Piercing through the noise of "degeneration": Why is "Ethereum's values" the broadest moat?

Article by: imToken

In recent times, if you’ve been paying close attention to the Ethereum ecosystem, you might feel a sense of disconnection.

• On one side are intense discussions about scalability routes, Rollup architecture, Interop, ZK, PBS, Slot shortening, and other technical topics;
• On the other side are debates around questions like “Is the Ethereum Foundation arrogant,” “Why aren’t they more aggressive,” “Why is the token price sluggish,” and even emotional confrontations;

These discussions repeatedly point to a deeper question: What kind of system does Ethereum truly want to become?
In fact, many disputes are not rooted in technical disagreements but stem from different understandings of Ethereum’s “value premises.” Only by returning to these premises can we truly understand why Ethereum has made choices that many consider “out of date” today.
1. Ethereum’s “Ten-Year Itch”: Is Ethereum Degenerating?
Recently, the Ethereum community has been anything but calm.
From reflecting on the route centered around Rollups, to debates about the “Alignment” concept, and comparisons with high-performance public chains, an undercurrent of “Ethereum anxiety” is quietly spreading.
This anxiety is understandable.
While other public chains continuously improve TPS, TVL, trending narratives, latency, and user experience metrics, Ethereum remains focused on discussions about architecture splitting, execution outsourcing, interoperability, and finality—topics that are neither immediately intuitive nor easy to sell.
This also raises a sharper question: Is Ethereum “degenerating”?
To answer this, one cannot just look at recent one or two years of technical routes but must zoom out to a longer time horizon—returning to what Ethereum has truly persisted with over the past decade.
In fact, over the past few years, many emerging high-performance chains have taken a more direct approach: reducing node counts, raising hardware thresholds, centralizing ordering and execution to achieve maximum performance and user experience.
From the Ethereum community’s perspective, such speed often comes at the cost of sacrificing resilience.
A frequently overlooked but highly illustrative fact is that, in nearly ten years of operation, Ethereum has never experienced a network-wide shutdown or rollback, maintaining 7×24×365 continuous operation.
This is not because Ethereum is luckier than Solana, Sui, or others, but because from the outset, it prioritized whether the system could continue operating under the worst conditions over raw performance metrics.
In other words, Ethereum today may seem slow, not because it cannot be faster, but because it is always asking a harder question—when the network scales up, with more participants, and in less friendly environments, can this system still operate?
From this perspective, the so-called “Ten-Year Itch” is not Ethereum degenerating but actively enduring short-term discomfort and skepticism for the sake of longer-term survival.
2. Understanding “Ethereum Alignment”: Not a Faction, but Boundaries
Because of this, the first step in understanding Ethereum is accepting a crucial, albeit unpopular, fact: Ethereum is not a system with “maximized efficiency” as its sole goal. Its core aim is not to run the fastest but to remain “trustworthy even in the worst case.”
Therefore, many seemingly technical issues within Ethereum are fundamentally value choices:
Should we sacrifice decentralization for speed?
Should we introduce powerful nodes to increase throughput?
Should we delegate security assumptions to a few users for better user experience?
Ethereum’s answers are often no.
This also explains why within the Ethereum community, there is an almost instinctive caution towards shortcuts—“Can we do it” always takes a backseat to “Should we do it.”
It is in this context that “Alignment” has become one of the most controversial concepts recently, with concerns that it might turn into a form of moral coercion or a tool for rent-seeking.
In fact, such concerns are not unfounded. As early as September 2024, Vitalik Buterin explicitly pointed out this risk in “Making Ethereum alignment legible”:

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

Vitalik’s proposed solution is not to abandon alignment but to make it explainable, decomposable, and discussable. In his view, alignment should not be a vague political stance but broken down into a set of attributes that can be scrutinized:

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

From this perspective, alignment is not a loyalty test but a social contract of mutual benefit and coexistence.
The Ethereum ecosystem allows chaos, competition, and even fierce internal competition among L2s; but ultimately, these activities should feed back into the core system that provides security, consensus, and settlement.
3. The Reflection on “Decentralization” and “Censorship Resistance”
If “alignment” defines the boundary of values, then what truly sustains this boundary are Ethereum’s two long-standing pillars: decentralization and censorship resistance.
First, in the context of Ethereum, “decentralization” does not mean more nodes are always better, nor does it mean everyone must run a node. It means that the system can operate normally without trusting any single participant.
This implies that the protocol should not rely on a single sequencer, coordinator, or company; it also means that node operation costs should not be so high that only professional institutions can run them, ensuring ordinary people can still verify that 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 this slows down some short-term performance metrics (see also “ZK Roadmap ‘Dawn’: Is Ethereum’s Finality Roadmap Accelerating?”).
In Ethereum’s view, a system that is fast but cannot be verified by ordinary users essentially loses the meaning of “permissionless.”
Another often misunderstood value is censorship resistance.
Ethereum does not assume the world is friendly. On the contrary, from its design, it presumes participants may seek profit, power may concentrate, and external pressures will inevitably arise. Therefore, censorship resistance does not mean “no one will ever censor,” but rather that even if someone attempts to censor, the system will not fail because of it.
This is why Ethereum places great importance on mechanisms like proposer/builder separation, decentralized construction, and economic game design—not because they are elegant, but because they can keep the system running under the worst conditions.
In many discussions, people ask: “Do such extreme scenarios really happen in reality?”
But at the end of the day, if a system is only safe in an ideal world, then it is not trustworthy in the real world.
Finally, to close with an interesting data point: currently, the queue for ETH staking withdrawals on PoS is nearly empty, while the queue for staking deposits continues to grow (over 1.57 million ETH).
Despite controversy and skepticism, a large amount of ETH remains locked in this system long-term.
Perhaps this speaks more than any declaration.

A Final Note
Many critics say Ethereum is always “discussing philosophy after others have already started.”
But from another perspective, it is precisely these discussions that have helped Ethereum avoid repeatedly starting over—whether it’s the Rollup-centric roadmap, the gradual introduction of ZK, or interoperability, fast finality, and slot shortening—all are based on a fundamental premise:
All performance improvements must be compatible with existing security and value assumptions.
This explains why Ethereum’s evolution often appears “conservative but steady.” Ultimately, it is not that Ethereum does not pursue efficiency but that it refuses to exchange current short-term advantages for future systemic risks.
And this is the underlying spirit that has supported Ethereum’s ecosystem through ten years—also the most scarce and valuable aspect to protect in an era obsessed with “efficiency/TVL.”