It’s been a year since I first met you. And wow, you’ve grown up a lot since then.

At the time, you handled 45 thousand transactions a day. And your coin, ether, cost the price of a Chipotle burrito with guacamole.

Today, you process north of a million daily transactions and a single ether will put you back more than an iPhone X.

When we met, you were the strange, new kid that just moved into town. Today, you are the life of the party.

Now let me be honest. I like you as an investment. A lot. But I love you as a technology

Of course I want the markets to like you too and to keep liking you. I want them to buy and Hodl you so that your price goes up. It would give me a nice dopamine rush and make my greedy Amygdala (or wherever the reward center in my brain is) light up.

But you’ve already made me and my friends enough cash. What I really want is to see you succeed as a technology. If you succeed as an investment too, great. I certainly wouldn’t mind that.

But even if the markets turned on you, I would still keep you. I would probably keep you in my portfolio (maybe even buy more), but I would definitely keep you in my life. I would keep reading, learning, thinking and writing about you and maybe even try my hand at making dapps.

Today it is summertime in Cryptoland and you and many of your ERC-20 friends are flying high. Tomorrow the party may quiet down a bit or come to a screeching halt…at least for a bit.

And that’s when you will see who your real friends are. And believe me, Mr. Market is not one of them. One day he may declare his love for you and the next morning he may run off with Ms. Vaporware. You know, the one with shiny hair and smooth skin but nothing underneath.

Mr. Market and Mr. Meme could disappear in the blink of an eye, but Mr. Maker will be there for you, grinding away, building and testing and making you stronger day after day.

Of course I want you to succeed in the markets but at the end of the day, Ethereum, I don’t care what car you drive. I don’t care if you drive a Rosso Bia Lambo or a beat-up Toyota Corolla.

I don’t care what you drive; I care what you are driven by. Relentless imagination, curiosity, and the vision of a decentralized world. I care that you are enabling people around the world to build all sorts of cool things. That you are pioneering breakthroughs like Sharding and Plasma. That you have the potential to make the world a less corrupt, closed, censorable, centralized place.

But that day is a long ways away and you know how impatient Mr. Market can be. You are still a youngster, a very precocious one at that, but still new to this world. Someday you may fly but today you are still learning to walk. Someday you may change the way we do economy, governance, and law. Today you let people buy and breed digital cats.

You could shoot up to 5000 or drop to 50 tomorrow and I would still believe in you. Would I still believe in you as an investment? Probably. Unless there was a good reason Mr. Market freaked out and there rarely is. Would I still believe in you as a technology? Absolutely.

Even if it all came crashing down and you didn’t succeed as a technology or grow into our world’s (or galaxy’s?) premier, trustless, shared supercomputer, you would have still paved the way for everything to come.

But I hope you will succeed. And I believe that you can.

Today it’s summertime in Cryptoland and the party rages on. But later, the neighbors could call the cops and Mr. Market and his friends will rush for the door.

But I’ll still be here, Ethereum.

And even if the party gets broken up, there’s always next weekend . . .

A couple afterthoughts…I think the utility of the network and financial value of the token are closely linked. But this is more likely true in the long run. In the short, there’s a lot of noise and fear and greed are powerful forces. And I don’t think that memes or short-term speculation are necessarily bad. I have participated in both myself. I wrote this post in response to sentiment I’ve seen lately that I think overestimates the stability and wisdom of Mr. Market and underestimates the patience and resolve of makers. I think in the short to medium term a bear market could actually benefit the space.

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