David Hoffman from Bankless stated on April 19, “The Ethereum vessel is gradually changing its course.” He noted that this transformation began more than half a year ago and that the impacts are already visible, underlining six key changes Ethereum is experiencing.
Earlier this year, Ethereum faced several challenges, including issues with the leadership at the Ethereum Foundation, developers leaving, and increasing levels of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). Nevertheless, it remains the benchmark network for DeFi, stablecoins, the tokenization of real-world assets, and decentralized applications.
According to Hoffman, Ethereum, which was primarily research-oriented for several years, is now acknowledging the necessity to evolve in response to the competitive pressures that emerged around 2021. The Ethereum community is proactively tackling these issues through aggressive layer-1 scaling, with plans to augment gas limits by ten times within two years.
There’s been a transition from a protocol-first to a product-first approach, coupled with new leadership roles. Also, the Ethereum Foundation is playing a more active coordinating role with new co-executive directors. Furthermore, Hoffman highlighted the more inclusive culture as the “Ivory Tower” doors open, leading to a plethora of voices contributing to roadmap discussions.
Improvements are being seen in layer-2 integration and the development of interoperability standards, placing Ethereum layer-1 service provider in a strong position to serve L2s. Finally, there’s an increased sense of urgency in adopting shorter roadmap cycles and quicker protocol upgrades.
During a recent podcast, Ethereum Foundation researchers Ansgar Dietrichs and Dankrad Feist revealed that the organization is stepping up to facilitate these steps.
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams shared his thoughts on the Ethereum scaling debate, stating, “I’m all for scaling improvements to L1, the rollup-centric roadmap actually requires it,” but mentioned that if Ethereum ultimately relies on L1 to support DeFi, Solana may have a better roadmap, team, and scaling model. He insisted Ethereum should stick to its rollup-centric layer-2 scaling strategy, which has been in development for the past five years.
Adams added that he was also against “just do every approach,” which is probably the only thing worse than not choosing an approach. Meanwhile, Ethereum prices remain at March 2023 levels, failing to push much higher than $1,600 so far this weekend.
