Opening Ceremony: Ethereum's Next Chapter | Austin Griffith | Gregory Markou | Jarrell James

hello thank you uh welcome everybody uh I am Mark Balin uh I work at a fund called boost VC uh we do preed investing a early stage deep Tech including crypto um but I'm very excited today to be moderating a panel with some very awesome guests here uh we're going to take a moment everyone's going to do some intros before we dive into some hopefully interesting thought-provoking conversations hopefully some truth seeking some some honest takes uh about ethereum and and the future of of the ecosystem um but before we get started let's do some intros uh Andrew maybe you want to kick things off hey everybody I'm Andrew Flockhart I'm head of engineering for Bas excited to be here um I'm based in New York and I've been working on bass for the last couple years so yeah excited to chat I'm Greg Marco I'm one of the co-founders of chains saafe and Sprinter um been in this space for I don't know like eight eight years I guess this year I'm Jerell James or JJ I'm the CEO of parable we focus on community internet ethereum infrastructure that runs on battery powered uh devices I'm Austin Griffith I founded the build build Guild Bild G uh we focus on developer onboarding and education and building cool things on chain awesome all right so let's get started with the first question and I guess the best way to ask this is you know if you had to describe the current Vibe right now with one metaphor what would you what would you use to describe how it feels to be in you know at eth Denver and in ethereum right now yeah I could kick it off um yeah I think you know the metaphor that comes to mind for me is that it's game time now instead of using a sports metaphor to describe that I'm going to use an anime metaphor and so in my mind this is like season 4 finale of a long running maybe like 50 or 100 season anime and if you're familiar with these types of things it's going to be like a two or three episode climax there's like a big challenge that the team is up against um but you've got the whole motly crew cast of characters coming together to you know make it through together you might see uh you know a couple characters that were feuding or at odds in season one they're working together now their Pals now um you know addressing the challenge together so interesting any other metaphors maybe contradictory metaphors does it feel like the gang's getting together no I think what's happening is that like we are seeing a lot of are you okay okay he's okay um I think we're at like this like Apex where there are a lot of really great Builders you know like kind of getting together like trying to like actually push through scaling but I think like the the the curtain's going to fall the lights are going to come on and a lot of people who are highly respected um are going to get caught with their pants around their ankles U my main reason for it is like I think there's a lot of people being extremely ch childish right now being very hung up on things and not like willing to change with the times that are coming and you know frankly I think it's that crowd that either needs to like you know get with the picture of like how the space and how the culture is moving or get out because it's really like that parasitic piece uh you know that that needs to get cut out interesting people need to either grow up and continue moving mov forward or or get up any other thoughts that's a good one yeah and like I'll preface this with saying that pretty much all my answers are going to focus on the leap frog South Leap Frog South being what many people would call the global South uh which I just don't and we don't do that at Parable because it's a bit diminutive um I'd say the the thing is you everyone all of us in 2017 we all got into the same Uber and we had a set team of Uber drivers and those were like vitalic Luben all the different leaders in the space um but you all had different destinations you're all in this giant Uber share and reality is if you wanted to get to the version of ethereum that you wanted to actually see happen you probably should have driven your own car and you probably should have not called an Uber that was being driven by a bunch of people who you couldn't quite you know vet or understand so I tend to be of the opinion that does stem from all the great Builders and engineers and designers that I know coming out of the global south or what I we call Lea frog South and I'm gonna be honest they got disillusioned years ago and they're still building and they aren't yelling and crying on Twitter and it's because like years ago they realized that after 2017 they needed to get into their own Uber so you think the ecosystems taken the wrong car and needs to get out basically I think the ecosystem tried to do a ride share to a single destination and none of them actually talk to each other ahead of time around what that destination was fascinating awesome how do you feel I I think that we may be in a stage right now where it feels like it's the darkest like it's the darkest before the dawn kind of and I I think that there's a lot of infighting and I think if number went up a lot less people would be infighting but for number to go up I think we need a lot more really good products and I think there are a lot of products in the space but it always feels like they're extractive and there's not a lot of really great positive sum products and I think that that's our fault because we've been at this for seven to eight years and we're still seeing a lot of not great products and a lot of extraction is this really the darkest I don't know I don't know if it get even darker like it's dark but I think it could be how many of you remember EIP 999 how about The Purge of Reddit moderators The Purge of Offrey all in the name of just trying to do the right what was like literally the standard way of doing things but there was still how about progpow where we literally had like multiple key leaders like burn out like is this really The Darkest Day or is it just a bunch of people that are like crying cuz they didn't make enough bags yet yeah there's a timeline people thought they'd be rich by now and like that's their mistake nobody in like Leap Frog South was out here thinking they'd be a multi-millionaire within 5 years of a product the the Reddit moderator thing helps me to jump to a different thing of infighting where we're seeing some of the ogs that are super hardcore Cipher Punk and some of the new blood that are more Finance clashing and I think this is descriptive of the whole Space there's a lot of these OG Cipher punks that are clashing with this kind of new school group that's coming in that's more focused on finance and info Finance so I think that's just like an interesting at odds that the ecosystem is many things to many people but it also is robust and at odds with itself well it's interesting you asked that because my next question was going to be about sort of these changes that are happening you know at the EF in the social layer more broadly right ya stepping down a couple days ago vitalic putting on a Mal lady right embracing this sort of uh countercultural ethos um I'm curious for you guys what do you guys think is next for this sort of um evolving cultural fabric there's like fluctuations in the governance layer um where do you think things kind of go from here do you think it gets more legitimate um more sort of spread out I think uh not to bring us back to metaphors but you guys ever been to like an actually really good party and you realize that there's like two DJs but you realize it about halfway through the party I think that a lot of people at the EF and a lot of people in Western crypto have been inside of one party and like inside of one DJ set being like oh wow this is going to be awesome and now there's you know the Music's Over the part's over they aren sure what's going on and they hear like a little rumbling happening somewhere and they're trying to figure out where it's coming from who's got that next brilliant idea and in reality when I say two parties I I see this cultural shift in the EF but I don't see it actually still dressing the key issue which is the EF and all of these consensus type organizations built a foundational platform of crypto for one half of the planet so no wonder you can't like keep playing these same Lego games to onboard users that have been users for 10 years those people are cash strapped they're done they're done with a lot of your nonsense so I do want to see more of like this less focus on just the EF giving us a road map forward in the culture but like who have we ignored Andrew what do you think I think those are good questions I mean I think hard times like this are um you know often some of the most valuable times if you can get through it because it's going to make us really reexamine and like reaffirm why we are here why we're we're drawn to this space in the first place um if we come through it I mean I I really agree with some of these points like we have to build we have to build apps that make people's lives better and actually you know change the meta um if we're able to come out of this I think will will have been a really clarifying time about what's important what are values that this ecosystem holds also don't think it has to be um a homogeneous you know uh set of values homogeneous uh culture I think it's sort of everyone who's here everyone who's listening who's showing up who's like interested in this ecosystem you are the culture right like you are going to write The Narrative of what happens in the next 5 to 10 years you're not at the whims of you know whatever the EF might decide culture is you know whatever this group of us you know say culture is um it's really about the people showing up the people building you are building ethereum's next next chapter of culture woo interesting well I mean there's a lot of you know debate happening about what is ethereum's culture right uh is ethereum woke is it anti-woke is it communist is it anti-communist right uh and I mean I'm curious for you guys on the panel what you as individuals believe both for yourselves and kind of of the ecosystem more broadly do you think that those values have a role to play in the formation of this of this protocol right or you know thinking more broadly right to what you said earlier uh as ethereum starts to scale right and become this global settlement layer uh which are the values that sort of continue to carry us forward and which are the ones that perhaps get left behind or that we maybe grow out of Greg to to your earlier Point like here here's the thing with like cult evolution of like cultures is that you know whatever you started with will never be what you ended with and you can never predict where you're going to go but the most fundamental thing you can do is say is educate along the way on the way of why you're here and why they should be here and I think this is one of the fundamental shifts that's like starting to happen is that the for probably up until like 22 really it was a lot of people in the ages of like you know 90 or 2002 and younger that were really like the core participants of crypto and now we have people that are like very young joining very different group of people here for very different reasons some of them are here literally just to make money really quickly turn a dollar but the core fundamental thing is like you got got to educate them on why they should be here on those like cyppher Punk values right but you're not jamming it down your throat and I think that's a problem that we see with a lot of people and a lot of the ogs on Twitter they're trying to say that the EF needs to like Jam these values down everybody's throats but like it makes no makes no sense I mean like the EF has other problems to deal with the EF has like an IBM organization that they've been trying to fix since like you know 2018 and they've been doing a really good job of fixing it just takes a lot of freaking time because they're also like trying to prop up this entire ecosystem um I mean I could ramble so yeah but um I think like when you talk about ogs and Cipher punks and I think a lot of us like to relate ourselves to Cipher punks and the ogs and the space just because we've been here for a lot of years um I think one of the cipher Punk values are something that you actually have to live and you actually have to recognize the reality around and build for like the anti of that reality in a lot of ways so like Cipher Punk class of crypto has is the richest class of Cipher punks that's ever existed and it's the most risk adverse when it comes to getting involved in hardware and there's a reason Cipher punks in the past had to get involved in Hardware because they had to change the physical reality around people in order for people to see the value in what they're making we have a culture that is completely risk adverse to making any hardware from a collective standpoint and from an individual corporate standpoint and when you have that culture you have people that make invisible tools for people who live in a physical reality and they keep making the same invisible tools over and over again and every single iteration it just seems like they're more invisible to the end user so we're never going to get the billion or the 100 million that we think we're going to get on- ramped in all these different places if we remain Cipher punks who have no like Risk tolerance for Hardware development I mean the thing that I have to point out here right the elephant in the room is that at the end of the day the thing that Fortune 500 companies and Cypher punks agree about is that they both want a platform that is sort of predictably uh uncensorable right or like that can't be evil right that can't be captured these are like qualities that are you know sort of like mutually beneficial so it's interesting to me that you know there's this idea of like the EF uh espousing the wrong values right or or uh that that's been a lot of what we've heard right and Greg what you mentioned but is it the case that maybe they're just leaning into the wrong values right or leaning the wrong direction do you think that EF has any role to play in shaping this culture do you think this culture should just arise naturally um obviously vitalic has a role to play in shifting this shaping his culture so do you guys on this panel I think um these are important questions but can also be sort of rabbit hole bait for us because culture will not matter at all if we don't build and so I think like a lot of the emergent culture that we can find and and you know identify with and feel you know confident in will emerge from getting town to business executing on the things we know we need to execute on I feel like this is the other missing half possibly is like we are in a a moment of change we're in a moment where we need to put our foot on the gas in terms of building the very important infrastructure that we all know needs to exist and getting distracted by like what is going on culturally not that it's irrelevant but it can kind of distract us you know if we zoom out nobody in the leap Pro South probably cares or knows what the EF cultural drama of the moment is right they're going to care if real apps real infra makes their life better and I feel like you know that is sort of like perhaps the only rallying unifying cry we can all get behind let's get down to business let's execute on the things we know we need to do also like most people complaining about culture right now at the EF level don't ship 90 99% I can count like one just echoing now is the time to build I want to say that a million times over everything is lining up here with l2s smart contract wallets regulation everything is ready now is the time to build the EF is not ethereum ethereum is a cold dark settlement layer that anyone can get to that's credibly neutral that anyone can settle anything on ethereum is not woke or anti-woke it is a settlement platform that does exactly what it's supposed to to do and allows you to write code to run on it and that's what's important and facilitates a bunch of champagne socialists depending on the market condition okay I know we're almost up on time I one question I did want to get to and you kind of started to touch on this right this need to uh be really competitive right ultimately this sort of fire has been lit I think under everyone's asses you know we've seen the last year most of the most interesting things that happened in the ecosystem happened either in Bitcoin or in Salon land and so you know I'm curious for you guys what do you think it will take for ethereum looking ahead in order for the chain to remain competitive on this continuous basis you know against these kind of new entrance that will continue popping up salana and others when I travel around I show people how to build on ethereum and the talk that I give is basically this is nation state level hardness this chain that you are settling to cannot be tampered with by nation states and so I think that the Catalyst might be a few nation states actually using it and starting to settle to it and that's what I really like to see and try to help facilitate in some way sorry to jump in there Andrew no good yeah I mean in terms of first of all I think we're very lucky that we have competitors you know lighting fires under our ass the the like one way to to fail and remain aifi as if you never have that um you know to to get back to the point of like what are we going to do about it I think it's time to build so we just published a Blog on our BAS engineering blog base. devblog about what we think a plan to 10x or 20x The Blob count for da that's going to keep uh fees low for users all around the world we think you know we as an industry we as an ethereum ecosystem should not be content with one slow hard Fork of like Grand magnitude at the end of the year long-term plans are great but let's also get short-term tactical Concrete Hard Forks that we have high confidence in so we have a plan around this it's on B.D blog and we love to work with anybody who feels the same way to like let's do the work we have the people we can work hard we can do hard things um especially if we all band in and do it together yeah I have to agree so for context I was a COR Dev for on eth 2 before it merged um I I what we really need to start seeing is there's a few fundamental things there's like a lot of fud in like what's going to actually scale the evm like parallel EVMS and all this it's not going to scale the evm that's like a 2X Improvement and salana you can actually look at the stats and like it's literally a 2X Improvement um you it doesn't scale if everybody uses Unis swap parallel evm done we need to scale underlying like Tech and in order to do that we actually have to start separating out the different pieces that people work on and rolling those into their own hard Forks so like robust incentives groups by the EF should be able to put in a hard Fork to change Supply emissions if they want on an ongoing basis throughout the year the CL should be able to do it independently of the E and blobs should be able to scale and have hard Fork scheduled independently of all of the other ones we need to start really looking at like even though we're not we need to think of the like text act like running consensus to be modular and those all need to be scheduled independently we should be able to see each of them hard Fork like two times a year it's it it shouldn't be hard I think more people from the EF ethereum leadership in general got to go back to school I think like read a few more books around social cohesion and like giving people Something to Believe In oh you're so wrong no not like going to school for mathematics and stuff like this I'm talking about ethereum leadership as a whole not just the EF Greg not just the EF uh I think we got really validated really early on as a space I think a bunch of people who knew a lot of stuff about computer science got validated on a a lot of stuff that touches into social dynamics now touches into Political Theory and touches into like economic oppression of whole groups of people and and like that is a pretty big deal and I don't see the seriousness coming from either leadership or the major players in this space that actually addresses that that's what the space has evolved into and if you were to realize that that's what the space has evolved into you need to maybe go back to school a little bit and realize that your role has gone into something new all right we're over on time but uh Austin any final thoughts my final thought is if you are a developer go speedrun ethereum at speedrun ethereum.org speed products go build thank you go build all right well that's that's the thesis is the future of ethereum is more building and less political conversations so yeah thank you all for coming uh thank you panelists for showing up and uh yeah best of luck for everyone building on ethereum thanks Alliance architect with the buff aorn's grit teaching St protocols how to commit decentralize this she smirks mid FL as her