Everyone. My name is Mark, and this is, uh, Jing. We're here to tell you a little about the future of the superchain. But, uh, first, I want to talk about some spicy stuff. We've heard rumors that optimism is dead, just floating around the internet, but, uh, little-known fact, Jing is actually a demon in treasury management, and we have plenty of chances to say that because I made him sleep in a tent for two years on the roof of the office.
This is true. In New York , in Mexico, you know, it's all part of the journey. It was a long journey. Yes. So, uh, basically, uh, you know, let's talk a little bit about the sentiment on L2 regarding ETH sentiment on L2 regarding ETH .
I've heard rumors that L2 is actually interested in becoming L1 due to frustration with the Ethereum ecosystem. Is this true? Um, I mean, if we talk about the first six months of hate speech at the Ethereum L2 level, I would say there was always a frustration with the speed of delivery within EF. I think that's why most L2 levels initially separated into separate teams. Um, but I think that, um, it all comes down to finding the right abstractions that we can build on.
And I think, um, ETH L1 has its place. And there is a reason why we continue to choose ETH L1 as our DA, even though we could use another DA. Uh, and despite the hate speech at the L2 level, um, because he has the qualities we look for in our DA. So I'm actually very supportive of the yield roadmap, which, um, is also very controversial. Why do you think?
Oh yes, the roadmap for crops. I mean, yields are the real reason I got into this space in the first place, and it was a little crazy that everyone was so upset about this statement from the Ethereum Foundation, because yields are really one of the value propositions of cryptocurrency as a whole. And I really think that maybe it's worth explaining what crops are? So, censorship resistance, capture resistance, open source, privacy, and security. Why was there resistance then?
I think it was more about the way the Ethereum Foundation communicated than the content. You know, the price of ETH fluctuated and fell for a long time. People weren't sure what to hold on to in order to see success. Yes, I really resonate with this. I think optimism has come through similar difficulties.
We truly believed in this vision of maximum decentralization. And in an era where tokens were just being thrown around left and right, and there was no real signal of product market fit, product market fit, any idea, whether bad or any idea, whether bad or good, seemed right or good. So we really took decentralized development very seriously. And it was difficult to implement. Um difficult to implement.
Um , and you know, for the last year and a half we've been fixing that we've been fixing that . We have merged all the companies into one again. Well all the companies into one again. Well , that was really great. Um, in the last six months we sold more products than in the last two and a half years combined, which, uh, was really cool.
Yes. It's really fun, you know, growing up, turning from a small hacker collective into a company. Yes. Your frontal cortex is finally forming as a human. Yes.
Yes. Yes. So, I mean, yeah, we've been doing this Ethereum thing for pretty much our entire adult lives. I know. Someone showed me a picture of us from 5 years ago and I thought, "Wow, we had some jelly-like cheeks.
We were so glowing and hydrated." But honestly, I think people are looking for some recognition from EF of the difficulties involved in production and implementation. Um, I think the roadmap for Harvest is optimistic, and I'm curious what you think about the love and support for Harvest in the Zcash community, which has pretty much the same development roadmap, and, um, the hate EF is getting for its version. Yes, it's so interesting, if you step back for a moment and think about what everyone is talking about Zcash, and you can see that Zack is just growing wildly. Seriously?
Um, they also create crops. So the problem is not the harvest. Um, there's something else. So I would say that, um, one of the main problems is that there's nothing quantitative. There is nothing measurable, right?
When you try to accomplish something, you need to measure it, otherwise it doesn't exist otherwise it doesn't exist . And now it is very difficult to measure the use of the crop. Therefore, it is difficult to know what Ethereum's success indicators are. And if we could unite the community around some metrics and basically put them on a little website and everyone would point to them , I think that would really bring everyone together and improve the attitude towards Ethereum, become more optimistic about ETH overall. Yes.
Hmm, I think this is interesting because ETH with a yield roadmap is much deeper into the narrative of ETH as money, and it really positions Ethereum as a competitor to Bitcoin, not Salana. This is true. This is quite fascinating. I mean, you know, Justin Drake recently said that, without a doubt, ETH will overturn Bitcoin, and this seems like a classic debate that's been going on for years. And you know, I can really imagine this with Ethereum, which would provide quantum resistance and a hard-wired privacy solution that works.
And I would like to see a website where we as the Ethereum ecosystem can create the largest anonymity set in all of cryptocurrency, bigger than Zcash. And I think that would be the most optimistic move for ETH and Ethereum. Yes, I completely agree. I think what we see in a lot of our conversations with fintech conversations with fintech companies and institutions is that Ethereum is still given a huge advantage because of its, you know, lack of trust, the amount of liquidity that's already placed there, leverage. Hmm, I really feel like in many ways this is still a game to lose with Ethereum .
And I think if EF or the broader Ethereum community can figure out how to implement this and how to deliver it, I think that would be great. Hmm, with L2, I mean L2 is L1, and that's if the forking discussions were canceled. I think the crypto community, and especially the Ethereum community, can be incredibly pedantic about small nuances in technical architecture that ultimately don't really have any impact on UX. And I would say that L2 gives you all the properties of EVM. Uh, it's incredibly cheap and in a way that you can control.
One of the main things One of the main things we've been pushing for in our roadmap this quarter or this half is the sequencer policy sequencer policy . You can stake your token to gain access to topof blocks. So if you're a fintech company, you've launched a token, and you want your, ahem, highest-paying subscribers to have preferential access or free transactions, there's a way to do that programmatically. Many companies want to integrate highly regulated assets, but they also want to do so in places where permissionless DeFi protocols can also be deployed . They have a lot of trouble figuring out how to do it.
Integrating technology, integrating logic into a sequencer—that's the strongest form of compliance you can have. So if you want to stop trading in stocks, and you want to do it on all protocols that they are deployed on, and you don't want to go to every command, you can just block the transfer of that asset at the sequencer level. And it doesn't matter whether the D5 protocol has this token wrapped. You don't even need to know what DeFi protocols are. You can just, uh, stop trading that asset on your blockchain or on your trading platform.
And this is, you know, the peak control stuff that enterprises are concerned about, but it has to be done at a censorship-resistant computing level, because you have the problem of all these different entities wanting to coordinate with each other, uh, on a substrate that everyone can, that everyone can trust. Uh, which is the funniest part of distrust. Absolutely. This is the L2 thesis again. She's not going anywhere.
It's just, you know, we had a lot of L2. We were all very excited about it, but the thesis remains the same, although, uh, you know, there's this movement back to L1, as if L1 can never provide the customer support, the last mile, and the customization that enterprises really need. But, as Jen said about Ethereum being this neutral , censorship-resistant layer of payments , institutions want it. So L2 is not going anywhere. L2 not going anywhere.
L2 servers will continue to grow as we get more adoption and enterprises want to connect to chains. And that's a really underrated thing that Jing said about the sequencer and this idea of sequencer policy sequencer policy , because businesses need constraints, like there are laws. And I know that, you know, there's lawlessness somewhere, but we have to grow up and, you know, sell to institutions that are, um, integrated into the existing system. And for this you need to follow the law to follow the law . And having an L2 with one sequencer is actually a superpower.
It's much more attractive for an institution to deploy it at L2, where they can deeply integrate into the sequencer, than on the network, where who-knows-who can sequence. For example, an institution might be concerned that, um, an authorized entity could be a validator on that network, then essentially an authorized entity like North Korea could be processing transactions on your behalf, and that's just not something an enterprise wants to be exposed to. So this idea of sequencing policies is really powerful when it comes to implementation for enterprises. Yes. Hmm, that's crazy because any logic you can put into a smart contract, you can also actually express as a sequencing policy, and that includes privacy.
So we work with a bunch of privacy partners on things like private contracts, private transfers. Hmm private transfers. Hmm , and another interesting thing is that, hmm, a lot of these institutions also want, hmm, quick access to liquidity in Ethereum. So we are finally going to reduce the withdrawal window from 7 days to one day. This has been awaited for so long.
Hmm, so it was interesting to see how the narratives unfolded on Twitter and then look at what the , um, customer demands were actually. Hmm, and translating that into, you know, protocol terminology was interesting. This ended up with our technical co-founder wearing a damn suit. Yes, it's fun. I used to just be a guy who wore hoodies all the time , never went outside, just sat in front of a laptop all day.
What do you need to get rid of shoes with a label? Oh, good question. I don't know. Honestly, I'm not ready to give them up yet. As Mark says, either free your little finger or cut it off.
I said it. Although I highly recommend shoes with a slogan. They truly changed my life. So, you know, uh, to wrap this all up, optimism is not dead. Mark is no longer in the tent.
He's actually in a suit. Hmm, we have many podiums, many, many years. We are working on many exciting things. We are hiring. Hmm, we have a bunch of crazy things coming in.
If you follow our Twitter, we have new features, new announcements about every two weeks. Uh, and we have many more. Many people in the crypto community are particularly happy with same-day withdrawals. Uh withdrawals. Uh , and for ZK.
So, very cool. Check out our sequencer rules. Uh, you can try steak for priority. Now he's, uh, in mainnet. Steeply.
Thank you all.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.
