Visualizing Ethereum’s History

This post explains Ethstory, an NFT project that describes Ethereum’s history through data visualization. Ethstory has a charitable goal. 100% of all initial sales are going to charity. Links to transactions into public addresses for charities can be found here. Series 4, the final series, will be released as an OpenSea auction this Friday, April 30th at 5pm NYC time. All proceeds to charity.

Andrew here, this is a guest post created by my friend Takens Theorem who is the genius behind the data-driven art masterpieces known as Ethstory. The final NFT release for Ethstory is this Friday and I wanted to give Takens a platform to discuss the project. The passion and thought that goes into every one of these pieces are astonishing and actually make me in awe of how someone can be so inspired by a blockchain protocol. Its true believers like Takens that turn this technological paradigm into a true movement that will impact all aspects of our lives.

Obviously, I am biased because I have helped Takens with this project and have purchased pieces from him but I highly suggest you check it out. 16 originals in 110 editions and with the final set of NFTs relating this Friday @ 5pm ET. I promote this because Takens heart is in the right place, he has made some incredible works AND the proceeds of the primary sale go to charity!! He is not even doing this for money which I find actually quite shocking (because he could have made a lot). Also if you enjoy his work then give him a follow on Twitter.

Ethereum is amazing. You don’t even have to like Ethereum to have this opinion. Just take in some cold, dispassionate facts. Ethereum now serves as a base layer for trillions of US dollars of yearly transacted value across diverse projects that are all built upon it: autonomous organizations, decentralized finance, digital ownership, identity and name services, and more. Yet, its mainnet is not 6 years old. And while we wait for it to evolve into Eth2, it is doing all of this on barely 20 transactions per second.

It is a historic technical achievement.

These successes are also a social achievement. The community surrounding Ethereum is just as important as its Turing-complete technical specification. What drew me deep into the rabbit hole in 2018 was the early NFT community. Meandering various Dapps with a freshly setup MetaMask felt like installing an early mod onto my reality. The notion of digital ownership, amidst all the other stuff built on Ethereum, seemed like an alluring, amorphous upgrade to everything I was doing on the Internet.

My favorite thing about Ethereum, and public blockchain in general, is its treasure trove of data. In 2019, I wrote a couple of blog posts for the wonderful OpenSea. One showed that we can predict ENS name value from applied natural language processing. Another blog post described an experimental NFT recommender system. I created a series of experimental data-driven interfaces, many of them for NFTs. I also…