DAPPCON 2025: H.O.P.E. Reclaiming Ethereum's Future - Florian Glatz

Transcript

Thank you. Hi everybody. Thanks for showing up at this early hour. Um yeah, so I was asked to talk about whatever I want and um the reason was that about a year ago I held a talk at the Ethereum 10-year Jubilee meetup where I was not all too positive all the time about you know Ethereum from a good place obviously and so I guess um I'm invited to just share my thoughts on you know what I how I see what's happening.

I hope it's interesting. So it starts with a little bit of history. Being in crypto used to be really simple. Uh at least when you joined early uh you would just go to local Bitcoin and Ethereum meetups to find other lost souls who had really no you know desire to have a normal job. And um it was really a unique experience. I just shared two photos here. One uh literally on the day the network launched we had this big rainbow on the sky over Berlin. That was kind of cool. And then shortly thereafter uh there I was on an Ethereum meetup and funny enough uh Minehard who's standing there in front of the network dashboard of Ethereum now sits here in the first row.

So that's very cool. Hi Minehard. He was you were the leading miner I think on the Ethereum network back then for like a few weeks. Um so it was simple to be in crypto because there was no moral implications I feel at all of doing this. It was a nerdy hobby and I feel this has changed and I want to just sort of uh linger a little bit on how it's different now to be in crypto and um I feel there are more ways than ever to do harm when you touch this technology and um you know to some extent you should be able to harm yourself when you touch crypto because you're only truly free if you can hurt yourself in you know in whatever you do.

But I think what none of us really had uh you know uh on the uh on the radar is the fact that just by swapping tokens on base or you know using Coinbase to cash out, you're now paying for a military parade in the United States, right? Um that's kind of weird. I didn't expect this to happen and uh obviously there's probably a lot of context why Coinbase did it but uh in the end they still decided to sponsor a military parade and I just remember how there was an ethos in crypto that was like universally shared which is like we don't like physical violence and the the monopoly on violence by the by the state. So uh

pretty awkward. Um now I want to raise the question how can we reclaim Ethereum's future and uh I just want to say uh off the bat that I don't have any answers either. I don't really know but uh I have some opinions like probably most of you and so uh you know I'm going to share them. Uh since I think since I started this space everything was always very technical. I tried to condense it into a formula uh what I think Ethereum could use more of instead of less for the next 10 years and uh I sort of condensed it into humility, openness and plurality. And I just want to share what I think these

words could mean here. Starting with uh humility. Um the reason I got I think oneshotted by Ethereum back in I think 2014 when I heard about it was really vital's um epistemic framework that he developed in his blog posts. It just totally blew my mind how differently you can look at the world and understand things, understand uh causal connections between things, be it in finance, philosophy, how the internet works, accounting, like he was able to synthesize things in new ways that created genuinely new explanations for why the world is how it

is and where we should go. And um today I feel we kind of forgot a lot of that and we're like in this to me low IQ range of like fighting about cipher punk and DeFi punk and the current thing punk and I'm like what the is even cipher punk? Like is it even a good ideology to adopt? I mean I don't know. I'm not a historian on cipher punk but when I read you know my Twitter feed it's everybody's saying yeah Ethereum be should be more cippher punk again or now it should be DeFi punk. It's like what the is this even? You know, and uh the best I think um epistemic framework that I found in my I guess you know 40

years of being on this planet is what's being referred to as fallibilism or a fallibilist mindset. Uh I stumbled upon it through David Deutsch, a really great philosopher and and physicist. He co-invented quantum computing in the 80s and um it's the idea that you can be infinitely optimistic in this world just by virtue of the fact that errors are discoverable and fixable over time. So just as much as problems are inevitable, so are solutions provided that criticism uh stays free and knowledge remains conjectural.

Meaning as long as we stay immune to any kind of ideology, be it you know socialist or fascist or cipher punk or this punk but we just stay epistemologically humble. Uh we can solve every problem that comes our way in this industry. And uh I don't understand why we need to play this stupid game of you know trading one ideology for another. I I just don't understand it. Um, next one, openness. Uh, obviously Ethereum is an open network. I think Ethereum is, you know, one of the most open infrastructures you can find on the web to build on. Obviously, that's its premise. At the same time I feel over

the last 10 years we've acquired some sort of neo institutional rot throughout the industry which is means like this layer of professional careerists and middle managers who just gatekeep things I think in this ecosystem. So um I don't want to you know go too deep into this because it's a complex topic and to some extent unavoidable but I feel we have too much gatekeeping in Ethereum and I think that might be part of the reason why other ecosystems seem to be accelerating faster at the moment because maybe there's less gatekeeping in other places. Um just putting that one out there.

And lastly um plurality. uh this is something that uh sort of has been with me lingering with me now for a while and obviously there are books about plurality and I'm far from an expert on this philosophical stream of of plurality and so on but I do think it's important I want to mention it here um here's a picture of David Clark there's this famous interview I think from 2012 or 14 or I don't know he's being interviewed on Bitcoin and in this short segment he says well you You know what I learned as the designer of TCP IP is that all things that we think of as specifiable or technically constrained very quickly

end up embedded in a social ecosystem which in some sense defies the simplicity of the protocol that you've designed. And I feel in crypto and Ethereum maybe specifically we've always had this expectation that just by virtue of designing a simple protocol that has you know some incentives maybe well aligned we now solved you know the real problem of rolling this out into the world and we have not and I feel Ethereum if anything should become more embedded in the world um and you know adopt a more pluralist mindset and not be so dogmatic which goes back to this epistemic humility um about you know well is it fully

decentralized is it not fully decentralized does it follow this current dogma or that current dogma I feel this has been holding us back now for too long and uh I think we should be more open to uh various ways of doing things so that leads me to this Ethereum slide which sort of looking back obviously it's not a correct or the only way to look at the last 10 years but I feel that in the early years 2013 to 17 we really rewarded the early believers in this idea of a new settlement layer decentralized open permissionless and programmable tour incomplete right that was the one differentiating factor to bitcoin uh in 2018 we rewarded the early

you know defy plumbers laying the financial pipes to make it possible to swap the tokens to take out loans all that stuff afterwards we rewarded And I think most recently we've seen it with stablecoin issuers. The people who really believe that we should bring fiat on chain and stocks on chain and securities and all the stuff. I feel these people are being rewarded now. And the open question is well who will be rewarded next? What do we want to see in this ecosystem uh develop more of? And um I feel that if we blindly follow down this, you know, cyher punk, cipher punk, cipher punk uh stuff, I'm not sure we're we're making the right decisions. Um

because at least, you know, and that's probably very debatable, but this idea of, you know, trust no one, verify everything, only trust in the numbers might lead us to build a low trust society as opposed to a high trust society. But I think we're all much happier as humans in high trust societies. And there is this paradox in crypto where if you have a high trust society, you probably don't need a decentralized ledger in the first place, right? You could do it, right? You could count stones uh like like people did it thousands of years ago instead of, you know, having hanging some ledger in the cloud. uh paradoxically I think the well the way the world is developing we need

to develop infrastructure where you don't have to trust no one but I don't I'm not sure it's a good north star to have culturally and you know philosophically in terms of what kind of society do we build so I feel the opposite of trust no one is build bridges and um I feel Ethereum needs to build more bridges personally I've been a bridge builder in this space now for 10 is and uh it's been fun and frustrating. Uh the first you know bridge building I've started doing was back in 2017 when I founded I think the first uh crypto lobby organization in in Europe. I mean it was in Germany at the time and then a couple of years later I

founded with other great uh people uh here in Europe the first I think community you know focused uh crypto lobby organization in Europe uh in Brussels called the European crypto initiative EOCI and uh we've been building bridges to regulators where you know most people in the space think it's not worth talking to regulators we've been educating them on DeFi and you know giving like You spend thousands of hours in calls and meetings with regulators explaining them why what we do matters and why there is some deep moral truth and justification in what we do like some inherent goodness that this world needs to sort of move move forward. And

you know with this kind of signaling we are able to reach people far beyond uh you know sort of of what we should be able to to reach an impact which is great. Um and lastly, sorry for shilling my my projects now, I suppose, but that's, you know, an example of what I consider bridge building, uh is um a web 3 social application that I've been now developing for over 3 years called common ground. Uh and the idea of common ground again is to bring you know people from all over the not just crypto space but kind of the web 3 space uh together on you know in one environment in in their own communities and be able to you

know collaborate better exchange knowledge and retain knowledge better and so on so forth. Um I feel building bridges in Ethereum has been a pretty you know ungrateful job for the last decade. I don't want to complain, but I think there wasn't too much support. Um, I think now might be the time where we want to, you know, spread our aperture, make it bigger and and and bring, you know, more attention to these kinds of efforts too, not just the technical development. That's uh pretty much everything I wanted to share in this uh little talk.

Thank you very much for listening and happy to answer any questions if you might have them. Thanks. Thank you, Florian, for your provocative talk. And any questions right here down in front? Sure. Just here's your microphone. Hey, Florian, thanks for the shout out. Um, so do you think you moved the needle on regulation or did you just kind of spend a lot of time and they were like, "Thanks, but we'll do it the other way." Actually, yeah, we did move the the needle a lot.

Um let me pick two examples. I think the biggest one is that we managed to exempt decentralized finance so Dows uh decentralized protocols like Ave and so on to exempt them from this regulatory burden of this European regulation called Mika that entered into force earlier this year. There is a a paragraph in their recital 22. It's not even a real uh paragraph in the text. It's like preemptive exclusion that says well if your project is not um operated in a centralized way but fully decentralized you can ignore this entire regulation and continue

doing what you do in this sort of illegal space as Kevin Wood called it and that's kind of ridiculous that we achieved this uh to me because uh I mean crazy so yeah when I think write those lines. Pardon me. Who wrote those lines? So, um I wrote a long report on how this came into the final text. Um the suggestion came through the Portuguese um team inside the council. But then how did the Portugu So there is a long chain of causality how to find that? But um I would love to actually share this. I I've long thought that crypto should have some sort of, you know, retro PGF,

but for public policy impact. Um, frankly, we were told that this would not be a good idea because that would make political outcomes sort of purchasable or sort of like monetize them. I understand that viewpoint, too. So, I don't really know how to solve this, but yeah, thanks for asking that question. That's a great question. Yeah. Other questions for Floren? One of my favorite aspects of Ethereum culture is its willingness to critique itself. So, thank you so much for your great talk and please a round of applause for Florian.

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