ETHNewYork Keynote with Hayden Adams, Karl Floersch

[Applause] [Music] i want to invite two special guests on stage to share some fun stories and the past present and the future of web3 so without further ado please welcome hayden adams ceo of unit swap labs and kara floresch cto of op labs on stage we're gonna do some questions hey hey hey hello all right so this is a really interesting time people are somewhat talking about the markets but we don't see any of that in this room this is more than we've ever had in any room or any place in the world in terms of developers and you two have been a unique part of that history so wanna talk about how some of these things happen and what to look forward to so let's start off by some intros but let's make that interesting so carl tell us about how you got into this space and how you know hayden oh right so i am carl i work on optimism and i have known hayden for we calculated it literally over there nine years nine years that's that's a while and we first met each other in college i knew his roommate he's a mechanical engineering major i knew his roommate because he was a compsci major and so i chilled with his roommate because i'm a comp sci major because i'm yeah yeah and then i met him and then i was like yo you should live in my suite because my suite's way better than yours and so he came over to mine and then i kind of got deep into ethereum in about 2015 absolutely deep and i uh hayden was my uh my loki rock you know he was kind of my my dude um and i just could not stop talking about ethereum every single day to hayden i am so sorry in fact it's a massive understatement this this is true i was like oh yeah i i feel like hayden may have just from our hangs like gotten more than like a deep like just absurd crash course like what are we that's all we talked about for a very long time yeah i'd say there was like two things carl said to me every day was one i should stop being a mechanical engineer and i should start coding and two i should be more into ethereum um this was all the way back in starting in 2015 but it persisted for several years um that was good advice yeah uh persisted until about 2017 um i was at that point we had both graduated uh he was working at he had just moved from consent he had gone to consensus and then he had gone to the ethereum foundation afterwards uh and he was now working on writing the uh casper ffg smart contract um and i was working at siemens doing you know boring heat flow analysis and um i got laid off uh you know one year into working there i don't think i was very good at my job um and carl was very happy um you know the first thing that carl said to me was like this is the best thing that has ever happened to you um because now you can work in ethereum and you have no excuse not to um and i kind of took it and ran with it um you know for what it's worth um i at that point i think he had actually converted me over um took years of wearing me down but you know the idea of building uh you know smart contracts and you know applications that were unstoppable that you know people could use and interact with each other and didn't need to trust each other um but could engage in complex interactions was like pretty cool um and so i'd say i was pretty one over um uh yeah i mean so so maybe just gonna walk us through how did that lead to uniswap um so the way that that led to unit swap and i think we can probably go back and forth to get through both of our stories but i'd say that you know the way that that led to uniswap is about three months in to learning solidity and uh for what it's worth the the developer resources at the time were very very sparse i initially learned solidity basically through like a small blog post that carl had written and like so did i yeah carl had written a blog post that was like the very basics of using remix uh connecting it to metamask deploying a smart contract um and then like maybe one or two youtube videos but it was really sparse at the time uh and i felt like i needed something a little bit more to like learn i felt like i was stalling in my progress i actually shouldn't even take credit carl was like the way that you stop stalling and your progress is you have a side project that like focuses you and so you know i was looking for a side project and uh maybe carl can come to like how it got recommended to me but essentially carl pointed me to a blog post from vitalik talking about like a new way to do exchange on ethereum um and so i you know decided to start implementing it uh and eventually that became uniswap i don't know if you have oh yeah i've been contact's there i could give some extra extra deets um so i was working at the ethereum foundation traveling around the world with vitalik now vitalik knows how to travel he is a a beast i mean seriously so anyway i was just barely keeping up with him but we were like giving talks and in between giving these conference talks vitalik was saying hey no one has built the most dead simple like the most obvious like this of all of the designs of a decentralized exchange there is this one design and it is called the constant product market maker and it is the best design by far and no one's made it you need to find someone or you should build this like someone should build this like we need to fund this and by the way this is a public good right he was saying that even back then and so i found someone to build it david knott actually the first implementation was david knott shout out to david knott coinbase respect usually don't say that one [Laughter] the second person to implement this no actually the first person to implement it was a vitalik actually wrote a quick prototype in viper which of course was a language that he also built himself literally just savage savage individual but then hayden was the most clear-cut you know obvious choice right there like waiting hungry to actually take a project and run with it and so i was like hey yeah cool um so carl convinced me to build you and swap and i basically spent uh the next few months uh building out like a prototype uh actually he you know he told me that if i built a demo in a month he would talk about it on stage at devcon 2. um so i built the first i basically uh wrote the first version of the universe smart contracts and my first website which was like a simple create react app i didn't even know how to use components so it was just one long uh file um one long like app.js file and uh i created like a dead simple interface for the for unit swap uh and he talked about on stage um at devcon 2 and then from there a few people reached out to carl to be connected to me and then i started going to ethereum conferences you know east global events and other events uh shout out heath global [Music] and you know started to become more ingrained in the ethereum community and i eventually met vitalik got an ethereum foundation grant uh eventually finished building unit swap and launched it but no this is incredible what we're going to try to do is the timeline intersection here a bunch of times so maybe in parallel carl had it working from casper to optimism or plasma to optimism how did that happen oh wow all right well started out building casper this is the early ethereum proof of stake protocol learning all about consensus algorithms learning all about decentralization and implemented this alpha casper test net so you know implementing fork choice with proof of stake verify validators all this kind of stuff but after having implemented that it was pretty clear that ethereum itself the core protocol could not scale and i like i like using things i like interacting with things and i got a little disillusioned because casper is more about security it's like hypothetical stuff it's you know this application but it doesn't make the your your average dap a huge amount better right the average depth is still going to be expensive if ethereum cannot scale and so i was like okay let me get into scalability so it was eth2 consensus protocol i mean eth2 sharding protocols with justin drake he came in and he just described all this amazing stuff and i was like wow this is amazing but i am extremely impatient and i do not want to wait for sharding and hard forks and governance and like oh my god i'm just so bored by governance so what i wanted to do was build in layer two you don't have to wait you don't have to this is permissionless innovation so with the help of uh ben jones jing lan wang like a uh kelvin fisher we started plasma group and plasma group was this layered two scalability company but guess what happened hayden adams comes again he strikes again because we built plasma or we we created a a a plasma test net and then we showed our plasma test net to hayden and you know what hayden said he said that's nice but but can it run uniswap and we're like oh you know we could like kinda like you know and it couldn't really so we went back to the drawing board and we came up with this generalized version of plasma and it had all these things and you know it was really cool it was like programmable you could like deploy plasma contracts and then we went up to hayden again we're like check this out and hayden was like huh cool can it run you to swap and our our spirits were we're at the the bottom we nearly gave up on scalability no i actually we didn't give up yet but we came back we were like and boom this is what led us to optimistic roll-ups this is why we were like yo we should call them optimistic because we're pretty optimistic people so we called them optimistic roll-ups because hashtag branding and we showed it to hayden and we're like can it run eunice and then he asked of course can it run uniform and we're like heck yeah can run unit swap so we're like let's call it optimistic rollups and let's create a company called optimism and let's inject some vibes in this this place and here we are here we are yeah okay so there's an interesting point that you brought up and and obviously i asked this with benefit of hindsight but as you both were doing this was the intention to ever create a company out of this like implementing a working prototype from a blog post to getting uni-swapped to run on a scalability solution i don't think for either of us the intention was ever to work at companies or create companies i think for both of us we were at the time like pretty obsessed with ethereum in in our respective ways um i was you know i had this grant funding i thought maybe uniswap would always be funded by grants i wasn't really sure um and i was just most interested in like you know trying to make something work and thought maybe after i proved that it would work maybe someone would hire me at their crypto project um i it was more for me like a proof of concept um to learn and broaden yeah i think that like the backdrop was that there were like three or four other decentralized exchanges at the time that had raised between 40 and 153 million dollars and i sort of assumed one of them would like win and that uniswap was kind of more of a proof of concept for something that was built on top of ethereum but was as decentralized as ethereum itself uh and it was less about like efficiency or or even like um just like availability of it yeah i wasn't like trying to build a business i was just saying like can we build something that says decentralized ethereum that is on top of ethereum um and then can answer carl's for him a little bit um which was that you know originally they formed like the the plasma foundation or something plasma groups which was a non-profit foundation and that's how they originally set out to build it um but i think what we both learned is and i think uh carl has a lot of opinions on on public goods funding um but i think what we both learned is you know when i went back to apply for another grant it wasn't going to be big enough to fund development of unit swap v2 uh or all the things that i wanted to build um and when carl was at you know plasma group and they were looking for funding it wasn't going to be enough to fund what they were working on um and so you know that is what led to the initial seed round where i formed a company and the time there was no business model in mind or anything but it was like hey like this idea is really cool people are building on top of it when unit swap launched there was this immediate like developer community because i was the only developer on it and i didn't really it wasn't really a developer and i when there was a bug there was no one to fix it and when there was no analytics and so someone had to build analytics and so there was this like natural grassroots thing and that's an interesting point too because obviously the world was entirely different a few years ago from a developer tooling standpoint resources available other opportunities if you could kind of come back or go back in time and kind of give yourself a piece of advice on what would you have done differently for your own progress about either optimism or plasma or unit swap what would you what would you tell yourself [Music] you want to go first you can go first if you have an idea advice i i don't know it's a little bit hard to give i feel like it's worked out pretty well and i'd say that like i would maybe yeah i think i think i do i think that i would probably tell myself to get less distracted by a really short-term things um you know things that were like short-term incentives or short-term ideas or narratives or or you know one person getting mad at me on twitter and then getting roped into it i think i've wasted a lot of time arguing with people on twitter over random [ __ ] that ended up not mattering at all welcome to the internet okay yes so yes no short term thinking long term steady build sustainability that is one thing for sure the other thing is the simpler the protocol the simpler the expression of the protocol the greater the better ah so i would go back and i would tell my old self the cohens that the why sage geohot told me geohop being a hacker uh uh oh great great and great dude anyway his cohens were there are two of them one the fool goes and okay the wise person i don't really know the whole saying but basically the wise person spends to cut down a tree spend seven hours sharpening the blade and one hour chopping down the tree the dumb person you know spends like 24 hours chopping down the tree with a dull blade okay what does that mean that means that you need to be planning and thinking about what you're going to execute on for way longer than you expect like iteration and experimentation you do need to absolutely do that but thinking really clearly about a simple and elegant solution to a problem is a way to have way more impact with way fewer lines of code so the second cohen is every line of code is worth a hundred dollars so think about it that way like when you are thinking about a solution you spend seven hours sharpening the blade and then you write very few lines of code to actually solve the root of the problem and that like those in those ingredients allow you to solve mega mega mega problems um that that otherwise would not be possible that's a really really good answer that's much better than mine i'm jealous does it actually work at a hackathon yes no agree i think simple solutions always always the best so this creates an interesting conundrum because obviously we have the benefit of hindsight but in that world when you're trying to figure out anywhere from elegant solutions to just waiting for certain things to happen for you to kind of get the prerequisites you need how do you think about staying motivated or not losing track or falsely kind of making a short-term decision like do you have any frameworks or just overall like how are you going to think about making that type of decision it's a very open-ended question and a hard one how do you stay motivated when yeah yeah um that is a good question i think for me the thing that kept me motivated was i was really excited and interested in what i was working on and so i think that like whatever you're working on i think that like i don't think it's good to be like lukewarm on it or like but like i think that to like put in like the time and the energy you have to be like interested and excited by it um because if you're interested and excited about it it'll feel a lot more natural um i don't know that's my thing nice my how i stay motivated is i stay optimistic okay no here's the framework that i use wink framework that i use really is there are two options right you can either be optimistic and think that you can have an impact and think that you can do things and you know actually make a change or you can be pessimistic and not think that the world can be made better and the thing about being optimistic is that how are you going to make the world a better place how are you going to actually have an impact if you don't believe in yourself to make that impact turns out the word optimized is actually to act as an optimist you make something better because you see a path to a better future so the thing that keeps me optimistic is not necessarily that we are going to survive the next year as a species i have no idea but what keeps me optimistic is i definitely know that if we do not survive as a species in a year from now but we were working to make the world better then i feel pretty happy about the journey that i was on throughout that whole process because it's it's fun i mean i want to help like this this ship is sinking right and i want to like plug holes as we go down with the ship like i'm ready i mean we might make it to shore but like at least we'll be plugging holes it'd be crazy it'll be fun we can chant and stuff he's always been like this i i think we should think about it from counting lines and hundred dollars as a diff well speaking of exciting things um unit swap recently acquired genie tell us about uh how that decision happened and uh what do you plan on doing with this acquisition yeah so for people who don't know uh jeannie is an nft marketplace aggregator and so you know you have a bunch of different nft marketplaces like openc and looks rare and wearable and coinbase nft and all that and uh genie the website you go and unless you trade across all of all of them at once um so the reason that it was so exciting for me uh and for our team uh is is one that we you know shared shared a vision um and what that was is really you know the reason that i'm excited i'm not excited about erc20 tokens in the abstract you know i'm not excited about any of this stuff in the abstract i'm excited about you know what uh what web3 and this technology enables and uh so you know one of the things i'm really excited about is uh you know the same way that like the internet democratized access to information um you know to me web 3 is about democratizing access to ownership and value creation um and so to me erc20 tokens are interesting because they are a means of digital ownership and a means of you know expressing value and creating value um and making uh ownership and value you know more accessible to more people and to me nfts represent basically the exact same thing um and when you know i think about what we do at uniform labs it's not just about building efficient protocols to back web3 it's about you know explicitly with the intention of making like it's not you know there's protocols there's interfaces there's you know developer things in between um and what we're most interested in is the impact that we have and the you know the ability to make webfree more accessible and so uh you know uniform protocol has pretty high market share like it's definitely possible to make more efficient trading protocols uh but to us uh what we started to feel is that the barrier to entry uh the the the thing that's holding back you know web3 is not necessarily efficiency at the trading protocol level uh but you know how accessible it is uh access on its own is is the barrier yeah and and so i think that like you know web three or nfts erc20 tokens there are two different you know ways to represent value and ownership both really valuable and you know we're really excited about you know over this next year uh transitioning from just building protocols to you know building protocols but also building the interfaces the developer facing interfaces the user-facing interfaces um and more to make it more accessible to more people so maybe i guess beyond nft marketplace integration what else is uh it's cooking i i think you know i i can't there's only so much alpha i can look at at once but what i'll say is that like um you know we do want to just continue to press on uh well one thing cool about nft is that i think that there's a lot of room for like right now they're viewed as erc20 tokens and nfts are like two very different ecosystems people view it there's like we are having like right now this is more of like a defy thing and you know earlier this week we had the nft thing um but i think that it's all building towards like a shared future and a shared internet of ownership and so i think that's something we're really excited about is starting to try to bring the two things together uh as well as like implement more of a i think the same way that the internet is that a protocol and a product argument or just a product side of it protocol product all of it but um i think that you know uh just like the internet like web 3 is going to be very social it's going to be very community based uh it's not the lines aren't going to be erc20 and nft it's going to be you know uh it's the communities are gonna need both um and so you know figuring out the ways to make both of them more accessible uh in unified experiences is something that's really exciting to us can't wait to uh try this out this is gonna be fun uh for a a world that's ready for this how do you kind of think about the future of scalability carl wait for a world that's ready for just a lot more social behaviors and a unification and just access how do we think about l2 is evolving oh i mean how is he gonna transact you need the base layer to scale okay we okay i mean i'll just go i'll just say okay future here here here without question ethereum layer twos we will scale in fact we will scale to a point where we can support as much demand as we can support with literal hardware right so horizontal scalability making sure that like the cost of a transaction is not proportional to the you know this massive amount of demand for this single you know the the single chain but instead the cost of a transaction at least for cheap transactions that are not related to like you know arbitraging a really volatile asset right that's always going to be expensive but for your average you know game for your average you know even just a social interaction that needs to be dirt cheap that needs to cost essentially the the cost of the bare metal and so we are building out that experience but that does not mean that we need to fracture our you know ecosystem into a lot of different separate chains and networks and all that kind of stuff as hayden was saying we need to have a consistent experience a unified experience an intuitive experience and that unified intuitive experience needs to be supported on the back end and the infrastructure just like we have front ends that are unified we also need our back ends to be expressible enough expressive enough so that it can support it and so that you know that's what we're building we're building this is gonna be crazy the amount of transactions that are gonna go on on optimism that is absolutely great thank you not chilling if i do it for him and he does it for me oh yeah the test really is it must always be able to run unit swap in any form because the test becomes can you run unit swap in any form in any shape in any size yes and and then you pass the l2 bottleneck tell us more about bedrock oh oh yeah okay so bedrock what does it invoke it evokes a foundation what is bedrock bedrock is the foundational roll-up client for literally all l2s and by the way i'm not just talking about like optimistic roll-ups i'm talking it'll be in the future zk robes all the kinds of roll-ups as long as they are evm equivalent bedrock is that foundation so what is bedrock really okay death is what runs the evm again gonna get a little technical here to make guesth run in layer 2 we were able to get the lines of code down to 400 lines of code that means that you can look at the diff and you can say okay i know geth runs in production this is these are the changes that need to be made to get geth running in layer 2 boom i understand what layer 2 is doing i understand the protocol making it simple and approachable why did we do this you might ask why great question [Laughter] because geohot came up and he was like yo your code is way too complicated there are way too many lines you need to cut this down by 10x for it to be even remotely ready for a full production life-changing world-changing protocol and so what we did is we spent the next seven hours sharpening our axes and we chopped those lines of code down to that 400 number and it has been a goliath task but it will now serve as the basis the bedrock of an enormous amount of innovation in the layer 2 space you can now understand what layer 2 is really doing and hack on it so take a look read the code it's one commit it's crazy that is crazy and and i've read that and it blows my mind that you can do that and it sparks such a massive change it's shocking that like when you look at a very small line like diff how much more work that took like it's like you want every line of code to take hours addition by subtraction addition through subtraction wow my god we're making the iphone of death clients well is there is there something both of you disagree on either of you do you disagree on anything amongst each other whether it's a principle or an approach or a direction very open-ended yeah i'd say carl i don't want to say he's more optimistic than me i think i'm like reasonably optimistic and i am a big believer i think he wins that game by default being optimistic but i think um sometimes it's kind of abstract and opaque i think we agree on a lot of things but um i think sometimes we disagree about like the inevitability of things i think sometimes carl's like well it's inevitable that all these huge forces will move together to like this end result um they're sort of like path independence of like societal forces um and i'd say that like for me i feel like things are a little bit more path dependent um like you know like individual kind of not saying that like yeah but um uh i don't know that's kind of a weird abstract answer no we we do we disagree but agree you know like we're like you know yeah but i will say that i am obsessed and i am obsessed with thinking from first principles thinking about like math using that to inform my decisions and that is why i you know i feel like over confidence sometimes but nah i'm not overca i'm just in the right amount but i feel overconfident in like making insane bets like i'm like retroactive public good funny vitalik said retroactive public goods funding to me and like explained it and i was like that is it and i am like in insane i'm mad everything is retroactive public goods funny it's just like a pursuit tell us more about what that is how and why is that set up and uh and your role in that great question well retroactive public goods funding it's really the it's in the the name the idea is that you retroactively reward public goods but what does that do right you're retroactively rewarding public goods well what it does is in the long term it means that people who are building public goods know that they can get retroactively rewarded why do we want this well we want impact to equal profit right now there's a big problem in in in and this is actually what hayden was alluding to earlier with the formation of uniswap and the formation of uh from the transformation from plasma group to optimism is that ethereum back in the day did not have sufficient public goods funding sources if you wanted to make ethereum better that would not that impact would not result in profit and that's a problem in ethereum but it's also a huge problem in our society generally when you think of profit you think of exploitation you think of extractive behavior that is bad news that is going to lead us down these pessimistic paths so we need to make sure that positive impact results in profit and so retroactive public goods funding is the long-term way that we can actually make it so that people know if i have that positive impact i will be able to get rewarded through these mechanisms through public goods funding channels and make that thing pop and uh there's been a couple attempts by the optimism side uh tell us more about what's happened and and now it was structured yes indeed so we have done our retroactive public goods funding round one that was a million dollars it was a few quite a few months ago we are now going to do the second iteration of retroactive public goods funding and it is going to be way more legit we are improving the quadratic voting mechanism we are making the interfaces really really quite nice and we are going to be using it as the launching of the citizens house in a very small form so what is the citizens house optimism the optimism collective the you know governance system for optimism the layer two has two houses one tokens two citizens we need identity solutions so we are allowing the citizens those are the people who will be directing these retroactive public goods funding because we don't want our public goods we don't want those to be judged by token holders that's that's like a plutocracy we don't want the people who have the money to say where the public what the public goods are right that doesn't make sense we want the human beings the individuals to direct those funds so retroactive public goods funding and the citizens house is coming soon so for what it's worth we have seen some of these like retroactive public goods funding um forces in action um no an example is that like a lot of d5 protocols are seen as you know uh public good infrastructure um and you know what happened with the uni token launch was that air drops is a a variation of that yeah yeah everyone who had ever used the protocol in the early days who added a huge amount of value and helped you know get the thing off the ground um you know was rewarded when that when the token launched and it was you know and then since then what has happened people have started more people have started using d5 protocols earlier speculating that they'll be rewarded and so that's essentially a you know a kind of a hint of what retroactive public good funding looks like but then what they're talking about is like making it more explicit and having actual funds that that go out and find whoever is doing the most public good and just paying them money for for nothing i know this opens up a slightly bigger can of worms but how do you sort of subjectively assess the impact because a lot of things are in that category that is the ultimate question is it is incredibly hard if we can assess the impact in some well we can't do it objectively that is just fundamentally in like an impossibility result because impact is fundamentally subjective based on your goals your preferences however what we can do is we can start equipping every human being with stronger forms of identity so their voices can be heard the big problem right now with assessing impact is determining who actually is what people's preferences are what individuals preferences are and we have this horrible problem where we don't even know who is a human on the internet so how are we going to there's no way we have no hope of assessing impact until we give people a voice and so that is step one so does that mean if you solve civil resistance before we get to solve retroactive funding yeah civil resistance is something that is not going to be so it's not like we rather improve than yes we need to create civil resistant mechanisms before we can start to judge impact and hayden you have a thing about that what's that you have a solution for the problem for civil resistance or potentially with sybil.org oh that that um yeah i'd say that that's very loosely at solution it is correct it's more of a way to people to link twitter identity to ethereum addresses so i don't know if i want to show that as as a true solve um for what it's worth i don't know if you need to fully solve civil resistance like you know two things you disagree on yeah there you go um i mean i think that like again it's like not all that it's not extremes in one way or the other like you know like you could also just have some funding you know you could have protocols vote on you can tear up the yeah the the amount i guess yeah or you could do your best you could yolo your best right like you the you know you know the unit swap initial feat here point three percent it was a yolo it worked well enough for unison v1 and i think you could kind of yolo out a a public goods fund that would improve things versus not having it um and maybe it doesn't go all the way to the like we've solved all of society's problems but it's like you know a step and to be clear we are not going to solve civil resistance before retroactive public goods funding round number two so in a few weeks yeah exactly 36 hours to hack yeah not happening but the more as the interesting thing is that this is actually something that kind of solves itself it is an emergent property of everyone using systems building better identity systems every single little impact counts and by the way we cannot solve civil resistance until we solve privacy preserving civil resistance because we are not trying to create some surveillance state carl talks about retroactive public goods funding the way he used to talk about ethereum in 2015 and that's the alpha now um unit swap also has a grants program tell us more more about the unit swap grants program um yeah the uniform grants program is awesome and there are there are multiple people here who are working on it um so you know i i'd say that like decentralized governance is pretty hard um that's that's a general you know thing that the theorem community understands at this point um and you know there's different like levels of speed and cadence um and i think that one you know fairly effective thing is having a more slow system that like allocates out to faster systems and so you know unit swap governance has like infrequent governance proposals um but you know you can have infrequent high-impact governance proposals and then you could have those governance proposals fund other things that fund other things that are much faster and higher impact and the uniswap grants program is you know in my mind one of the most successful uh you know governance proposals in all of ethereum to date uh because it's funded 122 different projects um and multiple teams that have been probably on par with the foundation now i think yeah it's wild yeah um you know uh it's it's pretty wild and you know eunice swap started out as a grantee of the ethereum foundation um and you know ken who runs uniform grants uh was on the along with you was on the grant committee at the ethereum foundation uh that got us off his initial grant um but yeah i mean ken and other people working at the the um at utah grand have really you know funded uh tons of projects all around the world that you know have led to other companies and and events and hackathons and you know there was even like the unicode was a hackathon fund by using grants and then there was like three or four that you were involved with uh then there were like three or four other projects that were uh created there that are now you know real companies that have raised rounds that's incredible i don't think i knew this either yeah so it's like it's you you kind of you can underestimate the impact but this was one governance vote one proposal and it's impacted you know probably tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people around the world careers measurable impact just income and just more things that are also intangible that just kind of came from that that one decision so yeah you're right yeah exactly um so yeah i don't know i i think that like uh hard to underestimate how important uh right the ethereum foundation grant you know spawning units like it's hard to you know understand how important uh public goods grants are and i'll add to that we as eat global also received a grant that started everything heath global started off with uh with the 80 thousand dollars from the ethereum foundation and then here we are 80 000 well spent exactly thank you all right i want to close off with that with one last question um there's a lot of i mean there's over a thousand developers here that are looking to get into web3 and start their careers uh some are looking to get better at just what their development some are looking to start companies some are looking to understand what's going on so they can think about moving over if you were to start now as a developer what would you recommend or advice you would give or resources you recommend or what would you tell them to kind of stay involved in this space and either can you go first and uh and uh yeah there you go it's a tough one it is a tough one and i'm not gonna lie i gave some of my advice already i mean i was thinking when i was stay optimistic right of course of course but i'll say a different thing i'll just say one do what you love that's what that's what hayden said right this is it's really the amount of energy that you can get from doing something that you really want and you really want to see happen is incredible and also make sure that you are doing things for the right reasons i do think i have i am an optimist i do think that in the long term if you work on just slow incremental progress trying to get to something that is actually valuable focusing on impact what goes around comes around people will start to notice your friends will start to notice you can bring your friends up also spread the love because everything is a community effort we need to work together and support each other because this is i mean we're all in it we're all in this experience together um yeah i guess what i would say is you know one like you never know what's gonna happen i think me and carl we were over there talking right before this and like we were kind of like holy [ __ ] these past few years have been really insane um and i don't think either of us really expected it to play out the way it did or for us to be in the positions that we're in um and i think that it was like a combination of just like interest and passion but also like luck and serendipity and like things kind of like you know unexpected don't forget their hard work hard work for sure um but i guess like again you know maybe it speaks to the being optimistic thing but like you know like you don't really know how things are going to play out and so i think that the most important thing is like coming in with like genuine intentions and and like working you know to working towards something that that is genuine and that you believe in and you know maybe maybe it will you know you never really know what's going to happen i think experimentation over anything else probably leads to more creative outcomes with that aiden carl thank you so much for being here and we really appreciate you joining us out of new york