On July 30, 2015, at 3:26 PM, the first block of Ethereum was successfully mined.
Accompanied by the genesis moment known as 'Frontier', an ambitious prophecy was born — 'world computer'. Vitalik and the early developers believed they were not building an upgraded version of Bitcoin but a global computing platform capable of running any decentralized application.
Ten years later, it is now the tenth anniversary of the Ethereum mainnet's operation.
When we examine Ethereum's development trajectory, we find that this 'world computer' has not operated various decentralized applications as expected, but has instead evolved into a settlement layer dominated by financial applications.
DeFi protocols account for the vast majority of gas consumption, with trillions of dollars in assets flowing through this network, while those once-promising decentralized social, gaming, storage, and other applications have either gone silent or migrated to other chains.
Is this narrative shift a compromise or an evolution?
Looking back at this point, the narrative changes of Ethereum over the past decade are not just a story about Ethereum itself, but a story about how technological ideals find footing in the real world.
To understand the origin of Ethereum's narrative, we must return to that winter at the end of 2013.
At the age of 19, Vitalik Buterin conceived a bold idea while traveling in Israel: What if blockchain could not only transfer value but also run arbitrarily complex programs?
The revolutionary aspect of this idea is that it expanded blockchain from a dedicated value transfer tool to a general-purpose computing platform.
But behind this initial vision lies a deeper cultural motivation.
The early Ethereum community was gathered by a group of technological idealists who believed in 'code is law'. They were not just building a new technology platform but were trying to create a new social paradigm — a digital utopia that operates without centralized authority and is entirely governed by code.
At that time, the narrative revolved around 'decentralization', in a 'world computer' where code is law.
This is not only a technical ideal but has become a political declaration and philosophical stance. Early supporters of Ethereum believed that through smart contracts, they could reconstruct the operating rules of society and create a fairer, more transparent, and trustless world.
This technological idealism can be seen everywhere in Ethereum's early design. The Turing-complete virtual machine, the gas mechanism, the account model — each technical choice reflects a value orientation of 'maximizing decentralization' and 'maximizing universality'.
On April 30, 2016, less than a year after the launch of the Ethereum mainnet, The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) officially launched its crowdfunding.
This project perfectly embodies the idealistic spirit of the early Ethereum community: an investment fund without management, without a board, completely controlled by code. In just 28 days, The DAO raised 11.5 million ETH, accounting for 14% of the total ETH supply at the time, worth over $150 million.
However, the ideal soon faced the harsh test of reality. On June 17, an attacker exploited a recursive call vulnerability in The DAO smart contract to steal 3.6 million ETH.
The subsequent debate tore the entire community apart. One side argued that since code is law, the ETH obtained through exploiting code vulnerabilities is 'legitimate', and any human intervention violates the core spirit of blockchain. The other side argued that when the outcome clearly contradicts the community's common will, it is necessary to correct the error through hard forks.
Ultimately, the majority, represented by Vitalik, chose a hard fork to return the stolen ETH to the original holders. This decision led to Ethereum's first major split, with the minority who insisted on the 'Code is Law' principle continuing to maintain the original chain, which is today's Ethereum Classic (ETC).
This crisis reveals the inherent contradictions of technological idealism: complete decentralization may lead to unacceptable consequences, while any form of human intervention may be seen as a betrayal of decentralization principles.
This contradiction runs through Ethereum's entire development history and lays the foundation for future narrative shifts.
At the end of 2016, no one could foresee how the upcoming ICO craze would change everything for Ethereum.
In the summer of 2017, the crypto world experienced an unprecedented capital frenzy. The simple concept of ICO (Initial Coin Offering) — raising funds by issuing tokens — ignited the imagination of global speculators. In 2017 alone, funds raised through ICOs exceeded $6 billion, and by the first half of 2018, this figure soared to $12 billion.
And Ethereum was the token machine that carried numerous ICOs.
Writing contracts, designing payment rules, naming tokens and defining quantities, one by one, tokens that do not require real commitments made their appearance:
A seemingly grand white paper, a story capable of triggering FOMO (fear of missing out), and a seemingly reasonable token economic model.
At that time, Ethereum faced an unexpected identity crisis — initially designed as a 'world computer', it suddenly found its greatest use was in issuing tokens.
The significant gap between this reality and vision constitutes the first major fracture in Ethereum's narrative.
Vitalik and the early core developers envisioned a global computing platform for running decentralized applications, but the market's answer was: we only need a simple ERC-20 standard to issue tokens.
This simplification is not only at the technical level but also at the cognitive level. In the eyes of investors, Ethereum is no longer a revolutionary computing paradigm but a money printing machine.
The deeper issue is that this 'token issuance platform' label begins to shape the development direction of Ethereum in reverse. When 90% of activities in the ecosystem are token-related, development priorities inevitably tilt in this direction. Discussions about token standards in EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) far exceed other application scenarios, and developer tools mainly revolve around token issuance and trading, leading the entire ecosystem into a state of 'path dependence'.
If the previous The DAO incident was a philosophical debate within idealism, then the ICO boom was the first direct collision between idealism and market reality. This collision exposed a fundamental contradiction in Ethereum's narrative: the huge gap between technological vision and market demand.
The following year, 2018, saw a bear market.
For Ethereum, this is not only a collapse in price but also a collapse in narrative. When the ICO bubble bursts and the slogan of 'blockchain revolution' is no longer believed, Ethereum must answer a fundamental question:
If it is not a world computer, then what exactly are you?
The answer to this question gradually emerged in the trials of the bear market. A new narrative began to take shape: Ethereum is first a financial settlement layer, and only then might it become a general-purpose computing platform.
The shift is also reflected in the technical roadmap. The design of Ethereum 2.0 began to consider the needs of financial applications more — faster finality, lower transaction costs, and higher security. Although the official discourse still emphasizes 'universality', the actual optimization direction has clearly pointed towards financial use cases.
The correctness of this choice will be tested in the next phase.
The DeFi Summer of 2020 was not just an explosion of the application layer for Ethereum but also a complete transformation of identity.
If the ICO boom of 2017 unexpectedly turned Ethereum into a token issuance platform, the success of DeFi made the entire ecosystem realize: finance might not be Ethereum's compromise choice but its natural mission.
This shift in understanding is gradual.
Initially, DeFi was seen as one of many experiments, alongside applications like gaming, social, and supply chain. But when Compound's liquidity mining ignited market enthusiasm, when hundreds of billions of dollars flowed into various DeFi protocols, and when gas fees soared due to DeFi activity, an undeniable fact emerged: Ethereum found its product-market fit.
In the past, positioning Ethereum as a financial platform seemed like a 'dimensional reduction', a betrayal of the grand vision of 'world computer'. But DeFi has shown another possibility: finance itself is the most complex and valuable form of computation.
Every transaction, every settlement, every derivative is a complex computational process. From this perspective, becoming a 'world financial computer' is not contradictory to becoming a 'world computer', but rather different expressions of the same vision.
The explosion of DeFi created a powerful positive feedback loop, continuously strengthening Ethereum's narrative as financial infrastructure. The surge in usage, the gathering of developers, and the gradual shift of discourse power have made the voices of DeFi project parties increasingly louder.
However, the success of DeFi also brought a severe reality problem: Ethereum's performance bottleneck.
When a simple token swap requires paying dozens or hundreds of dollars in gas fees, Ethereum faces a survival crisis. This is no longer an ideal question of 'how to become a world computer', but a practical question of 'how to keep DeFi running'.
This urgency fundamentally changed Ethereum's technical priorities. In the past, scaling was seen as a long-term goal, a slow search for the most elegant solution. But the explosion of DeFi made scaling an urgent necessity. The Ethereum community had to accept a reality:
A perfect solution can wait, but the market will not wait.
Thus, we saw a series of pragmatic choices. Layer 2 was no longer a distant concept but an urgent solution to be deployed immediately. Although Rollup technology is not sufficiently decentralized, it can quickly alleviate congestion, thus gaining full support from core developers. The roadmap for Ethereum 2.0 was also readjusted to prioritize features that would be most helpful to DeFi.
This adjustment in the technical roadmap is essentially a concrete manifestation of the narrative shift. When Ethereum accepted its positioning as financial infrastructure, all technical decisions revolved around this core.
In 2021, Ethereum faced a harsh reality: the success of DeFi was killing Ethereum.
When a simple transaction needs to wait for several minutes and ordinary users are squeezed out by high costs, Ethereum's narrative faces a new crisis. The positioning of 'global financial settlement layer' sounds beautiful, but if only the wealthy can afford it, can this narrative still hold?
The deeper contradiction lies in the fact that Ethereum's success has exposed fundamental flaws in its architecture. As a monolithic blockchain, Ethereum attempts to handle everything at the same layer: executing computations, verifying transactions, storing data, and reaching consensus. This 'omnidirectional' design was advantageous in the early days, but became a fatal weakness during the scaling phase.
Faced with this dilemma, the Ethereum community underwent a painful cognitive shift. A true world computer should, like the internet, be a modular and layered system.
This shift is most clearly articulated in one of Vitalik's articles: 'The future of Ethereum is modular.'
This statement marks another significant turning point in the Ethereum narrative. From 'one chain rules all' to 'a multi-layer collaborative ecosystem', Ethereum began to accept a reality — a single blockchain cannot meet all needs, and the future belongs to specialized division of labor.
So when Rollup solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism began to carry more and more transactions, the fundamental question emerged. If most activities occur on Layer 2, then what is the Ethereum mainnet?
In 2022, this issue manifested more explicitly in data availability. When projects like Celestia proposed dedicated layers for data availability, the balance between Ethereum's openness and control began to unfold amidst the data availability (DA) debate.
Ethereum has always touted openness and decentralization, but when this openness threatens its own position, the community's response becomes complex. Some people began to use the concept of 'Ethereum Alignment', trying to maintain some form of control while being open.
More interestingly, this debate changed the definition of success.
In the past, success meant that all activities took place on Ethereum. Now, success has been redefined as: even if activities occur elsewhere, as long as they ultimately require Ethereum's security, it is a victory for the Ethereum ecosystem. This change in definition reflects Ethereum's shift from 'exclusivity' to 'symbiosis'.
In 2023, a subtle but significant change occurred in the blockchain world: the new generation of public chains no longer attempts to become 'a better Ethereum', but rather begins to tell completely different stories.
Solana no longer emphasizes itself as 'a faster smart contract platform', but positions itself as 'the Nasdaq of blockchains'. Aptos and Sui do not talk about 'decentralization', but emphasize 'Web2-level user experience'.
For Ethereum, this change is both a relief and a challenge. The relief lies in no longer being caught in an arms race of performance parameters; the challenge is that as competitors carve out new battlegrounds, Ethereum's traditional advantages may become irrelevant.
The deeper question is: when 'decentralization' is no longer the only value standard, how much attractiveness does Ethereum's core value still hold?
The complexity of this narrative competition is most evident in Solana's resurgence.
After the collapse of FTX in 2022, everyone thought Solana was finished. But in 2023, it made a strong comeback with meme coins and low-cost transactions. This phenomenon reveals a disconcerting fact for the Ethereum community — the market may not care about decentralization as much as they imagined.
Faced with the rise of new public chains, the initial response of the Ethereum community is to emphasize 'orthodoxy'.
Ethereum supporters pointed out the centralization issues, security risks, and technical compromises of these chains. However, the market's reaction was surprisingly lukewarm. When users could complete transactions at a cost of just a few cents, they seemed unconcerned about whether this network was 'sufficiently decentralized'.
When Ethereum tries to explain its value in pragmatic terms, it loses its original moral high ground. 'We are safer' sounds far less compelling than 'We are building a decentralized future'. This secularization of the narrative, while potentially attracting more mainstream users, may also alienate core supporters.
More complexly, new public chains are beginning to redefine 'decentralization' in reverse.
They believe that true decentralization should allow ordinary people to participate, rather than being an elite network only for the wealthy. When Solana users criticize Ethereum's high gas fees using this argument, Ethereum finds itself caught in a moral trap of its own making.
By early 2024, a disturbing trend became apparent: Ethereum's narrative was becoming increasingly defensive. Most discussions were not about 'what we want to build' but rather 'why we are better than other chains'. This shift from offense to defense exposed Ethereum's predicament of innovation.
This defensive posture manifests in multiple ways.
The technical roadmap increasingly responds to competitive pressure rather than intrinsic vision, and community discussions are filled with criticisms of other chains rather than self-reflection. Even Vitalik's articles are increasingly focused on explanation and defense, rather than proposing bold new ideas like in the early days.
More seriously, this defensive mentality has begun to affect the innovative vitality of the ecosystem. Developers no longer ask 'what is possible', but rather 'what is safe'. Investors no longer seek breakthrough innovations, but instead look for 'the killer of the Ethereum killer'. The entire ecosystem has fallen into a state of inward competition rather than external expansion.
The root of this situation lies in the exhaustion of narrative. When 'world computer' proves too grand, 'DeFi settlement layer' too narrow, and 'modular blockchain' too technical, Ethereum lacks a new narrative that can spark imagination.
In 2024, as the crypto market seeks new growth momentum, RWA (Real World Assets) has become the new savior. For Ethereum, this is not only a new application scenario but also an opportunity for narrative reconstruction. From 'changing finance' to 'connecting reality', Ethereum attempts to tell a more pragmatic and mainstream story.
Ethereum's RWA narrative attracts attention because of its specificity.
It is no longer the abstract 'decentralized finance', but rather 'turning your treasury bonds into tradable tokens'. No longer 'permissionless innovation', but 'reducing friction costs in cross-border trade'. This shift from idealism to pragmatism reflects the Ethereum community's new understanding of market demand.
More subtly, the RWA narrative has changed the definition of success. In the past, success meant creating a brand new, native crypto economy. Now, success has turned into serving the existing financial system.
The old money on Wall Street is scrambling to enter ETH ETFs, while Ethereum co-founders have jumped back into the US stock market to acquire listed company shells... Assets are moving out, coin stocks are linked, and Ethereum is gradually returning to $4,000 in the new market cycle.
The gameplay has changed, and so has the narrative.
In the past, the community was always searching for 'that' grand narrative that could define Ethereum; now, more and more people are beginning to accept a reality: maybe there is simply no single answer.
People no longer pursue a unified, all-encompassing story but allow multiple narratives to coexist. For DeFi users, Ethereum is financial infrastructure; for enterprises, it is a tool for crypto transformation; for creators, it is a copyright protection platform; for idealists, it remains the decentralized future.
Let Ethereum serve broader needs and attract a more diverse user base.
We just don't know whether this diversification is a sign of maturity or a symptom of being lost. A healthy ecosystem should indeed embrace diversity, but a platform lacking a core vision may lose its momentum for progress.
But in any case, the marginal effect of technological innovation is diminishing, and narrative innovation must continue.
When technology and narrative become decoupled, it is better to solve real problems than to invent new terminologies. Rather than promising to change the world, it is better to first improve the user experience. This pragmatic attitude, though not as exciting, may be more sustainable.
The spring breeze brings a cup of wine, while the night rain brings ten years of light.
From idealism to realism, from revolution to reform, from disruption to integration. Ethereum's decade may not be a betrayal of its original intention, but rather the cost of growth. After all, when the old story is finished, the new story can begin.
Perhaps what truly brings Ethereum to billions of users is not just what it can do, but what the real world chooses to do with it.
From vision to reality, from commitment to delivery, this may be the ultimate direction of Ethereum's narrative evolution. The gains and losses, advances and retreats, persistence and compromises in this process will define not only Ethereum but also the future of the entire crypto industry.
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