Ethereum Community Backs Ethiopia Ahead of Olympics

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Key Takeaways Ethereum fans are showing their support for Ethiopia after Twitter added the country’s flag to the “ETH” hashtag in celebration of the Olympics.

A DAO called EthiopiaDAO has formed, while some community members have suggested sponsoring the country’s Olympic team.

The Olympics thanked Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and the wider crypto community for their support.

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Ethereans are voicing their support for Ethiopia.

Ethereum Forms Ties with Ethiopia

Ethereum fans are backing Ethiopia ahead of the Tokyo Olympics.

Members of the second-ranked blockchain’s community began showing their support for the African nation after Twitter added national flag emojis for each of the teams appearing at the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. The social media platform added the Ethiopia flag to the hashtag “ETH,” which coincides with the name for Ethereum’s native currency.

Ethereum enthusiasts quickly adopted the hashtag and united in showing support for Ethiopia. Many reposted the country’s flag, similar to how Bitcoiners and other crypto believers collectively adopted “laser eyes” on their Twitter avatars earlier this year. Since the flag surfaced on Twitter, a decentralized autonomous organization called EthiopiaDAO “centered around Ethiopia and blockchain education” has formed. A member of the DAO told Crypto Briefing:

“While there isn’t a clear vision of exactly how EthiopiaDAO can help today, we have the tools and know how to coordinate capital globally towards whatever we decide to put our efforts towards. Currently there seems to be memetic alignment between communities and we’d like to capture that momentum towards funding communal goods that could have real world benefits to Ethiopia, and the Ethereum ecosystem at large.”

Meanwhile, several community members have suggested supporting the country in other ways. Brantly Millegan, director of operations at Ethereum Name Service, reached out to Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to suggest sponsoring the country in the Tokyo Olympics. Meanwhile, Mike Demarais, co-founder of the Ethereum wallet rainbow, shared a similar proposal and suggested that Ethereum could “copy/paste el salvador strat but for vitalik coin.“ El Salvador made history when it adopted Bitcoin as legal tender last month, indicating that Demarais was most likely proposing a campaign to make ETH an official currency in Ethiopia.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square founder and longtime Bitcoin evangelist, also joined in with the trend by posting the hashtag in a tweet. In the crypto world, Dorsey is best known for his ardent support for Bitcoin, though he’s been less enthusiastic about Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. The official Olympics Twitter account responded to Dorsey’s post to say it was “great to see” him and the crypto community supporting Ethiopia’s athletes.

Great to see @jack and the crypto community supporting the #ETH athletes! 👏 — Olympics (@Olympics) July 22, 2021

Ethereum isn’t the only cryptocurrency project to show support for Ethiopia: earlier this year, Cardano’s IOHK partnered with the country’s government to develop a blockchain system focusing on student performance in schools. The deal will involve five million Ethiopian students having their digital identities stored on the blockchain.

The Tokyo Olympics runs from today until Aug. 8. Representatives from the country are yet to respond to the Ethereum community, though ETH has enjoyed an overnight rise: it’s back above $2,000, up around 4%.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH, ETH2X-FLI, and several other cryptocurrencies.

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#ethgate Overshadows Big News But Helps Ethereum With Memes Amid Ethiopia Crisis

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Source: Adobe/Tobias Arhelger

Today, the Cryptoverse found itself in a strange situation, as an alleged attempt by a major Bitcoin (BTC) bull to troll the Ethereum (ETH) community overshadowed more important news and eventually helped ETH to get more publicity at the expense of a struggling country.

First, the important news.

Mikhail Kalinin, a researcher at Ethereum-focused major blockchain company ConsenSys, created a pull-request for an Ethereum improvement proposal, EIP-3675: Upgrade consensus to Proof-of-Stake on Github on July 22 - meaning that the Ethereum 2.0 Merge has been formalized.

The so-called ‘The Merge’ is the moment when the current Ethereum mainnet “merges” with the beacon chain proof-of-stake (PoS) system, slated for late 2021 at the earliest. Therefore, the network’s consensus mechanism will transition away from the current proof-of-work (PoW), used by Bitcoin also, to PoS.

Per Pooja Ranjan, founder of blockchain-based company Avarch and its project EtherWorld, the beacon chain network has been running since December 2020, and “neither safety nor liveness failures were detected during this period of time.” Ranjan further added that “the long period of running without failures demonstrates sustainability of the beacon chain system and witnesses its readiness to start driving and become a security provider for the Ethereum Mainnet.”

Furthermore, the developers are working on fixing any remaining issues related to EIPs slated to be implemented with the upcoming London upgrade, itself set for August 4 or 5. As reported, one of these is EIP-3554, which will delay the difficulty bomb, that will make Ethereum impossible to mine, until December, and another is the much-discussed EIP-1559, which will change the current auction-based mechanism and bring the gas fee burning.

However, the ‘eth’ hashtag which directly had nothing to do with Ethereum seemingly garnered far more interest on social media than this important EIP-3675.

It all started when certain Twitter users noticed that hashtagging ‘eth’ came with the Ethiopian flag.

Even the official Olympics account commented on this, stating that “great to see Jack [Dorsey, CEO of Twitter] and the crypto community supporting the #ETH [Ethiopian flag] athletes!”

@jack Great to see @jack and the crypto community supporting the #ETH athletes! # — Olympics (@Olympics)

Dorsey is a well-known Bitcoin proponent and Ethereum skeptic, so it’s not surprising that this Twiter post with three letters and a flag produced multiple theories as to why this happened. Many are questioning whether Dorsey is trolling the Ethereum community.

However, some commenters noted that the same thing happened five years ago. And that’s because 2016 was the year of the Rio De Janeiro Olympics. This time around, for the Tokyo Olympics, hashtags have been created and shared relating to the competing countries, adding flags to each. So #eth outside of the still-small, yet growing world of crypto is #Ethiopa, not #Ethereum.

Some were not convinced by this, swiftly traveling into the conspiracy territory - or were trolling themselves.

Dude, come on now. That was entirely his intention, it’s a lame attempt at diluting the ETH tag — 0x22 🏝 (@0x22Mb) July 23, 2021

In either case, it seems that the major Bitcoin bull inadvertently helped Ethereans to get another meme that might help them get more attention, as they’re now using this situation for their own gain, creating multiple jokes and memes.

I was late to the party. Support this! https://t.co/rMGhjBj1fa — Alex Svanevik 🧭 (@ASvanevik)

Meanwhile, while both Bitcoin and Ethereum camps are enjoying themselves at the expense of Ethiopia, the country is in the midst of a tragic conflict combined with the growing aids fears.

“A bloody eight-month battle for control of the north Ethiopian state of Tigray has spilled over into the neighboring region of Afar in the past week,” reported BBC Wednesday. “At least 20 civilians have been killed and 54,000 people have been displaced, reports say, as fears grow of a fast-developing humanitarian crisis.”

At 11:03 UTC, ETH trades at USD 2,055. It’s up 3% in a day and 7.5% in a week.

Other reactions:

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MAN IS STRAIGHT CYBERBULLYING ETH LMFAOOOOO https://t.co/pCgpTP3EDO — NFTdart🦋🐝 (@loomdart)

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#ETH is… Ethiopian money? — Alex Masmej is hiring engineers for Showtime (@AlexMasmej)

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#Bitcoin got a nice emoji. #Eth got a whole country. — Victor “DeFi Toronto” Li 🦇🔊 (@CryptoEcon_Li)

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Ethiopia doesn’t exist. Its a psyops to keep ethereum subjugated. https://t.co/jqumLfUDXy — NFTdart🦋🐝 (@loomdart)

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mum please pick me up the olympics is cyberbullying me https://t.co/4E7pwaZckl — path.eth 🛡️ (@Cryptopathic)

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You know someone is afraid of getting disrupted when does things like this. — ILiveInLambo 🦇️🔊️ (@LiveLambo)

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It’s really funny actually how this whole thing mixed with the olympics and jack’s trolling ethereum became a meme for Ethiopia + ethereum 😂 — Lefteris Karapetsas | Hiring for @rotkiapp (@LefterisJP) July 23, 2021

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No, Jack Dorsey isn’t trolling ETH by making its logo the Ethiopian flag

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Crypto Twitter was united in amusement today when the hashtag #eth began to automatically show the Ethiopian flag as the Ethereum ‘logo’.

Given Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s love of Bitcoin and the fact Bitcoin has its own Twitter icon many wondered if Dorsey was subtly trolling Ethereum (ETH). After all he’s a staunch Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist that has refused to consider buying into ETH and other altcoins on multiple occasions and has repeatedly stated that Bitcoin will become the internet’s native currency.

The Twitter and Square founder certainly saw the funny side of it, Tweeting “#eth” which drew the attention of the official Olympics account which said it was “great to see Jack and the crypto community supporting the #ETH athletes!”

Twitter influencer Crypto Cobain also found the funny side and tweeted “HAHA” to his 403,400 followers that “this is perfect.”

NFL footballer Sean Culkin, who is converting his entire 2021 NFL salary into Bitcoin, wondered why so many people were “not realizing its a troll”

Bitcoiners such as “Bitcoin Meme Hub” jumped in the joke by posting fake Tweets from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin supposedly stating that “this is not funny Jack.”

Hashflags

In fact, the Ethiopian flag had nothing to do with Ethereum at all. The social media platform has been attaching flags to hashtags of nations competing in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. The promotion is part of a ‘hashflags’ campaign that the platform also did for the 2016 Olympics in Rio De Janeiro.

Related: Aave founder hints at developing ‘Twitter on Ethereum’

Interestingly the Twitter CEO used the Ethiopian flag to promote Bitcoin earlier this year, after he retweeted lobbying efforts from a group of Ethiopian-based entrepreneurs dubbed “Project Mano” who were urging their government to consider mining and hodling BTC.

Dorsey this week spoke at “The ₿ Word,” — a virtual Bitcoin event alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood. During the event, Dorsey outlined his hope that Bitcoin “creates world peace or helps create world peace.”

“We have all these monopolies off balance and the individual doesn’t have power and the amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real and it takes away attention from the bigger problems,” he said as he emphasized Bitcoin’s potential for solving financial inequality.