Is Ethereum alignment a meme?

Transcript

happy Friday today we have an interesting philosophical discussion with one of the lead Community Managers from Tao we discussed their big sequencing design the public goods versus profit-seeking mentality things like igen layer ethereum alignment and how this affects your design choices as a builder we really enjoyed this light conversation and hope to do more ideological conversations in the future hope you guys enjoy [Music] he

[Music] welcome back to the rollup we are here today to talk about some of the interesting Concepts in web 3 uh the web3 moral compass uh ethereum alignment modularity and a couple other interesting topics that we think are

pressing right now um here today with Rob of course and Alex from Tao got to know that the Tao team quite well um but Alex would love to have a quick intro and what you do at Tao and what you're passionate about in in web3 crypto yeah absolutely so yeah I'm working with uh Tao I'm the community manager there but it's not just Community you know working in this space you kind of deal with a little bit of everything you know there's like the people side of it there's the ecos side uh ecosystem side of it there's the overall you know protocol design part of things where you know you really have to understand

what's going on in the background and behind the scenes to be able to communicate that to people uh so it's a yeah it's a really interesting spot that keeps me really busy so there's lots and lots that I can talk about yeah and uh hoping to get into uh some of the more like philosophical questions um that you see in the community and not just the Tao Community but the ethereum community at large um and so we see a lot of positioning on the uh ethereum moral compass in terms of alignment or uh intentional misalignment and so I'm curious just like from a first principal standpoint like how how do you see this idea of ethereum like not just ethereum

alignment but like what does that mean like what is ethereum's moral compass and then why does it make sense to align or or not with that right that's a really good question so ethereum alignment is one thing and I think like ethereum's like moral compass is slightly another thing I think a theorem alignment can be it's usually more of a technical thing it's it can be a little philosophical but I feel like the moral compass thing is just cly like this philosophical aspect of you know basically asking the question of what are we doing here like what is what are most of the people on here doing what's the whole point why are we building all of these systems all these networks why are all of these people

some of these you know some of the smartest people in the world spending their time you know to work on this kind of stuff you know so the moral compass question is really asking like okay what are we doing with all of this Tech what are we doing with decentralized technology and so yeah you see the conversation kind of crop up around uh you know meme coins and you know the overall kind of like dgen mindset which you know again isn't inherently like a a good or a bad thing you know uh as you can see in like vitalic like you know blog post about you know ethereum's moral compass and all that he basically brings up the point of like you know these are like human behaviors like human mindsets that we have of you know like who doesn't

like to get rich you know who doesn't want to make more money and all that and I think it's really just asking again that question of like how do we take those motivations and like understandings of like General human nature and how do we tweak it to be the best you know it's really easy to kind of stand on the sidelines and be a vocal uh opponent of again things that people see like meme coins you know just chasing you know the the the latest hype and all that uh I think yeah when when you put the question in less of a negative like Spotlight and you just more ask of like what can do with this uh like you can see in the article that vitalic grow it it he kind of lays out and points out that you know you can

utilize this to to do effective things for people again to to raise for charity you know to funnel this money to to people and things and organizations that really need it you know to really make a difference uh so yeah it's it's that's like one side of the the whole conversation of like what are we doing and like what's the whole point of this and then ethereum alignment is a really big question because it plays into the more like technical aspects of like when you're building some of these networks and distributed systems it's asking how how close to like the ethereum ethos of like decentralized decentralization security permissionless um and uh what What's the

last and well speed really scaling and so that's when you have like for example you see like a plethora of like l2s and rollups and ZK evm ZK VMS and along that you'll see the whole spectrum of like how ethereum aligned are they so it goes from everything to how decentralized and how permissionless are these things all the way to how is your uh you know sequencer or proposer Network set up are you you know funneling that money back up to the ethereum uh Network itself like the ethereum ecosystem of like validators and node runners or uh are you you know extracting that money and

giving it back to like a more centralized like company or organization uh you know so it's it's uh there's it's a really big and open-ended topic about how like important is ethereum alignment and where do you start drawing lines at the end of the day in protocol design to basically say like we need to you know make this viable for like a business you know so it's really asking are you trying to build a protocol or are you trying to build a business you know uh and I think those are some of those questions that you see crop up around like ethereum alignment itself yeah and are we thinking that ethereum alignment is quite a bit of a meme now but are we thinking that it has to do with building censorship resistant and resilient

systems in the way which kind of Satoshi and metallic and other leaders have built or is it more of a question question of like a profit mindset um because ultimately I view ethereum as like one of the weaknesses of ethereum right now is like the lack of censorship resistance compared to something like Bitcoin where as much as as I want to say ethereum could never go down I think that there could be some three-letter agencies that that that cause problems so like are we thinking of e the alignment for censorship resistance for profit maximalism versus uh public goods like let's break this down further into kind of like the subcategories here sure absolutely so yeah you do have like the the business side of things again like

how do you how how is like profit alignment and things like that enabled but then it all it all really starts off with that question of building like a resilient decentralized system uh that I think is sort of like the first and foremost like topic and it's the thing that people talk about the most I think when you're talking about like the overall organizational structure of like a company behind 2 protocol for example I think that's been one of the topics that's just a little less like talked about again because it's it's the the first and foremost thing that people again are talking about is well is this even like what's the point of building this right like if you don't have censorship resistance if you're don't

have decentralization you're not following these tenants of like again like Satoshi and balic and like the things that they've built up uh you know you you don't have like uh it's basically you don't have like a system that really makes sense so that's the first point of asking like does this even make sense to do you know it's like if you don't have if you have like a rollup that goes down or doesn't inherent any of the security from ethereum is there even a point for it being a rollup you know is it better to be its own thing uh and I think those are a lot of the questions that a lot of the smart people in the space are asking first because it's a lot of engineering and it's a lot of like technical types of um you know problems where it's really even asking like where should we

be building what are we building and I think if you protocol and project isn't very ethereum lined it really doesn't make sense to be like an L2 right if you're not inherent inheriting ethereum's uh security what's the whole point it would be better just to spin up your own project your own chain or or or you know your own part of like a modular blockchain that you know you're just focusing on one sole aspect you know uh so yeah that that's the the thing that people talk about the most it's just really about why are we building here does it even make sense to build on ethereum what does it mean to build on ethereum yeah yeah and I I think it is quite helpful to separate the ethical alignment of ethereum and then the technical alignment with ethereum and so

yeah as you men like there's quite a few principles right you got censorship resistance permissionless decentralization all all of those ethical properties that ethereum has and the cool thing is that you can you can have all of those ethical alignment properties uh with ethereum and the community at large but you don't have to have the technical alignment and so if I want to to run my own blockchain um not necessarily like kind of pay rent we kind of maybe get into like what that really means when it comes to paying rent to ethereum but let's say I don't want to align with like the users the economic security the validator Set uh the liquidity landscape I can kind of

like build my own blockchain as mentioned and that's a on that's a pattern that we're seeing more and more projects take build their own blockchain take ownership of their own block space not be technically aligned with ethereum but still maintain a lot of the ethical alignment a lot of the ethical properties that ethereum has in their own chain and reflect those ethical properties in their Community despite the lack of technical alignment yeah I was just saying I think I AVS extension of restak eth to create new chains and new uh avss kind of just blows this whole idea of like M ethereum alignment out of the water because you're just

you're just automatically an extension of the ethereum network but you can go and do all these different things you're still reliant on ethereum but and on the the the restake eth and and the validator set but it it almost like it it begs the question like at what point does being ideologically aligned with any given technology inhibit your ability to build that people want to use that actually changes the world and I'll pass it over to you Alex I know that you had a thought but I I just wanted to chime in there on on Rob's Point yeah so to that aanay is a great example because it's super unique and it's super novel and Innovative and something like aen lay really blurs the

lines between what is ethical and ideological alignment and what is technical alignment and so like vitalik wrote that blog post called Don't overuse social consensus and so just like let's focus on social consensus for a moment that is one like that is one functionality of ethereum that is really in the middle of like a technical feature and an ideological feature it's the idea that everyone can pull their tokens use them to vote and then whatever we we vote on is the outcome of the chain and the best example of that in ethereum's case is ethereum classic when all of the ethereum token holders voted on whether or not to Fork the chain and Blacklist

those ethereum tokens that were stolen obviously ended up doing that ethereum classic exists and that was a very costly hard for like ethereum classic still has a market cap of five billion or something like that and so the mission or the purpose of that article as I take it was basically to say like we can't extend the ethereum social consensus whether you call that like an ideological feature or a technical feature it shouldn't apply to these things that are built on top of or aside from from ethereum itself and so so yeah igen layer is super super aligned with ethereum the the asset like eth as money and using it as economic stake it has a

lot of technical alignment and I do think that there are a lot of ideological alignment uh properties that Ian layer and and E agree on uh the one place where I think they might diverge is this social consensus element where Ian L is going to end up taking its own social consensus it'll end up having the igen token and that's what we'll we'll use for any sort of disagreement uh on the igen layer protocol yeah um again yeah it's it's this this topic of alignment it's really broad again it's like what are you talking about like again social consensus like ual like technical alignment and again it's like that ethereum ethos so again it's not to say

that any like not being like for example like ethereum aligned is like a bad thing or anything like that it's it's again these are all like open-ended questions you know nobody knows if ethereum is like the end all be all of you know distributed networks and you know uh cryptocurrency itself like it's still an open-ended question so it's really good to have again like projects like Ian lay and all that really testing like the boundaries of what you can do with this technology and again it's it's not a bad thing I I really think there's like a really there's good value in in in you know pushing the boundaries and and testing things especially with ethereum you know ethereum is supposed to be uh you know a resilient uh you know permissionless

system so when you have that you really have to test out all edge cases so you know a big part again is like how far can you push social consensus when when when does it go too when are the lines drawn again when does it start to affect the overall trajectory of the protocol itself and those are questions yet to be answered so I think everybody and that's the thing in the space is everybody that's building I genuinely feel like has good intentions for it you know I don't think anybody's ever building a protocol to to go and destroy ethereum you know I feel like that was maybe the vibe in like you know like 2016 2017 with all those you know the I and all the other like uh you know alt layers and stuff like that kind

of popping up and you know side chains you know all competing but uh you know I feel like we're really getting to the point where everybody's just really there's been so many there's been so much uh like technical Foundation laid out that's been like untested and like unquestioned and unexplored that uh it's it's really you you just see like good honest efforts of people really trying to see again like the limitations of this this space in general uh so yeah I I I think it's it's important to have projects that like igen L that kind of extend some of that and again they're aligned in in some ways but maybe not others but uh it's really good to see where where that that's going to end up leading let's get into this question of

rent that ethereum uh is charging for certain functionalities that it it provides uh the applications on top um like ier uh you know is choosing to like kind of rent out the eth asset as this economic stake um and avss are going to end up paying something for the stakers to stake their eth um and they're going to do that in terms of rewards that that they'll pay to to the stakers for taking on like a slashing risk and so the abss on top of Ian layer are basically paying rent to these ethereum stakers whether they're liquid stakers or rakers um so that's one aspect of ethereum that's

kind of like for sale or for is probably better way to put it the social consensus is something that V said like that's not even for sale that's not for rent you can't really buy that um but for the things that you can rent out right you can use the ethereum sequencer you have to pay some some something to ethereum to use that sequencer same same thing with the the economic stake you have to kind of pay ethereum stakers to use that stake for Economic Security like when does it make sense to build something in house or like take ownership of of your own sequencer or launch your own chain with your own token as economic security when does it make sense to do that yourself or when

does it make sense to pay ethereum to use ethereum Solution that's a really good question you know because you hear that rent conversation kind of crop up around like me and things like that you know and so that's a that's a big that plays a really big aspect when designing something like a rollup right when you're asking like okay where do we want all of like that me flow to go right is that something that we want to extract ourselves is that something that we want to pass on to you know the ethereum like validator set and again it all really depends on and I think it it touches upon that topic that I mentioned before where it's really starting to look at like the organizational structures of some protocols and all that where you

really start to ask is it like okay are we building like a decentralized protocol or are we building and sustaining like a company that builds protocols and and things like that so you know for example you're going to ask this question when you're building a rollup of like okay well where how are we going to extract value for our protocol itself right and there's that big question of do we run our own sequencers or do we pass that on as like a a based rollup do you pass that on to the ethereum validator said and so again it's really asking that question of like ethereum alignment like how far does that go and where does that

take you right because what are you going to be using all this like uh you know both if you're running your own sequencer and you're extracting me from like your users and and basically uh you know keeping that for yourself not passing that on to you know the ethereum validator Set uh you know you're asking the question of like what is this money for right it's you know usually the plan is you know send it to a treasury a DA so then they can decide and Implement uh you know changes to the protocol so they can pay people to maintain things it's so you know you have to have some level of Economic Security and protocol for it to exist right like why is anybody going to be here to help you know actually keep the protocol going who's going to actually like code the changes you know for these

proposals and all that and again it's really I think this unexplored question that uh a lot of people have you know barely touched the surface on and haven't really talked about too much is just how much do you really need to keep a protocol like this going and for example it's like if you go like the based rollup R and as a protocol yourself you are not extracting me right like you're not running your own sequencer network uh anything like that everything is run by the ethereum validator set so the L1 validator set is the ones who get to extract that me to think on one hand it's that question of like how do we want to support ethereum

itself right like we wouldn't be here without ethereum uh it's really helpful to it's like a two-fold thing you know like we can you know say that we have a decentralized like uh sequencer Network you know at the cost of paying L1 basically giving them that like me and you know giving them all those that flow and so that's again that's a big thing in ethereum alignment about like how do we want to support ethereum like with Tao we've we've you know with our token allocation there's that the the pgp grant it's the the protocol Guild pledge you know where we allocate 1% of our tokens to the protocol Guild itself which directly you know helps both like ethereum's future you know both in the

development and how they can fund things like that and Tao's future itself you know we really rely on ethereum for existence you know we couldn't we couldn't exist without ethereum itself so when taking that like choice of not you know Finding ways to like extract value you know for our protocol itself you know how can you actually guarantee that there's going to be any help or interest or money in the tyo protocol itself and I think when you start building something that's so ethereum aligned that it doesn't feel separate from ethereum it feels like an extension of ethereum you can actually get these like non-monetary benefits right like you know we're not getting all this

money and you know putting it into a treasury but you have like this developer mind chair right when you align yourself with like the ethereum like you know core principles and like ideals and like the general philosophy you're on one hand you're going to get a lot of people that are just really interested in building stuff on ethereum for ethereum these like you know really hardcore like ethereum align developers that their interest is peaked in this right they they want to see this thing you know be built out they want to see they want to participate you know they're i' I mean I've personally seen you know developers just coming on board because they you know they like the the principles of of what the Project's doing and how we're going about it that they they just take their own time and

effort to try and find ways to make things better on their own end because they're like oh hey this is super sick like I see this that I want to improve like I just want to see that get done and I think that's a really important part in this whole Space is getting like you know philosophically aligned with the whole uh ethereum like community and developer ecosystem because it's a really robust and Powerful group of people that are really driven from what I've seen less about money and more about again like principles and like the change that they can make so when you have a roll up or something any any kind of project that really just feels like ethereum extended you really don't have to worry as much and this is all in my

opinion I really don't think you have to worry you know as much about about like the financialization of your protocol uh you really have to you know you're really going to get a lot of help from the ethereum community as a whole again like General mind share of like developers people working on stuff and the really cool thing again is when you have a project that is just it's it's ethereum extended it really doesn't look different from ethereum itself like the changes that affect ethereum also affect like your L2 your rollup so so you're really getting as much as you can from the ethereum L1 from like Upstream changes things like that uh you know adjustments to like for example like EIP

4844 where that just makes l2s a lot cheaper and you don't have to be super ethereum aligned for that or anything like that but these kinds of things these changes this work is already being done for you if you can already adapt and like you know bring all these changes in you know from Upstream as as as easily as you can so yeah I've been rambling a bit but basically there there's it's it's a really interesting question that I feel like I haven't even you know had a lot of opportunity to talk to others to explore again you know like if you do have like a centralized model for your protocol and project then that just opens up the the next question of like okay when are things like hands off for us like when do we you know let go of things so it's a little less like

company controlled and it's more of that decentralized like Dow structure right that's I and I I don't know if that's like the goal for all these other projects but I know overall that's sort of the goal for l2s in general is like okay how can how can we decentralize this how can we go more hands off with it you know it's it's you know like for example ethereum you have the ethereum foundation and all that but you don't have you know they're not the ones making the decisions really about the protocol you know again that's that's the whole ecosystem of developers that are all you know discussing and and figuring out it's like the whole distributed team of clients that are you know run that help run like ethereum nodes and all that like those are the people that are really making a lot of

the changes and a lot of like the choices behind the decisions about where you know ethereum should go all that and so I think that's the overall path that like layer twos uh are eventually going to take where it's less one project and one you know company behind it that makes all these changes and it moves to a more you know decentralized sort of like Dow structure and so when you have all of this centralized like infrastructure and all that again you're really asking the question well when when do they make the transition when do they let go of all this stuff when do the sequencers get decentralized right like what happens when this like company no longer wants to run these servers to run these like nodes provs sequencers

whatever uh you know what happens to the protocol itself you know is is there infrastructure and Technology they already built to decentralize it you know when a protocol is looking to you know extract me through their sequencer model and all that it's like where what is that money going to what's the point of it you know and again what happens when things want to be more decentralized right where is that money going to go in the future what is it being used for now does the company have plans to exist for a longer time to to be more on top of this protocol and project uh and again it's all it's just these a lot of these questions that I think have been unanswered and sort of unex for uh so far yeah it's this it's this really really interesting idea of

public goods I think is a way to kind of some this it's like decentralized public goods but it's just weird it's this weird conversation where like Alex I'll just ask you like are crypto companies supposed to make money are rollup supposed to operate as a organizational company business with this with a centralized sequencer or are they supposed to operate more like a network state of like a Bitcoin or of an ethereum and it's like it's not that easy of yes or no but it becomes the this this question of like where do we align the incentives right exactly that was like a very beautiful and succinct way of putting my entire rant there that was yeah that's exactly perfect it's are we are we building public goods or are

we building a more you know like structured company you know when when does when does decentralization you know take effect that's that's a really good way of putting it and for me like we've Rob and I talked to a lot of teams both on both sides and when you speak to people there's a clear differentiation in how they speak about crypto as a whole from these more like profit driven uh less public good teams versus these more like let's call them ethereum aligned or kind of uh uh teams that are building uh technology for the sake of building the the technology but again all people have to eat and this is where you get into like the meme coins and the

speculation because it's like well you know uh this stuff is appealing to to to to people because um it's a byproduct of the decentralized openness of crypto markets and so like our mcoins really a net negative I don't know like what what is a bad use of good technology and and for us it's it's it's almost like this NeverEnding uh uh search and it's yeah it's it's exciting and and also just feels like there's always more unknowns no totally it's uh I mean that's the beauty of working in a permissionless kind of space you know is as everybody has the freedom to do whatever they want and nobody's forcing yeah that's the

whole point there's no forcing anybody to do anything so it's again it's like how can we you know build off of like that ethereum like social consensus of like what do we want to see in this space what do we want to build what you know which direction do we want to take these things um and yeah again and just quickly touching back on what we were talking about just about like public goods and whatnot it's again I don't even think that there's like a right or wrong answer like we really don't know we're in such an early State you know because you know I I'll go to conferences and stuff and you know I'll talk to people about Tao and I'll talk to them about their protocols and a lot of time they just have questions of like well if you guys aren't like you know

extracting like me and running your own sequencer Network they're like how are you going to make money like how you know that's a lot of money being missed out on and I don't know I guess that's just like a it's a traditional business like World mindset and all that that's kind of merging with that public goods mindset uh and yeah there's there's a few ways to you know answer that question you know I don't think uh for example like a protocol like Tao needs to uh extract you know money from me from their sequencer Network you know you have everything from like you know of course there's you know going to a token that's needed you know to to help incentivize our approver proposer

Network and all that but at the end of the day that's I mean if you look at how how do how does every other project right now like basically capitalize on their project you know every project has a token you know they're out there they're freely traded they're freely exchanged you know they have you know pretty high market caps you know so they use those mainly as their treasury so you really you know I I don't see a single project right now out there that's supporting themselves purely off of like that like rent extracting from their users uh you know I don't I don't see that as solely supporting anyone project or or protocol out there and I think it's just one of those things that people immediately see and they're like oh you're just giving up all this money but at the end of the day I really don't

see it as like a the the Mak or break of of a project you know I know it's maybe the harder way of doing it and it's kind of a it's a it's a harder sell for other people to tell them like yeah we're just there's all this money on the table and we're not taking again it's it's just that mindset and I guess that conversation that we you know need to have in this space as well is like are we building public goods or are we building like you know private companies yeah and as we kind of wrap up here Alex um just curious more about uh the current updates with with Tao for our community how you guys are uh moving along towards mainnet and just more ways that our community can get involved I

know that you guys have various different developer programs grants for all types of Builders um you know if people want to build an ethereum aligned ecosystem how can they do it yeah absolutely so there's uh a few things that like you know Tao is doing on like that we're doing on our own so for example we have like our grants program that's there we have our community grants track we have our developer grants track and then we have a request for proposal track so right now the developer like our ecosystem Grant track is open and our request for proposal track is open and so that just means like if you come to Tao and you just build an application or anything it can

be helpful to the infrastructure of the rollup if that's your expertise or if it's just like you know a d app that's out there doesn't even have to be like crazy groundbreaking like this crazy D5 protocol it's just are is it cool like are people going to use it is it like novel is it fun is it like an interesting idea you know is it a game is it like some sort of like social f is it like you know decentralized identity anything like that you know we're here to you know provide grants to people that are here you know building stuff and and you know making a concerted effort to just like build cool things that you know we haven't really seen in like the web 2 world and all that and then the request for proposal track is sort of like that almost like really

ethereum align thing where you know you can Implement for example like IPS but they're called tips you know Tao Improvement proposals and so what they are is they're they're cool things that we would like to see built into like the Tao protocol itself you know that people can just come by you know if they if it's Falls in your wheelhouse of expertise you know you can go through basically write a proposal of like this is how I could implement this and here's the timeline you know and we'll give you a grant to build that out uh and the cool thing is that when you build these things out for Tao and it's part of that like ethereum alignment aspect because we are just like ethereum extended like our protocol doesn't alter ethereum

itself too much but these changes can actually go from Tao Upstream to ethereum L1 so it doesn't have to just affect you know Tao itself so if you go through and you implement you know a change for uh Tao and you get one of these requests or proposals completed I mean you're already making changes to ethereum itself like whether or not the L1 you know accepts those changes or you know actually wants to implement that into the protocol itself is a different question but the fact that now anybody that you know can Fort Tao and use those new upgrades and again that that work has already been laid out and done and that it's it's a very marginal change to get that implemented into ethereum itself so you know participating in our request for like our proposals and all

that you know is is is almost like contributing to ethereum itself you know and yeah overall it's it just know contributing to Tao itself uh you know going into our GitHub checking things out again like it's where we we're very close to what ethereum itself looks like so any changes or any like contributions that you make there you're really making to the overall ethereum ecosystem and then I know that I've seen them around that there's like rollup Improvement proposals rips and those are protocol changes that would affect like rollups as a whole so like the entire roll up Landscape like cool adjustments and implementations again that would

steamline like the the layer two both like ux and and general experience so much great great stuff happening over on uh Tao yeah I like the analogy too uh because by making changes and and uh building things on Tao uh you have the opp opportunity to then roll that Upstream to ethereum L1 uh and so these rollups are almost like these like experim mentation fields for ethereum uh which I think is really cool because if you want to move fast and break things do it on a rollup uh you know you have more of a chance of getting implemented and then if it if it ends up successful ethereum itself could could end up adopting that standard so awesome awesome work so far thank you so much

for coming on Alex and uh good luck have fun to uh the entire Tao Community yeah of course thank you so much I really appreciate the time and having me on here I know are big big topics to discuss as a whole so I I hope I uh did my best answering all of these I hope I didn't ramble too much effective rambling cheers man all good thanks man cheers all right thanks guys much appreciated