The Ethereum Journey: Where's the Next Stop?
author:Kathy
Original title: Where is Ethereum's Long March?
In October 1934, the Central Red Army set out from Jiangxi; no one called that departure the “Long March.” It was just a hasty retreat — the fifth anti-encirclement was defeated, the base could not be held, and more than 80,000 people headed west with guns, not knowing where the end was.
It was just a hasty retreat — the fifth anti-encirclement was defeated, the base could not be held, and more than 80,000 people headed west with guns, not knowing where the end was.
Yesterday I was watching ETH on CC@VitalikButerinThe news suddenly reminded me of the Long March.
It's not that Ethereum is “miserable,” but that kind of situation feels very similar. It used to be the strongest position, and I suddenly discovered that it was full of holes on all sides; once an unquestionable story, I suddenly discovered that even my own people didn't believe it.
So the question is: Is the Ethereum Foundation out of trouble?
The fifth anti-encirclement failed
You must first explain the defeat clearly before you can understand everything that comes later.
The past two years have been two years of Ethereum's “multi-faceted collapse”.
The ETH/BTC ratio fell back to the 2021 level, and the ETH price was very tortuous. It barely broke through the previous high in 2025 and fell all the way down.
The on-chain data is also hard to read. Solana's DEX trading volume has completely surpassed Ethereum. In February 2026, the monthly stablecoin transaction volume reached a record high of $650 billion. 98 million monthly active users is a number you can hardly pretend not to see.
But these are all external problems. The Ethereum Foundation has dug a deeper hole for itself — called the “L2 parasitic effect.”
In March 2024, Dencun was upgraded and launched, and L2 transaction fees were reduced by 99% overnight. This was originally good news: it's cheaper, the capacity has been expanded, and the user experience has improved. But then one thing became clear: the more L2 prospered, the more empty L1 became.
Coinbase's base chain will generate $75 million in 2025. Ethereum L1 protocol revenue for the same period: $39.2 million.
Ethereum L1's revenue is less than half of an L2 built on it.
The blob fee that L2 paid to L1 was extremely low, and the EIP-1559 destruction mechanism almost failed. As a result, in the third quarter of 2025, Ethereum's annualized supply growth rate rebounded to +0.22% — the “Ultra Sound Money” deflation narrative, officially declared bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the EF treasury is also anxious. Treasury figures released in October 2024: $970.2 million, down 39% from the previous disclosure. EF has sold a total of 16,000 ETH in the past 6 months to lay down its blood.
One sentence: There are strong enemies on the outside, there are parasites on the inside, the treasury shrinks, and the narrative falls apart.
Isn't it very similar to the defeat of the fifth anti-encirclement?
Zunyi Conference: Had to change hands
To lose to this point, the leadership must act.
In January 2025, EF Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi@AyaMiyagotchiAnnounced his resignation.Vitalik personally announced: “I am the one who decided to lead the new EF team.” This statement is intriguing — both at the helm and at the same time acknowledging the accounts: EF's independent governance in the past was nothing.
The new co-executive director is Wang Xiaowei@hwwonxand Tomasz Stańczak@tkstanczak. The direction seemed clear. But just 11 months later, Stańczak left his job again. Within 13 months, the core executives changed three times.
That's not the harshest part yet.
In October 2025, a letter of resignation written in May 2024 was made public. The author is Péter Szilágyi@peter_szilagyi——Former head of the Geth client, the creator of the client that once supported more than 60% of Ethereum's nodes. He worked at EF for a full 9 years.
What's in the letterIt shocked the entire community.
Szilágyi said his total income for 6 years was $625,000 — before taxes, an average of about $100,000 a year. In the same period, the market value of the chain he helped build rose from zero to $450 billion. Unbeknownst to him, EF secretly funded a “second Geth team” within Nethermind — the equivalent of starting a new project behind him. When he found out and objected, he was fired within 24 hours.
He also pointed out that EF has a small “ruling elite” circle of 5 to 10 people, with Vitalik as the core, and the support of 1 to 3 VCs behind it. It is ostensibly decentralized and essentially highly centralized. He used one word to describe himself: “useful fool.”
There is a shadow of the Long March here. What the Zunyi Conference did was not to eliminate internal conflicts, but to make one person's judgment an unshakable guide during the most terrible moments. The EF exchange in early 2025 also had this meaning — Vitalik was not “listening to opinions”; he was reorganizing power and using the crisis as an opportunity to re-establish control over the road map.
The reason the Long March was able to continue is because some people are willing to take on the final responsibility of judgment.
Strategic shift: a major shift in the road map
The coach changed, and so did the road map.
The old logic is: L1 is secure, and all extensions depend on L2. The problem with this route has been mentioned above — the more successful the L2, the more empty the L1 becomes, and the value capture is broken.
In May 2025, Vitalik published an article proposing a “lean Ethereum” vision: 5 years from now, Ethereum will be as simple as Bitcoin. A more aggressive proposal: replace the EVM execution architecture with RISC-V, potentially increasing performance by 100 times.
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1918562016329162844
The slogan sounds good; the key is action.
The Fusaka upgrade was the first substantial anchor point. The core is PeerDAS, which increases the blob data capacity by 2 to 4 times, and theoretically can reach 100,000 TPS. But more importantly, the included EIP-7918: Set a floor price for the blob, linked to L1 Gas, and directly pull the blob fee from 1 wei to 0.01 to 0.5 Gwei.
EIP-7918 is a key part of this route shift. It says: L2 can no longer use the safety of prostitutes as L1. You use my data layer, and you have to pay a reasonable fee.” The era of “L2 prosperity and L1 drinking northwest wind” will be forcibly brought to an end.
This is equivalent to the Red Army changing its marching route from a frontal attack to a roundabout interlacing during the Long March — not abandoning the battle, but a different style of play.
ETHcc 2026: Has Ethereum reached “Yan'an”?
ETH CC was held in Cannes last week. The conference released several signals, each of which is worth putting into the Long March analogy.
Disappearance Test: Vitalik mentions — if he disappears tomorrow, can Ethereum continue to operate? This is the ultimate goal of the Long March — the system survives even after the leader disappears. When he asked this question publicly, he said, “I know I am a centralized risk, and we need to seriously address this matter. It's maturity, but it's also stressful.
EEZ Framework: The day before the opening of ETHCC, Gnosis and Zisk jointly announced the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ). The goal is to enable contracts on different rollups to call each other in the same transaction through real-time zero-knowledge proof — solving the “hundred islands problem” where $40 billion assets are locked in more than 20 isolated chains. The reason Yan'an is based is because it has logistics and infrastructure. This is exactly what EEZ does. But let's be clear: EEZ isn't live yet.
The Agora Institutional Forum: People from JP Morgan and Societe Generale-Forge sit on stage to talk about OnChain Finance. Traditional financial institutions took the initiative to negotiate. It wasn't Ethereum compromising; it was Ethereum that grew up. Of course, MICA's regulatory pressure and Solana's continued catch-up are real variables; we can't just be optimistic.
Core judgment: Are you out of trouble?
Let's first make a comparison:
Judging from the series of signals released by ETH CC, the strategic shift has been completed, but it has not yet reached Yan'an.
“The strategic shift has been completed” means: the direction has really changed. Vitalik personally changed hands. The EIP-7918 directly targeted the L2 parasitic problem, and the RISC-V replaced the EVM, which opened up room for imagination in the 10-year technology roadmap. This isn't a patching; it's a route reshaping.
“Not yet in Yan'an” means: the changes are real, but the results have yet to be implemented. Can EIP-7918 really improve L1 fee capture? Can ETH/BTC recover steadily? Can the developer retention rate stop falling? There are currently no definitive answers to these three indicators.
Another fundamental question hangs in the air: Where is Ethereum's Yan'an?
Different people give different answers. “World computer,” “global settlement layer,” “programmable currency,” and “censorship-resistant infrastructure” — these visions don't contradict each other, but they don't form a clear consensus narrative. Without consensus, it is difficult to mobilize the entire ecosystem to follow suit.
Implications of the Long March
The meaning of the Long March was never that suffering itself had any value.
Suffering is not an asset; suffering is a filter. Its role is to force out the wrong route, wrong command, wrong tactics — and then leave behind those surviving judgments.
The siege that Ethereum has suffered in the past two years — the rapid rise of Solana, L2 parasitic effects, EF's internal governance crisis — is real, and so is the reaction. EIP-7918 is a surgical operation on economic loopholes. When Vitalik asked about the “disappearance test” in Cannes, he was forcing himself and the entire ecosystem to face up to the most vulnerable node.
A dying thing wouldn't do such a specific operation.
However, the Long March tells us that completing the strategic shift has only reached a place where we can start again. Yan'an is the starting point of the base, not the end point. Next, construction is needed, operation is needed, and scattered forces need to be integrated into one direction.
Ethereum's success depends on two things: the execution of the technology roadmap and the community's acceptance of the new narrative. The former has a road map to check; the latter has no guarantees.
So, what is Ethereum's “Yan'an”?
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