AMA with lightclient | EPF5 Office Hours

um honorable guest uh one of these M uh thank you so much uh for joining gu um and uh yeah I'm very excited to have met here because he is um he can answer any of your questions on any area of theum I'm sure he has strong opinions on many many interesting things happening around protocol um uh and uh before we dive into your questions I wanted to get more of met ground to learn a bit more about you to give people context on where are you coming from what do you do so um I wonder what's uh what's your story if you don't mind uh looking with yourself for for a few minutes there um what uh what What's your biground what you've been doing before etherum what brought you to the core development cool thanks a lot Maria glad to be back with you guys uh it's been a while since I've got a chance to talk with the EPF program but I've sort of been keeping track what you've been up to it's been awesome I've seen some of you guys contributing to repos that I look at and I love I love seeing that so yeah super excited to be talking to you uh I guess a good place to start with my story is when I sort of first my first interaction with ethereum was through a software engineering daily podcast funnily enough um was listening to a pro to a podcast with Kevin auke founder of gitcoin at the time um gitcoin I mean this was 2017 or so gitcoin was like very much of a premier project in ethereum and I think if you look at the number of people that getcoin has onboarded to the ethereum ecosystem it's been extremely high and I was one of those people so I listened to this podcast and at the time I was in university and we were thinking about what we wanted to do for this big Capstone project that was coming up in a couple quarters and listening to this to his podcast and he was talking about this way of paying people with cryptocurrency to do development tasks I thought that was a really interesting concept and having had a lot of experience in e-commerce growing up uh selling things on eBay just to make money on the side while I was a kid I realized that there was a big problem with dealing with disputes in these T types of ecosystems these like peer-to-peer Market places so immediately like we my friend and I messaged Kevin we were like hey really cool project what happens when there you know someone says they did the work and the person paying for the work says they didn't do the work like what do you do and he was like yeah that's a good point honestly we just pay off the people so that they just go away because this is a problem that we haven't figured out yet and I don't know to me like solving the dispute resolution like I had been burned a few times on eBay with this this process and so I it was sort of like near and dear to me and that was a really exciting project to me so we hacked together some ideas for this Capstone project at University and I got involved with another project there was like sort of gitcoin and there was a different project called bounties Network at the time they were doing kind of the same thing but bounties network was a more general purpose platform and gitcoin was more of a development platform so I got working with the bounties people pretty closely and we built this project and it was probably a terrible project like we're University students we have no idea what we're doing it was like you know I don't know if you know this meme of the Cheeto holding the door closed that's like probably what it felt like with all these like ER composes put together so we put this thing together we really excited about it and I you know I was going to go work at some Silicon Valley company when I graduated and I was just like after this project talking to the that team and I was like hey you know this is cool um how can I keep working on this on my free time because I really like ethereum and this project like I care about this few resolution and they were like I mean why would you work on this sen your free time like we we'll just hire you and I was like wait you know I could actually work that never even crossed my mind that I could like work for this like fake Internet money company uh as like a full-time engineer so they we did some interviews they hired me whatever I I was a full stack engineer for the bounties Network I was doing mostly front end engineering which I had never done before so I'm like frantically going through this like react uh this react tutorial project just trying to figure out like how am I going to contribute to this project as a full-time engineer so I do that and that last for about six months this is like end of 2018 and and ethereum price collapses to like $80 and I was like I knew it this isn't a real thing fake Internet money is going to go back where it came from to zero and I was working at consensus that's where these projects were based and so consensus went through this big like restructuring a lot of layoffs we had grown I don't know through that bull market to almost 1,200 people and we started cutting cutting and my team was one of the teams that got got cut that project got cut and we were looking for the thing to do and around that time like ethereum 2.0 was sort of the big rage and there was a lot of people who were like deep with the ecosystem thinking like how can we accelerate ethereum 2.0 because this is how ethereum is going to compete with EOS and you know those other like really important chains so I connect with uh some people in this R&D Department that was spining up at consensus and we talk about it we're like okay yeah you know there's this thing ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 we were talking about phases like phase zer was launched the beacon chain phase one was like you know some sort of like data availability layer phase two was supposed to be sharded execution and they were like look literally no one has looked at ethereum Phase 2 ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 like vitalic wrote One post about it but you know everyone is working on the beacon chain so if you know you could just like go and look at that maybe you could do something useful there and I I didn't really have a lot of experience with like virtual machines or execution like I really barely knew how the evm worked to be Frank and this was like a learning opportunity for me in some way so it really took me 6 12 months to bootstrap into understanding the execution model of ethereum and I think it was like a cool introduction because a lot of people who come into ethereum and the blockchain space they sort of like look at what exists and they're like this is the evm this is the blockchain let me learn these things and I kind of did that but I also had the opportunity to look at ethereum more from the perspective of first principle like we want to execute things in relation to uh a global database you know how would we do that and I I was able to think about it in terms of like constantly trying to think of how my own virtual machine would work because we were looking at ewm at the time which was an ethereum flavored wasum and so I spent about a year working on projects related to that and that was like mostly a development opportunity for me like we wrote a couple research posts but I don't know if we contributed that much overall to the to the discourse and and it makes sense because ethereum Phase 2 was like many many years away even at the time that we were working on it and after like one one and a half years the road map for ethereum started becoming clear like we're going to launch the beacon chain I think we launch the beacon chain we're going to do the merge we're GNA combine this proof of work layer with this uh proof of stake layer and this like shed execution layer like doesn't really make as much sense like we're starting to have some problems with how efficient we can make the proofs and how do we deal with accounts abstraction in these situations and so that's kind of when I was like okay I'm I feel like I want to contribute to ethereum and I want to like see contributions be accepted into this project rather than spinning my wheels doing research on something that's like many many years away so I started contributing to go ethereum this must have been 2020 uh and I started working on the type transactions proposals and that was just like a stroke of luck because we were working on account substraction the time and we were thinking you know if we're going to do accounts obstruction the right way we want to have a custom transaction type to do this thing so I'm like trying to push for this EIP 2930 which was the access list transaction and I was like yeah you got this access list transaction that's a cool idea but like the way you're doing it it would be cooler if you had like a type bite on it so I was like helping with this like type transaction concept and you know that 20 no one uses the 2930 transaction that one like is really kind of irrelevant in like the great scheme of ium but that sort of like teed me up to work on EIP 1559 which ended up being like kind of an important EIP that she probably heard of so I after worked on 2930 I started working on 1559 contribute to that for like quite a while and was able to like get that ver to gu and at that time like I was starting to like be more involved with core development going to a lot of allore devs calls talking with the GU team on like somewhat of a regular basis you know every couple months or so like I'm still an outside contributor but I see these people conf conferences and people were starting to make fun of me they were like you know you're always around but you're not with us or you're like not on the team like I don't understand like what do you do and I started to feel bad that people were making fun of me that I wasn't like on the inside and so I started talking to Peter and and Martin and I was like Hey can I have a job that you're in your team and I kind of like your project um I could learn some more stuff and fortunately I had contributed for long enough that they sort of like saw my contributions and they were like sure yeah it makes sense so that was kind of like the progression of me onto the go ethereum team um that took you know from 2018 until I guess I joined two and a half years ago so that must have been 2022 so you know I spent about four years of consensus doing research and like kind of being on the outside and you know I don't know I say outside it's not like I wouldn't say like the go ethereum t team is necess the inside anymore but there is like this kind of concept of like being more of like an external contributor coming to allore devs and like not being like in the thick of the like protocol research and development and so it took a while to break in but now that I've been in I've been able to like work on a lot of the the hard Forks so I've implemented quite quite a few of the eaps for this coming one pectra implemented a couple things in in uh Cancun and have just really been involved with like the day-to-day like protocol shipping operation and yeah yeah that's kind of like how I've gotten here today I've picked up a lot of responsibilities over the years I'm an editor on the EIP repository I managed the Json RPC execution apis I managed some of the engine API uh repositories and yeah try to trying to lead quite a few efforts so there is no shortage of work like I feel like there's like too many things to be doing so I'm happy that this program exists uh to try and develop some more people to take on this tasks anyways that's a whole bunch about me I'm happy to answer some questions about that or about anything related to ethereum because it's kind of a crazy project thanks thanks a lot Matt it was great uh yeah thank thank you for working us through all of that it's uh yeah all the way from 2018 to the present a lot of stuff you've been working on um yeah and I had no idea that you started actually on these bounties and doing front end out all things it's it's really interesting um yeah yeah it's funny because like k are actually kind of friends now like we both live in Boulder so I see him pretty frequently and I just like remind him every once while I'm like you know you're my dad basically like you brought me here you created me and he just kind of laughs you know but I think it's cool like he's there's definitely people in the ecosystem that bring a lot of people in I think Piper is one of those people like Piper has really brought a ton of people into the ecosystem you know he's the Godfather of this program in yep most ways yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um yeah he brought Josh uh just uh confirming here and uh started the whole the whole EPF so yeah but also yeah next time I see Kevin I will thank him for bringing you in I had no idea about that and uh yeah Al so one thing to add actually um important thing that you missed in your past and people are curious about is where the name comes from uh well I I kind of know the answer but yeah people are curious right how did you become life client so back into my University days you know we we we had some classes where we got to use GitHub and that those were like the coolest classes because that was like what real Engineers use so we were on GitHub and I I don't know my I probably had my full name as my GitHub handle and I saw these people with cool GitHub handles and I was like I want that like I want to be cool I need the aesthetic of being like I can't ship code if I don't have a good name uh and so I wrote These Bots that would like go through a ton of like permutations of words like I was just shooting in the dark literally anything and I couldn't find so I am like sitting here you know still like weeks trying to look for this username can't find any usernames and I had like an old an old gamer tag on Xbox that was like related to color so I thought like maybe I could do like a name related to color because color is cool like I think I love I love colors who doesn't and I obviously couldn't find any permutation related to color for sure so what I did was I did a hyphen between every letter so it ended up as C- l- o d uh C- o- l- o-r and the people I was working with were getting really tired after it took like one year but like after a while people were like we cannot tag you on issues or PRS anymore this is unreal and so I really needed to find a new username and at that time I was working with a guy named Joseph Chow he is like very OG ethereum person not as involved anymore but he was at Devcon zero and involved with consensus like you know top first 25 employees or so and he had the username on GitHub ethers and I was like this is like such a cool name like you know you've named yourself after the project so I was starting to like look at things that were related to ethereum and I was like okay proof of work proof of stake way you know just like all the like the ethereum vocabulary and you know this was I think I picked my name up in 2019 and at that time like clients that I feel like that was like the first uh emergence of people being excited about like clients like people had talked about it earlier on but I feel like 2019 people were like okay we're so close we're going to ship it it's here and I was like okay let me get in a little bit early and you know pick this username so I picked like client it was a cool concept I like the idea uh and then it absolutely died off for like five years or four years so nobody was like actually shipping or working on like clients and now you know it feels a little bit like we're back into this people are getting closer we've got Helios from a16z they people sort of working on like clients and so now it's confusing because it's actually a term that people are using again and it's never clear like do you mean the guy or do you mean the technology um but I think it's not like it's it's kind of nice because it keeps me a bit Anonymous like it's hard to look me up on the Internet which I like so if you search like like client ethereum then you just get like a page about what a like client is and then you're like okay this isn't a real person you're the most real light client in ethereum right now yeah uh yeah thank you so much for elaborating on that it's a it's a important part of your super hero b story um yeah awesome um I want to yeah of course like folks if you have any questions feel free to raise your hand I have some more questions for Matt but I want to want to make sure you guys have space to to ask anything [Music] um yeah rori yeah was just what improvements would you make with the EIP process I know Tim you know sent out a post on E magicians a while ago kind of some proposals he had in mind but since you know you're an editor what um what do you think uh could be the future for the whole EIP process that was a good question um I think there are two two two stages to the answer the first is near term and I think near term we're sort of close to the optimal situation I feel like um I I think where we're lacking is we're lacking in EIP editors so you know that's kind of a call out if anybody is interested in contributing check out EIP 1 there's an EIP I think it's 5656 it describes what an EIP editor does you know I would love to add some more people as an editor I think we're a little bit bottlenecked by that now so in general I think the process that we have is a quite light weight the AP editors are just making sure that the process is sort of being followed the stages of the EIP needs to go through go through and that you know the text of the EIP makes sense so I think that that's okay but longer term I would like to see a lot more structure around this and the reason I say longer term and not now is that I don't think that we have the people we don't have enough people in the ecosystem to do I imagine so I I imagine something kind of like how the ietf works where you have different tracks of work and you know in core development like we kind of have like some different things like we have networking that's like a core client related track we have the evm we have the consensus layer we have uh PBS like a lot of these Concepts and I think that it would make sense if we sort of had people that were involved in those areas and Not only would they review Eeps that are related to that area but they would actually uh be like a a group that's focusing on who else is working on this this area so if you're the chair of the epbs track then you might help direct people who are coming in or people who are like trying to ship projects related to this and I think that's very different than what we have today because if you're working on PBS you kind of just like throw things onto the Eeps repository you like throw it on to all court devs but there's no direction it's like hard to get feedback and I think that if we really want to like continue scaling in terms of more people uh involved in the ecosystem that we need to add a little bit more of structure around this and I think that we need to have leaders in the ecosystem who are able to keep people on track and to make sure that questions are answered and that um eips move through the process at the correct pace so I would love to see that happen later on awesome yeah thank you so much for answering that uh folks if you have any more questions feel free to raise your hand um yeah I have a few more things I wanted to ask like in general because you've been working on bunch of hard problems which are being still pushed forward for years like 374 eof and bunch of stuff you've been contributing to I'm wondering like what keeps you going what keeps you motivating especially when working on things which are like these long-term projects caught in the big coordination game schemes yeah yeah I feel like there's a few main things I mean number one in the darkest moments I do try to remember that the technology that we're working on is something that's going to be useful for Humanity do I think that pump.

fun is like the way that we're going to connect with the masses no but uh I think that eventually we're going to find a way to use this technology because this is something that didn't exist before having technology that is um technology that can be used to run programs that are not controlled by anyone this is something that there's going to be uses for I'm I'm pretty confident in that and I'm excited by it so that's one thing uh two is friends I have a lot of friends in the ecosystem now it would be weird to just leave the ecosystem because all my friends are kind of still working on it I really enjoy the people here it's fun I have a great time uh it would be really hard for me to work at a regular tech company because I can't send Pepe memes non-stop I maybe I can but like it's just not the same it's just different and I would probably get fired really quickly for being yeah it's like open source development in this decentralized way is is fun and I think it like fits my skill set a lot uh and also I don't know I mean how do I keep working on 3074 or whatever like there's a bit of ego there like I think it's something that's like so close to my personality at this point that I want to ship it because I want to close that chapter of like my Development Career and I think it's like super useful like I'm excited about improving the ux for ethereum I think that this is like the right track but why did I not drop off from working on this project like one year ago whenever it seemed dead because I think that it was just like unclo like an unfinished chapter for my development book and so that's not a great reason to keep working on things but it's a real reason and it's a real reason that a lot of people are shipping things in ethereum like whenever we we this ecosystem is getting bigger and more mature and people are dedicated years of their lives to things and it's like important to realize whenever you're talking about hard forks and like what to go what's going to go into hard hard Fork you have to think about the people behind the proposals too because it's difficult whenever you've spent two three four five years on a project to be like perfectly partial to impartial to its inclusion so I try to not be too loud of a voice in terms of like should it be included or not I try to let the other people make those decisions because I know that like personally I would obviously say it should be included I would say it should have been included in the London hard Fork when we proposed it um but that's why we have this process to like try and counteract uh people's egos awesome thanks a lot for that man that's uh that's inspiring um kathia yeah have a question yeah hi M uh what what Hot Topic are you currently working on uh and guess any specific I mean I'm kind of the lead on the Prague hard Fork so there's a lot of it's a lot of busy work honestly and it's not I haven't had the opportunity to like sit down and like really develop a big feature in gu in the last few months I mean you can say that the eips in the prag hard Fork are big features I suppose so that's mostly what I've been working on uh I have developed a lot of the system contracts for this hard fork and the last one so that's like the evm assembly um system the contracts that called by the system so that was probably the last like bigger bigger thing that I've been focused on but yeah honestly I've just been I've been trying to be very close to like the to the like operational side of G and the core protocol for the last year so rather than like you know sinking my head into the sand and developing a project yeah I got it thanks yeah thank you um we have chair Visa um and am I asking in the in the uh comments yeah I can respond to JS Visa um yeah if you're I was going to read if you're reading that go ahead okay yeah let me just read it so he's just asking um based on my commit history it looks like I've shifted a bit from core development gu to more research role on the Eeps um and how does that role come about is there a lot of coordination on the Eeps uh compared to collaborating with Peter what are the differences with vitalic blah blah blah yeah good question um okay so I would say I wouldn't say that I've shifted from like core development to go ethereum because honestly I don't think I have ever been that core of a GU contributor and what I mean by that is like I am I came into the project like late by terms of how long the project has existed like this project began in 2014 so I came in in 2021 2022 full-time uh so that's a six seven years of code that's been written by like extremely talented Engineers so it's hard for me and not quite as interesting to me to come in and like make huge technical contributions to very complicated pieces of the code base like the sync like the database and so a place that I found like a very good Niche is implementing eips so my bread and butter for GU is like the transaction format so I've implemented like pretty much all of the transaction types uh that's something that I do a lot I do a lot of the changes to the block header I do a lot of I just do a lot of like changes to the core protocol and that works for me because it's a role that I was do kind of doing before I joined gu I've always been like pretty social you know not in terms of like the fun social sense but like pretty social in terms of just like talking with other core developers seeing what's going on with them like letting them know about what's happening in gu or what's happening with eips so I've always been like interested and involved in that part of the pipeline like if you think about the protocol pipeline there's like research on the left and then you would have you know maybe some more applied research where you're trying to get some benchmarks on the proposals and then you have the development and like the actual shipping of that feature and so I've been very much in like the development shipping phase and dabbling in the like kind of Applied research uh phase so you know my contributions to gu come and go I would say the last couple months I've been contributing more to just like fixing issues in gu and just like trying to you know review things that are in the PRS uh trying to improve the API so that's like cool development and then every once in a while I have more research projects that I'm focused on and so that has historically been accounts abstraction that's been a research project of mine since 2019 I've been involved with four fours the state xur uh sorry the history xere I've been involved with State xere like those are like I've been more involved on the execution side of research so as of late like I've been the lead on the EIP 7702 which was obviously the rep for 3074 and that's required me to make a lot of contributions to the Eeps repository and that's required me to talk to vitalic and that's required me to spend a lot of time with wallet teams and talking to all the people who use accounts in ethereum and understand what they need and I enjoy it like I think that's a cool thing to do it's hard sometimes because these are all people that are you know falic is very busy the wallet teams are very busy they don't necessarily have time to just sit down every day and discuss how this proposal should go and people are coming with different levels of context like the wallet teams really understand what a smart contract wallet is and like how people use their product but they don't have the like fiveyear history that I do and that other people do on accounts abstraction like where accounts abstraction came from and where 3074 came from and what's possible in the core protocol so that's something that's like I've had to try and navigate which is like how do you lead a like research technical proposal project which is the specification of an EIP uh and get like valuable feedback from people who just don't aren don't have the context and I probably will never be able to get the context and that's very different than like working on the GU team like working with Peter or Felix or Martin because those people like you don't have to explain things to them you can just say things or not even say and then they just like know they understand because they've been doing this for so long so I would say that's like a big difference with the specification side and vitalic is the same way like I appreciate working with vitalic on accounts abstraction because he has been talking to count to counts obstruction since 2014 he totally understands like everything that we're talking about he really gets at a very high level and at a very low level all the things that we're talking about so it's easy like the conversations are relatively short because like we don't have to go back and forth like we're on the same wavelength when he says something it's right or it's something that I haven't thought about uh and the same with like Peter and Felix and Martin so I would say like it's like similar it's just like different types of content okay uh there's one other question in the chat sorry I'll just ask I'll just read this one have you ever got self-doubt on your skills when problems you are solving is not getting solved by you and kind of stuck uh totally um I think it's like getting better now you know I've been working in in ethereum for six years now but I would say like the first I mean definitely the first two or three I felt a lot of impostor syndrome didn't feel like I was the right person to be solving these things I felt weird that I was in these roles um I've gotten more comfortable over time I've like it I wouldn't say it's the healthiest of fuels but it was definitely a fuel to like really lock in and understand things and you know develop myself devel my experience improve my abilities so in some ways like it pushed me but in other ways like yeah it was hard and there was a lot of like confidence confidence issues and I didn't I don't like presenting at conferences in general but like I really didn't like presenting conferences um you know when I was first starting out I'll tell you a really funny story because I don't think there's a recording of This anywhere uh but not of this meeting but of like this uh event so I went to Devcon Prague this was 2018 I had been working had consensus for like three months and I don't know like the en crypto like people just give presentations all the time that's just something that people seem to do especially like back then when there weren to many people you're just like going to events presentation event presentation so I come in and they're like hey you've been working on this thing and react I know you just learned react three weeks ago but do you want to give a presentation at Devcon about the module you've been building and like I do not like public speaking I definitely did not like public speaking whenever I was like 21 years old uh but but I was like I guess I have to do this so I went up and do it and I I mean they put me in this room of like that that could sit like 150 people and there were like no joke like eight people in this room and I'm miked up as if like it's getting it recorded and all the stuff and I am absolutely bombing like I'm just like putting so many filler words in anyway so that scared me from public speaking for like a good year or two and I still think about that I'm just like oh my God I'm so I'm so thankful there are no recordings of that so I never have to like go through the pain of seeing it but um yeah it's uh you're not alone if you're just coming into the space especially if you don't have a lot of technical career experience then yeah probably gonna spend some time uh having some imposter syndrome unless you're just like really confident in yourself and secure which go good for you but I would guess like a lot of people a lot of people I know have like had similar um s s similar internal battles so I would say just like stay the course keep working like at the end of the day there's so many things to contribute to like if you understand yourself you understand where you can contribute like I'm not vitalic I'm not Peter and I'm honestly not as good of developers as some of those people and I'm never not GNA be as good of a researcher as metallic and I'm not as good as a researcher as onar like there's a lot of people who are really really smart in this ecosystem but like I am good at making sure that PRS get merged and I am good at just like dedicating myself and spending time on things and I am good at like socializing and talking to different developers to understand where things are at so find the thing that you are good at and like lean into it because if you're good at it then there will be a place to contribute okay I think Rory was up next uh was Dan actually yeah Dan was first sorry thanks it's not really competition uh I wanted to ask what's the status of 7495 the the Ser the stable container uh because you mentioned Spectra do you see it something that uh is going to happen or then we need it because we have projects that you know bring changes to CL I mean to specs and I'm curious about stable container yeah I'll just say quickly 7495 is the EIP for those not familiar where you make it so that the SSD container isn't broken between forks you're sort of able to like specify what the structure of it is and then you can continue making proofs about it in the future so this is like a forward compatibility solution um I think it's a great proposal I don't think it's going to go on pectra just because I think there are so many other things that are being slated for Petra right now and in terms of priority like I would say we haven't officially included pios in Petra still and pios I would say is higher priority honestly than anything that's in it right now so probably Afters yeah yeah possibly there's a lot of priorities and that's like the really like the CL is really in a place where there's so many things that are pretty important like we also have single slot finality like we have a lot of things that need to be done so that's the hard thing with stable containers like it's a good proposal but it's just like when is it the right time to do it my guess is that it's Petra won't be that time but we'll have to see how Petra development goes the next three or four months yeah it's not in the in the is not in the 7,600 so I thought that's the case but you are the man to ask about about this yeah okay thanks thank you um so uh bori or Baston or whoever feels like it yeah go ahead oh yeah I was going to ask um so I mean uh I guess ever since joining the EPF U and even before that with the our the study group that we did we've been listening to the the ACD calls and so I would say you're probably fairly active on those calls um and I'm just curious like are you this active as a result of being an EIP editor and because you have your you know you're just doing a lot with the different areas and do you ever feel overwhelmed with all that you're working on um and then having to you know vocally communicate uh on these calls yeah I definitely feel a bit overwhelmed with all the different things like there I I feel like I mean this is just true for any kind of company that you work for you know any job over time you you gain a lot of responsibility and you just sort of accumulate it and they you know you're getting more responsibilities than responsibilities like end up becoming not important usually so over the years like I've just gained a lot of responsibility because I'm like willing to generally say like let me help with this let me do that so now you know one of those responsibilities I have is execution apis and I literally go on there once a month once every two months and I just try to merge PRS and that's not as much contribution as I would like but it's kind of like lower priority of the types of things so yeah there's totally a bunch of stuff that I feel a bit overwhelmed uh with with keeping track of so I just like try to think like what it a like am I blocking people like are there things that I'm needing to be doing that I'm not but is keeping people from doing their jobs and I try to prioritize those uh because if a human being is working on something especially a well paid productive human being like a core developer then it's good to unlock them uh but yeah I am very active on award devs calls I think that's a product of just going to every single award devs call for like many years and involving myself in many of the projects um but also like I for some reason feel okay speaking my opinion and I think there are some people who have same experience or better and they just don't either want to or they don't feel comfortable sharing their opinions maybe that's a product of like me spending a lot of time like I live in Boulder and there's a lot of people there's a lot of core developers or researchers in Boulder so I might have a better understanding in general about how people feel about proposals and like I said I talk to a lot of people even outside in person but like over Discord and and in other calls and so I am often times like not just sharing my opinion but like a broader opinion of people that are not coming to the call like the GU team has standups many times a week and oftentimes Peter and Martin and Felix are not on the call to share their opinion but I tried to share their opinion on the call um just as like the GU sentiment about something so yeah I gu I do talk a lot on the calls I try to not be too overbearing but yeah for some reason I feel like my opinion should be heard so I make it heard and it's great um thanks uh Bastin thanks uh so I wanted to ask uh like in your opinion what's the status on light clients and what's the near future uh what does it look like and more important more importantly what's missing uh good question so like clients today I think the the Pinnacle is Helios so Helios is a rapper around an e RPC and it basically lets you get the data in a verifiable way so it will you tell it what you once a request and then it will go get that data and verify it against the like client that it's keeping track of and that kind of got a bit easier with the beacon chain because now we have these sync committees like that system works pretty well but it's still centralized in the sense that like we have a livess requirement on whatever like client server you're using and I think that that's in general okay um to me I would ra like it's a lot better than than what is what is the status quo today which is just asking infura or Alchemy and just trusting whatever they say that's not great and I think that if more people were using Helios to verify the data that would be preferable I think the reason that they're not for one people just don't care as much as like we would like them to do so I don't really know how to solve that like it would be better if there were if the defaults were just to have a less trusted system uh that's really the only way because I don't think like most people really understand the concept that they're getting data from a centralized source and not verifying it so there's a bit of like ux design there that maybe could improve like think the the analogy like I always like to use is that the the uh uh TLS SSL https this whole project like coming up with the lock icon and the browser was really transformational for that because if you didn't have that like people look at that and they're like okay this is secure and they don't know what it means they have no clue how it actually works like what's what's secure but like it gives them a sense of security and so if we were to come up with some sort of UI design around uh verifying data like I think that would be beneficial uh but I think like maybe the reason that we haven't spend as much time at is it's not free and it's not even cheap like verifying uh building the proof is kind of expensive so that's the feedback I've heard from the a16z team is that eth get proof is is just too inefficient and I don't I don't think it's a bandwidth problem like I think that you can download the proof I just think that Computing the proof is kind of expensive so if we were to unlock more like clients I think that like Computing the proofs is something that uh would be pretty useful to look into I don't know how much better we can make it like we have tried to work on E skit proof and in general it has been like fairly performant for us so I don't know if verle will improve the world for this it may not because it's more expensive to create the proof uh but that's more computational rather than disc reading so yeah big problems people don't care don't know how to communicate it expensive to create the proofs and I don't know I mean I think I would like to see someone just build a wallet that does this that's like you know very legit about being a like client and I don't see a reason that like the technology exists it's possible uh I don't know why someone hasn't done it I think there's funding to do it I don't know if you're going to make millions of dollars doing it but uh it would be an interesting like educational project that I would like to see thanks thank you uh and Chloe had a question so I just curious you mentioned before that we need more long form discussion of protocol change and I just curious like why do you think that should be case or um how can we integrate into the current form discussion because we already have ACD call breakout course then if you're in Research Forum um magician for and also like Discord Channel and a lot of people also discuss or fight on Twitter so how do you think we can promote such kind of like discussion in public yeah I think it's really hard because it's so easy to just send an instant message and that's kind of the battle that we're fighting is why think why spend the time to type something out whenever you can just back and forth messages between a person or a couple people and then like get to the solution um I don't really know how to resolve that which and I think that's like why we don't have as much long form the reason I think we need more long form is I think that writing is a way of thinking I think once you get to a like a level that you're at now I mean we're not in grade school writing anymore this isn't like an assignment that we're trying to turn in this is like this is to help us think about a problem and to organize our own thoughts and to create new thoughts like that's what the process of writing is to me and I think that that's why we need more of it like we spend too little time organizing our own thoughts and like really thinking about what we're talking about when we're just instant messaging each other so I would like to see more of it I don't know how to enforce it like we could turn Discord off I think that would help but I think that that's like too big of a change for people uh in terms of priority you list to a lot of places that communication happens I think number one priority is all cevs like these synchronous calls if you were to only like engage in one way like engaging there is like the highest reward because you know it's a it's a quick way to like know where everyone is thinking like there's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes to make all qu dos happen so Tim like Tim doesn't just appear uh for an hour and a half every two weeks and then like disappear you know he is spending a lot of time in the background talking with client teams to understand what is a priority for them where they're at with development and so all cord devs is like the product of that process so when you read the agenda for alcort devs just know that like it's not just halfhazard it's also very um um it's very curated so it's a good place to understand like where the Mind share is so that's like number one in terms of what are people thinking and doing and how can you contribute and so then that's like a good place to figure out like where to contribute if you were trying to contribute to something that's being talked about on all cevs or something you're contributing is not being talked about all cevs like that's the place to like get in front of people after that like the next priority it's like hard to say because it depends on the specific project and where those people people are communicating but I would say in general at this point like Discord is like number two priority I would just like mute all the channels on the R&D Discord except for the couple topics that you care about and are like active in and follow that uh and then like I don't know eth magicians like pretty far down the list at this point we're trying to improve it but like the reality is is that the magician's forum is not um it's not being as loved as it once was and maybe that's an opportunity for people like there's a lot of conversations discussions that happen on Discord like you can just go look at the execution Dev the future of EAS Channel right now there's a lot of things about 7702 that's being asked a lot of questions and I'm giving some answers but like this would be a great thing to propagate back to eth magicians so if someone is bored like trying to bridge some of that information that could be like a useful exercise uh yeah okay um yeah thank you uh we have a question in the chat about veral trees it's another uh kind of for still um yeah so what do you think should we wait for some binary trees some Quantum safe mechanism or uh yeah what do you think about the veral at the current state I am not allowed to comment on this because gon will literally kill me if I say anything so I will we will remove this from the recording uh I don't know the veral boys are on my nerves a little bit with their 29th 35 EIP uh so maybe I'm like slanted in the wrong way I'm not sure I think like there are good questions being asked in general I'm not like convinced that we need to change the course on verl like we're still just targeting you know 2026 for verle that's a long time uh so I don't really see a problem like people are going to R&D until the thing goes alive on the hard fork and I think that's the right thing to do like we've pulled things out of forks weeks before the fork because something came up where we realized it wasn't as good of an idea and so as long as there's time like we're going to fill that with doing research and if something better comes along we're going to migrate to that thing uh honestly like I'm not as involved with veral so I only know like what people are talking about I do know that there are like questions about is this uh try design the best there's ideas that we should convert the thing to Binary there's ideas that we should use different um proof mechanisms and I like there's some interesting ideas out there but like they they're still very early in the research phase there's also proposals to use like really new uh cryptographic functions and we're just not going to basically if you're going to put a cryptographic function in ethereum it needs to be at least 10 years old I think that that's like a pretty reasonable expectation and that just means that most of the things that are being proposed are like way too young so verl is staying the course for now but yeah people are doing research on it as well yeah that's interesting um thank you Matt um yeah we get more questions in the [Music] comments hold out oh a lot of things I like the question from Rahul what are some things that were pulled out last minute yeah so there is an EIP 2315 that was removed to the last minute I'm just going to link you this issue that describes the situation it's kind of a it's a good one it's an interesting one see yeah let me just send this in I would just give that a read it gives you all the context about what happened with 2315 oh it was Berlin okay that's interesting thanks for sharing that okay we have last five minutes [Music] um uh yeah we have questions from the from J Visa um do you do you do you read it you want to commend some of that um Clan diversity and changes oh let's see okay so there is something that's happening with ethereum core that I think is going to impact what a execution client looks like the consensus client is a bit of a different Beast like I think that for the very long foreseeable future if you want to be a full node on ethereum you need to run a full consensus client like we just don't really have a way around that uh there's ideas of snarking the consensus protocol but like I said like this a lot of that technology is very new zero knowledge cryptographic Primitives and it's just going to take a long time for that stuff to stabilize to actually do uh with the protocol itself but on the execution layer side there's a couple things happening the most important thing is stess uh as stess becomes more real and if and when veral SL whatever stateless mechanism we come up with ships uh it's going to be a lot easier to as a consensus client give the execution client the data that it needs to verify the block right now we've like sort of matched these two pieces software projects together and the execution client is a very complicated piece of software and a lot of the complication comes from needing to sync the State that's a very difficult task and we've come up with a snap protocol to do that and it works really well but it's not simple and there's a lot of code there's a lot of threads that need to be spun up uh and you know you have to have two peer-to-peer Stacks you've got the peer-to-peer stack on that consensus client that's doing block announcements um and you know verifying the consensus layer and then you have the execution layer and it's doing the state syncing and the transaction propagation in the pool so I can see the next couple years a client popping up that is stateless and is just a drop in library to consensus clients um and sort of circumvents the whole engine API situation I think that's like a pretty interesting idea and if I were to start an execution client today I would probably start with that honestly because you can do it today you can do it with merel Patricia tree proofs you can do it by downloading the state on demand like there's a lot of ways that you could do this and um I think it helps avoid a lot of the complexity of the execution client that's probably going to disappear okay but this is more about the diversity [Music] um okay okay advancements of parallel transaction execution I okay yeah these things I'm not sure how much it will affect the client diversity like like clients to me it's like a really interesting and important concept but it's not really related to client diversity because when we think about clients I think much more about full clients like if you're a like client that means you're susceptible to being tricked by a malicious majority of the network if you're a full node that's like the people who in the event of some catastrophic event are going to be able to say I am following the chain and I know what the head of the chain is without without a doubt do Mev and you need to head of the chain very quickly you need to like speed up the time it takes to verify the block like maybe trans parallel transaction execution makes sense U if you're building an L2 then you might buy you might want to have the core client be running transactions in parallel but that's not going to impact the um client diversity on L1 um I don't see L1 doing parallel transaction execution like as a primitive of the core protocol probably ever but at least for a long time just because I don't think that it's I think it's like far too complicated for us to put into the core protocol and it's something that just makes more sense as a tool that developers use to execute their blocks faster or certain clients use to be faster but I don't think that it will be super meaningful in terms of um in terms of Cent diversity Josh want to finish it yeah I'll finish fin it up here I got two uh two quick questions for you uh first as uh as the most prolific uh Meme creator in the ethereum community do you have a particularly favorite meme that you've created or alternatively uh a a format that you particularly enjoy oh man it's a good question I'll try and pull it up I don't know if I'll get it by the this meeting but I made this one um it was core developers then versus now that was a really that was a pretty funny one lately yeah yeah I'll find it I'll s to you guys uh but lately I've really thought this one the silence um someone else's talking meme that one has been pretty funny lately the CRA has been sorry the crab silencing someone or oh no no that one is really funny too silence brand silence brand yeah yeah no there's one that's like silence blank so and so is talking now ah it's like silence user a core devis talking yeah exactly yeah yeah that one is I was expecting that you'll say the baseball the the the Emoji uh ball okay yeah yeah yeah you're right that one actually take that back oh yeah that's I mean there's just so many good ones I will say that like the number one meme I've ever used is definitely the cowboy oof like when that one started popping off I was sitting that 10 times a day in the chat people were like we have to you can't do that anymore that's just not allowed well and then uh secondarily in a little more serious uh what sort of what like piece of advice would you give to uh somebody who is an Aspire and core developer somebody who's trying to make their way into the ecosystem um has some skills but is struggling to do so so I think that I've given this advice previously for epos but I think it's continues to be relevant and that advice is to do to find the tasks that people aren't doing and do them especially if they're not fun tasks like there's a lot of cool things to do and you can totally contribute there but it's going to be a lot harder to break in when you're competing with the best core developers and researchers and if you feel comfortable with that and you feel like you can contribute like go for it but the way that I found success is I found success by doing the stuff that nobody else lik to do like editing eips and maintaining execution API repo which I'm looking for someone to take over like I would love some to hire someone to contribute to that it's not a fun job but like it's a job and it's a good way to like get into the ecosystem I would say like first and foremost like find a way to work full-time in blockchain if you're not already and then if you want to be in core development like find a way to work full-time in core development even if it's not necessarily the most ethereum aligned and like keep focused on like where you want to go that was like the goal for me is like I was like I just need to stay in blockchain this was back in 2018 you know I don't I think this technolog is probably going to make it I just had to keep working full-time because you accumulate so much experience by just working full-time versus working a non-related job being a full stack engineer or whatever and then in your free time doing core development like being able to say like let me read the eth magician form today that's like an hour and it's going to take I'm gonna say that's part of my work because that's me keeping up to day with the industry so I think you get a lot of accumulative Advantage by working full-time in the space so find a way to work full-time find things that core developers don't like doing and do it for them because they will probably hire you and I've seen a lot of people come into the space like doing that right now testing is something that we really need and it's hard to do it's not super fun to do but they're kind of the most important people in the ecosystem so if you have an aptitude for that like that's another good place awesome yeah thank you so much Matt uh I think it's a great point to finish it off we are few minutes after the hour so we get a repat up here but yeah thank you so much again Matt uh thank you so much everyone normally we open a a discussion thread uh