Author: Kathy Source: X, @Kathydotxyz

In October 1934, the Central Red Army set out from Jiangxi. No one called that departure the "Long March." It was just a hasty retreat - the fifth counter-encirclement and suppression campaign was lost, the base area could no longer be defended, and more than 80,000 people walked west with guns in hand, not knowing where the end point was.

It was just a hasty retreat - the fifth counter-encirclement and suppression campaign was lost, the base area could no longer be defended, and more than 80,000 people walked west with guns in hand, not knowing where the end point was.

Yesterday I was watching the news of @VitalikButerin on ETH CC, and suddenly I thought of the Long March.

It’s not that Ethereum is “miserable”, but it feels very similar to that situation. It was once the strongest position, but suddenly it was found that there were loopholes on all sides; it was once an unquestionable narrative, but suddenly it was found that even its own people no longer believed it.

Then the question is: Is the Ethereum Foundation out of the woods?

The fifth counter-encirclement and suppression campaign failed

First explain the defeat clearly before you can understand everything that follows.

The past two years have been two years of "multi-faceted collapse" for Ethereum.

The ETH/BTC ratio fell back to the level of 2021, and the ETH price followed a very tortuous path. It barely broke through the previous high in 2025, and then fell all the way.

On-chain data is also ugly. Solana's DEX trading volume has completely surpassed Ethereum. In February 2026, the monthly stablecoin trading volume reached $650 billion, setting a record high. There are 98 million monthly active users, a number you can hardly pretend not to see.

But these are still foreign invasions. The Ethereum Foundation has dug a deeper hole for itself - called "L2 parasitic effect".

In March 2024, Dencun was upgraded and launched, and L2 transaction fees dropped by 99% overnight. This was originally good news: it was cheaper, the capacity was expanded, and the user experience became better. But then one thing became clear: the more prosperous L2 was, the emptier L1 became.

Coinbase’s Base chain will earn $75 million in 2025. Ethereum L1 protocol revenue during the same period: $39.2 million.

The revenue of Ethereum L1 is less than half of an L2 built on it.

The Blob fee paid by L2 to L1 is extremely low, and the destruction mechanism of EIP-1559 is almost ineffective. The result is that in the third quarter of 2025, Ethereum's annualized supply growth rebounded to +0.22% - the deflationary narrative of "Ultra Sound Money" officially declared bankruptcy.

At the same time, the EF treasury is also in crisis. Treasury figures announced in October 2024: $970.2 million, a 39% decrease from the last disclosure. In the past six months, EF has sold a total of 16,000 ETH to pay for itself.

In one sentence: There are powerful enemies outside, parasitism inside, the treasury shrinks, and the narrative collapses.

Is it very similar to the failure of the fifth counter-encirclement and suppression campaign?

Zunyi Conference: Had to change coaches

With this defeat, the leadership must take action.

In January 2025, EF Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi @AyaMiyagotchi announced his resignation. Vitalik personally announced: "I am the one who decides on the new EF leadership team." This sentence is intriguing - it is both taking the helm and admitting that the independent governance of EF in the past was in name only.

The new co-executive directors are Wang Xiaowei @hwwonx and Tomasz Stańczak @tkstanczak. The direction seems clear. But just 11 months later, Stańczak left again. Within 13 months, there were three core executive changes.

That's not the harshest part.

In October 2025, a resignation letter written in May 2024 was made public. The author was Péter Szilágyi @peter_szilagyi - the former head of the Geth client, the creator of the client that once supported more than 60% of the nodes in Ethereum. He has been working at EF for 9 years.

The contents of the letter shocked the entire community.

Szilágyi said that his total income in the past six years was $625,000 - before taxes, which averaged about $100,000 per year. During the same period, the market value of the chain he helped build rose from zero to $450 billion. Without his knowledge, EF secretly funded a "second Geth team" within Nethermind - which was equivalent to starting a new one behind his back. When he found out and objected, he was fired within 24 hours.

He also pointed out: EF has a small circle of "ruling elites" of 5 to 10 people, with Vitalik as the core and supported by 1 to 3 VCs behind it. It is decentralized on the surface but highly centralized in nature. He used one word to describe himself: "useful fool".

There is a shadow of the Long March here. What the Zunyi Conference did was not to eliminate internal contradictions, but to make one person's judgment an unshakable direction guide at the most tragic moment. The EF shake-up at the beginning of 2025 also has this meaning - Vitalik is not "listening to opinions", he is taking back power and reorganizing, using the crisis as an opportunity to re-establish control of the roadmap.

The reason why the Long March can go on is because there are people who are willing to bear the responsibility of final judgment.

Strategic Shift: A Big Turn in the Roadmap

When the coach changes, the road map also needs to change.

The old logic is: L1 ensures safety, and expansion depends entirely on L2. The problem with this route is mentioned above - the more successful L2 is, the more empty L1 will be, and the value capture will be broken.

In May 2025, Vitalik published a document proposing the vision of "Lean Ethereum": Ethereum will be as simple as Bitcoin in 5 years. A more radical proposal: replacing the EVM execution architecture with RISC-V, potentially increasing performance by 100 times.

https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1918562016329162844

The slogan sounds good, but the key lies in the actions.

Fusaka upgrade is the first substantial anchor point. The core is PeerDAS, which increases Blob data capacity by 2 to 4 times, theoretically reaching 100,000 TPS. But more importantly is the accompanying EIP-7918: setting a floor price for Blobs, pegged to L1 Gas, and directly pulling the Blob cost from 1 wei to 0.01 to 0.5 Gwei.

EIP-7918 is the key to this course change. It's saying: L2 can no longer afford L1 security for free. When you use my data layer, you have to pay a reasonable fee. The era of "L2 prosperity and L1 drinking from the northwest wind" will be forcibly ended.

This is equivalent to the Red Army changing its marching route from a frontal assault to a roundabout insertion during the Long March - not giving up the battle, but changing its fighting style.

EthCC 2026: Has Ethereum arrived in "Yan'an"?

ETH CC was held in Cannes last week. This conference released several signals, each of which is worthy of examination in the Long March analogy.

• Disappearance test: Vitalik mentioned - if he disappears tomorrow, can Ethereum continue to operate? This is the ultimate goal of the Long March - to survive the loss of the leader. By asking this question publicly, he is saying: I know that I am a centralization risk, and we must seriously resolve this matter. It's maturity, but it's also pressure.

• EEZ Framework: One day before the opening of EthCC, Gnosis, Zisk and EF announced the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ). The goal is to enable contracts on different rollups to call each other in the same transaction through real-time zero-knowledge proof - solving the "Hundred Islands Problem" in which $40 billion in assets are locked on more than two dozen isolated chains. The reason why Yan'an is a base area is because it has logistics and infrastructure. EEZ does exactly that. But to be clear: EEZ is not yet online.

• The Agora Institutional Forum: People from JP Morgan and Societe Generale-Forge sat on the stage to talk about onchain finance. Traditional financial institutions took the initiative to negotiate. It was not that Ethereum compromised, but that Ethereum grew up. Of course, MiCA's regulatory pressure and Solana's continued pursuit are real variables, and we cannot just look at the bright side.

Core judgment: Are you out of the woods?

Let’s make a comparison first:

Judging from a series of signals released by ETH CC, the strategic shift has been completed, but it has not yet arrived in Yan'an.

"The strategic shift has been completed" means: the direction has really changed. Vitalik personally made the change, EIP-7918 directly targeted the L2 parasitic problem, and RISC-V replaced EVM, opening up the imagination of the 10-year technology roadmap. This is not tinkering, this is rerouting.

"Not yet arrived in Yan'an" means: the changes are real, but the results have not yet been implemented. Can EIP-7918 really improve L1 fee capture? Can ETH/BTC stabilize and rebound? Can developer retention rates stop falling? There is currently no definite answer to these three indicators.

There is still a fundamental question hanging there: Where is the Yan'an of Ethereum?

Different people give different answers. "World computer", "global settlement layer", "programmable currency", "censorship-resistant infrastructure" - these visions do not contradict each other, but they do not form a clear consensus narrative. Without consensus, it is difficult to mobilize the entire ecosystem to follow.

Inspiration from the Long March

The significance of the Long March has never been the value of suffering itself.

Suffering is not an asset, it is a filter. Its function is to force out wrong lines, wrong commands, wrong tactics - and then leave behind those judgments that survive.

The siege that Ethereum has suffered in the past two years - the rapid rise of Solana, the parasitic effect of L2, and the internal governance crisis of EF - the blow is real, and the reaction is also real. EIP-7918 is surgical removal of economic holes. When Vitalik asked about the "disappearance test" in Cannes, he was forcing himself and the entire ecosystem to face the most vulnerable point.

A person who is about to die will not undergo such a specific operation.

But the Long March tells us that completing a strategic shift only brings us to a place where we can start again. Yan'an is the starting point of the base area, not the end. Next, we need to build, we need to operate, and we need to integrate scattered forces into one direction.

Ethereum’s success depends on two things: the execution of its technical roadmap, and the community’s acceptance of the new narrative. The former has a road map to check, while the latter has no guarantees.

So, what is the "Yan'an" of Ethereum?