# The Internet You Can Own

Source: https://x.com/tgwxyz/status/1896992289190273217

## Summary

Ethereum should embrace marketing and modern media while keeping decentralization at the core of its value proposition. In 2024, Bitcoin rose from $39K to $106K (2.7x) while Ethereum rose from $2.2K to $4K (1.8x), and the ETH/BTC ratio sits at levels not seen since 2018. After community members @jillrgunter and @divine_economy launched an ETHDenver Brand Hack to crowdsource marketing ideas, the Ethereum Marketing Cabal formed on Telegram. The text contrasts Solana's influencer and meme strategy with Ethereum's approach and notes that running a Solana node requires $1M USD of SOL, compared with $73K for an Ethereum node.

## Article

How has one of the world’s most promising blockchains stumbled just when the crypto boom was at its peak? The Ethereum community has survived a trial by fire in the last couple of years. In 2024, Bitcoin went from a low of $39K to a high of $106K (2.7x), Ethereum went from a low of $2.2K to $4K (1.8x). The ETH/BTC ratio is at levels not seen since 2018 after the ICO bubble popped.

The market has overwhelmingly favored traders over investors, rewarding quick flips over long-term conviction. Short-termism is the trend, scams are in vogue, and grifters are applauded. Crypto will fry your dopamine receptors if you’re not careful. That said, markets are cyclical — when things get too nihilistic, fundamentals eventually reassert themselves.

Despite the poor sentiment on Crypto Twitter, which has increasingly become an echo chamber, the ~vibes~ around Ethereum are improving and we are seeing some positive changes which could allow Ethereum to gain some momentum.

A few weeks back, a couple of Ethereum community members (notably @jillrgunter and @divine_economy) decided to launch an ETHDenver Brand Hack. The idea was to crowdsource marketing ideas for Ethereum and take ownership of the lack of hype around Ethereum. Here’s the original post by David that caught our attention. One thing led to another, and the Ethereum Marketing Cabal formed on Telegram. Ethereum finally has a creative director — and it’s all of us.

Why Ethereum?

From a first principles perspective, blockchains need to be decentralized. Without decentralization, then we might as well be running everything on a centralized database. After all, blockchains could then be much faster and cheaper! The magic of blockchains is they ~could be~ immutable, credibly neutral, unstoppable, and censorship resistant with the right balance of decentralization.

The Scalability Trilemma isn’t mentioned much these days, but it was all the rage from 2016-2020 when many alt-L1s were in development.

The idea is that you have 1) Scalability, 2) Security, and 3) Decentralization on the three faces of a triangle. You can’t have all three. You need to give up something. Most alt-L1 chains sacrificed decentralization and security to increase scalability. In other words, they became more centralized.

When does a blockchain become too centralized? It’s hard to say, but one question we like to ask ourselves is “could this chain be shutdown by a hostile, motivated actor, such as a nation state?”

Ethereum opted to preserve decentralization. It seems like a good bet all things considered. While the market hasn’t valued decentralization, it’s certainly valued by users. For example, just compare where people store their money - Ethereum dominates Solana in this metric.

Rollups can inherit 100% of the base layer security and you can scale via different L2s or economic zones on-top of the base layer. This is how Bitcoin will attempt to scale with BitVM and BitVM2 style rollups. If Solana reaches a max capacity at the base layer, they too will also need to scale with L2s.

For all of crypto, Ethereum represents a really good shot on target to achieve the holy grail of an immutable, credibly neutral, unstoppable, and censorship resistant blockchain.

The Ethereum community represents all cypherpunks, and it represents a vision that is loyal to a mission, not to a casino.

@lex_node summarizes it well here.

How does Ethereum win?

What is Ethereum getting wrong right now? If the mission is so great, why hasn’t it been reflected in price? One challenge the Ethereum community has yet to reconcile is how to stay true to its ideals while engaging with areas of crypto it historically looks down on — like the attention economy (memes, aggressive marketing, etc.).

After the ICO bubble, Ethereum’s leadership understandably distanced itself from anything that might tarnish its credibility. The focus shifted toward “serious” use cases like DeFi, while cultural phenomena like memes were left largely untouched and dismissed. But in doing so, Ethereum lost cultural ground to chains that embraced it like Solana.

Ethereum can do better at shaping the culture and championing the kinds of projects it wants to see thrive. It’s time to make Ethereum cool again, together.

Below are some suggestions on what Ethereum can do better:

1. Ethereum needs to be cool again

One of the best moves by Vitalik was putting on the Milady PFP. Remilia, the founding organization behind Milady, controls Crypto Twitter culture. They believe in a cypherpunk endgame and realize crypto is much bigger than just a technology play — it’s politics, economics, computer science, memetics, philosophy, governance, and art all-in-one. Miladys are cool and they’re edgy. They push the bounds of what’s socially acceptable in the name of preserving freedoms online, like freedom of speech.

Ethereum leadership is often critiqued for their political stances. The politics of Ethereum leadership seem to be out of touch with what the people want. They don’t need to entirely avoid politics, but their stances reflect a feeling that they have lost touched with their customer. What companies have ever succeeded once they’ve lost touch with their customers? None! Why have subcultures like Milady created more cultural impact and influence than the Ethereum culture itself? Ethereum doesn’t have a strong culture and it’s had weak leadership. It’s far too passive — the best founders are in the trenches with their users and deeply understand their pain points. Just study @charlottefang77 and how he’s actively channeling a Dynasty Mindset (for the purpose of elevating his community and fortifying values) and creating discourse in a manner that is digestible by all of Milady’s community regardless of their status, IQ, or technical background. The ability to communicate to all spectrums of your community is powerful. Up until recently, the Ethereum Foundation wasn’t even using major DeFi protocols. Native ideology is more important than political discussions and whether you support a certain candidate. Rallying around a cypherpunk and edgy ideology, like the early days of crypto, would make Ethereum cool again. The video below from Marc Andreessen talks about how to replace the elites of today. It’s not just a technological revolution - culture and philosophy are necessary for winning.

Solana is winning mindshare because it has an identity and an ideology - fast and cheap. They’ve embraced influencers, and they’ve embraced memes. They hustle and work hard. They’re not afraid to sell themselves, their product, or their ethos — they’re willing to fight. In a world where it’s troll or be trolled, the only way to beat ideas is to present better ideas. Ethereum cannot be afraid to fight. Ethereum needs to go full war mode and directly support proven projects and communities on its chain - whether that’s a memecoin, DeFi app, or NFT project - the customer is always right!

2. Embrace Modern Communicative Mediums & Memetic Power

Ethereum has few allies on the press or the timeline (which has now become arguably more important). Where are the Ethereum efforts to align themselves with media? If you don’t promote it, it doesn’t matter. “Build and they will come” doesn’t work. Ethereum needs to sell. Why don’t more people talk about how hard it is for the average person to run a profitable node on Solana? It requires $1M USD of SOL. It costs $73K to run an Ethereum node in comparison. Read this post by @bogdanoffi for more info. This could be front page news, but few people ever talk about it.

Solana has embraced media and influencers. They welcome them into their community. There’s accounts like @DegenerateNews which look like a neutral news account on the face of it, but they’re mainly posting bullish updates about Solana. Blockworks seems to be Solana aligned as well. It’s great for Solana and a smart move, but it’s bad for Ethereum. There’s a lesson in there that you must embrace media.

Moving from X to Farcaster was a longterm move by the Ethereum community, but it’s unfortunately come at the expense of having less mindshare on X. Until Farcaster can attract your average person to onboard, X needs to be prioritized as the dominant form of social media amongst the Ethereum community, or mindshare and influence will continue to decrease.

3. Understand the Competition

Ethereum isn’t just competing with Solana, it’s competing with Bitcoin L2s. Bitcoin markets themselves as money, and Solana markets themselves as tech. Where does Ethereum fit? Is it just a worse money and worse tech? It feels like there’s an easy rebuttal here if we go back to the scalability trilemma and focus on Ethereum’s core value prop - decentralization. The explanation for “Why Ethereum” hasn’t been made clear to the average user, despite its accuracy. More time needs to be spent on this topic.

Solana is generally known for their better UX. We believe this is for two main reasons 1) Phantom is associated with Solana and widely considered the most user friendly wallet, 2) Solana only has one chain, so users don’t need to bridge between 4-5 different chains in order to execute a transaction. Account abstraction has been memed for years, but where is it? Why hasn’t there been any wallets that have been able to abstract away the underlying L2s and treat all USDC/USDT the same, despite which L2 it sits on? If Ethereum wants to be known as user friendly, it starts with abstracting away the L2 experience and giving it the feeling of just operating on the base layer of Ethereum.

4. Partnerships

Is there an Ethereum aligned accelerator? Consensys has often been looked to for this role, but they have yet to embrace it in a bottom-up way. Are they as good at scaling projects like DeFi Alliance, who appears to be more aligned with Solana? Who can step in and fill this role? If there’s a promising Ethereum based project, how do they get connected to other players in the ecosystem they could potentially work with? When nobody steps up and the Ethereum Foundation doesn’t take responsibility, decentralization is a weakness.

5. Central Hub (or lack thereof)

The Ethereum website is actually pretty good, but ironically, that’s part of the problem. In an era where emails feel annoying, do you really expect people to be reading the FAQs on a website? Ethereum needs a concerted and coordinated effort for an Ethereum homepage/dapp store, but they also need these values and applications to flood the timeline and meet the consumer where they already exist. In the long run, ideally crypto is just the backend and people don’t even know they’re using Ethereum, but don’t wait for Apple and company to integrate it. Ethereum needs to build it themselves and meet the users where they already are.

Ethereum Marketing Ideas

The Ethereum community needs to be able to describe what Ethereum does in a sentence. Memes rule how information spreads. It needs to be simple enough for someone to get what Ethereum does right away. Bitcoin’s “Digital Gold” meme is incredible. Everyone gets it instantly. The answer to this question will inform how we propose Ethereum moves forward with the brand hackathon.

Here’s some crowdsourced and original ideas:

Web1: Read, Web2: Write, Web3: Own

-- Our take: Good start, but it’s probably too long.

World Computer

-- Our take: Not sure this resonates with people. People think of their computer as the laptop/desktop sitting right in front of them. What’s a world computer, just a really big computer?

Digital Oil

-- Our take: Feels like a ripoff of digital gold, but it’s actually pretty good at communicating what Ethereum does. It communicates that Ether derives value from being useful and being the currency of the digital economy. But it lives too much in Bitcoin’s frame to be the dominant meme.

The Internet of Money

-- Our take: Generally believe the Internet of Things only resonated with engineering types and it’s too abstract of a concept for normies.

The People’s Internet

-- Our take: We like this, but it’s too abstract.

Open-source software with incentives

-- Our take: This meme works best with VCs and investors. They know open-source software is eating the world, but they don’t have a mental model for how tokens and crypto fit into this, so this is a helpful explanation.

The global settlement layer

-- Our take: Might work for traders and funds, but it probably doesn’t resonate with normies who don’t get what that means.

Ethereum - the Internet you can own!

-- Our take: This is our favorite. Credit to this piece written by @safetyth1rd. It checks all the boxes. It explains the value prop, it’s simple to understand, and it can resonate with everyone. People know about the internet and they know all of the biggest tech companies in the world are valuable - so what if they could own the internet itself and buy “equity” in it? The internet is only getting more powerful and more pervasive every year. “Ethereum - The Internet you can own” attempts to thread the needle between pushing the technology and the asset ETH.

Other Attempts at a logo re-design:

Be careful about using ≡thereum - most normies will just read this as “thereum”. (eg. Built on ≡thereum)

Don’t be too cypherpunk, it will abandon normies.

Don’t be too woke. Ethereum is a meritocracy, you don’t get bonus points for being “woke” - you get points for delivering value to the customer.

Intel Inside

One of the inspirations of this brand hack was Intel Inside. Jill Gunter mentions this here.

The genius wasn’t in the branding, however. It was actually the go-to market which followed the branding that made everything work. So for this brand hackathon to be successful we need to be thinking about both 1) branding and 2) go-to market.

For context, Intel Inside was a campaign for computer manufacturers (OEMs) to show they were aligned with Intel and help Intel build a reputation with customers (history of Intel Inside). The simple logo gave a way for normies to understand that their devices contained quality components provided by a company that defined the state of the art - Intel.

Intel actually provided subsidies to the manufacturers who included the Intel Inside logo on their own products and ads, thus encouraging consumers to think about the processors inside the devices they bought and recognize Intel as a sign of quality and innovation. The manufacturers weren’t putting the logo on their devices out of the kindness of their hearts. By the end of 1992, 500+ manufacturers had signed onto the co-marketing program and 70% of computer ads that could carry the logo did so.

Intel contributed a $250 million initial investment ($562 million in today’s dollars) into the initiative. By the end of the 1990s, Intel had spent more than $7 billion ($12.9 billion in today’s dollars) on the Intel Inside campaign and had 2,700 PC firms locked up. By 2001, these rebates were running $1.5 billion a year ($2.69 billion in today’s dollars).

All Intel Inside participants had to submit every ad, regardless of the medium, to Intel for approval. Ads were checked for compliance with Intel corporate identity standards for: size, color, prominence of Intel's logo, verbiage in the accompanying taglines, click-throughs to Intel websites for advertising and more.

Intel had a 100 page manual of regulations that even dictated how ad copy must be written. Failing to follow Intel's guidelines and committing any infraction could lead to all funds being halted. Adding a product that uses a non-Intel chip to an existing line would also lead to forfeiture of all Intel grants for that product line. Savage!

Here's an example of one of the commercials Intel funded.

Intel meant business when they designed this plan. It was cutthroat, aggressive, and well organized. They were able to successfully partner with all of the manufacturers, encourage them to use Intel chips, and then build a relationship with the end consumer who recognized the Intel brand meant cutting edge and reliable. This increased their brand presence and reputation over time.

If you want to read a few other views on the Inside Intel campaign check out: 1) Overview of Intel Inside and 2) YC forum on the pros/cons of Intel Inside.

Our Submission

Ethereum is the Internet you can own! Using the Intel Inside example, applications are the OEMs, and Ethereum is the chip equivalent. It’s worth considering that Ethereum needs to run a campaign with capital in a similar order of magnitude as the one that Intel ran. In addition, Ethereum needs to be aggressive with implementation and determining its allies.

The first question that jumps out is the following:

If Intel wouldn’t fund OEMs who worked with competing chips, should Ethereum fund applications who are going multichain?

Long-time Ethereum allies like Maker/Sky, Uniswap, and Aave have gone multichain. What would this mean for their participation in a program like this? Should there be an expectation that they need to be more “Ethereum aligned” and what would that look like if so? These are hard, but worthwhile, conversations that need to happen. We don’t have the answers — it needs to be a discussion with consensus from the community.

With the above go-to market in mind, we believe the ideal submission for this hackathon is a logo that derives inspiration from the Intel Inside campaign and can be used as a brand asset in a go-to market where applications are required to use the logo in a prominent location of their UX, if they want to receive the benefits of being affiliated with this Intel Inside like program.

We believe the logo should communicate the application is built on Ethereum and it inherits the trust properties of Ethereum’s decentralization. We also believe the logo needs to strike a balance between the technology and the asset. This is what we aimed to develop below. Thus, we added what we believe is the strongest ETH meme (“The Internet You Can Own”) and incorporated the phrase “Powered by Ethereum” to show the application is using Ethereum as the underlying blockchain. Branding is key and we didn’t want to move significantly away from the iconic Ethereum logo.

Designs by @pdes_igns.

The go-to market implementation needs to feature some sort of program, whether it be an accelerator, an alliance, or a business development team that’s an arm of the Ethereum Foundation that operates just like the BD team at a startup like Solana would operate. The Ethereum community should take inspiration from how Intel went to market - both in how they did co-marketing, how they funded their allies, and how they cut ties with anyone who crossed them. We see the above logo (or sticker) as being a key component of a potential Intel Inside style campaign, if the Ethereum community chose to rally and put the resources behind it.

Conclusion

The most important takeaway in our view is there needs to be a tangible next step for Ethereum to implement an ecosystem wide co-marketing program which brings Ethereum branding to the forefront. If successful dapps will spin up their own L1 and abandon Ethereum at some point, then none of this matters and Ethereum is dead, so Ethereum needs to incentivize alignment and start providing resources to the teams that have the same vision for Ethereum. Hope isn’t a strategy. There needs to be a thoughtful and serious conversation amongst the top players in the Ethereum community on how to drive value back to Ethereum both in terms of the technology and the branding. The same things that got Ethereum from 0-1 won’t be the same things that get Ethereum from 1-100. There’s not one best way of doing it, but we’re happy to support the ETHDenver Brand Hack and throw our hat in the ring with our ideas.

There was once a Myspace, and there was once a BoredApe.

A 1000 year dynasty is not built without the support of its tribe. It’s time for Ethereum to mog.

Special thanks and all the credit to @pdes_igns for his work on our ETHDenver Brand Hack Submission. In addition, thank you to @j0xrdan, @ShisuiXBT, @HalloweenIn2008, and @puniaviision for their detailed feedback and review.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: This document is intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be construed as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients of this document should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance (which are not considered in this document) before investing. This document is not an offer, nor the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned herein.

## Comments

**timdaub.eth**: This is actually spot on, but it also informs one of my biggest frustrations, which is that basically none of we need is achieved by core devs, or researchers or by speeding up hard forks. 99% of what is being described here is related to marketing, setting the right standards for wallets, cleaning shit up, having good defaults and opinions.