Ethereum: A Decade of Narrative Metamorphosis

Authors: Ada and David, TechFlow

At 3:26 PM on July 30, 2015, Ethereum's first block was successfully mined.

With this genesis moment, known as "Frontier," came an ambitious prophecy: the "world computer." Vitalik and early developers believed they were building not an upgrade to Bitcoin, but a global computing platform capable of running any decentralized application.

Ten years later, the Ethereum mainnet celebrates its tenth anniversary.

Examining Ethereum's trajectory, we find that this "world computer" has not, as anticipated, run a variety of decentralized applications. Instead, it has evolved into a settlement layer dominated by financial applications.

DeFi protocols account for the vast majority of gas consumption, with trillions of dollars in assets circulating on this network. Meanwhile, once-promising decentralized social, gaming, and storage applications have either vanished or migrated to other chains.

Is this narrative shift a compromise or an evolution?

Looking back at this juncture, the narrative shift around Ethereum over the past decade is not just a story about Ethereum itself, but also a story about how technological ideals find a foothold in the real world.

World Computer, the Golden Age of Idealism (2015-2017)

To understand the origins of Ethereum's narrative, we must return to the winter of late 2013.

While traveling in Israel, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin had a bold idea: What if blockchains could not only transfer money but also run arbitrarily complex programs?

The revolutionary nature of this idea lies in the fact that, for the first time, it expanded the blockchain from a specialized value transfer tool into a general-purpose computing platform.

But behind this initial vision lies a deeper cultural motivation.

The early Ethereum community was comprised of technical idealists who believed that "code is law." They weren't just building a new technical platform; they were attempting to create a new social paradigm—a digital utopia, free of centralized authority and governed entirely by code.

The narrative at the time revolved around "decentralization" and a "world computer" where code was law.

This wasn't just a technical ideal; it became a political statement and a philosophical position. Ethereum's early supporters believed that through smart contracts, they could reshape the rules governing society and create a fairer, more transparent, and trustless world.

This technological idealism is evident throughout Ethereum's early design. The Turing-complete virtual machine, gas mechanism, and account model—each technical choice reflects the values of "maximizing decentralization" and "maximizing universality."

On April 30, 2016, less than a year after the Ethereum mainnet launched, The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) officially launched its crowdfunding campaign.

This project perfectly embodied the idealism of the early Ethereum community: an investment fund with no management, no board, and controlled entirely by code. In just 28 days, The DAO raised 11.5 million ETH, representing 14% of the total ETH supply at the time and valued at over $150 million.

However, these ideals soon faced a harsh test of reality. On June 17th, an attacker exploited a recursive call vulnerability in The DAO's smart contract and stole 3.6 million ETH.

The ensuing debate tore the community apart. One side argued that, since code is law, the ETH obtained through exploitation was "legal," and any human intervention violated the core spirit of the blockchain. The other side argued that when the outcome clearly contradicted the community's shared will, a hard fork was necessary to correct the error.

Ultimately, the majority, led by Vitalik, opted for a hard fork, returning the stolen ETH to its original holders. This decision led to Ethereum's first major split, with a minority adhering to the "Code is Law" principle continuing to maintain the original chain, known today as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

This crisis revealed the inherent contradiction of technological idealism: complete decentralization could lead to unacceptable consequences, while any form of human intervention could be seen as a betrayal of the principle of decentralization.

This contradiction permeated Ethereum's entire development and laid the groundwork for subsequent narrative shifts.

ICOs: Lost in the Bubble (2017-2020)

At the end of 2016, no one could have foreseen how the impending ICO craze would change everything for Ethereum.

In the summer of 2017, the crypto world ushered in an unprecedented capital frenzy. The simple concept of an ICO (Initial Coin Offering)—raising funds by issuing tokens—captured the imagination of speculators worldwide. In 2017 alone, funds raised through ICOs exceeded $6 billion, and by the first half of 2018, that figure had soared to $12 billion. Ethereum, on the other hand, served as the coin issuance engine for many ICOs. Contracts were written, payment rules designed, token names and quantities were compiled, and one by one, tokens that required no real commitments were launched: A seemingly ambitious white paper, a story that evoked FOMO (fear of missing out), and a seemingly plausible token economic model. Ethereum, at the time, faced an unexpected identity crisis. Originally designed as a "world computer," it suddenly discovered that its greatest use was issuing tokens. This yawning gap between reality and vision marked the first major rupture in Ethereum's narrative.

Vitalik and early core developers envisioned a global computing platform for decentralized applications, but the market's response was: "We only need a simple ERC-20 standard for issuing tokens."

This simplification was not only technical but also cognitive. In the eyes of investors, Ethereum was no longer a revolutionary computing paradigm, but a money-printing machine.

The deeper issue is that the label of "token issuance platform" has begun to reversely shape the direction of Ethereum's development. When 90% of activity in an ecosystem is token-related, development priorities inevitably shift in this direction. EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) debated token standards far more than other application scenarios, and developer tools primarily revolved around token issuance and trading, leaving the entire ecosystem mired in a kind of "path dependency." If The DAO incident was a philosophical debate within idealism, the ICO craze was the first head-on collision between idealism and market realities. This collision exposed a fundamental contradiction in Ethereum's narrative: the vast gap between its technological vision and market demand. Then came the 2018 bear market. For Ethereum, this wasn't just a price collapse; it was a narrative collapse. When the ICO bubble burst, when the slogan of a "blockchain revolution" was no longer believed, Ethereum had to answer a fundamental question: If you're not the world computer, then what are you? The answer to this question gradually emerged amid the agonies of the bear market. A new narrative is gradually taking shape: Ethereum is first a financial settlement layer, and only then can it become a general-purpose computing platform.

This shift is also reflected in the technical roadmap. The design of Ethereum 2.0 has begun to prioritize the needs of financial applications—faster finality, lower transaction costs, and higher security. While official rhetoric still emphasizes "universality," the actual optimization direction is clearly oriented towards financial use cases.

The correctness of this choice will be tested in the next phase.

DeFi's Great Victory: When Finance Becomes Ethereum's Natural Mission (2020-2021)

For Ethereum, the DeFi Summer of 2020 was not just an application-layer explosion, but a complete shift in its identity.

If the 2017 ICO led to Ethereum's unexpected rise as a token issuance platform, then the success of DeFi has made the entire ecosystem realize that finance may not be a compromise for Ethereum, but rather its natural mission.

This shift in perception has been gradual.

Initially, DeFi was seen as just one of many experiments, alongside applications like gaming, social networking, and supply chains. But when Compound's liquidity mining ignited market enthusiasm, tens of billions of dollars poured into various DeFi protocols, and gas fees hit record highs driven by DeFi activity, an undeniable fact became apparent: Ethereum had found its product-market fit.

In the past, positioning Ethereum as a financial platform seemed like a "dimensionality reduction," a betrayal of the grand vision of a "world computer." But DeFi presents another possibility: finance itself is the most complex and valuable form of computation.

Every transaction, every settlement, every derivative is a complex computational process. From this perspective, becoming the "world's financial computer" isn't contradictory to becoming the "world computer," but rather different expressions of the same vision.

The explosion of DeFi has created a powerful positive feedback loop, continuously reinforcing Ethereum's narrative as financial infrastructure. With the surge in usage, the gathering of developers, and the gradual shift in voice, DeFi projects are gaining a stronger voice.

However, DeFi's success has also brought with it a serious practical problem: Ethereum's performance bottleneck.

When a simple token swap requires tens or hundreds of dollars in gas fees, Ethereum faces an existential crisis. This is no longer a question of "how to become the world's computer," but rather a practical question of "how to keep DeFi running."

This urgency has completely reshaped Ethereum's technical priorities. In the past, scaling was viewed as a long-term goal, allowing for the most elegant solutions to be explored slowly. However, the explosion of DeFi has made scaling a pressing issue. The Ethereum community has been forced to accept a reality:

The perfect solution can wait, but the market won't.

As a result, we've seen a series of pragmatic options emerge. Layer 2 is no longer a distant concept; it's an urgent solution that must be deployed immediately. While Rollup technology lacks decentralization, it can quickly alleviate congestion, earning the full support of core developers. The Ethereum 2.0 roadmap has also been recalibrated, prioritizing the features that will most benefit DeFi.

This technical shift is essentially a concrete manifestation of a narrative shift. Once Ethereum embraced its role as financial infrastructure, all technical decisions revolved around this core principle.

The Rise of Layer 2, Sovereignty Transfer, and Parasites (2021-2023)

Ethereum in 2021 faces a harsh reality: DeFi's success is killing it.

When simple transactions require wait times of several minutes and ordinary users are squeezed out by high costs, Ethereum's narrative faces a new crisis. The "global financial settlement layer" narrative is a beautiful one, but if only the wealthy can afford it, does that narrative still hold?

A deeper contradiction lies in the fact that Ethereum's success has exposed fundamental flaws in its architecture. As a monolithic blockchain, Ethereum attempts to handle everything on a single layer: executing computations, verifying transactions, storing data, and reaching consensus. This "all-in-one" design was an advantage in its early days, but it became a fatal weakness at scale.

Faced with this dilemma, the Ethereum community underwent a painful cognitive shift. A true world computer should be a modular, layered system, like the internet.

This shift was most clearly articulated in an article by Vitalik: "The future of Ethereum is modular."

This statement marks another major shift in the Ethereum narrative. From a "one chain to rule them all" to a "multi-layered, collaborative ecosystem," Ethereum has begun to accept a reality: a single blockchain cannot meet all needs, and the future belongs to specialized division of labor.

As Rollup solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism begin to carry an increasing number of transactions, a fundamental question emerges. If most activity occurs on Layer 2, what is the Ethereum mainnet?

In 2022, this issue manifested itself even more prominently in the context of data availability. As projects like Celestia propose dedicated data availability layers, the debate over data availability (DA) is raging on Ethereum's balance between openness and control.

Ethereum has always touted openness and decentralization, but when this openness threatens its position, the community's reaction becomes complex. Some have begun to use the concept of "Ethereum Alignment," attempting to maintain some form of control while maintaining openness.

Even more interestingly, this debate is changing the definition of success.

In the past, success meant that all activity took place on Ethereum. Now, success has been redefined: even if activity takes place elsewhere, as long as it ultimately requires Ethereum's security, it is a victory for the Ethereum ecosystem. This shift in definition reflects Ethereum's shift in thinking from "exclusive" to "symbiotic."

The Hundred-Chain War and the Defense of the "Legitimacy" Narrative (2023-2024)

A subtle but significant shift has occurred in the blockchain world in 2023: the new generation of public chains is no longer trying to be a "better Ethereum" but is instead telling a completely different story.

Solana no longer emphasizes being a "faster smart contract platform" but is positioning itself as the "Nasdaq of blockchain." Aptos and Sui no longer talk about "decentralization" but rather emphasize "Web2-level user experience."

For Ethereum, this shift presents both a relief and a challenge. The relief lies in no longer being caught in a performance arms race; the challenge lies in the fact that as competitors open up new battlefields, Ethereum's traditional advantages may become irrelevant.

The deeper question is: when "decentralization" is no longer the sole criterion for value, how much appeal does Ethereum's vaunted core value still hold?

The complexity of this narrative competition is most evident in Solana's resurgence.

After the FTX collapse in 2022, everyone thought Solana was finished. But in 2023, it staged a strong comeback, fueled by meme coins and low-cost transactions. This phenomenon reveals a disturbing truth for the Ethereum community: the market may not care about decentralization as much as they imagined.

Faced with the rise of new public chains, the Ethereum community's first reaction is to emphasize "legitimacy."

Ethereum's supporters point out the centralization issues, security risks, and technical compromises of these chains. But the market's response has been surprisingly cold. When users can complete transactions for a fraction of a cent, they don't seem to care whether the network is "decentralized enough."

When Ethereum attempts to explain its value through pragmatic language, it loses its moral high ground. "We're more secure" sounds far less inspiring than "We're building a decentralized future." While this secularized narrative may attract more mainstream users, it could also alienate core supporters.

To complicate matters, new public chains are beginning to define "decentralization" in reverse.

They argue that true decentralization should be accessible to ordinary people, not an elite network accessible only to the wealthy. When Solana users used this to criticize Ethereum's high gas fees, Ethereum fell into a self-imposed moral trap.

By early 2024, a disturbing trend became apparent: Ethereum's narrative became increasingly defensive. Much of the discussion was less about "what we're building" and more about "why we're better than other chains." This shift from offense to defense exposed Ethereum's innovation dilemma.

This defensive stance manifested itself in multiple ways.

Technical roadmaps increasingly responded to competitive pressures rather than internal vision, and community discussions were filled with criticism of other chains rather than self-reflection. Even Vitalik's writing increasingly focused on explanations and defenses, rather than the bold new ideas of his early days.

More seriously, this defensive mindset began to undermine the ecosystem's innovative vitality. Developers no longer asked "what is possible," but "what is safe." Investors no longer sought breakthrough innovations but "Ethereum killers' killers." The entire ecosystem fell into a state of involution, preoccupied with internal competition rather than external expansion.

The root cause of this situation lies in the exhaustion of its narrative. When the "world computer" proved too ambitious, the "DeFi settlement layer" too narrow, and the "modular blockchain" too technical, Ethereum lacked a new narrative to capture the imagination.

Narrative Reconstruction and the Future (2024-)

In 2024, as the crypto market once again searches for new growth drivers, RWAs (Real World Assets) emerge as the new savior. For Ethereum, this represents not only a new application scenario but also an opportunity to reframe its narrative. From "transforming finance" to "connecting reality," Ethereum seeks to tell a more pragmatic and mainstream story.

The appeal of Ethereum's RWA narrative lies in its concreteness.

It's no longer the abstract concept of "decentralized finance," but rather "turning your US Treasury bonds into tradable tokens." It's no longer about "permissionless innovation," but about "reducing friction costs in cross-border trade." This shift from idealism to pragmatism reflects the Ethereum community's new understanding of market needs.

More subtly, the RWA narrative has shifted the definition of success. In the past, success meant creating a new, native crypto economy. Now, success has become serving the existing financial system.

Old money on Wall Street is rushing to invest in ETH ETFs, while Ethereum's co-founder is jumping back into the US stock market to acquire publicly traded shell companies... With assets expanding beyond the cryptocurrency market and crypto-stock synergy, Ethereum is gradually returning to $4,000 in a new market cycle.

The gameplay has changed, and so has the narrative.

In the past, the community was always searching for "that one" grand narrative that would define Ethereum; now, more and more people are beginning to accept the reality that perhaps there isn't a single answer.

Rather than pursuing a unified, all-encompassing story, we're allowing multiple narratives to coexist. For DeFi users, Ethereum is financial infrastructure; for businesses, it's a tool for crypto transformation; for creators, it's a platform for copyright protection; and for idealists, it remains the decentralized future.

Let Ethereum serve a wider range of needs and attract a more diverse user base.

We don't know yet whether this diversification is a sign of maturity or a symptom of loss. A healthy ecosystem should embrace diversity, but a platform lacking a core vision may lose momentum.

Regardless, the marginal impact of technological innovation is diminishing, while narrative innovation must continue.

When technology is decoupled from narrative, instead of inventing new terms, it's better to solve real problems. Instead of promising to change the world, it's better to improve the user experience first. While this pragmatic approach may not be thrilling, it may be more sustainable.

A cup of wine in the spring breeze, a decade of lanterns in the rain.

From idealism to realism, from revolution to reform, from disruption to integration. Ethereum's decade isn't necessarily a betrayal of its original aspirations, but rather the price of growth. After all, only when the old story ends can the new begin.

Perhaps, what truly brings Ethereum to billions of users isn't just what it can do, but what the real world chooses to do with it.

From vision to reality, from promise to delivery, this may be the ultimate direction of the Ethereum narrative's evolution. The gains and losses, advances and retreats, persistence and compromises along the way will define not only the future of Ethereum, but the future of the entire crypto industry.