making it difficult for new users to enter.
Governance is rigid, lacking effective coordination and correction mechanisms.
If these core issues are not addressed and reformed, Ethereum's tenth anniversary may become a turning point of decline rather than the beginning of a new round of glory.
In this major industry change, insight into trends and anticipation of changes have become essential courses for every investor and practitioner.
Choose Mlion.ai as your AI intelligent investment research assistant, helping you occupy a favorable position in the future crypto ecological landscape through real-time data monitoring, trend forecasting, and policy change tracking.
Disclaimer
The above content is for information sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice! The cryptocurrency market is highly volatile; investments should be made cautiously and decisions should be based on one's own risk tolerance.
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