The Limits of Ethereum: From Computing Protocol to Foundation of Civilization
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The Limits of Ethereum: From Computing Protocol to Foundation of Civilization
Exploring the theoretical limits of Ethereum's evolution from a "world computer" to the "foundation of civilization."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: XiaoHai
This article aims to explore the theoretical upper limit of Ethereum's evolution from a "world computer" to the "foundation of civilization."
We argue that Ethereum's ultimate value lies in its role as the social operating system of a "computational civilization"—a programmable foundational layer capable of hosting core civilizational elements such as wealth, identity, contracts, and governance.
By analyzing its three pillars of legitimacy—technical, institutional, and cultural—this paper systematically demonstrates Ethereum's potential to become the foundation of civilization. It then explores the theoretical boundaries of its development across technical, economic, governance, and social dimensions, ultimately outlining the final form of an "Ethereum civilization" defined by physical limits, UBI, contestable sovereignty, and human-machine co-governance.
The study concludes that Ethereum’s upper bound is fundamentally the limit of complexity, coordination, and secure evolutionary capacity that human social order can achieve on a programmable, verifiable foundation—an unprecedented "meta-framework" enabling civilization to evolve safely.
Keywords: Ethereum; Social Operating System; Trustless Neutrality; UBI; Contestable Sovereignty; Civilizational Framework; Metaverse Base Layer
01 Introduction: The Paradigm Shift from "Trust Machine" to "Social Operating System"
1. In our first paper, "Taming Leviathan," we proposed the governance paradigm of "reversible authorization," arguing that the legitimacy of power stems from its revocability, and highlighted the critical role of DAOs in governance practice. This paper further asks: when on-chain economic density and institutional complexity surpass their off-chain counterparts, what role will Ethereum play?
Ethereum's narrative is undergoing a profound paradigm shift—from a "protocol layer" focused solely on computation to a "social operating system" enabling complex social collaboration. Its theoretical ceiling is no longer defined by microeconomic metrics like TPS or gas fees, but by the institutional complexity, social scalability, and civilizational adaptability it can support as a civilizational foundation.
More importantly, Ethereum has effectively become the base layer for humanity's scientific vision of the "metaverse." All metaverse functional modules and ecosystem coordination must be built atop Ethereum—it is humanity’s first systematic attempt to reconstruct an alternative parallel universe at the foundational level. Therefore, the central thesis of this paper is: Is Ethereum’s theoretical upper limit merely a boundary of technical parameters, or is it the limit of civilizational complexity that humans can build upon a programmable foundation?
02 Pillars of Legitimacy: The Three Foundations of Ethereum as Civilization's Bedrock
For a system to sustain civilization, it must pass rigorous legitimacy tests. Ethereum’s irreplaceability arises precisely from the robust foundations it has established across these three dimensions.
2.1 Technical Legitimacy: Uncompromising Security and Trustless Neutrality
A consensus system with over 1.06 million active validator nodes worldwide and more than 34 million ETH staked makes attack costs vastly exceed any potential gains, achieving absolute security in terms of "economic physics." Ongoing technological upgrades significantly enhance Ethereum's scalability, providing technical support for large-scale applications.
Quantum resistance and long-term security planning ensure Ethereum maintains enduring security amid rapid technological change, offering sustainability as civilizational infrastructure.
More crucially, protocol rules are enforced by code rather than human will—the "code is law" neutrality that forms the precondition for global, diverse actors to converge and collaborate here. This is a moat that high-performance chains compromising decentralization cannot cross.
2.2 Institutional Legitimacy: Programmable Social Contracts and "Institutional LEGO"
Ethereum's institutional legitimacy manifests in its evolving relationship with traditional governance systems and the maturation of its internal governance mechanisms—its institutional safeguard as a civilizational foundation.
Ethereum’s core value lies in transforming abstract social institutions (e.g., corporate law, contract law, governance charters) into composable, verifiable smart contracts, thereby forming a "social operating system" with programmable institutions.
As real-world assets (RWA) progressively migrate on-chain, a deeper process unfolds—RWO (Real-World Organization), where entire organizations go on-chain.
RWO onboarding signifies that institutions themselves become composable "on-chain LEGO": identity modules, authority modules, decision-making modules, treasury modules, and audit modules can be freely invoked, forked, and reconfigured.
When human institutions enter a "Three-Body"-style evolutionary phase—where trial-and-error costs approach zero and iteration nears real-time—Ethereum’s institutional legitimacy will achieve its ultimate validation.
2.3 Cultural Legitimacy: Public Spirit and the Gene of Positive-Sum Games
Ethereum’s core values include decentralization, censorship resistance, transparency, and security. The global spread of these values has transformed Ethereum from a mere technical platform into a cultural symbol and value system, establishing a foundation of cultural identity for its role as civilizational bedrock.
The Ethereum community has evolved into a global, diverse network encompassing developers, financial innovators, artists, and activists from varied backgrounds.
Ethereum’s community culture is deeply rooted in anti-zero-sum, pro-positive-sum principles. This public spirit—transcending short-term interests—acts as the "soft power" uniting global collaboration, elevating Ethereum beyond pure technology into a global community united by shared values.
03 Boundary Exploration: The Evolutionary Path from Technical Limits to Civilizational Expansion
Built on these legitimacies, Ethereum’s development will reach theoretical limits across four dimensions—boundaries that collectively outline the contours of an "Ethereum civilization" and define core constraints for metaverse construction.
3.1 Technical Boundary: From Scalability Challenges to Infinite Computation
Scalability is Ethereum’s primary path to transcend technical limits. The flourishing Layer 2 ecosystem and continuous expansion of blob capacity are key avenues for breaking through these barriers.
According to the Ethereum Foundation’s long-term technical roadmap, Ethereum will keep pushing these technical frontiers into the foreseeable future, supporting its role as civilizational infrastructure. Under modular architecture, its computational capacity could theoretically scale to serve global-level applications.
However, the speed of light will impose an absolute limit on consensus synchronization. As human civilization expands into space, interplanetary communication delays will force the unified Ethereum network to fragment into multiple relatively independent "consensus autonomous zones," forming civilizational partitions based on physical distance.
3.2 Economic Boundary: From Productive Capital to UBI Systems
Vitalik once stated that "low-risk DeFi for Ethereum is like search for Google"—it sustains Ethereum’s floor value. This represents Ethereum’s lower bound.
With continued growth in real-world assets (RWA), real-world organizations on-chain (RWO), and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), when on-chain economic density and institutional complexity exceed off-chain levels, Ethereum’s economic ceiling will no longer be bounded by Earth’s GDP or market size, but by the total complexity of computational civilization.
At that point, its economic scale could surpass Earth’s economy by several orders of magnitude, becoming a "consensus economic universe" jointly operated by billions of humans and trillions of AIs.
Within this system, wealth creation and distribution mechanisms will be restructured. Global Basic Income (UBI) will primarily consist of node dividends and data yield, while $ETH evolves into the fundamental unit measuring the energy of the entire "consensus economic universe." Wealth, in this context, ceases to be mere asset aggregation and instead becomes a function of civilization’s ability to coordinate complex activities. Thus, Ethereum’s economic upper bound is the economic expression of the civilizational complexity it can sustain.
3.3 Governance Boundary: Contestable Sovereignty and Layered Legal Orders
Ethereum’s governance boundary reflects its evolution from core-developer dominance toward multi-stakeholder co-governance—its governance foundation as civilizational infrastructure.
The Ethereum Foundation has introduced four strategic pillars—accelerate, amplify, support, and long-term unblock—to support ecosystem development, along with two overarching visions:
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Maximize the number of people directly or indirectly using Ethereum and benefiting from its foundational values;
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Maximize the resilience of Ethereum’s technological and social infrastructure.
Ethereum has developed a governance model involving multiple stakeholders—developers, validators, users, enterprises, and institutions. This pluralistic governance better balances diverse interests and adapts to complex ecosystem needs, securing its role as civilizational foundation.
The development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) exemplifies the expansion of Ethereum’s governance boundary.
In a decentralized society (DeSoc) built on SBTs, individuals can seamlessly migrate their biometrics (identity), skills, behavior, health, and wealth across different DAOs (treated as "digital city-states"). The role of nation-states will gradually shift toward being "physical-world public service providers" (public health, security), while Ethereum becomes the "transnational constitutional layer," setting foundational rules like "identity rights confirmation" and "asset protection." Global governance will thus form a layered legal order: "off-chain governance (nation-states/communities) + on-chain governance (constitutional layer) + DAO governance (application layer)."
From this emerges a novel system of contestable sovereignty: legitimacy earned through competition, governance optimized through migration, and institutions iterated via consensus. "Sovereignty competition" will drive future societal evolution, with governance quality determined in real time by citizens’ migration patterns.
3.4 Social Boundary: Human-Machine Co-Governance and Networks of Consciousness
Ethereum’s social boundary lies in its transformation from an experiment by a few tech enthusiasts into a globally adopted social infrastructure—its social foundation as civilizational bedrock.
Ongoing improvements in user experience are key to transcending social barriers, attracting non-technical users and expanding its social base.
Localization and enhanced cultural adaptability are vital strategies—encouraging regional developers and users to build applications and services tailored to local needs and cultures, enabling Ethereum to integrate smoothly into diverse societies and strengthening its cultural foundation.
Expanding education and knowledge dissemination helps broaden talent pools, providing human capital essential for long-term development.
When the richness and depth of human digital identities (via technologies like SBTs) and AI agents’ on-chain activities together constitute the mainstream of social interaction, Ethereum will evolve into a neutral "human-machine interface." Social governance will involve both humans and silicon-based intelligences with on-chain personhood, ultimately forming an interspecies consciousness community. Coordinative intelligence becomes Ethereum’s ultimate social function.
At this stage, Ethereum ceases to be merely a tool extending human society—it becomes society itself: an operating system where humans and silicon-based intelligences coexist.
In summary, exploring the boundaries of technology, economy, governance, and society culminates in a qualitative leap: when civilizational core elements are encoded on a programmable foundation, the evolutionary paradigm shifts from slow, friction-laden rigid iteration to agile, reversible, elastic evolution. This marks the emergence of systemic error-correction as an intrinsic property of civilization.
British physicist David Deutsch, in *The Beginning of Infinity*, argued that once a civilization masters a systematic error-correcting mechanism, its progress becomes unbounded.
This "infinitely correctable" capability is the very source of civilizational continuity. Ethereum is precisely the technological embodiment of such an error-correcting mechanism. On Ethereum, social institutions are no longer immutable codes but updatable software; power is not static monopoly but reversible authorization; governance is not one-off design but continuous iteration. This "programmability of institutions" is essentially the "correctability of civilization." It enables society to operate under low-cost experimentation and high-frequency evolution, aligning institutional update speed with technological innovation for the first time.
When social contracts can be improved, copied, and forked like open-source software, humanity truly enters an "infinite beginning"—a civilizational phase not aiming for perfection, but normalizing continuous correction and evolution.
This signifies a fundamental leap in human society: from irreversible to reversible, from monopolized power to fluid power, from closed institutions to open-source institutions.
Therefore, Ethereum’s upper limit is not a static endpoint, but an eternally activated "infinite beginning"—an uncapped civilizational process driven by programmable institutions, revocable power, and iterative governance.
04 Ultimate Form: The Infinite Game as Civilizational Meta-Framework
Ethereum’s ultimate form is not any specific civilizational vision, but a meta-framework for digital civilization—a foundational layer enabling infinite civilizational forms to emerge, compete, evolve, and dissolve securely. It does not define civilization’s end goal, but provides the necessary rules and soil for evolution.
4.1 Civilizational Meta-Framework: Rules of the Infinite Game
As a meta-framework, Ethereum’s essence is creating a field for infinite games. Within this field, participants are not engaged in finite games aimed at termination (e.g., winning elections, defeating opponents), but in an infinite game whose objective is to continue the game indefinitely—the continuation and flourishing of civilization itself.
Programmable institutions constitute mutable game rules, allowing social contracts to iterate at code-speed, enabling low-cost experimentation and high-frequency evolution.
Trustless execution ensures rule fairness: all participants, regardless of strength, interact under the same rules—the prerequisite for sustained gameplay.
Contestable sovereignty introduces competitive rule dynamics: different DAOs ("digital city-states") offer distinct governance models, cultural values, and economic systems, with individuals voting with their feet, driving continuous system-wide optimization.
Thus, Ethereum’s upper bound is not a quantifiable technical metric, but the limit of complexity and coordination achievable when a civilization anchors its core institutions on a programmable, verifiable foundation. Its limit is not computing power, but social coordinability. When institutions can be updated like code and values freely migrated via consensus, human society enters, for the first time, an order space that is computable, verifiable, and evolvable—this is the true meaning of "civilizational upper bound."
4.2 Metaverse: The First Instance of the Civilizational Framework
This civilizational meta-framework is no castle in the air. Its first and most tangible instantiation is precisely the metaverse envisioned in human science fiction. Indeed, Ethereum has objectively become the only viable foundational layer for constructing any genuine metaverse.
The metaverse is not merely a "virtual game" or "digital space," but a parallel universe requiring "unique and trustworthy identity, clear asset ownership, non-defaulting contracts, and efficient collaborative governance"—core needs perfectly fulfilled by Ethereum’s foundational architecture:
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Decentralized Identity (DID/SBT) ensures unique, verifiable identity and self-sovereignty;
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Non-fungible/Fungible Tokens (NFT/FT) enable clear asset ownership and global liquidity;
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Smart Contracts guarantee non-defaulting, automated execution of agreements;
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Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) support efficient, collaborative governance with reversible authorization.
In other words, all metaverse functional modules and ecosystem coordination must be built atop Ethereum or similar trustlessly neutral base layers. Any so-called "metaverse" detached from this foundation, no matter how visually impressive, will inevitably fall into the traditional internet traps of platform monopolies or data silos, failing to become a true "parallel universe" where rights are fundamentally protected and economies can flourish freely. Therefore, Ethereum is not just a civilizational framework—it is already the constitution and bedrock of the metaverse.
05 Conclusion: From Genesis Block to Genesis Civilization
From its very first "genesis block," Ethereum has embodied ambitions beyond technology. This paper systematically establishes its triple legitimacy, four boundaries, and ultimate form as a social operating system.
When identity, wealth, and governance fully migrate on-chain, Ethereum ceases to be merely a tool—it becomes the "promised land of digital civilization." Here, we are not just users of code, but co-creators writing the social contracts of the future.
The "possible futures" sketched by Vitalik represent technological pathways, while the "ultimate form" revealed here defines the underlying rules of civilizational evolution. Ethereum becomes the base protocol for all social experiments—its upper limit a function of humanity’s collective wisdom and collaborative capacity: an endless infinite game.
From "genesis block" to "genesis civilization," Ethereum’s upper bound ultimately reflects our collective resolve and imagination about where we choose to go. It carries not only the evolution of a new technology, but humanity’s first attempt to build another universe in the digital realm—its horizon is the frontier of human collaborative imagination.
Notes: 1. RWO (Real-World Organization): the process of putting real-world organizations (companies, groups, NGOs) on-chain via smart contracts, including identity, authority, decision-making, treasury, and audit modules. 2. Node Dividend: periodic returns earned by nodes for contributing resources to consensus participation. 3. Data Yield: income derived from personal data exchanged in markets.
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