I actually think fairly differently on this. Solana needs to never stop iterating. It shouldn’t depend on any single group or individual to do so, but if it ever stops changing to fit the needs of its devs and users, it will die.
It needs to be so materially useful to humans and used by so many devs that are gainfully employed from the value of the transactions on solana, that the devs have spare LLM token credits to upstream improvements to this common open source protocol.
To not die requires to always be useful. So the primary goal of protocol changes should be to solve a dev or user problem. That doesn’t mean solve every problem, in fact, saying no to most problems is necessary.
You should always count on there being a next version of solana, just not necessarily from anza or labs or fd. The way things are going we are likely to end up in a world where a simd vote pays for the GPUs that write the code.
Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.
Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail.
But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.
This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we can ossify if we want to. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already.
This includes the following:
Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride. An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we ge