Author: Kieren James-Lubin, CoinTelegraph; Translation: Baishui, Golden Finance

ETH was conceived at the end of 2013 and launched in July 2015. I started researching Ethereum in the summer of 2014, and it seems incredible that a decade has passed. It is useful to check our expectations against what has actually happened when these milestones are over.

Blockchain and tokens have not unified but continue to increase.

Blockchain has a powerful network effect, almost by definition. Therefore, people may expect a small number of blockchains, or even a single blockchain, where most end-user activity takes place. Part of Ethereum's creation was to "rule all chains," which contrasted sharply with the practice of creating a new blockchain for each new feature at the time.

Social networks and stock markets exhibit integration behavior -we have a popular social network for almost every use case (X/Twitter-text, Instagram-images, YouTube-videos, etc.). The United States has two popular stock markets. Most countries have only one or none, and only about the top 20 stock markets truly have global significance. In contrast, there are approximately 2.5 million cryptocurrencies-about five times more than in 2021. Although many of these tokens and blockchains may not be widely used, as of September 2024, there are over 50 tokens and blockchains with a market cap of billions of dollars.

Blockchain and blockchain-based tokens are relatively easy to build and finance, so it is reasonable to see a large number of such tokens. Ethereum greatly facilitates this activity, simplifying the issuance of new tokens to a few lines of code or even a few clicks. Private investments often chase hot areas, with a large amount of capital flowing into a specific category, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, or past ride-hailing companies, etc.

Top 25 global securities exchanges. Source: Visual Capitalist

We usually see that after market consolidation, one to three winners will dominate most of the market share, and other participants will be acquired or go bankrupt. In contrast, blockchain and native blockchain tokens have a strange resilience, and some projects will continue to exist even if they are no longer actively developed. Some projects will make a comeback-for example, Dogecoin went through a long period of silence, but it became active again from 2020.

The argument that "the market decides everything" has not been proven.

Around 2014, every lengthy discussion about the unaccountability of blockchain technology would eventually turn to the assassination market - a market that allows speculators to bet on someone's time of death. The assassination market did indeed appear in 2018, but it seems to have not continued to exist. Prediction markets, which were popular long before blockchain emerged, are becoming popular in the fields of elections and sports, with huge trading volumes recently.

Less noticeable is the early conceptualization of decentralized on-chain insurance, which seems to still be on the fringes. We can imagine countless micro-insurance markets - will my train arrive on time? If not, will I be compensated? But having just this capability is not enough for these markets to exist. People's interest in how these markets operate is not large enough - at least not yet.

The progress of institutional adoption is different from what was expected.

Institutions are adopting more new assets rather than migrating business processes, and the speed of migrating legacy assets to the chain is slower than expected.

In the early days of the technology industry, the government, especially defense, was usually your first customer. Well-funded institutions hired technical personnel who were able to use immature products and achieve better results than those using products available at the time. This could be the adoption path for blockchain technology, especially considering the strong interest of traditional financial institutions.

On the contrary, successful digital use cases for large institutions tend to be consumer-oriented. This technology may be too transformative to adopt gradually and cannot be used by traditional participants for core business processes. New asset categories have always been the main focus, with brands like Nike earning an astonishing $0.185 billion in non-fungible token (NFT) revenue, while iShares Bitcoin Trust manages over $20 billion in assets.

Startups have been more successful than traditional institutions in putting traditional assets on the chain. Tether has a market cap of $120 billion, making it the most obvious success case. The asset management scale of large financial institutions is much larger, with BlackRock leading with $9 trillion in assets under management. But relatively speaking, their actions on the chain have been very limited so far.

The development of this industry completely surprised me. It's strange, disappointing in some aspects, but astonishing in others. In his 1997 letter to shareholders - when Amazon's revenue was $0.15 billion - Jeff Bezos referred to the internet as the 'global wait'. With a pragmatic and optimistic attitude, we will all succeed.