Bridge Atlas - Episode 1: Intro | Tim Beiko & Timber Stinson-Schroff

Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome to the inaugural episode of [music] the Bridge Atlas series, a limited run interview series for Summer of Protocols. I'm Christine DKim, the host of this series and for this introductory episode. I'm joined by two special guests. First is Ethereum Foundation's protocol coordination co-team lead Tim Bo. Hi, Tim. >> Hey, thanks for having me. glad that you are kicking off this episode with us. And we are also joined by the summer of protocols pro project manager Timber Stinoff Shro. Hi Timber.

>> Hey Christine. >> I hope I didn't um like butcher your last name. >> It wasn't too bad. [laughter] >> Okay. I should have probably asked you that before starting this interview, but that's fine. um to te we're I'm really glad you and Tim uh Tim and Timber both of you guys are here because we're going to spend this episode teeing up for our listeners what they're going to what they should expect out of this entire interview series and hopefully it will also encourage listeners to come back and listen to all of the the interviews in this series. Um so for maybe to kick us off in this in this conversation and

um for any listeners that may not be familiar with summer of protocols at all. Um Timber, can you start us off with uh just like a brief overview of what Summer of Protocols is and a brief overview of its history? >> Sure. Um well the summer protocols is a research program that was started about 3 years ago with the idea of making protocols a first class concept for thinking about the world and the program has roughly gone through four phases. It started off with a pilot study which we'll probably talk about later. Um and then the first summer which was focused on research, second summer which has been focused on application and then the

third summer which was focused on education. Along the way, we've had full-time year-round tracks like guest talk series, a newsletter that's evolved from just a basic info letter all the way up to a science fiction magazine plus non-fiction essays. Produced a whole bunch of content. And it's all been started with the idea of studying what protocols are and getting a better idea about how to design them, how to manage them, and how to improve the ones that already exist. Um, it's been funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Um we've had about a hundred different uh people go through the program um sopers these participants who've produced essays projects artifacts all sorts of stuff along the way and uh yeah it's been a

very exciting three years and I'm excited to share more about it. Yeah, I I gotta say I didn't know very much about Summer of Protocols before being approached to host this series, but I was really impressed with how much content you guys have created over the span of just 3 years. Um, it's quite the breadth of work. Um, and I'm glad you mentioned, Timber, that this is an Ethereum Foundation focused initiative. Um Tim as I understand you helped to kickstart this initiative summer of protocols at the foundation. Is that right?

>> Yeah actually. So summer of protocols was kind of the consequence of me thinking about some Ethereum problems. So um in 2022 I reached out to Venites who now also helps run the program. um because he was one of like the I don't know broadest thinkers that I knew of that was uh extremely good at making sense of a lot of weird things and how they come together. And I told him I was like look I work on Ethereum and I'm not sure how to think about my work like it's not kind of like a product. It's not quite a tech platform. It's not quite a like political construct, but it's a bit of all of those things. And

Vancad in the past uh had done this work with Andre Horowitz. When Mark Andre put out this software eating the world blog post, uh they effectively hired him to think about the implications of software is eating the world for a year and he you know worked with them and came up with this book uh called Breaking Smart kind of thinking through the implications of it. So I reached out to Venat and I told him like can you just help me think about Ethereum better so that I understand what I'm working on. Um we we spoke and and it was obviously very productive but I realized like okay me and Venat talking is just like too narrow of a focus. So I brought Vancad on as a consultant to the EF and had him speak with a bunch of people in the EF and outside and you know tackle similar

questions around like governance and oification and you know what even is Ethereum and that also felt too narrow. But the frame of reference we landed on is thinking of Ethereum as a protocol and trying to better understand protocols broadly was probably the right way to approach this where a lot of the thinking about Ethereum tends to happen by analogy. We're like, okay, Ethereum is like a country or Ethereum is like a tech platform. And these analogies are kind of useful to like get some high level intuitions, but they break down really quickly as soon as you get into the weeds and, you know, thinking about the specific things about Ethereum. So, it felt more like instead of reasoning by analogy, we should figure out what is like this abstract class that Ethereum

is actually a part of. Um, and yeah, we landed on protocols. So like like you mentioned, we we originally had this pilot study uh that was written by Vancat, myself, a bunch of others from the EF exploring what we thought was like a first definition of protocols and how Ethereum fit in. And once we had that, what we wanted to do was to validate that this was actually true, that like exploring protocols at a broader level made sense. So the first year for the first summer we just decided to fund uh about 30 researchers from completely different domains and ask them all to study protocols. Um and I used this meme a lot in our presentations around the blind man

touching the elephant where everyone sees something differently and I guess what we were trying to answer was like is there actually an elephant here? So we funded people that we knew were like in different domains and Timber was one of them. So Timber's work at the time had to do with like workplace safety protocols and how those evolve over time. Um to try and see like okay are there some common ideas that we realized like can apply to all of this. Um and there were and so this is why we decided to keep running the program because it it felt like after a year we just really validated that yes this is like a super rich field of study. Even after year one we felt like we already had too much material. We put it all together in a binder and then year two we tried to get

people to actually work with this material. So we funded people in a bunch of different domains again but to actually run experiments and like work on improving protocols. And now this last year uh that we've just wrapped up we funded teachers from around the world to build actual courses about protocols and to try to integrate this in you know the fields of study that they they teach in. Um, so it feels like now we at least have like the a solid foundation that we can use to kind of articulate what protocols are, what they work, why they're exciting, how they relate to Ethereum. And then bringing it back to the series, it finally felt like we had enough built up that we can we can start to draw the parallels between Ethereum and this broader field more explicitly. And

hopefully, yeah, we get to do this through these series of episodes. Yeah, I want to get into the series a little bit more, but before we talk a little bit about the bridge atlas series, I want to make sure our listeners really understand the point and the mission of summer of protocols. I think in crypto when I say crypto I mean crypto shorthand for cryptocurrencies not the word cryptography which is truly what the shortened version of crypto is and for protocols when many listeners if if they're you know very cryptonative when they hear protocols we're thinking D5 protocols we're thinking L1

blockchains L2 blockchains when you guys say protocols um what do you mean, and when we're talking about these types of research, types of content, and funding research on different protocols, like where does the line start and where does the line end in terms of this very broad theme? Um, Timber, do you want to explain that the protocols domain a little bit more? Yeah. Well, I I do feel well suited to talk about this because I came into the program in 2023 after working in health and safety and tech policy for government. So, my background and my research project for the summer was looking at the history of coal mining

safety for the past 100 years, which is a really far cry from what, you know, the Ethereum Foundation works on. I think the risks posed to people working on on that sort of mining versus coal mining are much different. Um, but yeah, it spans a lot of different fields. One of the great successes of this program is bringing people together from fields like as different as coal mining to video game design to cryptocurrency to encryption to wildfires to flood management, urban spaces. It really is that wide and we took it literally when we're like, okay, we're going to look out and try and find principles that underly all these different protocols.

So to give you like a sense of the the the full scope of what we are looking at is micro protocols like handshakes and handwashing all the way up to really really big ones like the Kyoto protocol and the very successful Montreal protocol for limiting um emissions into the atmosphere of CFCs and then you've got technical and soft ones as well as technical as stuff like the original Ethereum protocol and how that has been developed to really give this like um characterist istic that we call hardness that Josh Stark has come up with um over to more social things like how we do elections, how do we vote, how do we decide among ourselves like what is legitimate and we've also had people

study that. So it really is is wide ranging and yeah sometimes you have to say the stuff isn't a protocol. Like if there's a better word for something than protocol, use the better word. But to confirm, you guys are both pretty confident that that elephant um to use the analogy that Tim was mentioning is a protocol and there's multiple different parts different parts of the elephant. They're all protocols and Ethereum is one part. Um is that correct? >> I guess the elephant analogy maybe breaks down a little bit here. One way I was explaining it that this year's cohort is a bit more like Swiss Army knives, right? If you think of protocols

as like Swiss Army knives, they all tend to have similar things like they usually have a blade on them. Um, but then they might have things that are like unique. And I think this is a good way to think about Ethereum is like Ethereum is like a protocol. It shares a lot of the affordances and constraints of other protocols, but it obviously has money in it like literally embedded in it where whereas like you know workplace safety protocols don't have this concept of money. And so the I think where we're at now is we're able to say like okay Ethereum is like a you know Swiss Army knife and most Swiss Army knives have like these properties and Ethereum is unique in that it has you know this property but then we can learn from how other protocols just kind of set up

their own Swiss Army knives. what are things that that they [clears throat] have that like Ethereum might not have that it should consider or ways that they approach how they like handle the Swiss Army knife that are that are different or you know complimentary to ours. Um and I think that's been like the right framing where um a lot of the lessons basically it's like you know can the things we learn from one domain actually generalize to some other space um and and over the year I think we've grown confident that yes like there are these ideas that keep coming up whether you're talking about Ethereum whether you're talking about how you're designing like like yes a protocol for workplace safety or a protocol for how to run an election or something like

that and there's these like higher level principles you can use to think of your work and that's the thing that felt was missing. Whereas if you're, you know, like a software engineer, you tend to have all these frameworks for how do you build good software? If you're running a startup, you tend to have all these frameworks for like how do you actually structure a startup? Um, and so for protocols, there wasn't something like that. Um, and maybe to like I don't know like encapsulate that quite crisply, uh, our first our first paper had this like 20word definition of protocols by Danny Ryan that was very verbose. And then at the end of the second year, Vancat reduced that to thinking of protocols as engineered arguments. Um that they're effectively this construct that exists

that allows us to um work through how an argument whether this is like a technological argument like how Ethereum comes to consensus on some state or some you know higher level argument where if you're looking at like social protocols and how we handle things that can go wrong there. Um then through this lens of engineers arguments you can get just these common um like yeah the these common themes that keep coming up and and that help you like do this better. So um yeah, long story short is we think that there's common features of different types of protocols and studying it at that level um allows us to make sure that the intuitions are correct and we're not just, you know,

making some generalization that actually doesn't apply or isn't quite right. >> Yeah. Okay, that's really helpful. I think that really does speak to the motivation of summer of protocols and what it's about and what it's doing. I guess as like one final question to really drive home summer of protocols and tee us up for the next part of this conversation will be which will be about the bridge atlas series in particular. If Timber, Tim, and if Timber and Tim, your guys' names are so similar.

[laughter] Timber and Tim. Um, I just realized that as I was talking with you guys. But anyways, if Timber and Dem if both of you guys could share just one or two maybe very key learnings or impacts of this is something that was part of like a nonthereum protocol study that actually did have really important or um relevant learnings for the Ethereum ecosystem. I think that would be also really helpful to just uh I guess like explain why this initiative is something that you guys renewed for the last like three years. Um what has been a a research or

a learning or commission work that did impact Ethereum in a in a positive way? Um yeah, Timber, do you want to start us off and then we can go to Tim? Well, Tim might Tim Tim might be better poised to answer this one, but I'll flip it first because for me, the thing I wasn't expecting coming into this program given my background as like someone from outside of crypto was what am I going to take away from people's expertise on the Ethereum protocol? And it was stuff about that that really has added a lot of richness to my study, which is still occupational health and safety. So like the economies that you can build on top of the Ethereum protocol are very interesting and we do see parallels with that in health and safety but it's not

something that I would have looked for until I started working on this project. So like it goes both ways too. The original impetus of the program was to learn from what's out there and bring it back to Ethereum. But I've also seen people including myself learn from people who work on stewarding the Ethereum protocol. >> That's good. Yeah, and maybe from my perspective, um, there are definitely a couple of these ideas that ended up just changing the way I think about the work and think about Ethereum. And it was useful to see that they applied to like everyone in the cohort, right? Like it felt like when we came up or ran across these ideas, it wasn't just me being like, oh, this is useful for Ethereum. It was

like, you know, m people being like, oh, this is useful for what I do. Um and the first one [clears throat] I remember quite vividly is uh this was in the Seattle retreat we had the first year we kind of realized that it's actually better to analyze protocols by how bad they are than how good they are. Um and Nadia uh from the first cohort came up with this idea of like this CFKA index that you would like a protocol on all its dimensions and the worst version of it. And and and the reason for this is like, you know, if you think of like a protocol that's really good, like, you know, HTTP is like the protocol that people would probably say is, you know, most impactful in the world. And you don't really get a sense for like why it's good, like what's, you know,

special about it. Um, but if you think of a protocol that's really bad, like the the example we tend to use is like, you know, airport security protocols, um, you immediately get a sense of like everything that's wrong with airport security and why it's broken and how you could potentially improve it. And I think even for Ethereum, that's been like a much better frame of mind of thinking about like, okay, what are the things we can like very sharply perceive are just problematic? and instead of getting from like, you know, 0 to 100, you're trying to get from minus 100 to zero. And if we fix all those things, we'll be in a good spot. And I guess it's like a complement of that idea. The other thing that that kept coming up over and over is um what we've called

like whitehead advances. Now, there's this quote from Ann Whitehead that says that civilization advances at uh by the number of operations it can uh it can complete without thinking about them. And we kind of realized like protocols are like tools that allow you to generate these whitehead advances where um when they actually work, they basically completely fade into the background. Like you know, for example, HTTP, like it works, no one or very little people actually think about it relative to the entirety of what's built on top of it. Um GPS is another good example, right? Like we just have this entire protocol that runs that allows us to get anywhere from point A to point B.

Um, and this means that when you're doing protocols, you have to get them really really right. Like it's less like a a kind of, you know, linear curve up where you're trying to iterate and and tweak and adapt and and every step of the way you kind of get some feedback. It feels more like you get one chance or, you know, like a short period of time before the world either adopts or doesn't adopt your protocol at scale. And there tends to be these events or these like I don't know activation like yes uh circumstances that that will lead to like mass adoption but then once you actually get there the protocol almost disappears into the background and it becomes much harder to change much harder to to iterate and I think

this framing has been really helpful to me compared to say like you know the cryptonatives framings around like oification versus not and you know how does that work so just looking at the adoption and the impact of other protocols and how it actually plays out I think has just helped like refine some of these intuitions and maybe at a more mellow level I'll say like one takeaway that I got that was that was good is I feel like the Ethereum's community's intuitions around building protocols are like mostly correct like it's it's kind of nice to know we're not like doing this in a completely broken way so it's definitely felt more like okay we we are aware of the biggest problems or like the hardest questions and what are just

like some better mental models to approach them and to like resolve these hard issues rather than you know oh we're we're actually doing this completely wrong and we need to start from scratch. So that's been also very validating. Yeah, I'm really glad, Tim, that you mentioned the some of those really key vocabulary and terms like the Kafka uh index, the Whitehead Advance because like you said, I do think as I was reviewing the summer of uh protocols content library, it these terms really help you think about it helps you like formulate the language around you how you would talk about what

Ethereum is as a protocol and and when you were talk it reminded me of when you were saying one of the impetus or like the motivations for even starting summer of protocols is because you were thinking about what you do as a as a uh as one of the team leads at the Ethereum Foundation for pro protocol coordination of like how do I think about my work? How do we think about Ethereum? And one of the key I would say like um offerings that this program and successes of this program has been giving people the tools like the language to talk about this and to think about it. Um and it's cool that so much of this has happened through very like non-ethereum related people and and and researchers. Um I learned a

lot of these terms timber from one of your videos. Uh it I think it was argu arguments for dummies or like architecture for dummies. We're going to link to it in the show notes of this episode. Um but I wanted to try using some of these terms and ask you a question uh Timber about the way that you think about uh summer of protocols. >> Okay, >> you correct me if I'm wrong in how I use these terms. It's the Kafka advance or Kafka index. So I I thought of summer of protocols as a protocol itself for trying to uh bridge the loai of

Ethereum protocol research and nonthereum types of research is or research fields. Um and one of the bullets of of how you can tell if a protocol is bad is if there's no measures of of success. Um so one of my questions for you Timber is how do how do you measure success um for summer of protocols and do you think of summer of protocols as a protocol itself that you need to or that you want to help assist um in becoming uh like a sustainable hardened protocol in the future?

Great question and that that's probably the first time that somebody's like taken this like gun and like turned it around on me to think about in in these terms. Um yeah, perfect use of all the terms in my opinion. Um yeah, I'll start with like what the success of the program is and how we might measure that. Um we have a great guest talk uh too actually by Corey Levenson who's a climate researcher and he talks about protocols for measuring um carbon emissions and accounting. Um and he says that there's this paradox in that field which is that the stuff that's easy to measure isn't the most effective. It's easy to account for and like that's what we tend to do because we want to hold everybody accountable. And then second

is it's easier to make an impact on this stuff if you don't worry about the accounting. And that's kind of the approach that we've taken here. It's like it's very grassroots. It's very bottom up. We're trying to protocol pill as many people as we can bring up their literacy with these terms that you talked about. I think that at the beginning of this program, there's this tension between breadth and depth and that's what the impetus for the program was. It's like, okay, the Ethereum Foundation has very deep expertise in their protocol, so they need to go the other way and build breadth. So we swung the pendulum that way and we didn't just swing the pendulum back to breadth after it was like there was this protocol innovation

which is all the new terms that we've come up with. So that is a kind of protocol. It's like this literacy that we're building in people is how they can communicate with each other about these things in their field that they couldn't before. These words weren't used in this way. Um so we've gradually taken like year 1, year two, year three, the complica like the complexity of this language from posttock to PhD to masters. And this summer is like when we really recruited help from professors from Beijing, uh, Southeast University and Ireland, Harvard, Princeton, Medina University in Italy, all over to help us take these terms and turn it into um

really important stuff. Um, Helina Wrong, one of our teaching fellows this summer, had a line that was um, protocols are everybody's second language. like there's nobody who has native uh levels of fluency in protocols yet, but we're hoping to get there. So, it is a kind of protocol for communication between people to talk about something very important that they weren't talking about before between fields. Um, but it is hard to measure and we're okay with that and we're probably going to work towards ways to measure it. Um, one of the things I do keep an eye on is um, like Stuart Bran says, like I'll get back to work when I'm done reading the internet and I'm an avid subscriber to that as well. Um, I read articles online, people I don't

know who have mentioned the summer of protocols and the research that's come out of it and they're using these terms. Um, and that's a really good sign to me. I don't have data on it. It's all an anecdot. >> Very cool. We've been kind of teasing throughout this conversation of this moment for summer of protocols in expanding it. Um really showing how this protocols, this emerging language, this emerging field of research can be more accessible and more broadly um understood and adopted. Let's talk about the bridge atlas series and how this

fits in to this moment of time for summer protocols as an initiative. Uh Tim, do you want to start us off with just a quick overview of what inspired the creation of this bridge atlas series? >> Of course. Um, you know, you mentioned yourself summer protocols has a lot of content now and when we started the program, one thing I wanted to make sure of is that it didn't bias towards being like a crypto protocol thing only, right? Like we wanted to attract folks from many different domains. And I think a a a part of that strategy was like we we kind of had to deemphasize crypto and Ethereum because the EF was already

funding this. It was already a weird program. And I wanted to make sure people like we could get serious people from other domains and they didn't think that oh the EF is gonna like ask me to put my research in a smart contract or whatever. So we we we we just really focus on like okay protocols at a high level don't even think about Ethereum just and I was obviously involved others at the EF were involved. So like there was like some Ethereum link there. Um, but we wanted the field to develop on its own. And now that we have that like three years in, I think it is really important to start to bridge the gap between like Ethereum and its community and this broader community we've created with Summer of Protocols. Um, beyond just the stuff that's, you know, useful

to me narrowly, I think the framing of protocols has been a really helpful one to talk to people about Ethereum and its problems in a way that doesn't like throw them off. like when you say crypto uh you know a lot of people have very strong reactions but if you just frame like okay Ethereum is this protocol it has money and you know we can forget about this for a second but it has all these other features that are like similar to your protocol and we have all these similar problems um it's it's been really really like generative and so what we want to do for this series is to bring some of the like top researchers and people from the Ethereum community and get them talking with some of the alumni from SOP from over the years who are like experts in their own fields

completely unrelated to crypto and to kind of zoom in on many of these parallel themes and kind of try to get both perspectives together. And we're doing this now because we have the first summer of protocols event at an Ethereum event around Defconnect. So to close off DEFC connect we'll have a full day summer of protocols event and the idea there will be similar to try and bridge effectively the gap between um the kind of frontier of knowledge about protocols in the Ethereum community and then what we've learned in SOP. Um so yeah that's kind of the uh the rationale for this and what we're hoping to get out of it.

I don't want to be too on the nose, but to uh use another kind of term is another way to explain the goal of this series or this season for this the summer of protocols. Uh creating new stratums for for protocol research and different areas of of protocol. Uh I guess like >> I think that's kind of a stretch but it is it is I think it is yeah if you stretch the definition it is correct like we and and I think also one thing to highlight as as like a a bridge back is a lot of the Ethereum specific

research is actually helpful to the rest of the world like for example you know Josh Dark the EF has this piece about hardness or trust experience and these are two themes that have come up consistently and I've resonated with folks like in, you know, in our cohorts independent of the domains they work on. And I think this is like, yes, the other side of the bridge is to be able to to give a platform or a stratum um for folks in the Ethereum community who are actually doing this like cutting edge work around how protocols like are and designing new protocols that just don't exist anywhere else. And um yeah, having an audience of like smart and curious people um that are outside of just a crypto bubble that we can we can

interact with and and learn from. >> Yeah. One way you can think >> Yeah. Uh one way you can think about the the stratum that we're trying to establish is the kind of missing messo level of discourse that is similar to what Silicon Valley has, but what crypto might lack. So not talking about like really high scale like geopolitical stuff or small scale technical stuff but like what's important at that messo level of organizations and institutions and groups to design and manage protocols effectively and I think that >> macro level >> mezo is between micro and macro and something that I've talked about in the

past is that we we're kind of myopic about what we focus on and it tends to be either like very small lowle level technical stuff with protocols or like really way too big picture like then you get into emergent issues to to map the analogy to to Silicon Valley in and that meo level would be venture capital blogs, entrepreneurs giving advice, people that have worked in these startups. There's a level of maturity in that ecosystem with regards to the the advice that people give each other. Um, Tim.

>> Yeah. And I guess to bring it back to Yeah. the original thing that brought me here and like had me reach out to Vancat is I felt like this didn't exist for Ethereum. Like yes, if you're running a startup, you know, if whether it's like a B2B SAS or a consumer company or like an AI startup, there's all this thinking that goes into like how should you structure your startup? How should you think about fundraising? How should you think about recruiting? Right? There's an entire kind of playbook that exists and this exists for pretty much everything, right? Like if you're like a software engineer or you're like a lawyer, there are like best practices for like how you approach your work that's not tied to the, you know, very narrow domain in which you operate. Like if you write code for you know an app

versus a website versus firmware obviously a lot of like the microlevel practices change but there's still like you know there's still this notion of what it means to be a good software engineer or what it means to be like a good founder. And so creating this type of knowledge around protocols is the thing we felt was missing where it's it's not clear what's the equivalent of like a a protocol entrepreneur and you know this again the context matters right like working on Ethereum is not the same as working on workplace safety protocols but a lot of the like midlevel abstractions actually end up being quite similar and so to the extent we're able to better reason about them we can kind of level

you know, how we do work on Ethereum and on crypto protocols, but also how other protocols around the world are uh are thought about. >> It might be helpful at this point to tee up some of the key themes or ideas that we're going to be covering in this series. Um if you guys could um share maybe um a few one or two sentences on on what key themes you think are are going to be the most impactful for not just maybe for Timber from your perspective like in very interesting

from the perspective of a nonthereum um research searcher or non-ethereum listener and then Tim themes and ideas and concepts that are going to be discussed in this series that are going to be very interesting um for from more of like an Ethereum perspective. Um I think I think that that might be be be helpful. >> Sure. I can start with a couple sentences on that. I think that you know something as abstract as computing frontiers is going to be an interesting topic even in my field. Um like the rise of wearables is something that's making a big impact and it's really unclear how that's going to work

but people that are going to come on and talk here have better expertise in software and hardware standards that are going to shape the development of of occupational health and safety on the computing frontier. Another thing that I'm excited about is this notion of the commons and what we have to do with that. Whether those are software commons or commons that are important um in day-to-day life like air quality, road safety, water availability. How can we harden these comments against common failure modes like collective action problems? How can we harden them against economic failures like lemon markets? I think that folks in crypto will have a lot to share about both

computing frontiers and commons in both the software context and those can be ported over to real life comments. >> Yeah. And I think you know part of the design of these episodes is to appeal to both the Ethereum people and the non-Ethereum people with the same uh theme. So like yeah I'm also excited to hear about this. Like these are things, you know, we think about all the time like how should we fund and steward the comments for Ethereum? What does this look like, you know, short and long term? Um, what does it look like when, you know, new computing uh frontiers just has start to have an impact on society?

Like we're at this point, I think, in Ethereum's history where we're just starting to see real world adoption at scale. And uh, you know, we're not the only technology that's growing exponentially. AI is obviously another big one. And so thinking through like what does it look like when these digital protocols and technologies get adopted and and go through this phase shift. Um one thing I'm excited to talk to about is like uh what is how to think about protocol design in more depth right like what does it look like when you're actually trying to design in the abstract what a protocol will be. Um and then lastly another bit is just like what are the right institutional landscapes to to have around protocols?

How do you actually support them? Um how do these institutions change over time? What's their role relative to the actual individual in the protocols? Um so those are all the themes that we hope to cover in the series and have people who have experience both from the Ethereum side and from other domains come in and um yeah get into the weeds. Not to derail this conversation on the Bridge Atlas series, but I do want to address a little bit of a elephant in the room and that is my role in this series you guys. Um, I have been asking you guys all the questions as is my my duty as a as a host. Um, but I think it's important to address in this intro

episode, not just, you know, summer protocols, bridge atlas, but also what I will be doing and and why I'm doing what I'm doing. Um, so as a bit of a background for listeners, sorry, Tim Timber, go ahead. >> No, I was just say, why are you here, Christine? >> You're going to be leading the the charge on these awesome guests and hosting this. And yeah, we are very interested in in hearing about your background. We love to know more and I'm sure that everybody listening to this episode is going to appreciate the context uh moving forward. >> Thank you. Thank you for teeing me up there. Uh [laughter] I too was actually quite shocked when um Tim you had reached out to me about hosting this series. Uh as a bit of background for

any listeners uh who don't know who who I am and my background I have been working in the crypto industry the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry um since 2018. I used to be a former journalist at Coindesk a crypto media publication and then I went on to join the research team at at Galaxy Digital. I am now an independent journalist and researcher. I focus primarily on covering the Ethereum protocols and the Bitcoin pro and the Bitcoin core protocol. Um, so I would say my background and my expertise, what I really bring to the table is um just a very strong understanding of how the protocols of of crypto work. Um, I got to say I'm I'm catching up as much as I

can with the resources you're giving me, Timber, on on the discourse around just protocols in general, not just just cryptocurrency protocols. Um, but I I gotta say I'm a bit I'm a bit nervous about, you know, moderating some of these conversations between Ethereum and then non Ethereum people. Um, Timber, do you have any advice for me actually in terms of bridging these conversations? Like have you been in situations in in kind of past like while you've been um pro while you've been the project manager for summer of protocols?

What are some tips and tricks for for um bridging this discourse on Ethereum protocol development and and nonthereum protocol development? >> I think what you've been doing um bringing up your own level of literacy with the terms that have been coming out of the SOP research program um that's a great way to do it. Introducing some of those getting people to think about the protocols in their own fields and share a little bit of insight. Um, one of the advantages of the series that we've lined up is that um, probably at least half of the guests were previous participants in the program, either alumni or guest speakers. So, they are first. So, like there will be some um,

expertise there, some level literacy that's that's uh, already existing. Um, but these are great people that we have lined up and they're going to have a great time chatting. Um, everybody's put a lot of thought into who's going to be talking to who and yeah, I would say let your own curiosity guide you and ask questions about what you find interesting. >> Yeah. And maybe to add to that like I think part of the reason I reish originally in addition to you understanding Ethereum and having that be a good starting point is a lot of the series uh you've done and you know in the past have to do with like looking at the humans who are building the protocols and kind of getting into their motivations and how they think about it and their mindset and that does feel

like something that's you know that's quite universal right like where um you whether you're working on Ethereum or you're working on, you know, wildfire management or you're working on AI, like there's something around how people approach their work and how they think about what they're doing. Um, that's that's kind of at this this higher level. And yeah, I think you've done an amazing job doing this for the Ethereum community and now hopefully we can replicate this in this context. >> I am support guys. Yeah, Timber, >> I I was just going to ask um I was wondering what you're most curious about finding out over the course of this series yourself and what you're looking to get out of it in terms of learning

about protocols. >> So Tim should know this about me. I am very much a skeptic. Uh I'm pretty I'm pretty especially when it comes to my coverage on Ethereum. Every time developers talk about a timeline, every time developers talk about reaching a particular milestone, the way that I approach it is very much proof to me that this is real. Prove to me that this matters and that this is actually going to happen. So, one of the things that I'm actually most excited about in this summer of proto in the the bridge atlas series is confirming

whether there whether those those learnings do actually exist between non-protocol researchers and and these like experts in wildlife or wildfire management. um like to what extent I guess is it really all that relevant to Ethereum because I feel like now is kind of the test. I'm an outsider, so I don't have any skin in the game of like wanting Summer of Protocols to succeed or not. And I've to be quite honest I have been impressed with some of the content that I've been reading with the uh vocabulary but I want to I want to experience I guess the um this conviction that uh

what people are studying in terms of protocols that are outside of Ethereum, outside of crypto, outside of blockchain do actually have a lot of relevance and and yeah impact to to this industry That's awesome. I think if we can get you there, then all of the listeners will get there, too. And that's the goal for what we're doing. So, yeah, that's super exciting. >> I love that. >> I think this has sufficiently teed up what we're going to be doing for these next uh few weeks um with all of the interviews that are coming up. Oh, I guess one last thing that maybe we should clarify to our listeners, especially because I'm going to be talking about the Bridge Atlas series

quite a bit. Um, is the name itself, the Bridge Atlas series. Uh, [laughter] I I I think it's pretty self-explanatory, maybe the bridge part, because we've been talking a lot about bridging discourse and communities and and researchers. Um, Timber, do you want to explain perhaps a little bit more on the the motivation for the the name of this series? And I believe it's the name for the event as well um at the end. Correct. For dev connect. >> It is the same name. So the name of this series will be the same name as the event in Dev Connect on the last day there in Buenos Areas in Argentina. Um yeah about the name bridge like you said self-explanatory. I think it's important to um think about making these

connections between fields, between uh theory and real life, between people, and to think about it on a big scale. Like we're making a new map of what the future might look like through these bridges that we're building. And it's not just one map. Like an atlas is multiple maps. There will be multiple perspectives brought here. people building bridges from different islands of their own practice to different um fields of study. So this multiplicity this plurality of bridges is an important aspect of that name and also the scale of it. I think that it evokes a sense of planetarity. we thinking about the the globe um as a whole, all the economies and cosmopolses

as Vancat likes to say across the world, how they're working together to bring in a I suppose a a new interesting future. And lastly, I suppose it's a bit of a hat tip to the mythological figure of Atlas, who is like doing the hard work of being the foundation for the world in a somewhat invisible and thankless way like most protocols do. As Tim alluded to earlier, they have this tendency to go behind the scenes unnoticed when they're working well. And when they're working bad, you know, Atlas gets a bad rap.

>> No, that's good. Thank you, Timber. And thank you, Tim, as well. Thank you guys for um helping me tee up the series. I'm really excited to host it and uh yeah, I hope everyone listening is going to be joining us for all of the upcoming Bridge Atlas interviews. Um I'm really excited. >> Thanks. >> Yeah, we are too. Thanks, Christine. >> My pleasure. Um I have three quick um like reminders for all of the listeners that are are listening to this intro episode. Um, as you heard in today's episode, what you can expect for the next few weeks is um, more roundtable discussions with both subject matter experts from the Ethereum community, but

also non-crypto non-Ethereum um, related uh, who are from non-crypto non-thereum related industries and academic fields. Um, I want to to emphasize three three different things. The first is if you enjoyed this episode, if you liked listening to it, and if you're excited for the Bridge Atlas series, um please be sure to give this episode a big thumbs up on YouTube and subscribe to the Summer of Protocols YouTube channel. Um, if you are listening and you want to stay engaged with the with Summer of Protocols community, um, if you have any follow-up questions or want to to to um continue the discussion after the end of any of

the episodes, there is a Summer of Protocols Discord channel um, which will be linked in the show notes. So, uh, please do join, chime in. There's, yeah, a whole community of of people that, um, are watching the same kind of content you're watching. Um, and finally, uh, please check the show notes of today's episode as well for links to more of, uh, what we talked about if you're curious about to learn more about these terms, white advance, uh, Kafka index. Um, if you want to get more educated on this discourse around protocols, uh, as we mentioned throughout the episode, there's so much content. So, um, check out the show notes for, uh, links to

where you can find that content. And, um, and yeah, I think I think those were the the three. Um, I will be back again with a new episode of, uh, Bridge Atlas, [music] um, soon. So, stay tuned and I'll talk to you guys all again. Thanks, everyone. [music] >> [music]