10 Years On, The Fight For Ethereum's Soul Continues...
But what does the future of Ethereum hold? It's a loaded question that is incredibly difficult to answer given the complexity and decentralized nature of the world's pioneering smart-contract blockchain protocol.
Cointelegraph recently traveled to EthCC in Cannes to speak to the brightest minds in the Ethereum community about its current state and the future of the protocol amid the rise of highly competitive next-generation layer-1 blockchains.
These conversations formed the backbone of Cointelegraph's latest mini-documentary: 'The Fight for Ethereum's Soul.'
The documentary features several founders, CEOs and builders in the Ethereum ecosystem including Ethereum Foundation (EF) co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Ethereum France president Jerome de Tychey, Figment co-founder and CEO Lorien Gabel, Dune Analytics co-founder and CEO Fredrik Haga, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, YAP Global co-founder and CEO Samantha Yap and Base head of product Tom Vieira.
The documentary was directed and produced by Cointelegraph's head of multimedia Gareth Jenkinson, with senior producer Celine Tan.
Ethereum has dramatically evolved over the past decade. The blockchain managed to execute a change in consensus algorithm, often likened to replacing the engine of a car driving at full speed on a highway.
The shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake fundamentally changed the way the protocol works. Ethereum parted ways with Bitcoin's proof-of-work approach to consensus, rooted in computationally and energy-intensive hashing, to a skin-in-the-game system that requires validators to stake ETH tokens to maintain the network and reap rewards.
While Ethereum initially provided fantastic functionality, it eventually encountered the same problems as the preeminent cryptocurrency protocol. Its base layer chain simply could not serve the needs of the growing number of users, applications and services that set up on its network.
To enable the ability to process infinitely scalable transactions, the Ethereum community adopted a layer 2-centric approach to scaling. Execution, from transactions or asset creation, was shifted to a separate infrastructure layer. These layers use incredible advances in cryptography, like ZK-proofs, to submit trustless evidence of transactions and activity to Ethereum's base layer.
This brought scale, speed and cost reductions to layer 1, but an inevitable consequence was the fragmentation of liquidity and shifting incentives for validators. Fees dropped on the base layer, which remains a core incentive for Ethereum validators to maintain the network.
Meanwhile, the superior execution environments of layer 2s began to pull liquidity from Ethereum's base layer. In 2024, grumblings of discontent began to surface.
Prominent voices called for the EF to intervene and propose changes to the protocol that ensured the value of ETH continues to rise while maintaining the advances in UX and UI that layer 2s had provided.
In 2025, the EF made significant changes to its organisational structure. Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang took up a dual role at the top of the Foundation, reporting to a braintrust led by Vitalik Buterin.
Pectra, Ethereum's latest network upgrade, hit the mainnet in May. It was the most significant change to the protocol since the Merge in 2022.
Combining the Prague execution layer and Electra consensus layer hard forks, Pectra introduced 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to improve scalability, user experience and staking efficiency.
Pectra builds improvements made by the 2024 Dencun upgrade, which famously introduced Blobs through EIP 4844, known as proto-danksharding.
Blobs provided a new way for L2s to post transaction data on the L1. The impact was dramatic; L2 transaction fees dropped by 90%.
An unavoidable consequence of this upgrade was that L2s no longer paid huge fees to settle on Ethereum. According to Dune co-founder Fredrik Haga, this was a technological boon, but an economic drawback for L1 validators.
'The L2 situation is interesting because now 85% of transactions are on L2, so there's only 15% left on Ethereum L1, but 85% of the volume still lives on L1,' Haga said. 'The L1 has very limited engagement, if you will, in like the absolute number. But the big money is still clearly on L1. Then obviously the L2 used to pay a lot to settle to L1. And since blobs were introduced in March 2024, that has basically gone to zero.'
The combined impact of Dencun in 2024 and Pectra in 2025 has helped the Ethereum ecosystem move further down an intricate development roadmap. Stańczak said unifying liquidity, interoperability and improving overall user experience has been a top priority for the Ethereum Foundation (EF) over the past 18 months.
'I think the big focus now is on the interop, on the tooling and the standards, and accelerating that idea that all the chains around Ethereum should feel very much like a single ecosystem, and it should be very natural for the users to transfer between them to use all the applications that just flow to different chains if they need to,' Stańczak said.
'There are clear challenges on presenting how the fee structure, data availability and interop mechanics all work together. Just a few years ago, it was really hard to predict how the L2s would evolve. Now we see we have much more clarity.'
Jerome de Tychey, the head of Ethereum France and organizer of EthCC, added that the future success of the protocol is a balancing act between prioritizing L1 mechanics and the symbiosis with L2s.
'We are doing two things right now. First, we are putting some emphasis on the L1, on scalability and on the sustainability of the L2. We have a lot of consideration about the future performance of the security aspect of things, and also of potentially the token itself, of course, but also upgrading how the user experience is going to be unfolded in the next years. That's a very, very good signal that Ethereum is going to be more accessible from a usability standpoint,' De Tychey said.
Still, the balancing act remains a precarious one. How does the Ethereum L1 ensure that validators are incentivized to keep the network running and avoid getting into a performance arm-wrestle with new-age layer 1s like Solana, SUI and Aptos?
Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron offered food for thought, suggesting that any efforts to try to compete directly with Solana, SUI or Aptos might be to the detriment of Ethereum's future.
'I'm pretty optimistic about it in the sense that it does look like they're saying, like, OK, maybe let's focus on data availability and execution more than personally I would like, but without really giving up this benefit that we have from a settlement perspective,' Boiron said.
'I think it is dangerous, right? If they go down this road of trying to compete on execution too heavily, the likelihood is they will end up getting out-competed by those who are trying to do the exact same thing.'
While the volume of criticism was deafeningly loud over the past year, conversations at EthCC gave a sense of optimism about the future of Ethereum.
This optimism is not rooted in fervour but rather in utility and onchain metrics. More than 90% of tokenized real-world assets are being built on Ethereum.
BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, is tokenizing securities on Ethereum.
Robinhood grabbed headlines in Cannes with the launch of its own Ethereum-based layer 2, squarely aimed at RWA and securities tokenization.
'If you think about DeFi versus TradFi, I would say absolutely no chance that DeFi will not dominate all the global markets. It will be there. It will happen on Ethereum,' Stańczak said.
De Tychey said there's no meaningful alternative. 'Everything else is a ghost train and going in the wrong direction, and pushing and lobbying to still be able to exist with a lot of different interests, a lot of vested interests.'
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal summed things up succinctly:
'Ethereum got dragged into the execution game. Whereas Ethereum's core value proposition is this highly decentralized, sovereign-resistant, permissionless settlement layer. And if Ethereum plays well to its strengths and focuses on being the best settlement layer, we already have enough network effects and the momentum for the whole Web3 world to be created around Ethereum.'
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