Blockchain Veteran's Ten-Year Retrospective: The Middle Layer Has Been Completely Wiped Out, Ethereum's Future Is Only Heaven and Earth

Ethereum developer Chen Pin (artistic709) recently wrote an article reflecting on his ten-year journey since first engaging with Ethereum in 2016, offering profound insights into the current state of the blockchain industry. He believes that application explorers in the industry’s middle layer have almost all been wiped out, and the future of blockchain will head toward two completely different extremes.

Disappearance of the Middle Ground

Chen Pin cites his classmates as an example—out of 50 students, more than 10 work in AI-related fields, while only 3 are involved in blockchain. He points out that blockchain is no longer the top employment choice nor a hot spot for capital. More notably, the middle layer of “entrepreneurs and power users” who were once active during waves like ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, and GameFi has now almost vanished.

“There haven’t been stories of young heroes for a long time,” he writes. The remaining big brands repeatedly highlight milestones in asset management scale or trading volume and actively embrace governments, regulators, and financial groups, describing this as a “financial revolution.”

The Irreplaceability of Blockchain: Credible Neutrality

Chen Pin believes that if blockchain still has any unique value today, it is “credible neutrality.” Ethereum’s nodes are distributed across jurisdictions worldwide, with no single country or entity able to fully control it. This is the fundamental reason why stablecoins like Circle and Tether choose to issue on-chain.

He further uses USB Type-C as an analogy: when two giants compete, the one that compromises first by adopting the other’s standard incurs the cost of migration and is at a disadvantage. Blockchain’s neutrality makes it a platform that all parties can accept and migrate to—not because one is stronger, but because it does not belong to anyone.

A Three-Stage Historical Review

Chen Pin divides the ten years of blockchain development into three phases: 2015 to 2019 as the “age of experimentation,” where various decentralization permutations were tried one after another, mostly ending in failure but helping later entrants understand the terrain; 2020 to 2023 as the grassroots wave driven by DeFi Summer, with NFTs, GameFi, and Layer 2 emerging successively, creating an unsustainable boom supported by extraordinary attention and capital; and post-2024, where despite rising token prices and TVL, the “user base has disappeared”—the chain remains, but the people are gone.

Two Future Paths: Naive Idealism or Pragmatic Tooling

Regarding the future, Chen Pin believes blockchain will head toward two extremes. One is a return to the more ideological early days, where blockchain challenges social issues like voting, public goods, and digital identity—this is where the spirit of crypto-punk still lives. The other is complete toolification, where blockchain directly competes with existing solutions in stablecoins, RWA (real-world assets), and enterprise applications, serving users who do not care whether the underlying is blockchain or not.

“I can’t say which direction is better,” he admits. “As long as I stay here, I want what I do to be useful and have real applications. The only difference is whether it solves today’s problems or those of a few years from now.”

This article, “A Decade in Blockchain Veteran’s Reflection: The Middle Layer Has Fully Collapsed, Ethereum’s Future Is Only Sky and Earth,” first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.