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As Ethereum marks its 10th anniversary, Cointelegraph's documentary "The Fight for Ethereum's Soul" reveals the blockchain's ongoing battle to maintain dominance amid rising competition. Featuring insights from Ethereum Foundation leaders and industry builders, the film explores how recent upgrades and layer-2 solutions are reshaping the ecosystem.
The network's transition from energy-intensive mining to staking mechanisms represented a fundamental shift in blockchain consensus models. This "engine change while driving" achievement, completed in 2022's Merge upgrade, reduced Ethereum's energy consumption by 【99.95%】 while introducing new economic dynamics for validators.
——"85% of transactions now occur on layer-2 networks, but 85% of value remains on Ethereum's base layer,"—— notes Dune Analytics CEO Fredrik Haga. The 2024 Dencun upgrade's proto-danksharding feature dramatically reduced layer-2 fees, creating what Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron calls "a technological victory with economic consequences" for Ethereum's core infrastructure.
May 2025's Pectra hard fork introduced 11 key improvements, building on Dencun's advancements. Ethereum Foundation co-director Tomasz Stańczak emphasizes interoperability as the current focus: "We're working to make all chains feel like a single ecosystem." Meanwhile, Ethereum France president Jerome de Tychey highlights the delicate balance between layer-1 security and layer-2 usability requirements.
With Solana and other next-gen blockchains gaining traction, Ethereum faces pressure to optimize execution speed without compromising decentralization. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal argues Ethereum should focus on its core strength: "Being the best settlement layer" rather than competing directly on transaction throughput.
As traditional finance giants like BlackRock adopt Ethereum for tokenization, the network's role in bridging decentralized and conventional finance appears secure. Yet the documentary underscores how Ethereum's success now depends on navigating complex technical and economic tradeoffs in its multi-layered ecosystem.