I have just concluded my trip to Asia, during which I engaged in deep discussions with Ethereum developers and ecosystem leaders. Special thanks to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV teams in Seoul, as well as partners from SNZ, and the newly established Ethereum Community Center in Hong Kong, supported by the Ethereum Foundation. This center is the first permanent Ethereum offline community in Asia.
What touched me the most on this trip was not only the vibrant atmosphere of the industry but also the local builders' rigorous and practical approach coupled with a grand vision. The global Ethereum ecosystem has seen an array of high-quality projects, innovative experiments, and long-term strategies that left me deeply touched and greatly inspired.
One set of data that has become vivid through this offline interaction: according to data provided by Electric Capital, the total number of developers contributing to Ethereum has exceeded one million, with a specific count of 1,012,824; no other ecosystem in the crypto industry can compare.
A Milestone Worthy of Our Attention
While a million is a round number, many such numbers are often hollow, but this data is extraordinary. Behind this number is the largest pool of technical talent converged on a global open and permissionless blockchain network, and more importantly, the scale and professional depth of this talent pool continue to expand.
Among these million developers, approximately 232,000 have remained active in development over the past 12 months.
Why Choose Ethereum? That Is the Real Key Question
For a long time, discussions in the crypto industry have always revolved around transaction speed, fees, and throughput. Every emerging public chain claims to be "faster than Ethereum." However, the most crucial question in the crypto field has never been which chain has the best performance but rather another core question:
Which chain will top developers choose to focus on for the long term?
On this issue, Ethereum stands alone as irreplaceable. Its advantage lies not only in its technological aspects, but also includes institutional, industry cultural, economic, and composability dimensions. This is the result of a decade-long accumulation of developers, infrastructure, industry standards, development tools, liquidity, academic research, various applications, and industry collaborative systems, which cannot be replicated by other ecosystems.
Ethereum has become the foundational general-purpose operating system for programmable finance and on-chain native asset issuance.
What are millions of developers currently building? And how are they continuously strengthening industry moats?
The value of the millions of developers lies in their tackling of the industry's toughest and most impactful issues: base layer protocol scaling, privacy technology, post-quantum security, and future on-chain-running intelligent autonomous systems.
Glamsterdam Upgrade: Innovating While Upholding Core Foundations
The Glamsterdam upgrade planned for 2026 perfectly illustrates how Ethereum iterates innovation while adhering to core values. The core changes in this upgrade include the proposer-collator separation mechanism (ePBS) and Block Access Lists (BALs), which will enable parallel execution, significantly increase network throughput, and are also expected to raise the Gas limit, substantially enhancing the Layer 1 mainnet's capacity.
While meeting future market scaling needs, ensuring network trust neutrality, security, stability, and fair MEV distribution—this is a vivid manifestation of Ethereum's continuously strengthened moat.
Synchronized Composability: Enabling Dozens of Rollups to Behave Like a Single Full Chain
Composability has always been Ethereum's trump card, and the next breakthrough is to extend this capability to all layer 2 networks. Native, basic Rollups with synchronized composability can solve the ecosystem fragmentation challenge: within a single atomic transaction, a Rollup's smart contracts can directly call mainnet or other layer 2 network contracts without cross-chain bridges or latency.
Teams such as Linea, Ethereum Economic Space, Gnosis, Zisk, and others are collaborating with the Ethereum Foundation to advance related research, combining this architecture with real-time proof technologies. The ultimate result is that dozens of Rollups are no longer isolated networks but integrated into one, directly addressing external concerns about Ethereum ecosystem fragmentation.
Post-Quantum Security: Ethereum's Most Prominent Leading Edge
No mainstream public chain ecosystem can proactively lay out a post-quantum secure system like Ethereum. Leveraging the "Ethereum Simplified" development roadmap, the Post-Quantum Security Team established by the Ethereum Foundation in early 2026, the official site pq.ethereum.org, and more than ten client teams running a post-quantum interoperability testnet weekly, the entire open-source collaborative migration plan has taken shape, with the goal of being largely implemented by 2029.
Once quantum computing poses a security risk, institutions holding trillions of dollars in custody assets will only focus on one thing: which public chain was the earliest and most comprehensive in preparing for protection.
Moat Beyond Developers: Composability, Common Standards, and Industry Trust
Ethereum's developer talent advantage will continue to compound, rooted in its underlying architecture design. Its most core network effect is not liquidity but rather extreme composability: lending, stablecoins, trading platforms, wallets, tokenized assets, oracles, layer-two Rollups, and various other applications are like freely combinable financial building blocks, achieving interoperability based on common industry standards, allowing developers to build a full system without starting from scratch.
The EVM is a universal application layer in the crypto industry, and the Solidity programming language is applicable to over a hundred networks such as Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, ZKsync, StarkWare, and Linea.
Mastering Ethereum development technology maximizes the development choice space, leading to a positive feedback loop: more developers entering the space → continuous improvement of supporting tools → enhanced market liquidity → ongoing institutional participation → attracting more developers to build interoperable protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds more liquidity, and composability continuously amplifies the composability advantage.
Ethereum firmly occupies the core position of value accrual, rather than just staying at a short-term on-chain activity level.
The three core advantages continue to widen the leading gap:
· Trustworthiness: Ethereum has over 900,000 validating nodes, while Solana has only about 800. This highly decentralized, neutral, unbiased platform attribute is a core feature highly valued by large financial institutions;
· Modular Architecture: Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and other Rollups have not fragmented the Ethereum ecosystem but instead expanded it into an interconnected modular on-chain economy, where all layer-two networks can inherit mainnet security guarantees;
· Industry Ecosystem Culture: Ethereum has gathered industry-leading researchers, cryptographers, and EIP standard setters, who define the entire crypto industry's development direction. This culture barrier formed based on talent accumulation is difficult for any forked project to replicate.
The Unique Ethereum
Making a pure play for short-term on-chain activity versus positioning as the long-term foundational layer for global native finance, earning the trust of marquee financial institutions—the difference could not be starker. In the minds of the most concrete asset-holding institutions, Ethereum reigns supreme, with security, trust, and liquidity being top priorities for such institutions. I witnessed this industry trend up close during my time at BlackRock.
The development trajectory in the tech industry is clear: over the long term, ecosystem resources tend to concentrate around a common standard, ample liquidity, and developer consensus, which forms Ethereum's unassailable moat.
After conversations with developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul, Hong Kong, and beyond, I am more convinced than ever of Ethereum's competitive advantage. I met the top talent building the next generation of financial infrastructure—entrepreneurs shaping the industry's future, designers of intelligent decentralized financial systems. It is these teams and practitioners who will reshape the entire world.
Ethereum's future is happening now.
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