Ethereum's 10-Year Milestone: Uptime vs. Centralization Concerns
Ethereum (ETH) is approaching its tenth anniversary, celebrating a decade of network resilience. The countdown began with the unveiling of an NFT torch, first held by co-founder Joseph Lubin, symbolizing the network's enduring spirit.
Ethereum Celebrates a Decade of Uptime
The tenth-anniversary countdown started with the launch of an NFT Torch that is symbolically passed every 24 hours.
Binji Pande, an Ethereum Foundation and Optimism (OP) contributor, highlighted Ethereum’s decade-long run without pauses or maintenance windows.
“Ethereum has been online ten years straight with zero pauses and zero maintenance windows. In that time: – Facebook went down for 14 hours – AWS Kinesis froze for 17 – Cloudflare dropped 19 datacenters – Alt L1s…well, you know. Every centralized giant blinks, they rely on on-call humans and scheduled downtime,”
Pande noted Ethereum’s ability to withstand market volatility, unlike other networks that experience downtime during peak congestion.
“…Ethereum never stops, not through forks, crashes, bubbles, lawsuits, hacks, wars, and every kind of drama the internet can throw at it,”
According to Pande, this resilience is thanks to the Ethereum community, including developers, stakers, researchers, and users.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also acknowledged this milestone. However, some critics question Ethereum's continuous uptime narrative.
Critics Question Ethereum’s Uptime and Centralization
Analyst Marty Party challenged the narrative, pointing to Ethereum’s slow speed and reliance on Layer-2 (L2) infrastructures. He argues that L2s are centralized and escrow-bound proxies, making Ethereum's uptime claims misleading.
“Stop sugar coating the facts. It is slow and unusable at 13 tps. L2s are not blockchains; they are centralized sequencers that just gather pseudo “transactions”, zip them up, and write them in zips to Ethereum with a 7-day escrow window,”
He also cautioned about unregistered securities on platforms like Hyperliquid, urging caution until new US crypto laws provide clarity. Hyperliquid features a native bridge to Ethereum and is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
“I’d wait for Market Structure Act and Clarity Act to conclude the guidelines before contributing large amounts to Ethereum L2s,”
Despite the debate, the Ethereum tenth-anniversary countdown continues. Alex Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, currently holds the Ethereum Torch NFT.
Previous torch holders include Joseph Lubin and Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov. The torch is passed among prominent community figures every 24 hours since July 20.
As of this writing, Ethereum is trading at $3,848, up by over 2.3% in the last 24 hours amid increasing institutional interest.
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