Today, 9 years later, Ethereum seems to be facing controversy in the community again, with both sides arguing fiercely. In fact, this is not the first time. I am honored to have entered this industry at the beginning of the second year after the birth of Ethereum, and therefore I have personally experienced the biggest crisis since the birth of Ethereum.

I believe that many elderly people have experienced that crisis. Compared with today's community atmosphere, that crisis was real. Many developers and holders did not sleep for several days.

The end of Friday.

That day was June 17, 2016, which was a Friday if I remember correctly. Like everyone else, we were supposed to finish a tiring week at work, but we received a message push from the work group. When we saw the ETH price on the exchange, I believe everyone was almost scared to death.

Later, following the discussion, I found Vitalik’s post on Reddit. The content was brief and direct, saying that the DAO project in which Ethereum participated was attacked and a lot of ETH was stolen. Then all centralized exchanges received emails and contacts, asking them to stop ETH trading and deposits and withdrawals. So everyone worked overtime that day waiting for the next notification from Ethereum officials.

What’s interesting is that when I looked at the comment section of the Reddit post, most people were making fun of Ethereum, especially the Bitcoin holders at the time, who made detailed comments on the design and flaws of Ethereum.

During those days, except for a few Ethereum holders who continued to believe in Ethereum, basically, when you opened the QQ group, you would see only very aggressive comments.

But fortunately, due to some previous designs, hackers cannot withdraw the stolen assets directly, and need to wait more than 20 days before they can withdraw the funds. Therefore, everyone is waiting for the official next notification.

Subsequently, Vitalik published an announcement on the Ethereum blog, which roughly meant that we were going to fork in order to save Ethereum and to prevent hackers from getting 14% of the total ETH.

But at that time, whether it was the holders or us as the exchange, everyone had some ETH in their hands, so the vast majority of holders in the community supported this fork. Everyone in the exchange also joined in the attention and discussion of this event and cooperated with the final fork.

After that incident, many community opinion leaders made suggestions for the future development of Ethereum. I remember the one that impressed me the most was that the Ethereum Foundation should not be overly involved in a project, but should remain neutral and only fund the development of some basic frameworks.

Perhaps after that incident, the foundation has always been in a relatively neutral role, rather than personally participating in and calling for some projects like other public chains, and then making the coin price perform better.

Eight years later, I still believe that many decisions made by the Ethereum Foundation today, including Vitalik’s, are deeply influenced by that incident.

The end of the ICO.

The second major controversy about Ethereum was the end of the ICO boom in 2017 and 2018. Before the ICO boom, ETH holders were still very scattered. As more and more projects raised ETH to distribute their own tokens, a lot of ETH that should have been active was concentrated in the hands of many project parties.

Many of these project owners have no faith in blockchain. They are just passers-by who follow the trend or are forced by investors to issue coins in this field. Therefore, after obtaining ETH, these people directly sell it for cash. Some of them find that the price of ETH has been low after the decline, so they are unwilling to wait and sell the coins directly.

At that time, the community also erupted in criticism of Ethereum. The biggest point of view was: the biggest use of smart contracts is to issue coins, but if the market is not good, no one will issue coins, and Ethereum will be useless.

I still remember that time, when I opened Etherscan, 9 of the top 10 contract applications that burned the most gas were related to on-chain gambling or scams. The design of most of these applications was also very interesting. They would put an Ethereum address on the website, and there would be a probability that more ETH would be returned when you called it, and then they would wait until the website ran away. Everyone thought that they would not be the last one.

During that wave, in addition to Fud, the community’s movement targeting Ethereum, some ETH believers also sold their tokens and bought EOS or TRON. More people bought EOS because in addition to the blueprint drawn by the founder, the node voting of EOS at that time was also very pyramid-like, which caused many holders who could not stand the low price of ETH to leave.

But in hindsight, ETH won. The founder of EOS also started a new project. Some bloggers expressed similar views today, saying that if you sold ETH to buy XXX at this time, it would be equivalent to selling ETH to buy EOS that year.

I will not comment on this because the two sides of the community are arguing too fiercely.

The end of the DeFi era.

The third major controversy about Ethereum, which I believe many of you have experienced, was the collapse of DeFi in 2022. At that time, as the price of ETH fell sharply, those who opened leverage or bet on the chain were waiting in line to be liquidated.

As a result, many voices emerged in the community, that is, as the liquidation becomes more severe, will ETH fall more, and the more ETH falls, will the liquidation be more severe.

Fortunately, ETH has reached more than $900, which is also the safety line for many institutions and low-leverage participants. Compared with the 312 wave in 2020, many people have bought cheap ETH this time, so I think it is good to have more industry participants, and there will be more potential bargain buyers.

Then, various Layer2s came onto the scene, ETH staking started again, and then came ReStaking, parallel EVM, etc. that we know today.

At that time, there was actually not much discussion about Ethereum’s Fud. I think there are three reasons: first, other public chains except Ethereum were also in a miserable state; second, the foundation and leading institutions in the industry had strong directional guidance at the time, which had a positive effect on ETH holders’ confidence in the coin price; third, there were more people scolding FTX than those scolding Ethereum, and the criticism of Solana at that time was much more severe than that of ETH now.

Therefore, that was the time window for the Ethereum dispute with the shortest time and it was also the most peaceful. Many developers continued to build their own projects, the ecosystem was still relatively prosperous, and holders were willing to actively stake their ETH.

Until many expectations are fulfilled and the Meme season arrives.

The slump in currency prices.

This is the fourth time I have personally experienced the controversy over Ethereum. Is there any problem with Ethereum itself? No, first, it has not been stolen, second, the price of the currency is still fluctuating normally, and third, the infrastructure is still operating.

However, after many of our overly anticipated expectations were realized, the market did not give us the results we wanted, which also led to dissatisfaction in the community. Many people participated in projects supported by Vitalik or members of the foundation, but found that the results were not as expected after implementation. Some founders were also dug out and had luxurious experiences of traveling and attending conferences, which was in sharp contrast to the startup appearance before financing.

Some Ethereum projects are also being pushed up in the process of increasing their valuations, and early investors are taking profits and leaving the market OTC. I believe that many Chinese communities and bloggers have more or less helped to share the burden and digest the transfer shares of these highly valued projects.

Did the project owner know about this? Maybe they knew, or maybe they didn’t, but they couldn’t interfere. After all, the $1 million Seed share was split into 100 shares, and the organization sold them to KOLs and the community at a higher price. No one could verify this with the project owner. However, due to the organization’s popularity, no one would question this when signing the transfer agreement.

In addition, many early investors who once supported Ethereum were absent in this controversy. Of course, I can understand why this happened, because they also want to sell ETH to support their own business development, such as opening a compliant exchange, investing in immigration to Singapore, and making larger investments.

Therefore, today’s Ethereum does lack the supporters in the community like it did in the past, but looking back at the three community disputes in the past, especially the one with the most intense sense of crisis, Ethereum has come through them smoothly.

In fact, as a participant in crypto, I personally support strong discussions in the community, because every time this phenomenon occurs in history, there is often a new turning point in the industry, and a new narrative will follow.

Ultimately, the market comes down to price and position, so let's keep the discussion going, there's nothing wrong with that.