On July 30, 2025, we will celebrate a decade since the launch of Ethereum on Mainnet. Inadiously, one of the biggest stages of the short life of this industry.
When launched as a first intelligent contract platform in the world, it was obviously something completely new and a whole new way of thinking about software. Instead of renting access to someone else’s platform who could change the rules or locked you at any time, we could – in theory – now participate in systems that belonged to everyone and to anyone, where the rules were written in code and could not be arbitrarily modified by the CEO of a CEO. Users had their date and software would be maintained and managed by a network rather than a conference room. The consequences seemed quite utopian.
However, almost ten years after the launch of Ethereum and the dreams of a web3 version of Amazon, Ebay, Facebook or Tiktok have not arrived and are nowhere on the horizon.
Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, and his vision of “Web3” envisaged exactly that. Joe Lubin, the famous founder of Consensys, said that “Ethereum will have the same omnipresent influence on our communications and all our information infrastructure”.
The libertarian journalist Jim Epstein predicted a year after the launch of Ethereum according to which “the same types of services offered by companies like Facebook, Google, Ebay and Amazon will be provided instead by computers distributed worldwide.”
Vitalik Buterin himself envisaged Ethereum “law, cloud storage, prediction markets, decentralized trading the accommodation, [hosting] Your own currency “, in his Bitcoin Miami 2014 speech, where he announced Ethereum in the world.” Maybe even Skynet “, the artificial neural network of Terminator films. He described the platform he created both as a threat and an opportunity for platforms like Facebook and Twitter in 2021.
The scale problem
The barrier to the realization of this vision is the scale. The most successful consumption applications now serve hundreds of millions of users. Instagram processes more than a billion photos of photos per day. Ebay manages about $ 17 billion in transactions each quarter. Facebook messaging platforms treat thousands of messages a year.
Ethereum treats approximately 14 transactions per second, and Solana can manage more than 1000. Instagram manages more than 1 billion downloads of photos per day. Ebay deals $ 17 billion in quarterly transactions. Mathematics do not work.
Let’s direct the decentralized ebay example for a moment. A truly decentralized eBay would require much more than simple payments. Each creation or update of the list would require onchain transactions for the metadata of the elements, the prices and the details of the state. Auctions would need automatic resolution of auctions with intelligent contracts locked over time. Complete systems should hold funds until confirmation of delivery, with DAO arbitration for disputes.
Users’ reputation systems would require immutable rating storage linked to portfolio addresses. Inventory management would need to monitor actions in real time, perhaps through tokenized goods. Shipping confirmations would require the integration of Oracle for delivery evidence. Market costs and tax royalties would need the application of smart contracts. Optional identity verification systems would require management of decentralized identification information. Each interaction would multiply the transaction load in an exponential way beyond what the current infrastructure could take care of.
It goes without saying that it would require an unprecedented speed and speed blockchain. Frankly, a decade after Ethereum, the infrastructure simply was not there to support it.
The economy does not work
The corporate model did not always make sense either. Modern applications need a massive scale to generate income that covers development costs. In addition, the layer 2 solutions fragment of users on platforms, where (For example) Arbitrum users cannot interact directly with polygon applications. This goes against the objective of building unified overall computers.
It is not theoretical. OpenSsesea had trouble profitability despite dominating NFT trading with high -value transactions and tolerant users at the expense. If you cannot take advantage of the sale of digital art to crypto enthusiasts paying hundreds of costs, how do you build a market for used products? The economy is even worse for low -value transactions that define consumer trade. A decentralized social network invoicing $ 5 per post would have died on arrival.
The game applications that require a few dollars of transaction costs for each business of the items do not attract players who expect the same thing for free elsewhere. Until now, the only viable chain companies have been those that can extract a massive value of relatively few users – financial applications and speculative exchanges with high issues.
Calvary arrives
The industry has accepted a false compromise: security and decentralization, or functionality and scale, but not both. But transactions flow has regularly increased (and will continue) through networks as technology ripens. We can now reach a massive scale even with work chains, maintaining the safety and decentralization that made the blockchain revolutionary in the first place (rather than the premature adoption of proof of participation which compromised these principles).
The evidence of zero knowledge allows users to prove the validity of locally transactions, subjecting only small cryptographic proofs which are aggregated recursive and parallel by a network of promoters. Networks can treat millions of transactions without each node checking each. When users prove their own transactions, the marginal cost of adding an additional transaction approaching zero and blockchains can finally support the economy that consumer applications require.
But ten years later, it is clear that the vision formerly exposed by web futurists evolved at a disappointing pace. Hopefully the next decade will move a little faster – and the crossed fingers – our blockchains too.
