Ethereum's distinctive property is hardness
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 mil...
Ethereum's distinctive property is hardness
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 mil...
Making sense of Trust Experience (TX)
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 co...
Making sense of Trust Experience (TX)
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 co...
What was Bitcoin's total transaction volume in 2021?
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:Ark Invest also posted a chart with similar figures, showing Bitcoin sett...
What was Bitcoin's total transaction volume in 2021?
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:Ark Invest also posted a chart with similar figures, showing Bitcoin sett...
Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains
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 arti...
Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains
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 arti...
The Year in Ethereum 2021
By Josh Stark & Evan Van NessEthereum 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 infrastructureArtists use it to give permanence to their workAssets use it as a settlement layerCommunities use it to govern shared resourc...
The Year in Ethereum 2021
By Josh Stark & Evan Van NessEthereum 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 infrastructureArtists use it to give permanence to their workAssets use it as a settlement layerCommunities use it to govern shared resourc...
