The full title should sound like “Why Ethereum Foundation is an absolutely unprecedented phenomenon in human history and why Vitalik should get the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences”.

There is this phrase “dual use product” – a product that can be utilized for both civilian and military purposes. When it comes to emerging heavy technologies (airplanes, AI, Internet, nuclear power, etc.) – they require huge investments into R&D. By huge, I mean billions and billions invested purely into technology development that occasionally may not work out.

The only type of entity who is ready to provide this amount of investment into R&D – governments. So, the technology is developed relying on governments funding and serving the goals governments want it to serve. And only after that, it’s wrapped into a commercial product that can be used by Enterprise or other commercial entities. The second stage assumes low R&D so it can be backed by canonical VCs. But the first stage cannot as no sane VC will give let us say $200M purely on R&D that might require $200M after that for the same purpose.

It’s just how heavy tech adoption has worked throughout history and is working today.

The underlying cryptography of blockchain – zero knowledge cryptography can be referred to as emerging heavy tech. However, it was bootstrapped by Ethereum Foundation, quite a credibly neutral organization funding itself. They granted a number of famous and unfamous researchers, university labs, early-stage startups requiring uncertain R&D, etc. All in all, it shaped the proof of concept for zero-knowledge cryptography that has potential of huge worldwide impact. We don’t know today if it will be as meaningful as AI, hardware acceleration, or nanorobots, but at least it has solid chances to make a difference. Now the ball is already partially on the product side. However, there is still a lot of heavy R&D as well.

This precedent illustrates that DeepTech can be bootstrapped by a neutral community-driven non-profit organization. And this is a big deal. If it worked once – it can work again. If you asked some DeepTech OG 20 years ago if that was possible – they would tell you no, no, and no.

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Have a thought you want to share – drop me an email lisaakselrod@gmail.com