The Battle of Public Chains: Ethereum's Persistence and Challenges

In recent years, the competition among public chains has been ongoing, mainly due to the shortcomings of Ethereum in terms of network efficiency, transaction fees, and scalability. Although numerous "Ethereum killers" have emerged, Ethereum has maintained its unique position so far. With the explosion of the DeFi craze, a series of new platform public chains have also come into competition, which can be seen as a kind of fork in public chains.

A Review of Early Public Chain Competition

The early competition among public blockchains mainly focused on addressing issues such as Ethereum's network congestion, high transaction fees, and limited scalability. Various public blockchain projects emphasized their own characteristics in an attempt to solve Ethereum's various shortcomings. However, when the speculation frenzy subsided, many projects found that the actual demand was not as expected, ultimately leaving behind only marginalized tokens.

In this competition, all parties were once full of confidence. However, as time passed, people gradually realized that the development paths of Bitcoin and Ethereum are to explore and create a new type of game system for human society based on decentralization. In contrast, other public chain projects often exaggerate certain demands excessively, deviating from the core principles of decentralization.

The Core Genes of Ethereum

Ethereum inherits the most critical feature of Bitcoin - trustworthiness. The success of Bitcoin is by no means accidental; it utilizes a combination of existing technological tools to design a completely new mechanism aimed at solving the issues of decentralization and data immutability without relying on a trusted third party. Ethereum continues this philosophy and innovates upon it.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, the establishment of specific decentralized platforms provides an open cultural window for cultural exchange, DAO experiments, and developer communication within the entire ecosystem. These platforms do not primarily aim for profit but exist as ecological infrastructure. This spirit requires a strong sense of dedication and mission, similar to the early days of Bitcoin, when even though the consensus was weak and BTC was difficult to sell, there was still a group of people providing computing power to maintain network security.

In the blockchain world, code can be quickly copied, but the core value that truly attracts people to participate is irreplaceable. The continuous innovation and creativity of Ethereum is difficult for other public chains to match, which is why other public chains often need to wait for Ethereum's innovations to gain inspiration.

The Spillover Effect of Ethereum Value

Recently, some platforms' smart chains have seized the market by leveraging the DeFi boom, utilizing their strong resources and traffic. The root of this phenomenon is similar to the early public chain competition—it stems from the network congestion and high transaction fees of Ethereum, resulting in high costs and poor user experience when using Ethereum DeFi protocols.

These platform public chains are taking advantage of the situation by constantly refreshing trading volumes and maintaining their centralized public chain DeFi ecosystem through a "mining-for-mining" approach. The market has responded positively, and the spillover effect of DeFi on the Ethereum chain has provided a survival space for many projects. However, the sustainability of this model remains to be tested, as even the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum has yet to find a truly successful development path.

Nevertheless, the DeFi ecosystem of these public chain platforms has played a positive role in education and popular science, providing a testing ground for exploring another possibility.

Conclusion

Developers in the Ethereum community are working hard to address current issues such as Layer 2 and ETH 2.0 solutions. However, the fundamental principle of addressing these issues remains to improve without sacrificing trustworthiness. This is the core of maintaining long-term development and also the basis for building native on-chain economies.

Continuing the decentralized path of Bitcoin and Ethereum is an important measure to trace the origin of blockchain. Those "blockchain" projects that deviate from this path may ultimately become the nourishment for promoting decentralized development. The challenges and competition faced by Ethereum may be the driving force behind its continuous progress and innovation.