Closing Speech

Transcript

[applause] >> Yeah, thank you all for coming to Devcon. Uh, this was the eighth edition of Devcon and I think I need a ticker. >> [laughter] >> Um, excuse me. One second. Do we have a ticker? Anyways uh thank you. This was the eighth edition of of Devcon and thank you all for coming.

Um, also thank you for all the sponsors that are supporting us. Like some are new, some are have been supporting us for a while and yeah, thank you for everyone who has been supporting this event. I especially would like to thank Aman who has been organizing it in the background together with many others. So, let's give a round of of applause to Aman. >> [applause] >> Thank you. Uh, I think you did a great job and of course there were many other people also involved too. Thank you for everyone who helped to put this event together. I also would like to thank many people, speakers and and the audience who have been part of this journey for a long time.

Specifically I want to mention one person who has been very loyal to us over the years. So, Lefteris has been at every single at every single Devcon as a speaker and has been a very loyal friend. So, thank you Lefteris. Uh, I'm happy that you were always here with us. And yeah, this is a closing speech and a closing speech is always a good opportunity to kind of look back and then see kind of where everything started and where we are right now. And actually Berlin, many of you probably know, but this is actually one of the like cities where Ethereum started.

And actually Lefteris is even on this picture. >> [gasps] >> This is the office where like the first Ethereum office, actually not far away from here in Kreuzberg. And it is also the office where actually Gnosis also started and worked and worked from, so even me personally, I spent quite a lot of time in this office working next to to Christian who basically invented or developed Solidity. And there was a very like obviously very early days, we're talking about 2014 and 2015 when Ethereum was still at the very early beginning and I think everyone who was in this office was united by the idea, yeah, we have to build something

that's revolutionary. We have the opportunity, we have a new technology that allows us to disrupt the status quo, something that's decentralized, that allows permissionless innovation. It's censorship resistant. We called it the world computer because it's globally accessible and it has a globally shared state. And it should allow us to build all kind of new businesses without centralized intermediaries. And people came up with all kind of crazy ideas. And Joe Lubin was happy to fund all kind of crazy ideas, including Gnosis.

And yeah, it was much less about yeah, we have to create an asset and we have to maximize the token price or we have to become the fastest blockchain. It was really like very idealistically driven. And I think this lasted for quite a while. I would say there was kind of the Cypherpunk era of Ethereum from like 2013 to 2017. Uh where like people were very idealistically motivated and I think then the ICO craziness started, also the Gnosis ICO actually took place in 2017.

And a lot of money was fueled into the ecosystem, which I think on the one hand was great because it allowed us to build everything uh and even do things like Devcon. Um but of course also attracted a very different audience that was primarily not driven by ideals, but rather by speculation. And I think this kind of bursted in 2022 when Terra Luna exploded, FTX exploded, Three Arrows Capital lost a lot of money, and uh I think since then crypto has slowly been recovering, but if you ask like what is the public perception, then it's not really a revolutionary

movement anymore that's trying to transform society. It is rather seen as something niche, potentially very important, and it's kind of a new asset class, but it's a bit unclear like uh what will be the long-term significance. And I think the focus has also shifted from like, "Yeah, we want to build decentralization privacy censorship resistance." And focus on this to like, "Okay, how does the institutional adoption look like? What are the financial use cases?" And uh that is kind of driving the discourse around crypto these days.

Now, Ethereum was started in 2013 when Vitalik wrote the white paper initially. And of course crypto itself goes way further, like goes a few years further back. And if you look at how the world actually developed in this time frame, then it's actually quite striking that the world has become a lot more centralized in many ways. And I think here is actually on the on the left side you see the uh the the the share that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 are as part of the entire index. And you can see this this goes back to kind of after World War II uh up to up to now basically. Now it's probably even higher after latest

listings, which I think are not part of the S&P 500 yet, but at some point probably will be. And uh yeah, what we see is basically from when Ethereum started, well, like about 20% was was yeah, was basically represented by the top 10 companies. Now it's about 40%. So, what does that mean? Obviously, it just means that there are very few mega corporations emerging, which obviously means that there are very few parties ultimately that are super relevant to to make decisions and kind of some extent act on our behalf, and that obviously have mostly the shareholder interest of their own companies in mind, and not really what we have in mind. And

uh yeah, I think this is also seen by the um by uh yeah, by the like the wealth gap that there is in the US, but also elsewhere. So, what we see is just an increasing increasing disparity between rich and poor, and yeah, centralizing a lot of wealth in very few in the hands of very few people. And Bitcoin is also not really an exception. Like if you would kind of calculate the Gini coefficient of Bitcoin, then it would be even worse than any of the countries, uh simply because the early early contributors and the early whales, they own majority of the supply.

So, wealth is one thing. It's very clear centralization of wealth happening continuously and is increasing. Uh it's also centralization of power. Like if you if you think that like democracy is valuable and kind of ideally everyone has a say that basically democracy peaked in the early 2000s, and and since then there has been a steady decline. So, this is here like from a nonprofit organization called Freedom House. They measure like how many countries have improved versus uh yeah, worsened in in terms of global freedom and and what are the the rights of the individual and the sovereignty that everyone has.

And you can see basically since 2005 this has been steadily decreasing. Which effectively also just means that the power is in the hands of fewer people that can decide. And obviously there's a big risk simply from having power centralized because you depend on very few people and their judgment calls. And I think right now we see it pretty much everywhere that those judgment calls are not always the best. So it looks kind of desperate. But at the same time I think if you look at this is not the first time that I kind of power and wealth is centralizing in human history. This has happened many many times and this has been many many times disrupted.

And most of the times actually disruption happened through technology. So we have always a cycle of like decentralization then a new technology arises. It lowers coordination costs. Which disperses the power among the individual. Then of course new network effects can arise. And that forms new centralization. But my point right now is we are actually at the top of this. Right now we are kind of moving to top centralization and the question is what can we do to kind of disperse this power again?

And in my view we just have to build the technology that allows people to do this. And as you can see here on this table it's just like some kind of random examples. But just to provide all like when Gutenberg developed the printing press um it moved de facto power from the church to readers and publishers because the church back at the time had the monopoly on information. Because they were the ones writing the books and distributing the information. And that was heavily disrupted by just inventing something as simple as a printing press.

Now we had this into innovation obviously also more recently like the internet being a good example. But, I think with internet we have already seen that we have kind of gone through the cycle of centralization to new network effects and then new form of of of of concentration very few companies. And the question is now what what is what can we do now? And who is basically the Gutenberg of of our generation? And in my opinion is this simply our responsibility. Because who else is going to build this?

Um and yeah, the mega corporations are not going to do it because they don't have the incentive to do this. And Vitalik recently made a post on Twitter in terms of like what he would like the Ethereum Foundation to focus on because of course resources are maybe a bit less. And it's important to have a clear focus and he focused very much on the on the core principles of what initially I think made Ethereum stand out. So, building something that is censorship resistant that cannot be captured by governance by governments or or other parties. Something that is open source, easy to replicate.

Something that allows privacy that empowers the individual towards everyone else. And that is also obviously has to be very secure because if something is not secure it will not succeed and I think we have seen now enough facts to to understand that security is probably one of the most important items on this. So, I think there's no reason to be desperate, but we have to understand that there's there's a lot of responsibility here where hopefully we can contribute to. And yeah, if anyone like who is the who was the Gutenberg of our times? I think it has to be a collaborative effort from us because I don't see anyone else will step up to actually try

to to break this cycle of of centralization. With this I would like to leave you for this year and yeah, thank you all for coming and I hope I'll see you next year. >> [applause] [applause]