Whirlpool
“Whirlpool” – a cartoon that illustrates the gravitational pull of Ethereum on the rest of the blockchain industry.
Ethereum was first mentioned in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, who argued that the blockchain industry could benefit from other applications besides money and that it needed a more robust language for application development.
Despite a successful start, many commentators thought Ethereum could not scale due to technical limitations and governance issues, which led to articles like that in the Financial Times in 2019 titled “The Rise and Fall of Ethereum.”
Yet, today Ethereum seems very much back in the saddle – it is currently the only fully programmable protocol that has built a digital economy at scale (DeFi), overcome many of the scaling issues through tech innovation (e.g. Layer 2s) and has the largest active developer community.
Also, as the industry starts to consolidate, many of the new entrants are using the fundamental building blocks of Ethereum for these new superchains (e.g. Eclipse’s use of Ethereum as the settlement layer).
Within the industry, the primary threat to Ethereum is Bitcoin, which with the development of smart contracts on Bitcoin (e.g. Ordinals, BitVM), has the potential to tap into a much larger community with over 219M global holders.
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