Author: Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

What is Ethereum ? Ethereum is the most decentralized, most valuable, and most mature general-purpose blockchain in the world. Although Ethereum is first and foremost a technology, this year's Ethereum developer conference Devcon focuses on Ethereum as a concept, focusing on how much the principles and values ​​that drive the development of the Ethereum protocol have changed over the years.

From the perspective of ETH price and market sentiment, 2024 is an extremely challenging year.

Many critics of Ethereum believe that over time, Ethereum will The cypherpunk values ​​of community decentralization, trusted neutrality, and censorship resistance have declined or even been abandoned entirely. Even within the Ethereum community, differences in values ​​sparked debate during the Pectra upgrade decision-making process and sparked heated debate on X on topics such as the blob fee market and issuance.

While Devcon 7 showcased a wealth of technical innovations and announcements, none of them provided the community with a clear message about Ethereum’s long-term value and narrative. By far the most anticipated announcement of the week shared by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake is the launch of Beam Chain, a radical proposal to overhaul Ethereum’s current consensus protocol, Beacon Chain.

Although Drake detailed several projects aimed at enhancing the capabilities of Ethereum and L2 New features of the technology, but the proposal lacked broad community support and failed to provide a "North Star" (a forward-looking goal) for stakeholders to have similar to the Ethereum Merge (Merge) for Ethereum's transition to proof of stake. of excitement.

Merge has been Ethereum’s North Star for several years. It’s a technological upgrade rooted in the values ​​of environmentalism and decentralization that nearly the entire community shares. Since the Ethereum merger, no technology upgrade has clearly aligned its values ​​with Ethereum, which in turn has led toThere is confusion and dispute among stakeholders about how exactly Ethereum should develop as a technology.

In addition to a series of technical announcements, the presentation at Devcon was about how to build Ethereum and how to build it in a way that promotes the values ​​of decentralization and trustworthy neutrality. The idea greatly piqued the interest of Devcon attendees. Although all the speakers presented slightly different ideas about Ethereum, they all shared a common basic belief that Ethereum is about creating a permissionless, trust-minimized, transparent system for the betterment of humanity. .

If you've ever had doubts about Ethereum's cypherpunk values ​​motivating innovation, the Devcon 7 talk emphasized that these values ​​are still at the core of Ethereum's philosophy. When asked about the trade-offs between decentralization and performance, all four members of the “Ethereum Values ​​and Ethos Alignment” panel reiterated that the importance of decentralization should be weighed against both performance and performance. On top of scalability.

Flashbots co-founder Philip Daian talked about "Ethereum" in his keynote speech The four characteristics of 3.0”, these characteristics cannot be compromised under any circumstances. They include: permissionless, distributed, geo-economically decentralized and truly builder-neutral. Daian asked the Ethereum community to refocus on promoting and enhancing geographic diversity and permissionless design across all verticals of the Ethereum technology stack, rather than focusing entirely on other goals such as promoting mass adoption through improved user experience.

"The problem is that if you focus purely on user experience, it will be very bad. I think this is why the value of ETH will go to zero. This will destroy the decentralized system we have carefully created, making us vulnerable to exploitation and re-forming the system we are trying to avoid," Daian said in the keynote speech. Gnosis co-founder Martin Koeppelmann proposed the concept of "native rollup" in his keynote speech, that is, a rollup built according to Ethereum values ​​such as decentralization and trusted neutrality. From a practical perspective, what this means for Koeppelmann is not using multi-sig, which controls key functions of rollup,Deploy multiple rollup proof systems, and rigorous testing of the rollup codebase (i.e. "thousands of eyes reviewing every line of code"), just like Ethereum.

Finally, a full day of Devcon programming dedicated to exploring defensive acceleration or The “d/acc” concept. In the words of creator Vitalik Buterin, “d/acc is a philosophy, a set of techniques and protocols for building technologies that enable human agency as both a means and an end. Every technology we create should point to humans Shared freedom and happiness.” Many Devcon attendees received a booklet about the d/acc philosophy as part of the conference souvenir, and on the last day of the conference, they also received a small talk about the future development of the Ethereum protocol. booklets, both written by Vitalik Buterin.

Devcon 7’s manual and programming emphasize the importance of communication among Ethereum developers A shared philosophy, not a shared technology roadmap. More than any innovation, upcoming upgrade, or development team in the Ethereum ecosystem, the most compelling “north star” presented at the conference was the creation of permissionless, trust-minimized, transparent systems for improving human welfare. This is the common wish of all participants.