Ethereum's Institutional Future: Vision, Trade-offs, and Execution | Ethereum Korea One: Genesis

So why did I co-found Ethereum? So the world was in a complicated state many years ago, 15 years ago, global financial crisis, et cetera, too much debt in the system. And I did a lot of research and I felt that things were potentially going to get worse financially in the world rather than better. Bitcoin emerged in the global financial crisis. Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto essentially invented the profound construct of decentralized trust, and a lot of us felt that that was going to be potentially pivotal in helping form a better world, but the Bitcoin technology was very narrow and it was virtually impossible to build something significant on the Bitcoin protocol. So we, several different initiatives were tried in 2011, 2012. And I was fortunate enough to meet Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, in early 2014, after a bunch of different projects had recognized that, hey, this powerful construct of decentralized trust should be applied to everything, not just a narrow version of money. And so I was already very much a Bitcoiner in early 2011. And it just made so much sense that decentralized trust should be applied to everything we build in the global economy and society. And so I joined the Ethereum project. A few of us declared ourselves co-founders and we launched the network about a year and a half later. About six months before that, I started our company ConsenSys to essentially continue the vision and the mission of the Ethereum project.

So the Ethereum Foundation essentially took the approach in its previous administration of subtraction. The idea that minimalism in the Ethereum Foundation, not trying to control the system, but trying to enable the entire ecosystem to flourish without over-reliance on the Ethereum Foundation, that was a healthy thing, and that worked well for a while. But a little while ago, the world got more complicated in both very positive and to some people concerning ways. So with the advent of, let's call it, AI enabling humanity to do things that seem magical and a pretty interesting roadmap for all of us over the next few years and decades, with geopolitical complications, with even more debt in the system, Vitalik, Bastian, the executive director of the EF and leadership inside the EF, recognized that hey, there's some really important things that we have to keep building and we have to preserve. And so we need to narrow the focus of the Ethereum Foundation to the cypherpunk principles, the CROPS mandate, censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security, and these amazing initiatives that Tomasz Stańczyk, the previous executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, we recognize that they're very powerful. How do we perpetuate them? How do we keep what was built while still focusing the Ethereum Foundation on the real backbone of what matters and set the North Star for the Ethereum ecosystem? And so the EF shrunk itself up, Tom Lee, BitMine, Joseph Chalom, SharpLink, I and many other contributors from the Ethereum ecosystem put some grant money together for ETH Labs, for Ethereum Institutional, put some funding together for ETH Systems and we called that the summer of Ethereum love because they all launched in the summer and totally transformed the sentiment in the Ethereum ecosystem, both inside the Ethereum Foundation and across the Ethereum ecosystem. I can't really say that much, but the summer of Ethereum Love is going to continue into autumn. There are some projects that are in formation that may be announced soon that rhyme with the advent of these three other projects. So I won't talk about those, but ETH Labs is some of the best and brightest researchers and developers in the Ethereum ecosystem. They will focus on Ethereum price going up. They will focus on all the different ways that they can foster adoption, grow usage amongst institutions, amongst retail. Ethereum Institutional is the front door, the help desk, the Sherpas that will guide in a neutral way that will guide your institution and lead you to whatever institution or provider in the Ethereum ecosystem that they think can help you. ETH Systems is focused on privacy in institutional developments and so importantly they represent the decentralization of the stewardship of the Ethereum ecosystem, and that's the right way for a credibly neutral censorship-resistant platform to be governed or stewarded.