A monopoly that has made enemies on all sides, is Ethereum still viable?

What happened to Ethereum? Is there hope for Ethereum? This article is from an article by ABC Alpha researcher @Cyrus_G3 and reprinted by PANews. (Synopsis: Ethereum faces generational calls!) V God: The growth of the application layer needs more "good social philosophy", naming the advantages and disadvantages of the application) (Background supplement: Xiao Feng Hong Kong dialogue Vitalik: one year to learn Chinese, Ethereum Foundation to open a branch in Hong Kong.. Since Bitcoin broke through the previous high ($69,000) in 2024 and Ethereum has moved further and further away from the previous high ($4,800), the skepticism about Ethereum has grown. By 2025, Ethereum fell below $3,000 in February, below $2,000 in March, and even below $1,500 in April, and the market's sentiment towards Ethereum has gradually shifted from skepticism to despair and abandonment. Many ICO-era ancient addresses have also begun to gradually clear Ethereum. The top institutions that once supported Ethereum have also begun to falter. What happened to Ethereum? Is there hope for Ethereum? This article will focus on these two issues, starting from the following five aspects, reviewing the rise and decline of Ethereum, and looking forward to the possible future of Ethereum. First, Ethereum's glorious years (2017-2022) In July 2014, Ethereum opened an ICO However, since 2014 – 2016, the price of Ethereum has been below $10, Ethereum at this stage, empty of the name of blockchain 2.0, smart contract technology is also cool, however, Ethereum at this time is useless. In 2017, the era of violent ICOs began, and Ethereum began to become very useful, and everyone bought ETH to participate in ICOs. By January 13, 2018, Ethereum had risen from $10 in early 2017 to $1,430, reaching the first new high in Ethereum's history. According to incomplete statistics, in 2017 – early 2018, more than 2500 tokens launched ICOs using ETH. At this stage, the biggest value of Ethereum is to issue coins, and ETH is not only the most consumed GAS token on the chain, but also the only bargaining chip to participate in the IOC wealth wave. Although this stage has also given birth to many new public blockchains such as NEO, QUTM, EOS, TRON and so on, in the ICO and smart contract market monopolized exclusively by Ethereum, the combined market share of other public chains is almost negligible. Ethereum has enjoyed a huge dividend of innovators at this stage! 2018 – 2019 is the era of 100 chains Because of the success of Ethereum, countless new public chains have emerged on the market, in addition to the above mentioned, we will list a few public chains that many people may not be familiar with, such as: GXC, NULS, ELF, Algorand and so on. Of course, there are also some public chains that are still active today at this stage, such as: TON, ADA, Cosmos, Avalanche, of course, the most famous of them is Solana, yes, Solana was not prominent among the new public chains at that time, but a few years later, it became the biggest challenger to Ethereum, which is quite emotional. Although at this stage, there have been countless new public chains in the market that have tried to challenge Ethereum, Ethereum still has an absolute monopoly on the smart contract market. Smart contracts were first created by Ethereum, the era of smart contracts was opened by Vitalk, V God in the global Crypto field, has a huge appeal and influence second only to Satoshi Nakamoto, the Ethereum ecosystem also gathers the world's largest number of smart contract developers and countless native Crypto technology and thought innovators, all of which are vividly expressed in the upcoming 2020. Finally, in 2020, the summer of DEFI, which countless people have dreamed of, the absolute highlight moment of Ethereum, has finally arrived. After silent fermentation and continuous exploration in 2018-2019, the earliest batch of Crypto native applications – DEFI Protocol finally broke out in the Ethereum ecosystem in the summer of 2020. Compound liquidity mining directly detonated the market, a large number of ETH was used to mint COMP, skyrocketing TVL and platform coins, opening a wave of liquidity mining Uniswap, invested by Vitalik himself, opened the era of on-chain DEX with the minimalist formula of X*Y=K Yearn.Finance launched the DEFI revenue aggregator, and the #YFI that skyrocketed 10,000 times in 30 days is a great ride DAI launched by MakerDAO, It also gave birth to the first stablecoin DEX, the first decentralized stablecoin Curve, on Ethereum, allowing many stablecoins and DEFI tokens to obtain silky liquidity on Ethereum....... DEFI Summer has pushed everyone's expectations of Ethereum to a peak, because Ethereum can not only be used to issue coins, but also build truly valuable decentralized applications, and the future decentralized world will be built on Ethereum. Ethereum is devouring the world. Following DEFI Summer in 2020, in 2021 and 2022, the Ethereum ecosystem has also seen a boom in GameFi, SocialFi, NFTs, etc., and waves of innovation have made the Ethereum ecosystem a thriving scene. On November 10, 2021, Ethereum reached an all-time high of $4,878, and Ethereum's prosperity reached its peak. However, as more and more funds, users, and applications are carried on the Ethereum chain, Ethereum is also starting to become more expensive and slower. The problem of performance expansion has become the biggest obstacle on the road to Ethereum's development. Second, the expansion and pivot of Ethereum (POS-Layer2) Ethereum's expansion plan has always had two main directions - to POS mechanism and development Layer2 from POW mechanism to POS mechanism, is the direction set by Vitalik at the beginning of the creation of Ethereum, Vitalik believes that POS is more resource-efficient than POW, and the POS mechanism can also improve the performance of the Ethereum network, Make Ethereum more scalable. The Layer2 solution is also the direction of Ethereum network expansion that Vitalik has been promoting, from the initial state channel (Raiden Network), subnet (Plasma, Sharding) and other directions, to the later mainstream Rollup solution. As well as OP-Rollup and ZK-Rollup, which exploded intensively in 2022-2023, have brought hope for Ethereum's expansion. Whether it's going to POS or Layer 2, the Ethereum community at the time was considered the right choice for Ethereum to continue to be great and prosperous. Although the POS mechanism has attracted a large number of miners' dissatisfaction, Ethereum is still ...