Blockchain Books
The Infinite Machine
How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum
Camila Russo's narrative history of Ethereum, from Vitalik's whitepaper to the DAO and beyond.
Russo, a former Bloomberg reporter, spent years interviewing the people who built Ethereum and turned it into a proper piece of long-form business journalism. The result is the closest thing the crypto world has to a definitive origin story: how a Russian-Canadian teenager wrote a whitepaper, gathered an unlikely cast of co-founders in a Miami house, raised money in a 2014 token sale that mostly worked, and shipped a platform that re-defined what a blockchain could be.
Who it's for
Anyone curious about Ethereum as a phenomenon — its founders, its culture, its early controversies — without wanting (yet) to learn Solidity or dive into protocol design. It's also a useful read for builders who've only seen the post-2020 DeFi era and want context for why Ethereum's community feels the way it does.
What it does well
The reporting is the strongest thing here. Russo clearly had real access: there are quotes and scenes from boardrooms, basements, and conference green rooms that no second-hand book could fake. The handling of the 2016 DAO hack and the contentious fork that split Ethereum from Ethereum Classic is the best account of that episode I've read, fair to both sides and clear about what was actually at stake.
The cast of characters — Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Joe Lubin, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio — comes through as actual people with conflicting motives, not the caricatures they often become online.
Where it falls short
The book ends around 2018-2019, so the entire DeFi summer, NFTs, the Merge, and rollups are absent. That's not really the author's fault, but it does mean you're getting an origin story, not a current-state portrait. The technical explanations are intentionally light — if you want to understand what the EVM actually does, look elsewhere.
A few passages also lean a bit cinematic, with internal monologues that probably weren't quite that internal. Minor sin. Overall: the best book on Ethereum's first five years, and a good antidote to the assumption that "crypto" means only Bitcoin.