Vitalik Buterin & Kartik Talwar I Ethereum's Impact and Future I ETHGlobal Bangkok 2024

[Music] Hi cartic how are you I am a little bit tired but overall great so cartic it's been uh like how many years of eth global now um seven years 130 events yeah so so how was your general impression of Defcon this week I actually really enjoyed the fact that this was a developer focused Community this time around and I feel like we've seen it a bunch of different waves mhm and this time it kind of gives me the same 2017 2018 Vibes and that was a moment where people were actually excited about making the protocol better and uh I actually found that refreshing I think I I think I felt the same way amazing well that was my first question to you too um my math says you have done 26 different talks this week is that right or is there more I me to one minute count now um do you count okay do you count talks or do you count like events that I've been to okay maybe talks is simpler um okay so hold on 2 + 2 + 11 okay that's 15 then that was before Devcon then okay during deathcon what was that the First first day hour was like I think it was like three plus 4 plus uh 3 plus three so about 13 so that gets us to 28 and then I still have like I think like one more soon 30 that's a very busy schedule what were some of your favorite moments from uh that whole week um DC day was fun uh so that was uh yesterday so that was uh it was it was really amazing to like actually see that whole Community come together and people who are doing a really fascinating bioscience together with people working on computer security together with people working on uh prediction markets and neurotech and like all of those different concepts all come just uh come together and like actually function as uh one community and uh like just also just seeing the progress in all of those individual Fields so that was really impressive the very beginning of uh Devan I uh I mean especially the opening um part the like I felt like the choice of just like putting so many anime themes in there was just like perfect like that's the that's the etherum I know exactly yeah yeah awesome um well maybe maybe let's go into some of the stuff that I know the rest of the Internet's been talking about and that is uh Justin Drake's talk okay so what I'm kind of curious about is what do you as vitalic think about beam chain so I think um almost all of the ideas in there are like basically correct right and they're like basically very similar to things that have been talked about in the ethereum research space for quite a while right I know they're right in my uh roadmap documents that I've published I think uh the two places where I would uh uh either disagree or at least Express uncertainty on substance are one is short slat times so I worry about short slat times because I think it would hurt like it risks hurting uh both like um fairness toward people in geographically non- Central locations it's like even if theoretically you can optimize the loop down so that theoretically someone who is based in Latin America or southeast Asia or orano or New Zealand can participate in creating a block if it's the case said the yeah it they still suffer like a lot like even like 10 or 20% incentive wise than like even if they can they won't right and so I think uh like for that reason you actually want to be a lot more careful and also you want to be robust against potential breakdown in in uh internet communications you want to be uh robust against potentially a rise in censorship and like other kinds of active attacks against the chain and so I don't think that the ethereum L1 should like over optimize and say like okay the Earth's like half circumference is 20,000 kilm that divided by the speed of light is 67 milliseconds times three rounds of communication therefore the L1 should have 200 M second block times right that's like the kind of uh thinking where like uh okay like I think this seem to lab trolls people on Twitter way too much and Eagles over but if you do that you're like say the word fragile at you 500 and you will deserve every single one of them right so I think ethereum needs to be way more cautious than that that's like one piece and then the not to say that I think 12 seconds lot times are optimal right I think we should just do the research and it's and we're not sure yet how far we can go and then the other thing is like the trade-off between uh doing it all at once versus doing it more incrementally and I think we should like start the work and then uh figure out over time the what the right approach is I think I mean I saw there has been a lot of criticism of the beam chain but it's not like criticism of the beam chain as the beam chain it's criticism of this uh like perception and I think realistically misperception miscommunication that the beam chain is ethereum 3.0 and basically like everyone is the thing that that everyone is supposed to put their hopes on is that this is this specific set of redesigns that will come in 2029 and that's like not true at all right so even even within the beam chain road map like huge numbers of things like dank sharting you know expected to come 20125 2026 uh so the thing that matters for users in terms of scale will come much sooner and also like the entire beam chain road map is just consensus layer right so aside from consensus layer ethereum is also execution layer so that includes the evm there's a whole other road map for upgrading the evm then you have layer 2s then you have cross layer 2 and there's whole other road map for upgrading the Crossway 2 situation then you have wallets and then today actually about 15 minutes ago the cave team showed me how they like fully integrated social recovery and even ZK email recovery and so you know there's like a whole road map for like doing the like wallet ux on both the convenience and the security side so the consensus uh part of ethereum is like less than a quarter of everything in ethereum is up that is being upgraded and there's just so many other parts that are moving way faster than a 5year timeline that are extremely relevant to developers and users so so a few followup questions by the way this is a great actually Ure to understand again of what are the misconceptions here yeah um my understanding is this 5-year timeline is a conservative estimate uh but I mean I think it's uh actually a reasonable or maybe even slightly aggressive set of estimates for the full set of things that Justin wants to do you just have to remember that like 2029 is the timeline for Nirvana and even a quarter of Nirvana is like incredibly useful right and like the things that users need are just are come much much sooner than like the completion of the entire vision and this is effectively clarifying that yeah you can't you're not waiting for the five years to the whole thing as a massive single push these are all parts where you actually get to the Finish Line when the last one is confirmed a years down the road um what is the differentiation between the part that beam chain focuses on and the parts that we're already outlined in the road map that you've outlined before because we're effectively not the right word but cherry-picking certain things and prioritizing those over the rest of the plan is is that a fair way to think about it how kind of does that relate to the rest of the road map and does this mean that we are going to be less focused on finishing the rest of this I would say absolutely not I mean I would say ethereum right now is very good at parallelizing right and so there is a team that is working on statelessness there is a team that is working on evm upgrades there is a team that is working on me issues right there's a huge amount of Paralis that's happening already and so I definitely do not expect that Justin is going to like pull away researchers who would otherwise be giving us like vergal trees or starked binary trees that's like just not how this ecosystem works at all all um I I mean I think actually the higher more likely possibility is that this road map is going to be able to pull in people into the specking process who would otherwise not be able to participate at all just like how the beacon chain like pulled in an entire set of client devs who were not part of client Dev at all before right um so I think like that's a really Justin's goal um I think like all of the other things that are happening are still happening and there are huge um sets of developers that are and huge constituencies that will benefit greatly from each of those things happening that are putting huge uh amounts of resources into making them happen so I definitely don't view it at all as being competitive okay um one thing that I also saw this week MH on the internet M was uh a lot of smaller but and some bigger arguments around the lack of focus that they're seeing from cevs and ether Foundation it's and it's a it's a very interesting thing because there were a lot of arguments around it but there was not a lot of justification or or explanation but the part that I do actually want to talk about is one comment was from U from John chano saying that it's actually not clear that the ethereum cevs actually agree on what the product is and just the way you kind of answered the question just now implies that Justin has his own version of what the the next set of prioritization should be and and you have a different sort of opinion and a few other people may have a different version is this is this coordinated is that what it feels like how do you kind of address these types of comments I mean look like Bitcoin has that exact same problem but even more so like bit like do you think everyone in Bitcoin agrees on opcat right do you think everyone in Bitcoin agrees on what even comes after opcat it's uh like having internal difference of opinion is not a failure mode it is a decentralized pluralistic ecosystem right and like no ethereum is not taking the iPhone approach like uh if uh that's what you want there's uh plenty of uh other blockchains for you and there's and realistically there's plenty of uh things that that that offer far more scale and far lower latency than blockchains that are for you right so so then tell us why that is actually not something you want to go do as ethereum and and why does it matter that we have this approach to building software yeah I mean I think okay so one other thing that I think is important right is that what ethereum is with respect to developers I actually think is incredibly clear right so ethereum is the world computer layer one is the trust machine it's the anchor it holds everything together it holds high value applications that really depend on it and ler two is the GPU it provides speed and impr provide scale and uh that includes a a very heterogeneous a combination of uh rollups and other systems that have all kinds of speed and scale trade-offs for for all kinds of different applications like that is uh what ethereum is and it and basically it's the vision that it's been going for all the way since 20120 right I mean I think uh there is the separate question of like what do people think is the economic model of e the asset and I think the challenge there is like there's this weird magnifying glass on eth as though eth has this like much greater responsibility to answer this question than everyone else when like the reality is like what is the okay look like Doge Doge went up by like what like 40% 50% the last two days why did it go up it went up I think because Elon and Trump and like Co announced that they're making a department of government efficiency like okay first you have a coin and the coin had value because it had a dog now you have a coin and the coin hasue because there's a a government Department named after a dog okay so like explain this in the lingo of like PE ratios and like discounted cash flows and like anything that's intelligible to a finance professor at a university right or even Bitcoin right remember remember how back in 2019 Bitcoin had the stock to flow model and like it's it's like you know you you take the like flow rate which is like the number of Bitcoins being issued and then divided by stock and then you rate is and you or you like invert that and you raise it to the power of 3.3 and then basically it's like the guy figured out that this is the model that like perfectly fits bitcoin's up or no it was the 463 day moving average of that is the thing that perfectly fits bitcoin's price up to that and then it's like basically the the year after the stock to flow model got like accepted and beloved by everyone in the Bitcoin Community it basically stopped working right and then if you look at the charts like actually it's like the Bitcoin price started going up at exactly the time when the 463 day EMA stock to flow stopped moving up right and so it's like basically the whole thing is just like completely stupid and like the like half the Bitcoin influencer class like actually belied it for a couple of years right and so the I think the conclusion is like nobody freaking has a clue how these things are valued and this isn't an ethereum problem this is not even a crypto problem like honestly yeah this is just how crowds behave irrationally exactly right it's like the world is just a fundamentally incredibly chaotic place where there's even today a huge amount of things that we uh know very little about and we are constantly learning and uh to me the benefit of eth as an asset is that it's at the center of this very Diversified ecosystem that has uh and so basically it has exposure to to a whole range of different applications and like to use a very cringe word you know thesis right so you know it like there's multiple flavors of layer 2s there's layer one applications there is people using eth as collateral in a bunch of applications and you basically need like any one of these succeed for it to do well but I think one push back I'll give you here is that I don't think it's a binary choice right it's not like well we don't want to be the the Apple here and dictate every single aspect of what the features should be we also don't want to be well everybody can figure out what they want we'll kind of collectively address if they agree or not um yeah kind of from that perspective why is it important to take the approach that leans towards not being fully in know victorial about the decision- making of how we improv the protocol uh but separately why are we not making the layer one faster I me I think uh the reason not to just bump up the keep bumping up the gas limit is that like decentralization is one of those things that once you lose it's hard to get it back and the ethereum community actually has a track record of getting it back but every time you see a centralization stat or a censorship stat improving behind that stat are like hundreds of hours of sweating tears of like Danny and Justin giving of impassioned phone calls to like all kinds of different ecosystem actors you have um all kinds of people talking to each other you have like Evan vaness and friends like making a very loud case of like something on Twitter you have just like all kinds of different people um fighting really really hard to try to push the ecosystem toward a more decentralized equilibrium and like sometimes uh there actually are successes right and but on the other hand like slipping from more uh decentralization to more centralization is something that's easy right and uh I think the risk is right that is basically that if you look at the end game right the end game is that we want 100,000 transactions a second right and on the L1 no the end game is said we want 100,000 transaction a second we now the 100,000 transactions a second cannot live on the L1 because if they live like an L1 that can actually directly run 100,000 transactions a second like that there is just no way to run that on a node at the same time as having a decentralized network right the only like basically the only approach that you can like basically ends up looking like um what we call enshrined rollups and and like that actually is one of the long-term ideas that's being considered right but like doing it directly like there's no way to do that that's not centralizing and so the risk is that if we take a halfway house approach and we say okay well instead of doing 15 TPS on L1 and say 985 TPS on on L2 we're going to do let's say like 60 TPS on L1 and 940 TPS on L2 the risk is that well you've actually uh significantly centralized the L1 and what have you gotten well instead of 98% of activity being on on L2 you have 94% of activity being on al2 right and so I think like this is one of those things right where know if you go in that direction sometimes it's easy to to make it in response to AE a knee-jerk judgment but then like you have to be really clear about you know like what you aim to get and like what what risks you're taking right and so I personally like I I do support L1 increasing in scale and I do support both uh you know moderate gas limit increases evm repricings introduction of entirely new features like evm Max and simd that could greatly accelerate evm computation of specific operations um like be very beneficial to l2s and to L1 based privacy protocols right but I think this is something that should happen like reasonably and at a gradual Pace right and uh at the same time as L2 scaling can happen very aggressively so is decentralization in this example and just in this kind of decision making purely the ability for some any individual to just run with the same specs and and assuming that that the hardware requirements are accessible is that kind of the only axis that we're we're looking at so one is is uh number of distinct people who run nodes another is number of uh both solo stakers and even smaller medium Enterprise stakers that are like actually staking um so you have those stats right and again this is one of those things where it's not about capability it's about incentive right in the sense that like a lot of the time people say things like oh you know you can buy an 18 like a a 20 terabyte hard drive for like half a, doar or whatever the the number is right and like therefore requiring 20 terabytes of storage is actually not that bad right but that's the wrong metric the metric is you don't want running a node to be possible you want running a node to be easy enough that it's a thing that people consider doing by default right um and uh the challenge is basically that if running a node becomes more costly then even if it's theoretically possible people get lazy people start um aggregating all over their nodes and basically we all like have trusting one operator to do everything and like that like that itself starts this slide toward an ecosystem where you have a relatively small number of actors that are actually interpreting the rules and once you have a relatively small number of actors that are interpreting the rules that means you have a relatively small number of actors that need to be convinced to change the rules and so from the perspective of someone building an application that needs to last like 5 or 10 years or even from the perspective of someone building a layer two right the thing that you want out of out of the layer one is robustness the thing you want out of the layer one is that you want something that is going to be what what it promised to be right and I think that's something that's uh really valuable for ethereum L1 just like for bit Bitcoin L1 to really yeah take seriously and not be willing to give up asily that that makes a lot of sense and and I think U have a couple followup questions there but I'm not going to do that because uh that'll be a personal tangent that I I going into the thing I'm kind of curious about is how does this tie into the L2 road map so is kind of the bet that let's make everything happen on the l2s because we are agreeing to the lay ones being more scalable over time but want to paralyze that so that eventually we can absorb this or is it that actually you think delegation transactions is important to be on l2s and the layer one should be mostly just aggregating and rolling up instead of actually storing the raw hundreds of thousands of transactions if you ever get to that world I me I I could definitely see certain types of high value activity continuing to be on L1 for quite a while right and uh I think if uh me potentially that could even continue into the long term we will see right the uh I me I think there's uh a lot of different long-term end games I do think it makes sense for at least some amount of uh activity to continue to be on L2 even in a long-term future where L1 like adds something like like native rollups right and uh I think like that one's true for two reasons right one of those reasons is that like even if L1 adopts native rollups I think realistically C Dev would wants to do it in a way that is minimally opinionated and and in a way that like gives developers maximum flexibility and so it'll be done in a way that like basically makes it easy for even existing l2s and like even based rollups to just slot themselves into the frame work and just continue to function so that's one part and then another part is that I see the like valid room for two different kinds of Els right like one kind that is uh focuses more on decentralization and boim home security and uh like inheriting the properties of1 as much as possible and I also see the room for l2s that focus on maximum scale that focus on maximum speed and they give things like latency pre-confirmation way more data than ethereum like data availability will be will be willing to offer and those kinds of things are just inherently not going to be native rollups right those kinds of things are inherently going to be al2 and so that's a niche that I think will continue to persist even into the longterm future and it's going to have a lot of applications on it is is it okay to accept single points of failures for these l2s because some of them will make these compromises for higher latency or faster through but uh not settle as fast and you kind of do those trade-offs H what's a good framework for understanding why you should just be defaulted to all the l2s and uh and how to think about that growing yeah I mean so I think I mean if you're an application that does not demands a low latency then it just makes sense to be on an L2 that uh offers higher levels of decentralization if you're on if you are an application that does demand very low latency then I do think that we as an ecosystem need to have a more rigorous discipline of like figuring out what what like what fallback me mechanisms actually are realistic right because right now the theory that we have so far basically says okay you're on an L2 it has a centralized sequencer if the central sequence starts being bad you can exit right but like what does exiting actually mean right if you have like say you know you have like e Frontier right like Eve on Line's new thing and let's say it becomes nl2 that is a low latency optimized well let's say if servers disappear and you want to mass exit what does it actually mean right well like how would users like actually migrate to some kind of new provider that would actually keep the game running for them right like that's an open question or another one is in some cases you have this idea that well if the sequencer goes bad you have a governance mean mechm that can change the sequence if that happens well what would that governance mechanism actually look like would it actually try to detect like say abuse if it does how do you actually detect M abuse is this something that can be automated um or another example is like from an application perspective a lot of the time what you're worried about is you're not worried about like actual theft you're worried about vendor lockin and so if an L2 start starts becoming thater lockin toward you and let's say L2 even makes a a governance upgrade right like imagine an L2 does something where they start suddenly introducing a wealth tax into their system but they go through the governance upgrade Channel they have a 30-day delay it satisfies a St Sho definition technically everyone can exit but like actually can the collective set of users of an application like actually coordinated do an exit right and like I do think our ecosystem like really needs a rigorous discipline of like think through those issues and like actually even War gaming some of them and figuring out like what could users and application developers collectively do in that kind of situation well I hope uh we don't get to see those situations often but we still need a way to think about addressing them yeah absolutely I mean I think I mean in dydx V3 I think shut down a few days ago right and like we actually saw some Mass exits uh come out of that and that seems pretty orderly but like that was users on an application specific roll up right I think the big test is what happens when an application needs to mass exit right it's like imagine if let say polygon became an a proper stage two L2 and poly Market was still on polygon but then polygon would had suddenly uh you say it had a 30-day uh window for governance updates and someone bought up half the polygon token and they said okay we're making a governance upgrade and the governance upgrade says we're going to grab all theone in poly Market can poly Market as an application Mass exit what does that actually mean right like when something like any kind of instance of an application Mass exiting happens well I I think that would be the next big test for the ethereum ecosystem to pass I think that's a very interesting world to see uh how you kind of design applications this way especially as we see a bigger set of contracts going to be getting deployed as actually uh immutable um wow um I do want to change topics a little bit I want to go back to one interesting announcement that we heard from the kickoff at at Decon and that was kind of the the spin out or kind of the formation of Argo Collective where solidity Fay uh sourcify all of the the teams were kind of moving over to a new nonprofit and the big question I have is um why is that transition happening and and why is that now part of etherum foundation especially when you have pretty core features of the protocol being worked on by these teams uh does it make sense to create a separation yeah and so the E theum Foundation has uh you know for a long time like followed this uh philosophy of subtraction right and the way that I think about it is that the ethereum foundation's mission is not to grow the ethereum foundation the ethereum foundation's mission is to grow the Civil Society of ethereum even if needed at the at the expense of the ethereum foundation and event at the of like potentially 100% of The Ether found existence right and so not necessarily but potentially right and uh the reason why this is important right is that like if you think if you take the analogy to politics right A lot of the time one of the ways in which like very centralized forms of government like very totalitarian ones end up arising is when you have something that collapses uh but then you don't have a strong Civil Society like that that is able to take on the r and uh what we mean by Civil Society is like basically something other than either the centralized organ or profit motivated actors right if you don't have a civil society then like basically you end up collapsing into just having profit motivated actors and then that itself is a very centralizing game and then like very quickly you end up just like sliding into yet another equilibrium where you have either like some kind of very centralized scenario or you have something more chaotic where the end result again is a very centralized scenario right and so if he wants to avoid that situation having a strong Civil Society like having a strong decentralized body of uh actors that is uh like that has a strong tradition of acting together as an ecosystem and that is motivated by goals other than profit maximization like basically is the kind of social immune system that can actually make an ecosystem resilient right and so the goal of the foundation is basically making that ethereum has that right and so the philosophy makes sense but I think the question is how do you going to think about the execution now you're going to create this dependency of if they want to grow they need to figure out additional funding or now somebody else can approach them and that may create a whole new set of incentives to prior to something else H how does that work when we kind of think about something as critical solidity yeah I mean so I think we need to acknowledge that there is an unsolved problem here right and uh you know even the ethereum foundation right does not have an infinite Lifetime right and uh like the to be clear like the amount of funding that we're planning to give argot is like it's not like two year two years and then ask again all funding it's like endowment level funding right it's meant to be smaller than EF but in principle equal longevity to EF as a an ethereum institution right and so I think in terms of like solidity longevity right like that happening inside of inside of argot it does not make the problem worse but it does still leave open the fact that there is this open question in terms of longevity and I think the way that I think about this actually is that I do think that there is an actual open problem that I do acknowledge within the ethereum ecosystem which is basically that I think there's like a lack of uh like medium scale um and and of hybrid like nonprofit and for-profit funding models right basically like what often happens is that if you have a bright new public good idea that has no business model whatsoever but it's like clearly public good in a way that a lot of people in the ecosystem recognize there are plenty of actors that will give you a $100,000 Grant there's actors that will give you a $300,000 Grant or even $500,000 Grant the problem is that once you go from like $300,000 demo size to 30 million doll production size your incentive basically swishes from like so full socialist Garden of Eden the good people take care of you all the way into full capitalist your only source of funding comes from fully profit motivated actors right and so you basically go from like Garden of Eden all the way into you know the jungle right and like the like this is like a very rapid shift and like I think it is an unhealthy Dynamic that this rapid shift exists right and so so I do think that the ecosystem will be more healthy if we actually do see like more of these entity more mechanisms that are in the middle more mechanisms that do have some way of getting profit do have some way of returning Capital to investors even growing Capital but for at the same time which are willing to make some level of sacrifices and uh to take a principled stance in terms of supporting ethereum alignment and supporting ethereum values supporting open source Open Standards decentralization passing the walkway test like being positive some toward ethereum positive some toward the world and like all of these different things that we care about right and like I think yeah like making a figuring that out is uh still an open problem and that's something that I'm willing to acknowledge no that makes a lot of sense and as as I kind of as you say this I feel like the closest thing I've seen similar to this is actually the Mozilla Foundation and uh they kind of do both sides of this and you kind of still get to see amazing impr is interesting right in that it's like both a success story but then it's also a bit of a capture story because like their main customer is basically Google right and like you know like auctioning off that like SE chent slot so it's uh I mean I think these are all like great examples to learn from right and then I think for each one you want to like understand the successes and understand the failures and ideally come up with something I mean this is also one of the reasons why why you know I think we want to have this distributed ecosystem right because like it's okay if each individual entity ends up having a business model that has a problem as long as the problems all Go in different directions and so like that instead of being additive the problem is so like cancel each other out or at least like insure against each other yeah it's going to be a pretty long experiment to figure out what what works and what doesn't which is actually exciting abely absolutely it's exciting for me too um want to talk about a couple more things before we wrap things up one is something that we've kind of seen become more and more prominent over the last few weeks and and especially this year that is the role crypto has played in politics uh you recently made a comment that uh kind of being leveraging crypto to uh effectively prioritize certain government official elections is not something kind of you what you signed up for maybe buer in the direct quote but uh we've kind of seen a lot of these things happen um we've seen a lot of uh positive and negative outcomes and I'm kind of curious about kind of what you think now the role crypto plays in uh the world of politics whether it's us or the rest of the world and uh you going to have any different thoughts nowadays yeah I mean I think it uh it's it's playing a very different uh roles and I think often like very invisible roles in all kinds of different ways right I think even the ideas coming out of crypto are already Upstream of a huge number of different things uh but uh obviously the thing that we saw this year right I mean I think two things right one is like just uh as an application like I think polygon was uh or poly Market on polygon on on ethereum was uh a very net Val valuable um you know contributor to the US info ecosystem and I think in general like it did help people be more informed about what's going on both uh with with regard to the election and even with regard to things that are happening or could happen within within each party right and like that's to me like an example of like the positive side right which is like applications that actually show sort of the spirit of decentralization which is making things that are useful and that provide valuable information to people without relying on centralized Elite that gets to pred decide like what is true and false and what is good and bad on behalf of everyone else but then on the other hand we definitely are seeing this phenomenon that like crypto is turning into this big pool of money and the big pool of money is basically acting as this like big thing that is often sending a message that basically says like you do what we want or else and I think there is something unhealthy to that right like I do think that there is something unhealthy to the idea of like this problem exists without even crypto this is this happens all the time in general it's like it definitely is you know the game that lots of big money actors are trying to play right but uh you know it's like the kind of a game where even if you know you come in in stage one um and then like stage one of the game feels like you want a thing and it feels like you got a thing but the more you get into the loop then like basically instead of um you know like becoming an actor that's providing an alternative to the machine you're basically becoming an actor that's like actually reinforcing those exact same Loops right and potentially yeah reinforcing the like the exact same mechanisms and and uh like also if you're choosing politicians based on you know like how good they are for like crypto as an industry that comes at the expense of uh choosing politicians based on how good they are for other things that people care about and even like the underlying values of crypto it's just it's like one of those games where even if you come in well intentioned it's just like incredibly easy I think to con keep convincing yourself that that you're doing the right thing and then eventually from the uh next generation's perspective like you actually do become the thing that ever that uh people start to agree as like part of the center of power that needs to be rebelled against and that's like something that I hope that we as an EOS system can like preempt and like try to be better then and the fact that uh you may think this is what you're optimizing for but it's a multiplayer game and uh yes this gets complicated and chaotic very fast no multiplayer games are indeed incredibly chaotic and Incredibly complex I think uh people often think of Politics as a tug of war I mean no like politics is a Whirlpool like a huge percentage of the time the outcome of your actions is uh not like not even in the same direction as the uh direction in which you're originally pulling right like sometimes you pull in a particular direction and you create a backlash that makes the situation even worse sometimes you pull in a particular direction and uh someone joins your faction and that person uses 8 billion dollar of stolen customer funds to pull in the same direction and as a result people start like hating that entire direction for for for like a decade even and like even the bits that like actually I think are reasonable and correct and like it's this incredibly chaotic system and like you have to like basically ask the question like are you contributing signal or are you contributing noise and I do think that if you just come in as a relatively naive actor it's like very easy to think that you're contributing signal but like actually be contributing noise or like even worse no up yes or like even even worse than noop like be basically being a thing that just gets like co-opted by whoever the highest bidder is yeah which sucks because now yeah you made that so more accessible with crypto and uh that means you create these short-term outcomes that are yeah worse um H are there other things that uh you're spending time on Beyond just scaling ethereum and your role at the foundation uh what else interests you H so right before I was in uh Bangkok for Defcon I was in changai for six weeks and uh the Zulu popups were happening there right and so this was uh like probably day facto sort of the second round of the experiments right so the first round was in Montenegro last year and then there were a lot of little ones but this time it was uh about like 10 of them all running in parallel and all independently organized I would say roughly half and all in changai yeah all in changai I mean there's actually also Zoo Thailand which is happening very close to Bangkok right after Defcon so that's also one but these were in changai about half a thousand people all in close proximity to each other a lot of ethereum people um and uh it was really impressive to see the community grow to see the community like actually function to start to see the concept of these pop-up cities finds product Market fit to also start to see interest in a lot of these ethereum adjacent topics really start to continue also diak which was this meme that came out of this post that I wrote back at the end of last year so combining together ethereum together with uh computer security technology and physical resilience and biod defense like that whole bundle of topics so at Defcon as I mentioned at the beginning we had a diac day and we had speakers from all those uh top areas present and that seemed really successful and so DC is really turning into this uh very coherent thing and it does feel like I know out of like there's like about five or 10 different product Market fits for uh uh pop-up cities and one of the like I think building Network effects for a lot of uh crypto applications that would otherwise not find a network effects on their own is one of them and I think finding Network effects for DC application and the as even like synergistically witht salons and for ethereum I think is definitely one of them what's an example of a DC application that uh is immediately useful or beneficial to people and how can we think about Network effects here um so I think uh to name one in each category um one uh would be a hardware um ethereum Hardware device um so like actually maximizing the security with which you can with which you can access ethereum and I think uh the reason why that would be valuable to do in a pop-up context is is so that you can actually like build something and then push it out in the context of a community where you can actually try like Community related uh use cases um one thing that was at Edge city is there was a cursive which was a live use of fhe to help pairs of people identify common interests and so you can actually try these use cases live and then get feedback and then iterate on them so that's the computer um um security side then on the info defense side like Collective governance use cases and like truth seeking type of applications even prediction markets all of that could be useful inside of popups on the biod defense side just making popups safe against Airborne diseases making popups environments where it's easy to have a very healthy culture um making popups uh environments that are very uh conducive to just like everything that it takes uh to be uh to to maximize your your longevity uh popups has a vehicle for testing out Technologies for physical resilience like people have been interested in actually doing modular construction like other kinds of physical technology inside of them so like all of those things are possible like basically anything that involves physical world um coordination um and anything that actually like benefits from coordination and and a tight feedback loop of coordination between developers and users I think is something that is a potential pop-up City application awesome um actually that's super cool and I think we all get to watch the the de from Devcon so we get to catch up on all the new things that are being tried out and experimented with uh this is a developer focused event so my last question to you is actually giving us sort of a a a more focused preview of uh what we can expect on the protocol side of things uh this is a very broad generic question but obviously given the the recent blog post you published the book that people got to uh to win today um I want to kind of condense this into a a shorter time frame which is can you give us an idea for what we can expect on the layer one side or any of the SC road map in the next two years and two only I mean I think maybe one like related question that would be good to answer is like what are the basically the valuable toys for hackers here to play with um so one example is EIP 7702 so this is uh the an EIP that's making it into the next hard Fork that is going to uh Bas um provide a lot of convenience and usability benefits to EAS that will like put them on the same track as smart contract buets and there are like Dev Nets and test NS that are doing 7702 today and so 7702 is absolutely ready for people to hack with so that's one good example number two blobs so we're going to see blob count increases and well thanks to P do um and uh other Technologies over the next couple of years and so building on top of blobs um building like both layer 2os as well as other kinds of uh blob based applications like I saw some I think it was like CH Joo and Phil Diane like both had different like apps that would basically put like some kind of like dap interfaces onto blobs so a lot of like interesting applications like that um I guess that was a example to um also not a call future but ZK rappers of everything so ZK email ZK government ID um ZK like web 2 with TLS notary um ZK like some of everything right um and I think you like this stuff has use cases in Social recovery and like multisig wallets it also has use cases in identity and reputation systems uh so that stuff that I think is uh really valuable to work with also cross L2 interoperability so again not part of L1 but coming soon and there are things to is that a comment on just we want to see more of or you're saying there's actually improvements happening but I want to see more of so one example of something that I think someone can build on today take an existing open source wallet Fork it make it support EIP 7683 make it support um chain specific addresses and so you're able to like copy and paste chain specific addresses and then it if you paste in an address that is on a different L2 from where you currently are then it just automatically routes your transfer through a NC 7683 intent based uh exchange and then also use Helios and laula light clients for L1 and for L2 um you could do a mockup of moving um L2 configs onto L1 and turnning turning the main ASMR contracts and then support the version of chain specific address as the routes through that um like basically the enre set of features that is currently being thought about like basically take them put them into a wallet or even put them into two wallets and then get them to talk to each other like that's a hackathon idea right there that I think would be really valuable um then maybe two years away stateless clients um not sure if there's anything that's like worth building on right now what does that unlock huh what do stat list clients unlock they unlock basically they make it much easier for users to run nodes that verify the chain which is valuable both for stakers and for users um okay light clients for L1 and for L2 so Helios basically take that and just like integrate that into wallets and I mentioned this but it's like also really important um evm Max and simd I'm hoping we can get this uh within the next couple of years and you can actually Implement a lot of stuff much more efficiently with that also a project um privacy protocols continue to be important um what other good things are coming over um I'm just trying to like go through the feature list um and there's definitely like staking stuff that you can do on top of single SWOT finality um or even on top of the orbit you also talked about reducing the uh the minimum saking requirements the same window I think it's I definitely want it to be considered um yes um yeah I mean I think those were the big things those are pretty good things yeah andrin counter abstraction another one so e771 but yeah okay that yeah that's the list a lot of goods that you can actually play with right now which is actually awesome so the biggest hackathon here in the world it's going to be a good fun weekend for all the hackers balic thank you so much for this amazing conversation please give him a big round of applause thank you [Music]