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Hangout #9 with Nader Dabit
Recorded: June 11, 2025 Duration: 0:58:28Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion celebrating Ethereum's 10th anniversary, industry leaders reflect on the platform's evolution, the importance of developer relations, and the emergence of innovative projects like Eigenlayer. Key trends include the shift towards permissionless systems and strategic partnerships that enhance the crypto ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. . Thank you, John. Thank you. Sounds good.
Hello, hello.
Can you hear me?
Yes, I can.
Yes.
And I am. Yes.
And I am on Twitter.
Fantastic.
Chinmay, can I hear you?
Could you please give me a one, two, three?
If you can hear me.
One, two, three.
Lovely, lovely, lovely.
Hello, hello, hello.
And welcome back to another Hangout with Chinmai and Marv,
where we celebrate 10 years of Ethereum.
Our guest today, okay, I've seen Chinmai get excited about guests
and about encounters, but the level of excitement I got from him
like in the run-up to this was on another level.
So it's my absolute pleasure to introduce you to Nader.
Nader is one of the top DevRel people in our space.
He works at Eigenlayer right now
and is one of the greatest advertisements
for what it means to be a developer
and how to be a developer in Web3.
So this is a builder-focused episode
where we talk about all the work
that goes into making Ethereum such a great place to be.
So the floor is yours, Chinmai.
Please introduce our guest
with all the enthusiasm of a fellow builder.
Thank you so much, Mar.
And again, later, we met a couple of times in different startups, different events and everything.
And I follow you on Twitter and everything around that.
And one thing I take away from why I fangirling around this is you have been someone who I admire too because you create prototypes really fast.
You come up with conclusions on products and prototypes and
projects really fast and share your conclusions so succinctly and i don't know how you have this
time to like get all of that so today what i want to do at a selfish level is understand your process
understand how you do it and we'll focus on like of course your personal story how you got into it
i recently come to know that you learned programming a little later in your life compared to everyone else. So I want to understand how you got into
programming a little bit as well, but super impressed with everything that you've built.
Please take over and tell me your journey into how you got into programming, how you got into
Ethereum, like when you heard Ethereum as a word, what came in your mind and how did you analyze it and everything around that?
And then we'll jump into more aspects of it.
Okay, got it.
So very kind intro.
Thank you very much.
Very humbling to kind of be here and talking about a lot of the stuff that I've really benefited from and enjoyed being a part of over the last four and a half years.
So, you know, thank you
for having this and for hosting it. And I know that you all have had a lot of other people on,
and you will be having other people on as well. So people that are listening, you know, keep an
eye out for future interviews. These are going to be a good series. So there's a lot that you just
asked there. So it's hard for me to know where to start. I guess the first thing I might start on is maybe to make it in a timeline type of thing.
We can start with the question that you asked that I learned how to start programming kind of late.
So yeah, I started programming really professionally or taking it seriously as a job when I was 30.
So a lot of people like think that they're starting too late and they're like, I meet people that are literally in college that are like just thinking about starting to program and are starting to shift their career and they're thinking they're too late.
And I've also met people that have started programming in their 40s and that are
successful. So, I mean, I don't think there's ever a time to kind of say that it's too late. You can
be extremely successful at any point in time if you kind of just put your mind to it, I think.
But yeah, I started programming when I was 30 and I had a lot of struggle. I didn't really land
what I would consider a job that would kind of
like make my parents proud of me until I was like 37. So it took me a good like six or
seven years to kind of get to that point. So it's been a struggle. But since then, it's
been a lot of fun because I have had a lot of great opportunities that have come over
the last seven years after that. So yeah, so I've been programming for about 13, 14 years at this point.
And, um, Ethereum, you asked, you were kind of like asking like what inspired
me or what got me into this space?
Well, I've been in the traditional software industry for like over maybe a
little bit around eight or nine years before I joined
the crypto space or the blockchain space and made like a complete like pivot literally complete
shift in what I was focusing on and what I was doing before joining the crypto space which the
first company I joined was the graph protocol, which is an indexing service, basically allows you to kind of take blockchain data
and turn it into more of a traditional database
that can be queried or an API that can be queried.
Before I joined the Graph,
I was working at Amazon Web Services
on the developer platform team for front-end web and mobile,
which is kind of like,
there's a lot of parallels between like what they were doing and what we're doing at Eigenlayer actually, which is kind of like, there's a, yeah, there's a lot of parallels between like
what they were doing and what we're doing at Eigenlayer actually, which is kind of interesting.
But basically we built developer tooling and abstractions for building out like cloud
applications. That's kind of the TLDR. We, my team wasn't focused on building out like EC2 or S3 or
more of these low level primitives. We were kind of building out primitives2 or S3 or more of these low-level primitives.
We were kind of building out primitives
on top of those primitives
that were more focused for app developers.
So I spent about three and a half years there on that team.
So we focused on mobile SDKs, web SDKs,
and serverless function abstractions
that kind of made it just really simple
for developers to build.
And I got really bored after being there for about three and a half years. It was kind of like
at first it was really, really fun and exciting. But over the course of a couple of years,
it became more of like a corporate feeling environment. And we weren't really doing
a lot of things that I would consider that um revolutionary or that you know that impactful maybe uh
year over year and um i discovered like the the idea of like web3 um almost like over the course
of like 48 hours or like maybe a week of just like reading and looking at videos or watching
videos and stuff because i didn't really know that much about crypto before that week. I was more like an investor.
So I've been investing and like speculating since about 2016 or 2017 on Bitcoin, Ethereum,
and then random things after that. But in 2020, I started kind of really diving into,
you know, I would say the idea of permissionless systems,
composable systems, public permissionless, I would say, you know, completely open database
style systems that just weren't possible with like traditional technology. And that's really
what got me excited about Ethereum was the idea that you could kind of build out an application that was unstoppable that anyone could use and anyone could build upon.
And there's a lot that I can go into, but I don't want to kind of keep talking.
I'll actually stop for a second and see if you have any thoughts or questions.
Honestly, keep talking because you're putting top truth bombs.
But let me just direct that a little bit in the context of like, I think you were spot
on in terms of like there is a lot of similarities between Amazon Web Services and what Ethereum
provides because they both are developer related platform or developer platforms, right?
Like they are not really consumer platforms, they are developer platforms.
Like when you saw Ethereum, what parallels did you draw in your own head and uh what
opportunities did you foresee at that time in the initial introductions to ethereum and uh if you can
share those that will be perfect yeah so it was an interesting time one of my friends uh that i
had known i used to work with prior to, I would say like working in AWS,
he had a company that was very, very successful
and it was built entirely on top of the Twitter API.
The Twitter API is just,
has shifted a lot over the last 10 or 15 years.
And at the time though, like it was fairly stable.
So people kind of assumed that they could build
their own applications and software
on top of the Twitter API.
So he had built this company,
he had raised like $10 million,
everything was going excellent.
And then literally one day they woke up
and Twitter had completely changed
and removed a lot of the different APIs.
And I would say systems that he,
his company was relying on. So everything broke.
And they literally had to essentially lay off a bunch of people and pivot their entire company
based on that one incident. And I just remember going to lunch with him and
kind of talking about that whole experience and how it was such a negative, like crazy thing that could happen.
And, and, and, you know, we were just saying like, you know, there should be a version of Twitter that no one can kind of like change the API on, or that there's more of like a contract
with everyone using it, all of their consumers. And, you know, we were just kind of like doing
all of these ideas. And anyway, like, so six or seven months later is when I started reading about,
well, I was actually watching videos from Juan Benet,
the founder of, I guess, like Falquin and IPFS,
as well as Yannif Tal, who's the founder of Graph Protocol.
And like one of the ideas that Ethereum and like Web3
kind of like are the principles is that
you can kind of have like these unstoppable systems
that no one can break, no one can shut down,
and no one can change.
And also you have this data that is available forever
that no one can kind of like silo from you.
And that was a light bulb moment because I was like,
oh, this is how you would build out the,
like I would say, unstoppable API version of Twitter.
These are the types of systems that would kind of enable
that. And that's actually the main, that was the main thing that really got me excited about all
this stuff. It was more like the nature of like being able to build out contracts with developers
in the form of APIs that you could essentially promise that they would never change, they would
never break. You could build out a million companies on top of this data.
It's not going anywhere. And then the other thing that had always interested me was like stable coins.
The more I'd kind of learned about stable coins through just experimenting with different crypto stuff
and seeing what was happening in different parts of the world.
I think it was at the time Lebanon and Venezuela
and a few other countries where inflation was going insane.
So I think those are the two main things that drew me into
wanting to work in crypto and Ethereum specifically.
Wow.
No, that's amazing.
And just to remind everyone,
this is not really an advertisement for either Lens or Farcaster.
It's just like this is either the proposition
and speaking of lens this is when i came to know about your work very first time
and you were helping them out with uh develop a relationship and i
was in the complete awe of like professional work that you have done
there as in like making sure that the system is set up the the
the communication the cadences the the APIs and everything around that.
And for the folks who does not know what it takes to work with developer,
there is a role called developer relationships manager or head or whichever,
but the developer relationships in general, it's very important.
And this is what the role you have been doing for a while.
For the listeners, what is this role?
Why is it important?
If you can break that down, that would be super important.
Sure.
So, I mean, I guess it depends on the type of application
and the type of product that you're building in crypto.
There's a lot of stuff that doesn't need DevRel,
but there are a lot of things that probably do,
and there's everything in between.
So there's teams that I've seen that have like zero DevRel, but there are a lot of things that probably do and there's everything in between. So there's teams that I've seen that have like zero DevRel and then I've seen teams that
have like 10, 20, 30 DevRel.
And then if you look at like the traditional like web two world, there's much larger teams
often for these larger companies.
But yeah, the general like TLDR is that we help.
There's actually like a few things I would say.
Number one is that we try to provide product feedback to the engineering teams
or find ways to kind of siphon direct feedback to the engineering teams
around what people want and what people like and what they don't like
and maybe just general thoughts around developer experience.
That's one thing.
Another thing we do is we help developers become successful.
So if someone wants to build an application
and we think that our product is the best way for them to do that,
we try to kind of help them know about the product
and also learn about it and try it out and use it.
Another thing we do is awareness.
So awareness could be social media,
it could be documentation, it could be like videos,
it could be coding to conferences.
So a decent amount of like the more public facing
developer relations stuff is around like awareness.
So like, you know, if you have a large platform,
that's often a benefit that companies see
because if you can combine good technical expertise
along with being able to kind of make people aware
of the product, then that's a good combination.
So product feedback, awareness,
just straight up developer support, like I mentioned,
helping people become successful. I would say those are kind of like the three main things that we do.
That is very interesting. You basically combined technical customer success,
a little bit of sales, a little bit of like development itself where you have to do everything.
So that's like you have to thread the needle, like multiple needles and make sure that that
is a fine balance.
A selfish question here, like how do you measure success here?
Like what is the KPI for someone like in this role?
And I know you have a team now, like then how do you measure your own success and your
team member's success?
Yeah, this is the hardest question, Endeavor.
When I was at Amazon Web Services for almost four years,
we literally never found the answer to that question
because there was no direct correlation that we could say,
I went to this conference, I wrote this tutorial, I wrote the software, and here's the outcome
of that. It was more like a general combined effort that the company can't really measure,
to be quite honest. Because if the product is extremely good and the dev rel is extremely bad,
the product will still do good, right? If the product is extremely bad, and your
dev rel is insanely good, then you still might do pretty good. But you can't say like, one or the
other is the reason. So it's kind of like, objective, it's very, very, very, I'm sorry,
it's very subjective. It's very subjective. So, you know, but but we try to measure it in different
ways. And, you know, there is no perfect way to measure it,
but it's probably the biggest question in this role.
It's like, how do you actually measure exactly,
like, what is success and what isn't?
So, I mean, if you write a tutorial
and then you get, like, 100 new developers sign up,
like, that's a good sign, right?
But it's probably not something that you could kind of reproduce,
like, over and over and over.
You might be able to do it here and there, but you can't really.
So it's kind of like you do everything you can possibly think of to do and you try to
measure what you can, but there is no like single metric that everyone measures.
At AWS, like our team, we grew our total user base from 2000-h developers, active developers, which meaning that they use and used an API and made an API call in the last 30 days.
We grew from like 2000 to over 300,000 in the course of about three and a half years that I was there for our product suite.
But I can't take credit for that.
And no single person can take credit for that because it was a combined effort by engineering,
design, marketing, like everyone working together.
So it's kind of hard.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Like, of course, I'm pretty sure we can pull more spreads and like, figure it out, like
the challenges of like, figuring out how to buy this kind of product and everything.
We can resurface that question, but I want to give you the opportunity.
And again, selfishly, I want to know more about Eigenlayer. It's a complicated protocol, or at least for me and many other
folks. Please tell me more about Eigenlayer. And feel free to make it a sales pitch because
I think everyone wants to know more.
Well, on the last note, I guess I can just say, I feel like I'm working on the most
highly functional team that I've ever worked on in my entire life.
Like everyone here is equally good.
And we're all like working together, I think, and making a positive impact.
And it doesn't, it often doesn't like show right away.
But like, it's one of those things that if you have, if you're all like working together on a solution or doing something and everyone's executing extremely well,
it's like over time, the needle moves and it moves extremely, extremely far.
So I think like we were I'm just really excited about like where we are,
where we're at and where we're going to be in the next six to 12 months.
But anyway, so Eigenlayer, I mean, the way that I would kind of like try to explain it today, because, yeah, like the way that we got here was a little complicated because of the fact that we needed the initial product of restaking to exist before we can actually get to where we are today doesn't really need to be talking about the initial product, which was kind of restaking, because restaking was more of a means to an end.
Ultimately, I can kind of put it this way.
When Ethereum launched, it was the first time any developer could essentially leverage the existing security of another blockchain to build out their own application
without having to build their own blockchain. This is the idea of a smart contract blockchain
or a programmable blockchain. So when Ethereum launched, it unleashed an insane amount of
innovation because the average Joe could not go and build a blockchain from scratch,
but they could go and write a smart
contract and they can literally write like five or 10 lines of code and build out an
application and launch it to Ethereum.
And now everyone in the world had this new way that they could program, which would be
smart contracts.
The challenge with everything that came after that is like everything is a smart contract, blockchain, or a new virtual machine that is slightly different.
And they have their own improvements, but they all typically have to do around,
I would say, performance or cost.
So you have the Solana virtual machine and the Move virtual machine,
and then you have the underlying network.
And those things can make the things that were possible before possible but faster and cheaper.
But they didn't make the things that were possible to do in a traditional programming environment possible.
So if I want to send a token from one person to the other on Ethereum and then Solana came out, it's faster
and cheaper. That doesn't mean I can now build out an application that calls some traditional API
with the same security. That just isn't possible. So we have Solana, we have Ethereum, we have base,
we have like maybe a thousand different L1s and L2s at this point, but they all are enabling the same thing in different ways.
But if you want to actually expand into the real world, if you want to call a traditional API, if you want to talk to a database, if you want to talk to an LLM, if you want to do complex computation, if you want to talk to a different blockchain, like none of those things are possible.
complex computation. If you want to talk to a different blockchain, like none of those things
are possible. Eigenlayer unlocks all of that functionality with the same security as an L1.
So you can literally use any programming language. You can talk to any API. You can
interact with any database. You can do anything that you want. You can talk to anything in the
real world and have that same layer one level of security. That's kind of the TLDR, I would say.
That's awesome.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Because our team at Breadchain, we're actually building on Eigenlayer.
And there are specific aspects of what you folks over there do that have made it possible
for us to make what we're making.
So we have this tool called GasK killer that can significantly reduce the gas fees and it works with it works alongside the complexity of a
smart contract so as it gets more complex we can save more gas and i think that's something really
special about what eigenlayer is making possible so are there any more applications like this that
you're seeing being implemented right now?
And that the developer community can sort of look at as a max hour?
Yeah, totally. GasKiller is awesome.
I mean, I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening in the Oracle space,
because Oracles are essentially bringing real-world information and bringing it on-chain and making it verifiable.
So the design space there is insanely big.
One of the things that we saw recently
was that Twitter is actually implementing
the Polymarket prediction market into the application.
You know, Twitter has always talked about
being the everything app.
So they're doing all types of stuff.
They added encrypted messaging, I think, recently,
and now they're adding prediction markets.
Well, Polymarket and Uma are building out
a new prediction market Oracle on Eigenlayer.
So I think that's a really exciting thing
because of a few different reasons.
Number one, if you look at most of the successful applications
and protocols today, okay, if you look at most of the successful applications and protocols today,
okay, if you look at most of the successful protocols that are really successful,
they're also applications, right?
Farcaster is not just an application.
It's not just a protocol.
It's both.
And it used to be Warpcast and Farcaster.
Now it's Farcaster.
Polymarket isn't just an application.
They had to build out their own network and everything from scratch as well.
And they're using, like, obviously other infrastructure like UMA.
But they didn't just build.
They couldn't build the application, and they didn't just build the backend.
They built the whole thing together.
Hyperliquid and HyperEVM and HyperCore, they built out the network, the protocol and the application.
So I think like a lot of the more successful teams
are doing this, but with this new prediction market Oracle
from Polymarket on Eigenlayer with UMA,
they're actually gonna make the prediction market available
for every developer in the world to use.
So if you want to build out
your own prediction market application,
you can essentially leverage the same infrastructure that Polymarket has for their application.
I think I was dogfooding the AVS idea to build out EigenDA as a good like North Star example of like what can be done.
star example of like what can be done. We're about to ship Eigen DAD2 which is basically going to be
800 times like it's scalable as like the current version of Ethereum blobs at 50 megabytes per
second but in reality we're probably going to ship more than 50 megabytes per second to mainnet. We don't have that exact number yet,
but we essentially built out a data availability layer
as an ADS that rivals multi-billion dollar companies
like Celestia and we did it with maybe a fraction
of the number of people and we did it much, much faster.
And I worked at Celestia and I have experience there
and I totally have a lot of respect
for their technology and team as well.
Different architecture for sure.
But the fact that we were able to kind of like say,
this isn't just an idea.
We're literally shipping better products, faster products
and we're doing it with less people
and we're doing it on shorter timelines.
It's a really good example of dogfooding your own infrastructure, I would say.
Wow.
Okay.
That is amazing execution.
Again, most people underestimate the idea of how hard it is to execute. Idea of a dime a dozen.
Everyone wants to build ABC apps or they know how to build it.
But again, executing it with the team, with the resources,
and getting it out the door and then getting adoption,
all things are really, really, really hard.
So I'm glad that you guys are focused on all of that eigenlayer
and then getting it out.
So one question in this story, right?
Like there is a lesson here
for all the other infrastructure layer companies.
You mentioned that Forecaster is a protocol.
At the same time, Forecaster is an application.
They're building their own like dog fooding product.
How much time and resources, again,
every answer is it depends,
but how do you guys decide like how much time and resources again every answer is it depends but how do you guys
decide like how much time and resources you need to spend on building your own application versus
and what for what purposes versus you should spend time on getting other people to build on top of
you and like how is it like you go and build one side for the other side for a little bit and come
back back and forth or is it time-and-gainless process?
How do you think about this?
Sure. And I'll just make a comment before I kind of go into this is that I'm
not, I am fortunate to be kind of more of like a public basing,
like person on the, on the company, but there's so like,
there's so many extremely like talented engineers and developers that are actually doing the
hard work on our team that I'm kind of here, I would say, talking on behalf of.
And I just want to make sure that I kind of acknowledge that and give them their credit.
Because honestly, the team is insanely good, like just across the board. And I feel very like fortunate
to be able to kind of like even be working next to them, to be honest. But um, but yeah,
I mean, so I'm kind of like speaking on their like on their behalf. So I hope I represent
them like well enough. But I mean, to my understanding, like we have a strategy and we re
evaluate everything on a weekly basis.
So like what we decided last week could change next week.
Like we have a focus, we have a vision, we have like a roadmap and things that we're
working towards, but the crypto industry changes like insanely fast and things deprioritize
and reprioritize all the time.
So like what we have, you know, on a weekly basis, we're essentially, we, we, I think we have
a very, very, like highly functional type of company. Now we didn't have this when I joined,
to be quite honest, but we've had a lot of, we have like an insanely good COO that joined about
maybe about a year ago. And we have like really great processes. So like every week we, we re
evaluate everything on a, onby-team basis.
What's working?
What isn't working?
How can we improve?
And we gauge that on a spreadsheet basically with numbers.
And we can then look back and we can say, okay, how have things changed over the last
week?
How have things changed over the last month?
Are we prioritizing the right things and things like that?
So the question that you had was around, should we focus on building the protocol or should
we focus on building the applications? Well, we initially focused on building out what we had,
you kind of have to take things in stages based on where you are. So initially there were no ADSs,
there were no apps. It was all about getting
that economic security locked in, which was the restaking part. Then once we had the economic
security, the next part of the flywheel is like, how can we build out as many AVSs as
possible? How can we support them? So that's kind of like the stage that we're currently
in, but we're also now moving to the application stage so we want to facilitate as
many new abs as possible so what does that mean that means where we want to 100x improve our
developer experience we'll have some really great stuff that's going to be out within about a week
about what that actually looks like in practice we want to give as much support as we can to AVS teams. That means we give them BD
support. We give them developer relations support. We give them distribution if possible. We give
them fundraising support. If there's grants available, we try to make them available to them.
We just kind of want to be there along with them on their road to success, hopefully.
That's the ABS part.
So we wanna support ABS's,
we wanna get as many as possible.
On our, on the ABS's that we build,
the only one that we're currently, you know,
building publicly that I would even say is worth
like us talking about would be IGNDA.
And IGNDA we feel is like extremely important
for a couple of reasons.
Number one, it's proof that the idea of an ABS can work.
And number two, you cannot build the scale of a data availability layer
that Sriram kind of first thought of when he thought of Eigenly,
I would say, without this type of architecture.
Because of the fact that when you kind of think about the constraints of a blockchain that have to do with like consensus and peer to peer networking and all of those things, they are very prohibitive. the ultimate goal would be like hundreds of millions of transactions per second.
And therefore you need gigabits per second of throughput.
Then you can't do that with a traditional blockchain.
And if it is going to be achieved, it's not going to be anytime soon.
So being able to kind of like apply this optimistic AVS, I would say,
I would say technique to enabling that
is kind of, if we didn't do it, no one we felt was going to do it.
So the team decided to build out EigenDA.
So that's EigenDA.
And then the last thing is applications.
So we just launched app.agonLayer.xyz slash apps that kind of showcase around 100 different apps that we have built on Eigenlayer.
And we've been on mainnet for a little over a year now.
But we're starting to see just a lot of applications.
So, I mean, we have, if you kind of like combine ABS and app revenue,
we're trying to kind of tie this together in some type of dashboard or something.
But we're at a few hundred million dollars in revenue at the moment.
Oh, solid.
Is it like applications making that much or Agilear itself is making that much from this usage?
I think, yes, I think you might have.
Oh, you're back.
You're back.
Fantastic.
Welcome back.
With the apps.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
We can hear you.
Yeah.
Okay, go ahead.
Cool.
So I'll try to wrap this up.
Yeah, with the apps, we're starting to really scale up apps, and we're also starting to see a lot of successful apps. So, I mean, like I said, between apps and AVS revenue, we're trying to kind of visualize that,
but we're at somewhere around $250 million
or $300 million in annual revenue
that we're able to kind of like track.
But we want to kind of like visualize that.
That's between apps and AVSs.
Some of the apps that I think are most notable
would be stuff like having to do,
I would say mainly with ZKTLS.
So there's a lot of like successful like ZKTLS apps
and companies and founders kind of like building
in that vertical alone.
The founder of Reddit is building out something
with the founder of Dig that is leveraging opacity.
Some of the top apps in the app store are leveraging opacity
which is built on Eigenlayer.
I think I saw EarnOS recently released a list of the different teams that they're working
with.
And EarnOS is built on Eigenlayer with Opacity.
They have customers like Uber, BMW, North Face, Minecraft, Amazon.
They have a lot of really interesting companies.
So like when you start looking at the different layers, it's crazy.
At this point, we're starting to already see some breakout successes,
but we still have a long way to go.
So I mean, ultimately, this year is all about ramping up applications
and ramping up developer experience to see more AVSs.
Wow. Wow.
OK, that's super solid.
For a time being, we'd love to move on to one of your other
college side project or endeavor,
but you're quite into getting more developers on chain
as well.
And that's why you started DeveloperDAO.
Tell me more about DeveloperDAO, Mike,
and how can people participate into it?
Sure. I mean, developer Dell, pretty long story, but I'll try to summarize that, I guess.
But I'll give like a very big acknowledgement and shout out to all the people that have
like contributed and helped out because really it's been a massive community effort and effort
with dozens or maybe even hundreds of people that have all like contributed to success.
So I created it, but a lot of other people have supported and maintained it like while I have been there and while I haven't been there.
But yeah, originally developer DAO was like when I joined the crypto space, there wasn't like I would say a single place for all of us developers
to kind of get together, network with each other, find jobs together and just be a community
together. Like everything that I was seeing was all like NFT related at the time, you
know, we had that NFT boom, what's kind of happening. And it was all about speculation
and all about, like, I would say. And there wasn't much for developers and builders to rally around.
So developer DAO was an attempt at that.
And the core ethos was there is zero financialization of this.
Don't join expecting to get an airdrop.
Don't join expecting to sell your token.
You're not going to make any money like by
simply joining but you will be equipped with the knowledge and the resources and the connections
to go get a job or start a company to make money but like it's not going to be a financial
speculative instrument at all um and that was kind of the ethos. And a lot of it resonated with a lot of people,
because we attracted the type of people that we wanted, because we didn't want the speculators,
we didn't want the people that were like, going to come in and try to make this into a financial
thing. We did want the people that were looking to come in, work hard, find an opportunity and
get a job and then they can make money.
But it's based on their skill set.
It's not based on like flipping or buying and selling something.
But anyway, it's kind of a long story.
But I mean, we had like initially it was a discord.
We've done so many events around the world.
So many people have like started companies and, you know, like there's a lot of people
that are CEOs and that are like like director level types of positions now that came into developer DAO.
It's still ongoing.
It's just a place for you to join and meet people and get connected and hopefully get a job, I would say.
Amazing. I remember in the early days of agents, you were like doing hackathons demos, like five, seven demos in a session, and a few of them.
Not sure if it was part of developer now or not,
or was it in the same umbrella, but that was really fun.
And I actually watched all of them, learned a lot,
different experiments people are doing and everything.
And if that's what developer now is going to propel,
I think we need more of it.
So I will be paying more attention.
I request everyone who's
listening to pay more attention to this because this is where you can go and hang out with other
developers find out the direction of where the technology is going to go and make some predictions
and yes it's not about making money right now but it will eventually help your career and hopefully
make you more money but it's not not about speculative part of it at all.
So absolutely.
While talking about a little bit future
and predicting future,
I wanna talk about like, again,
one news that I think is one of the biggest news
in the last 12 months when Stripe purchased Previ,
came as a surprise to me, not gonna lie.
I was expecting this kind of news
to happen 12 months from me, not gonna lie. I was expecting this kind of news to happen
12 months from here, not right now.
I think this acceleration is just bonkers.
Theoretically, everyone has a wallet now.
Like everyone is literally using five one way or the another
and now everyone has a wallet.
Tell me more about what you think of this kind of news
and any predictions, bold predictions
that you would like to make based on this news or anything else in the industry?
No, I mean, it's hard for me to ever make a prediction because we just never know what's
going to happen. But I've always been extremely bullish on Pridhi and they've always been
extremely supportive of anything that I've done. And I've always been extremely supportive of them in return.
And I assume I'm not the only one, right? Like if I feel that way, a lot of other people probably
feel that way. And that's probably why they became acquired because they had a great product. They
had great people working there. They were very humble and they were like relentless in their
execution of everything that they did. And they just had a very polished product. This idea of
building out a wallet abstraction isn't a new idea, but there were a few teams that were executing on
the level of Privy. And they were early, they did everything right. So I mean, I'm not too
surprised that they were acquired. But I think that you're right. It's awesome. It's a very bullish signal to kind of see such a massive financial company acquire like what is probably the best crypto wallet experience for developers.
And, you know, Stripe is like a developer focused company.
Like everyone uses Stripe as kind of like the core. I mean, I would say the gold standard of like documentation for developers.
Documentation. I've been hearing it for years, right? So yeah, if they can, if they can start
integrating like crypto payments or crypto identity, I would say is a better way to put it
as a first class citizen, then it really opens up the door to a lot more adoption. And these are
the types of things that truly enable mass adoption. It isn't like launching a new network that's like 10% faster or some shit.
It's these sorts of like massive like upgrades to existing networks of people that will bring in like another 10 or 100 million people.
And then those people can go and look at all these other things that are happening right but like it's hard to kind of create a brand new um primitive that
brings in a billion people without vampire attacking something that already exists and like
this is kind of like an example of it wouldn't say it's a vampire it's like obviously but it's
a company that already has distribution already has everything they're just now bringing in a
crypto primitive and it's good for everybody. Nice.
Yeah, like the whole of crypto Twitter is like on,
like elated hearing this news because it means so much
for the potential of what we can put in place.
And I'd kind of like to wind it back a little bit, actually,
because to talk about how you've been onboarding people
because you've been making content, you have your DAO,
you have a lot of different methods of distribution.
So I'd also like to tie this in with your experience,
because you came to the coding game a little bit later.
What does your personal journey, in terms of insight,
tell you about how people learn,
and then how you can
communicate these difficult concepts to them? To me, like the core thing that's worked really
well for me that if I apply it to everything, it usually just turns out to be a positive thing
is this idea of like learning in public or building in public. So that's worked for me.
I don't know. I wouldn't say that everyone should apply that
because everyone is different.
Everyone has their own niche or their own thing.
But for me, building in public or learning in public
has just been a general philosophy of if I apply it
to everything that I do every day,
then I end up with more opportunities, larger networks,
more job offers, more like positive like things.
So I think just supplying like this idea of like learning and building a public,
oh, I learned something, I'm going to tweet about it.
Oh, I built something, I'm going to open source it.
Oh, I learned something that is teachable, I'm going to teach it.
And if you just do that, like consistently over time, you're probably going to,
you know, grow your network, like with AI and stuff. You know know it's interesting to kind of see where this is going to take a turn
because it seems to be less about like educating and more about entertainment now almost and i'm
not good at entertaining so i don't know how i'm going to fit into that that world but maybe um
maybe i'm overthinking it but i feel like yeah like a lot of the educational stuff is going to be, you know, done by LLMs.
Because if LLM knows everything, then like, why should I follow this person to learn anything when I can just ask LLM?
Maybe it's more about like combining like entertainment or something with that.
I don't know.
That is very interesting.
I just have a follow-up, because I find your content very, again, succinctly put.
How much AI do you use in order to, once you write something, to transfer, or do you start
with AI and then add it afterwards, when you're sharing your knowledge about buying some new
product or technology or something like that?
Yeah, I've started implementing AI more in the last year, year and a half. Typically,
it's around, you know, I would say coming up with a structure of, of like, taking the information
that I have and making it more consumable, more concise, like more digestible, but I still have found that there isn't like a great LLM that doesn't,
that doesn't sound like it's coming from an AI. So like, you know, it's hard to lean on it 100%
for sure. And I don't think it would be smart to do that anyway. Right. But yeah, I mean,
I use it to kind of come up with like a structure. So I'm saying, oh, I want to,
like, I had this video that I did and it went really well everyone loved it here's the um
here's the uh the script that I had for that video I want to apply like this same type of like
script but to this new subject so give me an outline and then like I'll use that outline to
create my next script and that that's worked for me I I would say. Stuff like that.
OK, no, I like it.
So basically, repeating the successes.
But you will not expect AI to get you new successes.
But once you find something successful,
then you can use AI to repeat the whole thing.
I think so, yeah.
Wow, OK.
I never thought it that way.
We are coming in the last five minutes of it,
and I want to make sure that you leave at 2 o'clock as we expected.
But one particular one is,
what tooling do you think is the biggest gap in the industry right now?
Or the one that you think that if this existed,
that would have helped you personally to onboard a lot of developers
or to those developers get on boarded by themselves faster?
Have you thought about those tooling in recent times?
I mean, I've thought a lot about it for sure, yeah.
But I think like where we are today, it's just so much better
than where we were like a few years ago.
I think Foundry and those sorts of tools have been incredibly like valuable,
like just improvements in that whole developer experience of like building and connecting on chain.
Honestly, LLMs have done so much, I think, for everyone that, like, I can't think of anything that would be
more impactful than that, right? I think LLMs have been the thing that kind of really unlocked.
I think now it's all about, I would say, developer experience at, like, the protocol level or,
like, the APIs that these different networks are kind of exposing that enable us to kind of build out like the type of UX that we're used to on
the traditional world, but on chain.
So I think it's now more up to the protocols to build out like clean and useful APIs, but
LLMs do most of the heavy lifting I think these days.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So one selfish follow up question.
This is something I'm researching as well,
and I would love to get an answer if that is available, is how do you basically get
eigenlayer's information to something like chat GPT or perplexity and get those answered
from that location? Because I'm not going to go to eigenlayer and ask questions. I'm
generally going to ask questions to Gemini's per for flexities, and to GPT's of the world,
and how basically train those models with your information
so that eigenlayer is either prioritized
and accurate and latest information
is provided to the user.
Have you thought about it?
Have you succeeded at some experimentation?
Would love to learn more.
Again, this is a selfish question.
It was not in the list for sure yeah yeah totally um we've thought about this like a lot actually there's um there's a tweet
that came from andre carpathy do you know andre carpathy
no but he's he's he's kind of like uh really famous AI researcher, and he invented the term like vibe coding.
So he's like the one that first wrote like vibe coding,
and he kind of explained it, and everyone senses like run with it.
So he had another tweet that he said,
Tired is elaborate docs pages for your product service library
with fancy color palettes, branding, and animations.
And he said, what is, so you know how like tired, wired, like it's like the kind of the
meme.
So tired is just traditional docs.
Wired is one single docs.md file and a copy the clipboard button.
Like what he is insinuating is exactly what you're talking about.
Like how do you bring up-to-date context
into the developer's local environment and IDE
because everyone's vibe coding now.
So the answer to that is there's two answers to that,
I would say.
One would be you build an MCP server
that is really, really great, that does everything
you possibly can think of to bring all that more
like up-to-date context locally.
The problem is that MCP is not quite ready yet, in my opinion, in terms of the latency
and developer experience that most of us kind of like expect.
So we don't want to wait 10 or 20 seconds for an LLM to kind of like come back with
a simple query.
We want it much faster than that.
And it's much harder to kind of like keep that MCP server up to date with everything.
So the other answer is to actually do exactly what Andre Karpathy said.
Just provide like all of these different context files in a single like page so people can bring them down.
So what we've done is like we created an AI resources page in our documentation
where we have single page files for everything that you could possibly think of. them down. So what we've done is like we created an AI resources page in our documentation where
we have single page files for everything that you could possibly think of. We have our full
documentation. We have AVS developer documentation. We have the Eigenlayer contracts. We have the
Hello World AVS. We have our SDKs. Everything is like available in these single click files.
So what developers can do is they go to our documentation,
they bring these files locally into their IDE,
like Windsurf or Cursurf,
and then they have the most up-to-date context for their IDE.
And I think that's the way to do it right now, in my opinion.
And I think a lot of the more like senior,
like AI people that I trust and listen to,
they agree with that.
So like, I'm just kind of going by like that consensus, but that could change, I guess.
So yeah, our approach is basically provide everything that developers could possibly
need in these single page files for them to bring down.
And we, and we provide that in our documentation now.
So like, every time a file changes in our docs, this entire resources queue gets rebuilt.
So it's always like up to date.
So like the most up to date context
you could possibly want is like ready for you.
And we're not the only ones that are doing this.
Wormhole actually did this first.
And I kind of copied what Wormhole did
because I thought it was such a nice idea.
You're so nice to give credit to Wormhole in this.
But for me, credit goes to you because I'm in awe right now in terms of that's just so
bloody brilliant.
You just have a button that says train my AI.
And all it does is you click that button and then it copies either the clipboard or basically
there are other buttons saying train Gemini, train perplexity.
And it automatically goes and you can just put it into context.
And maybe it's just train by co-pilot or something and then it just copies automatically and saves the file for
you in one click.
It's like one click installations, right?
Oh my God.
Sorry, I have so many ideas.
This is brilliant.
Thank you so much.
This is a selfish answer question.
Sure.
Question answered, I think.
We are coming to very much end.
If Marv doesn't have any questions, thenader final thoughts from your side and we can end
so Marv please take over
yeah actually since we are at the end of it
I just want to get your final thoughts Nader
I'd like you to reflect on
these 10 years that we've had
and what can we talk about the next 10 years
to come is there anything that we've learned over here
that you see is going to
play a vital role in shaping
the next few years have we already found these here that you see is going to play a vital role in shaping the next few years?
Have we already found these technologies that are going to shape the future of Ethereum? And are
they already in use? So, I mean, Ethereum has been around for so long and has such a rich history
and so many contributors. I feel like I'm very late to this whole thing. Like I joined
this space four years ago or four and a half years ago and Ethereum had already been around
for five and a half years, I guess. And then on top of that, people have been thinking about these
challenges like before that. So, I mean, I feel like I'm such like a newbie here relative to a
lot of other people that it's hard for me to kind of like almost feel like I'm the type of
person that can even give any, you know, advice on like, you know, where, what we can do better.
But I mean, I think one thing that Ethereum is the foundation has done lately has been to actually
like rethink a lot of their current decisions and like, how can they improve and actually take
action on that? So the EF has done an excellent job on that.
I think if you like hear a lot of the,
like if you kind of really try to distill the value proposition
of Ethereum down to like one thing,
you could almost kind of say it's the fact that Ethereum
has been around for so long and it never goes down.
It's like the most hardened system in the world
in terms of a programming environment. There is no programming environment in the entire world or the universe that we're aware of that is as hardened as Ethereum is.
So if we kind of like work backwards from there, there's a lot of stuff we can build on that.
And, you know, I'm excited that Eigenlayer is a part of this story in the sense that we're taking that hardened environment.
We're making it more programmable.
You have roll-ups that are taking that environment and they're building different execution environments on top of that.
You have financial products like stable coins that are taking that and they're making stable currencies available to everyone in the world who is suffering from like inflation and war and all these other things so i mean i think you take that uh core value prop and you work backwards from it you
find all the things that can be built there and then the larger that garden grows the more valuable
the base layer becomes
this is This is great.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
I'm looking forward to seeing all this development.
Like, this is the beauty of the crypto space, right?
It's permissionless.
It's always growing out in every direction.
As the tools get better, as the resources to which you contribute as well to get better and more flesh out, the more we can build,
the faster we can build, and the better and more flesh out, the more we can build, the faster we can build,
and the better stuff can come out
for more people to try and use and benefit from.
So Nader, where could our listeners connect with you
and find you?
Where do you nurture your community?
Yeah, you can find me on, I would say,
mainly Farcaster, Lens, and X.
I still have a YouTube channel that I post videos sometimes,
but in terms of interactions, I would say, yeah, Twitter or X,
you could say Farcaster and Lens.
And then here's my handle is dabit3.
Amazing.
And Chima, do you have any closing words and otherwise we shall say goodbye to the good i just want to say thank you again nader this is amazing again i asked about i slipped in a
little bit of like a selfish question as we're there so i really appreciate you answering them
um meanwhile we are just for the listeners i'm trying to remind, we are, just for the listeners,
I'm trying to remind what we are trying to do.
Ethereum is turning 10.
Ethereum has given a lot of us a lot of things.
And we're just trying to give back to the community by celebrating amazing builders like Nader.
We have had amazing guests in the past as well.
And we are continuing the tradition today.
We have had people from Ethereum Foundation
and a couple other folks like that.
We have some amazing similar guests lined up in the coming ones as well.
We are trying to do two podcasts a week or not podcasts, but like sessions a week.
We are slowly, slowly releasing it.
So give us a follow.
Give us a retweet.
We would love for you to join us whenever you can.
And if Italian has given you anything in the past,
feel free to come back and share with us.
We would love to get your story here as well.
So again, thanks, everyone.
Thank you, Nader.
If anything else anyone wants to talk about,
we are easy to reach out.
Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.
Awesome. Thank you for having me.
Take care, folks.
