Ethereum’s turning point? The battle for leadership and scaling is heating up

Author: Macauley Peterson, Blockworks; Translator: Baishui, Golden Finance

Under the shadow of the Trump Meme craze this weekend, the ongoing debate over the future of Ethereum has reached a fever pitch. Public discussions have highlighted the divide between parts of the community and the Ethereum Foundation (EF). The debate involves governance, the network's scalability roadmap, and long-term vision.

A key area of ​​debate is the governance of the EF. Critics argue that the EF's internal structure may not be fit for purpose in the current era. Despite the Foundation's mission to be decentralized, its current centralized decision-making has sparked criticism of its ability to respond to competitive threats and evolving narratives.

Ironically, much of the pointed criticism of current Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi stems from a mistranslation of comments she made in a Japanese interview, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding and misrepresentation of her views.

Vitalik Buterin himself and other community members have called attention to the issue, highlighting the difference between the original Japanese article and the version posted on Crypto Twitter — the latter of which falsely claimed that Miyaguchi’s words about “competing and winning” were values ​​that ran counter to Ethereum culture. (This was not the case.)

The mistranslation was so obvious that it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional. These translation errors have fueled cyberbullying, which continues despite clarification.

Some comments have become venomous enough to scare core developers, with developer Potuz, who goes by the pseudonym Prysm, commenting on the broader sentiment: “Reading Twitter in recent days has left me feeling like I should either log off and keep coding, or leave the space altogether.”

How best to articulate Ethereum’s core mission is another sore spot. On one hand, those who emphasize Ethereum as a settlement layer argue that a strong monetary premium is essential for network security. On the other hand, voices like Martin Koeppelmann advocate positioning Ethereum as a “world computer,” focusing on transaction capacity and total fees as the primary metrics for success. These voices view ETH as secondary to “money.”

Ethereum’s plans for scalability via rollups continue to be questioned. We’re seeing a renewed round of calls for a more ambitious strategy to scale the Ethereum mainnet — this time coming from within EF.

“If Ethereum wants to win, we need to be ambitious,” Dankrad Feist wrote on X on Monday.

Achieving bandwidth goals by 2026 is crucial, he argues. “We need to get to our current goal of 1 megabyte per second in 1-2 years, not 5, and then move on.”

Maintaining the status quo won’t work, that seems to be the emerging consensus.