# H.O.P.E. Reclaiming Ethereum's Future

- Channel: [Dappcon](https://streameth.org/dappcon)
- Date: 2025-06-18
- Duration: 15:50
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/6852de5d90bd41297b969cfc

## Transcript

Thank you. Hi everybody, thanks for showing up at this early hour. Yeah, so I was asked to talk about whatever I want and the reason was that about a year ago I held a talk at the Ethereum 10 year jubilee meetup where I was not all too positive all the time about, you know, Ethereum, from a good place obviously. And so I guess I'm invited to just share my thoughts on, you know, how I see what's happening. I hope it's interesting. So it starts with a little bit of history. Being in crypto used to be really simple, at least when you joined early. You would just go to local Bitcoin and Ethereum meetups to find other lost souls who had really no, you know, desire to have a normal job. And it was really a unique experience. I just shared two photos here. One, literally on the day the network launched, we had this big rainbow on the sky over Berlin. That was kind of cool. And then shortly thereafter, I was on an Ethereum meetup and funny enough, Meinhard, who is standing there in front of the network dashboard of Ethereum, now sits here in the first row. So that's very cool. Hi Meinhard. You were the leading miner, I think, on the Ethereum network back then, for like a few weeks. So it was simple to be in crypto because there was no moral implications, I feel, at all of doing this. It was a nerdy hobby. And I feel this has changed. And I want to just sort of linger a little bit on how it's different now to be in crypto. And I feel there are more ways than ever to do harm when you touch this technology. And, you know, to some extent, you should be able to harm yourself when you touch crypto because you're only truly free if you can hurt yourself in whatever you do. But I think what none of us really had on the radar is the fact that just by swapping tokens on base or using Coinbase to cash out, you're now paying for a military parade in the United States. That's kind of weird. I didn't expect this to happen. And obviously, there's probably a lot of context why Coinbase did it. But in the end, they still decided to sponsor a military parade. And I just remember how there was an ethos in crypto that was like universally shared, which is like we don't like physical violence and the monopoly on violence by the state. So pretty awkward. Now, I want to raise the question, how can we reclaim Ethereum's future? And I just want to say off the bat that I don't have any answers either. I don't really know, but I have some opinions like probably most of you. And so, you know, I'm going to share them. Since I think since I started this space, everything was always very technical. I tried to condense it into a formula, what I think Ethereum could use more of instead of less for the next 10 years. And I sort of condensed it into humility, openness, and plurality. And I just want to share what I think these words could mean here. Starting with humility, the reason I got, I think, one-shotted by Ethereum back in, I think, 2014 when I heard about it, was really Vitalik's epistemic framework that he developed in his blog posts. It just totally blew my mind how differently you can look at the world and understand things, understand causal connections between things, be it in finance, philosophy, how the Internet works, accounting. He was able to synthesize things in new ways that created genuinely new explanations for why the world is how it is and where we should go. And today I feel we kind of forgot a lot of that. And we're like in this, to me, low IQ range of like fighting about cypherpunk and defypunk and the current thing, punk. And I'm like, what the fuck is even cypherpunk? Like, is it even a good ideology to adopt? I mean, I don't know, I'm not a historian on cypherpunk, but when I read my Twitter feed, everybody's saying, yeah, Ethereum should be more cypherpunk again, or now it should be defypunk. It's like, what the fuck is this even? And the best, I think, epistemic framework that I found in my, I guess, 40 years of being on this planet is what's being referred to as fallibilism or a fallibilist mindset. I stumbled upon it through David Deutsch, a really great philosopher and physicist. He co-invented quantum computing in the 80s. And it's the idea that you can be infinitely optimistic in this world just by virtue of the fact that errors are discoverable and fixable over time. So just as much as problems are inevitable, so are solutions. Provided that criticism stays free and knowledge remains conjectural. Meaning, as long as we stay immune to any kind of ideology, be it socialist or fascist or cypherpunk or this punk, but we just stay epistemologically humble, we can solve every problem that comes our way in this industry. And I don't understand why we need to play this stupid game of trading one ideology for another. I just don't understand it. Next one, openness. Obviously, Ethereum is an open network. I think Ethereum is one of the most open infrastructures you can find on the web to build on. Obviously, that's its premise. At the same time, I feel over the last 10 years, we've acquired some sort of neo-institutional rot throughout the industry, which means this layer of professional careerists and middle managers who just gatekeep things, I think, in this ecosystem. So I don't want to go too deep into this because it's a complex topic and to some extent unavoidable, but I feel we have too much gatekeeping in Ethereum, and I think that might be part of the reason why other ecosystems seem to be accelerating faster at the moment, because maybe there's less gatekeeping in other places. Just putting that one out there. And lastly, plurality. This is something that sort of has been with me, lingering with me now for a while, and obviously there are books about plurality, and I'm far from an expert on this philosophical stream of plurality and so on, but I do think it's important I want to mention it here. Here's a picture of David Clark. There's this famous interview, I think, from 2012 or 2014, or I don't know. He's being interviewed on Bitcoin, and in this short segment he says, well, you know, what I learned as the designer of CCPIP is that all things that we think of as specifiable or technically constrained very quickly end up embedded in a social ecosystem, which in some sense defies the simplicity of the protocol that you've designed. And I feel in crypto and Ethereum, maybe specifically, we've always had this expectation that just by virtue of designing a simple protocol that has some incentives maybe well aligned, we now solve the real problem of rolling this out into the world, and we have not. And I feel Ethereum, if anything, should become more embedded in the world and adopt a more pluralist mindset and not be so dogmatic, which goes back to this epistemic humility, about, you know, well, is it fully decentralized? Is it not fully decentralized? Does it follow this current dogma or that current dogma? I feel this has been holding us back now for too long, and I think we should be more open to various ways of doing things. So that leads me to this Ethereum slide, which, sort of looking back, obviously it's not a correct or the only way to look at the last 10 years, but I feel that in the early years, 2013 to 17, we really rewarded the early believers in this idea of a new settlement layer, decentralized, open, permissionless, and programmable, Turing-complete, right? That was the one differentiating factor to Bitcoin. In 2018, we rewarded the early, you know, DeFi plumbers laying the financial pipes to make it possible to swap the tokens, to take out loans, all that stuff. Afterwards, we rewarded, and I think most recently, we've seen it with stablecoin issuers, the people who really believe that we should bring fiat on chain and stocks on chain and securities and all the stuff. I feel these people are being rewarded now, and the open question is, well, who will be rewarded next? What do we want to see in this ecosystem develop more of? And I feel that if we blindly follow down this, you know, cypherpunk, cypherpunk, cypherpunk stuff, I'm not sure we're making the right decisions, because at least, you know, and that's probably very debatable, but this idea of, you know, trust no one, verify everything, only trust in the numbers might lead us to build a low-trust society as opposed to a high-trust society. But I think we're all much happier as humans in high-trust societies, and there is this paradox in crypto where if you have a high-trust society, you probably don't need a decentralized ledger in the first place, right? You could do it, right? You could count stones like people did it thousands of years ago instead of, you know, having some ledger in the cloud. Paradoxically, I think the way the world is developing, we need to develop infrastructure where you don't have to trust no one, but I'm not sure it's a good north star to have culturally and, you know, philosophically in terms of what kind of society do we build. So I feel the opposite of trust no one is build bridges. And I feel Ethereum needs to build more bridges. Personally, I've been a bridge builder in this space now for 10 years, and it's been fun and frustrating. The first, you know, bridge building I've started doing was back in 2017 when I founded, I think, the first crypto lobby organization in Europe. I mean, it was in Germany at the time. And then a couple of years later, I founded with other great people in Europe the first, I think, community-focused crypto lobby organization in Europe, in Brussels, called the European Crypto Initiative, EUCI. And we've been building bridges to regulators where, you know, most people in the space think it's not worth talking to regulators. We've been educating them on DeFi and, you know, giving— like, we spend thousands of hours in calls and meetings with regulators explaining them why what we do matters and why there is some deep moral truth and justification in what we do, like some inherent goodness that this world needs to sort of move forward. And, you know, with this kind of signaling, we are able to reach people far beyond, you know, sort of what we should be able to reach and impact, which is great. And lastly, sorry for shilling my project now, I suppose, but that's, you know, an example of what I consider bridge building is a Web3 social application that I've been now developing for over three years called Common Ground. And the idea of Common Ground, again, is to bring, you know, people from all over the, not just crypto space, but kind of the Web3 space, together on, you know, in one environment in their own communities and be able to, you know, collaborate better, exchange knowledge, and retain knowledge better, and so on and so forth. I feel building bridges in Ethereum has been a pretty, you know, ungrateful job for the last decade. I don't want to complain, but I think there wasn't too much support. I think now might be the time where we want to, you know, spread our aperture, make it bigger, and bring, you know, more attention to these kinds of efforts too, not just the technical development. That's pretty much everything I wanted to share in this little talk. Thank you very much for listening. I'm happy to answer any questions if you might have them. Thanks. Thank you, Florian, for your provocative talk. Any questions? Right here, down front. Here's your microphone. Hey, Florian. Thanks for the shout-outs. Do you think you moved the needle on regulation, or did you just kind of spend a lot of time and they were like, thanks, but we'll do it the other way? Actually, yeah, we did move the needle a lot. Let me pick two examples. I think the biggest one is that we managed to exempt decentralized finance, so DAOs, decentralized protocols like Aave and so on, to exempt them from this regulatory burden of this European regulation called MICA that entered into force earlier this year. There is a paragraph in there, Recital 22. It's not even a real paragraph in the text. It's like a preemptive exclusion that says, well, if your project is not operated in a centralized way but fully decentralized, you can ignore this entire regulation and continue doing what you do in this sort of illegal space, as Gavin Wood called it. And that's kind of ridiculous that we achieved this, to me, because, I mean, crazy. Can you write those lines? Pardon me? Who wrote those lines? So, I wrote a long report on how this came into the final text. The suggestion came through the Portuguese team inside the council, but then how did the Portuguese, so there is a long chain of causality how to find that, but I would love to actually share this. I've long thought that crypto should have some sort of retro-PGF, but for public policy impact. Frankly, we were told that this would not be a good idea because that would make political outcomes sort of purchasable or sort of like monetize them. I understand that viewpoint, too, so I don't really know how to solve this. Yeah, thanks for asking that question. That's a great question. Other questions for Florian? One of my favorite aspects of Ethereum culture is its willingness to critique itself. So, thank you so much for your great talk. Please, a round of applause for Florian.