Ethereum has been a great success as a pioneer of blockchain technology. However, as it has grown and spread, some contradictions and issues have become apparent. Although its founder, Buterin, has maintained a strict neutral stance, the contradictions have become a source of dissatisfaction among the public.
Although Ethereum is committed to decentralization and touts decentralization, it is quite difficult to scale the network while maintaining decentralization.
As a result, the more decentralization is increased, the more scalability and transaction speed are sacrificed, making the platform difficult for users to use.
Development of Layer 2 and other technologies is also underway to solve this problem, but these technologies are complex and require the assistance of a limited number of people to use them. It has become necessary to rely on a few experts, and decentralization has been sacrificed.
Furthermore, Ethereum has a limited processing power per second (TPS), and gas fees rise sharply when the network becomes congested. It has been pointed out that Ethereum has higher gas fees than other blockchains, which has become an obstacle for small users and projects.
An inequality has naturally arisen in which the wealthy and large-scale projects, who do not have to worry about gas fees, can easily use the network, while general users find it difficult to use. This contradicts the Web 3.0 ideal of "democratizing" the network.
Furthermore, although Ethereum aims for "complete decentralization," in reality it is highly dependent on certain players and developers (e.g., the Ethereum Foundation and a group of major developers), and it has been pointed out that the final decision-making process for hard forks (e.g., The DAO incident, The Merge transition) is "centrally" carried out by these influential players, contrary to the ideal.
