For those of us who have spent years building from the ground up, it feels less like joining a socio-economic revolution and more like wandering in search of The Castle. In this famous Kafka novel, the protagonist finds himself in an infinite loop of polite deferrals.

For grassroots ETH event organisers, it’s an infinite garden.

As an Irishman, I’ve become accustomed to bureaucracy. Pot hole disputes in the Dáil, smothering farmers with paperwork, too many AI oversight bodies and little action to follow. 

What I’m afraid of is what comes with it. Corruption, mismanagement, budgets ballooning beyond belief. We’ve seen it all, from bike sheds costing hundreds of thousands to backdoor payment scandals.

“But that’s web2 behaviour!” we said, with light in our eyes.

Ethereum has undeniable anti-establishment origins. It was and still is an intoxicating ideology, one that afforded a sense of hope and belonging to many like myself. Somewhere along the line, this took a back seat, best reflected by the organisation’s restructuring earlier this year.

As an optimist, the emphasis on engineering excellence is noble and commendable: it should bring benefits to all. As a pessimist, most people–to the tune of billions–don’t really care about millisecond improvements or whatever.

Yes, I hear you. Certain things need to scale for Ethereum to handle billions of users’ daily activity. Makes sense, but I think of Rory Sutherland in this instance. A conservative, indeed, with an uncanny ability to illuminate the ingenuity of simple marketing tactics. 

Of his many famous and worn-out examples, my favourite is travelling by train. He simply asks how one can make rail transport so enjoyable that nobody wants to drive. 

Applying Sutherland’s thinking, it might be best for someone at the EF to spin up a user success department. Tim Daub says it best in this cast. To paraphrase, a decade of research and development to deliver a worse-than-legacy experience (and not in the Wildcat sense).

Having inspected the EF org chart, it’s clear that no one is explicitly managing or tracking the holistic success of users or communities. The closest thing is the recently launched Ethereum Everywhere, but time will tell how that fares. 

Granted, people are working on user experience and user interface, but, for all the feedback forms filled out over the years and grantee community calls attended, it is hard to detect someone solely tasked with making sure Ethereans at large succeed in their efforts. 

To be frank, I’ve never really rushed to something for engineering brilliance alone anyway. Even design features themselves don’t cut it. In other words, Ethereum feels like an expensive, brand-new train that doesn’t stop where you need it to. 

This feeling of neglect is precisely what Project Mirror, a recent qualitative snapshot of the ecosystem’s perceptions, identifies several archetypes. Among them are The Abandoned, labelled as web3 app builders who experience “zero human support”. 

I heard a very intellectual bunch of people talk about this in Berlin earlier this year, namely that a lot of time and effort has gone into defining things that don’t affect the people among ‘the next billion’.

Definitions, discussions or debates around credible neutrality and what a BUIDler actually is are virtually non-existent. If I’m wrong, please correct me.

Among the labyrinth of spin-outs, collectives, fellowships, protocol teams, grant programmes, and whatever else you can find, there’s bureaucracy in open-source clothing. It’s a paradox.

This reflects a broader geopolitical choice identified in Paul Murphy’s ‘Geopolitics at the Edge’. Murphy contrasts two global trajectories: Solarpunk, defined by decentralized cooperation and open-source systems, and Cyberpunk, which leads to ‘digital feudalism, restricted participation’.

If you’re not blessed with an ‘ethereum.org’ email, you likely operate in a vacuum of accountability. Personally, I have yet to experience a functional feedback loop and have spoken to many other grassroots organisers who feel the same. 

We are talking about people who have championed Ethereum in their local environments, usually on a voluntary or not-for-profit basis, for years. There’s an emotional support group specific to European-based ETH event organisers, with about 100 members. 

I can’t speak for them all, but I’ve detected a few things that indicate the EF is drifting into the very Cyberpunk vision it was philosophically established to reject. Namely, a lack of effective transparency in resource allocation decisions. Some communities get this, some get that. Lots of confusion there, and cookie-cutter responses are very common.

Everyone is friendly, but no one is responsible. This creates a strange sense of digital homelessness, with many wandering around the infinite garden like Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. And nowhere is that more evident than in the story of one humble island nation.

Famed for its creative flair, Ireland tills its own patch. Over three years, the little ETH Dublin that could has run three annual events in Ireland, many side events outside Ireland, and contributed to an onboarding program that’s actively being scaled for DevConnect ARG.

A personal badge of honour for me is hosting the world’s first Crypto Céilí alongside Base Ireland and SheFi. Super cool. 

All of this was accomplished by a team of ~14 volunteers with less than €150,000. In corporate terms, it’s an impressive cost-to-impact ratio. Of that chunk of change, which is less than a high-level salary at the EF, >10% came from the Ethereum Support Programme. 

Call us ungrateful, but we’re not. We are confused that, despite doing so much with relatively little, there’s less and less support form the EF.

We were informed that first-time events weren’t eligible and previous grantees are favoured, but that turned out to be inaccurate. We were allegedly denied funding for operating under a Limited Liability wrapper, which is kind of unfair when you look at the way things work here. 

We introduced an idea to relax the definition of what a builder could mean, which precluded us from funding. Later, even though this funding MO changed, our team was still excluded.

The list could go on, but in essence, we followed the publicly available materials as best we could and replicated the structure of other successful ETH community events. None of this seemed to matter, and no one could really explain to us why.

Meanwhile, the Solana Superteam have set up a hub in Dublin where builders can come in weekly and develop their knowledge or skills. It’s even just a cool place to hang out if you’re mildly interested in the blockchain space.  

This bureaucratic pattern speaks directly to the principle of cosmolocalism, referring back to Murphy. He advocates for a framework that shares what’s light globally (protocol) and what’s heavy (infrastructure, funding, and community organisation), locally. 

What’s rewarded in a system so procedural it forgets its purpose is not alignment, but proximity. At home, we say, “It’s who you know, not what you know.” 

To be frank again, I don’t really care if it’s nepotism at play, but let’s just be clear. My interrogation of the EF’s machinations over the years has revealed so much anecdotal dissonance, I can’t believe it sometimes. I experienced the EF’s hiring processes mirror its bureaucratic funding culture, telling me I’m overqualified for this, underqualified for that.

In my own applications to jobs at or adjacent to the EF, even referrals and adequate qualifications yield arbitrary outcomes. I was overqualified for one role, but not the right fit for another, although it actually aligned much better with my career.

I was rejected from a DevConnect Scholarship on the basis that I had already attended paid my own way to DevCon SEA the year previous, which seems like a silly reason. 

I’m pretty confident that, if the list of this year’s scholars were made available, I’d find at least one person who’s already been.

Budkowski was right to warn that we shouldn’t “onboard the next billion” until we understand what those words demand of us. The words don’t mean anything. The rhetoric of growth has replaced the substance of care

Project Mirror further corroborates this with another archetype, The Next Generation, composed mostly of students and the Global South. This group chooses ecosystems based on utility, among other things, like job opportunities. 

It’s not solely Ethereum’s failure; it’s a human one. This is web2’s customer-success logic: help arrives only after the crisis, not before. 

And therein lies the irony: god knows how many resources and time We3co, Optimism, Espresso Systems, and the EF itself poured into the Project Mirror report, when we’ve already been telling them for free.

If only the EF rediscovered the courage to care for its stewards before it seeks to onboard the world, things would be different. Empathy is conducive to efficiency, actually. 

If made it this far ... thank you <3

Maybe you are an event organiser or possible a hacker/participant, there is a home for you.

We have dubbed it the Hacker Archives (for now), spearheaded by Alina Latinina with support from me (Caolán Walsh). Soon we will be collecting your feedback on bringing care and empathy into BUIDLing :)