Devcon attendee experience: The community is pessimistic about Ethereum, but offline events are in full swing

Author: 0xNatalie Source: ChainFeeds

Recently, the mood in the Ethereum community has been low. Since the launch of the ETF this year, the price of ETH has not met market expectations. There are many reasons for this, such as the rapid development of Layer 2 technology has improved transaction efficiency, but it has also invisibly weakened the economic capture ability of the Ethereum main chain, resulting in a gradual decline in the demand for ETH; narratives that once supported the value of Ethereum, such as DeFi, have also gradually lost their appeal, and there are currently no sufficiently fresh and attractive narratives on the market.

In addition, the price increase of Solana has become a direct contrast, and against this background, the FUD sentiment of the Ethereum community has spread. In particular, the practice of the Ethereum Foundation selling ETH has caused widespread dissatisfaction. Many community members believe that the Foundation's behavior ignores market sentiment in the context of low ETH prices, questioning the leadership of Ethereum and believing that they are "self-destructing."

This negative sentiment broke out on Twitter, and criticizing Ethereum seemed to have become the traffic password for some KOLs. Since the end of October, the debate around Ethereum has continued. Just as this sentiment spread, the Devcon event arrived as scheduled, bringing some confidence and positive energy to Ethereum.

In mid-November, I attended the Ethereum Developer Conference (Devcon 7) held in Bangkok. As one of the most influential events in the blockchain field, the main venue is full of vitality and diversity, and the overall atmosphere is friendly and open. The venue agenda is compact and the amount of information is large, but it is also difficult to keep up with the pace in some links. According to official statistics, 60% of the attendees this time are attending Devcon for the first time. When communicating with the participants, the most mentioned words in everyone's evaluation of this conference are "chill", "colorful" and "friendly".

Interesting New Concept: POD

During the conference, I came across an interesting concept - Provable Object Data (POD), which is a data structure used to store and manage data that needs to be verified by zero-knowledge proof. GPC is a circuit used to verify these POD objects. In GPC, POD data will be used as input, and the circuit will check whether the data meets certain preset conditions to obtain a verification result. For example, Zupass, the ticket system of this conference, uses POD technology to ensure the uniqueness of each ticket. When a user purchases a ticket, the Zupass system will generate a POD for this ticket, which contains the ticket's unique identifier, basic information, purchase time and other data. After processing the POD data through the GPC circuit, the venue staff will not directly see the specific information of the ticket. Only the results verified by the zero-knowledge proof will be seen.

Core ideas in the exchange

During the intervals between speeches, booths, Hubs and other communication spaces, I discussed a number of topics with technical/marketing personnel from different projects, among which ZK, Based Rollup and Appchain were very impressive.

Aztec Software Engineer Adam Domurad mentioned in the exchange that ZK technology is very suitable for blockchain expansion due to its significant advantages of constant proof size and efficient verification. Compared with OP Rollup, ZK Rollup uses zero-knowledge proof to ensure the correctness of each transaction, which not only avoids the risk of node maliciousness, but also reduces the workload of repeated verification. Currently, OP Rollup occupies a mainstream position, mainly because users are more concerned about low fees and high speed rather than the superiority of the underlying technology.The long-term value of ZK Rollup lies in its excellent security and scalability. Many blockchains (including Ethereum) have begun to redesign their architecture to fully utilize the potential of ZK technology. In addition, ZK technology also shows great application potential in the field of privacy protection. For example, the Anon Aadhaar project presented at Devcon, developed by the PSE team supported by the Ethereum Foundation, verifies Indian citizenship through zero-knowledge proof without revealing specific identities. However, ZK Rollup needs to further optimize speed and cost to win wider market recognition. He confidently stated that in the future, as ZK technology continues to mature, ZK Rollup is expected to replace OP Rollup and become the mainstream expansion solution.

Ethereum researcher mteam is a 17-year-old school student who focuses on the research of Based Rollup. He shared with me the design advantages of Based Rollup as an independent execution environment. By sharing a sorter, multiple Based Rollups can share liquidity without direct bridging, and liquidity can flow between different Based Rollups with the help of the Ethereum mainnet. This design improves the efficiency of cross-chain operations while reducing dependence on a single bridging solution. Based Rollup's decentralized sorter has a higher operating cost than a centralized sorter, but multiple Based Rollups can share the cost by aggregating blocks, significantly reducing the cost of a single operation. In terms of performance, Based Rollup can achieve the same speed as other Rollups through a pre-confirmation mechanism, providing a fast user experience within the Ethereum block time (12 seconds). In terms of the economic model, Based Rollup returns most of the MEV's revenue to Ethereum, so its main source of income comes from the Gas fees paid by users. In addition, Based Rollup achieves economic sustainability through front-end service fees and smart contract execution fees, avoiding dependence on MEV revenue. Due to its deep integration with the Ethereum mainnet, Based Rollup inherits Ethereum's censorship resistance and high reliability characteristics, which means that future Ethereum upgrades (such as stronger censorship resistance) will directly bring additional advantages to Based Rollup.

Carbon project leader Mark Richardson mentioned that DeFi currently faces two major challenges: liquidity fragmentation and complex user experience. He mentioned that although protocols like Uniswap can capture more value by developing Appchain, this approach may further aggravate the problem of liquidity fragmentation. In contrast, cross-chain deployment and shared liquidity mechanisms are a more efficient solution. For Appchain, he believes that although as a trend, it can indeed help protocols capture more value, because the protocol controls the entire chain to better optimize the cost structure and user experience, while achieving more efficient value extraction. However, from the perspective of the entire DeFi ecosystem, the path of Appchain is not necessarily the best choice. Mark predicts that as cross-chain technology continues to develop, multi-chain collaboration will become simpler, and the specific attributes of the chain on which users are trading will become irrelevant. Therefore, he prefers to focus on addressing the problem of liquidity fragmentation through cross-chain solutions rather than allowing protocols to isolate themselves from the ecosystem through Appchain. In addition, he mentioned that intent-driven trading models are becoming a major trend. This design allows users to clearly express their trading needs while obtaining a trading experience with zero slippage and MEV protection. As for market trends, he believes that it is unlikely that "DeFi Summer" will reappear in the near future, but "Memecoin Summer" may come. In this environment, DeFi applications need to seize opportunities and combine flexibility with robustness to meet user needs. He particularly emphasized that the success of future projects depends not only on the leading technology, but also on how to optimize the user experience through data analysis and achieve coordinated development in a multi-chain ecosystem.

Thoughts

Communicating with these Buliders made me realize that Ethereum’s current dilemma is that it is too focused on infrastructure construction, but lacks sufficiently useful and attractive applications. However, from a macro perspective, Ethereum is still at the forefront of underlying technological innovation, which is important. After all, other chains seem to be "replicating" Ethereum's path in a similar way, including the meme phenomenon.

Ethereum lost the opportunity to meme, in part because its high transaction fees were not fast enough, forcing some small and medium-sized users to look for chains that are more suitable for their needs, such as Solana. However, Solana's success does not rely solely on low transaction fees, but more importantly, it has successfully attracted a large number of excellent developers and is more focused on the end-user experience. These factors make Solana stand out from the competition and attract a large number of users seeking efficient and low-cost transactions. However, as Solana's transaction fees and MEV continue to rise, the use of trading robots and high-end tools becomes popular, which may also lead to the loss of ordinary users. Most of the remaining players trade through complex tools, which is similar to the meme phenomenon in the early days of Ethereum.

Therefore, I think other chains may be popular at certain stages, but overall, Ethereum's ecological position and potential remain solid. Ethereum's unique advantages in technology and ecological depth are difficult for other chains to replace in the short term.