Tomasz Stanczak - Ethereum Foundation Ethereum Vision

[Music] All right. Hi everyone. Oh wow. Nice. This is amazing venue, amazing place to be speaking at.

Uh great to see everyone. I'm happy that we see all each other here in Khan uh this summer. I'll be talking about Ethereum vision. Uh my name is Thomas Stanuk. I'm aim foundation co-executive director uh alongside uh Shiaoi Wang and I'll be speaking about the vision but because I'm executive director the vision is not necessarily the thing that I'm responsible for vision comes from from the board from Vitalic from the community from everyone who was really caring about Ethereum in the early days and caring that it never changes and it never erodess.

So my job is to make sure that that vision is executed well and I'll start showing you a bit about how how that execution is going so far. All right. First of all, I would like to say massive thank you to FCC organizers. Uh the city is beautiful, the venue is amazing and it's great to see so many people from Europe and outside coming to see each other. Uh FCC for me personally is very important.

It used to be one of the largest events, if not the largest event that I was uh attending at the early days of my adventure with Ethereum. I learned a lot. I met a lot of friends, friends for forever, I think. Uh friends that have been alongside my journey for the last six, seven years, eight years. Uh and I think I've been at UCCC five or six times.

So once again, thank you a lot for all those events. Uh so some updates that we published in April this year. uh first as a vision document coming from Ya and Vitali and then as a follow-up document or like blog post from myself and show uh we were talking about the execution the next few months the next year and the years forward and I and Vitalik were setting up the stage for us to operate and to start executing the vision of Ethereum. Uh you can find those documents there. they were published uh also in press and what we've done at the very beginning we started talking about the communication how it foundation communicates with all of you with everyone on online so we started reviewing our approach to the social media handles uh how we respond to questions how we participate in podcasts how we start attending more events and over time I think we'll be showing up also in the events where normally Ethereum was uh invisible So it's very important for all of us to actually also attend the events that are outside of our typical comfort zone events where everyone recognizes us that the audience is lots of friends that make it so much easier to speak because we have to go now even more to all the institutions to people that will use applications on Ethereum.

It's a pivotal year. There is lots of adoption. There are stable coins. There'll be lots of applications whether it will be prediction markets, new wallets, trading applications and so on and so on. All of this merging with AI, it will be exciting.

Let's communicate a lot. Let's talk a lot about what we're building and what are the goals ahead that were set for us. So, first of all, maximizing the number of people that will be directly or indirectly through some applications that are maybe hiding the intricacies of the blockchain. uh affected by or like impacted in a positive way with the attention to Ethereum values. So Ethereum values, open source, privacy, censorship resistance, security, all of that matters.

It's not about just on boarding millions of users, billions of users to Ethereum. It's also making sure that it can take advantage of all of those values that we that we care so much about. And well most of us when we were starting years ago we really cared about how to preserve privacy how preserve censorship resistance in the world that is rapidly changing with the technologies that are putting even more pressure centralization pressure on all of this. Uh so there will be absolutely no benefit of simply deploying the applications to billions of users without it. The second uh goal is practically like the hardening of the protocol, the resiliency of the protocol and it's very like big expectations for everyone that the protocol will survive forever that will exist that will be secure that will be preserving all those values.

the resiliency and now if you see some of the some of the articles that we published some of the blog posts that describe some initiatives initiatives that we picked up in the last two three months um there's a treasury policy so a bit clear communication about what we do with uh Ethereum treasury there is the information about the trillion dollar security initiative so thinking about how we communicate how we'll be improving security of Ethereum even more in the next years with institutions and for users So trillion dollar security as we say it's either a single institution holding $1 trillion funds on a single smart contract or maybe billion people holding $1,000 each. And in both of those cases we have to feel absolutely confident about Ethereum. Um amazing project as well the Kohaku wallet that will show a lot of improvements in the interop and UX that we're bringing. All right. So there was a lot of mention that we switching to Ethereum in the winning mode, not in the winning mode as uh the Pi is not growing.

The the Pi has to grow. So you have to win by just bringing on board more users, bringing more activity, more of those benefits and win in the sense that we want to every single day to push very hard for better results that we want to see those numbers going up for everyone to benefit. and whether it's Ethereum mainet, it's Ethereum layer 2s, uh any other technologies that actually carry on the values that we mentioned. The Ethereum foundation treasury policy also says how we should look at the D5 protocols that are massively adopted. How we as the Ethereum Foundation can allocate the funds to the D5 protocols with the guidance on D5 bank.

to how the treasury policy selects DeFi protocols that really care about funds being self-custodial, no KYC, privacy preserving and the other properties of the protocol that we all care about without any shortcuts. We will provide that guidance for the top D5 protocols by allocating funds not necessarily by requiring all of those properties to be perfectly matched but just saying that some protocols will be approaching it better and will be encouraging them to move in that direction and also what matters for the Ethereum vision is that we've been always thinking about the long-term vision for Ethereum and just what's changing I think this year is the long term is now we have The AI technology creating a lot of questions about how the privacy in the future will look, how the centralization in the future will look. There are threats from AI. There are challenges, there are opportunities. There is a pivotal moment in the regulatory environment and the adoption with the institutions, stable coins.

All of this is happening now and will have impact for many many years forward. So this particular year I think when we think about long long term everything is happening now that matters for the long term. What happens and what we have to look at is real world assets on Ethereum. Why it matters? Because we really care about all the institutions and governments to slowly move on chain to achieve that transparency of the governance systems, transparency of the big institution behaviors and processes.

And slowly we think all of this will merge to the network. Slowly maybe melt into the network and dissipate because module by module we'll be introducing like perfect replacement for various components where we can remove intermediaries. Still it will be a massive success for everyone. And it will be success for the institutions that will move smoothly through a transition with the help of the Ethereum builders and the success for the users who will benefit from ability to trade all the assets in the world on chain. And one of those discussions about bringing institutions on chain will be happening I think today uh 7:45 p.

m. So please see uh that conversation between Vitalik and uh the team from Robin Hood and Arbitum security challenges overview. So we published recently a report on this trillion dollar security uh project. What we've done, we went to the various players in the ecosystems, users, builders of the tooling, builders of the applications institutions. So we started asking questions, what are what are the perceived risks that would be obstacles for you to go towards a trillion dollar security?

What prevents you nowadays from keeping trillion dollar assets on Ethereum? And it's not because we think that Ethereum is behind, it's ahead. It's ahead on security side and want to be even more ahead. We want to think of how we bring a lot of traditional finance to chain. How we bring billions of users with a feeling of really caring about never taking shortcuts on the security side.

And we talked about the user experience. So on the side of user experience, are there some confusing elements that lead to users making mistakes and being uh victims of the frauds? Smart contract security. So auditing risks, the results of the of the hacks of smart contracts, infrastructure and cloud security. Not only the problems with the infrastructure of Ethereum, but also the problems with the underlying infrastructure.

It's not only Ethereum that we have to care about when we care about trillion dollar security. It's also how Ethereum connects with internet with the infrastructure like global cloud architecture and so on. Uh consensus protocol itself. Does it secure the amount of money against the attacks of the uh nation states like organized crime? Is the consensus working there for coordinated attacks from chain operators?

Monitoring incidents uh sorry monitoring incident response mitigation. So all the questions about the Ethereum security like observing it and reacting very fast and knowing always about whatever what happens on term uh social layer and governance. So do we really ensure that security remains the value of Ethereum by always having the governance models that cannot be captured and can deliver the values over and over again. Open source it matters for us and we are I think at the verge of being able to build the entire world that will be open source. We can open source the laws, the agriculture.

We can create open hardware. Uh we can start open sourcing and redesigning how the healthcare systems work. Manufacturing automation of everything. Uh we can think of the future much advanced generative AI, open-source metaverse. We can think of designing education around the world, science and verifiable AI.

All of those questions are particularly difficult but also extremely exciting. I think this is exactly what will bring a lot of new builders uh new generation of builders uh to building on chain. Understanding that you could in the future open the repository that defines the healthcare system in one of the countries and start editing from another country by defining the agents the automation robots and the chain interactions that ensure verifiability and safety and security of all of the solutions. It will matter that we'll deliver privacy because privacy matters in healthcare in insurance uh world in uh in education everywhere there it matters. We'll want to deliver the system of infrastructure for the world for the societies that will really care about the privacy of the users and will allow them to use all of this borderless by moving from country to country and using all the services seamlessly.

Um what else? I think that what will be very important for Ethereum communities now we'll be building a lot of habs small spaces for physical meetups continuation of something that obviously is already a tradition in the space of web 3 lots of meetings events but thinking about how we can make them even more crossindustry how we can ensure that it people are going more often to meet with the technologies from other industries with the thought leaders from AI from biotech uh and so on and one of Those events will be described like one of those spaces happens in SF and you'll be able to listen about it on Wednesday. So it's a frontier tower in SF. Now talking about Ethereum humanity shared world computer an open and permissionless platform and interestingly I think nowadays we can even start questioning what does it mean that it belongs to humanity in the age of AI. If we automate everything and start connecting agents are we serving humanity or agents.

I think that one of the roles of Ethereum and Ethereum vision is to make sure that we can always always place the human somewhere there in the control in control or as a beneficiary of the systems that we're building. So we want to protect humanity. We want to allow humanity to control the systems even even extremely well automated systems. In all of this, we'll be asking questions about privacy and identity, identity of humans. We see solutions like world ID and at the same time we can read blog posts from Vitalik which highlights the problems of global ids.

We start talking about plurality of ids. How many different ids we can collect from solutions from self from cello or metric. So circles from nosist team all of this gives us opportunity to create the social structures between ourselves and then by inviting more and more people from web 3 and support the privacy and identity initiatives the cypher pack manifesto. So I think it will be important to for me to always mention people that care a lot about slowing us down a bit when we when we get over excited about institutional adoption, about big money, about big trading, people that will keep reminding us that there is cypher pank underneath that there is privacy question and it's always always at risk. So please always pay attention to the voices that very often are quieter or more obscure.

Those are the people that operate from the shadows very often in stealth because they fight for privacy. What else? We'll be talking about the privacy and identity of the future world with AI. You can look at the pretty exciting projects like Frasa or many other exciting projects in the space of AI that choose Ethereum as a trusted layer for their execution. the globally credibly neutral chain that make sure makes sure that the privacy and security of the users is preserved forever.

The plurality as the aspect of Ethereum in its vision is very important. Making sure that we listen to multiple voices that we look at different approaches to solution of the problems that we uh enable participation from all around the world for geographical decentralization by facilitating network building networking connecting people from different communities reducing centralization. We're building systems that are anti-fragile, but what we want to do is to make sure that it's more of us in everything and that we encourage others to be even more of them in building in Ethereum. So, Foundation doesn't want to disappear. It wants us to make sure that it drowns in the waves of other participants, other institutions and builders, millions of builders participating in building the network.

So making everyone being able being empowered to build more will definitely be uh something that we'll always care about. Uh the book plurality probably also one of the ways of building Ethereum vision. So Ethereum vision is built by by people in the foundation by people outside of the foundation by those who describe Ethereum and tell us all what Ethereum is. Uh recently we've been organizing Berlin interop. It was a meeting of the core developers of Aturum Foundation of the client teams but also various teams from the L2s teams in ZKVM space many other teams and all of those builders met together and it was also a bit of a symbol of opening to to more of the community.

core developers in the past were being asked to listen more to the D5 builders to L2's developers and it happened this year in Berlin. So thanks for organizers. We had a lots of interactions and opening to conversations with altus. In later this year we'll see events in Argentina def connect in Argentina in November. It will be once again the confirmation that we're reaching out to more of the communities.

Argentina has been for many years an important space for for the privacy fights for the adoption of blockchain. a lot of fantastic builders, lots of builders who created some of the most important applications of Ethereum. The communities are also managed in in Africa. There is borderless Africa project uh organized by Yosefella and uh last year the car developers met together in Kenya and met with the local communities and as they rightly here there's 900 million people that are really limited by existing systems and they can be unblocked their collaboration their creativity and their entrepreneurship can be unlocked by the systems if we build them well and if we really listen of what matters. So building those connections, building those networks once again empowers plurality of opinions and diversity of builders.

Similarly in India the folio has been organizer of hackathons and events for many years and we hope that the Indian community of Vtorium will be building more and more in LATAM. There will be a latam in Brazil before before defcon connect Argentina. So if you go to Brazil a few weeks before this should be a pretty great big event organized by EF Kiput. In Asia there's lots of events also some of those belonging to the uh list of community builder events around ep city are continuations of the zoalo style events. Shanghai is one of them and will bring builders together for a month in Singapore.

All of this will be happening around the big events like token 2049 in Singapore. So the events where you can meet with builders with game developers with big adoption companies with enterprises. We have to be at those events and we have to keep caring about Ethereum being very visible there on stages. plurality of opinions and ideas, welcoming all the L2s and continuously accepting them as a very very strong important component of the Ethereum community. L2s that are innovating, building, bringing users on board and making sure that we never never for a moment feel that something is wrong between L2s and L1.

uh this collaboration brought so much of the innovation, so much of the progress on the ZK side, so many users using Ethereum and benefiting from it, so many of the enterprise business development collaborations, stable coin adoptions, all this happens and we'll keep caring to make sure that the security parameters of the Ethereum mainet are being um inherited by L2s that L2s can have very clear guidance of how they can claim the stage one, stage two, uh, and other requirements saying how they can really protect users with the Ethereum as a base layer underneath. And I think that if you define it for the protocol, for the vision of the protocol and the technical side, it starts to feel very much like there might be some kind of system between the censorship resistance and geographic decentralizations that as we approach some very small perimeter of the financial systems like a city of New York or or some financial hubs in Asia, then we may see chains appearing that are kind of city chains for local economy. They may approach very very fast block times and have real challenges for how to decentralize them, how to prevent them to really operating from a single data centers. There's some set of challenges for the researchers and for technologies. Nowadays, we see solutions like hyperlquid and mega.

How to make sure that those solutions can be connected with Ethereum mainet. I think that's a good question for some of you. How to build 25 millisecond block time blockchains that will inherit the security parameters of Eternet. The regional chains probably collecting them within the region or the continent and operating maybe at 250 milliseconds. This is the space nowadays where you see a competition between the O2s.

uh some of the O2s will think more globally maybe with one or two second blockchains block uh sorry block up times and still you have the credibly neutral global chain of Ethereum uh that will act as a security provider as a liquidity provider interrupt hub the high value holding chain uh identity holding chain and so on. So you can see this chain as a global chain and you see here two and a half seconds and I think if we see nowadays the block times of 12 seconds on Ethereum. Uh we have now proposals for 6 seconds thinking about some modifications to the behavior of the slot and propagation of blocks with adoption of solutions around ZKVM with improvements in the P2P protocol layer. we can maybe go to five, four seconds or even in the future to three, two and a half seconds. Uh these are not promises but these are very ambitious goals for many of the researchers to think how we can go there and they start to be promising because we started thinking about it.

It really matters. we want to be there and we approached that because we've uh executed recently the changes to the uh protocol teams also now executing the structuring of the ecosystem development teams at the Ethereum Foundation supporting clear communication and clear coordination and goal setting for everyone in the ecosystem. Um so not only you see the leaders from the beginning of the presentation when I showed on the slide some names of people from the uh from the management team we activating much more the team leads from the teams to really operate without the clear guidance but deciding on based on all their multi-year experience of how to define the teams at the Ethereum foundation and how to coordinate all the client teams in the best way to reach the goals that are important for us in a short and medium term. and short and medium term we care about the scaling of L once scaling blobs improving interop and UX all of that matters not mattering only as a thing forever but this is the response to a lot of conversations where we learned we neglected it a bit uh the values matter but we have to have a moment of focus on technology itself through through those changes we also discovered a ZKV VM progressing amazingly fast with lots of promises now delivers many of those solutions for us in Ethereum. So we can improve scaling of L1, we can improve coordination between L2s and L1 ones, security parameters of the chain.

uh we have to answer some questions with the KVM on if we change the scaling and we have light verifying nodes how we ensure that the memple exists how we ensure that we can delegate block building with safety of censorship resistance all of those questions will be coming together over the next probably two years but this some first results of ZKVM with real-time proving should be appearing at the end of this year even maybe we'll see we'll be targeting dev connect for for some of the presentations and demos. ZKVM teams has executed amazing job uh sorry like amazing efforts over the last over the last years and are now approaching a drill time proving with even single GPU at home. So that really potentially promotes the decentralization for Ethereum and places Ethereum at absolute front forefront of the ZKVM uh innovation. Uh massive congratulations to some of the teams. There are much more.

ZK Singh Airbender announcing fantastic results just a few days ago. Zisk team that span off span out from the polygon team. So they have been operating with polygon for many years. Polygon has supported a lot of innovation for Ethereum as well. Not only here but through the egg layer as well.

uh SP1 team from succinct one of the first ones that was announcing the real-time proving for Ethereum blocks uh risk zero team and openVM all of them approaching it from slightly different angles and probably learning from each other uh even if it makes them sometimes probably a bit uneasy about being open source that learning from each other aspect may feel like borrowing from each other but also actually accelerating each other I think that that result is much more important for all of them. Uh scaling a one. So we scale one now with the focus on very thorough review of all the challenges that we have with the execution layer. So we brought people on the testing team, on the infrastructure team, the core developers to bring new tooling to verify at what levels we can discover some challenging op codes, some potential new attack vectors. And suddenly we had a lot of creativity among the client developers that started thinking okay if we set it to 100 million gas now on execution layer how we can answer questions sorry what kind of challenges we have what kind of paths for the scaling we have to choose and yesterday I think Mario announced that practically all the client teams agreed for 45 million they'll be going further towards 60 million of gas per block on Ethereum one and then we'll be thinking of how to get to 100 million gas this year.

We'll see whether we sleep a bit or not. Uh this is the wallet beat. So the project that borrows a lot from the ideas of L2B thinking about the L2s. Uh but the wallet beat is bringing for us some of the review of the privacy security aspects of the wallets. Uh so we'll try to bring more clarity to the wallet ecosystem.

We'll try to also build solutions SDKs for the wallets mostly supporting the teams that operate in the tooling space. Um probably less by building them ourselves but Ethereum foundation may also support directly solutions related to privacy. Privacy very often strictly lies in this public goods space but it also is being requested a lot from the institutions not only from users. Institutions come and say privacy and censorship resistance matters. Uh they ask for the institutional wallets they ask for the solutions for the institutions and everyone can benefit from that probably.

uh the blob scaling coming in Fusaka. Fusaka targeting the end of this year or probably even earlier Q3 Q4 and Fusaka has the peer focus where we'll be increasing the blob blob count by eight and also introducing a lot of other improvements around the UX and drop. Then Glamsterdam should follow next year probably with a bit more focus on scaling. uh and then lots of interrupt and UX improvements will be happening in parallel. Uh this is the example of the work that is being done on the cohack wallet prototype wallet that includes a lot of standards for the interrop and privacy things that all the other wallets will be able to borrow.

All of this is uh built into the wallet that is a fork of umpire wallet on the one that's uh probably many of you should try uh and then should look at the open source code of Kohaku and start experimenting with how we improving the UX of Ethereum. Thank you so much. That's the vision for Ethereum for the next few months for the next years. Much of it will be built by you or all of it will be built by you. Thanks a lot.

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