A decade ago, half a dozen mavericks assembled in a Swiss house to launch Ethereum — a piece of the crypto ecosystem that acts as a distributed computing platform, using the ether token.  

It initially looked likely to fail: the founding tribe imploded after bitter internal fights; Ethereum suffered a massive cyber hack; scandals erupted and, like bitcoin, ether’s price became crazily volatile, surging from nothing to $5,000, before collapsing.

But this week something striking occurred: just as the White House was issuing a report about the “Golden Age of Crypto”, the Nasdaq exchange celebrated Ethereum’s tenth birthday. “Ethereum has demonstrated itself?.?.?.?as the definition of antifragile,” enthused Joe Lubin, one former inhabitant of that founding house, who presents the platform as “a reliable trust layer for our fast-growing digital world”.