Ethereum has risen gradually over the week, with the crypto’s movements stirring hopes that better days may be ahead. Even so, not everything is going smoothly, with one Ethereum developer pointing out something interesting about the ecosystem’s growing complexity.
$3000 beckon for ETH
On the price charts, the largest altcoin in the world appears to be on the verge of breaking through $3,000. Trading at $2,946 at press time, ETH may soon breach the aforementioned resistance level, a level that has held up well despite some unsustainable breaches.
According to analysts, sustaining a breach of the same will be key to ETH hiking to its former ATH again.
Coincidentally this week, whales also became active again as their transactions started to increase across the board. Reaching a peak of $8.8 billion in a single day, it was the largest spike in their activity since February 24. In fact, that was around the time Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
On the contrary, retail investors who hold 58.21% of Ethereum’s 120 million ETH supply are, as always, inactive. Since the stock market crash, their contribution to daily volume has only been 10%.
Despite the 17.1% hike in price this week, the non-whale cohort continues to remain fairly quiet.
A complicated matter
It’s worth pointing out, however, that investor optimism only stems from Ethereum’s use cases and the potential it claims it has with Proof of Stake (POS). This uptrend is also starting to affect developers. One actually thinks that Ethereum’s complexity is near breaking point and touching it would push it beyond the point of no return.
One of Ethereum’s team leads and developer Péter Szilágyi recently touched upon one of the most overlooked aspects of the system – Complexity.
According to him, with every Ethereum Enhancement Protocol (EIP) such as EIP-1559, sharding, and even upcoming merger, the complexity keeps increasing.
This rise in complexity could lead to cascading failure. And with the Merge coming soon, he said that this complexity will only keep increasing. He explicitly stated that if the protocol does not get slimmer, Ethereum is not going to make it past the Merge.
He added,
“There have been engineering attempts to reduce complexity (division of modules in Erigon, distribution of responsibilities in The Merge). Yet there has never been an attempt to reduce the complexity of the protocol. We’re already past the point where anyone has a full system picture. It’s bad.”
Szilágyi also stated that the cause of this issue is the “disconnect” between developers and the research team. The latter, according to Péter, has to only dream up an idea whereas the former have to include the new idea into the myriad of ideas introduced before.
However, it is not something that can be solved in the blink of an eye.
“I can’t say what the solution is, but my 2c is to stop adding features and start culling, even at the expense of breaking things. There are less and less people knowing and willing to piece together a broken network. And each change pushes more away. (sic)”
If this happens to break Ethereum, the crypto-space will likely face unprecedented damage.
