Episode 1: Community.eth

The first episode of Optimist's Community.eth series. To celebrate the 9th birthday of Ethereum, different people from across the community were asked one question: "What is Ethereum?" Their answers capture what the community has built over Ethereum's first nine years and the future of what's possible.

This transcript is an accessible copy of the original video (opens in a new tab) published by Optimist. It has been lightly edited for readability. Speakers are members of the Ethereum community and not all were individually identified in the video.

What is Ethereum? (0:00)

Person 1: What is Ethereum?

Kain Warwick: What is Ethereum? That's a tough question.

Person 2: What is Ethereum? It's hard to define the shape of something shapeless. It's a really hard question.

Person 3: Ethereum is a small but obvious step in a long, causal, connected loop of human evolution.

Person 4: Ethereum is a lot of things for a lot of people.

What makes it powerful (0:40)

Aya Miyaguchi: The potential that Ethereum has is great because we can't even define it. And I think that's very powerful.

Hayden Adams: The things that made Ethereum special was that you could create applications that no one controlled. You could create applications that were fully transparent and that didn't have these single points of failure.

Ameen Soleimani: This radically expands the amount of trust that people can have in working with each other across borders, across faiths, across languages. And to me, it represents this next evolution of coordination for humanity.

Kain Warwick: When you have this kind of network that's open and permissionless, I think you will have a situation where we can't really anticipate what will come out of it, but we know that it's going to massively change the world.

Joseph Lubin: We have terrible systems right now, globally, politically, because it's just really hard to represent a lot of people with diverse agendas. Bottom line, it's about greater economic and political agency for more people and small organizations.

Simona Pop: Ethereum, for me, is the next stage in the evolution of the internet.

Why we build (2:00)

Simona Pop: Yes, of course there's buzz when the price goes up, but the people and the true believers are there when it goes down, when it goes up—it doesn't really matter. We're doing it because we genuinely believe in what we're building.

Kevin Owocki: What's really cool is that in the Ethereum ecosystem, you can have a team of two or three 22-year-olds that can build something in a weekend at a hackathon that it would have taken a bank hundreds of millions of dollars and ten years to build.

Alexis Ohanian: We have the chance to reimagine so many institutions of society with real ownership, with the real ability to accrue value for the rest of your life, for generations—for infinity, basically. I really desperately want to see that get unlocked.

The community (3:00)

Amber Baldet: One thing that really sets the Ethereum community apart has been, from the beginning, that they're not afraid to be a little bit silly. You see that in the unicorns and the silly rainbow colors and the dances and the songs—and that silliness is what lends the entire ecosystem a sense of hope. And one thing people really need these days is hope.

Mariano Conti: This to me is the next financial revolution, social revolution, gaming revolution, identity revolution. I'm never going to bet against innovation. And this is a technological innovation that happens once every 100 years.

Stefany Trujillo: For me, Ethereum is freedom. It's the feeling that you can really help others and not just give money to a group of people, but see how those people can build together that world that we really want to improve.

Jeff Coleman: That's the fuel in the Ethereum community. When you have this kind of friendliness and openness that's combined with nerding out over the tiniest details, figuring out how to get it right, making something new, making something interesting, making something good—making something that positively impacts the world.

Stani Kulechov: There's just a lot of love out there, and everyone seems to be part of a big family. It's about decentralization and just building networks that are owned by their communities.

Ameen Soleimani: It's a blockchain. It's a culture. It's a way of life. I think Ethereum is humanity's last hope—maybe best hope.

Vitalik Buterin: To me, the most beautiful thing about Ethereum is probably its community. Ethereum and things around Ethereum are obviously very powerful technologies, but the kinds of people that are around Ethereum, that follow or are interested in Ethereum, are just incredibly interesting. Lots of very smart people, lots of very kind people, all working together to make the ecosystem better.