Recently, if you’ve been following the Ethereum ecosystem closely, you may have felt a real sense of disconnect.
On one side are intense technical discussions—scaling roadmaps, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, shorter slots, and more.
On the other are arguments like “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant?”, “Why isn’t Ethereum more aggressive?”, and “Why is the price so weak?”—sometimes turning into emotional, polarized clashes.
Ultimately, these debates all point back to one deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum want to become?
Many disputes aren’t really about technical details—they stem from different understandings of Ethereum’s underlying values and assumptions. To understand why Ethereum makes choices some see as “out of sync,” we need to revisit those first principles.
1) Ethereum’s “ten-year itch”: Is Ethereum in decline?
The Ethereum community has been anything but calm lately.
From reassessing the Rollup-centric roadmap, to debating what “Ethereum Alignment” really means, to constant comparisons with high-performance chains—a quiet but steadily intensifying anxiety is spreading through the community.
It’s easy to see why.
While other chains keep setting new benchmarks—TPS, TVL, trending narratives, latency, UX—Ethereum keeps circling back to architecture splits, execution offloading, Interop, and finality. It feels neither intuitive nor crowd-pleasing.
Which raises a sharper question:
Is Ethereum “in decline”?
To answer that, we can’t judge by the past one or two years alone. We need to zoom out—to what Ethereum has consistently held onto over the last decade.
In recent years, many newer high-performance chains have taken a more direct path: fewer nodes, higher hardware requirements, and centralized ordering/execution—in exchange for peak performance and a smoother experience.
In the Ethereum community’s view, that kind of speed often comes at the cost of antifragility.
Here’s a widely overlooked but telling fact: over nearly ten years, Ethereum has never had a network-wide outage or rollback—and it has run continuously, 24/7/365.
That isn’t because Ethereum is “luckier” than Solana, Sui, and others—it’s because, from day one, it prioritized worst-case survivability over raw performance.
In other words, Ethereum looks slow today not because it can’t be faster, but because it keeps asking a harder question: when the network is larger, participants are more diverse, and conditions are more hostile, can the system still keep functioning?
From this perspective, the “ten-year itch” isn’t decline—it’s Ethereum choosing short-term discomfort and criticism to stay viable for the long haul.
2) Understanding “Ethereum Alignment”: Not taking sides, but defining boundaries
That’s why the first step to understanding Ethereum is accepting an inconvenient but crucial truth: Ethereum isn’t built solely to maximize efficiency. Its core goal isn’t to be the fastest—it’s to remain trustworthy even in worst-case conditions.
So in Ethereum’s context, many “technical” debates are really value choices: should we trade decentralization for speed? introduce highly privileged nodes for throughput? or hand security assumptions to a small group for better UX?
Ethereum’s answer is usually no.
This also explains the community’s near-instinctive caution about shortcuts: “Can we do it?” always comes after “Should we do it?”
Against this backdrop, “Ethereum Alignment” has become one of the most contested ideas. Some worry it could turn into a moral litmus test—or even a tool for rent-seeking.
This concern isn’t unfounded. In September 2024, Vitalik Buterin called out the risk directly in Making Ethereum Alignment Legible:
if alignment means having the right friends, then "alignment" as a concept has failed.
Vitalik’s solution wasn’t to abandon alignment, but to make it clearer and easier to break down and debate. In his view, alignment shouldn’t be a vague political stance; it should be a set of concrete, inspectable attributes:
- Technical alignment: Do you build on Ethereum’s security model and consensus? Do you support open source and open standards?
- Economic alignment: Over the long term, do you strengthen ETH’s value capture—rather than extracting value without giving back?
- Ethos alignment: Are you pursuing public benefit, rather than purely extractive growth?
From this angle, alignment isn’t a loyalty test—it’s a mutually beneficial social contract.
The Ethereum ecosystem can tolerate chaos, competition, and even fierce rivalry among L2s—but ultimately, that activity should flow back to the base layer that provides security, consensus, and settlement.
3) Re-examining “decentralization” and “censorship resistance”
If alignment sets the value boundaries, then two long-held pillars make those boundaries real: decentralization and censorship resistance.
In Ethereum’s context, decentralization doesn’t mean “more nodes is always better,” or that everyone must run a node. It means the system can function normally even if you don’t trust any single participant.
This means the protocol shouldn’t rely on any single sequencer, coordinator, or company. It also means running a node can’t become so costly that only institutions can do it—ordinary users still need to be able to verify the system is following the rules.
That’s why Ethereum has long kept hardware requirements, bandwidth needs, and state bloat in check—even if it slows short-term performance (Further reading, ZK Dawn: Is Ethereum’s Endgame Accelerating？”).
In Ethereum’s view, a system that’s blazing fast but can’t be verified by ordinary users has effectively lost what it means to be permissionless.
Another frequently misunderstood value is censorship resistance.
Ethereum doesn’t assume a friendly world. From the start, it assumes participants may be profit-driven, power may concentrate, and outside pressure will arise. So censorship resistance isn’t “no one will ever censor”—it’s ensuring the system still works even if someone tries.
That’s why Ethereum emphasizes proposer/builder separation, decentralized block building, and incentive-driven mechanism design—not because they’re “elegant,” but because they keep working under worst-case conditions.
People often ask: “Will things ever really get that extreme?”
Put simply: if a system is only safe in an ideal world, it isn’t worth entrusting with real value.
One more data point: Ethereum’s PoS exit queue is nearly cleared, while the entry queue keeps growing—now over 1.57 million ETH.
Even amid controversy and doubt, a large amount of ETH is still being locked into the system long term.
That may say more than any statement ever could.
In closing
Critics often say Ethereum is “still debating philosophy while others are already shipping.”
But seen differently, those debates are exactly what keeps Ethereum from repeatedly tearing everything down and rebuilding. The Rollup-centric roadmap, gradual ZK adoption, Interop, faster confirmations, shorter slots—all of it is pursued under one shared premise:
Every performance improvement must fit within Ethereum’s existing security and value assumptions.
That’s why Ethereum’s evolution can look “conservative on the surface, but resilient underneath.” It’s not anti-efficiency—it simply refuses to trade future systemic risk for short-term gains today.
And that spirit is what has carried Ethereum through a decade. In an era that worships “efficiency / TVL above all,” it may be one of the scarcest—and most worth protecting—things in Web3.