At the beginning, there was Bitcoin. A hard digital currency with one goal : to fight fiat debasement. To do this, it needed one thing : decentralization. It came with the new proof-of-work algorithm, using raw energy to power a lottery anyone can participate in. Some called it genius, others saw it as barbarian. It is still at the heart of many debates 15 years later.

A few years later came a young Canadian called Vitalik. He was a definite Bitcoin supporter, but believed we could do much more. He saw Bitcoin as the first stone of a decentralized economy, and maybe one day society. So he got to work, and in 2015, he published what came out to be the Ethereum whitepaper : “A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform”.

His vision was that we could decentralize many more things than money, from finance to digital information. One day, he hoped, everyone would use Ethereum for one type of application or another. It originally attracted only a few people around the Bitcoin community. Gradually, more people joined and took part in this new innovation.

In 2017, something completely new started getting more attention : non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. 4 years later, the most expensive NFT ever would turn out to sell at $… M. In 2020, decentralized finance, or DeFi, started to emerge. After a crazy growth in 2021, its total market value on Ethereum reached around $100 billion dollars.

Witnessing this success, others started to wonder. What if? What if we could build something better? What are the problems Ethereum has that we could solve? The answer was obvious : speed, but, most importantly, fees. For almost a month, at the end of 2021, Ethereum users spent $400m per WEEK in fees to use the network. More than $1.6 billion over one month. And for what?

Why were they spending this much? Do they really want to? Of course not. No one wants to spend $100 for a simple transaction. Not even for the sake of dEceNtraLiZatiOn. They did it to take part in the giant casino that was flourishing under their eyes, waiting for them. And joined the party they did !

What is left seven years after the birth of Ethereum? A group of users that want a cheap, fast and accessible casino, and many alternatives to the expensive one on Ethereum. Some of these are even a little bit decentralized, how lucky !

If you have read it this far, my point is that Ethereum found a pmf that it no longer has today. It’s currently lost between digital gold (Bitcoin) and somewhat decentralized casinos (Solana, Avalanche). Unfortunately, most end-user activity in crypto today is casino. Just look at the memecoin craze that started again a few months ago.

I do believe that Ethereum will find its pmf with large scale applications (likely DeFi, but who knows) that require the level of decentralization Ethereum offers and are ready to pay for it. I just don’t think it’s now. Until then, farewell ETH 👋