Who Will Fight For ETH I Jill Gunter at Pragma Denver 2025

And for this one, I'd like to bring on Jill from Espresso to tell you about how we can fight for Ethereum. So, without further ado, please welcome Jill on stage. Thanks, Parsa. Great to see you. I do.

It's on. All right, thank you. Is this thing on? Can you hear me? Tuning up.

Okay. All right, thank you. My name is Jill Gunter. I work for a company called Espresso Systems, but I work on Ethereum. And today I'll be talking about what makes Ethereum worth fighting for, why it needs to be championed right now, and who is taking on this work.

So, I want to start here, okay? I recognize that my talk title asks, "Who will fight for ETH?" So, we're going to talk about the asset, and we're going to talk about price. And I start here because when you see this price chart, you might feel like no one is fighting for Ethereum. I'm here to convince you otherwise.

So, we will talk about price today a little bit. We will address why it matters and what the current dynamics are. But I want to talk about more than just price. I want to talk also about why Ethereum is worth fighting for as a technology and as a set of objectives. So, let's take a step back and remind ourselves, why fight for Ethereum?

What has Ethereum given us? Well, Ethereum has given us a fundraiser run by a nation-state while it was under attack with immediate global reach raising $225 million. It's given us the ability to fund and defend people whose own nation-states are attacking them. It's allowed people to donate privately to causes that they care about. And Ethereum has powered accountability for transparently tracking when and how charities use those funds.

Ethereum has given us verifiable anonymous referendums on autocrats and on currencies. Ethereum has been a lifeline to receive remittances for people living in places with capital controls who need to get money in from abroad. It's also been a lifeline to enable people in those same countries to emigrate and leave their homes with their assets in hand. Ethereum helped us buy the Constitution, almost. Ethereum has given us new forms of self-expression and new ways to fund art.

It has created unstoppable trading platforms and globally accessible lending markets, and I could go on and on. And so yes, all of these things are powered by Ethereum. What do all of these applications have in common? What are the threads that tie them together? I think it comes down to these three things.

These apps are unstoppable, they're composable, and they're permissionless. And I recognize that these words sound very familiar, they sound tired even to many of us. They're part of the word salad of jargon that we see on every company's website, but I think it's worth dwelling on them, at least for a moment. Each of these words has a distinct meaning and represents a superpower that applications can only get on Ethereum. Ethereum is unstoppable.

The platform and the applications that call it home cannot be shut down. Ethereum is a composable environment, which means it's an open ecosystem where anything can be built and everything is compatible. And Ethereum is permissionless. Anyone can contribute to it. Anyone can build on it.

Everyone can use it. Which brings us back to the ultimate buzzword. Why do we care about decentralization? Decentralization is what keeps Ethereum with all of those qualities that we just reviewed. It what make It's what makes Ethereum unstoppable, composable, and permissionless.

But it Decentralization is extremely hard. It demands tradeoffs in terms of user experience. It demands greater complexity in the technology itself. And therefore, it demands constant vigilance and attention. Or as Elon Musk recently put it, only the paranoid survive.

For the last couple of years, it's actually been pretty easy to not be that paranoid. Up until 3 days ago, we didn't have many major hacks in the last couple of years. A far cry from the environment in 2020 and 2021. So, it's been easy to prioritize more comfortable choices over decentralization. Said another way, hard times create strong protocols, strong protocols create good times, good times create weak protocols, and weak protocols create hard times.

Where are we in this cycle? Oop. Didn't mean to hop that up there. Um in all seriousness, the last few years has made it really easy to think that maybe we and Ethereum made the wrong set of trade-offs. Perhaps we should have done things differently and optimized for different features.

Maybe we should have optimized for the usability of the platform instead of its strength and security. Indeed, in some regards, we've started to stray in that direction. We've started to let cracks appear in the system as we as builders at times we have made those trade-offs that compromise on ETH's core values. This has often been in a desperate bid to compete for mindshare and market share amongst our meme meme coin loving brethren. But this is my call for us to stop and take stock of what we're doing here, why it matters, and double down on building a strong set of protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Because everyday trust assumptions, they're invisible until something goes wrong. It reminds me of in a true crime documentary where they walk into a room and it's a pristine living room, everything is all white and clean until someone turns on a black light and you see just what a mess the situation is. To me, fighting for Ethereum means making sure that when that black light of censorship, of hackers, of Lazarus, of US government ordered shutdowns, and more attacks, which are coming, when they shine on the platform, that we have as little clean up to do as possible. Fighting for Ethereum means keeping it unstoppable, keeping it composable, and keeping it permissionless. These are the qualities of Ethereum that motivate me to wake up every day and keep coming back to this wild industry.

They're what motivate me to work on Espresso. So, we have three main weapons, I would say, in our arsenal to fight for Ethereum. These are social pressure, technology, and free markets. So, first let's tackle how we're using these to keep Ethereum unstoppable. Now, why are we talking about this right now?

What are the main threats to Ethereum that we've seen arise in conversation over the last couple of weeks? So, I don't know if you've been following, but there's been suggestions in the last few days that maybe Ethereum should do another hard fork as happened back in 2016 with the DAO hack. I took this photo in 2016. This is my friend Oleg. He has a great hat.

Says, "Make Ethereum immutable." Oleg is a Bitcoiner, as you might have guessed from the hat. But, this idea this idea is still around that through social consensus all things are possible. Albeit, I think this was a joke when Ali and Ian respectively posted it. But, if there's strong enough motivation, the chain can hard fork.

So, it's up to us to know what our values are, know where that line gets drawn, and protect our values. These discussions, as you all know, are happening because of the hack that happened on Friday in which 1.5 billion in ETH got stolen from a centralized exchange called Bybit. And when something like that happens, people start talking about making Ethereum not immutable again. And so, we see how hacks hurt Ethereum in multiple ways.

They hurt the end users, of course, who have lost their funds. And I want to be clear, this was not a hack on Ethereum, the protocol, but it still affects the chain. It's still a vulnerability for the chain because of the conversations that have come up around it. They make the chain specifically vulnerable to social pressure, and perhaps someday even nation-state level scrutiny. Because if the US government thinks that they can hit the undo button on North Korea, one of our biggest adversaries, suddenly getting 1.

5 billion dollars, I'm guessing there are some people in Washington who are going to think it's irresponsible to not do everything in their power to make that happen. So prevention of hacks, I would say, is a great place where we see the tool of social pressure at play. Social pressure, technology, and free markets, again, I think are the weapons that we have in our arsenal to fight for Ethereum. Here's Taylor, one of Ethereum's greatest security researchers. She's putting pressure here on a product called Hyperliquid to better secure their bridge.

Got to love her spice. Um I want to be clear, Hyperliquid, it's not an Ethereum product, but the bridge that she's talking about is a bridge to Arbitrum, which is an Ethereum product. And so we see it's not just about the Ethereum or protocol, it's about all of these pieces around it. And I would say that as a community, we spend far too much time trying to pull our hair out to define exactly what is ETH, what is Ethereum. It's everything around us that can affect the protocol and its values and its security.

So to keep Ethereum unstoppable, we need to keep it secure. And to keep it secure, we need to eradicate not only security vulnerabilities at endpoints like centralized exchanges, as we just discussed, also we need to eradicate points of centralization, of course within the protocol, we'll get there, but also within the apps and the environments built around it, as we just saw with the Hyperliquid bridge. That's what Taylor was doing in this last slide. The thing that I spend all day thinking about is how to eradicate points of centralization in the L2 ecosystem, which is where the majority of activity now is happening on Ethereum. Specifically, I worry about centralized pre-confirmations.

So here who here has ever used an L2? Raise your hands. Great, almost everyone. Who here has ever used something like a cross to move your assets between chains? Again, most of you, excellent.

Congratulations, you have all used centralized pre-confirmation, though you might not have even known it. So what is a centralized pre-confirmation? Well, every single L2 today they run a centralized sequencer. Just about every L2. There are a few exceptions here and there.

Shout out to Alex who was just on stage. ZK sync is among those working on decentralizing. They're at the forefront. Um The centralized sequencers though, it's this part of the software stack. It's this component that orders the transactions and posts it to Ethereum for settlement.

Now, what happens if the centralized sequencer goes down? Well, if you're lucky, maybe you're using a more mature L2 with a working escape hatch and you'll still get your money back, but you might have to wait for it and pay for it. We'll get there in a minute. What I'm worried about is a slightly different concern that has to do with centralized sequencers and their pre-confirmations. Because you see almost every interoperability protocol out there today depends on the word of the sequencer to bridge your funds.

Because waiting on the L1 for finality will take minutes and users aren't going to wait around for that long. You won't be able to compete as a bridge protocol. And so if we're in a world with many L2s and many transactions happening across those L2s, that's the world we're already in and it's only accelerating, then all of those transactions rely on centralized pre-confirmations and a new threat emerges. That one of these chain sequencers will pull the rug, will equivocate, will be malicious, and that creates a vulnerability for the loss of user funds. So this is what I work on all day.

This is what we're working on at Espresso. Introducing a confirmation layer that will help sequencers to be able to post and feel assured of the transactions that are happening on their chain and bridges and all of the users around us to feel more secure. We're finally going to get to price here. I'm taking you out of the L2 stack, thank god. So if we care about making Ethereum unstoppable, we care about security, again, of exchanges, of bridges, of L2s, of sequencers, of all of these things.

What about the Ethereum protocol itself? Price matters because we care about economic security. And well, we haven't been moving exactly in the right direction on that for some time. Though admittedly with a market cap of around 300 billion, I'm not that worried right now about an attack on the economic security of the protocol. But I think it's worth reminding ourselves that it's not a number that's out of reach for any number of entities.

You don't even have to be a state-level actor. I happen to be talking to some of my friends who work in AI the other day about the Bybit hack, and they all kind of scratch their heads and said, "Is 1.5 billion a lot of money in your industry?" Because it's not in AI anymore. So it's a good reminder just to put things in perspective.

So yes, Ethereum needs to figure out its value accrual problem. I'm not going to get to the answer to that in the last 5 minutes of this talk, unfortunately. I don't have the answer. I think that it's a problem that we all need to be working on with all of the tools in our arsenal. I think John Charbonneau here is right.

That you first need to ask the question of whether the L1 is creating enough value before you ask about capturing that value. And I would argue actually that the Ethereum L1 is creating quite a lot of value for all of the rollups who are actually using it for security, all of the applications running on top of it. But I think in the last 2 years, again, we haven't really felt that value. We haven't felt it in our bones. And maybe we need to.

So, we're back to this. I'm optimistic that Ethereum can solve the value accrual problem, but it's undoubtedly again the hardest challenge that Ethereum faces right now. And it's a challenge that we need that third tool to solve, market forces. Because ultimately that's what it's going to come down to. Because it's a marketplace for apps, L2s, users, validators.

All of these actors will move elsewhere. They're the ones who determine the price of Ethereum and the value it's creating. So, we need to look at things like data availability, Pectra upgrade of course is happening um to scale the DA so that we make sure the L1 stays competitive on that front. We need to take things like based sequencing seriously. There's a lot of resistance to the idea of using the L1 as the sequencer.

I'd urge us all to really take it seriously and ask the L2s who are working with and building on and and using why they're not going in that direction, what they need to see. Um and I would say that, you know, these are both areas again where we can wield technology to help us out. But I also think that we should not shy away from social pressure or talk of alignment. I think that we should pressure L2s to support ETH with some percentage of fees and that we should pressure L2s and applications to support ETH as their base assets. Social pressure, while we often like to criticize it, is a market force as well.

Okay. So, we've talked a little bit about keeping Ethereum unstoppable. I want to talk very briefly about keeping Ethereum composable. This is my colleague Mariana. She is not a Bitcoiner, but she still has a great hat.

If you'd like one, you can come find me. Composability is the money LEGOs quality of Ethereum and it's what allows us to build a trading app that builds off of lending protocol that builds off of identity products. Composability on Ethereum is what gives us the world of free, open APIs. The composability of Ethereum has broken down as we've scaled across many chains. And that's what we need to fix.

And the good news is is that there are so many teams working on this composability problem. I like to say that we're not all building the same thing. I know it can probably feel like, "Oh my god, another interrupt protocol." But we're all building actually different parts for the most part of one product at all layers of the stack. So again, many of you have used Across, one of the best bridges out there, I think, an intense space bridge.

They've also pioneered a lot of the work behind ERC proposals that will go a long way towards fixing this. We have message passing protocols that can move do more than move assets. They can actually transmit state across chains. We have shared builder networks like NodeKit. We have Espresso, which I already touched upon, a confirmation layer to make bridging more secure.

So again, these are all examples of teams fighting for Ethereum to help us maintain composability. And I would also this say that all of this showcases the market forces that are at play here, pushing Ethereum forward. We should be so glad that we have all of these private, venture-backed infra companies competing to be the solution that improves the Ethereum ecosystem. It can sometimes feel like xkcd.jpeg.

Again, I know, but I would highlight that these protocols are often complimentary to each other. They're not actually competing standards for the most part. And again, I want to emphasize it's good that Ethereum has all of this competition happening within and on top of it. So what about social pressure here? Where does social pressure come in to the composability picture?

Well, we just heard in the last talk about roll-up clusters. I sometimes like to criticize L2s for focusing a little too much on in-cluster interop. You know who I'm talking about. And I do think that there is a very real risk that if L2s are left to their own devices without social pressure, then they will only prioritize their own ecosystem, their own cluster, among their own stack. And this is where social pressure comes in.

And this is why I like to be a little spicy about this sometimes. Because to say that we need interop, we need to acknowledge that we need Ethereum-wide interop if we're fighting for Ethereum. This can coexist with roll-up cluster interop. A lot of the people who are pioneering roll-up cluster interop are some of my good friends. They're excellent and they're building great real tech that is doing great things for their ecosystems.

But, it cannot be at the expense of Ethereum-wide composability. The good news is, it's not. All of these teams are also working together. The open intense framework was something that came out last week as a result of collaboration across so many of these competitor teams. And I want to give credit to all of the devs working on these initiatives.

I have not been involved myself. Uh Ellie from my team has been contributing. I want to give credit to people like Josh Rudolph, who's at the Ethereum Foundation, who's spearheading this initiative and has the very hard work of bringing all of these cats herded together. So, let's wrap up very briefly on my last point here of keeping Ethereum permissionless. What does it take to keep Ethereum permissionless?

I do not have a keep Ethereum permissionless hat. If someone does, I'm in the market. But, this is the third key component. This is about censorship resistance. L2Beat is one of my favorite projects in the space and it should be one of yours, too.

Because this is social pressure, technology, and markets all in action. They've created an entirely legible way, even for the most basic user, to get a sense and understand the risks that they take when they're using each and every L2. This creates free market competition for the best technology, and it creates social pressure for L2s to improve. And sequencers come up here. This is just one of many examples of the types of things that they highlight.

And one of the many examples of ways that we can keep pushing for better standards. This is the difference if you go on their website, you can see when a sequencer has an escape hatch, and you can get your money out no matter what, and when they don't. To me it's a little bit like a Volvo put next to a Porsche, right? If we're not educated, we're going to pick the Porsche every time. But if you're thinking pretty clearly about where you want to put your most precious assets, then you want to be educated about what the risks are involved.

Builder centralization, it's the last thing I'll touch on here. This is yet another area of centralization, another crack perhaps in our foundation. There's two main block builders who dominate the Ethereum network right now. And again, another venture-funded infra project is standing guard and working to make sure that this does not become a problem for the permissionless of the Ethereum network. So, the tools in our arsenal, what is my real takeaway here?

One of my real takeaways here is to stop complaining. We're all fighting for Ethereum. We're all fighting for Ethereum's values. We're fighting with social pressure. I hear a lot of talk about toxic alignment maxis.

They have an important role to play, and we should all acknowledge that. I also hear a lot of talk about infra projects who are VC-backed and didn't give the community enough tokens and all of these things. Okay, maybe I'm one of them. We're fighting for the technology. We're fighting for Ethereum's values.

And we're also all fighting with free markets. I don't know what's going on here. I don't love it. I don't know what Vitalik's politics are. I don't really care.

Because anyone who seriously thinks that Ethereum is trending towards communism is not looking at the state of the world. Ethereum is the most capitalistic platform in crypto because it fosters all of this open free market competition. And that is what is making Ethereum in the long run the best prospect that we have for unstoppable, composable, and permissionless applications. So, who's fighting for Ethereum? It's the parasitic L2s.

It's the toxic alignment maxis. It's the lame duck Ethereum Foundation. It's the communist Vitalik. And it's me, the venture-backed infra builder. It's really easy amidst the literal insanity of this space to get lost in what we're doing here.

Okay? You know, why build real products when you can go launch a meme coin on Solana? Why care about decentralization when you can rely on a single server? Why have BFT consensus when you can just use a multi-sig? So, we have to commit to constantly remind ourselves what we're doing here and recommit to those common goals.

And let me say clearly, if your goal is not to build an unstoppable, composable, permissionless system, then you're not building Ethereum. You're doing something else. So, the United States is so back. So, I want to just about end on this slide with a call to all of us. I want you to keep fighting for Ethereum.

And I'll tee up our next speaker, Ameen, to whom I say, "There is no need to be upset." Thank you. Yes.