Six Major Complaints of an Ethereum Developer

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Author: Reid

Translation: Jiahui, ChainCatcher

When you don't want to blame those who have made Ethereum what it is today, you'll say "ETH has reached its deserved market cap limit." But this limit, as it stands now, is backed by specific people and specific dates, not some vague coordination theory.

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

At the same time, I am also a frustrated holder who is trapped, and this is the key point: this is an insider speaking honestly, not a Solana hype party throwing stones from outside.

No power, no glory

Sometime between 2021 and 2023, the discourse system of the Ethereum Foundation shifted.

"Building" became "We are infrastructure."

Vitalik's focus shifted from Casper standards to articles about diversification, multi-identity, and network states.

The set of "trustworthy, neutral, generous" images in David Hoffman's article is precisely the rhetoric mature institutions use to defend their turf when ceding ground.

This is the posture of someone who hasn't yet secured their position but is already acting like a ruler. In the market, your stance leads to results. Acting like a winner before winning is exactly why challengers can take your place.

Ethereum hasn't yet secured the chairmanship but already treats itself as a retired chairman, and the price charts reflect this accurately: since the merge, ETH's price relative to BTC has fallen about 65%.

Environmental promotion is a signal

The core marketing message of the merge is reducing energy consumption by 99.95%. Check out the Ethereum official website. This choice reveals Ethereum Foundation's target audience: they are speaking to their conscience, not the market. Institutions want profits. Developers want certainty. Users want cheaper transactions.

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

For years, ESG critics and climate activists have attacked PoW over carbon emissions. This attack is ineffective against Bitcoin because it’s baseless; more importantly, those allocating capital don't care.

Ethereum has spent its most significant narrative window defending a harmless attack rather than promoting speed and returns. Meanwhile, Solana is promoting speed.

Seven years of delays

Proof of Stake (PoS) has been on Ethereum's roadmap since its 2015 launch. Vitalik was discussing the slasher algorithm as early as early 2014. The merge only happened on September 15, 2022. Seven years from launch, experiencing two full crypto cycles.

Solana launched its mainnet testnet in March 2020. While Ethereum spent its largest narrative window delivering PoS, Solana delivered wallets, multiple decentralized exchanges, aggregators, money markets, and an alternative DeFi stack.

The cost was not only the passage of calendar time but also the missed window for ETH to enter the 2021 bull market. By the time PoS was implemented, debates over modular versus monolithic architecture had become hot topics, and Ethereum was no longer dominant.

Lack of native staking user experience

PoS is the core argument for "ETH as money." Issuance discipline. Native yields. Sound currency.

Three years after the merge, Ethereum Foundation still hasn't launched a first-party staking app suitable for ordinary users. The official method is: operate via command-line tools on a completely offline computer, deposit at least 32 ETH, and run and maintain a validator node yourself.

Users can only go through Lido, which still accounts for about 25%. Vitalik himself pointed out this centralization risk.

Every asset aiming to be money has default custodial and yield options. Bitcoin has Bitcoin Core. The US dollar has banks. But ETH, with its most important monetary feature, lacks a standardized interface.

When an organization doesn't want to compete, it says, "We don't pick winners." This is a hidden form of constructive failure beneath all other failures.

A managed decline

The roadmap centered around rollups explicitly weakens the base layer. EIP-4844 goes live on March 13, 2024. Blob base fees will be at or near 1 wei for most of 2024 and 2025. Ethereum's quarterly fee revenue has dropped about 95% from its peak of $4.3 billion in Q4 2021.

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

This cannot be justified by architecture. From a revenue perspective, it’s a strategic surrender. The moment the underlying assets are drained coincides with Solana proving that integrated L1s can capture fees and accumulate value for their native tokens. Modularization sounds elegant in slides.

Ideology over product delivery

This is an uncomfortable topic. The vocabulary of the Ethereum Foundation is full of philosophical meaning: trustworthy neutrality, public goods, quadratic funding, diversification, regen, multi-identity. Ethereum culture favors philosophical correctness over product victory.

Vitalik writes articles trying to distance this chain from financialization, but at the time, the only market willing to buy into that was precisely the financialization.

Call it "awakening" or "academic capture," it’s all the same. Every successful consumer tech company optimizes for what users truly want, not philosophical purity.

The iPhone is closed. AWS is centralized. Uber broke legal restrictions. Stripe ignores established standards. They deliver things users even didn't realize they wanted, building moats.

Solana organizes around a question: what do users want, and how do we deliver it together? Ecosystems coordinate, products interoperate, and value returns to the base assets.

Ethereum, on the other hand, is organized around philosophical purity.

One side is busy working; the other is talking philosophy.

When you stop competing, you call yourself a "noble giver."

Honest diagnosis

Polishing the current decline as a "decent cover-up" is self-deception. The real issue is accumulated execution debt.

The obstacle to development isn't coordination problems. It's delivery issues. In 2021, Ethereum had absolute structural advantages but spent its best three years on governance debates; meanwhile, Solana, as an ecosystem, collaborated efficiently and completed the next L1 cycle's valuation without Ethereum's involvement.

"ETH has reached its deserved market cap limit" is correct. That limit is just lower than what bulls expected, and lower than my own expectations. The reason behind it is specific execution failures, not some coordination theory.

Selling because the "logic has been fulfilled" is a decent way to exit. The honest truth is: selling is because Ethereum has given up fighting for asset appreciation.