Analysis of the Current Status and Future Prospects of the ETH Ecosystem Development

Recently, the Ethereum community has once again sparked a heated discussion about the development of ETH. The source of this discussion can be traced back to two aspects: first, the reactions from the Chinese community following Vitalik's interview, and second, the poor price performance of ETH compared to BTC and SOL. Regarding the current situation, I have some personal insights.

Overall, the long-term development prospects of ETH remain optimistic. There has not yet been a competitor that can directly compete with Ethereum in the market, as the core value of Ethereum lies in its "decentralized" nature within its "decentralized execution environment," rather than just the "execution environment" itself. This fundamental aspect has not fundamentally changed.

However, the ETH ecosystem is indeed facing some development bottlenecks at present, mainly reflected in two aspects:

First of all, the Restaking track has caused a diversion of resources for Layer 2. The Restaking mechanism itself cannot create incremental demand for ETH, resulting in difficulty for the application layer to obtain sufficient development resources and user attention, and promotion and user education efforts have come to a standstill.

Secondly, key opinion leaders in the Ethereum ecosystem are forming a relatively closed interest group. This phenomenon has led to the solidification of class mobility, a lack of sufficient incentives in the developer ecosystem, and insufficient innovation momentum.

The Impact of Restaking on Ethereum Ecological Resources

The official development roadmap of Ethereum has always focused on building a fully decentralized execution environment through sharding technology. In simple terms, it aims to create a distributed cloud platform that is not controlled by a single party. Applications can bid for computing and storage resources on this platform, with all resources regulated by market supply and demand.

Considering the technical complexity, the community ultimately chose the Rollup-Layer2 solution as the main development direction. In this architecture, applications can choose to build on independent Layer2s, while the Ethereum mainnet serves as the infrastructure for all application chains, providing data finality and information relay functions for the application chains.

However, the rise of the ETH Restaking track, represented by EigenLayer, has had a certain impact on Layer 2. Restaking provides applications with a "second consensus solution" that does not require the payment of main chain ETH costs, which directly affects ETH's value capture ability. For example, at the data availability (DA) level, Restaking offers new options, allowing applications to achieve data finality by purchasing AVS consensus without the need to use ETH.

This change transformed the DA market, which was originally dominated by Ethereum, into an oligopolistic competition market, weakening Ethereum's market pricing power and profits. More critically, Restaking has dispersed the valuable resources originally used for application promotion and market education, leading to a downturn in the entire ecosystem's value capture system.

Changes in Ethereum Ecosystem Influencers

Compared to other public chain ecosystems, the Ethereum ecosystem lacks actively engaged opinion leaders. Aside from Vitalik, it is difficult to find other influential leaders. This phenomenon partly stems from the early team's fragmentation and is also related to the solidification of internal hierarchies within the ecosystem.

Many early participants have achieved considerable gains through ecological growth, and they are starting to shift toward more conservative strategies. Maintaining the status quo is more attractive to them compared to actively promoting ecological expansion. This conservative tendency also explains why they often adopt a more cautious approach when promoting ecological development.

However, despite these challenges, the long-term development prospects of ETH remain promising. In its positioning as a "decentralized execution environment", "decentralization" is its core advantage, and this fundamental aspect has not changed. As long as resources can be effectively integrated and application development is promoted, the future of Ethereum remains bright.