In Conversation: Vitalik Buterin & Siddharth Shetty

Transcript

Wow. All right. So, this is something that I'm uh just to preface. Uh this is a talk that I'm uh very excited about because uh on one hand we have uh Mr. V who uh doesn't need any introduction and finally is here at ETH India for the very first time uh in person. Uh so yeah super glad to have him over. Um and we also have Siddhhat on the other side right now. Sedhhat is somebody I've known since I think 2017ish. Um and I've always seen him at the forefront of like you know just being in the midst of everything exciting that's been happening on the Indian digital public infrastructure both as an initial

volunteer early volunteer at IPRit and and yeah much more. Um so with that I'd like to just invite both of them on stage and see uh what we have to chat about today. Please. YEAH. RIGHT. RIGHT. COOL. Uh so yeah, let's just start off with um the basics like you know what are you really like currently most excited about? Like a question to both of you. uh what what what keeps you uh what keeps you up at night or what what

what motivates you to wake up in the morning right uh currently like very short term >> I mean I think uh a big part of it is uh that we uh have the opportunity now to really uh progress forward in so many areas like both inside of Ethereum and uh even outside like just so much more faster than we were able to before, right? And uh like even like like within Ethereum, a lot of the things that I've cared about for a long time like you know getting to the proof singularity like making even uh more advanced and crazier forbes of cryptography like making everything properly properly

secure moving forward on privacy. Like all of these things are like basically things that we thought would only be happening in 25 years are only are looking to be only about 1 or 2 years away now. And in general, you know, like the sort of the speed at which the tech tree is growing is accelerating so quickly. And uh I mean, I think that uh opens up a lot of poss a lot of opportunities, right? Like a lot of things that were very difficult or not practical for us to build before becoming much easier now, right? I mean, even things like, for example, how all of the L2s had such a hard time like

basic basically almost none of them got rid of their security councils for like more than 5 years, right? And now formal verification is uh advancing so quickly that that seems easy. Um, and then on the other hand, you know, you can also be kept at night by things that worry you. And I think the answer there is also AI. anything anything new like I I mean I've been I read your blog that you wrote that you put out just before you came here but like anything you met a lot of people yesterday what was like what was the highlight of like um from from yesterday anything new >> uh that you came across >> I mean it was interesting just uh how rapidly the mindset uh shifted toward like hey we have to yeah make sure that

Ethereum is secure and you know we have to make sure it's quantum safe. We have to make sure it's AI safe. And uh I mean I think it's interesting how like a lot of the optimism around Ethereum that I see like sometimes even just has to do with the fact that like actually in this age of AI breaking everything. Ethereum is one of those things that's very well positioned to like not break and to survive. And uh in this kind of world like that alone is worth so much. >> Perfect. and uh USAD like what what's what's uh what's up what's exciting for you? Yeah, I feel um you know almost in the David Deutschin sense uh we are in

the beginning of infinity and I feel when we think about this progress in addition to progress in different functional areas whether it's in cryptography whether it's in energy whether it's beyond that uh fundamentally what I'm most excited about is how do we navigate this change as humans um and how do we lean into our own interiority uh which is basically the space of feelings that we have and how do we sense the world from there? How do you lean into your curiosity? How do you lean into the entire universe of feelings that that makes us human and fundamentally given that a lot of the cognitive work can be taken on by AI? Uh

what do you create from that place? Um how do you coordinate? How do we diffuse innovations at scale? Not primarily from the lens of fear. Um so fundamentally what I'm excited about is just seeing this shift where for a long while you had to you operated in organizational structures that suppressed a lot of this uh and in that suppressed innov innovation intuition creations uh which will now come out and have a chance to express themselves. So that's basically what yeah I I wake up every day uh pumped about.

>> Very interesting, right? Like I think now in this age there's a sense that there's almost more opportunities to be human, right? Um right and that's a very that's very so like from a very different I talk to people from very different strats of society and that's not uniform. Right. A lot of people are definitely worried about where the world is going and especially AI and you know a lot of things but these these are some interesting u you know threads to pick on. Um so I I'll touch upon that a bit later but like overall I want to you know dive a little deeper into um you know just understanding when we are building like coordination systems at

scale. Now, now you know Vitalic has been at the forefront of building um largely Ethereum and so many other like you know coordination mechanisms. Um so what is it that you know so what were some of the hardest lessons that you had to uh you know uh sort of deal with while building all of these things? What was like harder than anticipated uh while building this? And what and is there something that you would you wish that uh you like in hindsight you would have like you could have like smoothed over um more simply or there were some certain architectural decisions that you

could have taken um a little earlier or later or something like that. >> Yeah, I mean I think uh realistically the hardest problems are always not the technical problems, they're the social problems, right? And uh you can always look at each one of them and you can always figure out like this is a way that I could have acted that could have made the whole thing much better and we would have gotten to the same place a year earlier but uh or a better place a year earlier right but uh at the same time you know these things are always just uh so hard to predict I think uh on the technical side right it's you know it's easier to give answers right like don't make a 256-bit VM you know make the three like 64-bit instead of 512 bit. Make uh some make something better

than RL OLP. Don't spend too much time on coming up with over complicated proof of stake and start with simple proof of stake. Um don't probably don't waste time on uncles. Um in other words, like don't never implement the mod x pre-ompile, right? It's like on technical stuff there. It's uh like it's much easier to say these things and uh figure out those answers. But uh like on all of the yeah other stuff that just has to do with like relationships between people and the ecosystem like sometimes even in retrospect it's like hard to say what the answer really should have been. M >> is there something like do you feel in the process like how much of this was like for you in the process of like you

know just like you know growing up and seeing many more systems as you as you thought about and then you're like okay I I I know I should have like probably like this is something that I liked from somebody something that somebody else did and then this something that I should have like considered. Um >> h >> yeah. >> Yeah, I think that was uh definitely a big part of it. Like I uh you know like coming up with all of the technical details of Ethereum originally. Like I definitely you know only knew about some things did not know about a lot of other things. And uh I think the other thing that's good to remember right is that 12 years ago it was just much harder to

like learn about things in general right it's like you know these like right now you know a week ago like I had no idea how the quadratic save algorithm worked and then I decided like hey I should learn this and then I asked AI to draw an SVG of it and then I looked at the SVG and I'm like oh wow okay now I know how it works right and like I think I actually know how it works and uh you know like like that kind of level problem is something that 10 years ago I would have like struggled with for days right and you know other examples would be like learning how any specific existing protocol on the internet works like learning how existing things work is always uh I think hard in that way right especially because they often tend

to express it in language that's like very unfamiliar to me right I mean cryptography is the worst you know cryptography papers basically all uh like are essenti written for people with the exact same kind of academic background that the authors themselves have and like I uh you know did not have that and like I find PDFs totally unreadable, right? And uh I think you know like half of my blog was basically born out of like feeling that frustration and wanting to reduce that for other people at least a bit. Um but uh now it's uh like much easier to you know like see all of these pieces of

what already exists to learn from them. Uh so I uh yeah it's like on the one hands you know I have a lot of like specific regrets but on the other hands I'm uh not sure what else like someone in my position really could have done. >> Makes a lot of sense. Uh Sat same for you like what do you think um the like what what have been like some lessons uh building all of these systems over the years and I also let you want to touch a little about about the systems because some of them that you have been involved with I think Aadhaar was probably a little before your time if correct me if I'm wrong but Aadhaar UPI are much more wellknown but what are some of like you were involved with a lot of like little

underrated DPI work as well uh at least not much well known to the public. So how was the process of building all of that and what were the lessons uh through that? >> Yeah. So I mean to to expand on DPI, DPI was really digital public infrastructure and it originated um as a thinking about 15 years back when we were initially starting off in India although now DPI has become a global phenomena and I saw that the recent Ethereum foundation post on on digital public infrastructure as well. But when we started the primary problem we were looking at is how do you think about inclusion in an extremely diverse country. So how do you think

about formalizing you know 1.3 billion people into the economy? Um and it started off with identity. You mentioned Aadhaar but I'll touch on something that might be relatively lesser known uh called Digilocker. Um how many of you have a Digi Locker wallet? a good 80% of the room right now fundamentally that uses cryptography what is in digil locker and so for me although I'm not a cryptographer what I've always been fascinated by is how cryptography of course has a security dimension to it but I'm more excited about the coordination dimension that it unlocks so let's look at digil locker as an example right it's a wallet everyone

has one uh you could imagine you know even tomorrow different applications that host these wallets. But inside your Digi Locker are over 9 billion credentials. These are digitally signed certificates of otherwise paper documents issued straight into your wallet. And the power of that because this then included credentials from state governments, central governments like your driver's license, mark sheets, now it goes no disability certificates, etc. uh allows you to then take that record and prove who you are, prove what other things you're eligible for to any other counterparty around the world

because you can just share that digitally assigned record and without anyone's permission because it's just a simple file. They can verify the properties of are you indeed who you claim you are? Are you matching the corresponding benefits outlined in this certificate? so on and so forth. So that fundamentally unlocked universality for how people prove themselves and now you can layer on you know zero knowledge proofs and so on from a privacy lens on top of it but that was an extremely powerful unlock. Yeah. H how did this how did this even come to be? like I want to touch a little bit about that because like one one big idea like I think we have a lot of people coming to India um this time especially for DevCon right a lot of them are like kind of

surprised by the contrast right it's a it's a it's a land of contradictions right on one hand we're talking about DPI and like these things which you know benefit a lot of uh humans on the other side like you know you go outside geo and like you you step into um a different neighborhood. It's it's it's not so nice, right? So like um we have this big contrast between how uncoordinated our physical infrastructure uh is and how well like I mean how our DPI is designed, right? And then like I mean sure you can argue that not all of the

DPI implementations are the same and the execution is um is is is um up to figure out like how exactly they were executed but certain design decisions of you know even especially diger the worker even Samati how did you come across that you like this consent basis is not a natural way of building right so you you'll You would like ideally if you want to build such systems you'd want like it's much easier to just take all of the data and like hold that right >> yeah no there was a lot of how do I put it um one you need to have extremely deep context about the environment you're operating in right and so in this

case because we were looking at it with the borders of India you you would imagine something very different if you imagine this cross border um and I'll come to that in a minute but when you think about it in India extreme levels of heterogeneity, extreme levels of diversity. It's very clear that there's no one application that can solve everyone's problem. So you straight away start thinking about networks. You straight away start thinking about universality. You straight away start thinking about how do you distribute the ability to solve these problems on the edges. So then what is the most minimal intervention we can do that allows multiple orders of ecosystems on top to solve the end problem for a user which

might be a specific type of interface that needs to be made available to them. And so when you look at it from that lens then when you think about Digilocker when you think about Somati when you think about UPI what it did is it allowed for an unbundling of the supply chain both on for example in the case of UPI you unbundled the merchant side. So we went from 3 million merchants that had digital payments uh to today over 60 million merchants that are enabled with digital payments. Same on the consumer side. You went from about 20 million people that were doing digital payments through credit cards to today over 500 million people that are doing digital payments uh bordering

almost about a billion transactions a day, right? And so a lot of if you look at the ecosystem to a user, yeah, someone might be using Phone Pay, someone uses Google Pay. So how do you think about interoperability? How do you think about competition very deeply? Um how do you think about evolvability? um a lot of these infrastructure projects have to last, you know, many decades into the future. So, how do you allow for evolution because it's very clear that whatever technology choice we make today, you're going to have something that's far better tomorrow.

So, how do you architect for that? Um, and how do you architect for optionality? Because we also don't know the future. So, then how do you give yourself options in the present? And so when we thought about a lot of these large scale systems, uh this thinking permeated both on the technology side but also on the policy side. I mean to make a lot of this work, it did require public authorities to believe in it. I mean the same reason if you look at why haven't credentials picked up around the world but picked up in India is primarily because then they also modified the law to legally recognize these digital objects as acceptable. And so I think there's a bit of this balance uh between both worlds that's critical

for population scale adoption. >> What would it take to put some of this infrastructure on Ethereum? And why would you Okay, first of all, is that a good idea? Why should you do it? Uh if if if any thoughts also from you uh uh Vitalik like is it a good idea to put like population level um ids or something on Ethereum and should people be doing it and if so what are the blockers or challenges right >> yeah I mean I think uh when you start uh putting the that kind of infrastructure and even anything related to identity on Ethereum you have to like like you

really wants to not start with the solution start sometimes not satisfy the goals or even make things worse from like a privacy standpoint for example right so I would start by asking the question of like what are specific examples of like security guarantees privacy guarantees maybe interoperability that you don't have right now that you could try to improve on right and then I think The answer sometimes will involve zero knowledge proofs. Sometimes it will involve putting things onto Ethereum possibly like hashes of of uh data instead of the actual data. Uh sometimes

uh it might involve doing some kind of like two-party computation. Um so you want to start with like take some use case, take some property of that use case that uh you're not satisfied with and then see how to improve it. Um and uh like any Ethereum integration and like also any kind of like cryptography integration should be based on that. >> Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So some of it we've actually already put on Ethereum. So for example, uh we realize that when you think about credentials, these digitally assigned files, you deal with a problem of revocation. So imagine I've issued you a driver's license, but now your driver's license is revoked. How do I know that

as a counterparty? Imagine a counterparty agent for example, how do I know it's revoked? And so we created something called the decentralized directory uh that we actually then work closely with the Linux Foundation on where we said public authorities both in India and around the world at least for public information like this entity is licensed by me because they'll revoke the license at some point or there'll be a state change should make those certificates available and then the hashes of that are committed to Ethereum. So that was dealing with public data making that verifiable and making those state changes verifiable.

Uh when you get to private data um is where you know you have to navigate this in a bit more nuanced way in terms of putting these private identities on on on a blockchain there. I think some of including the work that Vitalik's written about and and I know Jay and others have been working on like offiscation and some of these new primitives become very powerful to imagine private state behind these assets. Uh but I think the other part I mean a lot of these use cryptography but where I I've been excited about from a blockchain perspective is especially when it comes to settlements and the ability to unlock settlements um at scale around the world um is where

basically blockchains become natively very powerful. And so when you start to imagine those kinds of transactions uh then it becomes extremely obvious. But I think in that regard it's going to be um yeah I I think it's it's it's less at this point in time about institutions putting a lot of this um I think there's going to be new sources of demand. So for example tomorrow let's let's imagine a simple uh use case. Um we created an open network it's called the open network for digital commerce which is built on a peer-to-peer protocol called Beckin. And in that you can basically discover buyers and sellers across platforms. Now imagine I discover a a

seller but I trust it less. So what could I do? I could programmatically spin up an escrow. That escrow is nothing but a smart contract. Uh that could be on Ethereum. And now do I do that or does my app do that? Uh they could but there's just too much of complexity. Would my agent do that in the future? 100%. So I think this sort of interplay uh when it comes to many other types of coordination uh and then state changes of that coordination is where blockchains become quite powerful. >> That's super cool. Um in the meantime I just like to remind the audience that we can uh take in your questions through Mircat. You can like scan the QR code.

Uh but then I can see the questions here and basically it's a competition between if I find my own questions or your questions more interesting. Um but yeah uh that's where um that's at. Um and yeah I want to touch a little bit bit about uh what do you like u now like do you see like in my mind correct me if I'm wrong um like the plan is to largely oify uh things in a few years right um like postquantum to come soon uh like quantum to come soon privacy and um scale right uh what's like uh two-parter Right. So one is that how how do you think that the the oification

plans are going? How they're going and then okay like once you plan to oify all what what do you plan to do with the rest of your life? Yeah, I mean I think uh for at least a couple of years now know the set of things that we still want to do with uh Ethereum the protocol is definitely like stabilized more and more right and it's basically the lean road map right and uh I mean if I had to summarize the lean road map in three places I would say one is like security and especially you know postquantum and post AI two is scale and efficiency um and Uh, I mean insecurity I would also add privacy because to me privacy is a type of security, right? And three is

basically cleanup, right? Like basically taking all of the kind of ugly junk, all of the ways in which things are kind of needlessly far far from optimal in the protocol and just replacing things with the way that things would have been if we had uh designed them from scratch right now. Right? And uh I think once uh you know like those three uh are done then I mean I think you know we want to be always open-minded that there's always the possibility that something even better comes up but I I think the bulk of the attention starts to uh really shift much more toward the application layer kind of higher layers

building kind of frameworks to make it easier to build applications that you know like use some parts of Ethereum, some parts of other technology kind of crops software and hardware that kind of sits in other areas. So like I've been getting interested in like metadata, network layer privacy and things like mixets more for example. um figuring out I mean like on the uh finance side for example uh you know like are we really at the peak of where we can be in terms of uh you know like both functionality and security right um think like really taking seriously security of oracles um thinking about uh like will we even need

kind of the concept of an application once we sort of just have an open order book where anyone can make an order with a smart contract and everyone one else's agents can just read all the smart contracts and see which ones uh have terms that they um that they accept and uh like thinking around more of those kinds of uh very deep like application layer questions. >> Yeah. And for you Sid like what what does um you know things look like you know what what are your future plans um you know in in in the short term like in the in the longer term.

>> Yeah. One of the things we've started to do at at networks for humanity is to go back to the physical infrastructure piece that you mentioned first. So just a bit about what is networks humanity also since >> Yeah. So so networks for humanity is a is a global foundation that we set up uh primarily uh to build all sorts of open protocols and open networks. Uh these started off pre-agents. So these were you could imagine the nodes to be a lot more static and so some of these networks include uh Namayatri which is a peer-to-peer mobility network that's done over you know $250 million uh of funds going directly to drivers they discovered each other completely

decentralized uh the network on commerce open commerce the network for energy where basically um uh the entire grid uh changed its regulatory structure to allow for peer-to-peer transactions So a farmer in one village could sell their excess solar to let's say a manufacturer in another part of the country which was a big shift given the state level regulations and so we've been you know generally building a lot of these uh protocols and networks uh for a while but what we're now seeing one when you imagine a world with AI agents um and particularly the generative capabilities of agents means that they can generate these protocols on the fly And that's

extremely powerful. The second is uh we're leaning into this thesis of coordination logic over organizational logic. So you know traditionally when you think of solving problems you'd imagine it very organizationally like you know imagine even if you had to solve for payments I'll create a clearing house I'll create a settlement agency um I'll create people teams hierarchy and then solve for it. Um, Ethereum shows a completely different playbook based fundamentally on coordination, incentive design and you know other game theoretical mechanisms and cryptography. And I feel that when you start to imagine agents diffuse to the edges in all of our hands, then the ability for us to coordinate and become

nodes where not only are organizations important, but your ability to essentially the connections between these nodes become a lot more intelligent. In fact, uh the lines between the nodes could also be considered as nodes in a slightly meta way. uh completely will change the fabric of how products and services get built. And so what we are really leaning into over the next year um is building out like what would it mean for coordination logic to be fully embraced across whether I'm discovering a new drug uh or to cure a disease um or you're solving the biomass uh/crop burning problem in northern parts of

India um or you need to build a completely new nuclear reactor um how would you imagine you know if you'd imagine the full supply chain as a Rubik's cube and you have to imagine all the actors, all the approvals, all of that. I mean recently Anthropic acquired a one person biotech company. It would have been impossible before given regulatory approvals, testing, target design, mechanism design. It was literally one person, right? Um and so I think that offers a bit of a peak into where the future is going. And so we're really focused on building the underlying substrate uh that would make this happen.

some very interesting questions here but I'd like to uh reframe probably just some of them like one is that around uh with AI right like now uh earlier in a in a lot of ways the centralization mapping or the vectors that you had to do was very onetoone but now with the ability to for for immense agents right you don't really know how many agents are under control of like how many people right so do you think see as like a another centralization vector. So if you like let's say like you know are you worried about that for Ethereum that that at least lead to uh more sort of control or centralization some ways of

on the user level >> you I mean it can be I mean I don't think uh that issue was kind of specific to Ethereum more than to anything else. I mean I do think that you know there's many applications on Ethereum where you really need to know the difference between like a thousand different actors and like a thousand puppets of one actor right and uh I think in those cases you know we do need some kind of solution and there's a lot of be been people working on that problem for I think quite a few years now um I mean otherwise uh I mean the possibility that like a few people will have like much

more power because you can have very small teams that run huge fleets of agents. I mean it's a it's a huge problem everywhere, right? I mean it's a a problem with like just individuals. It's a problem with corporations. It's a problem, you know, like even with governments that you could have like basically, you know, like an entire military controlled by like four or five people and their keys and if they wanted to, they could uh suddenly make a decision and like literally nobody else would have the power to stop them and like even the robots would not disobey them, right? So I see that as like a much more of a a big picture human problem. And I think you know within Ethereum we need to like find solutions

to like parts of that problem where we can but I mean there's also limits to how much Ethereum itself can do. >> Perfect. Uh now I have a bevy of questions to choose from but unfortunately we are almost at time. Um, so what I'm going to do is I'm I'm definitely going to like collect all of these questions and send them over to both Vitalik and um, you know, um, Sudhhat and and in their own time they can like probably choose to uh, get back on that you know just like maybe uh, tweet or cast your thoughts out uh, whenever you can. um on these um specifically I wanted to touch a little

bit on like DAC and like why is it important for you? Anything interesting that you have seen from an India perspective that would be interesting for Indians uh in a local context. I mean actually India has been uh participating in the bio side of DAX um a huge amount already right so from popvax which is like one of the big open- source vaccine efforts right so like Balv funded that a few years ago and uh like that's uh like entering like very serious trials right now and uh he presented yesterday right and also a lot of work on things like air filtering a

lot of work on like very lowcost open-source hardware. Um I mean in general I think uh on the bio side India is like great at uh bas doing like very very meaningful and like and uh effective things at like basically 10 times lower cost than you know you might get from something like a US company and that's like something that you know like we've seen in our biodac efforts so far. Um so I think that's been great. Um and then uh I mean like to me a big part of this is that the bio parts you know and the software parts and the hardware parts like are going to converge more and more over time right because uh you know if you want to like properly have a

high standard of uh you know like health and biological safety and all of those things like you do need to collect data you do need to like do things with data and uh there's a question of how to do that while preserving privacy And uh you know like being sure that like giving people the assurance that you're only collecting the data for that purpose and uh like having good kind of verifiable hardware and like having good cryptography are both uh really big parts of that right and uh you know we've been seeing more and more people working on that. So like I really hope all of those threads continue to converge.

>> That's good. Uh and yeah like just for you um Sedat like one is like I am assuming you're like first of all are you optimistic about like India and uh India's ability to you know um build for itself right in the future and um if you if if so are you optimistic on India and uh what makes you so >> yeah so so I'm I'm eternally optimistic Um and and so the way I look at it is is actually a a great opportunity to leapfrog. Um I think particularly um if we look at it in an India context uh we have suffered from massive

capability gaps uh when it comes to healthcare when it comes to education when it comes to you know sector after sector uh they're just enormous capability gaps that you could never scale the traditional way of you know create more institutions uh train more people diffuse those trained people into society um and so I think fundamentally there's an extremely ly large market uh to really reimagine how do we diffuse all of the best healthcare, the best education uh completely to the edges and um you could now imagine a world where we 3D print industries. I mean if you fundamentally take the notion of

coordination logic extremely seriously um and you think about how you know innovation happens where fundamentally unless it's constrained by the laws of physics it's largely constrained by our lack of understanding our lack of knowledge that's that's basically the biggest limiting factor and if you create an ecosystem that has sufficient amount of competition on one end and cooperation on another um you can actually solve most problems that are there um and India is a great test bed for that. So I'm actually extremely optimistic. I think particularly even the work on the bio side uh the stuff that can happen. I mean basically we can we can 3D print completely new industries of the future and the fact

that there's no legacy is actually a great um great step to make uh much like there was no legacy in other areas on uh payments and credentials and data sharing. >> Yeah. and like um any advice for like probably the next uh Sithhat you know to to who's who's trying to break into the space because I I know you broke into the space quite early had a very unconventional journey into this um where I'm coming from is that like I think we need smart people to build all of these infrastructure things for for for the next generation um but at the same time in India we are plagued with like a lot of like uh not so competent

people making a lot of decisions including things involving certificates, certificate authorities that affect a lot of people around the world, right? Um so how did you like I mean not to judge too much about your journey but like any advice you have for somebody very young trying to uh influence at a big scale. >> Yeah, so I mean my my background is extremely simple. I dropped out of high school, grew up in Goa. So, you know, there's no reason for me to be here or uh doing a lot of the work that I've been doing over the last 10 years. Uh but I think if you look for a reason, it primarily comes down to u belief and a sense of what I would call uh pragmat pragmatic idealism. Um and I think

that's extremely important. So, if you take the case and point you're mentioning, yes, there are lots of problems. You'll have enough of opposition. uh there'll be a lot of incumbents that don't want things to happen. Um and so I think it's about being very smart around how do you first acknowledge what the ground reality is. I mean we can't live completely in the future oblivious to the ground reality if you want to make change happen. But once you've acknowledged that ground reality um howsoever bad that might be uh you'll generally find champions um on the other end. And that's what we found.

If you have a mission that's big enough and if you play a long-term game, I mean, a lot of what we do has a multi-deade view to it, then it's okay. You'll find one or two people that are ready to make that change and then you go in and, you know, very surgically make that change happen and and that's about it. I mean um whether you imagine regulatory reform and legislative reform uh whether you imagine uh you know a whole new set of technologies that have to be created uh fundamentally it comes down from to belief and are you willing to stay the course makes a lot of sense. Um yeah, I think we're at the final leg and uh yeah uh Vitalic I just want to ask you like I I think I touched upon this earlier but

like what's the plan after after Ethereum like after most of the oification uh are you are you looking to uh in a new career with like either sci-fi novelist or like what's the plan? No, I think uh you know Ethereum will always continue right and uh you know even if there's nothing on the protocol layer there's uh more and more in applications and otherwise like basically keep kind of filling out the you know the deact tree and uh keep uh like doing the things that need to be done to you know make a more you know secure open and verifiable world >> and yeah like last time you came uh over to India we saw or a picture of you with

a dosa. Uh what are you looking forward to trying this time? >> You tell me what do you recommend I try? >> Any recommendations? >> Vada. >> Vapa. >> Vapa. Okay. Okay. >> That's where we are at. So, uh we need a picture of you with a vada for proof. Uh that's how we'll really believe that uh endorsed by you. Yeah. >> Yeah. No, before we wrap up, I I just wanted to, you know, uh have the room acknowledge the enormous effort Denver that you've put in. I mean, you've been such an important bridge to the Ethereum ecosystem and I I believe you you need a complete ovation. Thank you.

So, both to you and the entire DeFoldio team. >> Appreciate it. >> Yeah, we've taken a long road to get here and yeah, couldn't be happier to have uh you folks along for the journey. Thank you. And um that's it for today. I will um as promised I will send over all your questions.