The internet is the best thing in the world, and Ethereum has a chance to make it even better. Let me explain how I see the future of Ethereum, and compare it to what others have been talking about.
Let’s start with Georgios’s post on Ethereum’s North Star
This is a nice TODO list. But not a “north star”. I imagine telling my dad: “Hey Dad, Ethereum’s North Star is to scale horizontally, like the cloud taught us”. 1) He probably doesn’t even know what this means and 2) even if he did, it’s not very inspiring.
A proper North Star tells you something about the destination.
A proper North Star tells you where we are trying to go.
Next let’s look at Sassal’s post on Ethereum’s North Star:
Roadmaps and North Stars are not the same. When trying to articulate Ethereum’s vision, I don’t like starting with the full roadmap. But if you look at the left side of this picture, it does includes six goals for Ethereum:
The Merge: proof of stake improvements
The Surge: 100,000 transactions per second and beyond
The Scourge: credibly neutral, censorship resistant, MEV resistant
The Verge: Verifying blocks should be super easy
The Purge: simplify the protocol, eliminate technical debt, and limit costs of participating in the network
The Splurge: everything else (such as Account Abstraction)
These six goals are an excellent description of what Ethereum is trying to achieve. But the biggest question still remains: why are we trying to achieve these six goals? What destination are we trying to reach?
The best destination I’ve heard so far is Vitalik’s 2016 vision of the “World Computer”. Ethereum will be a global, decentralized computing platform that the whole world can use. This is a really cool and powerful vision. Something that had never existed before.
The problem with this destination is that, in some sense, we already achieved it. Ethereum is a global decentralized computing platform that the whole world can use.
Where do we go from here?
Forget blockchain for a second. Forget crypto. Forget web3.
People don’t trust their governments any more. People don’t trust corporations any more. People simply don’t trust much at all.
In the face of centralization, people want to be self-sufficient. People want to control their own money. People want to own their place in communities. People do not trust the world around them, but insist on having control themselves. Call it the Sovereign Individual, call it whatever you want. This is the direction our world is going.
Ethereum will be the digital infrastructure that holds the whole interconnected internet together. Users will have full control of the internet. And I literally mean the entire internet.
Users will control social media on Ethereum
Users will control gaming on Ethereum
Users will control communities on Ethereum
Users will control finance on Ethereum
Users will control banking on Ethereum
Users will control personal data on Ethereum
Ethereum has always prioritized giving control to users; that’s why it’s my favorite blockchain, and why I think it’s extremely well suited to fulfilling this mission.
To fulfill this mission, we must uphold the same principles we’ve always had:
censorship-resistant
decentralized
permissionless
and more
All the usual qualities we know and love are necessary to giving control of the internet to users.
Everyone should have control of their online life. Through their wallet. Through their phone. Through their computer. Everyone should have control of Ethereum.
The roadmap is working. Ethereum, including its L2s, are already bringing many amazing things onchain. But there’s still a long way to go. We must keep building.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your feedback. Where do you think Ethereum will be in the future?
Thanks to several people who inspired me with similar visions.
“HTTPZ: the internet you can trust” - Will Cove, Mina
“Blockchains are servers with superpowers” - Hayden Adams, Uniswap
“World Computer” - Vitalik Buterin
Thanks to people who reviewed early drafts of this post:
Enyu55, den0th, nutcha_nj, karsenthil, and others