Ethereum’s (ETH) leadership is to blame for the blockchain’s declining fortunes. That’s according to one of the platform’s fiercest critics, Cyber Capital’s founder and CIO, Justin Bons. The analyst tore through the network’s top brass in a hard-hitting X thread on the project.
Mr Bons slated ETH for muzzling its stakeholders from speaking on its running. Instead, he suggested:
ETH is governed in a dictatorial fashion from the top down by developers who live in ivory towers & are disconnected from the realities of competitive markets, driving ETH into the ground.
Justin Bons
His thoughts resonated with many of his respondents, who agreed that the Solana (SOL) platform he has been championing is superior. However, a few, like X users Neils, Jedai One, and ThinkingCritically, remind him not to write off ETH while pointing out SOL’s shortcomings.
The Ethereum Foundation had not responded to the post by the time we went to press.
ETH is pushing away innovation
Like Bitcoin, Mr. Bons also reasoned that ETH was stifling innovation, pushing the cypherpunk revolution elsewhere. He painted it as an uncompetitive blockchain whose governance problems made it lack a viable path to success. Consequently, it couldn’t scale, which is the reason behind its loss to Solana (SOL).
In his view, SOL was eating ETH’s lunch through its cheaper, faster, easier and more secure offering. He posited that crypto users would rather deal with network downtimes than have unscrupulous individuals steal their funds through Layer 2 (L2) admin keys.
Furthermore, he argued that crypto enthusiasts would rather have occasional failed transactions than systematic censorship by an L2 sequencer. In other words, by selecting SOL, they showed that they trusted in decentralization, which is good for the free market and cypherpunk principles.
He said that although SOL is not yet a perfect blockchain, he argued that it is better than ETH in its current form.
Which way out for Ethereum?
To Mr. Bons, the only solution to Ethereum’s issues is for the project to self-govern. This on-chain stakeholder governance, he insisted, would allow the ETH faithful to cut “through all of the politics & BS.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t see the likelihood of that happening owing to the deep-pocketed parties favouring the maintenance of the status quo. That shift, he felt, would upset the multi-billion L2 industry that profits from ETH’s current governance structure.
The CIO further argued that ETH’s relationship with the L2s was parasitic as the latter extracted more value than what they paid back. Again, they hinder the host’s positive growth, therefore killing it slowly. So, the only way that ETH can fix its fatal problems is by scaling, which would drive the L2s out of business overnight.
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