Since Ethereum launched on Mainnet, we will celebrate the decade on July 30, 2025. This is undoubtedly one of the biggest milestones in the industry’s short-term life.
When it was launched as the world’s first smart contract platform, it was obviously a brand new and a brand new way of thinking about software. In theory, people can participate in a system that belongs to everyone, and instead of renting access to platforms that can change rules or locking your other people’s access to a system that can write rules through code, the rise of CEOs cannot be changed arbitrarily. Users will have their dates and the software will be maintained and managed by the network rather than the board of directors. The consequences seem to be utopian.
But it’s been nearly a decade since the launch of Ethereum, and the dream of a Web3 version of Amazon, eBay, Facebook or Tiktok has not arrived yet and has nowhere to go.
Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and he “web3” This is completely conceived. “Ethereum will have the same general impact on our communication and the information infrastructure as a whole,” said Joe Lubin, a well-known consensus founder.
Liberal journalist Jim Epstein predict One year after Ethereum’s release, “The same type of services provided by companies like Facebook, Google, eBay and Amazon will be provided by computers distributed around the world.”
Vitalik Buterin himself envisions Ethereum “law, cloud storage, forecasting markets, trading decentralized custody, (custody) your own currency”, his 2014 Miami Bitcoin speechhe announced Ethereum to the world. The fictional artificial neural network in the Terminator movie “maybe even Skynet”. He described the platform he created as Threats and opportunities By 2021, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Proportional issues
The obstacle to achieving this vision is scale. Today’s most successful consumer applications serve hundreds of millions of users. Instagram uploads more than 1 billion photos every day. eBay processes approximately $17 billion in transactions each quarter. Facebook’s messaging platform processes trillions of messages each year.
The Ethereum process has about 14 transactions per second, and Solana can process more than 1,000 transactions. Instagram processes more than 1 billion photos uploaded every day. eBay processes $17 billion in transactions every quarter. Mathematics doesn’t work.
Let’s have a little entertainment eBay example. The requirement of a truly decentralized eBay will require far more than simple payments. Each list creation or update requires chain transactions that require product metadata, pricing and condition details. Auctions will require time-locked smart contracts to automatically bid. The custodial system will have to hold funds until delivery is confirmed and conduct dispute arbitration.
The user reputation system will require immutable price storage bound to the wallet address. Inventory management may require real-time inventory tracking, possibly through tokenization of goods. Shipping confirmation will require Oracle integration for proof of delivery. Market fees and tax royalties will require smart contract enforcement. An optional authentication system will require decentralized credential management. Each interaction will exceed the support of the current infrastructure in an exponential multiple.
Needless to say, this will require an unprecedented blockchain with speed and throughput. Frankly, ten years later, infrastructure has not come to support it.
Economics doesn’t work
Business models are not always meaningful either. Modern applications require large-scale scale to generate revenue covering development costs. In addition, the snippet of the layer 2 solution users cross-platform, where (For example) The quorum user cannot interact directly with the polygon application. This defeated the purpose of building a unified global computing.
This is not theoretical. Opensea Struggling with profitability Despite the fact that with high value trading and high-demand deposit users dominate NFT trading. How to build a market for used goods if you can’t pay hundreds of dollars from selling digital art to crypto enthusiasts? Economics is even worse for low-value transactions that define mainstream trade. A decentralized social network charges $5 per post and will die upon arrival.
The gaming app that requires a few dollars in transaction fees per project transaction will not attract players who expect the same for free elsewhere. So far, the only viable on-chain businesses are those that can extract huge value from relatively few users – essentially high-risk financial applications and speculative transactions.
Calvary is here
The industry embraced a false trade-off: security and decentralization, or functionality and scale, but not both. But transaction throughput steadily increases (and will continue) As the technology matures, the entire network. Now, even with proof of work chains, we can achieve huge scale, thus maintaining security and decentralization, which first revolutionizes blockchain (rather than embracing prematurely dangerous proof of damaging these principles).
Zero-knowledge proof allows users to prove transaction validity locally, submitting only recursive summary and small cryptographic proofs paralleled by the plundering network. The network can process millions of transactions without having to verify each node individually. When users prove their transactions, the marginal cost of adding additional transaction methods is zero, and blockchain can ultimately support the economics required for mainstream applications.
But for a decade, it’s clear that the vision once proposed by Web3 futurists moved at a disappointing pace. Hopefully, move faster in the next decade – and finger crossing – so do our blockchains.
