A decade ago, half a dozen mavericks assembled in a Swiss house to launch Ethereum — a piece of the crypto ecosystem that acts as a distributed computing platform, using the ether token.
It initially looked likely to fail: the founding tribe imploded after bitter internal fights; Ethereum suffered a massive cyber hack; scandals erupted and, like bitcoin, ether’s price became crazily volatile, surging from nothing to $5,000, before collapsing.
But this week something striking occurred: just as the White House was issuing a report about the “Golden Age of Crypto”, the Nasdaq exchange celebrated Ethereum’s tenth birthday. “Ethereum has demonstrated itself . . . as the definition of antifragile,” enthused Joe Lubin, one former inhabitant of that founding house, who presents the platform as “a reliable trust layer for our fast-growing digital world”.