The Big Question at Ethereal Summit NY: Is DeFi Enough for Ethereum?

Ethereum's true believers think the world's second-largest blockchain can still be all-encompassing.

"If you think about ethereum as programmable money and decentralized finance applications, that's probably good enough," Selkis argued.

Still, speakers kept coming back to DeFi, which was unquestionably a major recurring theme for the day, given the rise of ethereum lending platform MakerDAO. But it was also clear that the crowd was not ready to give up on ethereum running the decentralized web.

"If Layer 2 does not work, ethereum will not work. I believe that with pretty high conviction," Tushar Jain, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, said from the Ethereal main stage.

"There are other Layer 1 chains out there that outperform ethereum on multiple dimensions."

When asked if ethereum should drop all other applications for DeFi, he gave an immediate head shake.

The MakerDAO smart contract has $346 million in ETH locked up in it, 83 percent of all the ETH locked in the DeFi sector as a whole, according to DeFi Pulse.

If the main use case remains financial, the question for ethereum is whether DeFi is all it needs to be.

It's a narrative question for ethereum's community, says Long Reads Sunday curator Nathaniel Whittemore, one the community should have seen coming.

Whether the question is raised as a defensive counternarrative or a legitimate critique, Whittemore argued that communities like ethereum's need to be ready to grapple with these big challenges when they arise.