My eight years with Ethereum

Ethereum has been running smoothly for 10 years, 3650 days and nights, without any interruptions or maintenance windows.

Written by: Todd

First of all, congratulations on the 10th anniversary of Ethereum!

It has been exactly 8 years since I registered my first Ethereum wallet.

There is a saying that humans undergo a large-scale cell renewal replacement on average every 7 years.

Indeed, from a cellular perspective, I am no longer myself.

Ethereum is still Ethereum.

My earliest Ethereum wallet is still alive, and even the small change that was left in the wallet back then has surprisingly grown 10 times.

At that moment, I was typing at home, discussing Ethereum;

At this moment, it's hard to imagine that I am still sitting in the same place, discussing Ethereum.

Let me talk about myself first.

As we all know, I am a loyal supporter of Bitcoin, but I wouldn't consider myself a BTC maxi (, which roughly translates to being a die-hard fan. I am not a die-hard fan ); I also like Ethereum, BNB, and Solana, and I enjoy researching them.

My first Ethereum wallet was actually not MetaMask, but an ancient wallet called My Ether Wallet. This wallet was too primitive because every time I logged in, I had to first upload a file called keystore, and then enter a password to unlock that file before I could use it.

The reason I want to register an Ethereum wallet is that I wanted to buy a CryptoKitty at that time.

At that time, two cats could give birth, and some cats had scarce traits, while the birthing speed varied for each cat, resulting in endless descendants to speculate on.

My first time using MetaMask dates back to 2020, when it was to trade the algorithmic stablecoin pioneer called AMPL. Its characteristic is that if it rises above 1 dollar, it will print money for everyone. If it falls below 1 dollar, it will deduct money from everyone's balance, achieving the effect of a stablecoin by adjusting supply and demand.

Two wallets are actually a reflection of two eras. In fact, I generally divide Ethereum into four eras:

• Era 0 (2015-2016): Ethereum is born
• Era 1 (2017-2019): ICO Era
• Era 2 (2020-2022): DeFi Era
• Era 3 (2023-2025): LST Era
• Era 4 (2025 - Present): Asset Era

Era 1: ICO Era

Ethereum in 2015-2016 actually had only one move, which was smart contracts. At that time, this was definitely a fresh thing, because other altcoins, such as Ripple and Litecoin, did not have this.

Of course, people's understanding of smart contract development is very superficial. Until 2017, it was mainly used to issue tokens.

After all, I'm still using a user-unfriendly wallet like My Ether Wallet, how could I possibly develop a Dapp?

However, the ability to issue tokens is enough. In the past, to issue a token, you needed to modify the code (for example, changing a few instances of Bitcoin to Litecoin), find miners to support it, and constantly monitor the stability of the network, which was extremely troublesome.

At least 80% of people just want a coin to speculate on, and they really don't care what its underlying mechanism is (now even the narrative is becoming less important, and I really regret that I didn't understand this sentence clearly back then).

And Ethereum perfectly met this demand, making it the absolute supernova of that year.

I have a deep impression that when the domestic nine-four encryption ban was issued, the price of Ethereum was 1400 RMB, and six months later, Ethereum reached 1400 USD!

The recent high price of Ethereum is essentially driven by the FOMO sentiment triggered by supply and demand.

Imagine, you have to participate in 1-3 public ICOs in the group every day, each requiring Ether to be sent to the smart contract. Once sent, you can earn 3-100 times the investment. How can you not accumulate a bit of Ether?

Of course, that time the Ethereum checkout was also quite unexpected.

I often share with my friends the story of the time when Space Chain and Hero Chain lost their value. Space Chain is about launching blockchain nodes into space, while Hero Chain is the gambling chain supposedly issued by casino owners in Southeast Asia.

These two projects should be considered as the king-level projects of the ICO era, but in early 2018, they both broke below their offering price, marking the beginning of the wave of price drops.

And when everyone discovered that projects previously financed by Ethereum began to cash out Ether, at the same time, participating in ICOs with Ethereum resulted in losses one after another, naturally, they also started to slowly dump Ethereum.

So, Ethereum was actually smashed down to 80 dollars each in 2019, which can be said to be the true valley of despair.

Actually, I can't escape the norm either. I'm not the kind of true E guardian who maintains faith during a continuous decline.

Maintaining writing is indeed a good habit, as it helps to leave a tool for self-reflection. I looked back at my writings from March 2018, when Ether was about 400 USD. I also published articles during the low period of Ethereum, questioning the value of Ethereum—if it can only issue ICOs, then once the ICOs are settled, what else can Ethereum do?

At that time, there were indeed experts in the comment section, and a person named LionStar rebutted sharply:

"2018 was just the beginning for Ethereum. Even people in the Ethereum community know that Ethereum currently lacks scalability and performance; it's all still early. The grand vision for Ethereum will only take its first steps in 2018, with POS, sharding, plasma, truebit, state channels, swarm, zero-knowledge proofs, and a whole host of other technologies yet to be applied. Let's look at Ethereum's development five years from now. Moreover, the vast majority of speculators base their views solely on price; if the price goes up, they are excited, and if it goes down, they think it's no good. This mentality is not only scary but also meaningless. Technology and development prospects truly determine real value, while price will ultimately trend towards real value."

The dark humor is that all of the above content, except for PoS and zero-knowledge proofs, has failed.

Of course, this is also one of the most appreciated aspects of Ethereum, which is that it is an open framework that allows various teams to experiment with a wide range of ideas, such as the ones mentioned above—sharding, plasma, truebit, state channels, swarm, etc. Most of these come from the community, where everyone expresses their opinions and contributes efforts, which is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Internet and open-source software.

Continuous and free trial and error is what has led to today's Ethereum.

The entire Ethereum community actually has two main lines.

One is technology, improving Ethereum's own performance;

Two条 is an application that is built around Ethereum.

Flowers bloom at both ends, each displaying a branch. Unexpectedly, after Ethereum fell into a trough, DeFi slowly began to unfold.

Era 2: DeFi Era

It all started in 2020 when Compound announced that it would begin subsidizing depositors and borrowers. People were surprised to find that meaningful applications could indeed be built on Ethereum, rather than just boring games like CryptoKitties that serve only as collectibles.

Moreover, this truly functional application can actually perform better than traditional applications. Lower borrowing costs and higher deposit interest rates. There was even a time when the situation of "subsidies > loan interest" led to the reversal of electric meters.

People are accustomed to it now, but at that time, people were shocked.

To know that at that time, other popular coins were all kinds of distributed storage, and even things created for the sake of creation like solar-powered cannabis game chains, Ethereum, however, had something that could surpass traditional applications, which is very cool and could be considered the first college student in the village.

Additionally, ICOs are not all bubbles; they brought some new things. The predecessor of AAVE, EthLend, also comes from the ancient ICO era that we now use every day.

Thus, Ethereum was broken and then rebuilt, marking the official beginning of the DeFi era.

DeFi has also caused changes in supply and demand, as both Uniswap and Sushiswap require a large amount of Ether as LP, which has sharply increased the demand for Ether.

Holding Ethereum, casually mining something, bearing a little impermanence, can easily yield an annualized APR of over 100%. With such rates, who wouldn't be tempted?

With the intense demand for Ethereum in DeFi, Ethereum first climbed to 4100, and then reached a historical high of 4800 in 2021. This contains people's (including myself) hopes that Ethereum can consume traditional finance.

However, unlike ICOs, Ethereum in 2021 is surrounded by fierce competition. DeFi was born on Ethereum, but the news quickly spread to competitive chains. Ethereum's competitors offer cheaper fees and faster performance. During the ICO era, the difference in Gas fees was not significant, but in the DeFi era, the term "noble chain" is definitely the worst advertisement for Ethereum, rather than a compliment.

Time has quickly turned to 2022, and Luna - it is hard to call it DeFi since it was a Ponzi scheme from the very beginning. Its sudden collapse shattered the market, taking down FTX and 3AC, and it also brought down the DeFi boom that these institutions were deeply involved in, as if it struck a heavy blow to the summer of DeFi.

Similar to the past ICOs, due to the reverse change in supply and demand, people no longer participate in liquidity mining, and Ethereum has also begun to enter a long downward channel. Especially with the depreciation against BTC, countless dreams have been shattered.

When DeFi thrives, Ether thrives; when DeFi declines, it is naturally difficult for Ether to hold strong, especially when other chains are focusing on transaction fees below 1 cent.

Why has Ethereum been vigorously promoting the L2 strategy instead of the L1 expansion strategy in recent years?

I think you probably understand by now.

This is indeed a critical moment for survival! Ethereum must immediately stay put and slow down the exodus of DeFi, even at the cost of its own mainnet status. Thus, a large number of L2 solutions were born at this moment.

There are groundbreaking ones like Arb OP ZK, institution-led ones like Base Mantle OPBNB, parental chains like Metis, innovative ideas like Taiko, and application-driven ones like Uni.

Ethereum does not need a long-term landing solution, but rather a very fast, very simple, and immediate scaling solution that does not hesitate to drink poison to quench thirst, and after selecting, it is L2.

It has been proven that L2 has played its expected role, solidifying the EVM brand and preventing a large number of DeFi developers from losing out to ecosystems due to fee losses.

The fertile water does not flow to outsiders' fields. Although these funds and users have left the ETH mainnet, at least:

(1) Did not go to the competitors;

(2) It has not spawned more competitors.

Imagine, without the L2 strategy, Coinbase would definitely issue its own chain, that's human nature. But with L2, at least nominally, Base, Uni, and so on still regard Ethereum as the "ruler of the world."

As long as the EVM does not collapse, Ethereum will not lose.

Era 3: LST Era

The following is the third chapter of Ethereum, which is also the worst-performing chapter.

After the ICO era and the DeFi era, Ethereum has now entered the LST era.

With the upgrade in Shanghai, Ethereum's transition to PoS has been completely successful. From the perspective of TVL, Lido has risen, EtherFi has emerged, and countless ETH LSTs have sprung up like bamboo shoots after a rain.

Every new era will carry the strong imprint of the previous one. You can check DeFillama; currently, the top DeFi on Ethereum is basically LST or its affiliated units.

Source: DeFillama

What is the auxiliary unit of LST?

For example, the revolving loan, EtherFi's revolving loan can easily achieve a yield of over 10% in Ethereum terms (feel free to DM me if you're interested). However, "loans" require a borrowing venue, so the large TVL of AAVE and Morpho actually comes from the demand for revolving loans. Therefore, although they are DeFi, I metaphorically refer to them as LST affiliated units.

DeFi has propelled the emergence of LST, and LST has become the largest client of DeFi currently.

Speaking of which, our company Ebunker was also established at this time, on September 15, 2022, which is also the day Ethereum successfully merged for PoS.

As of today, there are more than 400,000 Ether running on our nodes in a non-custodial manner, which makes me quite satisfied with the decision I made at that time.

After all, every E subnet guardian wants to take practical action to protect the security of Ethereum (I do this by running nodes).

Back to the point, if you pay close attention, you will notice that I have been emphasizing "the dramatic changes in supply and demand have affected the price of Ethereum."

However, LST (including non-custodial Staking) has not improved the supply-demand relationship, with Lido's ETH rate maintaining at 3% for a long time, and EtherFi being slightly higher at 3.5%, but this is already the limit.

Whether it is EigenLayer or other re-staking mechanisms that follow, none of them have changed the essence of this benchmark interest rate.

But just like everyone hopes for a rate cut in the US every day, this 3% benchmark interest rate has even magically further suppressed the virtual economic activities of Ethereum, this virtual nation.

The gas fee of Ethereum has started to decrease (of course, it is also due to the efforts of L1 scaling and L2 strategies), but the economic activity above is still very sluggish.

This is similar to the two occurrences in history where the supply and demand relationship was imbalanced.

So, LST did not become a summer, but instead fell alongside Ethereum.

Because a 3% interest rate does not constitute a reason for large holders to buy Ethereum; at most, it can delay their selling. However, we still have to thank LST, as many large holders have staked their Ethereum, at least preventing a situation similar to the $80 golden pit of 2019.

Era 4: Asset Era

Fortunately, after Bitcoin, Ethereum has also successfully launched a spot ETF in the United States, which created a brief hype around Ethereum. In fact, this has already opened the fourth major chapter of Ethereum – the asset era.

The process of alternative assets becoming mainstream assets is a long one. In this way, everyone watched as the ETH/BTC exchange rate gradually fell below 0.02, and Ethereum faced its third "great doubt."

In fact, everyone should thank that man, which is Saylor, for inventing the great MicroStrategy play.

The company first buys Bitcoin / Ether, leveraging these held assets to issue more stocks and debts, then buys more Bitcoin / Ether, continues to issue more stocks and borrow more bonds, and then buys even more Bitcoin / Ether.

MicroStrategy's success in Bitcoin has inspired the Ethereum community.

Led by Consensys, the industry capital-dominated sharplink, along with bitmine, which is backed by Cathie Wood's traditional funding representatives, has begun to compete for the leading position in Ethereum micro-strategy.

They and a host of imitators successfully ignited the resonance linkage between the US stock market and cryptocurrency.

Yes, that's right, this time it has changed the supply and demand relationship of Ethereum.

Institutions are making significant purchases of Ethereum at true market prices, and as before, the LST era has similarly played a foundational role, with a large amount of Staking locking up the liquidity of a significant amount of Ethereum float, naturally leading to the current FOMO of the coin-stock linkage.

Of course, this is also inseparable from the good impression that Ethereum has left on the industry and traditional funds over the long term.

V God did not flaunt luxury cars or villas, nor did he stand on a platform for scams, but instead continued to think about how technology affects the future of Ethereum, such as ZKVM, privacy, L1 simplification, and so on.

Not even once mentioned sbet or bitmine on Twitter.

Ethereum can be chosen by the market to welcome this fourth era, thanks to the reputation and goodwill accumulated by Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin over the years.

It can be said that Vitalik Buterin is an important part of my recognition of Ethereum's values.

Finally

As Binji said, the Ethereum network has been running smoothly for 10 years, 3650 days and nights, without any interruptions or maintenance windows.

During this period:

• Facebook was down for 14 hours;
• AWS Kinesis was frozen for 17 hours;
• Cloudflare has closed 19 data centers.

Yes, the robustness of Ethereum is fascinating.

I hope, and of course I believe, that I can still analyze everything about Ethereum on Twitter in 10 years.

Happy 10th Anniversary Ethereum!