Ethereum Needs More Adults

A love letter with notes.

Let me start with something I mean entirely: I love Ethereum.

Not in the abstract, hedge-everything way that investors love "the space." I mean it in the way you love something that changed your life — that gave you a community when you did not expect to find one, a language for ideas you had been circling without the vocabulary to name, a proof that the world could be organized differently. Ethereum made room for people who did not fit elsewhere. The neurodivergent, the obsessive, the people who thought too laterally for the institutions that were supposed to want them — the protocol community, at its best, became a place where those minds could do their finest work, valued for exactly the qualities that had made them difficult to employ. That is extraordinary.

The promise of decentralized organizations is something I believe in deeply. Ethereum was conceived as a liberatory technology — machinery of freedom, a tool for self-sovereignty and sovereignty-preserving coordination at scale. That ambition is real and worth working toward seriously.

What follows is critical, and I want it to land in the right register. This is the writing of someone who has watched an ecosystem with extraordinary potential make the same category of mistake, repeatedly, for years — and who thinks naming the mistake clearly is more useful than continued celebration.

The mistake is this: Ethereum has never learned to grow up.

This is not a criticism of any single person or institution. Ethereum has no shortage of brilliant, well-meaning people who care deeply about getting this right. It is more a quiet cry for help — from someone inside the ecosystem, who has watched the gap between the ambition and the reality widen for years, and who believes, stubbornly, that it does not have to be this way.

The argument this piece makes is simple, if uncomfortable. Decentralization requires more leaders, not fewer — and currently Ethereum has no way of validating the human nodes it depends on. It has built world-class material technology on a social technology stack that is barely functional. It has celebrated vision and ignored the people who make vision survivable. It has handed authority to people without the experience and the scar tissue to carry it, and built a culture that makes accountability feel like an attack. And it has, in doing so, produced exactly the gap between its stated values and its lived reality that anyone paying attention has been watching widen for years.

None of this is a criticism of Vitalik — if anything, the opposite. Despite his relative youth, he has often been one of the few genuine adults in the room: someone who has grown visibly, who takes the human and philosophical dimensions of what he built seriously, and who has been more insistent than almost anyone that Ethereum deserves better than what parts of its culture have made of it. This piece is written in that same spirit.

I am not the first to have called this out. Vinay Gupta — one of Ethereum's original contributors, present at the creation — wrote in Be Realistic — Demand the Incorruptible: 

"I've seen a fair bit of magic over the years, and I understand when it needs rules." 

His diagnosis of what followed the early idealism is unsparing: three generations of actors, ending with what he called simply the heartless Scammers, and an economic reality in which sophisticated mechanisms for moving money around do not create wealth — they redistribute it, usually upward.

In late 2024, Mark Beylin posted on the Ethereum Magicians forum — the closest thing the ecosystem has to a formal deliberative space — making the same diagnosis from inside the governance layer: 

"For too long our community has been told that these forums are meant to be a place of technical discussion, and that talking about the people layer is not a good use of this space. I think avoiding these discussions has eventually become a hindrance to the healthy functioning of this ecosystem." 

He went further, arguing that while the protocol layer has largely succeeded in upholding Ethereum's values, the social layer has not, and that power has quietly consolidated through informal, opaque networks structurally antithetical to everything the protocol was designed to prevent.

These are not fringe views or outsider critiques.

They are the observations of people who have been in the room, who helped build this thing, and who are watching the same gap widen. The conversation is overdue.

A clarification before we go further: what follows is not an argument about age. There are twenty-five year olds who have absorbed more genuine leadership experience than some fifty year olds will accumulate in a lifetime, and veterans of traditional finance who spent decades in institutions that taught them nothing useful. Age is a weak proxy for what this piece is actually about, which is scar tissue — the specific kind of knowledge that only forms when something you built failed, when you had to sit with the consequences and explain what went wrong. It cannot be faked or skipped or replaced by intelligence and enthusiasm. It accrues through experience that depends entirely on whether a person has been in situations where failure had real costs, accountability was unavoidable, and they were willing to swallow some humble pie and actually improve. Ethereum has (unintentionally) built a culture that systematically shields people from all three.

Decentralization Requires More Leaders

Ethereum was born out of a nineteen-year-old's dream — a whitepaper more influential than most governments' policy agendas, a founding mythology that celebrated the kind of genius that burns brightest untethered from institutional constraints. That mythology served the protocol well in its early years. You need visionaries to build something from nothing.

But adolescence is not a permanent state. And the problem with adolescent genius is not the intelligence. It is the experience gap.There are two kinds of genius that matter in building something at scale. The first designs the system — sees the architecture before it exists, holds the vision when no one else can. Ethereum has always had this in abundance. The second sustains it — shows up after the launch, manages the people who are burning out, makes the call that disappoints someone, documents the thing so the next person knows what to do, and carries the weight of what the system does to the humans inside it. This genius is quieter, less photogenic, and almost entirely absent from the ecosystem's mythology.

The gap between them is not filled by reading. It is filled by experience — the sleepless nights worrying about someone else's livelihood, the meeting where you had to deliver news that broke someone, the moment you realized you had caused harm you could not undo and had to stay in the room anyway. That is the scar tissue. And without it, the most brilliant engineers in the world will keep building things that work beautifully in theory but fail the people inside them.

Ethereum needs more of the second kind of genius. Not a single CEO or a benevolent dictator. We keep looking to the EF, or to Vitalik, to fix this for us, and that instinct is itself part of the problem.

A traditional institution can function with one excellent leader at the top and competent executors beneath. Decentralized organizations cannot work this way. That is their entire point. They distribute authority, decision-making, and accountability across a wide network. There is no apex. The quality of the network is determined not by one extraordinary individual but by the aggregate quality of leadership distributed across every node — in the core protocol teams, the DAOs, the community organizations, the events infrastructure, the legal entities, the grant organizations, the validator networks, the L2 ecosystems.

Which raises a question the ecosystem has never seriously tried to answer: how do we know we can trust the nodes? Not the technical nodes — we have rigorous mechanisms for those. Proof of work made dishonesty computationally expensive. Proof of stake gave validators something real to lose. We would not accept a technical validator that could not demonstrate its integrity.

But what is the human equivalent? What is proof of stake for a person? The ecosystem has no answer — no equivalent of slashing conditions for human misbehavior, no cultural infrastructure for assessing leadership integrity before handing someone influence over millions. We run the human layer of Ethereum on trust assumptions we would never accept in the protocol itself. And too often what runs on that layer is not merely buggy software. It is malware — extractive, self-serving, architecturally invisible — running free precisely because the system was never designed to name it, let alone catch it.

We keep placing barely graduated twenty-somethings in positions of power over hundreds of millions of dollars and acting shocked when the outcomes disappoint: casino mechanics dressed up as financial primitives, yacht parties and token launches optimized for spectacle, conferences where the side events cost more than the product development budgets. What makes this especially painful is that the ecosystem's own values explicitly reject it. The gap between those stated values and what parts of the culture actually do is not a technical problem. It is a leadership problem.

Social Technology as Key Infrastructure

Samo Burja argues that it is society that disrupts technology, not the other way around — that social technologies enable and regulate what material technologies we use and how. More pointedly: a failure of social technologies ultimately results in a failure of the material technologies at hand.

Functional institutions are the exception, not the rule. Violence is the default. Coordination is costly. Most institutions merely imitate functional ones — generating narratives of competence while quietly failing at their actual purpose. Every civilization rests on a core stack of social technology that coordinates and sustains its vital institutions. Without it, even the most impressive material technology eventually fails.

There is a cypherpunk dream — and I believed it too, for a brief idealistic moment in 2020 — that the smart contracts are the social technology. That "don't be evil" becomes "can't be evil." That code is coordination, and coordination is enough. It is a beautiful idea. But without humans, the contracts are at best a network, not an economy. Community, culture, and coordination are not byproducts of good infrastructure. They are the scarce resources the infrastructure is supposed to serve. We have been optimizing for the pipes while neglecting everything that needs to flow through them.

Ethereum has invested extraordinary resources in building material technology: the protocol, the tooling, the Layer 2 infrastructure, the cryptographic primitives. It has invested comparatively little in the social technology stack that would allow that material technology to function at scale.

The walkaway test — whether Ethereum could continue to function reliably even if today's core developers disappeared tomorrow — is a technical goal but also, inescapably, a human one. A network passes it not just when its code is robust, but when its culture, its institutions, and its leadership are robust enough to carry it forward. On the technical dimension, genuine progress has been made. On the human dimension, the ecosystem has barely started.

What "Adults" Actually Means

Calling for more adults in Ethereum is not a call for suits, for TradFi refugees, for compliance officers who want to sand down every interesting edge. The ecosystem has enough of those already, mostly haunting the enterprise blockchain graveyard alongside their Hyperledger tombstones.

What Ethereum needs is maturity forged not in whitepapers but in experience — the kind that accumulates when you have managed real people in complex situations, cared whether someone kept their job, built something that broke and had to answer for it.

There is a structural problem nobody likes to say plainly: an industry built on unpaid or token-compensated labor disproportionately attracts people who were unable (or unwilling) to find stable employment elsewhere. Stubborn, spirited, irreverent, passionate, often with streaks of genius ...many things, but often not natural leaders. Thus Ethereum's contributor pool primarily splits into two distinct failure modes. On one side: genuinely talented, often neurodivergent people who bring extraordinary capability alongside real gaps in organizational experience — the ecosystem's greatest asset and, without proper support, one of its most predictable points of fragility. On the other side: the soulless opportunists who arrived with gambling profits and the confidence that comes from never having been held accountable, people who mistake a bull market for intelligence, and a token launch for a business. Neither group, alone or in combination, is a likely recipe for building humanity's future coordination infrastructure. The first needs mentorship and structure. The second needs consequences — which the ecosystem has been extraordinarily reluctant to provide.

This maturity, when it exists, asks uncomfortable questions. Who is this actually for? Adults find out by sitting with real people and watching them fail, with curiosity rather than contempt. What happens when it breaks? Adults plan for failure and ask what happens to the person on the other end. What does success look like? Adults define it before the game starts, not after they've lost.

The Work Is Everywhere

The maturity deficit runs through all of it — technical teams that never invested in leadership development because shipping code was always more urgent; funding structures that rewarded fast liquidity over durable institutions; governance systems that built sophisticated tooling and then discovered the bottleneck was never the tooling but the human capacity to participate constructively; financial products that transferred risk invisibly because nobody in the room had ever watched what happens when someone who doesn't understand a complex product is handed one; large gatherings of thousands managed by people who had never run a large event, where the absence of professional operations expertise was not merely an inconvenience but a genuine physical liability.

The pattern is consistent: extraordinary investment in technical infrastructure, comparatively little in the human infrastructure required to make it function. The cost of that gap is paid not by the people who created it, but by the contributors, the users, and the communities that depend on what was built.

Leadership Is a Craft, Not a Title

There is a working assumption in Ethereum that leadership is a byproduct of technical excellence. Ship enough code, attract enough followers, and leadership simply accretes to you like a natural consequence of being smart.

This is wrong, and the damage it causes is enormous.

Leadership is an art. It requires coaches who push you into discomfort, mentors who share their failures honestly rather than packaging them as origin stories, and mistakes absorbed at the level of identity rather than catalogued in post-mortems. Resilient systems are built by people who can disagree clearly without cruelty and stay curious under pressure. That is not a personality trait. It is a developed skill that takes years to build.

The leaders who do lasting damage are rarely malicious. They were handed authority before they had the internal resources to carry it — no coaching, because coaching was soft; no mentors, because the culture celebrated self-sufficiency; no lessons from mistakes, because there were no consequences that forced them home, and plenty of new capital to paper over what went wrong.

Managing people compounds this. Not because people are irrational, but because they are whole — financial pressures, personal crises, competing loyalties. A contributor burning out silently. A team fracturing over a decision that is 20% technical and 80% about who feels heard. Crypto culture — built around radical impermanence, permissionless exit, the romance of disruption — treats human beings as interchangeable nodes rather than people who need stability and the knowledge that someone is thinking about their long-term wellbeing. Someone needs to care whether contributors have stable jobs, health coverage, and the conditions to still be here doing good work in five years.

This is compounded by a near-total absence of leadership and HR training among founders. Human capital, people leadership — hiring well, managing performance, supporting people through difficulty — is treated as administrative overhead. Mental health awareness barely registers as a hiring criterion. Founders who would spend weeks on a protocol parameter will hire a head of people as an afterthought, and wonder later why their best contributors quietly fell apart.

The Talent We Drove Away

In the early booms, serious people showed up. Lawyers, operators, product people, finance professionals, organizational designers. They saw something genuine and came to help build it.

Most of them left.

Vinay Gupta described what displaced them with characteristic precision: 

"The people who understood what Ethereum was truly about were, generally speaking, poor presenters, and they were pushed aside by the people that understood how to sell scams. Those people didn't really understand what it was they were selling, and they didn't have to — they just needed to understand what people were buying. All they had to have was a plausible enough story to separate rubes from their money, and those people went through the space like dysentery through a refugee camp."

This points to something important that is easy to misread. The call for more adults in Ethereum is not a call for polish. It is not a call for people who have passed three interviews, been handed a title, and learned to perform competence in a meeting room. That particular species — the McCorposlop professional — is not what was lost, and is not what is needed.

What was lost was something different: people who had developed genuine judgment through genuine experience. Leadership is not a title. It is not a suit. It is not the ability to present well or manage upward or make a room feel comfortable. It is self-awareness — understanding your own perspective, but also how you are perceived and experienced by others. It is thinking in nuance. It is the capacity to know better and then actually do better, at every level, not just at the top of the org chart. We need it from our teams, as much as we need it from our founders and investors. Leadership is a practice, not a title.

Many of these contributors were driven out in recent years by a deep cultural disdain for anything resembling professionalism — for process, documentation, the careful institutional knowledge that accumulates only when people stay long enough to pass it on. The message, sent clearly though never stated directly: experience was a liability. Rigor was TradFi. Maturity was capture.

Those people took with them exactly the competencies the ecosystem now most needs. Getting them back requires more than a bull market. It requires a culture that understands what leadership actually looks like in practice — and it often looks nothing like what the ecosystem celebrates.

Leadership is writing a considered blog post instead of screaming into the timeline. It is choosing not to repeat gossip you cannot verify yourself. It is apologising when you get something wrong, without being asked. It is knowing when not to say something as much as knowing when to speak. It is the unglamorous, undramatic, daily practice of behaving as if your words and actions have consequences — because they do.

None of that requires a title. None of it requires seniority. Some of it — the self-awareness, the nuance, the capacity to hold complexity without reaching for a hot take — does take time to develop. But the practice can start today, with the next thing you choose to say or not say. Leadership at scale is built from ten thousand small decisions made by people who chose, each time, to behave as if their words and actions had consequences.

Because they do.

The Swiss Lesson: Social Technology Comes First

Switzerland is famous for its physical outputs — precision instruments, pharmaceuticals, watches engineered to tolerances that border on the absurd. But that is not what makes it work. What makes Switzerland work is social technology so deeply embedded it is almost invisible: a multi-generational commitment to raising well-balanced adults and protecting that investment for the duration of their working lives.

The Swiss apprenticeship system routes roughly two-thirds of young people through structured, employer-integrated vocational training. It is not a consolation prize. It produces people who are technically expert, practically experienced, and emotionally grounded in the reality of work before they are twenty.

Around that, the Swiss have built comprehensive social insurance — unemployment protection, disability coverage, pension schemes, mental health care — not as charity but as asset protection. You have invested enormously in developing this person's capabilities. It would be wasteful, as well as cruel, to let those capabilities degrade through a health crisis or a market failure that was not their fault.

The physical technologies Switzerland produces are impressive. But they are outputs, not causes. The cause is a society that decided the development and protection of its people is the most important engineering problem it has.

Ethereum has a mandate written for a civilisational horizon. Switzerland has been running its apprenticeship system for over a century. The gap between that ambition and the current investment in human capital is the central tension this article is trying to name.

The Floors Nobody Is Paid To Sweep

There is a cathedral being designed here — soaring, ambitious, awe-inspiring. There are many people willing and able to carry out the rubble, risk their lives on the scaffolding, and work on hands and knees to polish the altar. But in a culture that celebrates the architect and ignores the stonemason, cathedrals do not get finished.

The engineers building our cathedral have done genuinely remarkable work — work that deserves to be the foundation of something that lasts. However, in my eyes, the technical roadmap functions, at times, as a displacement activity — a way of feeling productive while avoiding the harder, less glamorous work of making Ethereum accessible and safe for real humans to engage with, to build on, to build in, and to stake their livelihoods on. Technology is hard, but it's tangible. People are orders of magnitude harder.

The floor-sweepers are not a metaphor. They are the community builders who show up every day for years, holding the social fabric together through bear markets and the slow grinding attrition of thankless work. The security folk trying to make sure users are safe. The HR people making sure contributors get paid correctly and on time, because financial stress destroys focus and dignity in equal measure. The tax and legal professionals ensuring the organization does not expose its people to personal liability. The events coordinators who understand that a poorly managed crowd of thousands in a temporary venue is a genuine physical risk, and who take seriously their responsibility to make sure nobody gets hurt.

Ethereum's own mandate names these people as fellow travelers of the path, fellow stewards of the infinite garden. The culture has not caught up. The floor-sweepers remain almost uniformly underpaid, undervalued, and invisible in the status hierarchies that determine where resources flow.

Little of this work generates prestige in Ethereum.

All of it is load-bearing.

The Game Theory of Consequences

The most persistent adolescent belief in Ethereum is that accountability is the enemy — that the whole point of decentralization is to build systems where no one can be held responsible for outcomes. This is not just a moral failure. It is a strategic one.

In Axelrod's iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments — later extended by Strogatz and others — the finding was robust: in a one-shot game, defection is rational. Take what you can, exit cleanly, leave the counterparty to deal with the consequences. But in repeated games, cooperation and reciprocity consistently outperform it. Tit-for-tat wins not because it is morally superior but because reputation and consequences matter when the game goes on long enough.

Crypto has structured itself as a series of one-shot games. Pseudonymity removes reputational stakes. Token liquidity enables exit before consequences arrive. Protocol forks offer a reset button when accountability looms. The ecosystems that have generated durable value — in all of civilization — introduced the opposite conditions: persistent identity, long-term relationships, reputational consequences, social infrastructure that makes defection costly.

Culture. Norms. Protocols — the human kind, not the cryptographic kind.

As Burja puts it: 

"Social technology makes it easier to scale institutions. The more advanced your social technology, and the more you can reduce coordination costs, the more effective your institution becomes. If you're building a purpose-driven institution, then you will need advanced social technology to actually get your collaborators to hit the goal." 

The default without it is not neutrality — it is a high-defection environment where you cannot know what to expect from others, and so you must protect yourself, sometimes by hurting them.

Crypto has built an elaborate technical architecture for trustless coordination while systematically dismantling the social architecture that makes trust possible in the first place. The result is not a trust-minimized system. It is a high-defection environment dressed in the language of freedom.

Accountability is not the enemy of decentralization.

It is the precondition for it actually working.

The Stakes

Ethereum was designed to be a liberatory technology — not just from power relations imposed without consent, but from attempts to order reality in a way that leaves no alternative. That is a serious ambition. It deserves serious people at every level of its implementation, not just at the protocol layer. It is why people like me, who have watched the casinos and the boat parties and the endless cycles of promise and disappointment, still have not walked away.

Switzerland did not become one of the most stable, innovative societies in the world by producing brilliant individuals and setting them loose. It did so by building systems that allowed those individuals to develop fully, fail safely, and contribute sustainably over long careers. The social technology came first. The physical technology followed. Ethereum is trying to do it backwards.

The people who could change this are not hypothetical. Some left in previous cycles, exhausted by a culture that had no use for what they knew. Some are still here, doing the work quietly without recognition. Some are the neurodivergent misfits who found in this ecosystem the first community that made sense to them, and who have more to give than the ecosystem has yet thought to ask for. There is room for all of them. The goal is not to find one great adult and install them at the top. The goal is to build a culture where maturity, experience, emotional intelligence and the unglamorous craft of leadership are valued at every level of the network.

I acknowledge that this piece raises more problems than it solves. That is intentional. If Ethereum is to survive for thousands of years, this is a task for the many and not the few. Balaji Srinivasan has argued that the promise of decentralization is precisely the ability to choose from many leaders — not the replacement of one center with another, but the genuine flowering of alternatives. That is the standard we should be holding ourselves to.

I have seen glimpses of what that could look like. Zuzalu, for me, was a kind of 'summer of love' for Ethereum — proof that something different was possible. What it showed was not just the value of smart people in a room, but of in-person social graphs built slowly over time, of trust networks that compound, of legitimacy earned rather than assumed. The relationships formed there have outlasted the event itself. People who met in Montenegro are still building together, still choosing to be in the same room years later. Some of them have fought bitterly — and that too is a sign of something real. You do not hold someone accountable unless you believe the relationship is worth the friction. Shallow networks dissolve the moment things get hard. The ones that survive disagreement are the ones that were built on something.

Only with real people — real collaboration over time, and with social consequences for bad actors — will Ethereum survive.

That experience is part of what has driven the work behind Zuitzerland — our attempt to build something more permanent than a pop-up village. Zuitzerland is a hub initiative rooted in Switzerland, designed around the idea that the Ethereum ecosystem needs not just more events but more homes — places where contributors can live and work alongside each other over months and years rather than days, where trust accumulates naturally, where culture forms through proximity and shared stakes rather than through conference panels and Discord threads.

The model we are developing is a network of d/acc-aligned permanent hubs, each anchored in a community, each operating as long-term social infrastructure rather than a venue. The logic is the same as the Swiss apprenticeship system: you cannot develop human capability through short sprints. You develop it through sustained environments that reward growth, punish defection, and make the long game feel worth playing.

This piece is not an advertisement for Zuitzerland. It is an argument for the importance of a defensive social layer — and a thesis that Zuzalu (and the hubs emerging from it) are part of the answer.

But you do not have to build a hub to make a difference. The change this ecosystem needs is not only structural — it is personal, and it is available right now.

What is it? Hire for emotional intelligence alongside technical skill. Pay the floor-sweepers what they are worth and give them the status to match. Build mentorship structures that treat leadership as a discipline rather than a byproduct of seniority. Create real consequences for bad behavior — not just in protocol design, but in the rooms where decisions about people and resources are made. Name the malware when you see it, instead of looking the other way because it is inconvenient or because the person running it has the right friends. Hire coaches. Get therapy if your parents or your high school bullies messed you up...and even if they didn't.

If you cared enough to read this: it's in your hands now, anon.

Ethereum doesn't need to become boring. It doesn't need to become safe. But it does need to grow up.

The world is watching. Most of it is still waiting.

The Ethereum ecosystem contains many people doing exactly the kind of patient, unglamorous, human-centered work described here. This piece is a provocation about cultural incentives and dominant discourse, not a condemnation of individuals — and it is written by someone who still, stubbornly, believes in what this ecosystem is trying to do.