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Ethereum Back from the Dead?? 🪦 The Aggregated Ep. 124
Recorded: Aug. 8, 2025 Duration: 3:08:15Space Recording
Short Summary
Ethereum is experiencing a resurgence with new partnerships and a focus on privacy solutions, as the Ethereum Foundation engages with public innovation agencies to fund initiatives. The introduction of innovative funding models like streaming quadratic funding and a commitment to cross-chain composability signal a bright future for the Ethereum ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks you can walk
Now you won't see
Where we walk into the streets
And I'm going to be the streets you can walk
Now you won't see
Where we walk into the streets
And I'm going to be the streets you can walk Thank you. . I'm going to sing. Thank you. you
well good morning good morning darren are you there no thought not as much. All right.
Should we play another song till rock comes
or do you want to jump in?
Yeah.
Hang on.
I'll play this one.
Yeah, two minutes.
Sounds good.
Much love, everybody.
Polygon, pump it up. Much love, everybody. Molly John, pump it up. Pump it, pump it. You gotta pump it.
Pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it.
ZKEVM is Ethereum.
ZKEVM is Ethereum.
ZKEVM is Ethereum.
ZKEVM is Ethereum. Pump it, pump it. You gotta pump it, pump it, pump it. You gotta pump it, pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it.
Yeah. you
you got a you got a
you got a
you got a
you got a you got a let's go all right guys i'm going to go ahead and jump in i'm not sure where rock is but
there we go someone's got to do it all right well like always guys uh after the introductions
we just have a dynamic conversation free flowing you don't have to raise your hands
um just piggyback off
each other and and let's have fun it's like a bunch of friends around a big table or like rock
likes to say like the roman bath house we're all just sharing philosophy and alpha in our bathrobes
robes sometimes without our bath robes as rock says uh but here we go ethereum back from the dead
the aggregated episode 124 so it's awesome finally hit 124 we're here and let's go guys
let's dive in i want to introduce everyone today. Rock, introduce yourself, bro.
Hello, hello, beautiful people. Really excited for this topic. This is probably the one of the, when I heard we had this topic, it was probably one of the most, like, exciting moments I had about the show in a bit.
exciting moments I had about the show in a bit. There's just so much stuff we could talk about
here. But yeah, I'm Rock Zacharias, CEO of Lunar Digital Assets, a venture studio. We incubated
Polygon, Quickswap, LitVM, and a bunch of others. I serve on the Polygon Grants Board,
where we have a large fund. It's a billion- 10 year fund over that's focused on building out
Polygon founders and Ethereum as well, helping progress the Ethereum mission.
And we'll have some Ethereum foundation people on today actually to talk about some of this stuff.
But I also mentor for Tim Draper's Bitcoin Fi Accelerator, and I'm the head of the Global
Leadership Council for Michael Turpin's BitAngels Global Investor Pitch Network and co-founder of Quakeswap.
Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. We love rock. All right, brother. Oh, wait, I forgot to mention,
I put my co-founder hat back on recently. Some of you may have heard. For the first time in, I don't know, five years since we co-founded QuickSwap, I am now co-founding LitVM, the Litecoin layer 2 that's a roll-up to Litecoin, a true ZK roll-up to Litecoin, but also plugs into Ethereum through AgLayer and Vault Bridge.
And yeah, really, really excited to be using the amazing Polygon technology that they've built to make Litecoin and other proof of work coins plug into Ethereum.
100% bringing Litecoin to Polygon and Ethereum.
It's exciting exciting times guys and i have to say is ethereum back from the dead that that's the question today um so we're going to dive deep
into that i'm sure everyone here has some opinions on that and it is like rock said i think it's
going to be an exciting conversation today uh let's go ahead
and pass the mic on over to aida what's up guys pleasure to meet you meet you here hi everyone
uh how are you doing vlad speaking uh vd at aida and. And yeah, Ethereum definitely get back from the dead, right?
But for someone, probably it's never been dead.
So it depends on what side of this opinion you are.
So yeah, I believe this is some good news before the weekend.
this is some good news before the weekend and
I'm happy to
To congratulate you guys with a first 4k in in the last
Probably several months. Yeah, congrats
Thank you, thank you and glad to have you here back on the show
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Sebastian.
Hey, guys. Nice to meet you, and thanks for having me here.
And, yeah, thanks for also having the episode.
For me, Ethereum was never dead.
I'm happy to welcome a bunch of other people that thought it was dead
and they're back alive now.
Well, that's good for you. Good to have you all back.
I'm VP Tech at Gnosis. I'm also a
founder of Hopper, a privacy protocol on top of which we are building Gnosis VPN. Yeah, so I'm a
privacy guy and very passionate about the infrastructure. I'm not here for the vcs um and yeah i'm just here to think about how ethereum can make the
world a little bit better and how a lot of the infrastructure that we have here is just phenomenal
and just got so much better and yeah i mean i i would say i'm also personally celebrating
uh ef a little bit um i guess we get to speak about that later.
Yeah, I am, you know, as pumped speaking about pumping, I'm as pumped as I've ever been about
what's going on in the Ethereum ecosystem and EF. So yeah, very excited to talk about that. And
yeah, have this Roman Barthro circle here. Yeah, I don't know if you know, but we have at least one Ethereum Foundation and we're coming on later.
So we're also excited to talk about all this stuff.
I mean, you know, they've basically created one of the greatest experiments of mankind.
But I got I got to say, though, because you said, you know, you're not here to pump it and those things.
But but come on, when you touched 4K today today, tell me you didn't get a little smile.
I mean, sure.
I mean, I am most unconditionally long ETH in probably, you know, irresponsible ways.
But, you know, I'm more excited than that.
I am about this absolutely insane technology
and the absolutely wonderful people
that are building it and on it and around it.
But yeah.
Yeah, just had to throw that in.
All right, go ahead, Aztec.
Yeah.
Much love, much love.
And great to have you here, Sebastian.
Sounds like you've got some great opinions
and we want to hear them in a second here.
Oh, by the way, when I said ETH has built some great things for mankind, Gnosis has certainly built some incredible things to protect mankind against hacks and things through Gnosis.
Originally Gnosis, safe, and then safe.
And yeah, I mean, just was using it last night, actually.
And we use it at our grants program to manage most of our flow and protection of the community's
assets. So incredible work you guys have done there. Sorry about that, Aztec. Go ahead, though.
No worries. Credit to do where credit is due. Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to
Two Cent Timmy. What's up, brother?
GM. Yeah, I woke up. I'll proudly say that I had a smile when I saw the 4K post come on. It was
very fun. But I am Two Cent Timmy. I am on the Polygon marketing team. I am, uh, angry at,
I assume it's Darren keeps sending me thumbs down like DMs emojis, but, uh, no, I'm, I'm excited to
talk about Ethereum. I think it's like the most fun, I think Bitcoin was great, but Ethereum,
like actually gives greater tools for financial freedom. And like when we talk about people being their own bank,
I don't think with Bitcoin,
like as a store of value,
it's not really being your own bank where with Ethereum,
it actually gives you the option to,
to go on chain and opt out of like traditional finance,
which is fantastic.
I would give a little push back there.
I still think you're your own bank with Bitcoin,
but we can duke that out later. But no, I do agree. Ethereum provides so much more
flexibility and things. I mean, you can't build a will and testament on Bitcoin,
but you can build that on Ethereum, right? Yeah. No, I love Bitcoin. Don't get me wrong.
I'm just saying like, I call myself a Bitcoin preferentialist, but like, I think Ethereum
had like super valuable contributions as far as programmable money.
And I call myself Bitcoin maximal-ish, ish.
I actually told someone that on Wednesday, I was at like a Scottish blockchain summit.
And actually, Sebastian was speaking there on noses pay and I actually said yeah rocks Bitcoin maximal
ish and the gang wrote it down he was like it's a good one he got no pad like
that but I made that up like I don't know seven or eight years ago it's
basically saying that I think Bitcoin is the king. I think it's going to be the
world reserve asset someday. I don't know if it'll be world reserve currency. My thesis on that kind
of moves around because those two things don't always have to be the same. But I think there's
a lot of great lessons to learn from Bitcoin. I think it does decentralization very well,
and many projects in the industry should take note and try to strive for that kind of
decentralization. But I don't think it's the only one and nor should it be. I think that would be
not a good world, actually. I think we need lots of experimentation, lots of different types of
technologies. And then we let the user choose what they want. We let the market choose. We figure out
what has product market fit. Bitcoin didn't have product market fit for payments, for example.
As much as people wanted it to be for payments, the users decided that wasn't the way to go.
And so now payments are happening on Litecoin and stablecoins, on Polygon and on Tron and all this.
So, yeah, I think we should have a plethora, just like in biology and evolution.
We have this, you know, that's
my, I came from a medical background before I came into this, but, uh, you know, in evolution,
we, you want, you want to have as much diversity as you can, because then when there's catastrophic
events like an ice age or like a, you know, meteor hitting the earth or volcano ash that
covers the world, you need to have lots of different options so that, you know, meteor hitting the earth or volcano ash that covers the world. You need to
have lots of different options so that, you know, if one species goes extinct, or in our case,
if one crypto project goes extinct because of government or because of hacks or whatever,
that we have lots of other things and we can run these experiments in mass, you know, like a Cambrian,
We can run these experiments en masse, you know, like a Cambrian, you know, explosion of evolution.
Centralize the money.
Facts.
All right, let's go ahead and get everyone introduced here.
Just Ray, welcome to the show.
Hey, how's it going?
um yeah this is ray super excited to be here i'm the founder of april we are a high performance
Yeah, this is Ray.
Super excited to be here.
I'm the founder of April.
trading infrastructure platform that productizes end-to-end order flow through an ai dex aggregator
and mev power liquid staking most of the team including me our background was in
high frequency trading like jump trading citadel securities but i'd be lying if i say that ethereum
wasn't the reason why all of us entered this space in the first place.
Largely, I was just getting very attracted to the promise of open decentralized finance.
And it's been a wild run for the last six, seven years now, I guess.
So yeah, super excited to be here and super excited to see Ethereum getting the same traction,
same attention, same hype and optimism as it deserves.
100%. I actually onboarded by Litecoin. This was before Ethereum.
But definitely, I think Ethereum has changed the game with smart contracts
and led the smart contract revolution and continues to do that um and
much love great to have you here just right i'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to panda
you should introduce yourself man i know you're going to say well it's just
my account i have it here because i played the music through it but
introduce yourself bro yeah my setup is actually so weird on that account to play the music through it, but introduce yourself, bro. Yeah, my setup is actually so weird on that
account to play the music that I can't
actually, I can't figure out how to talk through it
anymore.
Now getting thumbs down from Timmy.
Can we all thumbs down
Panda now?
They're a little private thumbs down
though.
All love, bro.
All love.
We much love you.
Yeah.
I mean, being fair, I'm just leaving that account there while the panel isn't full to farm followers.
So that's me.
Everybody take a moment to follow Panda.
His voice may throw you off when you see his image, but that's okay.
Just go with it.
So Panda is a beauty master.
I'll throw that in for him.
Just show him.
And he helps with the show.
And a defiant infrastructure master. I mean, he really with the show. And the DeFi and infrastructure master.
I mean, he really understands this stuff.
I mean, he, like, honestly, I'm co-founder of QuickSwap.
I created it, but he knows more about QuickSwap's in and outs than I do now.
Yeah, well, I actually go to him as my DeFi guru.
So that's saying a lot because I'm a power user.
So yeah, much love, man.
Okay, all right, and enough shilling Panda.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Alex.
Yo, I'm just a regular guy in the neighborhood.
Also do marketing for Dingo.
We are the platform that gives real-world assets,
prizes for those who stake our tokens.
I'm kind of regular here now, and would love to talk about it.
I've just been on a big conference a few weeks ago
and talked to some founders and CTOs and
maybe share some insight as well what's the street is talking about but I would
love to hear what people are saying as well. Awesome you got some alpha and great to have
you back on the show here and let's go ahead and pass the mic to change now hey what's
up everyone uh can you hear me loud and clear perfect hey what's up hi long time no see 10
minutes 20 minutes ago yeah so my name is pauline and i'm chief Strategy Officer over at ChangeNow. It's an instant crypto exchange service.
We support all kinds of assets swapping in between each other
without having to create any type of account.
And that is kind of our main premise.
As for me, I am a big internet fan.
I'm an extremely online person.
This has been my hyperfixation for a while.
And when I joined crypto,
some I think almost eight years ago now, since 2018,
I have seen a lot of projects come and go.
And I've talked to a lot of like bitcoin maximalists not just like you rock not bitcoin
maximal ish but like these true fanatics who think that bitcoin is the supreme crypto out there and
i've talked to people who are more more like the altcoin side uh because again change now as a
project is coin agnostic so we kind of have to be everywhere. But I personally have always been a fan of Vitalik's vision.
And I do think that Ethereum has kind of laid the foundation for a lot of decentralized finance.
And the Ethereum virtual machine has created...
It basically invented it.
But yeah, go on.
Exactly, exactly.
That's a good point.
Basically, where Bitcoin was underperforming,
and to echo previous speakers,
that's why it kind of failed as a payment tool.
Ethereum was there to kind of pick up the slack.
There were some hiccups in the system, like there were some hiccups in the network,
which kind of made it slow at times and expensive at times.
But since Ethereum is kind of like an evolving entity, an evolving system,
it's been super nice to see that there have been changes that have kind of pushed Ethereum into the territory of the ecosystem where more regular people, like more retail investors' needs were heard.
And that's why, for example, Circle, a stablecoin company, for them, the Ethereum network is still a primary network for stablecoin payments.
And I did have a chat with Vitalik and I did have a chat with a few Ethereum maxis over a few months.
And I do think that right now kind of the Tron supremacy needs to be moved away from a little bit.
And Ethereum has a fairly good chance to actually do it as a payment and a remittance network.
So I'm super excited to hear what you guys have to see about Ethereum and offer up some views of my own.
Thank you so much for having me, Rock and Darren and Aztec.
Super, super excited for the space.
Yeah, much love, Pauline excited for the space. Yeah.
Much love Pauline.
Great to have you here and I can't wait to pick your brain.
And actually on that we introduced everyone and I want to piggyback off
what something you said, Pauline.
sure.
So guys, and this is for everyone, uh, to jump in, but
and this is for everyone to jump in,
but we mentioned Vitalik's vision.
You know, what is Vitalik's vision?
I'd love for someone to catch everyone up here.
And thank you to everyone
that's hanging out with us on a Friday.
But let's start there.
You know, what is Vitalik's vision?
Does it matter still? and and and like where
are we going with ethereum i personally think uh that's a really good question um and as we know
uh vitalik's vision for um a decentralized means of payment decentralized currency kind of evolved
centralized means of payment and decentralized currency kind of evolved from him being upset
over being defeated in a World of Warcraft.
I think it was a tournament or something.
He was upset and he was a crypto fan.
So he went on and kind of started what is Ethereum right now.
But over the past years, I've been following his content and I've been following his opinions fairly closely.
And he does seem to understand that Ethereum as a virtual machine and as a new, like an entirely new financial system, which would be different even from Bitcoin, has a lot of power to serve the people and not just function as, you know,
as like a limited liability company or something. And I do also, like, I do feel fairly similarly to
that. Because again, I do think that, especially in the past few years, there has been a growing need for the little people to feel recognized in the industry and not just like projects grifting and collecting a quick profit.
And the Ethereum ecosystem with the way like with the recent EIPs that have been introduced, that has played a fairly big role.
And Vitalik keeps talking about like politically exposed persons, politically vulnerable persons
who would be able to kind of seek help in terms of not just in terms of donations, but in terms of payments with Ethereum, especially with the
ZK proofs and with the recently lowered gas fees. I think that alone has the power to do quite a lot
of good. But again, I am an idealist. I am perhaps more humanistic in my worldview.
This is, by the way, this is not a shade towards anyone.
But I do think that Ethereum as like more of a social project and not just like an IT project or like a money project has the potential to do a lot of good.
And it has been doing quite a lot of good recently.
So this is kind of my take on the situation.
And as for whether Vitalik's vision still matters,
well, he is, if not like a governing body
within the Ethereum Foundation,
but more like as a key opinion leader
if you will
a lot of people still listen to him
and a lot of people still kind of subscribe
to his views and
he has created this big
thing which Ethereum is right now so
I do think that Vitalik
still has the power to kind of
if not govern
Ethereum but steer it in a direction which he kind of sees fit.
Yeah.
High priest of Ethereum.
Exactly.
I found it actually kind of funny if you look back at it, Vitalik has never, like many people think that Vitalik has been in charge of Ethereum and can tell people what to do.
That hasn't actually ever been the case.
So funnily enough, there have been some EIPs from Vitalik, such as I remember one, for example, for removing the self-destruct opcode and like that people were just not as excited in as Vitalik was and that therefore
just wasn't moved forward.
So I think that was some interesting sign that already years ago Vitalik could not just
call the shots.
Vitalik is not the CEO of Ethereum or something like that.
And that's something that I found kind of cool.
And yeah, I do think his vision still matters. Like what does Vitalik say Ethereum is? Vitalik says Ethereum is freedom technology, right? Ethereum is not money. Ethereum is not ETH. Ethereum is not just a thing that's a bit better than Bitcoin in a kind of shitcoin launch platform. Ethereum is freedom technology.
freedom technology. And I think if we look at the recent shifts within EF and the support that it
gives to application developers, to privacy, to taking this stuff out there to actually make an
impact, that's kind of cool. So that's what I mean. I'm very pumped for what we do. We are talking a
lot about resilience now. If you look at kind of the potential upcoming headliners for Glamsterdam, it's huge, right?
And it goes very much in this direction of, okay, you know, let the Solana folks and maybe
base compete with one another on moving more money faster.
Ethereum will be this hard, you this hard base layer of humanity that we
will build hundreds of years of commerce and social interactions on.
And that's something I find incredibly cool.
And it hasn't always been so much in the forefront as it is now.
And yeah, I don't know how much Vitalik has a direct input on it, but I see it very much
in line with his writings and the things that he's been talking about for years now.
Yeah, guys, feel free to piggyback off each other. You know, you don't have to raise your
hand, just jump in. I do see what you're saying. And both of you guys made some really great points. I think that, uh, that kind of helps summarize where we're at in regards to Ethereum.
Um, where, um, sorry, I'm getting a weird call.
Rock, can you take this real quick yeah sure so
yeah i'm i'm pretty happy with the the direction of ethereum i think that there's
there's it's it's kind of funny i think
in a lot of ways in this industry we just kind of can will things into existence through hard work through
proper messaging etc and i think you know there came this moment where it was just performing so
poorly and people were like worried that other competitors were starting to eat its lunch and so
you had this like concerted effort. It felt like between,
you know, and maybe these things didn't all happen. Like, it's not like they got behind
closed doors and, you know, in the Roman bathhouse and they're smoking a, you know, a cigar and,
you know, they're like, okay, here's the plan guys. I don't think it worked. It's like that,
but I think enough people felt the need for things to like change or felt that it was like our time to kind of reclaim,
you know, not, not just price, but, you know, users and, and the public sentiment in a way.
And so Vitalik came forward and started talking about these more aggressive plans that were
changed to ETH Foundation, which I've personally experienced now, seeing that they're way more interactive.
You know, they're coming on our show later.
They're reaching out to do things with people and trying to meet with different.
I know one of their big focuses right now is privacy, but we'll let them talk more about that.
They're actually interacting with even politicians or banks or people or institutions
because they know that if those, you know, institutions like, you know, maybe cypherpunks
would say we shouldn't do that. I disagree. I think it's very important that we have a voice
on Capitol Hill. I'm actually going to speak on Capitol Hill later this year in October.
I think it's really important that we talk to these
people because if we don't, then they will make rules and laws that will favor either incumbents
like banks and other businesses that hate to see us thrive and hate to see decentralization and
don't want to be disrupted, or they will support more centralized projects.
And I won't name the names of those for now. So it's important that we do go out and we do have
a voice with all of these different entities to get them to come build on Ethereum. Because
if Visa is building an L2 on Ethereum, and if Robinhood is building an L2 on Ethereum, and I have,
yeah, I won't say, but Robinhood might not have come to Ethereum. There was another path that
almost took. So it was important that we got it to come to Ethereum on Arbitrum. And so it's
important that we do fight for these things. I love the new direction. I love that they're reaching out.
I'm super happy with all this.
I think a lot of the roadmap changes are cool.
I think a lot of the upgrades that have happened are really cool.
They just had, I think it was Pectro with 11 EIPs.
And then there's, I think, another one that's either coming or it's just, I forget, that's another 11 EIPs.
So it's like all of a sudden we're seeing this rapid growth and change
and like a fire behind Vitalik, a fire behind the foundation
and a fire behind the community.
And I think it's just a magical thing to be a part of.
Yeah, I've shared an opinion of me.
Sorry about that.
I've shared an opinion piece in the Jumbotron.
I recently did
CryptoNews, again,
which kind of echoes the same idea
that the only thing
like Ethereum is already
becoming the freedom
engine of Web3.
Some might argue that
the freedom engine of the internet.
So I do think that it's been really
good that the like the ethereum foundation and the people the community behind it is finally
kind of reaching out and popularizing ethereum even more because it definitely deserves it
definitely i see it that way as well alex i see your hand up you don't have to raise your hand
brother just jump right in no just thinking about what you said rock uh do you feel like
there's a vibe change change in it i mean i wasn't there whatever seven years ago but it always feel like a chain for nerds and for builders now we have big boys in the suits uh
for one k nerd
100 i'm a nerd too bro
I'm a nerd too, bro.
Me too.
Yeah, me and Rock watch anime.
Well, I can't speak to Rock.
No, I love anime.
But here, guys.
Oh, me too.
I got a question.
Oh, there we go.
That's what's up.
So, guys, like, the title is Ethereum Back From The Dead.
I mean, what actually, I'd like to just dive for a second into
what was the problem? Like, why did people think Ethereum was dead? Is it just, you know,
general macro, you know, the cycle and people just said it was dead or were there actual issues?
Are these issues fixed now? Are we on the road to, you know better things now like what what was that all about
because that was definitely there was there was this one point where a large part of the timeline
was saying ethereum's dead and there was all these like ethereum's watching memes and uh you know like it seemed like solana and uh some of the other stacks were
dunking on ethereum what but what was what led to that what was the issue and uh are we are we
headed to for clear skies yeah i just want to quickly jump in here i think the biggest
you know characteristic that really sets sets Ethereum apart is this credible
neutrality, right?
And that is largely a double-edged sword, meaning when the market sentiment is low,
when the macro environment is kind of adversely, and when there's like a lack of clarity on regulations on all fronts, it is a lot harder to acquire users and customers
right when you are running a very decentralized, in a very decentralized fashion compared to
the other chains that could go really aggressively moving in a very aligned fashion to go out
and acquiring like partnerships users, and whatnot.
Now the flip side of that is the moment that the regulatory clarity start to increase in
this industry.
When the institutions, when the larger tech companies that are looking for a chain to
do global settlement, credible neutral healthy immediately becomes a lot more important.
So kind of to answer your question here,
I think the last couple of years,
decentralization and credible neutrality
is something that could slow things down
when the other chains or ecosystem
are aggressively pursuing over metrics and KPIs.
However, the moment when we are thinking about open finance, right, like in the
last like six months or so, we saw a lot more clarity via the, you know, Genius Act around
stablecoin. You know, last week, SEC also started ruling around liquid staking tokens, all of these
primitives that, you know, most of the volume in terms of assets are still lodging on Ethereum,
that's when the network effect really started to take off. When you are looking for a blockchain,
when you're looking for something as like a global settlement, where do you think about,
where do you go for something that's censorship resistant? These things immediately go from
just an ideological advantage to actual product advantage.
When you're looking to move not just billions, right, but like trillions of assets on chain,
where do you feel the most comfortable by parking this capital?
We're not just talking about like small hedge funds.
We're really talking about the likes of like BlackRock's huge asset managers across the board.
When you're trying to move private credit on chain, all of these assets going to one ecosystem,
where do people feel the safest, right?
I think Ethereum is still kind of the safest bet.
That's where, in our opinion, that's where you see kind of like back from the dead.
I don't know if it ever was dead, but it's definitely definitely getting more and more alive each day
Yeah, for sure. I like that
Maybe it wasn't dead, but it sure is more alive now
Yeah, yeah, the point about the dad becomes like in a Twitter space and everywhere
when when when the probably is from our perspective it was
happening just to be because we had some issues with the ETF and staking
improvement with it at ETF and that moment, uh, just some other ecosystems,
and I'm going to talk about them today, but some other ecosystems just heating up with, uh, several new products.
And, uh, it's, it was, looks like more looks like more like a lot of noise
around the real elephant around a real lion in a you know in the room so
meanwhile like the the big guy is just laying taking a rest before the next run
just other small mouses and I most like I was running around and making some noise.
So yeah, Ethereum was looking more about like a system which growing and developing on its way.
And it was, for me, it was really clear that everything will be fine with the Ethereum as an ecosystem because when the institutions become a part of the market,
when they come with the ETF,
that's the best showcase that there is some sense in their mind
regarding the Ethereum.
So they will definitely follow them.
They will definitely push them.
They will definitely grab some of them for their internal usage.
And yeah, it was just a question of a time.
So probably the time is now.
And the only thing we need to do right now,
just use your safety belt.
Like I put down your ass on a on a sofa just watch what what's what's
going on around probably because uh like yeah there is a lot of uh a lot of cool things building
right now in ethereum and uh we just need to wait before it's become really huge.
I'm as a BD,
I'm connecting with a lot of different builders on Ethereum
and with the different layers
and everyone like a super positive about this ecosystem.
So yeah, for me, it's also was never dead.
Yeah, I agree.
I think it was never dead yeah i i agree i think it was never dead i i do see that there was a bit of a
fling with other uh stacks across the market but i do think that a lot of people are coming back to
ethereum i don't believe it was ever dead um i'd love to, does anyone else have anything else they'd like to piggyback or add on to this?
If not, I'd love to jump into ETH fragmentation and what your guys' thoughts on that subject.
I do kind of want to pipe in with the Ethereum is dead or Ethereum is not dead narrative, which we're kind of talking about today.
And that, I think think Ethereum was never dead.
It was at times overshadowed by a lot like historically there has been a lot of noise
within the crypto space.
It is very grifter heavy and very hype dependent.
grifter heavy and very hype dependent. And we have had a few things that would kind of like over the
years that would overshadow Ethereum, like with the massive casino that Solana was. And BASE also
kind of hopped in on the bandwagon of launching meme coins. Like if you guys remember, the very
first meme coins were actually launched on Ethereum back in 2021. Like, you've got the meme coin OGs like Shiba, like Floki Inu, like Baby Doge and whatnot.
With the overall hype and with the overall amount of people that were kind of trying to join into the meme coin movement, people started looking for something that was perhaps not as massive historically, but something lighter, something cheaper, something more easy to trade on. And that's where
Ethereum kind of lost big time because historically trading on
Uniswap has been very expensive. Like the gas fees were simply
insane. So people would come up with other either like L2s or
simply other chains like again like Solana like base
like buying a smart chain to launch their meme coins because trading them was easier. However
that kind of narrative would dominate the market over three or something like three something
years up until now and I don't think Ethereum is dead. I think it is just waking up
and starting to dominate the space because there is a certain need for it at the moment.
There is a certain push for a money system, for a payment system that would be safe to interact with, censorship resistant, private, and at
the same time, cheap and easy to interact with and adopted widely enough to not need
any additional ecosystem support.
So Ethereum is just coming out of the shadow.
It was never dead.
It was just not as hyped up because, again, people wanted to trade meme coins and Ethereum just didn't really have the necessary infrastructure for it, despite Uniswap actually existing.
I think above and beyond that as well, as you look at all the other chains over the years, you look at Binance, that was a fork off of ethereum um you know and and
there's so many other chains that have done that all those things continue to feed that ethereum
ecosystem and then you look at the protocol overall and the adjustments that have been made
over the last several years gas fees being reduced um the amount of corporations coming in. And those corporations are always going
to be looking at what's the most stable protocol to build upon. And we all see that they're
building upon whether it's XRP, Cardano, Ethereum, the the top ones that they're they're building upon
they're doing it because they see that um you know what makes the most sense for them um you
know from a nft standpoint we're seeing that market wake up a lot and that was based majority
around the ethereum blockchain more so than any other one. Yes, we've seen stuff launch on other chains,
whether it be base or Binance or Solana, but they've never really hit. Unlike with Ethereum,
now you're starting to see that market wake back up as well. You're starting to see more
brands and businesses building. And then you start looking at what they're doing with that technology
as they're building it out and the use cases that are there.
And I agree.
I don't think that Ethereum was ever dead or dying.
I think that adjustments had to be made to be able to pivot
and to grow within the ecosystem as we're seeing everything else grow
and evolve. I would just add to this one that it I don't think was just narrative I think it was
also just a strategic focus of Ethereum playing exclusively the long game whereas other ecosystems, like specifically Solana, was making trade-offs for shipping some quick wins.
So, and just to pick on one point that I found super interesting to look at, both of them have tremendous engineering teams, right?
Like, I'm not a Solana hater.
I don't hold any soul, but I'm not a Solana hater.
I think they're fantastic engineers.
And like, if you look at solana you hear one thing
for example you hear look the speed of light is this and this fast the typical cpu has a size of
around one inch and that means the speed of light within your cpu takes this and that much time
right and that's how we optimize it if you look so basically they're thinking about like
optimizing the fastest possible thing that's running on one computer if you look at the
ethereum ecosystem you hear look the speed of light is 300 000 kilometers a second and like
um the size of the planet is this given that speed of light takes at least a second or so to travel in a decentralized
network around the globe and these two perspectives i find really interesting so solana is building
this machine that goes as fast as humanly possible whereas ethereum is kind of thinking on global
scale on kind of planetary scale and on like human
civilization scale trying to build something that all of us wherever we are on this planet can
interact with on kind of equal footing you don't need to be in that same computing center in
frankfurt new york or what have you like we want to, you know, empowered to work with the same machine. I just
find that beautiful. So yeah, and I think now, and I think that greatly contributed to this
narrative of Ethereum is dead. Well, because, you know, if you take this thing, this machine and
make it as fast as possible, you're going to see incredible gains. And Solana has shown these gains
and they have materialized,
whereas Ethereum was just playing this very long game.
And I think now Ethereum started making some trade-offs,
not just playing them, they still do it,
but they also do things which ship more imminent results.
And I think that's cool.
All well said.
So many great points.
Can I sidetrack really, really really quick because i just had this like
epiphany that i i have to say or i'll forget and it'll be lost to history um okay so you were
talking about speed of light and it was making me think is there is there any way we could have
information flow across the world faster than the speed of light because that's the like theoretical
limitation right okay i think i might have just thought of a way, though. Hear me out. Okay. Do you know about
like string theory or quantum entanglement? Yes. Okay. What if, I've never heard anyone say this,
I don't know if it's true, maybe I'm stupid, but what if you used quantum
entanglement to move information faster? The theory is that if you can entangle two atoms or
molecules or whatever and separate them, and then you do something to one, it can affect the other, no matter how far the
distance. And this was just like a theory for a long time. And then they actually proved it
recently. So what they did is they took a, I think an atom or something, uh, maybe, maybe a
electron or something. I don't know, but they, they took this, they kind of held it with lasers, they shot it from one shore to an island far away to their other lab, and first they entangled it with another atom, or whatever it was, then they shot it to the island, and they held it there with also lasers, and I think cooling or something. And then they did something to the atom on the,
on the shore. And it, and it, it, I think instantly affected the other one, even though
they're not talking to each other. They're not, you know, there's no, nothing moved between them
that we know of. Maybe something did, maybe something that's limited by the speed of light.
I don't know, but, but when we did something to one, it affected the other. And so this proved
that we can use this quantum entanglement physically.
So imagine if you could make some kind of computer that is quantumly entangled with another computer in a far-off place, and you can change something on one computer, and it changes on the other.
And you could think of this as like across the universe you could do this.
Hypothetically, quantum entanglement should work across the universe. i don't know if this is a thing maybe i'm stupid but
health and psychedelics is next week just to answer that one just to answer that one quickly
that's true but you cannot like this is true but you cannot use it to transfer information
like you this is fine, like they react,
but you cannot actually transmit information through that.
Why?
If I could change the spin of electron,
why can't I have a computer made of millions of electrons
and the spin going left or right is like a transistor,
a zero or a one?
I think we need a solid-state physics, you know,
Twitter spaces.
I think it will be smaller,
but I think I'd be happy to dive into it.
But like my master's-
I gotta look into this now.
I've been a while back.
I mean, this, this, I wouldn't be surprised if this is like sum up.
I don't think this is used in quantum computers,
but quantum computers use this kind of weird magical stuff that think this is used in quantum computers, but quantum computers use
this kind of weird magical stuff that doesn't really make sense to us. But actually we have,
like quantum mechanics is actually used in a lot of our devices. It's even used in cell phones to
some extent from my understanding in some minor ways. And in the future, quantum mechanics is
going to be used in probably everything we do or a lot of what we do. But anyways, sorry for sidetracking. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I always say. I will say, sorry, Rock,
I just want to say, I do think you're right. I think that the possibilities, I don't think that
we truly understand what's possible yet because we're constantly seeing the evolution of how,
of how things are changing and what we think is possible and what's not possible. Look at 10,
20 years ago, what we thought was impossible has already been broken. And now we find is possible.
So do I think that what you're saying is a possibility? I do. Because for anybody to think
that it's not is limiting their own, if they think that it's not possible, they're limiting their own mindset.
And I think that speaks to the whole Ethereum is not dead and has not been dead, you know.
And that, you know, I think part of it is that people have expected Ethereum to be doing the same thing as everybody else all along, right? When you take a look at sort of the numbers,
you know, James, you were talking about, you know, the meme coins over the past,
you know, past couple of years,
you know, when SHIB was trying to sort of,
you know, run their peak the end of October 21, right?
There was only, you know,
one to 2,000 entire memes, you know,
active in the market back then, right?
You know, now at this point, there's between 30 and 50,000 active memes, you know, active in the market back then, right? You know, now at this
point, there's between 30,000 and 50,000 active meme coins right now, but that's spread across
10 different chains, right? There was only two chains really active at that point with meme
coins. You know, things have changed so much, right? So, you know, with Ethereum has, you know,
5,000 to 8,000 active meme coins right now, You know, Solana has 10 to 15 thousand. Right.
You know, things are so different, you know, and you look at the speed of the different change.
Look at how fast SUI is right now.
You know, everybody expects that Ethereum is supposed to be the same all along.
Well, they're trying to accomplish different goals and people sort of forgotten that all along.
They're accomplishing different things and they're making incredible improvements along the way.
So we have to sort of stop expecting everybody to be the same and give credits.
And I think they have been making incredible, incredible changes.
And they were nowhere near dead.
But as everybody was watching other people surge in their prices, people sort of thought, well, why isn't Ethereum?
Well, Ethereum was doing other things.
And people were, you know, were running, you know, like you say, you know, they were running Solana up because people were over there gambling.
So, yeah, all things are not equal.
I also think what Sebastian was talking about with like Ethereum was playing the long game.
I think it's partly playing the long game, but it like Ethereum, because it was like, I love Vitalik being an idealist and like this, almost like building for utopia, but that doesn't like there will be a gap where people who want to move fast and make the sacrifices like will appeal to traditional finance. And like, I think the vision for Ethereum
I think it's partly playing the long game.
was beyond what most people could conceptualize,
that it takes time from people first hearing about it
and like a chain like Solana might make more sense
and like the, okay, you can do it faster
and therefore it's better,
where it takes people playing around in crypto
to really understand like the true power
of what decentralization is.
And I think there was
a lag and like as there was a lag with like time to finality and just speed of chains and i think
as ethereum and then other layer twos uh got faster and faster people began to realize like
okay this is this is the future and this is something that's really powerful, but you can't expect people to learn this very novel concept
the first time they're exposed to it.
So I think the idealism of Vitalik,
it hurts in the short term a lot,
and it hurts at the start of Bullrun,
because, I mean, remember in 2021,
literally every single new chain was called the ethereum killer so like it's not a
new narrative that ethereum's dead it just like and then people were like oh wait no actually this
is the superior technology and that's what's important but i think people just need to warm
up to that idea 100 percent to sit to you i think that uh there were many different chains that tried to iterate on
ethereum to l1 and while they made a little bit better you know way to do memes let's say
or some other random thing ethereum was looking at the long game. I personally include layer twos in that
the innovation there in Ethereum. So when I say Ethereum, I think of Ethereum, the L1 and the L2s
and all of the innovation that's happening together. And so when people think of Ethereum, I think they miss out when they just think of the L1 and then compare it to other L1s.
And if you include the Layer 2s and all the innovation there, you realize that while some of these other L1s had some general success,
some of these other L1s had some general success.
Ethereum was scaling at the layer two level.
So, you know, I'm a huge fan of Polygon.
But, you know, there's a ton of innovation across other layer twos as well.
Additionally, they were working on this whole time.
We've been working on fragmentation.
So you have the ag layer.
And so now i think when these institutions are looking at where they want to place their bets
and they're looking at things more holistically they see that ethereum is more future-proofed
and has been playing the long game.
And while there's all these L1s that have had little wins here and there,
if you look at it holistically, Ethereum is way farther along the curve.
And all these other L1s are going to have to catch up to an Ethereum that is no longer fragmented, that has chain abstraction, that's unified by something like the Ag layer, or could be another solution.
I believe it's going to be the Ag layer. And it's starting to work on even further in-game type solutions like privacy. And you're also going to see, in my opinion,
the unification of the hard money layer.
So not only will Ethereum be smart contracts
for the dollar in a digital sense,
but for instance, I'm co-founder of LitVM.
You know, we're bringing litecoin into the polygon or
ethereum world and it's going to be unified by the aglare and you know bitcoin's going to join
that and and we're so you're just you're going to go uh and and all the rail like eth theory is the rails for for all this so i i think people don't realize how far ethereum
has come you know and you can even add zk to that you know the all the innovations with
with zk and how that's going to change the game so um all these other chains haven't even really
thought about these things for the most part and if they have it's just pieces of it
so i don't think ethereum's dead i think they've been playing the long game uh the whole time and as a as an ecosystem
yeah who remembers these ethereum killer there was this my all-time favorite was this one that said
we're the ethereum of china and that was the literally only differentiation
there was nothing else we've come a long way since then i think so yeah well that's like
every nba player that's come after michael jordan saying that they're the next michael jordan
yeah look uh i mean uh saying that this thing or that thing is a popular project killer has been the like a very popular marketing strategy from times immemorial.
So we've had Bitcoin killers.
We've had Ethereum killers.
We've had Solana killers, Binance killers.
I mean, Coinbase killers, Robinhood killers.
I mean, Coinbase killers, Robinhood killers.
And this is just, I think, like as a marketer with an extensive background in marketing,
association branding is a fairly powerful tool to kind of get mindshare for your project.
And I don't think that there's anything necessarily bad with it.
And I don't think that there's anything necessarily bad with it.
But I don't think we've seen any technology that would have been enough to kind of beat Ethereum.
Aside from like payment, I guess, payment oriented L2s.
Again, like Polygon or Bitrum or anything other than that.
But I think within the past few years, again, we've seen quite a lot of serial killer projects
that use that narrative as their main marketing channel.
And I think that is kind of lazy.
There is no creativity about it. And I don't think those projects have had any merit in the first place.
I mean, if we had an Ethereum for every time someone said they were going to kill Ethereum,
these ETH killers, we'd all be pretty wealthy. But yeah, I think, you know what I like is
instead of trying to compete with something you believe in,
try to build on it, right? Or at least
be aligned with the values or the ethos. Like this, we're going to kill this thing
is poor form and it
makes people not want to build on your thing because you're saying you're going
to kill something that most of us all believe in. So like with Bitcoin, you had Hex or Bitcoin
Cash say, we're going to fork and we're going to be the real one or whatever. We're going to be the
Bitcoin killer. And people didn't like that. So even if there's merit behind the things that Bitcoin Cash has built, and I think there are
some merit to some of the things they've built, as much as I battled them during the block wars,
I've become good friends with a lot of them now. But Litecoin did it right for Bitcoin when they
said, we are not competing with Bitcoin. We are Bitcoin's gold. We are the payments and we are
fast and cheap. Bitcoin can be digital gold and we want to be digital silver. And then same with ETH. So on the ETH side, we have lots of examples of people who instead of trying to build an ETH killer, they said, we're going to build something that strengthens ETH, right? Like Polygon, like Arbitrum, like Base, even Robinhood now, you know, all of these.
Visa, they're not trying to build, I mean, they are building their own networks,
but as a subsect of ETH that makes ETH, the world's supercomputer,
one of the most decentralized systems on the planet, stronger.
You seem to settle back to ETH, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I guess it would be the same as, for example,
us to change now claiming that we're like both the sex and dex killer
because we allow people to swap tokens that exist on any major sex or any major dex.
But it is kind of important to kind of draw a line between the target audiences of our project
and sexes and
DEXs because we work for the average investor while both centralized and decentralized exchanges,
they mostly work for the good of traders. And there is kind of a way for us to coexist, just like there is a way for Ethereum and all of the L2s that
Rocky just listed to kind of amplify the entire experience without taking away from either
basically player within the space.
Yeah, it's like the L2s.
I mean, I'll note an interesting fact.
So there's a lot of talk,
and then we have a couple new guests, or a few new guests we'll introduce here in a second.
But with ETHL2s, a lot of people talk about, well, some of these are competitive to ETH or
extractive to ETH. A lot of people said this about Matic pre-Polygon and pre-all the ZK roll-ups
and stuff. But Matic just and Polygon,
our messaging was always,
no, we are here to support Ethereum.
Yes, we did what Vitalik called on the Lex Friedman show,
the quick and dirty thing,
which was, you know, when we were building Plasma
and then we shifted more to proof of stake
because Plasma just turned out not to be the best technology
and it was clunky and things.
And it was actuallyunky and things. And it was actually quick swap. I think our decision to not, we supported Plasma assets,
but we, Samip Singani, one of my co-founders told Polygon, like, guys, I know you really want us to
push this Plasma stuff to be more ETH aligned, but, and to like follow to the ethos and everything,
but the Plasma stuff was clunky, it didn't work.
That's why Omize Go, which Vitalik was,
I think advising, right?
That didn't work either.
We just realized plasma was a cool concept
and maybe could have worked, but just didn't.
And for whatever reason, we found better technologies.
But anyways, Polygon stayed true to its mission
to scale Ethereum and be aligned with Ethereum.
And now is putting some of the greatest research, the ZK roll-up side and the interop side for Ethereum.
Well, even back in the day, Polygon, so the whole Layer 2 narrative from a tech perspective
has evolved.
We didn't actually look at Layer 2os as necessarily needing to settle.
Like if they were a side chain, we were calling, you know, layer twos,
calling them layer twos, but in a way, yeah, big debate.
But Polygon did help Ethereum even as, you know, early Polygon,
because at the time there was BSC and it was on the rise
and they were kicking off
DeFi summer additionally.
And one of the things that quick swap did alongside the polygon team early on is
we kicked off DeFi on polygon and all, and because it was this like Ethereum layer
two, all this mindshare kind of stayed in the ethereum uh world you could say and and so
uh and and now you know has kind of merit to, uh, aligning and not trying
to kill. And, and, and I think that's, that's a big part of why, uh, Polygon had, has so much
success. Yeah. And Vitalik said that, you know, it was this quick and dirty, uh, that, that
Matic Polygon took the quick and dirty
method which was get something out that works because we need we need a release valve for the
ethereum gas fees and there was nothing else at the time that was working and so i think you know
the matic team did a good job at that and and vitalik said that he was supportive as long as
they pushed hard to to move towards better true L2 things like roll-ups, etc.
And that's exactly what they've done.
They've put all their focus into this, right?
But anyways, yeah, we have a few new guests here.
We have, let's start with Casey.
Casey is from Ethereum Foundation, and I'm sure he has a lot of opinions on the stuff we're going to talk about today. But yeah, Casey, maybe you could just quickly introduce yourself.
Yeah. Hi, I'm Casey. I'm from the Ethereum Foundation. I work on the SFC team, which
is the strategic funding coordination team here at Ethereum. So a lot of interesting
things we work on that I want to talk about.
I know Michelle is also joining. She's in the listener section right now. But yeah, I sort of
do a lot of the co-funding, a lot of the working, connecting EF grantees to now like public innovation
agencies in like the UK, Singapore, EU, EA, and just a lot of exciting things to talk about on that front.
So that is a little bit about me.
Yeah, thanks for coming, Casey.
Big fan of everything you guys are doing.
You weren't here for the first hour,
but we talked a lot about how a lot of people
gave a lot of flowers for the ETH Foundation
and how it's really being kind of community-centric,
being more communicative with the community and all the people involved and trying of community centric, being more communicative
with the community and all the people involved and trying to make sure that, you know, we steer
people in a good direction of decentralization. Because if we don't have a voice, you know,
to these even institutions or like Capitol Hill or these different, you know, people that are
just builders in general, you know, people might go somewhere else that's less decentralized.
But yeah, we have Michelle, she actually is a speaker.
You're just maybe a little glitch,
happens on Twitter sometimes,
but Michelle, who I am a huge fan of,
and she's our most recent addition
to the Polygon Grants Board.
So she serves there with myself,
along with Pete Kim, formerly Coinbase Wallet, and
David from DYDX Foundation, and Maggie from SheFi. But yeah, Michelle is... The main reason we wanted
to bring Michelle on is because her research is, I would say, and I don't know if she agrees, but I would say kind of unparalleled,
or at least really good in the industry on the grants and funding side. And she is just
such a wealth. And we've been so happy to have her at our grants board. She's brought so much
great information. And like me, she's founder first and builder first, so it's great to have her voice.
And we'll pin some stuff in the Jumbotron, some of her research for everyone to read.
I highly recommend everybody reads her research and gives her a follow.
She's great.
And give Casey a follow.
But yeah, Michelle, go ahead and introduce yourself.
I kind of did, but...
Thank you, Rock.
That was really nice of you hi everyone I'm
Michelle and as this rock just said I yeah I'm a big grants nerd so I have co-authored the state
of web3 grants report in the last two years have done a lot of deeper dives into pretty much every
major grants program have come up with frameworks on how to compare grants programs, how to evaluate
how to, how whoever your funding is getting funded and whether it's effective and how
do you build growing ecosystems and how you can provide more layers of support past this
funding.
And so we've been doing a lot of that.
I also head marketing at Octent.
We fund impactful projects in the Ethereum ecosystem using sustainable growth.
We have over 100,000 ETH that we've staked and a good chunk of those staking rewards have gone towards funding some of Ethereum's most important projects.
There's just been a lot that we've been working and we've been cooking up.
Today's actually a really special day because it's our two- anniversary at Octant. And that's a pretty big moment here. But I've been so excited because I feel like, of course, I'm excited about E through and we're seeing the results of a lot of that work and that advocacy and behind the scenes quiet org which I feel like has moved the space
forward in so many ways and just so many big changes even at the EF and I think there's been
a lot of listening to a lot of what was being shared in terms of sentiment in terms of constructive
critique as well and we're seeing a lot of really, really cool teams come up.
Of course, Casey's team is one of those really, really great teams as well
that have been doing a lot of good work.
And we're excited to share.
I don't know, Casey, I don't think we can share a lot of the stuff
that we've been cooking up with Octon and with the EF.
But I know there's going to be a lot that we will be in just a couple of days
because we have some pretty big announcements there too.
Well, we're going to strategically
squeeze a little bit of alpha out of you
at some point here.
Or Casey, are you going to jump in there?
I'd love to hear from,
maybe the Ethereum Foundation can catch us up
on the changes and kind of the future,
the next six months kind of roadmap where we're headed.
I do want to shout out that Jin has joined us.
Also Stardogs, Matthew, welcome back.
Do we want to jump?
I would actually like to,
cause I don't know how long you guys have.
I'd love to hear about your guys' take on the future of the Ethereum Foundation and how it plays into bringing Ethereum forward.
Yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and start. I am from the Ethereum Foundation, but I am speaking my own words here, my own personal opinions.
And something to note is that I believe we did
post our 10-year roadmap not that long ago. So it's something that anyone's able to read.
It's out in the public, but I can give you sort of my take on where we're going. I think
something that's very interesting that you see it a lot. You see institutional adoption,
you see all these buzzwords, right? Like, what's going on there. Ethereum is the invisible backbone of finance. You see a lot of threads, a lot of posts like that, but a lot of people don't really know what that means and how much work goes into that. Another member of the Ethereum Foundation talking about how the enterprise team in the month they've existed has already done 200 calls.
They've already spoken, went out to banks and institutions and have already, in the one month they've been speaking, have already had 200 calls.
And it's not like 200 calls with separate organizations.
You have to imagine a call happens here, there's interest, it goes further, it goes further, it goes further.
So there's a lot of work being done on the institutional adoption side and then also on
privacy as well i'm sure you pretty much all like pretty much aware that what's going on with like
aztec for example with the nor language nor programming language how easy it is to build
these privacy solutions we We see Phantom Zone.
We see Zama on the FHC.
And all of this is tying into the building of real-world assets, right?
And I'm sure you guys have also seen, like, tokenized funds
like BlackRock's Build Fund.
We've seen JP Morgan's crypto-back lending
that I believe has public information as well.
WisdomTree Digital Funds is working in the background as well.
So all this to say, there is a lot, a lot, a lot of effort being put in to creating or positioning ETH as the invisible backbone, which finance stands on top of.
And I'm really excited, extremely excited about that future because it opens up a lot
of possibilities, right?
And I want to shout out Octent really quickly because a possibility that I see in the future
is we have all of this money that exists in fiat right now, right, on the traditional
finance sector.
Octent is a really interesting organization because I believe they're associated with the Goldman Foundation
but they have 100,000 ETH in the treasury
and they have regenerating funds
based off that. I think you're going to see more and more and more
of that. Not just funds
that contribute to Ethereum but funds
that contribute to different problem spaces
in the world. So I think that's going to be something
that you're going to see out of this
new direction that's being
taken. I have a lot more to say on that, but I see change now.
And this is all my personal opinion on the direction of Ethereum.
I see change now as it's hand up, but I also want to give the mic to Michelle
if she wants to say anything on that.
Yeah, thanks, Casey.
And I think, yes, like streaming QF is a very interesting model we actually
so we ran a pilot experiment on on just yeah streaming quadratic funding and that's been an
interesting way of more accountability from projects too and for those of you don't know if
if you ever participated in like a Gitcoin round and it was a QF round, what would typically happen is you donate to a round and it gets matched.
And then the grantees immediately get that funding when the round is over.
Streaming QF is a little bit different because you're technically like your matching is happening, like it's getting streamed every second.
And so instead of immediately getting that funding, it happens
over time during the duration of the round. And it can be longer lasting. And it's just a lot more
effective because there have been so many issues. And we've seen that over time and time again,
during different grants rounds, where like projects get an absurd amount of funding,
but there's no accountability. And then there's a lot of questions around whether that funding
was effective, what is a way to just lead to a little bit of better, I'd say, maybe even responsibility and accountability there.
And so this helps in that aspect of having, yeah, just the community engage in a way that's more effective, it's more productive, and it does put the onus on the grantees as well to constantly update and to be better about reporting
and communicating and whatnot. And that's been interesting. So we did a pilot with an accelerator
program that we built last year. But again, with I think a lot of the different mechanisms that
are coming up, there's just so many different ways to both engage the community and to support
projects. And I'm a big advocate of non-financial support as well, because funding is just one part of it.
And funding is tough as it is, especially for deserving builders.
But there's just so many other ways.
And Brock, you and I are quite passionate about this, I know.
And I know we've got really strong thoughts on how builders can be supported.
But it sort of feels like it's about time that we started moving towards the action side of things, right?
And building different support layers for that is just so important. I'm really fortunate, I feel,
that we're able to do that. And we've started doing a lot more of that at Octon. And even I
think from the Polygon side, like with the new season that's coming up and everything else,
we're going to be able to do with a lot of the different orgs that are providing different
support layers. Like there's just a lot more that could be done for builders, that could be done with builders,
and I think it starts with listening and really understanding where a lot of these pain points
start from.
And sorry, if I can just jump in.
Something that I think is really cool is I don't think that this, like, Machel talked
a bit about strategic quadratic funding, right, as sort of a method to increase the throughput
of, like, builder success, right,
via an accelerator or a grant program.
I don't think that is going to be limited
to building things on Ethereum.
What I mean by that is, like,
as Ethereum sees sort of this real-world adoption,
I think, like, that method of,
okay, you have a treasury,
you have a problem that you want to solve, you want to increase builder throughput, I think like that method of, okay, you have a treasury, you have a problem that
you want to solve, you want to increase builder throughput. I think you're going to see that in
different problem spaces too. So I don't think like Octent is just building a method that's
going to work for the Ethereum builders and Ethereum community. I think that this is going
to be something that we're going to see long term in the future as Ethereum gets better real world adoption.
I agree. I think this goes beyond Ethereum.
I think with any community and especially with anything that people care about that you can rally the community around.
I see a lot of use cases even just outside of it when it comes to the philanthropic side, even when it comes to a lot of the impact side.
And I'm part of so many fandoms, like even being able to to see i think my real in an ideal world like i'm waiting for this
to to move into the fandom side and i say fandoms because that's when you really see things nerd
culture so
just just really quick sorry case but I think me and
Michelle have spent way too
much time talking about
Lord of the Rings lore
and theories about
things
that we probably have wasted
way too much time on our calls
you called her a nerd man
I say that
so affectionately I was i was the i was the
rock i was the closet nerd in high school i was on the wrestling team but i would go home
and uh raid in everquest this is you know 25 years ago or something and uh i actually dropped i've
kind of embarrassing but i dropped out of wrestling because I was offered to become the raid leader for my guild.
So I am as nerdy as it comes.
I don't know how you can be in this space and not a nerd at the same time.
Like you, to like be into crypto, you have to be a little bit nerdy.
We sit for three hours every week talking about this like magic internet money.
We're nerds and it's got to be affectionate.
Yes, sir. And we had a champion wrestling team's it's got to be affectionate yes sir and
we had we had a champion wrestling it's all good it wasn't just any wrestling team we were cif
champions and i dropped out to be the raid leader of descendants the second uh biggest guild in the
world in everquest i was i was the second highest ranked shaman in the world and uh actually was
selling digital currencies at one point when i was like
earlier than that um i was selling digital currencies to brock pierce and jonathan yantis
brock pierce made tether and uh and um eos and a bunch of other things uh big bitfinex and stuff
but um i was selling him digital currencies he would would then sell them in smaller amounts.
And his company became IGE, which I think was like a multi-billion dollar, you know,
wow, an EverQuest gold seller or whatever.
And then Jonathan Yantis made Wax, the gaming chain.
But so that was like 12 or 13.
But yeah, so I say it with all the utmost affection.
Good times.
I want to, Pauline, I've seen your hand go up.
Of course, you guys know on the show you don't have to raise your hand, just jump in.
Did you want to piggyback off something or still?
Yeah, thank you so much, Aztec.
I just wanted to say a few words to Casey, Michelle. Thank you so much for joining the space. It's always super fun to have all of these interesting guests as a guest myself and as a host occasionally.
been, especially recently, I've been pretty vocal about how Ethereum has all of the resources
and all of the infrastructure and all of the technology that is necessary for it to become
the, like I'm saying the with two E's, ultimate like private, immutable, censorship-resistant payment layer.
And I just wanted to say that it's super satisfying for me to hear that the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum at large are becoming, like, are actually putting effort into making Ethereum
more and more widespread.
So I just wanted to give you guys a big shout out and to express my utmost gratitude
for the things that you do.
And I, as always, will be looking forward
to any and all updates that you guys might have for us.
Yeah.
Thank you for coming up.
Thank you for saying that.
I have only been working at Ethereum Foundation
for like a month at this point. I'm pretty new. So I feel bad taking any credit. But yeah, I think Ethereum,
there's a lot of work being done to push Ethereum to the mainstream. One thing that I want to,
I just wanted to finish my thoughts. I am really passionate about it with Michelle, right? So
and then we'll move on, we'll move topics. But, like, the innovative, like, the strategic,
or not the strategic, the streaming, what,
quadratic funding model, right?
Like, that's being built on Ethereum.
I think that it's going to end up happening,
if you're in the audience, right?
If you're like, okay, why is this relevant?
I think as this model is tested and as it shows success, you're going to see
other real world programs like adopt history. I used to work with this program called House.
They have about $300 million sitting in their treasury in fiat and Canadian dollars. And
basically their job is to help Black or people of color entrepreneurs in Canada.
And that's how they use their funds for that reason, right?
We're going to see funds like that move on to Ethereum, right?
We're going to see these large fiat treasuries that solve X problem or Y problem or Z problem move on to Ethereum.
They're going to be using things like Octent as a model.
So I think we're going to see adoption not just by banks,
but by public goods organizations, by accelerators,
by people solving problems.
And I think that's very exciting if you're in the audience,
if you're a fan of Ethereum, and as the person who just came up,
sorry, I forget your name, but the person who just came up,
that's going to drive adoption further.
I'm very passionate about that. Sorry. I had to get that thought out.
I see hands up. We can move to the next.
Yeah, I actually would love to steer this right after we also introduce Maddie.
And I want to get your take, Matthew. dive deeper into what does you know builder impact look like your uh funding and and understanding
where we're going because like currently everyone knows like the traditional route with uh vcs and
uh you know incubation but i, is that changing for Ethereum?
That's a question I have.
But yeah, Matthew, what did you want to pick you back off?
Am I muted?
Matthew, you're muted.
I don't think Matthew's here, or you can't hear us or he can't speak
Okay, we could go to Maddie
speaking of nerds
one of my favorite nerds
and we've also had fun conversations
like you and I, Michelle, about Lord of the Rings
Maddie, it's more on the
video game theory and design
so she has a pretty cool background
and now leads a lot of really cool
stuff at Polygon, but I'll let her introduce herself in her wizard hat.
It reminds me of like the wizard hat from like, does anyone remember?
Like, so some of the very early Final Fantasies or like, I think, what was Vivi, was that
Final Fantasy 9?
But anyways, go ahead.
Yes, go ahead.
It was.
Yeah, it was Final Fantasy IX.
And I think it was also mentioned in Final Fantasy Tactics, I think it was, on Nintendo DS.
Well, Tactics was made way before DS, but, you know, the remake, but yeah.
Remake, right. I am so excited to be here on Lord of the Rings chat and aggregate together
wizard talks.
And especially as we try to decentralize magic and get it into the hands of
more people, like ultimately that's why I'm here.
We need decentralized bubble magic too, but we don't need to go to it.
We do need that.
There'll be more of that.
So maybe, do they have video on space at some point we'll have a live bubble magic performance but anyways hello everybody
happy friday my name is maddie i'm the head of founder experience at polygon and we work with
the community treasury board to try to get badass resources in the hands of badass founders to build
badass stuff and so i am badass founders to build badass stuff.
And so I am so excited to be here today.
I'm going to have a, I guarantee I'll have a couple technical issues as the headset falls out of my ear, but we'll figure it out.
It'll be great.
But if you see me drop off and pop back on, that's what's happening.
And my favorite, favorite Lord of the Rings movie has got to be Two Towers.
Like that's got to be the main answer, right?
Like the third one was great, but kind of lagged there at the end,
whereas nothing quite matches the...
Two Towers has to be the best one out of all of the three.
But the extended version.
I'm torn between the feel-goodness of the first movie
and then the epicness of the Ents marching into battle in Two Towers.
It's hard for me to choose. That's a good one, too. Yeah. movie, and then the epicness of the Ents marching into battle in Two Towers.
It's hard for me to choose. That's a good one, too.
That intro and the Hobbits
and Michelle's background,
by the way, on Google
Meets is like
a variation of
Hobbit-like houses
in the Shire. But anyways,
alright, too far, guys, too far.
Well, go chill, man.
A bunch of friends around the table. So it's jumping.
You're cutting out a bit there Aztec, but yeah, go ahead, Matthew.
tech but yeah go ahead matthew yeah i wasn't sure no worries thanks guys um uh uh michelle casey
Yeah, I wasn't sure. No worries. Thanks guys.
amazing to have you guys here um as well maddie uh awesome too and everybody else thanks thanks
again um i just had a you know just a comment to make i know casey you said you just got started
a little while ago and michelle super cool to hear about octane app and what you
guys are doing there. Uh, very interesting.
Like the past couple of years has been a lot,
like I've done a lot of fundraising, um, you know,
a lot of business development for organizations and recently grants has been,
uh, grants and liquid investments have been amazing,
but grants have been really, really solid. Uh, just like one, one quick note.
Have you heard of OX labs before we've been, you know, multiple of my clients have been working with them solid. Just like one quick note, have you heard of OX Labs before?
We've been, you know, multiple of my clients
have been working with them pretty heavily.
I don't know, maybe that's something as well too
that Maddie, you guys would be aware of,
but they have been amazing organization
that have been helping sort of tons and tons of grants
for our clients and have done really, really well.
So if you haven't already, they're amazing.
So you're like one of the first folks that I've heard in a while that said kind of unequivocally,
yep, these are going great. Like what, what is it that's going well for it? Like what is it
unlocking for them? Oh, sorry. Say that again. You kind of cut out there.
What is it that's going well with the grants like in comparison in comparison the uh unlocks of
capital to support founders have been way more steady in regards to grants in comparison to
venture capital or angel investment currently right now and over the past like six to nine
months because vcs are sick of the game um also founders are sick of VCs in a lot of ways as well, too. KOLs have been
burnt hardcore over the past two years. Some projects that I raised, 100K, 200K, 300K for
on launch pads that I was advising, they still have tokens locked and money locked in protocols
that haven't launched that were supposed to launch nine months ago, 12 months ago.
So KOLs are not raising money right now. So what I mean by that is for
founders that are looking for capital that might not have a lead investor yet or have a huge like
founding team or, you know, but have a really good product or have a community or whatever,
you know, they've had a little bit more success accessing, you know, say seed capital, like 100k,
200k, 300k in grants in comparison to getting, you know,
a 50K investment from an angel investor or a 500K lead investment from, you know, a layer one.
That's more of what I meant is they've been able to access capital a little bit easier.
Yeah. And I ask because that's what's been kicking around in my head for a bit. And I had like six aha moments yesterday reading about the Octon, the SQF round.
And specifically that it came later, that it was a, that was, and of course, Michelle, feel free to correct me on these, but it really stood out to me that I was first focused on, let's get you some revenue. And then the funding came after that in this like, you were looking for people that had already received two grants.
And that's like itself an interesting signal that it's not like we expect you to get a
grant, you're going to hit product market fit, and then we all make a billion dollars
and it'll be amazing.
But instead it's, we want you to have one or two traction signals of a protocol says
that they love you.
And then that means that we think you're ready to start like taking this step. So I don't know, there's something like really interesting
cooking here as folks start to see grants more as like a piece, a Lego that they're building on
than a silver bullet. Yeah. And you know, the point with having that as part of the eligibility
criteria was if you've received one or two grants, you, there probably have been one or two different teams that have assessed you that have done a little bit of due diligence and you've qualified and that's the basic filter.
So it's not for first time projects that haven't received funding. We wanted builders that were a little bit more advanced and that were really committed.
And that's why we didn't promote any financial aspect at all. It was very intentional because we wanted builders who would want to grow and
were serious about revenue.
And that was the whole point is like the whole program was focused on getting
to revenue and building from day one for that.
So that you were incentivized to be more active and driven for action.
It worked out because we introduced a funding component towards the last part of the program.
And it just, yeah, I think it worked really well.
They were able to incentivize community
and even their own self-confidence in their growth, right?
Throughout from like day one
to when they had metrics to show for the work they'd done
and for all of the effort they were putting in.
Like it just was a very different story.
And by the time the demo day came up,
which we initially hadn't planned,
but after seeing all of the interest, it felt like, you know what, we should put together
a really solid demo day. And it was just such a great moment to see all of them come together,
show all the traction and the growth and the progress. And I think it was a really solid
signal to a lot of the other stakeholders who were in the program and a lot of other
projects that were assessing them as well.
I'm curious about that. Cause I'm going to go back to another question that I have for Casey as well
too, but just to kind of wrap that part up, like, yeah,
I'm curious cause like my experience with grants over the past couple of
years and doing some work with OX labs as well too, cause they've been great.
You know,
they have access to all the layer ones and the majority of the grants in the
space. So they do, you know crafting of of of the pitch and the crafting
of the information and then go to all the teams and do a lot of that lag work to access capital
um but but basically like initially my experience with grants is like okay you don't have any
revenue you don't have too much traction yet you might have a good idea you might be a good founder
team uh you know you might have these aspects idea. You might be a good founder team. You might have
these aspects in place, but grants would traditionally, in my eyes, be like something
where you get seed capital without a lot of those other things that primarily VCs and angels would
be looking for. And so is it the question that I have, Michelle, is now that you guys are kind
of looking at deploying capital through actually seeing traction evolve from other grants or other aspects that you're looking for in the growth,
you know, the early growth patterns of a project. Is that because of where we are in the actual
current, the market? Because, you know, obviously, we're coming into a bull market. We're in the
bull market, we're coming to the tops of the bull market, 2026.
You know, probably after Q1, we're going to be looking at some pretty heavy bear signals.
You know, we're already seeing, you know, massive allocators or massive protocols like XRP and others starting to take huge amounts of, you know, their native token into central exchanges to get ready to sell, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm just curious, because obviously you guys are a massive organization
that are working with tons of ETH and have a huge amount of traction in that aspect.
Is your thesis just, we need to see projects really with traction first before we allocate
money? Because that's what I've experienced with VCs more so. Oh, we need a lead investor
and then we'll come in. Is that kind of because of the market or are things shifting with
the mentality around grants and Web3 in totality?
The SQF round and the funding round that we did that Maddie's speaking about that I just spoke about was this is a pilot program that we ran last year.
And it was a lot of things that happened to more sustainable.
But I think you speak about the grants ecosystem as a whole.
Everybody had funding and suddenly people were like, well, let's just start a grants program.
I don't think there was a lot of intentionality that was being brought to how these programs were being designed.
And we've done a lot of work with MediGov and a lot of the research that even from the
Octon perspective that we've invested into to understand how programs can become more
effective, how can you more effectively deploy capital.
And we've been thinking very deeply about that.
And again, there's a lot of different experimentation that still needs to be done.
There's no right or wrong answer.
But I think the point that I'm going to present right now is there is definitely one crop of programs who are taking a bet on earlier stage builders.
But my current understanding, based on a lot of programs, is there are a lot more grants now for more advanced builders.
The time for free funding is always coming to an end if you will right where there's if anything
it's going to be a lot smaller grants but most programs are being a lot more effective a lot
more I'd say like diligent in who they're giving funding to they want to see a little bit more
traction or some version of um at least proof that the team can deliver.
Because the previous cycle and what we were seeing before is like there was just a lot of free funding going on.
And there wasn't as much accountability on the grantee side.
And when we did a lot of the grants research, the unfortunate reality was that most programs didn't even know if the funding that they had given out, if those products were alive or not.
And part of it was because programs were overwhelmed with the kinds of projects that were getting funding.
But on the other side, like it just clearly showed that on the grantee side, there wasn't as much communication.
For whatever reason, there was just like a lot that was happening.
And this was consistently happening across the board.
So I think now the landscape is a lot more sophisticated.
There's a lot more requirements. There's a lot more requirements.
There's a lot more.
Show us what you can do, even in the hacker mentality in a way.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
But if you can show that you can deliver, you will get access to more funding and unlock a lot more if you can do something really well.
And then from the opt-in side, so we run funding rounds every three months. We just had our last one where we funded an Ethereum infra and core contributions to like main net protocol.
But our place has been, I mean, we run a lot of experiments even in terms of themes and what we want to fund.
And we started off pretty generic with who we were funding, where it really was our definition even was like our rounds were for public goods.
And then from there, we decided to become a lot more specific with what we wanted to fund because we wanted to get better at that.
But again, our thesis really, it just depends on what we're trying to understand better with the funding side.
I think we're still too early to have the outcomes realized just because the timeline's a lot longer.
But a lot of the products that we funded are a little bit more advanced.
So projects like Protocol Guild and a lot of the core, I'd say, like contributors to growing Ethereum.
I'd say like a lot of those advanced projects sometimes also struggle with funding because they don't always have financial sources contributing.
And I think outside of the EF or some of these bigger protocols, they may not have the funding, even though the perception may be that they do. And so I think that's where sometimes we've seen that place. But yeah,
I hope that answers your question. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think it comes down to me just seeing
the, us seeing the maturing of another part of the industry and that is happening with the grants as
well too. Because, you know, just the other day we got offered a half a million dollar grant from say one of my
clients and their criteria was um it was a convertible grant into investment uh based off
of their choice factor you know they could convert it into investment but their criteria was incredibly
high it was like it was like it was surprising because it was like, we need to see the success of your project before we give you this money.
And we were like, Oh, okay. Cause we were familiar with grants,
actually giving a hundred thousand, 200,000, 300,000,
was seeing a really good idea and a solid team and some advisors to help boost
the project before revenue or before community. So yeah, that,
that answers a lot. Casey, if you want to jump in,
then I just have one more question for Casey,
but go ahead, bro.
Yeah, I wanted to jump in.
I wanna come at it through a builder perspective
and I just wanna plus one to everything,
like Michelle has said,
for those of you who probably don't know,
before Ethereum Foundation,
I was a builder, right?
A builder at this place called LearnWeb3,
and I think we've received about $600,000 or $700,000 in grants to build.
And we were even a receiver of Optimism Circle,
Retroactive Round, that happened a while ago.
The landscape has definitely changed
from sort of this free-flowing landscape that Michelle described to now.
It's moving towards or should move towards more advanced builders.
And that's a change that I see as well.
So I wanted to plus one to everything Michelle said pretty much.
And then happy to take a question as well.
happy to take a question as well. I'd love to hop in there. So a convertible note that converts
I'd love to hop in there.
after hitting some really rigorous milestones, is that good? It seems like you would want a
convertible note to do it like our ancestors did, to convert after there's a lead investor that gets
in, that they hit a funding milestone. it seems like also if you're converting like
it doesn't actually help the builder hit those milestones or as yeah that that grant offer like
why are we structuring that differently it was it was i felt like it was inappropriate like they had
offered money uh but not actual support they were like if you hit these milestones we'll give you
a hundred thousand every you know one of their milestones was like you need 50 you know you need 50 million active users or something
it was crazy and we were like okay dude obviously you guys are not interested in the project itself
but because they were asking for exclusivity as well too right and it was for 500 000
giving the money up front or no they were not giving a dollar up front it was it was it was a
bit embarrassing right i was like okay say it's all good because they were not each giving a dollar up front. It was a bit embarrassing, right?
I was like, okay, say it's all good
because they were giving offers to other people that were nice.
But in this instant, they didn't really see the value
and they weren't supporting the founder.
They were just trying to extract and get,
you know, say wallet counts and mini games
and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
So I saw that happen and I was like,
ooh, this doesn't feel very good.
But then I also see the side of needing to see value.
Needed to see value from the project first before giving grants.
So I kind of see both sides, but I didn't think that was appropriate, no.
And this is what I think is so, so interesting as both the ecosystem matures,
treasury matures, the builders mature.
And even as Ethereum and all of these different things start realizing that we're
supporting more than people who have never started a company before who have never built a product
before and I think that we can get like overly focused on the mechanism like I do think that
streaming is one of the coolest things that we've come up with across the ecosystem like there's
something really cool there but as you see it from the ecosystem side,
that it tends to be this pendulum that swings from,
we're gonna do totally non-dilutive.
We're gonna give a grant
that doesn't take any equity at all.
This is great.
And then like not have those aligned incentives.
Then it'll swing over to, all right,
we're only gonna do like these really hardcore,
we must see ROI, like every one of these must be a successful investment.
And it's just, it's why the timescale gets weird in things.
And so, yeah, the thing that I'm really excited about for what folks on this call are working
on are things like, how can we help a protocol understand what they want to achieve, like what outcomes they want to support, how they know if it's working, and then structure the capital over time so that it like maximally supports that versus, I don't know, if you're just throwing a bunch of hoops in front of people, like as a way to try to improve decision making, then something has gone very wrong.
That sounds maturely founder focused. That sounds maturely founder focused that sounds maturely founder focused right which is which is the
difference i think in that case yeah michelle 100 yeah yeah i just wanted to add on to everything
totally agree with what maddie said um i think a middle ground here or a safer way for grants
programs at least that is quite builder friendly too is to start off with like a scoped down version and
this is something that's worked with us really well on the often side as well as
like start off with even if it is smaller grant size that you're starting
with but if you've got a scoped down version of whatever it is that you want
to work with the team on you get a really good idea of how the team's
working dynamics are and if it is a builder you really do want in the ecosystem longer term you get a fairly good idea of how the team's working dynamics are. And if it is a builder, you really do want in the ecosystem longer term,
you get a fairly good idea of that.
And I think like that's a good starting point to then build up to like the
bigger grand sizes that does feel a lot more, you know,
risk averse in a way because you then have that working relationship.
And I think that can be a really good stepping, uh, step forward.
Yeah, guys, I, I love this conversation um it's i i want to ask a a different question here so at
the beginning of the show we were talking about uh vitalik the high priest of ethereum and our
thoughts there and his vision and we kind of segued into just is Ethereum dead and that whole conversation
we've been talking grants for a while here and we're nearly at the two hour mark I'd love to
pick your brain on something that's a little bit more just kind of like general in the news
and that's Ethereum treasury companies so recently Vitalik said Ethereum treasury companies brought in
Ethereum access to wider investors,
but warns the trend could become an overleveraged game
if not handled responsibly.
What's your guys' thoughts on the institutional interest in Ethereum and how that's changing the landscape?
And also just in, I guess, any thoughts on these treasury companies stacking Ethereum?
Yeah, I think it's changing.
The institutional interest is changing the Ethereum landscape.
And like pretty wholeheartedly, like even on the funding side of things at Ethereum,
now we're seeing like we're being approached by like public innovation agencies in like the UK, Singapore, EU to fund EF grantees or to fund Ethereum-based initiatives, right? And we're seeing it permeate. So like institutional
interest is permeating throughout like almost every single aspect of Ethereum. And when
it comes to the treasury, I think Ethereum is something like the fourth, Ethereum Foundation
is something like the fourth or third largest treasury now. It's not number one. Like as
I actually, I don't know exactly what that implies.
Like, I was looking for good resources.
I'm like, okay, what does this mean, right?
Like, Ethereum Foundation is number four and number three.
And I'm sure some of you in the audience are sitting, like, saying, hey, you work at EF.
Like, you know, shouldn't you know, like, what it implies?
Like, I still feel like I'm a, like, again, I've worked here for a month, right?
I feel like I'm, like, growing in my Ethereum Foundation journey.
But I've been finding, looking for good resources on what it means for the theory and foundation to not be
the number one treasury to have all these treasuries come up and i haven't found too
many good resources other than vitalik's opinion opinion on that so i'm happy to i'm actually
interested to hear other people's answers yeah i can i ask a dumb question? Is this a safe space? Y'all are cool, right?
Safe space. We don't know.
What is a treasury company? These sound like investment companies that are pinky swearing not to sell.
But what is the actual difference between a treasury company and an investment firm or whatever?
Should I take it? Anyone take it?
Anyone take it?
Rock, you could probably dive in.
So from like a treasury company standpoint, you know, you're really great at explaining what MicroStrategy is doing.
And this is probably similar to what, you know, companies will do with Ethereum.
And then obviously there's a, yeah, you can, you can break this down.
Yeah.
So, I mean, they are investment companies basically with like a different narrative, I guess.
And it's like, maybe, you know, they're, they're more signaling, like you said, pinky promise we won't sell, but there's no promise that they won't.
Right.
Actually, in some legal cases, they they are they can be forced to sell um i guess what makes them interesting for people
let's use i guess micro strategy which kicked it all off because what what micro strategy
essentially is and and i'm kind of like surprised in some ways but not not in others because people
are kind of dgens in the world including um funds um and hedge funds uh maybe they're some of the
most dgens in the world but they know how to hedge and that's basically what micro strategy is is it
it's a leverage play on bitcoin um but like hedged in and created in a very sophisticated way that utilizes more advanced financial tools to get you leverage with like the best risk to reward or like minimal kind of risk of liquidation.
reward or like minimal kind of risk of liquidation uh that that actually i think that makes so
i'm hoping that the hedge is more than kind of how how the podcast world makes it sound which is
all right i'm gonna buy a bunch of bitcoin and we're gonna talk about that we bought a bunch of
bitcoin and we're gonna get people so excited that we're buying bitcoin that it's not market
manipulation because we promise not to sell it, but then the number will go up.
But if they're pairing that with something like we have a basically like it's a hedge fund, but they're hedging against one really, really primary asset.
And so therefore they're like managing their upside on one, their downside on one specific thing with these.
I guess,
are there instruments aside from like talking about it? It sounds like yes.
Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. I guess I'll just finish. Well, yeah, go ahead. And then I'll finish like,
yeah, I can give you some examples of some of the kind of advanced financial structuring they're
doing. Yeah. Yeah. I'll go super quick. So yeah, the hedge is that micro strategy gives people liquidation
into the company stock and other things if the performance of that instrument doesn't go well.
So the hedge is that they get to put micro strategy on the hook to deliver,
or else they have things that would give you more of an out that Bitcoin just went to zero.
Really well. That's like the easiest summary of it. Yeah. Interesting.
So like as an example, one of the first things they did, so first they had 500 million in cash
on their books, and it was losing value rapidly. And they were trying to find somewhere to put it.
And they had all these issues, and they had issues with the different things they could put it in. And when they did dividends to their shareholders, that didn't seem
to help the stock. When they used it to try to reinvest, they weren't able to turn a big enough
profit on it because their business maybe had plateaued. They're a business intelligent,
their core business or their old core business. And so they were like, what do we do with this
500 mil? So they decided let's buy some Bitcoin. And then, and they actually offered all their
shareholders, Hey, if you don't like this, we're going to do this. We're going this way. If you
don't like it, we'll buy you out. And we'll even give you a little premium. You sell us your shares,
we'll buy anyone out who doesn't like this. If you don't, if you, but if you're along for the
ride, stay with us. And, and so the next thing they did was they started selling these like convertible kind of notes or bonds.
I think basically that were, we will give us a loan, a low interest loan.
I think even some of these were like 0%. And then we will give you a call option that if our stock goes up a lot, then you can convert
the loan to shares of our company at a lower price at a strike.
And so then, and then if it doesn't, if the shares don't go up a lot, we will actually mint new shares and dilute ourselves to give you the shares like equivalent so that you don't lose money.
So it was like kind of a good deal for both sides, which is what you want in finance.
You want something that both sides agree this is a good bet for us.
for us. Go ahead, Maddie. Okay. And so, Casey, I'm curious if that changes how you're exploring for
Go ahead, Maddie.
the different reading material and the like. It might be why it's been harder to find. So,
to a treasury noob like me, it sounds like what Rock is describing is a different type of treasury
than the common parlance of treasury, which is just a giant stack of treasury than like how like the common parlance of treasury which is just
a giant stack of resources that is used for stability or like federal reserve type things
versus this like financial instrument because i'm assuming that ethereum ethereum doesn't do that
instrument side on the treasury yet, right?
I don't believe so.
No, it's not.
I understand sort of like what a treasury is.
I'm more so, what I'm trying to do some research into is what does it mean for the foundation to not be the largest holder of Ethereum?
What does it mean as the treasury companies come up more and more and more and more and
more?
What does it mean for the ecosystem as sort of what I've been trying to do some research
into and I haven't really found too many good answers yet?
I think it's a good thing.
I think it shows decentralization.
And I think, yeah, like Tom Lee, who was mostly a Bitcoin bull, has now started Bitmine.
They started fundraising on July 28th, I think.
And then they completed, I don't know, hundreds of millions by August 6th or something.
So within eight days.
And now they're the third largest holder of any crypto asset.
They're above MetaPlanet even that holds Bitcoin.
And they're using some unique strategies like MicroStrategy.
But yeah, I think it's good.
I think it shows decentralization.
I think you want to have as many kind of, they're not shares, but we'll call it like
as many either vested parties or parties with vested
interests or shareholders. We want as many people. We want this distributed to as many people as we
can. I think some people don't like these companies because they're like, you know,
these are the institutions and these are the guys we hate. And I totally understand that.
And there's some truth to that. But I think actually our whole ethos is anybody should
be able to use these things
whether we like them or not that's the point it's the money of friends and enemies we want
whether you're israeli or palestinian or you know russian or ukrainian north korean iranian
black white gay straight everybody should be able to use these things, institution or cypherpunk, everybody should be able to use these things, and we shouldn't be
telling them, hey, we don't like you, don't use this, because we don't like your kind,
even if their kind is a big institution that we might not like, like BlackRock or something.
So I think it's really important that we distribute this to as many parties as possible,
and I think it's a good sign, actually. I mean, Charlie Lee at Litecoin did this.
He sold all of his Litecoin because he said he didn't want to be the point of failure
for Litecoin.
And he donated a lot of that money to the Litecoin Foundation.
So, yeah, that's my take.
Yeah, I mean, I think definitely, again, I speak for myself, not the EF, but I think that it is important that Ethereum is used by everyone.
We don't really pick and choose who gets to use it.
I think that's awesome.
But I think what I'm trying to figure out is, Vitalik talked a bit about, you know, he said, over-leveraged game, right?
game, right? Like, what are the risks? You know, as Ethereum Foundation has less and less and less
Like, what are the risks?
total Ether as compared to all these treasury companies, the treasury companies rise through
the ranks, right? I wonder what the risks are. I wonder if, like, that's something that we could
study and see. And yes, we shouldn't, like, stop anybody, even institutions from, you know,
committing Ethereum. Ethereum is decentralized.
But I wonder if there's anything that we should be worried about when it comes to leverage or anything else.
Yeah, I mean, you definitely should be worried.
I mean, because now people that have a lot of resources and aren't tied, you know, either to like a cult mentality or loyalist mentality can determine
the direction of the token. And so that's, that's the big risk that you have when you let go of
supply control. But it also really puts the onus on, you know, either the foundation or the people
building on the network to keep adding value to that. I mean, it's just like, again, we don't want to say Ethereum tokens or shares, but it's the reason why public companies are under so much scrutiny
because at any point in time, people can just say, I don't want to own you anymore. Or even if
they're looking at their product, they can say, oh, well, Salesforce, we're just not going to use
you anymore. And so that makes companies have to
continue to deliver and so yeah the big risk is is that you don't have a cult-like following just
holding your token you know waiting for valhalla you've got people that actually need to see
results but if you deliver those results you create a new kind of loyalty. And sorry, the whole hollow part made me laugh a little bit.
I think I really, if there's anyone in the audience that says something to this conversation,
I think like we are in desperate need of like, like a research like paper or like, like something,
something on this, right? Like what are the risks, right? Like as I believe her name is Humming,
Hummingbird, Hummingbird Network. As Hummingbird said,
like, as these treasury companies accumulate more and more Ethereum, right? And they're
not necessarily like ETH Maxis that will hold to Valhalla. Like, what are the risks? What
can happen in this ecosystem that maybe we can mitigate, right?
There's huge risks.
Someone needs to write something. You know, I might just
take you up on that. We have lots of like, you know, we work with, you know, Cointelegraph and
Coindesk. And I bet if I wrote or co-authored with someone here, if anyone wants to, a research
paper on this, that they would publish it in their research section. but I'll give you some of the risks. Okay. So, and I
actually, I'll start with, I actually think these treasury companies, whether they are the cause or
not of the end of this cycle, or if there's some big downturn, some big liquidation, catastrophic
events, like we've seen lots of times in this industry in the past, that they will either be the cause of it or like the
straw that breaks the camel's back because they over leverage, or even if they're not, they will
be blamed for it. It'll be part of the narrative that it's these guys' fault that everything
crashed. I would give that at least like a 40 to 50% probability. and so here the risk is that some of these companies are
okay if you're micro strategy you're the first mover you can play a very sophisticated and
conservative game because you have the mind share and you have the trust and you have all the big
backers and all that um if you're smaller and the money don't forget about the money If you're a smaller, newer one of these, almost by definition, you have to take
a little more risk. That's why startups take more risk than the incumbents. The incumbents are
playing more of a conservative game. Rich people, once you have money, you don't do the degen stuff
anymore. I haven't done degen stuff in seven, I, cause I'm trying to conserve my capital now. Um, and, and that's how, um, you know, micro strategy is probably thinking they're not doing massive leverage. They're doing like, it's hard to judge because they're doing it through these complicated vehicles like stride, strike and, and stripe.
like stride, strike and, and stripe. Um, but if the new guys come in and they want to, they want
to compete, they have to take a little more risk because they got to grow faster. So Tom Lee from
fun strat is talking about, we were able to make our ETH dollars per share go from $4 to $19, uh,
go from $4 to $19 in just a month. Well, how the hell did you do that?
There's something, it wasn't just because you're super smart, it's because you're either taking
leverage or people are overbuying and there's a premium. So these things do carry risk and he's
already grown very fast, right? And maybe they'll be amazing for you. I think they will be, but
there is risk that comes with
that. We had a project pitch at BitAngels that was doing a hundred X leverage basically. And
they had their way of explaining that this was not as crazy as it sounds. And it actually,
you know, maybe, maybe they got me, but you know, it actually, like everybody laughed.
It was the funniest pitch we've ever had at a BitAngels event because just the way this young Asian guy delivered it in a suit and talking about 100x.
And it was really funny if anyone was there at DevCon.
But anyways, I talked to this young gentleman after, and he had some interesting ways of how he said they're going to do it in some safe ways.
And I just don't think there's really a way you could do 100x leverage in any safe way. But whatever. Anyways,
that aside, the point is that a lot of these people are going to take this risk, and the risk
will look, they'll look like geniuses in the short term. Because in the short term, in a bull market,
leverage makes you rich, but it quickly makes you very poor when things turn around. And so the more and more hundreds
of these companies are now springing up and for different assets and some will overdo it.
That's the, it's actually kind of the whole foundation of being an investor is weighing
risk and trying to take just the right amount of risk without overdoing it
and getting liquidated or blowing up. And so there will be a lot of risk here. And I think
you're right, Casey. It would be great to see some research on this. And I'll try to put
something together there, either myself or maybe some of the better authors that I know.
But yeah, great idea. Yeah. And I'm sure some of my colleagues at the
sorry if I could just, I'm sure
some of my colleagues at the foundation
are actively researching this.
This is more of a personal question,
like my own, like not related to the foundation.
I think it's great because everyone is singing the same
song right now and these things are so
great, they're going to make all this money.
I do a lot of investor relations
for, you know, Bit angels and other people. And like a lot of the investors are telling me,
like my friend from BlackRock the other day, he, I asked him about, you know, what he's investing
in right now. And he said, he's literally paused all investment in private stuff. And he's fully
focused on these treasury companies. And he's a really smart guy, but like a lot of investors
that i know
are moving to these uh i've had many investors tell me the exact same thing and when you see
everyone doing the same thing that to me maybe is a counter indicator and i might take the other
side of that trade or be be a little concerned that it's getting frothy yeah vitalik's concern I think is the main concern over leverage. In my opinion, other entities having more of any one asset,
like Ethereum in this case, I think brings more mind share
and builds a larger network.
And I think as those entities find success, others will spring up.
And so you'll increase the network.
You'll have all these different types of participants.
So I think that's like a net positive overall.
And Casey, to your point, like with research, I'd probably start with looking at case studies of gold and throughout history, how different companies sacked gold and how that there's probably some case study there to see what issues kind of arose in that market.
That's a mature.
Yeah, fractional reserves.
The U.S. did it to everyone the u.s was uh like a you know like a strategy company kind of in a way like during bretton
woods we told everyone we're pegging the dollar uh to gold at 35 an ounce and everybody will
peg to us and so the yen and and the major currencies all pegged to the dollar. And
it was after the war and everyone said, oh, this is great. You know, we trust the US,
they've got the best military. They kind of came in and saved the day and we can trust them.
And then in like the early seventies, late sixties, they said, hey, our people started
to question whether they had the money. And part of it was because they were funding Vietnam War and people were like okay do they
really have the gold backing these dollars and so the French called them on
the bluff brought a warship and said give us our gold and they did and then
UK said hey we want our gold to actually and then that's when Nixon came and
closed the gold window on his famous speech
and said, hey, we have to defend against the speculators that are trying to harm the dollar,
and we are going to temporarily close the gold window. And he blamed it on the speculators.
But really, the reality was they definitely did not have the full backing of the pegged
number anymore. We don't know how much they have. Maybe they have a lot, maybe they have a little,
but they definitely were printing more dollars than they had gold. It was pretty clear, I think. And so, yeah, this could happen with these companies,
you know, and this is why a lot of Bitcoiners are asking MicroStrategy, well, why don't you do
public list all your wallets and show us what you have? And Michael Saylor says no, because that
provides like attack vectors for, yeah, I think
he might've used the word speculators, or I don't know if he did, don't quote me, but basically said,
if we tell people exactly what we have and where it is, it provides attack vectors. You know,
they could ransom us, they could try to hack us. We're not going to do that. And I see both sides
kind of, I would prefer that it's more transparent so that they can't run a fractional reserve.
But it is entirely possible that some of these companies will start creating sort of paper Bitcoin or, you know, this is what's happened in gold markets and silver markets and other kind of shenanigans in the diamond markets.
Yeah, I think JP Morgan got sued for this, for manipulating this stuff.
I think JP Morgan got sued for this, for manipulating this stuff.
But anyways.
I just wanted to jump in and say,
it's funny that we talk about the risk factors of these treasury companies.
I got exposed to one substantial one.
Brock, you probably know about this one as well too.
Enzo is a big part of it.
And Michael Turpin's an advisor.
It's Project Tone.
I think they got like 500 million
uh investment for for tone to create a treasury around around that asset but it's hilarious that
we talk about like the you know the risk factors to um price manipulation and sentiment manipulation
through these large holders of uh you know bitcoin or you, you know, eventually Solana and Tone and these other
treasury companies or Ethereum or whatever, when literally the whole market, and I don't think
this is mentioned enough. And this is the funny aspect of how still like the speculation or the
DGN aspect of creating a new asset class, where like the whole market is propped up on a infamous
anonymous individual that holds the majority
of Bitcoin. And that at any moment that person could like, well, not majority, sorry, sorry,
sorry. That is the largest, not the majority, sorry, is the largest holder outside of BlackRock
now. So between BlackRock and Satoshi, because I think BlackRock holds 3%, Satoshi holds 5%.
And that's a pretty substantial amount, right?
So if that was to move and be sold, I mean, that would have a massive market effect and
would probably put the market back in totality and the technology back in totality.
Maybe not the tech, but the market back in substantial ways if that was to be liquidated
or to be sold or whatever, right?
So it's really quite something that we're taking this amount of risk on a whole industry
based off of that pinnacle factor of the inception of the whole market around Bitcoin.
So I feel like that's an interesting point.
And I personally wonder if you have these entities like BlackRock,
like who is currently building their tokenized fund, right?
And you have sort of this cascading tragic event that Vitalik mentioned where companies are over leveraged,
creates this cascading effect in price and then like a loss of credibility happens.
Like I think those are the words that he used in that video.
What happens to these tokenized funds and these other large companies that are building on Ethereum, right?
Matthew, do you think that it has any sort of... Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Pauline, jump in.
Yeah, thank you. I mean, I might be slightly controversial towards
what you guys have just said, by the way.
Interesting, very interesting convo.
But I do kind of think that this
expansive capital
is sustainable to the space as a whole,
because this is actually, in my eyes, at the very least,
kind of the bad aspect of centralization.
Because again, as Casey has just mentioned,
that if something were to happen to any treasury within MicroStrategy or BlackRock or any other big institutional treasury company,
that would be, again, a very tragic event on the market.
And that basically pretty much collapse the entire infrastructure that we have been building so far.
I don't think that's good.
I do not think that is sustainable.
I do not think that this is egalitarian enough
in terms of, you know, being decentralized and whatnot.
But I might be wrong, might be stupid and kind of misunderstanding the entire thing.
So please, I think your concern is real and it makes sense.
I don't think you're stupid at all.
But I do have to say, I don't think we're anywhere close to this strategy becoming frothy.
I think it's many years away. And in the meantime,
what you'll probably see just looking at this specific strategy more holistically is that companies are just going further down the risk curve or further down the coin market cap for different types of
assets that they'll hold. So, you know, Bitcoin, micro strategies, and then there's the followers
there. And then you have Tom Lee with Ethereum and there'll be followers there. Also in the news,
you have like Luxfolio and My Pharma, which is a pharmaceutical company that are buying, you know, millions of dollars in Litecoin.
And, you know, I'm sure there's going to be a Polygon, a company that has a pull strategy in the future and a Solana strategy.
think over time you know people the followers will try to over leverage and and uh create uh more
i guess leveraged solutions or uh strategy so that they can try to out compete but i think we're
really far away from that that's my personal thought there yeah this is more of a niche topic right
like i think brought in but about vitalik's uh by vitalik's uh comments i think it was yesterday or
the day before this is a niche topic i wouldn't even say far away i would say hopefully uh it
just never happens uh in general like that sort of uh market movement um But yeah, I think maybe, are we going to continue
on this topic? Should we talk about...
Actually, I'd love to...
Could I just put a bow on that
really quick? Aztec, just...
Because we kind of talked a lot of doom and gloom.
Let's jump to Heath Bragg after this.
Yes, sir.
You guys are down for that.
I just want to give some positives
here. I think these things are net positive and I'm, I am stating, you know, risk.
I always try to look at both sides of everything and there are risks, but like for the companies
who aren't taking on too much leverage and who are being responsible and who are just
signaling to like institutions and other investors that are more, um, more open to these kinds of financial products. Um, and that
are, they're like, you know, they're orange pilling and they're ETH pilling people and they're
purple, you know, all this stuff. That's, that's great. And it's positive. And if we have actually
enough, because of the limited supply of our industry's assets, if we have enough people in
unison buying it, it like actually kind of becomes a number go up forever
thing. As crazy as that sounds, it sounds like a Ponzi, but because you don't need new users to
come in to buy, to keep the Ponzi going. It's not like that. That's what a Ponzi is. A Ponzi,
you always need new people. And if people stop buying, the thing collapses to zero. That's not how this is. Because we have
these limited scarce assets. If you have people who are basically just dollar cost averaging all
the time, I've been dollar cost averaging Bitcoin since 2015, Ethereum since 2016, etc.
And so if you have the whole world, millions of regular people, little guys like us, you know, dollar cost averaging, and you have hundreds or thousands of institutions like BlackRock or like MicroStrategy or like, you know, Tom Lee's Fundstrat through BitMind now with ETH and all these.
If you just have all these people dollar cost averaging forever, then it just becomes this self-perpetuating
number just keeps going up as long as people believe in the thing and most these things don't
really have gravity like equities equities are have their gravity is price to earnings ratio
if they get to and that average is around 15 to 20 for you know 50 years so if it gets too high
above the earnings then the stock comes down but. But like we're talking about scarce assets and money and these things, their addressable market is like all the kind of stored assets in the world and the payment assets I mean, in some ways you can write these models,
but it's not the same thing. But anyway, so my point is these are generally positive.
They're generally just a bunch of us all dollar cost averaging together. But the problem comes
when you get too, you drink the Kool-Aid too much and you start doing too much leverage,
and then that could create,
you know, temporary downward events. But yeah, Aztec, go ahead and take us to the next topic.
Sure, sure. So it's a little spicy potentially, but I definitely want to pick everyone's brain
here on ETHFRAG. You know, the space is called Ethereum Back from the Dead. One of the big
critiques that we receive from other stacks is, you know, just the fragmentation. And so I'm
wondering, in your guys' opinion, what the future looks like? How do we solve this? You know, is it chain abstraction? Is it at the
wallet level? Is it something like the ag layer, which is, you know, I'm really bullish on the ag
layer, but some type of protocol that unifies liquidity, ZK technology. In your guys' opinion,
what does the future look like for ETH fragmentation?
When you say fragmentation, are you talking about more like a roll-up centric roadmap that we've had for the last couple of years?
I guess more specifically, it's all the different tokens, like different versions of ETH, versions of stable coins, also the, yes, the roll-ups,
all the different clusters and different layer twos.
Yeah, a bit of all of that.
Can I add to that question,
just to kind of bring more context,
cause I was gonna ask a question to Casey earlier as well too,
because there's been some updates recently
with Ethereum as well too.
You'll have to correct me about this pronunciation,
but new leadership team at Ethereum Foundation
with Hesio Wei Wang, where his model is research first.
Thomas Stan Kasek, builder and operator X, nevermind,
where they're saying together,
they bring the vision and execution,
and already launching simplified focus roadmap,
prioritizing scaling layer one, finally, and expanding layer two storage and data
and radically improving their user experience. So this is what I have recently heard about,
you know, kind of the momentum around Ethereum and the new leadership team and some of the
aspects there. Can we speak on that at all as well, too, to add to Asik's question around the fragmentation
and how things are evolving with Ethereum?
Can we summarize the question?
There's a lot of aspects to it.
We have what the layer two,
what are our opinions on fragmentation
and Ethereum ecosystem?
And then leadership,
could you clarify a bit
what you mean there?
Yeah, I'm just, what I was curious
was like the new leadership coming in
to add to ASIC's question.
Have you, it's only been a month that you've been there,
but like, how is their focus aligning with, you know,
solving some of these challenges that have been lasting?
And, you know, to address some of these questions
around what ASIC was saying.
And then that's the kind of the question from the new leadership team and how they're aligning with that. and to address some of these questions around what Aztec was saying.
And then that's the kind of the question from the new leadership team
and how they're aligning with that.
But then I just made the comment
saying that their public comment
around their focus going forward
with the roadmap of scaling the layer one,
expanding layer two storage and data
and radically improving the user experience.
I'm just curious, that was just a side note that
was what they publicly put out there but just to add how's the leadership team been you know
focusing around what asek was saying yeah i'll try my best to answer that question uh also i see
there are a thousand new people in here so i just want to reiterate that i'm everything i say is my
own personal opinion and not reflective of whatever the foundation thinks. My opinion, again, I've been
at Ethereum Foundation for only about four weeks. My sense, so I've only seen this new leadership,
right? Like I don't have like the comparative background to say Ethereum was like,
the foundation was like this, and now it's like this. But my sense is that people are very happy,
right? People are very happy with how things have been going and the leadership's vision, right? And there's been a lot of, for more experienced
CFers, there's been a lot of positivity in the direction that we're headed, right? So I wish I
had more of a, I've been here for a year and it was like this, now it's like this, but I'm like a,
I'm like a baby, like I'm like, this is the only thing I know, right?
At the EF.
So I think in terms of leadership,
I've only heard positive things from new EFers than from old EFers.
And when it comes to some of the statements
that they've made,
I haven't actually spoken too much to leadership.
So I know as much as you in that regard.
What I do know that's maybe something that I have personal insight into is
there is a rigor, but it feels like a rigor at the EF right now.
There's a lot of new things that are happening, right? There's a lot of like the culture, right? Like the optimism,
right? Like I think the, I think I said this earlier, but the enterprise team that was nearly
formed has already spoken to like 200 different institutions at this, why not different institutions,
but they had 200 different calls, right? So from what I know about the culture that the leadership
has been influencing,
it's very hungry at the moment.
Everyone's very excited.
Everyone's very into their work and very committed to pushing Ethereum forward, right?
So that's sort of my insight there.
I know it's probably not what you wanted,
but that's to the best of my knowledge.
Therog, can anyone guys hear me?
I'm just waiting to see if anyone wants to piggyback off that
or have any other questions
yeah
I'm just going to
swoop in and say that
this has been super fun, thank you so much for having me
on the space, but unfortunately
I do have to run
my mom has like has some
news that she wants to share so gotta call her and find out what went wrong
thank you so much guys it has been a very like awesome very interesting
discussion of for sure I have learned a. I have given a follow to every single one of you.
And again, see you around.
If you have any questions about me or about the project, please feel free to reach out.
But other than that, you guys have a great weekend and have a great rest of your Friday.
And yeah, have fun. Much love. Thanks for coming and all your great insights. Hopefully it's good news.
And by the way, great, yeah, hopefully. Great spaces earlier that you hosted Change Now,
by the way, we had a really cool, before this spaces, conversation about like, what does
decentralization mean and the
importance of it? And we got into all kinds of really, uh, interesting stuff. So recommend,
uh, follow change now and listen to their spaces. They do some solid ones. Um, but yeah,
we're going to keep the magic going here. Um, this has been an incredible, uh, conversation guys.
And Casey, I, uh, just pinned your, uh, tweet about reading the, about reading the Octant. It looks like it's a paper.
I don't think I've seen it yet. So I think it's new. So I'll be reading it after this spaces,
but I pinned it to the Jumbotron. Everybody go ahead and support Casey here to thank him and
the ETH Foundation for the work they're doing and Octant and what Michal is doing. She
actually had to run two for a family emergency. I don't know if she'll be back on, but she wants
to come on. We're going to have her back on. Maybe Casey, if you want to come around that time to
talk about like an announcement from Octant that's coming up soon, I think, or around the
quadratic funding and stuff. And I actually really wanted to get into that today. I don't know if
we want it, maybe we just save it, but I really wanted to get into that today. I don't know if we want it, maybe we just save it, but I really
wanted to get into just generally what quadratic funding is. We don't got to get into the complicated
math of it that I never understand, but at some point, yeah, maybe we have you and Michelle back
and we can talk about this stuff more in depth specifically. Yeah, if I'm there, I can talk about
it with Michelle, but it's just Michelle, she's got that.
She's very well read into, obviously she works at Octane, but she's very well read into contract funding as well.
And I do want to ask, okay, well, Aztec, I want to let you steer us here, keep us on track and everything.
But I do, you know, I know that you're a fan of Aztec.
You know, I know that you're a fan of Aztec.
Well, not this Aztec.
The Aztec protocol, the decentralized privacy layer on Ethereum.
They stole my name.
So, Casey, I don't know if you want to maybe mention something on that now.
Or, yeah, just like what you think about Aztec.
Or if you want to invite them to come
jump on general yeah ethereum privacy is an interesting conversation as well because um
there's a lot of people building for privacy but also you know ethereum has its own vision for
privacy which could potentially disrupt uh how we look at privacy across like web 3.0
but uh either of these things and from the polygon side i mean we're very interested casey as as
we've discussed in potentially co-funding some privacy focused things that help you know the
ethereum and polygon communities uh with with uh each Foundation. But yeah, so take the floor.
Yeah, so I mean, let me just link privacy to institutional adoption.
So if you're in the audience right now and you see all these buzzwords,
you know, Ethereum is like the invisible backbone of institutions.
Why I'm bringing this up is institutions want to have basic private payments.
They don't want all of their information
publicly visible on a public blockchain.
So that's sort of why we've seen this big trend happening
with privacy-focused applications.
And what Aztec is, before I even get to that,
there's a couple of different types of solutions that exist.
There's FHE, which is fully homomorphic encryption.
We see Phantom Zone or Zama.
And then there's the ZK privacy solutions, which is Aztec.
And I'm going to get into that.
But a big fan of Aztec, and if you're a builder, listen to what I'm about to say.
Aztec, with its NOR programming language, makes building privacy applications really, really easy.
Before, you would have to have a PhD and really understand ZK.
You would have to be a very smart individual
to build something like TornadoCache, for example.
But with Noir and these other solutions that have been coming out,
you don't really need that knowledge anymore, right?
Like I built a mixer, I built like tomato cache almost
in NOR like two weeks ago and I posted it on Twitter, right?
Like basically what Aztec is and what NOR programming language
is and all these solutions are,
it's abstracting away the very complicated ZK knowledge
that you have to have to build these applications
and making it so that everyone can do it.
So if you're a builder and you're interested in this, because privacy is so important for
institutional adoption, because there's so many different things that we need, stable
coin infrastructures, peer-to-peer payment, not peer-to-peer payment, sorry, that is public watching stuff. But because there's so many different use cases
for privacy, I think builders should be focused on that.
And we had Ethereum, I shouldn't say we had Ethereum Foundation, sorry.
That's speaking for EF, my personal opinion. My personal opinion is that
EF should fund
privacy applications that are useful to the space.
And we've seen funding come in from the Ethereum Foundation
for things like Phantom Zone, which we funded even before this hype, right?
So all that's to say is VCs, different grant boards,
different funds have been funding privacy. It's been
very easy to build with something like Aztec, right? These different solutions that are coming
out, Zama. I think every builder should get into it and it's going to lead to even more adoption
in the future.
Can you tell us, you mentioned Zama, I'm not familiar with that.
Noor is, and also not super familiar with it, I try to keep up to date with all privacy
things because I'm a huge advocate of privacy.
But Noor sounds like a programming language.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and then what is Zama?
Yeah, you're right.
So, NOR is the programming language for Zika privacy applications.
Zama is an FHE,
a fully homomorphic encryption tool that allows you to like,
you write a smart contract and then you privacy it.
Does that make sense?
You write the smart contract in solidity and then you're able to, from what I understand,
I've never actually used it,
but from what I understand,
you're able to write a smart contract in Solidity,
wave a magic wand that, like, I don't know what they do there,
and then have it sort of be a privacy-focused
or a privacy-preserving smart contract.
Wow.
That really will take the complexity away then if it's it's
just like that easy so that's awesome um and someone attacked me i'm pretty sure i'm right
but i for some i haven't used it that's very interesting yeah these type of solutions are definitely needed. Um, and I think, especially on what you were talking about with institutions
interested in privacy, uh, I'm building lit VM and talking with,
you know,
many different partners and different people that want to build within the
ecosystem, different institutions.
And privacy is definitely on everyone's mind
because we've seen the issues as like one example
we can point to that BlackRock had
as they were scaling into different assets
or moving different funds around.
And everyone was watching them.
And from a competitive standpoint, this is a problem.
And, uh, there's, there's many other things that privacy solves besides, uh, you know,
the, the competitive portion of it. But yeah, I, I think that, um, all these teams building for privacy are really important and that that will help usher in
um you know we have regulation that's currently unfolding and and providing clarity so that
more money can pour in i think from a technological standpoint the unificationification of all the stacks and all the liquidity is another thing that
needs to happen. And for more money to easily flow in and interact with Web3 and privacy,
very important because for so many reasons, of course.
So it's great to hear that they're also building that the Ethereum Foundation has their eyes on
teams that are building for privacy.
Yeah, and it's honestly not just interesting
for like the institutional lens.
Like I'm sure there are some builders
or some people that are learning how to build
in the chat right now.
There's 3,000 people, guys.
Thank you for coming, by the way.
But I'm sure there are some builders in chat now that are going to hop on Noir,
use something like Xamarin or Phantom Zone in the future, right?
To build a privacy application, right?
That will hopefully push the face forward, right? Hopefully, like, as you said,
like the regulation bottleneck keeps being lifted, right?
And people don't go to jail for any privacy applications.
That's the hope.
It's kind of like,
if privacy apps are so easy to create,
like if we can like double click and create a privacy app,
can we skip forward and create the protection
from the scammers first before we do that, right?
Protection from the scammers?
Yeah, because if we do that, then scammers will have the ability to basically one-click scam everybody, right?
Like privately.
So we just need to devise the protection first.
devise the protection first.
I'm just kind of like making a light.
I'm just kind of like making a light...
I guess when I think of these apps,
I'm more thinking of them in the context of like banks, right?
Or even like a mixer.
Like how do you think like...
It's an interesting point.
It's the same table, right?
We're all on the same table, right?
So it's just kind of funny.
You need to create protection from those.
Oh my God. Hey, you need to create protection from those. That's what's first, I think.
Oh, my God.
Hey, John, your mic's not, it's a little hard to hear, but thanks, John.
I'll switch headphones.
Sorry, my dog.
Okay, no worries.
Yeah, I think there's definitely, like, identity things being created with ZK technology that will be paired with privacy.
And so you can protect your identity,
but at the same time,
verify yourself in a way.
So in this, there's many teams working on this.
I think this will be,
this type of technology will be a big part of the way forward as well.
Exactly. And then I'd imagine, I'm not sure exactly if this is like, my personal opinion is what I'm trying to say, but like, I'd imagine like, maybe in the future, my personal opinion is that like, we have, I think, I think Vitalik has talked about putting privacy
on the layer one, right?
Am I crazy?
Yes, he has.
To be honest, I haven't read over his thoughts
on it exactly yet, but I think it's balance blinding
or something along those lines.
I need to read up on it. Yeah, 100%. I think that it could be a good idea, personally. But yeah,
privacy, if you're a builder in chat, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, how can I
How can I capitalize on these narratives?
capitalize on these narratives, I think using some of these privacy-focused
I think using some of these privacy-focused building tools like Noor, like Lazama, I think it'll help a lot.
But yeah, Rock, happy to jump into any other topic.
This is probably the last topic for me before I have to hop off.
Yeah, we'll be wrapping up here in about 18 minutes, so perfect timing.
It's been such a pleasure to have you here. And like, frankly, I haven't seen ETH Foundation,
not just you, but others like,
and the messaging and the founder support
and like listening to the community.
I haven't felt this from ETH Foundation,
just being honest, in a long time.
And it really is a breath of fresh air.
It doesn't feel like the e-foundation or like
ethereum or vitalik are you know like at times and and you know and it's not such a bad thing
but like it felt like they were up on a hill and we were just like all you know you know like and
now every tower yeah and ivory tower a little bit like the high priest and like, don't,
you're not allowed to talk to the high priest directly, you know, but it's been,
it's been nice. Like the, I've seen, you know, a lot of people, uh,
liking and including Vitalik and others,
but going on shows and putting out more, um,
like more papers for us to read and more,
more communication and more of a longer term look at like whatever,
all the things that are happening,
taking community feedback more on what should be done.
So I just am really happy to see it happening.
I think everybody is.
Ethereum, I think is changing for the better.
I'm really excited.
I think that the foundation has listened to a lot
of the feedback that was given to them.
I think you're seeing it in sort of these spaces where, like, someone that is from the EF is sitting on these spaces, right?
There was another space today.
I think it was Benji.
I don't know if that's how to pronounce it.
But he was running a space.
He's from the foundation as well.
So I think, like, hopefully we see more and more communication, more transparency, and then more listening to feedback. I think it's
already happening, and it makes me personally excited for the future.
Yeah, I think part of it is that I think one of the ways maybe that the foundation and Vitalik
and just consensus and others, and by the way, we might have consensus join here in a second. I know we're ending here, but we might have consensus hopping in. But I think part of the thing,
it wasn't, I don't think it was on purpose like, hey, we're better than you. We don't want to talk
to you peasants. It wasn't like that at all, I don't think. I think it was more like Ethereum
is a decentralized protocol and we don't want to influence it too much we want it to take a life of its own
and um you know vitalik says people call him like a high priest but i don't think he really wants
that position he's voiced many times that he doesn't want to be the leader of east you know
he wants it to be more decentralized and he's donated a lot of money towards that that ends but
i think that this is probably a better approach like
having a lot more communication and more public kind of rhetoric and and a
little bit of leadership you know I mean I know some might argue that's like a
form of centralization but in this case I think it's it's like it's an it's a
it's a pot it's a net positive because Ethereum is still incredibly decentralized, has hundreds of thousands
of nodes, and has a whole community with a whole life of its own. So maybe it was good that for
all this time, it was more like, hey, let's let the builders figure out the direction of ETH in
a way and let that steer the foundation. But I think when it's such a
competitive space and we have others, you know, it's like, I'm a free market guy. I would rather
we have no tariffs, no, you know, free trade in the world and free labor moving across the world
and open borders. But then when you have other, you know, when you're dealing in the real world,
when you have other countries who are gonna put
tariffs or things then it makes you have to think shoot wait what are we doing if we do free market
and they don't are we competing properly and so when you have you know solana reaching out to
you know all these institutions and banks and trying to win them over to to what they're doing
which i'm not as aligned with i don't think think it's decentralized, then it means, okay, well, maybe we do need Vitalik,
you know, we've kind of forced into this high priest position.
Maybe we do need him out there talking to these people.
Maybe we do need some people like yourself
that are gonna go out there and be an interface
to the builders, the public, the institutions.
And maybe that's a good thing, but who knows?
That's just my my sense
my sense sorry i definitely want to comment on this i believe that i personally believe that
the ef is still that they still care a lot about credible neutrality right that they still care a
lot about not being king makers right like there Like, there's, I think there's
a difference between, like, the foundation going out and seeking institutional, you know, partners
or institutional adoption, like, not partners, but, like, I think there's a big difference between,
like, what's going on with institutional adoption, and, like like pursuing a leadership within the blockchain space, right?
Within the web three space, right?
Because if the Ethereum foundation, right?
Like if that were to happen where the Ethereum foundation was super focused on
like trying to lead the blockchain space, then it doesn't really be,
it's not really decentralized anymore, right?
Like if everyone is sort of hopping on whatever decision that the foundation
makes, then in my opinion, it's like it's important that people kind of form their own opinions.
Right. That people that I think it's important that the space doesn't have a central leader in my in my opinion.
Right. So I do think that the EF is still, in my personal opinion, very committed to, again, not being that kingmaker
not trying to stifle the voices
of people in the space
not trying to be the leader
of whatever the EF
says is like
the word is law
everyone should focus on it
bend the knee
I think
the EF is still very committed,
like in my personal opinion, to not being that kingmaker.
But it is nice to see, like, with institutional adoption,
that we're capable of increasing the throughput
and increasing presence
and then trying to do something positive for the Ethereum ecosystem.
Without telling everyone that they should do the same thing. If that makes any sense.
Yeah. It's a difficult balance.
And this is actually the topic we were talking about in the last spaces about
decentralization and, and the, the pros and cons of it, you know,
because in our industry, everybody wants, you know, Hey,
you guys better do something. Come on, do something. Make our bags better, you know.
But, you know, in reality, these are decentralized systems.
And sometimes the best thing to do is not get involved.
I mean, I'm a libertarian, so I generally think, you know, a lot of people, when they elect presidents, they're like, well, what did he do?
What did she do?
How much did they do?
How many executive orders?
And I'm like, actually, in most cases, I don't want them to do all that.
I want them to just kind of leave it alone and let the market figure it out on its own.
And so there's this balance that you have to strike, especially when we're building decentralized platforms.
And we don't want to go the way of, you know,
like, I think the internet started very decentralized. And if we don't keep the
decentralized ethos, we don't fight for it. There's a parallel path things can take.
And if like, I think the internet took, I would say, okay path, but not the best path, right? We did kind of let it get taken over by companies in a
lot of ways. And we now do have major power brokers in the internet and people are censored
on the internet. And so I think it's really important that while we do keep pushing for
progress, we still always remember, like, we need to keep this decentralized because it can go a bad direction if we don't.
Yeah, I think that, honestly, that the institutions wouldn't even want to build on Ethereum if it wasn't centralized, right?
Or sorry, if it wasn't decentralized.
Yeah.
So I think that's why they're coming to Ethereum and not others.
Yeah, so I think...
That's why we won Robinhood on Arbitrum,
because they realized this is the most decentralized way.
Yeah, I personally think that
we'll be committed continuously to not becoming the kingmaker,
not trying to be the de facto leader in this space.
And I think, like, some of the really big things that have been happening
in this space are the fruits of that labor, in my opinion.
And those are my two cents on that.
Definitely.
Well, we're right at the end end here rock do you want to start
wrapping up oh yeah we should read some comments yeah i'd love to read some comments see if there's
anything good there um also shout some people out here do you do you want to shout out while i look
through comments yeah sure or perfect no that's perfect yeah let's give some shout outs
we have Alex from Lingo
who used to be at base
and is a great speaker on our show
has come on our show many times
shout out to you
shout out to Omnity Network
shout out to Luke Berkfeld
the man in armor shout out to Omnity Network. Shout out to Luke Berkfeld, the man
in armor. Shout out
to Stardogs, Pippi,
Metarides, Dads,
ETHDaily.ETH,
Treasure, Guth,
Cuban, KingDank
Kush, Rainbow,
Tuan, Brad, Digital Fellow,
Red.
I told Red I'd give him a shout out. He asked in the comments.
Thanks for the support, Red. Goobs, Shamana, Hummingbird, FalcoFi, Leroy J. Panda's got his
account in the audience. Sin, Caruso, all good friends that we see all the time. We've got Richard with a Tornado Cash logo.
I don't know if that's like a, you know, standing in solidarity with them. And I think we need to
do that, by the way. I kind of want to have a whole spaces about what's happened recently with
Roman from Tornado Cash, as well as Samurai. Really not cool stuff, guys. Also, I heard, and i haven't dug deep into this enough but i kind of
want to do like a i don't know a rebellion episode um to talk about the really negative things the
governments have done around the world recently um apparently the uk has just passed some law
and they're saying it's to prevent pornography stuff, but what it basically includes, and don't quote me because I haven't read from the source myself, but I got it from a very trusted person that is usually right on these things.
But he says that the UK has put in a new law that they want backdoors into all encrypted messaging, and they want to be able to read people's messages at will without a warrant.
I've been told this by one of my friends too that lives in the uk i mean that is insane that is
insane the whole world should be rioting right now if that's true so i need to look into that but
yeah roman from tornado cash just took i think a plea deal hopefully it gets appealed they did
drop the two worst charges which was um, um, avoiding sanctions or something or,
or working with sanctioned countries. They, they dropped those and they, they only got them for,
um, operating an unlicensed money transmitting operation, which is a lighter thing and a lighter
sentence, but still not cool. Um, he's, he's a freedom fighter in my opinion and all of tornado
caches and all of samurai and we have to have encrypted messaging. So this stuff's really, um, something that I'm really like getting concerned about. We've had a lot of like
positives in the world with people being good to our industry and good to privacy.
And they did drop a lot of the charges for the different tornado cache people and the,
and the protocol itself, but clearly we're not getting all the wins that we need. So we got to
keep fighting guys. So we should probably have a show on that um but yeah shouting out kenneth codes by mdb.eth uh doomsday um topi etan ada chris webster showdeer octant.eth
in the audience um give octon a follow and give all the all the um community members give them
follows too guys these are these are people who come here like you know some of these are people who've come here every week for
like two years so um give the audience follows as well and everyone on the stage um khalid zanun i
always see you i see um hundreds from diana um uh i see i'm gonna i'm oh I'm already following you, cool. Paul Passam gave a wave, I'm following you already too.
And Aryan Oja, I'm following you too.
Dang, I follow a lot of you guys already.
Francesco Ciula, I saw that you actually retweeted the space
and asked a lot of people to join, so thank you for that.
Shout out to you, I'm following you now.
Francesco's a friend of mine as well.
Oh, awesome.
We have Kevin
Zabo. Not sure
if that's related to Nick Zabo, but I'm
following you now. Bailey
Devoir.
We got Sam
Stefanina. We got
Francesco Andrioli
who has the
ENS Andriolf.eth.
We have DeFi Planet, Gary.base.
Shout out to base.
Actually, Quickswap is going live on base very soon, guys.
Really exciting.
Keep an eye out for that.
It's going to be a big launch.
We have a bunch of partners we're doing stuff with on base.
Let's see.
Okay, I guess I can't shout out everyone, guys.
There's too many people.
Oh, someone's got it.
Oh, wait, I got to shout this out.
Jet Senpai has a Naruto PFP.
That's pretty cool.
So I got to shout you out.
Nerd.
But Aztec, yeah, do you have some, like, comments or questions from the audience?
Sure.
Actually, there wasn't too many questions.
Some of the questions were related to what we have already discussed.
And then there was a lot of comments based on what we were discussing over the last three hours.
But I'll just shout out some of the – I'll mention some of the good comments here.
Yeah, we really got to do the comments on the hour or something,
because I know a lot of time when we get to the end,
they're kind of like, we've already covered,
or it's too off topic, or it's going to open a can of worms.
So Darren, please, please, please remind us once in a while
to do some comments from the audience.
We always forget.
We always try and don't forget.
Go ahead, Aztec.
Well, there's some good ones.
Yeah, this one's funny.
It might even be Darren.
He said 18 minutes in,
and CryptoRocky hasn't mentioned politics yet.
Happy new all time high everyone.
That was two hours ago.
He made it 32 minutes if anyone's wondering.
Very nice.
Is there a polymarket on this? is there a poly market on this is there
a poly market on me mentioning politics we should at the we should uh launch a uh what do they call
them um a market a market for how soon you'll you'll mention politics within the uh or or we do
a drinking or we do a drinking game and every time I say the word libertarian, everyone has to drink.
Good times.
Yeah.
I would be asleep by the end of the spaces.
We couldn't finish up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Luke Berkfield, good friend here, said, big fan of Circle Crypto.
That's me as well.
That's my tag on x um caruso says ethereum remains the
leader in defy and nft markets with a 2025 market cap second only to bitcoin it's far from being
dead there was a lot of comments about ethereum's not dead so web alchemist says Ethereum was never dead. Daniel says Ethereum never died.
It was just charging up.
Locked in red.
Another friend of mine on the Litecoin side says,
iFarm engagement too.
Shield me too.
So I'm shouting him out.
He creates some really great content.
KingDankCush, good buddy, says, the sleeping giant has awoken we've been waiting since
the merge um uh Octet they say nerds are cool we fully agree with that let's go is that is that
Octon the the the yeah yeah that's that's's where Michelle is doing incredible work on behalf of Ethereum.
And I didn't know because I've actually been holding Golem tokens since, I don't know, probably 2016 or maybe early 17.
And it's just sitting in deep cold storage somewhere.
And I guess they did change the token and I haven't been following it.
But I have that
still in deep deep cold storage so great to see that they're making moves these days they were uh
decentralized compute which is like a super cool thing that i everyone was so bullish on back then
it went away kind of for a while and now it's all back with the ai and everything but anyways yeah
shout out to octa and and golem for their work on ethereum
very cool i just followed them uh kivon says awesome and uh awesome education space ethereum
is the financial machine um let's see we have uh two we posted this space a couple days back and there was comments there.
And then comments.
Oh, here's Prené, a good friend on the Polygon side.
Prené says, Polygon quietly powers the future while Ethereum takes the spotlight from BlackRock's Buildle to tokenized Bonds and Gov Infra.
The real Infra narrative is unfolding on Polygon polygon the aggregated episode is going to be fire so much love man and we love all of our polygon um family and uh yeah that there
was uh there was a lot of comments but but uh there's you know a lot of shilling a lot of uh
speculation on eeth is going up and uh comments on kind of the different topics that
we already discussed but it was a great show i really appreciate you casey for being here
sharing your insights um you know from your perspective and uh it was it was a great
conversation overall just diving into all the different aspects of Ethereum. And I think at the end of this three hours, because now we're a little over three hours, we can definitely say that Ethereum is not dead.
And the future looks very bright for Ethereum.
And as a builder, I've never believed that Ethereum is dead.
And that's why I'm building on Ethereum with Polygon
and bringing Litecoin to Polygon Ethereum
and going to connect it to and unify
with all the liquidity via the ag layer.
So I'm very bullish on Ethereum.
Brock, do you have any closing thoughts?
Yes.
I just want to, I want to, i talked about you know on the last basis
and i think it's really important that when we care about something i think we have the power
to will it into existence um we did this on bitcoin we've done this on ethereum we really
do like we said nation states would buy bitcoin we said you know the u.s should hold bitcoin and
it's just like we willed that into existence And so I'm trying to will something into existence.
And that's a new phrase I think I came up with.
I've never heard anyone say it.
So I'm going to try to will this into existence, but it's called declustering.
And that's that I think we got to get Arbitrum.
And we're in talks with Arbitrum and with Optimism.
And I don't know if anyone at Polygon's in touch with ZK Sync,
but I'm sure they are because they use some of the open source technology that Polygon's built.
And I think they cited it correctly or credited it properly, which was great. But anyways,
the point is like Arbitrum through Orbit, Optimism through Superchain, Polygon, AgLayer,
Optimism through Superchain, Polygon, AgLayer, ZK Sync with their stack.
I really want us to find a way to work together, guys.
I really want us not to be building walled gardens
because that fragmentation doesn't help us.
It doesn't help the user.
So we really got to get all these clusters, as Vitalik has called.
And he has asked for this too, by the way.
And so I thoroughly agree with him.
And I don't know how we do it.
I'm totally open to, and the Polygon Grants Board,
we are totally open to even funding teams
who can help build this out
or co-funding teams with Arbitrum or with Optimism
or with ZK Sync and with Ethereum Foundation, we are totally down
to co-fund and put real money behind trying to solve this problem so that we could get rid of
this fragmentation and achieve not only trustless interoperability and privacy in that mix. And
we're working with people who are doing stuff like that, like silent swap, but we're, so, uh, I really want to see us all find a way to work together. And then the, the true goal of
mine, that my big fantasy in life is that we don't just have interoperable easy and trustless
interoperability where you're not relying on third party bridges, but that you have cross chain
defy Legos or cross chain composability. That That is the super cool holy grail to me.
I don't hear anyone ever talk about hardly, but that's what I want to see. And what that means is
we don't just have, you could bridge between chains. That's simple. No, I want to see DeFi
Legos where one DeFi Lego is on one chain, a general chain or an app chain, whatever. And then another
DeFi Lego is on another chain. For example, if you could have quick swap on Polygon,
Uniswap on Ethereum or Uniswap on Unichain or Aerodrome on base or soon quick swap on base.
But if you could have all these, then have aggregators like one inch, they could even be
on any chain and you can aggregate between all chains.
That's actually relatively simple because that's just a swap.
But you could there's way more advanced stuff you could do more advanced defy yield strategies, liquid staking.
You could do like liquidity lockers where on one chain you're doing liquidity locking on a dex on another chain
but that cross-chain composability to me is one of the holy grails then you don't even know any
of these chains exist you don't worry about fragmentation of liquidity anymore you know
instead of having to go to one chain and you get this amount of slippage you're using the liquidity
of every chain in the world at the same time And that only works if we do it through trustless methods,
which to me the best right now is through some kind of ZK rollup,
which is just math and code.
Optimistic rollups are also interesting for this,
but have some limitations.
And there are ways to solve those limitations.
And Polygon is working on a way to link those with pessimistic proofs,
which can link to these optimistic chains so that you can roll up together.
You could do batch rolling up to Ethereum to save on the cost and to save on the time and to build this cross chain composability.
So the word I'm trying to will into existence is we got to decluster.
I don't know how we do it.
I don't know if it's something we need Vitalik or the ETH Foundation to help, you know, push to get the teams to work together, but somehow or another, it's like really important to
I have a personal interest in L2 to L2 collaboration. It's a personal interest, not a personal
interest. What am I trying to say? Not a foundational interest, a personal interest. So I would love to have a conversation with you,
maybe on a call.
Beautiful. We're so excited. Excited for the future of Ethereum, guys.
This has been such an amazing space. Thank you to everyone that's here on Friday,
on a Friday to hang out with us and,
and hear all the alpha
and the information that was dropped today.
It's definitely one of those spaces
I will probably even just replay later
and just listen to it again.
Wealth of knowledge was given today.
So much love to everyone.
We're here every Friday.
We'll be here next week.
And until next time.
Oh, interact with Casey's tweet.
It's in the Jumbotron, guys.
Give him some support for being on the ground here with us
from the ivory, straight from the ivory tower.
Just kidding, just kidding.
But not even.
If you're in the tweet, it says if you're a
builder, a chain and allocator, I would bookmark the tweet and read that read that article. I think
it's very important. Yeah, but I'm bookmarking right now, guys. Everybody support that, please.
Awesome. Thank you so much, everyone in the audience. Thanks, Aztec. You're the man. You
really hold these spaces together. Thanks, everyone else who helps with it. Darren, the panda behind QuickSop account.
Also Marshall and Nicole and everyone else who helps book the high quality guests we get on the show and kind of produce the show, I guess.
We've never taken a sponsorship on this show.
We've never made any money from this show.
It's just public good.
So cheers, everyone. And thanks for everyone
that makes this happen, and especially the audience. Bye-bye.
