Why Ethereum’s Based Future Is So Bright That We Need Sunglasses

Transcript

hello everyone I'm Christina I'm a co- contributor for perer finance very honored to be here today we today we brought out four amazing panelists to share their unique perspective about etherum everybody knows Justin Drake ACC cring to him ethereum the future is too bright that we need sunglasses I got to cover today everyone I prepared yay second pair of

sunglasses let's go sunglasses are we are we G to wear got it I'll wear this second you got it Austin's already on it okay all right all right let's okay we're all protected to get ready for the bright future so first the question um please introduce yourself to the audience today who you are and what you are focusing on uh who want to start first Amir yeah yeah thank you uh it's

very exciting to see like a great community of um ethereum coming together at edcon this year Tokyo has definitely been amazing um Amir um one of the co-founders at puffer uh we think we believe one of the prerequisites to creating a great ecosystem a great protocol is decentralization that's where we started our protocol to actually uh make running ethereum validators more viable and and give a fair chance to at home stakers and decentralized operators to be able to compete with liquid staking and other liquid reaking protocols therefore we created the first permissionless liquid staking protocol to make running an ethereum validator more viable later on

based on that to actually making running ethereum valuators even more viable we introduced base rollups and base sequencing which takes advantage of this credibly neutral set of validators to se SE quence the future of rollups I'm sure we're going to like talk a lot about that today and uh very happy to be on this panel and see you guys Justin hey I'm Justin etherum researcher uh traditionally I focused on the layer one U but now i' in the last few months I've um spent some time um basically looking at infrastructure that is shared among amongst the l2s uh trying to address fragmentation of l2s and and one piece

of infrastructure that I'm especially interested in is the sequencing layer and and shared sequencers I'm sure we'll take about that in the panel hey everyone I'm Scott uh co-founder of gitcoin uh Community for funding public kids um largely within ethereum but also more broadly within real world ecosystems local communities uh more recently I've been doing a lot of research into plurality as part of Public Works uh which is just a kind of catchall for work on governance advisory in the context of that kind of collaboration across difference uh and kind of uh mechanism design for new types of public goods funding I'm Austin Griffith uh I founded

the build Guild uh we focus on developer tooling education and Grant giving uh we have speedrun ethereum.org more developers great so my first question to Justin five months ago you attended an episode at in with bankless fixing ethereum's fragmentation with Justin Drake I listened to that episode many times learned a lot thank you very much so today uh can you like tell the audience what Bas theup is and why it is

important and we heard about uh JK R apps op apps now base rups what's the differences between them and why base rup can make etherum the future very bright we have to wear sunglasses to protect ourself right so rollups is all about scaling etherum but in the process of scaling um in the process of adding quantity in some sense we've lost a little bit of quality and the quality that we've lost is some of the composability so every L2 is its own Silo and we have this asynchronous communication between the the rollups and this is slow asynchronous communication so for example if you want

to withdraw funds from arbitrum or withdraw from some optimism that is going to take uh about one week now the um the idea of of Base sequencing is to try and reunify uh the the the rollups and specifically by looking at who has the right to create the next block and that is basically called the the sequencer and and it turns out that if you have multiple rollups that each share the same sequencer in the next slot that sequencer Can Do Magic and the magic is called a super block so it's a block that simultaneously encompasses multiple uh

L2 blocks and within the super super block you can have synchronous composability now you do need another thing in order to get uh the the synchronous composability which is real time proving which is a cryptographic breakthrough which we are almost there uh with the engineering thank you then my next question is to Amir um we all know puffer is a liquid resticking protocol and recently launched a puer UniFi a based rup service can you talk about it and the reason why and the

progression of course like uh Justin mentioned actually to achieve uh the the best shared sequencer to achieve the synchronous composability is ethereum itself ethereum validator on the L1 itself what we have a lot of at puffer is permissionless and decentralized set of ethereum validators some of these folks are at home stakers that can also take advantage of sequencing these future rollups and that what made sense for us in terms of like the next step next service to provide to our permissionless decentralized um operators on top of that we are also uh introducing this concept of also native

yield that all of these Ro s that app chains that build using UniFi can take advantage of and provide better ux for the users for the da developers to actually come in and create this ecosystem of Bas rollups got it thank you so my next question is to Austin according to Justin and and Amir that basa promis to help address ether fragmentation issues um from a liquidity and uh user a point of view so atin how do you

developers tool work on based Ro apps uh thankfully anything that's evm compatible scaffold e runs on so basically it's just about pointing it at that new network and it'll deploy and like you said you get a lot of of liquidity from L1 out of the box by using this base rollup uh but the tools like scaffold e speedrun ethereum we we have state-of-the-art evm tooling and you can point it at Main net you could point it at an L2 or you can point it at one of these based rollups it's just just exactly the same uh in terms of what commands the developer has to run so you just pointed at the the

network and fire away and it works so my next question to Scott uh we all know you focus on public goods so we have a very broad audience today here could you tell everyone what public good is and uh why it is important in crypto we should care about it and in terms of technology that based the r we're talking about today how that going to affect the public was F raising so I'm personally really interested in anything that solves coordination problems because public

goods funding is fundamentally a coordination problem so when it comes to these kinds of sequencer models I think it's really interesting in the sense that we might be able to start focusing more on the like core research um and and sort of the core Community as one thing with these kinds of approaches versus kind of fragmentation across many many different often very separate often very kind of distinct communities and I think that's an important thing to have as we start to scale ethereum I think it's an important thing to have as we start to scale the community because eventually imagine 20 years from now 30 years from now 50 years from now which is often the scale you know even 100 years that these kinds of public goods problems are are measured on you're

going to be in a position where people might not even you know necessarily remember what ethereum is if there's just one monolithic you know rollup that is is you know branded in a certain way that has has a certain sort of like community that is is sort of taking over mind chair so to me I think what's really interesting about like this approach is that it actually kind of Blends the right balance of giving people the option to still be part of that Skilling Journey while also making it easy for them to still really integrate and and be part like more deeply of the ethereum community so that's like high level just to tied it into the technology but specifically on the public goods funding piece I would say I'm most excited about is any

coordination problem or public goods funding problem is basically just about trying to get people funding for some shared need that otherwise wouldn't be solved by the market that wouldn't be solved by just a private company and there's many of these types of libraries these tools in ethereum that are already being funded by sequencer fees for example in the optimism ecosystem and I think we should see a lot more of that and I think things like either JS or things like uh client development or things like new types of even permanent Spore staking could in theory be in that category of things that could be funded by the sequencer fees over over time and that would be a really interesting kind of sustainable approach to public goods funding uh whereas usually right now

we're sort of reliant on donations from the community which is sometimes really great in good times and sometimes really rough in bad times one one small comment here is that the I I agree with everything but one small comment is the the term sequencer fee is a little confusing uh because it is indeed the sequencer that is collecting the fees but the value creation is actually the chain itself um so I think the a better term is is is congestion fees and if you look at any roll up today you know optimism arbitrum base if they were to change their sequencer to be one that they don't control they would still be collecting

the so-called sequencer fees um and so yeah congestion fees I think better describes the the concept I'm going to take that turn so my next question is to everybody in your working domain what is the biggest a pain point you know we all have the pain point however we still believe we still have the passion for the future whatever you are working on and that is something drives some was going and that is something that we believe they're going to be a bright future that make us uh wear sunglasses

to protect ourselves so what is that b pinpoint and the what still drive us going for the bright future so in order to get this United chains of ethereum where we bring everyone together we need to solve two things one is the cryptography and the realtime SN proving and in some sense this is just technology and it's happening at an increasingly fastpaced this exponential rate um just a few days ago the risk zero team told me that they can prove the average evm uh block on L1 in 15 seconds so that's extremely extremely fast and it's getting close to

this real time proving and um also a few days ago the stock team um experimented with GPU acceleration and maybe they can get something like a 100x that current benchmarks and the current benchmarks are already extremely good uh on the order of 1 million hashes proven per second which is really really good on on on a laptop now the second big problem that we need to solve and I think that is the true pain point is human coordination right because we want to have this shared sequencer and the question becomes which shed sequencer do we want and there's many different L2 shed sequencers there's the optimism

shed sequencer the arbitrum shared sequencer there's the polygon one and there's also um projects that are dedicated to sequencing uh like like espresso but one of the problems is is credible neutrality how can for example arbitrum agree to opt in to the optimism shared sequencer if if they direct competitors and vice versa and so I think we need to find a credibly neutral shed sequencer that doesn't introduce a new token that doesn't introduce a new brand or a new security assumption and the only one that fulfills this criteria is etherum itself and this is where the base sequencer meme comes from because

we're reusing the base layer the L1 for sequencing yeah I think that's like I fully agree with this I think that's pretty much the fundamental problem right now is just trying to figure out how to reduce that fragmentation because in the community right now you have people trying to figure out you know should they spend time in ethereum at all there's some people trying to you know spend time in other random ecosystems which I think are less values aligned and have less sort of emphasis on the sort of decentralized uh ecosystem values that we actually care about the the general Vibe of ethereum now though is that you're having to choose between one of these many different commun

and from a participate like from a community participation perspective that's very confusing so I think people need to be able to really align around one thing just because any kind of culture any kind of value system really should be focused in on you know something like a core ethos and I think balic post around making ethereum Cipher Punk again is maybe what I would say is the best source of Truth on some of these questions about what those values might be no one's really you know the Arbiter of this but I think if we can get some of those embedded into the eventual sort of solution that we decide on technically here then that could be a really great outcome for everyone and I

think at the app layer uh I think we're we're at a really special time right now speaking of being optimistic and so bright uh we we have l2s right so now we have faster and cheaper transactions we have Smart contract wallets and we still have some work to do around those smart contract wallets but we're getting account abstraction l2s things are finally coming together at the app layer where I think it's a lot easier and we're getting to the point where we can bring a lot more people on chain and more types of apps can run on chain I think the problem though is you know other than that smart contract ux stuff uh I think the unclear regulation territory

is a little bit of a problem and I think that developers are afraid to to deploy privacy apps developers are afraid to deploy apps that might become financialized and look bad to the SEC or whatever so it's this really interesting point where the the tech and the infra is there and the app Builders are there and the users are coming on chain and we're just a little bit worried about what we're allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do so I think regulation is is probably one of those pain points yeah Amir yeah great point by Austin actually um I'm sure we probably can talk about that for a little while but probably I'll address the technical side of things for us we're addressing

two sectors of the market really maybe even more we have users that want to take advantage of like the yield the reward that ethereum or other mid providers provide but don't have the knowledge of running the hardware themselves that's on our Staker SES we wanted to give them cheaper transactions our job was to okay what do we do are we going to go try and bet on a stack an existing rollup stack or L2 stack that is going to be sort of winner take all and kind of opt into that centralized sequencer or can we have a better way to not go to this negative sum game where we create fragmentation and create these

little islands of liquidity that's where sort of like the base rollups these bright future of Bas rollups actually came to our mind not only can address these like expensive transaction issue for our stakers but also we can give more job to the home stakers to do home stakers are always thought if you look at crypto ttor or other places they're always thinking oh home stakers are getting pushed to the side they're getting pushed to the side this is one of our other main focuses give them more work to do actually engage them more within the theam itself and this is one of our efforts and actually like engaging them more within this whole stack so that's what we do thank you everyone one Al te mentioned regulations

secd that's my next question actually are you're ready for a little bit politics so two days ago Donald Trump went to Nashville give a speech uh in the uh Bitcoin conference um it's a becoming a very important topic even for us uh presidential president presidential candidates so is this is this um a bright oblique for ethereum the future so who go who wants to go first

oh I'll take it I I'll I'll take the bullet I think the I don't have a strong opinion on this but I'm I'm Canadian so I see the us as like the the large elephant that is like basically sleeping like kind of you know above us in a sense and that might just fall on us at any time so I I think from my perspective we maybe the only thing I'll say is that we shouldn't choose anything politically just based on financial potential returns there's a lot of complexity in politics uh there's a lot of potential uh outcomes that are good and bad from both both you know sort of outcomes both options but fundamentally the US is just one country there's an

entire world that's using ethereum and I think we should try to abstract away as much as possible the choices we make and the way that we approach building communities uh to not worry about what those political outcomes are because if we if we really align ourselves with one party or another in all these different places we're just going to increas get way more complexity in terms of the order of magnitude of the types of actors we have to address when we're creating new types of you know designs or new types of research questions for ethereum in the future um and I think that's going to actually be a a mistake that doesn't take you know five years or 10 years to play out but it takes 50

years or 100 years for us to realize oh we probably shouldn't have really focused in on like this one country or this one party or this one ecosystem we should have made ethereum as incredibly neutral and and Global as possible I I would say uh probably as a protocol developer right now which can always be under regulatory U sort of like um aspect of things that we always have to account for these regulatory things I'll see the bright side of this as hey we got big enough that the country with the biggest GDP in the world their presidential candidates are like betting on this as a winning point and I think that that's huge we already should be

stoked about this because we made enough noise we showed enough feasibility in the tech stack in what this can bring for the future of the financial ecosystem that they start talking about us I already see this as a big win um I know it's just the start of the way but we made enough noise we actually proven track record that this thing can work and this thing can be the future so they it actually becomes a topic of like speech and the topic of Engagement and I believe this is just a good start I do agree with you like yes we shouldn't like go and like make his like choose parties or anything but I just do appreciate it for the fact that it's getting enough attention and getting more mainstream more retailers more

folks are coming into this and this is what we needed what we were asking for like look at the technology look at its feasibility and eventually we'll convince everyone that this is uh this has a bright future and this is the direction we should go I mean I I've been in this space uh you know since 2013 and in the early days I was an entrepreneur building on top of Bitcoin and um as an entrepreneur it was tough you know I tried opening a bank account really really tough and so the the speech that I saw from Trump just a few days ago was like wow like we are in New Times this is this is a new a new paradigm that we're that we're entering um but yeah having said that the technology is is neutral right we want to have as much credible neutrality

as we can get uh just like the internet is a bipartisan topic you know computers are a bipartisan topic blockchains should also be a bipartisan topic and I think as as Amir said like we've reached this tapping point because we have enough size uh that that the politicians start to care and what I'm hoping will happen is that all the parties start being friendly to crypto not just one party and and that that is really the outcome that we should be striving for Austin I think it's good overall I think it's bright I think it's good that they're talking about it I think American politics are really weird right now um I'm glad that they're talking about

it but it does kind of feel like what was Trump's closing remarks it it it felt like you know like your your crypto toy you're playing with like we'll we'll take care of your toy for you it he still I don't think gets it enough that he is actually paying attention to the ethos and understanding decentralization and cred neutrality I think to him it's like a still a money game that people are gambling on right so I think it's still going to take some time before even the politicians get it but I'm glad that they're at least talking about it I think that's good okay so um now tell me something spicy what is your halest to take about the ethering

Amir o I mean I would say with the emergence of based rollups and especially pre-confirmation like the speed of transactions on ethereum and the speed of like finality is going to like greatly improve for users so my hardest sck is like what would be really the relevance of like a lot of other Technologies and ALT l1s that are coming out that are just coming out with the promise of fastness um if we would be able to actually like successfully deliver this um yeah that's my hardest take Justin I think my hottest take has has

to do with ethereum's biggest competitor which is which is Bitcoin uh I I think that Bitcoin will get 51% attacked uh within a few years I think Bitcoin is is insecure um and and the reason why this is this is relevant to to ethereum is that Bitcoin has taken that Niche right of of money internet money and uh in some sense by having Bitcoin be attacked it would lose the credible neutrality uh for BTC the token to become money and and that that that gives a a big opportunity for EA the asset to to become uh even more money than it currently is wow

Scott perhaps ultrasound money it's so but I think I I think I've already given some spicy takes like I guess mine would be I think we are becoming you know we are a mainstream thing now as air mentioned we're a mainstream ecosystem we have mainstream problems but we're still a very insell community and I think we should be more open to and more uh willing to fund real world experiments I think we should start to be focused on uh local first uh sort of Community currencies we should be focused on stable coin payments and developing economies we should be focused on um you know as as the ef's own program talks about the next billion

people and I think if we start to do that you know we'll get a lot more traction but we'll also just have a more engaged community in discussion and I think that's something that I haven't seen yet in in terms of the amount of activity on chain in these these places relative to the sort of way that we promote the fact that we have this mainstream attention or adoption and that I think we're we're starting to you know ship tides on but we we still have a lot of work to do Austin uh I don't know what my spicy take would be I think I think maybe uh kind of back at the application layer I feel like I'm the least qualified person on this panel but at the application

layer I think of uh my spicy take might be there aren't enough non-vc captured app product people there's there's just a lot of smart contract Engineers that write smart contracts but they're not thinking about the end user using the smart contract they're not doing all the other things that you need to do to actually have people use things and be on chain and actually you know use a blockchain for what it's for so I think my spicy take might be we're too focused on the smart contracts and we're too zoomed in and we're not focused enough on products and people using those productss and bringing mainstream

audiences on chain thank you so my last question um ethereum has been around for a while at today stage if someone is interested to get involved with ethereum what is your suggestion how to start speedrun ethereum.org let's just I'm I'm Austin right now uh get a telegram account and DM me street I'm here um exactly talk to Justin or Austin or

Scott okay ladies and gentlemen another round of applause to the speakers thank you thank you