Galaxy: Devcon 2024 — Ethereum’s North Star

Author: Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital; Translation: Jinse Finance xiaozou

What is Ethereum? Ethereum is the world's most decentralized, valuable and mature general-purpose blockchain. While Ethereum is ultimately a technology, this year's Ethereum Developer Conference Devcon focuses on Ethereum as an idea, focusing on how much the principles and values ​​that drive Ethereum protocol development have changed over the years.

1. A bad year for Ethereum

From the perspective of ETH prices and market sentiment, 2024 is an extremely challenging year.

Many critics of Ethereum believe that over time, the Ethereum community’s cypherpunk values ​​of decentralization, trusted neutrality, and censorship resistance have decayed or even been abandoned entirely. Even within the Ethereum community, differences in values ​​have sparked debate during the Pectra upgrade decision-making process and sparked heated debates on X over topics such as the blob fee market and issuance.

While Devcon 7 showcased a plethora of technical innovations and announcements, nothing in it provided the community with a clear message about Ethereum’s long-term value and narrative. By far the most anticipated announcement of the week, shared by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, was the launch of Beam Chain, a radical proposal to overhaul Ethereum’s current consensus protocol, Beacon Chain.

While Drake detailed several new technical features designed to enhance Ethereum and L2 functionality, the proposal lacked broad community support and failed to provide a “North Star” (a forward-looking goal) that would have stakeholders excited similar to the Ethereum Merge, which was Ethereum’s North Star for several years.

It is a technical upgrade that is rooted in the values ​​of environmentalism and decentralization that almost the entire community shares. Since the Ethereum merger, no technical upgrade has clearly aligned with Ethereum's values, which in turn has led to confusion and disputes among Ethereum stakeholders about how Ethereum as a technology should develop.

2. What is Ethereum?

In addition to a series of technical announcements, the ideas presented at Devcon about how Ethereum should be built and how it can be built in a way that promotes decentralization and trusted neutrality values ​​have greatly stimulated the interest of Devcon attendees. Although all the speakers proposed slightly different ideas about Ethereum, they all shared a common basic belief that Ethereum is pursuing the creation of permissionless, trust-minimized, transparent systems for the purpose of improving human welfare.

If you have ever doubted that Ethereum's cypherpunk values ​​inspire innovation, the talks at Devcon 7 emphasized that these values ​​are still at the core of Ethereum's philosophy. When asked about the trade-offs between decentralization and performance, all four members of the “Ethereum Values ​​and Ethos Alignment” panel reiterated the importance of decentralization over performance and scalability.

Flashbots co-founder Philip Daian talked about four features of “Ethereum 3.0” in his keynote speech that cannot be compromised in any way. They include: permissionless, distributed, geo-economic decentralization, and a truly neutral builder. Daian asked the Ethereum community to refocus on promoting and strengthening geographic diversity and permissionless design in all verticals of the Ethereum technology stack, rather than focusing entirely on other goals such as promoting mass adoption through improved user experience.

"The problem is that if you focus purely on user experience, it will be very bad. I think this is why the value of ETH will go to zero. It will destroy the decentralized system that we carefully created and make us vulnerable to exploitation and re-form the system we are trying to avoid." Daian said in his keynote. Gnosis co-founder Martin Koeppelmann proposed the concept of "native rollup" in his keynote, that is, rollup built in accordance with Ethereum values ​​such as decentralization and trusted neutrality. From a practical perspective, for Koeppelmann this means not using multi-sig for key rollup functions, deploying multiple rollup proof systems, and rigorous testing of the rollup codebase (i.e., “thousands of eyes reviewing every line of code”), as is done with Ethereum.

Finally, a full day of Devcon programming was dedicated to exploring the idea of ​​defensive acceleration, or “d/acc.” In the words of creator Vitalik Buterin, "d/acc is a philosophy, a set of techniques and protocols for building technology that makes human agency its means and ends. Every technology we create should point to shared human freedom and happiness." Many Devcon attendees received a booklet about the philosophy of d/acc as part of the conference gift, and on the last day of the conference, a booklet about the future development of the Ethereum protocol, both written by Vitalik Buterin.

Devcon 7's manuals and programming emphasized the common philosophy among Ethereum developers rather than a shared technical roadmap. More than any innovation, upcoming upgrade, or development team in the Ethereum ecosystem, the most compelling “North Star” raised at the conference was the shared desire to build permissionless, trust-minimized, transparent systems for the betterment of humanity.