A great debate about the future of Ethereum was ignited by an industry commentary article titled (The Twilight of the Technological Utopia). The article's viewpoint is sharp and direct: Ethereum's biggest enemy may not be Solana, which is lightning-fast in transaction speed, but rather itself — the one that adheres to the 'correct' roadmap while increasingly drifting away from the real user experience.
The story of Ethereum was once a passionate legend of a dragon-slaying youth. But now, this youth seems to have built an ivory tower that is too perfect for himself. The core design of this tower is the well-known 'Rollup-centered roadmap.'
Shifting the burden of transaction processing from the overcrowded mainnet (L1) to efficient layer two networks (L2s), while the mainnet retreats to the background, playing the role of the ultimate 'security judge'. The goal is beautiful: lower gas fees, faster transactions.
The grand narrative of 'everything is Rollup' translates into a perspective of 'everything is fragmented' in the eyes of users and developers. An analysis report from the end of 2025 astonishingly points out that nearly 90% of L2 transaction volume is monopolized by the three giants: Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
But the problem is that this fragmented experience is fundamentally eroding Ethereum's most valuable asset: network effects. When a new user enters the Ethereum ecosystem, they are no longer faced with a unified entry point, but rather a confusing multiple-choice question: Which L2 should I go to? How do my assets cross chains? Why does my Uniswap on Arbitrum seem to be separated by a Pacific Ocean from my friend's Aave on zkSync?
Ethereum is gradually losing its former charm in the battle for new developers, while the number of active developers among competitors like Solana is rapidly increasing.
. When leading projects like Render Network announce their migration from the Ethereum ecosystem to Solana,
, the entire industry heard the sound of tectonic shifts. Soon after, well-known projects like Sorare also made the same choice, and the reason is simple: the pursuit of extreme performance and low costs.
The teams that have left do not fail to understand the grandeur and intricacy of Ethereum's roadmap. They are simply expressing a straightforward viewpoint through action: rather than waiting in a still-developing, complex 'future city', it's better to race on a 'track' that has already allowed users to enjoy 'driving'.
While Ethereum users are still troubled by the mainnet's throughput of dozens of transactions per second (TPS) and the high bridging costs between L2s, Solana has already been able to stably provide thousands of TPS in real processing capacity, with transaction confirmation times fast to sub-second levels, and costs that are negligible.
Having come this far, we must touch the core of the problem: does a 'technological ideological' purism exist within Ethereum's governance and culture? A tendency that sacrifices the core needs of current users in pursuit of theoretical 'decentralization' and 'security'?
Looking back through history, whether it was the massive controversy triggered by the ProgPoW upgrade or the sharp opposition with the miner community during the implementation of EIP-1559, we can see a pattern: the core developer group plays an almost 'gatekeeper' role in technical decisions, and their decision-making process sometimes appears opaque, with ordinary users having extremely limited voice.
Even Vitalik Buterin himself has criticized the 'lightning-fast passage' of the ProgPoW proposal for damaging community confidence.
The roadmap centered around Rollup, to some extent, is the ultimate embodiment of this ideology. It insists that L1 must maintain absolute simplicity and security, even at the cost of an extremely complicated user experience. This choice may be 'correct' technically, but in the market, it may be losing to those more 'down-to-earth' pragmatists.
Back to the initial question: Did Ethereum lose to Solana?
The answer may be that it is losing to an era trend represented by Solana—an era that values performance, cost, and user experience immensely.
The dilemma of Ethereum is essentially an internal struggle over routes, a philosophical game about 'correctness' versus 'usability'.
