Thanks to Jason Chaskin and Joseph Schweitzer for sharing feedback to this piece.

"Are you in it for the tech or the money?"

— goes an old question.

But is it even the right question to ask? I don’t think most people are in Ethereum just for tech. Not even Vitalik.

How is that possible? Well... imagine Ethereum got magically overtaken by the Solana team. Or Cardano. Or Justin Sun.

What kind of projects would be built on top of Ethereum now? Would it still make hard decentralization trade-offs? And would we still want to work on growing this ecosystem?

Probably not.

So if it's not tech, what is Ethereum actually about? Why are we here?

Why are we here

There are many ways to answer this question.

• "We're building a world computer,"

• "We're creating a new form of money,"

• "We're creating a permissionless financial system for everyone."

We all know those lines. But they only tell us what we build, not why we build it.

So here's a 2014 take on "why" from Gavin Wood:

“Web 3.0, or as might be termed the "post-Snowden" web, is a reimagination of the sorts of things that we already use the Web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties.

Information that we assume to be public, we publish. Information that we assume to be agreed, we place on a consensus-ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal. Communication always takes place over encrypted channels and only with pseudonymous identities as endpoints; never with anything traceable (such as IP addresses). 

In short, we engineer the system to mathematically enforce our prior assumptions, since no government or organisation can reasonably be trusted.”

So Gavin says "We build an alternative system because we don't want to be spied on by governments and companies". Ten years later the job's not finished, and privacy still remains an important motivation for pcaversaccio and other Ethereum cypherpunks.

If you asked Vitalik in 2025 why he's here, he probably wouldn't mention Blizzard nerfing his World of Warcraft character anymore. But the answer could be much broader:

If you asked me, I'd probably say something less ambitious, like "I'm in Ethereum because I want a better alternative to financial system and social media."

There are also other motivations. Some might want to help artists make money online. Others want to help people in developing countries preserve their wealth. And some are here because it gives them the wild west vibes of the early Internet.

And of course some ETH builders got nerdsniped by the decentralized networks tech. But if you dig deeper, for many of them tech is just a tool to solve some of the humanity's most pressing problems. Take a bigger vision away, and tech instantly becomes less interesting.

Of course not everyone comes to Ethereum to change the world.

My first contact with crypto was when my OG friend told me I can buy ETH when it's low and sell when it gets higher. Many people enter crypto for the same reasons, but then some "come for the money, stay for the network", as described by a16z's price-innovation cycle. "Believe in something" is contagious.

So we are here because we have some big problems to solve. And how we solve them matters, too.

The Ethereum way

A few months ago I was at a garden party and met a friend I haven't seen for years. So we sat down near a bonfire and he asked me what do I do now.

So I told him about Ethereum. I told him that we want software and data to be more open and decentralized. That we want more privacy, and personal liberty. That stablecoins are already helping millions of people, and so does DeFi. That we build alternatives to Big Tech social apps. That the community is so meritocratic that Danny Ryan - a guy from the Internet - led its most important project. That we have conferences around the world, and everyone is so welcoming that if I got teleported to Taipei, Nairobi or Buenos Aires, I'd find "my people" there.

He looked at me, visibly sad, and said:
"Man, I'm jealous. I'm just working on a CRM app I couldn't care less about."

It made me realize that we take for granted that Ethereum is ideologically driven. But after 30 years of mainly soulless Silicon Valley projects, it's an exception, not a rule.

So what's the Ethereum way of doing things?

I think we all believe that critical software should be open source. That devs should be compensated for maintaining public good software. That code can take over some parts of the security and law enforcement. That free speech should be protected. That composability should be incentivized. That critical infrastructure should follow the "voice & exit" rule. And so on and so forth.

And this ideology doesn't stop at words. Satoshi hasn't written a WSJ op-ed to criticize financial crisis. He hasn't given lectures at Harvard about corporate socialism, nor has he founded an NGO to lobby the government. He just built an alternative to the system he didn't like. And so did Vitalik when he realized he can't build his vision on Bitcoin. This focus on action is part of our ethos.

The Ethereum approach is also focused on cooperation. We believe that many smart people working on the same problem might reach better results than one creative genius. That's one of the reasons why, contrary to other projects, the community is so open, and our L2s are independent like the United States.

Without people sharing and acting on this "why & how", Ethereum wouldn't be Ethereum. These beliefs define our roadmap: how we approach problems, what we focus on, and what we deliberately ignore. Take them out and we might become another centralized blockchain with closed source smart contracts, memecoins dominance and more hype than substance.

And sure, not everyone who builds on Ethereum will follow these ideas. But this is the point of permissionless networks. Someone wants to build a socialist coop, and someone wants to build a libertarian wild west memecoin launcher. And that's fine!

As in famous quote, attributed to Voltaire:

"I wholly disapprove of what you say—and will defend to the death your right to say it."

In other words, giving people freedom to do what they want to do is also part of our how.

And these beliefs totally change the output of what we actually build.

So what do we build, exactly?

So let's say we build this world computer. What kind of computer is it?

Because our computer is dealing with money and identity, we need it to be protected from manipulation and unexpected changes or - as Josh Stark would say - we need it to be hard. That's why Ethereum needs to stay decentralized. If there was one CEO, company or nation state who could control how much ETH you own or where you can transact, it'd not be much better than TradFi and Big Tech.

We need to build castles without kings.

And this decentralization has consequences. Because no single entity can control the network, and Ethereum has an open source culture that believes in code overtaking important parts of the security, our smart contracts can protect billions of dollars. This also means that the contracts are composable, so builders can tap into our collective intelligence and build on each others work. And because we want the network to stay open to everyone, we work on things like inclusion lists, to ensure that people have a freedom to transact.

This computer is one of a kind. And this means that people can build one of a kind applications on top of it.

So yes, Ethereum has DeFi, just like other chains now. But because we build it on a different computer, our DeFi is different.

Marc Zeller said it best:

At this point it's only DeFi when it comes from Ethereum region of blockchain, otherwise it's just sparkling CeFi.

We could also say that Ethereum has stablecoins. But because of decentralization, our stablecoins provide much better security guarantees than for example Tron. So although you can exchange Tron USDT to Ethereum USDT on Coinbase, our stablecoins are different than Tron's. Just like a gold coin bought from a royal mint is different than the one bought from some shady guy on the street.

And thanks to this decentralization ETH - although volatile - is definitely a new form of money, too. And there are prediction markets, onchain art, tokenized stocks, decentralized identity, and social networks, which work differently when they're built on Ethereum.

This is why "Built on Ethereum" badge makes sense. It's as if the app was built with titanium instead of wood or plastic. And sure, you can still make something useless or fragile with titanium, just like you can produce a scam website using https. But at least you know it’s the designer who failed, not the material.

No wonder why Ethereum dominates in basically all use cases where hardness is key.

And these are just dapps. But Ethereum is already larger than that.

When we started Kiwi, we wanted to curate Ethereum-related content. But then we faced a dilemma: what actually is Ethereum-related content? Are public goods Ethereum? And how about privacy? Or network states? Or DeSci? Or d/acc?

There's a whole myriad of Ethereum-adjacent ideas which create our ecosystem. And this eclectic group builds on each others ideas - just like XVIII century scientists and philosophers who believed in empiricism, rationality and personal liberty and ended up building the foundations of modern science and democracy.

What we build here may eventually go beyond dapps you can use with your wallet.

Path forward

So this is why I think we are here.

Because we believe in something, and despite 10 years of people ignoring, laughing, and fighting Ethereum, the mission stayed the same. And the hard trade offs are still being made, despite all Crypto Twitter dunks, and ‘Ethereum killers’ showing up every year.

This is a beautiful culture and I think we should cultivate it. That being said, I hope we will also evolve.

In the last 9 years, we've been in the infrastructure phase, where we had to work out how to build and scale this new type of a computer. We all had moments when we paid $200 in gas for a simple Mainnet transaction, and solving that was a #1 problem. The regulatory environment was also more predatory, and EF chose to be more hands-off and focused on infra to stay safe.

Now the sentiment changed, Ethereum grew up, and we are ready for consumer adoption. So we have to make some changes.

I love open source but we can't show consumers 57 wallet options. Dev-first culture is what built Ethereum, but we can't limit our communications to PeerDAS, Verkle trees and MEV, because 99.9% people don't care. I think it's great that each L2 has their own BD team, but we should have some entity to represent Ethereum (and that's why I cheer for Ethrealize).

We also shouldn't only speak about defensive attributes of Ethereum like censorship resistance or self-custody. These lines might cater to Turks and Argentinians who crave freedom to hold and transact assets, but they don't move people in the US or Europe. No one cares about building bunkers in peacetime.

So on top of d/acc, we should also speak about eth/acc. How stablecoins are 10X better than TradFi, how Aave helps people lend and borrow money, how global prediction markets are better than walled garden betting platforms, how we helped digital artists earn money, and so on and so forth.

There's also a larger question of integrating newcomers.

(How to not make them horrified when the first thing they see is Crypto Twitter, is a material for another post)

There are many crypto founders who just want to build something successful and make a lot of money. We can't just try to teach them about Ethereum values and hope they'd override their selfish incentives just to be seen as a good person. How to solve that is an important challenge, and I hope we'd find a way.

There's also PR. It's nice that people build apps on top of Ethereum, but if some of them are scams, grifts or get hacked, and get most of the media attention, we need to find a way to react. One way to solve it is moving the spotlight from casinos to quality projects, to make Ethereum "obviously useful".

There are many challenges in front of us, and they are all hard-earned problems that we wish we had 5 years ago. And since we have the new EF leadership, I really do hope that now is the great time to remind everyone why we are here, what's the Ethereum way of doing things, and highlighting projects that make it useful.

Fingers crossed.

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