- The Ethereum Applications Guild focuses on accelerating Ethereum’s transition from infrastructure development to application-driven growth.
- The Guild leverages insights from Shanhaiwoo’s cross-disciplinary work to build collaborative structures for Ethereum developers.
- Vitalik Buterin and Xiao Feng highlight the Guild’s role in pushing Ethereum into a new era, centered around large-scale applications.
Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, alongside HashKey Group’s CEO Dr. Xiao Feng, has officially launched the Ethereum Applications Guild (EAG) at the Token2049 summit in Singapore. This initiative, which builds on the Shanhaiwoo experiment, aims to accelerate Ethereum’s transition from its current infrastructure-heavy phase to an application-driven era.
The EAG provides a collaborative framework that encourages Ethereum developers to focus on real-world problems and deploy native Ethereum projects. It aims to create a structured environment where global developers can collaborate effectively. The initiative’s purpose is to shift the ecosystem’s focus from technological issues to structural challenges. This shift intends to foster an environment where large-scale applications can thrive.
Building on Shanhaiwoo’s Success
The Ethereum Applications Guild takes inspiration from Shanhaiwoo, an incubator program that Dr. Xiao Feng initiated in 2023. Shanhaiwoo hosted global developers across various locations, from China to Thailand, facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations in fields such as AI, crypto, and public goods. The program highlighted Ethereum’s most pressing challenge—its lack of a sustainable, structured co-creation mechanism. It revealed that the blockchain ecosystem’s deficit is less technological and more structural, with insufficient funding for public goods and few large-scale applications coming to fruition.
By leveraging the momentum from Shanhaiwoo, the Ethereum Applications Guild aims to channel these insights into tangible solutions. The Guild offers developers a proven environment to build, test, and advance new projects, focusing on real-world impact. This practical approach will hopefully bridge the gap between Ethereum’s infrastructure and its full potential in driving decentralized applications (dApps).
Backing from Industry Leaders
Dr. Xiao Feng emphasized that the Ethereum Applications Guild marks a pivotal point for the Ethereum ecosystem. He compared this moment to the early days of the internet in the 1990s, where commercial applications began to flourish. Similarly, the Guild aims to help Ethereum transition into a period where applications take center stage.
Vitalik Buterin echoed this sentiment, urging long-term Ethereum developers to anchor their work in the ecosystem and help push Ethereum beyond its infrastructure phase. The Guild has already started inviting key stakeholders, including treasury groups, research institutions, Layer 2 teams, and protocol foundations, to foster a bottom-up, community-driven coalition.
The Ethereum Applications Guild seeks to ignite the next phase of Ethereum’s development by focusing on collaborative, real-world application building. Through structured collaboration and the lessons learned from Shanhaiwoo, the initiative aims to help Ethereum shift from a technology-centric phase to a more application-focused era.
