[Music] Good morning everybody. My name is Cartek. I'm one of the co-founders of ETH Global and I want to welcome all of you to Pragma New York. This is a conference. If you've been to an ETH global event before, you know that we're known for doing two things.
running hackathons and summits. This week, we're in New York doing both of these things in a pretty big scale. But we're going to start today off and this whole week off by running our one-day event called Pragma. Every solidity developer knows that a smart contract starts with the word pragma. For us, it's not just a way for you to understand what's going on in a developer's head, but this event's goal is to make a call towards pragmatism.
Our goal here is to bring Web3 to a much wider audience. This event is open to anybody with any skills. You don't have to be an engineer. You don't have to know exactly what's going on. Our job is to help simplify that for you.
And that's the goal for this this day. What makes Pragma different is a few beliefs that we have on how we think a formatted event like this should work. This event is going to be single day and single track, which means there's no parallel things going on. Everything that you need to know is happening on this stage and everything is curated for you. Every speaker is a founder or the executive in charge of that company.
So you get to hear things from the people who are actually making those decisions and what's on their mind and how they're thinking about the future altogether. The focus is going to be on the future. We're going to look at things that we've learned from the past, things that have not gone well, things we can improve on. But everything here is going to be about what you can expect in the next six to 12 months. And we're going to keep most things non-technical.
There'll be one or two talks where you may have to know some specifics around how something works in a in a tech stack, but we're going to do our job to make sure that you get to understand the basics, but you don't need to have any specific background in understanding the context behind any of the conversations today. There's going to be 15 sessions. There's going to be eight interviews and seven talks. Every interview is going to be a fireside chat. There's no panels.
And you can see the entire schedule on the back of the postcard that you were all given at registration. Everything is also on the website. So that's still a source of truth. And you can see all the talks, speakers, and everything else directly there. Now, people are here for a lot of things.
There's a lot of cool things going on this week. Um, and we're excited about not only just Pragma, but also for the hackathon. And unique New York is like a unique one for us. There's 410 people here at Pragma from 43 different countries. And it's a perfect mix of people from all over the world coming here to uh not only just understand what's going on but also build something over the weekend.
Uh and also want to thank four incredible partners uh who are helping support this event especially Archology Chain Link Circle and PayPal USD. Please give them a big round of applause. They're all outside. You get to talk to them and uh learn about what they're focused on and what they're up to. Uh now I also want to thank everybody who bought a New York pack.
um more than about 60% of all tickets were purchased as a city pack for New York, which meant that you got not only just the the Pragma ticket, but also a bunch of things like credits, access to other side events, eim, and a bunch of other cool things, including access to a co-working space that we have in this venue can use all day today. So, packs for us are a new primitive that lets you blend onchain and off-chain primitives and perks, and it's accessible. So, anybody can look at this and uh play with it and add things to it. And we get to do that every time we do an event in any part of the world. And uh this is also kind of what we're doing now with ETH Global Plus.
We're bundling all the things that we're doing as ETH global and letting anybody in our ecosystem and community access to everything across 100 plus countries. And that includes things like not only just the stuff that we offer like Pragma events, city packs, community meetups, all those things, but we're doing all cool things like you actually now have access to priority pass. Uh we're doing international roaming for eims in any country you want to be part of. Uh if you're a developer, there's a lot of credits and faucets that let you not worry about any of these things that you need to do uh to get started. And all these things are kind of part of this bundle and you get to learn more about that on eglobal.
com/plus or uh there's a booth that we also have as ETH global to tell you more about all these things. The other thing I want to talk about is these wristbands. Uh everybody here has this wristband. This is not only just the way to control access to the venue, uh but each wristband is customized to to you. You get to uh scan anybody's wristband.
You get to understand who they are. you get to connect with them. The person on the other end can specify what information they want to share with you, whether it's your email, Discord, Telegram, all those things. Um, and you don't have to worry about knowing how do I get in touch with somebody. You get to simply tap anybody's wristband on your phone.
It opens on the browser and there you go. And uh, this will kind of port over for the weekend, too. So, you get to maintain a history of all these things pretty seamlessly. Now, want to get started with the the event. I'm going to give a quick overview of what we have planned for today.
We're going to start off with Tomas from the Ethereum Foundation giving us an overview of how things have been going with the feature of Ethereum as a protocol. Our second fireside chat is going to be with Henry from Privy and we're going to talk about things that are on Henry's mind. Then John is going to talk about interoperability and how we think that's going to shape global finance. It is going to talk about fintech and stable coins and how he sees that world blending and how we can simplify things or what we can look forward to. Then Danny is going to talk about how you can incorporate infrastructure for AI to be part of the web3 stack and how all that becomes all comes together uh seamlessly.
We're going to have another chat with Stephen from offchain labs or the the co-founders of arbitum to talk about what's on their mind and how they're thinking about the future of scaling. We're going to take a lunch break and we're going to resume with Deiet sharing his version of what cryptoi looks like for consumer applications and how flow is making an impact there. Howard is going to share his version of privacy on chain and how we can manage not only just user privacy but also understanding how transactions can be made private without compromising on and violating different laws. Then there's going to be a fireside chat with Sergey from Chainlink to see how he thinks about institutional adoption and how fintech companies and just general regulators are thinking about this space and integrating and looking at how we can blend uh onchain and ret and fintech together. Chris from Plume is going to talk about how to think about yield in 2025, especially as RWS get more and more popular.
Then have Vivec from Etherealize share his version of what they're building to help satisfy the institutional demand for Ethereum. Then Hayden from Uniswap and Phil from Flashbots are going to talk about how we think onchain DeFi evolves, especially with anywhere from new me techniques to scaling techniques that are helping introduce new ways to think about economics of onchain transactions. We're going to take a quick 20-minute break so all of you can talk to each other. Then we're going to resume the day with a fireside chat with Lisa and we're going to talk about how Aztec is thinking about privacy on Ethereum. Then David from Bank list is going to tell you 10 reasons why he's bullish on Ethereum.
And uh we'll see how that one goes. And our last talk of the day will be an interview with Ben from Optimism to share his version of where the future of scaling looks like from Optimism's point of view. So that's the agenda. Everything is on our website. [Music]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.