Moderator: Alex, Research Partner at Mint Ventures
Guests: Zhou Qi, Founder of EthStorage; Lawrence, Researcher at Mint Ventures
Hello everyone, welcome to WEB3 Mint To Be initiated by Mint Ventures. Here, we clarify facts, explore reality, and find consensus in the WEB3 world through continuous questioning and in-depth thinking. We clarify the logic behind hot topics, provide insights that penetrate the events themselves, and introduce multiple perspectives.
Alex: In this episode, we invited Dr. Zhou from EthStorage and our researcher Lawrence. Let's talk about a blue chip that crypto investors are very concerned about - Ethereum. We know that Ethereum's overall performance in this cycle has not been very good. Its exchange rate has been lagging behind BTC, and most of the time it is not as good as its competitor Solana. However, Ethereum has made many remarkable changes recently. For example, Vitalik has become very determined in the expansion of Layer 1, and he is also restructuring the structure and laying off employees. The overall attitude towards doing things is more pragmatic. Is now a turning point for Ethereum to revive its price? Before we start the formal discussion today, let's ask the two guests to introduce themselves to our listeners. Dr. Zhou comes first.
Zhou Qi: Hello everyone, I am Zhou Qi, the founder of EthStorage. Today I am very happy to share with you some of our insights on Ethereum, including some of our recent work on Ethereum. In fact, we studied the entire Ethereum technology very deeply in 2017 and 2018, including Ethereum's expansion roadmap, from the previous Layer 2 to the current Layer 1, and participated in a lot of research work on Ethereum. We also received a lot of support from Ethereum, including some research on DA, and some related research with OP Stack, and also received a lot of grants. So today we are very happy to share some of our relatively unique insights in this.
Lawrence: Hello everyone, I am Lawrence from Mint Ventures. I am very happy to discuss this issue with Dr. Zhou today.
The reason why Ethereum underperformed BTC and SOL in this round
Alex: Then let's get to the point of today. Before discussing the reasons why Ethereum is worth looking forward to today, let's first sort out the problems Ethereum is currently facing. In your opinion, what are the main reasons why Ethereum has significantly underperformed BTC and Solana in this cycle? Otherwise, please let Zhou Bo share this question first.
Qi Zhou: I think there are several reasons. The first is the entire Ethereum roadmap, especially the roadmap centered on Layer 2. In fact, everyone has found that it is not so consistent with the core value of Ethereum. This is actually the issue I discussed with Vitalik when I met him at East Asia last month, and this is also one of his ideas. We can see that, for example, last year, before EIP 4844 went online, Ethereum was still in a relatively deflationary state. But when the 4844 upgrade went online, the handling fee for L2 to submit data to Ethereum dropped significantly, and at the same time, it also caused a lot of L2 value not to be reflected in Ethereum itself. For example, many L2 projects, such as Base and Arbitrum, have received a lot of user fees, but these fees have not fed back the value of Ethereum itself. Therefore, this has caused a big incentive incompatibility problem.
Secondly, from the perspective of Ethereum itself, because it performed very well in the last cycle, it also affected its judgment in a certain sense, making it relatively slow in some aspects, such as engineering progress. At that time, Ethereum did not have a real challenger, whether it was Bitcoin or Solana. In this wave, many people complained that Ethereum changed too slowly, and the roadmap was planned for a long time, but there were no actual engineering results. Each upgrade takes one to two years to implement the corresponding functions. Compared with some radical engineering advancements of Solana, Ethereum has always been biased towards research, and engineering is not a particularly priority model. This approach has caused a great lag in the overall development and upgrade roadmap of Ethereum. We have a lot of personal experience in this regard. For example, we have made many EIPs for Ethereum in the past few years, including EthStorage itself, which we can talk about in detail later. In summary, it is mainly these two aspects.
Lawrence: The two points that Zhou Bo just mentioned are also the two points I want to mention. Another reason that I think is more important is that in this cycle, generally speaking, there are relatively few new business models or new innovations on the chain. The richness and activity of on-chain businesses have not improved much compared to 21 years. In fact, if we exclude Meme transactions, the activity and richness of on-chain businesses may have declined slightly. On the contrary, the fundamentals of BTC have improved significantly. So with this increase and decrease, the overall performance of all public chains is actually not good. Even Solana, which has performed relatively well, is at least 50% away from the high point of 21 years compared to BTC. The high point of this round is 50% worse than the previous round. I think this is also a common problem encountered by all Layer 1 in this round.
The other two points are what Dr. Zhou just mentioned. One can be said to be a strategic problem of Ethereum in the past two or three years, which is the Layer 2 strategy. I think to be frank, it can basically be judged as a failure. Another point, I concluded that it may be a long-term structural problem of Ethereum, not a medium- and short-term strategic problem. I have recently seen many people's criticisms on this point, especially the criticism of a person named Max Resnick, which I think is very typical. This Max was actually a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation before. At the end of 24, he switched to Solana and went to Anza, which is the team that Solana Labs split out to do research and development. In fact, when he was at the Ethereum Foundation, he did not support the Rollup strategy, but supported the expansion of Layer 1. He has some very sharp criticisms of Ethereum. For example, he believes that the person who formulated the Ethereum roadmap, to be precise, Vitalik, their expertise is in the research of blockchain and cryptography, but less research in computers. In this way, Ethereum has made many basic and factual deviations in its judgment and research on how to improve blockchain performance for a long time in the past, including deviations in direction. For example, the Ethereum Foundation has long believed that the bottleneck of Ethereum's performance improvement is at the execution layer. But according to him, the bottleneck of performance improvement is obviously at the consensus layer. He also mentioned that Vitalik or the people who formulate the Ethereum roadmap are too focused on the long-term and the direction that seems relatively illusory at present, instead of paying attention to current users. For example, Vitalik himself has been talking about privacy applications and social applications on his blog, but he has talked less about DeFi. But in fact, DeFi has always existed on the Ethereum mainnet and has been used by the most people. This issue was debated for a period of time in July and August last year, and Vitalik and several leading DeFi projects on Ethereum were discussing this matter.
Including the reasons caused by these, as Zhou Bo just mentioned, Ethereum's R&D efficiency is actually quite low. On the one hand, there is a big disconnect between its research team and development team, and there is a big gap between what the research team studies and what the development team develops. On the other hand, its R&D progress is indeed very slow, and basically there is only one major upgrade a year. For example, Vitalik may have started to mention the POS conversion in 2015 or 2016, but it was not until the Shanghai upgrade in 2023 that the matter was officially closed. In the past, since 2021, there are actually not many upgrades that everyone can call out: Merge in 2022, Shanghai upgrade in 2023, Cancun upgrade last year, and Pectra upgrade just passed. In general, the development progress is very slow, which makes its error correction cost very high, especially the time cost. For example, the Layer 2 strategy mentioned above, in the case of Ethereum, in 2020, Vitalik proposed to focus on Rollup, but in fact, the relevant things were not implemented until 2022, and now in 2025, everyone found that it was not working and needed to be changed. A lot of time was wasted in the meantime.
Especially compared to Solana and some new Layer 1s, such as Sui, the gap between their R&D progress is close to an order of magnitude efficiency gap. In other words, Ethereum may take 10 times the time of other public chains to make a decision and push this thing online. Of course, I think there is a reason for this, because Ethereum is the first influential public chain after Bitcoin, and it faces many problems, including many regulatory factors before, and it has always been relatively persistent in decentralization. However, judging from the results, I think the problems just mentioned are all long-term structural problems of the Ethereum Foundation or the Ethereum core layer, that is, the people who formulate the Ethereum roadmap. I think these are the main three points.
Alex: OK, I might want to add one more thing. Lawrence just mentioned that the top management of the Ethereum Foundation is very persistent in its insistence on decentralization. Until the last cycle, everyone still believed that this was one of the elements of blockchain legitimacy. But there have been quite a lot of changes in this round. One of the most important changes is that the US government has undergone a big change. This round of the US government is very friendly to encryption and the supervision is very loose. As a result, at least in this round of governance, the encirclement and resistance to censorship of encryption projects has become less urgent. Ethereum's high persistence in decentralization has become less necessary in this round of government cycle. On the contrary, Sol and Sui may not have a high degree of decentralization, but their efficiency and performance are very good, which has become an advantage. And in the long run, I feel that even if the next government changes to the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party will realize that the votes of crypto investors in the United States are very important.
Under this premise, I believe that they will not carry out such a brutal crackdown on crypto projects during their term of office as Gary Gensler did in the last round. Therefore, the necessity of decentralization is gradually decreasing as the industry changes. We can see that many projects that have emerged in this round, such as Ethena, including RWA, a narrative that many investors now think is very important, are actually the product of the combination of CeFi and DeFi. This is the general trend. The decline in the importance of this narrative has actually weakened the consensus of Ethereum to a certain extent. This is also one of the reasons why it is not as good as SOL in terms of narrative in this round.
Consensus and non-consensus on Ethereum issues
Alex: Let's talk about the next question. We just talked about a lot of issues about Ethereum, including its engineering capabilities, some understanding of the direction of development, and the slow speed of error correction. So we have raised so many questions. What are the consensuses among Ethereum's leaders, community, and developers on these issues? What are the non-consensuses? Let me put it more simply. Which issues are considered to be problems by Ethereum's core management, community, and developers? Which ones are there differences? For example, we think this is a problem and an obstacle, but Ethereum's current attitude is that it is not a problem, but a feature that we are very concerned about. What do you think about this? Let's first ask Dr. Zhou to talk about it.
Qi Zhou: I think a very important point in this wave is that Ethereum's definition of decentralization has changed greatly. I can say that a few years ago, Ethereum still had a very idealistic, even somewhat religious way of pursuing decentralization. I remember chatting with some people from Ethereum at that time, and they said that they hoped that Ethereum L1 would become a minimum trust layer, so that, for example, mobile phones and even very simple embedded devices could run an Ethereum validator. But it is obvious that this time after the challenges of Solana and others, especially in the upgrade roadmap for L1 expansion, including the continuous increase of gas limit and the introduction of block-level access list to speed up the transaction speed of the execution layer, they are actually using a more practical way to find a trade-off between decentralization and execution efficiency. This also means that we may need a more powerful computer. The direct problem everyone faces is: you are now designing an Ethereum consensus, and let a mobile phone or a 100 yuan device run the validator, but you need at least 32 Ethereum. At the current price, it is about 100,000. This is actually not a match. Your device is not the bottleneck of the validator, but the main thing is that you need too many Ethereums.
So under this premise, why can't we relax this assumption? For example, can we allow computers worth $1,000, $2,000, or $3,000 to run nodes, and at the same time, Ethereum's L1 throughput can be expanded by 2, 3, or even 10 times? This is Ethereum's next plan. This is a very pragmatic adjustment for Ethereum in its search for decentralization and execution efficiency.
For example, we submitted a proposal to Ethereum two years ago, which is the ESP grant. We hope to study the block-level access list. It means that when packaging a block, I can tell other validators which data I will access when executing these transactions. In this way, they can use the pre-access technology to pre-read the randomly accessed data such as account balances in advance with high concurrency, greatly improving the execution efficiency. Two years ago, we only applied for 10,000 yuan to study this problem. We think this research is valuable and helpful to Ethereum, but it was rejected without explaining the reason. We guess that it is because Ethereum thinks that this may have an impact on decentralization and is not a top priority. But at the beginning of this year, they suddenly said that they wanted to do research in this area and welcome us to participate. This shows that the paradigm of Ethereum has changed from the ideal decentralization concept two years ago to a more practical perspective now. Especially with the improvement of computer performance and the reduction of cost, it is roughly in line with Moore's Law. If Ethereum still follows the original design framework, does not dynamically adjust the gas limit, or does not dynamically add the block level access list, then the execution efficiency cannot be released, and it will be difficult to achieve the possibility of tenfold expansion, for example. I was quite surprised. Two or three years ago, I wondered why they didn't consider this issue. I can only understand it as their persistence in idealism.
As for the non-consensus part, I think Ethereum still has a lot of "debts" - including technical debt, cognitive debt, and even brand debt. That is to say, when it wants to make major reforms, it often cannot directly deny itself. There have been such cases in history, such as China's reform and opening up and the handover of certain leaders in the Soviet Union. We can see that slow but firm reform is more effective than completely overthrowing the past. For example, Ethereum now adopts a multi-client roadmap. There are clients written in four or five different languages at the execution layer and the consensus layer. And we have seen that those particularly successful infrastructure software in history, such as Solana itself, Linux operating system, HDFS, etc., are basically implemented with a set of languages and a set of testing frameworks. They pursue engineering efficiency. Ethereum, because it has experienced the DAO attack, predicts that the use of a language may introduce some mechanisms due to the vulnerabilities of this language, which will cause downtime. Because Ethereum is still changing very quickly, unlike Bitcoin, many functions are basically solidified. So they would rather spend ten times the engineering effort to prevent this risk. But if they do this, Ethereum will need five to ten times the engineering effort to keep up with Solana's pace. This is why every upgrade of Ethereum is so slow. We have personally participated in the upgrade process of Ethereum, including EIP formulation, DevNet, and TestNet. We found that it takes a lot of effort to coordinate the implementation between different clients. For example, in this Pectra upgrade, it was found that Geth was inconsistent with other client configurations, resulting in asynchrony, which had to be repaired immediately. In the end, it was found that the problem was with Geth. This is a trade-off issue, and it takes a lot of effort in engineering. So here I am thinking about a question: must fast-changing software like Ethereum not crash? Solana has crashed many times, and so have other projects. Maybe we can allow crashes, but the recovery speed is very fast. At the same time, only one client is maintained, so it can iterate faster. This is actually a software engineering problem. I saw that Ethereum is also recruiting, for example, chief performance developers recently, focusing more on solving progress problems more efficiently from an engineering perspective. I have worked in large companies and know that crashes are actually the norm. Even if there is money and engineers, problems often occur. Every time we have to talk about how many times our system has crashed, for example, Meta or Google systems have been completely inaccessible for an hour, which is not uncommon. Therefore, how to overcome these problems is an issue that deserves in-depth discussion and is also an aspect on which there is still no consensus.
Lawrence: I understand that the consensus is that the strategy of focusing on Layer 2 in the past is going to change. Because of this, I saw that the Ethereum Foundation has recently proposed a series of actions. In fact, the community has always been skeptical about this matter. Of course, there are still some uncertain parts. For example, the Ethereum Foundation used the word "re-prioritization" for this matter, which sounds more moderate. But most people think that this should be called Pivot, which is a turning point, which means that it is necessary to admit that the past was wrong. But at least from the current actual actions, I think focusing on Layer 1 and abandoning the past Rollup Centric strategy is the most consensus point at present.
Dr. Zhou just mentioned the point of non-consensus. I think it still depends on the limit of the Ethereum Foundation's insistence on decentralization. At present, it seems that there is no consensus on this. In fact, many of Ethereum's inefficiencies can be traced back to their adherence to the principle of decentralization. For example, whether it is the execution layer or the consensus layer client, they all require decentralization and support multiple terminals. At the same time, they have long insisted on supporting Solo Staker and regard the participation rate of individual stakers as a very important goal. This will also affect efficiency because there are so many clients to coordinate. I have also been paying attention to Lido in the past. I think that at present, the Ethereum Foundation has not shown a clear attitude on this issue, such as no longer paying attention to Solo Staker and thinking that it is okay to be more centralized. I feel that Ethereum can only be compared with Bitcoin at the beginning of its establishment, and Bitcoin has always existed as a rebel against the global financial system in the first few years. Therefore, Ethereum has emphasized anti-regulation and anti-censorship from the beginning. Compared with BTC, which has no subject, Ethereum has a subject and is very worried about being investigated by regulators. In general, it is very cautious. In the past few years, Solana has experienced some of the things that Ethereum was initially worried about. For example, Solana was clearly defined as a security by the SEC in 2023. The Ethereum Foundation used to be very concerned about this, but now it seems that even if it is defined as a security, it doesn't seem to be a big problem, and Solana is still developing well. I haven't seen much discussion on how far decentralization can be compromised or compromised. I think this is a key issue that will continue to affect Ethereum's efficiency and other aspects in the medium and long term, and there is no consensus yet.
Timeline of Ethereum Reform Events
Alex: Ok. We just talked about so many issues, and also talked about some consensus from the community to the top of the Ethereum Foundation. So for these issues that everyone agrees on, what countermeasures has the current Ethereum leadership planned? What is the approximate timetable for these countermeasures? For example, recently everyone has paid close attention to two events: the first is that Vitalik mentioned that he hopes to achieve a tenfold expansion of Ethereum by the end of this year; the other is that the Ethereum Foundation has recently reorganized and laid off employees. What are the key events like this in your opinion? Is there a common expectation for their corresponding occurrence time? Let Dr. Zhou talk about this question first.
Qi Zhou: First of all, the first one is about Ethereum's L1 expansion. You can see that Ethereum has launched a very clear roadmap on how to increase the current Gas Limit from about 30 million to, for example, 60 million, and gradually increase it. They also have corresponding EIPs to make related improvements. Secondly, we also see that Ethereum's client, such as Geth, is also actively optimizing the current code. For example, recently we have seen a very interesting phenomenon, that is, all Ethereum clients have implemented a certain sense of performance caching, that is, data caching. We found that Geth's cache implementation was not particularly effective in the past four or five years. We were surprised by this, but we did not conduct an in-depth analysis. This leads to the current transaction execution speed of about 100 million gas per second. If the gas limit of the block is adjusted to 100 million or even 200 million, for example, 10 times is 300 million, then it may take 3 seconds to process the block for executing the transaction, which may cause the block to time out. Because Ethereum has strict time limits for block generation, voting, execution, etc. within 12 seconds, it is very likely to time out. Interestingly, Nethermind implemented some cache optimization techniques during the engineering implementation, which magically improved the performance by about 3 to 4 times, reaching 400 to 500 million gas per second. This is the data we have measured and can reproduce. We saw that Geth released the latest improvements at the beginning of this month or the end of last month. We also reproduced it with our own machine and achieved the same performance standard without modifying any spec (technical specifications) of the current consensus and execution layer. It can be seen that Geth may not have spent too much time on optimization in this regard in the past four or five years. Suddenly, there was pressure. Seeing that others did better, it began to optimize significantly, and the performance was improved by 4 to 5 times. When we saw Nethermind's 4 to 5 times performance improvement for all Ethereum clients, we thought they used black magic or the data was inaccurate. Later, we found that everyone was not pushing themselves hard enough and was still in the comfort zone. Now we know that performance can actually run faster, which is an improvement under pressure. This also means that we have verified through data that we can improve Ethereum by 3 to 4 times in advance, or even 10 times. Originally, everyone thought that if the gas per second of 100 million was increased by 10 times, it would time out, but now it seems that this is no longer a big problem. This is a very detailed perspective, and it also shows that this pressure is actually a very good progress for Ethereum. Although Solana did not perform well against Ethereum this time, the final result may be that Ethereum continues to improve due to competition, which is a good progress for the entire industry.
Another story about layoffs is also worth sharing. We previously worked with the official Ethereum project Portal Network, which mainly solves the data storage problem after Ethereum expansion. Ethereum's historical transaction data is about 300G to 400G, and the state data is also 300G to 400G, which adds up to about 1T. If the capacity is expanded 10 times, the data will soon exceed 2T or 3T. The ultimate goal is to store the data without affecting decentralization, while reducing the overhead of verification nodes and full nodes, so as to achieve a better decentralized expansion method. We worked closely with them for one and a half to two years, but on a Monday, they suddenly announced that the project was cancelled and all full-time members were unemployed. So we can see that Ethereum should have made a very big determination. All solutions that cannot directly solve the expansion problem are not their top priority at the moment. Ethereum's determination in this regard is huge.
Lawrence: Currently, we only have very rough information about the timetable, such as the 10-fold expansion of L1 within one year mentioned just now, and the goal of 100-fold expansion in 4 or 2 years. What Dr. Zhou just said also indirectly illustrates the problems of Ethereum in the past: for example, the execution layer actually has more than 5 times of optimization at its fingertips, but it has not been done in the past few years. The countermeasures are, on the one hand, strategic adjustments, returning L1 to the core strategy; on the other hand, changes in the organizational structure, including the addition of two new executive directors, one is Wang Xiaowei, and the other is Tomasz kajetan Stanczak, the founder of Nethermind. There have been intensive layoffs in the past few days. This morning, the Ethereum Foundation issued a general letter on the budget, and some time ago, the foundation was reorganized and personnel were allocated. A more detailed timetable may be after more detailed actions. But for now, the term of office of these two new executive directors is two years, starting from this year. I think they should be of good help to Ethereum's expansion goals, especially to improve the performance of L1. Because they have a stronger R&D background than other researchers. Wang Xiaowei has been studying Ethereum expansion for a long time, and at that time he was studying sharding; and Tomasz Stańczak's Nethermind client has shocked other Ethereum clients in recent times. I think the addition of these two people will be beneficial to the performance improvement of Ethereum and may bring more direct improvements.
Is Ethereum still worth looking forward to?
Alex: So, based on what we just talked about, Ethereum has some problems and has made many improvements. Of course, it also has its own advantages. Looking forward to the future at this stage, are you still optimistic about Ethereum? I mean, as an asset investment. What are the reasons for your optimism? Among the reasons for your optimism, which reasons do you think may be seriously ignored by the market? Let Dr. Zhou answer first.
Qi Zhou: I am cautiously optimistic about Ethereum. From an optimistic point of view, I think Ethereum is a very rare decentralized ecosystem with a large developer community participating and contributing. In a way, it is also a very impressive achievement in our entire web3 industry. When I talk to many studios that don’t know much about crypto, everyone will compare Ethereum with high-tech companies such as Nvidia, Apple, and Tesla. In this regard, I think Ethereum has a very good foundation and network effect. From a personal point of view, I think if our industry only has Bitcoin and there are no new and interesting things, this industry would be too boring.
If I am cautious, I think Ethereum is driven by some very idealistic people due to some historical reasons. At the beginning, it received some very good market feedback, but when it gradually dealt with some real problems, some of its previous overly idealistic ideas were exposed. If the foundation cannot make major reforms, or if the reforms are not thorough enough, I think there will be some possibility of rebound. I think it is human nature in many cases. After all, they have reached such a high level, and they still have to keep their original intentions and keep working hard to do things. This is also a very big challenge to their human nature. So in this regard, I am still cautious about Ethereum.
Lawrence: I am still optimistic about Ethereum, but I may not be as optimistic as in the previous cycle. I think the reason for optimism is that there are still many excellent developers who have been continuously building in the Ethereum ecosystem, just like Dr. Zhou. I think this is a very critical competitive advantage of Ethereum. Of course, there will be some new applications that may not choose Ethereum when they choose, and may go directly to Solana or Sui, but there are still a considerable number of excellent developers who participated in the crypto market very early and are still developing in the Ethereum or EVM ecosystem. I think this is an important factor for the long-term optimism of Ethereum. The second point is that although many new application types in this round first appeared on Solana, financial applications, including RWA, and Ethena are also new applications, and HyperLiquid can barely be counted. We can see that some new developments in the DeFi field are still in the Ethereum ecosystem. Later, after the further implementation of regulatory relaxation, there may be more financial applications, and they may still choose Ethereum when they choose a chain. Another point is that I think in the short and medium term, we may soon see the improvement of Ethereum's performance or the reduction of fees. I think there will be a strong short-term feeling similar to an oversold rebound, that is, the market's short-term view of it may change.
But like Dr. Zhou, I am still cautiously optimistic. Although Ethereum has changed in the short and medium term, it is still difficult to say whether the long-term route has really changed. For example, what will happen after the two-year term of the two new executive directors ends? And will some of Vitalik's characteristics change in the future? It may become more concerned with existing users and some short-term indicators, and cannot be said to be completely concerned with some illusory indicators in the medium and long term. I think if these characteristics do not change, or if Vitalik's influence on Ethereum remains unchanged and his attitude remains unchanged, Ethereum may still remain slow and overly conservative in the long term of five to ten years relative to competing chains, such as Solana and Sui. In this case, the competitive advantages brought by Ethereum's early launch in a cycle, whether it is the early deployment of developers or financial applications, will become less and less as the cycles pass. I think if Ethereum is still so slow and conservative in the next cycle, it may not be a very worthy target for investment.
Under what circumstances will Ethereum be increased?
Alex: OK, let's get back to a question directly related to investment. Ethereum's current overall valuation level has been declining relative to Bitcoin. Now there are some signs of a better turnaround. For both of you, what facts, data or information will give you enough confidence to choose to buy or increase your position, or increase the level of Ethereum in the overall crypto asset allocation? What might such facts, data or information be?
Lawrence: Okay. I think if you make the decision to buy ETH now, if you look at the data, the data will be delayed too much, and it is very likely that the price will increase more before the data increases. I am looking forward to seeing Vitalik suddenly jump out one day and say that we did it wrong in the past, and then we decide to do this and that now. I have a vague feeling now that everyone tells him that he is doing it wrong, and he says that we will just try it according to what you said. This is the feeling. Vitalik's influence on Ethereum as a whole is still unmatched by anyone else. Maybe his influence will be relatively weakened with the addition of two new executive directors, but he is still the person who has the greatest influence on Ethereum at present. The fact or information I hope to see is that Vitalik himself becomes more radical or that relatively radical people like Tomasz have a greater influence within Ethereum.
Another point is that I hope Ethereum can make a mistake. I think they have been too eager to avoid mistakes in the past, and too eager to make something that will take ten or a hundred years. It can be slow, but it must not make mistakes. They are a bit too eager for this. Dr. Zhou just mentioned that it is normal to make mistakes. Solana has been down so many times in the past, including new public chains, but Ethereum is still too cautious. I hope to see Ethereum not be as cautious as in the past, but become more aggressive. If I can see some such signals from the decision-making level, I may increase my position. Of course, it is mainly because my own Ethereum position has been held and the proportion is not small, so I will consider more when I may increase my position.
Qi Zhou: I think from the perspective of valuation, our industry valuation itself is a completely new issue. So when deciding to buy Ethereum, I may consider two main factors. One is the big market. In fact, Ethereum has already achieved such a large network effect. As long as they are on the path of practicality, as long as they are not bought when they are hyped, there should be some very good investment opportunities. After several rounds of cycles, there are still many opportunities for Ethereum. The second is whether Ethereum can maintain their more practical attitude to make various decisions in the future. There are actually some very interesting issues here, not just Ethereum's problems, but various problems that a large organization or community will encounter. For example, why many people go to FUD Ethereum this time is because everyone thinks that there are many villains around Vitalik who take advantage of him or oversell him. But some real community newcomers think that Vitalik is a bit out of touch with the masses, resulting in information asymmetry. There is too much noise around Vitalik, and there is no good way to identify good or excellent people. I think this is an objective fact. Any organization that reaches a certain scale will inevitably encounter such a situation. It depends on how Vitalik builds a better team, listens to the voice of the community, and faces the mistakes that may have been made. But I still hold a view here, that is, this process may need to be smoother. If a situation like Khrushchev had occurred, it would easily cause the community to split. So in this regard, Vitalik may need more introspection and reflection. It is very important to identify and distinguish the voices in the community in this process, so that more people and more organizations can enter Ethereum more easily. And before, I also felt that Vitalik and his team designed Ethereum as a super-sovereign project. He felt that some ideologies did not fit his needs, so he held a distant attitude. For example, this time, Trump and his team in the United States did a lot of friendly things for Crypto, including banquets, various hearings, etc. I feel that Vitalik still holds a relatively distant attitude towards such activities. Although I have seen that he has been very active this time and I have seen him running around recently, when answering some sensitive questions, such as whether to set up an office in Hong Kong, whether to attend Trump's party, or go to the US hearing, I feel that he may still have some hesitation. I am not saying that he is confrontational, but he may be a little hesitant. In fact, in this process, the entire Ethereum ecosystem evolution cannot lack a lot of local community support, including the general public, the upper level, and the support of the formulation of supervision. I have read his blog before. He may have a lot of interactions with Russia and Putin in this regard, because he is originally a Russian. But after the Russo-Ukrainian war, he was extremely opposed to such things. So he said that he would no longer do things related to sovereign exchanges in the future. But I think if you kill it with one stick, it is not a particularly practical attitude. We have a saying in China, that is, make more friends and fewer enemies. In this case, I think Ethereum still has a lot of room for performance in the future.
Alex: Okay. Thank you to both guests for sharing your views on this topic today. I hope we can invite you to express your views on more topics in the future. That’s all for today’s show. Thank you.
