Ethereum
also referred to as: ethereum blockchain · ethereum network
includes Ethereum Virtual Machine, Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Computation Market, Ethereum L Two's
81 statements across 34 episodes · 36 bullish · 21 bearish · 26 people on the record · first statement Dec 9, 2017 by Alex Rampell · said 474 times in 66 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Chris Dixon (108), Ali Yahya (49), Olaf Carlson-Wee (44), Fred Ehrsam (26), Jesse Walden (24), Alex Gluchowski (Alex G) (23), Linda Xie (16), Dan Boneh (15)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2025 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Crypto Experts Explain Stablecoins & the Future Financial System w/ Ali Yahya & Arianna Simpson
- Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | Kevin Rose and Anish Acharya
- Tech vs. Media: Balaji Srinivasan on the Battle Shaping Our Future
- Where Crypto Meets AI with Chris Dixon & David George
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 23 mentions in 6 episodes 4 per episode
- Future of Crypto, Blockchain & Web3 w/ Chris Dixon
- Truth Terminal - The AI Bot That Became a Crypto Millionaire
- Startup Building: Challenges & Opportunities
- Regulating Crypto in the Name of National Competitiveness
- The Quest for Community-Trained Open Source AI Models
- Trump Vs. Biden: Tech Policy
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2022 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2021 65 mentions in 7 episodes 9 per episode
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 264 mentions in 31 episodes 9 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Ethereum, App Coins, and Beyond
- Seven Trends in Blockchain Computing (Spring 2019)
- a16z Podcast | Cryptonetworks and Cities -- Analogies
- a16z Podcast | Cryptocurrencies, App Coins, and Investing in Protocols
- a16z Podcast | Mental Models for Understanding Crypto Tokens
- a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
- a16z Podcast | Cryptonetworks and Decentralization -- Building Blocks
- a16z Podcast | All About Stablecoins
- 23 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 93 mentions in 12 episodes 8 per episode
- Cryptonetworks and Cities: Analogies
- An Intro to Crypto: Building Blocks
- Crypto and Decentralization: Building Blocks
- Crypto, the Future of Trust
- Company Building in Crypto: A Conversation between Brian Armstrong and Chris Dixon
- Crypto and the Evolution of Open Source
- Debating Crypto: Katie Haun vs. Paul Krugman
- An Intro to Crypto: Building Companies, from People to Code
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 6 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Ethereum, oldest first
Dec 9, 2017
Dec 9, 2017 neutral
May 5, 2018 neutral
May 5, 2018
Jul 15, 2018
Liu: Ethereum Foundation employs 5 to 10 people despite $70B market cap
“Ethereum, for example, has, depending on the day, you know, above a 50, 60, seventy million seventy billion market cap, right? So if you think about the corollary of a similarly sized company here, here in the Bay Area, Uber might be an apt analogy. Uber has t…”
Jul 26, 2018 negative
Jul 26, 2018 bullish
Dixon: Crypto networks are fundamentally a new type of computer
“You know, being kind of, being technology focused, we kind of, we like to look at it or one way we like to look at it is as a, as you can think of a crypto network like Ethereum or Bitcoin or one of the many other new innovative, you know, networks out there a…”
Jul 26, 2018 positive
Ali Yahya: Bitcoin and Ethereum emerged from bottom-up community collaboration
“Ethereum Bitcoin to a considerable degree emerged out of communities working together as opposed to necessarily a top-down monolithic design that's imposed upon an organization or a group of people who are working together by a single person or a small group o…”
Jul 26, 2018 negative
Jesse Walden: Not every crypto project needs its own token
“And not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol but there's not an incentive or there's at least no mechanism by which the community can for…”
Jul 26, 2018 negative
Ali Yahya: Ethereum incentivizes application developers but fails core protocol development
“Ethereum, Hasn't yet succeeded at incentivizing core development or development on the core protocol and has succeeded massively at incentivizing people building on top of it. Developers that is not users yet.”
Jul 26, 2018 neutral
Ali Yahya: Bitcoin is organized around digital gold, Ethereum around technology
“But in the case of Bitcoin, or at least the later form of Bitcoin, the current Bitcoin, the shared meme seems to be fixed supply, store of value, digital gold. In the case of Ethereum, it's more of a meme around technology. Say we're building a technology, it'…”
Nov 2, 2018 positive
Dec 16, 2018 positive
Dec 16, 2018 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Khanna: Ethereum and blockchain lower global shipping and trade costs
“So of course, Ethereum you know, and blockchain technologies really reduce the transaction cost and the transparency and the security. Of participating in global economic transactions, in getting your goods from, you know, the village in country X to the big c…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Buterin: Ethereum developers would have built replay protection before the DAO fork
“Had we known that things would turn out the way they had turned out, there were things that we would have done differently. So like one of them would have been Including, you know, transaction replay protection straight into the protocol directly”
Jan 2, 2019
Buterin: Ethereum was originally planned as a meta-protocol on Primecoin
“So the first version of Ethereum that I was thinking of building is just a very simple kind of meta protocol. So something on top of the prime coin blockchain that would just make a Prime point transaction data have sort of different meanings that would be und…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Buterin: Difficulty Ice Age Will Force Ethereum Hard Fork Within 18 Months
“The difficulty Ice Age, which is something I will go into right now, but generally, essentially has the purpose of kind of putting a sort of finite lifetime on the Ethereum blockchain, so basically forcing us to kind of fork to add new features at some points …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Buterin: Ethereum's core design principle is that it has no features
“And eventually I realized that the thing that made the most sense is to basically just go all the way and create a blockchain where you have this principle that essentially there are no features. So what there are no features means in Ethereum land is essentia…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Buterin: Building fair lotteries on Bitcoin requires O(N³) collateral versus O(N) on Ethereum
“Like, one of them was they published this at the Financial Cryptography, in the workshop, that they were trying to create a provably fair lottery on top of Bitcoin, and it turns out that if you have N players in the lottery, Then you basically have to have O o…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Buterin: Bitcoin's Protocol Lacks Native State Persistence Across Transactions
“But with Bitcoin itself, you can't do that because the protocol has a kind of inherent Statelessness to it. Like, you can't remember the notion of, well, this guy already withdrew 500 ETH six hours ago, and another 500 ETH two hours ago, so he can't withdraw a…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: No one, including Vitalik Buterin, can cut developers off Ethereum
“As a developer, you can now invest in this. You can build things on top of Ethereum with the knowledge that no one can, you know, Vitalik, who's the kind of the, you know, the leader of Ethereum, can't pull the rug out from under you, even if you wanted to.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Carlson-Wee: Polychain bought Maker tokens via Ethereum because Maker lacked bank accounts
“When we wanted to do a deal with Maker and purchase some of these tokens, there was no legal entity. Behind them. It's a pure open source project, and there was no bank account they had, so there was no way we could send them money. So we actually had to send …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Dixon: Ethereum proved multiple scaled blockchain networks can coexist
“One, it showed that you could just simply have another Scaled network, right? I think a lot of people just assumed it was gonna be one network to rule them all, network effects, et cetera. So it showed just like an existence proof that you could do another net…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Ehrsam: Ethereum throughput is 20,000x short of running Facebook
“And if you look at what Ethereum is capable of in terms of just throughput of the network, it can't handle more than about twenty-ish transactions a second right now, which means that you're about 20,000 X off being able to run Facebook on the chain.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Ehrsam: Crypto enables direct monetization of internet building blocks
“You could pay for literal goods and services on the internet, but the building blocks of the internet themselves were not precisely programmed and parceled out into little units that you could pay for directly through the protocol. And that's sort of what we'r…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Ehrsam: A working sharding upgrade would boost Ethereum's market value by 10-20%
“If you're to come out and submit an improvement, like sharding, for example, a working implementation, it could easily raise the value of the network 10 or 20%, which we're talking two and a half to five billion dollars.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Most Big Tech talent moving into crypto builds on Ethereum
“At least what I'm seeing is lots of teams leaving GAFA companies, Google, Facebook, et cetera, and getting into this, and like really good teams. People with real, you know, strong engineering and product backgrounds. And I think for me, at least, it's the vas…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Dixon: Ethereum Is Less Performant Than AWS and Google Cloud
“Crypto networks like Ethereum are actually kind of worse in some of those dimensions. So, for example, as in the performance side, it's not as performant as, let's say, AWS or Google Cloud Services or something if you wanted to write a video game or something.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Yahya: Successful crypto networks emerge bottom-up from community collaboration
“They also tend to emerge in a bottom-up way. They're organized in a bottom-up way. And I think this is a trait that's common to a lot of the crypto networks that are most successful. I think Ethereum Bitcoin to a considerable degree emerged out of communities …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Yahya: Ethereum exemplifies a bottom-up modular software design
“Like Ethereum, I think, as sort of Jesse was saying, is more an example of the bottoms-up modular approach, where there's a kernel of an idea, there's that riverbed along which people people get together. But then there's also a community that's building all s…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Walden: Ethereum had no code or network when its whitepaper launched
“If we talk about a project like Ethereum, for example you know, early on, there was this amazing white paper, and it described this profound vision about what the platform could enable. And at the time, you know, the code hadn't been written. There was There w…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Dixon: Ethereum processes 10 tx/sec and cannot be world computer yet
“So like Ethereum is a good example where you can run any kind of arbitrary code in that crypto network, but the network can only handle, like, 10 transactions a second or something, and so it's just not at all ready to really be the world computer.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Milenius: Maker is Ethereum's first formally verified non-trivial application
“We are very proud to be the first application to be launched on the Ethereum blockchain that is formally verified. There have been experiments with this up to this point. This is the first non-trivial application that will be launched that will have these guar…”
Feb 26, 2019 negative
Dayan: Ethereum storage pricing creates a tragedy of the commons
“So the fact that the miners get payment for storage when the miners actually don't need to store the whole state, and it's the full nodes that, that bear the cost. So this sort of asymmetry between who's bearing the cost, like where the externality is, and lik…”
Feb 26, 2019
Feb 26, 2019 positive
Apr 19, 2019 neutral
Yahya: Early successful Ethereum applications are primarily financial tools
“And a bunch of the applications that have worked so far in the Ethereum ecosystem primarily have been financial in nature, have been things that build on top of that initial idea. So things like lending platforms, derivatives, exchanges, things that depend on …”
Apr 19, 2019 bullish
Yahya: Blockchains as general computers is a five-year-old paradigm
“Even if it's been 10 years since the publishing of the Bitcoin white paper, this is still very, very early days, because I think that it's only been recent, it's only recently that, that people have begun to conceive of blockchains as computers, as opposed to …”
Apr 19, 2019 bullish
May 8, 2019 negative
May 8, 2019 negative
May 8, 2019 negative
Dixon: Sub-second transaction finality is impossible in proof-of-work systems
“You just simply can't have, ah, like sub-second transaction finality in a proof of work system. Like, so Bitcoin, like you really need to wait, you know, each block is 10 minutes, and it has to do with the coordination among the network, and the network propag…”
May 8, 2019 negative
May 8, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Third wave of blockchain computing will arrive in 12 to 24 months
“And now I think what we're seeing over the next 12 months or so, maybe 12 to 24 months, is the kind of the wave three happening, right, which is taking the ideas of Ethereum upgrading the developer experience like you just discussed very importantly, upgrading…”
May 18, 2021 bullish
Boneh predicts Bitcoin and Ethereum data will survive until year 3000
“So I think that the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains are going to be with humanity now forever, you know, in the year 3000, you know, the era of Futurama, we're still going to be looking at the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. Maybe they won't be called that,…”
May 19, 2021 positive
May 19, 2021
May 21, 2021 negative
May 26, 2021 negative
May 27, 2021 positive
Nov 8, 2021 bullish
Gluchowski: ZK-rollups will maintain a 50x cost reduction ratio over Ethereum mainnet
“So right now the rollups we have for ZK rollups we have for payments are about 50 times cheaper than native payments on layer one. And I expect that this ratio to remain roughly the same for also for smart contracts.”
Nov 8, 2021 negative
Gluchowski: Alternative L1 Blockchains Failed to Gain Traction Without EVM Compatibility
“We see it with alternative L ones. We have a couple of Ethereum killers. Having launched in in the previous year with custom systems, with different virtual machines and different languages and they didn't really get traction until they implemented Ethereum co…”
Nov 8, 2021 positive
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Gluchowski: Recursive ZK proof verification became affordable on Ethereum in 2020
“And recursion is something that became available and became affordable on Ethereum just last year. Before that, it was very expensive. We had different proof systems that supported recursion, but they were way too expensive to be used on Ethereum.”
Nov 8, 2021
Gluchowski: Matter Labs Created Custom Language Zinc Before Pivoting to EVM
“We actually started originally with building a custom language, which was optimized for zero knowledge pros. It was called Zinc. But we quickly realized that it will be really hard to onboard the existing ecosystem of Ethereum and let everyone rewrite their pr…”
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Feb 28, 2024 positive
Feb 28, 2024 bullish
Dixon: Ethereum upgrade will 100x capacity and drop fees below a penny
“There's an Ethereum upgrade happening in three weeks, four, eight, four, four, which is going to Pro like basically a hundred X, the improvement of Ethereum L two's, which are the main way of scaling Ethereum today. And you get sort of sub penny transaction co…”
Feb 28, 2024 neutral
Feb 28, 2024 positive
Feb 28, 2024 positive
Feb 28, 2024 bullish
Jul 9, 2025 bearish
Yahya: Ethereum Layer 1 cannot handle Nasdaq-scale exchange throughput
“If you wanted to build something like the Nasdaq exchange on chain, there's no way you're doing that on Ethereum one. You probably need a blockchain that has the kind of the level of performance that a Solana or a Sui or some of the other kind of More modern o…”