Ethereum was my entry into crypto in 2016. I fell in love with the vision for permissionless finance and smart contracts. ETH was my first meaningful source of wealth In 2017 Ethereum was the center of crypto. Up 100x in a year. ICOs. Future of finance. Gas fees spiking. People were using the chain! ETH was the fastest asset in human history to $100b in market cap. In history!!! Ethereum was king of the world Ethereum just had one glaring problem: scaling I attended Devcon 3. November 2017. Cancun, Mexico. Ethereum was 2.5 years old at the time. I showed up to Vitalik’s keynote an hour early. I think I was the first person in the room. I was absolutely giddy. Multicoin was 6 weeks old. I was a kid in a candy shop. The presentation didn’t even attempt to address scaling. I left the presentation in dismay. I just could not fathom how the EF could be so utterly clueless. How can you not recognize what’s going on around you, and set forth a credible plan with concrete and aggressive timelines? It’s your annual developer conference. This is explicitly *the* venue for sharing the plan!!! $100b in market cap depends on it!!! How can you not even try to address the elephant in the room? Not a single person in the EF inner circles had the awareness to push for a concrete scaling plan. Devcon 3 is when I lost faith in Ethereum I don’t think much has changed in the 7 years since then. There is still a total lack of urgency, leadership is not in touch with the needs of its core constituents, and there is still no North Star