Ethereum has no king. What began as one foundation's project has grown into a polycentric order — foundations, labs, guilds and coalitions that research, fund, coordinate, scale and advocate for the network, each with its own mandate and none with a monopoly on its future. This deck is a praise-song and a field guide: twelve of these stewards, cast as a curated tarot of twelve Major Arcana archetypes, and a case that multiplicity itself is the architecture.
No single body can be coerced, captured or fail catastrophically when a dozen overlapping ones share the load.
Competing visions — values vs. markets, scarcity vs. growth — keep every important question open and contested.
Credible neutrality means decoupling who pays, who builds, and who decides. Stewardship without ownership.
Twelve stewards, cast as twelve selected Major Arcana · each rests face-down — hover to reveal its card · click to read its keeper · each rests face-down — tap to turn it · “Reveal” to read its keeper
Read together, these twelve are not a hierarchy but a weave. The Foundation can codify its own walkaway; the Guild can pay the maintainers without buying a vote; each steward holds a single thread — and the network holds precisely because no one holds it alone.
The future Ethereum is betting on isn't a better king; it is the quiet, redundant, gloriously argumentative multiplicity of many hands tending the same garden. And the weave is unfinished — there is no fixed seat-count here. Perhaps the most Ethereum-native thing you can do is find a gap none of these twelve yet cover, and begin tending it yourself. The next steward could be you.
This is a living, fallible sketch, kept open to correction. If you steward one of these projects and a card — or its words — doesn't frame you rightly, please reach out to zeugh.eth, and it will be set right.