Ethereum's Evolving Social Layer

Okay, hello everybody, I'm extending the talk, it's a bit of a double act, this, between Anne and myself. I'm going to talk about Ethereum's evolving social layer. Okay, so in case you just arrived, so some people may have missed Anne's talk, which is basically the comprehensive overview of the paper. I'm just going to give a little summary, like a very quick summary as I see it. The paper is called Tending the Infinite Garden, Organisational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem.

It's submitted to the Journal of Cultural Economy, which is basically the only journal in the whole of academia which is sympathetic to crypto, so give them some love if you ever want to read any academic journal, that's where to go. It's improvised and resubmits, so we've done a revision, we've resubmitted it, now we're just waiting for some other academics to sign off on it. This being academia, it takes a very long time, this article would have been started maybe two years ago, the first seeds of it, maybe a year and a half on it to do the interviews and the work, and then even now we're still waiting, right, such is life of an academic, basically the opposite of crypto, everything takes much longer. So in the paper what we did is we're trying to find some imaginaries, pre-existing imaginaries that were identified by academics, and then see if we could discover a new one, which is what we do, we find the infinite garden imaginary. As Anne explained, imaginaries is just a fancy academic term meaning the way things go on between each other, the expectations we have of each other, and how we lend legitimacy to decision making.

It also involves an idea of what the future would be like, the socio-technical future, what the cultural endgame might end up like. We interviewed a bunch of people, it's basically a who's who of Ethereum core developers as we call them in the paper, so Vitalik, Alex, Ben, Trent, Pooja, Alex Stokes, etc, right, so it's a very high quality group of people to have talked to. Yeah, so that's the general idea, and then what I'm going to do is talk about how things have gone since, right, what's the deal with Ethereum since this point. Now up until maybe five years ago, every academic paper on crypto was the same, they basically went something like this, the crypto people say things are decentralised, but did you know they're actually centralised. It was the most boring thing you could imagine as an academic, every paper went the same way.

But in recent years, there's been a bit of an evolution, and so now it's more common to understand blockchain communities as polycentric, so this is the term of art in the industry, meaning multiple overlapping decision making centres, what we would call stakeholders, right, with some degree of autonomy, engaging in cooperation, competition, conflict and conflict resolution. Now the first thing that struck me on rereading the article is that we really focus, as you saw with Ann's paper, on this idea of cooperation and conflict resolution. When interviewing the core devs, you get this very strong sense of high trust amongst each other, and the sense that they feel that all issues could be resolved, right, rough consensus can always be reached, as Vitalik says, we simply talk it out, right, that's the general gist that you get from these interviews. Now what we missed is the competition and conflict, because, or at least in my estimation, the reason we missed this is because we were so focused on one particular stakeholder group that we were just talking to the core devs and not taking into account the other stakeholders, and I'll do a stakeholder set list a little bit later on, and so we missed the beginnings of the coup, the shake-up, right, the revolt against the Ethereum Foundation that happened, and maybe we would have seen that if we'd talked to more people. Now the reason we did this is, again, something to do with academia, which is, from our perspective, this is all very familiar, right, you're talking about the Ethereum Foundation, you're talking about core devs, to academics who read these journals, they have no idea what you're talking about, you have to pick one group, you have to simplify things, and by necessity you end up distorting the situation to some degree.

Another thing I think really struck me is if I was writing this today, or me and Ann decided we're going to write a new article today, we'd probably start off by focusing on the Ethereum Foundation, right, that's where all the drama is, that's where all the excitement is today, whereas at that point, right, when we were writing this article, that wasn't really the case, right, the Ethereum Foundation was something we didn't talk about, it did a lot of stuff in the background, and now it's become an entirely different beast. So if you're working at the Ethereum Foundation, we're going to be watching what you're doing, so not to freak you out or anything, but that's what we're doing. Okay, so stakeholder expansion dilemma. Another aspect of the paper that stood out to me is, this is a term I guess that I'm trying to introduce, you can see in the paper that the core devs are aware of this, right, they know that what's going to be the big issue in the coming times is the desire of the wider stakeholder set to voice their concerns and to influence the core development process in some kind of way, and what is this going to involve, let's say from the cultural perspective, well it's going to involve a challenge to the traditional cypherpunk values. So here's Alex Stokes, it seems that things have gotten bigger, I expect they'll keep getting bigger in some form or fashion, so as it happens it'll be harder to maintain alignment.

How do we incorporate the interests of these stakeholders into development without compromising our cypherpunk values? I don't think it would be easy, right, all the signs were there, in retrospect in reading this article you can see that subtle awareness. Now the other starting point that I would do, or we would do if we were starting a paper now, is we have the perfect beginning for a new article because of course all core devs, for those who don't know the kind of governance calls for Ethereum, are being reconfigured, so this is a major change and a really excellent starting point for any future academic article, and this is going to involve a few things, one of which is the flagship, right, the EIP is having a flagship or like a theme basically, so that's different, and then also the idea of including the stakeholders, right, so the stakeholders are going to have more of a voice, and so this would be a perfect way to begin. Now in Tim's post you can see a recognition that the categorisation of the stakeholders would be the most important thing, and so what I'm going to do briefly is just talk about what I consider the stakeholders set in 2025, now there's a real metaphysics of stakeholder set generation in Ethereum culture, anybody who's worked their salt in like Ethereum social science thinking or like a philosophy of Ethereum or whatever, has their own stakeholder list, Vlad Zamfir has one all the way back in 2016, Vitalik has one, of course, right, Tim Byko has one in his governance talks, Trent has it in his commons work, Blockchain Gov, the other academics are rivals, they have a, and then I also have it in absolute essentials of Ethereum, and then Ann and I have a stakeholder list in our paper, now this is a very rough list, kind of thrown together on Fileverse, so that's why it's kind of maybe, you know, I'm still learning how to use it, so it's not the prettiest slides yet, shout out Fileverse, by the way, on the Excel, so this is how I see the core devs as the presumed stakeholder set today, we know that these are grandfathered in, they have to be included, but there are issues around the core devs today that I think are interesting, so the core devs up until the last call effectively, right, the way in which decisions will be made is that the chair of the ACB would effectively go around and tell people, here are the options, and then everybody would chime in, and then if there was rough consensus reached, then that's the decision that would be gone with, but you could see in the last call with EOS that we saw some stakeholders appear in the call, complicate matters such that it has to be shelved, and so that's something from an academic perspective that I think would need to be discussed when it comes to the core devs and the wider stakeholder set, so does everybody get to pitch in a little bit? The researchers, here the interesting thing for me is the remnant of Aya's reign, a couple of things, calling it the infinite garden was probably a bit wrong-headed, right, because that's fallen out of fashion, but subtraction, right, the process of subtraction, is Ethereum Foundation still in this process of subtraction, is this something that's still being pursued, or have we switched over into this idea that the Ethereum Foundation is essentially the guiding entity, as Christine Kim has been raising in her newsletter?

The organisers, okay, so Ethereum Cohorters, the Protocol Guild, and the chair of the ACB is always an Ethereum Foundation person, this is something again that Christine Kim brings up, it's a very, very powerful position, right, between Tim and Alex, they're essentially the people who decide when rough consensus is reached, effectively a little bit on a vibey kind of way during the calls, and that's something to be interrogated, although my position is actually it's better just to keep them, right, they're obviously very competent at it, but it's worth, from an academic article perspective, bringing up. The Ethereum Foundation, a can of worms, here represented by my favourite, Xiao Wei, so the Ethereum Foundation at the time of writing this article was effectively something we didn't really mention that much, and now has switched into this, as mentioned, this guiding role, to me that's the most fascinating question, the most fascinating difference between then and now, so the EF is something we didn't talk about, so the EF is now very much guiding what's happening. Okay, another group of stakeholders who may or may not be included, the end users and power users, so the average Joe and Jane represented here by LDF, who volunteered for this, someone who just wants ETH to go to 10K, and then the power users, who I've kept as Dr Nick here, but of course that's now controversial, right, he's a bit of a defector, so these are highly experienced and sophisticated class of Ethereum users, so we could also say you have Hasu, you know, specialist people, now I've been arguing for a long time that this is probably a group of people who are too messy to have involved in core governance, but it is fascinating to me that we've never figured out a feedback mechanism, now in articles in Coindesk, all the way back in 2003, 24, why don't we have some way for them to signal whether they agree that the EIP is the theme, or is the correct way to go, it seems something relatively simple to do, it could be done online, and it could also be done say at DevConnect or DevCon, and non-binding feedback, I don't know why we haven't done this, and by we here I'm talking broader Ethereum community. Okay, our three, the groups that will definitely be in, and I'm going to skip past them because of time, but these are the groups that are, I suspect, most likely going to be included in future core governance discussions, and they are a complete mess, right, it's really really complicated when you begin digging into it, so you can have a Nixos style homestaker, but you also have Chorus One, you also have Lido, you have Relays and Builders, and then the builders themselves here, represented by Lawrence, shout out to Wes Ham, we have a, I can see you guys there, right, so it's everything from say more aligned entities, like let's say Dune Analytics or L2B, all the way to centralised exchanges, right, so where do we have the criteria to say like to demarcate the boundaries of legitimacy in the imaginary sense, that's perhaps where a Shawe style DeFi punk criteria setting may become important. The roll-ups, who are now kind of in the cold culturally, but are the most integrated into governance, I feel actually that's probably the most existential topic we aren't really addressing, that we have long had this idea of the roll-up centric roadmap, and now we're back to scaling the L1, you know, healing that bond sounds a bit hippie-ish, but it is something I think we need to talk about at some point, maybe this is the way that we go about it.

The ambiguous stakeholders, those of you who know me know that these are my two, let's say, my ideological enemies, right, the media and the investors in VC, in particular types of media, not say nativist media like the Daily Guay or Bankless, although Bankless is obviously way better, but the Blockworks extended universe, right, that kind of group of podcasts where it's the VC talking heads, and I think there's a complicated question there that I'm going to talk about, I don't believe they should be included in protocol governance, but they are part of the stakeholder set, and we probably should begin including them to some degree. Now the other part that I want to talk about is today, obviously, we're talking about imaginaries, we have to talk about the emergence of this new imaginary which we can call the pragmatist imaginary, or which I'm calling the pragmatist imaginary. Today it's called Tomashism, last week it was Dankradism, I've got the blessing from Dankrad, now I have to get the blessing from Tomas. The way that I see it, it's like a Dread Pirate Robert situation, if you're pragmatically minded, business minded, it will change each time, depending on whether they may or may not be in the audience. I did see him a few days ago, but I was not confident enough to go up and talk to him.

So today it's Tomashism, this is someone who is interested in Ethereum's competitive position, so there's a bit of a repression here, when we say competitive position, what do I really mean? We mean Solana, right? That's the real threat, that's what we're really talking about. So maintaining Ethereum's competitive position, bringing in institutional app orientation, all those strategic initiatives, and thinking very much in the near term. So when you think of this Tomashism or Dankradism, I'm very much thinking of somebody who sees the job as like a two, three year timeline threat.

I do believe this group is Ethereum-aligned, to evoke that term, and they have an interest in the values, but they tend to minimise them, and they tend to use very specific language, security, privacy, and censorship resistance, which comes from PCAV Versaceo's Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto, where those are the three principles, but we don't tend to get much detail, and we do tend to see certain terms disappearing, decentralisation, permissionlessness, in particular, less and less said by this particular group. Now, I do also think that the pragmatist turn is in a productive relationship with what I like to call the Shawe, or OG Cypherpunk, the other imaginary, meaning Vitalik, Shawe, civil culture people, who are the long-term tinkerers, right? They're the ones who are really obsessed more with the 10-year plan. After this week, so I was thinking, like, okay, what's the best situation that we have at the moment? And I do believe the situation, more and more, is probably one where we need to stay out of each other's way.

It's temperamental. There are people who are more pragmatic. There are people who are practical and pragmatic. Leave them to it. And then the OG Cypherpunks, leave them to it.

Don't get into each other's way. And then maybe things will be okay, right? So maybe things will be fine. So yeah, why not both, to put it another way? Okay, my favourite group, in the more negative sense, is this group, the other pragmatist imaginary.

Now, if you're not a culture vulture like myself, right, who spends time listening to Ethereum-adjacent podcasts, you may not be super aware of this kind of thing, but there is another imaginary when it comes to Ethereum, post-ideological pragmatism. This is a term that comes from their world, right? It's not my term. They use it themselves. And in this group, I think the core difference is that they don't really care whether Ethereum is, like, you know, second or first, right?

So it's not about Ethereum beating Solana, et cetera. It's just that ETH, the asset, performs. ETH could be in the fifth position and Solana second, but if ETH has gone to 10K and the portfolio has gone up, the post-ideological pragmatists would be happy, right? That's the difference between them. They are also wildly disinterested in the values.

They dunk on them on the podcast, kind of completely the famous Unchained headline, crypto needs more builders, fewer values, right, to me the kind of worst post-ideological phrase. Now, this group, I think, is very influenced by specific media, by crypto, Twitter, and also the podcast. I won't get into it because I can see kind of the time ticking down. The short version is to just say, right, mimetically, my only goal this week was to introduce the term CTVC Podcast Industrial Complex, and I encourage people to use that term as much as possible under their posts. They are onto me.

They've started to follow me, and they have endorsed BlockWorth's Extended Universe, so now I just need them to endorse CTVC Podcast Industrial Complex, and all is done. So what is the mindset that you will see on these podcasts? Well, for me, it's very familiar. It's business school thinking. So I see it as a business schoolification of a crypto culture, so I'm a business school lecturer, so that's, you know, I can see that they were business students or finance students who are now applying the kind of thinking to our way more interesting, polycentric, cultural imaginaries, right?

They're trying to reduce us down to business school, do not let it happen, right? You do not want to exist in a world that's like KPMG, Deloitte, that's what we're escaping from, right? So how do they think? They think ETH is a product, right? So if we just figure out what ETH is as a product, everything will be fine.

That is Ethereum's primary mission, according to John C., and that's not how I see it. So ETH is a product, the Ethereum Foundation is a company, right, in this thinking, Ethereum itself is a company which has revenue, right, real economic value, the, yeah, cursed term of the BlockWorth Extended Universe, and then North Starism, a startup cultural term, it's from entrepreneurship and marketing. My colleagues used it for many years, and I was really surprised to see it actually turn up in Airworld. So we have to reject product thinking, we have to reject company thinking, and we definitely have to reject North Star thinking, if only because they're too bland for us to live with, so don't let it happen.

Okay, that being said, this is my things I thought about this week. Slide, so it doesn't really spit, it's just thrown together very, very quickly. So it is clear, right, that we have these post-ideological blockchains, at least when it comes to Solana, so what should we do? My position is we need to be aware that defections are coming, Nick is the canary in the coal mine, he's almost certain that people are going to begin leaving for Solana over time. Also, I think we need to be aware that there are these Solana super teams, right, these Solana super teams embedded in places like in Dublin, where every day I go to the hacker lounge and there's maybe like 10 people there, they're all under the age of 25, they're a permanent presence, they meet every Friday, we need to have something like this.

And then a warning from Bitcoin governance, if you want to see what's happening in governance, look at Bitcoin, it's always two years ahead of Ethereum, and while it's good that the Ethereum foundation is taking on this very robust and muscular role and so on, that's only going to work until people kind of turn on it, so we have introduced into the sort of sphere something of the populist versus elitist dynamic, and in Bitcoin at the moment there is currently a populist revolt against the elite, and that's going to come for us at some point. Okay, so I'll end here just by saying, if you're writing today, it would focus on the new governance process, a wider stakeholder set to interview, we talk about Solana, and we talk about the pragmatist imaginary, but it being academia you can expect to see that in maybe like three years or something like that. So okay, I'll leave it there, thank you.