Exploring Ethereum's Role in Shaping the Future of Blockchain | KBW2023

[Music] hello everyone good afternoon um I am jacqulyn melanic as he mentioned I'm a senior crypto reporter at Tech runch and I'm here with Jeremy Miller it's not Millar actually um and he is the chief development officer at consensus right Jeremy yep so I guess to let the audience know a little bit more about you can you kind of tell us how you got into consensus this world and what brought you here I know you've been here for a while but prior to that like what were you up to yeah in 2015 I was working in venture capital and was looking at various forms of future fintech and started exploring what was going on in Bitcoin and crypto more generally and talk to everyone in the space at the time and wrote a big research piece on it that got read hundreds of thousands of times and um decided I was going to do it full-time and spend a bunch of time with a bunch of companies and ended up you know spending more time with Joe and consensus than anyone else lose maybe 20 people 30 people at consensus at the time and joined formally in April 2016 I think and then looking at consensus the last conversation was about all things Bitcoin and I feel like consensus kind of has like a focus on ethereum uh I know you mentioned that you have a multi-chain vision but can you kind of tell us about your position there yeah well I mean a lot of our position in the ethereum ecosystem is historic uh Joe was a co-founder of ethereum and uh there are various tellings of what happened but um sort of our perspective or Joe's perspective on it is you know after the network was launched Joe felt passionately that that there should be a software company building software for ethereum between sort of the beta launch and the mainnet going live and he sought out engineers and entrepreneurs to go and do that um consensus began as a venture Production Studio where we had at one point over a hundred companies that we were building or working with and more recently is a now is two separate entities mesh. XYZ that continues sort of the Venture production route but also consensus or consensus software Inc which is home to metamask and infura and some of the core ethereum tools but we very much do believe in a multi-protocol multi-chain world and our products are designed to work that way and probably one of the biggest areas of development over the last certainly two years has been working on multi-chain support and multiprotocol support in all of our products so I know the conference started today but some of the ma major sectors I'm hearing conversations around especially in Korea are gaming institutional involvement and investing in this space I'm curious at like a high level do you agree with that and then why are those three areas so topical right now yeah I think that's pretty aligned with uh a lot of what we're seeing I mean I think there are other things too but to take each of those I mean I think gaming uh there's a number of factors why gaming is important obvious viously you know we've seen some success with things like axi we've seen some other uh sort of fan engagement platforms do fairly well some of the stuff around football and card trading games of doing fairly well but I think the real reason why gaming is such a Hot Topic is so much money went into gaming 18 months ago and so if you look at where Venture Capital funding went during the last bull market say between you know summer of or fall of 21 and the spring of 22 before things blew up the biggest area of venture investment in crypto was in games and so there's a whole bunch of money that's gone into AAA games that are going to be released over the next 6 to 24 6 to 12 months so there's a bunch just a bunch of titles in the pipeline uh that are coming um and corresponding with the of the titles is obviously you know a whole bunch of innovation sort of you know various people call it different things app chains l3s you know propri you know self-developed l2s however you want to describe it has been going along alongside that and so you know there's a whole ecosystem there's a whole ecosystem in crypto going up growing up around games right now but there aren't there haven't been so many hits yet so I think that explains it on the institutional side I mean obviously you've seen some announcements predominantly in the US but also elsewhere around institutional appetite for launching products whether they're ETFs or other products that can bring in you know ultimately more retail money or institutional money is is exciting uh particular we've seen you know softening regulatory stances particularly in Asia which we think is hugely positive uh and then on the investment side I mean under hash not Financial advice I mean uh by the dip I mean I think there is a general sense in crypto that the level of activity in the Builder Community when you come to events like this is as high as it's ever been right um while there are concerns around the ability to raise money in the current market regardless of what sector you're in if you're in Venture right now and you need to raise money in the next six months you better have good metrics um and you know probably doubly true if you're in crypto but many of the crypto companies are well funded um you know so I think the I think the investment thesis around our sector generally right now is given the level of technical Innovation that we're seeing given the level of compelling sort of higher level applications whether they're social or gaming or what have you uh I think there's anticipation that there is you know another wave coming at some time in the near future certainly from an activity standpoint it feels that way obviously ethereum is one of the biggest if not arguably the biggest blockchains out there for developer activity by market cap it's the second largest behind Bitcoin I would say there's probably more Innovation being done on ethereum than Bitcoin I don't know if that's a controversial thing to say but I'd love to hear your take on how ethereum is positioning itself within those three sectors we just talked about and then for consensus too like what are you doing with your products to kind of get into those areas yeah so we think about I mean Joe likes the term Metropolitan ethereum so we think about ethereum as an ecosystem not just about you know the L1 uh so we think about l2s l3s app chains anything that runs the evm uh you know if you want to run run a bunch of EVMS and use Cosmos for inter blockchain communication great that's that's still that's still for from our perspective part of the ethereum community more broadly I mean where we are in the ethereum community today is volumes on l2s are already bigger than what's on l1s right so the future of ethereum has been fairly well telescribe or telescoped for some time right vitalic posts various updates on where he thinks ethereum's going but most of the things that vitalik's posting about seem to be informed by things he's actually seeing in the community so there's a really positive feedback loop and you know at the ethereum's done a pretty good job of when it sees interesting ideas and other ecosystems that could be useful for ethereum of like learning about them and seeing how they fit in so I don't think I think what's interesting about ethereum philosophically and you know especially if you hear you know the foundation speak and what have you is to try and keep the actual organizing structure as minimal as possible and allow permissionless Innovation to come from the builders and that seems to be working um from a consensus perspective in terms of our products you know our role well we do we do spend a lot of work on the protocol level on all the all core devs calls Etc but from a product perspective you know like many people in the space we are thinking about what does it look like when you have a billion users and what do those products need to be like and what do developers need for an environment so that they can build the things that a billion people might want to use and how do you make that happen in a way that is more of a web 3 environment than a web two environment and so you know our two core products are metamask and and fura and three today including our zkm Network Linea um but what we're what what we're really thinking about in the longer term is how do you think about a billion users in web 3 and it was interesting I was having a conversation with Dan Finley the founder of metamask one of the founders of metamask last week and we were describing we were talking about well what will a wallet look like in a future and I said to him look I want to go to a place where I wake up in the morning and I can see all the relevant news about everything that I'm following everything I hold in my wallet you know I've got my nfts my art the games I'm playing my social my crypto asset Holdings and what's going on the Dows I'm in what proposals are coming do I have any work assignments to you he said look never once in that did you say which network am I on right and so the tooling that we're dealing with today and the way we interact with these is still it's still uh pretty early stage like we're seeing things like Rabbi and you know and and metamask and various of the wallets take big steps forward in terms of what you know true native multi Network looks like right but that's not ultimately but we're at a point in time where you still need to think about it and that's not where we're going to be when we have a billion users right because a billion users will not be willing to configure their RPC endpoints they just won't be they're going to need something where they come in like let's say let's say you log on to a new wallet and you're in South Korea if you're and you're Korean well you'd probably like it if it spoke Korean to you not English as a as a general starting point it would probably be useful if it started with Clayton right and it had all the swaps and everything for Clayton right there instead of starting on mainnet right right those are the types of things that you know the product should do out of the box they don't today right you should have a pretty good idea of like hey here are some interesting applications to get started with this is what's trending right now this is where what's interesting right like that's not what the products do today and that's what they and if we're going to have a billion people engaged with them that's what they will need to be doing in the future so I don't know if that really answers the question or not that's all right um You kind of talked about in the beginning how you want to be able to like look at your phone and see all these different apps in one place and coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said that he wants coinbase to become a super app in the past and I know we've talked about this before off the stage Jeremy and I have talked about like super apps so I'm curious if you see a future where metamask can become one of those and if so what would that look like and where's like a road map for that yeah so I'm not the definitive person to talk to about metamask but I certainly have an opinion uh I think I I think that your wallet becomes your passport and it doesn't just become your in a virtual way in that right now we think about wallets you know we've got our Wallets on our phones that have our credit cards in them and then we've got our crypto wallets that we can sign things with right um but imagine having imagine having a totally different uh type of user experience so most of our user experiences at least in web 2 are driven by newsfeeds right Instagram is a Newsfeed driven app Tik Tok is a Newsfeed driven app right well what would a news feed driven crypto wallet look like um it would look very different right you see a stream of things that are happening in the space events alerts this is happening this is happening this is happening notifications D and you'd click on them and you'd go and take actions in web 3 that's very different than how we think about a wallet today so I can imagine having a cockpit a digital dashboard to web 3 that lets me based on what I hold in my token and maybe some things I've looked at or expressed interested in lets me see all the activities going on around the things that I care about so I probably hold the token and then lets me take actions on them in a in an an intelligent way um so that the software is making my life easy for me and helping me do things I want to do I think on that front though in looking at a super app how how can that kind of become marketable to mainstream people who aren't in crypto at all and how can we get to that first billion users I know everyone calls it the next billion users but we don't have a billion to start with so uh well I think there needs to be good things for people to want to do so um one of the things that people actually you know our economy our world spends a lot of time doing we spend a lot of time paying for things in investing in things right like Financial Services is the biggest contributor to Global GDP it's something like 177% right actually it's more than that it's a17 trillion do a year industry out of an80 trillion do a year total GDP so it's like a 20% of the global economy so right there the good thing is crypto started on some good use cases some things that people actually need to do every day to to get through their lives uh and we've already seen quite a lot of adoption around that um but what are the things that have been having adoption the last Rave well nfts were one of them digital art digital scarcity um a lot around social Dows ways of moving into a nomadic lifestyle in which your digital reality moves around with you place to place and you're participating in Dows and getting paid so I think what I think I think the benefits that come from operating in web 3 where you have self-control self- sovereignty privacy Etc what we have to what we have to have is compelling user experiences buil built on those Primitives that allow people to live the lives they want to live and so that the easiest way to live your life the way you want to live it is through web 3 right and like if you don't want to have a job and you want to be a creative and you want to be in five Dows and you want to collect and trade nfts well I guess you're going to be doing a lot of stuff in your wallet and on a bunch of websites and on Twitter and stuff that you know a web two mindset wouldn't think about and so I think it's about having it's about it's about having the compelling experiences and uses uses there for people already right so we're not thinking about trying to fix things in web 2 like that's that that's a reverse Salient you deal with that in you deal with that later you think you have to and I really mean that like you deal with that later uh you need to focus on the things that are 10 or 100 times better in web 3 and and making those things really slick and compelling and and then people will want people will be using them not because they're cool or Innovative but because they derive a lot of utility from them I mean once you've done any sort of complex transaction in defi using crypto you never want to go into a bank again because despite the clunkiness of the actual Graphics in the user interface the user experience of being able to watch your transaction sell on ether scan see it in your wallet have the money immediately available for you to do whatever you want versus going into a bank is so much better it's just it's so much better already right like I I you know and so what happens when that applies to lots of other components of our life right you know we're going to see that that's what I think does it and so I think our role as a software company is to do two things it's to create the tools developers need to build those experiences and then create the end user layer that allows those experiences to be rendered beautifully and easily to the end user you kind of talked about uh Web 2.0 companies and like their involvement in the space I'm curious what is the Enterprise market like today for those who may want to get into the ethereum ecosystem or even work with consensus like traditional Brands big Brands what are they trying to say uh well I think that's changed a great deal over the last over my time in crypto so when I started in crypto every major bank had an innovation lab that was playing around with Bitcoin and ethereum and tokens and we started something called the Enterprise ethereum Alliance I spent a bunch of time doing that um and then you know 2018 2019 that sort of went away and then what we saw in like 2021 in particular is like so who do I think and and when I think of someone doing Enterprise crypto today my favorite company is Nike I think what Nike is doing with the way they engage with their audience and allow for like now custom sakers to be forged if you hold the nft you get in at the right time Etc to me that's really interesting and so the conversation I want to have with Nike is how do you when you do this you know you've got your users over here in metamask and then you've got your Nike app your Nike website you've got a workflow through it goes through the Discord what do you need us to do in metamask to make that work better for your users right and that's the conversation and that's where the conversation I think is starting to go whereas I think five years ago it was about can you set up a private chain within my bank so I can try and do some syndicated loan Po and I think there is still some work going on like that but it's being much more isolated I think a lot of that work shifting to people working on L2 stacks and I think think sort of the private Network Market you know something I'm very passionate about but I think it's it's it's it's it's not a very big market and it's largely going away so I think you know I think I I think about Enterprise in our space Sorry in two different ways one is companies that see what's interesting in web 3 and actually want to participate in web 3 then the other interesting Market is uh providing tools for web 3 companies so there's a whole uh group of companies that are getting funded that do things like build token tables for web 3 companies run crypto payroll for web 3 companies you know do dow analytics and DOW votings and you know various things like that to me that's a very interesting category because I see web 3 is starting to become an economy that's self- sustaining where there's enough players in web 3 doing trade with each other that they are making enough money off of the different companies in web 3 that you're starting to get a a self-sustaining economy in web 3 itself and so I'm really interested in the software stack that powers that and and thinking about then if Nike's out here doing their drops how does that software what's what are the features they need in that software stack for their drops Etc right so if you're going to do a drop in you're Nike you probably need some custody at some point as an example yeah speaking of Nike or just big brands in general do you think there is a desire from these companies to actually have these like self-controlled environments where they don't have a say in what happens there and it's in a decentralized nature I think individual companies will have individual philosophies and and we should all and everyone everyone should be empowered to be their own agent and advocate for their own position on that but I do think what what what is interesting is I think uh there were there is a certain level of interesting Innovation that's not not just technical but that's happening sort of at the cultural and social layer in web 3 which is attractive for certain brands to participate in and so I think you're seeing some so you're seeing brands do and look all right the Market's different than it was a year and a half ago you know but you you you saw Brands doing big collabs with nft projects right so you instead of like well hey can you build me a private blockchain it's like hey can you build me a t-shirt right it's a slightly different conversation yeah it's a bit simpler I would argue but um how has ethereum's current technology or infrastructure that exists today kind of inhibited itself from taking on the next wave sure we have layer twos that improve scaling and accessibility of the blockchain but what do you think is the current hurdles and how can those developers or who have you like improve that so I think there you have to separate out between like technical hurdle that the community can solve and sort of systemic risk factors so I would suggest other than you know obviously our industry went through a tough year last year with some notable failings and collapses um that were largely not caused by human error but human greed and dishonesty uh and that had left you know had lot caused lots of damage on in lots of different ways um but one of the one of the biggest so that's one headwind uh I think the other big headwind has been sort of the regulatory response to that right which has made it hard to do anything um and so I I I I would view those extraneous factors as sort of bigger challenges I think uh ethereum has the nice thing about ethereum is the fact that it is decentralized as a philosophy inside of the ecosystem itself allows for lots of permissionless innovation to happen around the evm and around the main chain uh without anyone being in control and that's really great um that that's really great and as you and you point out what's going on with l2s and with app chains I think that's fantastic um you know is there anything specific that's holding the ecosystem back I mean I don't feel like there is structurally and if I thought there was something structural I'd probably be working on that problem I guess um so I don't I think I think there are some things around the edges that can always get better but I think the beauty of the ethereum ecosystem is the minimalistic approach you know the foundation has taken to it and the amount of sort of permissionless innovation that continues to evolve and so you know no one person really owns the road map yes there's a road map yes vitalic presents things but I think you know the people who do that like there's a reason why the ethereum community has something called the cat herters right which is a bunch of senior devs that try to go around from conferences and participate in various eips and Dev calls and stuff to try and keep every things sort of on track and organized as some older Mentor you know Mentor figures in the community literally call themselves cat hurs that's kind of how ethereum works I think kind of going off of that there's a lot of opportunity for Innovation Beyond just like finance and Technology sure that is a major asset to the industry and the ecosystem I will not say that's not true but how can ethereum developers build new use cases Beyond those two sectors and what is consensus kind of doing to also get behind that well I think uh I think I think well I don't think it's the sovereignty of any one company but I think there is a pervasive philosophy in web 3 around self- sovereignty uh privacy preservation right autonomy self- agency and I think and so and the question is how are those Primitives and beliefs going to surface themselves in things like a Next Generation social media platform right and so I think where you've seen the most successful and the greatest Innovation comeing around web 3 it's where people have not only Built something interesting and engaging as an application but they've done through in a way that really follows through on the philosophy of community collaboration Mass coordination Fair economic incentives Etc setad of web three principles and those projects I think that I've observed that sort of when you find a way of building something that's interesting from an engagement perspective that has something Innovative trendy Etc and yet sticks to the principles I think that's where the really interesting stuff is going to come from do you think that will kind of shift over time and we'll see kind of things that we don't even have existing today arise I was listening to a conversation this morning about that I mean dis so like 15 years ago or 20 years ago social media marketing was not a job category now Discord mod is right um you know I mean uh you know and you're going to continue to have that you're going to continue to you're G to you know you know smart contract auditor wasn't a job 10 years ago so for sure things are going to be developed that the the whole the whole point is yeah yeah I mean the interesting thing particularly if you work at the technology level is seeing where the application breakthroughs really happen and you know quite honestly I'm not super great at doing that I'm really good at like what I'm really good at is pattern matching and understanding adoption Trends in underlying Technologies and figuring out what scaling that starts to look like so I'm usually a bit lost when it comes to actually picking the the Breakthrough application so for me it usually appears somewhere that that I don't expect it to in the beginning I brought up three sectors that I saw a lot of conversations around which was web 3 gaming institutional involvement and investing in Asia more specifically Korea I would love to know what are three categories you're following right now well I mean those three for sure um those three for sure I think if I was to add on to that so I continue to believe uh I'm an art lover so I continue to believe in digital art as a category in nfts in particular even if that's less trendy than it was 18 months ago uh I think that we're going to see interesting things at the intersection of AI and crypto um like people are going to build chat Bots or people already are building like defi chat Bots like those things kind of already exist um so the intersection of AI uh and and crypto I think will be interesting and then I think we're only just beginning to see sort of dows and social really start to scale and so I think like even if that has been a core component of web 3 for a while I think like the the level of proliferation and the amount of activity that's happening there is is continues to be astonishing all right I guess there's a lot for us to follow there Jeremy thank you for taking the time to talk today and thank you to everyone for listening in thank you [Music] la