Ethereum’s Social Layer is Broken

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I believe that Ethereum’s social layer is broken. I believe that there are serious issues with the way this ecosystem currently operates — not at the protocol layer, but at the people layer. My goal with this post is to highlight some of the issues I personally have witnessed, but I will confess that my view of the ecosystem is obviously imperfect. I am open to all challenges to the claims I make below, and I also encourage others to share their own feedback on Ethereum’s social layer too.

For too long our community has been told that these forums are meant to be a place of technical discussion, and that talking about the people layer is not a good use of this space. This makes sense, as conversations about people can quickly devolve into ad-hominem attacks on individuals themselves, vs structured and facts-based critiques of their actions. Nonetheless I think avoiding these discussions has eventually become a hinderance to the healthy functioning of this ecosystem and has led to significant capture and consolidation of power, and so today I’ll attempt to share some of what I’ve witnessed. To any individuals/groups I mention here specifically — I apologize in advance for singling you out — these issues are extremely widespread (far beyond the examples I mention below), but nonetheless my claims would fall flat without at least some substantiation. My hope is that anyone reading this will recognize that all of the people I mention below, despite my qualms with some of their actions, are good people who have helped build this ecosystem with mostly good intentions. Without them Ethereum would not be where it is today.

Finally I will say that I am certain that in writing this, the Mafia will turn to attacking me personally rather than the contents of this post. I hope that smart and well intentioned people can recognize these attacks as their own auto-poetic evidence the very issues I highlight below.

A Mafia: a highly organized, often opaque, network of individuals or groups who operate collectively to achieve mutual benefits, typically through informal or non-official means.

There are a number of characteristics which define a mafia, as compared with other groups:

  • Shared Interests and Goals: Members align around common goals or mutual benefits, such as economic gain, power consolidation, or influence over a particular domain or system.
  • Insularity and Exclusivity: These groups are usually closed to outsiders, requiring strong loyalty or specific qualifications for membership, often reinforced through rituals, oaths, or other forms of initiation or intimidation.
  • Dependency on Obfuscation: Activities and goals are often hidden from public view, using secrecy and coded communication to protect the group’s interests and members.
  • Informal Enforcement Mechanisms: Mafias rely on their own systems of rules, norms, and enforcement, including incentives like profit-sharing and deterrents such as punishment or ostracism, rather than relying on formal legal systems.
  • Shadow Power Dynamics: While they often operate in parallel to formal institutions, mafias exercise significant influence over these institutions—whether through corruption, coercion, or indirect control.
  • Adaptability: A mafia-style organization is highly adaptive, capable of evolving to meet the challenges posed by external pressures like law enforcement, competition, or social change.
  • Focus on Power Accumulation: Beyond economic gain, mafias often aim to accumulate soft or hard power, ensuring influence over individuals, organizations, or governments.

I have never really been a part of any of Ethereum’s most important Mafias. For better or worse I was never invited; although I have many close friends who have been a part of them, at various levels. Nonetheless, I’ve been able to observe from the outside the way that these Mafias operate, especially when they act counter to the core values of Ethereum which I believe are extremely important.

The specific values which are antithetical to a Mafia’s operations are:

  • Decentralization: Ethereum disperses power across a broad network of participants, ensuring no single entity can dominate or control the system.
  • Transparency: Ethereum is built on the principle of transparency, with an open-source codebase and a public ledger that ensures all transactions and smart contracts are visible and auditable by anyone.
  • Trustlessness: Ethereum eliminates the need for trust in individuals by replacing them with cryptographic proofs and automated, immutable smart contracts.
  • Inclusion and Accessibility: Ethereum promotes open participation, inclusivity, and permissionless access, allowing anyone with an internet connection to interact with the network.
  • Censorship Resistance: Ethereum is designed to be censorship-resistant, ensuring no entity can suppress or interfere with the actions of participants on the network.
  • Collaboration and Open Innovation: Ethereum fosters open collaboration and innovation, encouraging a diverse community of developers, users, and entrepreneurs to build and grow the ecosystem collectively.

Since Ethereum’s inception, an incredible amount of work has gone into ensuring that the core technology/ protocol layer upholds these values, and I would say this work has generally been successful. However, this has occurred at the expense of upholding the same values at the social layer.

I believe that for a while, this was a healthy and necessary design choice. Ensuring the core protocol itself upheld these values is paramount, and I believe that the social layer is secondary to it in all respects. Even if we all go away, the core protocol can now continue operating in a manner that will perpetuate these values, and that is an outcome that everyone involved should feel extremely proud of.

However, now that the risk of protocol layer capture has gone down significantly, I believe that the biggest risk to Ethereum’s success heading into 2025 is the capture of various elements of our social layer. The way our social layer operates is currently extremely capturable (and is already showing signs of it), and is totally antithetical to the values outlined above. My goal in writing this post is to shine a light on some of the patterns I’ve witnessed over the years, in the hopes that sunlight and transparency can help harden this otherwise extremely weakened layer.

To begin I want to start by trying to define what I believe Ethereum’s social layer actually is, for the sake of fruitful discussion about one consistent thing (vs everyone having their own unique, irreconcilable definitions of it).

The social layer is made up of PEOPLE, who work for a number of different organizations within the Ethereum ecosystem. These organizations include:

  • The Ethereum Foundation — the org charged with developing the core protocol and shepherding its growth.
  • The Core Dev Teams — the plethora of organizations charged with building critical technology which enables Ethereum to exist and operate. This includes:
    • Client teams — the groups which develop the actual software that nodes use to participate in the network.
    • Layer 2 / scaling teams — the groups which develop extra-protocol solutions to help the base layer’s limitations on throughput and .
    • Protocol R&D teams — the groups which perform research and help produce EIPs, to help evolve the protocol from its current form.
    • Infrastructure and tooling teams — the groups which build the critical infrastructure and codebases which are required by developers to access data which lives on the core protocol, or develop smart contracts/dapps which live on the network.
    • Security teams — the groups which audit the core protocol and smart contracts, as well as those who actively monitor the chain for attacks.
  • Product teams — the groups building the end-user-facing platforms and products which real humans use to interact with Ethereum. This includes wallets, dapps, data platforms, etc. This also includes both the core orgs that develop these products, as well as the externalized DAOs which contribute to their continued existence.
  • Social Coordination Teams — the groups charged with building and organizing the spaces where Ethereum’s social coordination occurs. This includes:
    • Event Teams — the groups which host hackathons and conferences which are frequented by core members of the Ethereum ecosystem.
    • Funding platform teams — the groups which build and administer the spaces where funding gets allocated to a plethora of teams building on Ethereum.
    • Media/education teams — the groups which drive internal/external attention to various elements of Ethereum’s ecosystem, by regularly sharing content as broadly as possible on public social platforms.
    • Social network teams — the groups which build and administer the digital spaces where conversation about Ethereum occurs.
  • Investing Teams — the groups which invest capital into any/all of the above entities, in the hopes of maximizing their profits for their limited partners, as their fiduciary duty requires.

For a detailed list of specific groups which fit in the above categories, please copy my list into your favorite LLM; I’ve avoided sharing them explicitly here for the sake of brevity.

The most difficult thing about tracking a Mafia’s operations is that it often relies on an extremely interconnected web of personal/ private relationships, where influence is softly wielded (sometimes without people even needing to ask for it) by sub-groups of individuals who choose to align their goals with one another.

One of the most complicated elements of this in the Ethereum ecosystem is that there are now large entities (like ConsenSys, Paradigm, a16z, and Coinbase) which administer billions of dollars of capital, either internally employing many implementations of the above teams, or investing in them externally. These orgs (and others like them) wield enormous power by encouraging alignment among the teams they invest in, creating networks of power and influence which span across the entire ecosystem. These subgroups aren’t mutually exclusive with each other, which is why their individual power dynamics within the ecosystem are constantly shifting. The fact that there isn’t just one single such group but now at least 4 means that, just as in geopolitics, we live in a multipolar world, with these groups regularly competing amongst themselves to continuously rebalance against each other (either by co-investing or by funding competitors to drive margins and outsized power down). This has been a positive outcome for the ecosystem. But make no mistake — these groups still wield enormous power behind the scenes, and the individuals they invest in are well aware of who is on our side vs their side. “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”. These teams are well aware, and they keep their mouths shut in order to avoid severe punishment from the various ingroups they’re members of. **

Importantly however, I want to point out that these groups are not the only mafias which exist in Ethereum. In fact they are probably not even the most powerful mafia groups in Ethereum, although they are the easiest to spot from the outside, which is why I listed them here.

You, the person reading this post, are likely part of at least one mafia-like subgroup, if not several. You have people who you call your personal friends, people who you’re in group chats with, who you stand by regardless of whether their actions are aligned with Ethereum’s core values or not. You drive any attention, capital, and social support to them, and you likely justify it by saying to yourself that you are simply investing in things which align with your personal values — you have skin in the game. And yet, in doing so, you are yourself participating in/helping to perpetuate a system which is completely antithetical to Ethereum’s values — you make these decisions behind closed doors, helping aggregate power and valuable resources to the people you know (at the expense of the ones you don’t).

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, I’ve heard stories about one specific “Ethereum Illuminati” — a self selecting group of individuals who are employed by a variety of different org types I listed above (including members of the Ethereum Foundation itself), which explicitly functions via the mafia mechanics I listed above, as if their very existence depended on it*.* Again I will state that groups like this are likely formed and operated with good intention, by well meaning individuals who want to see Ethereum succeed. However, like slowly boiled frogs, I believe they have become blinded to the enormous power which groups like theirs wield, and the attack surface that such operations are inevitably open the social protocol up to. Ethereum is weaker because of the existence of these fallback mechanisms, not stronger.

Above all of the values which I think our social layer has failed to uphold, the worst one of all is “can’t be evil”, a phrase which was commonly shared in the early days of Ethereum, contrasting Google’s “don’t be evil”. This core tenet emphasized the belief that human-administered systems are invariably open to capture, because at best humans aren’t perfect, and at worst valuable protocols will inevitably attract a long list of self-interested individuals who will do everything they can to increase the power/attention/capital which flows to them, at the expense of the thing they’re meant to be administering. This was the entire f**king reason that Ethereum got created in the first place!

Nonetheless, over the last 9 years, it seems as individuals we have prioritized other goals instead of upholding this core tenet — we have built systems which we ourselves can control, because we know what Ethereum truly needs better than them. We’ve seen power aggregate to certain individuals (often those most hungry for it), without any proper checks/balances on this behavior. Again, I believe that for a while this was extremely useful (especially in defending against bad-faith attacks from outsiders as the core protocol was still being hardened). But as our protocol has matured, this softening of values has led to our social layer exhibiting a number of tendencies which are antithetical to Ethereum’s core values, and which are hindering the success of Ethereum in the market today.

This post was originally inspired by a series of tweets I made, outlining some of the organizing patterns which I believe are continuing to weaken Ethereum rather than strengthening it.

My claims were that currently:

  • In Ethereum culture, the people at the center proclaim what’s true, and the rest of the group is expected to accept it at face value with 0 debate. Even useful criticism will be deemed “problematic” and ignored, in order to defend narratives vs actually searching for truth.
  • Ethereum’s culture also heavily favors external signalling, focusing on how people present themselves/what they say vs the outcomes of their actions.
  • Ethereum’s culture is based on insular communities and constant purity tests, where anyone who doesn’t pass their tests is deemed part of the out-group and gets shunned.
  • Ethereum’s culture claims to empower marginalized voices, but in reality is extremely good at consolidating power among the few gatekeepers who have clawed their way to the top.

While some of these have already been covered both above (and will be covered below via some specific examples), I want to also share a number of broad historical reference points for when these dynamics originally developed and strengthened themselves within the ecosystem over the years.

The DAO Fork (2016)

The famous DAO Hack led to a hard fork split into ETH and ETC. The decision to fork the protocol was framed as “the only viable option” by influential Ethereum leaders, and critics of the hard fork were dismissed as purists for being unwilling to accept the necessary tradeoffs. After the fork, people in favor of ETC were shunned and marginalized, painted as “agitators” despite producing valid critiques of Ethereum’s governance model. The fork was publicly portrayed as a win — evidence of how adaptable and committed to the community Ethereum was, despite the decision serving to consolidate power among a few key individuals.

The Parity Wallet Hack (2017-2019)

In 2017, someone triggered a bug in the multisig smart contract wallets and froze $280M worth of ETH. A proposal (EIP-999) was floated to fork and recover those frozen funds, which led to heated debate within the ecosystem. This time however, those same Ethereum leaders claimed that such a fork would create a slippery slope, and shut down any constructive discussions about reclaiming those funds. Anyone who supported the proposal was criticized for prioritizing their personal interests over those of Ethereum itself. Importantly however, this disagreement coincided with an increasing personal rift between Gavin Wood/ the Parity mafia, and the individuals who wielded the power to help ensure this proposal failed.

The First Ethereum Bear Market (2018-2019)

During our first bear market, the ecosystem struggled with stagnation in our adoption and scalability. The chain had become too crowded/expensive for many non-wealthy people to use, and they eventually moved onto cheaper alternatives like TRON. During this time we also witnessed significant delays in the development of ETH2.0, and a general drying up of new functional applications being built. During this time, anyone who pointed out Ethereum’s shortcomings were dismissed for spreading FUD, and these conversations were framed as attacks on Ethereum rather than healthy opportunities for reflections. This period also led to the formation of stronger Ethereum Maximalists, who felt emboldened to exclusively spread positive news (ostracizing anyone who did the opposite). The result was that our ecosystem became significantly more insular, and much more of an echo-chamber than it was before this period.

The ProgPoW Controversy (2018-2021)

The ProgPoW upgrade was aimed at reducing the efficiency gap between ASICS and GPUs, in order to ensure a more fair distribution of mining power. The proposal was initially supported by people who were employed by the EF/core dev teams, who framed it as a technical improvement. People who criticized the proposal were dismissed as being “anti decentralization” or “anti Ethereum”, creating an ingroup/outgroup dynamic that created tension by framing the conversation about loyalty to Ethereum’s values vs the technical merits of the proposal itself. In the end the proposal was abandoned, but not before creating significant rifts within the ecosystem.

EIP-1559 and Inflation Reduction (2021)

This proposal introduced a fee-burning mechanism to Ethereum, which benefited existing ETH holders by reducing supply and simultaneously cutting miner income. While many participants [ETH maxi’s] celebrated it broadly and created memes to help drive the narrative home (remember the bats?), it was naturally unpopular among miners, who were framed to be villains despite having upheld the network for the previous 5+ years. Even those who weren’t active miners but criticized the proposal were shunned and ostracized for not toeing the line.

The Rollup Debate and L2 Centralization (2021-2023)

Ethereum has now largely shifted heavily towards an L2 centric roadmap, an approach which is now heavily favored by Vitalik and other prominent leaders in our ecosystem. While rollups do solve a number of the scalability issues that the core protocol is facing, they lead to significant security issues due to the centralization risks they open up (an over-reliance on sequencers, multisigs, and opaque governance processes). Many of these solutions are also developed by for-profit entities, who once again have a fiduciary duty to their investors to generate returns on capital invested, and are not exactly designed to produce public goods. Despite these projects proclaiming their alignment with Ethereum’s core values, there is currently no way for the protocol/ecosystem to hold these projects accountable (beyond social shaming and pitting them against each other). Once again, critics of this roadmap choice have struggled to be heard against well-funded projects with larger marketing influence and connections, consolidating power in a few centralized entities.

Even if one believes that at all of these key decision forks our ecosystem took the right course (I generally do), it’s still fairly self-evident how the dynamics I referenced above came to form and strengthen their hold over our community. Over time we got better at narrative control and discouraging dissent, under the guise of maintaining cohesion. We got better at external signaling, allowing centralized power structures to persist despite communicating the opposite. We got better at administering our purity tests, often driving out critical voices by tiring them out / blocking them from spaces where conversations happen / encouraging new dissenters to shut up and follow existing narratives. With each successive step, this culture strengthened — anyone who spoke up, who dissented, who dared to challenge the few core individuals who wielded power, were increasingly ostracized and de-platformed.

With every step the core protocol grew stronger, while the social layer grew weaker.

As an ecosystem, those with power got better at wielding the core levers which are most impactful in an individual’s success, which are most likely to influence them in the direction of maintaining the status quo vs questioning authority.

Those levers are:

  • Attention — which individuals/teams/products/protocols get featured in the leading media channels and outlets, including podcasts, conference speaking slots, and Vitalik’s blog posts.
  • Funding — which individuals/teams/products/protocols are able to raise from angels and funds in the ecosystem, vs seeking funding from competing ecosystems.
  • Social Inclusion — which individuals/teams/products/protocols are invited to host or participate in the various back rooms and group chats where important decisions get made.

Those who do a good job of signalling adherence to the various existing ingroups’ goals are continuously rewarded with increased attention/funding/power. Those who step out of line are punished, and eventually incentivized to simply go build elsewhere.

I believe that this is one of the core reasons why Ethereum has struggled to continue attracting new developers over the last few years, especially as well-funded alt-L1 chains have emerged to compete with Ethereum. If you’re a smart developer trying to build a new blockchain based project, these kinds of dynamics are anathema to you. Why would you want to join an ecosystem that values hypocrisy, where your valid and honest and well-intended feedback only serves to weaken your ability to succeed? Smart founders are truth seekers — they value intellectual honesty above all else, and they generally despise having to play various political games in order to succeed. They want to win on merit, they want the best ideas to float to the top; not just the ones which are properly aligned with the existing power structures which have developed over the last 9 years.

I believe this is why the current calls for “more developers” and “more dapps” by Ethereum’s leaders feels at best extremely self-unaware, and at worst feels like an attempt to gaslight the people who have slowly left our community for others which are more open to honest discourse. Our protocol has succeeded by driving out truth seeking individuals, and then throws up its hands and asks why they left. Have we considered that it’s time to take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror? Are we even still capable of this kind of self-reflection, or has our success simply gone to our heads?

While the historical examples I listed above have likely been useful in highlighting how our social layer became this broken, I still believe that this post would be incomplete if I didn’t stick my neck out a bit and actually call out some of the specific individuals and groups which I have personally witnessed act in a way that is so deeply against our ethos that their behavior can explicitly be described as evidence of the social layer being very broken. Once again I will state that despite the fact that I disagree with the tactics that these people have employed, I still choose to believe they were doing it because they thought it made Ethereum stronger — I won’t ascribe malice where other explanations are just as likely.

The Bankless Bullies

On numerous occasions, I have personally witnessed how Bankless Media (and the individuals who run it) have exercised their accumulated power to achieve their own personal ends. This goes from their desire to enforce what they believe are the important narratives worth defending (like Solana not being a credible L1 or dismissing critics of the rollup centric roadmap), to elevating “aligned” voices while de-platforming individuals who opposed them, to quite literally bullying individuals (especially females) who dared act in a manner that disagreed with them or opposed their personal interests, or those of groups they’re aligned with. Bankless always seems to be on top of the important narratives coming out of the EF, to the degree that it could essentially be considered Ethereum’s de-facto PR arm. And yet, Bankless is presented to the public as an independent media organization, producing “unbiased content”. Over the last 5 years, Bankless has grown to become one of the most important audio/video publishing networks in Ethereum, and perhaps even crypto at large — this is an accomplishment that David and Ryan should feel sincerely proud of. And yet, as an ecosystem, we have to ask ourselves — is Ethereum a healthier organism when its most prominent journalists operate without any sense of journalistic independence? Is it normal for EF-enshrined media outlets to regularly wield their power to accomplish their own personal goals?

Gitcoin’s “Public Goods”

Over the last 5 years, Gitcoin has increasingly been touted as one of the primary venues for funding and sustaining public goods on Ethereum. It’s helped channel over $60M in funding from key organizations like the EF, and for a while was prominently featured and raised up by Vitalik as being a prime example of a values-aligned project on Ethereum — again this is something that Kevin and his team should feel extremely proud of. And yet, when looking past the surface words and graphics, one sees an entirely different picture. I have personally never encountered an organization within Ethereum that is quite as skilled at duplicity as Gitcoin. Whether it’s constantly memejacking from adjacent communities, to actually stealing ideas from potential “collaborators” (who they see as competitors), to eschewing attempts to actually decentralize their power and decision making. Gitcoin has on the one hand been extremely good at saying one thing publicly, and acting another way behind closed doors, all in service of driving more capital/attention/power to themselves. While I had personal experiences in building alongside Kevin early in my Ethereum career which alerted me to these qualities, for a while I wrote them off as likely being one-offs, or just personal blunders of mine. However over the last 5 years this pattern has only continued to perpetuate itself long after I stopped working with him, and has led to a constant exodus of core team members who eventually realize the consequences of working with someone whose actions are not aligned with their words. It’s hard to know exactly how many well-intentioned individuals who wanted to help build the future of public goods have churned from our ecosystem after getting chewed up and realizing how false this facade really is.

Vitalik’s Sporadic Signalling

While I love the fact that Ethereum continues to be led by an active crusader who makes innumerable sacrifices in service of the protocol he created, it’s tough to talk about the failings in our social layer without pointing to the ways that Vitalik has used his power to direct the public’s attention towards specific projects, to the detriment of the broader ecosystem. Besides his aforementioned lifting up of a false public goods ecosystem, Vitalik has consistently tried to drive attention towards use-cases he personally deems values-aligned, ignoring (or outright criticizing) other valuable use-cases which were dominant on the chain — NFTs and Defi being the two obvious examples here. Again it’s impossible to know what the ecosystem would look like if Vitalik had directed some of the attention he receives towards those spaces in a healthy way, or if he had simply chosen to avoid speaking on these kinds of use-cases altogether, in order to maintain healthy impartiality. But from my perspective, I can personally attest that it’s incredibly demoralizing to build something valuable and important in Ethereum’s history, only to have its primary leader turn in the opposite direction and then say that we need more builders. While the Bitcoin ecosystem benefits from a purely market-driven approach (where the top projects bubble up to the top, without the help of centralized actors who accelerate their growth), Ethereum is markedly different, and in my view it has significantly hindered the development of interesting and novel applications built on the chain. The person who founded Ethereum should not have a personal say over what is and is not an important use of public blockspace — again this is the entire point of Ethereum’s existence.

While these are just some personal examples that I feel confident enough about to be willing to wager my reputation on sharing them, I have also heard a plethora of other stories of significant capture within our ecosystem, enabled by the same mechanisms I describe above. I’ve chosen not to publish those in this post (despite receiving some DMs about them), because I believe our ecosystem will be healthier if those individuals can muster the courage to publish their own stories themselves, perhaps as a reply to this post or in other venues.

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Part 2 (due to character limit).

What do we do about this?

I don’t believe that it’s meaningful or productive to share complaints about a system without being able to suggest at least some meaningful fixes to help repair what’s not working. I list some of these suggestions below, although I’ll admit that because I’m not exactly a core member of these systems anymore, I’m aware of the fact that my suggestions here may be impractical.

  1. You, the reader of this post, need to wake up to the role you have played in perpetuating this system. I’m imploring you to reflect on your own participation in this problem, and the various ways that the sin of pride has driven you to aggregate power/attention/capital for yourself, especially in a way that goes against the core values of Ethereum. If you love Ethereum as much as I do, you will recognize that the things which once made Ethereum stronger are now its achilles heel, and that we all have a role to play in maintaining a healthy social layer.
  2. We need to strengthen the mechanisms by which we enable feedback to bubble up in our ecosystem, especially feedback on the ever-changing social layer. It’s quite frankly embarrassing that people need to turn to launching anon accounts (or posting to tools like Anoncast) in order to share valid and truthful feedback that is meant to make the systems we build stronger. While I do acknowledge that not all feedback is delivered in good faith, I think the “bad faith” argument is used far more often than it should (especially when criticisms come from people who aren’t at the center of these groups). When people shine a light on valid issues with process or people, their bravery should be celebrated publicly, not quietly agreed upon, before moving on and pretending like nothing happened. We need a culture that encourages a healthy immune response to sociopathic tendencies, as well as more innocent forces which centralize power/capital/attention in a way that goes against our ecosystem’s values around trustlessness and fairness. If I’m being honest I personally have sensed the seed of this culture already bubbling up over the last few months (with people feeling more emboldened to critique the actions of people at the center), and this is in part what’s inspired me to make this post. I hope that the ripple spreads onwards and that this post can help stoke that fire.
  3. We need to evolve the way that the EF and its members communicate with the outside world. The cherrypicked interviews that EF members give (choosing certain aligned outlets over others) is totally unacceptable for an organization that claims to be impartial. The extremely biased way that certain projects get featured in presentations given by EF representatives, and the privacy with which those decisions get made, is once again unacceptable, and again is a core part of the way that attention/capital/power helps aggregate towards those who are “in” and away from those who are “out”. I think that a heavier reliance on data-driven analysis, a stronger desire to actually surface work from people who are on the edges of the network, and a movement back towards standard press releases and announcements, will help return the EF’s communications to a state of reflecting the true fairness and impartiality which are meant to be the core of our ecosystem. I also believe that the EF should feel more emboldened to actually host the platforms where our social layer lives themselves — beyond just technical forums— ensuring that those platforms meet the same standards which the core protocol development processes are held to. Again this is based on the fact that as a living and evolving ecosystem, we inevitably need these spaces in order to succeed, and ceding control over those venues to third parties (who have their own personal interests) does more harm than good.
  4. We all need to take our jobs more seriously. We need to stop pretending like Ethereum and its auxiliary systems are some kind of personal school project, where we can all pick and choose which of our friends we want to join our team (at the expense of any semblance of fairness in this process). Not only is this un-meritocratic, it more importantly opens these processes up to capture — not just by self interested individuals, but by large, well funded corporate entities, and eventually nation states themselves. People need to wake up to the reality that this technology is deeply political, and has profound economic implications on the livelihoods of millions of people around the world. They need to take their roles seriously and understand that defending the social layer from social attack vectors is now just as important as defending the protocol layer, again because of how important this social layer is to the continued success of Ethereum.
  5. We as an ecosystem need to start embracing critical feedback. The core tenet of being a truth-seeking individual is that you are constantly looking for new information which counteracts your existing belief system, and you do so militantly. Most people are too kind/polite to tell you the critical feedback they have for you; without asking for it you will likely spend years in ignorance. When I posted my original tweet I received a number of EF/related parties asking me for examples, proof, long explanations, when simply copying and pasting my tweet into your favorite LLM would have yielded a number of the historical examples I shared above. If they truly cared to understand my criticism, they could have peeled back the wallpaper themselves, and this post would have been unnecessary. If you actually care about making Ethereum as strong as possible, then it’s time to embrace intellectual honesty, which means embracing the feeling of being wrong. The only thing worse than being wrong is spending years thinking you’re right, only to eventually discover you wasted your time by building in the wrong direction. As an ecosystem we need to harden our personal shells, drop our egos, and embrace the information that makes us uncomfortable. All of the best human growth happens at the edges of our comfort zones :slight_smile:

Who am I even? Why am I posting this?

I got into Ethereum back in 2016, first as an intern building block-explorers at Deloitte, then at ConsenSys helping build client-facing projects, before returning to school and building my first startup — The Bounties Network. We were one of the first Ethereum dapps which grew to $1m+ TVL, and one of the only ones at the time which were in the top 10 of active users which wasn’t either explicitly a ponzi or a purely financial game. That project failed for a number of reasons (some of which I outlined above), and we eventually sunsetted the effort at the end of 2019.

During this time I was also an early community builder — I founded the first Ethereum meetup at Waterloo, and helped run the first major Ethereum hackathon (ETHWaterloo 2017) which eventually became the ETHGlobal circuit that is now a core element of Ethereum’s social layer. I used to be close to the center of this ecosystem, close enough that I got to witness some of the ways that our ecosystem operates (for both better and worse) from behind the scenes.

However, since the bear market of 2018/19, I’ve grown further and further away from this core, largely because I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the very cultural elements I outlined above. I personally am a strong believer in truth and in intellectual honesty, and I have consistently refused to play the backroom games which would have helped me aggregate power/attention/capital to myself at the expense of my core values (many of which are the core values of Ethereum itself). At every turn when I tried to point out the obvious discrepancies between public narratives and actual truth, I was shunned and ignored, until I simply grew too tired to continue even trying to fight that fight. I resigned myself to the realities of the world and decided I would be better off doing other productive work in other spaces.

I’ve made many mistakes over my last 6 years in crypto, but among the most prominent of them is that I accepted defeat in this search for truth within Ethereum. I resigned myself to letting this broken social layer grow and prosper, instead of fighting back tooth and nail to stand up for the core values that originally brought me (and many others) to this ecosystem. I am fully prepared to own this weakness as a major contributing factor here — perhaps Ethereum would have been better off if I had felt the courage to make a post like this one years ago, instead of waiting until the issue got this bad.

Nonetheless, I’m grateful for my current circumstances being such that I can now feel comfortable making this post without my professional career being jeopardized by it. I hope that with time others can feel the same level of confidence in their own positions, enough to re-awaken and start fighting for the things they believe in. While I used to believe that a kumbaya approach to life was a wise one, life has taught me a painful lesson that if you don’t defend the things you care about, they will eventually be stolen from you by people who play dirty games and win dirty prizes. While I believe it’s only human for us to err, I also believe that evolution is possible— that well intentioned people can move forward and right their past wrongs, instead of spending the rest of their lives perpetuating past mistakes.

I hope that you, the reader, will reflect on the mistakes YOU have made since Ethereum’s inception, and think critically about how you can right the wrongs you’ve made.

All views expressed above are my own.

PS — incase it wasn’t already clear, I encourage you to push back on any of the points I make above. I myself am not above similar criticism, and I’m sure there are many gaping holes in the description I’ve given, both of how the ecosystem functions and how we can solve some of these issues. If criticizing my post is your gateway-criticism, then all the better :slight_smile:

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No pushback towards you. What’s said above reflects what’s keeping you awake.

Few non-personal comments:

  • social trust, instead of social layer, seems broken worldwide.
  • your confident assumptions are limited by your personal experience.

Few personal comments:

  • getting mesmerized by a bankless podcast is not going to erase the fact that none of its creators and investors launched and operated such a financially-risky business while being technically bankless since day one. I’ve been bankless since the podcast’s birth, so no comments. Directing attention here and there is a personal choice by you.

  • people who idolize the named blockchain co-founder will have a hard time understanding that there is an open and free playground waiting for you play ball and not bully its public figures. There are free books on how to become a cult leader, if interested. Maybe ask Millionaire AIs. Yes, many LLMs may soon steal his spotlight because of the same social dynamics of… ignoring a next-door beggar and falling in love with a superstar billionaire.

  • Thanks to Gitcoin, I became a supporter few years ago, with digital pennies, as an unbanked blockchain user, of at least two illustrious ecosystem contributors: ZachXBT and Scaffold-ETH. There are two sides to every coin.

  • Why wouldn’t one advocate for an Ethical Chart of Conduct or a similar department rectifying moral attitude across all individual, regional, national… socio-political decisionmakers according to one’s definition of right and wrong public statements and transactions on Ethereum? Oups, someone else is still working on this concept elsewhere on Earth.

One non-personal suggestion:

  • Strengthen and secure the human and technological layer readily protecting the decentralized administrators of Ethereum. Protection against new post-human era threats: bio-hacking of revered brains and remote social uprisings targeting EF/Founders. Back to reading EIPs and withdrawing from attention-seeking.
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Been in similar organizations before - where co-founders and core developers made ground-breaking contributions to a software system, then fell behind in risk appetite, partly because of their knowledge on the complexities of the system, but partly because of their suspicion of new blood & new thinking.
EF core devs have built strong trust among them, and respects for co-founder (Vitalik). It’s just smooth sail communicating between old friends. However, Ethereum is a live system evolving with technologies and meeting new user demands. It would be critical at this stage for EF to (1) give more voices to core devs than Vitalik, (2) more voices to client development team than core devs, (3) more voices to product & marketing team than development team. People feel EF operating like a cult most likely because Vitalik, core devs, client devs and product/marketing have diminishing influence in that order, but no clear path to balance that. L2 roadmap brought up a lot of criticisms, which may or may not be valid in the long run, but it’s great opportunity for EF to reconsider its operating model. EF might also need to found a separate entity focusing on non-core development and business development/marketing

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Thanks for writing this. I’ve often felt and shared many similar concerns in the past 18 to 36 months.

Personally, I don’t think Ethereum’s social layer is broken.

But I do think that something big is broken. In Eth, there’s a a void of leadership in marketing and narrative management that has contributed to ignorance, accidental misalignment, and infighting in our community.

Ordinary people and investors don’t understand Ethereum at a basic high level. Why is onchain important? Why is the whole world going to come onchain? Why will it be on Eth? Why did Ethereum choose credible neutrality? What even is credible neutrality? Why did Eth choose the L2 model? How does the L2 model work at a basic level? Why is an L2 a great option for new adopters? What are our expectations for how the L2 model looks in ten years? These are super basic questions, yet the public does not understand this at all. Plus, we’ll often struggle to find alignment ourselves on these key topics. This illustrates the void of narrative leadership in our community.

Eth’s top folks may not realize that, besides themselves, there are few if any groups that are willing and able - with the resources and legitimacy needed - to step in and fill these gaps effectively. Oh sure lots of us twitter people try to post 365 days a year on these topics - but we frequently contradict each other on fundamental issues and lack the horsepower to level up marketing+narrative management anywhere near its potential. Imagine running any part of core development in the amateur and haphazard way that marketing+narrative management is run today.

There are plenty of non-EF orgs in Ethereum with sufficient resources to fill this gap. But they’re unwilling and inappropriate because of their incentives. E.g. an L2 can’t take up the mantle of providing Eth-wide narrative leadership - they shouldn’t be expected or asked to, as they already have a hard job competing with other L2s. We wouldn’t want an L2 to sell all of Eth, it’s a conflict of interest. Some other orgs are willing and able, but unearnest. These orgs larp as being in eth’s best interest while aiming to farm private goods. imo we should be wary of those with bad intentions trying to step into this gap.

What should we do? I think we should seriously try to fix our marketing and narrative management problem by imbuing the right new org with the right resources and legitimacy. If it works, we may find we actually don’t have any other big problems - everything else seems to be going terrific afaict. I think the EF is doing a wonderful job except in this gap.

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It starts with EIP1. The EIP workflow is poorly conceived and seems designed to encourage, anchoring, herding and groupthink. From it’s start, having EIP author’s vet their ideas in this forum to unspecified “negative community feedback” that may prevent your EIP from moiving past draft stage. The lack of decision hygiene is quite unbelievable.

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I want to point out some underlying principles that need to be challenged:

  1. Decentralized vs Distributed. What you call mafia I call DAOs.
  2. Transparency: Public Domain vs Copy Left. Not everyone in this space agrees on the nuances of transparency. Transparency over time? Does transparency include full disclosures? Source code? Does contract code have to be verified to be useful or can it be useful and still be open to use? Is transparency necessary to be inclusive and accessible?
  3. Collaboration is a double-edge sword. I like forks because it implies the freedom to do your own thing.

My point is a “mafia” is not necessarily antithetical to the core values of Ethereum. I would say the core values of Ethereum is the fact we can disagree with each other and still coexist. Maybe calling it “broken” is exactly how we like it. Broken into bits and pieces for everyone to share.

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The specific difference between a mafia and a traditional DAO (as social groups go) is that the list of members within a DAO is perfectly open for the public to audit. While the conversations that might occur between those members can indeed be private, the very nature of their membership being fully auditable by the public changes the manner in which they can leverage that position/others for personal benefit.

If there’s one thing traditional game theory can teach us, it’s just how much a given game’s Nash equilibrium changes when information sharing is involved – this is why transparency is extremely important in healthy functioning social systems. While it’s not technically always the case, as a general rule we can witness that increasing transparency within a game moves the Nash equilibrium towards cooperative outcomes.

There are many good reasons to not have every single private conversation be made public, but at minimum having membership within private groups, and their individual payoff functions more publicly known will lead to fewer defections for personal reasons.

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Interesting you make reference to Ethereum as a DAO.

Personally, Ethereum as a commons makes more sense. Here I think the industry in general could to well to lean on existing research that provides more clear cut rules for how we resolve conflict.

If you search for “Elinor Ostrom’s 8 rules for managing the commons” there is a lot of very good research that basically lays a path for us to explore.

"she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons. - Wikipeida

In my opinion, no one to date has got it right (and thats ok!) but there should be more of an considered directive in exploring how we can align closer to these principle (as a bare minimum) before we classify complex orgs as “DAOs” which really is a wapper for complexity people are unwilling to unpack.

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I lost track of just how many things you said I disagree with, assertions I was waiting for evidence of, and examples to illustrate the straw man mafia comparison.

Personally I have found Ethereum incredibly open and inviting. Anyone willing to put in the effort to contribute is welcome. An example of this is that all core devs meetings are live streamed on YouTube, and vid conf details are shared publicly. I joined a core devs call long before I could call it my day job. Participated in protocol dev efforts just by engaging in discord and looking for GitHub issues I could manage. That culture is still here, strong, and pervasive though all core protocol projects. Name one that has a closed repository, that you cannot submit a PR to. This includes EIPs, ERCs, RIPs and core dev meeting agenda items.

There is a high competence bar to pass, one which I have struggled with myself. But that isn’t an insular mafia, that is the complexity of the problem space.

In short, be the change you want to see. The ecosystem is also permissionless, show up and do the work.

Edits: typos posting from mobile

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While the core protocol development social layer has indeed done well to avoid some of these outcomes, this represents only a small fraction of the entirety of the Ethereum ecosystem. I listed a number of specific examples outside of ACD /core protocol dev spaces which highlight the issues I bring up, and the specific mafia dynamics at play here. Ethereum, as a technology project, is much bigger than just the development of protocol clients themselves. If you disagree then please, show me where - not by calling my argument a “straw man” or by pointing to a subset of the ecosystem which has retained a healthy social layer.

A typical disproof by counterexample only requires one such example in order to admit that a given generalization is false. I have provided a number of specific examples above about why the generalization that “Ethereum’s Social Layer is Healthy” is completely false (enough to make the counter-claim that it is no longer functioning as a healthy system at all).

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Thanks for taking the time to write all of this, @beylin!

While I agree with @garyschulte that your experience feels quite different from mine, I think you and @ryanberckmans raise a few good points.

Having hosted a few Bankless episodes myself, I’m definitely guilty of this! I don’t think this is anything to blame them for, though: they make it extremely easy for people like me to reach a large audience interested in Ethereum when we have important things to communicate. That said, I can see how myself and others at the EF “defaulting to Bankless” for podcasts can lead to this perception. I’ll do better here going forward.

I strongly agree with this. We also need a better digitial town square for our social layer than social media like Twitter/Lens/Farcaster. My hope is we can gradually make Ethereum Magicians this place. It hasn’t received enough maintenance these past few years and it’s something we’ve been trying to improve. @nicocsgy has been hugely helpful here!

I’m also sympathetic to this (see above) but will note that your suggestions around “the edges of the network” are a bit contradictory with your previous sentiment that Vitalik has ignored the most valuable use cases for the chain.

These things aren’t necessarily in conflict (we can do better at celebrating both), but hopefully this highlights some of the challenges in calibrating here.

To the extent I can, I’m happy to help with this!

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The EIP workflow is poorly conceived and seems designed to encourage, anchoring, herding and groupthink.

Since this is an information design artifact, it seems amenable to refactoring or engineering. What are the principles … eg what it is you want to encourage (remembering that CatHerders already split into 3 queues)?

is it that the threaded discussion format is ineffective/inefficient? see Campsite which strives to be between chatty & long-posts

is it the organisation of EIP … sequential number rather than clustering for analogous functionality (and thus foster contestable ideas).

Do you have a different modality (cf adversarial vs inquisitional) to avoid groupthink? eg 10th man rule

Fixing the social layer (broken or not) might be a mammoth change exercise but putting forth fixes to a process based on neutral and mutually accepted evidence might be a way for new social conventions to arise. At least it is tractable.

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Hey, thanks for responding. I’ll answer only one of the questions to keep things moving.

“Do you have a different modality (cf adversarial vs inquisitional) to avoid groupthink? eg 10th man rule”

A group of us at RnDAO are studying this problem. Wisdom of Crowds Technology is the solution we have moved on to develop. Anchoring, Herding and groupthink occur when group members don’t act in an egalitarian way. Group Dynamics can be affected by who speaks first, or who stays silent or who is boisterous or power, influence etc.

A study of Wisdom of Crowds Technology (good book is Noise by Kehneman) is quite clear. What is needed is: 1. Diversity of Opinion, 2. members have access to local knowledge 3. Independence of thinking and lastly unbiased aggregation (averaging).

In Ethereum, the community is clearly diverse with members having local knowledge. The parts that are missing are independent judgement and unbiased aggregation. In fact the current governance structure is the opposite of independent judgement and unbiased aggregation. I could add a section of EIP1 here, but I’m sure you are already aware.

So the Modality:

I’m not sure where exactly this would fit in to current EIP1. Probably in advance of core dev calls.

Step 1,

Independent judgement: (Harmonica) Ask the core devs to provide their opinions of upcoming proposals in advance. Within RnDAO we have developed Harmonica. It is a sensemaking and deliberation platform. Has facilitation functionality which makes the user experience enjoyable.

After capturing the Independent Judgements

Step 2

Unbiased Aggregation: (SimScore) Based on the collated ideas from the Harmonica session, the unbiased aggregation (SimScore) is determined by calculating a pairwise similarity matrix… Similarity Score is a measure of how similar one statement is to another. From the pairwise matrix, an interactive relationship graph and cluster / priority list are presented. .

Prior to the core dev meeting, the SimScore report should be reviewed by the devs in advance. This will allow them to see everyone’s opinion along with the collective priority.

At this point, the effects of Wisdom of Crowds tech are in place. No Anchoring, herding or groupthink has occurred.

Step 3 Though we have not developed this, we think a use of an adapted Delphi method would help reach consensus. eg estimate (Harmonica + SimScore) > Talk > Estimate again (by vote or other mechanism)

Hope this helps.

It’s quite wild that Eth governance is a copy paste from bitcoin governance which was a copy paste from Python governance. Python had a benevolent dictator…in 2000.

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G’day … I also rummage through RnDAO occasionally but haven’t visited for a while. Whilst I don’t have an answer, let me give an asian perspective just to widen the frame

What you describe is is due to power distance in asian society where seniority (often are which in employer-4-life correlates well with experience). You can tell who are the real-THOUGHT-leaders (not necessarily managerial) because in a meeting (not who sits where), when a really tricky question gets asked, all eyes sneak-peek at them. This is also problem in non-asian firms when extroverts (or squeaky wheel) gets to squeeze out moderates. In worse cases cliques form which lead to factional in-fighting (you can see it say in Bankleses when they were trying to decide which direction to jump ship) or more likely quiet-quitting. Attempts I’m aware of to ameliorate this are

  • Aussie voting - secret ballots so you don’t get retaliated for non-conformity
  • Kiwi voting - where you can vote 1person yes/no/veto/abstain but restrict the veto to a very small number of “elders” (at least it is tacit and not hidden backroom deal)
  • French voting - oui/d’accord/non/refuse (permit emotional attachment which signals splits/forks/revolution?)

I vaguely recall ???Daniel??? trying some anon thread thingy but allowed AI to cluster so the rebels could find each other and counter-clique

Concur … Wisdom of crowd requires those pre-conditions to work … but I qualify this by context in sometimes in chaotic situations, some immediate action needs to be taken rather than analysis/paralysis. As others noted, the core is highly technical which following IETF practices leads to

  1. compromises usually via minimal subset of interfaces + extensions
  2. objectively best solution “wins” based on (real-world) evidence
  3. parallel solutions and let the market sort it out

So it appears is the non-core part which fails to meritocratise.

Memes work … but as you pointed out the process premised a benevolent dictator which as others pointed out, Ethereum as a whole is too broad leading to the various “mafia” insiders (acute local knowledge) in the original complaint.

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I’m not sure if I agree with the mafia wording, but it does seem to me that Ethereum decision-making is rather opaque. It’s technically open, but compared to the ease by which anyone can deploy a contract onto Ethereum, it is incredibly difficult for outsiders to come in and make meaningful changes to the protocol itself, with numerous obstacles at all levels.

From the bottom, it is difficult as a newcomer to know where to start. If you have an idea, it is unclear where you are supposed to go and what you are supposed to do with it. There are many different venues, none of which are official. Unless you already have a good picture of the entire system there is no way to know which one is best suited, or even if there is a suitable place at all to present your idea. One could argue that this is a good thing, since you don’t want people to make changes if they don’t know what is going on. But I think Ethereum is too big for this to be a reasonable expectation. If you have to have to understand everything before you can make any change, the sheer amount of effort required will greatly reduce the number of people willing to join.

From the top, the ultimate decision-making processes around narrative and features is also unclear. Even if everything is actually being done by rough consensus, it’s clear that in many cases this consensus is at least partially and probably primarily being done in closed meetings among insiders. This further reduces the incentive to join, because even if you put in all the effort to understand everything and go through the burnout inducing process of championing an EIP, you have no leverage on the the ultimate decision-making.

I had a suggestion in the Pectra Retrospective thread which I think could help with some of these issues.The idea is essentially to formalize the values of Ethereum into competing political factions. This sounds bad but is good because:

  • Formalization means everyone knows where to go for any given issue
  • Competition incentivizes insiders towards open communication and actively recruiting newcomers
  • Factions means that good ideas will receive coordinated support from other faction members
  • Politics encourages decentralization, since any group which becomes too powerful will become the target of an allied coalition

Based on my current understanding of Ethereum values, here is one possible list of special interest groups (SIGs) along with issues or features they might champion:

  • Censorship Resistance (FOCIL)
  • Decentralization (SSF)
  • Moneyness (Issuance Curve, Marketing)
  • Network Stability (State Expiry)
  • Privacy (Dark Pools)
  • Scaling (PeerDAS)
  • Security (Self-Destruct, Post-Quantum)
  • Ship Speed (Process Design, Documentation, Devnets)
  • UX Applications (EOF)
  • UX End-users (Interop)
  • UX Validators (Verkle)

I believe all of these groups already exist in some form or another. EthStaker could slot directly into the UX Validators SIG. Some exist bifurcated in highbrow and lowbrow versions, like RIG and Bankless for Moneyness. Others exist more informally, perhaps as “mafias”. For example, I understand there is a customary step where EIPs are evaluated for DoS before consideration for inclusion, which could take place more transparently in a Network Stability SIG.

Under this system, there’s a very clear and open way for anyone to go about getting some idea of theirs into Ethereum. Firstly, you identify which of Ethereum’s values your idea best advances, to find the relevant SIG where you can present your idea. Other members of the SIG can discuss your idea, and help you refine it, possibly in consultation or alliance with other SIGs. If your idea is good, it gains consensus to become the priority of the SIG, which will push it through the EIP process and lobby for it to be selected for inclusion for the next fork (or if a fork isn’t required, form a subgroup to help make it a reality in whatever way is required).

The key question for fixing the social layer is asking, how can we make it easy for well-meaning outsiders to come in and make a difference?

On the other side, I want to answer that question on how to make it easy for this SIG system to arise. I think the key is on fork lobbying, either through the creation of a steering committee or by some other reformation of ACD. If being the best at meeting some specific outcomes, whether that’s voting popularity or testnet readiness or something else, becomes the way that EIPs become selected for fork inclusion, then ability-maximizing groups should naturally form. Possibly because insiders like having flexibility and rightly do not want to be beholden to the uninformed, this is not how things are currently being done. But Ethereum is too big for this to stay effective, and too important to be ineffective, and part of being more efficient is formalization and modularization.

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Great write-up @beylin

I want to say that I think you did an amazing job articulating these observations. It was well-documented, clear, and concise (not an easy thing to do).

What I did want to mention (from someone who has been observing these dynamics in practice as well) is that these observations are not isolated to Ethereum alone. They are displayed in almost all decentralized social systems to varying degrees. Yes, Ethereum has displayed a greater propensity for control compared to others, but that is because Ethereum is further along in it’s social and technical development, and therefore is forced to deal with a greater degree of complexity. The majority of the things you brought up are related to the process structures by which communication, decision-making, and work is facilitated through.

In light of that, I want to bring up a couple of points.

Communication & Decision-Making

The mafias do exist, and they are a negative force on the social layer. But it’s important to understand why they exist and what function they provide. In all of the major confrontations you listed and the 100’s of others not listed, one thing is painfully true: when the mafia comes to consensus, they will shut you out. Socially it is damaging and prevents others from engaging or providing alternative directions for the ecosystem to move in.

Usually when a decision such as these need to be made, deliberations start locally in a small-group setting of subject-matter experts who are weighing a small decision-space against the values and incentives that would otherwise naturally align themselves toward consensus. When consensus breaks down for whatever reason, a strong-willed minority will escalate these decisions to a larger network of experts, which undoubtedly fails to reach consensus again, and this repeats until it eventually lands in the laps of the general public. Once the inclusion of all of these group perspectives are considered, we find ourselves further away from expert consensus than where we started. The only remedy is for the mafias to wield their influence for the sake of control and continuity.

To me this is the biggest issue the social layer faces. The decision-making process should be inverted in order to begin deliberations on the macro-scale capturing a wider design-space and filter it down to the smaller groups of technical experts, where decisions must be made.

Vitalk & the EF

I went to my first EthCC and remember the amount of excitement and admiration people had for Vitalik Buterin. It’s all they talked about. I was working at a stand, and I remember everyone cramming themselves into the conference room to find a seat just to listen to him speak for 30 minutes. I never went in. I stood outside the conference room to a completely empty venue. I was literally the only person at the conference not inside that room, and I remember thinking that I would never want that type of power. Vitalik is a human being, and he should be allowed to have opinions. Yes, he has to be more careful than most with what he says and what he does, but then again, we should also stop treating him like a God.

The EF was founded by Vitalik, Gavin, and Jeffrey, and while Vitalik as a person is entitled to have opinions, the EF is also entitled to have opinions. They attempt to stay neutral, but it is not a requirement, and it’s unrealistic for all of us to expect it.

I’ve never seen another non-profit entity get bullied around by the very groups they financially support and serve like the EF has to endure. If I were Vitalik or the EF, I’d just keep chugging along the way things are. They don’t owe you anything. The critiques of Vitalik and the EF are a cultural problem created by individuals seeking to proxy capture their influence and generosity for their own personal gain. The difference between those groups and the projects you described supported by Vitalik is that those supported projects contain a concrete logic that leads to experimentation and growth within the ecosystem.

Builders & Funding

As you mentioned, the environment for Builders is not a good one. Especially if you are not well connected. While some of it can be blamed on the lack of access to core levers and specific problems around gatekeeping, the main problem for builders is centered around funding and support. This was the area that our Public-Goods funding programs should be better at serving, and where we need to see drastic improvements.

The largest grant-programs seem to have a tendency to distribute the most capital to projects with already large operational budgets, while new projects, and their builders, are forced to compete with each other among the smaller grant programs and round-operators. For every 1 successful project that receives massive funding, there are 10 smaller projects failing to get the support and funding that they need to succeed. When they can’t make it work here, they look elsewhere. To me this can be remedied by better understanding the different needs of builders and supporting them through different stages of their projects’ development.

I honestly don’t think the social layer is broken, but it does need attention, and it needs reform. While I may disagree with your view on who is responsible for failures in the social layer, there is one thing that I firmly agree with you on.

Thank you for that line. I wouldn’t have posted this otherwise. I think we need to have more critical discussions, and we need to figure out a way for others to participate in them. Thanks for hearing me out!