On July 30, 2025, we will celebrate a decade since Ethereum launched in Mainnet. Without a doubt, one of the greatest milestones in the short life of this industry.
When it was launched as the world’s first intelligent contract platform, obviously this was something completely new and a completely new way of thinking about software. Instead of renting access to the platform of another person who could change the rules or block it at any time, one could, in theory, now participate in systems that belonged to all anyone anymore, where the rules were written in code and could not be arbitrarily changed by the whim of a CEO. Users would own their date, and the software would be maintained and managed by a network instead of a joint room. The consequences seemed quite utopian.
However, almost ten years after the launch of Ethereum and the dreams of a web version of Amazon, Ebay, Facebook or Tiktok have not arrived, and are not anywhere on the horizon.
Gavin Wood, co -founder of Ethereum, and his vision of “Web3” planned exactly that. Joe Lubin, the famous founder of Consensys, said that “Ethereum will have the same generalized influence on our communications and our entire information infrastructure.”
The libertarian journalist Jim Epstein predicted a year after the launch of Ethereum as “the same types of services offered by companies such as Facebook, Google, Ebay and Amazon will be provided by computers distributed worldwide.”
VITALIK BUTERIN itself foresees that Ethereum “Law, cloud storage, prediction markets, decentralized accommodation trade, [hosting] His own currency “, in his Bitcoin Miami 2014 speech, where Ethereum announced to the world.” Perhaps even Skynet “, the fictional artificial neuronal network of Terminator films. The platform that created both a threat and an opportunity for platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in 2021 has described.
THE PROBLEM OF THE SCALE
The barrier to achieve this vision is the scale. The most successful consumption applications today serve hundreds of millions of users. Instagram processes more than one billion photo loads daily. EBAY handles approximately 17 billion dollars in transactions each quarter. Facebook messaging platforms process billion messages annually.
Ethereum processes approximately 14 transactions per second, and Solana can handle more than 1000. Instagram handles more than one billion photos of photos daily. EBAY processes 17 billion dollars in transactions quarterly. Mathematics does not work.
We entertain EBAY’s decentralized example for a moment. A truly decentralized eBay would demand much more than simple payments. Each creation or update of the list would require transactions in the chain for metadata of elements, prices and condition details. The auctions would need an automatic resolution of tenders with intelligent blocked time contracts. Custody systems would have to maintain funds until delivery confirmation, with DAO arbitration for disputes.
User reputation systems would require immutable qualification storage linked to wallet addresses. Inventory management would need real -time actions, possibly through tokenized goods. Shipping confirmations would demand the integration of Oracle for delivery tests. Market rates and tax royalties would need an intelligent contract application. Optional identity verification systems would require decentralized credential management. Each interaction would multiply the transaction load exponentially beyond what the current infrastructure could withstand.
Needless to say, this would require an unprecedented speed and performance block chain. Frankly, a decade after Ethereum, the infrastructure has simply not been there to support it.
The economy does not work
The business model has not always made sense either. Modern applications need a massive scale to generate income that covers development costs. In addition, layer 2 solutions fragment users on all platforms, where (For example) Referee users cannot interact directly with polygon applications. This defeats the purpose of building unified global computer science.
This is not theoretical. Opensea fought with profitability despite dominating NFT trade with high -value transactions and tolerant users to rates. If you cannot benefit from the sale of digital art to cryptography enthusiasts who pay hundreds of rates, how is a market built for used goods? The economy is even worse for lower value transactions that define conventional trade. A decentralized social network that charges $ 5 per publication would be dead upon arrival.
Game applications that require a few dollars in transaction fees for each trade trade will not attract players who expect the same free otherwise. Until now, the only chain viable companies have been those that can extract a massive value of relatively few users, essentially high -risk financial applications and speculative trade.
Calvary is coming
The industry accepted false compensation: security and decentralization, or functionality and scale, but not both. But transaction performance has constantly increased (and will continue) through networks as technology matures. Now we can achieve a massive scale even with work chain tests, maintaining the security and decentralization that made blockchain revolutionize first (instead of the premature hug of the stake test that committed these principles).
Zero knowledge tests allow users to prove the validity of the transaction locally, sending only small cryptographic tests that are added recursively and in parallel by a network of setbacks. The networks can process millions of transactions without each node verifying each one individually. When users test their own transactions, the marginal cost of adding an additional transaction is close to zero, and blockchains can finally support the economy required by conventional applications.
But ten years later, it is clear that the vision once presented by web3 futurists has moved at a disappointing rhythm. Hopefully the next decade moves a little faster, and, the crossed fingers, also our blockchains.
