Ethereum Nears 10-Year Uptime but Critics Question Its Scaling and Legal Risks

As Ethereum (ETH) approaches its tenth anniversary, community members have come forward to highlight the network’s decade-long resilience.

Ethereum started the countdown to its 10th anniversary just over a week ago, unveiling an NFT torch first held by co-founder Joseph Lubin.

Ethereum Hits 10 Years Online With Zero Downtime

BeInCrypto reported that the countdown to Ethereum’s 10th anniversary started with the network launching an NFT Torch, which exchanges hands every 24 hours.

As hype builds, with only two days to the event, community members highlight the network’s resilience spanning 10 years.

Binji Pande, an Ethereum Foundation and Optimism (OP) contributor, articulated the network’s record of accomplishment, citing ten years of neither pauses nor 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,” wrote Binji.

The contributor noted that Ethereum has proven unstoppable, enduring diverse market forces, unlike other networks, which suffer downtime during congestion seasons.

“…Ethereum never stops, not through forks, crashes, bubbles, lawsuits, hacks, wars, and every kind of drama the internet can throw at it,” the contributor added.

According to Binji, this record of accomplishment is ascribed to the Ethereum community, comprising developers, stakers, researchers, and users.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin echoed the sentiment, re-sharing the post on X (Twitter). However, not everyone bought into the idea of Ethereum as an infinite machine.

Critics Challenge Ethereum’s Uptime Narrative and Legal Foundations

Analyst Marty Party challenged the view, pointing out the Ethereum network’s slow speed and its Layer-2 (L2) infrastructures. He also says Ethereum’s uptime record is misleading, calling L2s centralized, escrow-bound proxies.

“Stop sugar couting 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,” the analyst challenged.

He warns that most assets are unregistered securities, especially on platforms like Hyperliquid, and urges caution until new US crypto laws clarify what is legal.

Notably, Hyperliquid has a native bridge to Ethereum and is designed to be 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,” he cautioned.

Notwithstanding, the countdown to Ethereum’s tenth anniversary continues, with reports suggesting Alex Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, is the current holder of the Ethereum Torch NFT.

Previous holders of the Ethereum NFT Torch include Joseph Lubin, the ceremonial holder, and Michael Egorov, the founder of Curve Finance.

BeInCrypto reported that a rotating cast of prominent community figures and builders will hold the torch for 24 hours since July 20. The next holder is due in a few hours after this publication.

As of this writing, Ethereum was trading for $3,848, up by over 2.3% in the last 24 hours amid soaring institutional interest.