"In the last few months, there has been a great amount of interest into the area of using Bitcoin-like blockchains - the mechanism that allows for the entire world to agree on the state of a public ownership database - for more than just money." Vitalik Buterin, 2013
v4.1. May 4th, 2021
Current version: ethstory.eth.link
Ethstory is a data visualization project, using network and other diagrams to depict major themes and events in the history of Ethereum. Visualizations will be released as NFTs, and draw inspiration from many exciting artists in this space who use crypto themes to underpin their work. Each original visualization uses thousands of data points from on-chain and other resources to create symbolic depictions of Ethereum's intriguing history. Scarcity is associated with depth in time — the earlier the depicted events, the rarer the items. On OpenSea, owners (and only owners) unlock a link to a password-protected vector-quality PDF, permitting printing, zooming, etc. to any resolution.
There will only be 4 series produced. Each series will include several originals, and each of these originals will have a limited number of editions. These will be issued as NFTs minted on OpenSea. Series will be released in waves in spring, 2021.
The project is stewarded by Sfermion, and initial sales hosted on OpenSea. Takens Theorem will hold a complete set of these NFTs, and 100% of the ether in initial sales of the remaining NFTs will go to charity (minus gas costs for maintenance). Charities will be chosen among those that take ether. Toggle "Owner's Guide" below to get more information about donations. The decision to donate to charity is to leverage the recent surge of interest in NFTs and crypto to support important causes, and to bring further attention to the many exciting artistic projects taking place on Ethereum.
Donation Information
Securing Editions
Attributes
Tips for Scaling / Printing
Further Reading
Thank you again very much to owners who supported Ethstory. The response has been far beyond what was anticipated. A primary goal of Ethstory is to support charities through the NFT space. Donations on Ethereum's blockchain are public, so the donations made to charities here are based on the following criteria: (i) humanitarian for those most in need and/or environmental issues, (ii) public giving addresses so that donations can be checked on-chain, (iii) registered 501(c)(3) charities (though they may pursue international missions) and if possible (iv) a charity ranking in Charity Navigator or related sites. The list below details donations. Inside [...] are links to Etherscan for each transaction. The links for each charity take you to their website with the public address listed. Donations were made in waves, the first focusing on major humanitarian causes. After this first wave, donations were made to initiatives relating to the environment and more, including to public goods Gitcoin projects to support the space:
Ethstory takes a different approach to provenance — using OpenSea's "unlockable content" feature. This feature lets owners reveal an IPFS link to an encrypted PDF (along with the password). This means that owners have distinct experience with their pieces — only they have the opportunity to unlock it and print, scale, zoom, etc., over the data visualization. The IPFS URLs reveal the IPFS CID (a hash), and this should work across many IPFS resolvers, including Cloudflare's, Pinata's and of course those pointing to IPFS (ipfs.io). Nevertheless, it is strongly encouraged that owners download and secure their PDF and password. This transfer of file and the password that decrypts it can be considered as a kind of delivery of the work itself.
Each Ethstory original is a distinct piece, rendered in a unique way with thousands of various data points. This makes it difficult to describe each in terms of specific attributes, like classic NFT projects. Nevertheless, here's a loose guide based on some general attributes across Ethstory's originals. Generally, the earlier in history, the rarer the item. However, some items have unique combinations of features, shown in the attribute icons below. Hover your mouse over these icons to get information about each. Rare attributes are in green.
Owners have access to a vector-quality PDF. Every data point among the thousands on these originals is a vector object. This means it can scale to any size desired. One tip for printing to a larger size is to open the PDF and simply go to "print." There you should be able to set the paper size to whatever you desire. All Ethstory pieces are square, so you could in principle set a page size to any large square, even 10 feet by 10 feet, and select "scale to fit." It should fill the custom paper size, and you may be able to export this as a new PDF and share with your favorite printing service. Despite this massive rescaling, the PDF should not be measurably different in size.
In this section, various connections to other material will be made for each original. Pointers to book chapters, block explorers, blog posts — and so on — will inform readers new to Ethereum and add to the relevance of the data visualizations.
"Chain archaeology" describes the analysis of on-chain activity extending back in time. I love to analyze old on-chain data. It sometimes reveals curious patterns in various pockets of the chain. You wonder who were the individuals or organizations behind these patterns. This first series is in a dark theme. For me, it connotes exploration of some strange, ancient cave. Chain archaeology is like the study of etchings made permanent on the cave wall. The cave's dark surrounding signals something intriguing behind these etchings, of human intentions before knowing their future course. It also bears reminding, for those new to crypto: Once made, these digital etchings are forever.
The first series "36PrZ (Conception)" illustrates some basic elements of pre-Ethereum history. All are based on actual data, structured and laid out in a manner that produces visuals that relay this early significance. Each original was generated using thousands of pieces of data drawn from original sources, including Ethereum documentation and on-chain activity.
4 originals, 22 minted. Ether from initial sales of 18 of 22 NFTs (82%) will be donated to charity (minus gas costs for maintenance). Visit the collection on OpenSea.
WPYP Chromosome (4 Editions)
Before there was on-chain data, Ethereum was born in the brain of Vitalik Buterin. To bring this vision to life, his white paper was codified systematically in a detailed and technical yellow paper by Gavin Wood. This piece draws from the original documents, an early version of the white paper (originally distributed in 2013) and the Frontier version of the yellow paper (first protocol specification). "WPYP Chromosome," the core genetic material of Ethereum, was generated from the main prose of these works, setting a coordinate for each idea, each word, in a grid. The grids overlap, illustrating the flow of ideas as they bring Ethereum into reality. In total, almost 20,000 words are projected on this original. Some are highlighted, indicating concepts key to Ethereum's originating aims — to bring more flexible computation and scripting and contracts to blockchain. From a distance, a grid of mysterious overlapping elements is evident; on close inspection, one can almost read the core ideas from left to right, across spans of these original founding documents. In the PDF, it is possible to zoom in on individual words at perfect image quality, or to zoom out and take in the aggregate complexity of these ideas before they manifested on-chain.
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Inject BTC (5 Editions)
Deposits into Ethereum's public sale were hosted in 2014 by BTC address 36PrZ[...]. "Inject BTC" plots most of the depositors into this BTC address. It represents over 6,000 transactions (zoomed in, the larger nodes) and many more thousands of inputs (zoomed in, smaller nodes). One starts to see those curious collective patterns pool in this pocket or that, making one wonder about the goals behind them. Some wallets input to many transactions, some just to 1. Using a deterministic grid layout algorithm, it results in these concentrations of paths here and there. Ownership includes a PDF, and zooming in on the PDF reveals the first few characters of the wallet addresses and transaction hashes for 36PrZ[...] as it collects the inputs to support Ethereum development in late summer, 2014.
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Bridging BTC (6 Editions)
Deposits into Ethereum's public sale were hosted in 2014 by BTC address 36PrZ[...]. "Bridging BTC" plots in orange most depositors who purchased approximately 10,000 or more ether in 2014. BTC transactions flow into this central address. Vitalik Buterin's blog post about the sale (7/22/14) indicated that 1 bitcoin would yield 2,000 ether for the early period of the sale, and then linearly scale down to 1337 ether/bitcoin by 9/2/2014. Using this formula, this piece draws possible linkages to GENESIS wallets in the Ethereum mainnet launch — bridging the wallets on Ethereum with their corresponding wallets on Bitcoin. The dotted lines reflect this alignment, symbolizing what is to come but not yet realized. They converge on the future GENESIS block, at the top left. Those who submitted into 36PrZ[...] await this realization, shown here only as an intriguing specter of that future state. Zooming in on the PDF version of this original reveals the first few characters of wallet addresses and transaction hashes.
Nodes and edges are taken directly from a subset of on-chain data. Edges are rendered with Davidson-Harel, an algorithm that positions wallet addresses on this graph. Randomization is done by seeding Davidson-Harel with the Unix timestamp associated with the first wave of transactions to 36PrZ[...] and Vitalik Buterin's blog post about the sale (7/22/14).
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Birth (7 Editions)
Deposits into Ethereum's public sale were hosted in 2014 by BTC address 36PrZ[...]. This piece plots most depositors who purchased approximately 10,000 or more ether in 2014. This is depicted on the left, as edges on a connection graph, flowing into this deposit address. A year later, Ethereum's mainnet went live, with ether flowing from the GENESIS block. Edges to the right depict the first transactions from GENESIS. The first transactions that spring from these same large BTC depositors are shown, but now in ETH, representing the birth of a new meshwork that would found ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, and more.
Nodes and edges are taken directly from a subset of on-chain data. Intensity of the color indicates multiple transactions between wallets. Edges are rendered with Fruchterman-Reingold, an algorithm that positions wallet addresses on this graph. Randomization is done by seeding Fruchterman-Reingold with the Unix timestamp associated with the first wave of transactions to 36PrZ[...] and Vitalik Buterin's blog post about the ether sale (7/22/14).
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It is in Ethereum's nature to expand and diversify, to branch and bring into existence new varieties, new experiences. This is true in its very founding — the genetic material of Ethereum is agnostic to underlying codebase, and so permits multiple distinct implementations. It is also true of some of Ethereum's most formative episodes — such as the fraught decision to hard fork after the attack on the DAO (0xBB9bc[...]). This series is brighter than the first, signaling a kind of "turning on the light," actualizing and perceiving these rapidly branching projects. All 4 originals are based on actual data or documentation, structured and laid out in a manner that produces visuals that relay this early significance. Each original was generated using thousands of pieces of data drawn from original sources, including Ethereum documentation and on-chain activity.
4 originals, 26 minted. Ether from initial sales of 22 of 26 NFTs (85%) will be donated to charity (minus gas costs for maintenance). Visit the collection on OpenSea.
Clients (5 Editions)
Ethereum's genetic material (seen in "WPYP Chromosome," Series 1, Original 1) specifies how any client may be implemented for Ethereum, regardless of the underlying codebase. This early "branching" strategy has yielded benefits. For example, in 2016, as developers worked to keep Go Ethereum ("geth") more resistant to DDoS-like attacks, nodes using Parity's Rust-based Ethereum client kept churning, maintaining the network. Each implementation makes the network less vulnerable. On this original, these two main clients are shown in their early forms. Over 40,000 code items are adapted from early client versions and visualized here. Key concepts among variables are highlighted. In green, the Go Ethereum implementation; in red, the Rust-based Parity implementation. They are separate clients, helping to expand Ethereum's blockchain, but they are both built on the backdrop of the yellow paper, and both stay aligned within its specifications. In the PDF, it is possible to zoom in on individual bits of code at perfect image quality, or to zoom out and see a kind of texture of code reflecting this branching, diversified implementation strategy.
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Big Bang (6 Editions)
On July 30th 2015, Ethereum distributed ether from its sale into 36PrZ[...] (see "Inject Bitcoin," Series 1). This original plots hundreds of large so-called "genesis wallets" — addresses that received this ether. The network is laid out with Schmuhl's graphopt algorithm, seeded with the Unix timestamp of the genesis block (7/30/2015). Nodes are sized according to the amount of ether received. For example, the largest distribution of ETH flowed into the Ethereum Foundation wallet, indicated by the massive node at the center of the "big bang." Also plotted are some of the first transactions from these large wallets, sized in accordance with the ether received. Many of these initial transactions are to emerging token sales and applications, which emerged quickly on Ethereum — the ERC-20 token standard was proposed just months after the genesis block. Owners have access to a PDF key of this plot. This key labels many of these wallets, and includes many QR codes to Etherscan, where these and many other wallet labels can be explored. Apt to the space analogy is that some of these expansive projects experienced a slow heat death, while others formed vibrant solar systems of activity that continue today.
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Reentrancy (7 Editions)
The most prominent early project on Ethereum, emerging within months of genesis, was the DAO — a project to form a decentralized autonomous organization, in which members pay in ether in order to vote (and invest) in various project proposals that the DAO would support. Members could also withdraw their funds or "split" from the DAO under certain timing constraints. Its popularity exploded. Illustrated in this original are many incoming transactions into the DAO, much of it from exchanges, and in May 2016 it rapidly exceeded $100,000,000 in equivalent ETH. A famous bug was found in the DAO code, one that was also found in other token projects. This bug was a reentrancy bug — an attacker could recursively withdraw ether before the DAO contract updated its balance sheet. So with enough gas for a transaction, an attacker could do this reentrancy many times, withdrawing thousands of ether in a single transaction. In June 2016, an attacker did just this, and drained over a third of the DAO's ether. This reentrancy is shown in the dark petal of this flower graph — and the first attacker became known as the "Dark DAO" contract. A team associated with the DAO worked together to withdraw the remaining ether, shown in the white petal, and now known as the "White Hat DAO". These actions did not resolve issues with the DAO, which contained well over 10% of all ether. It eventually summoned drastic action, illustrated in the next original of Series 2.
Nodes and edges are taken directly from a subset of on-chain data, thousands of these transactions with the DAO, shown at the center right. Edges are rendered with a unique flower-graph approach, encircling the DAO with its most common transacting wallets, which are positioned on a circumference. The DAO not only had a massive economic impact on Ethereum, it also figured centrally in many of its philosophical ingredients: decentralized organizations, token sales and applications, open communities, and ultimately the immutable nature of a blockchain itself.
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Hardest Fork (8 Editions)
Saving the ether in the DAO did not resolve the issues posed by its attack. There was no guarantee that the ether was recoverable, because further attacks were possible. The Ethereum community faced an early challenge — how to preserve the integrity of its blockchain and burgeoning project. One approach was to do nothing — "code is law," and the attacker found conditions of the contract that were entirely permitted by the code. But others argued that the scale of the DAO made this approach untenable, and a so-called "hard fork" was needed. A hard fork forces a restructuring of the clients (see "Clients," Series 2), to be installed by all those participating in validating transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. This restructuring would recover the funds from the DAO attack, and return them to the original depositors. The community held a vote, and it was determined that a "hard fork" would be carried out at block 1,920,000.
This original is the most symbolic of Ethstory so far. The sinusoidal pattern in this original is built from block hashes leading into the hard fork, zooming in on the PDF one can read off these hashes. Behind these hashes is a verdant specter of distinct intentions — a percentage of the Ethereum community favored the philosophical foundation of immutability. They did not accept the hard fork. The block hashes are the same, but they have a distinct future. At block 1,920,000, Ethereum forked, but those individuals did not follow. They branched off, maintaining the original formulation and now known as "Ethereum Classic" (ETC). The first block hashes of ETC are seen forking from Ethereum.
The blue tint on the block hashes in Ethereum are generated from data. On-chain statistics (transactions, difficulty, etc.) showed some instability prior to the fork. The blue shading represents this deviation, like an on-chain anticipation of the major event. One of Ethereum's mantras has been "move fast and break things." But the DAO and the hard fork were a humbling reminder of other important approaches — it may have helped spur the standards and practices in contracts, such as through very influential code and services from OpenZeppelin and others.
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Series 2 symbolized the several ways in which Ethereum rapidly branched into varied agendas and projects. Series 3 highlights the extreme degree to which this complexity unfolded after 2016. Curiously, many of these ideas can be found in the white paper, which highlighted the promise of "sub-currencies" and "derivative financial instruments" and "identity systems" and more. But these glimmers from the white paper are much more striking when we see them implemented. Three such themes are shown here. The first, emerging primarily in 2017 and peaking early in 2018, is the so-called initial coin offering (ICO) phase. Here, seemingly countless projects were built on Ethereum, resulting in what has sometimes been called a "craze." The second is decentralized finance (DeFi) — smart contracts that represent complex financial instruments that interact with each other (and with users) in a way that acts almost like automated, decentralized "banks" (without the banks — "bankless"). The third is relevant to the present project itself — the concept of a non-fungible token (NFT) and its implementation on Ethereum.
This series is the most colorful, indicating this complexification of form and content across the Ethereum platform. Ethereum's massive and highly innovative developer community led to a complex tapestry of projects. All 4 originals are based on actual data or documentation, structured and laid out in a manner that produces visuals that relay these major themes. Each original was generated using thousands of pieces of data drawn from original sources, including Ethereum documentation and on-chain activity.
4 originals, 29 minted. Ether from initial sales of 25 of 29 NFTs (86%) will be donated to charity (minus gas costs for maintenance). Visit the collection on OpenSea.
Proliferation (6 Editions)
After the DAO hard fork (see Series 2), the following year saw rapidly proliferating token projects built on Ethereum. The DAO situation led to further codification of token standards, including template contracts that permitted rapid deployment of ERC-20 tokens and variants. As an open system with a now-massive developer community, Ethereum was by far the most common platform for building these projects. The facility with which these projects could be implemented led to a massive number of tokens. Many of these, perhaps most, were ill fated, ill planned or a scam of some sort. Despite such a complex beginning, it led to a rapidly evolving and highly innovative ecosystem of value. Several of these projects were very successful and are thriving today (zooming in one can see "Basic Attention Token" and "Chainlink" and "Synthetix" and "Decentraland" and more).
This original is a radial graph of over 1,000 early token projects across several platforms (Ethereum, Tron, EOS, etc.). This graph connects the spokes of the plot to the protocol on which they are based, and at the very edge one can zoom in and read the many varied project names. Ethereum housed the vast majority of these. The radial graph reveals this so strikingly it seems as if Ethereum is going to consume the entire token ecosystem in its entirety. In 2017, this proliferation quickly led to the "ICO craze," as many of these projects used a variant of Ethereum's ICO model itself to raise funds (see Series 1).
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Mania (7 Editions)
In crypto, price exploration can be wild. In 2017, the ICO craze — mostly built on Ethereum — intersected with the largest crypto mania yet seen by that time. This original plots 4 on-chain metrics across 11 major cryptocurrencies, revealing how they fluctuated across 2017-2018 (gray line down the middle). Colors of these ribbons reflect major crypto projects; zooming in one can see the ticker and the corresponding on-chain metrics (data from Coin Metrics). They are ordered from top-down by market capitalization in USD in late 2017 (BTC, XRP, ETH, etc.). The patterns of change in these metrics reflect Ethereum's well established stature already, after barely 2 years on mainnet. It shows that Ethereum is subject to similar market dynamics that describe the entire ensemble of digital currencies.
This original also illustrates that metrics can, on occasion, depart from the pack. Two of these departures are marked for Ethereum. These two depatures reflect a theme that has affected Ethereum since its inception and into 2021: Fees can fluctuate wildly under demand. The first of these dates is notched along the fee-per-transaction data in December 2017: The emergence of CryptoKitties caused network congestion and fees to spike. In summer 2018, a similar spike is seen, this time due to a marketing scheme by an exchange known as FCoin. Ethereum's on-chain cost for processing, "gas," also fluctuated wildly in 2020 and 2021 with DeFi and NFTs. This issue may be accommodated in part by implementation of Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 slated for summer 2021. Of course, the advent of Eth2.0 will bring quite a different model to fees as it will no longer face similar scaling issues (see Series 4).
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Swapcircuit (8 Editions)
Out of the ashes of the ICO craze came DeFi. Simmering of DeFi's future impact was already detectable in the earliest Ethereum documentation, such as the white paper itself. Discussion about its potential impact hit a fever pitch in 2019, and the many token projects illustrated in "Proliferation" (Original 1) came to fruition, survived and flourished into a veritable ecosystem of derivative financial activity. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is the decentralized swap exchange called Uniswap. Uniswap is a decentralized, automated trading platform for Ethereum's tokens (illustrated in "Proliferation"). Uniswap illustrates the power of Ethereum's so-called "composability," smart contracts interacting with other smart contracts, building upon each other, and creating a meshwork of value exchange that can be used (and automated) by anyone at anytime, anywhere. New interest-bearing tokens, utility tokens, stablecoins and more can be exchanged on this platform. By 2020, it began to attract daily volume in US dollars exceeding some major centralized exchanges.
This original visualizes Uniswap using data from its subgraph (v2) on the incredible The Graph. This original is a "day in the life" of Uniswap — in fall 2020 just as Uniswap was approaching one billion in daily volume, and the original was calculated with tens of thousands of swaps for about 24 hours at that date. This "circuit" of token swaps is represented as an arc diagram, showing the flow of one asset into another (clockwise flow). The Unix timestamp is shown at the top, along with the total volume for the set of swaps represented in the network diagram. The circuit itself can be zoomed in on the PDF, and one can see the specific inflows and outflows of particular coins.
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The Open Sea (8 Editions)
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were born well before the explosion of decentralized finance. In fact, the largest and most influential platform for exchanging NFTs, OpenSea, began in December, 2017 — only shortly after the appearance of the famous CryptoKitties that congested the Ethereum network (see also Original 2 in this series). This original is in honor of the OpenSea platform and the richness of the NFT space. It is based on a sample of over 10,000 NFT sales across almost 1,000 collectors over about 2 years. The varied colors symbolize the theme of this series: complexification. The very concept of a non-fungible token is complex, varied, diverse. There are tickets and unlock tokens and subscriptions, game pieces and collectibles and art and utility tokens for naming infrastructure and more. But despite their vivid distinctions, they connect. They can be combined and computed over together with the kind of rich composability of any platform, such as ERC-20 tokens on Uniswap from Original 3 of this series.
This network is rendered by projecting wallets and their transactions on a three-dimensional spherical surface, giving the impression of a vast almost planetary ecosystem. Zooming in, one can see some labels for particular NFT projects and their corresponding colors.
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Prior series depict Ethereum's dynamism. Ethereum will transform yet more. In the white paper, Vitalik Buterin described strategies to achieve scalability through new consensus processes. Years later, an upgrade is now underway — Eth2 — the major transformation of Ethereum sometimes known as "Serenity." While Ethereum's developer community continues to innovate and expand on top of Eth1, in parallel teams of developers are beginning to implement and test Eth2. Both agendas continue to transform what is possible on Ethereum and blockchain.
This is the final series of Ethstory. It is, approximately, where the story of Ethereum is at the time of this writing (mid 2021). The originals here depict this further transformation. Major changes will be seen in the coming months, especially with further implementation of Eth2. These originals depict this horizon of change. All are based on actual data, structured and laid out in a manner that produces visuals that relay this future significance.
4 originals, 33 minted. Ether from initial sales of 29 of 33 NFTs (88%) will be donated to charity (minus gas costs for maintenance). Visit the collection on OpenSea.
TCP/IP (7 Editions)
Ethereum's technical specification potentiates uncountable codable possibilities. This potential seems especially striking in the realm of programmable finance. Ethereum's native currency and its computational dynamics invite innovative (and sometimes risky) financial experiments. In a sense, this makes Ethereum more like a kind of generic protocol on which new systems are built. Much as TCP/IP forms the fundamental basis of information transfer on our present internet, by analogy Ethereum may serve that core architectural purpose for programmable, digital value. This piece illustrates this in a deceptively simple diagram. Using data from Coin Metrics, it illustrates several key market and on-chain metrics across the 12 months of 2020: transaction volume in USD (inner circle), average fees (in ETH, dark circle), launch date (when inner circle appears), total protocol volume (dark band expanding along 2020) -- for several major projects related to decentralized finance (zooming in on the PDF, one sees the relevant ticker). Ethereum is at the base, supporting the scaffold of this expanding functionality, a potential TCP/IP of programmable money. As reinforcement of this concept, the dark band illustrating total transacted volume of 2020 reaches alignment with the width of the monthly circles. This width was calibrated to represent a trillion in overall transacted USD. Zooming in, one sees that Ethereum exceeded this in 2020. Any variation seen in this simple diagram is a reflection from raw data (time along x-axis, width, radii, etc. -- even the colors represented here are computed from RGB profiles of coin logos).
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The Metaverse (8 Editions)
The Metaverse is a concept well-known to sci-fi fans. It found prominent expression in the influential novel Snow Crash, where it is described as a virtual 3D reality in which humans can exist as avatars distinct from their physical selves. The concept of the Metaverse has been culturally influential among Ethereans, not only because of this sci-fi pedigree, but because of what Ethereum enables. Ethereum is becoming a base protocol for a network of virtual landscapes and communities similar to the Metaverse from its sci-fi origins. Several teams of developers have created large game-like worlds for users to embed themselves as avatars, to own this land on the Ethereum blockchain, and to interact with other users akin to massively multiplayer online games, and even to engage in trade of items that are created, owned and transformed on the blockchain (often, as NFTs; see "The Open Sea," Series 3).
This original plots just a partial sampling of lands from 4 such virtual worlds: Decentraland (red), Cryptovoxels (gray), Somnium Space (white) and The Sandbox (green). On Ethereum, it is likely that the emerging Metaverse will not be a single landscape, not a single platform, but an integrated system of platforms. Each platform can capitalize on its unique properties and strengths, and the entire user experience can benefit from all such development agendas by creating vortices between worlds (this, in fact, has already been implemented). On this plot, lands on these platforms are connected by edges that reflect common ownership. As seen here from just a partial sample of ownership data -- from about 1,000 bridges sampled for each pair of worlds -- there are hundreds of users who own across these four platforms. Zooming in on the PDF, one can see the first few characters of owner addresses, and each node represents a piece of land on that part of the Metaverse. There are thousands of lands and connections here. The edges connecting these lands mean they are owned by the same user. The visual that results is a depiction of this emerging Metaverse being stitched together by shared community and integrated functionality.
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64 Shards (9 Editions)
While DeFi and NFT projects continued to evolve into the explosion of interest they attracted in 2020 and 2021, many teams of developers worked with the Ethereum community to build what has been promised early in Ethereum's designs: a move from proof-of-work consensus (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). PoS is touted as being more energy efficient and more scalable, primarily because it does not rely on competitive hashing as a basis for growing the blockchain and issuing new ether to miners. Known as Eth2, and originally termed "Serenity," it has now become an elaborate technical specification to scale Ethereum through PoS and other design upgrades. "Miners" are now "validators," and they cooperate on a consensus protocol that is based on skin in the game: Each validator must commit 32 ETH to participate in the validation process. There will be new clients that oversee the PoS process, forming a critical centerpiece to PoS and another upgrade: Ethereum's blockchain will be fractionated into 64 separate shard chains. These shards involve validation in parallel, permitting even more scalability, with blocks accumulating in each. The so-called Beacon-chain clients will fuse these shards into the single, unitary layer 1 blockchain that will be the new form of Ethereum.
These shards are not yet implemented, but the Beacon clients and the Beacon chain are now live. Indeed, one can already find excellent block explorers for the Beacon chain, where the PoS process and sharding will be coordinated. In this original, the 64 shards are depicted with the very first 64 slot roots associated with the Beacon chain. These are analogous to block hashes in traditional PoW, but they are now slotted into epochs, which update each 6 minutes or so -- the new clock for Ethereum. Depicting the fundamental role of these new clients, the codebase for the Go-based (Prysm, green) and Rust-based (Lighthouse, orange) clients stitch these symbolic shards into one structure. Key terms from Eth2 are highlighted, visible in both clients much as core concepts from Eth1 are shared on its clients (see Original 1, Series 2): slashable, PublicKey, validator, Epoch, slot, CommitteeIndex, attestation, etc.
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Deposits (9 Editions)
Deposits into Ethereum's Eth2 contract are hosted by 0x0000000021[...]. It is the onboarding process to become a validator on Eth2 (see Original 3 of this series). Beginning in late 2020, 32 ETH deposits were required for each validator, and of course participants could deposit many such amounts, thus implementing many validators on the future Eth2 upgrade. Within a couple of months, millions of ether flowed into this contract, gradually reaching 2% of all ether in existence. This original depicts this process from a sample of several hundred depositors. The size of the nodes reflect the total number of 32 ETH units deposited into the Eth2 contract, and the symbolic pool expanding at its base is directly locked into the data -- zooming in on the PDF, one can see the amounts in deposited ether at approximate time intervals of a few weeks. By the end of this data sample, illustrated by the outer blue circle, by late January 2021, over 2% of all ether (almost 3,000,000 ETH) had been deposited. As noted in Original 3, the Beacon chain was deployed in December 2020, and thousands of these validators were brought on board and began the process of PoS-based validation of epochs. The green nodes are among the first validators on Eth2. Zooming in shows the first few characters of their wallet or contract addresses (such as of Eth2 staking pools).
This original uses thousands of transactions from Eth2 depositors into the Eth2 contract. Nodes are depositors and their size reflects how much ether had been deposited by each. Nodes are arrayed on a circular graph folded onto itself and jittered. Edges reflect the many deposits, and lines shown are numbered proportionally for each depositor's on-chain data. The blue pool of expanding deposits has its radius locked onto a cumulative sum of ether put into the contract, ending at its outer ring with over 2% of all ether. With Original 3 and this Original 4, we see depicted the future of Ethereum -- the promise of orders of magnitude scaling in transaction throughput, and a digital ledger that is sustained by its own PoS algorithm that runs on skin in the game. We await its future.
Square, high-quality JPG (17.7 MB)
Scalable vector-quality PDF (2.5 MB).
Sample zoom in the PDF
" Ethereum is open-ended by design, and we believe that it is extremely well-suited to serving as a foundational layer for a very large number of both financial and non-financial protocols in the years to come." Vitalik Buterin, 2013
Takens Theorem
