ETHPrague: ETH Renaissance - Austin Griffith, Brenda Loya, Joseph Schweitzer, Marek Olszewski. 601

Transcript

There will be not enough block space for any one L1. And so it's almost the final puzzle piece to make L2s be able to communicate with each other in real time. Developers building cool things and getting rich. And for a touch there, I think that we saw some developers using less or less decentralized L1s to get rich. And I think that drove more developers to go there and do that thing, running pump and dumps, getting rich. I think that the L2 ecosystem on top of the L1 ecosystem is primed for a huge application summer. Making Ethereum the underdog is a very dangerous thing to do. You're betting against Ethereum.

Ethereum can take the whole game. The L1 is scaling faster than I think people will realize. They may get, you know, smack in the side of the head if they miss it. You know, they're not talking about a 2x improvement. They're talking about 100x improvements, thousandx improvements. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Chorus 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Panta Capital, and Ledger Trust Chorus 1 with their assets. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos, ensuring your stake is responsibly managed. Thanks to their advanced ME research, you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards. You can stake directly from your preferred wallet, set up a white label note, restake your assets on IG layer or symbiotic, or use the SDK

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DAO drives Nosis governance where every voice matters. Join the Nosis community in the Nosis DAO forum today. Deploy on the EVM compatible Nosis chain or secure the network with just one GNO and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at nosis.io. IO. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today is the epicenter at ETH Prague panel and we have a couple of awesome guests here. So, up first is our most elusive co-host, Joseph, who's been our co-host exactly once. We will twice. Twice.

Twice. Okay, you you kept count. Wasn't so difficult, huh? We'll have to bring you back on sometime soon. There was one Devcon Roundup episode. But I have to remember if there were two cuz this is either the third or fourth. But anyway, it's in many years. So, so I'll defer back and say I'm delinquent regardless. Cool. So, you guys know Joseph. There's also Brenda here. Brenda, maybe two sentences about the people about yourself for the people who don't know you yet. Yes. So, I'm Brenda. I'm the CEO and one of the founders of Teller. Uh, we're an Oracle in the space and we've been in the space since 2019 and excited to still be here. I love that.

Fantastic. What about Mark? Are you also excited to still be here? Oh, yeah. Like a cockroach. Um, so I'm uh Merrick. I'm one of the co-founders of Cello and then more recently one of the co-founders of Self Protocol, self.xyz. Yeah, we've also been building since 2017. So also very excited to still be here. Cool. And who's also been building is Austin. I'm Austin Griffith. I'm a builder and educator in the space. And yeah, happy to be here. are happy to be traveling around and happy to be educating and building. Super cool. So, ETH Prague, one of my favorite conferences. I have to say this, but it really is. Um, so Joseph, what's kind of the vision for ETH Prague? What's kind

of the vibe you're going for? So, there are two Josephs that co-organize ETH Prague and the other one is the founder. So, I'm going to paraphrase what I believe he would say. Um, but when he first announced this event, um, he wanted to set up a website that was, uh, DevCon 4.1 site that would essentially rip off EF's 2018 DevCon site and try and recreate that vibe. The whole European conference summer season is full of these very buildery events that are a nice mix between uh community feel, people that are doing things, creating things, but it also being accessible to users all with their own

flare. You know, Dapcon is very DAP focused. ETH Prague had this sort of uh greener vision around it. But regardless, it it brings together both the uh community folks for those that are newer to listening to Epicenter, the people that are building out these protocols. You know, it's very very different than when you go to the uh conferences that are uh entirely attended by, you know, maybe big names in the trifi space that are, you know, product pitching, but not as much that are kind of at the founder level. And it's that bridge between those that you might consider being sort of OGs and buildery and the users that are trying to make sense of these uh products and projects. Has it evolved over the past

seven years or so? ETH Prague or or just uh yeah, Ethra Prague. ETH Prague's been around for this is I think it's third or fourth year. 2018. So 2018 was DevCon in Prague. Okay. Okay. And and the the joke was trying to recreate uh uh that feel. Now it's hard because that was a 30,000 person event and it was uh EF's event. It's changed a bit. I think the it's hard for an event to earn its cred, but also to maintain its soul. That's kind of the balance, you know, because they want they tend to want to grow and as they want to grow, they you know, to need to get bigger. They need to grow more and spend more and then that, you know, creates a whole other kind of host of problems. I know that they care a lot about quality of quality of talk,

quality the folks that are attending the event and that requires some maintenance. I would say it hasn't changed that much. I mean, it's it'll change venue once in a while, but um uh uh uh there is a challenge in the event being as approachable as it was originally, but it not just being a reunion tour for the same folks. So, always welcome new people in. They planning on adding a new Joseph next year, three Josephs. So, there are four that are often in the city and they're all around the same height. There's a great auditing company in the space that any listeners that need auditing services, check out a uh uh Joseph Godmire is their founder. There's another Joseph that works on a Penumbra project. So, you know that come one come all.

One of the things that has always struck me about ETH Prague is the level of speakers that you kind of managed to attract. So, uh today was a panel between Vitilig and Tim Berners Lee who literally invented the internet. How do you get these people to come? And I'm I'm I'm I'd like to pretend I'm asking for a friend, but I really am not. for all the old people here. I thought I thought Al Gore invented the internet. Um, this is the Americans left. So, I'll I have to let Joseph speak to speaker recruitment. I help on the sponsor side. Um, you know, I got in because I have a lot of older relationships in the Ethereum space and wanted to help. But, you know, last year we did sort of a Ethereum co-founders uh reunion. Uh, Joseph really wanted to make this one

happen and yeah, when when DevCon was in Prague is when they had Stuart Brand here. You know, reputation matters. I think the legitimacy is worth a lot. So, they do put in a lot of good work on this kind of thing. I can't speak to the recruitment process, but happy to build bridges, you know, if we want good people to attend events in Berlin and elsewhere. You'll put the fireside chat online later, I assume. But did anyone here make it into the very crowded room and can give us kind of the recap? I was there, but I don't know if I could give a great recap. I took off early, but I think there were some really important moments where they were talking about the shape of the early

internet and how it came about and how decentralization was the original goal, but eventually that didn't play out completely. And uh one thing that they really kind of touched on that I thought was cool was how uh the structure of DNS could have been improved if blockchain had existed at the time. And I thought that was something that was pretty exciting now because we have ENS and maybe ENS could be something that starts to put DNS on chain. So there's there's definitely some like onchain product market fit at the light at the end of the tunnel there and that was uh for me the most exciting part. You also saw Brenda. I saw part of it. I cannot say I

could hear much of it of it uh in the very popular difficult. Yeah. Sorry. um other talks people should check out on YouTube. One that I found super interesting was um a I forget his Maurice Mauricius I forget his last name but he's a mathematician and he talked about mathematics and ethics and gave us sort of like um a framework of how to evaluate what we're doing and whether or not we're doing it right and how to evaluate even numbers that are provided to us by other people and in terms of how we're building why we're building it and how we're building it. Taking all those things into consideration, I don't think that we talk enough about ethics

in the space and I found it extremely refreshing. And I heard the circles v2 launch was pretty huge. For those who haven't checked it out, it's worth checking out. Upgrade if you had V1. If not, onboard invites are available from a lot of people that were ready to prog. I have onboarded. It's it's a smooth process. Maybe this is a bit biased, but uh my co-founder Remy uh of self-protocol gave a great talk that I I thought was really nice. So, highly recommend that one. I think just in general at a lower level, uh there's a lot of good YouTube content for builders out there and just getting, you know, searching speedrun Ethereum, searching how do I build on Ethereum, looking up uh some of the content from the build

guild. If you're a builder trying to figure out how to build, there's tons of good YouTubes out there for that. Cool. Give us a high level um overview of the event. How many how many talks, how many uh builders, how many attendees, how many sponsors? Uh the event over the last couple of years has been around the same number each year. Uh somewhere over a thousand but under 1500 somewhere in this it's like the this is a style of conference that you can manage without it becoming monstrous. I what's funny about this year is that ETH global came to town. So um ETH PROG has traditionally been a hackathon. Uh there are a lot of talks going on but there would usually be a second hall with a bunch of people building things. Um this year that's happening in one after the

other. So there'll be day three here tomorrow. There'll be Pragma from ETH Global taking place next door and then the ETH global hackathon takes place this weekend. Um so they'll both be about the same size but the events been consistent as far as like how many builders. This is why I tell the story of the hackathon uh uh happening alongside attendees around the same uh sponsors. You know, I'll say that uh happy to answer sponsor questions. It is good to try to keep events interesting looking, nice, but affordable, not just for the attendees, but also so that um you know they don't turn into I guess a mall of booths. It's nice to be able to to show off our products and the things

that we're building, but at the same time, when the events are affordable for the teams, there's less stress in organizing and fundraising for it, and um there's maybe less waste in the end as well. Yeah, 100%. One of the things that I noticed is Pola Dot has a very prominent presence this year at ETHRO. Tell us how uh how that came about. This is funny. They um you know, there's been a lot of controversy in the past of call it alt1, it's at ETH conferences. I think um you know the the Tezo showed up at Devcon 5 and that stirred the pot a lot. This was an old school controversy.

I was just like I think etc was there. You know support is tough to come by at times and the people here have been very open-minded. I've got to say last year Gav came and did a a panel alongside Vitalic. It was their second year in a row doing it. This is really just you know reach out to the folks from last year and see who might want to come back. There were a couple of other alt L1s in the other L1's in the past that that participated. I would add and I think this is kind of important that in the blockchain space generally there are products that are based on science and there are products that are projects that are based on hype and this is important because when you look back in time there the Bitcoin people hated on the Ethereum people the Ethereum people

maybe hated on the Cosmos people but when you compare a project that was playing with a different kind of consensus mechanism versus now we have if Amazon launched a blockchain aign and gave half of a percent of tokens to its top sellers but did everything else. This would look a lot like the projects of today where you know 40% to venture, 20% to founders, 20% to labs, 20% to foundation and like a you know a thank you airdrop on low liquidity and they kind of go from there. So you know the those folks they brought a lot to the table. They're still pitching interesting ideas. They want to be here and it's about you know having a door open not being elitist to say no and seeing what you can learn from one another. I can maybe add a little bit to that. I think um as a former uh L1, I've

always been really impressed by how a lot of the different Ethereum events have welcomed us in the past and certainly I think that played out in the long term to Ethereum's advantage because I think that only brought us closer to Ethereum and I think ultimately made it uh all the more easy for us to make the decision to transition to become an L2. So I think this is it's interesting that this is so controversial for me. I think this is like just a really amazing move to to pull more and more uh projects into Ethereum's orbit. Oh, 100%. So, kind of like I mean as a current alt L1 kind of I've never felt unwelcome from from these events. It's just kind of I had the feeling that kind of the push back came more from the other side. There was

kind of like that this is more of a move of Polka Dot back towards the Ethereum ecosystem. That's up to them, but But I mean I will say that like um it helps to not put yourself completely in a bubble. This has not been the easiest year for all ecosystems and you know when you're hosting an event and you want to see who's able to you know make the event happen but also not you know you can't bring anyone in because it might decrease the quality of you know what's what's going on. But you know if you're again if you're bringing substance I I watched uh Gav's talk and he's he's talking about new consensus models. I watched the talk it and it it was a really good talk. So absolutely he

talked about jam. He had a great presentation with lots of emojis which I super support also. I also want to say you said alt L1. I don't know. Nosis merged the pectra uh merge ahead of L1 which makes it yeah which which makes it to me it makes it a canary chain again. So I think I think uh instead of alt L1 we can go back to Canary Chain as long as you guys stay ahead of us on the EIP merges. For the old school polka dot listeners it's a Kusama. Nice. Cool. So Prague traditionally kind of kicks off the European uh summer events.

So uh what are we guys endorsing this year? I mean Stella is going to have a presence uh certainly at uh at Berlin Blockchain Week. I myself won't be there, but a lot of our team and my co-founder Renee will be there. Then we have big plans uh at ECC. We're really excited for Ken. Um I think there's been a lot of Yeah, just I guess controversy about the choice of Ken for ECC this year. I for one got an Airbnb for a very reasonable price and I thought yeah very very I think uh surprised by some of this controversy. So I'm I'm looking forward. where uh we have something big that we're going to be announcing uh from self-protocol there uh that I think will be really interesting to to your

European listeners and then um yeah what's next? I don't know. I think there's more events too, right? Yeah. So for me um this is the first stop of my Europe Euro tour for the summer. I usually do Prague, Belgrade and Berlin and then ECC wherever it happens to to land for the year. I booked early enough that I'm I think I'm okay compared to some of the prices that I've seen, but o I I could see why it was controversial. I just want to give a tip. Go to ETCC's website. I I've I've talked to the event hosts. Uh they have a booking thing on their website. And this is worth pointing out. Normal booking sites like hotels, booking, whatever else you guys

might use. Con doesn't have them on those sites, which may have played into this a little bit. And what's they they have plenty. just want to make it known because I mean epicenter listeners tend to also be uh people that are involved in the space you know much of the time and uh I I did it a few days ago there's there's it's you're good you're good you know find a four-star place for under €200 euro it's very doable well sometimes that works and sometimes I feel like that's more expensive like I always try and like price it out but anyway I'm I'm going there and just for the listeners yeah yeah sorry listeners yes for sure go and don't forget Airbnb I mean again we found some really great options for for not just me but a lot of our team and um just to round off the list I can't

believe I forgot ETH Warsaw which usually ends the whole tour. So looking forward to that this year as well. The one thing that we are going to be announcing at some point we're launching our L1 which is going to be something that you know now that we finally are on the test net and then everything all of this happens in January. We've been working on this for like a year and a half almost two years. It's interesting. Cool. And where will you be announcing this or don't you know yet? I mean, we've been announcing it since September of two years ago, but um hopefully at the end of the summer, uh we'll have uh our goal is end of the year and that's looking very promising according to my devs. Sounds like you need to go to ETH

Warsaw. Cool. So, maybe let's um move on to kind of like the general state of uh the ecosystem outside of Prague. Ethereum had a somewhat difficult Q1 this year. Seems like kind of a it's the waves have abated somewhat. What's your feeling as to morale right now? This may be a little bit of FUD too, but I think when we think about how developers are growing and moving into the space and when the Electric Capital report came out and said that Ethereum wasn't growing as fast as some of its competitors, I think the thing that causes that is developers building cool things and getting rich. And for a touch

there, I think that we saw some developers using less or less decentralized L1s to get rich. And I think that drove more developers to go there and do that thing, running pump and dumps, getting rich. I guess I kind of wish they were running those pump and dumps and getting rich on L2s, but uh they didn't exactly. And we've seen some leadership change within the EF and I think there's uh you know, other things at play here. But I think that the L2 ecosystem on top of the L1 ecosystem is primed for a huge application summer.

And we kind of talked about that last time, but maybe there's more to kind of dig into there, too. I'm going to add to this. I think Ethereum has been through a few rough patches in its 10-year history post DAO when people moved from asking could it be built to, you know, would any of these applications work, you know, and then when an early big application broke, is there is this all too risky to be doing? Period. One. two is probably uh post ICO craze and maybe three uh after the sort of main years of of of 2021 2022. But this is different in that it was a really transitional period. But I will add that I think

making Ethereum the underdog is a very dangerous thing to do if you're betting against Ethereum. Ethereum can take the whole game. you know, if you are building your digital railroads, digital runways, you know, digital highways, and whatever layer 2 system you're using, if you're building an identity system, if you're launching a stable coin, if you're building a voting system, if you're building a gaming system, whatever it is, and you know, you have a group of different look at the enterprise space, you know, if if all of the banks start picking up one L2 stack, the other banks are likely to pick up that L2 stack. If you're building some kind of identity system, you want to be able to interact or or be composable with other identity systems, you may go there as well. The L1 is scaling faster than I think people will realize. They

may get, you know, smacked in the side of the head if they miss it. You know, they're not talking about a 2x improvement. They're talking about 100x improvements, thousandx improvements. So, the foot is on the gas. And yeah, you've they've made Ethereum the underdog and it is still by far the largest ecosystem in terms of development, by far the largest ecosystem in terms of, you know, liquidity and RWAs and stables and the rest of it. So, uh, yeah, watch out. You know, it's interesting because there's been a lot of talk about is Ethereum moving too slowly and you know, I for one, you know, think that actually there's been a few developments that actually happened quicker than I expected. If you look at over the last three years um the fact that we've been able to accomplish ZK snark proving of

machine code of you know the risk 5 instruction set uh also the MIPS instruction set like that wasn't obvious that that would be possible and you know a lot of folks built ZKVMs by you know handwriting a lot of circuits because they didn't think that they'll be able to compile GE or ref one day into into a ZK Snark circuit and you fast forward Today, not only is it possible, just a few weeks ago, we've now surpassed this milestone where you can now prove these things uh faster than you than Ethereum is minting blocks. So, you now have this um milestone of real-time proving. And that is actually one of the few remaining things that was necessary to

make L2s be able to communicate with each other in real time. And so it's almost the final puzzle piece that now enables uh this you know L2 ccentric scaling vision that Ethereum has had for a while that actually now is possible and it won't be long before we'll have um you know transactions and users being able to just move seamlessly between uh all of these these L2s uh while still maintaining Ethereum level security. And I think if you look at the future where you know every company, every business, every person is going to be on chain, there will be not enough block space for any one L1. Um certainly not Ethereum

mainet and certainly not any other L1 that exists today. And I think Ethereum because of all the work that it's done on this scalability roadmap is in the pole position to take all of that block space. I I really just have so much conviction that Ethereum will do that and will ultimately become the settlement layer of the whole internet. It's why you know Cello has transitioned to become an L2. Um and and I think yeah, it's just it's just interesting seeing all of these conversations while all of this really I think technical and difficult infrastructure that maybe um you know isn't the most easy to to tweet about or to really grock but ultimately I think is actually putting Ethereum in

just really strong position going forward. So you guys actually became an L2 in March. So kind of you had announced this a year and a half ago at at ECC right in the last one in Paris I think. Tell us about that process and kind of like h how it then actually happened in March kind of like why kind of Ethereum doom was kind of a bound on Twitter. Yeah. So um as you said we we put out a proposal um to to the cell community. Ella has full onchain governance and so this was clearly a decision that needed to be voted on by onchain governance.

And so at ECC in Paris uh now coming up on two years ago uh we put out this proposal that was a bit of a leap of faith for us. We didn't really know how the seller community would react and we certainly didn't know how the Ethereum community would react. And so we put it out there honestly quite nervous and to our surprise and certainly delight both the seller ecosystem just wholeheartedly embraced uh this idea um in that governance vote and then it just became very clear at ECC. Uh we put out the proposal right before ECC. It's very clear at ECC that the whole Ethereum

community was just excited about this and was embracing it as well. And so that gave us a lot of I think just affirmation that this was the right direction. And so we worked very hard um on making this happen. It it sounds maybe easy and maybe if we were just a vanilla fork of of of Ethereum maybe it would have been a lot easier. because Cello has some unique features that I think make it particularly good for the real world use cases that that exist on Cello like the ability to pay for gas natively with tokens like um work that we've done around finality and token duality and then finally also this thing that we call ultra green money where a portion of all transaction fees goes

towards buying carbon offsite credits programmatically and retiring them. All of that we wanted to keep with the transition and and that required effectively porting a lot of our code uh to a new stack. We chose OP stack and then actually building out a migration flow that every full node in the network would be able to trustlessly execute in order to transition from one client to another in a way that also enabled backwards compatibility for archive nodes. So you can imagine that the complexity of this just kept growing and growing and that's why it took a lot of time and then just getting every uh full node operator to upgrade when the code was ready. That also took a long time

actually. I think we underestimated how long that took and ultimately just at least half a year of time was spent just getting getting folks to to get ready for this transition. So yeah, it happened this year in March and and you're totally right that was um maybe right before peak doom as you call it. But I don't think we once questioned the the decision. I think just being in the space, having worked on a lot of these different technical problems, thinking about how to get to stage one, stage two, uh seeing what was being built by the whole broader Ethereum ecosystem in order to solve some of these uh both scaling but also interop and

composability challenges that ultimately we need to solve as an industry to make Ethereum feel like one one chain. Seeing all of that work happening continued to uh give us conviction that that this was the right decision and that there will be no other protocol uh or chain or ecosystem of chains that will be able to to compete once um that demand for that block space exceeds what can run on any one chain. And I mean there is a lot to be said for having different kinds of L2s, right? kind of it just kind of fosters resilience. But what kind of um interoperability protocols kind of do you have your hopes up for at the

moment? So kind of what what should we look towards? Yeah, so we're OP stack based and we have a partnership with Optimism. Um and so we're obviously, you know, bullish on the super chain, but we're also I think excited about what Espresso is doing. Um we think that uh if you combine real-time proving with um kind of a shared sequencer across all of Ethereum that operates at a faster block time than Ethereum. So you can still do base sequencing say every 12 blocks. That to me is is really exciting because it unlocks composability not just within kind of these um these stack ecosystems but across all of Ethereum. uh and that

I think um yeah is there's just a lot of work happening on these types of um projects and I think it's going to really just improve how Ethereum feels collectively uh so that eventually it just feels like one one product. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean kind of the liquidity fragmentation is a very real issue at the moment. Um, how how do you guys how do you guys feel about this? Brenda and Austin kind of any thoughts as to this? Not specifically for Ethereum, but I I can talk about our decitive fragmentation and why we decided to go to move on to adapt chain.

It only does consens reaches consensus or information for for our oracle. But mainly what we were facing with is with everybody launching their own chain in us having to rely on a branch to be able to go and support them. it our liquidity was just randomly everywhere and it wasn't the the level of security that we wanted to have at each chain or behind each piece of information that we provide which mostly is prices at this point for for oracles but um for us that is a big problem because of security bottom line and that's why we chose to do this and I imagine that that is a very similar problem for for Ethereum we

started as smart contracts on Ethereum And maybe we are, you know, for for us it just made sense. Maybe we can talk about more about how hard it was to switch to an L2, but um as of now that it's going to work best for how we're operating in this highly recommended date. Bring it. So Austin, how long until kind of we we get the pump and dump schemes back on Ethereum? Great. Great setup. Well, you can do it now and it's actually cheaper than on any other chain. Uh, I think that the L2 interop discussion also comes down to developers and I think we are seeing slight fragmentations of developers but

it's not that bad because all of our stacks are EVM. So whichever chain you want you can kind of point your tooling at and everything will deploy there. So while developers attention may be getting divided a little bit between different L2s, the tooling and the stacks all still work. And a lot of times when I deploy an app uh live and do a demonstration, I like to deploy it across multiple L2s and have the the front end kind of do some magic over the top of that, which gives it this extra cool kind of decentralization property.

And I think that also from within the EF, I think there's a little bit more push to to create better interop uh just getting L2s to get along a little bit better. And I think kind of putting up the bat signal to draw in uh you know a greater greater than the sum of the parts amount of developers. So L2s aren't squabbling for the same developers, but we're actually bringing in a huge amount of more developers. going back to the the block space will all get taken up. I think that the the next big wave of developers will just saturate all these L2s also I hope. How confusing is it for new developers

coming into the space today? Because I mean I think it's confusing at times for us kind of old-timers, right? But I imagine kind of coming into the space in new and then kind of like being being told about kind of like all these different basically L2 was living on top of Ethereum that don't really speak that well with with one another yet if if Mark's correct but kind of how do you guys frame that for the newbies? I like Merrick's idea of like the the one chain once it's one big thing and you can move between the two atomically that's going to be amazing. But right now, we just consider it like, hey, it's just a faster, cheaper Ethereum. There's, you know, there's ETH L1 and then if you

want to deploy for a fraction of a cent and you want your users to pay a fraction of a cent to interact with that contract, you can go to any of these given L2s and they're all EVM compatible and your app will ship the same to each one. And so I think that it's it's not that scary. I think I think that we just say it's faster, cheaper, and it's just like the L1 and you just change one little flag when you're deploying and basically everything works the same on the L2. How do devs kind of choose which L2 to deploy to? because kind of I feel like a broken record sometimes because I've been saying this for at least 3 years kind of that kind of the spectrum um in L2S is so large in terms of kind

of security guarantees and kind of like the technical foundations and also the price point to be honest kind of like for each transaction. And so kind of I mean you you kind of uh you have kind of the the taos on on one end that kind of like do everything on Ethereum and then kind of you you have uh the people who who don't use data availability and uh that then kind of you kind of it stretches all the way to sovereign rollups which aren't really rollups at all and then kind of it kind of you have to you have to check whether kind of you have fraud proofs and kind of like all of that right kind of like how do you advise someone kind of like where to go and kind of like what point to choose for what level of security.

Yeah, I think uh a lot of it has more to do with like less security and more about like what's available on that chain in terms of composability like if if you you know need liquidity or you want to have a game that's running. Um a lot of that I think goes into this the decision for the devs. Also, there's just, I think, a little bit more like flirting with different L2s and whichever L2 does a the best job of capturing different types of devs from different parts of the world. You're talking about vibes. Yes, exactly. Vibes. I remember when I sat down with DC from Worldcoin and we were talking uh with someone from ZK Sync about why they

went with the chain they went with before they made their own chain. and vibes was one of the biggest answers. Vibes are really important, but I think what you mentioned just composability, right? I think frequently developers want to compose with other projects. They're building um not in isolation, but typically in partnership building on top of the shoulders of maybe other other protocol giants. And I think this is certainly a big one. And I think one one place where where we've seen for example a lot of interest from developers is just by virtue of having native USDT on Cello. I think we're the only L2 that has native USDT on the L2 itself. And so if anybody is interested

in building a project that's targeting users who predominantly like to use USDT then they frequently come to to Cello just to give you an example. And so I think yeah vibes and just where you can what you can compose with those are the two biggest things that we've seen. I just want to end my own take on this section where it started which is that there's not one team here. We we started this with Ethereum and having a tough beginning to the year, right? But just like in one camp, it might feel easy for a little while because there's the dev team, you know, the can the devs do something meme is the live and well for most of the ecosystem in Ethereum world.

You have, you know, 10 or 11 clients now, if not more. On the L in the L2 world, I mean, come on. just in in the ZK space. Maybe the scroll folks are competing with the Tao folks are competing with the ZK Sync people are competing with the Starknet people and one starts to specialize in gaming and the other one starts to specialize with, you know, Zika is landing bank deals on one side, some identity deals on the other. You've got stable coin proliferation and you know with cellop stack and and on and on and that trial by fire is uh uh you know something that you can't really mimic because you to have the manpower to manpower woman power people power to experiment with um you know 10 different paths at once in a

live environment and to see what enterprises want and what different application sort of creators of many different types want. Um there's power in that. So, you know, fruits of that labor forthcoming, but we're starting to see they're kind of bubbling up here and uh I wouldn't take that for granted. I mean, as a smaller project, we definitely look out to composibility, making sure that where wherever we go and the resources that we spend, we spend them in places where we're we know that people are building that we see growth and that's definitely driven a lot by bites and ethos. We are very decentralized. So we're very slow in terms of oracles to be very very fair and honest but I don't think we would want it any other way and it's all good

in games until something breaks. So that's when they think of us and and I am happy to be in that space and that compatibility with the projects that we integrate with has to be exist solely or almost solely in vibes a lot of times and to double down on me saying cello had USDT I think these stables are really important at the price point that they're at now that we're looking at L2s and fraction of a fraction of a cent we can now do stablecoin micro microtransaction streaming and I think that in itself is going to unlock so many different products that can come on chain that previously couldn't and so I

think you're going to be looking at your L2s for different stable coins and the liquidity for those stable coins and having native stable coins that you can do tiny tiny tiny little transactions with that stable coin is is going to open up a ton of stuff for developers like me. Super interesting. So we heard earlier that the um ETH global hackathon is starting this weekend. Yeah. Friday. Friday. How are hackathons going for you guys? So because I I heard over the last year or two kind of I heard a lot of people complain about hackathons and hackathon attendees and kind of the general quality of projects. How do you

feel about this? I mean, you you you're kind of like the firsthand uh I so I love hackathons first of all and I cut my teeth on hackathons and I I was hacking all the way back uh when Facebook was having F8 and their hackathons and I was building on that devel developer platform. So hackathons aren't going to go away. If dev platforms are out there and platforms are trying to bring in developers, there's going to be hackathons. I think it's just the structure of the hackathons. One thing that we've kind of fallen into a little bit is this idea of hackathon bingo where the same devs are traveling around picking up sponsor prizes and uh kind of checking off their bingo card of different sponsors so they can get paid. I think we need to go away

from that. I think maybe we we have more developer games that look more like uh you know like games look like egames look uh but onchain on stage. So I think there are structures to hackathons. I think we need to get a little bit more serious with our hackathons. Uh there there were times back in 2019 where a hackathon project would become a product pretty quickly. And I think we're seeing that less because of this like hackathon bingo thing where they're done with the hackathon. They're done with the project at the end of the weekend. And we just need to restructure the hackathons to have different expectations for the builders. So, they're there to start their thing that they're going to finish

and bring on chain and make a real product. And that's going to be a lot harder, but we need to grow up and be more serious about it. But we see that coming. I think it would be great to have a podcast episode with folks from, for example, DoD running ETH Berlin Hackathon, ETH Global, and the organizers and to figure out, you know, what can you do to transition into stage two hackathons, projects that have been before, won before, and figuring out how to move that forward or uh we have L1 interrupts, you know, application sort of layer interrupts, other things that are gather in-person gathered productivity based events. But I do still think that um great to give them a shout out. You know, when you can trial

a thousand uh ideas in a weekend, um there's a rate of iteration there that you know, even if it's not the thing that you built when you were learning how to use the tool, you know, their usefulness in onboarding, in pilling folks to want to participate here and giving first- timers and local computer science students an ability to see people that they didn't know that, you know, they'd ever get to see is uh pretty cool. I don't know. I for one think that the energy of these hackathons is still pretty invigorating and exciting. Um I I really like them. I think maybe just to build on that idea, maybe we should be uh giving in addition to these grant prizes, maybe there should just be like guaranteed investments if if folks continued. I think that could be pretty pretty

exciting. But I mean in general, I don't know. Um like we've we've been continuing to invest in hackathons. I think ETH Taipei the ETH global event there uh was probably our best hackathon in terms of um percentage participation in both Cello and Self and so I don't know for us we're we're pretty stoked by how things are going. So Teller actually started at a hackathon in 2018. Hell yeah. And uh we did not win. Uh it was kind of hard to actually explain to the judges and I feel like a lot of times it felt like it was a a popularity competition or like who could and and it was very difficult to be to have a very technical project and actually win. Uh

but we we loved it. Obviously we didn't do it just because of the of the incentives that I do think can be improved for sure. And uh that's one of the reasons like so we still sponsor hackathons but I like the longer term ones. I feel like even when I was doing hackathons, the weekend hackathons are so difficult and also it's not it doesn't feel like a real team and a lot of times with these hackathons happening alongside conferences, let's be very honest, a lot of these people are actually here to party and it's, you know, it's a little bit hard to actually get them to build something that's going to be meaningful

and continue to be a team for a longer period of time. When we did our hackathon for teller, uh there was two of us that the two founders uh me and Nick were were part of that team and we sort of had a vision for it and we like I said I didn't win but uh we built our first MVP and definitely we would have gotten an investment or something we would have started much faster than 2019 but it took us a couple months to actually get going and we didn't. And I think that there's a lot of people that do have those intentions when they come in as a, you know, a group or a team or somebody they know each other for a longer period of time that can be really nourished.

So, so I think another thing that we can do better at within our hackathons is founder support. I think we see a lot of cosai nerds show up, but you know, where are the entrepreneurs and how do we get them a stage for them to pitch their ideas and a lot of times they just need feedback and they need to know that like nah that's not going to work. You need to do it this way and and sometimes they just need someone to show up to help them out and I think we can do that. We we can provide that founder support on top of all this other stuff. Let's have hackathons. Let's have esports like onchain competitions, but let's also have pitch events and let's have even like developer speed dating in a way.

Like let's be helping founders meet builders and and helping accelerate them to to get to the next level. One of the things that will be really great too for especially like brand new fun founders just advice like how do you get a business started? How do you actually build something that you can get going without getting, you know, it's not just under your name, but you actually build something that that it's going to be lasting and and then you have some of that support rather than just like great, it's going to be a great idea. Do this. Like there's a a couple more steps to getting that off the ground than just going off with uh the feedback. But the feedback is amazing. that you should learn how to

work your idea into something that is marketable. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of um we also found that with Nosis that kind of like we we we kind of stopped giving out grants pretty early on because kind of like in the very beginning they were very effective kind of like we had a lot of good teams for instance um Gelato came out of a Nosis grant um and kind of like they're doing fantastic and I mean there's a couple of others right but kind of at some point kind of like you you you kind of had these I would say almost grifters who kind of lived in these hacker houses and kind of traveled from hackathon to hackathon on to kind of uh win these outsiz grants. What what we then started doing is investments and investments was this is actually we're stilling we're

still doing that. So kind of we have we now have a dedicated VC arm and um kind of we don't just I mean sometimes we just invest but oftentimes we actually give pretty solid services. So kind of for instance we have in-house auditors uh which is not always easy to come by. We we have a legal team that can kind of give you advice as to kind of where to set up. We have recruiters who can help you hire for positions that are difficult to hire for. I mean even just hiring for regular position, it's it's um it's it's a learned skill, right? So kind of um having having that sort of support I think this is what we've seen kind of portfolio companies really relish and even without the investment I

could add that just providing the support and seeing the people that actually follow through you know which ones are serious and they're going to do it or they're going to Google it you know or chat GBTN one way or another and giving them the extra support you can literally pick out who's actually going to move forward with their idea. Yeah, I think because there's so much money moving around our space that it's gotten hard to give grants cuz grant farmers are kind of grant farming. Even within the build guild, we had this really neat onchain setup where we streamed to builders and they could withdraw as they were building. And in the beginning, it it allowed me to have like 50 guys and girls working with me and building. And

then it kind of grew to a hundred. And then all of a sudden like we were overindexing on prototyping and we were shipping you know 30 prototypes a week but nothing was getting to production. So this is definitely something that uh we at the build guild are focused on also is quit giving small grants with no strings attached tons of mentorship along with the grant and maybe even I so I haven't done any personal angel investing. I feel like it's time, like it's time for me to like put my money where my mouth is. And I don't have that much money, but I need to really like take the risk and find the right people and mentor those folks and just really be much more serious about it and be checking in with them all the time and

providing that like just layer of help whenever they need it. I love it. You might appreciate we uh we just launched a proof of ship project. So, we also moved um some of our grant funding towards this proof of uh ship uh project where we're rewarding people for shipping. So, um it can be done. Cool. Super excited for that. Maybe let's move to our last section, the lightning round. You guys are to give very short answers to this, but all of you get to give an answer for each question. So, uh which onchain metrics are you watching most closely? Developers, daily active users, I don't know. By I'm with Austin. I'll just say

developers a bunch of times till you get sweaty. And which ones are overrated? Which metrics are overrated? Possibly TVL or something like that. All time TVL alltime throughput. Just like this is not at the shortest engine. Remember in the old days when uh Tron and and EOS, they would just sort of have these transaction essentially transaction cost free. So they would just move money back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and they'd have all of the top lists of most used applications across all the chains. Yeah. Big volumes I think have uh really damaged a lot of these metrics. And that's why I say like vibes because I feel like the talking to people that's how you know what's actually being or happening what's happening. Yeah. If you could snap your fingers and eliminate one ecosystem

problem, which one? It's not enough. Eliminate one ecosystem player. Sorry. It would be Joseph. It would be Joseph. How are we kidding? No. When wait, so he said ramping. I said on and off ramping. So, you know, I think we've made a lot of progress over the last few years. Um, and certainly we've invested in a lot of unoff ramps in emerging markets, but there is so much more ground to cover. And I think the sooner we do that as an ecosystem, the sooner everyone is on chain. I wish I could magically go back in time and not have so many grifters come into the space somehow. like somehow if we could have grown more even going forward that would still be useful. Yes. Yes. Yes. I wish when when I go to just a highly technical

conference and I say the words blockchain or Ethereum I get I get some people that give me this grifter look and there's this really really interesting and cool and heady technology behind all of this stuff but when I say it they think pump and dump and that's not what I want to be associated with the stuff that we're building. Kill the meme coins for sure. Uh yeah, sure. Go back in time and have L2 interrupt from the start. Okay, cool. Fantastic. Sounds good. Coming home from these sorts of conferences, how do you measure success for yourself? Kind of like what kind of makes you say that was a good conference. Well, the build guild is touring and we're doing a ton of uh developer engagements in a lot of ways

and the we do this thing where we get them to come on chain and we put them into a telegram group and we get all their addresses and we start uh interacting with them that way. So for us it's like straight up handtohand like how many devs showed up in the telegram and how many devs are going through our system and how many devs are deploying on chain. Yeah, for me it's usually after each talk, you know, people come and chat uh and connect and and usually just the the amount of people who have who come by and and talk to me and then to your point, usually my job is either putting them in Telegram groups or connecting them with other ecosystem projects that they can compose with. And so I'm always looking at just how many of those connections I'm making. Yeah,

very similar. I mean, TG chats at the end of the week and how many people you get to talk to, it's it's a major thing in every conference. But guys, that's like TVL. I it it eventually some of the things turn into something. Yeah. So, uh I think it's it's hard to place for me because the um it's did the right connections get made? I I think some of the biggest things that have happened in our industry, I can think of these moments where two individuals connected that wouldn't have otherwise connected and they shared ideas on something that they didn't know the other one was also building. So, it's like how many of these magic moments happen and it's tough to recreate. We work in a distributed space where most of what we

experience is online, but that leads to bubbles naturally and folks just kind of crash into your bubble at things like this. So it's it's bringing in really quality people and also new people. The new people end up building things because they met someone they didn't expect they'd ever meet and the quality people meet the other quality people and you know have a conversation that makes them think in a different way and you know massive projects pivot. So uh uh uh it's just continuity of that quality. And I forgot to say speedrunners. So we have speedrunthereum.com and if you want to learn how to build on Ethereum, you can go to speedrun Ethereum and start speedrunning and we can see spikes after each one of these events and so we're always looking for the spikes of new speedrunners at speedrun Ethereum. Super

cool. So which funky e partnership would you like to come out of uh ETH Prague? What's kind of the most unlikely matchup that you think would be would be worthwhile having? I don't have one specific one in mind but you know it's really funny is sometimes you know you'll be talking with some project about uh watch a bunch of researchers are talking about you know how to do something involving data storage and somebody walks up to them and says we solve that and usually there won't be a there there but sometimes there is and you know find a way to integrate these things so I mean it would be bigger than you think Mark mentioned a moment ago you know sort of advancements in in in the the zero pure knowledge ecosystem

that would just render a bunch of interop things to be uh to move from unsolvable to solvable. It's weird to think that those just happen at events sometimes, but they do. They're still worth our time. It's not all of the events that are always worth it, but we spoke before for the audience before this this podcast. There's this meme out there right now. It's the, you know, you've got the, uh, open AI, uh, um, you know, uh, anthropic, all the other logos on the America sort of side and the deepseek kind of China side and the European bottle cap meme, if you've seen it. One of the great things about Europe as a continent, especially in the blockchain space, is Brenda mentioned ETH uh, uh, Belgrade and and Vital company. Um, were at were in Dublin like

two three days ago. uh there's a hackathon here, Berlin's in a couple weeks, uh and France is is, you know, probably going to have at least 6 to 10,000 people there. And and that is a lot of cross collaboration that you cannot get elsewhere. I was born in the States, but ETH Denver is a very big event, but we're not able to see that kind of uh uh that cross collaboration, that um idea sharing move from say Denver to Utah to Wyoming to Idaho and over to California in a two-e period. So, um, it is a special thing that takes place at events like this and it's it's it's healthy that, uh, we continue it, but hopefully we find ways to do some of the most productive possible paths.

100%. Maybe just to go back to your question, I think I'm just again I'm biased, but I'm very very excited about all the conversations that we've been having with with self protocol. I think self, if you haven't heard of it yet, it's a it's a decentralized ZK passport protocol. So we can prove without a counterparty and in zero knowledge that you have a valid passport like a physical passport. These passports nowadays have little microchips in them and you can read that chip with a phone and you can then do some moon math on top of the data that's in that chip and you can effectively prove that you have a valid passport without a counterparty. And so anybody who has a civil resistance problem, anybody who who wants to prove that

someone isn't on the OFAC list in zero knowledge with full privacy, all of these people we've been chatting with and it's just so fun to see that they have this need and that we have a production ready solution that can fill that hole. Right now we should talk because I think there's a space for a self group on circus that kind of admits everyone who kind of has KYC with self with and then kind of you don't have to reveal who you are but you know people at least know you're not a bot. So uh 100%. Yeah, I think that's a really great use case and I was already chatting with this um the with your team a whole bunch of people at the circles booth about exactly that. So yeah, looking forward to making that happen.

Super nice. So final words for this conference this year. I said this last year so it's hard to say it again but I think with 7702 L2 interop like we're about to see a ton of applications that actually can come on chain like it they couldn't previously do it and now it's time we should see a huge blossoming of a ton of different applications coming on chain and building cool things on all these different L2s and on L1 in in particular instances. So, it's it's application summer. That's what I'm I'm calling. I think I may have called last summer application summer, too. But one of these summers is going to be application summer. Yeah, I would say stablecoin summer. I think just the

amount of growth of stable coin activity, especially in the kind of consumer peer-to-peer space in emerging markets is is getting me really excited that, you know, we're we're approaching an inflection point where it won't be long before everyone in the world will have a self-custodial wallet that you'll be able to send money to. I think that's the future that's going to happen really rapidly and very suddenly. And I think we're inching closer and closer to that inflection point when all of the sudden everyone you know will suddenly be able to transact on chain regardless of of where they live. So yeah, I think keep an eye out for that. I think Minipay is um certainly uh doing an amazing job

there. So if you haven't checked out Mini Pay, highly recommend. They literally just launched their iOS version uh a few weeks ago, so it's very timely to take a look. Super nice. What about you, Brenda? Yeah. No. Um, last words. Um, I think with with more regulatory clarity that it seems to be coming, I think we're going to have definitely stable coins are going to be a big thing. U more legitimized than ever and I I'm honestly very bullish on that side. Okay, to sum everything up here, this I think there's kind of a drum beat starting and the first half of the year was what it was. But to go back in time, you know, memecoins were 2013 and 14's thing. The rise of Doge, we saw

the advent of democratized fundraising and ICOs, you know, we saw DeFi, that was new. We saw, you know, digital ownership NFT, that was new. The last year, that wasn't new. That, you know, ventures ran back pump and dumps. They had fun. But uh folks here are talking about regulatory clarity, applications coming to fruition, L2's interop being interoperable, uh uh stable coin just leading to uh uh uh mass onboarding events. You know, don't count this ecosystem done. So, uh I think it's there's a drum beat starting would be my wrap-up and and if you listen closely, it might be a fun, you know, next couple of years. Super nice. Oh, yeah.