Author: Joseph Chalom

Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher

I just returned from Asia, where I spent some time with Ethereum developers and ecosystem leaders. Special thanks to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV in Seoul, as well as our friends at SNZ and the recently opened Ethereum Community Center in Hong Kong. This center is the first long-term operating physical Ethereum community space in Asia, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

What impressed me the most was not just the vibrancy there, but the rigor and ambition of the builders. The high-quality projects, experimental spirit, and long-term thinking emerging from the global Ethereum ecosystem deeply inspired me.

This also brings a series of numbers to life: Data from Electric Capital shows that the total number of Ethereum developers has now surpassed one million, with 1,012,824 individuals contributing to the ecosystem. No other ecosystem in the crypto space can compare.

A Milestone Worth Watching

One million is a round number, and round numbers can sometimes feel hollow. But this number is anything but that. It represents the largest reservoir of technical talent ever assembled around an open and permissionless blockchain network. More importantly, this reservoir continues to deepen and widen.

Among these one million developers, approximately 232,000 have remained active in the past twelve months.

Why Ethereum: The Real Question

For years, discussions in the crypto industry have revolved around speed, cost, and throughput. Every new chain claims to be "faster than Ethereum." But the core question in the crypto space has never been which chain is the fastest, but another:

"Where will the top builders choose to build long-term?"

On this question, Ethereum still maintains a distinct advantage. This advantage is not only reflected in technical aspects, but is a comprehensive embodiment of institutional, cultural, economic, and ecological structures, resulting from ten years of accumulated developers, infrastructure, standards, tools, liquidity, research, applications, and social coordination that no other ecosystem can replicate.

Ethereum has become the default operating system for programmable finance and internet-native capital formation.

What These Million Builders Are Constructing and How It Strengthens the Moat

The importance of these million builders lies in what they are currently doing. The focus today is on the most challenging and highest-risk issues within the industry: the scalability of core protocols, privacy, quantum resistance, and the intelligent systems that will run on them.

Glamsterdam Upgrade: Innovating Without Compromising Core Principles. Expected to take place in 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade showcases how Ethereum continues to advance while adhering to core values. Its core changes include built-in proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs), which unlock parallel execution and higher throughput, and are expected to raise the Gas cap, significantly enhancing Layer 1 capacity.

Expanding capacity for future demands while upholding credible neutrality, security, and MEV fairness is itself an evolving moat.

Synchronous Composability: Making Numerous Rollups Operate as One Chain. Composability has always been Ethereum's superpower; the next leap is to extend this capability to Layer 2. Native Rollups and Based Rollups integrate synchronous composability to solve this issue. Contracts on one Rollup can call contracts on the mainnet or another Rollup in a single atomic transaction without bridging and without waiting.

Linea, Ethereum Economic Zone, Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation are collaboratively advancing, combining this design with real-time proof. As a result, dozens of Rollups no longer operate as isolated networks but begin to function as a unified chain. This is a direct response to criticisms of fragmentation.

Quantum Resistance: Ethereum's Most Obvious Competitive Advantage. No mainstream ecosystem has prepared more thoroughly for the post-quantum era. The "Lean Ethereum" roadmap, the Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum security team established in early 2026, pq.ethereum.org, and over a dozen client teams that have been running weekly post-quantum interoperability development testnets collectively form a coordinated open-source migration aimed at 2029.

When quantum risks become a reality, the one thing that custodians of trillions of dollars in assets care about most is: which chain is the earliest and most thoroughly prepared.

A Moat Beyond Developers: Composability, Standards, and Trust

The aggregation of developer talent generates a compounding effect, thanks to the way Ethereum is built. Its deepest network effect is not liquidity but the depth of composability: various applications function like interoperable financial Lego blocks.

Lending, stablecoins, exchanges, wallets, tokenized assets, oracles, and Layer 2 Rollups—all these interact through shared standards, so developers never have to start from scratch. EVM is the application layer of the crypto industry, and Solidity skills are applicable across Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and hundreds of other networks.

Learning the Ethereum tech stack means maximizing choice space, which drives the flywheel effect: more developers, more tools, more liquidity, more institutions, and thereby attracting more developers to build composable protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds liquidity, and composability breeds composability.

Moreover, Ethereum dominates where value is genuinely consolidated, not just in the most high-profile places:

Three forces reinforce this leading position.

Credible Neutrality: Ethereum is secured by over 900,000 validators, while Solana has about 800. Major institutions place high importance on this level of decentralization and platform neutrality.

Modularity: Rollups like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism do not fragment Ethereum; instead, they expand it into a more closely connected modular internet economy while inheriting the security of the mainnet.

Culture: Ethereum attracts top researchers, cryptographers, and EIP standard drafters far beyond other ecosystems, who set the direction for the entire industry. This is also the most challenging advantage for other ecosystems to replicate.

There is Only One Ethereum in the World

There is an essential difference between generating on-chain activity and becoming the long-term coordination layer for internet-native finance. The latter means becoming the layer trusted by the world's largest financial institutions.

Ethereum firmly occupies the cognitive high ground of large asset holders, who prioritize trust, safety, and liquidity. During my tenure at BlackRock, I witnessed this firsthand from the front row.

In the tech market, ecosystems integrate over time around standards, liquidity, and developer attention. This is Ethereum's moat.

After communicating with these developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul and Hong Kong, I am more convinced than ever about Ethereum's competitive advantage. I met with the talent building the next generation of financial infrastructure, the founders of our industry's future, and the architects of agent finance. It is these people and teams that will change the world.

The future of Ethereum is happening now.

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