Crypto-communities seek for newish narratives or adapt current ones as an exercise of collective strengthening. They also do so to combat critique by isolating some of its premises (“Bitcoin is expensive to use! — But it’s not meant to be ‘used’ that often!”).

Proactive and reactive sense-making.

Nobody can know everything. The complexity of society is irreducible. We cling to mental models that satisfy our thirst for understanding a given phenomenon, and stick to groups who identify with similar narratives.

Image of the DEV plan³ circulated in 2014, at the time of the Ether sale.

Beliefs are not only shaped by reality; they define it. In any social arena, there’s a never ending battle to tells what’s happening, why is it happening, and what is happening next. Controlling narratives is particularly powerful in cryptoland² given the innate complexity and polytechnic nature of the field.

As 2018 unwinds over filled weeks in Berlin and Prague for the Ethereum community, it seems like a proper moment to reflect.

What exactly should Ether be? And how have our views on it changed, in the past 5 years? Below, we chronicle disparate answers to these questions over time.

⏳ Ether over time

In the absence of a reachable leader, Bitcoiners rely on founding documents to debate the currency’s ethos (e.g. “decipher what Satoshi ‘truly wanted’”).

Ethereum.org from 2014 to 2018.

Ethereum is way younger than Bitcoin. In the quest for legitimacy, it has flirted with a broad range of overarching narratives⁴. Founding documents are recent, their authors are still around, discordance abounds even among them⁵.

In Ethereum, vocation is an ever-growing construction (like bees building a hive), much more than an exercise in regression (like Theseus rolling back a ball of thread to escape the labyrinth).

Here we break down seven major themes around which Ethereum development has revolved, along time. In rough order of appearance:

1. Bitcoin 2.0:

Ethereum was unveiled to the public at a Bitcoin conference⁶. Early media coverage was very reliant on comparisons to the predecessor cryptocurrency (see 2014’s “Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor” by Al Jazeera⁷; “Bitcoin 2.0” by Bloomberg⁸). The original motivation for Ethereum stemmed from Bitcoin’s scripting limitations. The tale of a young idealist leaving the “toxic” bitcoin underworld was appealing to mainstream journalists having to report on crypto after the 10x price increase in BTC by the end of 2013. Although this narrative lost momentum as Ethereum carved its own identity, it’s still a popular way for newcomers to see $ETH when first picturing the space.

2. dApps (a.k.a. World Computer):

Technically, from the beginning, Ethereum was meant to be “a platform for the deployment and execution of smart contracts”. Old promotional material already described $ETH as “crypto-fuel”: the asset is to smart contracts akin to what gasoline is to cars. The vision of a “world computer” lost gas (😉) as scaling took longer than expected, dApps didn’t proliferate, and alternative smart contract platforms started to gain traction.

Tokens, derivatives, name registries and DAOs were a part of Ethereum’s online presence since the beginning - Ethereum.org, 2014.

3. DAOs:

The promise of ownerless organisations has always been a magnet for the politically-inclined ones. Proposals like the famed People’s Republic of DOUG⁹ (the first Ethereum-based DAO²) were common in Ethereum’s early days. Vinay Gupta, who coordinated releases for the Foundation, used to jam on what he called “State in a Box”¹⁰. TheDAO¹¹ obviously blew everyone’s expectations, and slowed down excitement for autonomous experiments. This narrative slowly languished as no DAO truly thrived; but it has seen resurgence as ICO-funded organisations did no better; and toolkits for managing ownerless organisations are finally coming to main net.

4. Crypto-crowdfunding (ICOs & STOs):

Ethereum’s mere existence is a testament to the power of borderless crypto-crowdfunding. Such has been praised the most eminent utility of ETH since it became obvious that deploying a token was the most straightforward thing to do with contracts. The story-line weakened as the SEC’s increased scrutiny towards the industry¹² and natural selection exerted its effect on the market¹³.

5. Utility tokens & collectibles:

As the “path to liquidity” for new tokens started to get more complicated, a lot of focus shifted to studying¹⁴, simulating and improving already existing token frameworks¹⁵. For some time, “utility” actually meant “defence to legal enforcement targeting securities”, even more than it meant “moulding incentives”. The introduction of the “NFT standard”¹⁶ in 2017 jumpstarted exploration of non-fungible tokens and highlighted the value proposition of games with shared states. These were already spoken of in Ethereum’s early 2014 videos, hinting at what would later become a very hyped use case.

6. Open finance:

The “open finance” narrative¹⁷ emerged in response to the frivolous abundance of tokens in the market. Abstracting ownership via socially agreed information structures (titles, tokens) is key to economic development¹⁸. Hernando de Soto argues that $9.3 trillion in property is economically dead capital (lost value) due to improper rights registration - mostly in the hands of the poorest. The point is: benefits of asset digitisation are somehow plutocratic until people have permissionless, shared economic infrastructure — what this story is about. 0x’s success in building an ecosystem of relayers from scratch fostered intense experimentation with financial instruments. The #DeFi Alliance was established by leading entities in the field. After the Fat Protocol and the Fat Monies “thesis”, the “Fat Wallet” theme¹⁹ arose, in line with the philosophy of “truly open source bankware”²⁰.

7. Radical Markets²¹:

“Open finance” is great, but instead of emulating the complex financial arrangements we’re used to in the real world, what if we could redesign markets from the ground up? How can programmable money help evolve private property contracts, improve (or liquidate) representative democracy, and prevent data harvesting in order to spawn more inclusive and efficient markets? Where is permissionless infrastructure needed the most? How can the community maximise social impact per unit of effort? From mid-2018 onwards, Ethereum started to be revered by the social values it embodies²² as much as it had been for its technical merits. If bitcoin was well-positioned to capitalise the aftermath of the last big financial crisis, Ether seems poised to fill the void left by the cultural, political and economic decline of surveillance capitalism²³ (as depicted by the slow corrosion of Facebook’s empire), in what appears to be a societal shift towards a more liberal future.