From the team

How we mapped ten years of Ethereum

Twenty topics, every subtopic defined, and the reasoning behind every cut. The map of the archive is now open source.

By Ethereum TV · · 3 min read

Ethereum TV exists to make a decade of Ethereum watchable: thousands of conference talks, protocol deep-dives, interviews, and workshops, more than nineteen thousand videos so far. Very early on we hit the problem every archive hits: a collection becomes useful the moment you can navigate it. So we spent a long time building the map.

Today that map goes public: browse it live, or take the data and the reasoning from the open-source repo.

The map

Twenty topics, and under them the 111 subtopics that power filtering, related talks, and search. Every name links to its page in the archive.

Less is more

Would a viewer actually filter by this, or does the topic alone already tell them what they need?

Every topic and subtopic had to pass a single test: would a viewer actually filter by this, or does the topic alone already tell them what they need? Anything that failed was cut. Any two neighbors that needed a written rule to tell apart were merged. A topic with three subtopics is fine. Gaming has three.

Some things belong in two places

A few subjects genuinely refuse to sit on one shelf. Account Abstraction is core protocol engineering, and it is also the future of wallets. Hardware wallets are a wallet choice, and they are a security posture. The usual fix is to split them into near-duplicates under each parent, and it is the wrong fix: curators guess, viewers check two shelves, counts lie.

Sixteen subtopics instead live under two topics at once, with one definition, one canonical page under their home topic, and a promise that they never count twice. Information architects call this a polyhierarchy, and it turned out the findability literature recommends exactly this shape, with exactly our safeguard: one canonical home, a hard cap of two parents.

No project names, anywhere

The map contains no company names, no project names, no token tickers. Projects rise and fall faster than a good shelf should, and a category named after this cycle's protagonist becomes a broken shelf by the next one.

Search closes the gap with aliases: type DePIN and you land on Physical Infrastructure, Perps takes you to Derivatives, ENS takes you to Naming. The names stay durable; the vocabulary people actually type keeps working. The alias list ships in the repo too.

Checked against the real world

Before freezing anything, we verified the map in four directions: the track lists of Devcon, Devconnect, EthCC, ETHDenver, and ETHGlobal, plus the categories of the excellent Devcon archive; the Ethereum Foundation's published protocol priorities, which is why L1 scaling and post-quantum work have first-class homes; the sector taxonomies of the major research firms; and the Baymard Institute's research on how filters and categories actually get used, which shaped the decision to keep level, format, event, language, and year out of the tree entirely. Those axes live as filters: beginner DeFi talks from Devcon in Spanish is four filters combined.

Every current conference track lands cleanly on these twenty topics. That was the acceptance test, and it passed.

Take it with you

The whole thing is open source at github.com/ethereumtv/taxonomy under CC BY 4.0: the map with every definition, machine-readable data with canonical URLs on every node, the alias list, and the full method. It is our second open release after the recommendation algorithm, and it comes with the same intent: if you run an archive, a newsletter, an event, or a research library, you should not have to draw this map from scratch.

And if you just want to watch: the living version is at ethereumtv.co/taxonomy. Click anything. That is what it is for.

Filed under Community, Developers

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