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Hardness is the capability to make the future more certain. Ethereum offers us hardness. We can give Ethereum code and receive a very strong guarantee that it will run any time we call on it. We can give Ethereum data and know with certainty it will still be available in the future, unaltered and uncorrupted. These simple building blocks give rise to more complex forms of coordination. Money. Contracts. Governance. Identity. Today Ethereum is the hard foundation of a digital economy where millions collaborate across time and space and nation. ...

The distinctive value of blockchains is that they can be reliable. Blockchains can be made consistently resistant to manipulation, censorship, or capture. Their design can make them reliably transparent and accessible. Blockchains do not merely have those properties temporarily - we value them because we have good reason to believe this characteristic hardness will persist. This deceptively simple property has enabled higher-order features. By combining this reliability with a programmable computing environment, blockchains have enabled digital property (like cryptocurrencies, tokens, and NFTs), complex global financial systems, and other use-cases where we care about reliability, like identity systems and social networks. ...

By Josh Stark & Bruno Lulinski In the Year in Ethereum 2021, we published a chart comparing the total transaction volume of the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. Last year, Ethereum transferred approximately $11.6 trillion (ETH and ERC-20s), and Bitcoin transferred approximately $4.6 trillion (BTC and USDT). After publishing, we saw a graph from Galaxy Digital claiming that in 2021 Bitcoin had settled $12.41 trillion USD: ...

0. What do a book, a radio broadcast, and the human voice all have in common? Today the answer is easy: they all contain information. But if you asked someone the same question 100 years ago, they would struggle. They would not have easily identified that these different things all share an abstract property like “information”. The modern idea of information is a recent invention. It was not until the 1940s that new communications technologies pushed people working on the cutting edge to articulate that there was something universal underlying sound, electromagnetic waves, symbols on paper, and much more. ...

By Josh Stark & Evan Van Ness Ethereum is the foundation for a digital civilization. It is hardened, secure, and reliable. It is the bedrock necessary to support the digital cities being built on top of it. Those cities are growing fast. Because Ethereum is open to everyone, many different users have found reasons to build on it: Markets use it as financial infrastructure Artists use it to give permanence to their work Assets use it as a settlement layer Communities use it to govern shared resources This year Ethereum applications exploded into public consciousness. The old term “web3” became fashionable again as the world began to understand the vision of a more decentralized internet built on Ethereum. ...

On Earth 2 history took a slightly different course. Computers, as we know them, were never invented. There was no analytical engine, no IBM, no Xerox PARC, and no Macintosh. But all that changed on a sunny day in 1972, when Alan Alcorn revealed his invention to the world - a machine he called Pong: a person-to-person electronic tennis system. Pong was a large box about 5 feet tall, containing some silicon & wires, a television screen, and a few buttons & dials. Pong, he explained, was a “video game” - a kind of electronic sport you could play with friends. ...

Ethereum is the digital frontier. Because it is open and programmable, Ethereum offers a vast uncharted expanse filled with opportunity. Over the last few years, this frontier has attracted its first major settlements. The freewheeling bazaar of decentralized finance (“DeFi”) has grown into a sector that is beginning to compete with Silicon Valley. This year, a second ecosystem began to put down roots: the creator economy of cryptoart, music, and media. ...

Ethereum began as a blank canvas. Ethereum is an open, permissionless blockchain that developers can use to create any kind of application they want. This year, the early strokes laid down on that canvas began to form into a coherent picture. You don’t have to squint so much to see the direction Ethereum is going. Protocols and applications built on Ethereum are beginning to find product-market fit, quickly building communities of thousands of paying users. ...

Two partners at Union Square Ventures recently published separate blogs critical of Ethereum: “Is Ethereum the AOL of Crypto?” by Albert Wenger, and “Some Thoughts on Crypto” by Fred Wilson. I’m fond of saying that “Ethereum needs better critics”. Hopefully Albert and Fred continue being critics, and through debate with the Ethereum community, become better ones over time. A positive trait in the Ethereum community is our interest in deliberately seeking out flaws, exposing them, and fixing them. ...

By Josh Stark & Evan Van Ness Ethereum began as a bold experiment. Can we build a universal platform for digital money and assets, un-censorable applications, and decentralized organizations? We started with a slightly smaller experiment: was it possible to launch a blockchain that could execute arbitrary programs? Over time, the Ethereum community began new experiments. Would developers find it interesting? What applications are actually useful? The community learned from its successes and failures, and iterated on their work. New people joined the community and started running their own experiments. ...