Hardness is the capability to make the future more certain. Ethereum offers us hardness. We can give Ethereum code and receive a very strong guarantee that it will run any time we call on it. We can give Ethereum data and know with certainty it will still be available in the future, unaltered and uncorrupted. These simple building blocks give rise to more complex forms of coordination. Money. Contracts. Governance. Identity. Today Ethereum is the hard foundation of a digital economy where millions collaborate across time and space and nation.

Only recently, after the invention of blockchains, have we begun to realize that these three things share a common underlying property. It is not a coincidence we make money out of them, or that we can use either institutions or blockchains to create contracts. All of them give us the ability to constrain the future, to make parts of it more certain, fixed points strong enough to coordinate around. If law, money, and government are the infrastructure of our civilization, then atoms, institutions, and blockchains like Ethereum are the raw materials this infrastructure is built with.