Where is Ethereum's Long March now?

Written by: @Kathy.xyz

In October 1934, the Central Red Army set out from Jiangxi, and no one referred to that departure as the "Long March." It was just a hurried retreat——the fifth encirclement and suppression was lost, the base area could not be held any longer, and over 80,000 people carrying guns headed west, uncertain of where the end was.

It was just a hurried retreat——the fifth encirclement and suppression was lost, the base area could not be held any longer, and over 80,000 people carrying guns headed west, uncertain of where the end was.

Yesterday I was reading news about @VitalikButerin at ETH CC and suddenly thought of the Long March.

I’m not saying that Ethereum is "miserable," but the feeling of that predicament is quite similar. Once the strongest fortress, it suddenly realized it was surrounded by vulnerabilities; once an unquestionable narrative, it turned out that even its own people no longer believed it.

So the question arises: Has the Ethereum Foundation found a way out of the predicament?

Failure of the Fifth Encirclement and Suppression

First, let’s clarify the defeat to understand everything that followed.

The past two years have been a period of "multiple failures" for Ethereum.

The ETH/BTC ratio fell back to the level of 2021, and the price of ETH has taken a very tortuous path, barely breaking previous highs in 2025 before continuing to decline.

On-chain data is also difficult to look at. The DEX trading volume of Solana has fully surpassed Ethereum, with a stablecoin trading volume of $650 billion in February 2026, setting a new historical high. Monthly active users at 98 million is a number that you can hardly pretend not to see.

But these are still external threats. The Ethereum Foundation has dug itself a deeper pit——called the "L2 parasitic effect."

In March 2024, with the launch of the Dencun upgrade, L2 transaction fees dropped by 99% overnight. This was initially good news: it became cheaper, it scaled, and the user experience improved. But soon after, one thing became clear: the more prosperous L2 became, the more empty L1 felt.

Coinbase's Base chain generated $75 million in revenue in 2025. During the same period, Ethereum's L1 protocol revenue was $39.2 million.

Ethereum's L1 revenue is less than half of that of an L2 built on it.

The Blob fees paid from L2 to L1 are extremely low, and the EIP-1559 burn mechanism is nearly ineffective. As a result, in the third quarter of 2025, Ethereum's annualized supply growth rate rebounded to +0.22%——the "Ultra Sound Money" narrative of deflation officially declared bankrupt.

Meanwhile, the EF treasury is also in urgent need. The treasury figures released in October 2024: $970.2 million, a decrease of 39% from the previous disclosure. In the past six months, EF has sold a total of 16,000 ETH to finance itself.

In a word: there are strong enemies outside, parasites inside, the treasury is shrinking, and the narrative has collapsed.

Doesn’t it sound like the failure of the fifth encirclement and suppression?

Zunyi Conference: Necessary Leadership Change

Having been defeated to this extent, the leadership must act.

In January 2025, EF Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi @AyaMiyagotchi announced her resignation. Vitalik himself announced: "The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me." This statement is thought-provoking——it serves both as a steering of the ship and an acknowledgment: the previous independent governance of EF was nominal.

The new co-executive directors are Wang Xiaowei @hwwonx and Tomasz Stańczak @tkstanczak. The direction seems to have become clearer. But just 11 months later, Stańczak resigned again. Within 13 months, there were three changes in core executives.

This is not even the most shocking part.

In October 2025, a resignation letter written in May 2024 was made public, authored by Péter Szilágyi @peter_szilagyi——the former head of the Geth client, the creator of the client that once supported over 60% of Ethereum nodes. He worked at EF for a full nine years.

The contents of the letter shocked the entire community.

Szilágyi stated that his total income over six years was $625,000——before tax, averaging about $100,000 a year. During this period, the chain he helped build increased in value from zero to $450 billion. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, the EF secretly funded a "second Geth team" within Nethermind——essentially creating an alternate path behind his back. When he discovered this and objected, he was fired within 24 hours.

He also pointed out: there is a small circle of "ruling elites" of 5 to 10 people within EF, centered around Vitalik, supported by 1 to 3 VC firms, appearing decentralized on the surface but essentially highly centralized. He referred to himself with the term: "useful fool."

Here lies a shadow of the Long March. The Zunyi Conference did not eliminate internal contradictions; instead, it made one person's judgment the unshakable beacon during the most brutal moments. The bloodletting within EF in early 2025 also carries this implication——Vitalik is not "listening to opinions," he is reorganizing power and reclaiming control of the roadmap using the crisis as an opportunity.

The reason the Long March was able to continue was because someone was willing to bear the final judgment responsibility.

Strategic Shift: Major Change in Roadmap

With a change in leadership, the roadmap must also change.

The old logic was: L1 ensures security, and expansion relies entirely on L2. The problems with this route have been mentioned above——the more successful L2 becomes, the more empty L1 feels, and value capture breaks apart.

In May 2025, Vitalik published the vision of "Lean Ethereum": In five years, Ethereum should be as simple as Bitcoin. A more radical proposal: replace the EVM execution architecture with RISC-V, potentially enhancing performance by 100 times.

The slogan sounds great; the key is in the actions.

The Fusaka upgrade is the first substantive anchor point. Its core is PeerDAS, which increases Blob data capacity by 2 to 4 times, theoretically reaching 100,000 TPS. But more importantly, the accompanying EIP-7918 establishes a floor price for Blobs linked to L1 Gas, pulling Blob fees directly from 1 wei to between 0.01 and 0.5 Gwei.

EIP-7918 is a critical cut in this route shift. It states: L2 can no longer exploit L1's security for free. If you use my data layer, you must pay a reasonable fee. The era of "L2 prosperity, L1 drinking northwest wind" will be enforced to an end.

This is akin to the Red Army changing its marching route from a frontal assault to a flanking maneuver during the Long March——not giving up the battle, but changing the way of fighting.

EthCC 2026: Has Ethereum Reached "Yan'an"?

ETH CC was held in Cannes last week. This conference released several signals, each of which is worth testing against the Long March analogy.

Disappearance Test: Vitalik mentioned——if he disappeared tomorrow, could Ethereum continue to operate? This is precisely the ultimate goal of the Long March——for the system to survive after the leader disappears. His public questioning of this is a declaration: I know I am a centralization risk, and we must seriously address this matter. This is maturity, but also pressure.
EEZ Framework: A day before the opening of EthCC, Gnosis and Zisk, in conjunction with EF, announced the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ). The goal is to allow contracts on different rollups to call each other in the same transaction through real-time zero-knowledge proofs——solving the "$40 billion asset locked on more than twenty isolated chains" issue also known as the "hundred island problem." Yan'an is a base area because of its logistics and infrastructure. EEZ is doing exactly that. But to clarify: EEZ is not yet live.
The Agora Institutional Forum: People from JP Morgan, Societe Generale-Forge sat on stage discussing on-chain finance. Traditional financial institutions are actively coming to negotiate; it is not that Ethereum has compromised, but rather that Ethereum has grown up. Of course, the MiCA regulatory pressure and Solana's continuous pursuit are real variables, and one cannot only look at the positive side.

Core Judgment: Has the Predicament Been Resolved?

Let’s make a comparison:

Based on a series of signals released during ETH CC, the strategic shift has been completed, but it has not yet reached Yan'an.

The meaning of "the strategic shift has been completed" is: the direction has truly changed. Vitalik personally took charge of the leadership change, EIP-7918 directly addresses the L2 parasitic issue, and RISC-V replacing EVM opens the imaginative space for the technology roadmap over the next decade. This is not a patch; this is a reshaping of the route.

The meaning of "not yet reached Yan'an" is: the changes are real, but results have not yet been realized. Can EIP-7918 truly enhance L1 fee capture? Can ETH/BTC stabilize and rise? Can developer retention halt its decline? Currently, all three indicators do not have definitive answers.

There is also a fundamental question hanging in the air: Where is Ethereum's Yan'an?

Different people provide different answers. "World computer," "global settlement layer," "programmable currency," "anti-censorship infrastructure"——these visions are not contradictory, but they have not formed a clear consensus narrative. Without consensus, it is difficult to mobilize the entire ecosystem to follow.

Lessons from the Long March

The significance of the Long March has never been about the value of suffering itself.

Suffering is not an asset; it is a filter. Its role is to force the elimination of wrong routes, wrong commands, wrong tactics——and then leave behind those judgments that survive.

The encirclement that Ethereum has faced in the past two years——the rapid rise of Solana, the L2 parasitic effect, the governance crisis within EF——the impact is real, and so is the response. EIP-7918 is a surgical intervention on the economic vulnerabilities. Vitalik’s question of "disappearance test" in Cannes forces himself and the entire ecosystem to confront that most vulnerable node.

Something that is nearly dead wouldn’t undertake such a specific surgery.

But the Long March teaches us that completing a strategic shift is just arriving at a place where one can set off again. Yan'an is the starting point of the base area, not the destination. What follows is the need for construction, for operation, and for integrating dispersed powers into one direction.

Whether Ethereum can succeed depends on two things: the execution of the technology roadmap, and the community's acceptance of the new narrative. The former has a roadmap to refer to, while the latter has no guarantees.

So, what is Ethereum's "Yan'an"?

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