Open Coordination at Scale

Transcript

Cool. So this panel is about uh open coordination at scale. It's all about how Ethereum is decentralized, how we coordinate, where it breaks and what are things that we should not do or which has not worked for Ethereum and what should we do like moving forward so that the network stays resilient as well as decentralized.

So uh all of them have already worked on Ethereum. They know a lot about it. They are not newbies. So we'll get take all the insights that you have. But before that we uh wait Okay, before that I would like you to introduce yourself and also just give one reason that why you would still want to build on Ethereum in today's date like there are so many protocols, so many uh hacks happening or so many different chains happening. Why would you personally have one reason that you would want to just keep on building on Ethereum? So yeah, we'll start with Kashri. You can introduce yourself and give that one reason.

>> Thank you Chandra. Um, I'm Kashi. I lead social marketing at Boundless. We started off as a zero knowledge decentralized proving protocol and have since expanded into being an AI inference platform. We very recently actually also launched a security and defense product line which is very in line with Ethereum's core values. I think Ethereum is still a great place to build because of the culture and the community and the kind of support that you get from other builders when you pursue them. I feel like with all our outreach, some of the fastest responses and conversions always come from ETH

builders. And even if everyone is not working on Ethereum full-time anymore, there's still this sense of like an EF cabal and everyone responds to everyone. >> Great. Yeah, Smith, you can go. >> Hey, uh Smith aside, um I got started with crypto around 10 years ago. Uh I did not have an ID card. Uh and I wanted to move money and there's no bank which takes an account without an ID card. So I figured out okay, I can move money with Bitcoin without any KYC just you know with addresses. So I started mining bitcoins on my school computer. Uh then around 2016 I found out Ethereum. I started arbitrageing it between multiple exchanges and then 2017 onwards I started building on Ethereum work with a bunch of investors on

technical diligence did a lot of security research. I still help companies uh with security. So yeah uh when it comes to Ethereum uh I think I I I personally am very uh Ethereum is very close to my heart as uh you know I I started with Ethereum in 2016 and so far you know of all the hacks Ethereum has been very very resilient even when you know we had to move Ethereum to POSOS they did not just you know rush it they they did a lot of research there were a lot of rounds of you know discussions with all the developers they they moved forward on the test net. They even even until just two to three months before the POSOS

merge happened. They were constantly doing research. They were constantly doing a lot of simulations on what could go wrong. Uh so I think you know given all all the other chains like that there are fast chains out there but most of these uh chains right they are run by let's say a foundation which is a little bit centralized. When it comes to Ethereum, it I would say Ethereum is the closest when it comes to complete decentralization. Obviously, after Bitcoin, but Bitcoin doesn't have smart contracts. >> Great. Thank you. And yes, you can introduce yourself and give one reason.

You still build on Ethereum. >> Yeah. Uh yeah, so my name is Yash and uh I'm a smart contact engineer at Etheri right now. For those of you who don't know, Etheri is a crypto neo bank. Um and we also have a staking protocol and liquid walts and uh yeah like uh one of the reason like the reason why I build on Ethereum today is the same reason why I started building on Ethereum like around 3 or so years ago and that is because Ethereum is the only credibly neutral and decentralized platform out there. Uh it allows uh people to build technologies which uh uh like uh to say like the title of the talk like allows people to like openly

coordinate like what what I mean by openly coordinate is uh there are a lot of things in tech which uh like is expensive or takes time because of bureaucracy bureaucracy involved and that is that is like specifically true for uh fintech. And uh in my opinion like blockchains is the perfect solution to get rid of that bureaucracy and that is why we have seen so much boom of uh D5 products because uh it's just like a perfect product market fit and uh yeah like that u that belief grows every single day. Uh so uh yeah it's great to build on Ethereum.

>> That's a good reason. Uh I'm here uh building on Ethereum 2 uh as a community ETH Mumbai hackathon conferences and I think I do it because of people because of all of you because of the audience because of what happened like before this session the interesting things that we get to do and we just make try to make Ethereum fun. And the next question is actually almost similar and I want yash you to take it take it up is that why do when people all around the world are building Ethereum right not just as they are coordinating they're coordinating how to fix bugs how to come up with new feature upgrades so what do you think like even when people who don't know each other who are living in

different parts of the world what what do you think is motivating them to keep building together like once a single thing. >> Uh yeah, that's a great question. Uh h I think uh the thing that drives for example what drives me most about u uh as I mentioned is like it's a re there's a really good quote that I've heard is that show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And uh so I have a very personal belief that if you like uh want to like trust each other and and if you want to like build a system or use a system where u uh like it can provide value it's very important to understand like what are the incentives uh behind that system and

sometimes it's incredibly difficult to figure out like what those incentives are in closed source platforms but that is not the case that's not like the case in blockchain. In blockchain everything is open everything is uh openly coordinated. It's a decentralized network. So, everyone needs to work together to build it. And that just puts the incentives of every single person like out in the open. And yeah, as I mentioned, if you know the incentives, you know the outcome. And you can clearly see like the outcome of uh decentralized technology is like growing every day. We are building new consumer apps. We we are scaling the protocol and uh yes, it's just like yeah, great to see everyone coordinating together.

Yeah, I think it's uh precisely because everyone knows that everyone else is like well-intentioned. >> I I have like I want to take it up from two more angles. The decentralization how people keep coordinating. One is the security point of view that uh is it a feature or a bug that uh no one person controls Ethereum according to you? >> Yeah. So if you look at the you know ethos of Ethereum uh like if you look at all the new chains that are popping up let's say you know Aptos or SUI just in order to run a validator you need a million dollar or $2 million stake Ethereum foundation and you know all the Ethereum devs have always tried to make

it very inclusive even of you know the retail that you should be able to run a node even on a laptop up until like a two to three years back you were able to run the Ethereum node just on your own laptop itself. Now they cannot fight physics. Um so now you need an SSD and at least like a 1 2 TBTE SSD to run run the node. So Ethereum has been trying to make it very inclusive that hey anybody should be able to verify the entire blockchain. You don't need you know enterprise hardware uh to do so. And if we and and if you look at the history of Ethereum Ethereum has had like insane amount of attacks. Like if you look at 201617

somebody spammed the entire chain with zero value transactions and it was under so much load that you know the chain was going down every now and then. Uh all the Ethereum core developers were up awake um you know trying to fix this. So all these new chains that are secure enough today they they took a lot of lessons from what Ethereum went through in 2016 17 uh when all these attackers try to spam the entire chain when it comes even when it comes to me or or any any kind of hacks um so one of the largest hacks that we saw the DAO hack happened on Ethereum right and that's when you know the entire uh security community started budding up that hey you know this is a code hack rather and

an infra hack. We we need to uh start auditing smart contracts. So I would say Ethereum has always been on the forefront to make sure it is like one of the most secure chains. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh so I I have a couple more questions actually regarding the hacks but I'll come to that like after one question one that another PO view that I wanted is that people are building uh all the technology is open source right it's built on the premise of transparency so how does community or people who are contributing make sure that there is transparency but at the same time uh there's a balance of security like we do not leak data that I mean personally anyone who's building

what do you suggest like how do people make sure that they don't leak any data when they're contributing to an open person's technology >> well I think it it's like a two-part question really right like first how do we foster that sense of community and then second ensure that there's a circle of trust and things aren't getting leaked so I think every developer on Ethereum at least the core developers have a lot of um sense of responsibility when it comes to the roles that they have and a part of that responsibility is constant communication and I think it's very important that you talk about your work often make very public you know announcements about it and then be

open to having discourse. I think a lot of people feel sometimes territorial about their work or they feel like they you know they don't want to take feedback but the more devs and technical people take feedback from one another and make it a more collaborative process the uh better it is for the community overall and on the part of hacks I mean I'm not like a technical community manager but I do know that ZK has a role to play in this and you should just always listen to what your security people are saying like um update everything use 2FA and you know do >> the basics >> the basics yes I follow those and I've never been hacked so

>> yeah I remember recently everyone thought they are hacked when Twitter was sending this to FA messages so I think that's also another uh tip that you know don't believe you're hacked just because someone sent you a message that you are hacked That's a very common trick, you know, sending emails that, hey, you've been hacked, please change your password. This is like quite common. >> So, another thing though that I think um my team has been working on and I've just been seeing in the industry. Would love to hear your thoughts is obliterated models and using openweight models for security instead of relying on the proprietary ones. Um, and like I'm just curious if crypto is adopting

them, if Ethereum developers are adopting them at the moment. >> I mean, that's the next question with the hacks is because it's happening because of the all the advancements in AI. So, where do you think that uh Smith, where do you think that uh crypto technology is still lacking that we still see this exploits even though we know that AI advancements are happening? what what are we not doing that we should be doing to prevent these exploits? >> So it's it's two parts. So one is I think everybody should have access to all of these abilitated models. Um so I don't think one company should just be so when it comes to proprietary models and let's say claude gatekeeping and it is fine because it's their research they

they build it but just like how operating systems were like back in 1990s you even had to pay for the other you know had to pay for competitor of GitHub when GitHub did not exist so you had to pay for ids you had to pay for compilers but then people came up with you know open source versions of it uh because not everybody can afford it not everybody can you know buy buy a license but they need to keep themselves secure. Now all these ability models they have done a good job of finding these vulnerabilities. Uh but then one of the biggest things that the entire crypto industry approached was immutability that once the smart contract is deployed we cannot edit it. We cannot change the code. So now when there is a bug now now we are in a limbo. What should we do?

There are funds in the smart contract. How how do we move move it? So when it comes to node let's say the ethereum code right when a major flaw is discovered in the flaw ethereum core developers do a great job of you know communicating it with all the other chains that have fked get let's say polygon or BNB and within two to 3 months they all deploy the fix even though that's like like Kashi said you should have great communication uh they are not publicly disclosing it but they're still internally communicating just to make sure that all the chains are up to date with the latest software and they they don't get hacked. Uh but yeah like we we we need more of these obliterated models so that everybody can

keep themselves secure >> and sorry just on the topic of obliterated models I don't mean to shell but my team has been very fast to hop on >> I want you to like add on to that actually I was anyway going to ask you that we're already >> what do you suggest as well >> well my engineers are great at suggesting the right stack I'm just here to bring distribution to their work but if anyone does need an audit and they need a security obliterated model stack. Uh please reach out to me after this panel because we are actively working with a lot of crypto teams specifically protocol teams to ensure that they are well set in how they use LLMs. Yeah, I mean this is a great point to tell you

all that uh this panel might be short so do not worry they will still be outside you can like meet them talk to them and obviously they are on Twitter that's the place but also try to find them here and coming to exploits I know that these things are happening and you also mentioned right how the immutabilities now like it is a feature but also this is something that we thinking about like what should we do what should we not do but uh not exactly that but I want to talk about this thing with you Yash that you you're working on a neo bank and a lot of hacks have also happened on like stable coins new banks crypto cards cold every I think every defi uh hard wallets

everywhere the hacks are happening so where do you draw the line that okay this is where we do it's uh draw the line on decentralization that this is where I don't like we should not get involved as a company for example as Ether and this is where we should act quickly in an emergency situation. We already saw that in the recent act last week like how do you when the funds are at risk how how do you draw the line and where do you draw the line? >> Yeah. So for example like currently at Ether 5 we're taking security incredibly seriously. we have uh like we prioritize a bunch of feature work just to focus on security because everyone and it's not just etheri I think everyone in industry has become incredibly paranoid in the

past couple of months and I think that believing that blockchains are getting like blockchain protocols are getting hacked left right and center is sort of a miscorrelation I feel like that opinion exists because blockchains are public if a blockchain protocol gets hacked you see that it gets hacked Uh but these security issues are not a blockchain specific issue because AI has adv has advanced so much I feel uh like I feel like everything is getting hacked. You see railway getting hacked recently you you see GitHub being down every single day just I think yesterday or something I think gbook also had some issues. So the and if you actually

actually look at what are the hacks that have been happening in the past couple of months, uh most smart contract practices and most smart contract uh uh security in the industry has been has matured a lot in the past couple of years. You don't I don't remember the last time I saw a smart contract hack like in the past couple of months. Every single hack that you have seen which is like like as like like getting bigger and bigger all of them have originated from some sort of operational security related issue. The Binance hack happened because a dev's uh like wallet laptop got compromised and that's basically the same story for every single hack. So uh what we need to do seriously as an

industry is just the same thing that everyone needs to do uh because everyone is getting impacted by AI and that is to improve our infrastructure, improve our security on every single aspect not just smart contracts but operational security uh operational security like signing uh infrastructure uh DevOps pipelines and everything like that. So we need like a complete hands-on approach to navigate this uh new world order uh as uh one might think because like AI has completely changed the cyber security space and I completely agree with uh uh Smith's point uh where uh like everyone should have access to like higher security

models because like if these models are increasing the chances of hacks and security then we also need access to better models so that we can prepare ourselves and improve our security infrastructure. >> Okay, good. Uh but where like once if something like that happens on a decentralized protocol? Uh how quickly you should react even though we know that we should not have controls over the decentralized protocol. So yeah, like freezing funds, right? Like how what what's your opinion on that? Like should we do that or should we not?

Yeah. >> So maybe let me let me read that. So in the last two to three years if you notice a lot of real-time security companies have popped up uh today you know if a protocol gets hacked you see a tweet within 5 to 10 minutes on Twitter uh there's some really great realtime security monitoring companies uh let's say when it comes to bridges u the way they work is you know you lock up funds on one side one chain and you mint uh an equivalent amount on another chain so now companies have come up with monitoring tools that monitor this that hey was the fund locked on some other chain before being minting here etc. Now then comes the response part. The emergence response part. When it comes to response, it depends on what you can

do. Let's say if the code is immutable, there's nothing you can do except for tweeting to the users that please withdraw your money. There's nothing you can do, right? Uh then uh comes reaching out to you know all the stable coin issuers because most of these stable coins you know be tether or or USDC they can be blacklisted. So I would say in the last two two and a half years we have seen some really good uh realtime uh emergency response happening in the industry and and if you notice like a lot of money that has been hacked has been blocked by tether circle etc. A lot of lot of funds have been recovered as well.

>> Uh thank you. So we we talked a lot about exploits. I know the panel is not about that but we are talking about where open coordination where decentralization breaks like we know it's good but also there are these places where because there's no centralized person to just freeze everything or lock everything or just uh revert things like this is where we need other types of solutions. Uh so yeah we we will continue on a different uh train of thought now very small uh like a couple more questions which is about uh scaling. So the that's also the title like open coordinate co coordination at scale. So for scaling you need more and more people to be part of these

protocols this uh uh like contribute to or just use them. So for events like this the conferences hackathons which happen everywhere around the world like what what do local communities get right like Kashi you can answer this what do local uh like the people the ecosystem get right so that when global uh like protocols which are operational globally they like want their support. Why why do they want their support? Well, I spoke about communication earlier and when it comes from a local to global game, it's really about streamlining communications as much as possible and electing a

steward or a PC from your specific community to represent you and them holding up to that responsibility of representing you on a global scale. For instance, like the Mumbai community trusts Chandra as the PC as ETH Mumbai and that's how we report globally to like Ethereum. Um so just having that system and streamline communications in place is important but then my belief is in like what are you actually talking about at the grassroot level and is there enough moderation and direction being given from a local standpoint

because when you run a global community there are very high chances that it's one thing when you're in Buenosiris it's one thing when you're in Bangkok and then it's a totally the other thing when you're in India but um I think from what I've seen is having that sense of consistency and infrastructure and that same skeleton for every form of communication is what really helps. It it's important uh to obviously be present in multiple places and also get it right like it's not just be present and do anything random things right to keep things in check to have a system and with that because uh uh yes you're working at etheri and I know that uh you

also need local communities right here and there for uh wherever etheri is supported uh so according to you like how how does local how are local communities helping you like helping Etherfi be like grow bigger. >> Uh yeah. So like uh at Etheri our goal is like incredibly simple. We want to bring financial services to everyone in the world. Uh uh like building uh building a neo bank on top of like uh crypto allows you to like provide services to people who would otherwise not have access to this.

So that is uh something that uh like we're just like providing value to a lot of local communities and uh that uh that just basically helps us grow a lot. For example, like we have a really good community in Brazil. We have uh a really good community in um uh and Taiwan and like other Southeast Asian countries. Of course, it's difficult to also grow um u to like for example countries like India because of like regulatory related issues. But uh local builders uh uh like people always like uh support something and uh want to use something that is helping them.

>> And to add to that, your community is a guy who knows a guy like at the end of the day it doesn't have to be this formalized thing in a server or a telegram group. Like it's just the people you know and the people that they can connect you to to solve problems. >> Uh great. And uh so in the last 10 years the communities have grown the developers have grown uh Ethereum the TVL is growing like the apps everything is growing we know that uh but according to you Smith you have worked uh since a long time on on Ethereum spec especially so according to you from a decentralized p decentralization perspective

are we getting more decentralized or are we getting less decentralized in recent time are we getting centralized or are we still getting more decentralized what's happening >> I think we are getting I think we getting more centralized like if you look at all the new chains that so Ethereum has tried to maintain you know its decentralized status and it has been doing quite well but if you look at all the other chains new chains like if you look at you know smart contracts 7 8 years ago uh the upgrade upgradable proxy contracts were considered a taboo like nobody wanted upgradeable contracts. Everybody wanted immutable contracts. Uh but it is a feature as well as a bug. You see all the hacks happening. Um so I I I think like um we

will soon reach a place where we come back to immutable smart contracts and and immutable code given with AI. I think it is it is getting we're getting faster there. So I would an example that I take is you know Hotmail one of the first email companies uh they had a exploit and they had to shut down their email servers for a week in 2026. Imagine not having access to your email for a week right. Uh so then they learned and then you know they they got better. So same I think now we are moving to a lot of centralization but once things are secure enough I think people will start moving back to immutable smart contracts and then we might have decentralization again but most chains let's say you know bitcoin

ethereum they they are still on on the same track they are still quite decentralized >> that that's very good to hear so I have just one uh last question on this to both you and Kashi like it's a different question sir But to Kashi it's like what one habit as an individual you can do to follow this part to keep the to be just keep things decentralized someone can do like to keep coordinating to open systems. >> I think it's about starting conversations with people. I think in communities often a lot of people are feeling something but they don't express it. All it takes is one person to come forward and point out a problem and then everyone else you know follows and

starts trying to solve it. Great on this I have another question to you is when people are coordinating together what kind of myth there is I mean I've heard that you know what some people see just contribute to any github but open source GitHub but open source GitHub uh maintainers uh say don't do that because we keep getting like GitHub issues a lot so what is one thing that someone should not do when they want to contribute to opensource systems like Uh hm good question. Uh I think one the like the way to definitely move forward is that you always uh you have like two ways to think about it. First of all

like if you are just like starting out then your goal is to like learn as much as possible and uh if you actually have uh like the understanding uh to like provide value then your goal should be like okay I need to provide value. So like if you're like contributing open source systems uh like it's completely true. A lot of people who are like just starting out they like uh uh misunderstand uh the differences between the two. Uh open source development can uh and just like being in the uh industry and coordinating with the industry can mean like you can either do it with a focused approach of like learning more things like the industry will help you do that. But if you uh like don't have the uh mindset of that and you just like uh try to like just like do something but like it's not

providing anyone else value that is something like uh you should never do. you you should always basically with whatever you're doing you should always the first thing that you should keep in mind is that I need to provide value and actually I do want to like circle back to the previous question that you have around decentralization because I uh I think that this uh needs to be spoken uh a little bit I would love to see uh a time where I can confidently deploy an immutable contract but that is not today today that that is not something that happens today. Today I do believe that a lot of systems are getting centralized not because like Ethereum is incredibly decentralized but the way we are building smart contracts on top of it we

are like blacklisting pausing there's like upgradability and all that stuff and uh I think that is really really important to sort of navigate this kind of middle phase where you're building systems they're getting hacked AI is getting better so like that has now like ballooned even more so you need ability to take fast incident responses and to actually protect user funds because that right now as of today is the most important thing more important than decentralization because if people lose their money they will not believe the technology and if they don't believe in the technology then the technology can yeah like sort of die down >> uh thank you so much for all your answers so I just want to wrap up uh this panel with uh so with all the points that we talked about like com

condensing them to a few points concluding it is that we are moving towards less decentralization but like we can individually contribute be mindful and like have small small habits and think of like where we can provide value and actually go to the direction of decentralization more and we also talked about how hacks are happening exploits are happening and we should have more uh first is knowledge about AI just in general so that we can protect ourselves know about open weights models and uh also just know about I think local ll s that we have been hearing it. So that I think knowledge is very important and yeah I I think and the last part is like

stay connected to the communities local communities because for decentralization for open coordination we don't need each other we all need to know a guy a girl who knows a guy or a girl we need to know someone who knows someone.