Ethereum's guiding light is open source.

The entire Ethereum project is defined and guided by the spirit of open source.

Here is a general definition of open source:

Open source software is software whose source code is made available to the public, allowing anyone to view, use, modify, and distribute it under the terms of a specific license. It emphasizes transparency, collaboration, and community-driven development, enabling developers and organizations to adapt the code to their needs while also contributing improvements to the broader community. Unlike proprietary software, which restricts access and modification, open source software thrives on openness and shared innovation.

If you are part of the Ethereum community, it's likely because you believe open source is essential to the primary development path of cryptocurrency.

After all, if we rebuild the financial system with proprietary, opaque, and unforkable code, what have we truly rebuilt?

An open source financial system returns power to the users. Users can "right-click and inspect the source code" of their financial applications and view the complete internal state of any application they are interested in—a stark contrast to the opacity that led to the 2008 financial crisis, where end users ultimately paid for the bailouts.

When individual developers can fork and adapt the code, it creates a brutal market where only the strongest software survives. The best projects are reused, improved, and strengthened until they become the foundational infrastructure of the open source ecosystem.

Open source software is dynamic—it continuously evolves, adapts, and integrates.

Like "money Legos," it is inherently composable. Individual projects might seem unremarkable on their own, but as more complex software accumulates, a larger emergent phenomenon takes shape. The value of each application compounds as it connects with others, forming a network where each component strengthens the whole.

The Open Source Project

I define humanity's "open source project" as the great collective experiment of building knowledge as code. It is a living organism, sustained by millions of contributors across time and space. What truly matters, more than any single project, is the shared infrastructure of the digital age—transparent, permissionless, and infinitely composable. Like language or science, it grows stronger with use, forming a self-perpetuating system that embodies the principle that open collaboration yields the best progress.

Before Ethereum, the open source software we had existed in isolation. Each piece of code might use others, but every deployment was a separate instance—a fleeting, incomplete manifestation of a larger collective open source project.

With Ethereum, open source found a home. It provides an economic foundation for the consolidation and solidification of open source value, along with the economic incentives needed to achieve it.

The Ethereum project caught my attention because of its potential to create a unified, robust, and reinforced open source software architecture.

Developers are exploring ways to deploy code onto Ethereum and make it work. Others are finding ways to layer their code on top of existing code. Some are solving technical or engineering challenges to accommodate more code for more use cases on Ethereum (e.g., Eigenlayer, Ethereum Layer2, etc.).

The Team Always Wins

When I was young, I loved riding my bike. The feeling of freedom, powered solely by my own legs, keeping a pace of over 20 mph.

In college, a friend and I would ride from Orange, California, to Santa Monica and back. One day, as we entered the bike path, a group of about fifteen riders passed us. In our early twenties and full of ourselves, I turned to my friend and said, "Let's drop these guys." We sprinted hard and managed to get ahead for a bit. But after ten minutes, I was done. I was fighting a headwind, struggling alone at the front. Then I heard, "On your left!" The group effortlessly passed us one by one.

I learned an important lesson that day: the team always wins.

In a pace line, no one rides alone. When the lead rider tires, they drop back into the draft, letting someone fresh take on the wind. In the middle of the pack, wind resistance is reduced by up to 60%—you just flow, pulled along by the peloton.

And the larger the group, the more efficient the machine, and the farther it can go.

If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.

Ethereum Is the Pace Car for Open Source Financial Software

Every Ethereum competitor has broken away from the peloton and started sprinting. In bike racing, this is common and a core part of winning strategies. Eventually, you need to break away, pour on the power, and cross the finish line first. You can't win by staying in the pack forever.
When and how you decide to sprint depends on the individual, their fitness, and their readiness.

But when applying this metaphor to open-source blockchain fintech, there's one problem.

There is no finish line.

The race never ends.

The way to win is to assemble the largest peloton and efficiently coordinate the lead riders.

This is why I'm bullish on Ethereum.

Ethereum's foundation is naturally aligned with the values of open-source technology, allowing Ethereum's team to be utilized by the most people. Ethereum's development has consistently followed a clear strategy of maximizing inclusivity for more participants. Ethereum has understandable specifications, multiple clients written in various languages, multiple Layer2 network implementations to build on, and a virtual machine becoming the standard for Wall Street institutions.

Ethereum's architecture evolves with contributions to its open-source ecosystem.

ETH

ETH is the native asset of Ethereum's open-source superstructure—the currency that flows through, secures, and coordinates this global cluster of code.

Every smart contract, every Layer-2, every application connected to Ethereum ultimately settles back into ETH. ETH is both the fuel that powers the system and the economic foundation serving as collateral—something open-source software never had before.

Traditional business school models fail here. ETH is not "revenue," not "equity," and cannot be neatly captured by any earnings framework. ETH is the monetary base of humanity's open-source financial organism. Its value derives not from profit margins but from the network effects of millions of people building, remixing, and compounding open-source code into a financial system whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.