Ethereum Development in China: Myths and Realities

Transcript

i think we can get started all right uh good to see you guys um yeah has been a dear friend for a long time and we i don't think we've ever met just like chatting on wechat team i don't think we've met either my days are concerned but you've done so much work at the ethereum foundation i've been a distant follower for a while so good to see you both yeah thanks for having me awesome so um just to the audience i think today we're discussing um ethereum development in china i just took the liberty and create a catchy title myth and reality but i think the really the

purpose is to you can say we're bridging cultural differences but it's more like what are the things what are the misconceptions that we think are true in the other geography region that is actually not true and then more importantly how do we bridge the difference and how we can work together i think at the end of the day we're all here for for the same reason right i think the more communication we have the better outcome it is uh that's just the truth um to to start with let's do a round of introduction um i'm going to start with myself first um hey guys i'm trial i work at consensus i also run a column with a decrypt uh it's called dabbing

for those who don't know dabbing is uh it means a chinese pancake and it's a nickname for bitcoin among the chinese crypto community i think it's just kind of cute um and then um so i covered mainly china news and just provided my own analysis in two cents um let's hear from the panelists uh yao do you want to do an intro yeah thanks sure yeah thanks for having having me here my name is yoshiang i'm the founder of primitive slang which is a non-profit research institute in china before that i was doing blockchain research for

financial institution and after that i joined a startup on the research and development of our country wallets the story between ethereum and i can date back to 2015. i heard this german red white paper and on the on october i listened to vitalik speech in shanghai at the first weinstein blockchain summit um now i'm a researcher focusing on the fundamental issues some blockchain area such as account abstraction smart control wallets their knowledge tech and threshold signatures and so on and also

i'm a lawyer audience of all cardiac meetings and fit for leader of rnd discord channels so yeah i'm quite familiar with your image and your voice yeah i want to uh briefly introduce preventive slang it has been organizing in-person stamina for more than a year and sure is aware of it talking about basic and important issues around blockchain area for example last month we held a seminar to talk about the changes that london operate will bring besides it attracts researchers to do basic frontier research by giving them support we will

publish some several outcomes soon including research on uh guest token and the brief history of difficulty um uh primitive lane is also a member together with which gathering israel ethereum communities to have a better understanding of each ot each other to know what other communities do and to host the meetups hacksaws and seminars together uh that's it thank you yeah so um i'm tim baco i work with the ethereum foundation now the main thing i do is i run the aqua devs called which is the

call where the different uh developers for ethereum get together and discuss changes to the protocol um prior to that i spent uh about three years at consensus working on their client team um so there i was a product manager working on the hybrid ledger u client which is consensus's ethereum client [Music] awesome welcome both um you i mean you've both done so much work for the ecosystem and i think the conversation today is really much conversational than you know strict answers so feel free to chime in talk to each other you know the rule um so i think a good way to start the communication is

um this is this one is probably to our chinese audience maybe to the western one as well um it's a question to tim uh i'm just really curious like as a core dev what are some of the conceptions perceptions that western or international east developer communities half of the chinese developer community and then i would love to hear what yao thinks about those conceptions whether they are true or not yeah i think the biggest i guess uh conception is just uh that there is like a gap right um and there's a few reasons i think for that gap uh the first is obviously you know talking in english

right like a large part of the chinese community speaks chinese obviously uh and and this is true not just of china but like of a lot of regions um and you know a lot of people have mentioned to me they maybe don't engage as much as they can because like english is not their first language uh again this is true outside of china as well so i think you know there's been some efforts by like the broader ethereum community to improve there like i think ethereum.org is is like really good in that respect but um at the core protocol level it's true that most stuff actually happens in english and if that's like a barrier uh that's you know that's not ideal i think the time zone so for example the actual core developer calls uh happen at the fact that there's always gonna be

time zones for who it doesn't work we tried really rotating the times in the past it didn't work quite well um but the time right now is is quite bad for china um you know and there are developers actually working on on on some teams that are based in asia and they just don't join the calls because of that um and um yeah i i i think there's also like the the platforms and the mediums of communications sometimes vary like for example we host the calls on youtube and you know you basically need a vpn to access it uh in china um and again there's some organizations that do a great job of like transcribing the notes and whatnot but um

yeah it's it's it's a it's a hard like there's a few things that that kind of create this gap and and um yeah it's it's it's it can be hard sometimes to have as much uh interactions with the chinese part of the community as we like yeah um thanks team and and i totally agree what you said and about the the gap um that is that are caused by uh the language various and the jet lag also you mentioned about the

the vpns so um maybe let me try to introduce some some developers in china and what they are doing um i think the the depths are layered so so there are many kinds of types of depths yeah they they have different behaviors uh you you basically you can regard them as a whole entity so um there are some researchers uh researchers they they are doing research on both

cryptography underlying protocol and also some are doing well in the innovation of application and also there are some programmers some of them are doing blockchain related development and some some are focusing on the product and also um there are some good startups there i like to do and some are building layer 2 solution yeah and also some there are some publishers and

whether they believe blockchain or not and they they they earn money from the the system and also there are some retail traders yeah they they may have full-time job but they are unrelated with blockchain but they they they they join us the ecosystem to find uh financial reward so uh for me i i'm trying to gather the researchers the programmer programmers and also the [Music] core member of the startups and we we joined together to talk about

the innovation of blockchain especially for our ethereum ecosystem yeah um that's super interesting i think tmi i really agree with you somehow i think what my what i'm doing is i'll be charging language because i'm on wechat all the time seeing all this information and translate or interpreting to the western audience i think language is a difference but i also think the way community or developer communities are built very different so i don't know if you can both of you can talk about the flavors in developer community that's maybe the same or different how they're diff operating so i i really have a bad view of the china developer

community so i'd be curious to hear from the two of you why like how do you think it's different yeah that would be really helpful for me to understand um so we are talking about the the developer community yeah yeah yes yes like spirits and flavors and things that we do just like pretty different from the western ones yeah the chinese like too and we i'm not not talking about all of the chinese people but most of them are they they would like to use wechat to

to to to talk about uh issues so but but we is not our open system which means that uh people out of the out of wechat if you are not in your in this small group you cannot see what they are talking about that's quite different from reddit or some perform or discord so so i i'm a word i'm i'm watching uh the the if r d discord channel all day all day long but

if you are if you were you wanted to know what our chinese developers are talking about it is it's impossible because you are not in the witcher group so i think that this is our major difference and and also um i think uh yeah we are talking about mostly uh following the the updates of of uh of the communities but maybe you guys would dig into the problem to find out uh what really happens i i i want to

mention just maybe yeah maybe two or three hours ago about the the transmission issue yeah and the chinese the chinese communities they're talking about the issue but if you guys know uh what exactly happens but we try to let people know what what uh what is wrong and what they should do that's i think that's a that's my role or responsibility to to help people to have chinese and development communities maybe one thing that's interesting with like the western community is we really

see it uh separated at like the different levels of the protocol and i don't know if this is also true in china like you know there's a lot of core developers and then there's like tooling providers and there's you know application developers and there's not like a ton of overlap like obviously they talk to each other kind of like when they have to but it's like they're you could spend all your time in just one of those circles and like never leave and you know there's there's like a ton to engage with so yeah that's one thing that's like kind of interesting where ethereum has grown so big now that like you know like for example i work on the protocol and like i have no idea what's happening in nfts right like there's like a massive nfc community on ethereum um and like i

you know i i don't feel like i i i know a lot i know that it's happening but like i'm definitely not like an insider of that community right um so it's it's it's really interesting how how much it's grown and evolved over the time yeah yeah uh it's true so so it's it's a huge ecosystem and nobody can know uh all the things you know uh they they only focus on what they are what they like or what they are maybe yeah yeah maybe they are good at uh with dealing with some some some uh protocol level or application level or some guys are

good at cryptography um i'm not that um i'm not that confident but maybe in chinese community people are more uh concerned about the the development of publication and also of of what uh the innovation of products i think most people are are concerned about that and for protocol level there are few uh a few guys they are trying to get in engaged in it but

what you said and just now there are some barriers so so so people need to to get together they need to get together to talk about how to how to uh know the yeah how to to improve their understanding of the protocol then i think i think that's very important i think that's important for uh if you are a startup for that suppose you are building your decks you need to know what happens on level that's very important so

yeah i think maybe there will be or we need some connections and also we can help help host some seminars or workshops people know what what will happen when the protocol changes that that it doesn't mean that the the the developers for for application level they they needed to know all the details of the protocol they need to know what is what's uh what's the the influence that that protocol change will cost to them

yeah and i think oh go ahead oh i was just gonna say i think uh you know it's true we we definitely need to um we we definitely need to like inform people and have better ways to talk about changes to the protocol we actually tried this uh i did an ama on telegram with the chinese community a few weeks ago um and you know i'm i'm happy to do more so if you know if there's part ways that you know i can just go and like talk with you all uh please reach out and and i'm always happy to do it like and we we already have a lot of speech yeah we're going to have a lot of big changes in the coming months with the

merge and moving to proof of stake and whatnot so um yeah just paid me and i'll do as many amas or or talks or you know and conferences like this i think they're really yeah yeah share the knowledge yeah tim you're welcome and also i'm i'm happy i would be happy to help you too to communicate with chinese communities so i think what i'm hearing is just to summarize a bit is um it's actually quite similar uh i think the two um developer community just i think in different region is that you would have people who are extremely interested in the protocol the technology layer you have people who are

a more the application layer you have people who love to run the community you have people who are great at ui ux design um i think what what's happening in china and yeah please correct me if i were wrong is i think there's so much chinese fat and then chinese uh misconception people think that uh you know china used to be a way more engaged in the ethereum community and now there are different l ones coming up um and then maybe uh chinese are way more interesting the application layer than the protocol layer and i'm curious yeah are you seeing any differences over the years do you think that we're just gonna continue trajectory i know you and a bunch of researchers are making huge

differences especially i think some of the ogs from the old you know mining community who will continue um i mean just crypto has such a deep history in china right like what differences are you seeing over the years and what kind of do you predict going forward oh yeah thanks i i want to do any prediction because things change too fast uh i i may mention some facts we we we must emphasize uh so maybe china has a you know special environment that that means uh i think the the the uncertainty of

policy that is uh is the advantage uh for for attracting people to to join the uh streaming community are the broader blockchain communities and also the prosperity of internet innovation so so the programs to the developers they they can earn a good good uh they can earn group they get rewarded uh i from the from the development of internet in internet industry so so cryptos it seems not that you know

uh attractive for them and also they need they have a stretch stressful life yeah so so i i think for for them for many elites and they script is not the the first uh option for them to uh to fight for and also um and i i want to mention her uh her finding that that is from from from a guy in um token he said um since it's too easy to to

get funded i mean i mean there are many crypto ventures they they so so the elites so the elites they are scattered in different teams you know so so um so so so great people are um they cannot get together in a a big group to for for uh for for product or for protocol so so that may be our uh some i think it's it's different the different facts that china have and also uh no need to mention about the

the language about the japanese i i remember last month i'm i'm having a world team to um to to to to help them to translate to i'm the translator i'm the translator they built their wallet uh code of what is mean to be uh audited by our biosecurity but they are not very good in english so i needed to help them to to get uh get touched with the security team so i think i think that that are but the difference comes from the

spec special environment comes from the the this the disconnection with with uh global comes from the the personalities some some some sometimes in china they are introverted and they they they don't like to [Music] express them you know they they are mostly they are they they are silent so maybe i have a question for tim so i i want to know how our devs around the world do especially for non-uh

non-english uh countries and what does a german foundation do to encourage diversity yeah so i think we we we do a fair a lot a fair amount like you know translating resources and you know making sure that there's like onboarding stuff accessible especially for the application layer in like as many languages as we can um i think we also have a lot of people working on different projects and whatnot across you know north america europe uh south america and and those regions just like naturally are easier to uh to kind of reach out to because you know

we there is a presence there um yeah and and i mean we're always kind of looking for for more more things we can do right like different communities within ethereum will do different we'll have different initiatives but if there's things you know that that people feel we we should do um that are that are you know relatively doable we we we will definitely um yeah consider them so yeah there's no like one answer i think just because it's just like such a diverse community that it's really hard to uh yeah to say exactly like you know what um yeah

what the initiatives are yes hopefully hopefully that makes sense yeah thanks thanks that makes sense and also i i see all your uh efforts on the maybe the the global global globalization of the documents of the of the application documents and uh yeah and and um that's that's the um information from from the foundation to to different areas but how can a smooth condition uh

how can can you to know what really happens in different countries and as just as true i mentioned uh maybe there are some understandings so i think it's just by having people there right like and having people plugged into those communities like the maybe what this is one thing people probably um people probably uh misunderstand about the ethereum foundation is this like it's not really like a top-down organization right like there's a bunch of different teams that the initiatives and people work on those um but yeah like there's there's no you know there's no say global outreach effort uh

you know i say i'm in canada and you know i i obviously interact with like a lot of the community here um and we have different people in different parts of the world that do the same uh so i think you know that's just like one thing we need to keep doing is being diverse in the the countries uh and backgrounds we hire from um because that's kind of how it naturally ripples out right um yeah and for example you know like uh i'll give a shout out to xiaowei like she's from taipei and on the research team and i think she she's really helped bridge a lot of gaps with you know different parts of the asian community and just having her on board like her her job is not she's not like a community representative or anything right like

she's a researcher but she's just by virtue of being there she's really helped bridge that gap so you know and maybe one one other way to put this if you are listening to this and like you know you want to get involved in ethereum and you know you you want to contribute like paid me twitter is the best um yeah and and we definitely are looking for like good people all around the world um even you know it's not for the ethereum foundation there's a ton of projects that are looking so i'll be happy to you know find a project and put you in touch with them um yeah because i think that's how we do it we just need to grow the community i think that's i'm not really spot on and thank you young y'all for asking

that question you know like i think for most chinese we grew just the environment we grew up in any organization is inherently hierarchical it's by that we are working crypto and everything is supposed to be flat i think a lot of just to debrief that myth even of what ethereum foundation is to the chinese community uh is extremely important and that has not been done very well i don't know yeah if you agree like i don't think a lot of people know what ef does in china people just think it's an org heart people do stuff and people don't know that hey i can be part of it too yeah right and i think maybe there is like yeah the ef doesn't really do things you know it doesn't like do

things in europe like we organized devcon right and defcon was in china uh uh earlier and it was in japan a couple years ago too so we'll probably not go back to china until we've done a lot of different places uh to go everywhere um but but like aside from devcon the ef doesn't really do like community outreach or whatnot like well support we give a lot of grants the people who do like there is i forget the name but there is like there are a couple china teams you know that do community uh and i expect edcon is one of them but we do give grants um and sponsorships so yeah we feel it's it's better to have you know different community members lead

those efforts than the ef trying to do it top down because the world is a really big place and we we can't like own all of that yeah yep that's great uh just when you guys were talking one thing that just came to my mind um you know how i think the whole crypto community is constructed around memes what are some of the i don't know ethereum dev memes in in china what are some of the memes in the global east serum community i don't know just random questions throughout to you guys because memes are important yeah means important um maybe it came first

yeah like they are i feel like the word meme has been like very uh uh abused in a way where like it's it's used to basically describe anything viral um you know i i think what's special about the ethereum community is not just like specific memes and we we have ton of them but there is like this feeling of you know being part of something and trying to build you know better institutions better applications and and not only being able to build those applications but maybe to shape how they will be built and um and that this is still kind of a early project like you know relative to the the impact that it can have um

and there's something special there that i have a hard time putting into words that like makes me want to work on ethereum rather than you know a bunch of other things i could work on um and and i think that's true for a lot of people so i'm yeah i'm not quite sure memes is just it it's definitely a part of it but it feels like there's something kind of you know deeper and more important that really drives people to ethereum and also that drives a lot of people to stand a long time right like we had a lot we have a lot of contributors and applications who've been here for you know five years or more now and like in blockchain time that's that's really really long so yeah that's that's my thoughts on it it's like a meta mask yeah yeah metamask is the og for sure

so yeah what do you think what are the the the memes or unite the actually it's just like i think this is perhaps my brother is like what brings people right the developers to the ethereum community um i i can't remember i remember a song called your idea [Music] remember that song you were breaking off a bit sorry we can't hear you yeah yeah is it you can you hear me yes okay okay yeah yeah i i i just remember a song called uh bu idr maybe in defcon 5 in osaka

and i think it's a good meme for for the devs yeah yeah dude did you say like the dev khan in osaka was a good meme for this i i i remember a song just the name of the song is b-u-i-d-r yes the yes the bedol bridal song yeah now we're getting really hungry oh the build yeah my autocorrect won't let me spell it but yeah um but but yeah i think just going back to the original question i mean there are some there are there are uh you know on wechat we have

all the emojis um so what really unites what are the the things that draw like for example like in the in the crypto nft community we're seeing like for example mao dao right yeah very strong right like a really strong community um what about uh the devs um i i think the devs they they they they don't have much time to talk in whichever so maybe it's it's better to to create some memes to create some emojis

for them to [Music] to to improve the the uh understanding of the museum culture i absolutely love it i think that really that's why i'm not a researcher and you are um all right cool so we have 10 or nine minutes left i i want i do want to you know bring that things a bit down to to something more concrete so what are the implications right how the difference of similarity and what are your advice to people who want to build um to have a better understand of of the

chinese developer community investors builders projects marketeers what are your advices may you start from yao first okay thanks sharia i think the maybe the most important thing is to we can do something to mitigate the information gap uh for example can uh periodically sync with others so invite chinese team to join community course or and also we can invite credits to join seminars in china and that's a jewish each other to invite each other and also

we can organize some workshops and seminars together issue driven and also communicate equally and also we we i i'm running the primitives and we have some brands for public research projects and i think the the the codefs and can give some kind of guidance and also we can cool research and also uh yeah i wanted to uh mention about the the incentive gas hot fix issue and we can help to

spread the news immediately and also to inform the the uh the imports such as finance first and also uh maybe yesterday at the end of andrew they are they they do not recognize their notes uh immediately so i think we can do a lot of things together yeah yeah i i agree with that i think one thing i'll say too is like you know if if you're if you feel like intimidated or like unsure about engaging please do like you know there are a lot of people

who participate who are not native english speakers whether from china or from elsewhere there's actually a ton of russians involved in core development and you know like a lot of them don't speak english as their first language and like it's fine you know basically 90 plus percent of the world doesn't speak english as their first language nobody will will like you know make you feel bad for it um and also like you know find some problems that that you you find interesting right there's so many things to fix on ethereum from like the core protocol all the way to building new applications um so like if you find something that that really excites you you know i i think you shouldn't assume that

there's somebody smarter than you that's already like solve this problem like most things are are pretty broken and still need to be fixed and yeah please contribute um and i'll yeah i'll reiterate this if you don't know where or how to get started uh reach out to me or go to ethereum.org and just you know browse um and yeah i you know i i think there's plenty of room for people to to be a part of the community lovely i absolutely agree with you uh both i think there's a lot of just more channels to have people open up and talk i think there's probably some reservation from both sides and i think what yaoi is doing is absolutely jam i i really i can't as someone who just

touched both sphere i i can't thank y'all enough for what he does it's it's really pure research and very deep grassroot community driven work i think we should encourage more maybe to grant either monitoring or reputational rewards to encourage this because i think if we don't i a part of me is it's just the deepest fear right like we might lose the developers because there there needs to be some incentive there needs to be a little bit of holding and for that community like you know let people feel our love and i think we should all have the responsibility to do that um i five minutes left i realized there's a spicy question that i have i

might just throw it out to entertain everyone as a question from yeah actually he's asking how to free from i guess ethereum from ventures control over project development especially when information gaps exist so now we're assuming that the vcs have a lot of control over projects um so team how would you answer that question so is the question like how do we i'm not trying to understand it it's how do we like give more funding options than just vcs for projects is that right i'm not sure i understood the question yeah was that the intention of the

question the free eye ventures control i i mean the the development of protocol uh maybe it's um the the the ventures they they show great uh control so how to yeah you know get rid of it sure so i mean you know there's there's al so as long as the theorem wants to like keep upgrading right like developers will need to write those upgrades um but all of the software is open source right and all of those teams you know have outside contributors so if you do want to contribute you know to

ethereum i think that the main way you can have an impact is by doing it yourself um i think if if things like funding and whatnot are the problem um then the ethereum foundation makes grants but we're also not the only ones right there's things like moloch dao there's a bunch there's a thousand more dows now that i haven't followed but like there's definitely a lot of ways for for for you to get funding for your work um and you know i think in ethereum we are generally supportive of trying to build stuff that's like kind of a disrupter to what's already there um at the protocol level you know the ethereum foundation funded this team called turboget which is basically a fork of gas that tries to improve and and make it make it better they're not called eragon and you know

the ethereum foundation funded that team for years and i i don't know if they still do i'm not involved in that but like um even though it was like a competitor to the main client on ethereum that you know they were building so i think there's definitely like an appetite by different like funders in the ecosystem to fund things that improve ethereum even if it's competitive to what's out there today so yeah hopefully that answers the question okay thanks yeah i think yeah i think what team is saying is like the ethereum it doesn't it's not owned by anything right i think also the power is food and it's per the power is perceived

different by different parties um i think the beauty in ethereum is that you still have a lot of control a lot of there's there's still the pie is big enough that anybody who wants to control have um have a seat uh on the stage and however i think a lot of it is blocked by language barrier by original by time zone all of that anyway uh i think uh thank you so much both of you for joining me today uh good to see you again yao and nice to meet you uh tim um i think maybe an action for anyone who's listening or who's curious like dm team if you have a question you can always dm yao as well dm me as well on twitter um let's get the conversation started i

think there is so much more work and just beautiful things we can do together uh us as a whole entity um as a force of good together um in innocent in the ecosystem so um good to have you guys good to thank you adcamp for organizing it uh for bringing us all together so i think that's it thank you thanks dad for having us this was great thank you