A lot of negative feedback has been thrown towards well funded companies applying for the RPGF grants (sorry Alchemy, you’re the scapegoat here)...

Incredibly grateful for the grant we received from Optimism for our work on Forum last year! A short description of what we were awarded for, and general thoughts on the process.

On a technical level the validators of Ethereum work to reach consensus on the correct state of the network, and although not a simple task, there is at least a well defined set of operations to run, check, and agree upon. But move up a few layers, beyond the world of bits, and you find a much messier, more human, level of consensus that needs to be settled. The world of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) is the arena in which any changes to the blockchain must prove themselves not mathematically, but socially.

There have been many blockchain projects where the answer to ‘could it be done’ is yes, and ‘should it be done’, is no… this is another one. There isn’t much point to write your name directly onchain. But there are cases where writing exact bytecode to an address is more than just an exercise in understanding how contracts are deployed at a low level.

Would you rather own a Claude Monet painting or a Crypto Punk NFT? While both collections have sold pieces for tens of millions of dollars, they seem worlds apart culturally. Monet fills grand museums and is considered one of the most influential painters of all time; Crypto Punks find themselves as Twitter profile pictures, with critics unable to comprehend why anyone would want to buy a pixelated head. At first glance the only similarity between the two collections is a price tag which few can afford, but if we look back at how each fits into the timeline of modern art, they might be more similar than we think.

If someone sent you a message today saying “QWERTYUIOP”, you probably wouldn’t be all that impressed… But take things back to 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent this as the first ever ‘electronic mail’ and you would have felt very different. In a similar light, the projects making the headlines in Decentralised Finance today might one day become commonplace, but until then, maybe they deserve the hype.