Comment on: Can Ethereum Win Again?

AI summary of the linked article

Ethereum's early lead in technology, economics and community is eroding as rival chains catch up, and its slow pace of innovation has left sentiment among longtime members at its lowest point, according to a former Ethereum Foundation employee who worked there from late 2017 to early-mid 2019. That person attributes the problem largely to a culture that prizes research over applications, usability and product work, noting there were no product people at the Foundation during their time there. Native account abstraction on NEAR and Spacemesh, stablecoin gas tokens and faster finality on newer chains are cited as evidence that Ethereum's usability problems were not inevitable.

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If I had to pick one thing that Ethereum has gotten wrong, it’s putting the research cart before the application horse. Since the very beginning, Ethereum culture, the Ethereum Foundation, and the most powerful, influential people in Ethereum have fetishized research at the expense of many other important things, including applications, usability, and simplicity. The people in Ethereum who get the lion’s share of attention and admiration are the researchers. They get the prime speaking slots and podcast interview slots.

+1. As much as critical their work is, 90%+ people don't care about PeerDAS, or Beam Chain. I am fine that they are coming to podcasts and represent Ethereum, but they should be also actively mentioning cool apps that are built here.

The people designing Ethereum are not application builders. They’ve never built a production application on Ethereum, and most of them couldn’t to save their lives. They have very little understanding of or appreciation for what things are like for builders: e.g., how hard it is to build modern, safe, usable applications in Solidity, on Ethereum, or how difficult key management can be. They don’t appreciate the downstream consequences on UX and the application layer of their designs. For a good example of what I’m talking about, see this recent tweet and the replies.

Something that Tim has been talking about for a long time. Actually I had a wild idea of a hackathon for EF researchers where they have to build dapps in 1-2 days, so they viscerally understand what people are dealing with.