Despite the sluggish market, why does Ethereum still maintain the broadest moat?

As Bitcoin repeatedly hits new highs and altcoins take turns rising, Ethereum’s performance seems somewhat subdued. Many people begin to question: with its sluggish price movement and ongoing ecosystem debates, is Ethereum falling behind?

But a closer look reveals that the current controversies surrounding Ethereum are not due to a lack of technical capability, but stem from misunderstandings of its core value premises. Those seemingly “untimely” technical choices, those repeated debates about scaling, alignment, and decentralization—all point to the same fundamental question: What kind of system does Ethereum truly want to become?

Understanding the answer to this question may be far more valuable in the long term than chasing short-term price performance.

The “Degradation” Question Behind a Decade of Persistence

Recently, the Ethereum community has been anything but calm. Reflections on the Rollup roadmap, debates over the concept of “alignment,” comparisons with high-performance public chains—an atmosphere of stagnation and anxiety is spreading—not only about price decline but also about the development direction.

The question appears straightforward: while Solana sets new TPS records, Sui optimizes user experience, and other high-performance chains continuously improve, Ethereum is stuck in discussions about architecture splitting, execution outsourcing, cross-chain interoperability, and finality issues. This seems neither intuitive nor “clever.”

Thus, a sharp question emerges: Is Ethereum degrading?

To answer this, one cannot look only at recent two years of technical trends. The timeline must be extended—back to what Ethereum has truly persisted with over the past decade.

Over the past ten years, many emerging high-performance chains have taken a more direct route: reducing validator nodes, raising hardware thresholds, centralizing ordering and execution rights—to achieve extreme performance and user experience. Ethereum’s community judges that such speed often comes at the cost of system resilience.

A widely overlooked fact is that Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown or data rollback in its decade of operation, maintaining continuous 365×24-hour uptime. This is not “luck,” but stems from its design philosophy—since inception, Ethereum has prioritized whether the system can continue to operate under the worst conditions over raw performance metrics.

In other words, Ethereum’s current “slowness” is not due to lack of ability but a deliberate choice—it’s asking a more difficult question: when the network scales up, with more participants and harsher external environments, can the system still survive?

The so-called “ten-year itch” is essentially not degradation but a proactive acceptance of short-term performance compromises and market doubts for longer-term survival.

Dissecting “Alignment”: From Value Boundaries to Mutual Benefit and Coexistence

Therefore, the first step in understanding Ethereum is accepting an unappealing but crucial reality: Ethereum does not pursue “maximized efficiency” as its sole goal. Its core pursuit is not to run the fastest but to be “trustworthy even in the worst case.”

This means that many choices that seem purely technical are fundamentally value-based decisions:

• Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed?
• Should we introduce powerful permissioned nodes for higher throughput?
• Should we entrust security assumptions to a few for better user experience?

Ethereum’s stance has always been negative on these questions. This also explains why the community remains instinctively cautious about various “shortcuts”—“can it be done” always takes a backseat to “should it be done.”

Against this backdrop, “alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts recently. Some worry it might turn into a moral coercion label or a tool for power rent-seeking.

Vitalik Buterin candidly pointed out this risk in his article “Making Ethereum alignment legible”: “If alignment just means whether you hold the right political stance, then the concept itself has already failed.”

His proposed solution is not to abandon the idea of alignment but to make it explainable, decomposable, and discussable. Alignment should not be a vague political allegiance but broken down into three independently examinable attributes:

Technical Alignment: Does it use Ethereum’s security consensus mechanism? Does it support open-source and open standards?

Economic Alignment: Does it promote long-term ETH value capture or just extract value unilaterally?

Ideological Alignment: Does it pursue public interest-driven goals or merely exploitative growth?

From this framework, alignment is not a loyalty test but a social contract of mutual benefit and coexistence. The Ethereum ecosystem allows chaos, competition, and even fierce battles among Layer 2s; but ultimately, these activities should feed back into the base layer that provides security, consensus, and settlement guarantees.

This also explains why, despite sluggish prices, many ETH still choose long-term staking and locking—participants are voting with confidence in the system’s long-term prospects.

Protecting Permissionless Freedom: The Deep Meaning of Decentralization and Censorship Resistance

If “alignment” delineates the value boundary, then what truly sustains this boundary are Ethereum’s two long-standing pillars: decentralization and censorship resistance.

Many misunderstand “decentralization,” thinking more nodes are always better or that everyone must run a node. In Ethereum’s context, decentralization means: the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.

This implies that the protocol should not rely on a specific sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means that the cost of running a node cannot be so high that only institutions can participate, ensuring ordinary users can verify the system’s proper operation.

For this reason, Ethereum maintains long-term restraint on hardware requirements, bandwidth, and state bloat—even if it hampers some short-term performance metrics. In Ethereum’s logic, a system that runs fast but cannot be verified by ordinary people has fundamentally lost its “permissionless” meaning.

Similarly, “censorship resistance” is often misunderstood. Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. From the start, it assumes: participants may seek profit, power may concentrate, external pressures will arise. Therefore, censorship resistance does not mean “no one will ever censor,” but that even if someone attempts to censor, the system will not fail.

This explains why Ethereum emphasizes mechanisms like proposer-builder separation, decentralized block production, and economic game design—not because they are elegant, but because they can continue to protect the system under the worst conditions.

A common question is: “Do such extreme scenarios really happen in reality?”

The simple answer is: if a system is only safe in an ideal world, then it is not trustworthy in the real world.

Final Words

Critics often say Ethereum is “still discussing philosophy while others have already launched.”

But from another perspective, it is precisely these seemingly philosophical discussions that have helped Ethereum avoid repeated rebuilds. Whether it’s the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or innovations like interoperability, fast finality, and slot shortening—all are built on the same premise: all performance improvements must fit within existing security and value assumptions.

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

This steadfastness is the underlying spirit that has supported Ethereum through ten years. In an era dominated by “efficiency first, TVL reigns,” this may be the most scarce and precious thing in Web3—a wide moat worth defending.