Author: Joseph Chalom , CEO of Sharplink
Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews
Editor's Note: Amidst the competition among numerous new public blockchains claiming to be "faster," Ethereum remains firmly in first place. Following a visit to Asia, Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom pointed out that Ethereum's core competitiveness lies in its 1 million developers. He emphasized that competition in the crypto world is not just about network speed, but also about "where the top minds build their houses." With its deep cultural foundation, seamless "financial Lego," and forward-looking strategies to address technological challenges such as quantum computing resistance, Ethereum has transcended simple parameter comparisons, building a truly insurmountable moat. Below is a translated excerpt:
I just returned from Asia, where I had in-depth conversations with Ethereum developers and ecosystem leaders. Special thanks to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV in Seoul, as well as our friends SNZ in Hong Kong and the recently opened Ethereum Community Center. This center is the first permanent physical Ethereum community space in Asia, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.
What impressed me most was not only the enthusiasm of the people, but also the rigorous attitude and lofty ambition shown by the builders. I was deeply inspired and have sincere admiration for the projects, experiments, and long-term thinking emerging in the Ethereum ecosystem.
This makes an otherwise abstract number vivid and concrete: according to Electric Capital, the number of lifetime Ethereum developers has now surpassed the 1 million mark, specifically 1,012,824 independent developers who have contributed to the ecosystem. No other ecosystem in the Crypto space comes close to this level.
A milestone worthy of our attention and reflection
One million is a round number, and round numbers can sometimes seem empty. But this number is anything but empty. Behind it lies the largest pool of technical talent in history, gathered around an open, permissionless blockchain network. More importantly, this talent pool continues to grow and expand.
Of these 1 million developers, approximately 232,000 were active in the past 12 months .
Why Ethereum: The Real Core Question
For years, discussions in the crypto space have revolved around speed, fees, and throughput. Every new chain claims to be "faster than Ethereum." However, the most important question in the crypto space has never been which chain is the fastest, but rather a completely different one:
Where will the best builders choose to carry out long-term development?
Ethereum remains unique in this regard. This advantage is not only technological, but also lies in its institutions, culture, economy, and composition . It is the result of a decade of continuous development in developers, infrastructure, standards, tools, liquidity, research, applications, and social coordination, which no other ecosystem can replicate.
Ethereum has become the default operating system for programmable finance and internet-native capital formation.
What is this million-strong army building today? And why is it deepening the moat?
The million developers are crucial primarily because of the challenges they are currently tackling. The focus is now on the industry's most difficult and riskiest problems: scalability of core protocols, privacy protection, quantum-resistant computing, and the intelligent agent systems that will run on them in the future.
The Glamsterdam upgrade—innovating without compromising core principles. Planned for 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade demonstrates how Ethereum can achieve technological leaps while protecting its core values. Its core changes—including the proposed and builder separation mechanism (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs) incorporated into the protocol—will unlock parallel execution capabilities and significantly increase throughput, while potentially raising the gas cap—will substantially increase Layer 1 capacity. Scaling for future needs while firmly upholding reliable neutrality, security, and MEV fairness is the moat that is at work.
Synchronous composability—making numerous Rollups feel like a single network. Composability has always been a major strength of Ethereum; the next huge leap is extending it to all Layer 2. Native and “base-based” Rollups, combined with synchronous composability, perfectly solve this problem. A contract on a Rollup can directly call a contract on the mainnet or another Rollup in a single atomic transaction. No cross-chain bridges are needed, no waiting is required. The collaboration between Linea, the Ethereum Economic Zone, Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation is combining this design with Proof-of-Live. The end result is that dozens of Rollups no longer feel like fragmented, independent networks, but begin to operate as a unified chain. This is the most powerful response to criticisms of ecosystem fragmentation.
Quantum resistance—Ethereum's most significant advantage. No mainstream ecosystem is better prepared for the post-quantum era than Ethereum. The "Lean Ethereum" roadmap, the dedicated Ethereum Foundation post-quantum security team established in early 2026, the pq.ethereum.org hub, and more than a dozen client teams already running weekly post-quantum interoperability developer testnets all converge to form a coordinated, large-scale open-source migration aimed at around 2029. When the risks of quantum computing truly materialize, institutions holding trillions of dollars in assets will only care about one thing: which chain was the first and most thoroughly prepared?
Beyond the developer's moat: composability, standards, and trust
Ethereum's unique architecture generates a powerful compounding effect from its pool of developers. Its deepest network effect isn't liquidity, but rather the depth of its composability. Various applications are like interlocking financial Lego bricks: lending, stablecoins, exchanges, wallets, tokenized assets, oracles, and Layer 2 rollups all interact through shared standards, so developers never need to start from scratch. The EVM is the application layer of the Crypto world, and the Solidity skills developers acquire can be seamlessly applied to Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and hundreds of other networks.
Learning the Ethereum technology stack provides maximum choice, which in turn drives a flywheel effect: attracting more developers, creating more tools, generating more liquidity, attracting more institutions, and then attracting even more developers to build composable protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds liquidity, and composability begets composability.
Moreover, Ethereum is where the real value is realized, not just where the surface activity is highest.
Three forces further solidified this leading position:
Reliable neutrality: Ethereum is secured by over 900,000 validator nodes, compared to only about 800 for Solana. Large institutions pay a very high premium for this level of decentralization and platform neutrality.
Modularity: Rollups like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism have not led Ethereum toward fragmentation; instead, they have expanded it into an increasingly interconnected modular internet economy while fully inheriting the security of the mainnet.
Culture: Ethereum attracts top researchers, cryptographers, and authors of EIP standards—the very people who set the direction for the entire industry. This last advantage is the most difficult to replicate with a hard fork.
There is only one Ethereum in the world.
There is a fundamental difference between merely generating on-chain activity and becoming a long-term coordinating layer for internet-native finance trusted by the world's largest financial institutions. Ethereum holds absolute dominance in the minds of the largest asset owners who prioritize trust, security, and liquidity. I witnessed this firsthand during my time at BlackRock.
In the technology market, over time, ecosystems always consolidate around standards, liquidity, and developer mindshare. This is Ethereum's insurmountable moat.
After speaking with these developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul and Hong Kong, I am more convinced than ever of Ethereum's competitive advantage. I met the talent building the next generation of financial infrastructure; they are the future founders of our industry and the architects of proxy finance. It is these people and these teams that will truly change the world.
The future of Ethereum is unfolding right now.
