Subscribe to Bankless or sign in
Build, create, deploy. Onchain, these are considered the sexy verbs. They bring the most attention and prestige, they make markets go 'round. But in the long-term, the unsung verbs like curating, documenting, stewarding and preserving, can be just as critical.
Two weeks from today will actually mark my 9th year in crypto. In my near decade here, ephemerality has been no stranger. I recall conversations that don't exist online anymore and old cryptoart and onchain game experiments that maybe a few people total, if that, still remember.
If I and these other folks walked away, would this knowledge be lost forever? Maybe. Does it matter if these sorts of obscure things are forgotten? I think so. They are only obscure from our current vantage. But true wisdom (and its ensuing breakthroughs) comes from cumulative understanding.
In other words, you can't fully be where you are and know what you can do now if you don't understand how you got here and what's been possible before. And you can't even do this well if the knowledge you need keeps fading into oblivion, here and there lost to the creep of time.
I don't know what the answer to this is for social contexts, e.g. community chats for old projects, but as far as 
Ethereum goes (i.e. tokens, smart contracts, game constructions, etc.), things only fade into the background and not into oblivion. All historic activity is latent and analyzable onchain for those who want to dig and sort and preserve and better understand.
Enjoying this article?
Subscribe to Bankless or sign in
This brings me to my main point, which is that one of my favorite new projects doing this kind of important but often overlooked onchain archaeology is Ethereum History by cart00n.eth.
A "Wikipedia for Ethereum smart contracts," Ethereum History is a rising grassroots archive for documenting and contextualizing the earliest contracts on mainnet, namely from the 2015-2018 era when everything was essentially experimental and sparsely documented.
The platform offers a range of analytical goodies from the Deployer Network (a visual graph of Ethereum's first builders) to Collections (curated galleries of deployments like The Vitalik Collection), but personally my favorite resource is the "Historical Significance" primers that the contributing historians write for archived contracts, of which there are nearly 500 and counting. For example, the blurb shown below annotates the first-ever attempt at a contract deployment on Ethereum.
Anyone can look up info here, and anyone can contribute edits. Of course, this hub is very much in-progress, and it's a labor of love and intellectual curiosity, but even still it's already an unparalleled resource for studying old Ethereum projects.
Ethereum's history is, of course, still being written, but the builders of tomorrow will find there are plenty of learnings from the past already housed in this archive – learnings that could help inform future creations. Here, I'm left thinking about "Withered Technology's Lateral Thinking," a design philosophy pioneered at Nintendo (that led to the Game Boy) that focuses on finding new ways to implement and leverage "outdated" tech.
In other words, overlooked but well understood tech, assembled with fresh eyes and creativity, can outperform cutting-edge competitors. Similarly, there may be a world-changing enterprise just waiting to be put together from the ideas found in old Ethereum contracts. But to get creative like that, you first have to grasp the possibilities, and this is where Ethereum History can shine.
