I was supposed to be over it by now.
It was 2017, gas was $2, and I thought I was smart. Bought some ETH, staked a little, watched the DAO drama from the sidelines like it was reality TV. Then 2021 happened fees went to the moon, my transactions failed for three straight days, and I swore I was done. “This chain is a joke,” I typed into a Discord at 3 a.m. while refreshing Etherscan like a maniac.
Fast-forward to February 2026. I’m still here. Still paying $8 to move $400 around on mainnet when I’m lazy. Still refreshing the same block explorer. Still arguing in the same group chats with the same people who also swore they were leaving in 2022. What the hell is wrong with us?
It’s not the tech. Not anymore.
The tech is actually… fine. L2s are cheap, blobs happened, danksharding is creeping in, and you can finally send a stablecoin without selling a kidney. The “Ethereum killers” that were going to eat our lunch? Most of them are either dead, pivoting to “we’re actually compatible with Ethereum now,” or quietly running on Ethereum under the hood. The narrative flipped so hard it gave me whiplash.
So if it’s not the tech, why am I still emotionally invested in this ridiculous, slow-moving, over-engineered, beautiful mess?
Because Ethereum is the only chain that feels like it has a personality disorder—and I relate.
Bitcoin is the grumpy grandpa who only cares about being sound money. Solana is the hyperactive cousin who talks too fast and sometimes forgets to breathe. Base is the cool new kid everyone wants to be friends with. But Ethereum? Ethereum is the guy who shows up to the party already arguing with himself about the guest list, then spends the whole night fixing the playlist while everyone else is dancing.
It’s insecure and overconfident at the same time. It moves like a glacier but changes its mind every six months. It will spend two years debating one EIP like it’s the meaning of life, then casually ship something that rewrites how the entire internet works. And somehow, against every prediction, it keeps working.
I think that’s the part nobody writes about.
We talk about “decentralization” like it’s a checkbox. But the real decentralization on Ethereum isn’t just 10,000 validators or whatever the number is this week. It’s the fact that nobody not Vitalik, not the EF, not the big staking pools—can actually kill the culture. They can try. God knows they’ve tried. But the culture is this weird, stubborn, global, slightly autistic, deeply online, occasionally offline, always arguing family that refuses to be managed.
I’ve watched people get absolutely wrecked by this chain lost money, lost time, lost sleep and then come back six months later with a new project because “this time the UX will be better.” That level of delusion is rare. It’s almost… admirable?
There’s a running joke in the community that Ethereum is “the chain of maximum cope.” And it is. But it’s also the chain of maximum optionality. You can be a DeFi degen, a soulbound-token idealist, a based rollup maxi, a privacy maximalist, a public-goods funder, or just some guy who wants to own his Twitter handle on-chain. All of those people are in the same Discord. All of them think the others are slightly insane. And somehow the whole thing doesn’t explode.
That tension is the feature.
Every other chain picks a personality and commits. Ethereum refuses. It wants to be everything, for everyone, all at once, and it’s willing to suffer for it. That suffering is what keeps the culture honest. When fees were $200, people screamed. When the merge finally happened after years of delays, people cried (some from joy, some from exhaustion). When blobs dropped and fees cratered, half the community celebrated and the other half immediately started complaining that it wasn’t enough. That’s not dysfunction. That’s feedback.
I don’t know what Ethereum will look like in 2030. Maybe it really does become the “settlement layer” everyone says, calm and boring and secure, like a digital Switzerland. Maybe the L2s eat everything and mainnet becomes a museum. Maybe we all wake up one day and realize we’ve been arguing about the wrong things for a decade.
But I do know this: no other chain has survived this many near-death experiences with its soul still intact. Not even close.
So yeah, I’m still here. Still paying dumb fees when I’m in a hurry. Still refreshing the same block explorer at 2 a.m. when something weird is happening. Still arguing in the same group chats.
Because every once in a while, in the middle of all the noise and cope and drama, something genuinely new gets built. Something that feels like it couldn’t have been built anywhere else. And for a few weeks the whole timeline lights up with that old 2017 energy like we’re all in on the same stupid, impossible joke again.
