Lambda 创始人 Fede：以太坊未来十年的技术硬仗与文化反思 - Devconnect 2025 | ETHPanda 译制

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[music] Hey [applause] I'm a little bit sleepy. Yesterday, we went with friends to watch Bokeh. I hope that you guys can meet many Argentinians that are as passionate as VA fans. Um, so I'm going to speak about the next 10 years of Ethereum, uh, from verifiable computer to global economy. So to me, Ethereum is a verifiable computer. Uh I never like to match the world computer meme. I think AWS or Google are the uh world computers. They have a lot of money. They have a lot of computers, but you have to trust them.

So to me, the big difference between Ethereum and the rest of the computers is that it's verifiable. Ethereum is the world first verifiable computer. No trash computation, economic incentives, and mathematics. This gives a huge edge over the world computer over AWS or Google cloud because anything that happens inside the computer is verifiable and you have to trust it. Uh I don't think there's it's like to me it's almost like a small god in terms of like you trust it because if you trust economic incentives, capitalism, mathematics, everything that happens over there is correct.

Uh this has a nature over AWS because AWS on Google are based on trust on trust can be broken. The other day, uh, I read on Twitter a guy that hacked into, uh, Bing on he changed the movies. If you Google like or Bing, uh, what are the top 10 movies, the guy hacked into it and changed the list of movies and you just have to trust Bing to say that whatever they're saying is correct. And in this case, he Bing was hacked. So you're trusting a hacker with a uh with um Ethereum that cannot happen unless everything get hacked and that's very difficult because you have to hack into multiple teams into multiple implementations and that can be seen also by everyone. So this makes it

antifragile every attack every week that somebody trying to attack Ethereum from North Korea or other state actors or or private actors at becomes stronger because it's over there running on there's a lot of money on people trying to get it. So from my point of view that's the biggest advantage is that it's verifiable and that we can all see what's going on. So what does that what does a verifiable computer enables? A verifiable computer enables internet property rights true ownership instead of believing or trusting platform terms like the typical thing you give next that says like you agree to give all the data to this company. Instead of doing that what you're doing is trusting uh private keys. private keys are way better than trusting just the uh terms

and services type of contract. So this creates global neutrality. A Chinese dev, a Russian trader, an American fund on Argentinian users user have the same art, the same playing field. Uh we choose uh use the verifiable computer. We can put money there, art there on we know we own it. We're not depending on anybody else. So this gives the uh basic rights to be able to build everything else. Before Ethereum, internet didn't have property rights. So this is crucial to be able to build a lot of things like the ones we're building nowadays. So from my point of view in the next 10 years, what's going to happen is that we're going to tokenize everything from art, land, and even artificial intelligence. That's very important. If

kids are going to be studenting with artificial intelligence, there's incentives for people to hack into AI, change the parameters so that the AI answers with whatever the hacker wants. So, we need Ethereum to verify that the AI is working properly. And there's a lot of people working on this. We're actually working on this too. So, Ethereum uh created a whole economy nowadays only if it's $300 billion. It's huge. Alus are growing on every month there's three trillions of stablecom monthly volume only on Ethereum Visa where so we're three times bigger than Visa um one of the biggest advantages we have over Visa over the New York Stock Exchange or uh the any other exchange like Argentinian exchange Marval uh is

that we we have composibility everything is in the same place you can change your stable coins of dollars for a tokenized asset for art on this creative flywheel because more people are adding more money on everything is happening at the same time in the same place all the time. Uh actually in that sense Ethereum is less um fragmented that the capital markets of the world it's running everywhere all the time because of the internet property or property rights that I mentioned before. So how did we create this with a bubble? From 2017 to 2022, there was a huge bubble in crypto.

Most projects were scams from my point of view. Ethereum one because Vitalik on the EF on people building it had long-term visions and they were not economically um I mean like they were economically incentivized but they wanted to make something bigger than themselves. So that's why after the big bubble on the small stagnation for two years uh we at team won were winning in some way on we could do things like zk polygon for example sandep put a lot of money for zk to be a big thing starware the same thing zking there was uh even the f like this enable to have uh zk as a uh amazing technology that from my point of view is going to be even bigger than blockchains. So yes, however, this also created

competitors on this something we sometimes forget. This bubble created new technologies like Solana, Sui and Apptos that we should check because they're doing things that are interesting and we should check to improve ourselves. So after the bubble from my point of view, Ethereum found some product market fit. The product market fit is decentralized or permissionless verifiability plus privacy something that we're trying to start building on the core of Ethereum plus stable coins. That's the Ethereum PMF like that's the basic thing that is working on growing. Most tokens are going down but the volume of of stable coins is going up.

Uh so it's a programmable private borderless USD. Uh right now we are 10 times bigger than competitors. So that's an edge we have to keep on working on and we don't have to uh sleep uh on on on forget that this is one of the biggest uh PMFs we have. Um next so these are there's two things I want to talk today that uh I'm going to rant a little bit about that is the technical challenges I see for a team to keep winning in the next years on the social ch uh challenges I see uh that I think we have to work on. So I will read them but then I will go down into each of one of them. Performance, scalability, interrupt privacy security

postquantum on complexity. So performance, we're building itrex. A few minutes ago I learned that my team uh managed to be 10% away from ref in terms of performance. We started working on this uh one year ago. So I'm super proud of the work we have been doing. But if you check apart from nethermind ref go on uh itrex most of the other clients have some difficulties performance-wise. I'm not saying this a piece of people. If you run a benchmark you can see it and unless we change the validator requirements it's going to be difficult to achieve the numbers we need to keep competing with things like Solana. I believe Ethereum is the only protocol that exists as a as a

verifiable computer because you have different implementations because you have a team for example us in Argentina we have more than 100 developers on the core of Ethereum right now working in different things uh where in Europe you have teams in Europe you have teams in the US you have teams in Asia no other blockchain or verifiable computer has this however for three years we decided not to increase the gas limit we decided to be slow I think we can be verifiable on people can check everything that's happening and at the same time keep raising the gas limit. This was a taboo topic until a few months ago. Dangrad, myself and many were trying to push to become faster so that we can keep uh winning in the competition. So I think we should keep doing the same on the

other execution clients should catch up because if they don't catch up we cannot wait for them. That's my point of view. I think we need to accelerate on whoever is left behind is left behind. uh Ethereum is bigger than any one of the teams that is building on it. I also believe that the validation requirements should go up. Uh I don't think I'm not sure actually it's something I have been debating mentally. I'm not sure that the objective of Ethereum is that everybody can run in its own home, its own validator. Uh I think that everybody should be able to do so if it can pay $1,000$2,000 or it could verify it or attest it with a few dollars. like we should attest on verify everything that's happening. But I'm not completely sure. That's a debate

that has been ongoing for ages on Ethereum that what we want is the the requirements to be so low that anybody can run it in like a Raspberry Pi that costs $50. Also another issue we have to work is state growth that is super important because if we increase the gas limit something that we can do to compete with others the state is going to grow a lot. Then scalability uh as I said before from my point of view it is about verifiability not homestaking. So I think we have to increase the gas limit by 100 because if we increase the gas limit, more people are going to use it. The cheaper we become, the more people are going to use it. It's like with the internet. People started creating things like YouTube or streaming platforms once the internet was fast. The first thing you have to do

is make things fast for people to build on top of it. I also believe I'm a huge fan of Rick 5. I am not a huge fan of solidity to be honest. From my point of view also um solidity is not Ethereum. ATUM is not defined by solidity. I respect the people working on it. It has been crucial. It's a simple language, but it has a lot of issues. I'm a big fan of Wix 5 and I think this should be the default. The other thing I have to say is that most L2 stacks don't work. Most L2 stacks literally don't work. You go, you clone the repo, you try to run it and it doesn't work. I don't want to name I don't want to shame anybody, but this is related to incentives.

Incentives are in place to launch a token, forget about it and die. Those are the incentives we have in place. So what we're trying to do with it is that anybody with one command can run another two on if we still believe in the rollup ccentric road map we have to make rollups easy to run interrupt on the centralization based rollups the other day we had an outage in AWS like I mean Ethereum many of the rollups a few of the rollups actually not that many uh went down I think this is super bad so people were ranting on us and I think they have a point we need to move to stage two we need to also make decentralized uh sequencers and we need to create censorship resistance in L2. Uh I believe in base rollups. I won't explain right now what it means

but it's so you reuse the pipeline of the L1 to create L2s to decentralize to have interrupt and this is something we have to work. Also commit boost is another piece of technology. Many of you guys don't know what is all this about. You can check the name the names on then Google and learn about it. It's an amazing piece of technology that Drew has been working on that creates a public good to be able to create things like preconfirmations. Lambda is also working on that privacy. The only thing I'm going to say is I became public after I got a call from a lawyer saying like, "Hey, Fed, if you don't cooperate, you're going to have big trouble." This happened a few years ago on every once in a while I have an issue because of it. Uh I'm still working on privacy work

in Maiden. We're working on privacy related things for Sombra, for governments on the only thing I'm going to say is like I think we should all be able to work on privacy and we should all support anybody working on privacy. Uh right now it's not clear what are the rules to be able to work on privacy. It's becoming a meme. It's becoming a thing that everybody wants to work on. But for example, I got a direct call from from somebody saying like don't touch privacy in this way on that way. And I honestly don't know if that's correct or not. There's no clear rules. So we should support everyone. Uh Roman um Alexi uh we should support the Samurai wallet guy that uh I think is going to jail for five years. uh on we need to fight this all together

and obviously the one needs privacy because if I want my mother to use uh Ethereum she won't like the fact that uh uh she she sends transactions to somebody and everybody can see it then security solidity compiler and multic solidity compiler uh maintenance right now if you check I ask everyone to check this go to GitHub check the contributors there's only one or two guys I don't know their names sorry I don't remember and I don't didn't want to put the picture uh I like the paintings. That's why I didn't put the picture. Um they're working very hard on solidity compiler. That's a huge issue. We don't have enough people working on the most important programming language on Ethereum. So if we want to be here in the next 10 years, we need to fund that or we need people working on that. The same with Viper that is also having I

believe some funding issues. So it syntax is simple and that's why people like it. However, the semantics on the compiler don't catch multiple bugs. many of the security bugs. I I I have worked in more than 20 easily programming languages from Llang to Rust. I'm a huge programming language fan. Lambda supports new programming languages where sponsors of Gleim for example from rock and I swear god on my team thinks the same. I have never had such a big time working a programming language like solidity. You're a very experienced developer on writing solidity feels like you're going to shoot yourself. Like I I for me it's easier to write assembly than solidity. It's so easy to create security bugs on this can be catched like if we had the better compiler there's many bugs that could be catched on compiling time. So I think the long-term solution is the risk 5 CKVM as

the L1 default postquantum. We're working with Justin Drake on the Lin Ethereum people. Uh we just went to Cambridge uh with three of our cryptographers, hackers, however you want to call it to work on hashbased signatures, minimal ZKVM. We're working on the lean VM. Thank you so much to Justin on the Tum Foundation for making things easy for people like us that were very far away that we are not so well connected in terms of VCs capital. to let us in on help. We're super proud like if you ask me the things I'm most proud of my life is working on it working on linthereum. Uh so we're working on immune zkm inspired in the kairo VM that we lambda implemented uh with the help of stackware uh on they're also working nethermind I believe is

working in formal verification. So here we have a huge advantage over Bitcoin because our accelerationism uh on our our attitude to um work on multiple implementations having too many people checking things like being more open in terms of core development on research makes us uh like gives us an advantage. Bitcoin has an issue on the um uh deployment of postquantum uh cryptography. So now the part where uh I have only 10 more minutes where I want to be very clear. I'm a huge Ethereum fan. My company depends on Ethereum. The next uh 10 years if Ethereum uh has an issue, my company and everything I have built for

the last 12 years is Uh we deployed dozens of millions of dollars in the last few months to create multiple new companies on top of Etheum. I'm going to mention a few of them. And I'm saying this because I love Etheum. It's not because I want Ethium to die. It's the other way around. I wanted to improve on improvement means speaking openly about the issues we have. So first problem we already won. This is self-imposed stagnation. Complacency leads to lack of growth on self-awareness. Keeps away new ambitious people. I have seen many young people that are 20 years old telling me like I'm going to Solana because I see there's more ambitious. I think we need to become ambitious. I think we need a little bit of the bronze age mindset of

like we're here we want to win we want to kill the competitor like Intel the the the founder of Intel wrote a book called only the paranoid survive he died and then check the stock of Intel that went down even Intel that was a gigantic thing is going down in comparison to Nvia on AMD so and the same thing happened with MySpace Blueberry on many amazing companies on even protocols so we didn't win like we're winning, but to keep winning, we need to keep an open critical uh sphere of debate. We don't need to see comments like mine or others as somebody being like uh harsh on Ethereum being I'm very harsh on my engineers. I'm very harsh on myself on

my company, but it's because I want the the company the culture to improve on the same thing with Ethereum. This uh yeah uh this creates a long ter longtail risk. a new competitor can appear that win over us if we don't have an open-minded uh mindset of like yeah we're winning but we have to be careful so I am part of the tech elalite I'm not speaking badly of other people I'm saying I am part of the tech elite we have to do this because people have been doing it for quite some time the other day I had a call the other day means like two days ago I had a call with one of the top EQ researchers and I asked like why the hell are we doing this and the answer was like because this person has been working on it for two

That's not okay. Like if Lambda is doing something for two years on somebody else does something better, please kill what Lambda is doing. We cannot have this attitude of like this has been being worked for quite some time. So we have to respect the person. Athereum is bigger than anybody. This doesn't mean that we have to be mean with the people working on it. We have to be thankful. But science or engineering means that we have to leave things behind. And I keep doing this even with the things I do in my company. We have to have an open mind where if anybody does something better than us, we have to remove it. I believe that UF was that case. I had to coordinate with multiple people very important people on Signal on Ethereum to go on a on on a call and say like why

UF is an issue on everybody was telling me hey Fred I think this but I don't I don't want to go on disrupt the the process. I don't want to say what I believe in. And I'm like, dude, science engineering means we have to be able to debate things openly and it cannot be the case that we keep doing things because people did it before. Uh yeah, as I mentioned, something important like UF was decided on closed doors. I was part of that like we had to influence. Yeah, there's social coordination and that's happening. I don't like that. I like public debate. I'm a Twitter guy. I go on Twitter and I say what I believe and I'm okay other people ranting on me. Like there was somebody a few princes I think was the the handle on Twitter saying like Fed I don't like this about uh about your talk

or whatever. I'm like it's okay dude like that's what science and engineering is all about. We have an open debate on people decide uh what has to be done if we keep doing things on closed doors. This is super fragile because anybody and an a state actor and there's many that are trying to get into the core of Ethereum. I know that for as a fact um are going to infiltrate are going to uh influence the core people taking the decisions behind closed doors. This has happened before. Check open BSD like uh they they had a state actors trying to enter the core of OpenBSD by paying one developer that was in charge of everything. Theodat exposed that. So we need things to be open on public.

Transparent things make things better for everyone. Um yeah, another thing, lack of knowledge of what competitors are doing. I have gone to every Solana Breakpoint and I'm proud of that. Why? Because I see them as a competitor. Some people might believe that I'm a Solana bull or whatever because I I go to I speak with them. No, it's because I want to learn from my competitor. I want to copy good ideas from them. They have a lot of smart people. The same with Su or Apptos. Um so we should copy anything that anybody else does that is good.

Linux did this many times. Linux copied everything from Solaris. I was a big Solaris bull. I worked in some micros systemystems and I love Solaris. I actually like it more than uh Linux. But Linux was open on copy all your good things. Uh that's what opens you. You have always reference what you copy from. I fire people in my company for not for stealing things and without referencing them. You have to do that. But copying is okay. Picasso said that good artists copy. Um also young people check the things they don't young people don't care who is winning they want to see who is driving things who is more like aggressive not in a like bad way but like I want to take over over the world that's how the how Linux became

huge now uh bulb uh Android are are using Linux we need to have that attitude to win yeah crowdf following mindset uh as I said before important debates aren't public echo chambers crash Ident contrary and cost exclus ex exclusion kills feedback loops I don't believe there's people that are ultra libertarians my I have a partner that is ultra libertarian he believes everything done by the state is bad and there's people that have another partner that is like closer to ponism that it's like everything that's done by private by by private actor is bad I don't think public or private is what define uh if something is long-term good for society I think that things that have a closed feedback loop where they learn from

their users ers from their stakeholders is what make good systems in the long run. So I think that we should literally pay people to be contrarian. We should um I I there's a partner in my company called Maudo, another one called Chah. He's a good friend. Sometimes I want to kill them, but I like working with them because they make me think like they're right. They're harsh on me. Like they they they make criticism to me on the first reaction I have is like I want to fire them because I'm a human. But at the end of the day actually it's the other way around. I'm happy of having people that question my authority. We need to have that because that enforces good feedback loops. So tech on culture the feedback loop c prices. I believe that if we

don't have a good culture that is open we're going to have in the long run bad tech on the other way around when we have bad tech the good young blood doesn't come to Ethereum. So we need to keep a better standard in terms of being more open to criticism on I might be wrong in many of the things I said. You might not like base rollups but we need to have open debate. Yes, I think we should debate more like Bitcoin uh without the threats. Sometimes Bitcoiners are crazy uh on the thread people that have a different ideas that's obviously wrong but we should have a very harsh direct debate but we should execute like Ethereum. We debate very harsh like we are very aggressive in the debates. Then we decide on all together we execute like a

team. I think we should change. We do that in lambda. We debate things very strongly and then when we work we work all together as a team. So two more minutes. Why the hell do you need to listen to me? So we're working in multiple countries in Latin America. We already have with uh our partners Diego Fernandez with Sombra more than 10 million IDs minted uh on Ethereum. We're going to do amazing things over there. We're working with the government of um Novalon uh in Mexico. Uh we're working here with multiple states. We're working uh we're starting to talk in Colombia on once you have ideas on chain, you can you can start giving uh you can do KYC's. We will need KYC for

corporations. I'm not a huge fan of that that that's going to happen. Uh we need to um uh we can give loans based on that. We're working also in Africa in different countries doing creating uh different infrastructure for passports for property rights like I mean like physical property rights. We're doing the same in Asia in different central Asian countries. I posted some pictures. I was recently in Usbekistan. Uh the other countries I can mention in Africa. We built Ethereum L1 client. We have 40 people working there. The L2 stack we are using SP1. We're using uh risk hero. We're using CISK by shorty. Uh we're building our own ZK uh VM with Lambda line on TMI labs. We're working with our friends um from Israel on Belgium that are theoretical cryptographers with

Tomer GMI labs as I mentioned Sobra. We're doing security audits with our French partners on members of Argotic fasting labs. We're doing we're working with Paul Finance on robust incentives. They're working with different clients Moro and many others. We're doing with our partner Ben from Belgium uh from Gant uh doing uh revenue back finance. We're working on privacy with Maiden Star is going to start rolling privacy too. Uh we're working in decentralized AI. We're working on linum commit boost. We're launching tomorrow something interesting with stable coins. Today I'm super proud with Rodrigo uh um a friend we met recently. We have decided to between Lambda and Boulder Tech create a giant in the region with Irsa. Irsa is

one of the owners if I'm not mistaken uh of this place. This was a cow place for me. So it's amazing. I love cows on horses. Now we have cows horses on on a team in the same place. We're working with them to do so many things in Latin America. Payment rails. I I posted today something. Rodo posted something too and people from New York were like dude we're having issues with our providers in Latin America. can we work together to to do uh payment rails and in a month or two we're going to make some noise on me on block building. So Lambda with hundreds of engineers in our group we have almost 500 people.

We're not very good at marketing. I'm the only guy on Twitter trolling all day long. Uh but we're working on so many things on I'm super proud of what we're doing. I'm super happy that uh you guys are here in Argentina and I hope you can be as passionate as me on the future of Ethereum. I just hope we are more open to debate to criticism to make ETH on Ethereum uh as big as we want. Thank you everyone. [applause] >> Thank you Petty. [applause] So we have some great questions uh from the audience. I guess I have one question before all of that. How do you feel right now? You know, we're we're in

Argentina. We're having Dev Connect. Is there one word to describe how you feel right now? >> Happy. Like, I'm super happy. I'm super happy that my mother is here. She now can hopefully understand what the hell I'm doing on what's a team. Uh I'm happy that I have we have partners from the church that came so that don't know much about the team. We actually went with some friends from the church to to to cans. Uh we have some like famous artists coming. So, it's amazing. I we invite a lot of people to show them what we're doing. It's people that know us for other businesses. So, I'm super happy to be able to show everything to the world.

>> Awesome. She must be very proud. Um so, first question, which of the outlined initiatives are most important to you right now? >> Lin Ethereum. I think what Justin Drake has been doing. Uh look, I'm a very blunt person. Uh I was not a huge fan of the uh the previous meme of uh what was it? Uh I don't remember. I have this section. Can I forget the name? >> Ultrasound. >> Yeah, ultrasound money. I don't know why I was not a huge fan. Justin pushed that a lot. I always like Justin, but I didn't I don't know. It didn't touch me. Lynn Ethereum from my point of view is like a cathedral. I went to see him in Cambridge. We were walking inside of one of the cathedral cathedrals. We were watching it so nicely. He told me, "Hey, Fred, do you think like in 500 years uh

people are going to see the design of Ethereum like this cathedral?" And I was like, "Yes, and you're the one of the architects." So, I'm super proud of the work he's doing and I'm super thankful to be part of it. >> Awesome. Yeah, Ethereum is a cathedral in the sky. It's super cool. U a technical question. How far can we raise the gas limits in the near future in your your mind? >> Chief servers can right now. So, first of all, I'm super uh resp I don't know the word in English. I'm amazed by the engineering capabilities of Nethermine. Uh we have been um checking on it like the last few uh months. Their work is amazing.

Working on C#. C# is a language I don't like uh by by Microsoft. Uh I mean I like it more than Java. It's not language I like. They they manage to get a lot of meagas. From my point of view they're the fastest uh implementation then get breath on us. I think you can get to 300 400 megastas with a good server with something like a cheaper thing like a orange P meagas right now. But with the changes that are coming, I think we should easily approach one gigas in the next few years. >> Awesome. Um, so you know, you're working with a bunch of different people from across institutions to governments to app builders to all the above.

>> Um, what is something that you find in common with all of them because they're very different, but in terms of like how you represent Ethereum, what is there something that um, you know, you always find yourself going towards when explaining it, especially to new people um, and get them to get them excited? I had to even speak with daughters of kings that are very powerful unexplained Ethereum presidents on big billionaires that are like old and savy on you know like when you have things like Libra going uh internationally uh like institutions on people that build a reputation they're worried uh about get about touching the things and I think what's something that uh that just in

bital dra before on everyone in the YF did very well is they focus on the long term on they always they don't understand very well what Ethereum is but they know that this is their serious thing this is the thing where the nerds are nerds are always trustworthy because they are motivated by other things than only money so I I I find that they always don't understand very well what Etheum is what they can do they're learning but they also see Etheum as the serious thing that that is going to be like winning in the future >> um for a young builder in the audience you know what do you recommend especially if they're interested in your line of work, um what's something they should >> Don't raise money until you have product market fit. Uh people are going to push you to raise money. Uh then you're have

going to have more problems than the ones you you believe. Like money is just a tool. Uh it's a gas to be able to build things. But there's more important things, connections, uh books. Try to work with people that are deeply motivated about what they're doing. work with people that have ethics, uh, morale, that they're trying to do something good for society, something they're proud, uh, you're doing this because you're proud of it. You want to tell your family, you want to tell your friends what you're doing. Probably you can do it, you can work at something else where you make more money. Follow the people doing things they're passionate about on work on things that you will be proud in 10 years.

>> Awesome. Well, thank you so much, V. Thank you for everything you do.