I lost count of all the people that told me they lost x amount of money when they first started with crypto, but a lot of those people stuck around and made the whole ecosystem a better place for it. While it is a sad truth, that so many participants of the Ethereum ecosystem have lost money in the past, the fact that so many of them are still here, reveals one of the ecosystem’s biggest strengths: Ethereum is antifragile.

What is antifragility?

Over the past Millenium, my hometown has been raided, burned down, and rebuilt more than a dozen times. It is thus no surprise, that its citizens chose a phoenix as their animal: Regularly burned down, and raised from the ashes each time. The thing is though, that its regular destruction throughout history has not been a hindrance to its steady development. In fact, many would argue, that these terrible events were precisely what made the city as resilient, secure, and beautiful as it is today. My hometown, in other words, was built back better every time it was rebuilt. This is a quality known as antifragility.

Why is Ethereum antifragile?

Similarly, each time the Ethereum ecosystem suffers from stressors, shocks, volatility, and yes, collapsing Ponzi schemes, the situation proves the importance of decentralization and security that people tend to pay less attention to during bull markets. Ironically, these kinds of collapses also improve these factors: The community as a whole gains members that won’t fall for a scam like that (again), making the whole ecosystem stronger in the process and hence the decentralized nature of Ethereum more resilient to such threats. On top of that, builders within the community gain more insights as to what does and what doesn’t work, which makes them deliver better solutions during the next cycle.

This is a major point that a lot of new users don’t fully understand. Once you go through a bear market it makes more sense, but it really is a phoenix rising from the ashes situation. The last bear market led to DeFi Summer and the projects that survived the bear thrived once new users and the users that stuck around came back. We are still in the very early days, and more likely than not, crypto will be the rails that everything is built on top of so we’ll get there someday and the users that got “burned” will end up benefiting from crypto in the long term without knowing it.

I lost count of all the people that told me they lost x amount of money when they first started with crypto, but a lot of those people stuck around and made the whole ecosystem a better place for it. While it is a sad truth, that so many participants of the Ethereum ecosystem have lost money in the past, the fact that so many of them are still here, reveals one of the ecosystem’s biggest strengths: Ethereum is antifragile.

What is antifragility?

Over the past Millenium, my hometown has been raided, burned down, and rebuilt more than a dozen times. It is thus no surprise, that its citizens chose a phoenix as their animal: Regularly burned down, and raised from the ashes each time. The thing is though, that its regular destruction throughout history has not been a hindrance to its steady development. In fact, many would argue, that these terrible events were precisely what made the city as resilient, secure, and beautiful as it is today. My hometown, in other words, was built back better every time it was rebuilt. This is a quality known as antifragility.

Why is Ethereum antifragile?

Similarly, each time the Ethereum ecosystem suffers from stressors, shocks, volatility, and yes, collapsing Ponzi schemes, the situation proves the importance of decentralization and security that people tend to pay less attention to during bull markets. Ironically, these kinds of collapses also improve these factors: The community as a whole gains members that won’t fall for a scam like that (again), making the whole ecosystem stronger in the process and hence the decentralized nature of Ethereum more resilient to such threats. On top of that, builders within the community gain more insights as to what does and what doesn’t work, which makes them deliver better solutions during the next cycle.

This is a major point that a lot of new users don’t fully understand. Once you go through a bear market it makes more sense, but it really is a phoenix rising from the ashes situation. The last bear market led to DeFi Summer and the projects that survived the bear thrived once new users and the users that stuck around came back. We are still in the very early days, and more likely than not, crypto will be the rails that everything is built on top of so we’ll get there someday and the users that got “burned” will end up benefiting from crypto in the long term without knowing it.