Entering Ethereum’s New Era | Tomasz Stańczak

Transcript

If I think about the Ethereum winning, it's a bit of like not a bit of everything. It's it's on the top of everything. Like really winning everywhere, a feeling that because the economy will be there, because it's programmable, because you can execute everything with security, and because it's so globally and neutral, then you can win in all the aspects. Hey guys, unfortunately no regular roundup this week as both me and Santi are traveling. We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, we have this episode of Bell Curve with Tomos at the Ethereum Foundation. So, I hope you enjoy and remember to go check out the Bell Curve podcast by clicking the link in the show notes and tell them I sent you. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. This episode is

brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X atcale network. Thanks to Scale for making today's episode possible. Hey guys, Jason here. Just to let you know, we have Permissionless 4 coming up in June from the 24th to the 26th at Industry City in Brooklyn. This is a conference for the developers and builders where we'll be focusing on the DeFi Renaissance, applications, token design, and much more. Click the link in the show notes to grab your ticket today and use code Empire 10 for 10% off. All right, everyone. Welcome back to another uh Bell Curve Weekly Roundup

edition. And you got Michael's one and two, Vance. And we have a very special guest uh joining us today. Uh today we're joined by Tomas Stanchchuk. Hope I got that last name pronunciation right. Tomas uh thank you V. Uh one of the co-executive directors of the EF. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thanks for thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, excited for this. Where where are you right now? Uh in Italy. I'm in Italy. So I'm just after after a nice espresso. So Sure. fresh and ready. What's going on in Italy right now? Uh, in Italy now.

Well, I'm I'm I'm here just for a few days and I'm running back to some some other European uh countries, I guess. Um, sure. Good weather. Oh, well, I I did a short trip on a on the worst day of the year probably. It was just raining seven hours straight and then the next day when I was sitting in hotel, I was just looking at the the sunshine outside. Beautiful. I mean, looks like you're on founder mode on the timeline. You're asking a lot of questions about who's the best person for this Ethereum initiative or that Ethereum initiative. Um, it's great to see. It's amazing to what what's the what's the plan there?

Just just putting out the public Batman call or or what? I know. I had a serious conversations today with with Drad with Vansar uh with uh with team and Alex. So we've been discussing about the the roles that we would like to uh to to feel in ter foundation to show that focus on product and delivery on engineering excellence and we started thinking how to how to give a bit of a signal to the community that that we're looking for uh bringing the top executives to to join us and that we want to structure the entire organization to be focused on on winning and delivering what we what we want to

focus So, man, it's a great change. It's it's a it's a great vibe. It's good to see. Yeah. One one comment we had a couple weeks ago was uh your your Twitter comment on uh stepping in. I think uh Matt Hogan from C from Bitwise um was asking who who' be good to talk to about all of this and you said, "How can I help?" Um reminiscent of the the Suarez mayor of Miami comments. um you know and exciting to see for the Ethereum ecosystem. Yeah, I have so many conversations. I I've had like hundreds of conversations the last uh last two months uh almost to the level where I where now I try to just like switch a bit to to more of a focus mode and and discussing the

strategy and writing things down and and making sure that everyone is having all the communication that even like taking notes and and then delivering the notes to everyone else. So, so you have context shared among all the team leads that they have. It it takes time and sometimes when crazy crazy amounts of meetings but it's then when you start feeling what's the what the common patterns of of complaints of asks and and it does repeat then there are some also interesting insights in every single conversations uh and it helps a lot. So like I'm really privileged position of being able to to talk all the fantastic people that that accumulated over many years some of the feedback that they would like to deliver to foundation and ask for improvement.

So it's fun. It's fun. I love it. H how did you get this job? Like like did you apply for it or like obviously there was kind of like the public like you know who was going to take this over but maybe talking a little bit to the process of that would be interesting. H I think that like in September last year uh it was one of the first times not the first time that uh that I talked to ya and we were discussing the general like sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sharing ideas about the leadership and how I've been building mind and how we address the questions about the talent management and so on. uh so that time absolutely we didn't discuss the uh any of like my role at Curium Foundation but uh I was

already exploring of like what what does it mean when when Danny was Danny Ryan was was leaving for uh for sobatical and potentially leaving so I think they were looking for answers of how they can look for leaders um and then we started just like being like we were in touch for for the next few months um maybe like we met once two times in Tokyo and somewhere else and I was reaching out in some like discussion around some enterprise project. Uh so reach out to trim foundation leadership asking like oh this this is what potentially would like to deliver uh with with large financial institutions for mind and they said oh actually we would talk to you and and then we started talking and that was the

discussion about the foundation uh co-executive uh co-executive director position and there was a few other meetings with with Italic and the rest of the management team. Yeah, that's a story. Nothing special really. No, makes sense. To I'm curious um you know, how is the culture changed or like where would you like to see the culture of the Ethereum Foundation go? And obviously you have much more of an inside look than uh certainly me and I think Michael and Vance as well. But you know from the outside it was kind of um you know my sense of the original the OG culture of the EF is it's very uh researchoriented and uh very idealistic and very concerned with building a decentralized

ecosystem and protocol. uh and it feels like there's been like hey we we like that but we also want to push to do more BD oriented things and go out there and speak to institution and get the you know e the ef in people's hands and stuff like that and you know I'm curious like has it felt like a cultural change inside of the EF like how much of that is actually real behind closed doors like talk to me about what it feels like on the ground what what the change has been like yeah sure maybe maybe before I say that in 201617 when I was joining Ethereum space it felt like it was exciting on both sides. There was a space for builders and experimenters thinking that all others like building other smart contracts and composition and uh and just having fun and then also

you've seen a lot of announcements from the AA at the time enterprise Ethereum alliance with all these big names SAK would be building on on Ethereum. So, so that excitement were was there and there was a feeling that yeah there's space for everyone and it means that there will be composition of traditional finance and what people are experimenting with. So you're changing the world and maybe recently you you've heard a lot about Eternal Foundation starts to distance itself from the places where where you can maybe win by making money or where the the big money comes in. But that was also part of part of genesis of why why Ethereum was growing. So uh I think this was a major complaint and then joining foundation understanding the internal structures. I

think that it's it's not the like people love DeFi and are very open to DeFi. Like I couldn't find a single person that would say no no like DeFi is something wrong. uh as per tradition finance short there's always like a bit of uh bit of people being afraid that there will be a capture and uh transition of a system towards something that that maybe doesn't deliver on the on the values that everyone is fighting for. But then you talk to the institutions and they say look you know well actually what we care about as a privacy for our customers is the censorship resistance. So so we can deliver all our uh transactions and not be censored. So this a fair market access. So it's it's fun enough as the institutions that are pushing for all

these values of Ethereum to say that's why we choose Ethereum and um and it means that also it's much more much more easy to start opening people within the EF to say oh let's let's keep talking to those builders they actually want to participate in the product definition in the uh in the governance systems and and you've seen that in the past also when when Coinbase Base was more open to to participate and and and build an Ethereum and it's the same as all the L2s on Ethereum go to institutions they want to want to do the BD uh effort and now the same Ethereum foundation is changing that direction so you're asking about the culture there was probably a bit not enough communication and openness to to

difficult questions to to conversations with big institutions with uh other big research centers or big development centers within the Ethereum ecosystem and I think that always comes from maybe like some some fears that some bad memory from the past comes back again that uh that someone will put too much pressure and you will not know how to how to maintain uh neutral stance and I think that nowadays I'm trying to make sure that we show strength by being very convinced that we know how to maintain those values and that we're not afraid to take people because we know that uh no pressure will really uh affect Ethereum because Ethereum is already like sufficiently decentralized in the

sense of how many institutions appear that are uh that are significant that have big money to uh to build that have uh a lot of like thought leadership established. So that's that's the opening now but built on the strength of those those values and thinking that yeah we have that lot of confidence. I I think the the values like sometimes it feels like the values of like something like a Salana is more like you know like bronze age mindset kind of type uh like Americana vibes like but Ethereum it's it's kind of more credibly neutral you know Switzerland style type identity and I think you know those values haven't gotten ETH to like you know directly where it is today but like they've culminated in the building of the system

which you know happened with DeFi summer and like things just are on ETH today. It's like there's the most stable coins, the most DeFi, the most TVL, the most fees generated from DeFi. Um and so like they have culminated in that and I guess it's like you now you have all these pieces of you know like people are bringing liquidity to ETH uh because like it just happens to be where all these things are today and like there isn't any more rationale versus you know that but like how do you kind of push things forward from like a network perspective um where you know like you're hiring for like a like a director of like product or someone to think about product like what does that mean for Ethereum in terms of like pushing the ecosystem forward as it is today?

H yeah I think that when when we have all of this and and it's unquestionable that we actually see D5 being very strong on Ethereum see the real world assets on Ethereum stable coins like winning and especially when you look at uh layer 1 plus or two is that it's it's even more of an advantage. Uh but now what I what I care a lot about is never to think that oh we're winning now so it's safe but actually what's the momentum where we going where where the other ecosystems are heading will we be able to to have all of this impact and and distribution and the users on boarding and being continuously excited to developers to build on Ethereum to integrate and and then it's like product UX interop all of this and when we start seeing it a bit more broadly I would say

oh UX is the perceived security of the network like it's like people really care what's the experience of of the risk like how comfortable I am there when I when I hold lots of assets as a fund on Ethereum. um UX is how many applications I see that I can use when I come to the come to the network and open the wallet and is it nice design but also is it a loss of choice u and then on the interop I think that's something that I started realizing just today like in some conversations like look everybody talks about the interop of Ethereum with L2 but maybe also we could talk about the interop of Ethereum and its L2s with the with the traditional finance with fiat assets right like so not only you feel like it's a single

single financial system when you're using your wallet and moving assets between L1 and L2 but also when you offramp on ramp assets and and you feel that Ethereum is this like very natural honorable space uh wherever you are in the world and it's because of this neutral aspect of being globally globally accepted as as something that's not just localized to a single region and I think it's a it's real strength for Vtorium to to be in the east to to be in the west to to be the self and so on.

This episode is brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, Scale allows for limitless scalability, and has already saved its $50 million users over 11 billion in gas fees. scales, high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X atcale network. That's scale spelled with a K. Thanks to Scale for making today's episode possible. I

wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Salana holders with the best staking rates on Salana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Salana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Salana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Salana staking with Marinad's bestin-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimize delegation via Marinades automated auction marketplace.

To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.inance or click the link in the show notes. I've got a question for you guys. Um maybe we can open it up. I I would love to um Tomas, maybe kick it off with your opinion here and then Michael and Vance get you guys to weigh. There have been a couple of debates um on Twitter in the last week and one is about um Ethereum and this idea of kind of should it try to mimic the sort of cult of Bitcoin. Um and so actually uh a friend of Blockworks and and the pod Ryan Sean Adams from over at Bankless uh he sort of took a little bit of time off Twitter and then came back um with a big post called like the blue gospel, right? And it was basically, hey, the Bitcoiners have had an enormous amount of success.

Uh, basically just creating a massive cult around Bitcoin. And we have all these debates around Ethereum about building businesses and generating fees. And REV was another huge debate uh the last week. But Bitcoin doesn't generate any fees. And look at how valuable it is. It's actually crushing everything else. And so there have been some, you know, at the same time, Tomas has felt like there's a push from you and Donrad to let's scale the L1. um let's focus on bringing uh businesses and RWAs and creating kind of fundamentals. Seems like there's another corner of the community which is advocating let's just evangelize ETH the asset and kind of run this uh gorilla style marketing campaign that admittedly has been wildly successful for not only Bitcoin but you know the Cardanos of the world as well.

Not picking on Cardano, there's not a lot of fundamentals. It's very richly valued. Uh so I'm just curious where do where do you three fall in this debate? you know, should we be evangelizing ETH the asset here? Should we be focusing on the fundamentals? Are they not mutually exclusive? Like, what do you think about this kind of push towards more of the, you know, the cult of the bluecoin? I mean, my my quick take is I I think um Ethereum is in this interesting space where it kind of lives within the continuum somewhere in the middle between the continuum of like Bitcoin on one end, which is maybe 100% monetary premium. um you know there's no tangible like RUV that you could ascribe to a discounted cash flow value analysis of the value of Bitcoin. On the flip side,

you've got, you know, DeFi protocols that are, you know, literally valued on token terminal or DeFi Llama based off of their, you know, the fees that they're generating and the value that they're passing back to tokens. Ethereum kind of lives somewhere in the middle. And I think that's one of the beauties of Ethereum the asset which is it it kind of has a little bit of everything for everyone where if you and you know over the last whatever nine months um with uh some of the changes to the blob fees and and the network um it has gone inflationary again. It's it's more recently gone deflationary again. There there is value that you could ascribe to analyzing you know what the fee base will be and what the token burn will be.

Um, but you also should think of it as the most widely used collateral asset within DeFi. You should also think of it as, you know, historically what people have paid for for NFTTS or what they're using, you know, to pay for things on chain. And so, it kind of combines a bunch of different valuation methodologies or or like asset um identification methodologies into one. And I I don't want or ascribe to the perspective of we need to put it in a single box. I think it can be a lot of things to a lot of people and you know it it may not be the perfect DCF. It may not be the perfect you know monetary asset as a standalone but the combination of the the multiple different angles I think is the value of it.

I think I I'm really happy that I see much more people being very optimistic that we've that what Ethereum foundation has to do is is make sure that the protocol uh shows that resilience and the the long-term growth scaling and we understand what we're doing and we continue supporting protocol indefinitely. uh and then that they can can build that confidence into understanding that okay so then there'll be a massive global economy that people will be building the the programmable money solutions they that will start on boarding stable coins more of the real world assets and over time it will be massive like it can move 10 100x of the of the size of economy that is executed on Ethereum and that while we also

ensure security then everyone else thinks oh okay so what happens if all of this uh all of these assets flow to Ethereum. what happens if all of those transaction flows happen within the Ethereum ecosystem and then they start building that confidence. Oh, wait a moment. then this is really big and then they start bringing uh probably a bit of this uh feeling of matic bitcoin style and maybe if if I think about the ethereum winning it's a bit of like not a bit of everything it's it's on the top of everything like really winning everywhere feeling that because the economy will be there because it's programmable because you can uh execute everything with security and because it's so global and neutral then you can win in all the aspects uh Sure it's it's

a it's a big trim big expectations especially now when when many people claim like oh there is there is a crisis you have to react fast so sure the foundation will be we'll be targeting this next one two years to show that we can have perfect execution but I'm very optimistic when I see everyone else thinking like oh this this gives me uh gives me the fuel to feel that it's it's all very powerful and it goes in the right direction. It's crazy to hear just like you know next couple years type deadline or not not like deadlines but like schedules from the EF and like you know we're going to demonstrate we're going to win like it's it's a very different change of tact. The only thing I would add to kind of the three points made are um I think like a lot of Ethereum, the

original values of Ethereum, at least for me, were more about like futurism than like cyberpunk. And I think they're kind of close cousins of each other. But um I think a lot of the futurism that's happening that we see outside of crypto is like frankly very expensive capex uh you know infrastructure. So like big data centers, you know, nextg energy. Um, and I think a lot of those pair naturally with like the very deep capital markets of Ethereum. Um, and so, you know, we talk to energy projects that want to issue things like bonds on chain. The natural home is Ethereum because the capital markets are deep.

Um, and I think just like prioritizing the intersection of, you know, Ethereum is like futuristic technology combining with other groups of futurism folks and like pushing the boundaries on energy and rwas and uh AI and data center capex. Like I think there's like a lot of optimism to be found at that intersection which is um also just like way not more tangible but just like it just has an impact. It's a lot different because you're bringing more people into the fold. Um, and it's like the by far the fastest growing component of the economy. I mean, like even today, we're we're fil we're reporting this on the 21st. You know, you got the OpenAI acquisition of basically Johnny IV for $6.5 billion. You've got there's a

there's an Easter egg in this podcast for uh eagle-eyed listeners actually. Yeah. Yeah, there is. We did pre-announce that. I guess we did. Yeah, we Yes, that is true. Um, but I mean, look, there there's no other place that's growing as rapidly as that is is happening. You know, the amount of capex spend like we're talking to some of these startups that are um some of them are usually literally using venture dollars to buy GPUs and you know, other examples like Corewave are issuing, you know, convertible bonds at 19%. Like sofur plus 11. Um and and it's just like crazy the amount of capital that's going into some of these angle some of these areas of the economy. Um but when we talk to the decentralized components or

the ones that are wanting to you know assemble capital to help go after these opportunities they're they're all talking about Ethereum. And so like REV I think is a interesting term for you know real economic value and it's more of like a measure I'd say of GDP on on an uh on an ecosystem. Um, but it's hard to measure too because it it does kind of imply like the fees that are being extracted versus like the economic value that's being transacted and and that I think is is a hard one to amass. But, you know, TVL is kind of a a wonky metric for that. Um, but but there is an element of like where is everything that has real value, tangible value going to exist in the future and and that's, you know, at least from what we can see um

forecasted for Ethereum. Yeah, it's it's a bit of everything here, right? So, so we're talking about the the massive investments in the technology of the future and definitely Ethereum is a space there for decentralization of that and look we also talk about the the DAG format. So, so Vitalik is uh spending a lot of time with uh with communities around the world. You you mentioned Switzerland actually the Switzerland style of of Ethereum a bit and there was Switzerland just last week when we were discussing those questions about uh privacy in the future governance of the future how AI and governance collaborate and u and how you decentralize access and make sure that you still have many of the cyber fang values. uh so this exists in Ethereum and I think the

neutral aspect of Ethereum is also that that you have uh a massive layer uh servicing people that really care about uh privacy and cannot be connected to some of the other layers of the economy and that those can safely exist on the chain that like remains absolutely neutral with the global financial markets that are creating big money and moving things. uh with understanding that there are obviously risks to acceleration but there like protocol almost like doesn't want to be uh too opinionated about what can be executed on protocol itself as long as it I think culturally does uh encourage a lot of communities that ask questions about how the centralization protects protects

communities protects uh us all humanity against the risks of um of accelerated AI Um but it's a question is is blockchain does the space for that safety and for additional additional opportunities on on building something novel when we talk about AI is like one of the categories. So the verification of AI and so on or blockchain is just becoming this source of slowing things down. I think it's the former. I also um I actually I want to get into the real-time proving announcement from succinct uh this week. But you know, one thing that I I don't know, Bitcoin may be a special snowflake here. Uh I I have no idea um in the long run, but I do I

don't know. I I don't want us to learn the wrong lessons from the last 5 years or so. Um and you know, I see a lot of people that are just pointing towards Cardono and XRP that have crazy valuations. Um almost like, hey, they have crazy valuations. Why shouldn't we try to meme and cult our way into crazy valuations? And um I have no idea. I I guess the way that I feel about that is why would we try to replicate what Cardano uh has done here? I think the opportunity for Ethereum is to do much more than that. I also think it's it's the better strategy in the fullness of time, right? To I don't know if uh I think by the way to maybe get into the rev definition and all that. I think that's one metric that you can look at blockchains through. I think TVL is

another metric. Um there's no one metric that holistically tells you this is how you should value a chain. gives you a slice of one uh component that should probably go into the valuation of of these chains, but it's definitely not the end- all beall, right? And it's um it depends what what uh stage of growth the chain is at. And on on V, I think there is some dimension of like blockchains are meant to literally like last forever. Like your children's children's children should be able to like see your transaction and be like, "Oh, he like cooked with that one." Or like he was he was using the chain. And so like like logically like a lot of the earnings should be very very far in the future like hundreds maybe thousands maybe 10 tens of thousands of years. And so like I think that's kind of the

unique answer as to why a DCF is not the right way to value these things. Um REV is probably closer but you know there's kind of like these negative externalities that you can get when you're trying to optimize for a metric like rev. Um, I do think like just on the kind of like long long-term strategy. I think it's like the cipher punk ideals are kind of like the foundation. It's like sovereign individual. You can kind of get most of the way there, you know, getting that into the base layer, not being too opinionated. And then there's kind of like the layer on top of that which is like futurism. And like what type of futurism? Is it like nihilism futurism where it's like we're all going to gamble, you know, hyper gamble, nihilism, that that type of idea? Is it just kind of like, you know, we can take

these technologies and merge with other groups of futurists and like that's like a very more optimistic vision. And I think the problem that most people have had with Ethereum historically or maybe the past few years is just like the vision of futurism was like NFTTS and like Dows and those things are obviously very valuable, but it's like it's not like it's not like world changing. It's not ambitious enough. Um, and so I think there's going to be like a movement to rewire like mostly brought in by external people that are now interfacing with blockchains like what the vision of the future looks like per chain. Well, and I actually I don't know if like Dows or like NFTTS themselves are, you know, as a concept over. I don't think

anything is ever officially over. I think it I think where we fell short especially in 2021 when all this stuff was kind of hitting its crescendo was there just wasn't anything that it was attached to that was tangible and it was sort of the circular capital motion of like everything lives on you know onchain and it's moving on chain but we didn't connect it to the off-world economy and like for the first time I think in the last year or two we've actually been able to start to connect things to the real world economy in ways that like literally started with T bills and you know now we're talking about like financing AI data centers on chain or like you know nextg gen energy on chain and like that's where we're starting to and I think finance and DeFi is sort of that first way of connecting

and eventually we're going to start to have enough onchain that or enough that's connected between onchain and off-chain where you can actually start to build some of these primitives and like maybe a DAO for you know coordinating all of that capital actually makes sense um and maybe an NFT to represent you know the deed for your house as everybody used to talk about like actually makes sense because you can take a loan against it as opposed to getting a mortgage All those types of things I think will in the fullness of time become real. But we're just now starting to build the inroads to the onchain, offchain and and you can tell that that's where a lot of the energy comes from because like you talk to people that work at these big private credit shops or that are tokenizing whatever asset and they're like this

[ __ ] is incredible. Like this is this is the future and you're like we've had this for a long time. They're like and but this is the first time we've used it, right? That's like the big unlock where you're like, "Okay, this is gonna work." But it's just gonna like you have to really have these ambitious scale projects. And I would say Tradfi is meeting us more than halfway because the ETF wave, which is turning into the tokenization wave, like it's just like we have standard file formats to read. It's like we can, you know, take your assets, we can do things with them, we can loop them, we can create shares. It's like that is very futuristic and I think a very like optimistic vision for for what Ethereum could be. And you know, it does have a lot to do with the

cipher punk ideals, but it's not there's not like a direct line. It's all indirect. And I think that's kind of the point. Yeah. Totally has been waiting for many years to to be able to move like full speed and and just be totally involved. Uh they were blocked by regulations. And I think that the same way as many many real use cases by crypto were just very well defined already in 2015 161 17 of how this will look on Ethereum and then suddenly people had to just do some kind of crazy limited solutions without being able to connect everything just because they they didn't know how to operate within the regulatory framework. So so this this is a massive unlock from from last year and and hopefully it will all be done well. there's lots of promising

signals and if we can see equities on chain if we can see this massive stable coins adoption uh this is already happening I like the acceleration is huge and we hear that from the institutions that are excited about Ethereum the they're now looking at how how to take advantage of this global system because with the global Ethereum network which is like very welcome in all the countries around the world you can have solid on-ramp offramp uh solid connectivity to all the financial systems and you have this borderless aspect of uh of blockchain that was always massive advantage of it.

you could you could uh escape local regulations and participate in global economy and and this is big and then then feed generation potential is huge and then NFTs you know they they appeared and they disappeared and then they came back or they much more force uh a few years ago and and then establishes the fabric for the future future design of maybe like the the ownership and some super future-looking metaverse ownership like now we have all the Gen AI and there will be next generation of Gen AI. We see probably full feature movies generated soon. It means that you'll be able to generate also live for people and then there'll be a question of what's the reality in digital space. Maybe there'll be one

space of hallucination that everyone will share and think this is this is where I prove that I own something and then suddenly you say oh actually there's so much space for innovation on NFTTS and again this will happen on Ethereum and people haven't even started this will be like new category probably in a year or two. So, so one one quick anecdote, um we have a a friend um who works at a very large bank in New York who's been working out of our office here in San Francisco and he said it on a pitch yesterday where they're actually uh it's a a concept that's going after the data center and specifically GPU um market where they are actually taking GPUs representing them in NFT form on chain. So they technically sell the GPUs uh to the to the company that then

issues a token on chain that according uh under UCC is actually representative of the ownership of those GPUs and then they're able to borrow against them and there's a amortization schedule and but like the NFT for the first time actually represents like the ownership of a physical asset in the real world and you're able to borrow against it and if you default on your loan like they can reclaim ownership. the GPU doesn't ever move and it's still being utilized, but it's something where the NFT actually represents that ownership and can point access to whoever the owner is based off of the loan status. Um, which is the first time that we've seen, you know, anything like that at scale. And we were showing this to our friend, you know, who works at this bank and he's like, "Yep, I got to quit.

It's over. We we're we're going to win." I just like having him in having this guy in our office this week. We were like, we heard, we heard Cororeweee is doing like a bond auction, this like big public company in the US. Like, can we see that? He's like, I think you can. He sends it to us. We're like, can you tokenize this? He's like, I mean, not right now, but like in the future. So, like it's just like I think especially like the funds that are I don't know if like Ethereum aligned or whatever you want to call it, like I just think you're going to end up on ETH doing these things kind of no matter what because like the capital markets are just so deep. But like it just it does take some creativity from the actual capitalists, the fund managers as well

to push the vision forward. This episode is brought to you by Scale, the next evolution in layer 1 blockchains with a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security. Scale allows for limitless scalability, and has already saved its 50 million users over 11 billion in gas fees. scale's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful web 3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X atcale network. That's scale spelled with a K. Thanks to Scale

for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Salana holders with the best staking rates on Salana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Salana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Salana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Salana staking with Marinad's bestin-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimize delegation via Marinad's automated auction marketplace.

To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.inance or click the link in the show notes. It seems like Ethereum is really running away with uh the DeFi market and the RWA sort of tokenization market. And you know, Tomas, I'd be curious to get your perspective on this. Um because yeah, it it seems like uh and and actually it seems like the and this is why I think there's so much debate about REV uh in general is just because if you're I guess it depends on like obviously certain chains are set up to do better on certain metrics, right?

Um and so whenever a metric gets created, the chain that you know looks good based on that metric, you know, champions it and uh you know the other chains push back and define your own KPIs. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Um whereas in reality I think there's a lot you we haven't actually defined what REV is. So I can circle back to that um at the end. But I I would be curious Tomas if you think uh and I'm curious why do you guys think it's been so sticky um with DeFi on Ethereum? And similarly, it kind of seems like Salana is running away with consumer in general. Uh, but I'm curious if you see these use cases being sticky to one chain or another. And why do you think it's DeFi that seems to be taking off on Ethereum versus maybe consumer on Solana? Um, yeah, sure. Like there's

definitely definitely aspect of the pre-existing liquidity and all the all the components of DeFi that are there that you can later compose and uh and take advantage of larger larger finance larger users to uh to be there and and creating liquidity space and and feed generation now. Yes, as you say like when when you have consumers when you have the gambling aspects meme coins and so on. So definitely we've seen it much much more on Solana in the in the last year or so and and it's not that we don't want to see it on Ethereum we absolutely do want to see it in Ethereum and Ethereum was going through that scaling road map of saying let's let's see L2 scaling massively that activity and then towards the end of last year we

felt like oh wow yeah we we're there like it's it's scaled it's available and I think we arrived maybe just like a a few months too late for some of those some of those applications and projects to launch on the O2s when they were getting ready. uh but I think that now we are ready to take it back and then as we progressing towards the integration of all the layers together all the L2s then you should see the network effect and those applications should be very comfortable coming back to to launch an L2s and say yeah like we can we can run it at the same at the same speed but yeah it will be challenged to look at are there some UX onrem components are there already some users of this uh new

wave that just uh stay on salon and feel very comfortable there and and how you attract them to uh to Ethereum space. So this will be for sure an effort but also we see a lot of signals that uh many applications are ready to to launch on L2s are launching on L2s on Ethereum and and it's not like suddenly everything escaped and there'll be many builders feeling like okay this this was the innovation how I can how I can evolve on this how I can experiment with it also on uh on Ethereum and many of the like old builders or G from Ethereum were coming back and I say oh actually this this is a fresh moment this the the crisis, the battle. I want to come back and I have lots of ideas I want to

launch. Uh and what we received as an ask is is to build this uh spaces, communities uh super team-like structures where we support uh support new builders, new founders on Ethereum to to launch applications. So this has to happen and it's it requires some effort coordination between uh different institutions, L21, Ethereum Foundation, uh incubators, accelerators. We're welcoming them now a lot to Ethereum to collaborate with Ethereum Foundation on accelerating those pipelines to just say hey we we are ready and we were we were asleep for a while and and sorry for that and uh let's build it there is lots of excitement we run the events where lots of new builders lots of new fresh

blood is coming to the ecosystem and and we will be building with hardware with AI uh and we very much very much welcome all the like trading or or gambling experiments it's it was respond and like so many builders from Ethereum that now now are super serious were starting with absolutely absolutely silly ideas ago man that's uh yeah I saw I think Jeffrey Jeff Wilkkey or whatever uh like I think he's like an OG Ethereum whale like people were like he's sending his ETH to Kraken and then he sent it all out of Kraken into like individual wallets and started like bull posting and you know posting about the ETH road map.

It's definitely like, you know, we're getting the band back together. It's cool to see. Yeah. Um, real quick, so I realized we haven't defined uh Rev and then we can move on from this. And I actually want to get your uh change of tax and start talking about real-time proving, which is a super cool um announcement this week. But um REV stands for real economic value. Um it's a subset of initially the the first metric here is actually something called total economic value. and it describes the revenue streams of uh an L1 or an L2 blockchain. So inflation uh transaction fees and then basically fees like priority fees, tips, me, that type of thing. Um and the intuition is uh inflation is not real revenue, right? Like that's endogenous

shifting value from uh non-stakers to stakers. So if you were to net that out like what is a measure of kind of like an ARR topline demand and value capture metric, that's what real economic value is. that's kind of what people are willing to pay to use the chain. Um, and this is like a related metric to what people kind of call chain GDP, which might just be the total amount of revenue uh that apps are generating in aggregate um on top of your chain. And so um I I do think some amount of nuance uh got lost in this on Twitter. Uh obviously I I think that the intention was never to say that any one metric defines the valuation of a of a chain.

That would be very silly. Um, obviously you're trying to make Rev happen. Obviously that's not the case. Almost like there's a blocks dashboard for it. There is there may be there may be uh Okay. Yeah. But you've seen a I've seen I've seen Tina Jen from Flashbots actually looking at it and saying in disbelief because uh I was I was with flashbots at the time when they were uh publishing paper on RV for the first time. uh so I think it was like 2021 2022 so the like the team was defining those metrics at the time from me I think RV for the first time when it was appearing was like real extractable value and and then it evolved and look

those those terms people reinterpret them and I think that the current current conversation is about this uh real economic activity that is uh that is meaningful like it tries to show the app activity everything that happens it matters it matters so definitely all the dashboards are are needed And I would love to to see it on Ethereum. Yeah. Um and I think that the definition has evolved a little bit from I think that was there's maximum extractable value which is a subset within that then the realized component of that is like how much did people actually profit from whatever arbitrage activity or uh you know auctions that were running on me.

But yeah it's an interesting it's an interesting debate uh for sure but I don't want to rehash it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. Uh, I want to talk about real time proving here. So, this was something that got announced um from Uma and the team at Succinct. Um, so I'm reading from the tweet here, but this is uh, you know, this is something that we've talked about on the pod that uh, ZK is always happening next year and it's been like that for the last 5 years. Um, but it seems like we're actually getting real-time pruning and real time being within um, you know, uh, 9 seconds on Ethereum which is uh, really really strong. Um and the implications of this are are quite large, right? There's been a huge amount of infrastructure and kind

of generalized interop uh infrastructure built on top of L2s to account for the fact that one uh we have relatively long block times um on Ethereum L1. Uh and the time to finality is quite high. So if you're kind of bridging from one chain to another, you're kind of waiting for uh it's like the lowest common denominator of how long the last um you know the lesser of the two chains is to come to finality. Uh and so if Ethereum can do that very quickly um and prove uh prove very fast then yeah it makes interoperability across L2s much much easier and much much cheaper uh and more secure actually importantly as well. So um yeah I'm curious what you guys think.

Uh there was a little bit of um Vitalik uh did uh you know he basically highlighted the fine print that we're not 100% there yet. Um, but uh, yeah, curious what you guys think about this and also what this means for just like how monumental of a step is this, what did I miss in terms of level setting on what an achievement this is, but then also what does it mean for the L2 landscape, the infrastructure that supports interop, all that good stuff. Well, I think also I saw something today from Tomas uh, talking about uh, potentially changing the block time or or having a a smaller slot time. Um so curious to get your take on whether or not you know this applies to that real-time proving or or how you think they interrelate. Yeah, I mean like coming back to that comment on Vitalic

because I think it's it's always good to have Vitalik saying that I'll like actually don't forget that there are some challenges like we we cannot overhyped it but even even there you've seen already response to to Vitalik's comments and um we we consistently have been talking about ZK and that is coming sometime and it consistently has been exceeding expectations was coming faster. So Justin Drake has been always like a great optimist on the on many of the ZK deliveries and it seems to be that while we were sometimes feeling like oh this is like overpromising it's it's that Justin was more right than everyone else and it's it's heading in the right direction. I think maybe Justin with

this so strong belief he's accelerating lots of those events happening. So, so with the Eve proofs, we started creating this competition and the dashboards like show us that you can do the real-time proving and now it's coming from succinct. We we see it very promising on the on the resero side. So, uh yeah, extremely exciting. It unlocks a lot of lot of other discussions. We we can talk more about native rollups. We can think about the uh base rollups on the ZK side. Uh the rollups and interoperability get stronger. Um yeah so like Vitalic was asking about the decentralization like could you could you run a pro if everything goes wrong could you run a prover yourself could you run a prover at home like how

expensive it will be on the capex side uh but it all accelerates and it's good to plan it with this assumption of uh everything moves faster and faster you have the the more law progressing and AI is getting smarter and the the machines and the hardware are getting cheaper And I think we haven't done it for a while. So we we stopped in place with the with the 30 million gas for a very long time. And and now it's totally fair to start acting like we expect some things to happen and we can always slow down otherwise but we should design everything uh with a bit of excitement about the about the progress and the success in in the space.

Yeah. And just to um some of it's push back here were so to be clear what um what succinct successfully executed is within a certain period of time they proved uh I think it was like 93% of the blocks for an average time of uh 10.3 seconds. So the idea here is to get it sub 12 seconds which is an Ethereum slot. Um but I would assume some of those blocks that they didn't get to prove were perhaps larger. Um and those are obviously the more um economically valuable blocks as well. So Vitalik's point is that this was an average case. we still need real-time worst case. Um the it's still roughly 10 10x uh you know too expensive to prove at home. Uh so you need to rely on uh you know an external sort of prover and we also want

to you know 10x the gas limit here as Tomas you and Donrat have been banging the table on. So uh it seems like there's a little bit of push back in terms of how long until this actually finds its way into production but still I mean it's a massive massive massive achievement I think. Um, and having things feel like it's just around the corner just makes it more real, right? Like getting real timelines, real demonstrated progress. Um, yeah, it's a fundamental, it's like a C change in terms of interop on L2s. So, sure, we want to 10x the all aspect of the scaling L1 direction, right? So even if we say 10x the the block size but then we have to understand that it means that we that we also want to 10x the the the

prover efficiency on the side like that the speed of provers and we have to start looking at the latencies that uh the scaling L1 means also that it it's more as a hub for for all the economic activity they can be at the center of all of this uh interrupt space with all the L2s which means that very often people will say the block time has to be uh has to be much shorter. The slot time has to be much shorter. And here Vitalik was again saying that look this this might be might be unachievable in the current architecture. uh what we started doing at DF no more is like asking tougher questions like which part of the Ethereum architecture could be replaced entirely that first set the goals and then think like of what is absolutely

top research and engineering that doesn't sacrifice that that security and the centralization requirement uh or understands exactly where it it became replaced by some other decentralization aspects of like so ifa says oh it's a decentralized prover market so actually you address some of the concerns and it can be in many other places like that there some new subsystems that got decentralized. Uh so coming back it's all aspect of this L1 scaling and we're looking at all of this together and we start uh taking more of the like challenging questions. So not that choose the IP first and then think after we implement it what does it mean for for the product and then when we deliver

we start measuring kind of seems like much too late instead of set the goal and start thinking of is those EIPs that we're choosing ambitious enough if not then we have to keep discarding them until we find something that is that is substantial enough that leads us on the engineering side to to the desired goals so I think that's a change of the attitude that would try and that's Why also I was asking like who should be the engineering leads, who should be the excellent engineers uh up for the challenge in term foundation. The ones that will actually be seen and like their names will be seen over and over again on Twitter like because people say those guys are delivering those people are delivering uh the the most exciting changes to Ethereum that you've seen

like the same kind of excitement that you've seen when the merge was happening. uh we we really need it in Ethereum people to feel like when I go to Ethereum I'm I'm working on absolutely most challenging network upgrades uh that the entire world has ever seen because that that was the feeling of the merch everyone who participated felt like oh wow that's this is big like I'll be able to talk about it man that's that's very embullish that you guys are embracing debate you know nothing is sacred um I saw Salana is like with an I think it's Anza is like thinking about swapping out their consensus this mechanism like I I do feel as you as you kind of get to the you know hundreds of billions then trillions of market cap like you do have to re-evaluate kind of all these

premises and it can often be pretty scary to do that but like it's also cathartic once you can kind of just go back to a blank slate and say like what what makes sense and and we've done it a few times without uh without stopping. So like if we done it on the merge, we we'll be very very hungry to show it that like that we have it that the teams uh are are like battle tested and and ready to deliver the most complex changes. Earlier in today's episode, I mentioned Ledger's latest products, the Stacks and Flex, and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them.

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risks associated with crypto before investing. Quick question just here is like what would you say are the top northstar metrics you know KPIs what are you shooting for in terms of scaling the L1 like how how do you think about you know what would success look like in whatever period of time you expect it to take. Uh so you've seen Dank talking about 3X each each year which means that it targets 100 million gas for this year. Yep. And we don't want it not to be a challenge, right? So like we said something that uh most of the client teams will say we are pretty comfortable with but some client teams will say oh like that there are some problems and we'll have to address those but we want to deliver it and then 3x next year means like it's 300 million gas and then

go 3x and 3x again and then you have like 100x from now. Uh and this may start invoking some questions about oh so what's what's the massive change here? is the next generation of VM, next generation of consensus maybe um how it affects the entire ecosystem. So you have to start planning with the thing like okay it will be 100x and there's no no saying no it won't be uh and then you go back and say so how the statelessness should look how the uh how the VM should look uh what what ZK ZVM can do for us how much the proving has to accelerate you know when you set those those goals and you some people think that when they set those goals they have to deliver

themselves but when you set the goals and you say it over and over again the the entire ecosystem starts adjusting and like suddenly there are some new crazy ideas and and the VCs are more likely to say okay let's do it we found it we found it because there is potential like if people say it's 100x it means that I can fund this crazy ideas and there'll be space for them because people are open for so uh I think that's the atmosphere that I would like to building in Ethereum to happen in uh Tomas while we got you here can you give us a quick um preview of Fusaka uh what is the latest in terms terms of timeline uh some of the big changes that we've got pieras um which has been long talked about um I also saw uh dograt has been uh calling for and banging the

table on one uh second block times is a headline number not for fusaka at all um not even for glamsterdam uh which I think he wants down to four or six seconds but uh I'm curious um what is the feasibility around the one second headline number I actually saw Vitalik get in the replies and say I'm not sure how I feel about this so how uh what do you think about that and then could you give us just like um the highlights of what we can expect in foraka like I think from from my perspective that's uh one second block times just to to show direction because definitely I wanted to start a debate that uh the slot times block times it's it's all it's all important aspect of scaling one and that we're not only asking about the the gas limit but we

also show that the entire network is changing towards better UX through the better better performance uh so so the question is like what can we do now and that's where that's where Dunkard starts talking about okay let's let's look at this 6 8 seconds whatever it will be and show that there is a direction we start thinking of again what's the next generation of of everything that's in Ethereum that would actually answer question can we make it 1 second can we make it 250 milliseconds does it introduce some other aspect of geographic sharding or or questions about can you really maintain the same number of validators and and we want those questions to be like positive that you maintain the same aspects of the centralization but think of well that can you create this like few hundred

milliseconds experience for the user. So like when when the users feel that the the things happen super fast um where exactly does it happen? Is it on the uh like Dra talks about this three levels like the the time to to confirmation, preconfirmation, the time to censorship resistance and the time to finality and when you start looking at any chains that are actually promising those those good results on the on the latency, they also have those multiple levels and and usually be very strong on the censorship side uh censorship resistance side and then on the time to finality uh that's where significant improvements are needed. Uh but then on pre

confirmation even more like how how quickly your experience looks like that that the transaction is executed and again like Dret will show you that well on on L2s you have the super fast preconfirmations of something will happen and then finality will happen on L1. Uh but the experience is good like it's just hundreds of milliseconds and and the things here happen and you can trade and you can you can have this super fun like gaming experience as well. Uh so all of that I went to the level where I forgot where I started from.

No, that's a helpful that's a helpful overview. Um, I actually wanted to get your guys' take on a story because it it scratches at this old fear around uh stable coins and who controls the network as you have RWAS that move onto the chain because uh this is like the most rumored IPO/ potential acquisition of all time. But, uh, Circle, um, is back in headlines here. And, uh, the reason being they, you know, there have been, it's kind of an on-again, off-again attempt to go public. Um, and there have also been acquisition rumors. And earlier this week, it was reported, well, a couple of weeks ago, it was reported that Ripple may have made a bid uh, for Circle valuing it between four and 5 billion. Um, didn't get fully substantiated. Now, there are talks uh

that it seems like there's a bidding war in between Coinbase and Ripple actually. Um and Coinbase has come to the table here as was reported in I think the Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal this week. Um and it seems like Ripple may have uh raised their bid to about 11 billion uh dollars, some combination of cash and XRP. Um and so the question is one, how do we all think about this as uh as a move from the perspective of Ripple? And then two, what would the implications be for Ethereum here if Ripple were to own um USDC uh which obviously has uh you know it's the still the main um stable trading pair and basically every DEX. Uh so yeah, I'm just curious about like from the Ripple perspective, do you think something like this makes sense? And then you know,

would this be disruptive for Ethereum um if this acquisition were to go through towards Ripple? Well, so I I think first and foremost when you go through an IPO process, you parallel process an acquisition process just to be able to go to the bank uh or be able to go to the board and say, "Hey, look, we've turned over every stone. Here's the best value. Our bankers think that the best value for us is to go public." Historically, that is the case. Um, now we don't necessarily historically have um the business model of Circle, which I'd say probably doesn't warrant a 4 to5 billion valuation in the public markets just based off of what the financials showed. Um, at the same time, you've got extremely um I would say token and cashri acquirers in our industry which have the ability to, you

know, potentially write a check for 11 billion um 11 billion worth of assets. And that's kind of the key point. I think generally um if Ripple was to buy circle, you know, that that is a a potential risk in that um I I don't think that they would kind of kill the golden deuce and and say, "Okay, all USC is now running on Ripple Rails. Um, but they could start to favor that and they could start to put Ripple on kind of the the same level of the stable coin issuance and and Rails and you know, maybe they're not as fast to do native integrations onto all the different, you know, Ethereum based chains. Maybe they're not as fast to do, you know, new chains that pop up. Um, and and they kind of prioritize Ripple over over others. um which is an interesting kind

of vector of what happens to this industry if you know Ripple kind of uh puts its thumb on the scale of of directing flow and attention and and assets in its direction. Um which is why it's worth potentially 11 billion to them. Um and and a massive opportunity for them to really right size especially with XRP trading at the at the at the uh FTD that it is. Um so I I I think this is a potential risk to Coinbase. Um, I I don't know if this is necessarily a potential risk to Ethereum as much. Um, because if Ripple kind of takes USDC and and moves it in their direction, I I think that there are plenty of other competitive um, you know, payment uh, payment stable coins that could step in and fill that void pretty easily. Um,

particularly Tether. Um, you know, all all they'd have to do is kind of abide by whatever this, you know, genius act will include and and they will be already the most dominant um, stable coin that exists in in the world. I I think they have maybe less of a focus on the US, but if Ripple is going to pull USDC in their direction, I I think it leaves kind of a great opportunity for for Tether to step in and kind of focus more on the US. Yeah, I feel that maybe it's worth to to think of what really does 11 billion bit represent what is it what is it applying for? So I I guess this might be infrastructure components, the integrations, the the knowhow, the like uh all the partnerships, connections, but very likely any acquirer of the

large uh stable coin issuer actually will will get closer to Ethereum uh and and even thinking about Ethereum being at the the hub of all the economic activity. I would love all the other L on to like start integrating with Ethereum economy more and more and this is also challenge for us. how to deliver that interop perfectly. So this is the hope but uh also expectation and also expectation as you said that that there'll be there'll be other stable coins launching this this becomes much more regulated market there's there'll be some delay so for sure you have advantage if you're now uh in this market where all the banks are integrating with uh with the space with blockchain uh to to be ahead and to be

able to build those partnerships but uh then I think it still places in the center uh it also creates See like we'll be we'll be hoping for some of the more decentralized representations of stable coin to appear um include all the offer to the local markets maybe participation of local banks around the world uh some consortia of banks to launch together uh stable coins so so some of those ideas are appearing and and seem very promising. Yeah, I I agree. I mean I think it's I guess we'll just have to see. Um I would also say you know to just in addition to the um you know the advantages that circle has they also have a lot of uh licenses um and they're very well regulated in the US um which is a huge barrier to entry for new uh

stable coin entrance. So if you look at a lot of like the levels and the caps of the world, a lot of the reason why uh they're very clever designs, but they're also, you know, lower cost. Um it'd be very difficult to replicate. Um certainly what Tether has built today and uh Circle for, you know, we talked about their financials um a couple of episodes ago, but you know, they've got they've got a moat uh for sure, and you don't see many just payment stable coins that are launching similar to either Circle or Tether uh today. So, and and just going on the background in terms of timing, uh, Genius bill passed closure uh, in the Senate. Um, it's going to be voted on. Uh, the amendment process is beginning, I think, today. Um, the expectation is, you know, depending on

how these amendment goes, amendments go, uh, it will pass. Um, it was 6632 and I think that that it's actually extended in in some of the other, you know, subsequent voting rounds. Um so expectation is that we're going to have a stable coin bill um pretty soon here. Yeah, actually we've had some really great news this week. The the stable coin uh the genius bill advanced. Uh we also had a albeit somewhat brief um new all-time high in Bitcoin. So happy all-time high uh day to those who celebrate. It feels a little bit different than it has in the past. It's a very quiet. This is the most quiet um all-time high break for Bitcoin that I've ever busy building.

Easy building. And the more time we have before things get really crazy, I think the better. Um you know, nothing leaves people less focused than like a serious bull market. So, I think it's just like give us to the end of the year to execute and then run it. That's that's my plan at least or hope. Yeah. Um, all right. Maybe just we wind down. Um, Tomas, could could you leave us with what is one thing um within the Ethereum ecosystem? Anything that we've talked about so far like upcoming changes um you know change in the energy or the vibe or the culture like what is uh the one thing that you're most excited about within um Ethereum here to leave us. M yeah I I I keep saying that the what I'm

super excited about and maybe like is a bit a bit too far in the future and then I I prefer not talk about it too much because because we have to have this focus over the next one or two years. So for sure there's massive excitement about about the new energy and and that's like how much support I see from the from the ecosystem for for me and show to execute everything. So uh this is exciting because it feels again like like being part of of everyone feeling that they want to build they want to show that Ethereum wins. Uh so this is short term and and I have a lot of expectation for what Ethereum does as a next big steps like we we solve the crisis and then seeing all the autonomous economy like autonomous

machines agents everything landing together in Ethereum and start integrating physical and digital world like the the simulations together like sitting around the around the fireplaces and the and and uh and generating new realities and and creating some kind of crazy economy. This is super futuristic. That's what I'm excited about. I feel like, oh, we need to solve like some really big down to earth problems now with the network so we can unlock some massive potential for moving to the next stage, like next chapter, next season of of this amazing technology, Curiosity Exploration. All right. Well, uh, Tomas, this has been a lot of fun, man. Thank you for for hopping on. Um, definitely it's been fun

to watch your uh, you know, early days of your leadership at the EF and uh, yeah, just keep on keep on chugging and uh, yeah, thanks for coming on. Yeah, I really it I'm even more optimistic. Thanks a lot, man. Thank you. Thank you so much. [Music] Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Block Works team may hold positions in the company's funds or projects

discussed.