From its original announcement, Ethereum had the ambition to tackle impossible-seeming ideas: from a "modular, stateful, Turing-complete contract scripting system married to a blockchain" to building the most secure & scalable proof-of-stake system: Serenity.
None of this was straightforward: Ethereum took 2+ years to launch from that initial announcement, and the Beacon Chain was the result of a half-decade of R&D, including some dead ends.
Between "impossible" and "inevitable", we have to go through the "impractical" đ
However, this process doesn't only happen at the protocol level: it's deeply ingrained in the ecosystem.
Onchain, the most notable example is DAOs. An idea that was hinted at in the 90s, formalized in the 2010s, but didn't have anywhere to exist before Ethereum.
TheDAO was Ethereum's most popular app in 2016, became the largest online crowdfunding event in history, and, after it got hacked led to the most intense "messy middle" in Ethereum's history...!
To put this in context: TheDAO had more ETH in it than *all L2s combined* đ
But that wasn't the end of DAOs: a couple years after this incident, @MolochDAO appeared and proved that Ethereum was the place for DAOs to exist and scale.
Now, they power all aspects of Ethereum and beyond, from L2s, to DeFi, public goods, and even things like @UkraineDAO.
@MolochDAO @UkraineDAO And, again, DAOs are only one example of this pattern:
- DeFi went from @EtherDelta to @Uniswap nearing $3T in total volume
- Sharding shipped, as the rollup centric roadmap, now securing billions
- Prediction markets went from fringe econ to mainstream
- ... and The Merge đ
At the protocol level, zkEVMs are a great example: they felt impossible just a few years ago, and now @eth_proofs tracks tons of teams who are getting closer and closer to real-time proving of Ethereum blocks!
Onchain, we went from blockspace being used for scams, to speculation, then building an internal economy that's starting to see signs of adoptions outside of crypto. We can now seriously start designing for a world where Ethereum secures trillions!
And beyond that, efforts like d/acc are aligning Ethereum's philosophy of progress with other technologies, Summer of Protocols is trying to derive a grand theory of protocols, both for crypto and beyond, and @Zuzalu_city & @JoinEdgeCity are embedding Ethereum's values (and technologies!) into literal cities đ
@MolochDAO @UkraineDAO @EtherDelta @Uniswap @eth_proofs Ethereum's roadmap is to make the impossible inevitable. We believe in somETHing, sufficiently so to get us through the many, many impracticalities.
And that's what we'll keep doing for the next 10 years. Happy Birthday, @ethereumfndn đ„ł
@MolochDAO @UkraineDAO @EtherDelta @Uniswap @eth_proofs Ethereum's roadmap is to make the impossible inevitable. We believe in somETHing, sufficiently so to get us through the many, many impracticalities.
And that's what we'll keep doing for the next 10 years.
Happy Birthday, @ethereumđ„ł
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