Austin Griffith & Linda Xie I Ethereum Dev Onboarding Day I Agentic Ethereum 2025

[Music] okay we are great awesome well welcome um thanks so much for attending our ethereum Dev onboarding session and thanks eth Global for hosting us um couldn't think of a better person today to give an overview of kind of what's happening in the space and just um getting started with some tools and resources there's just a lot going on in ethereum land so we're excited to go over today um we're going to uh want to make this a very interactive live stream so feel free to ask questions in the chat or if you want you can unmute yourself and uh you can ask questions uh we have 90 minutes today so uh if you feel like you um are confused by something definitely feel free to stop and um ask questions so uh I'll kick it off to Austin and I'll just be monitoring the chat oh no you got to do more than just monitor the chat we go to we got i i i watch some of the old videos and there's way too much mansplaining sa me for myself okay yeah I would definitely stop you there yes so okay first question I have before we get started with the other questions is how do I go watch the vitalic movie I still haven't seen the vitalic movie what do I oh yes okay so for context for the past three years we'd been filming vitalic and um ethereum devs up until the merge and so uh that's called ballic and ethereum story uh we had like a Crypton native distribution uh the end of last year and then we're going to have our mainstream distribution this year in Spring unfortunately cannot share more information than that but it will be we keep our eyes open widespread which is very exciting so yeah awesome okay so goal today is getting started as a developer and maybe even sort of what has changed and maybe even sort of like how is AI going to going to impact all of this and we have some I'm just G to start sharing my screen here we have some questions that you can I just share that doc directly is that okay it's kind of a notes doc with some questions in it but I feel like I just want to share the whole thing and and see how it goes okay cool awesome so there are some like so great questions and we should we should go through all of these there's a lot of like decisions you have to make as a builder but I think the very very like first thing is just like what are the very first steps like how do you as a technical person get started building and I think for me it's uh it's like tinkering with solidity I think you you need to go read the docs like solidity by example solidity by example something like that or uh so either go to solidity by example or go to the solidity dots either one of these are going to give you just a crash course in the syntax of solidity you'll just need a little solidity syntax to figure out uh you know where to go where how do you code these things up and I also have this like big thing here that like we don't exactly know what kinds of things are going to get deployed on a theorum looking back at some of the previous videos we did we were giving you the tools but we really don't exactly know what the next killer app is and that's really going to be the hardest part learning solidity learning the ins and outs of the evm It's Tricky but if you're a technical person you're going to pick it up pretty quickly the hardest challenge the final boss is how are people actually going to use this thing and I think uh this would be fun Linda to maybe just wrap a little bit on who has product Market fit right now uh prediction markets were big this year right yes yeah that was really exciting to see it go completely mainstream and non- crypto people talk about it I think like what's really exciting right now A lot of people are talking about are the AI agent side which is obviously on theme for this um hackathon and so um I think there's a lot that has changed since uh even just the past like one year uh so a lot of people are now like coding with AI um they're able to ship a lot faster we're seeing like a lot of smaller teams actually be able to ship a lot um what we're seeing product Market fitwise I mean there's still a lot of like you know um be able to spin up a token very quickly those are just immensely popular um but I I think like with the AI agent stuff it's going to be really exciting because like these agents can like earn money for people um they can like trade a autonomously or they can do like bounties and earn money by themselves what's also cool is we've on in our own product we've seen people uh these AI agents posting uh work that needs to be done so now you have like AI agents that are hiring humans so that that part's really cool as well um and then we're just I think with this uh us like friendlier regulation I think we're going to see a lot of um companies feel a lot more comfortable like pushing on their crypto stuff so just like a lot more innovation in general potentially coming out of the US so very excited yes I feel like there has been a feeling that I'm not sure if I'm allowed to deploy this thing like it makes sense for the build Guild to have uh onboarding of like you deploy a token that represents your you know success throughout this journey and we can buy in early and give you some help and if you do well and turn into Patric Collins or n or like you know some of that may show up in that token there may be actually some but that's like also like very scary territory but if the president of the United States is doing it maybe it's okay like yes we're we're in yes that we're in like a wild west kind of thing where everybody has been afraid to deploy things and then the president of the United States just walked out and did it in front of everyone so I think that that really opens up the the regulatory stuff and makes us like question our every action a little less now oh yeah as the VCS would say the overturn window has now shifted so yes yes okay so uh I want to zoom in first on those little weird parts of the evm those first few things that like cause you to hang up when you're first figuring out how to get started so say you've gone to solidity by example and you've looked at a few of these things and you kind of understand the syntax but then there's some of these Concepts like ether verse wayy and those are the kind of things I want to tackle first in in this conversation just hitting that and then we'll get to some questions and kind of dive into like all the different which way do I go kind of things so let's look at what what I have here is scaffold eth but what's more important here is that it is kind of like this contract debugger and what I want to show here is just a number we're gonna have like a u 256 this is just going to be a number uh if I could do it some number and let's set it equal to 10 great we're just GNA let the AI pick this is an AI hackathon also like shout out to eth globo for so quickly picking up the AI agent meta and turning that into this wonderful challenge in hackathon so if we have this 10 here some number right and then we have some other number all right and we're gonna set this to 10 ether okay and this one is technically 10 way okay when you don't have anything there it's going to be way I I'll just put it there to be very explicit so we have these two numbers and we're going to explore what ether verse wayy is just because this is one of the first Hang-Ups that people get when they start messing around with the evm and then let me find a deployer here and let's deploy this let's see and I'm just deploying on a local chain I have scaffold eth up you can go to scaffold eat.io to get it uh but what does it give us it gives us here here are our two numbers here we have some number which is the 10 but then we have the some other number which we set to 10 also but with ether right and what you have is 18 more decimals what the heck is this why is that well the reason is the evm is a little computer right but it's a simple little computer and the more simple we can make it the easier it is for people to run on their desk right over here if it has to be some gigantic supercomputer then it is going to be harder for people to run and therefore it's going to end up being less decentralized if you imagine what is ethereum it's not just like this chain of blocks it's thousands of computers all over the world coming to consensus about that chain of blocks and running a VM and the VM is executing things so it's a little computer and that little computer needs to do some math and if we have floating Point math it makes the computer a lot more complex so we're going to do a trick we're basically going to say that this is 10 but then we're going to put 18 zeros after it right and we're going to call that 10 and anytime we interact with it as humans we're going to call a 10 but anytime the computer the VM needs to interact with it we're going to add those extra zeros in there so what this gives us is a decimal like system where we can do decimal like things but without having to like build the decimal math into the evm and so this is just one of those first gotas that you'll find on solidity by example I would recommend just going through every single one of these and you'll really get the syntax down quick if if you're a quick Builder and and Technical but you can also see it here right he's got one way and then uh yeah one gay is actually to the ninth and then one ether is to the 18th and again it's just a way of doing decimals if we wanted for instance uh let's dig in a little bit more to this decimal let's say we wanted uh this happens to be a greeter contract and people can set a greeting here but let's say we had some like price variable public price right and we had that price set to a 0.1 ether right that's okay we can do a decimal there because it's going to do the multiplication for us so I think it's going to be okay with this but let's see let's see if the compil likes it right you need to be able to test your assumptions and try some things let's see what happens if we deploy this is it okay with 01 ether it is okay and then if we go back over here we should see that we have this nice price and it's not you know 01 it's like actually got 17 decimals there right so let's say we have our price and we want it to go up 5% the boss says make it go up 5% everyone every time someone sets the greeting well uh yeah sure first of of all we're going to have a require statement which is another thing you'll learn about the syntax that just makes sure that this is correct did they send in in this payable function did they send in enough value to cover the price so we're going to make sure that's the case and if that's not the case we're going to fail and they can't get to here but now we want that price to go up by 5% and you might think we'll do something like this price uh equals price times like 1.05 right let's see if it's going to like that my instinct is that it's not going to like that it's gonna yell at us and say hey that's a decimal I can't do that yep he says no no so what you need to do is this kind of numerator denominator game right you you'll have some kind of numerator uh you went 256 public numerator if it would just figure it out there we go oh yeah it's going to figure it out thank you Ai and then down here it's going to know what we want to do oh very nice very nice and maybe even this I mean order of operations I think it's already going to do that but let's be explicit about it now let's see if this works some was there a question there oh oh you got it you muted feel free feel free to ask questions definitely in the chat too we are watching the chat if you drop it in there if you're if you're brave enough to to un unmute coad but what we have is this price right and what we want to do is I'm going to set the greeting I'm going to say hello and what we're going to hopefully see is this price goes up by 5% if I do this correctly oh wait I don't have any money let me grab some money from the faucet I'm skipping over a lot of things like burner wallets and faucets just to get right to the heart of this where we can kind of like Tinker with the code but let's see oh no not enough funds I guess I need to send in some value too okay this time it's going to work yes there it is okay look it it went up 5% right and let's run it again right so we can't pay this amount it's going to fail and it's going to say that's not enough money whatever was in that require statement so now we need to pay 5% more than that original price and now this should go up another 5% okay I would argue that that is working great it's going up 5% and just to reiterate uh we had to do this trick where we used a numerator and a denominator we can't just use decimals because that EV m is a simple little machine and it can be more decentralized if it's more simple and so we have to do these tricks so you as a developer are going to have to learn these these new tricks as we go okay hopefully that's not too far in the weeds yet how we doing uh on the on the mansplain we need like a mans speno meter and when it starts okay okay no no no I think it's I think it's good like what are things that are commonly people get tripped up over um I think like another question is just like uh so sounds like yeah a scaffold eth uh going to these like solidity docks uh are there any like General sites that you think off the bat people should be um aware of let's get into that let's get into that so there's there's kind of a lot of questions you're GNA have between Foundry or hard hat or wag me or ethers or solidity or Viper scaffold ether remix so like what what are some of these like first sites you you want to land on okay so of course ethereum.org e e.

org almost has too much information at this point but ethereum.org is going to give you a bunch of information and it's going to really help you like level set with like what is this world computer and how do I build apps for it and and what kinds of new Concepts should I be learning within that hit that hit that learn section I really don't like that that button doesn't work hit that learn section and get in here and just like absorve it all right there's so much to absorve there right and then if you're a coder I think that you should do either solidity by example or the solidity docs and just get exposed to the syntax and then it's these these weird gachas right you kind of need to run through some of these gachas and I think solidity by example really shows off some of the gachas pretty well uh even if we get down here into like some of the hacks like re-entrancy and stuff like that a lot of great applications here but yeah reentrancy is like the first one Rey no I was going to say re yeah that's like scary that's such a vulnerability by in a lot of contracts so definitely you know keep out for this one so let's do a tangent here and talk about Ai and how AI is auditing I think that if we had AI back then I'm not sure AI would have found reentrancy until a human finds reentrancy by hacking it like maybe you know the models are going to get good enough that that's the case and maybe that already is the case and I'm just an old man slowly uptaking the AI but I I I my gut feeling is that some of these really weird edge cases like re-entrancy that sort of was actually deployed out it was like a what was it was it a parity wallet it was deployed out into the wild and actually found it no it was the eth classic Fork right is that where reentrance SE was first discovered I thought it was was it the Dow yeah I think it was the DOW hack was aentr right which which split eth into eth classic but but yes I think I think okay so let's imagine we have 2025 level AI or let's just say 2024 level AI because it's better to reason about back when the Dow was first deployed I'm not convinced that an AI agent would have found the reenter e bug but a human obviously did right so I think the AI is going to be really good at finding things we know about in contracts so now if you have a reiny bug it's like the first thing it's G to find but it's not naturally G to find like these new things quite yet I think but maybe like 2025 AI is like a whole different story and it will go beyond what humans can figure out and we will find stuff like that which is also like super scary and also exciting at the same time I actually like Curious what kind of um AI tools do you use uh as you're building for sure so I think that the um obviously chat GPT is where I start like when I'm like asking questions and trying to figure out like how does a Dutch auction how does a Dutch auction actually work right I'm gonna probably hit chat GPT and have a conversation first that like just level sets like do I even really have the right Concepts here by the way you can probably find out how Dutch auction works right here in the applications uh nice yep I think I saw Dutch auction there it is Dutch auction there you go right you should go you should go make a Dutch auction for sure so at first I'm gonna just like bounce things off chat GPT I might even be like yelling at it while I'm driving kind of like this can happen anywhere right but then when it's time to code uh I may have a model come up with a starting contract for me and then I'll paste it in but then from there I'm using copilot like you saw here to kind of pick up as I'm writing the code I don't do a whole lot of coding anymore a a lot of it comes from from right over here where I'm just prompting cursor and cursor is making the changes for me right uh let's up that fee from 5% to 10% now something obvious that I could just do but let's see uh let's see what happens here when I do this it should like be like oh yeah you need to do this and and I hit like one button and I'm done and I ship it and I like barely read the code like this is kind of my my Dev Loop right now and I feel like if you're not using cursor I know there's a lot of people out there that are kind of security maximalists that are like I'm not letting the AI write my smart contracts like okay fine but you're really like you're you're you're you're handicapping yourself big time like this this is a brand new superpower and you should be using it even if you're re auditing every single line it comes up with this is like it's a superpower I can can build so fast if if you have developers or a team of developers and over the last 6 months they haven't like 3x their output at least they are camping on you because because they should have like every single developer in the world should have 3x their output over the last six months or they're failing to to uptake this new technology yeah that's how because we're a team of two people and we're able and my co-founder is like the solo Dev and his output's really insane and at this point like I'm able to use something like a Devon I don't know if you've seen Devon at all dev. in is that what it is devon. a d v i n. a so I actually Ed that for this like Junior programmer so like I talk to it on slack and it just like creates PRS for me and then it tells me like its whole plan and then we can merge it if it's if it's good enough I can do all these like Junior engineering tasks without my co-founder it's pretty wild so I mean obviously cursor is fantastic if if you just want to like actually go through the code base but the tooling is amazing so highly recommend like you know if like what what Austin was saying like if you're skeptical like you you can use this as like a baseline too you know you don't have to be like just like merging stuff without reviewing like this is just like the most powerful technology like what a time we live in you know and the like tools that we have like GitHub and even like the concepts we have like microservices have kind of prepared us for this Paradigm where a bot could just make a PR right like you could just make an issue in your repo that says I really want this to happen and then there's a PR that shows up from your AI agent that uh like builds it and then another AI agent reviews it and then you're basically like hitting the button to ship it to production like that that's like a possible future very soon uh someone in the chats asking I guess like so are you using GitHub co-pilot you mentioned you were I guess like when are you using that over cursor so so I would say like um let's see I want a function to like set the price I could just say cursor make me a function to set the price but sometimes I kind of like want to think through it a little bit more and I get to about here and then I hit Tab and then I get to about here and I hit Tab and I look at it and I say okay this is good this is good it's it's basically the same thing as if I would have said hey give me a price function but maybe I'm just like old dog new tricks like I still use co-pilot I still like to get in here and and have a really good understanding of what the code is and and maybe even type a few lines here and there but a lot of times I'm like starting the line and then hitting tab as co-pilot finds it and then for more advanced things I'm over here in cursor giving it like more high level stuff does that kind of answer that well I think that does oh man yeah so what AI you use this is really interesting right because there's kind of like this concept of models and then the rappers around the models and at this point it's almost like the moat is the rapper not the model I think I saw someone tweet that that's not original thought there but like there are new models coming out every day from all over the world and some of them are open source it's almost like you should be able to plug whatever model in let's grab it here I think is here is where I'm picking my models but like this selection is just going to get bigger and more Advanced and it's about these like rappers that take the model and turn them into an agent or take the model and abuse them to get them to write code for you right so I think there's this in in terms of the concept someone said is your AI smart or not I think that's comes down to the model you want to have a good you want to have a good model and then you know the rapper is kind of like the agency around it I I I'm not the one actually building our um agent but we interviewed a bunch of people on which model they're using for building their agent and had a bunch of people say they've had a lot more success with Claude uh with sorry with Sonet 3.

5 um and uh that that was um that was like preferred over gbt for this kind of stuff it was slightly more expensive and like a a longer lag time but like found to be like higher success um and then someone asked on um deep seek uh do you have any view on it should be using it on our code base it's open source like okay so first of all Claude and GP uh I I think I agree with that I think that I I have more success with Claude I had it set to GP here which is only like if I'm prompting Claude and I'm getting frustrated I'll switch to a different model to see if it comes up with something better but yes I think I I plus one that Claude uh to me has has done better here and I only fall back to 01 for questions or I'll go to 01 over in the chat and ask it's some high level thing and then come back and tell Claud to build it in in cursor now the second question is deep seek I am not a geopolitical expert I don't know I don't exactly know the ramifications of this uh but deeps is awesome and I went and downloaded it right off the olama page and yes maybe it's made by a rival nation state and yes there are privacy concerns here and you need to be aware of those but when it comes down to I'm on my laptop and it's air gapped and I'm communicating with this humanlike thing I don't I don't think that the Chinese government can get anything from that but I also don't know and so whatever like whatever the arguments are people smarter than me will come up with reasons why you shouldn't but my reason for why you should is that it is a great model and it helps you like it it's fast and it gets you great answers and it's open source like I Love Open Source I love the fact that I can go to the Llama website and pick out whatever I want um so yes I think it comes with like this caveat that I am an idiot and I don't exactly know but for me a builder a lowly Builder like I get really excited about things like deep seek especially if it's open source and yeah you using it what do you think is there more subtleties to that I feel like no that's kind of I mean it's open source so I I know that people have been talking about like oh just make sure you're careful about how you're accessing it and there's like a lot of different methods of like okay you can have um like not just directly installing it on your computer or phone or something like that so um I think just being a little bit more careful about some of that um security privacy angle um but uh there's there's Services out there that provide it and then oh just one comment on my Devon pricing yes Devon is very expensive Devon is $500 a month which is just mind so absolutely if you're a Dev like you should you should absolutely be using um like any of these other tools um I will say so someone paid for our first month because they just wanted to help support us the second piece is uh I think it's particularly useful if you're not a developer on the team and you can just start shipping stuff on I was already doing like minor um like basic work anyways using um using Claud but uh this was uh this was just like easier for me to just instead of being like hey could you like implement this um Daniel who's my co-founder I could just do it myself and so I think that was like for for us but yeah individual the age of agency isn't just about AI but you a non-developer getting agency and actually being able to ship these things that's so cool it's so cool and I'm like reading its plan and I can still see what code changes is making and like Daniel my co-founder Daniel he was in the movie theater and I I had like submitted a PR and he just like commented on one of the lines of code in GitHub and he was just like oh you should actually be using this instead and then it like updated it and he didn't have to be like at his computer like going through things so anyways it's it's it's a pretty interesting tool and I think will affect a lot of teams in the long run heck yeah heck yeah okay so back to just were there any other resources that you just wanted to highlight um outside of the AI side of just like so I want you to Tinker I think is the thing that I'm trying to really dig at here I want you to get solidity by example or the docks I want you to go as a just like a a goal I want you to just build a whole bunch of applications however you do that is up to you but let me Pitch you a couple different angles you can go I think the classic way to do this is remix well it's not that remix though is it it's remix.in made this is a little scary when it when it lands and it looks like this it's a little scary uh but eventually if you clear out all the noise you you'll get in and you'll find that you have some kind of contract what is this thing get out of here uh and what you can do is you can compile and deploy and I don't even know where the compile or deploy button are I don't know where they are here but oh maybe it's this one yep deploy and run does anybody see a deploy button uh okay okay you'll figure it out you're a smart person you can get into maybe it's the Run button here that compiles it oh there we go there we go we got it okay then we deployed it and then you you should be able to interact with it yes here get owner that's what I want you to do I want you to have that feedback loop where you can make a change here what happens if instead of private it's public right and and we say public and we hit save and then we do that same thing we hit run and then we get our deploy contracts and we get to the owner I don't think anything changed there but this is the loop that I want you to be in and this is the most important first tool that you you'll have is some way to dink around with solidity and get the syntax so the other way to do this my my preferred route but I don't want to King make here is with scaffold eth this is going to get you closer to deploying a live app with the same feedback loop but if you run this create eth it's going to have you bring up um a blockchain locally and a front end locally and then you're kind of just like yarn deploying over here and so you'll have your app here where you can add in you know let's make the owner public or whatever and then you'll have your front end for scaffold eth at Local Host 3000 and this is like the gateway drug to make an app because it's all here already and you can just prompt cursor to make a button to talk to your smart contract but at first you're going to be over here in the debug contracts and you're going to have this ability to make a change and and see that change so let's do something like this let's uh there was that only owner right we could set the price where's that I think we made a set price did we make a set price there we go we made a set price okay and there's this is owner I want to test that I want to test that only the owner can set the price so let's just go through the loop here of what it might be like as a developer to test that and then we we'll get into all the other tools first but I'm kind of doing one tool at a time and ADHD going after it but here we go so what I want you to do is prove that this set price can only be called by the owner now right now the owner is this guy and that's a specific account that I don't want to be the owner so I need to get in here and hack something up what I'm going to do is set my burner wallet to be the owner and we'll redeploy real quick because I need the I need to control the owner account and uh it's wasn't an account I control so now let's make sure that that change worked if we go here now and we look at the owner we know yep for sure our little pink and teal guy is the owner okay so first of all can the owner set the price let's set the price to okay we're going to set it to one and we're going to see that it's one way so we're going to do a little eth bir verse way uh recap right I'm just going to set the price to one and that should work yep oh but look it's one oh no we just set it to one way what you need to do is set it to one ether so you need to hit this little button over here this is a button for developers your users of course would not have this but you as the developer need to know what e first way is a really hammering home the eth first way everyone is definitely going to get that by the end of it but there we go we we're able to set the price as our owner now we need a bad guy right we need to try it as someone else so I'm going to open up an incognito window and I'm going to go to Local Host and look at this we get a new character right it's kind of like this teal character compared to or green character compared to this one let's go ahead and close it and see that one more time new incognito window Local Host okay we've got our bad guy and our bad guy will get a a little bit of funds from the faucet now let's come over here and see if the bad guy can set the price I want to set the price to uh point one ether I want to make a really really cheap so I can attack this contract here we go I'm going to hit send oh no I got to hit this first then I'm hit send and hopefully this fails with not the owner okay we know that this modifier is what it's called is is enforcing let's go find it it's enforcing this is owner if I click this it's going to take me to here it's enforcing this require statement it's saying hey the person that's talking to this contract has to be this person that we're tracking as the owner and if not you got to kick them out of there as quick as you can and even though we haven't written an exhaustive test here to prove that only owner can get into it and you should have a big exhaustive test and every time you make a change you need to run those tests and make sure there's no Edge case you just missed when we're just thinkinking around we're learning the concepts we're trying to figure out what we want to build this this works this is enough testing we tried it with the good guy and the good guy got in we tried it with the bad guy and the bad guy can't get in okay I'm good enough now that I kind of like like that and this is the dev Loop that I want you to get into um let's let's let's look at one other thing that happened to be uh a huge okay here's what we're going to do we're gonna create a function okay let's tell let's tell uh let's let's use the AI we're we're AI here uh new function called increment price that adds I don't even know one ether to the price something like that so what I want is a quick increment price function what what do I want to do is do some overflow because that's the next thing uh that is a weird thing that's actually basically fixed because it used to be safe math but now that we have uh solidity 8.0 it's just built into solidity it's not going to let you overflow any uh number and you're like what the heck is Overflow okay let me show you what overflow is so let's say our price is actually a ENT 8 which means we only have eight bits to track our number and so our price has to be much smaller maybe it's uh 200 actually I'm going to set it to 250 okay and then we're going to increment not by one either but by one what else do I need to do here this is a un8 I need to change a few other things here that gets set that gets set uh it's going to be all messed up yeah it's definitely not going to like that let's just get rid of that what I want to do is just cause some overflow here let's see if this is happy I'm gonna have to hit the button 50 times though I don't want to do that either no no no five times five times we're good okay check this out so now we have this price that's at 250 now a un 8 can only track numbers from 0 to 255 okay as soon as you get to 250 6 that's actually all those bits and it's going to roll around okay so in a previous version of solidity you could actually roll this variable you would go you would hit in increment and it would get to uh where's that increment function one okay watch we're at 251 watch it down here 252 253 254 255 now this is as far as it's going to go if I hit it again it's going to fail it's going to say something like yeah panic underflow right in previous versions of solidity it actually didn't underflow you had to have a library there that was called safe math that was checking this stuff but even before that we didn't have that we didn't know about it so what would happen is someone would figure out how to trick the system and basically go the other way if I own one you could subtract two from it and then you would own like this giant amount of tokens right you could actually like trick your balance to have like a hell a lot so it would go the other direction here basically allowing you to uh underflow instead of overflow and then go from having one or two tokens to having like all of the tokens in the whole uh you know all of them and then you could steal the money and rug it so these are just like little things that you'll find and the way to discover these things the way to get better at this is to have this kind of environment either remix or scaffold eth where you can make small changes and you can test your assumptions uh with some kind of a front end okay that's that's kind of like 2011 and another concept to go through uh let's jump back over here oh yeah we're checking them off now okay so next choice I think is probably here it's probably between Foundry or hard hat and this is a highly debated topic and uh I just want to remind everybody that before this we had something called truffle and it was made by consensus and thank you consensus for doing 60% good job but thank God someone else did an 80 to 90% good job and truffle is no longer a thing and back in the day you could say truffle sucks and there's five reasons why and someone would argue with you and it's so glad to have this validation that we're at this point so people are also having this argument probably between Foundry and hard hat I would say that maybe Georgios would get on here and call me an idiot for even thinking of hard hat because of course you would test everything in solidity but let's let's get down to the subtleties of the argument there's a little nuance here and I would say that Foundry is better if you're going to write a heav smart contract protocol and you're going to need to write lots of tests because it's better because your tests will all be in solidity so if you're going to spend a ton of time in solidity land and you're going to make something Advanced and it needs to run fast your tests need to run fast and you need to have lots of tests that are in this same language Foundry is the answer like Foundry is what the most cracked devs are using but let me roll back a little bit to hard hat hard hat is a little bit easier to use and I think that Foundry is getting better at that every day hard hat was a little slower but now hard hat is actually rebuilding in Rust and actually using revm from Foundry so hard hat and Foundry are are slowly moving toward parody in terms of how long it takes and again Georgios would be like no it's not but we'll we'll have those arguments someday but hard hat is still a good option and it's a little bit easier for deploying contracts and you're going to be writing your tests either in solidity or JavaScript I think it's it's all it's been traditionally it's been all typescript and to me that makes a lot of sense because eventually I'm going to have an application I'm going to have a front end that people are going to click buttons and interact with my smart contract and it's really nice when I have typescript because I can really translate that really easy to my front end so by using hard hat and writing my tests in typescript I've kind of like given myself a a quick and easy transition to my front end but all hardcore contract Engineers are going to tell you that's dumb and you should run your tests in solidity and you should use Foundry and it's faster so I think I leave this like up to you I give you the subtleties and the nuances of it but you make the choice between hard hat and Foundry and luckily and this is a really cool part about this about how robust our ecosystem is luckily we have the option we're not stuck with truffle we have innovators and both of these products are constantly pushing the boundaries and moving the goalpost and the Overton window is shifting on us right there's there's so many really cool things that are happening and we're so lucky to have both of these wonderful tools tools just to recap foundaries probably more for the hardcore cracked engineer that wants to write their solidity their tests in solidity and they need them all to run fast and they have a huge Bank of tests hard hat is a little bit more approachable a little bit easier to deploy contracts I think you now have the option between the two but it used to be only tests in typescript which led to an easier experience when you wrote your front end the the kind of in it that I had with scaffold eth is that when I was building apps I didn't know exactly how to write I knew how to write some solidity but I didn't know exactly how this protocol is going to work if you're going to sit down and you're going to build a stable coin you have some ideas about the oracal and you have some ideas about uh liquidations and having that kind of stuff but you don't know exactly what the code is going to look like and you kind of have to write it out and Tinker with it and try some things and maybe you're like a correct developer that just sees the whole thing and you can just like bang it out maybe you don't need to dink around with it but I need to dink around with it I'm the kind of guy that kind of needs to try it and Dink around with it and see if it does what I expect it to do and so I think that like that's why I like hard hat in that my tests are closer to a front end and that I can dink around with it a little bit more and I can kind of have a front end coming up in parallel so as I'm writing my smart contract I'm already putting buttons over here and I'm already kind of displaying things I'm realizing oh shoot I need an event in that in that contract and if I were to just build the protocol and ship it I might have forgotten about that event that I never would have found until I started writing my front end and then trying to display all this information I realize I need all these extra events and information and read functions for my contract that is already off to the auditor and we have six months or something right so the way I build things and maybe it's not the way you build things and that's okay the way I build things is kind of iterating between the smart contract and the front end getting a feel for how certain things work making sure it displays correctly uh but I don't have hundreds or thousands of users on chain there are other guys out there that have built guys and girls out there that have built apps that have users on chain and some of them would say that the traditional method of write a really good protocol and test it really well and send it off to the auditor and your front end is sort of an afterthought that's sort of what has product Market fit right now that's sort of what we see in the space but my intuition is a little bit of messing around with the front end is going to give you some superpowers in terms of making sure your protocol kind of works once it's shipped and it has users and that front end isn't a huge pain in the butt okay so that's y That's My dinking around tool go go go go go I think the other yeah talking about some of the other decisions to make and a really good point like it's really cool that there are even decisions to make so what a sign of a growing ecosystem uh but yeah some there there's just like so many other choices as well so let's go yeah okay so next one I think is uh wagm slvm verse ethers and by the way there was one called Web 3js before this and it we were so thankful when ethers came out because it just worked better had way less dependencies it didn't fail like one out of 10 times randomly like we were so thankful to have ethers and so yeah doubling down on that point we're even more grateful that we have VM and wagm and I would say uh these two are again more of a personal preference and I'll try to add the Nuance to it so both of these are JavaScript typescript libraries um that help you write scripts and help you write your front end so these are the the the things that will kind of glue your your buttons to your smart contract if you want a a button that does something on a smart contract you're either going to use ethers or or wag me if you want to write a script that goes and reads something from your contract and make some decis decisions and write something to your contract you're going to use VM or or ethers uh but here's here's the subtle differences I think uh ethers is made by a king of the space Rick moo he's a badass he's awesome he comes to every he did the first one of these I think the first ethereum onboard if you look for eth Global eth Dev onboarding it wasn't just me man's planning it was it was actually like a lot of these tool builders in the space we had like Paul Berg who did had his Kate EAP we had a lot of of folks on but he he's written this ethers library and it's super lightweight very few dependencies very fast I think that there's some Concepts you have to learn like siner and providers and you need to kind of know what you know what what is a signer what is a provider and in this case a provider is like an RPC where where you'll get information so when you need to talk you need to read from the chain you're going to need a provider that will provide that connection to one of these basically it's an ethereum node a full ethereum node uh you need to ask that thing what is Austin's balance right that provider can give you that information and then when you want to make a transaction send $5 to Austin please do it to send $5 to Austin you need to sign something with a wallet that's when you'll use a signer so these Concepts were kind of created by ethers even though like we had different ideas about what they were like rickm did a good job of almost like signifying what these Concepts were as he's making the tool link so you kind of like learn these Concepts as you're using the tooling and so there's there are times when you might be using it wrong because you don't quite understand the concepts yet and you're frustrated at rickm because it doesn't work but it's actually your fault this happens this happened to me a lot in like 2017 2018 2019 uh I just didn't get quite get the concepts and it wasn't Rick Moo's fault it was my fault but I had just troubles with the docks let's let's let's go look at the ethers JS dots I just have had a hard time I'm navigating these and maybe it's just like my caveman brain and if I was a little bit better at it I would get it better but like I just uh let's see uh read from a contract I want to read from a contract how do I do it contract connect contract okay now you know like it's here if I spend some time I'm gonna figure it out right there's some Concepts like signers that I'm going to have to know but let's go to the VM uhsh box and let's search the same thing I've never done this before so look at that I was looking for read from a contract oh I probably wasn't supposed to hit enter there okay how do I read from a contract right again this is a little bit confusing I'm not sure let's just pick the first one yep I'm I'm down into the FAQ okay so either of them didn't really give me what I wanted what I wanted to do is figure out how to you know read from a contract oh it looks like I need to create a contract and instance and get it I think these are the small subtleties in in my mind let's go back to this list in my mind wagm and VM are I think it's built by product people they're really product minded they're thinking about product Market fit for ethereum they're thinking about bringing the world on chain and and what that looks like and I think in ethers it's more like we have to Define what a provider is and what a signer is and it it was just made like a few years earlier and it's just targeted I I feel like more at highly technical people rather than product people that are trying to make something even though like these guys are very high like the the wagy guys Jake and aqu web are you know human Geniuses also I think they're just thinking a little bit more about product people and their docks are a little bit easier to use so in scaffold eth we ended up going with wag me NVM but I do not want to Discount ethers and we're so lucky to have the choice and maybe ethers works great for you uh the only argument I would say is like sometimes I have a hard time with these docs but again it's probably just my my small brain like maybe you big brain it and you got it okay does that cover you think we cover those should we move on to the next yes awesome I haven't even been looking at questions either 23 new messages is it all the note takers oh okay we're just dropping links in here awesome amazing web.dev oh yeah these are great providers signers yep yep yep okay here we go um solidity vers Viper right I think this one is pretty pretty largely leaning towards solidity I think when you see uh so many protocols go to production with solidity and then the kind of like the backwards effect of so many new curriculums and so many examples a lot of it is in solidity and solidity is a JavaScript like language I think types javascri typescript typescript like language solidity to me is easier and there's just more documentation on it however Viper is around and it is an option and it's more python based so what I would argue here is maybe you're a data scientist or maybe you're an AI nerd and all you really really done as python for the last few years your first smart contracts might be Viper you might start writing something in Viper and I'm pretty sure unisat V2 was written in Viper so I think that like some Protocols are written in Viper maybe curve or something like that there are protocols that write in Viper but it's going to be a lot smaller but I still see it as like a gateway drug where you as an AI nerd have only written python so your first few smart contracts if you're making a hello you're making a buy me a coffee you're making a staking app or something simple a token vendor maybe Viper is the answer for you I would say that like again this is like you know there's subtleties and nuances to the question and while solidity seems to be sort of like the winner and most most examples are ins solidity Viper is also an option and especially friendly to python developers okay this one I made my my stance on pretty clear I I think that remix is an OG and it's King made to Hell have high heaven uh and it's great and people are still using it I don't even know what it what is it doing over here it's like over here thinking or something but I think it's a little bit too complicated and I have a I have my my caveman brain just has a hard time dealing with all of this but the numbers show people are using it uh people use like it's so nice that you can just come here in a browser right like the the the superpower of remix is that it gets you right into the heart of ethereum and lets you dink around with solidity and see the effects of it immediately the downside of remix is like everything else here and the last like seven years of development that they've added to it and agree to disagree like it's an awesome product and we're so thankful to have the choices uh but I think they should have gotten like remixed to a remix light kind of stage that kind of feels just like this and there's a there's your code on one side and there's this on the other side and there's a compile button and a deploy button and maybe a pull down that lets you select a couple things but that's it that's the whole website you stop right there you put it into maintenance mode you have one developer that you pay less than $100,000 a year to maintain and that's the whole thing that's how I would have done remix but it's gone a different way but still an amazing product and if you you need to get to the heart and you need to be able to dink around with solidity and you need to test your assumptions so go use remix or scaffold eth uh either one is a great option find the one that works best for you all right I'm gonna have some more opinions here on curriculum but let me pause there to see if we have okay I don't think there's no we'll come back to one of the other questions later custom cursor rules oh yes I do yeah we web three Dev shout out I do have some I think the cursor rules file right let's just make sure that everyone knows about that already you there's this cursor rules file just Google it and it's a doc cursor rules and that's going to live in your code directory and you can basically use it to give a bunch of hints to your cursor AI so just be aware of the cursor rules and know that like instead of just like starting a fresh thing and prompting it right off with like all the docks you could just like have that into your Cur cursor rules a lot of the ways I actually do this sorry for the tangent um I will actually go to the scaffold eth docs and when I want to read from a contract I'm going to get the the scaffold contract reader and I'm going to paste it in over here uh let's go let's go to our front end let's try see if just works we'll go to the page and we'll say something like here is how you read from a contract and I'll paste that in and then I'll say something like please read who the owner is and display it okay let's see what happens right we've given it an example it could have been in our cursor rules we've given it a prompt to go build something let's see if it does it a perfect first try or we have to like add some things so let's see what has it done oh do I have to hit apply apply so it brings in the scaffold e it queries for the owner and it displays it I think it's going to do it oh you know what it even wrapped it in an address very nice very nice let's just go look at our front end I think we've got a front end let's see which one is it up here let's go back to our homepage look at that contract owner it's displayed it's even using a nice uh thing I I don't even know how we got here but now I have two other tangents this is how this is how my brain works we're just on tangent land let me let me let me pull these threads though because I think they're interesting so uh one thing is watch uh whoops did I not accept that wait wait wait wait wait wait wait was that all good let me go back to that make sure we're good okay we're all good okay cool uh one thing is how cool typescript is the fact that you have typescript your front end so we're in react land now we're building a front end your front end knows about your smart contracts so watch this if I open up this quote so I know that I want to talk to my contract but I don't know what function I want to call I forgot what we've what we've added here as soon as I open up these quotes look at this it actually reads my smart contract and tells me all the available items in the smart contract and then I just pick owner right so even at this point if you didn't have any AI you still have all these like nice guard rails that are helping you get to the fact that that's an owner okay so that was one thread I wanted to pull second thread I wanted to pull is how nice this address component is another thing you get out of the box with scaffold eth is a bunch of components that make things look a lot nicer let's go ahead and just pull this off for a second and let's hit save and look how ugly that looks okay contract owner zerox d f f FF right no one wants to see that no one wants to mess around with that no one can even look at that and like make sense of it right what you need is to take that address and wrap it in this component that then turns that into this nice pretty blocky preview that thing it even has like if we go to debug contracts then I type in atg doeth this component even oop I didn't get there this component not only has that blocky but it's going to bring in my ens Avatar and it's going to show me my ens so these little things like ens up front ens avatars up front your app is going to need that and you may not realize it now when you're dinking around but by the time you ship your app you're going to have to rebuild all this stuff into your app you might as well just grab these components out of scaffolding and use them so those were the two threads I wanted to pull there let's roll it all the way back to the the original thing uh let me pause there just in case there's a thing and then let's start talking about like how to how to learn think we're good chat said reix debugger is nice yes I think I'm sure that there's a lot of nice things in there even the new stuff that they've added like AI I bet it's awesome I just haven't I'm I'm too afraid of it every time I open it that I really haven't got in to really like really dig in and get it okay uh I mean like when I started I was dinking around with remix but yeah okay let's get into curriculum so first of all you gota like know how to learn right you you don't need to go pay for a class to go learn it's 2025 you can start by just asking AI right you can have an AI tutor that takes you through all of these Concepts you could paste solidity by example into chat GPT and you could say build me a three-week curriculum that covers all of these Concepts and it's going to do a damn good job of it and if you follow that it's going to be better than how I could teach you probably one-on-one right like literally everyone at home now has like a one-on-one tutor because there's so much content available that's good and that the AI can distill it and teach it to you which is so freaking sweet but curriculums oh sorry was there did you want no I was saying that's so cool like I didn't even think about that like put together a threee curricul based off this like that's so genius I'm I'm like my eight-year-old I'm really excited about like I can just have like a a a temporary dad that I make out of GPT it's like go ask temporary dad first and see if he can answer it because he's probably smarter than me but like my eight-year-old has all these questions and I want to teach him all these things but I I think AI could do it better than I can and I and I I feel like I'm a great teacher and I work very hard to be a good teacher and I still think that like with the correct prompt it's going to come back with more insightful ways to teach than I could come up with so how do you learn now my instinct here is that you should build a bunch of things you kind of need to we we don't exactly know what the product Market fit is but we've seen some things we've seen how it's been used before so you should build all of those things and I don't mean uh just the hacks which you definitely should right you should learn that that reentrancy and overflow are things that we've already talked about but scroll down here and like you know delegate call is is complicated and it takes some time to wrap your head around and when you really get all these hacks figured out go take on both the uh the build Guild CTF at cf. Guild and also take on The Ether knot these will test your knowledge on whether you've got these hacks figured out sorry I tangent it off and now we're talking about once you're really good at things how to test that uh but do that okay but let let roll back let's roll back you're a starter you're getting started you're building some apps instead of hacks look at all these things here these applications make a wallet make a multisig understand how a miracle tree can take a bunch of offchain information and just use a single proof uh you'll have a little bit more on your front end but then you can store like a huge amount of information in like a tiny thing uh iterable mapping just go through all of these and understand them really well and there's things here that there there's things that have product Market fit that aren't here I mean is there a stable coin here for instance I don't know if I see a stable coin and you should you should go build a stable coin you should go build a prediction Market you should build these things even if they're toy versions right for instance your stable coin is going to need an oracle you don't need to get some fancy Oracle just make like an account that's just like like making a a a request in answering it that's not secure that won't work in production but it works perfect to build a toy version I think another um interesting lead is actually looking at like 2016 2017 era projects tcrs weren't possible because it's like you didn't have l2s and stable coins and like everything was so expensive on chain so like that could be fun to like revisit like what are things people try to build that are just like possible now so that's that's kind of fun to go through my my 2017 era exploration is still on if you go to build guild.

com and you scroll all the way down at the very bottom I have this Tech tree hidden and by the way like the East Tech tree is coming out we've been building a bunch of stuff but I have this really ugly Tech Tree and I've shared it on previous uh times let me just paste that into the chat just so we have it uh but it's this miror board and it's this disgusting mirror board I mean it's like huge and it's all over the place uh it's it's definitely my Charlie Meme here right this is me just like laying out everything I possibly could from from the start right like the very first things maybe it's an intro course from Patrick uh maybe it's an you know how to get started uh from from nater but you need to like get the you need to get the context of how to do things so you need to get the syntax down uh but then it's like this giant tree of different things and like yeah Tok this tokenization branch is so 2019 2018 tcrs and bonding curves and yeah some fun ones right but it kind of like they they Branch out you kind of you need a DEX so you can swap things before before we had a deex we had like order books and and Shout out zerox and will but but then like decentralized exchanges hit the scene and once you have a decentralized exchange then you have a whole bunch of other things if you pair that say with a price feed then then you can do lending or or teop or l l LP farming right there's lots of fun stuff to get to here but this yeah this goes through all the different things we thought might happen or might not happen like dii and identity and uh you know gaming and zero knowledge and then down here there's uh like nfts boy those those really held on and uh and running your own node right love that you got to run your own node I think one is like build your own seal yeah right here this is one of my favorites I think once you're done learning and we'll get back to the curriculum in a little bit but once you're done with every other curriculum and you need to start building your own tools build your own CLI because you'll learn so much about the nuances and little things and at the same time you'll have like a little toolkit that you can do anything you want with but like sign messages and ux and account abstraction and smart contract wallets and mobile this is I feel like this is an area where I personally am lacking to too much I have scaffold eth and I can help you build a desktop app but if you're going to build a mobile native app you're you're going to do it in react native and you're going to have a hard time because there aren't great examples there's not a lot of there's not a lot of great Tools around building a mobile app which is kind of like an obvious like screw up on my part and we need to do better and I I will do better me poool evm auditing so many cool things auditing used to be so hard and so expensive and it is of course still and complicated but people created markets around it and they created these like really cool you can you can basically get your start at becoming an auditor by going onto these platforms and competing with other people to find things in code bases and if you do that you're also like kind of providing an audit to someone so someone can get kind of like this first audit by giving it to a bunch of people to compete and so people are making money off this it used to be like you could even get away with just like gas optimization and you could make money off that but like the comptition is really steep there so you really have to kind of find some Maj things to make money off of these but they're still available and you know huge shout out to these platforms by building these platforms the price and the time for audits has gone down and that's like an amazing effect on the ecosystem okay wow really cool doc I I didn't know about this and I feel like it's a peek into your brain just like the Charli going on but it's really really fasinating it starts with me smoking a huge cigarette and then I'm like yeah yeah ripping a saggy okay so hold on I you cross this out but I'm not quite done yet you're not done no no can you believe it I didn't really even hit this okay you want to start by building things you want to get the syntax down you want to get in this mode where you can dink around whether you're using a remix or scaffold e or something else get to the point where you can write some solidity you can compile it and can see and you can mess with it right and you can get in that once you're in that you just need to build a whole bunch of things and whether you go build a whole bunch of things from from solidity by example whether you you know search the internet for what should I build next or you use the speedrun so I gotta really want to shout out speedrun ethereum I think this is the best curriculum I think this is the best way to get started if you're a developer you can land here and you can go through a couple of days to a couple of weeks worth of of time that you put into this and you'll get all of the concepts that will help kick your whole career off simple nft just like gets you ready for the tooling but a decentralized staking app really starts to show you a bunch of things about what kinds of things you build on ethereum in the case of this decentralized staking app and I don't mean staking like validator I mean people who don't trust each other need to coordinate so you're going to build a smart contract for a handful of people that don't trust each other and those people need to be able to put their money in and if you get enough people to put their money in something like the the Happy State happens and you go do something with that money uh but if two or three people put in their money but you don't get enough money staked you need to have kind of the sad path that for sure doesn't get any funds locked and no one loses their money so that's like table Stakes here no money can be lost or locked but people need to be able to have the chance to coordinate whether they coordinate or not is kind of up to them but you're going to write the rules that say no one's going to get screwed here like we're gonna make it the rules so we have some great guidelines so you either coordinate and make the thing happen or you defect and basically you get your money back and so this this really like shows that in an in a build and hopefully builders get that uh it also teaches you that like nothing is automatic even the moment after you get past some timeout period it doesn't just like automatically either go One Direction or the other someone's got to click the button and someone's got to hit it which kind of brings up this whole web 3 Cron job thing that we get into here if you're building a Cron job in web 2 you just have a machine and it runs at night and it compounds your interest or cleans your logs or whatever it does but you can't do that in web 3 in web 3 we have a blockchain and a blockchain is very hard and very secure if you have just one dinky service checking in there's a million ways that can go wrong and it will what you need is thousands of services competing to make that click right so let's say your logs your interest needs to get compounded and it has to happen right around midnight every night what you're going to do is you're going to write some rules that say whoever it is only one person someone's got to do it but the first one to do it gets paid and there's an incentive there and the incentive is so key and understanding that we're building these systems to be decentralized and credibly neutral they need incentives like incentives are a big part of this and you need to as a builder be understanding that how do I get someone to check in at night every night at midnight I make the code that checks in I give it out to tons of people and then whoever runs it gets paid a little bit and that's how you ensure that you'll have a service that checks in and that's how you make something automatic even though nothing on chain is automatic someone's got to poke it and hit the button and the kind of thing that you're building is something that people who don't trust each other can use to coordinate and that's like that's challenge one right that's the first challenge of the speedrun the second one is like hey you want a meme coin you want to build your own token and sell it in a vending machine and get rich like follow this and F off you can go I don't care but we just wanted to teach you how to do that so you understand one of the you know most powerful Primitives here which is like this erc20 token and a contract that allows you to sell that token at a certain price or maybe on a curve or some other exotic thing that I don't even understand yet and you'll also learn things like the approv pattern in order to give money to a Smart contract let's say I need to put tokens into a contract and do something you don't just send the tokens to the contract gosh that makes a lot more sense but that's just not how ethereum was built the way it works is you make one transaction to approve the contract to take your tokens then you make a second transaction on the contract that says okay I've approved them you can take them and do your thing and in that execution it goes and gets them and brings them in and makes sure and then does some stuff and that's just how the approved pattern works that's how er c20s work we're stuck with it we're getting a account abstraction and pretty soon those actions will just be batched but for now that's how it works and you as the Builder just need to be aware of how that works then a dice game to teach you about Randomness how how how in the heck can you have Randomness on a public deterministic blockchain this also teaches you how to attack that and then building a DEX this is like this is the clutch moment of the Builder can you make a decentralized exchange and the kind of the way it works is it holds reserves on both sides it has this constant product price function you'll figure it out you're going to go build a hyper structure and it's going to open up your whole world to the other things you can build on ethereum but at this point I want to make the point that like we don't know what's next we're we're soon we're going to have a stable coin here we're going to have a prediction market and we're going to have l2s we don't have those here they're like all in progress and there are teams building the curriculum now within build Guild those are going to be great things to learn too we have state channels that are kind of old multisig wallet is really cool uh SVG challenge these are going to be kind of like uh side quests but the point is this is a really good curriculum to help you build a bunch of things that are gonna really illuminate what is going on here and what kinds of things you can build but again we don't really know what the biggest product Market fit can be this thing is nation state level hard probably we're talking about building some kind of coordination game between nation states maybe it's like this thin layer of like World Government accountability holy moly that's way over my head I'm just a simple Builder but that's probably what we're going to see people use ethereum for in the coming years the president's eating in and buying staked eth it's it's a new time I tell you what it is a new time um okay so you mentioned account abstraction so wanted to ask uh which which one to use great yep okay so Let's uh let's so there are other curriculums out there I should say that I think like third web and cyphon and a handful of other ones follow people on Twitter and you just get into crypto Twitter and follow people and a lot of these answers will be answered for you because your preferences we'll we'll we'll figure them out just want to give a shout out that like speedrun is not the only answer there's a ton of good ones a lot of them are VC captured but whatever okay so let's talk about account abstraction next what do we have another 15 minutes I thought we didn't we weren't going to have enough content but we're we're filling it okay account abstraction is so necessary it's so needed that that approved pattern I was talking about seed phrases living in in uh on a piece of paper in your you know under your pillow these are these are elephants in the room in terms of bringing the world on chain if we're going to bring the world on chain we're going to need some account abstraction it needs to be basically I land I do a little fingerprint thing I do some actions I earn some rewards and they're protected in a smart contract and no one can steal them that's what I think of when I think of account abstraction there's a lot to it but there's a couple of different ways to do account abstraction I think 4337 is kind of the the big one EIP let's see 4337 is sort of like meta transactions it's uh a second kind of transaction a second kind of M poool there's this entry contract but it allows you to uh do things like sponsor gas it allows oh nice thumbs up it allows you to do things uh and by the way like follow these folks here because they're they're really good uh you can even find like permission list like is that that guy maybe it's a different Kristoff but there's a lot of different account abstraction implementations this is one of them that is pretty popular right now look at look at four or 37 and I think that maybe the competitor might be 7702 which is more coming up we'll see it in the Petra La Fork I think and what this one does is you can actually uh take an eoa and externally owned account a seed phrase like account that you have in all your wallets and you can upgrade it into a smart contract and then basically you can say hey Austin griffithe is my wallet that I've been using forever but what I want to do is upgrade it to a Smart contract wallet that lets me do things like batch transactions so I can approve and and run the thing I think there's probably some sponsored transactions in here too I'm not really sure how that would work yeah yeah you could like have the wall I don't know I don't know if you can do I bet you can yeah sponsorship that's right there account X pays for the transaction yes okay and that's kind of what you want right batching and sponsorship are probably the two major things that you're going to get from account abstraction and I guess that's also built into 7702 are there others am I thinking are there other account abstraction I I just thought it was always 4337 I didn't realize like there were others that people were so yeah that that's cool to know well and don't get discouraged I feel I I saw this on Twitter the other day someone was kind of really venting that like damn it we built our whole stack on 4337 and now oh someone's got their mic on I don't know damn it I we built everything in 4337 and now 7702 is coming out why right don't get discouraged by this this is a good thing like we're we're making the ecosystem more robust we're innovating we're moving but we're also keeping these good ones around and making sure that like standards exist and it's uh you know still easy to build on top of these things so I would say like don't get discouraged if you happen to have built everything on 4337 because you're still going to have this sponsored transactions batching you're still going to be doing that there or in 7702 just 772 is just a different way to do it and don't get discouraged that we have multiple options it's a good thing not a bad thing uh account abstraction I want to shout out permission list.js too is it permission list.js I think is what it's called yes by Pemco and I think it's a 4337 but maybe not I see 7702 I'm not even sure which one this uses but it's one of one of my yeah 4337 it's one of my favorites check check that one out too there's there's a lot of good ones though a lot of good implementations and by the way we really haven't dug into l2s yet some l2s actually have native account abstraction some l2s saw this coming and they were like let's just build it in let's figure it out and so you'll find that on on some of the l2s RPC providers are tricky like again we were talking about that provid you've got to go to a node and get the balance for someone you've got to send your sign transactions to a node in order to talk to ethereum you have to talk to a node that then uh you know peer-to-peer talks to the re of chain and and builds things into the chain in blocks so this RPC provider is important a lot of them are pretty centralized right now there there's this thing where okay you're gonna build a front end it's gonna live on versel you're GNA be hitting Alchemy your front end is not decentralized maybe you have just like a very open- Source front end and anybody can Fork it and bring it up somewhere else and it's your contracts that are the decentralized thing and if any of these centralized front ends fall down you can bring up another one somewhere else so this RPC provider thing there are trade-offs between the two but hardly anybody is actually running a node a full node at home that they can talk to and you just can't count on your users doing that like maybe in like 20 15 ethereum we were thinking everyone would do that you could download Mist but that's just not what end users are going to do end users don't care that much about decentralization until they do until they get deplatformed until they're trying to send money across the world and they can't and there's a huge fee and there's a bunch of middl men then they start saying oh yes I want decentralization but at first when they're just like grabbing the app and using it their first thought is not how decentralized is this like that's just not the way end user think but the more decentralized it is the better and the less Things fall over and in the long run that's what they want but you have to give them centralized like user experience while making it as decentralized as possible and so the RPC provider is one of those tricky things where most almost all apps basically use centralized RPC providers not some other method there's there's like Dr rpc's out there they're going to be slower like we built one within build Guild and we have all these nodes all around the world and whenever you use our apps we actually serve them out of our nodes all around the world but we have like two or three in Africa and it takes 200 milliseconds to get there and back rather than right here to my office on fiber right and so our drpc is just slower because it's decent it's distributed right so there are just tradeoffs and in the long run people want fast things and so you probably are just going to use a centralized RPC and you're probably just going to have a front end that is centralized on verell and it's going to be fast as heck and if you need to be more decentralized you kind of scale the other way and have lots of options and make it very open source okay we did Count cover did you already cover why do we need to update our RPC every so often um I don't even know the answer to that like rpcs change and the blockchain is changing but what did I write that or did you write that that a chat question I don't know why you would need to update your RPC every so often unless it's like actually the chain has changed like there's new versions of these clients coming out every every now and then and so like gu comes out with an upgrade and so Alchemy will get the new gu version and get it running but all of that's happening underneath the sheets and you don't need to worry about that if you're using Alchemy or whatever so I'm not exactly sure why you would need to update your RPC every so Christina if you if you have a clarifying question you can just ask it I want to make sure we cover the like L1 L2 which L2 topic because that was a very he let's get it yeah let's get it okay again like there's a lot of nuances to all of these and I think the question you should be uh asking yourself instead of giving you answers I'm going to give you questions and the first one is like how decentralized is it right and then I think the second one is probably ux and maybe ramping and then we're talking about cost and speed right the l2s the trick about l2s is the cost and speed is finally there we can make we can bring the world on chain now we could not bring the world onto 2015 ethereum like it just wouldn't work but we can do that with l2s and even like you know other layers that settle to those layers and abstract things but uh how decentralized is your L2 does it have a centralized sequencer and I think that if you go to L2 beat I think is the the website why did that say musical artist I don't know if that like get the Beats here we go here you're looking here what we're really looking for is a stage two L2 you want your L2 to be in stage two because that means it's bully decentralized or something I don't know I get in here and like learn what these stages look like but uh it comes down to how decentralized your L2 is so we've got lots of l2s they settle to ethereum you can Bridge you can Bridge from your L1 to your L2 or a lot of ramps will come right into an L2 you can give your users fast and cheap transactions but the first question is how decentralized is that and look at Bas is so close we've got like one more piie right and and has to do with I think exiting and how long the exit window is or something like that don't know exactly what that is but also they have a centralized sequencer one day we need decentralized sequencing to be happening on these l2s which is a hard problem to solve and I'm not the guy to do it but this this L2 beat I think is just come here and look and figure out like what L2 you want some of these l2s are ZK some of these l2s are rollups some of these l2s have built in account abstraction uh I think ZK sync era might be one of those uh some of these l2s do things like take the gas fees and give them to the contract deployers like this CSR contract something something Revenue so all of these have a little bit of different flavors and you kind of need to just get in and figure out which one is for you and I can't really make that decision for you honestly I think like between these I have no hard preferences uh maybe I do have some horses in the race but I don't want to make any Kings here I would say pick the one that's right for you yeah the only thing I'll add to that is just because we we've been building in the space and um chose which L2 and something that mattered to us was just like how much support we're going to be getting from that ecosystem like what other apps are building in that ecosystem as well because you're going to be plugging into a lot of stuff so like how thriving is it and then like are they helping you Market are gaining new users uh giving you grants and so those are also other considerations if you're building something for for the company if you're just like you know tinkering around or building something fun like I I I think uh you there's a lot of different considerations too so it really depends on what you're trying to do and you could go across multiple l2s it could be something that settles on multiple l2s and you use that there could be some bridging in between uh liquidity is another thing right if you're big into Defi and you need a lot of liquidity on the Chain you're going to need to get into these and figure out you know how much liquidity does it have when I make a trade from a stable to eth and back what are the fees on that how much is my user getting and and that's kind of based on if there's low liquidity those fees are going to be high if there's High liquidity those fees are going to be low you want that liquidity and there is kind of like some it's it's it's contained all over right there's there's fragmented liquidity for sure and youx um just Christina said it seems whenever I have an error using metamask I need to update my RPC I'm us assuming mm is metam mask but yeah I don't know I mean yeah o no no it's it's yeah I have to update my RPC yeah I I don't know I think I'm not a big fan of metamask I I am using it here on desktop still for a lot of things uh try try some other wallets too I would say try some another rpcs like yeah I'm not exactly like yeah every once in a while metamask is weird and I have to just like reset it right and it just feels so scary to do that yeah okay so we have two minutes is there anything we have not covered yet like you were just like okay we want to make sure that everybody is aware of this uh we haven't really talked about AI agent platforms like Eliza and a lot of the other ones I think you'll you do your own research also uh these AI agent platforms are out there you don't have to build you don't have to like abuse The Prompt yourself there's cool like rag storage and a lot of things that a lot of AI nerds have been thinking about for a long time that exist in these AI agent platforms that you as a solidity Dev may not know about so just be aware of these AI agent platforms and really get in and understand them um I think another big thing is like we don't know I've been saying this but I I really want to hammer at home that like the next big thing on ethereum is probably not in this file and it's up to you to like figure out and think of and I love what Linda is saying about go back to those 2018 years when people were talking about token curated curated Registries what if you have an AI agent or maybe multiple AI agents that are DJs and they're picking what they think is the best song for the room and then you have people voting on the songs that they're picking with a token and the person who made the best AI agent makes some money but overall what you curate is some really good music a really good list of music that people really like check out token curated Registries it's like there's like people scoffing from 2015 when I even say that but like check out some of these old ideas because because because because now is the time the the regulation scare is down what would you build if you could build anything that should be what you're asking yourself and you shouldn't just ask yourself you should get in and should learn and you should go ship and you should deploy something go put something on some main net somewhere nice great way to end it um well thanks so much for everyone for tuning in all of this is going to be recorded we'll share the list of all the links and resources that Austin covered um thank you Austin for just doing this you are the best you have done so many of these for the industry and I think a lot of people have learned through watching your videos so um thank you so much and appreciate everyone joining uh we can just all hop off we don't um eth Global is going to be handling the recording and stuff so we're good to go thank you awesome thank you everyone okay bye [Music]