Ethereum's Ten-Year Journey: Evolving Narratives That Shape Its Future

By TechFlow

Translator: Naetitia

On July 30, 2015, at 3:26 PM, Ethereum’s first block was successfully mined.

With that genesis moment, known as "Frontier," an ambitious prophecy was born—the "World Computer." Vitalik Buterin and the early developers envisioned they were building not just an upgraded version of Bitcoin, but a global computational platform capable of running any decentralized application.

Today, a decade later, marks the tenth anniversary of Ethereum’s mainnet launch.

As we reflect on Ethereum’s trajectory, it becomes clear that this so-called "World Computer" has not evolved into a platform running a diverse array of decentralized applications as originally envisioned. Instead, it has transformed into a settlement layer dominated by financial applications.

DeFi protocols account for the majority of Ethereum’s gas consumption, with trillions of dollars in assets flowing through the network. Meanwhile, the once highly anticipated decentralized applications in social media, gaming, storage, and other domains have either faded into obscurity or migrated to other chains.

Is this shift in narrative a compromise—or an evolution?

Looking back at this milestone, the ten-year transformation of Ethereum’s narrative is not just a story about Ethereum itself, but also a tale of how technological ideals find their footing in the real world.

The World Computer: The Golden Age of Idealism (2015–2017)

To understand the origins of Ethereum’s narrative, we must return to the winter of late 2013.

At that time, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin was traveling in Israel when a bold idea struck him: What if blockchain technology could do more than just transfer value—what if it could run any complex program?

The revolutionary nature of this idea lay in its ability to extend blockchain from a specialized value transfer tool into a universal computational platform.

But behind this initial vision lay deeper cultural motivations.

The early Ethereum community was composed of a group of tech idealists who believed in the principle of "code as law." They weren’t merely building a new technological platform—they were attempting to create a new societal paradigm: a digital utopia governed entirely by code rules, free from centralized authorities.

At the time, Ethereum’s narrative revolved around decentralization and the "World Computer" concept, where "code as law" was not just a technical ideal but also a political declaration and philosophical stance. Early Ethereum supporters believed that smart contracts could reshape societal rules, creating a fairer, more transparent, and trustless world.

This technological idealism was reflected in Ethereum’s early design choices. Its Turing-complete virtual machine, gas mechanism, and account model—all these technical decisions embodied the values of "maximizing decentralization" and "maximizing general-purpose functionality."

On April 30, 2016, less than a year after Ethereum’s mainnet launch, The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) officially began its crowdfunding campaign.

The DAO epitomized the idealistic spirit of the early Ethereum community: an investment fund with no management team, no board of directors, and entirely controlled by code. In just 28 days, The DAO raised 11.5 million ETH, accounting for 14% of Ethereum’s total supply at the time, with a value exceeding $150 million.

However, ideals soon collided with the harsh realities of the world. On June 17, an attacker exploited a recursive call vulnerability in The DAO’s smart contract, siphoning off 3.6 million ETH.

The ensuing debate tore the community apart. One faction argued that since "code is law," ETH obtained through code exploitation should be considered "legitimate," and any human intervention would violate the core principles of blockchain. The other faction contended that when outcomes clearly undermine the community’s shared values, a hard fork to rectify the issue is necessary.

Ultimately, the majority, led by Vitalik Buterin, opted for a hard fork to return the stolen ETH to its original holders. This decision resulted in Ethereum’s first major split, with the minority who adhered to the "code is law" principle continuing to maintain the original chain, now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

This crisis exposed the inherent contradictions of technological idealism: complete decentralization could lead to unacceptable consequences, while any form of human intervention might be seen as a betrayal of decentralization principles.

These contradictions have been a recurring theme throughout Ethereum’s development and laid the groundwork for the eventual shift in its narrative.

The ICO Money Machine: Lost in the Bubble (2017–2020)

At the end of 2016, no one could have foreseen how the upcoming ICO frenzy would transform Ethereum forever.

The summer of 2017 saw an unprecedented capital boom in the crypto world. The simple concept of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings)—raising funds through token issuance—captured the imagination of speculators worldwide. In 2017 alone, ICOs raised over $6 billion, and by the first half of 2018, this figure had skyrocketed to $12 billion.

Ethereum became the money machine powering countless ICOs.

Writing smart contracts, designing payment rules, choosing token names and quantities—tokens requiring no real-world commitments began to flood the market:

A whitepaper that looked grand enough, a story capable of triggering FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), and a seemingly reasonable tokenomics model.

At that time, Ethereum faced an unexpected identity crisis—originally designed as the "World Computer," it suddenly found its primary use case to be token issuance.

This stark discrepancy between reality and vision marked the first major fracture in Ethereum’s narrative.

Vitalik Buterin and the early core developers envisioned Ethereum as a global computing platform for decentralized applications, but the market had a different answer: all it needed was a simple ERC-20 standard for token issuance.

This simplification wasn’t just technical—it was cognitive. To investors, Ethereum was no longer a revolutionary computational paradigm but merely a money-printing machine.

The deeper issue was that this label of "token issuance platform" began to reshape Ethereum’s development direction. When 90% of ecosystem activity revolved around tokens, development priorities inevitably shifted toward this area. Discussions in EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) focused more on token standards than other application scenarios, developer tools centered on token issuance and trading, and the entire ecosystem fell into a "path dependency."

If the earlier DAO incident was a philosophical debate within idealism, then the ICO boom marked the first direct collision between idealism and market reality. This collision exposed a fundamental contradiction in Ethereum’s narrative: the vast gap between its technological vision and market demand.

Then came 2018, the bear market.

For Ethereum, this wasn’t just a collapse in price—it was a collapse in narrative. When the ICO bubble burst and the slogan of "blockchain revolution" lost its appeal, Ethereum had to confront a fundamental question:

If you’re not the World Computer, then what are you?

The answer to this question gradually emerged during the bear market’s trials. A new narrative began to take shape: Ethereum is first and foremost a financial settlement layer, and only then could it potentially become a general-purpose computing platform.

This shift was reflected in the technical roadmap. The design of Ethereum 2.0 increasingly considered the needs of financial applications—faster finality, lower transaction costs, and higher security. While the official rhetoric continued to emphasize "general-purpose functionality," the actual optimization direction clearly pointed toward financial use cases.

The correctness of this choice would be tested in the next phase.

DeFi’s Triumph: When Finance Becomes Ethereum's Calling (2020–2021)

The DeFi Summer of 2020 was not just an explosion of applications for Ethereum; it marked a complete transformation in its identity.

If the ICO boom of 2017 unexpectedly turned Ethereum into a token issuance platform, the success of DeFi made the ecosystem realize that finance might not be a compromise for Ethereum—it could be its inherent mission.

This shift in understanding was gradual.

Initially, DeFi was seen as one of many experiments, alongside applications in gaming, social networking, and supply chain management. But when Compound’s liquidity mining ignited market enthusiasm, when tens of billions of dollars poured into various DeFi protocols, and when Gas fees repeatedly hit record highs due to DeFi activity, an undeniable fact emerged: Ethereum had found its product-market fit.

Previously, positioning Ethereum as a financial platform seemed like "downgrading" its scope, betraying the grand vision of the "World Computer." But DeFi revealed another possibility: finance itself is one of the most complex and valuable forms of computation.

Every transaction, every settlement, every derivative is a complex computational process. From this perspective, becoming the "World Financial Computer" is not contradictory to becoming the "World Computer"; rather, it is a different expression of the same vision.

The DeFi boom created a powerful positive feedback loop, continuously reinforcing Ethereum’s narrative as financial infrastructure. The surge in usage, the concentration of developers, and the shift in discourse power gradually began to favor DeFi. Voices from DeFi project teams grew louder and more influential.

However, DeFi’s success also brought a pressing reality: Ethereum’s performance bottleneck.

When a simple token swap costs tens or even hundreds of dollars in Gas fees, Ethereum faced a survival crisis. This was no longer an idealistic question of "how to become the World Computer," but a practical question of "how to keep DeFi running."

This urgency fundamentally changed Ethereum’s technical priorities. In the past, scalability was seen as a long-term goal, something that could be solved gradually with the most elegant solutions. But the DeFi boom turned scalability into an immediate concern. The Ethereum community had to confront a harsh reality:

Perfect solutions can wait, but the market won’t.

Thus, we witnessed a series of pragmatic decisions. Layer 2 solutions were no longer distant concepts but emergency measures that had to be deployed immediately. Rollup technology, though not fully decentralized, could quickly alleviate congestion and therefore received full support from core developers. Ethereum 2.0’s roadmap was also adjusted to prioritize features most beneficial to DeFi.

This adjustment in the technical roadmap fundamentally reflects the shift in narrative. Once Ethereum embraced its identity as financial infrastructure, all technical decisions revolved around this core purpose.

The Rise of L2, Sovereignty Trade-offs, and the Parasite Dilemma (2021–2023)

In 2021, Ethereum faced a harsh reality: DeFi’s success was killing Ethereum.

When a simple transaction required minutes to confirm and ordinary users were priced out by exorbitant costs, Ethereum’s narrative encountered a new crisis. The vision of being the "global financial settlement layer" sounded appealing, but could this narrative hold if only the wealthy could afford to use it?

The deeper contradiction lay in the fact that Ethereum’s success exposed its fundamental architectural flaw. As a monolithic blockchain, Ethereum attempted to handle everything on the same layer: executing computations, validating transactions, storing data, and achieving consensus. While this "all-in-one" design was an advantage in its early stages, it became a fatal weakness at scale.

Faced with this dilemma, the Ethereum community underwent a painful shift in understanding. A true World Computer should resemble the internet: a modular, layered system.

This shift was most clearly articulated in a blog post by Vitalik Buterin: "The future of Ethereum is modular."

This statement marked yet another major turning point in Ethereum’s narrative. From "one chain to rule them all" to "a collaborative ecosystem of layers," Ethereum began to accept a new reality—no single blockchain can meet all needs, and the future lies in specialized division of labor.

Thus, as Rollup solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism began to handle an increasing share of transactions, a fundamental question emerged: If most activity happens on Layer 2, what is the role of Ethereum’s mainnet?

By 2022, this question manifested more prominently in the context of data availability. As projects like Celestia proposed dedicated data availability layers, the tension surrounding data availability (DA) highlighted the delicate balance between openness and control within Ethereum.

Ethereum has always prided itself on openness and decentralization, but when this openness threatened its own position, the community’s response became more complex. Some began to use the term "Ethereum Alignment" to advocate for maintaining a degree of control while preserving openness.

Even more intriguingly, this debate redefined the meaning of success.

In the past, success meant that all activity occurred directly on Ethereum. Now, success has been redefined: even if activity happens elsewhere, as long as it ultimately relies on Ethereum’s security, it is considered a victory for the Ethereum ecosystem. This redefinition reflects Ethereum’s shift in mindset—from "monopoly" to "symbiosis."

The Multi-Chain Wars and Defensive "Legitimacy" Narratives (2023–2024)

In 2023, the blockchain world underwent a subtle yet significant shift: the new generation of public chains no longer aimed to become "a better Ethereum," but instead began telling entirely different stories.

Solana stopped emphasizing itself as "a faster smart contract platform" and positioned itself as "the Nasdaq of blockchains." Aptos and Sui moved away from discussions of "decentralization" and instead highlighted "Web2-level user experience."

For Ethereum, this change was both a relief and a challenge. The relief lay in no longer being trapped in an arms race over performance metrics. The challenge, however, was that when competitors opened up new battlefields, Ethereum’s traditional advantages could potentially become irrelevant.

The deeper issue was: when "decentralization" was no longer the sole value standard, how attractive were Ethereum’s core values, which it had always prided itself on?

The complexity of this narrative competition was most vividly displayed in Solana’s resurgence.

After the collapse of FTX in 2022, everyone thought Solana was finished. Yet in 2023, it made a strong comeback with Meme coins and low-cost transactions. This phenomenon revealed an unsettling truth for the Ethereum community—the market might not care about decentralization as much as they had imagined.

Faced with the rise of new public chains, Ethereum’s initial response was to emphasize its "legitimacy."

Ethereum supporters pointed out issues like centralization, security risks, and technical compromises in these chains. However, the market’s reaction was unexpectedly indifferent. When users could complete transactions for mere pennies, they seemed unconcerned about whether the network was "decentralized enough."

When Ethereum tried to explain its value in pragmatic terms, it instead lost its original moral high ground. "We are safer" sounded far less inspiring than "We are building a decentralized future." This secularization of its narrative, while it might attract more mainstream users, could also alienate its core supporters.

Adding to the complexity was the fact that new public chains began redefining "decentralization" in reverse.

They argued that true decentralization should allow ordinary people to participate, rather than being an elite network affordable only to the wealthy. When Solana users criticized Ethereum for its high Gas fees using this argument, Ethereum found itself trapped in the moral dilemma it had set up.

By early 2024, a troubling trend became evident: Ethereum’s narrative was increasingly defensive. Most discussions revolved around "why we are better than other chains" rather than "what we are building." This shift from offense to defense exposed Ethereum’s struggle with innovation.

This defensive posture manifested in multiple ways.

The technical roadmap increasingly responded to competitive pressures rather than internal vision. Community discussions were filled with criticisms of other chains rather than self-reflection. Even Vitalik’s blog posts became more focused on explanations and justifications, rather than the bold ideas of earlier years.

More concerning was how this defensive mindset began to affect the ecosystem’s innovative vitality. Developers stopped asking "What is possible?" and instead asked "What is safe?" Investors no longer sought breakthrough innovations but rather looked for "Ethereum killer killers." The entire ecosystem fell into a state of internal competition rather than external expansion.

The root cause of this situation lay in the exhaustion of its narrative. When "World Computer" proved too grand, "DeFi settlement layer" too narrow, and "modular blockchain" too technical, Ethereum lacked a new narrative capable of inspiring imagination.

Narrative Reconstruction and the Future (2024–)

In 2024, as the crypto market searched for new growth drivers, RWA (Real World Assets) emerged as the new savior. For Ethereum, this was not only a new application scenario but also an opportunity for narrative reconstruction. Shifting from "changing finance" to "connecting reality," Ethereum aimed to tell a more pragmatic and mainstream-friendly story.

The appeal of Ethereum’s RWA narrative lies in its concreteness.

It is no longer the abstract "decentralized finance," but rather "turning your U.S. Treasury bonds into tradable tokens." It is no longer "permissionless innovation," but rather "reducing cross-border trade friction costs." This shift from idealism to pragmatism reflects the Ethereum community’s new understanding of market demand.

More subtly, the RWA narrative redefined the meaning of success. In the past, success meant creating an entirely new, native crypto economy. Now, success has become serving the existing financial system.

Wall Street’s old money rushed to participate in ETH ETFs, and Ethereum co-founders pivoted to acquire shell companies in the U.S. stock market. Assets went mainstream, crypto and equity markets became interconnected, and Ethereum gradually returned to $4,000 in this new market cycle.

The game has changed, and so has the narrative.

In the past, the community was always searching for "the" grand narrative that could define Ethereum. Now, more and more people are accepting a reality: perhaps there is no single answer.

People no longer pursue a unified, all-encompassing story but instead allow multiple narratives to coexist. For DeFi users, Ethereum is financial infrastructure; for enterprises, it is a tool for crypto transformation; for creators, it is a copyright protection platform; for idealists, it remains the decentralized future.

The goal is to make Ethereum serve broader needs and attract more diverse users.

However, it remains unclear whether this diversification is a sign of maturity or a symptom of losing direction. A healthy ecosystem should indeed embrace diversity, but a platform lacking a core vision might lose its momentum for progress.

Regardless, as the marginal benefits of technological innovation diminish, narrative innovation must continue.

When technology and narrative become untethered, it’s better to solve real problems than to invent new buzzwords. Instead of promising to change the world, it’s better to focus on improving user experience. This pragmatic attitude may not be as exciting but could prove more sustainable.

"Peach blossoms in spring, a cup of wine; lanterns in the rainy nights of the Jianghu, ten years past."

From idealism to realism, from revolution to reform, from disruption to integration—Ethereum’s ten-year journey may not be a betrayal of its original intentions but rather the cost of growth. After all, when the old story is finished, a new one can begin.

Perhaps what will truly bring Ethereum to billions of users is not just what it can do but what the real world chooses to do with it.

From vision to reality, from promises to delivery, this may be the ultimate direction of Ethereum’s narrative evolution. The gains and losses, advances and retreats, persistence and compromises along this path will define not just Ethereum but the future of the entire crypto industry.