The other day, someone I met at Cannes sent me this message:

It honestly just made me happy, and made me want to have that conversation with everyone on the planet. But that obviously doesn’t scale. So the next best thing is to write a post about what we talked about.

I’ve known for a long time that if Ethereum succeeds, it will make a real difference in the world. But it’s taken me a while to put into words exactly why.

I think it’s because the problems Ethereum tries to solve are hard to see. They’re baked into systems we’ve grown used to, so we don’t always notice how broken things are.

In a recent CNBC article about Ethereum’s 10-year birthday, Vitalik described the mission as making Ethereum “a really valuable part of global infrastructure that helps make the internet and the economy a more free and open place.”

That might sound like a nice tagline, but isn’t the internet already free and open?

At first glance, maybe. But if you look closer at how we got here, you’ll see something different. The internet started as an open, messy, beautiful space. Then slowly, it became siloed. The rules stopped being written to give you freedom and started being written to keep you locked in and extract from you.

The early internet showed what’s possible when no one controls the system. It was a rare window where open protocols won, governments funded the infrastructure, and corporate gatekeepers hadn’t yet taken over.

What do I mean when I say “open protocols won”?

I like Timber Schroff’s definition from Summer of Protocols: protocols “enable repeatable behaviors at scale without central authority.”

That might sound abstract, but it’s what made the early internet magical.

When you send an email or visit a website, you’re using protocols like HTTP or SMTP, systems anyone can build on without asking permission. No company owns them. No platform decides what message you can send or what page you can view. That’s the power of open protocols.

Gmail is a good example. It’s built on SMTP, an open protocol, which means you can leave at any time, take your email and messages with you, and everything will still work. Because Gmail has to compete with other email clients, it can’t lock you in, and as a result, it’s free, works well, and doesn’t show ads in most places. The open protocol keeps them honest.

For a while, it worked. Anyone could launch a website, share a video, or publish a blog. It was chaotic, creative, and deeply human.

Yes, you can still do those things today. But back then, it wasn’t filtered through an algorithm. You didn’t need a platform’s blessing, or worry that your reach would be throttled, your content demonetized, or your account banned without recourse. What you posted showed up in RSS feeds, blog sites, forums. Discovery was messy, but it was real.

In 2006, Time named "You" the Person of the Year, because for the first time, regular people were in control of the content, the platforms, and the culture.

That moment did not last, but it gave us a glimpse of what an open internet could be.

Ethereum didn’t get the same head start the internet did. The early internet was funded by governments, supported by universities, and eventually adopted by industry. Ethereum had none of that. It grew under pressure. It had to fight to survive, not just in the market but in the face of legal uncertainty and regulators who didn’t even understand what it was.

Despite being fully open source, with live calls anyone can join and a protocol anyone in the world can verify from home, Ethereum was met with skepticism and resistance.

Imagine if everything Apple built was open source and every strategic decision was made in public. That level of transparency is almost unthinkable. And yet that’s how Ethereum operates.

It starts with fixing finance.

What the internet did to information, Ethereum will do for finance.

Before the internet, your access to knowledge depended almost entirely on where you were born. If you didn’t live near a good library, weren’t in a strong school district, or didn’t have a shot at a top university, you were at a massive disadvantage.

The internet changed that. Borders started to matter less. Anyone with a connection could learn, explore, and teach themselves almost anything.

Finance is still waiting for that kind of update.

Traditional finance is closed, outdated, and tilted against the average user. Markets are only open during banker hours. Core infrastructure runs on code written decades ago. The rules are opaque, which allows insiders to exploit the system while regular people are left in the dark.

Entire regions are excluded.

https://www.unescwa.org/news/escwa-warns-nearly-65-adults-arab-region-still-unbanked-amid-sdg-push

Entire groups are systematically overcharged, steered into worse products, or excluded altogether.

People’s savings are trapped in systems they don’t understand or trust, while their wealth is quietly inflated away.

The result is a world where opportunity is unevenly distributed and trust in institutions keeps eroding. Ethereum gives us the chance to rebuild financial infrastructure from scratch and make it accessible, transparent, and fair.

Borders are imaginary lines, yet they determine so much of your life.

The internet made knowledge free and open.

Ethereum is doing the same for value.

Everyone should be free to learn, earn, and build no matter where they’re born.

That alone would be massive. Making the financial system neutral, accessible, and global is not some small improvement. It would shift power, unlock opportunity, and improve the lives of millions.

But that is only the beginning.

We are going through a digital version of the industrial revolution.

The original industrial revolution brought undeniable progress, but also caused harm we didn’t fully understand at the time, child labor, dangerous working conditions, environmental damage. It took decades to respond and adapt. Eventually, we introduced cleaner energy, labor protections, and safer factories.

The internet brought global access to information, but it also created systems that exploit attention. Social apps are designed to keep us on them as long as possible. They don’t aim to make us angry, they just show us whatever keeps us engaged the longest. It turns out that outrage, anxiety, and conflict are especially effective at doing that.

The result is rising depression, shrinking attention spans, and collapsing intimacy. These aren’t random outcomes. They’re the byproduct of systems optimized for engagement, not well-being.

We finally have the foundations for an open social ecosystem. Protocols like Farcaster are creating a world where identity is portable, where anyone can build a client, and where platforms compete to serve users instead of extract from them.

The network effects of Twitter are massive. Replacing it will not happen overnight. But open systems have one key advantage: they force apps to compete on user experience, not control.

There’s no central company that can shut down a better product just because it becomes too popular. Take Reddit, for example. Apollo was a third-party app that many people preferred over the official one. It had a cleaner design, better features, and a more thoughtful user experience. But Reddit made it impossible to operate by raising API prices, effectively killing it.

If Reddit were a protocol instead of a platform, Apollo could have kept growing. That’s what open systems make possible. When users are free to choose, and developers are free to build, the best experiences rise to the top.

And it is not just Twitter or Reddit.

It is Facebook and Instagram deciding who sees what and shaping our social lives through engagement algorithms.
It is YouTube controlling discovery and demonetizing creators without warning.
It is TikTok optimizing for addiction instead of well-being.
It is LinkedIn gatekeeping professional identity and reach.
It is Spotify owning the relationship between artists and their fans.
It is Amazon and Apple taking a cut of every purchase and locking developers into closed ecosystems.
It is Tinder putting your dating life behind a paywall and optimizing for swipes, not connection.
It is every platform that locks you in, extracts from you, and makes you play by their rules.

It’s time to replace those systems with something more open, fair, and humane.

That list isn't meant to be complete. It's meant to show what reimagining the internet to be more free and open can unlock.

This change might take a decade or longer, but it’s a fight worth fighting for.

And it doesn’t mean everything needs to be built entirely on Ethereum. Most apps in the future will likely use Ethereum for a small part, such as transferring value (money, financial assets, digital items, etc.) or verifying identity, while relying on other tools to complete the stack.

Zero knowledge for privacy. Decentralized storage for permanence. Peer-to-peer protocols for messaging. Ethereum is just one part of a growing toolkit for building open, user-owned systems.

So let’s go back to the conversation that inspired this post.

The story I just told is beautiful, but none of this will happen on its own.

We need developers. We need storytellers.
We need educators, designers, organizers, researchers, philosophers.
We need people who care.

One of the best things about this space is that you don’t need permission. You can just start doing things.

You're not too late. Ethereum needs people like you, believers.

If you ever feel lost or unsure how you fit in, message me. I’d love to talk.