It's Ethereum’s 10th birthday, and about time we address the deal with the devil we made in our network's youth.

In its original whitepaper, Ethereum’s stated purpose was to serve as “a tool of distributed consensus”. Reality today is a far cry from this purpose. While the Ethereum community has been meticulous about designing the network to facilitate a maximally distributed validator set, we have neglected to ensure the distribution of an equally critical element – one which currently jeopardizes the network's sovereignty: its value source.

An overwhelmingly dominant portion of value on the Ethereum network is dependent on centralized stablecoins. Nobody likes to talk about it, but this is such a significant problem that two companies, Circle and Tether, actually control the state of the Ethereum network.

The Ethereum state secures $1.1T of value, of which only about 10% is issued by Circle or Tether. Yet, the utility of USDT and USDC as media of exchange is so great compared to decentralized equivalents (e.g., the OG DAI, Liquity) that the majority of the value of the Ethereum state is dependent on USDT and USDC for liquidity and, de facto, its value.

In practice, therefore, we are not in a position to declare victory. In the same way that the Ethereum community responded to the existential threat of competition at the network layer, we must address the existential threat posed by centralized stablecoin issuers.

With Ethereum solidifying ETH’s dominance over BTC as a store of value from a monetary policy perspective, the last advantage BTC has over ETH is that its value does not derive from fundamentally centralized economic activity.

The missing ingredient to actually distribute the Ethereum consensus and establish ETH as a dominant store of value over BTC is a scalable Ethereum network-native censorship resistant medium of exchange.

After almost 5 years working on solving this problem, there is now significant evidence that a credit based model for a low volatility currency can fulfill this need. Credit is infinitely scalable, plus can be permissionless and distributed.

Trying to create a low volatility money that can outcompete USDT and USDC is frightening for many: there is a graveyard full of previous attempts. The last crypto market bull run effectively ended when the largest attempt to date, Terra, suddenly failed. But given the danger facing the Ethereum network, we cannot sit idly by. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water, we must learn from past failures and continue to make progress.

It is still early, but @pintodotmoney is the frontier. If you believe in the vision of Ethereum, it is worth your time to check it out.

-ben