Ethereum

A lot of EF hate on the app that’s designed to make us hate each other

I think most of it is completely missing the full picture. I shared my thots on x 👇

With the latest discussions around a modern-day consensys, or a second foundation, or an other vehicle to help fix eth's long-standing huge problems in marketing, ecosystem, and end-user app growth, it's crucial that we don't rely on or ask the current crop of infrastructure/core…

@ryanberckmans Ok I’ll finally bite. I’ll probably regret sending this but here we go. It feels like everyone is missing the big picture, and it’s especially disappointing to see this from people who’ve been in the Ethereum ecosystem way longer than me.

First off, yes, I work at the EF, but I…

chaskin.eth

A lot of EF hate on the app that’s designed to make us hate each other

I think most of it is completely missing the full picture. I shared my thots on x 👇

https://x.com/jchaskin22/status/1875639262860705903?s=46&t=Ngl1sElWUn3Od1WsMs2f0Q

/ethereum foundation | the tools we create will set us free paragraph.xyz/@chaskin

This is good but I also think there's a fundamental problem with CT not knowing what it even wants and so it picks an arbitrary label ("marketing") to express a much more nuanced desire ("perceived leadership and direction, catchy memeing and posting like Toly and Mert, and picking winning projects).

Solana videos don't do much if anything.
Toly and Mert shit posting most of the day and boiling vision down to IBRL is imo everything.

Also imo, EF's stance on credible neutrality is understandable but has drawbacks. If I build something decent on Solana, I know the Solana apparatus, + Toly & Mert would probably push it. 
If I built something amazing on Ethereum, I know the EF probably wouldn't do _anything_ because when there were EF folks who did (Eigenlayer) they got slapped hard.

I say this with love, as someone who's launched 2 diff protocols on Ethereum mainnet (and will continue to in the future), Ethereum doesn't give a shit if you launch on it. Solana gives many.

Founder, designer, & product guy at /basepaint and /eigenlayer

CT complaining about Ethereum's marketing today is like complaining about its UX two years ago.

When they said UX they meant: transaction times, and cost, and liquidity fragmentation, and wallets, and many other problems that were not solvable by a designer sitting down in Figma and redoing a wallet button. 

Similarly, "marketing" isn't solvable by someone cutting some cool videos about the next hard fork.

Appreciate your thoughts and your projects, basepaint is one of my favorite apps! I agree with most of it

The EF could definitely use a Toly / Mert, it's worth noting that Mert doesn't work at the Solana Foundation, he's definitely a value add to the Solana community so it would be awesome if someone from the Ethereum community wants to do something similar but also shit posting on twitter all day is brain rot so I don't blame people for not wanting to do it

Instead of shit posting on twitter like Toly does Vitalik leads by his blog posts which set the vision and philosophy for Ethereum, each has it's pros and cons, I know which one I prefer

But that doesn't mean something from the EF couldn't shit post all day. I think you're slightly off with the EigenLayer example - that went down the way it did because they were given multi million illiquid advisor deals. EF actually released it's COI policy in the most recent EF report (https://ethereum.foundation/report-2024.pdf) and most investments are allowed

I think I'm maybe 100% aligned w/ both your OP and reply (also ty for the kind words re BasePaint, means a lot!),  but I want to make a couple of counterpoints bc I think they're important:

1. The points you make are factually accurate, but marketing isn't about factual accuracy, it's about perception. So even if what happened with Eigenlayer is factual, what I caught second hand (and this is well before I joined Eigenlayer, super indifferent to it as a project as it happened) it looked from the outside like yet another instance of EF getting gun-shy about credible neutrality and punishing others for picking a winner. 

Additionally, I picked Eigen as an example bc I couldn't think of any other examples of the EF even commenting on something being built on Ethereum besides more Layer 2s. Maybe I'm wrong! I'm spending less time on CT because it's so toxic. But I do feel like I'm more aware of good apps on Solana than I am on anything deployed on Ethereum main, which is crazy because I solely use Ethereum.