From Expectation to Reality: Ethereum's Ten-Year Commitment "Contrary to Past Facts"

Over the past decade, Ethereum’s path has formed a stark contrast to the expectations of the entire industry. While everyone is pursuing ultimate performance, pushing transaction speeds, and expanding ecological scale, Ethereum is making choices opposite to past facts — abandoning short-term efficiency and betting on long-term system stability. This seemingly “outdated” decision conceals a completely different set of value logic.

The Hidden Community Anxiety: The “Reverse Choice” Between Efficiency Pursuit and Stability

Recently, within the Ethereum ecosystem, there has been a clear cognitive divide. On one side are intensive technical discussions — progress in Rollup architecture, ZK solutions, Interop, Slot shortening, and more; on the other side are doubts about “whether the foundation is too conservative,” “why not be more aggressive,” and “poor token performance.” This ideological split fundamentally reflects two entirely different system design philosophies.

Many ask: Is Ethereum regressing? But if we look at the timeline, the answer is completely opposite to past facts.

In the past ten years, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown or rollback, maintaining uninterrupted operation 7×24×365. In contrast, many high-performance public chains (like Solana, Sui) have experienced multiple outages. This is not luck but stems from fundamental differences in design philosophy.

Other public chains have chosen a more direct route: reducing the number of nodes, raising hardware thresholds, centralizing ordering, to achieve extreme performance metrics and user experience. This strategy has indeed paid off in the short term — TVL soared, TPS broke records, narratives became hot. But at what cost? Sacrificing the system’s anti-fragility.

Ethereum’s logic is the opposite: it would rather endure seemingly insufficient performance in the short term to ensure the system remains trustworthy in the worst-case scenario. In other words, contrary to past facts, Ethereum’s slow appearance is not because it cannot go faster, but because it actively chooses to sacrifice short-term advantages for long-term survival.

Decoding “Alignment”: From Value Boundaries to Mutual Contracts

The key to understanding Ethereum is accepting a less popular but extremely important fact: Ethereum is not a “maximally efficient” system; its core goal is “trustworthy even in the worst case.”

Because of this, many seemingly technical issues within Ethereum are fundamentally value choices: Should we decentralize for speed? Should we introduce powerful nodes for throughput? Should we entrust security assumptions to a few for better user experience?

Ethereum’s answer is often no — contrary to past facts, this “not pursuing optimality” choice has become its strongest competitive barrier.

The recently controversial concept of “Alignment” stems from this. Some worry it could evolve into moral coercion or rent-seeking. In response, Vitalik Buterin published “Making Ethereum alignment legible” in September 2024, providing a clear reply:

If “alignment” means whether you have the right friends, then the concept itself has already failed.

Vitalik’s proposed solution is to break down alignment into three scrutinizable dimensions:

• Technical Alignment: Are you using Ethereum’s security consensus? Do you support open source and open standards?
• Economic Alignment: Are you promoting long-term ETH value capture rather than one-way extraction?
• Moral Alignment: Are you pursuing the public interest, or purely predatory growth?

From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test but a set of reciprocal social contracts. Ethereum allows chaos, competition, and fierce internal competition among L2s, but all these activities should ultimately feed back into the main chain that provides security, consensus, and settlement guarantees. This is why Ethereum’s ecosystem evolution is fundamentally different from other public chains.

Decentralization and Censorship Resistance: Misunderstood System Design Philosophies

Supporting these value boundaries are Ethereum’s two long-standing pillars: decentralization and censorship resistance.

In the Ethereum context, “decentralization” does not mean “more nodes are better” or “everyone should run a node,” but that the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant. Specifically, the protocol should not rely on a particular sequencer, coordinator, or company; meanwhile, node operation costs must be low enough so that ordinary people can verify whether the system is functioning according to rules.

Because of this, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware thresholds, bandwidth requirements, and state bloat — even if it impacts short-term performance metrics. Contrary to past facts, this “slow and meticulous” approach ensures verifiability and permissionless operation. A system that runs faster but cannot be verified by ordinary users has fundamentally lost the meaning of “permissionless.”

Another often misunderstood value is censorship resistance. From its inception, Ethereum assumed the world is not friendly: participants seek profit, power concentrates, external pressures will emerge. Therefore, censorship resistance does not mean “no one will ever censor,” but that even if someone attempts to censor, the system can continue to operate.

This explains why Ethereum places such importance on proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, and economic game design — not because they are elegant, but because they can guarantee system survival in the worst-case scenarios. When skeptics ask, “Will such extreme situations really happen in reality?” Ethereum’s answer is: if a system is only safe in an ideal world, then it’s not worth trusting in the real world.

The Cost and Reward of Long-termism

Many critics say Ethereum is “still discussing philosophy while others are already running.” But contrary to past facts, it is precisely these seemingly useless discussions that have helped Ethereum avoid repeated rebuilds. Whether it’s the Rollup-centric route, progressive integration of ZK, or Interop, fast confirmation, Slot shortening, all improvements follow the same premise: performance gains must incorporate existing safety and value assumptions.

This also explains why Ethereum’s evolution often appears “conservative yet steady.” Ultimately, it’s not about avoiding efficiency but refusing to exchange current short-term advantages for future systemic risks.

An interesting data point is that currently, the withdrawal queue for Ethereum PoS staking has almost emptied, while the staking entry queue continues to grow. Amid all controversy and doubts, many ETH still choose to lock in long-term. This perhaps speaks louder than any declaration — holders are voting with their actions, showing trust in Ethereum’s approach.

In an era where “efficiency / TVL first” dominates, the persistence contrary to past facts is becoming increasingly rare. And this rarity is precisely what Web3 must cherish and protect.