Ethereum Architects

Purpose

TBD

Overview

Many Ethereum projects are developer-driven, grassroots projects. Developers are acting independently and get revenue from community attention generated by their project. Moreover, many in Ethereum dislike hierarchies and external management, as nothing can be enforced. We are cats that don’t like to be herded. Many projects have an Ethereum-style development process; this is our “eth-ish” lifestyle.

It has huge drawbacks. The Ethereum ecosystem is a patchwork of many loosely connected independent projects. There is no direct incentives for developers to spend their time working on interoperability and integrations into other projects. In the old-school world, there is a management for that, but we don’t like it. Therefore, projects often don’t have any role for taking care of the seamless integration of the parts into one smoothly working platform.

Ethereum Architect (EA) is the full-time role for that purpose. He/she …

• knows almost all sub projects in ethereum space (and makes his knowledge public),
  • … this includes project’s features, performance, interoperability and future development.
• proposes standard architectures and solutions, i.e. for external customer needs.
• creates a EIP’s in particular projects to improve their interoperability and UX, based on own experience in customer’s projects.
• represents customer needs in technical ethereum discussions.
• compares similar projects creating the “best-of” lists.
• provides quality reports and promotes best devs or projects or makes list of their flaws public.

EA role is meant to be “eth-ish”. It means that an EA should not pretend to manage other people, but because of his broad knowledge of the Ethereum ecosystem and community, this role is to influence others. “Eth-ish” also means working actively and independently. This role is self-sufficient; as an Ethereum Architect, you are able to earn money even if you are not part of any other project.

EA is like a Software Architect but it is more; because EA actively takes care about Ethereum as a platform in general. Moreover, he/she brings projects, developers and stakeholder together because of knowledge of the community and ecosystem.

Because of wide knowledge of Ethereum ecosystem and community, the EA plays an important role in Ethereum governance (Signaling): EA identifies influential projects and people, which is essential to interpret signals. The EA signals customer needs into the Ethereum community, and project needs to each other.