The Argument for Ethereum and Layer 2 Solutions - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

good morning everyone morning morning morning morning how's everyone's second day going woo oh I like it good energy um we have an exciting panel today um and I think what I wanted to start off with was really set the tone and you know all of us were kind of uh joking and laughing backstage but a lot of times what we're seeing in the industry and the narrative in the industry is going towards something like l2s are fragmenting ethereum l2s are taking value and extracting from ethereum is that really the truth or is that just something that we're seeing being kind of put forth by other folks in the industry so I wanted to get the takes of all our leaders here and maybe uh to kind of go directly for the elephant in the room um from your perspectives and your discussions in the last week or so uh Stephen what do we need to do better as an ecosystem for ethereum um and I love to get the you know takes from all the other Founders here yeah I think that ethereum uh ethereum's design the way it is today the layer two the layer design is actually I would say it's superpower you know if you look at the most successful protocol of all time which is the Internet it's a layered architecture and it's not by accident and actually if you go back to the '90s there were people having the same debate were having today which is is this a good idea is this a bad idea and it turns out it's a very good idea and the reason is you know let's go back to ethereum you know 2 years ago almost to the day we uh did a merge and we moved ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake today there are over 100 layer twos and layer 3es that are tracked by l2b on ethereum imagine if we had to do the consensus change 100 times but we don't because we have a layered architecture where ethereum sits on the bottom and it can provide it consensus and you know what changes arbitrum had to make when the happened to adop proof of stake none it just automatically inherited that and that's one of the superpowers and the other big one is innovation there are 100 different layer twos with 150 different strategies and the idea is that you can have privacy l2s DJ l2s you know the most buttoned up l2s for um fex or traditional finan financial institutions and they're all powered by ethereum and they can innovate there and they don't have to develop their own consensus they're all uh they're all secured by ethereum but to your question where can we be better is it does lead to the challenge of interoperability and you have different layer tws and you have to figure out layer 3es and you have to figure out how can they communicate and interrupt with each other and the thing I think we can do better as a community is there's sometimes a hyperfocus on your own stack where we say how can arbitrum chains talk to each other better or how can Stark net chains or how can polygon or scroll chains talk to each other better and sometimes there are good technical reasons for that but I think forever we can we should say how can all ethereum chains talk to each other together talk with each other and not limit ourselves to our own ecosystems if it's not technically necessary thank you and Ellie do you have any thoughts on this yeah so on whether um l2s are you know parasitic or going to extract value from ethereum or give it back I think the honest answer answer is that uh we're way too early in the game in the sense that um right now a very small percentage of humanity is using blockchains for anything and really the challenge of all of us is to give you know Humanity the scale and also the use cases and the New Vision uh in order for Humanity to embrace this technology now when all is said and done value will pull and acrw somewhere uh maybe it will acre in places that don't exist yet um and that's fine what I said to my team in the early days when we founded starkware and I still say to them today and I think it applies here as well is I said to them and I say to them now um I know that our technology is going to transform the world for the better and I mean not just the blockchains uh we're famous for um you know validity rollups and Stark proofs which we invented in product ties so I have no doubt that this will Embrace and permeate everywhere um I don't know whether value will acre necessarily to us or to some competitor or elsewhere I don't know that but that's fine because the most important thing is the most important scarse resource each of us has is our time the question is are we spending it on things that we find valuable and contributing to progress and I have no doubt that you know advancing l2s and ethereum in a variety of ways is going to acre a lot of value to uh humanity and we will look back and say I have not wasted my years in vain and I have done I have done I have done something that I'm proud of and that's all that matters so I don't know where value will acre but I'm very content you know progressing and advancing the technology we're building I would say um um you know day before yesterday I was saying that uh you should see it in a way that remove all the layer tws from ethereum assume they don't exist and only ethereum exists and what do you think the value of the of value of ethereum would be it's a pretty you know slow chain 13 TPS and all that and now you have a lot of lot of l1s who are offering this execution engines like execution environments most of the daps and the activity would have moved out of ethereum to some of these other l2s some of the other l1s and I I I say that the fact that because of l2s all these developers are still in the ethereum uh you know constellation I would say like you know now ethereum is no longer a single you know thing it's a constellation and all those developers have you know uh you know have places like starware arbitrum uh you know polygon scroll that they can launch these uh applications and Achieve like Mass uh adoption with that right like billions and billions of dollars of tvl and all that all this will not be available to eum developers if this was only ethereum and the gas fees is $50 there will be very few activity and markets will already price in that you know this is not going anywhere the activity cannot exist here so you know they will the way like you know we saw in the past cycle also the market started pricing that maybe some other l1s can take the place of ethereum if l2s were not there there's 100% people will believe that you know ethereum is is going to be phased out so that's the answer by contradiction that I think the l2s add huge value to ethereum I think and without l2s ethereum won't exist the way we see it today sen you have anything to add yeah um I think when I first heard of the um L2 road map and the concept of infinite Garden the idea that you can apply your own thinking in the different technical variations in experimentation to how ethereum scale was a super novel idea I've never heard of anything quite like that before and back then um multiple l1s were already fragmenting the onchain experience and fragmenting liquidity and developers so from ethereum's pect like from the Bas layer perspective I think this is a pragmatic choice and what is led to is multiple years of experimentation and and and and and different varieties of technical flavors of how to scale ethereum and and right now I think um the ecosystem as a whole is in a very healthy place with a lot of solid players like everyone on a table with their interpretation of how to scale ethereum and now like we have hundreds of different rups and everyone and there's a lot of people with different strategies about how to go to market how to BD how to bootstrap the ecosystem and uh I think we've moved on to the next phase where the tech stack is somewhat in a good place there's lots of solutions that are readily available and you can apply immediately and then the variety of different business go to market and how to assess different audience that's becomes like a even wider spectrum of competitive landscape and so I think you know the way I see it ethereum is a leader in kind of proposing this concept and we're seeing other chains trying to think of different names to o describe a similar setup because fundamentally this is the only way to scale this is really helpful context and I think it sounds like what uh many of you are saying is that without the l2s it wouldn't be even ethereum wouldn't be here the way it is today it wouldn't be here with the size it is today um for example if I were a developer trying to come in or even just a retail user trying to come in you know Into The Ether ecosystem I don't know much about ethereum but I see all these different l2s right and I have this EXP experience that I have to go bridging I have to do uh uh learn about these different chains what do you think is um a way for me as a new user into ethereum um to ease this experience and do you like do you guys have any thoughts on how you're addressing that right now Stephen or anyone else at Le nodding a lot s's nodding go ahead I can I can think that like you know um at polygon like we also believe that this fragmentation is an issue and due to that like we are working on this solution called AG which is uh pretty uh L2 neutral and we expect to integrate with most of the L2 so that you know you have one probably uh unified interface where uh the interoperability uh can be much easier much more intuitive and users don't have to go through that and developers also have these libraries and all that they can just simply abstract all of it away from the end users so U you know I think like and similarly I think every uh ecosystem is thinking L2 ecosystem is thinking of uh interoperability solution in some in one way or the other or collaborating with each other to you know find these uh better uh ux parts for the users and the developers so on on our side um you know and also continuing with what I said earlier the the real challenge is not um addressing the existing um crypto crowd which is very important but it's sort of already you know it's gotten used to whatever the 24 key pass phrases and all the complexity of it it's really attracting folks like you know my whatever my siblings and my dad aren't Crypt native today um so what we've been doing with this is um on on Stark net there's 100% native account abstraction which then is used by wallets to give um pure web to like experience you know using face recognition or Biometrics on those wallets uh without the need for elaborate um you know pass phrases and stuff like that while giving you all the security of web 3 so it's fully self- custodial fully safe but with a very web to experience and I think that uh so I know that ethereum is also you know moving towards the counter abstraction models and others and I think the way to go is to make everything more abstracted and seamless the internet also is very complex but you know by now um the user experience is very good and with more computation that hand on the blockchain and um you know better standards you can have an experience that is common to other areas and also you can uh have all the security of web 3 I encourage you not to take my word at it you know try either alent or braavos the wallets and see you know on board to them feel how it sees you'll see uh you'll see that it's quite web to experience yeah I would say that um you know specific technology such as account abstraction is going to make this very important uh very you know more accessible to users and is very important and also things like chain specific addresses right today users are jumping between chains and they're sometimes losing funds because oops I sent it you know I sent this to on the wrong chain the address address isn't supported there and like you know these things can happen but I think if we zoom out it's also because we're really early on so you know going back to the internet analogy and extending it a little more you know when I got here this morning I I took my phone and ordered a taxi on on grab and I didn't really think about the net networ stack underneath what I was doing you know the tcpip stack I just thought that I'm taking my phone and ordering a taxi and I didn't think about the network stack I didn't think whether the servers were being hosted on AWS really all I thought about was the experience that I was having and you know we're all here on chain it's like I think we we're very early on and we're like uh the Builders of those core layers but actually our success among users particularly as we go mainstream to users who don't really necessarily know or care about the fundamental intricacies of the blockchain I think us fading a little bit into the background is actually going to be important and something which I am actually hopeful that happens the same way I order my taxi I don't really think about the server stack underneath it I also think that uh eventually we'll get to a point where a user just says Hey I want to do this experience on the blockchain they might not even know they're using the blockchain they might be playing a game or doing some financial transaction uh in an app like grab on their phone and uh not realize that hey there's a whole blockchain stack underneath this that's making it possible so today we have you know hyper awareness of users because you go into your wallet you choose your network and you uh self- custody all your assets and you know that's always going to be good for some users but they also have to make experiences that uh with technology account abstraction and also just with the general mindset really abstracts us away from users that they don't have to be thinking about hey uh what is the software that this taxi uh grab app is running on I hear you and it sounds like um what um many of you are referring to is kind of that we're kind of stuck in this U bubble and really overthinking um the the the kind of the the the pitting one ecosystem against another when it's actually that we're really aiming towards to get Mass adoption and I understand I know you guys for many years and you all have been trying to do that right I'm very curious if you ever believe there will be a L2 that breaks itself from ethereum into become a its own independent chain or ideologically or technically would would you ever see that happening so there are 100 plus layer 2 layer 3's track today so you know can someone somewhere you know build a layer two and then decide that hey we're going to separate from ethereum of course someone can do that and I expect I actually expect it to happen you know there's uh it's not hard to spin up a lay or two today and you might have misaligned parties doing that but I think if you look at you know the people here on on stage today and like the serious builders in the in the space that care about security care about decentralization you know that doesn't really make sense it's like basically saying hey can you take take this grab taxi app and separate it from the internet I mean you can but you won't get a taxi because you won't be able to communicate and similarly you know arbitrum is only arbitrum because it's only able to have its fast block times its low fees it's a higher security assumption because it has ethereum underneath it if you took ethereum out you wouldn't have these features together with the security and that's it superpowers so could someone do that sure and will someone do that yes I don't think you'll see this from any serious blockchain and I certainly don't think you'll see this from anyone here on stage today yeah and I think like you know this classification of L1 and L2 is also very uh non- nuanced classification actually what it actually is is that you have execution environments and settlement environment and ethereum is a settlement environment and I don't as as Steven said that any serious you know execution environment building um you know on top of ethereum or anywhere else like you know if you really want to achieve that high performance on execution and en you would need some level of you need to offload some of this decentralization and many other assumptions to a you know a settlement layer which is providing you decentralization and you know Safety and Security and all that and and I think that's that's how it should be look at because a lot of Layer Two Chains in future I think most of the lay Two Chains will get decentralized right and they will start looking like something like a you can call them lay ones also right like they have their own validators own consensus but they are also using ethereum as a settlement layer so I think that's how we should be seen and in that context almost all layer tools will become will maybe will look like an L1 if you know in that classification but mostly they are everybody all l2s are trying to build execution environments and uh ethereum will uh you know my guess is that ethereum will remain the primary settlement layer of course like you know there are improvements but like I think Stark is also trying like on the Bitcoin side like you know Bitcoin is adding more and more functionalities which might make Bitcoin also and I think that's the only credible settlement layer that can rival ethereum in any form and iFit Bitcoin opens up all of those functionalities uh over the time then a lot of LDS would also think that okay maybe some of the l2s might want to settle to ethereum that that that might happen naturally but generally I think like ethereum is the most formidable settlement layer any other comments I'd like to hear Sandi I can um I think that that question brings me back to like a story that I haven't really shared in public about why we're called scroll is seemingly a random name but when we started this project one of the core missions is to bring a user experience that is as smooth as scrolling on your phone and the idea that everything about the chain about the wallet should hopefully be completely abstracted and you should just be seeing whatever you want to get from your mobile device and um there there's obviously a lot lot of work to do before we get there and um our our road map has never changed and that's why we're super focused on like that finality aspect which is um kind of something that a unique ZK property that we can get to a place where um interoperability between like various chains that clearly all have found like product Market fit somewhere and um and and everyone all the L2 can work together as a as a holistic you know like body and and and the end user doesn't need to deal with any of the choice is like right now the ux of scrolling down and seeing like you know five or 10 different like chain options is uh mind bogging and you don't see that in any other kind of consumer facing product and um and and one random fact that I was just thinking about as I was like hearing um all the speakers sharing is that um I have a thesis that the active onchain like real users is actually dwindling in recent months contrary to popular belief I think just the experience has become so confusing that real users who are like actively doing things on chain and moving about is um is shrinking a little bit um yeah so what do you guys think that you know just taking ethereum base chain as a settlement layer what does the base chain need to provide more of if anything um ideologically or technically I'm going to I'd like to answer that um I think it has to offer a broadness and uh also known as decentralization and like really strive for maximal broadness because that's really the only unique um thing that is new and different about um blockchain is is the base of trust so decentralization and broadness is the utmost important thing both on the layer ones and the layer twos and um so certainly Bitcoin does an amazing job at that ethereum does an amazing job at that they're probably the two best uh you know broad networks I would like to see even more broadness and addressing the questions of right whenever you have some decentralization there are these economic incentives towards centralization and I would like to see um a lot of efforts on behalf of the various l1s and also l2s to address this and I can share that you know as CEO of starcore I'm spending a lot of my time thinking about things like governance decentralization pushing it forward and in this context one thing that as as sandipa has already mentioned that you know our strategic vision is also to make Stark net um well a layer two but not just of one chain um you know next thing is going to be Bitcoin uh secure settlement onto Bitcoin as well as onto ethereum and then of course expanding to other places so even the concept of like exactly in L2 I see Stark net as this Integrity web that sort of allows you to you know um interact and settle with different broad decentralized Network so the most important thing which frankly I'm not sure is addressed well enough is the constant strive and discussion um of decentralization and more of it and how do you ensure that the powers are really you know there's no Central party or several Central parties that could um you know censor shut things down which I fear might be the case with any of those so I would like to see more of that and we'll certainly committed to advancing that a lot at least in our own uh you know corner of the universe so vitalic has been um pushing many of the al2 to kind of take off their training wheels and also start decentralizing as well but what you're saying is that you wish the base chain to become more decentralized than it is now yeah I mean that's also very important but you know this says this is under the assumption that ethereum is the most uh you know decentralized and Broad because he's basically saying oh you know you need to have these training wheels that'll basically uh put um you know more power to ethereum which is fine assuming ethereum is doing constantly everything that it can to broaden the base of uh you know powers that broker it and streamline and formalize the decision-making processes and you know how governance is being addressed and I I'll I'll speak about you know I am not content with the state uh of things uh in Stark net in our corner of the universe and we are constantly striving to more decentralization um both of the operation of the governance process of everything that is related to that I mean the very concrete next step is you know staking is being turned on uh next month uh on Stark net and um in mid next year we'll be uh starting to unroll the decentral ized operation but we're putting a lot of thought and effort into ensuring that at least on our Layer Two um operation and governance are extremely decentralized and keep on broadening which is an unending goal it will never cease because you will always have powers that want to come in and and and say okay I want to control more of this and it's a big challenge for Humanity yeah S I think like uh what Ellie also mentioned that you know permissionless and decentralization are the most important things for the base layer to have and U um you know censorship resistance is also one important thing and I think one year back we had like a big scare on ethereum like where their ofac sensoring went up and I think the ethereum community did great in bringing that back to you know kind of uh at least somewhat some uh sustainable level um obviously we have like still like some small challenges like I mean not small but challenges like this proposer Builders and uh less number of uh proposers and all that so those also ethereum needs to keep striving also having a you know better and better environment for these settlement uh you know um softwares that are being built for example like having better pre- compiles for ZK cheaper uh promiles and similar things for optimistic uh you know techniques um and uh obviously like you know blobs we see like you know a lot of uh layer tws can store their data also over there and I think one important thing is also is like if uh we can have less and more predictable uh I mean less vogs and and more predictable road map like you know because eventually like if so much of these layer tools are being built on ethereum the ethereum based layer should have uh like a more predictable uh road map right like right now we see in the ethereum community there is this tendency to you know kind of uh we call it like enshrine enshrining a lot of things in inside the B layer I think that might not be the best way because uh then you are exposing like as Steven are saying that you know the best thing about layer tws is there are 100 experiments that 100 layer tws are doing on top of these uh you know uh on these l2s whereas if L1 starts bringing in a lot of features and all that and then it results into some sort of catastrophic event on the on the L1 on the settlement layer that will disrupt the uh you know kind of Trust on the entire you know L2 EOS system also so more predictable road map more study in terms of the uh Rog uh and like you know better like settlement features uh would keep ethereum in the lead in amongst the settlement layers do you have anything to add yeah I really agree with with all those but just take it one step further uh this may sound controversial but I don't think either of you would disagree which is I think the ultimate goal is is really censorship resistance and decentralization is the best way we know how to build you know censorship resistance you know if we had some magical tool that could get us there I don't care about decentralization per se it's the but it is the tool that we have and the best tool that we have to get us to censorship resistance so I think you know and we actually at offchain Labs we have the L2 team that contributes to arbitra we also have the L1 team that builds prism and you know the things that we think about are not like how do you make ethereum more flashy and try to you know bring some of these uh you know more experimental features into ethereum which you know could happen over time but really you know as s was saying that would be limiting right the beauty of ethereum that is its general purpose and it can support such variety of different experiments on top and if you would start going in a particular direction you'd actually you know uh cut off some others so I think what ethereum can do though we think about how do we make it you know more robust you know more decentralized in a sense and more censorship resistance and things like having you know more uh diversity and like block proposers and making sure that even diversity in in core software as well right so um and I say this as someone who builds one of the core uh software clients of ethereum but client diversity is important because you know clients could have bugs and and you don't want the entire ethereum network to be running on one software client and we actually have made a ton of progress metallic has been you know pushing this for several years now and have made a ton of progress there as well but again the I think ethereum has such a critical role and those that think that uh it needs to take on more are actually in my opinion wrong and needs to just make sure it's doing that role you know as perfectly as possible so layer twos and layer 3es can tap into it for its decentralization and it censorship resistance Sandy you have anything to add I mean I think one of the hottest topic trending right now it's about the Bitcoin and eth ratio dropping below like a a point where it starts to hurt sentiment and people are kind of down on eth right now um but I really resonate with you know what what everyone's touched on so far is kind of like decentralization and and censorship resistance these are real Moes for uh the the base layer and and these things take time and I would go as far as to argue apart from Bitcoin and ethereum no one is kind of um improving on these two verticals of all the other l1s and um and these things require time and requires kind of opportunities to get to a place of global cultural and also experience diversity which both of these um you know protocols have uh with very different missions arguably so I think these are kind of Innovations at the at the level of like almost human civilization and it's kind of like the only solution available right now and um and I think I feel very lucky um you know to to be building with such amazing Builders uh to kind of build on top of this base layer and to expand this like efficacy with various different experimentations I want to add on that like what Steven and I were also saying that you know uh this that's why this this discussion around this value and ethereum price and all that is might be uh long-term bad for ethereum is that because what it is happening is that for ethereum Community like everybody feels so much pressured to somehow bring more value into ethereum right and I would say like you know people like all of us like you know uh I would like I'm biased but fairly smart people are dedicating their lives to build these like you know this trustless uh you know execution environments on top of ethereum is because when we when we came into ethereum it's like we saw this ethereum as this infinite Garden where people can build stuff on top right and now like because of this value pressures right price pressures and all that what is happening is there's a lot of like pressure within the community that okay what what all we can insource into the layer one and that is very uh that might be problematic for the long run L I think Bitcoin Community has done a great job in terms of keeping the layer one as simple as possible so that because you know you want to create you want to solve this one use case like store of value really really really really well and you know have no questions about that right and then all these other things can be small can be added on top I think for ethereum that should be to become the best settlement layer possible and then allow this layered uh you know architecture to evolve what stepen was saying yeah I I I agree with you in the sense that I think I'm biased too in that I've seen the theum system grow and it has the largest IQ kind of mind pool and mind share that we seen and it's kind of maintain its purest form right just using metallic as an example of singing on stage and you know a few years ago he was dancing at Devcon and and his uniform hat but of course if you kind of take it further and kind of have you know new folks entering the space looking at ethereum they may be like what's going on here right so so that that that leads to my next question which is I'm curious about how you guys are thinking about uh metalic role now in theorum right and S mentioned that you would like to see the foundation providing more of a road map for example and metallic still is very responsive when it comes to questions around technology um you know um most recently with conversations around sequencers decentralized U sequencers and and and and areas that that needs to be focused on or areas that needs to steer towards for the ecosystem um but you know as we're going towards a further decentralization um kind of um road map how how are you guys kind of thinking about in in your own kind of project of um uh how vitalic plays this role in the the ecosystem yeah we're we're very fortunate uh as an ecosystem to have vitalic who's really an incredible leader an incredible uh thinker and really has uh strong vision and you know back to the point before I think the thing that ethereum has is is time and and time Horizons right we're not short-term thinkers no one here is a short-term thinker vitalic is a long-term believer we're not trying to create something that optimizes for short-term value we're trying to fundamentally build technology that revolutionizes and changes the world and I think you know vitalic uh really expresses that well and um it really permeates into the entire ecosystem I think vitalic Des really good job you know decentralization means you have to give others space to innovate so you know we have ideas uh there's the all call developers call where there's lots of contentious ideas and pallic I think really gives the community space to have that decentralized informal governance but at the same time um to you know be the resource where people can look to to explain the values because the thing that I think is going to happen and we're seeing happen is you know it's kind of contradictory we all want to go uh mainstream and get you know users that don't care about the blockchain per se but we know just like get global adop option but as you do that every net user you get cares less and less and less about the values of decentralization decentralization so having the core nucleus you know really stemming from vitalic and the ethereum foundation into protocols like us as well that actually care about these values it's important that we stay true to them and communicate them because you know a new user coming in might just want to buy their nft today or might just want to you know trade their mem coin and that's okay and they don't care about Security decentralization today but there may be an event that happens in the future and we hope it doesn't where oh okay I understand now I really wish that you know it was Secure and decentralized because something happened so you know the fact that users might not care about it today doesn't mean that we need to uh that we shouldn't continue to promote these values and having really you know value driven leaders and uh thought leaders like vitalic explaining the values and pushing them and really uh encouraging and enlightening the ecosystem is a critical role so I think he's doing a great job at what he does and I hope he continues to do it for a very long time so I agree with everything that Steven has said it Alik is you know an amazing thinker and leader and I align with a lot of his values um at the same time um I think the process of governance in ethereum needs to be formalized and streamlined and you know there needs to be a way where there is more clarity and transparency and uh you know the decision making needs to be more decentralized and transparent um um and I say the same thing about by the way Stark net and as I said I'm very passionate about well fixing things or showing how things can be done by example and uh I'm a big believer in that so I hope at least we'll have a governance mechanism that people look up to and say okay we understand how this works and uh yeah I mean I agree with that that vitali's job is to be a moderator to be honest right like you know instead like what you said like instead of uh like you know ethereum Foundation providing the road map like you know the job and what we balik has done really really great I think he's the single source of you said like etherum is this IQ uh you know horsepower and all that like this is because metalik attracts that uh and he he he has done such a great job in not giving people a feeling that this is my network like come and build on my network he's always given that this is public good and uh you know uh people should come and build on top of it and in the past also in terms of the road map also he has always taken feedback changed multiple times uh you know taking the feedback and and things like that but what Ellie is saying like because he has much more experience in seeing these decentralized uh you know your networks that you know maybe uh having more transparent and more better governance process more predictable uh process would be great and uh and yeah like for vitalik to provide this uh good moderation approach and make sure that this core DNA that vitalik brings in doesn't get uh you know affected because of like because just now in this cycle ethereum has price pressures right so everybody wants to have like so many things inside so my expectation from vitalik is to stay how he is how has how he has been in the last 5 six years and uh you know keep sheering the the uh community and moderating the community to move in the right direction but not like you know allow any uh any Central party or any sections of the community to fully you know Dominate and and and and you know try to have like everything inside and all those things like that's that's really not great for the all the amazing protocol builders that are building on top of ethereum anything um I always say like there's a book or NBA case study somewhere about how the ethereum community is organized it's really very unique a traditional company is typically organized a little bit like the US Army there's a hierarchy it's a bit of a pyramid everyone has a number of direct reports if you're Jensen hang you have like 50 direct reports and it's like a flatter org but ethereum is a whole other kind of like you know animal where there is a um there is a way that we or sort of understand how we relate to each other even though we don't really talk on a daily basis and there isn't really a forum to organize the l2s there really isn't like there are these um you know eth research forums and EIP forums to organize the core Dev there are so many manyi projects all moving in different directions and building up multiple parts of the stack simultaneously and yet the whole um you know everyone reads certain things that are thought leaders and um and and and and and this whole like you know flurry of innovation in a slightly chaotic but also organic way is is really interesting and I think um yeah I think there there's like definitely like an anthropology like work in there for someone's PhD to get like really stuck into it and see how like vitalic thoughts and also there are other like emerging thought leaders in the East space and and how they're shaping the discourse and the narrative so we don't have that much time left but there is a panel after us uh where multi coin Capital will be talking about why salana will take over ethereum so I really want to take this last few B minutes to kind of have us take a stab at salana right um and I think what the argument has been made for salana is that they're monolithic you know the team is centralized they move fast and some of the um um traits I've seen um that uh that have kind of strengthened their Community is that they are very on the ground they are in many different local countries and they have formed a pretty a formidable kind of community in many of the smaller developer communities in these countries um I'm curious to get your thoughts in general here I know everyone's super nice in theum and I I I I feel like it's always been salana talking about ethereum and never ethereum people talking about salana do do you is it just me feeling that way right like this is the opportunity guys the the Challenger brand needs to attack the dominant brand that is always the branding strategy so by acknowledging them we are delivering them a win and need to recognize that the you know the community is something of existence but yeah I I'll let Stephen take the well said well said I agree that's quite and I think ethereum Community also have this background of like when ethereum was coming up BTC Community really really trashed ethereum and then you know within ethereum Community everybody used to think that you know what would it take to these for these guys to be a little bit open-minded so I think ethereum Community also tries to self-reflect and say that maybe these guys are doing something interesting you should see but these blockchains especially if you are building an L1 it's a very very long journey like short of like for example the communities that you are saying like on the ground Community theum had the same thing like in 20178 like eth Global and E communities were coming up all across the world right and over time when those communities built and then you know they see one cycle and then people made money and all that and they go away new people come how this how this this like organic uh propulsion of this this engine keeps happening over time is the is the most is the bigger determinant of long-term success for an for an L1 and uh I I see like for example ethereum Solana as more of an execution environment I think Anatoli himself has said multiple times that you know he doesn't care about settlement he just wants to build a fast execution environment so I think the this is like more of a marketing and Market tactics like the price tactics but I think the the the you know use case that ethereum and Solana are attacking are completely different and and Solana wants to be an execution engine multiple times like toia himself said that it would be if it's an L2 even better right so uh I don't even think there is a competition there okay I'll just say the the game hasn't even started yet like this whole competition within uh within crypto is is meaningless it's offering the world outside real value on everyday things that hasn't yet been done anywhere right and that's where we're focusing and that's where everyone should focus so these fights inside they're kind of fun but they don't matter at all and Solana's a great you know great technology so is ethereum and we haven't even started yet I'd say again yeah I think uh actually I have a lot of respect for salon and their Community they are taking a very different approach one that I personally disagree with but I think we overall again it's early in the game and it's good that someone's taking that experiment and actually um it probably helps us accelerate the alter road map if there wasn't a Solana that's act doing this on L1 you know people might say why do we need it like there's nothing here I think actually having a different competing layer that's making certain compromises that we disagree with is accelerating our response to it um of how we actually get security decentralization and scalability so you know they have a a strong community and they have you know a strong team and I think that they're actually you know trying to take a good experiment and do the right thing I don't personally think that it's the right experiment will win but I don't I don't think we're worse off for having them doing it all right all right with that we're out of time thank you everyone let's give a round of applause for our great panelists [Applause]