Author: XiaoHai
This article aims to explore the theoretical limits of Ethereum's evolution from a "world computer" to a "foundation of civilization."
We believe that the ultimate value of Ethereum lies in its role as a "social operating system" for "computational civilization"—a programmable foundational layer that carries core elements of civilization such as wealth, identity, contracts, and governance.
By analyzing its three pillars of technical, institutional, and cultural legitimacy, this article systematically argues for Ethereum's potential to become the foundation of civilization; furthermore, it explores the theoretical boundaries of its development from four dimensions: technology, economy, governance, and society, ultimately depicting an "Ethereum civilization" defined by physical limits, UBI, competitive sovereignty, and human-machine co-governance.
The research posits that Ethereum's upper limit is essentially the maximum complexity, coordination, and secure evolutionary capacity that human social order can achieve on a programmable, verifiable foundation, providing civilization with a "meta-framework" for safe evolution for the first time.
Keywords: Ethereum; social operating system; trusted neutrality; UBI; competitive sovereignty; civilization framework; metaverse foundational layer
01 Introduction: The Paradigm Shift from "Trust Machine" to "Social Operating System"
- In our first paper, "Taming Leviathan," we proposed the governance paradigm of "reversible authorization," arguing that the legitimacy of power stems from its revocability, and revealed the significant role of DAOs in governance practice. This article further questions: What role will Ethereum play when the on-chain economic density and institutional complexity surpass that of off-chain?
The narrative of Ethereum is undergoing a profound paradigm shift, evolving from a "protocol layer" focused on executing computations to a "social operating system" that supports complex social collaboration. Its theoretical limits are no longer defined by micro-indicators such as transaction throughput (TPS) or gas fees, but rather by the institutional complexity, social scalability, and civilizational adaptability it can support as a foundation of civilization.
More importantly, Ethereum has effectively become the foundational layer of humanity's scientific fantasy of the "metaverse." All functional modules and ecological synergies of the metaverse must be built upon Ethereum, marking the first attempt in human history to systematically reconstruct the underlying support for another parallel universe. Therefore, the core proposition of this article is: Is Ethereum's theoretical limit defined by technical parameters, or is it the limit of human civilization complexity built upon a programmable foundation?
02 Legitimacy Pillars: The Three Foundations of Ethereum as the Foundation of Civilization
For a system to support civilization, it must undergo a rigorous test of legitimacy. Ethereum's irreplaceability stems from its solid foundations built on the following three dimensions.
2.1 Technical Legitimacy: Uncompromising Security and Trusted Neutrality
A consensus system with over 1.06 million active validator nodes and more than 34 million ETH locked makes the cost of attacks far exceed any potential gains, creating absolute security in the sense of "economic physics." Continuous technological advancements greatly enhance Ethereum's scalability, providing technical support for large-scale applications.
Quantum resistance and long-term security planning ensure that Ethereum can maintain long-term security in a rapidly evolving technological environment, providing sustainability for its role as civilizational infrastructure.
More importantly, protocol rules are enforced by code rather than human will, and this "code is law" neutrality is a prerequisite for attracting diverse global participants to converge and collaborate here, forming a moat that high-performance chains compromising on decentralization cannot reach.
2.2 Institutional Legitimacy: Programmable Social Contracts and "Institutional Legos"
Ethereum's institutional legitimacy is reflected in its interaction with traditional governance systems and the maturation of its internal governance mechanisms, which serve as institutional guarantees for its role as a foundation of civilization.
The core value of Ethereum lies in transforming abstract social institutions (such as corporate law, contract law, governance charters) into combinable and verifiable smart contracts, thus forming a "social operating system" that is institutionally programmable.
As real-world assets (RWA) gradually move on-chain, a deeper process based on the on-chain transition of real-world organizations (RWO) is unfolding.
The on-chain of RWO signifies that institutions themselves become combinable "on-chain Legos"—identity modules, power modules, decision-making modules, financial modules, and auditing modules can be freely invoked, forked, and reorganized.
When the institutions of human society enter a "three-body" evolutionary stage where "trial and error costs approach zero and iteration speeds are nearly real-time," Ethereum's institutional legitimacy will achieve its ultimate establishment.
2.3 Cultural Legitimacy: Public Spirit and the Gene of Positive-Sum Games
Ethereum's core values include decentralization, anti-censorship, transparency, and security. The global dissemination of these values makes Ethereum not just a technological platform but also a cultural symbol and value system, providing a cultural identity foundation for its role as a foundation of civilization.
The Ethereum community has developed into a global, diverse network encompassing participants from various backgrounds, including technology developers, financial innovators, artists, and social activists.
The culture of the Ethereum community is deeply rooted in a gene of anti-zero-sum and pro-positive-sum. This public spirit, which transcends short-term interests, is the "soft power" that binds global collaboration, allowing Ethereum to surpass pure technical categories and become a global community with shared values.
03 Boundary Exploration: From Technical Limitations to the Evolution Path of Civilization Expansion
Based on the aforementioned legitimacy, Ethereum's development will touch its theoretical limits across four dimensions, collectively outlining the contours of "Ethereum civilization" while also defining the core constraints of metaverse construction.
3.1 Technical Boundaries: From Scalability Challenges to the Exploration of Infinite Computation
The path to scalability is the core route for Ethereum to break through technical boundaries. The prosperity of the Layer 2 ecosystem and the continuous increase in blob capacity are important ways for Ethereum to transcend technical limits.
According to the long-term technical planning of the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum is expected to continue breaking through technical boundaries in the foreseeable future, providing technical support for its role as civilizational infrastructure. Under a modular architecture, its computational capacity can theoretically scale to support global-level applications.
However, the physical speed of light will become the absolute boundary for consensus synchronization. As human civilization moves towards interstellar, the communication delays across planets will force the unified Ethereum network to split into multiple relatively independent "consensus districts," forming civilization partitions based on physical distance.
3.2 Economic Boundaries: From Productive Capital to UBI Systems
Vitalik once proposed that "low-risk decentralized finance (DeFi) for Ethereum is like search for Google," maintaining Ethereum's minimum value. This represents Ethereum's lower limit.
With the continuous development of real-world assets (RWA) + real-world organization on-chain (RWO) and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), when the density of on-chain economy and complexity of institutions exceed that of off-chain, Ethereum's economic upper limit will no longer be defined by Earth's GDP or market size, but by the total complexity of computational civilization.
At that point, its economic scale could potentially reach several orders of magnitude above the Earth's economy, becoming a "consensus economic universe" operated by billions of humans and trillions of AIs.
In this system, the mechanisms for wealth creation and distribution will be restructured. The global basic income system (UBI) will primarily consist of node dividends and data yields, with $ETH evolving into the basic unit measuring the energy of the entire "consensus economic universe." At this time, the essence of wealth will no longer be the aggregation of assets in the traditional sense, but rather a function of the civilization's ability to coordinate complex activities. Therefore, Ethereum's economic upper limit is, in fact, an economic representation of the civilizational complexity it can support.
3.3 Governance Boundaries: Competitive Sovereignty and Layered Legal Orders
Ethereum's governance boundaries are reflected in its evolution from core developer-led governance to multi-stakeholder co-governance, which serves as its governance foundation as a foundation of civilization.
The Ethereum Foundation has introduced four strategic pillars—accelerate, amplify, support, and long-term unblock—to support the development of the ecosystem. It has proposed the following two major visions:
- Maximize the number of people who directly or indirectly use Ethereum and benefit from its underlying values;
- Maximize the resilience of Ethereum's technology and social infrastructure.
Ethereum has formed a governance model that includes multiple stakeholders, such as developers, validators, users, enterprises, and institutions. This diverse governance model can better balance the interests of different groups, allowing Ethereum to better adapt to the complex demands of the ecosystem, providing governance guarantees for its role as a foundation of civilization.
The development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) is an important manifestation of the expansion of Ethereum's governance boundaries.
In a decentralized society (DeSoc) based on SBT composition, individuals can seamlessly transfer their biological characteristics (identity), abilities, behaviors, health, and wealth across different DAOs (which can be seen as "digital city-states"). The role of real-world nations will gradually shift to that of "public service providers in the physical world" (public health, public safety), while Ethereum will become a "transnational constitutional layer," establishing underlying rules for "identity confirmation and asset protection," forming a layered legal order of "real governance (nation/community) + on-chain governance (constitutional layer) + DAO governance (application layer)."
Thus, a new competitive sovereignty system emerges: power gains legitimacy through competition, governance is optimized through migration, and institutions iterate through consensus. "Sovereignty competition" will become the driving force for the continuous evolution of future societies, with the quality of governance determined by real-time voting based on citizens' migration data.
3.4 Social Boundaries: Human-Machine Co-Governance and Consciousness Community Networks
Ethereum's social boundaries are reflected in its evolution from an experiment by a few technical geeks to a social infrastructure involving global public participation, which serves as its social foundation as a foundation of civilization.
The continuous optimization of user experience is the key pathway for Ethereum to break through social boundaries, enabling it to attract more users without technical backgrounds and expand its social base.
Enhancing localization and cultural adaptability is an important strategy for Ethereum to break through social boundaries; encouraging developers and users from different regions to build applications and services based on local needs and cultural characteristics allows Ethereum to better integrate into different social environments, providing a cultural foundation for its role as a foundation of civilization.
The expansion of education and knowledge dissemination is an important pathway for Ethereum to break through social boundaries, enabling it to cultivate a broader talent base and provide human resource support for its long-term development.
As the abundance and depth of human digital identities (through technologies like SBT) and the on-chain activities of AI agents together constitute the mainstream of social interaction, Ethereum will evolve into a neutral "human-machine interaction space." Social governance will involve both humans and silicon-based intelligences with on-chain personas, ultimately transforming social forms into a cross-species consciousness community, with coordinated intelligence becoming Ethereum's ultimate social function.
At this stage, Ethereum is no longer merely an extension tool of human society but a new form of society itself—a social operating system cohabited by humans and silicon-based intelligences.
In summary, the exploration of boundaries in technology, economy, governance, and society ultimately converges into a qualitative leap—when the core elements of civilization are encoded on a programmable foundation, its evolutionary paradigm shifts from slow, friction-filled rigid iterations to agile, reversible elastic evolution. This marks the emergence of a systematic error-correcting capability as an intrinsic attribute of civilization.
British physicist David Deutsch points out in "The Beginning of Infinity" that when a civilization masters a systematic error-correction mechanism, its progress will no longer have limits.
This ability of "infinite correction" is the source of civilization's continuous evolution. Ethereum is precisely the technological realization of such an error-correction mechanism. On Ethereum, social institutions are no longer immutable codes but updatable code; power is no longer a static monopoly but reversible authorization; governance is no longer a one-time design but a continuous iterative process. This "programmability of institutions" is essentially the "error-correctability of civilization." It allows society to enter a low-cost trial-and-error, high-frequency evolution operational mode, aligning the speed of institutional updates with that of technological innovation for the first time.
When social contracts can be improved, copied, and forked like open-source software, humanity truly steps into an "infinite beginning": a stage of civilization that does not aim for perfection but normalizes continuous error correction and evolution.
This marks a fundamental leap in human society: from irreversible to reversible, from power monopoly to power flow, from institutional closure to institutional openness.
Therefore, the upper limit of Ethereum is not a static endpoint but an "infinite beginning" that is perpetually activated—a never-ending civilizational process driven by programmable institutions, revocable power, and iterative governance.
04 Ultimate Form: The Infinite Game as the Meta-Framework of Civilization
The ultimate form of Ethereum is not any specific vision of civilization but rather a meta-framework for digital civilization—a foundational basis that allows countless forms of civilization to safely be born, compete, evolve, and perish. It does not define the ultimate goal of civilization but provides the rules and soil necessary for evolution.
4.1 Meta-Framework of Civilization: Rules of the Infinite Game
As a meta-framework, Ethereum establishes a field for an infinite game. In this field, all participants engage not in a finite game aimed at an endpoint (such as winning elections or defeating opponents) but in an infinite game designed to ensure the game continues indefinitely—namely, the continuation and prosperity of civilization itself.
Programmable institutions constitute the variable rules of the game, allowing social contracts to iterate at the speed of code, achieving low-cost trial-and-error and high-frequency evolution.
Trusted neutrality in execution ensures the fairness of the rules, allowing any participant, regardless of their strength, to interact under the same set of rules, which is a prerequisite for the game's sustainability.
Competitive sovereignty introduces a mechanism for rule competition, where different DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) can offer various governance models, cultural values, and economic systems, enabling individuals to "vote with their feet" and drive the continuous optimization of the entire system.
Thus, the upper limit of Ethereum is not a quantifiable technical metric but the limit of complexity and coordination that civilization can achieve once its core institutions are placed on a programmable, verifiable foundation. Its limit is not the limit of computational power but the limit of social coordination. When a civilization's institutions can be updated like code and values can freely migrate through consensus, human society enters a calculable, verifiable, and evolvable order space for the first time—this is the true meaning of the "civilizational upper limit."
4.2 Metaverse: The First Instance of the Civilizational Framework
This civilizational meta-framework is not a castle in the air; its first and most intuitive instance is the metaverse envisioned in human scientific fantasy. In fact, Ethereum has objectively become the only viable foundational layer for constructing any truly meaningful metaverse.
The metaverse is not merely a "virtual game" or "digital space" but a parallel universe that requires "unique and trusted identities, clear asset ownership, inviolable contracts, and efficient governance collaboration"—these core needs are fully met by Ethereum's underlying system:
- Decentralized identity (DID/SBT) ensures the uniqueness and autonomy of identity;
- Non-fungible/fungible tokens (NFT/FT) achieve clear asset ownership and global liquidity;
- Smart contracts guarantee the inviolability and automatic execution of contracts;
- Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) support efficient governance collaboration and reversible authorization.
In other words, all functional modules and ecological synergies of the metaverse must be built upon Ethereum or similar trusted neutral foundational layers. Any so-called "metaverse" that departs from this foundational layer, no matter how stunning its visuals, will ultimately fall into the traditional internet traps of platform monopoly or data silos, failing to become a true "parallel universe" where rights are fundamentally guaranteed and the economy can thrive freely. Therefore, Ethereum is not only a civilizational framework; it has already become the constitution and cornerstone of the metaverse.
05 Conclusion: From Genesis Block to Genesis Civilization
From its first "genesis block," Ethereum has contained ambitions that transcend technology. This article systematically argues for its triple legitimacy as a social operating system, its four boundaries, and its ultimate form.
When identity, wealth, and governance fully migrate on-chain, Ethereum is no longer just a tool but a "promised land of digital civilization." Here, we are not only users of code but also co-creators of the future social contract.
Vitalik's envisioned "possible future" is a path for technological realization, while the "ultimate form" revealed in this article represents the underlying rules of civilizational evolution. Ethereum becomes the foundational protocol for all social experiments, and its upper limit is a function of human collective wisdom and collaborative ability—this is an infinite game that never ends.
From the "genesis block" to "genesis civilization," the upper limit of Ethereum ultimately reflects our determination and imagination about where we choose to go together. It not only carries the evolution of a new technology but also embodies humanity's first attempt to construct another universe in the digital realm, with its boundaries representing the horizon of human collaborative imagination.
Notes:
1. RWO, Real-World Organization, refers to the process of putting the identity modules, power modules, decision-making modules, financial modules, and auditing modules of real-world organizations (companies, groups, NGOs) on-chain in the form of smart contracts.
2. Node Dividend refers to the periodic income obtained by nodes through resource contributions in consensus participation.
3. Data Yield refers to the income obtained from personal data in market exchanges.
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