When The Community Responds

Unless you have been entrenched in smart contracts development, or working with blockchain or crypto environments, you probably didn’t hear much about a monumental event that took place last week. This was a true engineering feat, many years in the making. Monumental for many reasons, one of those being the transformative way in which it happened, cementing it as a blueprint for how a technology change can make a significant positive impact on society.

The change, also known as “the Merge”, was an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain environment. Ethereum, the largest smart contract blockchain platform, switched its consensus engine from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). This is the community-run technology powering not only the ether cryptocurrency but also thousands of smart contracts and decentralized applications.

This was an unprecedented and complex update executed without interrupting the operations of the network. Instead of requiring computational power to solve mining puzzles for securing the network, validators can now lock in funds for a specific period of time to propose or vote on new blocks. A design change that, once implemented, removed electricity as a safeguard for the network and replaced it by network participants’ stake. 

The new design introduced with the Merge provides a more secure consensus mechanism. It also cut global energy consumption usage by 0.2% overnight. A game changer. It is by far one of the biggest decarbonization events in the history of technology. And it was executed by hundreds of developers all over the world, collaborating for years on a voluntary basis. 

The Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI) has systemically analyzed the implication of the Merge by establishing metrics for electricity consumption and carbon footprint implications of both Ethererum PoW and PoS. The change in design introduced by the Merge reduced the electricity consumption of the network by over 99.988%, and reduced the carbon footprint generated by the network by 99.92%. Ethereum now generates less CO2 than a few hundred households, compared to the amount of CO2 it generated with the older design before the Merge, which equated to that of a small country. 

The sustainability implication of the Merge is impressive. But that is not all, the way that it was done is even more impressive. 

Those of us who have planned, implemented, and managed software projects during our careers know that impactful and potentially disruptive changes are usually implemented with a top-down hierarchical structure. We follow agile methodologies and processes. We have a budget, project managers, a set of teams, and a very well orchestrated and coordinated top-down plan. This is common not only in large enterprises but also in startups, where we may build fast and break things but still need governance, accountability and structure for the things that we deploy. 

With the Merge, it all started with ideas produced by hundreds of developers all over the world, followed by people thinking about the implications on the Ethereum protocol, identifying real needs vs wants, design tradeoffs which became posts in several open forums, academic papers, prototypes, and proposed specifications. Not all specifications made it to the Merge. And all of this was done in the span of a few years by volunteers around the world. All of these volunteers, through asynchronous processes, hashed out the importance of the specifications and figured out how to bring it all together. Security was always prioritized, nice-to-have features didn’t all make it to the final upgrade. 

The most significant technological upgrade to drastically reduce power consumption and CO2 generation was developed over the internet by a bunch of volunteers, without dedicated funding or organizational structure. The greatest technological decarbonization in years happened not because of a corporate mandate, or Wall Street directive, but because volunteers wanted it to happen. 

As Eric Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”,  would say: when code is developed over the internet in front of the public, all bugs are shallow and the impact is more profound.  When open source code is created developers can write lots of code but, if the community doesn’t want it, this was wasted development time. And at the same time the community may want a bunch of features implemented, but if developers can’t be convinced of the value and safety of these features, the code won’t get written. In this scenario there is no Head of Product, or Head of Engineering, or Project Manager. An incredibly messy process, but it works. 

Ultimately, with thousands of Distributed Applications (dApps) and Protocols running on top of Ethereum after the Merge, hundreds of additional teams will continue to hash out specifications and requirements and improve upon the network. Another set of mega-brains looking at what was implemented is always a good thing. Similar with other open source successes such as Linux, there is wisdom, resilience and strength in this process. And there is an unsurpassable scalability opportunity that sets it apart. 

Can this be a model for future endeavors to fast-track sustainability efforts? I think the answer to that question is an absolute Yes! 

But let’s see what the community has to say about it.