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Early Days of Ethereum
Recorded: Aug. 18, 2025 Duration: 0:51:21Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Hudson Jamison, VP of Community at Polygon, shared insights on Ethereum's evolution, highlighting key moments such as the DAO hack and the community's response to governance challenges. He emphasized the importance of community engagement in driving growth and the need for user-friendly blockchain solutions as Ethereum continues to expand its influence in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. GM everyone. We will get going in just a few minutes. Just letting the space fill up.
And letting Hudson get here.
And yeah.
We're going to have a very good time today.
I am actually very very excited for this one.
So yeah.
Sit back.
Relax.
Enjoy a little bit of the music.
And we will get to it shortly. Music The King of Night We'll be right back. The Scanini, Diacron, Dinn, Dinn, Poo, Balls Rock, Around the Clock. Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn, Gowen, and Dean.
David, Crockett, Peter, Pat.
Elvis, Leslie, Disneyland.
Barthol, Budapest.
Alabama, Bruce, Jeff.
Princess, Blake.
Pickle, Blake.
Trouble in the sewer.
We make a star-provider.
And that's all that matters.
The Earth resigned.
We make a star-provider. And that's all it's mine And since the month resigned We didn't start the fight
But we didn't grade it
But we tried to fight
Little Rock, Heather, Nat
Mickey, Man, Caliwax
Sputting it, showing that
Bridge on the river
Let the mountain shelter go
California baseball start
With a homicide
Children of the little mine The fucking baseball star with the homicide, children of thalidomide.
The last thing I spent, the last day, the money, the money, the hula hoop, the cash flow,
Edel and the no-go.
The top of the city, the great pay order, the Kennedy,
the tricky term, the psycho, Belgium and the Congo. We didn't start the power.
We was always going to stop the phone, we can't stop the phone, we can't stop the phone.
Alright, GM everyone, GM, happy Monday, this is going to be a very fun space today.
I am super excited to talk to Hudson, who is currently our VP of community at Polygon, but he was
early, early to Ethereum, and we reached out and we wanted to just get some Ethereum more,
basically.
So it's going to be a very, very fun space.
If everyone here can do us a favor and click in the bottom right corner, the little quotation mark, like the space, retweet it, get everyone in here because we certainly think it's going to be a good one.
With that being said, we won't wait any longer, but Hudson, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and then we will jump right into it.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thank you so much for asking. And yeah,
I'll do an intro and then we can jump into this. Let's go. So yeah, my name is Hudson Jamison.
I've been involved in blockchain technology stuff since about 2011, initially with Bitcoin and Dash.
Back then it was called DarkCoin and it was like a privacy token.
And after that, I started working at a bank and got deeper into blockchain stuff, including Ethereum, around the time of the crowd sale. So that would have been like 2014 or so.
like 2014 or so. And yeah, just the idea of going from like, you know, Bitcoin, where you just have
stores of value going back and forth, having programs on a blockchain was just like mind
blowing to me. So I got hooked and started volunteering in the ecosystem. And eventually
in 2016, the middle of 2016, I got to leave my job at the bank to work for the Ethereum Foundation
in the early days. I was there from 2016 to 2021 and I did a variety of roles while I was there.
I co-ran DevCons 2, 3, and 4. I was the DevOps lead for a few years. I was the security lead.
I helped restart the EIP program.
I helped restart the core developer calls
that happen every two weeks
that have now spawned into all this other stuff.
And kind of did community coordination,
protocol governance, you know, the network upgrades, I would be helping coordinate, did some operations tasks, things like that.
During that time, I also co-founded the Ethereum Cat Herders, which does decentralized project management, the ecosystem, and also co-founded or just basically helped start up the Zcash grants program.
So I did some stuff with Zcash at the time.
After 2021, I was with Flashbots for a little bit,
which is the MEV Research Collective.
And after Flashbots, I joined Polygon,
where I've been for two and a half years as VP of Community
and been enjoying it.
Love everybody who works there with me.
And it's been an amazing time.
So yeah, I've just kind of been all over the place. Hope I didn't forget anything. But yeah,
that's pretty much me. Now that is fantastic. You are been around for quite some time.
I think my first question, and it's always interesting to me because I see a lot of early adopters of Bitcoin.
They kind of went in two different directions.
At least that's my view.
They either were extreme Bitcoin maximalists that say like Bitcoin or nothing.
thing, everything else is a scam, blah, blah, blah. Or they were into Bitcoin early, basically
Everything else is a scam, blah, blah, blah.
saw what Vitalik was doing at Ethereum, said, oh my goodness, this is really cool. And then
they got really into the more programmable side of money. So what drew you to Ethereum
after having been involved in Bitcoin? What what was the attractive part of the entire
project for you? So there were a few things. Around that time, 2014, when Vitalik came out
with the white paper, that was at the time in response to how rigid and non-flexible the Bitcoin
community had become with things like upgrades, with things like
operations that would be needed to make Bitcoin more programmable. We're seeing that even today
with like fighting over OpCat and things like that within the Bitcoin community. And so that's
kind of what spurred Vitalik at the time to make Bitcoin or to make Ethereum, I should say. Man, that'd be funny if I was just like, yep, he made Bitcoin too.
No, he – to make Ethereum.
And for me, it was kind of similar where I was starting to get somewhat disillusioned
with Bitcoin after the block wars.
There was basically this, like, I guess, war that happened, people say, with Bitcoin over whether there should be,
blocks should be made bigger by default or smaller. This was like a huge deal back in 2013,
14, 15. And so like that lasted for years. And if you can't make up your mind on increasing the block size and there's all this vitriol and all this stuff like that that you can't work out through governance, just kind of didn't seem like the right move to be somewhere that's not that pragmatic.
exciting and like new and you know you could just like pitch your idea on reddit and people would
read it like you know people who were like big in ethereum like at the ethereum foundation and
other orgs would read it and respond to it and it was just a lot more open so yeah i think a lot of
the reason was the openness and then the excitement over programmable money and programmable systems
on a blockchain and censorship
resistant systems because i've always loved the censorship resistant aspects of bitcoin and
blockchain that that's kind of why i'm here like uh even and i'll even just spoil it i love polygon
but i think that polygon is ethereum's best chance for you, actually having like a safe censorship resistant transaction layer
that's scalable, that, that relies on Ethereum L1. And so that's kind of why I'm here, like,
you know, love Polygon, but at the end of the day, I think my heart is still with Ethereum.
And that's why I'm so happy that, you know, we work hand in hand with ethereum when it comes to some of the
direction that we um decide to take with ag layer with um uh all this all the other stuff we build
yeah no that's actually it's such a good point i um it's funny i i came to the space like
inspired by bitcoin with that like like, like you said, censorship resistant money.
That's like, I don't know, credibly neutral, decentralized layer.
And like, I often describe myself as a Bitcoin preferentialist, kind of for the same reasons that you mentioned earlier, where like a lot of Bitcoiners get really rigid around certain things.
A lot of Bitcoiners get really rigid around certain things.
I'm like, oh, no, we can start at this base, and then it can grow to something really, really powerful, which I think Ethereum gives the tools to do that and then kind of scales up.
So that's interesting. interesting and probably not a lot of people know and i'm like fascinated to get your perspective on it is how governance was approached in the early days of ethereum um and i know that you started
at uh the ethereum foundation basic i don't know if it was either right before right after the dow
hack but it must have i know it was right around that time so if you can like governance and then
also handling these big sort of,
I don't know,
I would say shaky questionable moments,
maybe like I would say it could have blown up and kind of ended the project
right then and there had it not been handled as effectively as it had been.
It's like,
I'm just curious about the governance and decision-making and things like
that.
Oh yeah. This is something that I'm really interested in the governance and decision-making and things like that. Oh, yeah.
This is something that I'm really interested in because I think over time, it's really been forgotten about.
It really has been like you hear about the DAO hack, and it's just such a distant memory now because it's been almost a decade at this point.
But yeah, my first week at the Ethereum Foundation was the DAO hack.
And just for those who don't know about the DAO hack. So the DAO hack was an incident that
happened. Whenever Ethereum first came out and launched in mid-2015, there weren't a lot of
dApps. A lot of them were kind of just little games or gambling daps that were like, you know, try your luck at this, or pyramid
scheme games, like, that were like knowingly pyramid scheme games, like, people were like,
king of the hill, top of the mountain, put your, put your ether here, and so they,
one of the biggest daps to come about back in those early days was called the DAO. And the DAO was stood for
Decentralized Autonomous Organization. And the idea was you would deposit your Ether and get
DAO tokens in return. And you could use those DAO tokens to vote on or like back certain businesses that would work for the DAO.
So it was really like what people are wanting DAOs to be today in some ways.
But back then it was a lot more simple.
But it became not simple because it was one of the most, it was basically a DAO that a
lot of the OGs built, like the Slocket group who were people who were there for the
original Ethereum launch they wanted to make kind of a decentralized everything app and that's what
and so like if you wanted to have decentralized Uber you can make a decentralized Uber using the
DAO and things like that and so what happened was so many people put in their money,
there was like a good percentage of the running supply of Ethereum in this one DAP. And someone
came along and found a loophole in the smart contracts that allowed you to take control of
the money in there. But the way the DAO was set up, there were some,
I'm going to call them time locks,
even though they weren't exactly time locks,
but they were basically ways that were put into the contract
that would prevent the hacker from immediately taking control.
So there was like 14-day voting waiting periods
and things like that.
So a lot of stuff happened in between that. Polygon Labs co-founder
Jordi Bellino was a big part of the rescue operation for those coins. And you can read
about that in Laura Shin's book, The Cryptopians, where he was very helpful in
working with a group of people like behind the scenes called the White
Hat Group to rescue the funds. So yeah, the DAO hack was very, very tense. And the reason for that
was we were still a small community. And the decision we had to make was this. So do we do do we do a regular state change, which just basically means doing surgery on a block for a specific transaction to revert the hack to make it like it didn't happen?
Or do we let it go and say, nope, we're going to be rigid and and not pragmatic with this and allow the hacker to keep the money?
and not pragmatic with this and allow the hacker to keep the money.
At that point, it would have been a ton of money,
and it would have really been a, like,
it probably wouldn't have killed Ethereum,
but I think it would have been something where even years later,
it's like, well, look at this bad actor who has all this ETH,
and look at what they can do to affect things,
or, you know, all this stuff.
So eventually the decision was made by the community,
and I can explain the community part in a second,
to go against the DAO hacker and do the irregular state change,
which created what we now know as Ethereum today.
And people who disagreed were on an old chain called Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum Classic. The reason you can do that is when we had proof of work back in the day,
The reason you can do that is when we had proof of work back in the day,
you could actually choose whether or not to participate in a chain. And if you didn't want
to participate in a chain, you could just not participate and stay on the old fork every time
there was an upgrade that happened. But that doesn't happen anymore because of proof
of stake as far as governance goes i'll touch on that real quick i say that the community decided
because we didn't have great signaling tools at the time we had we had coin voting that was very
very immature and like one way that we used to signal the community uh but other than that we
kind of all had to talk to each other at the ethereum foundation itself
we the foundation took no this is something actually i think people don't realize the
foundation took no like i guess exact uh uh like they didn't have like an exact uh position on
whether or not the dao hack should happen. They had a blog release that said,
if the community wants the DAO fork to happen,
you know, update your nodes to this version.
Otherwise, don't.
Because there were internal teams
in the Ethereum Foundation.
Some of them didn't want to fork
and then others wanted to fork.
So it was very tense and stressful,
but really Ming Chan,
who was the executive director at the time, gave everybody
autonomy to kind of make their own decision on that. And a lot of the apps at the time that were
doing upgrades for the nodes allowed you to put like a flag so that you could stay on the old
chain, which would be Ethereum Classic. So yeah, it's like people think that like Metallic have
this like cabal of people who were deciding what to do back then, but it was way too disorganized for that to actually be a thing.
It was much, much different.
Yeah, it's it is interesting.
I feel like I don't know all indication that I've ever seen from Metallica is he's very much like a neutral type of person
to not I don't know I feel like if you just see how we act I don't know how anyone besides someone
who like wants to tear down a theorem can come to the conclusion like oh he has a cabal and he's
after it for the money or whatever I'm like that that's not him um but no that's actually a fascinating, like, I don't know, would you say that was probably the moment where, like, obviously, as Ethereum was becoming what it is today, I'm sure there were things that were questionable where, like, you don't know if the right decision is being made or, not necessarily you, Hudson, but people within Ethereum as a whole.
What were some of those really hard decisions
where, in retrospect, were the best decisions,
but at the time there was a lot of debate,
and I would say, yeah,
debate on what the right way to proceed is.
Yeah, there's been a few of those times.
Oh, man.
I was thinking back to what were the most hectic times in Ethereum governance.
So one of them that kind of comes to mind was around 2018-2019 for something called ProgPow. And ProgPow was short for Progressive Proof of Work,
and it was a semi-anonymous group of people who wanted to change the mining algorithm in Ethereum
so that it could be more ASIC resistant. So the issue was we didn't really know if we wanted to kick the asics
off the network or not it was causing centralization risk but you know we were going to move to proof
of stake soon so it was like should we put our time and effort into this and then like the part
of the effort part of the like thing is people at least back back then, didn't look as closely at the core developer calls as they do now.
We didn't have some things in place.
Our note-taking didn't have as much structure as it did.
So there wasn't a decisions.
If you go to the core developer calls on the Ethereum slash PM repo in GitHub, we didn't have a...
The notes now are amazing. And it shows like
the decisions that were made today, the decisions that were made last time. And I, like, we didn't
have that as much in the notes. So people missed that we actually on the core dev calls a few
different times said, yeah, we want to do progpow. And then when people found out because, you know,
they had just not heard about it, like everyone was like, wait, why are you trying to trick us? Why are you trying to change this major part of it with these anonymous people? What if they have some insidious incentives at play and things like that?
The question was, do we want to kick off ASICs because we think it's a centralization risk?
Would ProgPow even work?
And that's where the Ethereum cat herders came in because they were a neutral third party that could do things like have an audit for ProgPow.
And they did a few audits.
They paid for a few audits for ProgPow, including a hardware one and a software one that turned out that it was like, okay.
And even though it did turn out that like ProgPal would be safe enough to put in,
and eventually the community backlash was so strong, we decided to not put it in,
even if the core devs wanted to.
So that's like the best example of a multi-year EIP that's been coded.
It's ready to go in.
And the community says, nope, we don't want that.
And so we just ditch it, even though it's mostly done.
And even though a majority at the time, I believe, of the core developers were either okay putting it in or wanted to put it in.
So that's just a big lesson.
And like, yeah, they do listen to the community.
Like what we have in the governance area of Ethereum is this technocracy.
And a technocracy is just a government run by the technical elite.
And we do technically have that because they're coding the shit that we're running for the blockchain.
And so I think that that's an okay system because we've seen them – they're very trustworthy people, the core devs.
They've gained trust over time.
And the system we have with Tim Baiko leading, who took over for me after 2021, has been, I feel like, working really well overall.
So, yeah, the governance system is a technocracy, but that's okay
because we like our devs.
That's fascinating.
You were making me laugh because I think
that
one of the
I like to think
big picture and personality types
and the people who are
generally speaking, the people who are generally speaking,
the people who are on like the cutting edge of new technology.
And I would even consider like honestly programming new tech and even art
like as artists,
like they're very similar personality types of like pushing the boundary,
figuring things out.
And you don't get, those people
are not the most rigidly organized and note takers.
And a lot of it is probably a lot more free flowing spirit.
So you were just making me laugh when you were saying like, yeah, the note taking wasn't
where it needed to be.
And I'm like, I can imagine for every startup company that exists.
So no, that's a really, really fascinating.
So you were there for five years and I'm sure there were moments along the way where I don't
know how, I mean, obviously you were attracted to it and you knew it could be something that
was big.
Um, but what were some of the moments where you, I would say,
realized the scale of what you were building beyond like,
oh, you said you have a small community,
and now you look at Ethereum's community, and it's so much bigger.
And by all indications, it's pretty much going to take over
a lot of financial instruments.
So what were some of the key points during that
where you had what I would say like the,
oh shit, this is really big
beyond just like cool programmable money sort of thing?
Yeah.
Man, I think I have one memory in mind.
So back in 2015, more like near the November-ish timeframe of 2015, I went to London to DevCon1 while I was still working at the bank.
And I hadn't started working for the Ethereum Foundation, but I volunteered there.
And there were only 400 people, roughly total, at the entire DevCon 1 in London in 2015.
And so it was basically like everybody I knew online.
It was like I was fangirling, like seeing all the core developers and meeting friends that I'd only talked to on the Internet.
internet and uh i got really hooked on ethereum during devcon one because i saw the talks and the
promises that you know ethereum could potentially have and things like that so ever since that time
i worked my like butt off like on ethereum uh working long hours at the ethereum foundation
doing some of the volunteer startup stuff with like Ethereum cat herders and stuff like that. And so that was 2015. So then in 20, man, what year would
DevCon 6 have been? So I guess it would have been 2022 or so. I go to DevCon 6 and Buenos Aires and they have a venue and they are not not in Buenos Aires where was it was in Bogota Bogota Colombia for DevCon 6 and they have a venue that is about six stories high and you can walk inside and look up and see all the floors like like, wrapping around, like, surrounding as you go up the levels of the escalator.
And I was walking and I looked and, like, there were thousands of people there, like 7,000 people, I think, there, filling up all the seats, down in a hackerspace, like, all kinds of stuff.
And I just suddenly kind of stopped walking and I was like wait i'm not at devcon1
anymore it's not 400 people we're not having to scrap and scrape because of like any kind of money
like like concerns or like oh is ethereum gonna make it i'm like it's made it it's like here and
there's like all these people and this is like crazy that i was like still in the mindset
of like devcon one um and so that was kind of a very good day for my mental health to break me out
of uh the uh like getting to maybe grind setty when it came to working on the stuff that i was
passionate about but not separating work from home life as much as I could have, being too passionate about Ethereum, I guess. That was one of the things that was
really a big aha moment of like, wow, we've really made it. And I don't have to, you know,
work like, like, you know, a ton of like tons of hours in the day after I do my normal work,
just to think that Ethereum is going to, gonna you know need more help to keep going like
it's already made it it's great that's fascinating i do i think as you're like i was thinking about
the uh famous andreas talking bitcoin like to an empty room um like and i'm sure that's probably
what you experience and like it it would be a cool feeling i i imagine too it's one of those you said it was
really good for your mental health that you didn't have to do the work but i would imagine it also
came with a sense of pride of like man we built this um to be something that's absolutely i mean
there are those core devs but like you have other builders and like really reach that network effect
where people can contribute to ethereum and do so voluntarily without it being driven by the core people.
So that's fascinating.
We have a couple more questions,
but I did want to put out to the audience.
If you guys have questions,
drop it in the comment or request to speak.
Cause I do want to save time and let the community just ask Hudson,
these questions.
I think it's, I love these lore stories.
I think it's really, really fun to do.
So kind of my last question before we get into the audience portion,
unless I think of anything else, but being around for so long,
obviously you've seen the changes.
Things like you touched on it earlier,
the proof of work versus proof of stake and things like that.
What are some of the biggest differences you see between 2016, 2017,
2018 Ethereum versus 2024, 2025 Ethereum.
And like where,
and then if you could guess where you think it's going,
let's say in 2030,
2035.
So like,
take us through that timeline and the changes you've experienced.
Yeah.
I feel like back in the day,
like back in the 2016 era,
there was more openness for use cases it was kind of sky's
the limit and we still have that to an extent but there's so much like there's so much like
red tape to get through now to make your idea a reality beyond just launching something and
like just just launching something seems easy as easy as it's ever been to do to
launch things on ethereum with um all the tools that we have and all of the expansive like
tutorials and education for launching stuff on ethereum but yet to get noticed is like so hard
now so i think that the difference between back then and now is like more of an openness to just kind of stick your idea out there and not have to have an NDA protecting it or like start a whole company just because you have an idea.
You can just have an idea and put it out there because it was so small. There weren't people really stealing any of the, excuse me, stealing any of the ideas back then as much as you would see now,
I'd say.
But I do also think that there is still luckily compared like before to now,
there's still like that positive energy in Ethereum.
I think there's still a cypherpunk values that I think are like embedded in
Ethereum that are very important and something that I really, really cherish that we like have cypherpunk values, things like censorship resistant and transparency and openness and kind of going against the grain and going against the, you know, evil powerful forces and things like that. That's always been something that I think has been around back then and it has stayed
around today in at least some of the core Ethereum ethos.
For 2034,
wait, which year? It was like a far year in the future.
Which year did you say was the future?
I said 10 years in the future, like 2030, 2035 as it continues to grow, really.
Yes. So to me, I don't think that – so I've always said to me, like for my purposes and why I'm here, I would consider what I've done with my life working on Ethereum to be successful if I can transact through a censorship-resistant means and get money and
information to countries that usually wouldn't allow it. So if that could happen, right now I
feel like that can't happen without me being tracked. Not that I'm doing that every day or
anything like that, but what I'm saying is I want a way where people can get the things they need in a censorship-resistant way in the face of authoritarian
governments. And if that's not happening yet, then I feel like there's more work to do on the
censorship-resistant front and on the decentralization front and things like that.
But I also think that's one thing, which is I really want that stuff to happen and then I'll
feel like it's successful. The other thing is Ethereum will be most successful if I don't know that I'm using it. If I'm on my phone, if I'm on my laptop and I'm doing something on the internet and I don't have to know that I'm using it, it all kind of blends together in this interop magic place that Aglayer is creating. Shout out Aglayer.
AgLayer is creating. Shout out AgLayer.
that's kind of, yeah, that's why
I'm working at Polygon too, is like AgLayer's
literally the best solution for
this type of thing where
we need
an interop layer for all of
these chains to connect together in like
a seamless way that shares liquidity.
So, yeah,
I think that if I don't know I'm using it,
if my mom doesn't know that she's using it in like 10 years,
I think that that'll be success.
It just needs to be invisible to everybody,
but working in the background.
I love that answer.
Yes, it's one thing every Monday we talk about,
like the idea of abstraction
and people just using things without i don't know
i know that generally speaking i would say most people in this space right now and certainly who
have been around for five plus year are big time nerds and like love the love the technical thing
but also understanding that's not that doesn't resonate with most people they don't love the love the technical thing but also understanding that's not that doesn't resonate
with most people they don't love the actual blockchain tech they just want to do what they
want to do um so i couldn't agree more with the let's just be able to do things in the censorship
resistant way um but we have a few speakers on stage speaking of ag layer we have oz who um
works on the agLayer team.
But, Ozman, why don't you introduce yourself and then ask Hudson your questions.
Hey, thanks.
Thanks, Timmy.
This is Oz.
I work on the Polygon team.
We're the core contributor behind AgLayer.
And I'm personally working on growing the adoption of ag layer um I had a question to Hudson
um how do you see like there's a lot of layer ones that are coming up and it's a little bit
um different than um ethereum's roadmap um in the sense that like ethereum 4 saw more L2s scaling the base layer
versus now I think there's like this natural tendency to launch,
you know, your company's own L1 control validator sets,
have more, you know, custom compliance measures, etc.
Hudson is someone that you've been in the L1 space very early on.
Is it a good sign that validates Ethereum's value proposition?
I mean, I think we all need to think that, have the abundance mindset.
think we all need to think that uh have the abundance mindset but um you know does this grow
the pie or does this like take away from you know ethereum's value proposition of this
like of being this um blue check mark um settlement layer
thanks for the question oz um so yes uh with the proliferation of L1s, honestly, okay, I think for the L1s, they're going to turn into L2 proliferation that to help with speed and security and all this other stuff is the way to go.
I think this like interoperability and aggregation thesis is also the way to go.
And I think that while L1s can connect to that, eventually it'll kind of be like, where are they getting value from?
Like, where are they getting value from? And that's kind of where I land on, oh, they're probably going to turn into L2s because we've seen that happen just further proves its thesis at the end of the day.
And there will be some L1s that do survive and that do need to be differentiated from L2s for certain reasons,
like Mina is one example, I think, where if it was an L2, that would be a little bit weird.
That's the one that does recursive ZK proofs to make their chain a certain size.
But it's a rare exception, I'd say.
Interesting.
So you, thanks for the answer.
So you are kind of like thinking along the lines of these L1s,
like stripes L1, circles L1, trying the L1 route,
and then, you know, having some sort of an issue and moving towards settling,
sending consensus proofs to Ethereum?
Yeah, I think eventually they'll send their consensus proofs to Ethereum.
But if they choose not to and there's a few other competitors,
that's not the end of the world either.
I don't think Ethereum needs to be a monolith necessarily. I think there's always going to be other chains, things like Bitcoin that are
out there where Ethereum can do what Bitcoin can do, but can it do it as good as Bitcoin?
Maybe not just because of the staying power and the brand recognition. And that plays an even
bigger role than the technological definition some of the time. Marketing matters.
Marketing matters and brand matters.
And so it's like, well, is Bitcoin better than Ethereum?
Well, no, but my grandparents know about Bitcoin and not Ethereum.
And so it's like, well, what do you do there?
Thank you. That's a great answer.
I actually had a question for you, Hudson, and that I didn't even put on the sheet now that I think about it.
And you mentioned it.
And I would say it's an area where I'm passionate about because it was my intro to the crypto space was on Reddit.
And you talked about seeing stuff on the Ethereum subreddit page. And one thing I've seen, like working for Polygon,
I'm like, I would say you kind of borrow from Ethereum's not a competitor,
but like what the other chains are doing really well is when EF has an AMA
on the Ethereum subreddit, the response is like the number of questions,
the number of people engaged is unlike anything I've seen on any other crypto subreddit, truthfully, with the exception of maybe the main cryptocurrency subreddit.
But I know you were involved in that. How did you build that community?
approaching like community building what was your number one priority or what were some things that
you said like you just i would say had the intuition or knew you wanted to execute to
get such a um a great feeling and like a true what i consider a true community i don't even
have a better word to describe it other than everyone's interested yeah great question so i um um oh back in the day so yeah the subreddit
ethereum subreddit what used to be very small back when i started in 2015 helping moderate it
so that was actually one of the first community volunteer things i did was moderation for that subreddit um and it was uh very exciting to um uh be able to see the
early community flourish i at the time though like you don't think of it as the early community you
think like oh it's like all my friends on here and stuff and i think keeping that mindset is one
thing that's helpful like in the early days of a community is just like, you know, enjoying yourself.
And yeah, I would say that it was very important. The Reddit still has some people that are very active on it and it's still thriving, but just in a different way.
But back then you could see like there was a Reddit thread about how to design the ERC20 token.
thread about how to design the erc20 token and like like and you know it's crazy now that everyone
is using this token standard that we just came up in a reddit thread for the most part and then also
moved to github after so like little things like that where you can see like oh so uh ethereum you
know your ethereum address has like some capital letters and some lowercase letters that's a check
sum which means that if you type in your address with the wrong capital letters and some lowercase letters, that's a checksum, which means
that if you type in your address with the wrong capitalization, it'll say, hey, did you mistype
your address? Because it doesn't, you know, line up correctly. That was decided on a Reddit thread.
Like a lot of the announcements for major hacks were all Reddit threads back in the day. So
yeah, it's definitely really cool to like see that early community, but that community feeling and that community stuff can happen on any venue.
And I think like Twitter spaces is one of those venues that like you can kind of feel some of the early like early days of blank like feelings happening with some of the Twitter spaces, I think.
So that's definitely cheers to you for running this and everything.
No, that's actually, that's really fascinating that there are like these, I don't know.
I think it's really cool.
And like you were saying, it can just pop up.
And I certainly felt like that.
I mean, even when I go on Twitter,
sometimes it's not like,
ooh, I'm going to go to quote unquote crypto Twitter.
It's like, I'm going to just go talk to my friends
and have a good time.
And I definitely feel like you get that in spaces.
So that's really interesting
that like literally ERC20 token standard
was a Reddit thread at the start.
That's fascinating.
I brought BC bread on stage um you can go ahead and ask your question if you want to introduce yourself you can do that
as well how are you hey gm gang um yeah thanks for having me up this is a great conversation a long
time long time builder out here in the space circa 2017 you know now leading
tech over at billy betts doing blockchain ai type stuff right but uh as we're starting to see you
know holly market becoming the golden child for polygon right i mean that's kind of brought a lot
of attention back to that network um one of the things that i was playing with maybe a year or
two years ago now was back when polygongon was with their Poly IDs and being
able to issue DIDs. Being that Polymarket is not technically allowed in the US, I'm just curious
if there's any plans to continue to build out the DID platforms and if it could be used as a form of
KYC for the US users?
Oh, that's a great question.
So I can't speak to PolyMarket's plans, obviously, because I'm not a PolyMarket, nor can I really speak to anything that has to do with why this kind of KYC thing would be used, why
the DID thing would be used, all that stuff.
That's kind of just outside of my scope.
What I can say is for DID
solutions in general, what I'm excited about is Provado, which was incubated in Polygon.
So definitely look up Provado ID. I would say that is the way to go when it comes to
looking at the latest in ZK identity. I was really impressed with the tech they have. And
I think in the future, it can be
used for a lot of different use cases. There's some like identity is just like a such a hard
shell to crack, like just or not to crack, I should say. And so I'm just hopeful that these
teams that are way smarter than me who are working on it get to cracking and they get it, get it done.
are working on it gets a kraken and they get it get it done oh yeah thanks man yeah i think uh
yeah dids are absolutely going to be you know needed you know over the course of the next you
know year or two years here as more institutional kind of uh players start coming in and really
being able to remain some sort of anonymity while maintaining compliance.
And I think that, yeah, DIDs plus, you know, subdomains, there's a lot that can be done there.
And so I'm excited to see kind of what happens.
I have seen Pravato.
That's exactly kind of, it's almost like what the Polygon DID turned into, if I'm not mistaken.
Amazing.
Awesome. Yep, I am going through
I am seeing if there are any questions
that we have in the thread
one question
and I don't know if this is
anything
about the
proof of storage
idea
but that was one question about decentralized storage.
If you want to just touch on that,
if you had any thoughts or feelings on the storage.
I do know that Avail,
which is also a Polygon incubator project,
is very big on the storage and data availability.
But I'll hand it off to you.
Yes, actually, this is something interesting for an early days of Ethereum-like type anecdote.
So the original vision of a decentralized Web3 future for Ethereum involved three things.
One of them was Ethereum for transactions and things like that. Then there was Swarm for
Swarm, which is actually still around today, but that's for decentralized storage. And then there
was a third one and what was it called? Whisper, which was an anonymous messaging system. So they
were supposed to all work together to make this like Web3 stack that we would see today.
And over time, they used to be built into Ethereum clients.
They were built into Geth, but they've now been stripped out of there.
So that like we're just focusing on the blockchain transaction piece.
But people took the Whisper network and turned it into Waku. So W-A-K-U, if y'all want to look that up, that's like the child of Whisper Network. left the Ethereum Foundation years ago and did their own thing with their own airdrop
of their buzz tokens, I think they're called.
But in short, that's just kind of like a quick anecdote
for the early days, what we were thinking about was storage.
Back then also, Filecoin had a huge presence
at DevCon 1 in 2015,
with Juan Binet speaking at that DevCon and then the subsequent DevCons,
because there was a lot of high hopes for Filecoin. Right now, the idea of having cheaper
storage than AWS that's redundant is really interesting, but it's just hard to perfect
because there's so many different variables
moving around for like,
how long should it be stored?
How much should the storage cost?
Like, you know,
what if like the fault tolerance
and the liveness qualities
of the storage that's online
and things like that,
that I haven't seen like a really
well-adopted replacement,
but that doesn't mean that that'll never happen.
And, you know, there is Filecoin, which is IPFS, you know, successor type thing.
And we still have IPFS.
So, yeah, there's a lot of different solutions out there.
solutions out there. I haven't found any that I've loved, really. But yeah, I'm hoping that
I haven't found any that I've loved, really.
they come to a realization that if it needs to involve blockchain, it can involve blockchain
stuff too. That was a much better answer than I could give you, certainly. I was unsure if you
had a lot, but you definitely do. So thank you for that.
Well, we are coming up on time.
I don't see any more questions or speaking requests.
So thank you so much, Hudson.
This was very, very informative and insightful, and I think it was a lot of fun.
So I certainly appreciate it.
But I'll hand it off to you for the final word, and then we will let everyone
get back to enjoying the rest of their Monday. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you so much
for having me. You did a great job hosting. Thank you so much, everybody, for coming and listening.
I'll leave you with, be nice to each other. Don't be a dick online. That's my message.
Love it. Thank you so much for doing this. We really appreciate it. Everyone in the audience, please tune in. And every week we try to do this Mondays
at 12 Eastern time. So it'll be a very great space. And thank you all and enjoy the rest of
your Monday. Take care.
