Uncle ↑

I have many criticisms of the Ethereum Foundation. But "no more manifestos, more shipping" from @hosseeb, a VC, is not feedback I'll take seriously. The ship faster intuition makes sense in one world: startups. You're burning runway, competitors are moving, every week debating is a week someone else is taking your market. I run many companies, we deliver, we grow fast, billions flow through what we've built and millions use our products. I know this logic from the inside. It's correct there. Ethereum is not a startup. It never was. It's a protocol. The mistake that keeps getting made by smart people with product backgrounds or VCs is applying the rules of one game to a completely different one. What makes Ethereum worth anything as infrastructure is credible neutrality. The belief that no single entity controls it. Not @VitalikButerin, not the @ethereumfndn. Theguarantee isn't in the code, it lives in thousands of independent people who are constantly watching, arguing, and who have shown repeatedly they will reject changes they consider illegitimate. The picture I'm posting captures perfectly the aesthetic of crypto taken over by performative believers: people who lost billions, kept the faith, and now demand to be taken seriously in fashion shoots. This is one of the two forces squeezing out the people actually building. Impatient capital that wants product velocity, and a performative culture that turned a technical movement into a costume party. Both are corrosive, both misunderstand what Ethereum is. Ethereum's premium over every other L1, despite being slower and more expensive, comes from one thing: people believe it won't be captured. The reason why it's also more expensive and slower is exactly because of this. All the research and technical work we're doing is difficult because we want to be the most decentralized L1 with Bitcoin. We want to become fast without losing our guarantees. Funds like Dragonfly have a structural incentive pointing in one direction. Criticize Ethereum's velocity, create urgency, justify backing cheaper copycats. This produces a genuine blind spot around the things that don't look like shipping but are actually holding everything together. The moment Ethereum optimizes only for shipping cadence over legitimacy it starts looking like every other foundation controlled chain. There are dozens of those. They're worth a fraction of the value. This doesn't mean Ethereum should be slow. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to become better. I've been one of the strongest critics of Ethereum. I'm burning a big part of my capital to push the boundaries of Ethereum. I'm building multiple companies on top and trying to make it faster and I'm trying to bring users to it. Believing that writing a manifesto is blocking the development of a protocol is ridiculous. The EF has real problems. Opaque communication, poor prioritization, bad recruiting, organizational dysfunction with real costs. These deserve serious criticism from people who understand what they're maintaining. But the solution is not startup logic applied to a protocol commons. It's better institutional design that preserves legitimacy while improving coordination. Those are different problems with different solutions. To the "just ship" crowd, from someone who has spent years building on these systems and not writing checks at them: the thing you want to optimize away is the thing you're invested in. The slow, pluralistic, nobody wins unilaterally process is not the cost of Ethereum. It's the product. The alternative is this Vanity Fair picture. A worse, cheaper version of TradFi dressed up in velvet and leopard print, demanding to be taken seriously.

"The Ethereum Foundation Mandate" generated a lot of fuss and critique. I really don't understand why. The @ethereumfndn is a non-profit. Remember this. It makes sense for it to focus on vision, values and stewardship. I think its goals (censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure--CROPS) make sense. While other blockchain's seek to differentiate with cheap and efficient throughput/transactions per second, etc...for Ethereum, its robustness, censorship resistance, neutrality and decentralization that serve as its moat. These are not easy to replicate, and in my mind, are a primary source of value in the network and the token. There is no "Ethereum Labs". This makes sense, too. Instead, there are plenty of public and private companies (@Consensys, @Etherealize_io, @BitMNR, @Sharplink, @TheEtherMachine, etc) that seek to drive commercial outcomes across the ecosystem for its users. So, let the non-profit be a non-profit. And let the builders build.

"The Ethereum Foundation Mandate" generated a lot of fuss and critique. I really don't understand why. The @ethereumfndn is a non-profit. Remember this. It makes sense for it to focus on vision, values and stewardship. I think its goals (censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure--CROPS) make sense. While other blockchain's seek to differentiate with cheap and efficient throughput/transactions per second, etc...for Ethereum, its robustness, censorship resistance, neutrality and decentralization that serve as its moat. These are not easy to replicate, and in my mind, are a primary source of value in the network and the token. There is no "Ethereum Labs". This makes sense, too. Instead, there are plenty of public and private companies (@Consensys, @Etherealize_io, @BitMNR, @Sharplink, @TheEtherMachine, etc) that seek to drive commercial outcomes across the ecosystem for its users. So, let the non-profit be a non-profit. And let the builders build.