Ethereum Cultural Victory I Ameen Soleimani at Pragma Denver 2025

So, without further ado, let's welcome Amin to tell you about Ethereum's cultural victory. Please give him a big round of applause. Good afternoon. Uh I don't really know why people keep giving me the microphone. Uh they should have learned better by now.

Uh I have a job. It's called Oxbow. Right now, I build privacy tools. This talk is not about that. Uh this talk is about something that I think is upstream of all of the problems that we have.

Uh this talk is about culture. So, this talk is about Ethereum cultural victory. Um I want to talk about how I play Civilization. Uh my favorite way to win Civilization is by winning through a cultural victory, which means you build a lot of wonders of the world. You have rock stars.

You put on shows, you know, you uh lot lot of stuff like that. But, you always have to be careful because the religious fanatics will win a religious victory before you win a cultural victory. And so, what I like to do, uh some people who play cultural games, they they think it's always about peace. Uh and I do not. Uh my favorite way to do this is to take out all of the religious fanatics, take over their wonders, and then go back to building my own wonders.

So, Vitalik set me free like I don't know, 2 weeks ago. Uh can you guys see these slides? Is that hard to see? Can you see? Thumbs up?

Yes? Okay, cool. Um I was calling out Gitcoin communists, which I do all the time, and Awaki, who's in this block, uh made a reference to Vitalik's April Fools Degen Communism blog post, and then Vitalik followed up with his now infamous joke tweet that Jill had make communism great again. And I finally realized who I was actually fighting. And the reason I was pissed off is because I thought I was presenting reasonable criticisms of commie culture and they were not being taken seriously.

And I knew from talking to Vitalik privately that one, his April Fools joke is not really a joke except for maybe the title. Two, he didn't actually agree with my criticisms. And three, he was happy to troll me by letting it ride as a joke instead of correcting the record which I thought happened at my expense. And at that point I realized I don't feel obligated to extend grace to anyone who doesn't extend it to me. I attempted diplomacy and failed.

It's time for war. So, the enemy is Marxism in this equation. It's a false god. This is Yuri Bezmenov, ex-KGB guy. I've been writing about this for a while.

The date on this is what? July 2020. So, he explains how ideological subversion works. Psychological warfare, it changes the perception of reality to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their family, their community, and their country. And he lays out the the path that it follows.

And so, you the Russian KGB strategy is basically it's a send Marxism into everyone else's societies to weaken their societies. It's it's a form of religious war. And so, it goes from an open society egalitarianism, you get your expectations up, you know, we're all equal. And then the aspirations versus reality kick in, people get upset, there's discontent, productivity goes down, there's inflation and unemployment, recession, social unrest, instability, radicalism, power struggle, replacement, civil war. We're probably somewhere in the radicalism instability part.

I'm grateful that Trump may be able to set things right, but it's a an uphill battle. And this this also describes this sort of summarized in stages, which is you demoralize people, you educate an entire generation in Marxist ideology. This is like a 20-30 year plan, by the way. This isn't like a 10-year, you know, 5-year. And then you destabilize it and then it leads to a crisis and then you normalize, which means there's a period of stability, but it ends up in a closed society.

My pin tweet, if you don't follow me, you should follow me and should read this article I put together. This is what the West can learn from the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. The the the meme here is Iranians in the West watching Marxist march with Islamists and it's like the Vietnam dog meme where we're just like traumatized. The reason Marxism is dangerous, it cost us our country, is that basically they teamed up with the Islamists to which they had nothing in common with except for hating the USA. And and in order to run cover for the Islamist propaganda, which eventually cost Iranians our country.

And the Shah, who they saw as a US puppet, was actually doing a pretty good job of defending Iran's interests in terms of getting like decent oil deals that favored Iran, which is actually why the CIA was mad at him and and the British Petroleum Company in the UK were also mad at him. It doesn't matter how much you actually have your own nation's interests at heart. The Marxist don't care. And the This is like a leftist woman who is putting Khomeini manifest It might as well have been my mother. I was raised by a communist mother and a Muslim father.

My mom is no longer Muslim or communist and my dad is no longer Muslim. We have a lot of regrets in my family. Uh, and so after the revolution, women lost basically all of the freedoms that they had. And the Islamists started executing the communists that the Shah had in prison. That's when the communists knew they up.

Uh, and then Khomeini has like the worst track record of any leader where he got in power for 1 year, started an 8-year war with Iraq, and then uh, which cost a million lives and accomplished nothing, and then died 1 year after it ended. Uh, this is Khomeini. Uh, this is one of the things that he said that was in the mandated religious scripture inside of Iran. This is the Ayatollah, the supreme leader. Questioning him is basically punishable by death.

And but, you know, uh, it's important to uh, I'm I'm not even going to get into this. So, why What does this have to do with Ethereum? Right? Uh, I have learned to identify Marxist infiltration when I see it. Uh, and I and I kind of I I I raise the alarm about it and I try to point it out to people and uh, I have mixed results.

So, uh, the the tweet on the left, um, is, you know, a result of people telling me that Ethereum doesn't have cultural problems, but then this guy who his handle is uh, the blockchain socialist, uh, is really excited about talking about communism. Uh, let me say the C-word, you know. And then Martin Köppelmann, who I have a lot of respect for, is a great builder, you know, Gnosis uh, CEO. Uh, they built the safe and everything. Uh, he comments with this tagline, "Fully automated luxury gay space communism contracts."

And I think Circles is kind of We had a uh, whole Twitter space about why Circles is I wrote a thread about it. You can go look it up. But, at the end of the thread, I lost my because he didn't even realize that the whole gay space communism meme comes from an Iranian Marxist in the UK. Uh who is also himself an Islamist sympathizer. When I looked up his tweets, it's like uh you know anything related to the grooming gangs for example in the UK, nothing.

Anything, you know, there's like Muslim Pakistanis raping UK girls all the time. It's horrific. But he does have a lot to say about Islamophobia and this is the way that your society gets destroyed. These people, you do not hate them enough. And so it was shocking to me to see the propaganda this the guy wrote this this guy's book as the tagline of the Circles Contract.

And and especially with Martin not even being aware of it. Um So this is somebody agreeing with me which I encourage you all to do about the the problems with Gitcoin communism. Uh most people don't get to experience it. Every DAO is infested with Refi Solar Punk Grifters who pretend to be acting in the ecosystem interest only to extract as much money. Champagne socialists, exactly who we were talking about.

Um And this is just emblematic of the reach of the Marxist ideology and the problems that they cause. On the right is Brantley. Who remembers Brantley? Show of hands, anyone? All right, like half of you.

Uh Brantley got fired from ENS because of woke mob uh stormed and demanded that he be fired and Nick Johnson fired him and even though he won the DAO vote which said that he should stay, uh people said we feel unsafe around his Catholic ideas even though Brantley is like one of the most tolerant people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. We could all be like Brantley. I also got canceled once for uh something anti-Semitic in 2019 as a joke. I love Jews. Uh but the funny thing is is that I'm pretty sure almost all of the people who canceled me for saying that actually were marching with the uh you know, pro-Hamas groups all over you know, New York and and other universities.

Makes no sense. So, uh other places that this shows up is uh Trent, for example, who runs uh Protocol Guild. You know, he had a comment. Uh I'm calling for a pause on Ethereum discourse until we figure out how woke popped up last week, you know, uh what's going on here. And I try to explain.

I'm like, okay, woke is a manifestation of Marxism, you know, it's not about like the proletariat class stuff, it's about, you know, race, gender, sexuality. Uh prioritizes surface over essences. You try to say the right words and and look right, but uh you kind of ignore actual bad things, right? It's like, Hamas are a bunch of genocidal rapists, but we're like, yeah, you know, we're not going to talk about that. Uh suicidal empathy, you know, if you if you're like a queer person going out for a mosque that like I encourage you to go to Gaza, they'll just throw you off a roof.

Um so, you can tell uh something is a sacred cow when people refuse to even talk about it. Uh in this case, Trent started a conversation with me about wokeism and then refused to elaborate. Uh I'm like, what do you think it is? And he's like, I'm not spending my time on this. I don't want to talk about this, you know.

And it's like, okay, well, why'd you bring it up? Uh and Elok and Vitalik did the same thing to me when uh they trolled me for bringing up Gitcoin commies. They did not discuss my criticisms, they just trolled me. Um I wish it didn't matter, right? I wish I could just be like, you think whatever you want and you know, that's fine with me.

But unfortunately, it does matter because it makes its way into policy. Uh and so, for example, this is Constantine saying we should fund a second foundation. Trent's going it's already happening. We want Protocol Guild to be the second foundation. And I comment on that and I'm like, "Hey man, as long as this thing is communist, everybody gets paid the same."

I'm making a remark about like the funding mechanism, right? And so Protocol Guild had everybody essentially on tenure where everybody was getting the same amount and the only thing that mattered is how long you were there. And so the incentives it creates are just do the minimum amount of work to stay on the stream. It does not incentivize anybody to do anything above and beyond. And so Trent does not care, ignores this, does not think it's a priority.

And I mean to his credit, they finally have started adding the exploring the idea of putting weights on on streams. But the reason I I I pick on him also is because I helped start what became Protocol Guild when I was running Moloch DAO. Show of hands, who even knows what Moloch DAO is here? Okay, most of you. Cool.

So, we intercepted this the the founder of Ethereal Eyes came up to me and he's like, "Hey man, I want to give a bunch of money to a bunch of Ethereum researchers and core devs." And we're like, "Okay." We made a spreadsheet, we assigned weights to everybody. Trent's only job was assigning addresses to people. So, he was going to go gather addresses.

And then we got Danny Ryan, who you'll hear more about, to ratify all the weights that we had. So, it didn't start communist, but then it became communist. It's very very frustrating. I started begging Danny Ryan to come back publicly because he he left and I thought it would only be a matter of time before we all did. People don't realize the critical role that he played in our ecosystem.

The screenshot that we have there is from the first report that Moloch DAO ever published in 2019 and it was a result of us interviewing all the core dev teams, the ETH 2 teams, the researchers, figuring out like who do you talk to, where do you get your marching orders, you know, what do you need, how many how big's your team, how much resources do you have, you know, basically put together a report as basically outside consultants. One of the things that we figured out was that Danny had stepped up into this leadership role, a pseudo leadership role. He'd never been actually formally recognized for it because, you know, the Ethereum Foundation doesn't really do that, but uh we after finding him uh allowed him to be promoted internally to uh being this sort of central nexus that connected all of the researchers and all the core teams. He was technical enough and social enough to be that bridge. So, we wanted to put him in charge of the Ethereum Foundation.

Uh this was the result of a vote uh to see if that was worth doing. It's overwhelmingly in his favor. It's what, 95, yeah, like 150 million dollars or something. Uh and Vitalik shut us down. Uh this was like the only thing that everybody in Ethereum agreed on.

Uh it was put Danny Ryan in charge. Uh and and Vitalik said, you know, this is not how the game works. Uh the person deciding the new EF leadership team is me. One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give EF a proper board, but until that happens, it's me. Okay.

If you keep the pressure on, then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talents. Some of Ethereum's best devs have been messaging me recently expressing their disgust with the social media environment. You are making my job harder. And you are decreasing the chance that I have any interest in doing what you want, my lady. Uh and so, you know, I thought this was a bunch of because the problem with me is I helped bury all these bodies, you know?

So, uh what when I just called out Aya. I'm like, "Okay, Aya, do you remember the time that you called me and asked me to continue being toxic to Lane Rettig because you didn't like him and wanted him out?" Awkward. So, uh yeah, V basically used that toxicity to shut us down and with no response to any of the, you know, points about Aya being toxic herself or endorsing it when it benefits her, you know, and so forth. Uh and then uh he he yeah, basically ignored all of our comments and and lumped us in with some minority Twitter personalities who were being somewhat toxic, admittedly.

But used that as an excuse to ignore all of us. Did it again here. Uh he commented on someone's suicidal plea for help uh in order to cast us in a negative light and say that we make him want to quit Ethereum and so we uh should basically go away and be quiet and and and thankfully we have some Ethereum meme lords who broke this down. Uh so, he said, you know, uh when people with no understanding of the Ethereum Foundation internals tell me exactly who I should rip out of the organization, who I should throw in. On top of that, expect it all to get done within 2 weeks.

Said, "No, I do not feel good about hearing these things. These are even times that make me the emotional desire to quit." Uh and then this guy, J Rag, said, "This is masterful narrative control. This is what we should be doing. We should be learning how Vitalik plays this game."

So, he's saying if you are asking for change, you're now grouped with like VC firms giving him thoughts about quitting. Uh you know, no one wants that. We love Vitalik. Um "Be patient" means anybody who proposes this appears toxic because we're asking for urgency. Uh people with no understanding of the EF, so he's just insulting all of our uh knowledge of and how any of this works.

Um and and to top it off, at the bottom it's like it's wrapped in a don't kill yourself post. So, you you you know, you're just done. You can't argue with that. Um, So, Vitalik is the problem. Uh, rumor has it that Danny's condition for returning was to be the sole executive director.

So far, V has blocked this, called this all toxic for asking. Uh, some suspect that this is due to Danny being an American, uh, essentially a DEI move, and others suspect that, you know, it's V being jealous of Danny's popularity. So, this guy, who is the guy I was calling out for Gitcoin calling me in the beginning, said, you know, uh, the issue with wokeism is in the workplace is recruiting. If they start choosing their own tribe more than the best man for the job. And I'm like, exactly.

Uh, in what world does anyone other than Danny Ryan the most qualified for the Ethereum executive director position? The culture problem goes up to the top, and this is why it's important. Danny is the people's choice. If you don't know, that's Danny Ryan. Uh, who is actually stepping up to the plate to rep Ethereum.

So, so like, Danny's one of the only people who can do a great job at representing the Ethereum Foundation protocol publicly. He's technical, he's charming, he's jacked. Put him in. Um, and so, as a result of this, we have to fight Vitalik. Uh, when Vitalik said, you know, I am the board, I don't I make all the decisions, he also basically identified himself as the the responsible party for everything that we were previously scapegoating Aya for.

Which is kind of a mind because it's like, bro, you put her as the executive director, even though you run everything, in order for to have a scapegoat. And then, when we scapegoated her, you got mad at us for scapegoating her. Um, but the the the solution to this is holding Vitalik accountable, and normalizing that. So, for example, he posted, uh, you know, about the 10x scaling. All of a sudden, in the year of our Lord 2025, he decided that Ethereum needs to scale the base layer by uh at least 10 times or more.

Uh which we could have started 2 years ago, 3 years ago, at any time before that. Uh and so it it's worth asking, "Hey, why didn't we do this? Whose job was it to figure this out? And and what's what's the problem? So, you know, I brought this up to to Waki.

Waki had some tweet he was saying we like wandered around and then Solana basically showed us that you you know, we had product market fit. I'm like, "What took us so long to get there?" Uh and and so I I asked, you know, "Whose job was this?" And he didn't respond. Cuz that's not a thing we do.

We don't We don't talk about Vitalik. It's like Voldemort. Uh and so, you know, uh another response to that question was Zaki saying, "The answer is that Ethereum does not have engineering problems, executives." Danny. Uh You have research exacts like Justin.

There isn't anyone who wakes up and tries to figure out how to get the extra 10% improvement on 100 different subcomponents. Uh I said it's worse than that. We actually don't even know that we're missing engineering executives. Uh that's that's not a problem that is registered for us. Um So, uh you know, until we can discuss the V word, he who shall not be named, Lord the Dark Lord Voldemort, we will continue to make the same mistakes.

You know, this is another Ethereum core dev, Preston, and he uh you know, in response to being like, "Hey, you know, what what was the problem here?" He's like, "Sure, a retrospective might be productive, but it doesn't do much to solve the current problems." And I disagree. I think if the same people are making the same mistakes, uh then it it is a problem. Uh and so, you know, it's one word and it starts with V.

Uh and I'll Um this is tweeted today uh by Joseph Schweitzer. and uh, it's mind-boggling the mental gymnastics that are required to tweet something like this. Frankly speaking, if the EF had too competent of an official wallet team, web team, client team funding mechanism, we wouldn't have had the alternatives that we see today. Much of that is by design. Help others grow, help others connect.

And it's like it's basically saying our incompetence is actually for your benefit. Uh, and I I don't agree. I think we should uh, normalize holding Vitalik accountable uh, for the incompetence of the Ethereum Foundation. Uh, so part of doing this uh, is uh, going, you know, identifying the ways that Vitalik is our cult leader, uh, identifying, you know, how cult leadership works, um, and destroying it. Uh, his whole cult of personality.

So, I recommend everybody read this blog post by Ela Girl of uh, gangbang fame. Um, it's called frame control. Just like type in Ela frame control. Uh, don't type in like Ela anything else. But, uh, it's basically pick-up artistry for cult leaders and you'll you'll enjoy it.

Um, the reason that she knows about this stuff is because she had to break out of like her father was like a Christian pastor, um, and and I identify with some of this because my dad was, you know, uh, very uh, radical Islamist, you know, growing up and and like I said, we had to both overcome all that. So, um, anyways, a lot of other people are going to talk about uh, the wonders that we're building. I wanted to talk about destroying the religious fanatics, but we should remember that when we are done destroying the religious fanatics, we will go back to building the wonders. Thank you.