Six Major Complaints from an Ethereum Developer

Author: Reid

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

When you don't want to blame those who have turned Ethereum into what it is today, you say, "ETH has received its deserved market cap limit." But the reason this limit is what it is now is due to specific individuals and specific dates, rather than some abstract coordination theory.

Before making accusations, let me make a statement. As an early financing participant, I am still developing on Ethereum. I respect its vision and liquidity.

At the same time, I am also a disgruntled holder who is stuck, and that is the point: this is an insider speaking the truth, not a Solana shill throwing stones from the sidelines.

Not in Power, Yet Retiring Honorably

At some point between 2021 and 2023, the discourse of the Ethereum Foundation shifted.

"We are building" turned into "We are infrastructure."

Vitalik shifted his focus from the Casper specification to articles about diversity, multiple identities, and network nations.

David Hoffman's portrayal of a "trustworthy, neutral, and generously giving noble image" is precisely the rhetoric that mature institutions use to justify ceding ground.

This is acting like an incumbent before even securing the position. In the market, your posture will lead to outcomes. Acting like a winner before winning is precisely why challengers take your job.

Ethereum has not yet won the chairmanship but has already acted like a retiring chairman, and the price chart accurately reflects this: since the merge, ETH has dropped about 65% against BTC.

Environmental Promotion is a Signal

The core marketing of the merge is a 99.95% reduction in energy consumption. Go check the Ethereum official website. This choice exposes the communication target of the Ethereum Foundation: they are speaking to their own conscience, not to the market. Institutions want returns. Developers want certainty. Users want cheaper transactions.

Promoting ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) instead of user experience indicates that Ethereum is answering questions that capital providers never even asked.

For years, ESG critics and climate activists have used carbon emissions issues to attack PoW. This attack has no effect on Bitcoin because it is unfounded, and more importantly, capital allocators simply do not care.

Ethereum spent its most significant narrative moment defending against a harmless attack instead of promoting speed and returns. Meanwhile, Solana is promoting speed.

Seven Years in the Making

Proof of Stake (PoS) has been on the roadmap since Ethereum launched in 2015. Vitalik was discussing the slasher algorithm as early as early 2014. The merge did not occur until September 15, 2022. It took seven years from the announcement, spanning two complete crypto cycles.

Solana launched its mainnet beta in March 2020. While Ethereum spent its most significant narrative window delivering PoS, Solana delivered wallets, multiple decentralized exchanges, aggregators, money markets, and the foundation of an alternative DeFi tech stack.

The cost is not only the passage of time on the calendar but also the dominance window needed for ETH to enter the 2021 bull market. By the time PoS was implemented, the debate between modularity and monolithic structures had become a hot topic, and Ethereum was no longer in a dominant position.

Lack of Native Staking User Experience

PoS is central to the argument of "ETH as currency." Issuance discipline. Native yield. Sound money.

Three years after the merge, the Ethereum Foundation still has not launched a first-party staking application suitable for ordinary users. The official route is: operate using command line tools on a completely offline computer, stake at least 32 ETH, and run and maintain a validator node yourself.

Users can only circumvent this through Lido, which still maintains a share of about 25%. Vitalik himself has pointed out this centralization risk.

Every asset that wants to become a currency has default custodial and yield pathways. Bitcoin has Bitcoin Core. The US dollar has banks. Yet ETH's most important currency characteristic lacks a standardized interface.

When an organization does not want to compete, it will say, "We do not pick winners." This is a constructive failure hidden beneath all other failures.

A Managed Decline

The rollup-centric roadmap clearly weakens the base layer. EIP-4844 will go live on March 13, 2024. The blob base fee will be at or near 1 wei for most of 2024 and 2025. Ethereum's quarterly fee revenue has dropped about 95% from the peak of $4.3 billion in Q4 2021.

Arbitrum's own marketing blog stated, "Arbitrum L2 occupies 90% to 98% of operating profit margins." By mid-2025, Base will account for about 70% of all rollup profits. Every major L2 has issued its own token, leading to severe fragmentation of capital flows within the Ethereum ecosystem.

This cannot be justified by architecture. From a revenue perspective, this is a strategic surrender. The timing of the base asset being hollowed out coincides with Solana proving that integrated L1 can capture fees and accumulate value for its native token. Modularity does sound elegant on slides.

Ideology Over Product Delivery

This is an uncomfortable topic. The vocabulary of the Ethereum Foundation is filled with philosophical meaning: trustworthy neutrality, public goods, secondary financing, diversity, regeneration, multiple identities. Ethereum culture values philosophical correctness over product victories.

Vitalik writes articles trying to distance this chain from financialization, while at that time, the only thing the market was willing to pay for was precisely financialization.

Call it "wokeness" or "academic capture," it doesn't matter what you call it. The essence is the same. Every successful consumer tech company optimizes for what users truly want, rather than pursuing philosophical purity.

The iPhone is closed. AWS is centralized. Uber once broke legal restrictions. Stripe ignored established standards. They delivered what users didn't even realize they wanted and built a moat.

Solana organizes around one question: what do users want, and how do we deliver it together? The ecosystem coordinates with each other, products combine, and value returns to the base asset.

Ethereum, on the other hand, organizes around philosophical purity.

One side is focused on doing the work, while the other side is engaged in empty philosophical discussions.

When you stop competing, you start calling yourself a "noble giver."

A Real Diagnosis

Dressing up the current downturn as a "decent fig leaf" is self-deception. The real essence is accumulated execution debt.

What hinders development is not a coordination issue. It is a delivery issue. Ethereum had an absolute structural advantage in 2021 but spent its best three years on governance debates; meanwhile, Solana efficiently collaborated as an ecosystem and priced the next L1 cycle without Ethereum's participation.

"ETH has received its deserved market cap limit" is correct. This deserved limit is simply below the expectations of the bulls and below my own expectations. The reasons behind it are specific execution failures, not some coordination theory.

Selling off because the logic "has already been realized" is a decent way to exit. The truly honest statement is: the sell-off is because Ethereum has given up fighting for asset appreciation.