ETH has entered a non-consensus phase, the turning point is approaching!

Author: @LaLiLuLeL0x (Founder of Glue, Co-founder of ETH Tbilisi)

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

The debate about managers is just a distraction. Ethereum truly wins when it no longer needs any managers, when its core is frozen, beyond the reach of the EF, Ethlabs, or any future successors. This is its "Manhattan Project," and progress is quite smooth.

Now it's mid-2026, but the data doesn't match up. The value settled on Ethereum has reached an all-time high, carrying the vast majority of stablecoins, tokenized funds, and DeFi. However, the trading price of ETH is around $1750, down about 57% from its peak in 2025, and still below the peak set in 2021.

Five years have passed, and technically a full transformation has been completed, yet asset prices are not as high as before. There must be something wrong; those soothing explanations about macroeconomics, the Federal Reserve, and capital rotation to Bitcoin have not touched the root of the problem.

The real explanation is harsher, and that is precisely why I am writing this. Ethereum is a machine that is operational but not yet finished. It is running, it is decentralized, it has never gone down. But it is filled with unfinished, in-progress, merely promised rather than delivered functionalities.

Especially after the merge and the rollup-centric roadmap, it feels less like a completed network and more like a long-term commitment, possessing reliable neutrality and decentralization on paper, but each upgrade quietly adds a pile of new problems that need to be solved to make that commitment fully realized, and each pile of problems ultimately falls on the same small group of people to clean up.

An unfinished machine needs repairmen. Therefore, although Ethereum is formally independent, with no single entity in control, in practice, it still indirectly relies on the goodwill of the Ethereum Foundation to continue building and guiding.

The market has not mispriced Ethereum's usage. The market is pricing this dependency. And the project that ultimately solves this problem has a name: Lean Ethereum, also known as Ethereum's Manhattan Project.

Let me break it down step by step, because I know this will anger many people. But I believe this precisely touches on the reality of the situation and the real challenges Ethereum currently faces at the leadership and protocol levels. Remember, I am an Ethereum maximalist. I am not here to spread FUD; I am here to keep the discussion in the right direction. I have my views. Please give me the chance to clarify.

1. The Current State of the Machine

Let’s take an honest look at Ethereum's current situation.

This injection into L2 has, in the only important place, bet half of it. The rollup-centric roadmap was originally intended to scale without losing decentralization. Years have passed, and every major L2 still operates centralized sequencers, meaning a single operator sorts transactions, can censor, extract value, or simply go down, as seen when Linea paused in 2024 and Base went offline in 2025.

Among dozens of rollups, hardly any have passed the first stage of maturity metrics set by L2Beat, let alone the second stage of complete trustlessness.

This is self-inflicted.

The only defense that stands for centralized sequencers has always been the escape hatch mechanism. Even if the operator censors you or completely shuts down, the rollup should allow you to force your transactions from L1 and withdraw assets from Ethereum without needing anyone's permission.

This guarantee is precisely why centralized sequencers were initially tolerated: the keys to the chain were never in your hands, but the exit was always in your hands.

However, the exit channel is conditional. In April 2026, after approximately $292 million was drained from the Kelp DAO cross-chain bridge, Arbitrum's security council (twelve elected members) exercised emergency powers to intervene and moved 30,766 ETH (about $71 million) from the attacker's address into a wallet controlled by governance.

Freezing the thief's loot sounds like the system is working, and perhaps it is. But look at what this proves. A small committee can actively seize and freeze funds on Arbitrum, meaning your assets stored there are subject to their control; since one power can stop hackers, it can stop anyone, including under subpoena or government pressure.

The escape hatch can only save you if no one holding privileged keys makes other decisions. Ironically, at the moment the on-chain freeze took effect, a U.S. court directly pierced through Arbitrum's so-called "decentralized" governance, ordering the DAO not to move those funds at all. The so-called unstoppable is nothing more than that.

The base layer itself carries an open wound that can never heal. State bloat continually increases the amount of data each node must store. The situation in the memory pool is even worse.

Because pending transactions are stored publicly, using a public memory pool has turned into a death spiral of frontrunning: the moment you broadcast a transaction, it is seen, and before it is confirmed, it is sandwiched and followed by transactions, a perpetual tax where bots extract value from ordinary users simply for seeing the order flow first.

The proposed solution of a cryptographic memory pool has been discussed and drafted for years but still has not gone live. These are not rare edge cases. They are core attributes of anything wanting to call itself a neutral settlement layer, yet they are still labeled "under construction."

Quantum computing is no longer a science fiction story without a specific date. Vitalik's 2026 cryptographic roadmap names four parts of Ethereum that could be cracked by quantum computers, with the threat model including "intercept first, decrypt later," meaning adversaries record encrypted data today and wait until the hardware is available to crack it.

This is a countdown, and the clock is ticking.

In this context, one faction wants Ethereum to respond by going into war mode. To become radical, to cater to institutions, to relax the decentralization standards that slow everything down, to become faster and more centralized, in order to compete with Solana on throughput and boost the coin price.

This sounds ambitious. In reality, it is surrender.

Because if Ethereum trades away the neutrality that makes it unique, it cannot defeat Solana; it will only become a slower Solana.

The best outcome of the war mode route is that Ethereum falls to Solana's market cap level, because that is the price the market pays for a fast chain that has abandoned reliable neutrality. You cannot win a monetary premium by becoming something that has never had a monetary premium.

2. Why ETH Has Not Reached $10,000

So, here lies the answer to the question that every ETH holder has been pondering.

The reason ETH has not reached five figures, or even maintained its old high in the face of a growing underlying network, is not due to a lack of usage. Its usage is overwhelming. The reason is that this machine is not yet finished, and an unfinished machine is unreliable; you cannot expect it to stand firm on its own.

Think about what a global settlement layer truly needs to commit to. It is not speed. It is not functionality. It must commit that the ground beneath your feet does not move, promising that if you settle a billion dollars today, the rules will still be the same tomorrow, and no one can arbitrarily change the rules.

Ethereum cannot yet make this commitment because it is still under construction, and the act of construction itself is an act of change. Scaling is not yet complete. L2 decentralization is not yet complete. The consensus layer is a five-year-old design waiting to be replaced.

Quantum-resistant features are just a roadmap, not a delivered fact. Every gap that remains open is a place where the protocol still needs to change, and every change must be decided by some entity.

That entity is the Ethereum Foundation. This is not a conspiracy; it is simply because they are the ones who can complete this unfinished machine.

The market sees all of this clearly. The market will not pay an eternal premium to a chain that evidently still needs its founders to complete and guide it. A settlement layer that relies on repairmen is not a settlement layer at all. It is merely a fine machine with a maintenance contract. This is what the $1750 is pricing: dependency.

In my article "Rigid Premium," I discussed the bullish side: the market will pay for eternity, and the chain that becomes the most immutable will win the monetary prize. This is the flip side of the same coin. Ethereum has not earned this premium because it has not yet become immutable. It has not solidified; if it has not solidified, it needs someone to manage it, and needing management means it must be discounted.

3. Everyone is Exhausted

An unfinished machine comes at a cost, but this cost is never reflected in the price; only those who are here doing the development feel it. Everyone building on Ethereum is exhausted; the fatigue at every layer is the same: the ground beneath their feet keeps moving, making it impossible to build anything lasting on top.

Starting with L2. They cannot fully decentralize because they are stuck waiting for the next standard, the next blob upgrade, the next interoperability layer, the next account abstraction model, and the next thing that will change the underlying layer. So they retain the keys.

As of 2026, no major rollup has reached the second stage on L2Beat's standards; Arbitrum and Optimism remain in the first stage, meaning the security council holding the upgrade keys is still a core trust point, a multi-signature mechanism that can rewrite cross-chain bridges or shut down proofs.

Everyone says this is the price of being in the early stages. But the early stage never ends because the underlying is unpredictable, and centralization will never leave.

Going up a layer, Dapps are also suffering the same fatigue. They are forced to deploy simultaneously on every L2, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, ZK chains, etc., maintaining dozens of deployment instances, diluting liquidity, and trusting those cross-chain bridges that are themselves attack surfaces.

Due to the uncertainty in the underlying, they keep their contracts upgradeable, retaining admin keys, proxies, and pause switches; it is these escape hatches that cause contracts to lose reliable neutrality.

The original dream was to write immutable code that no one, not even the authors themselves, could change. The reality is that uncertainty forces every serious team to set up an upgrade key because releasing something truly immutable on an unfrozen foundation is a bet most developers cannot afford.

The client teams are also having a hard time.

Browser vendors ultimately compete on performance and functionality, yet they spend all their time repeatedly altering the deepest internal structures of the protocol just to digest the next hard fork, now with two major upgrades each year, with a complete rewrite of the consensus layer queued up. They are not maintaining a solidified standard; they are stuck in migration mode, rewriting the underlying over and over instead of building on top of it.

The foundation sees the symptoms but wants to treat it with a timetable: setting a predictable fork rhythm of twice a year, promoting it externally like the release cycles of iOS or Android, clearly aiming to reduce developers' uncertainty. This can help with planning but does not cure the disease. Predictable turmoil is still turmoil.

And what should truly be unsettling is this: those who originally came for that promise should be the most vigilant.

This endless, "always under construction" state is quietly suffocating the dream of decentralization from top to bottom. You cannot build a reliable neutral, immutable, and hands-off application on a foundation that is itself neither immutable nor hands-off.

The variability of the underlying forces a top-down maintenance of variability: upgrade keys on rollups, admin keys on Dapps, migration modes on clients. This unfinished machine forces everyone building on it to also have a repairman. And the repairman represents the master key, which is the absolute opposite of what we all came here to build.

4. Two Wrong Escape Routes

There are two tempting escape routes, but both are traps.

The first is the war mode mentioned above. Moving towards centralization to compete is equivalent to erasing the only trait worth paying for. A dead end.

The second route is more subtle and more tempting for those concerned: to blame the foundation for the problems, either replacing it with a better institution or going to war with Vitalik.

This is also wrong; it completely misreads the entire situation. The current Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik are a gift. For a decade, they have guided Ethereum, maintaining neutrality when they did not have to. I am not writing this against them. I appreciate their existence.

But some things cannot be solved by gratitude. Relying on excellent managers does not mean we do not need managers. Even a perfect foundation is a single point of trust; it will not exist forever; it is made up of people, and people change.

The EF of 2035 will not be the EF of 2025. A foundation that maintains neutrality today may be captured, pressured, bribed, or simply replaced by worse people tomorrow.

No one wants the reliable neutrality of a global settlement layer to be built on the ongoing goodwill of the EF, Ethlabs, or any future power holder.

The whole point of cryptocurrency is not to have to trust those in power.

Ethereum needs about $30 million a year to maintain its client teams and researchers. Compared to their market value, these researchers' salaries are low, and the ecosystem itself acknowledges that this makes their teams more susceptible to acquisition.

New funders are squeezing into this vacuum. Ethlabs launched in June 2026, founded by five former EF researchers, supported by BitMine, SharpLink, and Joe Lubin, with the public mission of making Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy. They may be entirely well-intentioned and deliberately allocate funds through an independent management entity to protect neutrality. But that is not the point.

The point is structural: when neutral managers exit and capital fills the void, neutrality is no longer anchored in a disinterested institution but begins to rely on participants who inherently have interests.

Sharper conflicts have already emerged, such as a current proposal allowing 51% staked weight to redistribute validator rewards, which critics bluntly call a governance capture machine because those who will receive this money are the very people who designed the system.

Replacing one manager with another does not solve any problems. It merely changes the name of that single point of trust.

5. The Hands-Off Test

There is a clear way to see through the entire issue, and this is the core test of the entire argument.

Ask a question. If the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik collectively let go tomorrow, could Ethereum continue to run, remain unchanged, and maintain reliable neutrality forever?

To be honest, the answer today is no. This machine is not yet finished; once it lets go, it will stop; and the little neutrality it currently has is maintained by social consensus, a promise kept by good people, not enforced by mechanisms.

Vitalik himself defines reliable neutrality as requiring rules to be transparent, equally applicable, publicly participatory, and difficult to change. Ethereum has achieved the first three points but has failed on the fourth.

Its rules are still easily changeable, as long as through a small off-chain process: an EIP proposal, a weekly core developer call, and a rough consensus reached by about 150 core developers spread across approximately 11 organizations and a few client teams. There are no enforced rules.

6. The Only Solution

The fix is not to build a better foundation. It is to complete this machine and then freeze the parts that give it reliable neutrality, putting the base layer into maintenance mode, allowing Ethereum to ultimately pass the hands-off test on its own.

Once the neutral core is frozen, the dependency will dissolve. At that point, the Ethereum Foundation can do the healthiest thing a manager can do: become an optional role.

It can collaborate with countless new entities, shrink to a research lab, hand over work to a dozen competing teams, or even fade away, and none of this will threaten the blockchain network because the part that defines Ethereum's neutrality can no longer be changed by anyone, regardless of whether they are captured or whether they mean well. You cannot manipulate something that is already immovable. You cannot capture something that is already finished.

This is why this order leaves no room for negotiation, because the goal here is not anti-capitalism; on the contrary.

Private capital is flooding into Ethereum research, with entities like Ethlabs delivering tangible value instead of doing useless work sustained by grants; this is one of the healthiest things that can happen in this ecosystem, and I hope there will be more of it.

But you cannot inject capitalism into an environment without a rule order, where nothing can stop you from harming others, stealing, or tearing up contracts. A free market without underlying rules will not bring prosperity; it will only unleash the human evil tied to money.

Capitalism built on a rule order is a gift; breaking away from it is predation.

The same goes for protocols. First, freeze those parts that make Ethereum secure and reliable in neutrality, engrave the fundamental rules in stone, and then open the doors to private capital, allowing hundreds of well-funded teams to compete to build everything on top of it.

If you reverse the order and invite funding in before freezing the neutral core, you will only get a Solana competitor with a market cap of only one-sixth of today's ETH market cap.

As an ETH maximalist, I do not enjoy writing the next sentence, but it is the core truth of everything. The endgame for Ethereum is its own Bitcoinization. To become as immutable as Bitcoin, winning the eternality that the market is truly willing to pay for, and achieving something that Bitcoin can never do: crossing the finish line with complete programmability.

Bitcoin's freeze came from accident and negligence, ultimately turning into a stone that does nothing.

Ethereum has the opportunity to proactively and selectively freeze (only certain parts), ultimately becoming a trusted neutral settlement layer for the entire tokenized economy. The same eternity. Much larger rewards. This is the entire reason for the bullish outlook, and it requires achieving rigidity before entering war mode.

7. The Manhattan Project

Lean Ethereum is the way to complete and freeze this machine, which is also why I keep invoking that grand historical metaphor. When a field twists its most challenging problems into a single strand and launches a concentrated, deadline-driven, existential total assault, that is called the Manhattan Project. The current situation is just like that.

It bundles the four most difficult problems in the protocol into a decisive plan, aiming for a hard fork that binds them together, rather than a decade of toothpaste squeezing.

Rigidity. The consensus layer is being reconstructed from scratch into lean consensus, a work once known as Beam Chain, featuring 3 periods of finality, about 12 seconds of finality, and a 4-second block time. Justin Drake refers to this strategy as rigidity accelerationism: packaging every difficult change into a leap, allowing that layer to enter maintenance mode as quickly as possible. Build it once, then freeze it.

Scaling. The goal is to reach a level of 1 trillion gas per second on L1, with the base layer achieving about 10,000 transactions per second, and L2 reaching millions, achieved through ZK verification and data availability based on Blob and PeerDAS, rather than expanding blocks on centralized hardware. The pace of advancement is 3 times, then 10 times, then 100 times.

Quantum resistance. The BLS signatures of validators will be replaced by leanXMSS, a hash-based and quantum-safe solution, equipped with a STARK aggregation engine that can compress results by about 250 times. User accounts will gain signature agility through account abstraction, allowing wallets to choose to enable post-quantum protection without waiting for the entire chain's progress. The target readiness time is around 2029.

ZK. Making the entire chain provable, allowing anyone to verify consensus with cheap hardware through a concise proof, while the execution layer will be restructured around a ZK-friendly virtual machine. Hash-based signatures that are also friendly to SNARKs are the key hub that combines quantum resistance and provability.

And it is this plan that bridges the two specific wounds mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Statelessness. State bloat refers to the ever-expanding complete state copies that each node must carry, which gradually pushes out home validators; this is the first wound. The stateless mechanism cuts through it: validators no longer store the entire state but verify each block through compact proofs, shifting the burden of running nodes from storage to cheap computation, thus maintaining the broadness and decentralization of the validator set.

Native Rollup. The chaos of L2 is another wound, and the EXECUTE precompile in EIP-8079 is the fix. Native Rollups no longer run their own proofs, governance, and security councils but return their blocks to Ethereum for direct verification, inheriting L1's security, upgrades, and quantum protection for free.

No multi-signatures that could be hacked, no upgrade keys that need to be held. The centralization dilemma that rollups were forced into disappears: you are no longer re-implementing Ethereum; you are becoming part of Ethereum, and on the day Ethereum becomes rigid, you will rigidify along with it.

Synchronous composability. Better yet, it regains what fragmentation stole. With a shared execution layer and Ethereum-level ordering, rollups can achieve atomic-level composition: a transaction can hit several rollups and L1 in the same block, either all succeed or all fail, just like smart contracts on a single chain.

No need for cross-chain bridges, no need for routing, no need to doubt which chain you are on. Liquidity converges into a whole; no matter how many rollups run on top, Ethereum feels like the same computer. It needs real-time proofs, which are still racing to go live, but that is precisely where the finish line lies.

This work is already underway. The Fusaka upgrade has been released, featuring the first substantial step of the PeerDAS and scaling plan, with post-quantum efforts having a public platform at pq.ethereum.org, and its alternative signature scheme has been designated, with new client teams formed around lean consensus.

The difficult and decisive parts, the consensus layer rewrite, quantum migration, and final freezing, are still ahead; the next forks, Glamsterdam and Hegotá, are scheduled for 2026, aiming for full readiness by the end of this century. This part is still on a countdown.

The original Manhattan Project not only ended the bloodiest war in history but also reshaped the global order around the nation that first achieved it.

Lean Ethereum aims to achieve a comparable level of finality. Not to win the blockchain race, but to end it. When Ethereum freezes its neutral core, passes the hands-off test, and can no longer be artificially guided, the competition for the world's base layer will be completely over.

Bitcoin has already shown us what price the market is willing to pay for a stone that does nothing, over a trillion dollars just for eternity.

And the world has never priced a stone that is also the global economic settlement layer because it has never existed.

Lean Ethereum is the plan born to build this thing. Completing it, Ethereum will not only flip Bitcoin; it will reach a number that no model has been able to derive so far and will completely surpass Bitcoin because it ultimately possesses the only thing Bitcoin has: eternity, plus the only thing Bitcoin has given up: programmability.

This is why it cannot be a decade-long mild reformism. It is a race between two clocks.

The first is the rigidity clock: how fast Lean Ethereum can complete the machine and freeze the neutral core. The second is the capture clock: how fast the factors of funding vacuum, corporate management taking over the EF's empty chair, the war mode faction pushing for centralization, and the deadline of the quantum crisis harden into actual problems while the protocol is not yet solidified and still can be guided. For every year Ethereum remains unfinished, it gives another year of being captured, pressured, or simply continues to rely on whoever happens to hold the steering wheel.

8. Two Outcomes

So, setting aside the doomsday rhetoric and blind cheering, here is Ethereum's true situation.

Completing the Manhattan Project, freezing the base layer, and passing the hands-off test, Ethereum will become the world's first rigid, quantum-resistant, reliably neutral global economic settlement layer, one that does not need a foundation, does not need founders, and can continue to maintain neutrality without permission.

At that moment, the dependency discount that crushes the price will reverse into an eternity premium, a revaluation of value that has neither benchmark nor ceiling.

If it stagnates or allows the war mode faction to exchange neutrality for speed, Ethereum will, at best, become a slower Solana, and at worst, become an untrustworthy, manipulable, eternally variable chain, something that drifts with the tide and obeys the funders, and the premium it once pursued will evaporate forever.

I am bullish because I believe it can do it. But anyone who tells you the outcome is guaranteed has skipped the hardest chapter. Completing this machine, freezing it, and saying goodbye to the need for any steersman. That is the entirety of this game now.