What should Ethereum do when geek spirit meets the wave of Memes?

Question

Following this discussion, I would like to add my thoughts on the current predicament of Ethereum's Vitalik, as follows:

The "ivory tower" mindset restricts innovation: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has a tendency of elitism detached from the market during the period of 2020-2024, continually stacking technical concepts while neglecting the real needs of users.

In the face of overwhelming criticism and directional guidance, the EF management chose to "ignore" it, which led them to miss the crucial time window to fix the problems, allowing competitors like Solana and Sui to break free from the oligopolistic effects of the Ethereum ecosystem and grow wildly.

Overstacking of technical narratives leads to market fatigue: From DeFi, NFTs to various Layer 2 scaling solutions, the Ethereum ecosystem resembles a narrative production factory, continuously producing new technical narratives without achieving effective value capture.

This has led users to gradually feel fatigued by the development path that is purely technology-oriented but does not reflect on the ecosystem and coin prices. Ethereum has always hoped to stimulate a market build boom by raising technical barriers, but it has been proven that relying solely on technical narratives is difficult to sustain continuous market prosperity.

Layer 2 strategies lead to ecological fragmentation and liquidity dispersion: Layer 2 projects such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base have technically solved certain scaling issues, such as reducing Gas fees to negligible levels and significantly increasing TPS, but they have also resulted in the complex abstraction of user experience and excessive dispersion of liquidity.

The compatibility issues of cross-chain standards among different camps of OP Stack, ZK Stack, and Ethereum's native assets, as well as the interoperability barriers, have made these market darlings turn into vampires that issue tokens for the sake of issuing tokens. Not only do they fail to provide effective nourishment to the Ethereum ecosystem, but they also contribute to the ongoing stagnation of the Ethereum ecosystem.

$ETH Value Capture Model Failure: After the implementation of the EIP-1559 burning mechanism, the value capture effect of ETH has not continued to function as expected. ETH lacks a value accumulation mechanism directly linked to network usage, and the prosperity of the layer2 market has not fully transmitted transaction fees to the mainnet. The idea of a modular architecture advocates for the separation of the base layer and the application layer, leading to ETH becoming a basic infra settlement layer rather than a necessary "value hub."

Therefore, when competitors like Solana achieve several times growth in a short period, ETH still fails to effectively break through its historical high.

The geek community culture is detached from the market mainstream: The Ethereum community, primarily composed of geeks, long embraces technological purism, creating a divide with current mainstream market players. By rejecting seemingly "lowbrow" forms of innovation such as "Meme culture," it has led to a cognitive gap with the younger generation of users.

In contrast, the Solana ecosystem has successfully attracted a large amount of fresh blood and market attention with its inclusive and innovative attitude, forming a positive cycle of development effects.

Above.

But just like many friends who love and hate Ethereum deeply, even though they can see the various problems that exist with Ethereum, they still believe that the current predicament of Ethereum is not irreversible. It is undeniable that its active developer ecosystem and accumulated DeFi infrastructure security consensus remain the strongest.

When the technological narrative and the long-termism market theme are set, Ethereum will still occupy a core position. For most Ethereum enthusiasts and HODLers, giving up the excessive expectations of being the "second in the crypto universe" and viewing ETH from the perspective of a purely decentralized network asset from a global market standpoint may lead to better choices.