Sharplink CEO：以太坊護城河不在速度，百萬開發者才是王牌

Sharplink CEO points out: Ethereum’s true advantage is not its technical parameters, but the aggregation of millions of developers worldwide.
(Background recap: BitMine first stakes nearly 75,000 ETH! SharpLink unstakes over 35,000 ETH, but the CEO says: Ethereum’s TVL will grow 10x next year)
(Additional background: Ethereum’s “ten questions and ten answers” about MicroStrategy: analyzing the logic and holdings behind four major U.S. stock companies betting on ETH)

Table of Contents

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• Millions of developers: Not just numbers, but a talent pool
• The moat isn’t speed—it’s the builders’ choice
• Composability and standards: Advantages that are difficult to replicate

Amid the increasingly fierce competition in crypto infrastructure, after Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom returned from an inspection tour in Asia, he put forward a completely different perspective: Ethereum’s moat has never been about network speed or technical parameters—it lies in the decision of millions of developers worldwide to take root here. He observes that when new public chains keep touting they are “faster,” the real competitive focus has long shifted—where exactly are the top talents building their “houses”? This is not merely a numbers game; it is long-term ecosystem accumulation of culture, standards, and trust—making Ethereum the default operating system for financial Lego and native web capital.

Editor’s note: In the midst of competition among many new public chains claiming to be “faster,” Ethereum still firmly holds the top spot. After his Asia tour, Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom said that Ethereum has 1 million developers, which is its core competitive strength. He reiterated that competition in the crypto world is not only about network speed, but about “where the top minds choose to build their houses.” Backed by a deep cultural foundation, seamless “financial Lego,” and forward-looking plans in the face of technical challenges such as post-quantum computing, Ethereum has already moved beyond simple parameter comparisons and built a truly insurmountable moat. Below is the compiled translation of the original text:

I just returned from Asia. During that period, I had in-depth exchanges with Ethereum developers and ecosystem leaders. I would like to give special thanks here to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV in Seoul, as well as our friends in Hong Kong—SNZ—and the Ethereum community center that was just recently launched. This center is Asia’s first permanent physical Ethereum community space, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

What moved me most was not only the enthusiasm of the people, but also the rigorous attitude and ambitious aspirations demonstrated by the builders. I’m truly inspired, and I sincerely admire the projects, experiments, and long-term thinking emerging within the Ethereum ecosystem.

This also turns an originally abstract number into something concrete: according to Electric Capital, the number of lifetime Ethereum developers has now surpassed 1 million—specifically, 1,012,824 independent developers who have contributed to the ecosystem. In the crypto space, no other ecosystem is close to this scale.

Millions of developers: Not just numbers, but a talent pool

One million is an integer, and integers sometimes seem a bit unreal. But this number is absolutely not unreal. Behind it is the largest pool of technical talent in history, gathered around an open, permissionless blockchain network. More importantly, this talent pool is still continuing to deepen and expand.

Among these 1 million developers, about 232,000 have been active in the past 12 months.

For years, discussions in the Crypto field have always focused on speed, fees, and throughput. Every new chain claims it is “faster than Ethereum.” However, the most important question in Crypto has never been which chain is the fastest—it's a completely different question:

“Where will the best builders choose to develop long-term?”

On this point, Ethereum remains unique. This advantage is not only technical—it is also reflected in governance, culture, economics, and composition: the result of a decade of accumulation in areas such as developers, infrastructure, standards, tools, liquidity, research, applications, and social coordination, none of which can be replicated by any other ecosystem.

The moat isn’t speed—it’s the builders’ choice

Ethereum has become the default operating system for programmable finance and the formation of native web capital.

The reason one million developers are so crucial is, to the greatest extent, that they are currently tackling the difficult problems being surfaced. Today’s focus is on the industry’s most difficult and highest-risk issues: the scalability of the core protocol, privacy protection, post-quantum computing, and the intelligent system architectures that will run on top of it in the future.

• The Glamsterdam upgrade—innovating without breaking core principles. Scheduled for release in 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade shows how Ethereum can achieve technological leaps while protecting its core values. Its key transformation—including the separation mechanism for proposers and builders (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs), which are incorporated into the protocol—will unlock parallel execution capabilities and significantly increase throughput, while also potentially raising the Gas limit, thereby substantially expanding Layer1 capacity. While scaling for future demand, it steadfastly defends reliable neutrality, security, and MEV fairness—this is the moat that is already at work.
• Synchronous composability—making many Rollups feel like a single network. Composability has always been Ethereum’s superpower; the next major leap is extending it to all Layer2s. Native and “based” Rollups, together with synchronous composability, perfectly solve this problem. Contracts on one Rollup can directly call contracts on the mainnet or another Rollup in a single atomic transaction. No cross-chain bridges, no waiting. Collaborations involving Linea, Ethereum Economic Zone, Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation are integrating this design with real-time proofs. The final outcome is that dozens of Rollups no longer feel like isolated, separate networks, but begin to operate like a unified chain. This is the most powerful response to criticism about ecosystem fragmentation.
• Post-quantum computing resistance—Ethereum’s most notable leading advantage. In preparing for the post-quantum era, no mainstream ecosystem is more fully prepared than Ethereum. The “Lean Ethereum” roadmap, the dedicated post-quantum security team set up by the Ethereum Foundation in early 2026, the pq.ethereum.org center, and more than a dozen client teams that are already running weekly post-quantum interoperability developer testnets all come together into a coordinated, unified open-source migration targeted around 2029. When the real risk of quantum computing arrives, the institutions that custody assets worth tens of billions of dollars will only care about one thing: which chain has prepared the earliest and prepared the most thoroughly.

Because of Ethereum’s unique architectural approach, these developer talent teams generate a strong compounding effect. Its deepest network effect is not liquidity, but the depth of its composability. All kinds of applications are like financial Lego blocks that can be snapped together: lending, stablecoins, exchanges, wallets, tokenized assets, oracles, and Layer2 Rollups—all of which interact through shared standards. As a result, developers never need to start from scratch. EVM is the application layer in the Crypto world, and the Solidity skills that developers have mastered can be applied seamlessly across Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and hundreds of other networks.

Learning Ethereum’s technology stack maximizes optionality, which in turn drives a flywheel effect: attracting more developers, creating more tools, bringing more liquidity, attracting more institutions, and then attracting more developers to build composable protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds liquidity; composability breeds composability.

Composability and standards: Advantages that are difficult to replicate

Moreover, Ethereum leads not only where activity is the highest, but where true value is accumulated.

Three forces further strengthen this leading position:

• Reliable neutrality: Ethereum is secured by more than 900,000 validator nodes. By comparison, Solana has about 800. Large institutions place a significant premium on this level of decentralization and platform neutrality.
• Modularity: Rollups like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism have not led Ethereum toward fragmentation; instead, they extend it into a modular internet economic ecosystem that is increasingly tightly connected, while fully inheriting the security of the mainnet.
• Culture: Ethereum is especially attractive to the industry’s top researchers, cryptographers, and authors of EIP standards—the people who set the direction for the entire industry. This last advantage is the hardest of all advantages to replicate through a hard fork.

Simply creating activity on-chain is fundamentally different from being the long-term coordination layer trusted by the world’s largest financial institutions. In the minds of major asset owners who prioritize trust, security, and liquidity, Ethereum holds absolute dominance. During my time working at BlackRock, I witnessed all of this firsthand.

In technology markets, over time, ecosystems tend to converge and integrate around standards, liquidity, and mindshare of developers. This is Ethereum’s unsurpassable moat.

After exchanging ideas with these developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul and Hong Kong, I’m more convinced than ever of Ethereum’s competitive advantages. I saw the talent building the next generation of financial infrastructure—these are the future founders of our industry, and the architects of financial architecture. It is these people and these teams that will truly change the world.

Ethereum’s future is happening right now.