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Sections Below
Measuring Ethereum Alignment
Free software & the rise of Open Source
Let's Proliferate EIP-1
Let's dive in.
Measuring Ethereum Alignment
Last week, Vitalik published a new blog post titled Making Ethereum alignment legible.
After going through it, here are my takeaways:
Remember your roots: Ethereum has been around for a decade now and there are a variety of people building and proliferating their vision for what they think Ethereum should be. This diversity is great in terms of expanding the ecosystem itself, but it's important that there is still a link from all of the sub-cultures back to the core protocol.
The L2 Beat for x: The best example of a project demonstrating alignment so far is how L2 Beat objectively tracks how decentralized all the layer 2s in the ecosystem are. Vitalik put out a request looking for people to build the L2 Beat for other core Ethereum values. There's also clientdiversity.org that focuses on the diversity of clients Ethereum nodes are using and mevwatch.info that focus on the OFAC compliance of MEV-boost relays.
A call for dashboard organizations: Vitalik listed out some metrics he thinks are important to Ethereum. Open standards, open source, decentralization, security, positive sum for the ecosystem, positive sum for the world, etc. Over time, it'll be up to community members to figure out how to best grade the values above and to identify new metrics as the ecosystem continues to grow. It's essential that these are built by the community members, not the Ethereum Foundation itself so that that it's truly permissionless and not a "grading from the creators".
As we see more progress on Ethereum alignment, it's clear to me that the "front page of Ethereum" should be a list of of these dashboards. Not necessarily for end consumers of course...the goal there is to abstract away the crypto. But more so for developers, builders, and independent contributors looking for an entry point into the ecosystem.
This page of dashboards would provide a birds eye view of all the different infrastructure, subcultures, and products in the space while also showing how closely they tie back to Ethereum's core mission.
Hopefully, it should help community members identify 1) what values they care about and 2) where they would like to plug in.
For the most part, companies and products that rank higher on these dashboards should in fact be given more attention as those teams have demonstrated meaningful intent to build for and with Ethereum.
It's important to remember that this would be a community led effort so it's necessary to have multiple dashboards even on a single topic especially as the grading criteria gets more subjective. The Ethereum community should be able to vote on which dashboards they trust the most and would want to cite as a source when constructing an opinion/argument. There will definitely be a need for some sort of identity auth such as Farcaster or ENS to ensure votes aren't manipulated.
Okay, with that being said, I thought it would be fun to try brainstorming how I could contribute as a dashboard creator.
The first question for me was which values do I even care about enough to dive deeper into?
Although decentralization, security, compliance, & performance are all critical, I know that I'm not best suited to be a grader on these parameters.
For me, the values that stood out were open source and open standards because I selfishly care about the Ethereum ecosystem growing (more projects means more things for me to write about!)
And how can the ecosystem grow? By attracting more developers to build cool shit.
And how do you attract more devs? By making it simple to experiment with the new primitives.
And how do we make it simple to build in Ethereum? By providing open standards, templates, and open source code for new devs to quickly plug-in and hack away.
Now, before I get into how I would construct a dashboard for these values, I think it's worth diving deeper into the history of the free software movement to better understand how it has shaped the software industry so far. These days, many people in tech talk about open source as though they were working with Linus Torvalds in the '90s. But the reality is that the majority of us have only worked with the dominance of closed code bases at big tech in the last decade.
Vitalik mentions the free software and open source definition in his post above. Where did those come from? And why is it important to even have a dashboard tracking open source contributions in the space?
Free Software & the rise of Open Source
In the early days of computing (1950s-1970s), the concept of "for-profit" software wasn't a thing. Code was freely shared between the small group of academics and hobbyists. Software was still in its research phase and collaboration was the default culture.
However, this culture started to shift in the '70s. Developers working tirelessly on projects were frustrated that they were not getting rewarded properly. Most notably, in 1976, Gates wrote an "open letter to hobbyists" in which he calls the hacker community thieves for stealing Altair BAISC.
You could say this was one of the key moments when the split between for-profit and free-software became relevant.
The other notable catalyst of the free software movement was the launch of Unix by Bell Labs in 1969.
Because of antitrust regulations, AT&T wasn't allowed to participate in the computer industry. So, they licensed out the software to universities. Very quickly, enthusiasts at universities such as Berkeley & MIT started to iterate on the functionality and extensibility.
Richard Stallman, a researcher at MIT's AI lab decided to write a free Unix-like operating system. This became known as the GNU project and marked the start of the "Free Software Movement". Anyone could now use Unix functionality without having to get a license from AT&T. This allowed people to run, copy, and modify the software however they wanted.
And the west coast, Berkeley devs had added extra functionality to AT&T's Unix. They distributed this under the Berkeley Software Development (BSD) license. Key part is that they made this license permissive which meant derivatives could keep their versions proprietary.
Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, it was becoming clear that neither for-profit nor free-software would "win" - both models would have to co-exist. Microsoft, Apple, and many internet companies were growing in market value. And on the other side, there were tons of community-led projects that were becoming crucial to developer infrastructure:
Perl in 1987
Linux in 1991
PHP in 1994
Apache HTTP server in 1995
MySQL in 1995
In Jan 1998, Netscape announced its software would be free of charge and developed by the OS community. This was mainly done to compete against Microsoft's growing domination of the browser market.
Many folks in the software community thought there needed to be new term for free software.
A month later, in Feb 1998, Christine Peterson coined the term "open source" (OS) over "free software" (FS).
The key diff between OS & FS is that OS believes proprietary software can co-exist in parallel vs FS doesn't.
This marked the start of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) co-founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens. Perens released the open source definition and manifesto which quickly gained steam in the tech community.
And by the 2000s, for-profit companies were heavily investing and contributing to open source software.
Here are some examples:
IBM investing $1 billion into Linux (2001)
RedHat with Linux (late '90s)
Google with Android (2008) and Kubernetes (2013)
Facebook with React Native (2013)
Microsoft with .NET (2014)
The contributions from these large companies were so impactful because they not only brought substantial financial resources but also a critical mass of developer talent.
These companies could afford to invest in open-source projects at a scale that smaller organizations simply couldn't match. Their involvement validated the importance of open-source development and attracted even more talent and innovation to the ecosystem.
It made sense for more developers to try building projects with the new tools/frameworks.
I believe this train of thought on companies contributing to open standards back in the 2000s helps provide context on how we should be thinking about Ethereum's open standards dashboard.
Let's Proliferate EIP-1
EIP Context
As I was writing this post, it occurred to me that I don't know much about EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals). Sure, maybe the mainstream ones such as token standards, proto-danksharding (4844), and account abstraction (4437) but that's about it.
So I decided to dig deeper.
For starters, EIP-1 was authored by Martin Becze and Hudson Jameson 9 years ago in October 2015. The doc is a template and guideline on how other developers can and should submit Ethereum proposals.
There are three types of EIPs:
Standard - most EIPs fall into this category as they affect the network directly. Think network protocol changes, block or transaction validity rules, proposed application standards/conventions, etc.
Meta - describe a process surrounding Ethereum or propose a change to how proposals are made/passed. EIP-1 (screenshot above) is the main example here.
Informational - isn't a change directly but rather provides a design standard or naming convention that the community can use to communicate more simply. EIP-2228 is an example.
The numbering of EIPs is straightforward, for every new submission it just increments by one.
Highest # EIP to be finalized so far: 7636
There are ~80 EIPs under review, some from the 3000-6000 range but mostly all in the 7000s
Another ~100-150 in the draft section
Some are in last call and the rest are stagnant
I wanted to provide some clean graphs to show the timeline and growth of EIPs since 2015 but unfortunately Clause and ChatGPT both let me down :(
But! There are some takeaways from the analysis they did anyways:
In the first few years since Ethereum launched, there were way fewer proposals in the pipeline. This is obvious because the only people participating in the process were core Ethereum researchers
From 2019-2021, the growth rate of proposed EIPs was increasing rapidly due to the market craziness and flood of new developers coming in because of the NFT and defi spaces. Since 2021, the growth rate slowed down but the velocity of EIPs being proposed is still significant.
The % of proposals that actually passed has remained roughly consistent (~15%) since the launch of Ethereum showing that there is a stable approval process.
Corporate Contributions
Okay, now that we have some context on EIPs, let's loop back to the main purpose of this post...what dashboard would I make to help grade companies in terms of their contributions to open standards?
The answer is simple: how many EIPs has company x co-authored or contributed to? And what are the resources available to them (i.e. venture funding, # of employees, etc.)?
Now, to be clear, I think this dashboard would be initially meant for larger companies in the space. It's not realistic to expect seed stage startups to have the bandwidth to co-author and develop EIPs. But for them, it might make sense to do an analysis of how they are using Ethereum standards in their own projects and providing case studies for other founders in the space.
The numbers in this dashboard below are not really relevant; rather, focus on the framework itself. I could imagine an MVP looking like this:
The goal is to get a pulse check of large companies in the space that have the financial resources and human capital to take initiative on EIPs. Those companies that score low (high resources, low contributions) are probably on the "extractive" side of the spectrum in terms of Ethereum alignment.
This ranking will hopefully encourage other companies in the space to find ways to make contributions of their own. It could be writing a totally new EIP or even reaching out to one of the more well-resourced teams to co-author an EIP with.
Additionally, encouraging industry leaders to be loud and proud that their teams are actively working on improving open standards will help spread the culture to new entrants in the space as well. We need the open source mindset to be at all stacks of the ecosystem.
One example that's worth pointing to here is Jesse Pollak being vocal about Base's efforts in advancing EIP-4844.
Founders being vocal about their efforts to Ethereum open standards is important for the same reason as IBM contributing to Linux: it demonstrates that leaders care about open source software and attract the mindshare of new developers to build with the new primitives.
Other examples of companies in the space contributing to EIPs (courtesy of Claude)
It's important to remember that all of the EIP research done from 2015-2020 is being reflected in the ecosystem today. These efforts take years to come to fruition and the more we push community members to increase their EIP contributions, the faster everyone will be able to reap the rewards....hence the title of this post "the road to 10k EIPs".
Note: of course it's about EIP quality not just quantity, my point is that we need to get more people working on more EIPs.
As we get standards that are interesting to developers outside of crypto, it'll be easier to convince them that there are unique opportunities to experiment within Ethereum. Just as React Native inspired a new wave of web and mobile devs, what will be an EIP that is a no brainer for new entrepreneurs?
To me, the call for dashboard organizations is like a "holler to Ethereum food critics". Some will be a stickler for security while others will be curious about community involvement. All critics are welcome and it's up to the people to decide which reviews they want to listen to.
These critics are community members giving a pulse check on the Ethereum ecosystem by picking a core value that they care about and doing an objective analysis on how companies, products, & services are performing towards that goal.
With L2 Beat, the underlying mission is to push as many new layer 2 solutions to work towards full decentralization. And with the EIP dashboard I made above, the goal would be to push as many well funded companies to contribute to Ethereum standards.
By having a public database, teams in the ecosystem have no choice but to find ways to participate and "link back" to the Ethereum roots. If an increasing number of people start checking these dashboards, then to a certain extent Ethereum alignment becomes a marketing strategy of its own for companies in the space. A win for them and a win for the protocol.
That's all for today's post!
See you all on Friday, hope everyone has a great rest of the week :)
- YB
