Author: Joseph Chalom
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
I just returned from Asia, where I spent time with Ethereum developers and ecosystem leaders. Special thanks to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV in Seoul, our friends at SNZ, and the newly opened Ethereum Community Center in Hong Kong. This center is Asia’s first long-term physical Ethereum community space, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.
What impressed me most was not just the vibrancy there, but the rigor and ambition of the builders. The high-caliber projects, experimental spirit, and long-term thinking emerging from the global Ethereum ecosystem have deeply inspired me.
This brings a string of numbers to life: Electric Capital’s data shows that the total number of Ethereum developers in history has now surpassed one million, with 1,012,824 individuals contributing to the ecosystem. No other ecosystem in crypto comes close.
A milestone worth noting
One million is a whole number, and whole numbers can sometimes feel hollow. But this number is anything but. It represents the largest collection of technical talent ever assembled around an open, permissionless blockchain network. More importantly, this talent pool continues to deepen and expand.
Of these one million developers, approximately 232,000 have remained active over the past twelve months.
Why Ethereum: The Real Questions
For years, discussions in the crypto industry have centered around speed, fees, and throughput. Every new chain claims to be "faster than Ethereum." But the most fundamental question in crypto has never been which chain is the fastest—it’s another:
Where will the top builders choose to build for the long term?
On this issue, Ethereum still maintains a clear advantage. This advantage is not merely technical—it is a comprehensive reflection of institutional, cultural, economic, and ecosystem structures, the result of a decade of accumulated contributions from developers, infrastructure, standards, tools, liquidity, research, applications, and social coordination that no other ecosystem can replicate.
Ethereum has become the default operating system for programmable finance and native internet capital formation.
What are these million builders constructing, and why does it strengthen the moat?
The importance of a million builders lies in what they are doing right now. The current focus is on the most challenging and high-risk problems in the industry: scalability, privacy, quantum resistance of core protocols, and the agent systems running on top of them.
Glamsterdam upgrade: Innovating without compromising core principles. The Glamsterdam upgrade, expected in 2026, demonstrates how Ethereum continues to evolve while upholding its core values. Key changes include built-in proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs), enabling parallel execution and higher throughput, with the potential to increase the gas limit and significantly enhance Layer 1 capacity.
Scaling for future demand while safeguarding trustworthiness, neutrality, security, and MEV fairness is itself an evolving moat.
Synchronous composability: Making many Rollups behave as one chain. Composability has always been Ethereum’s superpower; the next leap is extending it to Layer 2. Native Rollups combined with Based Rollups and synchronous composability solve this problem. A contract on one Rollup can call a contract on mainnet or another Rollup within a single atomic transaction—no bridging, no waiting.
Linea, the Ethereum ecosystem, Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation are collaborating to combine this design with real-time proofs. The result is that dozens of Rollups are no longer operating as isolated networks but are beginning to function like a single unified chain. This is a direct response to criticisms of fragmentation.
Quantum resistance: Ethereum’s most obvious leading advantage. No other major ecosystem is better prepared for the post-quantum era. The Lean Ethereum roadmap, the post-quantum security team established by the Ethereum Foundation in early 2026, pq.ethereum.org, and over a dozen client teams already running weekly post-quantum interoperability testnets together form a coordinated, open-source migration effort targeted for around 2029.
When quantum risk becomes reality, institutions holding trillions of dollars in assets care about only one thing: which chain is prepared first and most thoroughly.
Beyond the Developer Moat: Composability, Standards, and Trust
The concentration of developer talent creates a compounding effect, thanks to the way Ethereum itself is built. Its deepest network effect is not liquidity, but the depth of composability: various applications function like interoperable financial LEGO blocks.
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 industry, and Solidity skills are universally applicable across Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and hundreds of other networks.
Learning the Ethereum tech stack means maximizing choice, which drives a flywheel effect: more developers, more tools, more liquidity, more institutions, which in turn attracts even more developers to build compositional protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds liquidity, and composability breeds composability.
Moreover, Ethereum dominates where value truly accumulates, not just where the hype is greatest:
Three forces have strengthened this leading position.
Trustworthiness and Neutrality: Ethereum is secured by over 900,000 validators, while Solana has approximately 800. Major institutions place high value on this level of decentralization and platform neutrality.
Modular: Rollups such as Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism have not fragmented Ethereum, but rather expanded it into an increasingly interconnected modular internet economy while inheriting the security of the mainnet.
Culture: Ethereum has attracted top researchers, cryptographers, and EIP drafters far beyond any other ecosystem, setting the direction for the entire industry. This is also the advantage that other ecosystems find hardest to replicate.
There is only one Ethereum.
There is a fundamental difference between generating on-chain activity and becoming the long-term coordination layer for internet-native finance. The latter means becoming the layer trusted by the world’s largest financial institutions.
Ethereum has firmly established itself as the preferred choice among major asset holders, who prioritize trust, security, and liquidity above all else. I witnessed this firsthand from the front row during my time at BlackRock.
In the technology market, ecosystems consolidate over time around standards, liquidity, and developer attention. This is Ethereum’s moat.
After engaging with these developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul and Hong Kong, I am more convinced than ever of Ethereum’s competitive advantages. I met the talent building the next generation of financial infrastructure—our industry’s future founders and the architects of agent-based finance. It is these individuals and teams who will change the world.
The future of Ethereum is unfolding.