Exploring the Future of Ethereum with the Lodestar Team

Transcript

[music] So today at dev connect I'm excited to meet all developers around here. We did have some conversation with application dev but I'm very happy to talk to some of the protocol devs here. We are joined by team loadar. We have got Matt Cayman and Phil. All three of you welcome to the show and we would like to first give you this opportunity to introduce yourself and your project and then we'll get into some questions that we have here for to you today.

>> Okay, I can start. I'm Phil. Um I have been working at Chain Safe since 2021. I pretty much worked on uh web 3JS and also Loadar and then um have been here ever since. Uh I've uh enjoyed all of my time here. I've been in in Ethereum since 2015. um but never really contributed until this point. So this is my way of giving back to the community here. >> Yeah, my name is Cayman. Uh I've been working with uh Loadar and Chain Safe since 2019. Longtime fan of Ethereum and I remember I got started when ETH2 was kind of a buzzword and you know in software and so I was like all right, where can I fit in? And so yeah, I saw

Loadar, it was uh you know on GitHub and uh yeah, been with them ever since. >> And my name is Matthew Ke. I'm actually the newest member of the team and I've been here almost 3 years now. Uh so it speaks to the just the uh longevity and the stability of uh a lot of the client devs and the ecosystem. It is an amazing project and I encourage everybody to uh get their feet wet and step into the development because it's it's just a humbling and invigorating experience to get to work around some of the brightest and most talented people I've ever had the opportunity to just everyday integrate with. It's wonderful.

>> And if I understand correctly, Matt, you are coming from a non-technical background and then being able to contribute to Ethereum ecosystem. That's inspiring. Yes, I so I was a construction manager and uh once I found blockchain, I do call myself a crypto evangelist. So I believe very deeply in the ethos and the underpinnings of what make blockchain special and learning to program is something I encourage everybody to do. It's a challenging uh road map, but uh it's something that gives you a great way in order to contribute back to the ecosystem. >> People like you make this space even more special. Thank you for joining you all here. So I understand devcon and dev connect is generally very technical focused although this time it is going to be application rather than protocol.

So what you guys are excited about in this dev connect 2025 any highlight that you would want to share? >> So I think for me um it's very important for protocol devs to be in tune with what's happening outside of the protocol sphere. Uh generally a lot of the times we're very heads down and very focused [snorts] on research and implementing protocols. Um and we forget that there are a lot of users out there who are depending on Ethereum and they have very specific needs uh to allow them to build the internet of value on what we're building. So um events like this is very is very good because it gives us a uh insight as to what people are using

Ethereum for. So, I'm really excited to see a lot of privacy uh tooling on chain. I think that's a really big thing. It's embedded in these cippher punk ethos and the Ethereum ethos. Uh but we haven't really gotten it quite right yet. So, I'm excited to see what we have there. >> Yeah. Um I think the whole world fair idea is just really exciting and seeing all the different little hubs of different activity on Ethereum. I'm especially excited about uh privacy on Ethereum. I think with the rise of like large centralized sources of data and the way that large actors are taking over a lot of control of different parts of people's lives, I think privacy is just even like even more important to

kind of double down on. And so the fact that this is actually u represented in our culture and in our community uh is is great. >> And I am very excited. I know utility has been the buzz word for a long time. I know that's that's a big thing but bringing more people into the fold for what the use cases of this amazing technology uh can do I think is absolutely the most interesting thing to me. I am very excited to see so many different things moving on chain whether you look at the examples of real estate in Dubai or you look at the idea of uh identity in um I believe is Bhutan and there's a lot of these real world use cases and it's not just the tokenization

that I think is really really to me very interesting and this plays into that this whole idea of scaling because if we are going to be the world computer in order to bring uh you know a billion people in the fold hold and provide security for a trillion plus. Being able to do more things with this technology is an extremely exciting and I believe an amazing frontier for the ecosystem as a whole. >> That is all exciting and I was listening to Tomas's conversation this morning. He also mentioned about AI. So we are getting some proposals ERC especially which are like how to make use of AI more into blockchain. That is good. And as you mentioned this is a world fair.

It provides it's a very good platform to meet people. You mentioned about Bhutan ID implementation. I met the team just the other day and we are hoping to have them on a separate podcast talking about how they actually made it happen the implementation of it for an entire nation. That's kind of amazing and we are so looking forward to learn more about it. Well, switching gears, ECH Institute is also organizing EIP summit and I understand you guys are loadar team a client dev. So you always work with EIPs. [laughter] So would love to hear your thoughts, feedbacks, anything in particular that loadar team is kind of finding it challenging to deal with when it comes to EIP or anything as a story that you

would like to share with us. How do you find the EIP process in general? You know, there's something that came up on the last ACV call, the all core devs call. Uh, it's an open call. I invite everybody in order to at least pay us a visit or watch it streamed on YouTube. It's a great opportunity to see how some of the inner workings happen. And one of those things that popped up on the last call was uh how are we going to plan for inclusions of the next fork? And one of the big things I think our team is really focused and eager to discuss is how do we plan for more than one fork ahead and start to do some of these continuity of development to do resource planning and also to give the community more time for feedback and give the

community more opportunity to implement some of these features and help us test them from from a usability standpoint not just from a a client implementation standpoint. >> That is a very good take. Earlier this morning I was talking to someone who is going to organize hakat and for another event and they were trying to check how they can help protocol teams. So I guess this is a very good point. We can try to ask them to integrate some of the EIP so we can get to know their usability beforehand it is being implemented in the all clients and goes for an upgrade.

That's cool. So talking about upgrade we are entering into the era Fusaka upgrade. Kusaka is on 3rd of December and this is going to be the second upgrade for the year. Curious to hear from Lordar point of view what are your upgrade preparation? How comfortable you are? How are things there? >> Yeah, I think Fusaka was really interesting because this is a first time that we've had a second fork in one year. So two forks per year and I I think it was a big challenge for us, right? because you're just it's a shift in priorities, shift in resources that I think all of us on the team were all aligned that we wanted to have, but it's kind of hard doing it the first time.

And so just like I think that was our experience was this is my my what stands out to me is that we move really fast. We did a lot of work really quickly and so I'm really proud of the team and proud of the work we accomplished. Um, so yeah, especially I mean Matt was heading up a lot of that work and so did a really good job >> and it was a very uh to to speak to that about uh some of the resource planning and and how that ties in with some of the future planning is that you know it was a big shift and it was a big lift in order to do this development and you know it was a great opportunity just to you know because of how the team dynamics work to raise a hand and say hey let's bring some more people in you

know let's there are some challenges in order to rally together. was a great rallying point in order to not only build uh great team dynamics and but really to ship the feature in a timely manner and I think that's really the big piece is making sure we're hitting our timelines because the the community really depends on these upgrades and they also need to do the planning as well. So having that shity that we're going to ship a successful but a safe fork really it takes a like like they say it takes a whole village to raise a child. It takes a whole team in order to ship a fork. Yeah, I would definitely like add to that in the sense that like it can be difficult sometimes to manage resources when there's so many different things that you have to account for. So like uh even like almost a year ago we

also announced a transition to utilizing the Zigg programming language. So there are many other um priorities as well that we have to balance alongside shipping a hard fork for Ethereum and contributing to the AIPs and seeing how that scope changes when we implement it into loadar and because of all the different client implementations. Everybody kind of has a different engineering effort required to implement something. So it might be say easy on loadar but it might more difficult on another team. So we have to balance a lot of these things together and generally once we're done with one fork we go right into the next. So there's not much of a break in the cycle. We are always busy with something.

>> That is true. Uh so I understand this is the first time that we having two folks in one year after the merge but historically we did have multiple folks in the past but that was just one layer right. I understand that coordination work doubles here because we have execution client and consensus client. So coordination works are more important here because we want to be safe, we want to be secured and we are trying to cater way more users. Right here [snorts] we did talk about multi-upgrade system like how we can prepare ourselves to make sure that we have resources available.

We have developers available to keep on testing and keep on u like going with other clients like if they are making progress we are making progress as well. I loved your voice in ACD map that you mentioned that there are some challenges maybe all clients are not being vocal but we are saying it out loud that is sometimes required because we want to be safe at any cost. So even if it delays by a few months, no big deal. We just want to make sure it is done rightly. >> And you know that was a hard decision in order to to speak up and say that uh it was something that I think was not taken lightly. But it was very reassuring to know that that security and safety was the priority and by creating a culture of inclusion and uh a place where there

it is a safe space even though it's quite for newcomers it's a little intimidating to talk in ACD. I'm just saying like there's a lot of very profoundly important voices there and but it's a place where everybody can speak up and it gives us that community aggregated voice across the community to make sure that we are preserving the things that are most important and in particular is that we're going to ship a safe fork >> over here like a lot of people have been talking and and even bragging about our 100% uptime as a protocol and I think that is a very important thing to uh continue to maintain. pain as you've seen in many of the uh earlier presentations, this 100% uptime is demanded by everybody. So, by having that voice to speak up um to call

something out when it's not safe is something that we should always be appreciative of. Um I can tell you right now the current Fusaka schedule with it being in December 3rd probably wouldn't have happened if we didn't speak up about it. We got like an extra month to actually ship Fusaka which was pretty important at the end of the day. >> It really was >> otherwise like you know who knows what could have happened. The goal was originally to ship before Dev Connect >> but it wasn't uh it wasn't reality because not every team was ready. Um, and with the voices such as Matt and others in the protocol dev community, we were able to still deliver a hard fork within the year, but also make sure we

were more confident in the code that we were shipping. So now we feel a lot better about it being on December 3rd. >> Yes, security is important as well as inclusivity. I know there are so many clients and we would want all of the clients to be working in lock step. So even if we have to delay the Pope for a month, that's no big deal. We did talk about uh newcomers like sometimes it could be intimidating but I believe the existing teams are providing enough handholding to newcomers to let them into the protocol development and make their role. Would you guys have any suggestions for people who would like to contribute to the existing protocol as an outside contributor maybe a volunteer?

>> You know this is something as you know I I feel very passionately about. There are a number of programs that the EF provides in order to uh create community outreach whether it be the women in Ethereum protocol or the Ethereum protocol fellows I think are the two headline programs that are I guess officially sanctioned but really the best thing to do is we're it's an open-source protocol and all of the teams we operate 100% on open source principles and out in the open. If there's something that is interesting to you reach out to us. I encourage and challenge you to come meet us on our Discord. It is absolutely something we we're excited to talk to community members. Whether it's your first time in

the Ethereum ecosystem or you're a seasoned veteran and you have 10 years of programming experience, we're inclusive of everybody. And I think that's a very important thing because everybody has to take their first step. I was a construction manager. I wore a hard hat and making that transition to protocol development instead of real estate development was it was a process and sometimes just knowing where do I take the first steps or what are the things that I can do can be overwhelming and this is where I think a lot of these programs that are put forth by the EF and and even some of the individual members of the core dev team like myself are eager in order to provide that resource or to provide that that opportunity to like where do I start and

that is just just say hello and I promise you if they don't give you a hello back I will have a talking to them >> from hard hat to red hat maybe yellow hat [laughter] >> that's quite a journey well before we wrap up if you guys would like to add any more thing any message to the community from your end as well >> I'm excited for next year I'm excited to ship EPBS and Fosil next year this is my personal goal so we'll see how it goes in in ACD and uh but yeah, things are looking really bright.

>> Yeah, I really do think we have the capacity to keep doing two hard forks a year. >> We just need to be very realistic about our velocity as client teams and to really um really find a system that works for all of us. I think we do have the ability to plan two forks ahead. I think it gives the community a lot of reassurance to know what's happening and what to expect within the next 12 months. And um I think by having that assurity that they can depend on the core devs to do what they say they can do in 12 months gives a lot of confidence for people to anticipate and build off of that momentum.

>> Um so if we just try just even a little bit harder like I I still can't believe we managed to ship two forks this year. This I don't think has really really happened before. >> We will and [laughter] let's just fingers crossed you know what I mean but optimistically I I yeah uh it is an awesome achievement. >> Yes, we just need to be realistic about inclusion of proposals and the workload that is getting on all clients. Well, thank you so much you all. I understand you are doing a great job running this Ethereum protocol without any blockage.

So, it's all the hard work that you people are doing behind the scenes. So, thank you so much for doing that. You enjoy rest of the D Connect and hopefully happy Fusaka soon. >> And I'd like to say thank you by the way. Doing the organization and coordination [music] and hurting us cats [laughter] is a wonderful job that I think isn't one of those unsung uh heroes. >> Yeah, it's not easy. It's definitely not easy to do coordination. It's sometimes even harder than the tech. Yes. >> Yeah. >> Thank you so much for your kind words. >> Thank you. Yeah.