Ten years ago, two weeks before the Ethereum project was publicly announced, I published this post on Bitcoin magazine arguing that issuing coins could be a new way to fund important public projects. The thinking went: society needs ways to fund valuable large-scale projects, markets and institutions (both corporations and governments) are the main techniques that we have today, and both work in some cases and fail in others. Issuing new coins seems like a third class of large-scale funding technology, and it seems different enough from both markets and institutions that it would succeed and fail in different places - and so it could fill in some important gaps.

The next big thing may start out by piggybacking off a popular memecoin