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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Bankless and we've got a treat for you on the show today. I'm here in the greatest city south of the equator, Buenos aires, where over 10,000 people converged for Ethereum DevConnect, a week long conference distributed all over the city. On The Tuesday of DevConnect we hosted the Bankless Summit where we gave 12 speakers the opportunity to deliver their best, most educational, most passionate talk. The talk that they have just a burning desire to espouse to the Ethereum community and therefore the world. We are packaging up a curated selection of these talks into two episodes. One episode featuring the talks from all the members of the Ethereum Foundation, Tamash Andar Donkrad and Danny Ryan, and another episode which represents my four personal favorites from the summit, talks from Shay Ketzever from flashbots, Lincoln Mer from Coinbase, Michael Dong from Brevis, and Luca Prosperi from M0. The Bankless Summit was done in partnership with M0, the universal stablecoin platform. They sit at the intersection of cypherpunk, crypto economics and the tradfi explosion of interest in stablecoins and stablecoin infrastructure. And they were just fantastic partners to have at the summit and really helped the whole thing come together. The episode that you're going to hear right now is the Ethereum foundation episode where Tamash gives the lay of the land around Ethereum, Don Grad Feis gives his proposed strategy for Ethereum moving forward, his last talk as a member of the Ethereum foundation before going on to Tempo. Ansgar gives a technical talk how we Scale Ethereum and Danny Ryan tells his personal hero's journey to where he is today at Etherealize. So let's go ahead and get into all of these incredible talks, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. You can now borrow USDC against your Ethereum and Bitcoin on Coinbase. 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It's currently available to US Customers except New York, and additional collateral types and increased loan limits are coming soon. Want to learn more? Click the link in the show notes or visit coinbase.comborrow crypto is risky your sleep shouldn't be 8 Sleep's mission is simple. Better sleep through cutting edge technology. Their new Pod 5 is a smart mattress cover that fits on the top of your bed. It automatically adjusts the temperature on each side so you and your partner can both sleep the way that you like. It's clinically proven to give you up to one extra hour of quality sleep per night. 8 Sleeps Pod uses AI to learn your sleep patterns, regulate temperature, reduce snoring and track key health metrics like HRV and breathing. With a new full body temperature regulating blanket and built in speaker, it is the most complete sleep upgrade yet. Upgrade your sleep and recovery with asleep use code bankless@8sleep.com bankless to get up to $400 off the Pod 5 Ultra during their holiday sale. That's 8sleep.com bankless. You also get 30 days to try it risk free. Link in the Show Notes for more information. Introducing FRAX USD the genius aligned digital dollar from frax. It's secure, stable and fully backed by institutional grade real world assets, Custody by BlackRock, Superstate and Fidelity. It's always redeemable one to one, transparently audited and built for payments, defi and banking. The best of all worlds. At the core is fraxnet, an on chain fintech platform built to align with emerging US regulatory frameworks where you can mint, redeem and use FRAX USD with just a few clicks. Deposit usdc, send a bank wire or tokenized Treasuries and receive programmable dollars straight to your wallet. Fraccent users benefits from the underlying return of U.S. treasuries and earn just by using the system. 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- [04:20]
B
So this will be very much like slides clicking. I think that 150 slides. So try to show you a lot of things around Ethereum or Ethereum Foundation. I think I was thinking of which topic finally I submitted. So I thought I'll talk about everything a bit. So it was meant to be Ethereum Finance will be a bit of next 5 years of Ethereum from the perspective of the foundation. So we celebrated 10 years. 10 years, no downtime, innovation and uptime. And I've showed this slides a few times. It was my thinking of how to expand as much as possible. What Ethereum should be in 10 years. I thought it should be all the assets in the world in the digital form. So everyone has the permissionless access through Ethereum to all the assets in the world. You don't have to necessarily financialize everything in the world, but you want to give access to the things for whatever automation reasons. All automation. I mean not only financial markets automation, but also embodied AI automation of robotaxis, robotics, humanoids with verification. If you want to make sure that the future is safe, automated, connected to global finance for everyone, open source. That's how we do it. Provide ambient trust. So this is more like what Ethereum really delivers the ambient trust for any applications. That's why Ethereum should be around you. So you can always reach for that trust if you like it, from institutions around you deliver privacy and security. Some of the fundamental values of Ethereum to everyone by default make the world open source. And what I mean by that is that every single aspect of the institution, of the government, of the financial systems around us becomes open source. And you can participate in definition of that the same way as you work on any GitHub protocol on any GitHub repository in the world. And yeah, that makes the world permissionless. And what Ethereum foundation is doing towards supporting the Ethereum ecosystem this year we've done some restructuring and because we had a lot of I think we had Ansgar and probably some other speakers that will talk and focus more about on protocol. So I'll show you a bit more on ecodev side. That is a bit of a change this year as we focus more on communication and talking to various participants of the ecosystem and outside. So ecosystem acceleration part of the Eco dev is developer acceleration, founder success, app relations and enterprise acceleration. And on the developer acceleration side, if you look at work, fantastic work from Austin Griffith and his team and also Binji supporting that effort, you have things like the Beetle Guild that is one of the reasons why you have some fantastic developer community, because there are Some fantastic materials to really go through all the aspects of Ethereum. This is what they do. All the effort they put into educating developers during DevConnect. So every day there are workshops and you see here prediction markets, zero knowledge proofs, the forecaster applications, speed running Ethereum stablecoins. So they really talk about all the aspects of DEFI and show people how to build that. And if you go to speedrunethereum.com, then you see the examples that people can go through. And the first challenges are the most basic ones like tokenization, decentralized staking apps. But they go all the way to teaching people DEFI from the very beginning over collateral choice, lending, stablecoins, prediction market, ZK voting and so on. And then this week the developers will have the ability to participate in this capture the flag competition. So Austin makes everything super fun to work with for many, many years working with his team and putting a lot of effort in making sure that Ethereum feels super friendly, welcoming and fun for the new developers. And it's the type of effort that is contributing to the success in the developer reports. Binji is doing great work now. If you've seen him as an MC during the opening talks the whole day, he did 10 years of 10, well, almost 10 years, 10 hours of emceeing and he comes to the ecosystem to help edit foundation with his 40,000 followers and has this fantastic voice which is a mixture of focused on builders, humble, a bit emotional, telling the stories and is the kind of voice that we definitely want to see and show people that something more matters. But also you put your emotions in everything and developer report, we kind of started trying to own it. We realized that it's very often misrepresented that we didn't put an effort to represent everything that happens on Ethereum. Then we pushed all the repositories that really belong to the Ethereum ecosystem and started preparing reports that combine all the aspects of the Ethereum ecosystem more broadly together. So we want to bring all the L2S developers and Ethereum developers, EVM developers and represent it the way that we think represents Ethereum best. But this is the actual official website of the developer report and it does show the Ethereum ecosystem leading. And when we publish reports, it's still raised a lot of questions about how we really define the Ethereum ecosystem, EVM L2 what really support as Ethereum foundation. What is important is that when you look at the data, indeed not only over the last years ago we were leading on the developer side developer community side. But also nowadays, when you see new developers and when you combine all the L2s with many of the developers, they are starting through L2s nowadays, right? And then they understand, oh, by the way, I've kind of learned mainnet anyway, and I'm just building applications on Altus. So then you see the numbers really being top. And also for the new devs. So we wanted to review that claim that Ethereum doesn't really attract new developers anymore.
- [10:09]
We have the app relations and research team with Jason Chaskin doing amazing work on pushing the conversations with the application. So when you look at the DevConnect this year, it was really focused on applications much more, which means that it was a bit of whack, a mole whenever the event was appearing on the main list for us, for the events that we were announcing, that was very much research or infrastructure focused. Somebody at DEF was saying, why? Why not applications? Can we put applications there? And it happened a few times and it had a lot of pushback. But those things sometimes don't happen just naturally. You have to put a bit of effort to say, let's talk about applications more. And the Ethereum ecosystem tries to focus more on founders and applications and the success of founders and conversations with DeFi, with payment systems, with stablecoins to show all of you that real world adoption that Ansger was also talking about. That's Jason. Just to bring more names and more faces for everyone's attention. Those people put a lot of effort and will be in the future the ones that will lead much of the conversation.
- [11:15]
More applications focused that I just mentioned on application showcases. If you go to LA Rural, you probably see lots of apps, let's see lots of app builders. And when we hear from app builders, I think they start to mention more and more often that yes, we do have founder support. People started talking to us, people started listening to us. Enterprise acceleration. This is a very new thing for the Ethereum foundation this year. We started talking to institutions, financial institutions. We went to Wall street, we talked to Etherealize. That itself built much of the Ethereum space for talking institutions about finance. We created the website institutions.ethere.org just to talk to institutions the institution's way. And Danyran talked about it a lot recently as well, that he realized that we talk about the same things but with different language. We don't use the words that are very typical for tradfi, like risk, like assets. We say real world assets, then we have to explain the things and then we realize actually we talk about the same things. And then if we talk about it properly, then the traditional finance realized, oh, by the way, you actually solved a lot of problems that we're trying to solve and we didn't even know it. The atomicity of the blockchain, the decentralization that we're looking for.
- [12:24]
No counterparty risk, and so on and so on. It's just different language. But we can sell everything in blockchain space much better. So we talk that language. We show the quotes from people that are analysts from the institutional finance world. We show the examples of large institutions that are adopting Ethereum. And we don't talk too much about the underlying technology. They always can reach out to us and learn more. And earlier this year we've seen that people expect Ethereum to become this new finance layer. And many institutions that we go to say, well, we expect that will start disappearing and it's great to participate in it. Actually, we've supported it for many years. This is when you talk to people inside the institutional hierarchies and they're climbing up just for the future to either merge with the blockchains, with Ethereum, or simply to continue changes, maybe jump. But it happens less often that people have to leave the institutions to start something in web three. Now they start disrupting these institutions from inside. Not really disrupting, but making that evolution happen and allow the whole transition to happen. I think that gradual disappearance of the institutions in the way that we've seen it in the past. And it's 10 years and in July we were celebrating that talking about Ethereum is very strong for the FCC for the first big announcements of this year. And we just continue since then all the time, wherever we go, the numbers keep showing Ethereum as super strong. 10 years, over 10 years. It's just when I was preparing the switch from 10.2 years to 10.3 years. So I'll be counting every month and every year forever, 108 billions of the total value securing the network. So this is staked eve Lots of TVL on DeFi. And this is so much more than any other competing solution. So Defi is absolutely crushing it on the ethereum ecosystem. Stablecoins TVL61 percent on Ethereum mainnet and high volumes on Dexes for the first time. I'm just pushing my picture, okay, but this is Hong Kong Fintech week. We went a lot to the events in Asia to talk to family offices, to banks, to institutions, talking about tokenizations in Asia, in Brazil, in us, in New York. That was next Fin Event not organized by the Ethereum foundation, but supported by Ethereum Foundation. Then we organized a similar event in Hong Kong where we Invited top institutional CEOs, CFOs, analysts of the top institutions participating, talking on stage with people from the foundation, from the top Defi applications and so on.
- [15:06]
Founder success team that supports founders with access to capital, with the mentoring, with the first stages, the first few months, years. So we wanted to transition that path from going to something like Eve Global Hackathon and then having an idea and then thinking, okay, how do I accelerate from here to launching a product and getting funding and then getting users. So that's the founder success story. And again, Abbas joined recently as just one of a few fantastic members of the team. And one of the things that they prepared and announced is a founders lab. It happens this week where probably around 20 different founders teams will have access one on one without any panel stocks, just simply access one on one to some of the top builders and most successful entrepreneurs of the Ethereum ecosystem. You see Jesse, you see Sandeep, you see Mike from Etherfi, Bingi himself. So the founders will be able to understand how to communicate, how to fundraise, how to organize the companies and so on.
- [16:14]
And also what we wanted to express was whenever we start talking about the Ethereum ecosystem, we want to present L2s. We want to show that all of this is together. So when we talk about founder success, we send founders not only to mainnet, but we show them this is how you can get financing and mentoring from L2s. So we push that through the ethereum.org website, but not only there, also through DevConnect, through Lara. We invited all the L2s together and we said one important thing to change compared to some of the previous big events of the Ethereum ecosystem is to push somehow and encourage L2s to be together in one space. So everyone who comes to the Ethereum ecosystem feels like, oh, right, okay, so this is all part of the one. And we keep talking about all the different L2s and all the possible events to say, look, this is all Ethereum and it's just the messaging, a communication and invitation and being friendly that really increases the feel and the strength of the ecosystem for the newcomers. Because now no longer they think, oh, this is all competing and I have to choose. So Ethereum is actually weak because there is also, I don't know, like Base or Bitrum and Starknet. Now they feel like, oh, this is all Ethereum. So this is such a strong ecosystem, I can just Join and I'll choose later maybe depending on the situation. Ecosystem Support Program so we made some changes to the grants and financing. We push much less on the direct financing and much more on the grants that are supporting through mentoring and through amplification from visibility. But also if we talk about financing, we collaborate with the external institutions that fund public goods like gitcoin or Octant or Allocapital and so on. And we also create a very clear wish list and we'll start working on it further to get all the team leads from the Ethereum foundation to define.
- [18:02]
Very specific wishes depending on the goals that we have set for ourselves, that we think it's something that is really missing in the ecosystem and we'll try to make sure that we never compete with the products that can be commercialized, that you can actually do business. And we force more and more people in the economic system to be entrepreneurial about public goods as well. Ecosystem Unblocking does talk a lot about the outreach to academia. We had events at Shanghai Jiao Tong University at Duke. We also went to Polyu in Hong Kong. And we look for more and more institutions, sorry, like academic institutions, universities in Asia, Latin America, but also us. We want to reach out and for sure, if you have connections to the top universities in Argentina, please always invite or around the world invite them to connect with the Ethereum Foundation. We'd like to establish more and more collaborations on bringing the students as developers to the systems, but also as founders, not also bringing researchers that can talk about either policy or the cryptography research. Everything is really much needed and it's better if this happens in a totally decentralized way. Well, Columbia, big support for the Columbia Ethereum Research center this year.
- [19:15]
Policy Support Team so something that we've been asked for for a long, long time to work with the regulators and answer questions from regulators about Ethereum.
- [19:25]
We collaborated in the past with Decentralization Research center but also Connor, who was leading Decentralized Research center, came to foundation recently and will lead the policy support team at the foundation globally. So support the advocacy group Policy Teams and regulators who reach out to foundation and ask questions with workshops with answers so we can guide them on what really defi means, what really decentralization means. Why do we build things this way? How do you choose between all twos? How do you solve the problems when there are sequencer issues, when there are forex in different scenarios? And then regulators start to feel much, much more comfortable when they find someone or group of people who are supported to answer all those Questions ecosystem amplification this is like ethereum.org website but also this year will be sorry next year we'll want to be a bit more visible during Eve Denver to make sure that we visit some events next year that somehow over the years started being seen as disconnecting from Ethereum foundations. Very often was our fault that we started focusing on something that is like entirely the vision of the foundation. And now we kind of reach for more connections, more communication and we'll be super excited if this is the massively successful event in the US Next year they're going to a new venue. The Ethereum Everywhere team is a bit of a response to much of the feedback that was talking about about how.
- [21:00]
How we're not creating local physical hubs that are focused on founders and supporting founders to be successful and meet regularly. Not the events that happen once per year in different cities, but something that happens every week. So we're opening the Hong Kong hub with snz. There are localized fund support for LATAM funders, the Ethereum London between ENCODE and Ethereum foundation and nethermind team. I think the frontier research with the robot fights underground. So things that are a bit multidisciplinary, that connect people from AI and longevity and biotech and Ethereum and can help them work together. What can I say about the governance of Ethereum now we try to make sure that it continues super transparent and we start to think how to involve more people and more feedback into how we drive the old core devs through the reports and supportive full understanding of the ecosystem. So obviously, always if research was the driver of the ideas and the Ethereum magicians is all the IPs forecast nowadays allows you to read through all the transcriptions and understand what happens on the Alcor dev calls. But what's also important is that through the Ethereum foundation work of the EcoDev team, we have many more conversations with the ecosystem, with defi teams, with L2 teams, with institutions, and we collect those to provide in the future very structured reports that say this is what the main problems are and this is how the industry is trying to suggest to solve them and provide this to the Alcor dev so they can independently address those issues and they can start choosing, but choosing in a very informed way and not like we kind of want engineers to feel like they can silo into this engineer mode and researcher mode while.
- [22:53]
Having access to all the information from the outside world on what's important, what the problems are. So many calls. Obviously the moment when we define how we structure how we seek that feedback it can be gamed a bit we will organize more of the strategic calls with the other participants and we provide those reports and this will lead to selection of headliners headliner ideas for every Every single network upgrade will have something that is big enough to talk about something that really changes Ethereum to talk about otherwise why to push a network upgrade and this not necessarily has to be a large core development effort on the side a bit independently there is Lean Ethereum roadmap that shows five years of Ethereum roadmap that talks a lot.
- [23:39]
C
About.
- [23:42]
B
Solutions around ZK and talking about the Defi space because this one also promised but I have 30 seconds left it's only okay, I'll probably go over half of the slides so nowadays we'll talk more about the hybrid defi and I think that if we see the examples of recent announcements from AAVE with the insurance for the participants I'll read through the details. Probably there's some small text there insurance of the deposits. Then finally we have more and more solutions for big institutions, end users to combine the traditional solutions and Defi. This is Etherefi that starts to look more and more like Neobank. This is an example of Morpho and Coinbase and you know the predictions are huge. Two trillions for the stablecoins market. Two trillions on the tokenization market. We've expected Ethereum domination and beautiful, beautiful numbers everywhere and really.
- [24:37]
I guess I'll share it and you'll see but everything else I think is mostly review of the numbers from RWXYZ. They look fantastic for Ethereum everywhere. It's like 60, 70, 80% of the market domination and generally whatever other chains alta ones were promised they're trying to achieve. I kind of feel they didn't and Ethereum did this year and it looks amazing. When you look into numbers then you realize that you can very, very easily answer any questions about are the things going well on Ethereum? The numbers are great scaling. You've heard from Ansgar see those scaling comments about the blobs and L2s. Lean roadmap shows us how we'll scale 100 times. Whatever you've heard on Banclass a fantastic episode with Justin Traig about going to Gigagas per second through zk. This is Kapalang. It's moving much faster than we expected and you know the I don't have to click through everything else. There's lots of L2s presented. Look at all of them like 20, 30, hundreds of L2s that are innovating and are super strong. It feels we're waiting for the time when we'll be talking about L2 premium on Ethereum. Yeah, I don't want to go too much over time.
- [25:50]
A
Thank you. Tamash. We got time for one question before we get to Marshall off the stage. She's got a question for Tamash. Yeah.
- [25:57]
C
Hi Tomash. I have a lot of respect for what you do. I was wondering how you were able to figure out what the right thing to do and drown all the noise. Especially because people are very emotional, especially on Twitter and things like that. When prices go up and down and things like that, how do you figure out who to listen to or what the right thing to do is?
- [26:16]
B
I think it's important to understand a few aspects of it separated. So one is the mood of the entire industry. So you know, we don't look at prices like as a target or anything in the context of what decisions we are making, but it's worth to keep looking at the prices almost as a metric that tells you what the mood of the entire industry is. Because very often the financing of the projects of startups or founders is dependent on the under token price and so on. So if you see that everything collapses on the market, you know that your founders are stressed or need support or need just like someone telling them, these are the examples of the past. This is the founders that were successful through the mermarkets and so on. So this allows you to already filter feedback based on the current mood and also adjust the feedback based on the current mood and understand how you should talk and what you should talk about, should you be more excited, less excited and so on. The other thing is just if you talk to enough people, like hundreds or thousands of people, and we start aggregating it, the truth just keeps becoming clearer and clearer and especially as you continuously talk to successful founders or the founders that are very perseverance, like pushing for years and years of thinking of what I'm doing wrong, what I'm doing right. If you hear enough of that, the false ideas, the ideas that don't make sense.
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Some ideas will obviously look false and some ideas will look like they are obviously genius. But that's because you have such a big space of something to compare them to. The genius ideas will become very clear to be genius and obviously fault ones will become even more obvious thanks to.
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A
A round of applause for Tomash.
- [28:01]
And in order to achieve that vision, Ethereum needs some scale, which is why we're going to bring up onsgar to talk about how Ethereum is scaling next year.
- [28:09]
C
Yeah. Hi everyone. Yeah, as David said, I initially wanted to just purely talk about our scaling plans for next year. And then when I was preparing the talk, I actually realized that there is like a bit of a broader theme that is kind of where I think the ours can't approach to scaling. And how that has changed over the last year is really emblematic of that. And so I expanded the scope a little bit and I want to talk about what I would call going from the decade of exploration to real world Ethereum and how basically scaling is a case study in that sense. But I want to start by briefly taking us to a bit of a painful moment of the last year. Not this tweet in particular, but I think it is emblematic. You know, like if you, I think many of you remember this time, like late last year, early this year, there was a lot of tension in the Ethereum community. And given that Vitalik is basically representing Ethereum like no one else, I thought it was like a good discord to take an example, but there was many, many people were screaming at each other. Basically everyone had this feeling that something was going wrong, but it wasn't quite clear what was the problem. And I basically want to propose one explanation, one narrative of like, what exactly went wrong or maybe even just like what the challenge in that moment in time was. But how that actually I think is overall a positive and hopeful story. So what I would propose is that basically from the conception of Ethereum from the, from basically the white paper, the yellow paper, all the way until maybe sometime through last year, Ethereum and crypto as a whole was really in this decade of exploration. And decade of exploration means most of the real adoption of the technology is still in the future. In a way, you're still in a sandbox. It doesn't mean what you're building is not already real in the moment, but you're still building towards a broader vision. A lot of the reasons why people were in this space at the time was not because they were, they were excited about what was happening, but they were even more excited about the potential for the future. And I think sometime last year you could really say we, we flipped and we, I would call it a phase change, a phase transition. And in my mind this is the largest phase transition that crypto has ever gone through and probably will ever go through. And I'll try to explain a little bit what, I mean, talking through a few examples and, and hope to convince you of that as well. But I really think that going forward, a lot of how we have thought historically about crypto, about Ethereum, needs to be rethought. Not necessarily thrown away, but rethought and basically mapped into this new time.
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Real world Ethereum. The first time I at least came across the term and I think actually this is where it originates. I couldn't find any earlier mention is a good friend of mine, D.C. posh, he ran a few events called Real World Ethereum starting February of last year and then also throughout last year, this year a little bit. And the idea was kind of, we had been talking a little bit and we both had this feeling that somehow Ethereum was still kind of like stuck in this sandbox mode when it felt like the real world was finally coming and knocking at the door. And we both had some trouble understanding what exactly does it imply, how does that change how we think about.
- [31:32]
The protocol? And I would even maybe go so far, you know, if you compare it to AI, it's maybe a bit more like of a punchy kind of comparison. AI existed pre chatgpt, right? And there was a lot of very useful real world applications of AI, but then there was the ChatGPT moment. And the ChatGPT moment really turned it from an industry where it made sense for you to always live a little bit in the future, plan more for the long term, to something where adoption was happening right now and people scrambled to like to build, you know, like famously. XAI got started in like less than a year. You couldn't do five year plans anymore. You had to like actually focus on the here and now. And I would argue that crypto actually, in a way through last year, it was not one single moment so much, but it had this perfect storm of different factors. The maturity of the tech stack and that's across, that's the chains, that's the wallets, that's all the standards, the onramps. Like everything in the tech step basically got to a point where it was good enough and you could start really using it in the real world. Of course there was the change in the US regulatory environment that I would say is more like it was a removal of this inhibiting factor that really I think had quite the chilling effect in crypto until that point. And then I would say stablecoins not as the first time crypto hit pmf, but I think the first time it had hit real world pmf, right the very first time. It obviously stablecoins had been around for a while, but it became obvious that there's actually Something here for the real world, hopefully only the first of many. I wanted to think a little bit through the implications of how that changed how we on the L1 side approach things and maybe what it means for the broader ecosystem. But I wanted to start where I'm basically the most of an expert, which of course is the Ethereum Technical Roadmap, and then zoom out a little bit towards the end. So what does this mean for the technical roadmap? If you look back in history, I think one of Ethereum's core strengths over the last 10 years has always been that it was basically it had the right long term plans, it was always pointed in the right direction, it always had these very ambitious projects and it was able to deliver on them. Right. It started with Proof of Stake, the beacon chain, then the merge. People always these days forget that those were two separate things. Right? Like the Proof of stake was a huge effort. And then separately bringing the existing chain into the Proof of stake system was also a huge effort. But the Rollup Centric Roadmap multi year project and more recent ones, ZKEVM got started already as part of the Rollup Centric Roadmap. But now we're talking about real time zkvm, which is an entirely new level and it's a huge ambition, but we are making very good progress towards that. And then most recently an example, Lean Ethereum. And I would argue that five years ago this was all that mattered in a sense from the L1 perspective, not from the application layer, but from the L1 perspective. What mattered was are you pointed in the right direction, do you have the right long term ambition and do you have the technical capabilities to execute on those ambitions? And I think the answer was uniquely yes for Ethereum and that's why Ethereum did out compete a lot of the competitors back in the day, right? I think because that was Ethereum's unique strength. But I think in the age of real world, Ethereum only ever living five years in the future is no longer good enough. And I want to take as a specific example, I said the talk would be about Ethereum L1 scaling. So you remember these roadmap diagrams by Vitalik, right? Like really, really amazing in depth. But I would want you to notice two aspects of that. This is from 2022, aspect one, breadth first. Right? Like there is no like 1, 2, 3 priorities on this list. There's like 50 different topics that all happen in parallel, right? It was a, it was always this approach of like we don't yet know it was basically exploring the technical roadmap of where a smart contract blockchain could go in this like wild exploratory mode. Like, let's see exactly like what of these things basically work, which ones don't work, and so on. And then so Brett, first one observation, other observation, I'm not sure you can probably not read it, but this little box here has on the left, snark, snarks for L1 EVM and then on the right, increase L1 gas limit. So the point was the L1 gas limit increase was basically like meant as this end point of this multi year journey, right? Like there's no other box on this diagram that says increase L1 gas limit. It was the very end point. And I think that really like is emblematic for the mindset of the time, which, I mean, I agreed with. Like, I really think for 2022 that was the right approach to blockchains. I don't think it's the right approach for 2025. And actually thank Vitalik and everyone, by now we all, I think we all have made that adjustment in our minds.
- [36:13]
And so, yeah, basically as I said, right, like long term plans, breadth first and then importantly real world. Ethereum does not mean throw away the five year plan because I still believe, and maybe some people have lost conviction that I still very strongly believe that Ethereum, that is Ethereum's unique strength. I think Ethereum is uniquely good at basically drowning out the noise and understanding exactly where do we have to go long term. But it is no longer good enough. It is no longer good enough. And the six, the 12 month plans also really, really, really matter. So what does that mean? Like again, I said I wanted to take L1 scaling as a case study. So what has happened over the last 12 months?
- [36:57]
Well, one thing that happened is this is from April. We had the changes at the Ethereum Foundation. We had Chumash and Xiaowei come in and in their kind of welcome blog post, they were talking about.
- [37:14]
Next 12 months. Here are three priorities, right? And you notice different in both of these dimensions. It's the plan for the next 12 months, not the next five years. And it's three priorities, not 50. And I think that was a really, really important adjustment. Doesn't mean work on everything else stopped, right? It was just saying like, hey, we need to start to also have specific short term priorities.
- [37:38]
And then just like a month later, we also specifically took all the teams in the, in the Ethereum foundation, all the technical teams and restructured them a little bit to specifically Say hey, these three priorities, they directly.
- [37:52]
Driving our attention and our resource allocation, right? Like it really was like a change in how the Ethereum foundation operated. And I think it was a very important change to align with the needs of this kind of this real world Ethereum moment.
- [38:08]
So.
- [38:10]
Why is L1 scaling on that list? Like what made it one of those priorities? Well, so what was the story at the beginning of the year? We were already at almost four years of no throughput increase of Ethereum. We'd been at 30 million gas for almost 4 years or 15 million before we had the 5059 upgrade that introduced the target max. And we had the plan, right, we had the long term plan, the right long term plan towards real time l1zkevm but we were only halfway through that plan, right? And the lesson was this is no longer good enough, we have to act now. So what to do? What happened? Right, so first of all I think actually this is one of those moments where again that's why I think over the last year and then beginning of this year there was so much tension because I really feel like everyone was kind of was feeling this change but was having a hard time putting the finger on it. And so I think a lot of there's a lot of credit as many times in Ethereum's history to the community again. And I mean you know, Eric had a bit of a crash out afterwards but like still I really think like huge credit to, to him, to, to everyone here. This was a push that came from the community first, right? To say hey look we need to push the gas limit. We had like this, there was this pump the gas effort that said look, we, we need to do, we need to like do something now. So that technically already started March of last year as I said, right, like this conversation happened, these conversations all happened like throughout last year. And then January there was a renewed push of saying look it's time. And indeed I think late early February of this year we went more for symbolic, not symbolic but it was a 20% bump, 30 to 36 million. But it was basically the signal of like hey, we really need to scale, right? And so that's why then also the Ethereum foundation, like people on the protocol side, the core devs broadly not just the EF came together and were like look this really needs to be short term priority.
- [40:10]
So how much do we want to scale right? On the left there's a blog post by Vitalik also from February of this year saying like hey, even within the roll up centric Roadmap, like say a 10x seems like a good idea, right? Like we need more scale even just for that. And then we had Dankrad. I mean you've heard him just now, like scale is really good. Scale is good for defi. Scale is good for many, many things. Had this proposal that's 100x over four years.
- [40:34]
And then Justin, you know, Justin is always on a different scale. Just reminded us that with ZKEVM, of course everything's possible. A thousand x, like why not, right? So like 10x, 100x, 1000x. Where are we actually going?
- [40:48]
Well actually I would say those are all not so different, right? Like 10x in two years, 100x in four years, 1000x in six years. That all comes down to 3x per year. And so I think that is basically the target, a realistic target for, for scaling. And importantly, right, Like I'm not, I would say out of those, out of those different timescales, the one that I may be the most uncertain about and we'll talk about it in a second, is this kind of medium term, they're like maybe two, three years out. But the point is again we have great long term plan and now let's not, let's not think about 2, 3 years, let's for now just focus on the next 612 months, right? And that I think really was the core lesson. And so we are now six months in depending on when you start to count, whether the blog post that originally announced the priorities or then the reorg that actually aligned the work at the Ethereum foundation to help deliver this. We were roughly six months in, so halfway through that period and we are just coming up to a second bump that we were able to deliver here. So initially in July we were able to just find a few easy wins like client optimizations that took a relatively short time and we went to 45 million of gas. And then it took a few more months to have another batch of client improvements ready. So now we had 60 million. Importantly, it's not like any increase from this point onwards will take longer and longer time because all of this was in a way hard mode because that was without being able to make any changes to the protocol itself. So the 60 million, we are rolling that out together with the Fusaka hard fork, but it's not yet enabled by anything in Fusaka. That is basically something that we're ready for today even before Fusaka goes live. Once Fusaka is live, there's actually some small improvements in there that will allow us to go even higher, 8,020 million, something like this early next year. And then if you think back, right, like we started maybe in May of this year, early next year, we go to 80, 120 million. That's roughly 3x.
- [42:45]
From where we started with the 36 million. So first year checkbox, we are on track, right? Okay. So works beyond 12 months. Good news. I think we can actually stay on this course for a while at least. Let's see.
- [42:59]
Glamsterdam, the next hard fork upcoming next year, another 3x is very realistic. Not guaranteed a lot of hard work left, but very realistic. And then the two hard forks afterwards, H star, I star, how we call them, another 3X. Very, very possible, very plausible. Beyond that, we will start to need help from the ZKEVM effort, most likely, but the timelines actually align that this is not unrealistic. And I think I wanted to take that opportunity to come back a little bit. ZKVM to me symbolizes this like the old Ethereum strength, right? Like the thing we should not give up just because we are now focused on the short term. And so I just wanted to say zkvm, to me, real time ZKVM is also a really amazing topic that showcases Ethereum's continued strengths. Right. So many, many people doing amazing work in this effort. But I wanted to highlight too, Justin, who I would call our ambassador to the future. I really think he is uniquely able to just always live five years in the future and see where the tech should be going, right? And basically help us bring it from the future into the present. And I think he's been doing an absolutely fantastic job of that in the past and is continuing to do that. And zkevm, Lean, Ethereum. Amazing. And then we have Kev. And Kev actually joined the Ethereum foundation. Only like I don't know, but at this point like one, two years, two years ago, full time, had been doing amazing work before. He has invented Noir, the.
- [44:31]
That you might know from, from the Aztec side. Absolutely amazing engineer, right. And he's now leading the engineering side of that effort. Right. And so it's no longer just the, let's do the research forever until it's like fully, fully finished. Let's actually prioritize engineering as soon as we possibly can and let's try to find ways with ckvm, there's actually a path where we can possibly start to get some of the benefits progressively over time. And so Kev is really spearheading that effort. And I personally am very, very excited to See where that's going. And I think again this symbolizes this. Like this. Let's not throw everything away, but let's find a way to balance the short term and the long term because that's what this moment in time calls for. So that was the part that I'm the most of an expert on Ethereum roadmap. Now I wanted to briefly talk about two other things. The first one is like the smaller concentric circle around that what some people call Ethereum strategy. And there I just, I just want to say that like in the past, I think five years ago again, right, like blockchains that were too focused, too obsessed with strategy were doing something wrong. Right? Because back then what you really needed to get right was the tech was the long term plans. But now I think it is important that we at least also consider kind of these strategic questions. And I just wanted to show a few, few up. Oh, that's unfortunate. But for me there was one line but it doesn't matter, just a few quick mentions. Right. Like Duncrad mentioned L1 defi. Right. Like what exactly? Like what do we need to do on the L1? What do we need to prioritize to be the best continued home for defi? Right. Like how can we best support defi? Is that more scale, shorter slot times, Other things maybe other non technical things like. Right. Like what is our strategy behind there? Not just the technical side, real world asset issuance. Right. Assets are coming on chain and it's important that we are intentional about it. Like what is the desired architecture? Are they supposed to be issued on all the chains and then interoperate through intermediaries? Are they supposed to be issued on one chain and then propagate to the ecosystem? How are these bridges supposed to work? All of this needs intentional design.
- [46:37]
And that's something that we need to get right. L1s, L2s. I think it's been a big topic, right. And I think the biggest question there is how can the L1 continue to support the L2s in the best way possible? So that is with data scaling, right? That is also with faster finality. But that might also be with better interop. That might also be with non technical things. It also means how can we best help guide the L2s towards the most synergistic outcome with the L1.
- [47:04]
D
Right.
- [47:04]
C
That's also a non trivial question. And then third, I want to briefly mention this, maybe it's a bit more controversial but I think the question is also from a strategic point of view is the L2s, even the right abstraction, right? Like what about these other important allies of Ethereum, Polygon, Gnosis, These kind of chains come to mind, right? They're not technically L2s. Clearly they are somehow part of the Ethereum family. Like how do we best express that? How can we make sure that broader Ethereum ecosystem is all synergistic with each other? And then of course just wanted to mention it, not going to go into it, but eth. Ethereum, what is the relationship and how can we make sure that is synergistic as well? And here point is again the lesson of real world Ethereum is just to say hey, we need to at least we need to keep iterating on these questions. We need to make progress on the timescale of 12 months, not five years. And I'm basically out of time. I'll very quickly do like the last point because it's also the one that I'm the least of an expert on. Ethereum ecosystem. What are maybe potential lessons for the Ethereum ecosystem?
- [48:00]
First slide. I actually had a colleague that wore this sweater a couple years ago but then I didn't find a photo so I just searched on X and found someone else posting this as well. I think there was swag a couple years ago. I swear mom, my job is real. I thought that was hilarious because I had this exact same problem, right? Explaining to my friends, family what my job was a couple years ago. Almost impossible. And I would say real world Ethereum means that needs to flip. Now if you are still struggling a lot, explaining why what you're doing makes sense, that should at least be a warning sign. And I'll pick on a few examples because they're good friends, the projects. But you know, if you do.
- [48:39]
Content coins, if you do intersubjective work tokens, right? These can make sense. I'm not saying this does not make sense but at least the fact that that might be hard to explain to your mom should now be a warning sign. We have real world traction. We should understand that in the past a lot of this circular inner worlds facing attraction on Ethereum was necessary to build up the infrastructure. But now that we have real world attraction, let's not get distracted by all the rest. And then last slide and I'm done. That should not mean lose Ethereum's ambition, right? Like that is very core to my heart. Like I think if you look back there was a lot of these like this dreamy time of Ethereum where people really had these like big ambitions like chains as these sovereign entities, these sovereign systems, not just infrastructure. ICOs as this amazing way of like leveling up capital formation in a new way. Daos as the next generation of human coordination and even prediction markets, you would say, well, aren't prediction markets at least the crypto success story? In some sense? Yes, but if you look at the current examples, I would say they're relatively thin in terms of the actual on chain part. And even there I think we could do more. There were all these ideas around Futaki, right? Using it for governance. We should not just make crypto become infrastructure now that we hit the real world. So that's all for my side. Sorry for running a little bit over, but I just wanted to leave you with real world. Ethereum is here. Let's make the most of it. Thank you.
- [50:04]
A
Thank you. I do want to fit in time for one question. If we have a question. Yeah, up in front.
- [50:14]
D
Will the most successful scenario for the.
- [50:16]
C
Foundation be one in which Ethereum achieves.
- [50:19]
D
Such a highest scalability that offers so much block space that the transaction cost marginally? So finally the capacity could cause a.
- [50:29]
C
Few ethers to use all the capacity of Ethereum. Is this the most successful scenario to have so much block space that finally only few Ethereums can cost all the transactions? I don't think the strategy is to scale the L1 so that it's the only chain you ever need. That was the question, right? I think even with amazing magical technology, ZKVM and whatnot, I think once the world comes on chain, the demand for block space is huge. And so one, I think there will always be the need for the longer tail of general purpose compute that doesn't happen on the L1 directly. I think the L1 will always be for more valuable use cases. And then second, and that's in a way even more important, we are seeing a lot, a lot of interest and demand of special purpose execution environments. Special purpose L2s for institutions for applications that want to control more finely and the specific properties of the execution system. And so I think for those.
- [51:26]
Two reasons, I think the future for L2s is very, very exciting and continues to be very exciting.
- [51:32]
A
Thank you, Anskar.
- [51:34]
C
Awesome.
- [51:34]
A
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- [53:23]
D
Going to talk about Ethereum's defi centric strategy.
- [53:28]
So I want to start by talking about revenue and I'm gonna just say like I think like there's a lot of talks about oh like talking about revenue it's bad. Like do you just want ether to be a DCF asset but like let's just like go back to the basics and say like revenue just like whatever you think is just a good thing. Like everyone can have their own way of valuing an asset and that's completely up to you. And actually you can't really tell to other people how they should value an asset really everyone will have their own model and I guess you can try to convince them to use a different model, but there's no guarantee of success. And in all those cases, having revenue improves the quality of the asset. So if you see an asset as a productive asset by itself, like an equity for example, then it's the fundamental basis of the value. But even if you think about an asset as a memetic store value, then like the number of coins decreases. Well, that's good for the store of value, right? And of course, like there are all kinds of things in between, right? You don't have to like even, even like a single personal entity doesn't have to make a choice between one of these two. They can also say like, well it's like a, it has like some productive asset qualities, but it has a premium due to its liquidity and how other people value it. So yeah, like this is kind of the basic assumption of this talk, that we just want to have some revenue because it makes it better. And yeah, then we can think about what is good revenue. Right. And so what we want is that the revenue should be sustainable. So we want to think about things that aren't necessarily forever, because that's really hard. I mean basically no business, if you just leave it forever alone, can just last forever. But we want to think about years and decades scales and we do want it to be from positive sum activity. Like at least me. I mean I would feel bad if it's not that. So like we want to create value, not destroy value. So we don't want to create a revenue strategy based on meme coins, but I think it makes sense to create a revenue strategy based on real world application. And the question is like, what if the world's borrowing and landing happened on chain? I think that's like the most natural fit for Ethereum.
- [55:53]
So let's talk about revenue from Defi. So this is Ethereum's revenue in US dollars in the last few years. And it's maybe not like, doesn't look like the most bullish curve, but it's still a very serious amount of revenue. And we'll come like in a bit. Like why? I think it's actually much more, much better than it looks.
- [56:17]
So we still had 2.5 billion in revenue in 2024. That is like a very significant amount. Like to all the people who say, oh, we'll never be able to raise serious revenue to justify our valuation, I think that's insane. I think on that metric Ethereum has been one of the most successful projects in all of crypto. And actually the pricing power of Ethereum, I believe, is much, much higher than that. Like, basically, when you think about it, the current congesting pricing, you could also call it the minimum viable fee. It's like the minimum fee that you raise just to make the market for block space on Ethereum efficient. But it's not in any way like an attempt to figure out what the actual pricing power is. It's almost certain that if we just set some minimum fee on Ethereum, like say every transaction costs X, then it would be much, much more than that.
- [57:18]
And then overall, defi is the most proven source of fees in crypto. There's a good reason for that. Like, defi leads to is first a very high value activity and it leads to lots of contention. Basically it's like defi creates states that you can only access by interacting with that particular chain and you want to do it on a short time horizon. So that's why potential fees are high. Ethereum has historically been the most successful at capturing that. And Ethereum still has very high Defi tvl. And even in terms of new protocols, there are new protocols like Fluid that still Launch on Ethereum L1. So why would you even want to give up on that? It's kind of an amazing thing. In the past, we haven't really, from the L1 development side done that much about it, but it seems like we should. It's very natural.
- [58:16]
And then we could ask like, well, we had a different strategy about providing data availability for rollups. So could the DA revenue replace this?
- [58:28]
So that's the original rollup centric roadmap. Like the applications will live on rollups. The rollups will pay fees to Ethereum via data availability.
- [58:37]
And so if we look at the revenue from blobs, it's also.
- [58:43]
Significant, but it's way, way lower. Like we're talking about maybe 1 to 2 million per month.
- [58:50]
And so that's like Ethereum revenue from blobs. For comparison, we can look at Celestia, they had like a very big spike initially. I don't know where that comes from, if that's real. But anyway, it's basically orders of magnitude less overall, despite having much more data. And so what we can say is Ethereum has a huge premium on selling data availability compared to other DA chains. It's pretty big, 100 to 1000x easily.
- [59:22]
But there's a problem, which is that on an absolute level at least, we do have to keep the DA pricing low because otherwise rollups will switch to Alt da.
- [59:34]
So basically you think, oh, it's a huge premium, so it should be an amazing source of revenue because Ethereum is so good at it. But it's just very low on an absolute level. And I think all the analysis that me and others have done on this is that this likely remains the case just because it is. Yeah, data availability is relatively easy to replace. If you try to charge a lot for it, then rollups can find a different way of getting their data availability.
- [60:04]
And basically since they can provide almost the same UX to user or pretty much the same ux, there's no strong reason not to do that other than some people shouting on Twitter.
- [60:18]
Okay, so what is the defi centric strategy?
- [60:23]
So I see it like this, like we want to build an Ethereum L1 with a lot of, most of, maybe all of the defi liquidity and then other chains, L2s and also L1s because they can all do this via for example intent interop can access that liquidity. So like Ethereum kind of becomes the defi hub for all of crypto essentially.
- [60:52]
And maybe even more maybe. I think basically the big goal should be like L1 is the world's liquidity layer. We want to bring RWAs on chain because together with Defi they can provide a valuable service to the world, even for those who are not interested in crypto assets. So Defi without any real world assets has kind of this problem. So you can now borrow things, but it doesn't help you if you're not also interested in holding the assets that you can borrow against. So we need to bring the real world assets on chain in order to give everyone in the world an actual defi experience that they would want to use.
- [61:31]
B
And.
- [61:33]
D
Third, we should build interoperability that's focused on providing liquidity to other chains.
- [61:40]
By using the L1's DeFi ecosystem.
- [61:47]
Yeah, and so the cool thing is like it provides a very natural monetization. So this way L1 will provide services for everyone. And I mean a lot of people have been questioning, oh, like did we erase Ethereum's network effects by starting the roll up Centigrade roadmap? Well, with this strategy.
- [62:10]
We actually benefit from all of crypto's network effects. Like each new crypto user will be a new potential Ethereum defi user. And so basically L2 value accrual will become all of crypto value accrual. And it also uses Ethereum's existing strength like Ethereum is still leading in DeFi TVL and DeFi protocols. So it's. It is a very natural fit for where Ethereum is now.
- [62:37]
All we have to do is actually prioritize it and start working on it. So what does it mean? Basically, we have to start fighting. I think in the past it happened very naturally because Ethereum was the only game in town and now the world is very different. There are a lot of other projects that also want to fight for the same. So Ethereum will have to start to embrace that fight and embrace DEFI as the main application that's going to live on Ethereum L1. So what does that mean? We need to scale, we need to think about block times and finality, so we need to lower latency. We need to think a lot about our MEV pipeline. I don't think the way it works right now is ideal. I think.
- [63:22]
I'm very interested in things like multiple concurrent proposals. Basically anything that makes people think this is actually a fair layer where everyone can get their transactions in a short amount of time. And we need to think about Interop and I think we should focus on how do we build the Interop to maximize this utility of Ethereum as the liquidity layer. We need to bring RWAs on chain, so we need to think about them. So the important thing is they need to be bearer assets because otherwise they can't be usable in defi. That's how, for example, stablecoins work at the moment. Like if you are hold some stablecoin, then you're kind of assumed to be the actual owner of that asset, which is like not how it works in traditional finance where the asset is coupled to your identity.
- [64:10]
And we need to have liquidity on these reward assets. And at some point in the future, in order to actually raise the revenue, we probably have to add some minimum pricing. It's probably not right now that we should maximize the revenue, although I think it's worthwhile thinking about some kind of minimum price.
- [64:31]
And yeah, so this is kind of like the summary of this, like.
- [64:36]
The broke way is like L2s don't accrue value to eth. That was kind of like the big worry last year. And I think if we properly implement the strategy, then we'll get to a world where all chains accrue value to eth.
- [64:49]
A
All right, big round of applause for Tankrad.
- [64:51]
D
Thank you.
- [64:53]
A
Who's got a question? We got some time for questions. That was a very fast hand.
- [64:58]
E
Thank you.
- [64:58]
C
Great presentation. So just question about, like, does this approach really play to the L1's strengths? So like one thing you could say is, well, yes, you can make the L1 faster, you can scale it, but ultimately defi people are going to want to do the fastest possible chain, the fastest, most scaled possible block times. And so are we going to be making some sacrifices to really compete with those chains? You know, I think of like lighter or whatever, like new defi, like speed basically.
- [65:25]
E
And can the L1 compete really?
- [65:28]
D
I mean I would say it's both. I think yes, like you have to make sacrifices. Like the world is full of trade offs and there are some here and I think like there will be some trade offs. I don't think the trade offs lead us to, oh, we just have to become like a centralized chain and one data center. Because there are other effects at play as well. Like there are network effects which are real on liquidity and currently Ethereum has them, so we need to keep those. And then the game that we're playing is very different from the one that other chains are playing. So I don't think as a user is your primary thing, you think, oh, where do I get the lowest latency? No, you want to do what you want to do. I want to exchange this asset or I want to borrow or whatever. And that is not equivalent to having the lowest latencies or the highest scale like it. Those like are factors that add into the amount of liquidity and so and so on. But like ultimately it's the question like where do you get the liquidity for the action that you want to do?
- [66:32]
A
Further questions? Here we go.
- [66:34]
E
Hi, thanks for the presentation. Could you help me understand like landing down.
- [66:40]
D
What do you mean exactly?
- [66:41]
E
Why liquidity? You mean like, for example, there will be some AMM liquidity on L2s and then arbors will gradually arb against the main net.
- [66:51]
D
The same thing for lending protocols.
- [66:53]
E
Like just exactly. Considering current defi. How would you explain this with existing protocols?
- [67:02]
D
Yeah, I mean I think it's basically. In other words, what we want is to maximize the defi liquidity on L1. So like in terms of market makers, we want the ones with the most liquidity to be on L1. Like in terms of lending protocols, the same thing. And I think basically the experience so far seems to be that they naturally want to be together. Like this is all like one big ecosystem that wants to sit on one composable layer because that makes it more efficient.
- [67:31]
C
Like.
- [67:31]
D
Yeah.
- [67:32]
A
Further questions. One more.
- [67:34]
E
You said why would you give up on it? Set your presentation right. So how is moving to tempo not giving up?
- [67:40]
D
That would be one Question.
- [67:41]
B
And is revenue good, not an EF culture?
- [67:45]
C
The thing that you started with the.
- [67:47]
D
Presentation was an E.F. what?
- [67:50]
E
An E.F. culture. Sorry, culture.
- [67:53]
C
Culture, yes.
- [67:54]
E
Right.
- [67:55]
D
Well, first, like, I mean, I'm moving to Tampa for something very different and like, I. I think that this is the strategy that I believe would be best for Ethereum. I've tried for about half a year. I think I've converted some people. I think there's still a lot of work to be done.
- [68:17]
I am currently seeing a lot more opportunities and working on real world things at Tempo. I'm not going to say that can't change in the future, but I think at the moment there's a lot of work to be done on Ethereum and.
- [68:35]
I don't think this is currently deep in EF culture. There are very few people who think about this. There are maybe a few more than there were in the past, but it's like a small percentage.
- [68:46]
A
Further questions? One more.
- [68:48]
B
Hey, great presentation, dankrad.
- [68:50]
C
I substantially agree with this presentation. And when you look at the factors you describe around the L1 serving as the hub and hub and spokes, and the deferral of significant fees until later.
- [69:04]
B
In Ethereum's growth, either from block space.
- [69:07]
C
Saturation or maybe the imposition of a.
- [69:09]
D
Minimum fee, to what extent do you see this overall vision representing a pivot.
- [69:14]
C
From where Ethereum has just been gradually headed in the past few years? Is this a pivot?
- [69:20]
D
Because to me it kind of sounds like this is what's been happening all along gradually.
- [69:26]
C
So you make it kind of sound like this is a radical agenda. But is this not just where things have been headed?
- [69:32]
D
Well, I mean that's great if it is where things have been headed. Where. What I see is that.
- [69:41]
There are a lot of people who don't want to make the trade offs. I do think like basically what is different to a few years ago is what I said before. Like maybe five years ago, Ethereum was the only game in town. So like everything happened naturally on Ethereum and so Ethereum still has these very strong moats around liquidity and so on. So there's a lot happening. But I do think that if we don't keep improving the chain at a higher rate than it was in the past, then I don't think that will stick around forever. Like I think like eventually Ethereum would lose that mode.
- [70:15]
C
Cool.
- [70:16]
D
And that's where I currently see the problem. Yeah.
- [70:18]
A
One last round of applause for dankrad. Thank you so much, dankrad.
- [70:23]
Every welcome Danny Ryan to The stage. Danny, come on up.
- [70:28]
E
Hello.
- [70:30]
I took an. I actually was at the. The main venue and thought that that was where I was supposed to be, so I had to quickly come over here. And on my way, the cab driver asked me about xrp, which is very exciting. I said I didn't know too much about. He. He said, BlackRock's been buying it every day. So not investment advice.
- [70:53]
David asked me to speak. I'm a bit oversubscribed this week. So I said, okay. I'm not making slides. He said, okay. And I said to myself, what can I talk about that doesn't require making slides? And I was like, oh, I'll talk about myself. I know a lot about that.
- [71:14]
So I'm just gonna take you. I'm just gonna tell you about what I've been doing for the past eight years. I think.
- [71:22]
I'll actually start before then. I graduated from college. I did do that computer science. I went to New Orleans. And my goal in life was to not get a job.
- [71:33]
So I was like, I'll do some, like, consulting here and there. I got somebody to pay me a reasonable rate, hourly rate. And I. I realized I did the math and I was like, okay, if I work one hour a day, I think I'm good. I think I'm good. But actually, during that time, I started working with a bunch of small businesses. I helped them, like, solve business problems. Like, honestly, people in Louisiana had never heard of automation before, so helped them, like, realize that they probably don't need those three people. We can totally get rid of that job. You shouldn't be doing manual reporting. Sorry, this is even before AI.
- [72:08]
But sometime in 2016, a friend of mine sent me an article, and it was a New York Times article, and it was for the DAO. Some of y' all probably familiar with the DAO. And I. I had.
- [72:24]
I had used Bitcoin in 2013, unclear probably what I was using for in 2013. Who knows what people use Bitcoin for in 2013? But I hadn't really. It hadn't really clicked the aha moment. But I read this article and I was like, oh, shit, this is crazy. And I had that moment. I mean, probably most of you had that moment where you're like, oh, Ethereum, oh, Crypto. Oh, programmable blockchains, decentralized consensus. This is crazy. This is something new. And I got obsessed. And I did. I sent my first mainnet transaction. I remember sitting on the couch with a friend. I turned to him and said, this is not going to End well. It was to the dao. It did not end well. But a crash course in blockchains and consensus and social. Like, what is consensus? Consensus is just the social rules and whatever. I think probably at the time, I don't even know if I knew what a hard fork was, but I think I was probably, probably dow hard fork because I lost a bunch of money.
- [73:28]
But it was systemic, right? And it was very exciting. I learned a ton. And by the end of 2016 is the only thing I could think about.
- [73:38]
I didn't want to do anything else. Just the mechanisms and the incentives and the money and the things you can build. And so January 1, 2017, I got rid of all my clients. Sorry guys. Small business owners in Louisiana. I said, I'll give myself a year to make this my work. Had no idea what that really meant. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna go to the New Orleans Ethereum meetup. And I went online and looked for it and it didn't exist. So I'm like, okay, I'll make this my work. I'll make the New Orleans Ethereum meetup cool. I'm doing something now.
- [74:16]
I used a lot of open source software. I was a open source software believer. I never contributed before. I was like, okay, I'm going to contribute. So I went on, I went online some nice Python repos and I was like, okay, I can write some Python. And like, made things a little bit better, tried, did a little stuff, I would read docs, fix typos, do random stuff. Just tried to, like, I don't know, make the world a little bit better. Every time I opened and tried to learn something like, you know, contribute a little bit here and there. And I found that the doors were wide open, like comically wide open. I heard proof of stake was coming. I was like, I don't know what the fuck that is. Read a little bit about it. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. But I was like, if they're doing it, I should like learn about it. Maybe I could make a staking company or, I don't know, get involved in some way. And there was an open Casper call, Casper Research call. And they would just like drop a link in a public chat. And I was like, well, I'm gonna go to that. And so it's like Vitalik and Vlad Zampier and some like wizard that started our chain and like, it showed up with a briefcase full of cash at one point and bought it. That was a. It was a strange time, but.
- [75:31]
C
I.
- [75:31]
E
Went to this call and I was like, oh, I had nothing to say or contribute, but they'd be like, we were reading this blog post and I'd be the guy that would go find the blog post real quick and drop it in the chat. It's like, hey, I did something and now everyone knows the can see the link. And I spent that year just trying to do stuff. And again, I heard Casper was coming. I heard proof of stake was coming. It was coming right at the beginning of the next year. So I was like, oh, I'll read about it. I'll go look at the code. And there was a bunch of solidity code. That's when Casper proof of stake was implemented in solidity. And I was like, there are no tests. Is this, this isn't good, right? So I wrote some tests, I made the world a little bit better.
- [76:14]
And I. I fixed refactor some code, cleaned up some stuff, made stuff a little bit more efficient. And by the end of 2017.
- [76:23]
B
Someone.
- [76:23]
E
Reached out to me from the EF and was like, hey, do you want a job? And I was like, I'm going to Japan for three months. So I don't know.
- [76:31]
And they said, how about 10 hours? I said, perfect. So I'm in this era where I have an incredible amount of optimism for the technology, an incredible amount of optimism for this Ethereum thing, this decentralized consensus. This is going to change the world.
- [76:50]
A little secret about myself, I'm a bit of a luddite. I work on. I never said what I work on. You're going to hear what I work on. I work on technology.
- [76:59]
But I'm a bit of a skeptic. I'm a bit of a pessimist. Obviously, technology does incredible things for humanity, but also the trajectory of technology is kind of terrifying Control. And these megacorps, these megacorps maybe are going to become bigger than the government. What's going on here? I have a slot machine in my pocket. The world's smartest people are trying to figure out how to get me to open this thing. Over and over and over. It's kind of. I don't know, it doesn't sit well with me. And so when I learned about Ethereum and during this time, I realized we can't turn the technological progress and machine off. And it's just going, it's going, it's going. But maybe with this technology we can like change the trajectory. So kind of unbridled optimism for the technology during this era. And I got to work at the EF and while I was in Japan, Carl, Karl from Optimism, he was at the EF at the time. We were chatting. And he's like, hey, we're in Tokyo. I was like, what? So I went to a coffee shop and I'm hanging out with Carl and Vitalik and a coffee shop. And I'm like, what the fuck's going on? I'm just like a random person on the Internet and I'm hanging out with Carl anyway. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm gonna, like, do what I can. I'm gonna try to keep this thing moving. So I'm like, okay, guys, what do we have to do to get proof of stake? Live thinking, like, they know the answers. Of course they know the answers. And they're like, I don't know. I mean, I was like, okay, well, maybe we should write an eip, right? Like, that's what people do. I've never read an EIP at that point, but I know they exist. And they're like, yeah, yeah, let's write an eip. And Carl's like. I said, okay, so who's going to do it? Carl's like, not me. Okay. Vitalik said, do I have to do it this time? And I'm just sitting there with these two guys and like, literally, my heroes. And I'm like, I'll do it. I'll write the EIP. Literally never read any IP. I'll write the EIP, we'll write the Proof of Stakey IP. And I went from 10 hours a week to this is all I'm doing every day. Every day. I met Aya at the time. She had just started the Ethereum foundation as well. She happened to be in Tokyo. A bunch of them were in Tokyo. And she said to me, when's proof of Stake gonna launch? And I was like, I don't know, like, six months. This is the beginning of 2018. I was a fool.
- [79:14]
So then somewhere at some point in 2018, I functionally was kind of like running the research team at the Ethereum foundation, like six months in. And Hudson, Hudson, Jameson at the time, he reached out and we were talking and he's like, you know, you're the only one that responds to their emails. I was like, okay, okay. Turns out communicating was important. Wrangling, wrangling the researchers was important. And I just. The doors were comically wide open. So I just kept walking through them. We kept building, we kept working and working and working and working and working. And this thing that I thought was going to take six months Took three years. But that was only the Phase Zero launch. That was the launch of the Beacon Chamber. Like, no, it didn't actually touch mainnet. And we told everyone it's Main Net. It's kind of Main Net. But anyway, two years later, two years later, we finally do the big thing, the merge, the thing happened. And I mean, it was an incredible release, right? It's the hardest I've ever worked on anything, probably the longest, other than like my schooling career, that I've ever worked on anything. It's the biggest thing I've ever done, maybe the biggest thing I'll ever do. It was very exciting.
- [80:30]
Then a couple years pass, I'm still kind of doing the same thing, still running the consensus calls doing the thing. And at a certain point I wake up and I'm like, I'm just kind of doing the thing. I kind of did the big thing and now I'm just doing the thing. And I was also, like, tired. I was kind of exhausted mentally, but also like, kind of existentially and physically. It'd be 10am and I'd be like, I kinda wanna take a nap. I think I might be burnt out. And at the beginning of the years, the years are confusing sometimes, but at the beginning of 2024, I hit up Aya and I was like, I gotta go, I'm sorry, it's time to go, I gotta go. And she said.
- [81:16]
Really? I think you should stay. Let's take some time. Take some time. Why don't you take a sabbatical? So. So said, okay, okay, okay, I'll take three months, I'll get my head in order, we'll figure out what I'm doing from there. It'll be fine. Maybe I won't go back, but maybe I'll go back, but I'll take three months. Friday, day one. I end, I'm done with work. Saturday, I guess that was Friday's day zero. Saturday, day one.
- [81:47]
Okay.
- [81:49]
I'm gonna start thinking I don't have the weight of the world on my shoulders anymore. Sunday, day two. It's Easter Sunday. My dad and my mom, they're divorced, they come to my house, there's kids running around, we're having fun, we're cooking, we're literally putting the dinner on the table. And I get a knock at the door.
- [82:09]
And I go answer the door and there's a young woman dressed in like, business casual, whatever, and she hands me a stack of papers. So you've been served. I was served by the United States government. I was served by The SEC personally.
- [82:25]
And I actually. I can kind of feel it right now. Like, the amount of adrenaline that I felt. Like, the. I felt fucking crazy. Like, I had this stack of papers, My family's in the fucking house. And I'm like, what have I done? And I go into the back room and I'm just looking at this stuff, and everyone's like, eating. Like, what's Danny doing? What's going on? Who was at the door? It's Easter. And I'm like, flipping through these documents and I'm like, I'm shaking.
- [82:53]
And like, I was just. I'm just like a random guy on the Internet. I was just working on stuff that I thought was cool. I was just working on stuff that I thought was gonna change, you know, like, it's positive. Like, of course we want new technology. We want. We want, like, open technology. Open. It's open source. Like, oh, what do I. I don't know. I'm not dead and do anything. And.
- [83:14]
And then I'm like.
- [83:17]
I don't want to go to jail. Am I going to go to jail? I know people that have gone to jail. And I thought they. They pushed the boundaries more. Like, I'm just working on proof of stake. I don't know. And it was fucking terrifying. And I spent the next three months of my sabbatical talking to $2,000 an hour lawyers out of New York prepping for an interrogation. Essentially, they wanted to talk to me. Like, in the document, it said, you need to be in New York on Friday. And I'm like, what the fuck? This is the US Government saying I need to be in New York on Friday.
- [83:56]
And so the three months that I was supposed to not spend thinking about crypto, I'm now, like, deeper. And. And. And it's the only thing you can think about. And it turns out the SEC is a civil organization. The worst I could do is lose all my money and go bankrupt if they find me enough. But. But not. It's not criminal, but they. They said, but be careful. The DOJ sometimes lurking right behind the sec. So I'm like, fuck. Like.
- [84:26]
So.
- [84:28]
Then.
- [84:31]
Then this. Then the ETF was approved, while the SEC is like, trying to interrogate me. And I'm like, what the fuck's going on here? And then they went from we want to talk to you yesterday to maybe we'll talk at the end of the summer. Then a week later, I get a letter in the mail, and it says, case closed. Don't worry about it. And I'm talking to these Lawyers in New York, and they say, and they used to work at the sec. It's kind of fucked up. You work at the sec, then you become a lawyer, you specialize in the sec. And they know the people at the. It's really strange. It's called the revolving bore. I think that's illegal in most countries.
- [85:09]
And they say, never in our history have we seen the SEC proactively close a case.
- [85:18]
The best you get is that they just kind of stop talking. And the longer they stop talking to you, the more you go, I guess I'm okay.
- [85:27]
But they actually sent a letter and they closed it because it was politics.
- [85:34]
Because it was some political mandate to destroy crypto.
- [85:40]
I guess because crypto might actually change the world. I guess because it is actually kind of powerful, I guess because it is actually a game changing technology.
- [85:54]
So now I'm going back to the app after my three month sabbatical.
- [86:00]
And I'm still kind of exhausted, still not feeling great. My head's not in the game and I say, I gotta go, I'm out. And so I did. I wrapped up and I left.
- [86:12]
And then I still felt terrible. And I was like, damn right, now it's some real horror. Kind of messes you up. And then I was like, do I sleep well? I put on this watch and he's like, no, you don't sleep well at all. Turns out it was some, like, debilitating sleep problem.
- [86:30]
Patch that up. Felt great. So literally the next day I was like, I felt like I was on drugs. I got some sleep trouble. I made it for decades.
- [86:40]
And so that was wild. Now I'm like, recontextualizing the past many years and I'm like, that was really hard. I was kind of tired the whole time.
- [86:48]
I wonder if it would have been different if I wasn't so tired. Maybe I would have done a better job. Maybe I would have cared for longer. Who knows? But I'm out.
- [86:58]
Then Trump wins. I was God was going to happen. But it's kind of unexpected. Then.
- [87:08]
Trump wants a meme plane two days before he's inaugurated. And I'm like, fucking whiplash. Like, what the fuck? Like, literally five months ago, I got served by the sec, by the federal government, and now the what world do I live in? And I mean, I'm just. And I was like, oh, I'm done. I'm done with crypto. We're definitely done not doing that anymore. This is fucked. I don't want to be involved this. And I wasn't at the app. And I wasn't working or anything. And I was like, okay, maybe I'll. I've been threatening to go into the woods for, like, since I started working in Crypto, saying it's time to go in the woods. And I was talking to a friend and he's like, yo, I hear this, like, maybe there's some problems with the eth, like, what can we do to make it better? I'm like, yeah, I don't work with A gap. Not a D gap. I don't EF anymore. And we're talking and we're talking. He's like, yo, actually it's clear that maybe they should have someone else on the E. And like, you should. I'm like, no, no, I'm not doing her.
- [88:08]
C
I pretty planted the seed.
- [88:10]
E
And like a week later I'm like, shit, maybe I should be there. So I get up Vitalik, and I was like, maybe I should run that ea. And we're kind of talking for a while. Back and forth, Loose looks, Sink, shooks, elite got on the Internet. It's kind of a fucking disaster. I don't know if you paid attention during that time. People were like, it was, it was bad. And it was like, I mean, it's very negative. I don't like to be involved in negative stuff, quite frankly. Aya and I worked very closely together for many years, have high trust and we should do great things during that time. And it kind of accelerated and put the nail in the coffin on, like, yeah, I'm not going to that.
- [88:54]
And I linked up with Vivit at the time again. I still kind of feel like I'm on drugs, like, start sleeping and I guess I could work on something harder, man. God. Linked up with Vivek and Vivek is. Comes from trap high. He has like boundless energy. Sometimes I'm like, are you on? But he just is super optimistic. Like, she's willing to talk to everyone in the world. And I was like, oh, that's like really good. Like complimentary energy. The. The regulatory stuff, you know, it's fucking wild. But like, there's a lot of opportunity right now. We could maybe like actually onboard the world. Let's do it. Took on something hard to work on, become something exciting to work on. And I. I find myself at this time. I think I'm still optimistic.
- [89:46]
I think I'm certainly less naive. I don't have the unbridled optimism anymore.
- [89:55]
The tool is a tool. The tool is a game changing technology. The tool is fundamentally new and exciting. And we can do things with it, but I don't think it's inherently good. I don't think it's inherently bad. I think it's ultimately what we.
- [90:14]
How we choose to wield it. And at this point, I'm. I'm gonna wield it. You know, I understand it. I understand things that I want to happen, and I'm gonna make it happen, and I'm gonna work on it. I found something exciting to work on. I found something, I think impactful to work on. And I think.
- [90:38]
You know, the life is what you make it, and the world is what you make it. So I'm gonna go make it.
- [90:47]
A
Thanks, Danny. Danny, you have time for a question?
- [90:52]
Who's got a question for Danny?
- [90:55]
No questions for Danny. Oh, we got one question for Danny. Usual suspect.
- [91:02]
E
So, hey, so what makes you optimistic today?
- [91:07]
I am optimistic.
- [91:11]
That if I work really hard, I might be able to make certain financial systems more efficient. I'm really optimistic that if I work really hard, I might be able to expand access to certain financial systems and assets that are currently gated to.
- [91:30]
And if I work really hard.
- [91:33]
Hopefully maybe we can reduce the having crazy.
- [91:44]
Centralizing nature of technology. But I don't know. I mean, I'm definitely much more in the I'm going to work really hard on something rather than like, this thing's just gonna make everything better round.