Beautifully crafted piece on "Why Ethereum?" Very powerful. Some quotes: “The original vision of consortium blockchains – the idea that you have 5 banks or major companies that come together and create their own chain – has been mostly a failure,” Vitalik Buterin explains . “It ends up inheriting most of the disadvantages of centralization and most of the disadvantages of decentralization at the same time.” The problem, as he describes it, is that the first few banks feel like equal founders, but bank number twenty is just joining something its competitors already control. You take on all the engineering cost of a distributed system and get none of the benefits of openness, composability, and credible neutrality that made blockchains worthwhile in the first place. The single-most important blockchain property is sovereignty (Note: Another way to express "sovereignty" is: credible neutrality + censorship resistance + privacy + security). What made Bitcoin revolutionary was that it was the world’s first sovereign computer platform. Before Bitcoin, all computer platforms belonged to a person, a company, or a government, and they had to obey the will of their owners and the rules of the jurisdiction where they resided. But a sovereign only obeys its own rules, and no single entity could impose rules on Bitcoin. (Note: On Ethereum, builders and users also have far more personal sovereignty than possible on any other large public platform in the world.) Much of Ethereum’s lead in sovereignty and credible neutrality comes from path dependence that no other blockchain can replicate. Ethereum launched with proof-of-work in 2015 and ran on it for seven years before transitioning to proof-of-stake in 2022. During that period, ownership of the network was distributed through an open 2014 crowdsale and GPU mining that was deliberately kept accessible to consumer hardware. The result was widespread token distribution with no single entity controlling a meaningful fraction of the network (an essential factor in the sovereignty of a proof-of-stake network). According to Token Terminal’s Ethereum Q1 2026 Report, Ethereum holds 79% of active DeFi loans across the top five chains, 62% of stablecoins, 73% of tokenized funds, and 84% of tokenized commodities. Erik Voorhees, the founder of Venice.ai (the privacy-first AI inference platform with 3+ million users and tens of millions of dollars in ARR), articulated a similar rationale a few days ago "It wasn't even a question for us," Erik replies when asked why he built Venice on Coinbase's Ethereum L2 Base, "The Ethereum ecosystem is the far more authentic, resilient, and robust ecosystem of all smart contract platforms."