Some personal thoughts on the Tempo and Ethereum news that trickled out today.
- Criticizing Dankrad for taking a new job is simply immature. People change jobs and roles all the time. I don't know him personally but from what I understand he contributed a lot to Ethereum while working on it. I wish him all the best.
- Being frustrated with Paradigm for essentially migrating all of their research efforts into supporting Tempo instead of Ethereum just highlights a level of naivete that exists still exists among many in our industry. Paradigm wants, and has a mandate, to make money. They always wanted to do that. That should come as a surprise to nobody. That being said, despite their significant contributions to Ethereum in the past, we should be extremely cautious about their role in the future of the development of Ethereum.
- Ethereum has had a significant culture shift in the last six months, with a mindset shift towards doing everything it can to win. I have seen some of Ethereum's old habits trickle in today. I absolutely do not understand how Dankrad is allowed to stay on as an advisor to the Ethereum Foundation and product roadmap work. I say this without knowing Dankrad, but having an immense amount of respect for him. He is going to be a competitor. That is fine, and it is his right. But Ethereum needs to recognize that he and Paradigm are undeniably spending a fortune of resources trying to build a competitor. And Ethereum needs to want to beat them, not invite them into continuing to design the future of Ethereum. It doesn't mean you can't find ways to collaborate with competitors, but there are lines that should not be crossed between collaborators and contributors.
- Ethereum needs to prioritize ways to convert some of its revenue into supporting its role in designing Ethereum's roadmap. The notion that as the EF's runway dissolves should align with Ethereum being in a place where decentralized decisions and operations should be in place feels outdated an misguided. Ethereum as a technology is incredibly decentralized. Ethereum's future needs centralized and opinionated planning by people that breathe Ethereum winning. Without a change in structure, we have about five years before that becomes unviable.
- I thought the era of infrastructure overinvestment was over. It is clearly not. The rumored $500m raise at a $5B valuation for a pre-product startup shows that the incremental technological innovation on top of open source software backed by a unique value propopition (in this case Stripes's payment distribution) is still by far the best way to make a fortune. Until someone disrupts that playbook it will be here for many more years to come. We literally saw the exact same playbook last month with Plasma, with more examples coming up in the next few months as well.
- I have been thinking through a lot of the questions that are being asked throughout the Ethereum ecosystem today due to my work at @offchain and on behalf of @arbitrum. The conclusion I have come to is that if you want to continue to build the best technology and attract the best human capital, you can never be satisfied or become complacent. You need to continue to push forward, build new products, earn more revenue, establish a grander vision and have an insatiable drive to win. Otherwise, well-funded competitors will always be there to try and capture market share when you may be at your most vulnerable. Ethereum should not be okay with letting them succeed.
