Moments of mixed feelings, flying over the Ethereum madhouse
Written by: Yanz & Liam
Editor: Liam
"This time I really sold!"
On April 22, the ETH/BTC exchange rate briefly fell to 0.01766, hitting a new low since 2020.
Lin Feng, who has continued to invest regularly and firmly held Ethereum for 4 years, couldn't stand it anymore and issued a heartbreak declaration in the circle of friends. Compared with a simple cut of meat, this is more like a collapse of faith, a farewell to dreams.
Also on this day, institutional investors are also taking action.
Galaxy Digital swapped ETH to SOL, and crypto VC Paradigm also transferred 5,500 ETH (about $8.66 million) to the brokerage platform Anchorage, which is suspected to be preparing for a sale.
The most ironic thing is that there is also an institution that has joined the army of coin sellers, the Ethereum Foundation. A wallet linked to the Ethereum Foundation deposited 1,000 ETH (about $1.58 million) into Kraken.
Ethereum, once seen as the standard-bearer of the blockchain revolution, seems to have reached its darkest hour.
Behind this collective exodus are stories of being forced to say goodbye to their ideals, as well as difficult choices of faith and interests.
And all of this is recorded, witnessed, and remembered in that group chat called "Ethereum Asylum".
Ethereum Asylum
"The name of our group at the beginning was not actually 'Ethereum Asylum', but 'I was wrong, I regret buying Ethereum'".
On February 3, 2025, the cryptocurrency market fell collectively, with Ethereum plummeting 25% at one point, reaching as low as $2080.19 per coin, catching many Ethereum holders off guard, including Tangerine.
Tangerine, who previously worked in a venture capital institution (VC), entered the crypto market in 2021, and his research on Ethereum technology established his belief in entering the circle.
However, the drop in the price of Ethereum to $3,300 made Tangerine feel bad and muttered repeatedly, and the group chat "I was wrong, I regret buying Ethereum" came into being.
On February 3rd, Tangerine panicked all of a sudden—"I can't run away, so what about the brothers?" ”。
In order to seek psychological comfort and warmth, this small group of only 6 friends began to usher in more "people who made mistakes": there are super big families like Da Chengzi and Du Jun, as well as high-level VCs, everyone gathers here to heal each other and seek psychological comfort.
As Ethereum continued to fall, the number of "patients" increased day by day, gradually expanding and stabilizing to 250 people in just one month - Tangerine said: "Buying Ethereum is 'two hundred and five'", a deliberately controlled number with a bit of self-deprecation.
"At first, there were people shouting for a dip at $3,000, and then it fell to $2,500, $2,100, and the bottom buying voice became quieter and quieter. In the end, everyone began to ridicule, saying that the person who wanted to copy the bottom asked Mr. Yang Yongxin to call. So we changed the name of the group to "Ethereum Asylum" because everyone thought they were crazy. "
Source: Big Orange @0xVeryBigOrangeAs
the leader of the group, Tangerine witnessed all this. He is an observer and a member of the asylum. But he was helpless, and it could even be said that most of the people who remained in the group were helpless.
Tangerine can't help but feel nostalgic for the summer of 2020.
That summer, Uniswap surpassed Coinbase in terms of trading volume, Compound's fiery liquidity mining made countless people rich overnight, and the concept of decentralized finance DeFi swept the entire crypto world.
DeFi Summer is like a frenzied technology feast, and Ethereum, as the protagonist of this feast, has attracted the attention of countless investors and developers.
For traditional Web2 VC practitioners like Tangerine, this is not only an opportunity to make money, but also an enlightenment and baptism of thought.
"We really did a lot of research at the time," Tangerine recalls, "Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation (EF) drew a lot of pies, such as sharding, zero-knowledge proofs (zk)... At the time, I thought this was the future.
Similarly, Lin Feng also bought Ethereum in the summer of 2020, when he was full of hope and anticipation, and was excited about the vision of Ethereum as a "world computer".
"At that time, as an Ethereum holder, I was very proud, and this is the real value investment, innovation at the level of human civilization."
In addition to individuals such as Tangerine and Lin Feng, a large number of traditional VCs also entered the emerging land of Web3 that summer with curiosity and longing for the new continent.
As the founder and spiritual leader of Ethereum, Vitalik's words and deeds have attracted wide attention, and everyone has followed Vitalik's guidance on investment layout. A large number of VCs are betting heavily on the Ethereum ecological infrastructure, and the valuation of Vitalik's optimistic ZK and Layer 2 tracks has skyrocketed, with Scroll valued at $1.8 billion, zkSync valued at $2 billion, and Starknet valued at $8 billion...... All kinds of capital have entered the market, betting on Ethereum's scaling dream.
However, after the DeFi Summer fever receded, in the new cycle, the technology narrative was abandoned by investors and replaced by the opposite of technology, MEME, as if it were a mockery.
"We were adamant that Solana wasn't going to be an Ethereum killer, but now it seems that the market doesn't care about the core issues of privacy and security." This divergence makes Tangerine feel helpless, but what really gets him into trouble is his deep affection for Ethereum.
As a true believer, he not only held Ethereum heavily during the bull market, but also chose to stake ETH in exchange for long-term gains. However, when the market entered a cold winter, the price of ETH plummeted, and the staked assets could not be withdrawn, Tangerine, like many members of the madhouse, was caught in a dilemma.
In fact, most of these trapped people are not speculators with the mentality of "getting rich overnight", but long-term holders who have experienced multiple rounds of market fluctuations and have a certain understanding of Ethereum, commonly known as old leeks.
The paradox of this cycle is on full display here, with Paper Hands being rewarded with PVP and Diamond Hands being punished, and constantly experiencing the double torment of reality and cognition.
For them, Ethereum is both a symbol of hope and a shackle that they cannot shake off.
They love Ethereum because it represents technological innovation and future possibilities; They also hate Ethereum because the pain and distress caused by the falling price is real.
For Lin Feng, the pain of selling Ethereum comes from real financial losses on the one hand, but more importantly, it is "damage to the Dao heart". He entered the crypto world with Ethereum and is a self-proclaimed value investor. He used to be proud of investing in Ethereum, but now the reality makes him deny who he once was. What made him even more ashamed was that he found that the belief he had boasted about to the outside world was not firm, and in the face of the continuously falling K-line, he couldn't do it without looking at the price, and finally chose to give up.
Lin Feng sold Ethereum and sold his former dream.
However, most of the patients are still waiting in the "ward". Not only are they longing to be discharged from the hospital, but the dream they planted in the story three years ago is also waiting for another scorching summer.
There is no new story
forEthereum: "There is no paradigm innovation in Ethereum this year!"
The well-known KOL Big Orange is also a member of the Ethereum madhouse, and on Twitter, he is the "E-guard leader" in the eyes of everyone.
On March 21, 2024, Big Orange tweeted that from today I am a dead long on Ethereum, and Ethereum will not reach a record high before May, and I eat.
Despite its passionate love, Big Orange also admits that there is a lack of innovation in Ethereum at the moment.
"There is nothing new that makes people shine," said Yuan Jie, co-founder of the public chain Conflux, who calls himself the "Web3 investment director", who once aspired to create an "Ethereum killer" and witnessed the rise and fall of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Theboom in DeFi, NFT, and GameFi in the last cycle still haunts him, "At that time, there were a lot of new things to learn every day, and in the process of learning, participation could also get a good return on wealth." "
In its golden age, Ethereum has had the best story. In that year, the on-chain ecology grew explosively, and the "cult" of Ethereum was pushed to a climax, and the attention of capital, developers and users was highly focused on certain directions (such as Layer 2, DeFi, ZK technology, etc.) and once blindly expanded, and investors came and went and bustled.
The narrative of three years ago fed the boom of the previous cycle, but now, such a story is over.
Just as the land loses its fertility due to overcultivation, talking about the present, Yuan Jie said, "Vitalik is too deeply involved in the guidance of the direction of the industry and the formulation of the route with his personal charm, which leads to the failure of Ethereum's resource allocation."
Whether it's a breakthrough at the technical level or a new application in the ecosystem, Ethereum has failed to provide enough freshness to attract the attention of the market.
Boiling frogs in warm water, the Ethereum main chain is facing the dilemma of a "gradually barren land".
"The transaction volume and activity on the chain are very low, and the whole ecosystem is cooling, resulting in Ethereum's deflationary mechanism (EIP-1559) not working well", in the view of Big Orange, the deflationary mechanism of EIP-1559 is like a beautifully designed irrigation system, but in the absence of sufficient "water" (liquidity), this system can only be used for nothing, and cannot provide real nourishment for the Ethereum ecosystem.
To complicate matters further, such a barren land has blossomed into "blood-sucking flowers".
Layer 2, which carries the dream of Ethereum's scaling, is the common owner of the world, and each Layer 2 is orthodox with ether, but it has its own feudal state, sucking the value of the Ethereum mainnet and constantly weakening Ethereum's control over its own ecology.
"Everyone is vying to cross the assets of Ethereum to their own chain, because the more they cross, the higher the points, and the more airdropped tokens they will get," Yuan Jie said a little excited, he attributed these "bloodsucking flowers" and the current ecological homogenization results driven by the short-term profit-seeking mentality to the "prisoner's dilemma" of human nature.
Yuan Jie believes that this may not be Vitalik's original intention, but in the process of planning to expand the ecological boundaries of Ethereum with Layer 2, he ignored "the human nature of everyone who wants to get rich quickly and compete for the same piece of property", and finally "fell into a cycle of involution and self-extinction".
The Layer 2 network is highly fragmented, separating the user experience and on-chain liquidity, and the composability advantage that the Ethereum mainnet once boasted of in the DeFi Summer is gone, but Solana has become the habitat of many consumer applications with its simple feature of "fast".
"Now ETH, I think of ATOM, and I'm really afraid that ETH will repeat the mistakes of ATOM."
Lin Feng believes that ETH's dilemma is similar to the ATOM dilemma, both of which are experiencing "value transfer to the upstream".
In the Cosmos ecosystem, various sovereign application chains (such as OSMO, JUNO, etc.) are interconnected through the IBC protocol, but they capture the value of their own ecosystems, and ATOM, as a central hub, fails to effectively capture value from these chains.
After the rise of various Ethereum L2s, relying on sequencers, they have obtained a large amount of MEV and transaction fee income, which greatly reduces the value returned to the Ethereum mainnet and weakens the value capture ability of ETH.
"If the Ethereum main chain is successfully upgraded and the carrying capacity is greatly improved, then Ethereum may really usher in a new peak of development," Da Orange thinks.
How to reinvent greatness?
On April 22, when many institutions were selling ETH, F2Pool co-creator WangChun once again swapped 50 WBTC to 2,794 ETH, worth about $4.36 million, bringing a hint of thought to those who still hold ETH today.
Ethereum, the land that once gave birth to countless innovations, seems to need a long "fallow period".
When fallow is fallow for farming, some people cut the meat, and some people hold on.
Big Orange chooses to stick to it. The bull market in 2021 has made Big Orange reap a lot of money, and his affection for Ethereum has long gone beyond a mere investment relationship. For him, ETH is more than just an asset, it's more like a belief.
Among the "E guards" that still exist today, everyone has become a supernumerary advisor to the Ethereum Foundation, offering advice and advice to Ethereum, and according to their respective "reform measures", they can be roughly divided into two camps.
On the right, there is a strong push for drastic reforms, arguing that Ethereum should be more "practical" and compliant, "close to authority".
For example, Tangerine believes that Ethereum needs to "stop playing dead" and actively embrace compliance.
"Since the dawn of humanity, some things have been predestined. You can't compete with the state apparatus. If you want to survive well, or show your function, you should not fight against the entire state apparatus. "
Between ideals and bread, the Ethereum Foundation needs to strike a balance. Yuanjie does not deny the purity of the Ethereum Foundation's focus on academic discussion and technological innovation, but a pragmatic business arm is necessary.
"If Trump is in power, we need Trump to accept Ethereum, then we need someone who doesn't hate Trump to get him. If Vitalik can't do it himself, he can let someone else do it. A good foundation, as a non-profit organization, should be able to accommodate a variety of decisions.
Lin Feng even believes that the Ethereum Foundation has been too ideologically focused on ideology in the past, ignoring real creation and construction, and is too "weak", and the Ethereum Foundation needs a Trump-style reform figure to completely reform the atmosphere.
On the other hand, there is a leftist group that believes that the greatest value of Ethereum lies in "decentralization, which is the last "idealistic place" in the crypto world besides Bitcoin.
The well-known KOL Blue Fox Note said that he only pays attention to Ethereum, "whether it will continue to maintain the core values of decentralization, security and trustlessness in the future." If it is maintained, it will continue to be supported, and if it changes, no matter how high the price is, it will go directly.
"The crypto world needs an internationalist warrior, and no one else can compare to Vitalik except the vanished Satoshi Nakamoto," said investor Jacob, who invests in Ethereum, and despite facing huge financial losses, he still recognizes Ethereum's values of not compromising with authority.
"SOL and other emerging high-performance public chains are essentially capital-driven company stock logic, and high efficiency is naturally more likely to cause market heat, but Ethereum is a new form of human civilization."
Behind this left-right battle is a different understanding of blockchain priorities – is it pragmatism, the pursuit of efficiency and commercial success, or the spirit of decentralization and freedom?
In the darkest hour, faith is more important than gold.
IOSG founder Jocy called for "Ethereum is not going to die, it's the most successful decentralized organization in the Web3 industry." Looking forward to the future, please cherish the Ethereum in your hands and look at its value and innovation from a ten-year perspective. "
Back to the Ethereum Asylum, the shelter that began out of panic and is now a place to witness history.
Whether it is the moment when Lin Feng presses the sell button, or every day when Big Orange holds it firmly, or every emotional fluctuation that Tangerine sees in the madhouse, they are recording and shaping the history of Ethereum.
No matter what the future holds, regardless of whether they leave or stick to it now, those who were once crazy about Ethereum will always remember that scorching summer and the Ethereum that once made them believe in the future.