Bangkok Devcon Reflections: Ethereum's Internal Challenges and External Pressures
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Bangkok Devcon Reflections: Ethereum's Internal Challenges and External Pressures
Ethereum's "external challenges" are precisely the potential breakthrough points for its delivery of a stable phase.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Haotian
These past few days have been a mix of conference sessions and endless socializing—so much information to process. There's the frustration among builders who feel the market no longer values technical narratives, the excitement from those chasing meme-driven gains in secondary markets, and of course, many like me: long-term value holders deeply committed to balanced progress across technology, markets, and product development, yet increasingly alienated by the shifting industry culture.
To be honest, I’ve wanted to find an answer to this sense of contradiction, fragmentation, and helplessness—but I know there isn’t one. So instead, let me share some scattered thoughts floating in my mind these days.
1) The Ethereum main stage drew massive crowds and featured diverse talks, but overall, underwhelming. The only somewhat eye-catching project, "Beamchain," was widely misunderstood. Beyond the market’s emotional reaction to lackluster secondary performance, Ethereum itself is now entering a critical phase: the delivery period for its long-standing roadmap and technical narratives. This means mediocre innovations are ignored, while even minor issues get amplified geometrically into FUD.
2) Though touted as the largest Devcon in Ethereum's history, Bangkok hosted over a hundred side events these past few days—with no clear central theme. Ethereum became merely the stage-setter, while the actual "performances" on that stage were largely ignored. Most people poured their energy into niche technical deep dives or purely social side events like clubbing and barbecues. My focus stayed on ZK, chain abstraction, and BTCFi—areas where I gained far more insight than from the main track.
3) The wave of "meme everything" is clearly rising—and it’s not inherently wrong. I even attended talks analyzing the cultural roots behind meme coins. As I often say, “eliminating meaninglessness itself can be meaningful.” When technical narratives fail to deliver and generate no wealth effect (i.e., seem meaningless), doesn’t the community embracing memes become the most meaningful response?
I fully recognize the value of memes in channeling community sentiment and attracting new users. But we must not break the core rhythm of innovation: VCs investing capital, builders investing time, and holders backing real progress. If project teams and VCs all start openly manipulating memes, we’ll plunge entirely into financial nihilism. Do you think the crypto industry would then collapse?
4) The Ethereum community is deeply divided. On the surface, it's about disappointment with ETH’s price performance, but at its core, it's a tense standoff between the entrenched “right wing” holding centralized control over key resources and the marginalized “left wing” fighting hard from the periphery.
Ethereum has always prioritized maintaining the dominance of a monolithic single chain, giving its technical upgrades and standard optimizations a sense of orthodoxy—but also making them slow. Take Account Abstraction: based on EIP-4337, numerous AA wallets emerged with grants, yet failed to build significant user bases. Then came the multi-chain era, sparking a wave of chain abstraction solutions challenging Ethereum with more flexible, expansive, and user-centric architectures.
What’s the response? Hide behind Vitalik’s endorsement and claim of technical purity—calling it consolidation and protection of protocol integrity. But in reality, it’s stagnation and resistance to new challenges. Don’t forget: many chain abstraction proposals still rely heavily on AA as a core primitive. This is what I call Ethereum’s internal crisis. Similar dynamics play out in AVS and zkVM spaces.
5) I put “external threats” in quotes because I don’t see them as real dangers—they’re actually potential breakthroughs during Ethereum’s stabilization phase. For example, Optimism delayed its Fraud Proof system for so long that when they finally launched, they realized OP Stack chains couldn’t sync properly.
So what happened? “External threats” stepped in—using AVS-based security consensus and ZK infrastructure to build ZK-enhanced optimistic proofs, accelerating deployment. Similarly, SNARKs integration—a key goal for Ethereum’s Verge phase—is crucial, yet well before that, projects had already developed generalized zkVM solutions like RISC-Zero and zkMIPS.
And while EigenLayer’s AVS security model remains unproven, its financial composability perfectly complements Ethereum’s current delivery bottlenecks.
I don’t understand why Vitalik hasn’t publicly endorsed AVS mechanisms. They don’t violate Ethereum’s decentralization principles—in fact, AVS could integrate most peripheral innovation efforts back into the Ethereum ecosystem. To me, zkVM, chain abstraction, and PayFi represent three emerging rebel forces gathering momentum at the edges, launching coordinated attacks on Ethereum’s towering walls. If we treat these innovators as external threats, then what exactly is Ethereum trying to protect?
6) Many fail to understand Ethereum’s current strategy of alignment and contraction. Indeed, once a decentralized organization reaches such scale, perhaps everything should be left to the community—to clash, compete, and evolve organically—while Ethereum passively reaps the benefits.
The reality is Ethereum’s ecosystem is too big to pivot quickly, lacking agility. This means every challenge Ethereum faces—and attempts to solve—already has market-driven alternatives. I closely followed discussions on interoperability among Ethereum L2s, eager to learn how these siloed, self-interested layer-2s plan to align. But as expected, it felt just like a corporate meeting between two departments blaming each other—long, tedious, and ultimately meaningless. All you walk away with is the vague impression that everyone’s busy doing something.
When will this walled-garden-style interoperability balance internal interests? When will it truly materialize? And when will developers and users finally benefit? These remain open questions.
7) Regarding CEXs: offline gatherings were full of conspiracy theories. I rarely analyze things through conspiratorial lenses—maybe I’m too naive. But from a business logic standpoint, I can clearly see why memes have replaced VC-backed tokens as exchanges’ new favorites. I won’t dive into the complex mechanics of accumulation, liquidity exits, cost efficiency, and timing—but at its core, it’s all about profit.
Faced with ever-growing on-chain transaction volumes, shrinking trading activity in their flagship assets, and declining user numbers, exchanges naturally make choices that serve their own interests. At this point, calling on exchanges to lead industry values is both powerless and pointless. Anyway, the market is always right—if it makes a mistake, it corrects itself. I just hope most of us won’t end up as cannon fodder in this invisible battle between on-chain and off-chain organized forces.
That’s all.
I’ll stop here. Each topic could fill volumes, but after several days of immersion, I’m left with both expanded horizons and deep exhaustion. Positive feedback versus negative emotions—who will win? I’d prefer they cancel each other out exactly. That way, my inner crypto faith can finally kick in. Oh, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard anyone talk about “faith” anymore.
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Haotian | CryptoInsight
