In the early days of Ethereum, everything was up for grabs. The idea that a global computer could run trustless applications in an adversarial environment was so radical that no one pretended to have it figured out. The very act of deploying a smart contract felt like something that could blow your leg off. There were no best practices, few standards, and fewer constraints. And it was magical.
But now, as Ethereum turns ten, we risk losing that spark.
Today, Ethereum is mature. It has become infrastructure. The network secures hundreds of billions in value. It hosts complex financial protocols, DAOs, rollups, and identity primitives. Ethereum has survived forks, wars, regulatory attention, and existential bugs. We’ve built things that last. We’ve learned from failure. We’ve built client diversity, formal verification, and rollup-centric scaling. But sadly, many people think they know what they’re doing.
And that’s dangerous.
As a creative person — whether you’re a researcher or protocol engineer — the most dangerous thought you can have is: I know what I’m doing. Because the moment you believe that, you stop looking. You stop exploring the edges. You become blind to strange new paths that don’t fit the shape of the thing you’ve already built.
It’s like the early programmers who coded in binary and dismissed assembly as not “real” programming. Once they’d internalised their craft, they could no longer see the better abstractions. We risk becoming those people.
The illusion of maturity
Ethereum today has a well-worn stack: Solidity, the EVM, JSON-RPC, rollups, L2 sequencers, and Block Builders. These tools are better than ever, more powerful, more stable, more integrated. But that very maturity creates an illusion: that we’ve figured it out. The architecture is basically settled, and the roadmap is correct. The debates are closed.
We start to treat the current ideas not as experiments, but as truths. Truths that must be swallowed whole to ensure “etherum alignment”.
We say things like: Rollups are the way. But what if they’re not? What if they’re just the best idea we’ve come up with so far, but far from the final form? What if there’s a better abstraction waiting, one we’re blind to because we’ve mistaken confidence and alignement for understanding?
Epistemic humility as a design principle
Ethereum has spent the last decade pioneering Tokenisation, DAOs, NFTs, smart locks and ZK rollups. Some of these ideas succeeded. Some exploded. Some quietly withered. But each emerged from a community willing to try things no one else would.
That openness is fragile.
The more we succeed, the more we risk becoming epistemically closed. The more we risk accepting ideas only from high priests. The more the roadmap becomes scripture, the more dissent sounds like heresy. But computing - and Ethereum is computing, even if we’ve stopped talking about the world computer - is not a linear march from worse to better. It’s a dense forest of ideas, many of which die not because they were flawed, but because no one was looking in their direction.
To remain fertile, Ethereum must keep its weirdness alive. We should remain suspicious of orthodoxy, even our own. We should keep asking absurd, impertinent questions. So, as Ethereum turns ten, the most important thing we can say is:
We still don’t know what we’re doing here
Not as a dismissal of our progress, but as a commitment to keep looking. To stay weird. To stay open. To keep reinventing the very thing we think we’ve built.
Because that - more than any upgrade, roadmap, or narrative - is what makes Ethereum truly unstoppable.