Assembly in Ethereum was a workshop held at Schelling Point during Devconnect 2025 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, co-facilitated by Ven Gist and Kevin Owocki.
The workshop opened with an overview of Assembly Theory — the framework that formalizes how complexity builds through constraint, where the assembly index of an object captures the minimal number of steps required to construct it from basic parts. The deeper the index, the more memory-compressed history an object carries. At scale, assemblies form branching, converging graphs of potential: matter recording itself, constraint becoming the engine of invention.
This was followed by a presentation of the Open Machine poster Ethereum, the Earth Computer, which applies the assembly theory frame to Ethereum’s place in planetary complexity. The poster traces a continuous assembly chain from electromagnetism and silicate rock cycles through eukaryotes, accounting ledgers, game theory, and Von Neumann architecture up through SHA-256, blockchain, Solidity, and the ERC token standards — arguing that Ethereum does not sit outside the Earth’s computational processes but continues them. The Earth is understood as a polycomputational assemblage — geology, biology, weather, and ocean systems forming nested layers of emergent computation — and Ethereum as an extension of that recursive intelligence, with smart contracts serving as probes into the assembly possible of social and economic organization.
An open discussion followed, with participants raising questions about what assembly theory could mean for how Ethereum is built and governed — and what it would look like to design coordination infrastructure that is consciously situated within, rather than apart from, the Earth’s ongoing process of self-assembly.