A turning point for Ethereum? The battle between leadership and scaling is heating up

Author: Macauley Peterson, Blockworks; Compiler: Baishui, Golden Finance

The ongoing debate over the future of Ethereum has reached a fever pitch amid the Trump meme craze this weekend. The public discussion highlighted the differences between various parts of the community and the Ethereum Foundation (EF). The debate touched on governance, network scalability roadmap and long- term vision.

A key area of ​​debate is the governance of EF. Critics argue that EF 's internal structure may not be suitable for the current era. Although the foundation's mission is to be decentralized, its current centralized decision- making has prompted criticism of its responsiveness to competing threats and evolving narratives.

Ironically, much of the sharp criticism of current Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi stems from the mistranslation of comments she made during a Japanese interview, which has led to considerable misunderstanding and distortion of her views.

Vitalik Buterin himself and other community members have called attention to the issue, highlighting the differences between the original Japanese article and the version posted on Crypto Twitter - the latter of which falsely claimed that Miyaguchi 's talk of "competing and winning" was with Ethereum Culturally opposed values. (This is not the case.)

The mistranslation is so obvious it's hard to imagine it wasn't intentional. These translation errors fueled cyberbullying, which continued despite clarifications.

Some comments have become vicious enough to freak out core developers, with Potuz, a developer who goes by the pseudonym Prysm, commenting on the broader sentiment: “Reading Twitter the last few days makes me feel like either I should log off and keep coding, Or leave the field entirely."

How best to express Ethereum’s core mission is another sore point. On the one hand, those who emphasize Ethereum as a settlement layer believe that a strong currency premium is essential for network security. On the other hand, voices like Martin Koeppelmann advocate positioning Ethereum as a “world computer,” focusing on transaction capacity and total fees as the main indicators of success. These voices view ETH as secondary "money".

Ethereum’s plans for scalability via rollups continue to be questioned. We’re seeing a new round of calls for a more ambitious strategy to scale the Ethereum mainnet – this time from within EF.

“If Ethereum wants to win, we need to be ambitious,” Dankrad Feist wrote on X on Monday.

He believes that achieving bandwidth targets by 2026 is critical. " We need to get to the current goal of 1 megabyte per second in 1-2 years, not 5 years, and then move on."

There seems to be an emerging consensus that maintaining the status quo will not work.