Panel on AVS by Nader Dabit

Transcript

So before we get started, uh introductions uh from the from the three guests. I guess we'll start there. Hi, uh my name is Sam Casset. Uh I'm a co-founder of a company called Layer and we make a product called Waves, which stands for web assembly system interface autonomous verifiable service. Sounds much better as Waves. uh but we make it very easy to build things that consume security from IGEN layer uh and make the developer experience much better. Also allows you to touch any uh blockchain essentially write to them and also read from them.

Hey everyone, just gave a talk a few minutes ago but my name is Ismile. I'm the founder of Lrangege. We're a company that focuses on the intersection of AI and ZK. We build Deepro, the fastest and most performant ZKML library in the space. Cool. I'm Yen. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Authentic. We build the Authentic stack which is an AVS development framework. Um, essentially highly versatile, highly configurable in all aspect of the development. We were I think one of the first ABSS being built on a level back then almost two years ago. Um, and now we're building the stack to build ABS's.

Today we have more than 50 teams that using the stack on May having fun. I think there's a lot of alpha between these three people. I'm obviously very biased, but I choose to work, you know, in a space with people that I really enjoy and I kind of truly believe in because I have the potential and the options thankfully like fortunately to do kind of whatever I want. But the things that I think that are like are being built by the folks on this stage to me are just like if you kind of would categorize everything in the crypto space like the cream of the crop like I really do truly believe that the things that that are being built by these founders are are kind of there. So it's an honor to kind of be here with you guys. So, um, you know, to to to

kind of build off of that, like I want to ask, what are like the things that you absolutely hate about the industry right now and how has that affected your approach to like building your company? Um, and how do you kind of like I would say deal with like some of the stuff that you see kind of happening as people that are actually building legitimate products that uh kind of are often, you know, it kind of gets discouraging sometimes. I think I was just talking with Sand Deep who's the founder of Polygon. I was listening to him talk I mean actually on a panel and he was kind of expressing you know the similar sentiment and it kind of hit home for me. I was like, "Yeah, that's interesting." Cuz they're, you know, there are different they're they're founders that can like essentially put

together the most uh I would say efficient and uh most extractable Ponzi uh mechanism and that's where they start their like thought process of building a company from. And then there's people on the opposite spectrum that start from like how can I build something that actually provide value that then ultimately becomes worth money because I'm building something that provides value and you have everything in between. So I'm kind of curious like what do you hate the most about the industry and how is it affecting what you're doing with your company? So I I appreciate the kind words. I mean Nater living legend himself in crypto the best dev in the space. I'm going to say something very controversial about what I don't like about the industry and I'm I'm going to be rocks are gonna come

flying on stage. There are too many builders. I want less builders and I want more commercially minded people building profitable businesses that can sustain themselves on chain. That's what I want. I want less code, less open-source repos, less demos. I want people to take their passion for crypto and embody that into a product that becomes durable and that people use. That's what I want more of in crypto, you know. Uh essentially we are in the tech ecosystem and we need to build products that provide real value to a specific customer segment right this is

not about decentralization it's not an edge right it's an added value you need to build a sustainable business that will serve customers and this is what this is all we need to build okay we need to provide real value to a specific market segment and this is all it is Um so of course we have middleware info apps consumer and all the uh discussions that are going around uh throughout the last few years about the crypto space. Essentially we need revenue generating business a consumer placing application provide real value to real customers.

So also agree with all that and thank you N that's very kind of you. Um like I've been in this industry a long time. uh about 10 years which makes me like very old I think. Uh I helped start this company consensus which basically like we told the story of Ethereum and there was no such thing as like smart contracts before that. welcome. Uh, you know, obviously the Ethereum Foundation, you know, made this up and Vitalic, but we helped, you know, we helped spread the word. And the beautiful thing about that time was that every smart person that was interested in the like the most interesting ideas in the world came out of the woodwork to help us build that. uh because they were

inspired by the idea that you could have decentralized protocols or you know uh as said like self- sustaining protocols that actually make create revenue actually um create this sort of equilibrium system that lives on its own and and we'd already seen examples of this right like for instance like Bit Torrent right like this is something that was real there's already true product market fit of decentralized protocols um it didn't have the economics part, but this is this is real and people saw that you could actually lower the cost of trust. You could change the way that the entire global economy works. And now we have like groups of people that, you know, max

extract vertically integrated. They do the marketing, they do the funding, they do the pump and and dump and they take money from people that don't know any better. Uh, and that's sad to me that we've gone from like the most interesting people in the world breaking in the most inspiring ideas to these people that have like ridden off of what like all those interesting smart people did uh and just sort of like, you know, capitalized on that dream. Um, that said, all the people on this stage are doing something real. uh and we all seek to use these decentralized principles to make something that uh that it that looks like this equilibrium system that's almost like a a life form that

can't can exist without the human governance structures that normally surround economic activity. Um so that's both the best and the worst. Um so welcome and we apologize for starting before you got here but do you mind giving us a quick intro? Yeah, super helpful. I was actually going to ask you what the topic of this panel was cuz there's some very interesting people. We're just like vibe talking. Let's just vibe talk. Yeah, we're past vibe coding. Let's vibe talk. Uh I'm Eric. I think I gave a talk here yesterday. I'm jetlagged so I don't remember. I work at the EF and Ethereal Eyes. We'll get into why I have two jobs later if we want to. Um we're talking about ABS's. Is that right? Well, we're we're talking about a lot of different

things. cuz I think there isn't I would say you know I think we can open the floor to anything interesting honestly etherealize now you all um are very much in the kind of like top of mind right now I think um a lot of people obviously have been talking about um Ethereum marketing and uh the I would say lack of excitement maybe in um the space from certain people about how things have gone and Etherealize is a team or a company I'm not sure exactly how it's structured but you all are here and put together to kind of like actually you might be able to explain it better for sure. So what is Ethereal OS like what is the the focus and the goal of of Ethereal? Yeah, it's it's a little confusing because I think if you trace

when Vivvec and others first popped out onto the scene, it was a very different thing. The team as it is today is 10 people. It's kind of a coalition of folks like half of us have some ties to the EF. the other folks. Vivix from Trafi, he's been in Ethereum for a while. Grant Hummer, I think, has been in Ethereum since the early he wasn't at Contentus, but he was he was there during the dark days. Um, early supporter. Zack Obron, he's just a cracked engineer. Like, he just crushes every CTF. Uh, I don't know. It's great he's with us, but I'm like, usually the security geniuses stay in security. They rarely I haven't seen a lot of security folks like who

are cracked come into product. He's very good. Um and there's some other EF folks there as well. Uh what are we? Uh we are definitely a company. We are forprofit. Uh I think you were talking about this. We need that. We need more of that actually. We need operators who can ship and make money. Open source is wonderful but Goldman Sachs is not going to fork your repo and trade on chain. That's not going to happen. So someone needs to do that work right like in SAS you'll have systems integrators like they will come in they will pitch and they will deliver you the whole thing and service the thing we don't I mean we have that in some form

but it's not very well developed right like consensus was arguably the first doing a lot of that work um and there haven't no one's really stepped into that position to do that um and to do more of that I I like we need people who who need to to operate just like probably not that controversial opinion on that but like consensus was too early in that sense. We were we were right on time in the sense of building a lot of things. Um, but the like enterprise system integrator portion of of what we were doing, I think that people thought that it would uh the

market would understand it faster. Uh, and so like now if you had done the same thing, I think it would it would be great. Some of that was was too early. Think didn't really work. So, I'm going to ask a question because I I've seen a lot about Etherize on Twitter, and I hope you don't mind me jumping in, but is it lobbying? Is it sales? What is the objective of Etherize? Is it trying to drive institutional purchasing? Is it trying to drive institutional development? All it's Palanteer.

Palanteer does all of that. That's the best mental model. But I mean lobby Palanteer lobbies to be able to sell its own product, right? We're talking about they wouldn't carp wouldn't call it that, but yes. Right. But but but the objective function of a company that's lobbying that is selling a product is to sell the product. The objective function of a crypto protocol that is lobbying is in theory to sell its token which is different than the sale of a product. And so what I'm trying to understand is whether that way I think there's two mandates that we have. One was given to us by the EF the community and others and it is to advocate for Ethereum. That means all sorts of

things. That might mean pitching ETH the asset. So I'm specifically working on that. Um it's not actually an uphill battle. It's just no one's been able to pull the thesis together and it's like yes, get the hedge fun person to do it. Um, the other part is I'll call it lobbying, but it's not really like it's not offensive lobbying of like I'm we're not trying to box out other L1s. We're more just there to make sure Ripple doesn't take the US, right? Because that's what's going to happen. You can look at their treasury. If they dump it with 95% slippage, they still have $3 billion. That is scary. We don't talk about Ripple cuz they're not in this

room, right? But I'm going to call them out specifically as they they predate all of us, right? They almost hired Vitalic. Like they are in the room. Imagine no one on like everyone's fighting over like like L1's, L2s, all this on Twitter and like who's the and like and then you like look at the valuation of people and they're like 1 1,000th of like Ripple and no one even talks. So like what is actually happening? I I mean I mean I know what's happening like but I'm saying like put it into words. I mean it's it's more Look, I think we exist in an echo chamber. The world does not care about CT and Twitter. We argue over little things that don't matter. Meanwhile, we

are getting rugged and we should not be getting rugged because we build real and we should we should actually tell the world that. But part of the concern so reg so Ripple obviously has has an advantage on regulatory capture compared to Ethereum right now I'd argue right they spent a lot more call it regulatory strategy for sure right but you know the the pitch that they make is very simple right it's swift what is Ethereum uh it's it's not a bank server right like that that's what Ripple is it's a bunch of servers that banks run but I'm not asking about Ripple I'm saying they would say um 's pitch is look zooming out the world is getting multipolar. Trust is scarce. There's the

thing it's easier for banks and countries to pick the thing that everyone either equally hates or equally loves that is Ethereum. And if you zoom out, it's interesting because there's really two types of people or customer segments that will pay for censorship resistance. One are individuals who really really need it, right? These are cipher punks. Occasionally they are criminals. Uh these are people who are willing to pay anything for mainet because you can just you you can't really be stopped there. There's another customer segment which are nation states and enterprises. They do not care about mainet fees. They will pay 10 times the amount because it will give you guarantees that you can actually build a

financial system on. If you want to build it in S3 bucket, you shouldn't do that. But you see how it feels complex like Swift. Uh it is complex, but you can reduce anything to a word. I can just say Ethereum, right? Swift is actually quite complex, right? But but Swift is something that exists that has existing demand. And so you're positioning the positioning of Ripple and why I think Ripple's has been quite successful is that they position Ripple as a replacement for a centralized technology. Anyway, I I I I think I would zoom out from that and say it's a scale issue. It's a skill issue on the part of Ethereum. We just need to push more, right? And if you zoom out, what did cobalt servers replace? A bunch of

people running around Manhattan with faxes. That was arguably a complex thing to do. I think we can do the same thing. Can Can I try? So uh on a number of levels I I totally I totally agree with you and I think I think the the global regulatory self- enforcing part to me is is really the highlight right in the United States and this is actually like a larger criticism of all web 3 that you hear from people that don't understand the global order or disorder right which is in the US or in Dubai or whatever I can get a bank account I can do you I can do all this stuff. I know that the rules are going to be enforced. Um, if I'm a multinational corporation, um, if I do

work here or, you know, do business here or I do business in the United States, pretty sure that's going to work and the courts are going to do something reasonable. If I do that in, I don't know, uh, Nicaragua or I do that in in like various like nations in the middle of uh, you know, America, maybe not so much. Um, so you know, how much is it worth it for me as a multinational corporation or a government to be able to have an economic substrate with another government or with a or with my like subsidiary in a country that uh that doesn't really have an organized rule of law. That's an incredibly valuable thing that most people that live in like very developed rule of law places don't appreciate. And that's the

disconnect between like the 11,000 like talking heads on Twitter that don't really understand what they're talking about and you know all of the global financial institutions that are actually using Ethereum. Like the disconnect is tremendous, tremendously large and it's based on whether you have any idea what's going on. Um because the actual adoption is on Ethereum and it's the inspiration for everything else. that wasn't that simple of a thing, but it is I I think that's that's that's the locust of of where this is real. I think I might be able to tie this conversation into what we all are working on maybe and and also get your input on this. So, Ethereum um is is kind of known for being incredibly neutral to some extent, right? They

don't like try to hype up or like support certain projects or or advertise them over others. um you might see a tendency to kind of maybe support optimism over arbitum though and and you know you have the nuances there and things like that happen but um I think one thing that that I feel and I don't know if these other guys maybe like feel a similar way it's like Ethereum is a developer platform that has all these layers that that kind of live on top of it that allow people to build in all these different ways. You can deploy to the L1, you can deploy to the L2. uh you can actually you know build other types of uh and other types of like like I would say techniques to essentially leverage that Ethereum security in

different ways and obviously I layer kind of like fits into that scope now like you could kind of say okay we have Ethereum as the L1 you know people are building applications there we have all these different L2s like hundreds probably even thousands really if you kind of like really look at it there's probably a lot of things that have launched that that that don't that don't really get talked about but you also have um the stuff that kind of we're doing, you know. Um, Ethereum doesn't just power blockchains. Ethereum now powers uh ZK uh like provers and ZK services. Uh they power these new developer platforms like what Authentic and Waves are are building that allow developers to build literally anything in the entire uh like world like conceptually and make it verifiable.

Something that isn't possible on any other underlying network. Um, you can build literally any uh I would say service that you see built as an L1. Like you could literally rebuild Chainlink but have it powered by Ethereum. I don't feel like Ethereum uh you know ever ever supports any of the stuff that's happening in that ecosystem at all. I feel like there's a lot of potential for like almost like a win-win scenario to kind of highlight all of these different things that are happening. We have incredible technology that's being built on Ethereum, but if we don't feel that we're having any support at all, like what's the point of even sticking around, you know, like why don't we just go build somewhere else? I mean, obviously we get the economic

security from Ethereum, but these types of uh networks be built elsewhere. That's great. Um, I used to work with a function in corporates called corporate innovation. This function is in charge of basically what so-called open innovation right in the corporate world you have this term open innovation which means that you need to have um which means that you want to work with external um products external solution and have high correlation between what the suit the suite of product that you're building for instance I used to work with Microsoft and and Salesforce for that um and the outside world okay which are early stage

startups. So how can you funnel down corporate strategy and work with early stage startup okay to advance your um added value? We have a completely different definition in our you know small ecosystem to open innovation. Okay. Which has to be you know correlated with the real product value. Okay. which is not the case as of now and it's a bit related with what you just mentioned that okay we have some great stuff like novel innovation that is being built on top of Ethereum but Ethereum as a whole has no correlation between the business value of this open innovation and the value of Ethereum

itself um I gave a talk um earlier today about this new paradigm shift between um L1 frameworks L2 framework networks and what we call AVS's or offchain services and you just mentioned chain link I think chain link uh the graph uh basically the first ass right they are not blockchains right they are not using cosmos SDK polka dot power chain they are not using optimum orbit right this is not a rollup this is not an application specific blockchain it's a distributed system it's a distributed network that has unique computational logic that has offchain logic essentially and the network come on

consensus on this arbitrary execution. So chain link provide price phase started off with price phase among the rest and the graphs providing off-chain indexing services but they are not blockchains. Now with um basically with a with authentic with layer um and of course with Ethereum we can derive this cryptoconomic security from Ethereum to build this offchain systems with validation components on top of that and that's open like a completely new type of use cases and innovations that is being built in the space right now and we can see this you

know going through authentic organ website and the amount of use cases that are being built on top of that and I hope this paradigm shift will you know drive value will drive real business to Ethereum to Ian and to our ecosystem so we can all you know enjoy this this uh innovative products that are being built. So to get it to get at your question which I think was was very precient about you know why Ethereum I think the problem I see with a lot of things in crypto is people aren't playing to win.

You you look at a business and the business has one imperative and a business should make money. That's the reason you found a company. That's the reason you design a business. But most protocols in crypto that isn't their objective. There's something else that they want. They want to be researchers right? They want to be scientists. They want people to refer to them as research or scientists. Not that they employ people who do research or science to the productive end of founding a business and running a business, but that's their only goal, right? There's a lot of companies I protocols in crypto that their stated goal is to be decentralized or credibly neutral, not to make money.

And that's the problem that we see in the space because there's a misalignment of incentives. Of course, nobody's using something that's goal is just to be decentralized because the goal isn't to build something that people are willing to pay to use the way that they would pay to use a traditional business, right? The goal of Slack is not to design a new security mechanism. It's to build a product that people use. And you look at other ecosystems that have designed their foundations and their labs entities in a way that they have an objective to win. Their objective is to build a fast chain that people use and that people pay for and want to build on. How you quantify usage fees and transaction

throughput? Simple. No simp I mean some some will say TVL is a way to quantify it. But once again that's the northstar metric. That's the objective function. It's precise. The problem with Ethereum is that it's very decentralized and there isn't an objective function. There's a bunch of ideological considerations surrounding the ecosystem that detract from the pursuit of a northstar metric that has some quantifiable business outcome. Yet, I still build on Ethereum because I think it is the best ecosystem from a talent quality standpoint. There's much higher talent density on Ethereum than I see elsewhere. But it needs to focus. It

needs leadership and I hope that Etherize does that. I hope that someone can explain to me why Ethereum in one sentence the way they do other ecosystems. ILBR no I IB increase band IBRL Swift right I hope Ethereum can have something like that but that means leadership. So I have a lot of mixed feelings about this question. Um but like to answer the question directly like why Ethereum? Uh Ethereum is the intellectual core that created this whole thing and that you know other than Bitcoin which I you know pay homage to.

Um but it was the only game in town. It collected the smartest people. uh it maintained in the absence of a whole bunch of incentives uh you know on the part of Vitalic and and other leadership like this credible neutrality which I think allowed it to allowed a lot of these things to flourish that wouldn't have flourished if we went max business first. I I think um you know I'd be willing to be challenged on that assertion but I think I think there was a real fear that had had we went full had had the industry gone full business had the industry gone full like adversary had the industry not had this almost like white tower or ivory tower feel to begin

with. It could have been it could have been attacked in a lot of ways that it that it wasn't successfully attacked. Um and I think that set a good foundation but uh you know as how much what's the treasury of the Ethereum Foundation right now? It's not that much. It's like a billion bucks. I can be wrong but it's it's it's well yeah maybe like a few weeks ago it was a billion but it's not that much. um and uh you know versus versus some other you know people that are designed uh to just like create this like maximal business outcome. Um that that could have been a problem then. I agree though and I'm and I'm hopeful for like some of the

leadership that we're really stepping up into kind of wartime mode. Um but you know when we talk about like waves what we're building you know the economic security that we're consuming is from IGEN layer uh and indirectly from Ethereum and Ethereum even even when I know uh IEN layer just announced like the Lombard integration right even though you know you're integrating with Bitcoin still Ethereum is the mechanism by which we're going to do that and the default if anyone were to you know any like person that's not trying to be radical if you were to ask like what program programmatic framework am I going to use to integrate like massive amounts of liquidity with massive amounts of trust? Of course, it's Ethereum. Like it's not a question at the moment. Um, and so even though

there's all this controversy, even though we need some more time behavior, uh, it's still sort of the gold standard. Um, and I hope it hope it stays that way. There there's uh I think it will honestly in startups you have this uh notion of esper, right? every few years you need to innovate innovate in order to stay relevant and I think Ethereum started off with this notion of world computer and decentralization right but along the years Ethereum have had our time to adjust itself to this new agile changing environment and this is like the our biggest issue okay 2017 okay great the word computer and decentralization was a thing now we

need to adjust oursel to you know, fastpace environment. Um, and at the lake of, you know, the leadership and objective, business objective, this is a a completely tough mission. Kan, uh, yeah, lots of interesting thoughts come to mind. Uh, I would say I think there is a the thing I do agree with is there is a I'll call it a leadership void in the ecosystem. I'll zoom out and say the EF picked a very specific point on the trade-off curve between telling you what to do

versus not doing anything and just letting you do it right. I it deliberately picked that point. I think I think it was the right point on the trade-off curve. I think what has not happened yet is there are there are many jobs to be done in Ethereum, right? There is the advocacy job. You might call that go to market for normal business which is explain the thing, sell the thing. Uh that that has never been the EF's job. I think the EF has been very clear about that. Uh there is the the R&D. This is I think the core of Ethereum. This is what people point to when they're like, "Which ecosystem is the smartest?" It's like by far this one. Like, it's not even close, right?

There truly is no second best. And then there's engineering, which is um when Justin Drake and Ansar Vitalic come up with a crazy thing, someone's got to code the thing. It's not them. It's like 20 different teams that do it, right? And there are downsides to that, right? It will take if there are n teams it will take you like n as long to fix all the bugs with all the implementations of the same white paper right that is the thing that gives us resilience that is also the thing that slows us down um this is the well I won't get into politics but you can see the analogies there right there are trade-offs and then there's the like business building

side of okay you have this open protocol well someone needs to bundle the thing you You don't just use protocols, you use things built on protocols. And I would challenge the like businessminded mind mindset which is I think this is the wrong layer of the stack to talk about the protocol. Like I would say what is the business objective of HTTPS? What is the business objective of English? These are all protocols. You do things with protocols. You build businesses. And I think we just I see it mostly as a talent problem, right? Like we are past the R&D phase. We kind of know the answer to most of the big blockchain questions. Like we have

solved scalability. We just need to throw more hardware at it. That's like kind of the solution. Privacy is around the corner. Like most of these fundamental research problems are solved and they move along the pipeline of like research into engineering into product into things that generate free cash flow. Like that is every single industry. We're just at that really awkward teenage phase where it's like, okay, the thing's almost done. We're we're the operators. Uh, that's the thing that I think we need to do some more work on. Right. HTTPS in English don't have assets associated with them is one thing I would add. I think the complaints that people generally levy against the Ethereum Foundation leadership are tied to the underperformance of the asset

compared to a a comp set. So, correct. But I I would challenge that and say the EF live P2P is an asset. The EF does not the the the mandate of the EF is not solely ETH the asset. It is Ethereum holistically of which ETH and Ether is part of right but also you can zoom out and be like okay let's say just as a hypothetical let's say the EF had an investor relations department. Let's say that actually happened. I don't think the EF would actually fundamentally do a good job of that. Like I I agree that it needs better resourcing, leadership. Um, no, I I think we have too much of a

tendency as an ecosystem to appeal to authority and wait for the EF and Vitalic to save us. And I think let's flip that on its head and say what is the EF and Vitalic and all the great folks that work there? What are they uniquely good at? And it is two areas. It is R&D. It is protocol coordination. And then if you believe that, then it's like, well, other people need to step up to do the other jobs to be done. No, I'm I'm aware that the they're not doing a very good job selling the asset, but I think the conversation point is around whether or not there is an obligation of the entity that has constructed and developed the protocol to sell that asset. If you look at the other comp set of Ethereum besides Bitcoin, you look at

Salana, Miston, Ripple. Why are we saying besides Bitcoin? Because Bitcoin doesn't have a central organization associated with it. Let's follow that logic through Well, the founder of Bitcoin has disappeared. It has been disappeared for about the existence of the protocol. I'm I'm saying follow that logic through there exists. Hang on. Hang on. Let me finish. There exists tweets from Vitalic on a regular basis promoting a different technical architecture for the protocol which introduces risk which must be priced into the asset. That is a single entity that has an influence on the price of that asset whose word is viewed as the

direction that Ethereum is going to take. I would say that is reflexive and I would say Vitalik himself would say I am one of many researchers. So I would challenge you to be like Vitalik put something out. You don't have to read it. There's like for every Vitalic there are 100 brilliant researchers elsewhere. It is it is on like let's take a very concrete example. He put out something on risk 5 and ZKBMS. There are so many domain experts in that space and that is one view and they all immediately came out and they were like yeah you should consider this like valid came out and they were like yeah I don't think this is a good idea risk zero came out they're like ah we would tweak that succinct came out and they were like oh this is great well of course they would

right but I I'm just saying let's not put the EF and Vitalic on a pedestal they are people doing things you can also go and do the things and you can look I just think that's a more practical path. And I think the the goal of the EF was not to pump the asset or to forever hold the ecosystem's hand. And I think we've gotten to the point where there's enough talent here that other people can just carry the torch, right? And I would say I don't know what could each of us do to do more of that. There there's a breath versus depth problem, right? Like

we talk about the talent in the Ethereum ecosystem. There's also a lack of central decision-m and that means that the things that are being built generally are inferior quality. Uh yes, can we hang on being built? Hang on. Look at for example fire dancer client which Sana put a lot of money behind obviously versus a lot of the EF clients, Ethereum clients. There's a clear engineering gap between the two of those. You look at uh what else the did the um the fiber optic company what's it called? you know the one zero double zero yeah that they effectively incubated alongside Jump that's an example of an immediately relevant protocol function that they spun out as

the independent entity that was incubated financed by Salana and they appointed a CEO who was previously at Salona I mean this is where you can talk about the depth of what they can do is substantially different we can have 15 teams debating on Twitter ZKVMs and risk five execution environments. We can't have one team building a fiber optic network for Ethereum. We can't have one team building a hyper optimized client for Ethereum. You're just describing a stack where there's monopolies at every layer of the stack. I think that's I don't think that's something we

want. It's not monopolies. You can go build a Salana client. there's just a specific suggestion in a financed company that is building one at the request of the entity who is developing the protocol. Yeah, I think that gets you know that's kind of the conflict between Ethereum values and other values like centralization and decentralization. Not that um the end user actually cares, right? But yeah, I think a lot of the builders and um you know and and obviously there would be situations where that that would and I know we're getting kind of uh very close on time, but if anyone wants to chime in before we wrap it up, uh feel free to.

Yeah, I want to just agree with and expand on something you just said, which I think a lot of the argument here, a lot of the arguments in all human conversations boil down to value systems. when people are talking past each other, it's often because they're actually they have a different fundamental thing that they're valuing. And like for some a lot of people criticize that, you know, the clients of Ethereum, people want them to run on Raspberry Pies. Uh and and people are like, well, why wouldn't you make a fully integrated like data center level hardware stack? Uh that, you know, it's like Salana. Those are two fundamentally different values. The way we got there at first was that like anything that was

ever a credible money other than Bitcoin and then you know second Ethereum I think essentially like it if it could have been shut down by a nation state level actor it would have been and that was the primary consideration when Ethereum was first being designed is that they would stop this if if they can and it had to be not stoppable. Nation state action could totally stop Salana. Maybe that's controversial to say. Um they could stop a lot of chains. Uh they couldn't have stopped Ethereum definitely in 2016. I mean that that does get at the the real underlying question which is how do you price censorship resistance? Is this actually something that is valuable to

the world? And I think that's the big bet that I think some ecosystems and I would say there are two that make this bet. It is Bitcoin and Ethereum. And there are others that make the opposite bet and it it is fundamentally a bet and things should flow downstream from that. Now I do I do think there was a lot of lowhanging fruit for Ethereum like uh one example might be it would be cool if someone just forked fire dancer and made a block builder. Someone should do that. I don't know. I won't do it but someone here should do it. So I I I understand the value of censorship resistance. The the thing I'm contending is that the correct way to get to the best infrastructure is to just say I

want it and hope somebody builds it. Right? If we want Ethereum nodes to run on a Raspberry Pi, we should go and pay somebody to build the best possible Ethereum node to run on a Raspberry Pi. That is the difference, right? I'm not saying that we should build all of our blockchains to be hyperformant with a small validator count, right? I in fact think of most blockchains shouldn't do that. That being said, we should set the objective, have it very clear and transparent what the objective is, and then a strategy to execute it. No more of this, I'm going to say what I want and hope that one kind stranger picks up the task.

Maybe we can ask the uh two and a half uh block builders uh to contribute some of the revenues to buying pressure of the that could be a a negative one. If you could unilaterally let's say impose a strategic direction like one directive like maybe something like we need a cracked execution client that does this like what what would that be? It could be at any level. It could be a wallet. It could be RPC front ends. Like what I would do immediately, I would build a a very performant execution client. I would work to improve the networking stack. Um, and then I would increase the

uh maximum stake limit so that things like P2P that are running very very large numbers of validators no longer need to network between these. Right? It's a little bit silly that one entity is going to be running, you know, 2,000 Ethereum nodes when there's already a stake concentration. Yeah. And they're all sitting in the same box. It's very silly. So, I think the middle one needs to be worked on. Uh I think the first one refs some time to cook. Lambda class is coming out with a very cool client. And then the last one, I think Max EV is going through and then there's the whole discussion between should we focus on execution or data availability? Why not just uh come and say hey I get DA and let's enshrine you and we can just focus

on just like throttling throughput on the execution and make it the most uh performative like it could possibly be and then let IGA deal with data availability and boom you kind of have a poor focus. I'm obviously, you know, just kind of like joking here, but you know, but generally at the same time, you know, you want to think outside the box and you want to actually get done, you know, you have to really consider what uh what potential options there are. And and then as a as a single final point, I want there to be someone who has the agency independently to set that direction. I don't want this to be, you know, me having to read through 4,000 threads and guess how the votes

going to go, right? I I want there to be somebody who says this is what Ethereum does, who is canonized as the person who has the ability to say that so that we know what Ethereum will be a year from now, 5 years from now, and hopefully 10 years from now. That person today, let's abstract away from specific names. Do you think that person today sits in the EF? And then second question, should that person sit in the EF? I'm fine with wherever we want to put them.

I want Ethereum to win. To be very clear, I build on Ethereum, but it needs to play to win. I'm a Bitcoiner. I don't know why I'm here. All right. Thanks everybody. We went way everyone on top. This is a fun discussion and um I value everyone's time. I know you could have been anywhere and uh you all could have been anywhere in the whole city and you came to hang out here with us. So, thank you for that and I hope you have a good rest of your week.