I am honored to be asked to be a torch bearer for the run up to the 10th anniversary celebration of Ethereum's launch and non-stop, essentially flawless, operation of the protocol -- even as the protocol underwent many major upgrades "in flight" – without missing a block.

I really think Vitalik should have been both the first and last torch bearer in this series, since Ethereum sprung from his pioneering genius all those years ago and Ethereum continues to benefit from his multifaceted brilliance and his unique and essential brand of leadership.

He has always led by example, with unimpeachable integrity, always listening broadly with an open mind and ensuring that all voices are heard and assimilated before he shares his perspective. Following in the tone he set, Ethereum incessantly progressively decentralizes itself, and maintains constant vigilance for threats of centralizing vectors.

The Ethereum Project is anti-fragile so when these attacks surface, we respond, and they end up just making the protocol and ecosystem stronger. Ethereum is not critically dependent on any organization or individual at this point for its continued growth and success. But it sure is great to have the smartest person in crypto on our team.

This first decade has been about building layers of enabling infrastructure for the increasingly decentralized future of Web3 -- the re-decentralized world wide web. Ethereum is rapidly growing into its intended role as civilization scale infrastructure.

We are now on the precipice of our broadband moment with: satisfying horizontal and vertical scaling mechanisms, affordable blockspace, attention to restoring synchronous and near-synchronous composability, good and soon great usability, and a legal framework developing in the USA that is designed to blow gale force winds into our sails.

It now makes sense for financial institutions, enterprises and builders to do what they couldn't under the previous US Government administration: use and issue tokens, use DeFi and employ Web3 primitives to build of, by and for the community, rather than in a traditional posture that is adversarial to and often exploitative of the user/consumer.

Ether has had slack supply-demand dynamics for the last few years because Ethereum prioritized the proliferation of large amounts of block and blob space making the glut of space cheap in ether terms, therefore lowering (speculative) demand for ETH.

ETPs and the ETH Treasury companies are now rapidly shifting this dynamic by buying ETH and deploying it in the protocol and in DeFi. This will greatly tighten up supply-demand dynamics in the near term, leading to an acceleration of the paradigm shift to a decentralized system of the world.

This 10th anniversary, coincidentally, will mark our moment of ignition as we launch into widespread mainstream awareness. Via stablecoins, RWAs, DeFi, ETFs and ETH Treasury Companies, we are onboarding TradFi to DeFi.

We are becoming top of mind on Wall Street. And as Wall Street, global financial institutions and enterprises onboard themselves to diverse offerings on Ethereum, mainstream main street will soon follow.

Satoshi invented and mechanized decentralized trust, the more powerful form of trust. Ethereum is a new kind of software platform. It is trustware. And trust is a new kind of virtual commodity.

Ether is the highest grade trust commodity, powering and guaranteeing proper execution and performance of transactions, agreements, processes and relationships.

Trustware is a new layer in society's stack that automates and guarantees trust, making it universally accessible and programmable. Ethereum trustware turns the enforcement of agreements into a programmable, cryptographically secure service that burns the digital commodity ETH as literal economic fuel.

Ethereum trustware is computationally verifiable and tamper resistant. The ETH trust commodity is consumed on demand as it powers transactions, 24/7, globally, without centralized intermediaries, for any person or program with access to the world wide web.

I look forward to the next decade in which we rearchitect much of the world's systems on the next generation global decentralized foundation of trust. Soon it will be clear to all builders that apps must be token enabled, must be resident on decentralized protocol rails and must also be built on networks of user-owned and controlled social graphs.

As it often happens with massively disruptive technology movements, it happened slowly, then all at once. And we are now locked-in.

Happy 10th, Ethereum. So much more to come.