Author: Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink
Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews
Sharplink CEO: Ethereum's true moat is not performance metrics, but "people"
Editor’s Note: Amidst the competition among numerous new blockchains claiming “faster speeds,” Ethereum remains firmly at the top. After conducting research in Asia, Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom pointed out that Ethereum’s core competitive advantage lies in its 1 million developers. He emphasized that competition in the crypto world is not just about network speed, but about “where the brightest minds are building.” With its deep cultural foundation, seamless “financial LEGO” ecosystem, and forward-looking positioning on technical challenges such as quantum resistance, Ethereum has moved beyond mere parameter comparisons to build a truly impenetrable moat. Below is the translated original text:
I just returned from Asia, where I had in-depth conversations with Ethereum developers and leaders across the ecosystem. Special thanks to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV in Seoul, as well as our friends at SNZ in Hong Kong and the newly launched Ethereum Community Center. This center is Asia’s first permanent physical Ethereum community space, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.
What impressed me most was not only people's enthusiasm, but also the rigor and ambition demonstrated by builders. I am truly inspired and deeply admire the projects, experiments, and long-term thinking emerging from the Ethereum ecosystem.
This brings an otherwise abstract number to life: according to Electric Capital, Ethereum’s lifetime developer count has now surpassed one million, standing at exactly 1,012,824 unique developers who have contributed to the ecosystem. No other ecosystem in crypto comes close to this scale.
A milestone worth pausing to reflect on
One million is a whole number, and whole numbers can sometimes feel hollow. But this number is anything but hollow. Behind it lies 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 1 million developers, approximately 232,000 were active over the past 12 months.
Why Ethereum: The Real Core Issue
For years, discussions in the Crypto space have always revolved around speed, fees, and throughput. Every new chain claims to be “faster than Ethereum.” However, the most important question in Crypto has never been which chain is the fastest, but a completely different one:
Where will the best builders choose to conduct long-term development?
On this front, Ethereum remains unique. This advantage is not merely technical—it is also institutional, cultural, economic, and compositional, the result of a decade of accumulated 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 the formation of internet-native capital.
What are these millions of troops building today? And how does it deepen the moat?
One million developers are crucial primarily because of the challenges they are currently tackling. Today, the focus is on the most difficult and high-risk problems in the industry: scalability of core protocols, privacy protection, quantum resistance, and the agent systems that will run on them in the future.
The Glamsterdam upgrade—innovation without compromising core principles. Scheduled for launch in 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade demonstrates how Ethereum can achieve technological leaps while safeguarding its core values. Its key changes—including the integration of proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs)—will unlock parallel execution capabilities, significantly increase throughput, and potentially raise the gas limit, substantially enhancing Layer1 capacity. While scaling for future demand, it firmly defends reliable neutrality, security, and MEV fairness—this is the moat at work.
Synchronous composability—making dozens of Rollups feel like a single network. Composability has long been Ethereum’s superpower; the next giant leap is extending it to all Layer 2s. Native and “based” Rollups, combined with synchronous composability, perfectly solve this problem. A contract on one Rollup can directly call a contract on mainnet or another Rollup within a single atomic transaction—no cross-chain bridges, no waiting. Linea, the Ethereum Economic Zone, Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation are collaborating to combine this design with real-time proofs. The end result: dozens of Rollups no longer feel like fragmented, isolated networks, but begin to operate as if they were one unified chain. This is the strongest response yet to criticisms of ecosystem fragmentation.
Quantum resistance—Ethereum’s most significant leading advantage. No major ecosystem is better prepared for the post-quantum era than Ethereum. The “Lean Ethereum” roadmap, the dedicated Post-Quantum Security team established by the Ethereum Foundation in early 2026, the pq.ethereum.org hub, and over a dozen client teams already running weekly post-quantum interoperability testnets are converging into a coordinated, open-source migration effort targeted for around 2029. When quantum computing risks finally materialize, the institutions holding trillions of dollars in assets will care about only one thing: which chain was ready first—and most thoroughly.
Beyond the Developer Moat: Composability, Standards, and Trust
Due to Ethereum’s unique architecture, this developer talent pool has generated a powerful compounding effect. Its deepest network effect is not liquidity, but the depth of its composability. Various applications function like financial LEGO bricks that can be seamlessly snapped together: lending, stablecoins, exchanges, wallets, tokenized assets, oracles, and Layer 2 Rollups—all interacting 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 possess can be seamlessly applied to Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and hundreds of other networks.
Learning the Ethereum tech stack maximizes your options, which in turn fuels a flywheel effect: attracting more developers, creating more tools, generating more liquidity, drawing in more institutions, and then attracting even more developers to build composable protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds liquidity, and composability spawns composability.
Moreover, Ethereum dominates where real value is accumulated, not just where activity appears to be highest.
Three forces have further solidified this leadership:
Reliable neutrality: Ethereum is secured by over 900,000 validation nodes, compared to approximately 800 for Solana, and large institutions place a high premium on this level of decentralization and platform neutrality.
Modular: Rollups like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism have not fragmented Ethereum; instead, they have expanded it into a tightly connected modular internet economy while fully inheriting the security of the mainnet.
Culture: Ethereum particularly attracts the industry’s top researchers, cryptographers, and authors of EIP standards—those who set the direction for the entire industry. This final advantage is the hardest to replicate via a hard fork.
There is only one Ethereum in the world.
There is a fundamental difference between merely generating on-chain activity and becoming the long-term coordinating layer for internet-native finance trusted by the world’s largest financial institutions. In the minds of the largest asset owners, who prioritize trust, security, and liquidity, Ethereum holds absolute dominance. 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 unassailable 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 delegated finance. It is these individuals and teams who will truly transform the world.
The future of Ethereum is happening now.
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