This simple article is about a new kid in the block that is forcing us to up our game, the options we have left and why we should keep playing the game. This piece is divided into 3 sections.
A Worthy Competitor with a Monolithic Experience
Ethereum's Hope for Survival
Why Ethereum is Worth Fighting For
A Worthy Competitor with a Monolithic Experience
Everyone normal I’ve spoken to loves using Solana. It just works they say. Yes, the transactions may fail now and then, but usually, it is fine, and it will be fine. Forget gas abstraction, forget wallet recovery (for now), forget bridging. It just works. All your assets are on a single chain and it has enough block space to accommodate all kinds of dApps in the ecosystem. It scales.
If you want to batch swap, deposit, borrow, and swap, it’s possible. If you find a yield opportunity, you can deposit into it in a single transaction. You can buy an NFT, ape into a meme coin, and stake a governance token—all with a single wallet and with simple transactions.
This is the monolithic experience, it's the Solana experience. Ethereum finally has a true competitor it has to compete with. It should either match the Solana experience or slowly become increasingly irrelevant as more and more retail users end up on Solana rather than on L2s.
Ethereum's Hope for Survival
In short, we need to build this experience for the Ethereum ecosystem. But it is hard, it requires all the following players to come together.
Token standards like OFTs by @LayerZero_Labs, xERC20 by @Connext, NTTs by @wormhole, ITS by @axelarnetwork, Warp Routes by @Hyperlane_xyz, etc., need to abstract token ownership across chains
Intent protocols like @AcrossProtocol, @deBridgeFinance, @Uniswap X, etc. need to enable any-to-any swaps, deposits and general actions
Smart accounts and 3074 enabled accounts by @4337Mafia and @lightclients respectively should abstract away all the chains and token balances
I am not going into each of these solutions right now because that's not the point of this post.
Why Ethereum is Worth Fighting For
We are all fighting for Ethereum's survival. We have not won yet. It is a hard battle. But it will be worth it. But why? Why bother? Why not just move over to Solana?
Because we are incentivized to. Ethereum enables so many things. It will help so many founders to emerge in their own niche fields. Here are the reasons why Ethereum will survive.
Freedom to innovate. This is the main reason why I am excited about the "modular future". We should be able to innovate around execution environments, fee markets, MEV mitigation, etc., these problems are yet to be solved. To expand on this.
Execution Environment: We can all agree that SVM is good but we can always learn from its issues and build a better one. Why not improve Solana you ask? Because you don't OWN AS MUCH SOLANA. As simple as that. Build your own L2 with your own token.
Fee markets: Recently @notnotstorm posted about how Base's long term storage is not priced in. Fees still spike on many L2s. No one has solved all the problems yet. Solana does not seem to have either, transaction failures. We need to innovate around fee markets a well. Again, become a founder and innovate around fee markets.
MEV Mitigation: MEV is a bigger problem on Solana as it is possible to sandwich each and every swap out there. Ethereum's focus has been on MEV for a few years now. L2s simply don't have MEV because they are centralized, for now. Innovate around MEV on the chain level.
Network Effects of Ethereum. The chad-VC @KyleSamani spoke about this in the @thebellcurvepod by @MikeIppolito_. The network effects of blockchain state is real. Ethereum's state growth is nothing but the ownership of assets on the blockchain. If you hold treasury bonds, stables with yield or LSTs on Ethereum, there is no reason to move them over to Solana. If you hold ETH as an asset, you SHOULD NOT move it to Solana. But you can trustlessly move to L2s as L2s are extensions of Ethereum. People hold a lot of assets on Ethereum already. Asking them to move their entire networth is like asking someone to move from the US to China just because a city in China is better (they are). Instead, you're more likely to move to Miami or Austin. The network effects lock users in the place despite certain issues.
Existing consensus and infra. I hope we agree on the fact that we need to innovate further on blockchains. Building Alt L1s is an alternative approach to solving the above problems. But having to bootstrap consensus from scratch in hopes to reach Ethereum-like decentralization is tough and might not be worth it. You would have to build an ecosystem of clients, RPC infra, wallet infra, and many many things. Alt L1s are harder than L2s. But we will see more L1s emerging in the market as well, they can also innovate on the problems I mentioned above along with consensus or they can use EigenLayer for bridging. But you will have another trust assumption on top of Ethereum's primary consensus layer. Trade-offs.
If you are a founder who wants to compete with your ideas, you are better positioned to align with Ethereum's consensus and innovate in your niche than starting from scratch.
Ethereum is here to stay because that is its fate. If you are here and you own assets through Ethereum's state you are likely to stay. If you are a builder and you can help Ethereans and ETH holders compete with Solana, you will be providing immense value to a lot of us while becoming wealthy yourself.
If you want to help the Ethereans achieve the monolithic experience, let us work together and grow together. DMs are open.