Ethereum holds the line between ‘in it for the tech’ and ‘for the money’
Building onchain public goods is noble but they don’t always make the number go up
Akif CUBUK/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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Can you still be in crypto “for the tech?”
The idealist in me would like to say yes — but it’s an increasingly tricky question to answer.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain, in the most general sense, are money technologies. That’s quite different from something like media software, where being in it “for the tech” can be more easily expressed by keeping the software free to use.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the creator of VLC media player, has over the years refused tens of millions of dollars from advertisers in order to do exactly that.
In crypto, it’s not so clear. If you’re in crypto for the “tech,” you’re also in it for the “money.”
Take Bitcoin. Those who’ve built out the protocol have helped provide uncensorable technology to send and receive money peer-to-peer.
And it would be impossible to send “money” peer-to-peer if bitcoin was worth zero in fiat terms. The money is the technology and vice versa.
Ethereum is slightly different. Its smart contracts can support non-financial use cases, so someone developing on Ethereum might be building software as a public good — like VLC media player — with no intention to make money from it.
That culture is fast becoming untenable with modern crypto markets. Vitalik, for instance, has faced renewed pressure to morph into a “wartime CEO” whose primary purpose is to maximize tokenholder value (i.e. pump the price of ETH).
To some, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation have focused too much on “the tech.” Prioritizing decentralization and a commitment to onchain public goods — nifty use cases with no obvious path to value accrual at the base asset, such as Fileverse, Ethereum’s answer to WeTransfer, which doesn’t have its own native token.
Maximizing value for Ethereum tokenholders would otherwise look more like funneling all energies towards apps that have a better shot at boosting the price of ETH, which has lately lagged rival SOL.
A difficult task in the Ethereum world. The most profitable apps in the current meta (launchpads, DEXs and prediction markets) have mostly been pushed onto layer-2s like Base and Polygon, a sidechain — too far away to directly impact ETH.
Still, Ethereum has clearly made Vitalik wealthy, perhaps similarly so to Linux founder Linus Torvalds, another superstar dev with legitimate cred when it comes to “being in it for the tech.”
It’s this divide that’s fast becoming a chasm. A Richard Stallman-esque stubbornness for FOSS sensibilities is a tough sell to a crypto market trained to hunt for the next 1000x, especially coming from those who have already “made it,” so to speak.
There’s no easy fix. The reality is that focusing on tech — functional use cases over money-making ideas — may simply come at a cost of less market attention.
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