The true growth engine of Ethereum has shifted from the underlying protocol to the ecological application layer. Developer activity rankings show that middleware and infrastructure projects like Chainlink far exceed Ethereum itself, indicating that the next bull market will be dominated by areas of 'horizontal expansion' such as cross-chain, oracle, liquidity automation, metaverse, and decentralized storage, rather than simply Layer 2 scaling.

1. Developer activity leads prices: truly outstanding teams continue to submit high-intensity work during bear markets (Santiment data), while bull markets are merely a harvesting period.

2. Chainlink is far ahead: Oracles have become the most active part of the Ethereum ecosystem, suggesting that the core narrative in the future will be 'deeper interoperability + enterprise-level integration.'

3. Ethereum is evolving from 'faster and cheaper chains' to 'platforms on top of platforms': the most active projects span the metaverse (Decentraland), cloud storage (Internxt), video (Livepeer), liquidity staking (Lido), indexing (The Graph), liquidity (Curve), etc., and the ecosystem is undergoing comprehensive horizontal expansion.

The main characters of the next cycle are likely not another Layer 2, but a bunch of middleware and killer application layer projects that are coding furiously. #ETH #Chainlink