For all the talk about the Ethereum Foundation's shortcomings, the refusal to get more involved or "build product" or fund/promote specific projects or be too focused on neutrality too early...this I know to be true: There have been dozens of other L1s who did the opposite. Raised a gazillion dollars, had a Foundation and Labs, hired many engineering, product, & BizDev people, ran points programs, invested in startups or gave grants, did TradFi PoCs and theater, promoted specific projects, spent lavishly on bougie conference parties, and did even crazier things like launch a memecoin fund (!). All but one of those L1s are so dead we don't even talk about them. For many, you can trace the failure to the "un-Ethereum" like GTM strategy. You can't build succesful decentralized infra by going out of your way to give a small opaque group of people excess power. You certainly can't build a global settlement layer that way; the billions of people, and trillions in assets, that aren't on your chain yet will always fear that control lever being used against them. All of which is to say: while there are many critiques one could have of the EF, they did one thing right, which was to err on the side of doing too little, as opposed to too much. Whatever other work needs to be done will be picked up by outside parties who have their own vested interest. That's what is happening now. In crypto, the greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince an army of smart people that the best way to be decentralized tomorrow was to be centralized today.