[This post is NOT taking part in the Lens x Kiwi Writing Contest, because I'm one of the co-organizors. I still wanted to write down my thoughts.]
gm newbies,
ETHEREUM IS DYING! PARASITES FEED ON ITS INTESTINES. WE ONCE HAD A GOOD BUSINESS, WE SOLD EXPENSIVE BLOCK SPACE TO THE GREATEST! NOW ALL IS LOST! OUR PRICE TO EARNINGS ARE REKT. DUDES, IT'S FUCKING OVER. SEND IT ALL TO ZERO. WE WON'T RECOVER, SOLANAFICATION IS IMMINENT!!!
...OK hold on a second though. You probably already get enough of this sentiment on X, so let's NOT repeat it here. Instead, let me tell you a personal story...
You may not know that about me, but I have been one of the earliest technical people to work on blockchain scaling. Right around the block size wars I worked on a private blockchain project that sadly overpromised but underdelivered. Shortly after, I worked on one of the first implementations of Minimum Viable Plasma, the precursor to modern rollups. In fact, the virtual machine my Plasma team employed was the precursor to what today is known as the OVM, the Optimism Virtual Machine.
But on social media, the story of Ethereum's scaling is often misconstructed with people saying that "L2s are not Ethereum" and so on. Their idea is that Ethereum is this ugly and in-elegant design and that substitude block space like Solana manage to solve the problem more beautifully and with greater efficiency for users. And don't get me wrong! I do think these claims have substance and as the Ethereum community we should take them seriously. Yet, to me there is a deeper truth known, which is often missed by these commentators, maybe because they haven't been around long enough. And so I feel obligated to tell the account of events from my side.
First and foremost, up until the merge it was an obvious goal for everyone in the community to get rid of Proof of Work as a leader election mechanism. It has an insanely negative externality. A delayed switch to PoS would have meant causing more irrevocable environmental damage. But there's no planet B!
But what's important to contextualize is that the upgrade replacing Proof of Work was first called "Ethereum 2.0." It was later renamed to "The Merge."
I still vividly remember the cognitive dissonance me and my colleagues were experiencing when we read comments about "Ethereum 2.0" on reddit. We thought WE were doing the lord's work (in the trenches) by figuring out how to get our users to bridge funds onto our Plasma bridge. In the meantime we also struggled to pay rent! But back then Plasma and rollups hadn't been recognized as the widely-understood scaling solution yet. Between ourselves we would always joke that our work was the actual "Ethereum 2.0!" And it turned out to be true.
Our Plasma L2 would only work with Metamask. Frankly there weren't any other notable wallets anyways. But back then the RPC picker that many wallets later introduced hadn't been invented yet. So every one of our transactions was just an arbitrary string proposed by the dapp to Metamask. It was hella confusing and no wallet provider, especially not the busy folks at Metamask would answer our calls to improve the UX. Which is probably also why we never succeeded with the project. Gladly though, our colleagues at the Plasma Group (an earlier name of Optimism) and Polygon managed to run with the ideas of that time. They succeeded into much bigger projects than I could have ever imagined.
Yet, the future of Ethereum currently looks uncertain. I even need to admit this as an Ethereum bull. In the words of our haters, "we've gone from a software platform with very precious and highly demanded compute to a 200B USD semi-scam with unclear business model." I myself have tried to value invest into Ethereum, and so I have looked at price to sales as a proxy for its success. I was one of the loudest to protest the move to blob space! I knew that withdrawing from calldata would make L1 block space less demanded and hence Ether less desirable as an investment. Talk about an innovator's dilemma!
Yet I do think that the Ethereum haters have one blind spot when it comes to evaluating us as a project. It might be true that Solana is more beautifully architected. Maybe it also has fewer UX problems! But our haters often like to put on the financial nihilism glasses. They must have gotten those as merch at some non-Ethereum conference.
Yet, Ethereum is not a financially nihilistic project. Ethereum didn't bail out the DAO. It delivered its Proof of Stake promise. And it didn't give into the centralization-pressure during 2020 and 2021. It's mission is what makes Ethereum Ethereum. Its founder has always made sure to deliberately grow a community of missionary optimists. He has done so sometimes at the cost of opportunity but, at least from what I can tell, always with the best intentions.
Hence, to pick up on the core criticism from these Ethereum haters, namely that the layer 2s will pick apart Ethereum, feed on its revenue, launch their own tokens, abolish Ether and that they'll become parasites leeching on the project's culture and members, my response to this is: "Every accusation is also an admission!" Ethereum is, and has always been, a vision for a nation of internet citizens as much as the European Union or the United States are containers of values, projects of visions and vessels of collaborations for many stake holders and peoples. It would be ridiculous to say that any of these states are parasitic to the union. And vice versa, California is not going to become the United States just because its economy is the biggest.
What would even be the point of abandoning Ethereum and don't we already have a list of failed projects who tried this? A Schelling Point is a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication. Ethereum is the Schelling Point for all rollups and for everyone wanting to build a system that can set us free. The beauty of rollups today is that we don't have to cram this diverse world of applications into a single layer. But that different interest groups can serve each other in the ways that they prefer, while still being able to build bridges between groups. The plural nature of Ethereum's vision is what's going to make layer 2s collaborate. The common knowledge that if I commit to Ethereum, then Ethereum will commit to me, is what will keep our interactions positive sum. This always has been true, always will be.
If you're a newbie, don't believe everything you hear on social media. Listen to the people you've met and those who you've learned to trust.