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- [00:00]
A
No, this is how capitalism works. Is that like, over a long enough period of time? It is on you. The organization that was entrusted with the hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the. Keep the fucking thing going. Not a dividend.
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B
It's a tale of two Kwan.
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A
Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.
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C
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.
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A
Unnamed trading firms who are very involved.
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B
Polloc eth is the ultimate puzzle.
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A
Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So today we've got a bit of a crossover show. We've got all the podcasts melding together into one super podcast. So, quick intros. First we got Tom the Defi maven and master of memes. Hello, everyone. Next we've got Tarun the Giga Brain and Grand Poobah at Gauntlet.
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B
Yo.
- [00:53]
A
And joining us today, special guest, we've got Taylor Monahan, former matriarch at Metamask, coming in from our sister show. How's it going, Tay?
- [01:03]
D
I'm super excited to be here.
- [01:05]
A
Do you have a new title? I don't know what I did. No idea what to update this with.
- [01:09]
D
So I'm just on the other show, we're just calling me a security expert right now.
- [01:13]
A
Security expert. Okay, security expert. I'll go with that. It doesn't rhyme, but we'll go with it. And then, of course, we've got David Hoffman, crypto connoisseur. Wait, no. What does it say? Somebody changed the cryptocurrency connoisseur and Zara super state. Okay.
- [01:27]
E
Last time I was on the show, because I also.
- [01:28]
A
Is that right? That's why it's there. That's why it's there. I was like, okay, okay. The tsar of superstate. Welcome. David, your hair is looking fantastic. You're looking quite svelte from the last time I remember you, but good to have you back. And I am Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please teach up and block XYZ for more disclosures. Okay, so there's a new fight going on, and we enlisted some more podcasters because we needed help podcasting this fight. So let me describe what the fight is about. So there was a document released on March 13th called the EF Mandate. Okay, now what is the EF? The EF is the Ethereum foundation and the mandate was a 38 page document that was illustrated very kind of cute cypherpunky illustration style. And it basically describes the role of the Ethereum foundation within the new mandate of Ethereum itself. And specifically it focuses on these core cypherpunk values and it describes it with a new acronym, never before seen called crops. CROPS stands for Censorship, Resistance, Open Source, Privacy and Security. It describes this walkaway test, which is that Ethereum must function even if the foundation disappears. And the EF is meant to measure its success by how unnecessary it becomes. And so the document primarily focused on how the EF is going to become effectively more and more invisible and less essential to Ethereum over time if it's succeeding in its mission. And that the core function of Ethereum is to be censorship resistant, neutral, and ultimately this credible, as they often call it, World War III resistant substrate that allows for always exit, even if intermediaries arise. Ethereum should always be usable for people who don't want to be in the presence of any of these intermediaries. So maybe in and of itself sounds unobjectionable. Vitalik came out and kind of underscored it as like, hey, Ethereum's awesome. This is our new mandate for the ef. Everything's great. It instigated a very large public debate. And now the two sides of this debate is one side of effectively the cypherpunks. Ethereum himself as well as many of the core Ethereum insider maxis. Many people within the EF saying that this is great. This is an underscoring of the true cypherpunk soul of Ethereum. This is what crypto is all about. And we're really glad to hear the EF saying all of this out loud. And then the other side, I don't know what you want to call them, I think many different voices in this crowd, but let's call them broadly the pragmatists who, who say that, hey, this seems like backsliding. This is what the EF was saying a year ago about the infinite garden and that Ethereum is all things to all people and it's this beautiful kaleidoscope. And instead Ethereum was kind of sitting on its hands. The EF wasn't really doing anything. It was kind of funding these sort of, I don't know, these grants into useless things that never ended up resulting in any material progress in the ecosystem and had largely seeded the role of advancing the adoption of Ethereum to outside parties, and that Ethereum was kind of holding on by a thread. And so I think to many people, and I'm within this camp, saw this as bad communication. This is like, on the face of it, you don't necessarily disagree with what they're saying, that decentralization is important, but just like, why are you saying this now when everything that the world has been telling you, screaming at you over the last year is get your shit together and start shipping and talk less about philosophy. So this has incited, I think, a large debate now that's still raging on several days later. And David specifically requested to come on the show just to sort of do a dive bomb on his position on this. On this debate. Now, Tay, you've taken a kind of middle ground, if I can characterize it that way. How would you. First, before. Before I bring David in, Tay, how would you describe your position on this. On this document?
- [05:13]
D
So first off, I think that the document is wildly consistent. Like, I've heard Vitalik personally say, like, the EF should be smaller over time since before Ethereum launched. Right. Like, that's always been the goal. To hear it again is not a surprise to me. And I think it's fine. I think that there are, like, specifically your point about, like, if people don't get it, it's bad communication. Definitely spot on. I guess maybe I've just been around for so long that I don't necessarily have high expectations. Like, DF is very good at doing some things and not great at doing others. And I think that the world would be better if everyone just accepted that
- [05:53]
A
and said, this is the best they can do. That's your defense? This is the best they can do? Look, this is just who these guys are. What did you expect? That's. Is that a fair summary?
- [06:05]
D
Specifically because I think it's empowering to be like, the EF is not gonna be like. Like the pragmatist comms marketing people. Other people can do that. And if you do that, well, you should absolutely let you.
- [06:19]
A
Okay, so here's why. Here's why I. I reject that argument is that the EF has improved dramatically at comms over the last year. Right. If you look at the stuff they're putting out compared to what they put out a year or two ago, right? They're like, underscoring entrepreneurs building in different spaces. They're like, doing these, like, startup profiles. They're. They're talking about actual use cases now. And they have like a. You know, they have entreprene like, you know, I was just in Frontier Tower. They have somebody there from the EF who's going there to support startups. Like they're people. There are people in the EF now who are pitching me startup pitches, which used to never happen. Nobody in the EF even knew what the startups were on top of the EF. Now they're trying to get VCs to look at startup pitches. Right. That's great. That's absolutely what they should be doing. That's encouraging capital formation, encouraging more startups to build on Ethereum itself, as opposed to going and building on Solana or Arbitrum or whatever, where more of the marginal entrepreneurs are going. That's great. That's all what people love to see. That's why people have been so supportive of the ways in which the EF has changed. But then, but then you get this.
- [07:22]
D
Yes, then you get this. And I don't know, maybe, maybe I'll put like this. I think I was like, moderately optimistic that the, like, the changes that we've seen are like, deep enough to, to really hold. But I do think that there is some amount of like, let's say, experimentation where, like the malady. Pfp, right, I think, is like, he's, he's sort of stepping into a role to try. But I think ultimately where the EF and Vitalik specifically is going to land is like, it's going to be a middle ground. Not necessarily. They're not going to turn into Solana. Right? Like, they aren't. And so it just doesn't. But I think that, like, you know, when you experiment, right, when you go out and you start retweeting projects and you're like, wait, actually nothing bad happened and people like to be supported. This is cool. You're going to keep doing that. On the flip side, if you go a bit too hard on the experimentation, there's a bunch of pushback or it doesn't, it doesn't feel genuine. You're going to pull back on that. And I think that generally, I think that that's fine. And again, I just, for me, Ethereum has always been about, there's room for people to build here. Right? You can build anything here. And so every time I see the EF not be super great at something, I'm like, okay, cool. There's so many other people that can do that and do it well, and they should.
- [08:52]
A
Okay, let's bring David in from the top rope. David, what's your take?
- [08:57]
E
This document, this mandate document from the EF I read it as it's far more a statement about what the EF is, not more than it is a statement about what the EF is and what it wants to do in 2026. This was your take, Haseeb. Like we don't need another document from the EF reaffirming its vows to Ethereum. Everyone knows what Ethereum's commitments are. Everyone knows what Ethereum's ethos are. The Ethereum community has been loudly talking about its ethos to the annoyance of the rest of the industry since inception. Like, no one has any doubt about how strong Ethereum cypherpunk's commitments are. I don't think that was even the purpose of this document to like reaffirm what those things are. That's, I think if you just kind of like the, the just like naively read the document, be like, oh, you know, Ethereum is doubling down on its commitments that it was always doubling down on and there's no, there's not anything new there. The real, in my opinion, the real lens for this document is it's Vitalik telling you what we, what Ethereum is not going to do. And I read it as Ethereum is going to be a cipher punk, super lightweight, super hardened protocol that is a backstop against financial oppression, totalitarianism, authoritative structures. But it is not going to be an economic engine. And I think a lot of people in the Ethereum community like me and people like me are here to build Ethereum the economic engine. And this, this, what I hear from this document is Vitalik is not really interested in that. He's interested in the DAC side of Ethereum but not the Eth A side of Ethereum, the acceleration side side of Ethereum where Ethereum as an institution grows in like might and power and economic weight. And the rest of the world has to contend with the power of Ethereum and the strength of the businesses upon Ethereum. And to me all this, this, this document is reading as like, that's not what Ethereum is for. That's not the direction that we're going in. And like you could take the point of just like this is the EF saying that this is not what they're doing and the Ethereum, the broader Ethereum community has the green light to go forth and try and build that. But I also don't think that this document represents a green light for the community to actually go do that. And I have never really seen any sort of signal of support from Vitalik or the EF about a Green light in that direction. It's always been like yellow at best. And like when Vitalik wrote that article about like Defi is Ethereum's foundation to finance other moonshots, like that was the best signal that we had to go in that direction. To me, I see this document as putting the brakes on the Ethereum maximalist being like the Ethereum growth engine and really saying that we are going to reprioritize the DAC side of Ethereum. The defensive technology of Ethereum, which to
- [12:07]
A
me describe what that DAC thing means. I think the words of Vitalik used to describe it. Is he called Ethereum a sanctuary technology. Can you just flesh out very briefly what does that mean?
- [12:18]
E
Yeah. The metaphor that he used in an article that I really, really liked is the. I'm going to have to explain this one again. The file of Galadriel from Lord of the Rings. It's a light. It's like this, this symbol in Lord of the Rings that the light, it's not that useful. It's not a very bright light. It doesn't do cool things, it doesn't have a lot of features. But it does work for you in the moment that you need it the most. And that's like the file that Frodo shines and he gets rid of the spider. It's like a very hard, like very cypherpunk, very censorship resistant, very hardened. It doesn't do a whole lot. But when you do need it, when you need to like preserve your capital to get out of the country, you need it because an authoritarian, totalitarian, oppressive structure is bearing down on you. You have Ethereum in your pocket and that's what Ethereum is optimized for. And so that's what I would characterize as like the DX side of things. And that's what I think Vitalik is saying. That's what we are building and that is what our mandate is. And I think he is projecting not just the EF in that direction, he's pointing the whole ecosystem in that direction.
- [13:26]
A
And so one more clarification here, David. You're using the, the name Vitalik. This document was written by the ef. There was no authorship, particularly attributed, to it, if I'm not mistaken. But you're saying that you think this is Vitalik's voice behind this document?
- [13:39]
E
Yes.
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A
Okay, got it. All right, Tom Tarun.
- [13:43]
E
It was, it was written by the board of the ef. There was a statement, the board and like, come on.
- [13:50]
A
Okay. All right, Tom Tun, let's get, let's bring you guys in. What's your. What's your response here?
- [13:55]
C
I more or less have a similar read. And just like, I think the constraint. I think the major gripe, more honestly than even vision, is momentum. I don't think anyone's saying, oh, like, wow, they're shipping really fast, but they're not really doing things in the spirit of what I think this should be. What this should be. People just generally feel like they're not doing anything. So I agree with you. This feels like a huge regression. But more to the point, these feel like very vacuous statements like, you want privacy? Great. What have you been doing? What have you done lately? What have you been doing for the past 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years? Do you want scalability? Are we still doing L2? I thought we were not doing that, and now we are doing that. So it just doesn't feel like there's a whole lot to it. It's just like this kind of empty mission statement, which is generally what you do at the beginning of a project or a company or maybe even when there's a big turning point in it. This is just like. No, there's not really.
- [14:45]
A
Yeah, it's just like random Tuesday that they just released this.
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B
Sure.
- [14:49]
C
It's a PDF too, which. That was kind of funny normally. Gigantic website or something.
- [14:53]
A
They really could have gassed all this thing down.
- [14:56]
C
Yeah, you'd think so.
- [14:58]
A
Yeah. Tarun, what's your. What's your response? EF mandate?
- [15:01]
B
I mean, I think I've learned over the years to just be disappointed in lots of things in crypto. So I don't really. It doesn't really bother me anymore. That's just like, what is this learned helplessness? The second thing is it's very bitcoin maxi, you know, Like, I feel like I think about the bitcoin development cycle and how it, like, started as like, optimistic and adding stuff. And then by 2015 it was kind of. I really thought Ethereum had that longer trajectory of that before solidifying, mainly because it was unlike Bitcoin. I think Ethereum's community was really more focused on new technologies, like adding ZK at the core for compression reasons, not just privacy. Kind of doing a lot more on consensus stuff. But then I think there just became this focus on either problems that don't affect users and are like, how do we spend a lot of money on research and timing games or other types of things we could add on the privacy side that still are pilots effectively? And in that sense, it reminds me of big Companies who just have a ton of pilots every time there's a new fad, but then none of them ever convert to a product or a real thing. And it does kind of have that vibe, except it's like supposed to be sort of more research and development organization, you know, like. And I think at the time DF was founded, which is like very similar to the time OpenAI is founded, you could like compare the trajectories of two kind of research to production organizations and see very different outcomes. Right. And I sort of had thought, you know, at that time there was like a chance that this would continue. But I do think this ossification thing in crypto is sort of a. There is always this sort of end state where like enough of the early parties are just like too satisfied with the status quo, that there's just not really, like, no one's really going to push the change after a certain number of rounds of improvements. I would love to be proven wrong, but empirically, that's what this just feels like. It really just is. It does remind me a little of like the block space wars, except with kinder language.
- [17:18]
A
I mean, what, okay, so what really rubbed me the wrong way about this whole debate was the way in which all of these Ethereum people are just piling onto anybody who objects. It's very like virtue politics, which is that where. Are you against decentralization? Are you against privacy? Are you against it? It's like, dude, what the fuck? We're all, we've all been in this industry for a long time. Like, why do you think we're here? I, I, it's like, you know, it's like a politician. Yeah, go ahead.
- [17:45]
B
Sorry. One thing I, I re remembered when you were talking about that is I, but there are people at the EF who I feel like are actually individually trying and like, are trying to like, you know, they just hired all these defi people before. They would never, they would never. Yeah, yeah, yeah, had that, right? Like, absolutely. I don't know. I don't know how I. You kind of have to have this like bipolar disorder to reason about it, right? Of like, oh, on one side, like only the infinite garden, and on the other side it's like, hey, we want people to use it. And like it's constantly switching between those and I'm not sure which one is there at any given time. It's like Schrodinger's cat.
- [18:19]
A
Yeah. So look, the reality is that the EF is itself a decentralized organization in that there's no Single CEO. They literally have co executive directors. There's no single CEO. Tomas just left. And there's a. There's. They sort of see themselves as being a loose affiliation of people who are kind of have their own brains and move in different directions. And so my understanding, from what I've heard from folks, is that even in the ef, there are grumblings about this recent document, right? Not everybody agrees with it. Some people believe that it was a mistake to put this out. Other people are like, no, it's really important to affirm our values and to say that this is the direction that we're going down. Not everybody agrees with Vitalik. Not everybody agrees with the people who disagree with Vitalik. Right? So there are genuine factions in the ef. And you know, to your point, Arun, they did recently add a bunch of people like the roles that I just spoke about. All these people who are doing like, go to market and growth and people who are interfacing VCs, they're all new. They were all brought in under the post Tomas transition who are focused on growth and go to market. And the other thing that we've not mentioned at all in this conversation, and I don't see anybody mentioning in this conversation, is that like, why did this happen in the first place? Why was there this big turning against Ethereum? And there's an obvious gigantic answer, which is Solana. Solana started all of this. It's the boulder that. Or it's the thing that started the boulder rolling down the hill over a year ago and now nobody mentioned Solana anymore. It's like the thing that you're not allowed to talk about if you're in Ethereum is that, oh, we are looking at like, you know, when you talk to Tomas, Dimash will literally tell you that we are seeing what the Solana foundation did well, and we're trying to learn from it. Now, we're not going to do exactly what they did, but obviously other foundations are doing things better than we are. And if you look back to just a year or two ago, many more users who are coming into crypto never use Ethereum. Many of them didn't even know that Ethereum Mainnet is a place that things live or that is worth interacting with. They just thought, oh, Ether is a token you can buy. And so like this, this Pollyanna ishness that like Ethereum is not competing and it's not still trying to make up ground that it's lost to hyperliquid or that it's lost to Solana. Or that it's lost to some of these other ecosystems. Like, yeah, you might say, like, well, meme coins are dead and fuck Solana and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, man, these, these ecosystems are still huge. And so. And Ethereum is still competing and it's not guaranteed to you. Like, you're being able to advance your values, which are values that we all agree with. That's why we all came into crypto. That's why we all fly the same banner. But those values, you don't get to advance them for free. You get to advance them if you win. And so, you know, it's like a politician who comes in and says, what are you, you know, you're, you're voting against my, know, my, my, my Social Security package. What do you like poverty? You don't like, you want more poor people out there? It's like, no, man, like, politics is complicated, buddy. Who's coming at you with a simple argument? They're like, oh, you don't like decentralization? Or, oh, you're just a fucking, you know, you think we should give it all away to bring the banks on chain? And it's like, no, man, it's not that simple. And like, we were just here, we were just here a year ago where all the people who are yelling at you that you don't like decentralization enough were driving Ethereum into the ground and we all agreed at that point, and now all of a sudden, people forgotten all of that.
- [21:30]
E
This is the point. Go ahead.
- [21:32]
B
Sorry, I just want. I was just going to say, like, this is where I definitely feel like, I agree a tay, which is like, it is, you get, you get what you see, you know, like, and I don't, I don't know, it's like, hard to be like, okay, like, here's also.
- [21:47]
A
I reject that. I reject that because, like, the EF has shown that they can change. Like, the difference between the EF of 2023 and the EF of 2025 is so big, it's like, hard to even recognize how good they've gotten relative to where they started.
- [22:03]
D
But I think that also makes me optimistic about it, right? Because so the. Maybe it's worth clarifying, like, what I see, like, Ethereum as. Because I'm less obsessed with the money side of it. Like, I am very much, and I've always been very much, that Ethereum is the platform atop which everything is built, right? And so the people, like, you don't know what's going to come next, right? We saw ICOs. Nobody saw that coming. NFTs had their whole life, right? All those things were not built by the ef, they were not encouraged by the ef. The biggest example obviously is defi summer and then actually credible defi, right? None of that needed Vitalik's permission or shilling. In fact, you could argue that all of those things may have been worse if Vitalik had been like, yeah, these are great, right? Like they, they were very fast and went very hard without Vitalik support. And so when I think about, like, what, what should the EF be doing, right, it is in part make sure that the platform, the underlying stuff is the things that no one else is going to do. And then as a secondary, like encourage people to build. And I think that like the mandate perhaps does not capture that quite as
- [23:28]
A
interested at all, right? There's no. They never mention users, they never mentioned product, they never mentioned payments, they mentioned stablecoins. I mentioned defi, never mentioned anything happening at the application layer. The entire thing is about being a sanctuary. And again, that's not to say that's not valuable. Obviously we all agree that it's valuable, but to Tom's point, like, when were you ever not that you've been that the whole time? Nobody has ever argued that, oh my God, Ethereum is no longer sanctuary. You guys had better get that shit back together so that people can use the base chain again. You know, like the indictment of Ethereum up until now has been all the users are going elsewhere. That's been the problem. It's not that Ethereum is not a sanctuary.
- [24:10]
E
This is why I agree with your takes, Haseeb. The crux of this whole thing just to me falls on the line of does Ethereum care about growth? And through this document, the read that I'm getting is that the EF does not care about growth. They view Ethereum as this technological puzzle. How do we put all of the crops on the chain? Can we get Ethereum max censorship resistant? Can we get Ethereum max private? Can we get like max secure? Can we solve that technological Sudoku puzzle? And then we're good. And then, and then there's the rest of us. Like you guys all have businesses on Ethereum. I have a business on Ethereum. My business, like your guys, is, is inherently tied to the strength of the Ethereum economy. Maybe, maybe mine more than more than your guys. Maybe you guys are a little bit more diversified, but like mine is one to one correlated, almost one to one correlated with like the size of the Ethereum economy. And that's, there's a. I can just go down and list off a bunch of companies that all. That are all true, right? Like consensus Eigen labs, OP labs, Arbitrum lab, off chain labs. Like, how many companies do I want to. Like? These are all people where Ethereum needs growth in order for their jobs to be secure, for them to pay salaries, for them to grow. It's not just that in crypto.
- [25:32]
A
It's not just that, right, because like a lot of the pivot that we've seen from Ethereum over the last year has been a refocus on the L1 away from this idea that, okay, we just created a substrate for Ult to go find your own fates. And that's what, you know, we took the directive from the EF and said, okay, EF likes rollups. We're gonna go invest in a bunch of rollups. All the rollups have been more or less decimated and Ethereum has taken back the mantle and said, okay, you know what, maybe we should have been focusing so much on the rollups. Let's scale the L1, let's increase throughput. And here's the thing, and many people pointed this out, the EF is doing all those things, all the things that I'm complaining about, about going out and talking to institutions. Well, Etherealize is doing that. It's an outgrowth directly from the EF or going out and scaling the L1. Well, Ethereum is doing that. All these things are in the roadmap. Ethereum's doing these things. The question is, why is Ethereum now telling us that that's not the EF's role? Words matter. Words do matter. Communication matters, Right? The problem with EF up till now has been that the communication has been terrible. And so that's why I think this contrast, especially when there's a leadership change very recently in the EF of Tomash leaving and Bastian coming in. I don't know Bastian, I have no reason to think that he has one philosophy or another. But I spoke very recently with people at the EF and they made pretty clear to me that there's not unanimity internally about both the direction as well as this particular document and the philosophy that it espouses. There's a lot of people in the EF who are basically from the Tamash camp of, hey, adoption and growth is what's missing. And we should be focusing single mindedly on that because it's our game to lose and we better not lose it or we're going to regret it for the rest of our lives. And then there's the other side of the Infinite Garden people. And they didn't leave, they weren't pushed out. There was no cleansing of the infinite garden people. And some of the people really do believe that, hey, this matters way more than adoption does. Adoption maybe is a nice to have price going up is maybe nice, but I think the real thing that matters is that it's a freedom technology and let's make it as free as possible.
- [27:33]
D
But it's not mutually exclusive, right?
- [27:35]
A
Right. Nobody.
- [27:37]
D
You don't need the people at the EF to be running around like shilling stuff and getting it adopted. You can if you support builders, right? They are gonna go out, they're gonna build a long tail of stuff forever and ever and ever. And whatever the people want, whatever is best executed, whatever, you know, the wind blows and people's minds change, then, then you have that adoption, right? Because the builders built it. That's what we saw with Defi Summer. This is what we've seen with everything in crypto. And that's also, by the way, what we saw with Solana. It just got very nihilistic. But that was also an ecosystem thing, a wider ecosystem thing. And so for me, I don't know, the EF's job is to decrease the, the risk of like the EF screwing with anyone that, that, that it's not going to exist in a couple of years. Because that's like if I'm a builder, right, what am I looking at? Like, why am I going to pick an L2 today, right? Are any of these going to exist in a couple of years? Am I going to pick someone?
- [28:38]
A
Is that demonstrably people do. There are more startups probably building today on Base and on Arbitrum than are building on Ethereum mainnet.
- [28:47]
D
If I had to, I mean base today though, because today didn't they just.
- [28:53]
A
I don't know. What do you guys think? You guys obviously also see startups. What would you guess is the spread today of what you see from marginal startups? Let's say the startups going through Defi alliance today, where would you guess they build, distribution wise?
- [29:06]
E
I can't name a startup that has started on the Ethereum layer one in the last couple years.
- [29:10]
D
No, me either, by the way. In the last couple years. I'm saying that, that in my opinion that's the problem is that everyone, right,
- [29:17]
A
well we're talking about now, we're not talking about Defi Summer, we're talking about
- [29:20]
B
now Actually, I'll take the one other side of this though, which is interesting, is that if you look at a lot of the institutions trying to launch like money market funds, other types of RWAs, I will say the L1 has been a real center of gravity. Like there have been a bunch of RWAs on Solana, but the volume has still been just like tremendously dominant to Ethel1 in a way that is the opposite of startups. It's like the big Companies love the L1, the small companies hate the old one. That's kind of what it was.
- [29:48]
A
And I think you have to give Etherealize a lot of credit for that.
- [29:50]
E
Yes. Yeah. And you'll also have to give like the emphasis on like the cypherpunk crops values to that as well. Like why did you know, why did Tom Lee become attracted to Ethereum? Because all of the things that Danny Ryan is espousing to Wall street right now, like censorship, resistance, you don't have a counterparty, like all the, all the cypherpunk properties naturally attracted so much of Wall street. And like that's a huge, that's a huge win for Ethereum. But like Tay, to your point where you have the EF focusing on the cypherpunk values and then growth is up to the hands of the community. I do agree with that dichotomy, but there is nonetheless a disposition of the EF that matters. Where did the Ethereum community grow the Ethereum economy in spite of the EF or in alignment with the ef? And it always, when we read these mood board Vibe documents that consistently come out of the EF every single year, it seems like the Ethereum community grew the Ethereum economy in spite of the EF or in like. Because there's a part of the EF that seems somewhat allergic to pushing on the gas.
- [31:00]
A
I think it's not just that, it's that clearly the ef, they have users they like and users they don't like. You know, there are, there are builders on Ethereum who the EF wants to highlight and feel proud of. And there are other ones that they don't. Right. And Vitalik's been very explicit about this of what he calls low risk defi. That's the defi he likes. Hyperliquid is not on Ethereum L1, but I assume he doesn't like Lidr because okay, that's high risk defi. We don't like that. The reality is that this whole idea that Ethereum is for everyone and that Ethereum is this beautiful Infinite Garden is somewhat contradicted by the fact that there are use cases that are kind of nice and cypherpunky and gentle and lovely, and there are use cases of crazy people gambling. And we don't like those so much. But that is actually what freedom looks like. A lot of what freedom looks like is black market shit. That's when you go to any place that is truly deregulated.
- [31:51]
B
Your black market might be my lit market. All right, buddy.
- [31:57]
A
I'm sure that it is drunk.
- [31:58]
E
You can go ask the 2022 cohort of Solana people that chewed glass with Solana through the bear market, and a decent number of them will be like the virtue signaling vibes of the Ethereum. Community policing. What is good behavior on chain turned me off and so I went to Solana and then we had two years of Ethereum infighting about how to get good vibes back. And then we had the pivot. And now we're getting a second pivot back to the way things were. We're unpivoting from our original pivot.
- [32:32]
A
I don't think it's actually a pivot. I don't think it's actually a pivot. No, I don't think, like, clearly this is a. Exactly, exactly. I think, like, clearly this is an immune response, right? People are like, why are you guys freaking out so much? And I think that's. That's actually the most valid response, which is like, why are you guys freaking out so much? You know, I wrote. I wrote one pretty short tweet of just like, hey, you know why, Please, no more manifestos. And then people just jumped down my throat. People were so angry that I posted this, and that's what made me like, no, fuck you. Like, why? Why can't I say that? But it's. It does feel like the. The reaction to the reaction is. What is making this so disconcerting for people is that other people seem to believe that pushing the EF in the direction of focusing on growth rather than focusing on value preservation is somehow anathema to the mission of Ethereum. And if that's what people believe, the EF will listen to that. And that's how you end up backsliding. I think this conversation is really important because the EF is paying attention. Obviously, they did not expect this reaction to what clearly is meant to be this kind of good vibes type. They've written so many of these over the years, right. And they keep coming with new names for them. And this is another thing that I often criticize Ethereum for is just bad comms generally because they keep inventing new names and coming up with new acronyms and new things that you need to learn and then two years later they stop using those. So there was the splurge and the Verge and the merge and then who got rid of that and then who
- [33:58]
B
comes up with more names? AI model companies or the Ethereum Foundation?
- [34:02]
A
In the AI model companies, they ship the things that they name. So at least.
- [34:06]
B
No, no, it's true, it's true, it's true.
- [34:08]
A
You remember the names.
- [34:08]
B
They have the same name. Name, name, volume. I feel like.
- [34:12]
A
Yeah, but you know, we've had the beam chain, we now have the straw map and we like, there's, there's all these new terms and they can't just have some communication discipline around. Here is the story. Here's what we're doing. We tell the same story every year and you just see us ticking away on the check marks. If the EF could do that, people would be very happy.
- [34:31]
B
But again, at the end of the day, a little bit to Tay's point, other than making sure that people can't rug each other in the low level, isn't it a good sign the EF is kind of doing this and it doesn't matter. People are still using Ethereum. I feel like at the end of the day, that's all it matters, right?
- [34:48]
A
Yeah. Look, right now it's obviously epiphenomenal. If this is it, and there was just a big argument about some document, that's a great outcome. I think what everyone is afraid of, like what myself and David are afraid of, is that this is the EF testing. Hey, is it okay? Did we do the thing that you wanted? Did we respond to your concerns? Last year we did. Great. Now we can go back to doing what we were doing before.
- [35:10]
E
Right? Are you guys for long?
- [35:13]
A
The answer is no. Absolutely not. Stay the course. Yes, that is the response that the community is trying to deliver them. No, stay the course.
- [35:21]
E
This is why when I say the document, it's not about what it said, it's about what it didn't say or telling us what it's not like. I read this document as a dog whistle, not a statement of its values.
- [35:33]
D
Okay, I want to go back to the. If you were starting a new on chain thing today, where would you choose? Today? Seriously? Because two, three, four years ago. Yeah, you're going to do an L. Two, you're going to do Solana. Why? Because. Well, one, because they'll literally give you so much money. So much money. Right. To even the Ethereum foundation is going to like is. Is supporting this L2 thing. And if you're not super keen on the. So me and Kane call it the. The Ethereum communism. The vibe. Right. It's. Then yeah, then you go to Salon if you want to ship if you want to. If you. If you're fine with nihilism. If you're. If you. Money, money, money, then people went to Solana. But at the end of the day, the reason why people chose these other things is like a very big mix of financial incentives and vibes and really like nobody, including anyone in Ethereum nor the Ethereum foundation was saying you should build on eth today. I think it's different. Most L2s at this point, I would not have faith are going to continue to exist in their current form. Think about it. Because if you're building something on chain, you want people to be there, you want the network effects. It's not necessarily the tech. You want people there. So where do you build?
- [37:01]
A
I think right now, if you were to take a sample of new startups that are building, I would guess the most common answers are base, Arbitrum and Solana. I think Ethereum Mainnet is pretty far behind. Unless you're doing something that's like asset issuance. If you're doing asset issuance, probably it's on Ethereum.
- [37:22]
E
If you are wearing a suit, you're on the Ethereum layer 1. If you are anyone else. If you're a consumer crypto, you're on Solana first and then base second.
- [37:31]
A
I think even defi. I think most new defi applications are not on Ethereum L1.
- [37:35]
D
Do you think that the base. So like two, three weeks ago, base, they did a big sort of pivot thing too. Right. And like Zora left the consumer.
- [37:44]
A
Yeah, that's right.
- [37:46]
C
Towards more defi. Yeah, no more, you know, it's.
- [37:52]
A
I didn't see it.
- [37:53]
C
Yeah.
- [37:53]
E
They're coming back to additionally expand on Solana. But they didn't leave base.
- [37:59]
B
No, no. But then they had this U turn thing. It was a very. I thought it was. I couldn't tell it was a marketing stunt or like. Yeah, I was like, something was. I was like, this is. Hopefully this is the end of the.
- [38:09]
A
Every time David comes on, we talk about Zora. I feel like it's kind of a pastime now.
- [38:14]
D
It was super weird though, because I was.
- [38:16]
B
It was very confusing. I. And I was just like, this is the weirdest reaction to base dumping coin
- [38:22]
A
okay, well, thank you. I'm also confused now because I didn't see any of this, but it was very.
- [38:28]
D
So anyway, so that's. In my opinion, this is if I'm going to build something on chain arbitrum maybe, but like Polygon optimism.
- [38:38]
C
To your point, what are the largest categories right now that people are excited about? We are talking about stablecoins, it's perps and prediction markets. Even if I talk to Solana people, they bemoan the fact that there is no good perp Dex on Solana. They're all like, oh, how do we get an actually good perp Dex on Solana? What is the second largest perp dex? It's lighter. It's an L2 on Ethereum. I just checked. They've never tweeted about it. They never tweeted about Polymarket, like, what the fuck are you doing? You have nothing for the actual categories people want to invest into. Builders are excited about. It's all this other random old crap that they're promoting and talking about. And so it's like just so like tone deaf. It's like, you know, you. I don't know, it just, it's kind of insane to me.
- [39:13]
D
Yeah. And I think that by the way, when you, when you talk like, because so on the other show, right, it's me and Kane and Luca. Luca explicitly says that like he loves Solana because he felt supported by Solana people, the Solana foundation and then there's like a few other orgs around the Solana foundation and he was like, they would network with me, connect me. Like I wanted to ship. They weren't chilling Dallas to me and I 100% get that. I just don't think, I think that there are also downsides to that. And today Ethereum, if you have faith in the fact that like it literally can't stop you and is not going to stop you, and if you have faith that it's going to continue to like basically scale and get cheaper and get faster, ETH is a pretty damn good place to build today because you know it's going to be there and you've like all the risk is basically gone. Right? They're not going to run you. They're. They're not. Sorry, they're not going to create a partnership with you. Right? But they're also not going to rug that partnership in a year. And I think that that's incredibly important, especially where we are at in the market. I don't know. That's just me.
- [40:25]
A
I mean, look, if you're if you're a startup, you are not shopping around for who's not going to rug you. You know, like maybe if you're a big institution and you are, you know, issuing, I think, platform risk, that's what you care about is who's not going to rug you. No, if you're a startup, all you care about is just the first person to give a shit about you because by default, nobody gives a shit about you because you're a startup. Why would anyone care about you? So it's true. But there is a little more.
- [40:47]
B
There is a little bit more. I don't think it's zero. Like you guys are discounting, obviously.
- [40:51]
A
Obviously. If you're going on like some way, you know, if you're, if you're thinking about building on, I don't know, scroll or something, then yeah, okay, you're thinking about platform risk. But if you're, if you're thinking about Arbitrum or Base or Solana, you're not worried about platform risk. Like, I just don't talk. Founders never tell me that they're worried about platform risk on any of these platforms. Like, it's, it's just there's a fake story. I've never heard it.
- [41:11]
E
Right. And like, the idea that LUCA is, is pleased by the experience that he has from the Solana ecosystem to me is what is missing from leadership from the EF of founders come and they get support, not just from the ef, but they get support from like a culture of people who are about growth, broadly speaking. And like the, the Solana community, like love Luka and they'll talk about LUCA and they'll tweet about LUCA and, and like they'll broadly support each other and support builders. And that is a culture that Ethereum used to have because we were the only game in town. And now Solana really has that much more than us. And Ethereum is far more selective about it because it is not a, a layer one for cute fuzzy penguins. It is a sanctuary coin to protect people from authoritarian regimes. And that is what the statement of this document is once again.
- [42:10]
A
Well, so look, I want to defend some element of this, right, because I think it's not surprising that a incumbent is going to behave differently from an upstart, right? So take the Facebook Marketplace, right? So back when the Facebook Marketplace first started, top app on it was farmville. And then you've got Zynga Poker and all these kind of social casino type games and they're all pretty unseemly, right? They're not really super great things to be beating your chest and talking about how you're improving the world. Because they all do kind of suck and everyone knows that. And they're appealing to the seven deadly sins. Right? I think it's reasonable for Ethereum to say, like, look, we're not going to advertise Pump Fund on the main Ethereum account even if Pump Fund exists on Ethereum, because it's just not a good look. And we're trying to play to a bigger audience than every, like, you know, if you're an upstart chain, if you're, you know, Monad or maybe even if you're Solana, you're just playing for trying to get on that big stage. And like Solana is now on the big stage. And Solana doesn't advertise Pump Fun either. Right? Go look at, go look at Solana account. How often do they talk about Pumped off Fun? They don't. They don't talk about it. In fact, the Pump Fun people complain that Solana doesn't support them and that's why they're now also talking about multi homing. So the reality is like it's not unique to Ethereum that they're not trying to associate themselves with these kind of unseemly aspects of crypto culture. But there, but I do think that there's a far cry from okay, you won't retweet Pump Fun to. You won't retweet anybody who's not basically a nonprofit. Right. Or like, who's not just, you know, some kind of values aligned. Okay, I'm building a ZK self sovereign thing for agents. It's like, okay, this is like two users anywhere and this is the thing that you're retweeting, right? So I think there's a middle ground that the EF is, has been encouraged to find and is resisting arriving at that middle ground. And I think people would take that, you know, I don't think they're expecting you to become Solana or to become like a startup. Right. I don't think it's appropriate for Ethereum to take on that kind of risk posture.
- [44:05]
C
But I think they are doing this shit. They're like retweeting virtuals, retweeting some like meme, coin, open, clock out. Like they just highlight a bunch of random bullshit no one uses because they're idiots. So yeah.
- [44:16]
A
All right.
- [44:17]
D
By the way, it's just like, tell
- [44:18]
B
us how you really feel. Tom.
- [44:20]
E
Tom.
- [44:20]
B
We had to wait 45 minutes to get like how you really feel.
- [44:24]
D
Okay, all right, here I have it. I have the advice though. Right. Here's the thing. There are issues with the ef, with Vitalik, with, with. There are downsides if they go and they shill pump on or anything else that's like super degenerate and potentially illegal. There are issues. There are, there are, Right. However, there are a lot of ways to support builders and what they are building and the fact that they are building without shilling the token and the product and the thing, like the underlying thing you can support the fact that people are doing cool things. And that support, I think means so much to startups. It means even more than like a retweet of the, the thing or whatever, right? Because, oh, they see me, right? They see what like I'm doing and they think it's cool. And for me, I know the F specifically when they see you. It is a deep level of support that is unmatched because it's like, okay, we're actually doing something like so cool, right? That like so technically novel. So whatever, like it's, it's in a different vein. And I think if the EF found got creative, they would have no problem doing this and no problem with, with the downsides of shilling shit.
- [45:51]
E
Here's what I would do if I was. If we're just talking about the Twitter narrowly, the way that the EF Twitter account can support or the Ethereum Twitter account can support it should take some of Ethereum's biggest successes over the last couple years. Some of the newer successes, Morpho comes to mind, Athena comes to mind. And I would tweet out milestones, Morpho milestones of like 1 billion deposits of capital into Morpho. And then I would take the crops part of my mandate and I'd be like, crops censorship resistance. $1 billion of censorship resistant assets deposited into morpho unruggable assets. And I would apply it to my mandate framework that I just wrote and I would go down the list of the most successful, maybe not early stage, because who knows, it might turn into a pump fund and we don't really want to support unsavory stuff we don't really know, but at least the medium tier and top tier successful examples on Ethereum. And then I would espouse the way that those startups fit into crops or the way that crops supported those startups, especially if we can get the privacy too. And then that way Ethereum can support its own ecosystem, we can encourage development and growth and Startups to have successful economic outcomes and we can always put it through a lens of Ethereum cypherpunk values on the Twitter account and that is just on the Twitter. I hope we can like apply this broadly where growth in the lens of Ethereum's values, the crops values is good and that's what the EF should, should do to promote stuff.
- [47:32]
D
Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with, I especially agree with like it's not just the new brand new projects that need the retweet. It is like people built stuff, they scaled it up, they leveled up, they made it more whatever they hit, whatever it is. I think that that's massively important and I think a lot of what we've seen just over time and what the EF rejects right is this very, very increasingly short term thinking. And I think that that's one reason why the EF has been hesitant to like sort of support basically anything.
- [48:10]
B
I will say though the dual of that is that you only support things that are so long term that their probability of success is basically zero. So then your kind of expected value of support is zero, close to zero also in the sense of like a lot, a lot of the like identity for agents type of stuff and like stuff that has, is like still very far from realistic and then giving. You know I remember how people got mad from like DEFCON last year about like how the roadmap is five years, you know, like and like it was like five years for this thing. I kind of feel like there's a little bit of like there's also this too long term like it. There's a Goldilocks amount of time to be kind of talking about and like if you project too far it's like at some point it's pure religion and less like practical realizability. Right. So there's like kind of a duality of these things. You go too short term, fine, it's like unsavory, legally, reputationally, et cetera. But if you go too long term also you're not the long now foundation. Like you are trying to build a product that people use. There is a difference.
- [49:18]
A
I mean look, I actually defend the EF taking very long horizon. I mean I think the reason why people objected to the five year roadmap was that it's like you don't have five years to scale. I don't think it's that there was a plan that encompassed five years. It was that it was going to take five years to scale the L1 and I think that's like motherfuckers. No, we're not waiting five years. You're going to lose the game. But the idea that Ethereum should not be thinking in five year chunks. I mean they have hundreds of millions of dollars. They absolutely.
- [49:44]
B
I don't mean that way. I don't, I don't mean that way. I mean, I mean the point of like some of the companies that are promoted especially in blog posts.
- [49:52]
A
Right, right. No, so that I obviously agree with
- [49:54]
B
that part is like companies that not only have no users or like working but they like are working on technology that's like probably too early. So like those startups are not. Are like usually the ones that haven't, you know, are. They certainly need support. But I think like it's like a different, different thing than like their high, you know, it's like highlighting you know, you know, a decentralized stablecoin with like so little liquidity that it can deep in like with thousand dollars of trades. Sure. And the, and saying like okay, all the centralized stable coins on the chain are bad and doomed is like there is kind of like a little bit of like that part I don't personally get some kind of like we've tried so many times on, on the, the other ones and actually they've caused more financial losses to people than the high risk defi in some ways. So like the thing that has kept people's money safe has been the centralized stablecoins for better or worse. Right. Like I'm just empirically so it's like you can't totally say they're useless and shitty and whatever. Right. Like they have done something for the ecosystem and keeping alive.
- [51:03]
A
Yeah.
- [51:03]
B
So there's stuff like that where I'm like, I always find I can't like map those two things.
- [51:07]
A
Yeah. I think this is part of the contradiction that also is at the heart of the ef which is that it reminds me a little bit of the Chinese government in that like the Chinese government calls itself socialist. Right. Like nominally it's supposed to be a socialist country and yet in many ways one of the most capitalist countries in the world. That's why they've become such a successful manufacturing powerhouse. Right. And so in the same way like you know, Ethereum kind of espouses this kind of cocktail party socialism talk and yet like Ethereum did an ico, it had venture backers like it and it almost like the EF itself seems to maybe to some extent and obviously this has lessened over time, but they kind of think it's like better to be an NGO or to be a nonprofit or to just be like, you know, working on ZK Tech than to build a product that people want and to launch it on Ethereum. And the reason why ETH is valuable, the reason why the EF treasury is valuable, the reason why like all of this experiment, the grand experiment can continue on, is because people are out there to try to make their fortune on Ethereum. Like people are not. Most people are not building on Ethereum because they are wanting to build a sanctuary. They're building on Ethereum because they want to create something valuable for other people and they want to make money. And it's okay to just accept that.
- [52:18]
B
I think there is a. The sense in which the long term vision of the sanctuary is fine and good. Right? Like everyone who's been crypto long enough, you were always kind of 10 years ago, there was no. Or a little more than 10 years ago, there was really no other reason you weren't. Unless you were like, I want to just do play satoshi dice or like whatever the, the Ponzi scheme of the 2014 flavor was. But most people I think, who are like really in crypto or not were like more focused on these value alignment type things. And I think there is a sense in which it makes sense to have those, but it doesn't necessarily make sense to promote things that only touch the extremes of those values because that's a small surface versus the whole ecosystem. And somehow I think that's where the fight is. Do we only focus on the boundary near this frontier of this vision, which might be shrinking as the world changes, or do we try to capture how this intersects the rest of the universe?
- [53:19]
E
I don't know if that's where the fight is, Tarun, because I'm going to sound like I'm a broken clock here, but to me the fight is to articulate what Haseeb said, which I agree with, is you have the values, the crops, the censorship, resistance, the decentralization, the security, the privacy. That cypherpunk stuff that Vitalik really, really likes, that the EF really, really likes. That's one half of the equation. That's Ethereum's soul. And this document, this EF mandate was like, here's a reaffirmation of our vows towards Ethereum's soul. And then you actually have the Ethereum body, the Ethereum economy, which is Uniswap, which is Morpho, which is Makerdao Aave, all the things that like kind of pay the bills, all the things that produce MEV that like incent people to stake Ethereum, that get this economic flywheel going.
- [54:10]
B
USDC and USDT also, which I think
- [54:15]
E
stable coins that love Ethereum. All the things that got attracted to Ethereum because of Ethereum's values represent the body of Ethereum. And you have a soul, which is Ethereum's purpose, its values, its crops. And then you have the body, which is the economic engine. And these things turn on each other and, and they create a flywheel and hopefully they, they grow bigger. And so, like, I don't know if the fight to ruin is like, which projects do we promote again? Like beating a dead horse here. The fight is like, some of the Ethereum leadership doesn't agree that we need the body at all. Like, it's actually just.
- [54:51]
B
I mean, that's fair. That's fair. If, if that is actually what I think that that's. I just don't know if I can maybe I'm like, not trying to read too much into like intent verse.
- [55:01]
C
What is happening to.
- [55:03]
B
I just don't see that exactly there, you know? Like, I agree that maybe you can, you can definitely infer that. But I'm. I don't know, I'm here. Other, other people build on Ethereum all the time and are successful doing it in spite and like, probably never interact with EF and like that. I feel like the fact they can do that has already proven out something. Right?
- [55:25]
D
And that's the thing is that, like, I don't know. And maybe it's just because my personal experience, like, dude, I was literally running. I was literally in the middle of like the biggest, earliest Ethereum things non stop. Like, Vitalik didn't know who the hell I was. Like today, I don't even. I don't know if he knows who I am. Right. It doesn't matter though. Like, that's what makes Ethereum great. Well, you build.
- [55:52]
A
No, no, no, no. But at the, at the time, it didn't matter because there was no one else. There was nothing else. There was nobody else to compete for your attention. But like, if you were building my crypto today, okay, and there were all these other teams that were out there, like, Vitalik doesn't know who you are. He doesn't give a shit. He's off tweeting, right? He's, he's, you know, whatever. Getting into arguments about writing essays. At that time, there were writing essays, writing beautiful essays, and every other blockchain out there is fighting for you and saying, you're amazing and I love your startup And I'm. You know what? I'm going to give you money. I'm going to help you hire a team. I think that you're awesome. And we. And Ethereum does not deserve your talents. Are you really going to tell me that that doesn't matter?
- [56:35]
D
No, it doesn't.
- [56:35]
A
It doesn't matter.
- [56:36]
D
Why are they doing 100% matters? And I think that like, my biggest issue with the last few years is that the, the entire ecosystem, Ethereum and Solana collectively, for different reasons, as if they were fighting, right? Said, no, there's no future on Ethereum. Wherever you're gonna build, don't build on Ethereum. And I think it was the most absurd thing that I've ever experienced in my entire life. It was absolutely hysterical. It was so ass backwards. I gave David a lot of shit because I was like, how the hell you talk about Ethan's money when literally nobody is choosing to build here. Okay? But we, we're at a different point now, okay? And I, yes, right now people are still going to build on Solana. That's fine. But I think that, like, I don't know, if I was the ef, I would be focused on one. Exactly what they're focused on, which is like the core of the platform has to be these things. If it is not, then everything else falls apart, right? Because anyone can build here. You can build the most government simpy thing that you want to decentralized thing. You can build that on Ethereum and literally nobody can stop you and you can be successful. And then number two is that how do you support builders? What can EF do to support builders? And I think that it goes way beyond the tweets. I think it's the networking. And if the EF doesn't want to directly network with people or for people, they just have to connect people, right? Like, they just have to have a few people that go, yo, you are of this degenerate thing that we don't like. But I know this other degenerate over here that I also don't like and I'll connect you. And now you have a support group, right? Like, that's what we always did. That's what Defi Summer did, right? That's what all the early builders over the summer, they weren't going to the. Yeah, sorry. This is just like super funny. Robert was not going to talk into the EF to build the compound, okay? He wasn't. Like, none of them were. They were all trying to survive. They're all almost out of money.
- [58:34]
B
I Don't think I will tell you. I don't think he's ever really talked to them ever in many years.
- [58:42]
D
And, and that's the thing. But every single company that made it through that bear and then exploded during Defi summer, they had each other, right? And there were enough people and there was enough sort of community support around them and it didn't matter. And it doesn't matter today that the EF wants to be whatever they want to build or if they, if they want to be cyberpunk, that's fine, you don't have to, you can still be successful here and nobody can stop you. And that's what actually matters. Because everywhere else I don't think that that's like maybe it's a very, very, very long tail risk, especially for new startups, but I still think that it's a risk when you're choosing where to build.
- [59:21]
E
None of these things are binaries. So like yes, it's amazing that we can build like you know, multimillion dollar billion dollar companies on Ethereum without ever talking to the EF with the data that we have coming out of like you know, people that were building in 2019 and into 2020 when DEF 2021, when the NFT mania happened, Ethereum was the only game in town. Like all people were going to go and did go to Ethereum because they basically had a monopoly on smart contract block space. So there's some like anomaly in the data there. We also do know that culture matters and even in decentralized ecosystems culture is set from the top down and that ripples out into the whole surrounding community, whether it's a centralized project like Binance or a decentralized project like, like Ethereum. And we do know that we do have data that the vibe of Ethereum, which I'll claim is set from the top, impacted builders decisions as to where they chose to build. So yes, you can still permissionlessly choose to build on Ethereum, but it again is going to go back to was it in spite of the disposition and the culture set from the top of Ethereum or was it in alignment with that? And I wish that it was more in alignment with what the Vibe set in these Vibe documents is.
- [60:41]
A
So I think I agree with most of what Tay said, but I disagree with a couple pieces in particular and one of them is this idea that the EF doesn't matter. They're this kind of artifact of stodgy old mandarins living in an ivory tower and who cares what they have to say. And it Actually does. Again, coming back to the Chinese government
- [60:59]
D
analogy to clarify this, it does matter. It 100% matters. However, like, as a builder who is built on Ethereum for a decade. Right. It doesn't matter. That's in my.
- [61:12]
A
Okay, so I'm going to take my summary as it. From the builder's perspective. From the builder's perspective, you should be able to get the fuck over it and build your own startup and just move on. And like, why are you so fixated on what's happening in this nonprofit in the sky? Right? I mean, that's effectively the. The argument.
- [61:28]
D
So as a builder, you should be empowered by the fact that, like, nobody can stop you. Go, go build your heart out and like, total. Right. The Ethereum foundation. You guys need to get a heck of a lot better at empowering builders.
- [61:44]
A
Right?
- [61:45]
E
Yes.
- [61:45]
A
Okay, so I look, I think, I think that's a great sales pitch to entrepreneurs. Okay. The reality is that it's not being heard right now. Like, when I go to look at startups, most of them are not building on Ethereum mainnet. And it's just like, I mean, just how many of the startups that you can think of that launched in the last year launched on Ethereum mainnet? Yeah, a small portion of that.
- [62:05]
D
That's the issue.
- [62:06]
A
So now the question is like, okay, how does that issue get solved? And I think part of it comes from the fact also that relative to five years ago. Right, five years ago, when you're talking about when Compound was created and my crypto even farther back than that, the reality was that there just weren't that many voices. And because there weren't that many voices, the EF also mattered less at the margin. Because most people think about consensus and think about the people who are the early L2 creators, before they'd even built the L2s, they were all part of the Ethereum tent in a way. The Ethereum voices were a lot louder and they were more consistent than they are today. The reality is that now everybody has a bag, okay? Everybody has gotten somewhere. Everybody's become someone.
- [62:49]
B
And because everyone who's still around.
- [62:51]
A
Everyone is still around. Sure, everyone is still around. And so like, everybody, like, there aren't that many people now even, like, listen to Joe Lubin. Joe Lubin's pimping Linea. You know, he's got his own stuff going on. Like, he's not. He's not, hey, go build on. He's like, yo, come build on Linnea.
- [63:06]
B
Isn't that just more a problem with like, the L2 just construct.
- [63:10]
A
No, it's not a problem with like capitalism works. No, this is how capitalism works. Is that like over a long enough period of time. It is on you, the organization that was entrusted with the hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the keep the fucking thing going. It's not on us, it's not on everybody else.
- [63:29]
E
This was donkrad's point donkrad when donkrad retweeted the ETH mandate article and he said the problem with Ethereum BD is everyone has their own self interest and we are just copy and pasting the same structural pattern that the layer twos offered. When we create a vacuum of power as like we don't want to do this thing Ethereum, we don't want to scale. We'll just leave it up to the free market and then we have 20 competing standards all with our own self interests because there's no direction or leadership when it comes to growth being done by the ef. Now there's a little bit of a difference there where crops and like the whole cypherpunk stuff we need to scale Ethereum in order to do the cypherpunk stuff and we don't need to do BD to do the cypherpunk stuff. And so there's a little bit of a difference there but it's the same structural problem of the EF doesn't want the responsibility so they're leaving it up to the free market and the free market is not organizing, it is not organized around alignment around what is good in the best interest of Ethereum which is when there are market failures you need the top down agency entity to insert its influence to the best of its ability to provide a coherent direction which the EF has in this document is stating that it does not want to do.
- [64:42]
A
That said I still, I do resonate with Tay's point which is almost one of kind of heroic empowerment of the entrepreneur which is there's also a line from Chinese history about the government which is that heaven is high and Beijing is far away which is a way of saying that like hey, there may be some power that be but it's very far away and it's focused on other shit and they probably don't care what I'm doing. And so even if the EF doesn't like what you're doing, if you're running pump font on Ethereum mainnet they're not going to stop you, no one's going to stop you. In fact even if you're doing it On Solana, no one's going to stop you. As a matter of fact, they are doing it on Solana and no one's stopping them. And so the reality is that, yes, as an entrepreneur, I completely agree with you. It doesn't matter that much whether the EF is doing a good job or a bad job or whether it's communicating this or that. For the most part, almost every blockchain that's efficiently decentralized gives you massive power to just do what you want to and build your own protocol or business or whatever it is that you want to do. And I think that's beautiful. But that does not release the EF from their stewardship over the Ethereum community. And that means more than just being a priesthood and protecting the values of Ethereum. It's not all you need to protect. You also need to protect the growth of Ethereum because there's an economy that you're stewarding alongside a ethical system that you're stewarding.
- [66:01]
E
Yes, agree.
- [66:03]
A
Yeah, Okay. I feel. I feel that's fair.
- [66:10]
B
I was not educated enough to make such so many inferences together. I was just kind of like, I
- [66:17]
A
don't know that we're more educated than you. I think we're just more. More worked up than you are.
- [66:21]
B
Yeah, I just kind of. I'm like, this has happened so many times. Like, it just feels like it keeps rotating. I don't know. I.
- [66:27]
E
It does feel like Groundhog Day.
- [66:29]
B
Yeah.
- [66:30]
C
I don't know.
- [66:30]
B
Somehow I'm like, haven't I seen the story before?
- [66:33]
E
Right, right. Yeah, it's like they. It was a slow news of livestock. We all interpret it, like, everyone interprets it slightly differently, but.
- [66:41]
B
But actually, you know what's interesting? You guys. You guys were talking about, like, what has been the most, like, where are builders going? What have been the, like, successful platforms in terms of things where people built something successful? I mean, the interesting thing is it's like things that are much more restrictive than smart contracts like Hip3, where it's like a particular subdomain. That's where you're seeing, like, that's where you see people going and competing on building stuff. And I do just wonder if there's also this natural thing where if you're really general purpose, inevitably there's this move back and forth between special purpose and general purpose. And we're just kind of in this current market cycle where it's like super special purpose. And all it takes is like one innovation in composability for people to suddenly be like, oh, shit, I got to go back to the, the shared state and there's some type of like everyone is. It's a bear market in shared state or something and like that's why everyone's so worked up about this. That's like my thesis for you guys.
- [67:40]
D
Yeah, I mean I, I wish more than anything that we saw more people building more applications and like things for me to do because yeah, I can go do perps and stuff. It's just not. That's not really my game. I thought Defi Summer was like way more fun even. And. And then you have prediction markets which are. There are some days where they like I'm super on board. But it can't be the only. I'm sorry, it can't be the only thing.
- [68:09]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean look, I described it to someone the other day as trading corn futures is not as fun as trading corn themed tokens.
- [68:17]
D
You know, literally. So it can be silly, it can be fun, it can be experimental. Like that is the vibe that, that, that we sort of lost right in the last couple years. And I don't think that Solana has that vibe. I think that like it's too hyper financialized and too nihilistic. I think Ethereum still does have it and I think that perhaps that's one reason why I'm not as like morally opposed to the sort of like these vision statements is that the ecosystem naturally trends towards like a, a certain thing. And like the EF being over here, even if we reject their vision, it does like pull things back and then you're gonna end up landing in like with things like Defi Summer with things like the actual like the blue chip defy things with things like NFTs. Right? Where yeah, it's I don't know, get, it's. Get. It's. It's very casino. Yeah, right. But it's not off the frickin deep end of nihilism. And so then you have innovation and stuff that can come out of it that's much more like net beneficial in the long term. Right. Because Defi is still here.
- [69:23]
B
Arguably stablecoins wanting to be used by everyone in the world owes it to Defi. Proving that it worked right, like that it was useful, you could use it. People understood what blows up, what doesn't blow up. Right. And I think the problem is that lag between the on chain native people using it and like your local bank or even like a revolut using it is like turns out to be like seven years, not like, not like a year unfortunately. It's like the opposite of AI where it's like, uptake is instant.
- [69:57]
D
Yeah.
- [69:58]
A
Well, I think I speak for all of us when I say that Ethereum was my first love in crypto. It was really what convinced me to come into the space more than just bitcoin. Bitcoin was cool. Bitcoin was. Oh, it's a great financial asset. But Ethereum was like, oh, my God, this is going to change everything. And so I think it's.
- [70:15]
B
I didn't see you as a seed oil and red meat only kind of person, but that's just.
- [70:19]
A
No, I'd never quite. Never quite got there. But it's because I feel that kind of deep, like, love and allegiance to Ethereum. It's kind of like watching an old friend of yours, like, become more and more religious and start to get a little crazy, and you're just kind of like, oh, no. This seems like maybe you really feel that this does seem bad for you. Like, I don't know how to describe it, but it does seem bad for you. That's how I feel a little bit. Seeing what's happening, I feel similar.
- [70:44]
B
So I think we can end this podcast by realizing Haseeb and David are going to clearly start a new podcast where they can focus.
- [70:51]
A
That's right. No, no, we need a counterpoint. That's the problem. We need a counterpoint. So, Tay, you're invited, and then, Tom, we can bring you in as, like, the Grinch who just. All right, beautiful. Okay, with that, I think we're wrapped. Thanks, everybody.
- [71:08]
E
Thank you, guys.
- [71:10]
D
Awesome. Take care, guys.