During the globally watched Token2049 summit,HashKey Group Chairman and CEO Dr. Xiao Feng, together with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, jointly launched the“Ethereum Applications Guild” (Ethereum Applications Guild, abbreviated asEAG) initiative.
The initiative aims to bring together developers, researchers, teams, and institutions from the Ethereum ecosystem to jointly build an open, transparent, and sustainable collaborative mechanism, accelerate the development and real-world implementation of native applications, and promote the Ethereum ecosystem from being“infrastructure-led” to a new stage of“application-driven” development.
The launch of this initiative is based on and carried out through the three-year residency practice of“Shanhaiwu”. As a native collaborative space initiated and supported by Dr. Xiao Feng in 2023, Shanhaiwu has been established in Beidahu, China, Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Singapore, gathering global builders to collaborate on AI, crypto, public chain ecosystems, and public goods.
Through three years of practice and accumulation at Shanhaiwu, experiment participants have come to realize that the Ethereum ecosystem does not lack technology or imagination; what is truly lacking is a sustainable and structured co-building mechanism——public goods and community support funding are still limited, and large-scale real-world applications have yet to emerge.The concept of EAG was proposed based on the exploration, accumulation, and problem discovery at Shanhaiwu, aiming to fundamentally address the ecosystem's structural needs in application implementation, public goods support, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
EAG is not a traditional foundation or accelerator, but an open initiative exploring the construction of a global collaborative network for Ethereum native applications. It uses Shanhaiwu as the main application incubation site, encouraging more developers to build, validate, and advance solutions to real-world problems. This initiative does not propose an organizational entity, but rather a mechanism concept, aiming to build a new generation of collaboration paradigms for Ethereum ecosystemBuilders.
At the launch event, Dr. Xiao Feng stated:The initiation of EAG symbolizes a key moment for the Ethereum application layer to“break out of its shell”; the establishment of such an alliance is to unite all parties to welcome the arrival of Ethereum and even the blockchain world's“1995moment”—a new era of explosive application growth.
HashKey will continue to invest in building the Ethereum ecosystem as always, and also welcomes more native applications to develop and grow on HashKey Chain L2, jointly enriching Ethereum's application layer.
Ethereum co-founderVitalik Buterin was present at the event and jointly launched this initiative. In his speech at the Shanhaiwu·Singapore event the previous day,Vitalik stated: He hopes that in the future, there will be more long-term community builders like Shanhaiwu, especially at the application layer, who choose Ethereum as their infrastructure base and jointly promote the ecosystem's real-world implementation.
Currently,the EAG initiative is in its early consensus stage. The alliance sincerely invites ETH treasury companies, technology companies, Layer2 teams, developer communities, protocol organizations, and research institutions from around the world to join, aggregating multiple stakeholders to jointly build a new bottom-up, truly collaborative paradigm for Ethereum applications, and to promote the Ethereum ecosystem from the infrastructure era into a golden stage of real-world impact.