Is Ethereum's biggest selling point credible neutrality?
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At risk of calling everything else “vanity metrics” — does it all come down to what network is the most credibly neutral?
If you've followed some of my writings, you'd know my answer already because I've discussed incentives extensively and being credibly neutral is an incentive and serves as a factor when people or companies are deciding on where to build.
A couple of days back, I came across a post on X that suggested that Ethereum's competitive advantage is that it is credibly neutral.
Posing a rhetorical question to the public “What does credible neutrality mean?”
The X post said:
It means a Democrat, a Republican, an anarchist, a warmonger, a hippie, an EU bureaucrat or a communist dictator can have complete confidence that their code will execute and their property rights will be respected.
It means a global common platform that doesn’t censor or control anybody. It means a place, the only place, where you can store a billion dollars digitally, secured by thousands of truly independent validators around the world.
In 20 years, the entire planet will run on Ethereum. Not because it wants to, not because it really likes the infinite garden meme, but because it’s the only Turing complete platform in the world that won’t try to control what you do with your money, your code, or your life.
This was a reaction to a tokenization report by RWA.xyz, highlighting that $271 billion Chinese asset manager, ChinaAMC, has launched a digital money market fund on Ethereum.
Anyone can understand why the post was deemed necessary by the author.
China has a bad reputation. Regardless of if what we've actively been taught to believe about China is true or not, it doesn't matter, because one thing is clear, the United States isn't exactly best friends with the Asian powerhouse.
As a result, if the US could — especially without harming itself, it would block everything coming from China.
That said, for companies out of Asia, particularly close to or in China to be comfortable building on Ethereum, it should mean that the network is indeed perceived to be the most credibly neutral.
So far, according to data from RWA.xyz, ChinaAMC has tokenized over $502 million on Ethereum with the Fund’s objective being to invest in short-term deposits and high quality money market instruments to achieve long-term return in Hong Kong Dollars.
We can talk about vanity metrics like market capitalization, total value locked (TVL), active addresses, and the list goes on, but at the end of the day, these are all subject to manipulation.
Market capitalization isn't an accurate representation of value, TVL can be pretty but it isn't a proof of security, and active addresses (suggesting active real users) can be faked.
Transactions per second (TPS), while not necessarily a vanity metric, isn't very valuable if a network is subject to the decisions of a centralized body.
So if we set all of these aside, is Ethereum ahead of everyone else including Bitcoin, as being the most credibly neutral network?
At present , the short answer is yes!
Ethereum is the most permissionless blockchain, this is a fact. If it wasn't, institutions, globally, wouldn't be risking billions of dollars on it.
We can argue the specifics of just what the governance process truly looks like, what key institutions or companies may have significant control either through stake or strategic alignment with the people or entities with significant stake.
However, when we stack it all up and measure against every other option out there, Ethereum comes out ahead.
Decentralization, at the end of the day, isn't a destination, it's a continuous process. So when we have a market as crypto, with a powerful security layer, being the blockchain, growing at an astounding rate, institutions coming in will have to do so in the most credibly neutral environment.
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