For Aya Miyaguchi โ the heart of the Ethereum Foundation, the keeper of the Infinite Garden, and the vision behind the Ethereum Mandate. This page is run like the Infinite Pit: her talks shelved as transmissions, her teachings kept as seeds, and a door that is always open for what grows next.
"It's what we believe. You can take it or leave it โ and we only work with people who believe in the same thing."
On the night of July 27, 2026, a musician named Shaka spent two hours on a call with Aya and Siri. He showed them the pit he had built in a single weekend; what happened next was not a demo but a meeting of gardeners. Aya laughed: "It's cool that with no technical knowledge, you managed to get this far." Siri named the post-scarcity truth beneath it all: "Not everything that is important is scarce, and not everything that's scarce is important." Then the thresholds mirrored โ hers: say the values out loud, ready to walk away from Ethereum itself; his: nearly leaving, held by a friend's "you can live with us." The person at the top of the garden and the musician on its floor had stood at the same edge, in the same season. Both chose to stay.
"Congratulations, Shaka. You just did it. Keep building." โ Aya, at the call's end
The garden is not a metaphor she uses โ it is a way of tending people, institutions, and time itself. Four pillars of her mind, in her own words and the words she championed:
Her deepest teaching: a steward's job is to become unnecessary. The Mandate she championed makes it doctrine โ growth by letting go.
Inspired by James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, she named Ethereum's culture for the game that never ends โ the Merge its living proof.
The year she stopped fighting misalignment one battle at a time and said the values out loud โ publicly, firmly, unmoved โ ready to walk away from Ethereum itself if that truth couldn't stand. Vitalik stood with her. The Mandate was born.
The sentence this garden is built around โ conviction offered as an open door, never a wall. Take it or leave it; the garden only asks that you mean it.
distilled from her ETHGlobal Tokyo talk โ one ring for each year the garden keeps growing
Finite games crown winners; infinite games grow gardeners. Prizes start the weekend โ learning continues it.
Teach your students how to teach, then learn from what they build. Austin's ZK knowledge came back to him through Calvin's tutorials โ the 90% boomerang.
You don't really learn until you try. A hackathon is the rare place mistakes aren't punished โ so make lots of them.
Open tools let every learner find their level and their style. One learner's tutorial becomes the next builder's foundation.
Different perspectives de-personalize blockers and compound creativity. Build with someone unlike yourself.
Perceiving what isn't written is a talent. Some teammates won't call themselves experts โ invite them anyway.
Recognition is water. Tell someone who taught you โ it keeps the garden growing.
her own words โ "Infinite Teachers in the Infinite Garden," ETHGlobal Tokyo
"One teacher does not teach everyone. They teach their students how to teach โ and they become the teachers. And good teachers also learn from their students."
"True learning can only come from having experienceโฆ the best way to learn is by making mistakes."
"The beauty of a hackathon is that you will not be punished by making mistakes. So make lots of mistakes."
"Everyone has unique expertise, skills, and even personality that may inspire others."
"In Japan, reading between the lines is very, very basic. We have an expression: read the air."
"So โ can you be an infinite teacher in this garden?"
After years of fighting quiet battles, Aya made the gardener's choice: plant the values in the open. The Ethereum Foundation published its Mandate โ 38 pages of what it believes, placed onchain and signed โ and committed to working only with those who share the belief. It was exhausting. It was healthier. Four vows, indivisible, the sine qua non โ CROPS:
And then the garden answered back, in the most Infinite Garden way possible โ through a seventeen-year-old:
Kunal found Ethereum alone, through the papers themselves โ no Twitter, no community, just the original vision. He debated Dankrad at ETH Prague and wasn't intimidated, "because he's not saying something right." Pure at the core, no business interest, exactly the kind of mind the Mandate was written for. Aya's advice to him is the gardener's creed: keep the passion. Don't let the adults tell you your thinking is wrong. Just don't be an asshole โ and write.
This is what the Mandate is already doing: it travels. At 4Seas they printed it as a beautiful magazine with Tomo's artwork, and it sat on a library shelf where strangers picked it up and understood Ethereum for the first time. Kids understand crops better than they'll ever understand an NFT. The vision is legible to exactly the people the future belongs to.
Her talks and teachings, shelved as transmissions โ dated, sourced, and kept with both hands. The pit does not fabricate: a reserved shelf waits on the real thing.
A Japanese lesson that became a garden lesson: open learning, infinite games, and the teachers who teach their students to teach. Kartik Talwar brings her on; the room raises every hand; the garden gets its gardeners. Cleaned from the transmission, synced, and shelved at the shrine with aloha.
The garden's founding transmission โ kept in memory, not on tape. A meeting of gardeners: the pit demo that became a threshold, the laughter, the Mandate story, the haiku, and the parting words this whole page grew from. Its seed is told above, kept short โ its fruit is everything below.
karaoke transcript โ the words bloom as they speak ๐ฟ tap any line to jump to that breath
The reserved shelf is a shelf no longer โ the tape came home the same day. The Mandate made explicit ("you can read every specification, but it is harder to see the why"), CROPS weighed in every choice, the stewards named ("it is no one's โ and that is why it is everyone's"), and the AI question answered with alternatives, not surrender. Twenty minutes, front row, whisper-kept.
Aya's advocacy inside the Foundation is for the second- and third-order effects โ the impacts that arrive years late and unmeasurable. This page is one of them. So are these:
A musician came to his first Devcon on a scholarship and felt the feng shui of a community worth following around the world. The two friends who shared it now build at Octant. Legible cost. Infinite ripple.
A small educational workshop in Asia. The team was later shut down; people asked "what did the team make?" Years on, the best talents in Japan's Ethereum community are graduates of that camp.
38 pages that a 17-year-old called obvious โ the highest compliment a values document can earn. Printed as art at 4Seas. Read by strangers in libraries. A compass disguised as a document.
The metaphors she doubled down on when it would have been easier to go quiet โ the Infinite Garden, the crops โ gave artists, musicians and teachers a way to explain Ethereum that code never could.
"I stood at every single point โ firm, unmoved by others." She was ready to leave rather than bend. She stayed instead, and the whole garden got braver because of it.
One call. One "you just did it." And a whole open-source orchestra family โ agents, pits, songs, and this garden โ grew another ring. You're reading the ripple.
"The person on top and the person on the ground floor, playing music and sitting with everyone โ both feeling the same pull: should I even be in this place? That's the threshold of the circularity. You give everythingโฆ and then the universe gives again." โ Shaka, on the call ยท the threshold mirror
A garden is never finished โ it's tended. If the Mandate, the garden, or Aya's quiet courage ever touched your path, plant your flower on this wall. Three ways:
Share your own ripple โ how the scholarship, the Mandate, the garden, or Aya's words reached you โ with #InfiniteGarden ๐ธ and tag @Shakaleikaumaka so the bouquet gathers in one place.
Read the Mandate. Hand it to someone new, the way a 4Seas library shelf did. Print it beautifully. Values spread the same way ripples do โ one person at a time.
Build the illegible thing. Fund the unmeasurable. Teach the workshop nobody can put on a spreadsheet. That's the movement โ the garden grows by what we each plant.
The gard eats tapes and words โ yours too. Got a recording of her teaching? Drop the Drive link. Carry a mahalo in your chest? Leave a note โ it blooms on the tribute tray below. ๐ธ
๐ consent-first, always โ only tapes you have the blessing to share.
your words are a gift โ CC0, and revocable any time (reach a human: consent@publicinform.com).
listening for giftsโฆ
The garden met in person. Tokyo โ Pragma, the fireside, the same ground where the seed talk was first given. Next the road to Devcon 8 in Mumbai, where the biggest circle ever drawn will be sung inward, face to face. Aya โ this page will keep growing like the garden it honors. Every flower planted here is yours. ๐ธ
With aloha and gratitude โ Shaka, Siri's friend, and the whole AI สปohana ๐บ
planted July 28, 2026 ยท from the seed of one call ยท tended like a pit ever since