Bankless - 75 - The ETHCC Experience | Interviews with Ethereum Community Leaders

Starting point is 00:00:07 Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. I'm Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, standard opener to every bankless episode, but this is not a standard bankless episode. You are in France right now as we're recording this intro and you just attended ETHCC. dude, we all have FOMO. I wanted to be there. I saw some of the clips coming out of this event,

Starting point is 00:00:41 a ton of excitement, and you have promised the antidote to our FOMO. So what are we going to dive into during this podcast? Yeah, so the format for this podcast is going to be extremely different. Ryan, you actually won't be in the podcast because you're not at ECCC. You know, should have been there. But this is, for those that we're not at CC,

Starting point is 00:01:02 this is the podcast for you. So these are about roughly, 12 to 15 minute clips of just quick interviews with some of the big names that we all know and love many previous bankless podcast guests. And so I asked a lot of the familiar names, just what their ECC experience is like and also kind of what the state of crypto is for them. And so I talked to Vitalik, Stani, Kane, and IMAGuchi and so many different people from around the ecosystem and kind of ask them what it's what it's been like for you, the guest. the ETHCC attendee, what the experience is like.

Starting point is 00:01:39 What are what talks are they looking forward to? What are they up to in Paris? What after parties are they going to? So if you weren't able to attend ETHCC, at least you have this podcast. That's awesome, man. I'm super excited to listen to it. So I haven't heard any of this full disclosure to podcast listeners as we're recording this intro, but I can't wait to listen to it.

Starting point is 00:01:59 And I've got a ton of questions. But maybe the first is this. For people not familiar with ETHC, what is the ETH. what is the ETHCC event? And David, is this the first real like Ethereum physical gathering place event since COVID went down? Was there like an ETHC event like just prior to COVID as well? Am I recalling that correctly? Yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 00:02:21 ETHC number three was basically the last event before everything shut down. And unfortunately, people who went to the last ECC actually contracted COVID there. And that's where people realized a lot of the crypto communities like, oh, this COVID. is an actual thing. That was like February, March of 2020. Yes, yes. I think March of 2020. And they try and have ECC at every single, at the same time, every single year. But they delay this one to be a little bit further into the summer just because they needed, you know, more time to pass for COVID to be a thing. So everyone's still wearing masks in Europe. The vaccination, the rate of vaccinations in Europe's not as fast as it is in America. So masks, at least in America on the West Coast, like masks are kind of done. But in France and Paris,

Starting point is 00:03:04 masks are very much still a thing. And actually today, which is today's the actual second day of ECC. Tomorrow is the third of three days. Today is more restrictive, you know, rules across all of France. And so yesterday you could have gotten into ECC without a vaccination card, but today you actually had to go and show your vaccination card or a negative test to get into the event. Wow. So, yeah. So you came prepared with all of that. Like you knew all of that going in that this could be necessary. Yes, well, I also needed to bring my vaccination card to even get into the country. They wouldn't have let me into France without my vaccination card.

Starting point is 00:03:40 So that's a battle that everyone's been battling. Some people who went to the event, depending on where are they coming from, had to fight even harder battles. Kane left Australia, Kane Warwick from... Very locked down in Australia. Yes, and so he had to more or less like a petition his government to like, hey, please let me leave. No way.

Starting point is 00:04:00 Yeah. And like say like this, this me leaving is going to be, economically beneficial to Australia. That's why you should let me go. And so he's here in France. And then he also said that he's also not going to go home right afterwards. He's just going to do a little bit a tour abroad. Mariano Conti, who I've been hanging out with all week, is in that same boat. So he actually literally cannot go home because they won't let him back into Argentina. And so everyone's coming from all over the world and everyone has like kind of their own game that they're playing with regards to COVID and what it took to get here and what it's going to take to

Starting point is 00:04:36 get back home. Some people just don't have plans to go home. They're just going to keep on touring around the world. I can understand why. So is this, is ETHC really an Ethereum-centric conference? I think so, right? Because ETH in the name, ETHC, but also it seems to be more broadly D-Fi. So what's the overall tone of the thing? Is it more technology? Is it more applications like D-Fi, or is it more like, you know, base layer Ethereum stuff? Or is it all of the above. Yeah, it's specific to builders. And so all the panelists, actually, there's actually not very many panelists. I actually don't think there was a single panel. It's all one, one speaker giving one talk at a time. And you had to apply to be a speaker. But the common

Starting point is 00:05:18 denominator for all the speakers is that they are a builder. And what's unique about this particular ETC event, and I haven't been to any other ECC event, so I'm just kind of going by word of mouth here is that what the definition for builder is has really expanded in this particular ECC event. Last ETHC and ETHC is a really hard thing to say. Just say CC. I don't know. C.

Starting point is 00:05:43 The last ECE event, there wasn't really this NFT mania or blossoming ecosystem. And there's there was a lot less like non-Defi, you know, platforms, right? And so this particular ECC, there's a lot more surface area for builders to be builders. And so now when we say builders, we're not just talking about just people who can code, but we're talking about people who are content creators. Like Cooper Turley, I interviewed Cooper Turely, and he's big in the creator economy. And so I got his take about what it's like to be at ECC. And he gave his own talk.

Starting point is 00:06:17 And he doesn't code. He's part of the creator world. And he's going to be in this episode too? He's in this episode, yeah. How many people did you get in this episode, dude? Nine? Wow. Should I list them off?

Starting point is 00:06:29 You can if you can remember them. Yeah, so of course I got Vitalik. I had 15 minutes with Vitalik. First bankless podcast with Vitalik in real life. So that was pretty cool. Like I said, Cooper Turley. Also, Jerome, the guy who actually organized and organized ECC number four and also ETHCC numbers one through three. So every single one.

Starting point is 00:06:49 That was a really interesting perspective. Kane Warwick, Stani from Ave, Ia, Miyaguchi from the Eith Foundation, who speaks really, really softly. so I really had to bump up her audio. Simonea Pop and then also Jordy from Hermes Network. And then also, oh, and Joseph DeLong from Sushi. And Sushi had a really big announcement here at ECC's. So those are all the people that I interviewed and those are who are the people that you are all going to hear from. Okay, so aggregate this for us, David.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Like what's the overall feeling or vibe? I guess the last ETHC event was pre-COVID, but it was also pre-Bull run. Remember like March 2020? Ethan and Bitcoin were just starting a like minor ascent. But of course, I don't know, we were still in the 200s, 300s. And then COVID totally smashed all of that. Now here we are. I guess we've had sort of a bull run.

Starting point is 00:07:40 But we're in crab market, doldrums, Heath Price below 2K as we're recording this. But what was the overall feeling or vibe that you felt from this conference? Yeah, yeah. Yesterday, Heath really dipped below to a new low at 1750. And then today it's kind of risen up to 1900. And the only reason why I'm talking about press right now is that I have not had one price conversation at East East.

Starting point is 00:08:04 Wow. No one is talking about price at all. Right? No one cares. No one cares. And like granted, it's largely because we've still had like a big run up. You know, it's still very much higher than where we were a year ago, like you've said. But this has not been a price conversation at all.

Starting point is 00:08:22 That's including at the conference and at the like peripheral events that I've been going to as well. Prices, not a topic of conversation, not in the slightest. So what is the vibe? What is the topic of conversation? Well, there's so many different tracks. So there's like the NFT track. There's the defy track. There's the non-financial use cases of Ethereum track. The vibe, I think I would say, well, there's a ton of energy, first off. Everyone is really stoked to be there. And everyone's just really chatty. There's like many different rooms for all the different like panels and workshops and talks. And so people are going to the talks that they are like really intrinsically interested in as in like this is my like thing that I care about. So I'm going to go to

Starting point is 00:09:06 this talk. But other than that, people are out in the halls. They're they're chatting with other people. There's booths kind of spread around. And there's a big like congregation room. And so people are more just hanging out in in the in the overall community. And then also like an outside area with a nice big tree with a lot of shade. So people are sitting under the tree. People are talking, as you would expect. And the energy is absolutely fantastic. I would say the overall ambiance is that like I said, this is like a builder focused event where builder is now kind of more expansively, not just coders, but just people who create. And people, I feel like we all know that there's still so much work to be done. Like everyone has like their builder hat on. And everyone is talking.

Starting point is 00:09:53 about like so many brand new projects that I have never heard of are at this event. And you know, people are wearing T-shirts like like, you know, reppping their their project or their company and a lot of new projects and companies that I've never seen before. So I would say that the vibe is definitely like, we're all here to build and talk about building and also talk about like all the new directions that Ethereum has taken in the last year since the last ETHC event. And we all want to kind of powwow and, you know, communicate what we're all up to because

Starting point is 00:10:22 we're all builders here. Yeah, I mean, it seems like since the last ETH conference in person, there have been so many catalyzing events like, you know, NFTs really came out and were a big thing. David, there was a raise this week of OpenC, the first NFT unicorn, like $1.5 billion, billion with a B, absolutely insane success there. And now the Ethereum community has layer two actually humming. So optimism and Eutyswap just went live with the first layer two solution. of a flagship defy application on a roll-up, I should say, not the layer two solution generally, but on a roll-up, super exciting. So roll-ups are here. We also have EIP 1559. We have ETH II that's shipped with staking for over six months. That's gone very well. A lot of positive catalysts ahead. Was that some of the enthusiasm that was felt? I guess that's why the conversation was so varied. It wasn't, you know, we're trying to solve this one particular problem because a lot of the problems are being solved.

Starting point is 00:11:25 And like the Ethereum community has sort of spread out in so many different directions. There's so many different avenues that are being pursued mutually at the same time. Was the feeling, was there a feeling of kind of enthusiasm about all of this progress? Or what were some of the main, I guess, topics of conversation when you're having those conversations with people? I would actually say Ether as a topic of conversation, including like EIP-159 in the merge, that also hasn't, kind of in the same way, prices hasn't been a topic of conversation. Ether really hasn't been a topic of conversation either.

Starting point is 00:11:59 And there's definitely a layer two track. So there's a lot of layer two talks as well. But also people, I think were really, a lot of the builders in the space have kind of considered L2 as like, you know, we've checked that box actually. Like that's done now. Like it's done. Yeah. How about scalability more broadly?

Starting point is 00:12:19 Yeah. Scalability. Yes. overall. And so here's, yeah, here's where I was going. Is, like, L2's optimism, like, Hermes Network is here with ZK rollups and Hermes Network is about to implement their own version of the EVM on Hermes Network. So we've got smart contracts on ZK rollups, not just on optimistic rollups. And so while those are definitely topics of conversations, because everyone's really excited about these brand new thing that we have about I have on Ethereum, people are looking towards different directions now. So like privacy is a big

Starting point is 00:12:48 conversation and other applications of zero knowledge, zero knowledge roll-ups. I thought there was a booth with the dark forest game, which is a game based off of zero knowledge cryptography. And so people are, and so gaming is actually a really big topic of conversation as well. And so definitely a lot of talk about L2, but now people are starting to look beyond the horizons because now L2 is right in front of us. And so there's a lot of conversations about, you know, what's next, what's after we have scalability because largely scalability is a solved problem. We just kind of need the things to roll out. That's incredible. How about eth2.0? Any conversation about the merge where what's going to happen in the future of sort of the base layer protocol? Again, like not a lot of talk about

Starting point is 00:13:34 proof of stake in the merge. It was really an application layer conference, I would say, not an Ethereum protocol conference. And so it's really projects that are trying to like, you know, market themselves and also like teach the rest of the community what they're up to and what they're doing. Not not a whole lot of a protocol level stuff except for like cryptography. There's definitely a cryptography element as well. I know you went to Bitcoin Miami just a few months prior. So contrast Bitcoin Miami. Oh my gosh. ETHC. And I get that they're different conferences like ETHCC is more tied to builders, but they are both, I guess, conferences run by their respective communities. What are some of the contrast points or similarities? Oh, my gosh, there's

Starting point is 00:14:19 so much. There's so much. And granted, I only went to the Bitcoin conference for about a couple hours before I left and started doing some of the Ethereum peripheral stuff. But first off, the tickets for ECC were $300. And one of the ethos of the event when I was talking to Jerome, who organizes ECCs, it wants to be accessible and, you know, viable for a broad community of people to attend it. You know, we, in Ethereum, like to lower barriers. But also in Ethereum, we understand that there are economic costs of ECCC was roughly $400,000. And so that got funded by, you know, $300 tickets or also sponsoring the events. So that's kind of how they made that. And start contrast to, like, the 1,000 or 2000, depending on when you bought your Bitcoin Miami tickets, it costs you minimum

Starting point is 00:15:10 $1,000 and up to $2,000 if you bought them, I think, within a month of the event. And so Bitcoin 2021 was definitely like profit maximization. And ETHCC is definitely like, okay, we paid the bills. Right. And so that is a stark contrast as well. Also, with Bitcoin 2021, there were, I think, like three basically main stages that people were talking on. But with ETHCC, there's one main stage, but I think there's like eight or nine like peripheral rooms going on. And so if you, you actually might have been caught in a rock and a hard place between going to two talks that were happening at the same time. And if you wanted to attend both, you had to pick one. Because there were so many things were happening in parallel. And, you know, that was also true

Starting point is 00:15:54 at Bitcoin 2021. But there's, again, there's only three stages and three stages with like, like thousands of chairs in each one. Whereas like ECC is like, you know, eight to nine smaller rooms. Some of them have like, you know, only 50 chairs to maybe a couple hundred chairs. And then the main event had maybe a thousand chairs. Also, there were only 500 tickets sold. So, you know, you know, COVID had to bring down the total number of people at the event. Wasn't too crowded also. Bitcoin 2021 definitely over subscribed.

Starting point is 00:16:22 Way too many people were going there. And it was also in Miami, which was, you know, in Miami, people never put masks on in the first place. And France and Europe, you know, much more like conscious about COVID and careful about COVID. than I would say about Miami and Bitcoiners at large. And so masks on inside of the buildings, no matter what. And even some of the workers there would have to say, like, hey, like, can you put your mask back on, please? And so that was a little bit of the vibe there.

Starting point is 00:16:51 A bit more price talk, I assume. And way more price talk at Bitcoin. Yeah, at Bitcoin, yeah. Even though even at Bitcoin in 2021, like prices had definitely started to dip by then. and more panels at Bitcoin 2021 as well. And overall, like Bitcoin 2020, not a builder's conference because what are you building on Bitcoin, right? Like people are talking about research and development with like core fundamental

Starting point is 00:17:16 like functioning of the Ethereum blockchain, right? Whereas Bitcoin 2021, like I say, Bitcoin is not a place for builders. Therefore the builders have migrated into the social layer. So Bitcoin is building on the social layer. And that's where you saw like toxic maximalism as a conference topic for Bitcoin 2021. You did not, as you could guess, you did not see that topic at ECC. It's like celebrities, right? Like Floyd Mayweather, right?

Starting point is 00:17:46 Steeping Bitcoin into the wider mainstream culture or the big news coming out of that was El Salvador adoption, right? So it's like not actually building. It's like we already have this thing called Bitcoin. It's kind of finished. Yeah, we're doing lightning, a few other things. but now it's about seeping this into mainstream acceptance and adoption. It's got to have a completely different vibe than Ethereum at its life cycle.

Starting point is 00:18:10 Totally. The biggest celebrity there at ETHCC was Vitalik, right? Yeah. He's the only one that had a little bit of a posse. And then you kind of had the other celebrities. Wait, just Vitalik have a posse? Well, there was also, we'll get to this topic, but there was also a documentary being filmed at ECC. and so there was some people with a decent production cameras like following Vitalik around,

Starting point is 00:18:34 kind of getting some B-roll of him, just, you know, chit-chatting with the conference goers. And so like there was a little bit of like, you know, posse there. And then the other celebrity aspect was just the other builders. Like everyone knows Mariano Conti. He's like pretty tall. So he stands out and he's also public. And, you know, he writes really good smart contracts and writes them for a lot of different communities. And so everyone knows and loves Mariano.

Starting point is 00:18:58 So, you know, having him around, like everyone giving him high fives. And then, you know, you had, you had Kane and Stani. And so those were our celebrities. They're like the defy builders. And so like, I know, did anyone know David Hoffman and Bankless? The shirt really helped, you know, the shirt helped me stand out. But no, everyone, it was hard to like walk more than just like a couple hundred feet without someone saying like, hey man, I love bankless.

Starting point is 00:19:21 I love what you guys do. And I'm decently like introverted. Actually, why podcast actually works well with me. find that hard to believe i know we've never met in person david hoffman but like i find it hard to believe that you're introvert but i know you've told me that you claim that right yeah so like coming to uh an event where people already kind of like know me because i'm a YouTuber like people know my face it actually is really helpful it's like i don't actually have to like explain you don't introduce yourself you have to wear the name hello my name is david name tag yeah i mean i still introduce myself because i don't want to like assume and and be like overly cocky but like yeah it's really

Starting point is 00:19:56 helpful just like, oh yeah, like you've listened to bank lists. Like, you know, I don't have to talk too much about that. Well, it's funny because I'm sure if they've listened to bank lists, they probably listened, you and I ramble for like hours, right? So they feel like they kind of already know David Hoffman, right? So that's an advantage when you're attending a conference, I suppose. Well, tell me more about this, uh, this documentary. So is this the documentary that was recently funded on the mirror protocol made like $2 million in funding, community funding? And it's going to be, an Ethereum-specific documentary? What's the scoop here?

Starting point is 00:20:30 Yeah, so the title is Ethereum, the Infinite Garden, which is a fantastic name. And then really the word infinite talks about iterative games and this is a game theory reference where you have one-off games where you just play one match or you have games that are recursive and they're iterative.

Starting point is 00:20:50 You play match after match after match. And in one-off games, you are in competition with your opponent. But with iterative games, you need to work with your opponent to come together so you guys can survive in the long term. That's like the, that's the, and so that's the reference of the infinite garden, a garden of growth, new things being born out of this iterative. Garden of cooperation. Garden of cooperation. That's great.

Starting point is 00:21:13 That's great. Yeah, it's a great, great reference. So I love the title. And so I met with the, the producers there. And so they actually filmed me interviewing some of the, some of the key defy members. right and Vitalik included right and so I had my like dinky little like MacBook laptop like recording like kind of hacky like recording on Zoom and so I was just the only person in my one Zoom room and Zoom was recording me talking to Vitalik with my microphone and then we had like this big big

Starting point is 00:21:45 camera like walking around us while they were while they were recording us and so if you guys are listening on the podcast you can go to the YouTube video and check that out and so they recorded me talking to Battalic. They also recorded me talking to Jerome, the coordinator of ECC, and then also Ayamaiyaguchi of the EF. And so there's some bankless content being recorded, being recorded by the actual documentary.

Starting point is 00:22:11 And Ryan, when I met the director, she said, like, oh, yeah, we want to talk to you and Ryan. And so I haven't had that conversation yet, but apparently they want to talk to us. With like cameras and stuff? I would assume. I could only assume. I guess it's a documentary.

Starting point is 00:22:28 Yeah. That's crazy, man. So if they do want to film us, Ryan, here's what I think we should do. I think they should film us meeting in person for the first time. The first meeting in person. Just for the documentary. Wow, just for the documentary. You know what?

Starting point is 00:22:44 That would actually make it pretty epic and definitely a good story. We should do that if they want to. Documentary people are listening. Wait, what does this documentary come out? I mean, they're still filming it, right? So I don't know much of the agenda or itinerary. I would imagine just like Ethereum, it would change as needed. So they're kind of just, they're trying to film it.

Starting point is 00:23:05 They're just making content right now, filming content. And then they'll actually like edit it and turn it into something. But I would expect not, definitely not this year. Maybe if we're lucky in 2022, I think. But I don't know what it's like to produce a movie. I only produce YouTube videos. That's right. On Zoom, you know.

Starting point is 00:23:22 Simple recording equipment that goes behind the scenes. I guess they'll get a taste if they watch the YouTube or if they watch the documentary as to behind the scenes of how a bankless interview works. David, what else you want to tell us about ECC? Is there anything else? Yeah. So today, like I said, is day two of three days of ECC. I'm here until Sunday.

Starting point is 00:23:43 This is actually my first time in Europe, kind of a Europe noob. But tonight is... How's French? Absolutely terrible. So I... I know a half decent amount of Spanish enough to get by. And so when I came to France, I came to France. I was like, okay, I can't speak English.

Starting point is 00:24:00 They don't speak English here. What other languages do I know? I'll also start speaking Spanish. Like, oh, no, no, that also doesn't work. No. There's a decent amount of English speakers here where I've been able to get by. I actually haven't been able to do too many France things, just because I've been all Ethereum focused.

Starting point is 00:24:14 But after tomorrow, I think I might just like straight up turn off like crypto mode and go straight into like French. Totally shit. Don't check any prices. don't worry about I got everything covered in the bank with stuff. Just go enjoy Paris, my friend. Yeah, but the event that everyone is talking about is tonight, which is Rave. And I talked to Stani, it's Tani about this.

Starting point is 00:24:35 Yeah, so AVE is throwing a rave and they're calling it Rave. Wow. Yeah. And so I talked to Stani about that because I also talked to Stani about Avey Pro, which has now been rebranded to Avey Arc to something different, fun fact. This is their institutional. AVE edition, right? Something that compound did recently.

Starting point is 00:24:55 But it's cool that AVE is also throwing a rave or Rave, but they're also throwing or generating like an institutional level at defy app. And so AVE's got Avey, the app for the retails, you know, the apes like you and me. And then it's also got Avey Arc for the institutions. And now it's got Rave the rave for the party scene, right? And I would imagine that like this is not going to be the last time that Avey throws a dope party. And so they're doing it all, man. And so that I asked Stani that question is like, Avae's just growing tentacles into like all different spheres of Ethereum. And Stani's right

Starting point is 00:25:31 on board with us, man, about like, yo, this isn't just like financial applications. This is like community and culture. And one of the big takeaways I had from my conversation from Stani is he talked about how with there's so much new surface area in Ethereum lately and there's so many new tracks to talk about at ECC. We are no longer talking about like just coding or now. just finance, but also NFTs and culture and more broader applications. And so he's calling like all the attendees of ETC a society, not just like a society. A society.

Starting point is 00:26:03 That's fascinating. Or maybe a nation is a nation for this. What's so interesting about this, David, is do you remember there was a time where we could like count the number of defy applications projects on our hand, right? We knew all the founders. We knew everyone. Every time, every year that goes by, it feels like we have less and less. There's just too so much more to keep track of and now it's like it's even it's impossible to keep

Starting point is 00:26:26 track of everything in D5 plus NFTs you know plus like layer two plus all of these other areas that like identity Ethereum is investing at the same time it's almost like the internet right like the very early days of the internet there were just like a few websites you kind of knew the main ones now go try to keep track of everything that's happening on the internet in parallel That's what is happening with Ethereum. It is becoming a digital society of crypto-natives. Super cool to see that, man. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:26:56 I don't have anything else to add, Ryan. I think we should just go right into the interviews. That's great. Let's do it. Guys, we are going to cut right into these exciting interviews. I can't wait to hear them myself. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your

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Starting point is 00:29:05 favorite Defy Apps building on Arbitrum. Arbitrum has been working with over 300 teams, including Ethereum's top infrastructure projects, and we'll be opening up to all users shortly. There are so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the Great Migration to the Arbitrum Layer 2. To keep up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter at Arbitrum and join their Discord. All right, everyone, I'm here with none other than Vitalik Buteran on the second day of ETHC, the first major Ethereum event after COVID. Vitalik, what's it like to be at ETHC? It's good to see people again. I mean, well, I saw some people for the last one and a half

Starting point is 00:29:45 years, but definitely far fewer than I'm normally used to. So, yeah, and it's always just good to see the lovely and friendly Ethereum community in person. And what about the ETHC number four? Are you particularly excited about? And also how have you seen this particular Ethereum event be different than the other ones that you've been to in the past? Hmm. I guess it feels like the ecosystem is just like slowly and steadily maturing. Like I don't think there's necessarily like a sort of zero to one C change happening. But I think that's a good thing, right? Like I think the ecosystem has already for quite a while now just been on this sort of very good forward course. And the projects keep getting better, the kind of bar of stuff that people actually talk about at the presentations just keeps getting higher and things that keep getting more interesting.

Starting point is 00:30:39 So I think, you know, things in the ecosystem just keep improving. And it's as obvious here as I was hoping. There's a bunch of different tracks for ECCC, a bunch of different lines of topics. what's new that you are interested in? And are there any talks out there that you're particularly excited to listen into or any talks that you enjoyed yesterday? Let's see. There were just like a scattering of a lot of different and interesting things, right?

Starting point is 00:31:10 Like there was the presentation on Proof of Humanity. Yesterday there was Carl talking about retroactive funding with his usual lovely Carly presentation style. There was that interesting presentation earlier in the morning. like talking about cryptocurrency monetary policy and how cryptocurrency monetary policies could be used to incentivize different things. So, you know, just a lot of different discussion from different people on a lot of different topics. One thing that I've noticed is that we, in previous Ethereum events, we had, you know, topics and conversations about possible products or possible future things.

Starting point is 00:31:49 And one thing I've noticed that this particular ECC is we have people talking about their next products, not their first products. Have you noticed anything like this as well? That's definitely true. And then the other thing that's true, of course, is that people not just talking about their next products, but people talking about their existing products, right? There's just so much fun existing stuff to talk about, right? Like in all the previous events, even all the previous online events, like optimism and arbitram were future products. And now, you know, optimism and arbitram both have live versions on main net of some kind. Like, you know, swap just launched on optimism about a week ago. So, you know, the future is already here. It's just

Starting point is 00:32:30 not evenly distributed, I think, as the phrase. And yeah, I mean, I expect, you know, the future, the future that's already here to just keep on getting even a future year over time. Vitalik, Ethereum is six years old, and we've had been having six years of conferences. And I'm a big fan of Heath, Denver. Those were my first Ethereum events. And this is my first ECHC event. And the community is so vibrant. And there's so much. energy here. As one of the biggest creator of Ethereum, do you ever just sit and reflect on the magnitude of what you've created? You've made people fly around the world to come to France, to go to Denver. How do you just think about the magnitude of the thing that you've created?

Starting point is 00:33:12 Oh, I mean, the Ethereum ecosystem is definitely much bigger than I was expecting it would end up being when I first started in 2014 and 2015. So it's definitely a, yeah, very strange and very unexpected journey. But I'm happy with what came out. I think there's just so much stuff that's happening now. I mean, both at the conference and everyone who wasn't able to make it this time around. But hopefully we'll be at DefCon what it happens. It will be just so much many fascinating and interesting things, you know, not just being being talked about in the future,

Starting point is 00:33:53 but actually, yeah, starting to run. I think it's amazing. Vitalik, in the six long years that we've had Ethereum, how has the Ethereum community and the builders on Ethereum, how have they exceeded your expectations as to what you might have predicted back in 2015? Hmm. The quality of the technology

Starting point is 00:34:14 are just the kinds of things that people figured out would be possible to do with technology is super impressive, right? Like even ZK. Snarks, for example, right? like that was still, you know, we called that moon math back in the old days, right? And now I guess, well, we're, I guess on the moon and what next? I mean, well, there's Mars math, I guess, what is that? Is that like obfuscation or something? But no, moon math is just like, hey, what? You just like do some stuff with polynomials and like everyone knows what those are. And if you want scalability,

Starting point is 00:34:45 you just make proofs out of them. And that's just like one example out of many. So just the, the kinds of tools that people have come up with that we could work with is a lot, and also the kind of collaboration that led to those things being possible, right? Like ZK. Starks, like that involved a collaboration between, you know, academics, Ethereum people, other kinds of mathematicians, software developers, and all the various people at the companies that actually made it happen. a lot of kind of cross-institutional, you know, cross-country, cross-world collaboration happening. So it's like that aspect of things, I think, is really great as well.

Starting point is 00:35:32 And then obviously even beyond Zika Stark, so we've just been seeing all of the rise of these Ethereum applications that just all talk to each other. I don't think I was actually even expecting the applications talking to each other part in 2014 at all. I was just thinking about it as more like individual kind of super power, you know, super powerful I guess decentralized automaton. But no, no, the automaton isn't any one of the things. It's like all the things. What about the Ethereum community? Do you think we could really work on? Or what is what needs more attention that you think the Ethereum community should point their attention towards?

Starting point is 00:36:09 So one of the things I'm going to talk about in my presentation in a couple hours is non-financial applications. So like right now, the main non-financial application that we have, I think, think is NFTs. And like, ENS is an NFT, right? So, no, no, it's all NFTs.

Starting point is 00:36:27 Always has been. I don't know. But, like, we could really go much further, right? Like, one of the,

Starting point is 00:36:34 things that we recently released on RFP for was Ethereum-based login. So we could use an Ethereum accounts to just to log into other services. And like, if you imagine everyone having a social recovery wallet and then using the, then using that to log in to services, then you know, you have distributed identities that are both more resistant against like basically centralized takeover and control than like Twitter and Facebook accounts and at the same time, more likely to actually give you your account back

Starting point is 00:37:04 if you lose it than Twitter and Facebook accounts are. Like we could really be outcompeting centralized systems here. And then aside the decentralized social media and or at least kind of crypto-enabled social media of various forms. Like that's a lot. the sort of thing that already exists within the crypto space in various forms, right? Like, I disagree with the economics of, like, you know, the steams and the voices in some places, but like the thing you can say about them is they're not ghost towns. And I think if the Ethereum community kind of gets into trying to like build better crypto social things, then like we could actually come up with some potentially like very powerful and much better things there too. And then

Starting point is 00:37:48 retroactive public goods funding. That's also amazing. So I think there's definitely lots of exciting things that we could work on. But like the key theme is, and I've been saying this for a long time, like at some points we have to kind of really start focusing on applications. But I think this has become both more possible and more urgent. You know, the mainstream I have Sauron is on the crypto space now, right? Like this, you know, we got like Elon Musk tweeting about the, about the doggy is. You know, we've got all sorts of celebrities.

Starting point is 00:38:22 Regrettably, Kim Kardashian pushing Ethereum Max. You know, hopefully she winds up, but, like, if not, then,

Starting point is 00:38:29 I don't know, maybe we can replace Kim Kardashian somehow. The challenge, I guess, like, a lot of people really are putting a lot of hope into the crypto space to,

Starting point is 00:38:41 like, actually, yeah, walk to walk in terms of changing the world and making it more collaborative and open, and permission and like at some point we have to actually do that, right? And the good use is that like the biggest bottleneck to us doing anything, which is scalability, like that's being

Starting point is 00:38:57 solved over the course of this year. So, you know, I mean, there's a need and there's an opportunity and we should just go and do it. Battalek, you are known for putting your attention on things that the Ethereum, the rest of us kind of figure out a couple years later. And right now, as you just said, we are in our like scalability summer. We had, you know, optimism rollout. We have a, or soon to be, you know, now you can use uniswap. Soon you can use synthetics. Also, Arbitrum is now out there in the wild. But what are you paying attention to and what do you think we will be paying attention to after we're done with the whole scalability thing? What comes next in Ethereum?

Starting point is 00:39:34 Hmm. So a few things, right? So one is privacy. I think privacy still needs to be improved, right? Like the whole like the blockchain is Twitter for your bank accounts thing. Like I think it's being underrated. But like if someone wants to sort of like put the magnifying glass on that problem in an accelerationist way they could just like make a Twitter account that like tweets out whatever. Someone makes a. No, that would actually be kind of mean. But like goodness.

Starting point is 00:39:59 The point is that the people who wants to peek at things are peaking at things and more and more people are going to peak at things. And like at some point that we need to actually improve the, the privacy situation. But, you know, like Umbra exists, tornado exists, but just ways to do at least basic things on Ethereum without leaking everything to the world is something that we need to improve on. Wallet security. I keep harping on about social recovery wallets, but I think, like, didn't we do multiple podcasts about those already? But I don't know. I think, you know, we just have to like keep on, well, I guess it's not just about harping. It's about like actually

Starting point is 00:40:37 implementing and there's all these account abstraction and other challenges. But like I think social recovery while it's just need to happen because like we need new friendly security. And like 24 word scenes are not new friendly security. Like they might look they're definitely friendlier than what came before. But still like you know, what happens if your house burns down? What happens if you accidentally lose that like these things happen? So that's another thing that needs to be. I improved quite a bit. And it's not just a, like solving these problems is not just a matter of like having solutions instead of not having solutions.

Starting point is 00:41:17 It's also a matter of having decentralized solutions come fast enough that the centralized solutions don't get entrenched, right? Like that's something that I am, I definitely worry about quite a bit. What other things? Again, I think, you know, there's a long tail. Like there's just making blockchain. applications easier to use. There's like just security on the application side. There's, I guess, oh, another one is making decentralized governance that's actually good. Like,

Starting point is 00:41:52 I've been yelling against coin voting for years. And I worry that coin voting is just kind of like slowly getting adopted and slowly kind of, I guess, gaining legitimacy by continuity, even though, in my opinion, it really doesn't deserve to. But at some point, someone's going to make the vote bribing app. And at some points, like these things that looked really just nice and secure by default are just suddenly going to look much less secure. And people are going to start scrambling. So I'm just hoping that we can come up with better alternatives before then.

Starting point is 00:42:27 Vitalik, there's a growing social scene about Ethereum. And so many different people are coming to the Ethereum ecosystem because so many new things have come to Ethereum. The NFT community has exploded. The creator economy is really burgeoning. And now we're all here in person at ECC. So, you know, tell me about your thoughts and reflections about the social layer that's growing around Ethereum. Well, I think as is the meme that you've also been spreading many times, layer zero is people, right? And for our blockchain community to prosper, it needs to have a community that people want to participate in and contribute to. And I I think that's actually something that the Ethereum community has done really well.

Starting point is 00:43:07 Like the community is supportive. It's very helpful and friendly to people just trying to join and do interesting things. And I think that's something really valuable. Fatalek, we are in Paris. How long are you in Paris for? I'm in Paris for about another week. Anything exciting about being in Paris that you're looking forward to after ECC is done? What are you up to?

Starting point is 00:43:31 I don't know, I mean, it's a good city. I'm sure I'll walk around and I'll explore it. It's always good to be here. The food is good. The architecture is good. Lots of things are good. And there's a decent party scene that's going around after ECC is over. We have the Ava Rave tonight and a few other parties. Are you going to partake in the party scene? I mean, so far I've been kind of like keeping up the nine to five, as in the sweep schedule. But I mean, I don't know. We'll be. We'll, I don't know. We'll be. see. Awesome. Well, Vitalik, we've had you on the bankless podcast so many times before, but this is the first time we've been able to do this in person, and it's fantastic to be able to do this in person, and I'm really excited to go to all the other future Ethereum events. For people that have not yet been to an Ethereum event, maybe pitch to them as to why it's unique and compelling and why they might be interested to come to one in the future. Yeah, no, and it's definitely been just great

Starting point is 00:44:26 to be at the event. I think it's just amazing to see all of the people doing, building all of the lovely things that make the Ethereum ecosystem as great as it is in person and just being able to see in real time the latest stuff that everyone is working on and everyone is excited about and actually being able to just talk to all of the other people that are just enthusiasts and fans of the ecosystem. So I think going to these events once in a while is great. Well, Vitalik, thank you for coming on the show. And I hope you have a fun rest of the time at ECC. I hope you did too. Cheers. All right, Bankless Nation, I'm here with Stani, the one and only Stani.

Starting point is 00:45:11 And we are here at the second day of ETHCC. Stani, tell us what it's like to be at ECC. Amazing. I mean, this is my third year here or fort. I can't remember. But the atmosphere is always good. I mean, you see a lot of people from the Ethereum community, developers building interesting things and also like you see the whole kind of like community here

Starting point is 00:45:32 in real life and it's wonderful to see again like so many nerds in a like a physical presence so cool yeah it is a place of for nerds who are also really really social and I feel I feel like that's always kind of like the through line of Ethereum events is like nerds who want to hang out and talk nerdy stuff and so Sonny you had a talk yesterday morning can you give the people who weren't able to watch the talk a little bit of a preview about what that was about. Yeah, definitely. So the talk was more about credit delegations. So now in Decentras Finance, for example, which AVE has been building for the past couple of years and being contributing to, it's about getting liquidity into the defy space. So getting dollars into crypto dollars and yield bearing crypto

Starting point is 00:46:16 dollars. And now kind of like with this credit delegation, we're thinking how you would get this kind of like a big defy liquidity pool and use it in real economy and funding things that, uh, can be fun before, like young entrepreneurs, emerging businesses, and credit delegation allows to take under collateralized loans and build this trust network. So that's what is all about and kind of like showing how decentralization can actually help the real economy and not just the kind of like a smaller group of BFI enthusiasts. I think one of the themes that I'm seeing a lot at ECC is that we are a lot of projects

Starting point is 00:46:54 and presenters are presenting the next products rather than their first products, right? So, you know, ETHLAND turned into AVE and then AVE had its use cases built out and proven as its first products. And now your presentation was about, here's a product that I think we should do next. And that's meaningfully different for an ecosystem that needed to, that we are no longer proving out our first use cases. We are now talking about the next products that we are going to build rather than our first products. Do you have any thoughts or reflections on that? Yeah, I think what's interesting is kind of like inspire other people and developers, like what you can build. And the talk of like trade delegation was about like showing like what kind of capabilities you can build.

Starting point is 00:47:33 And Ava has reached into a point as a Genesis team that we, we're just finalizing the latest version of our protocol, the version 2.5 or 3, however they can't do it, wants to name it. And then we move to build kind of like a next layer of defy and the other protocols. but the credit delegation idea is that we want to show something that is possible and just inspire other developers to build those things on top of this functionality and show like the potential. And why we're trying to do this because we had similar kind of like experience with slash loans. So beginning of last year, we implemented the flash loan feature into the AVE protocol and it

Starting point is 00:48:11 wasn't used very much. But then when we started to actually promote the use cases, what you can actually do with flash loans, we started to see like different kinds of, usage. And now there's like a billions of worth of flash loans from other protocol during this year. So it's kind of like shows that if you can inspire developers, help them out and just kind of evangelize the functions, like people will start to build. Yeah, as it turns out, marketing does work. So we are at ETC number four, which is the first Ethereum, DeFi crypto event, other than Bitcoin 2021, to really happen after COVID. And like you said, you were also.

Starting point is 00:48:49 at ECC number three, which was the last event before COVID happened. How is ECC4 different from the previous ECCs and the other crypto events that you've been to in the past? What's new and how is the energy feel different at this particular event? I think during this ETC, definitely like the gap and COVID and everything, maybe I would say brought a lot of kind of like new audiences into the space. As if I started to scale, we saw scaling with the NFT community, creators coming into the space. Essentially, what you saw kind of like I would say new demographics entering into Web 3. And what's interesting here is that now we kind of like are expanding the community,

Starting point is 00:49:27 just not being only like nerds excited about decentralization and, you know, like coding, but actually into a community that looks like a kind of like a society. And I'm very excited about this because we get more professionals, more creators and just like more diverse ecosystem. And this is what Ava is all about. We are about inclusivity, being able to expand our technology and just empower as many kind of demographic as we can. So this has been like the progress during. And I think it's because a lot of content went to Internet.

Starting point is 00:50:01 People had more time to research and explore. This is probably the reason that we see this expansion. But we have still a lot of work to do if we want to get Webstream to mainstream. Who's talks or the speakers or panelists at ECC? really looking forward to. What really excites you about the potential talks that are coming out in the next couple days? There's quite a lot of talks. And actually, there's multiple talks at the same time and various topics. And what I usually do, I try to look at the talks afterwards, because I'm trying to be here as available as possible for the community. But one of the talks that

Starting point is 00:50:37 is always like inspiring for me is what with Alex talks. And mainly because there's always kind of like this bigger message on what we could choose. build and Vitalik usually tries to also highlight parts that are a bit of like underserved and this is something that how ABA has grown itself. We're always trying to serve like underserved markets and empower communities, whether it's asset listings or whatnot and trying to just get new demographics. This is something which is very interesting if everyone is at home and can watch later Vitalik's talks are pretty good. And of course there's a talk I'm going after this by Dean Eggerman and he's talking about memes.

Starting point is 00:51:19 So I'm very curious to see what's going on there. And memes are very important. I mean, like, you remember beginning of Awe? There was just like a lot of memes all the time. And, you know, someone said that I'm the kind of like a meme lord of Avey. Yeah, Ave is one of the projects that made it through the bear market. I think memes are the way that like people keep themselves entertained and keep themselves going through bear markets.

Starting point is 00:51:42 And so it's no surprise that like the Ethereum community is like, really meme friendly. Before, I have a few more questions, but before I get there, I want to ask about Ave Pro. We've been hearing some rumors about Ave Pro. Is there any kind of details that you could share, any release dates or what can we expect with Ave Pro? Yeah, one interesting update is AVE Pro is now AVE ARC. So we ran the product to be a bit more sexier. But one interesting part is actually the AVE ARC is about, it's the same infrastructure, smart infrastructure we have in in currently deployed in Ethereum and in Polygon and tomorrow somewhere else. The only difference is that we added a functionality called white-listers,

Starting point is 00:52:23 which allows you to deploy a completely new market, so-called private market. So you can decide what kind of liquidity you accept there. So it's not just only asset listing and onboarding, but also you can white list their liquidity sources and borrowing, who is providing liquidity, borrowing it, and who is liquidating. And this brings the use case of so-called private polls if you want to create a market where you have less assets, more assets, or you have certain kind of like additional requirements. Let's say you want to use DFI, but you might have some compliance requirements that, let's say you want to use the transparency of DFI, the ability of using self-executing smart contract instead of paper agreements and having a network of counterparties and of course like the liquidity. then you can use the RVR market and build yourself as kind of like a market.

Starting point is 00:53:13 And what we are trying to achieve in a longer term is that we get more institutional to kind of like a test on how D5 works and how they actually benefit from using decent as finance, the transparency, the efficiency of the smart contracts, and hopefully they will forget all the kind of like what's happening in traditional finance with Piper agreements and everything and move towards like permissionless decentless finance. So what sort of signals have you gotten from institutions that they are actually looking for a product like this? Or are you kind of just building it and hoping that they'll figure it out?

Starting point is 00:53:45 Yeah, this product is completely based on demand. So demand has been very, very strong before the product itself. And once we kind of like, there was more people got interested in it and there was like more publicity about the product. There's even more interest. So we have pretty much from institutional sides, there's hedge fund. markets and banks. And it's actually very amazing to see that kind of like institutions and banks that I will never expect to even look into deep fire, looking towards the ABE arc market. So that's kind of like very fascinating to see like how much it has drawn traction for them.

Starting point is 00:54:24 And on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, AVE is throwing a rave tonight. And how do you pronounce it? Are you calling it the Rave or the rave or what are we calling this? I think it's Rawe. So, yeah, Rawe. So it's kind of like Raive Ave. And the thing is, like, we planned in previous conference in PTC, Miami that we, we went to throw a rape.

Starting point is 00:54:49 And, you know, we drop coordinates and ask people to do, come there. But then, you know, I was the only person there from Ava. And of course, Ajit was there. So we were two. So we were like, okay, maybe there isn't it stuff to throw a rape party. So we're going to do it today. And the idea is just kind of like to. show that, you know, like the Ethereum community is sort of about building, like, empowering,

Starting point is 00:55:12 but also it's kind of like having fun, meeting people and building new friendships, because it's not only about like smart contract-based composability, but also like human compatibility is very important. And I mean, this is how we became friends and everyone else in the space. And this is something, this relationship will last longer. And what's funny is that some of our like transactioning and kind of like interactions happen on chain. And we can not. always go back and look like what we did. And, you know, it's interesting to see, like, how our, like, human relationships will, will be, like, empowered with blockchain. Yeah, earlier, you talked about how we are as a community turning into a society, right? And, like, not only,

Starting point is 00:55:49 we are no longer in the phase of, you know, builders only in Ethereum and DeFi. We are now also, like, the culturalists in NFTs. And now there's games. And in addition to the expansion of DeFi, I really like how you called that as society. Now we're all partying together. Stani, how late are you going to be up tonight? Well, that's a good question. You know, I guess, I mean, it's Rave, so, you know, it's very, very, like, hard to leave. And I think, I think that will be the case for everyone tomorrow. I have a very early meeting tomorrow at 8 a.m.

Starting point is 00:56:21 So it's going to be very tricky and interesting at the same time. But I definitely agree, like, this is becoming, like, a very cultural movement. And just, like, especially when my mainstream are coming more into the space, there's, they're raising questions that are very important, like ecological impact, of, let's say, proof of work and things that we need to consider over kind of like as we scale to the mainstream. So I'm very happy that this is becoming a larger culture. How many people are going to be going to this event? And what's the capacity? I think in total we are at 500. So there is kind of like a rooftop party first and then we have a basement where they actually

Starting point is 00:56:56 Rave will be. So let's see. There's like all tickets went quite quickly. I mean, they're free, of course. And we try to invite as many as we can, but we have certain limits. And yeah, I mean, I'm very excited to see like a lot of friends there. So Avey has the defy app for all the retail people like you and me. It's also building out the institution with Arvei Arc. It's also dabbling into the party scene and the social scene. Stani, do you ever just like sit back and reflect as to the magnitude of the thing that you just built? Because it's spanning off into so many.

Starting point is 00:57:30 It's got so many different tentacles like everywhere. And like everyone knows Avey. The branding is phenomenal. that you guys have your own like memes and graphics on discord. The thing is just turning into an absolute monster. Like how do you like just reflect on just the magnitude of the thing that you just built? It's hard to kind of like even, even measure it because like it's just growing and you fly small, like always still small.

Starting point is 00:57:54 I mean, if you look at something like Google with like tens of thousands of employees, you know, we're still like always 65, 60 something employees. So it's very small. But I do believe that protocol will be bigger than. businesses bigger than nations because of the advantage of the efficiency. And these protocols will become as a decentralized organizations in a powerful position to actually move, not just move culture, but empower different kinds of societies, for example. If there is a cause in some part of the world, Dallas can actually contribute funding their inflation and actually empower a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:58:29 So I guess like we're moving to a very interesting models. But as AVE, we definitely like we are a VEP3 builder company. So we build the Aver protocol, which is now the biggest DFI protocol. And as we have built it and now the community is governing it and continue to improving it. The next step is pretty much like build the next innovation and just decentralized different kinds of Web3 businesses into something that our community owned by the users. govern transparently on chain. That's the kind of like a goal that we are trying to achieve. And this goal is the same that, for example, Ethereum has and is in general in Web 3. So any last few questions for you. For people that have never been to an Ethereum or crypto event,

Starting point is 00:59:15 pitch them as to why they should consider coming in the future. Well, there might be a chance that we throw another Rabe. That's a great reason. Yeah. And I think it's just kind of like seeing actually the college that is happening, especially the bigger events are very cool. Devcorn might not happen this year. If it happens, nice. But if it doesn't next year, it's very interesting to see how diverse the communities and just see very amazing talks. And there's so many ideas flying around and so many ways to contribute. And this is an event where you can bring your family, of course, after like the COVID

Starting point is 00:59:51 and everything is over and just have a lot of fun and enjoy. And I think this is a place where kind of like ideas come together, people come together to build, innovate, get inspired and just take a lot of things back to home and spread the kind of like idea of decentralization and make, you know,

Starting point is 01:00:10 world more transparent and also finance better and other areas where Web3 isn't yet kind of like touch upon. So there is a lot of opportunities here. Sonny, we've had you on the bankless podcast, but that was over Zoom. It's fantastic to be able to do this in person with you. And if crypto, and that's the whole point of crypto, right?

Starting point is 01:00:28 Like if we don't actually meet in the physical world and take over in the physical world, we all want crypto to take over, but it actually needs to happen in the physical world. And so it's fantastic to be able to talk to you and do this face to face. And I hope to do this many more times into the future. Totally. Thanks for having me here. It's very amazing and being like this physically and actually you're real. So it's nice to see. Well, cheers, Johnny.

Starting point is 01:00:52 Thank you so much. All right, guys. I'm here with Kane Warwick of Synthetics here. on his second day of ETHCC. Cain, what's it like to be at ECC? Tell us about your experiences so far. It's very weird to be back at a conference, seeing all these people that haven't seen in like two years.

Starting point is 01:01:06 But it's been really fun. It's been good to catch up with people and the vibe is amazing. And some of the talks have been really cool as well. So how did you get out of Australia? Tell us about that process. It was not easy. I needed to prove to the government that, you know,

Starting point is 01:01:20 I was speaking here. There was economic benefit to Australia, that we had our offsite in Mexico, which is coming up in about a week. So it was a long process to get out of here and a bit expensive, but well worth it. So you're telling me that Anthony Sizzano could have made it, but he didn't. Maybe he's just not famous enough. I don't know. I can't really remember who that guy is.

Starting point is 01:01:43 I think maybe the economic benefit that he brings to Australia is just not quite above the line. So apologies, Sasano. But yeah, I think maybe next time I'll try and help him escape. He can jump into my bags or something. Can you have a talk coming up later today? For people that won't be able to watch it in person, can you kind of give them a little teaser about what it's about? Yeah, so I published a blog post a couple weeks ago

Starting point is 01:02:08 about Dow Capital Formation, so raising funds directly into a Dow, so you can start a new community, new project. So it's going to be kind of covering the highlights of that and then obviously answering some questions, you know, about specifics of how that whole process works. and yeah probably also i guess answering some questions about my return to synthetics the return to synthetics so yeah and then are there any other talks that are being giving out today from

Starting point is 01:02:35 other people that are you particularly excited about and looking forward to um yeah there's a couple things um probably i think the obviously batallics talk is going to be good um and then there's some gaming talks uh which are pretty interesting um and uh i think there is another talk uh later this afternoon there was going into like some other governance things as well. So yeah, you know, I mean, yesterday I went to maybe seven different talks and they were all amazing. So it's been a really, really good lineup. I think a lot of people have banked up a lot of content for the last two years ready to present.

Starting point is 01:03:09 So this isn't your first Ethereum event, but it's definitely the first Ethereum event since COVID, right? So what's the vibe like for you? And how is this particular ECC different than the other ECCs that you might have been to in the past or the other Ethereum or defy events that you've been to? I think the last 8th event that I went to is maybe Ed Kong in Sydney, which is pre-COVID. I may have gone to something else like late 2019. But yeah, like in 2020, obviously no events.

Starting point is 01:03:38 It's, again, like the vibe is definitely pretty excited. I think everyone's, you know, there's so much has been built over the last two years. So many things that, you know, had been promised. or, you know, people were expecting or whatever kind of come about. Obviously, some other things that are like getting really close as well, like L2 scaling, super exciting. So, yeah, I just think like overall the ecosystem is so vibrant. There's so many people building things and so many, you know, cool projects that I've run into

Starting point is 01:04:06 while I've been here. It's been amazing. So we are all here in person, which is actually relatively new for us as an ecosystem, at least for the last year or so. And, you know, there's a bunch of faces from crypto Twitter and from Discord that everyone's relatively familiar with. What's it like to be meeting all the people that you've been talking to online for the past year? I mean, it's, it's been really fun to meet people that, you know, I've obviously met before in the past and I've spent time with. But I think particularly

Starting point is 01:04:33 the people that I've never met before. It's been, you know, even more interesting, right? Like, you know, we've never met in person. It's kind of weird. One interesting component, I guess, is obviously we don't have masks on right now, but everyone's wearing masks. Right. So there's been a bunch of people I've walked up to and we're kind of like looking at each other like, do we know each other? Like, Martin from Nosis was like, is that Kane? And I was like, who? And he's like Martin and you take the mask. Oh, okay. So it's a bit of like a masquerade ball as well. Like you can't tell who's behind the mask. So yeah, it's been, but it's been fun. It's been super exciting. And then, you know, we've had a chance to hang out with people after the conference as well, which has been cool.

Starting point is 01:05:08 So when people are coming up to meet you, what are they asking you about? What are people particularly interested in asking you about synthetic stuff or anything else related to that? It's been a range of things. You know, there's been some conversations. about governance. Like even, you know, today on Twitter, we were talking about, like, representative democracy versus direct democracy. And I think, you know, that's probably the thing that, like, has always stood out for me. Like, even just then I was talking to Fernando about, like,

Starting point is 01:05:33 liquidity distribution and yield, yield farming distributions. And we were talking about the ins and outs of it. Like, it's always been very kind of technical straight to the point questions. Like, you run into someone, you start hearing a conversation, and you just go down a crazy rabbit hole, like, really quickly. And I just think from like an intellectual standpoint, it's super stimulating. It's really fun. So yeah, that's been, that hasn't changed since, you know, COVID.

Starting point is 01:05:58 So it's cool. So with all these crypto events that we have, it's not just the event, but it's also the peripheral and satellite events that happen after ECC. What are you excited about to go do outside of the conference? I mean, Rave is on tonight. And I think that's probably going to be the highlight of the conference for everyone. It's funny when I was leaving, you know, like I've got all these things on my calendar, all these different appointments.

Starting point is 01:06:23 And my wife was like, it looks like you're going to a rave. But it was funny, actually, because this is how crypto she is. She was like, what's this Rave thing? And I was like, oh, she even pronounced her, right? So, yeah, I think people are pretty excited for that. But, you know, I've just like been catching up with people going for drinks and, you know, going to a couple of events and dinners and stuff. So, yeah, just having a chance to kind of sit down with people for a couple of

Starting point is 01:06:47 hours in person and chat to them has been amazing. So how late are you going to say up tonight? I've managed to stay up until midnight. I got to like about 1230 last night. I'm still a little bit jet lagged. Hopefully I can push through to like two tonight. That's my goal. I know it closes at four, but we'll see. If I can say until two, I'll think I've done pretty well. Awesome. And what are you really just excited for with the remainder of your time in Paris? Paris, pretty cool city. I don't know if you've been around Europe a lot, but after, after ECC, what are you going to do just in the city of Paris? So I'm hanging out here for another couple of nights. There's a few people staying on, obviously at the conference and just going to catch up with them. And then I'm headed to New York

Starting point is 01:07:28 after that. So looking forward to catching up with the New York crypto scene as well. There's a bunch of people that have very hit me up. So yeah, so that's going to be really fun. So it's a bit of like a crypto world tour for me. Yeah, trying to avoid going back home as long as possible, huh? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think when, when I initially kind of proposed it, they want you to obviously stay out of the country as long as possible. They don't want you kind of coming back. But luckily, we also have our global synthetics offsite. So a bunch of the core contributors in the Western Hemisphere are getting together in Mexico. That's kind of my last stop, which is going to be even crazier because there's people

Starting point is 01:08:02 in the core contributors and in the synthetics community who I've been working closely with for like almost two years, who I've never met. So it's going to be pretty amazing. So I'm really excited for that and I'm glad that I could get out and go and join that conference. So for people that have never been to an Ethereum or DeFi event, maybe pitch to them as to what they might be interested in if they actually did decide to come out to an event in the future. I think someone posted this on Twitter, you know, Bitcoin conferences and even like general crypto conferences like consensus, you know, the talks and panels like in the nicest possible way, they're usually kind of bullshit. There's not a huge amount of value. I think with the

Starting point is 01:08:44 with Ethereum conferences, there's so many people pushing the kind of state of the art in so many different directions that it's actually hard to even kind of choose. Like there were multiple times yesterday where I had like conflicting talks that I wanted to go to. One was late and I would like scramble out to the other one. So I think like the amount of content that you can kind of consume in a two day period is pretty amazing. And, you know, obviously we all read newsletters. We all, you know, listen to podcasts and, you know, read the different blogs and everything.

Starting point is 01:09:12 but having someone on stage kind of, you know, pitch it to you directly, being able to then ask questions, they answer them. There is something about that that like, I think, you know, just kind of sticks with you a little bit more. And so making the effort like come in person and some of those just serendipitous conversations that happen are amazing as well. But like making the effort to come in person, the amount of like just brain dump that you get after like a two or three day conference is just incredible. Kane, we've had you on the bankless podcast before, but that was over Zoom. This is actually in person,

Starting point is 01:09:44 which is new for me as well. So it's fantastic to actually meet you in person and be able to actually have this conversation face to face. Yeah, thanks. It was super fun. And as I said before, I need to go and frantically claim my bank tokens because I've been holding off.

Starting point is 01:09:59 I'm procrastinating. So that's my next task after I get out of the studios, jump on my laptop and grab them. I got a few weeks left to do that. They will expire. That goes for you, the listener, as well. Yeah. Kane, thank you for coming on the show.

Starting point is 01:10:12 Amazing. Thank you so much. Great to meet you. All right, guys. I am here with Jerome D. Tche. Jerome is the lead host, the lead organizer of ECC, the event that we all find ourselves at today. Now that ECCC is actually here and we're all here, Jerome, how do you feel? Like, are you excited? What's going on in your head?

Starting point is 01:10:30 I'm mainly feeling relieved, to be honest. Like, we didn't know not if, but when we were, we would be able to host this thing. So I've been with a conference since the beginning as their president since 2016-15. And we've been hosting this conference for the fourth time. Yeah, fourth time. We did five conference because we did atcon in Paris back in 2017. But we're very happy to have this conference as a recurring events. That's always happening in Paris, always gathering everyone roughly at the same time in the year in Paris.

Starting point is 01:11:04 And getting everybody together in Paris is awesome. Like, I think it's really, really nice to see everyone coming together after like 15 months of not seeing each other. We had the privilege of being the largest conference of 2020 since we were one over the last one. And now, well, opening up the new season. Yeah, ETH CC was the last event before everything really shut down. And now it's also the first event to really kick things off as things open up again. You know, fingers crossed, it stays opened up. So we're all optimistic about that.

Starting point is 01:11:35 But as the person that has been to all four ECC events, can you kind of illustrate for people who haven't been to any of the previous ones or people like me who are, this is my first one, tell us about the trajectory of one through four. How have they changed and grown and developed over time? Yeah, so we matured at the same pace of the ecosystem, basically. So initially we wanted to host a conference that would be community-based and recurring at the same times of the year at the same place because by the time, Edcon was moving every year, DefCon was moving every year, and we just wanted to say, well, let's make it easy. Like, you don't know if you're going to be able to travel to Bogota, if you're going to be able to travel to Japan. Well, yeah, let's just

Starting point is 01:12:20 go and stay in Paris all the time. So we started with this by having it's organized by Itcham, France, the nonprofit that I mentioned before, hosting the Iatheum France website as well, translating things in French for the French-speaking community. And As a non-profits, we basically say, well, we have connections with engineering schools in France. So we just wanted to host an events there, calculate how much it would cost to do live streaming, divided by the number of people that we are thinking about having and say, well, okay, it's going to be 200 per person and we are going to have a balanced budget. So we started off in 2018 with this. And the excitement was huge because it was like the trajectory of the previous world markets.

Starting point is 01:13:01 So we were like, yeah, sure, let's go to see a conference. And everybody was so lovely, so happy, so easygoing to work with that we decided to organize it once again at the same place next year. So the first edition had about 700 people. The second edition in 2019 had about 1,000 people. And on the third edition that we did last year, we were thinking about going up to 2000. We had commitments. We had lots of speakers. And unfortunately, well, COVID hits.

Starting point is 01:13:30 So all the speakers that came from Asia couldn't come. most of the speakers that came from the US canceled, but we still were able to host the conference and have it balanced and everything running. And now we are posting the 2021 season and it's going great.

Starting point is 01:13:47 We could have probably 5,000 people at the same time, but unfortunately due to the sanitary restriction, we had to have a hot cap of 1,000. But expect us to run this conference again next year and make it super duper big again. And the core

Starting point is 01:14:03 value that we try to convey with this conference is to say, well, it should be accessible. So a ticket to ATCC is usually 300 euros or so. So it's pretty accessible for anyone, compared to most tech conference where you pay thousands to get in. And we have lots of talks next to each other, like everything happening in parallel. So we have a ratio of about one person other five that is a speaker. So you meet the doers. And that creates this kind of cool interaction, where you just bump into speakers all the time. I want to keep growing at this pace, making sure that we stay at least at the one out of six, one out of four people that are coming to speak, not coming to be on a panel and discuss

Starting point is 01:14:47 a topic without preparing anything, but I'm against a panel, but you know, it takes commitment, it takes people to demonstrate what they are going to talk about, to really make something exciting. So we are going to continue this stage. Jerome, you talked about how there were, there's just so many different, rooms and panelists and the speakers are also being in in other speakers audiences and the future audience members are then the next speakers that kind of just overall kind of reminds me of the ethereum ecosystem at large like users and investors and builders they're all the same they're all

Starting point is 01:15:20 the same cohorts or all this we're all the same people here uh tell tell me a little bit more about how ecc is like resonant with the ethos that we find in ethereum at large um welcoming open cheap to go, lots of great content. That's what we want to demonstrate. It's a conference is a non-profit, like we aim at balancing the budget, keeping the price of the ticket as low as possible. So I think we are about 300 euro

Starting point is 01:15:48 for the three days of conference. And we want this conference to have the greatest amount of content that you take out of it. So here's our we all. We try to have as many tracks in parallel that we can and make the conference long as long as we can.

Starting point is 01:16:06 So it ends up with a nice ratio of number of speakers and numbers of attendee, making it that one person at a five is actually talking about what they are building right now. So if you are new to this field, you end up in this super iterative news ecosystem where you meet all of the people that are building this. You meet rock stars that you've heard about on the internet, or you meet the builders of this, or you meet the guy that just started this new gig and want to recruit. And it's a very welcoming environment and everybody is easygoing and everyone wants to share.

Starting point is 01:16:41 I think we wouldn't have got the same crowd or the same ethos if we were an expensive conference and doing it commercially. So I'm very happy that we have been long lasting and sticking to our initial values. And over the years, we tried to get different crowds to come also because the price of fees improved and the attention from the media. changed a little bit. So for us, we wanted to continue this education purpose that we have in in our main goals at Eterham France. And it translated into opening an interim VC track. So VCs can come to HCC, but have to pay for it. Like we are not going to beg them to come and pay them the trip. Like, hey, you want to meet the community. You just attend like everyone. But you get a nurtured deal flow of companies that are coming to.

Starting point is 01:17:32 to speak on technical topics at SEC, being in front of the cordials of Ethereum, being in front of the main doers of Ethereum, well, you get something that's neutral and clean. So they are coming in huge amount of number of VCs. Like, it's just, it's just mind-blowing. We think we have 50 or 60 funds that are attending this year. And so for our ecosystem that initially financed it with ICOs and token emissions, it's a shift towards, I think, more, more resilience in their financial structure to have some VCs in their rounds. And for us as organizer of the conference,

Starting point is 01:18:16 it's becoming future people that we want to sponsor the conference or we want to come every year or we do want to do product release here. Ave has done great demo this morning. I think I missed sushi swap demo or well. Happening right now. But yeah, but anyway, yeah,

Starting point is 01:18:32 everything is happening there and it's really great to see that. Are there any panels or guests or topics or, you know, talks that you are particularly excited about, anything that comes to mind? Well, we don't do that much panels. We've prepared to have speakers that come

Starting point is 01:18:54 and talk about something that are passionate about or talk about something they've been working on for some time. In our experience with panels, that they are great for after shows and great for having many people come together around the drink and discuss the topic and then talk with the rest of the assembly, at TC, most of the speakers, if not, 100 of the speakers, are just doing a talk.

Starting point is 01:19:14 You prepare something, you present something, you give us an abstract to work on, and say, like, hey, it sounds interesting. Like, you're not the 100 person that is going to talk about the future of Defi. Yeah, well, everybody wants to talk about that. And one thing I'm super excited about is, of course, Vitalik speaking tomorrow about how to do good with Defi. Well, probably E-stake on Defi is interesting.

Starting point is 01:19:38 So this is definitely the Defi here. We have a track. The Defi track is like three or four times the size of the other track. And it's hard for us to keep it well-balanced, having great diversity in the different style of talks. And I'll go to the ZK Snock and ZK Roll-Up work. that's going to happen on Thursday. So there's a lot of people who had to stay home. Now, ECC can't host everyone, but I'm sure there's a lot of people that, you know,

Starting point is 01:20:09 maybe they were on the edge and then they decided for whatever reason to not come. Why should they have come and why should they think about coming to Ethereum events like this in the future? So being totally unbiased, this is the best Heterum conference in the world. at least last year it was one of the last, or not only, so we give that, we give that to herself. I hope to continue to be able to host it this way.

Starting point is 01:20:35 The thing is, if you go to Paris, it's easy to reach. So first thing, Paris is a capitalized easy to reach, usually from wherever you are in the world. It's a full week of events, so you get something for the trip.

Starting point is 01:20:46 The conference itself, it's not that expensive. We try to be one of the cheapest of the ecosystem, and you can have a whole week of stuff happening. So the ideal HCC on the normal sedentary situation is that we have a job fair on the Monday. You meet VCs, you meet people, you meet probably your new employer, or you meet your new colleagues. You have three to four days of conference, and then you have a hackathon.

Starting point is 01:21:08 And around that, you get parties all the time, like, or events of the time, or side things happening all the time. And if you are grounded, like, if you cannot come, you cannot travel, we are in open source promoting association. So everything is available online. All the talks are live streamed and available right away, like one hour or so after the day directly on YouTube. So check it out. If you cannot come, just be there.

Starting point is 01:21:35 Look at the conference from your remote place. And he does some telegram, he just on Twitter. We're very happy to talk with you and do apply to the speaker call that we will probably publish in November. So last question for you, Jerome. ECC is over either at the end of today, tomorrow or Thursday, what other events are you excited about that you're going towards? So, well, my main party years was 10 years ago, like when I was at school. And back then, the music crowd in Paris was the French touch crowd, you know, and the Ed bangers, death punk, justice, and so on. And the AV team managed to get

Starting point is 01:22:21 all the DJs from this label to come and play tomorrow night. So I'm very excited about that. I still have to work on my presentation for the closing talk. So I hope I don't get too excited during this party, but that's definitely something I will head to. There is a ledger closing party also that I'm really looking forward to because on the rooftop near the sand, it's going to be a beautiful setup.

Starting point is 01:22:47 Well, I think I'm mentioning only parties, but yeah, I need to take the, to take some of the pressure off after this organization. And I'm taking a small trip to family place after the conference. But yeah, so I'm mainly staying for HCC and looking at a couple of side events and being super busy finalizing the last thing that need to be finalized. But I think there is a hackathon, Biogon, this weekend that I would then, yeah, I won't be able to, But I think coin fund is running it and it's a super exciting stuff being built around an FD with them. So it should be cool. I followed that from my holiday place.

Starting point is 01:23:30 Awesome. Jerome. Well, as somebody who really thoroughly enjoys meeting real life crypto people in the real world. And I do believe that eventually crypto will come to take over the world. And so we also need to come together in the real world as a community. So thank you for just organizing ECC, you know, for the last four years and continuing to do it into the future as well. Well, definitely, thanks for coming. Those events happen because people are coming. We try to make everything easy so they can come and so far they decided to. And that's great for us.

Starting point is 01:24:01 And you can count on us to host it again next year. Imposible, nepa falsely. All right, guys, I'm here and pleased to be joined with Ayat Maya Gucci of the Ethereum Foundation. Aya, you just got done with a talk here at ECC. And for those that weren't able to attend, can you kind of give them a preview about what you talked about? I spoke about Ethereum Infinite Garden and how I see, like what's the most special about Ethereum, I think. And, and then this was about, like, it's not just about the technology. It's actually the people and how the community members play in the Infinite Garden of Ethereum,

Starting point is 01:24:44 which is that basically. this is not really about winning. This is really the game is supposed to continue. And then so you play for the purpose of continuing to play. So that was the talk. And then also I introduced one of our fellows of the Lutheran Foundation Fellowship Program. This is the first cohort. And then she explained the project that she's working on,

Starting point is 01:25:11 which is the giga to connect schools with internet. and then also provide transparency and also like all their better governance and everything with the power of Ethereum. So and then also I introduce her as one of the gardeners of the infinite garden. I love that metaphor about Ethereum as a garden. And in the Ethereum world, we're all about long-term games and iterative games. And we are finally back into the world of more Ethereum events in real life,

Starting point is 01:25:44 real events. And so now that we are all back as a community in ECC, once again, for the fourth ever ECC, what are you really excited to see, or who are you excited to see Talk? Or what are you about ECC? Are you particularly excited for? In general, just like everyone knows, I was excited to like get together with other people again. This is, it's been a while. And that also, you know, like EF organized devcon and we've been like kind of postponing it for for many times and and then we kind of appreciate ECC to organize this like like almost the first first event to happen after the COVID started to happen and then so I think the whole devcon teams here to learn like what it's like you know how people are like experiencing this after the the

Starting point is 01:26:41 time that people were waiting. So yeah, and also like the combination of their thing that I wanted to send like the message that I wanted to send, which is about the infinite garden. And also I kind of wanted to see how people are enjoying like after a while. So that was, yeah, that was that was, that was my goal to come here. And then I'm also excited about the different talks. And then there's some like they have this blockchain for good track and and there are some stuff that I didn't know. So I'm looking forward to learn about what they're doing. The Ethereum community is now six years old and you've been with it every step of the way. What are you most proud about on behalf of the community that we've got that we've achieved in the last six years?

Starting point is 01:27:31 Well, I haven't been. I've been in the crypto space for the entire time, but even before Ethereum, but I've been. So, you know, I haven't been part of the Ethereum thing like for the whole time, but I think it's, even as an external audience for like as a participant, I think it's amazing that how what this community has achieved working like in a fully decentralized way. Basically, like, EF doesn't really manage and like we coordinate. that's what we say and that fixed still like very continuous effort to make it as decentralized as possible that that technical advancements that Ethereum has made is such a hard like a problem to solve and you know like people said in the beginning oh there's no way they can do it and but we are seeing that is actually happening now especially when the proof of

Starting point is 01:28:35 stake is happening and then. So yeah, and then now this is actually involving people outside and then they can also see, oh, wow, this is actually serious and this is happening. And so it's great to, it's not like I, you know, I'm proud, but I just feel proud to be part of it. And on the other side of things, what do you think the Ethereum community and ecosystem still needs to work on? What do we have left to achieve that's still on the table? So I don't know if it's left to achieve. And there are a lot of like technical challenges that still needs to achieve. But that one of the things that I mentioned in my talk is,

Starting point is 01:29:21 yes, there's an infinite garden and there may be keep playing this game. But then like unless we're conscious, this, this uniqueness can be lost. So I think it's really important for us to remember. what's special about the Ethereum and like this vibe you feel at ECC and like you just don't feel that anywhere else. So yeah, I think it's very, very important for us to maintain so that this stays very unique and interesting and really like not about winning. You said the vibe that we feel at ECC. Can you put that into words? What is the vibe of ECC? I think there's, there's certain seriousness, like what people talk about, like some, like, you know, like geeky

Starting point is 01:30:14 conversation about technical things, of course, because it's an Ethereum event. But, but then there's, like, always down-to-earth openness that you get to come talk to anyone, and then they're open to answer to your questions, so that you don't feel that, I mean, like, we feel that a I've gone to, but we don't maybe feel at a regular business conference or so that the openness and the downturnal vibe and also like you basically, people are always ready to be open to have conversation with anyone. And I always love that vibe about any Ethereum events. That definitely resonates with me. I think the moment I realized that I wanted to be in Ethereum was at my first Ethereum event ever, East Denver,

Starting point is 01:31:03 and it was just a matter of the conversations and the people that I met at the Ethereum events. It made me realize that it's not something that I wanted to miss. I didn't really know what Ethereum was at the time. I didn't really know what I could contribute at the time, but I just knew it's something that I didn't want to, you know, read in a book later. I wanted to be a part of it as it grows.

Starting point is 01:31:24 And speaking of experiencing it, we are on camera here at Bankless, while we are also on camera for the Infinite Garden. So tell us what it's like to be a part of a story of Ethereum's first, like high production movie documentary. What's that like? Yeah. So this is very, it's certainly been very interesting because like I explained about

Starting point is 01:31:48 Infinite Garden, the idea itself, when I first talking to the team, the crew optimist team, and then, you know, they were still. learning about what this was about when I was learning about them. But we gradually felt like this, this like alignment that, okay, like I think I believe this team actually understands. And so I started to trust them. And then it's just like idea. It's not just I gave one inspiration, but then it has evolved in the way that all other community members gave them ideas. And it's still evolving, right? So we don't know because they just started and then they just finished the fund raising achieved the fundraising and so it's I like this it's almost like an experiment like this

Starting point is 01:32:36 I don't know this how normally regular documentaries made but yeah it's been like discoveries for both of us but also for them to learn about and then now they actually understand a lot of like things in the Ethereum that like it's hard to catch up with everyone or everything but but I'm very, very excited how this is going to come, that I don't even know how this is going to become, but I can see that, you know, like a positive vibe coming from people, from the community members, and the support from everyone.

Starting point is 01:33:20 And this was like I heard that, you know, even the creative production side is because this was, ways in a way that like a decentralized way. So yeah, I'm actually I didn't know when we started this how this was going to go, but I'm very, very excited how things are going and I'm just looking forward to see the unknown yet. Yeah. So my last question for you, Ayah, is, you know, we're not totally out of the woods yet with regards to COVID, but, you know, we're all here together, we're in Paris. What are you looking forward to in Paris after ECC is over? Do you have any cool Paris plans? I don't have plans yet, but I'm a huge fan of natural wine. And then Paris is

Starting point is 01:34:13 the France is the biggest place for that. I was actually just in Tokyo before coming over here. Yeah, and then I even saw an event happening tonight that people are going to talk about, the Ethereum for good and then also drinking natural wine. That kind of thing, like it's just never happens if you were not in Paris. So yeah, but I mean, if I start talking about natural wine, I talk too much. So I will stop there. Ethereum for good and natural wine. That's the place I would expect to find I am I Gucci.

Starting point is 01:34:49 So I thank you for coming on the show and telling us your ECC experience. Thank you very much. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure that you are getting the best possible price on your trade and that you aren't paying high gas costs that you could have otherwise avoided. That's why you should be using Macha. Mata routes your orders across all the various DFI exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Finance, Smart Chain,

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Starting point is 01:36:43 If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of money, capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni grant at unigrant.

Starting point is 01:37:04 And help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring bankless. All right, guys, I'm here with Cooper Turley. Cooper, how excited are you for ECC? Tell me all about it. I'm super excited this time last year. I got COVID at this very conference. So it's very great to be back wearing masks, feeling healthy, feeling good. Life is great.

Starting point is 01:37:31 Yeah, we didn't really have a mask this time last year for ECC. A little bit naive at that time. We really didn't know what's coming. I know you're excited for the resurgence of crypto events and Ethereum events. But specifically with this ECC event, what are you excited about just on this one? I'm really excited just to hear about the progress that's been made. You know, I think that a lot has happened over the last year. we've been living online.

Starting point is 01:37:54 I think this is the first time where people can come and talk about things, IRL. For me, that's where you really get a vibe of which projects have the most attention and energy just based off what people are talking about at these events. So it's great to go a little bit beyond Twitter, Discord, Telegram, you know, see people,

Starting point is 01:38:07 IRL and hear what's really exciting and worth paying attention to. Definitely one of the biggest innovations in the last year while we were all home is stuff in both DAOs and NFTs, which are largely, you know, status and social games, right? Like, DOWS are social communities and NFTs are largely things that are about, you know, at status, which is inherently a social

Starting point is 01:38:27 phenomenon. So I think it's actually really cool that a lot of these events that are coming out of COVID are Dow and NFT themes. And I know that you are particularly focused in the world of Dow's and also the creator economy, which is also a social element as well. And you just came out of your talk. So can you got for the people that are, you know, we're at home and we're able to attend ECC, can you kind of give them a little teaser of what your talk was about? Yeah, absolutely. So I gave a talk on the future of music. You know, as you said, I think this is an industry that's right for social and financial disruption. And so for me, being able to talk about, you know, how NFTs play a role in the future of

Starting point is 01:39:00 audience, how governance makes sense in a more broader context. You know, I just love this design space of every creator feeling like they're in their own startup now. And so being able to take these tools and apply them in, you know, both crypto and non-crypto-native ways. That's kind of the intersection I sit at. How do you take it down and make it understandable to someone who's never used MetaMask before? And how to use tools like POOP to basically do NFTs at IRL events, despite the fact that no one's ever set up a wall up previous to that. And so who and or what panels are you really looking forward to speaking about? And you know,

Starting point is 01:39:28 and there's always that funny little line where the audience looks towards one artist, but then that artist is their, they're met like their savant or their person that they're interested in is somebody else. So who's the person that Cooper is interested in seeing on stage talking? I mean, it's going to be a cliche answer, but I think Vitalik is going to be fantastic. You know, I love coming to see him talk IRA because you never know what he's going to talk about. It kind of always gives you something to look forward to a little bit further along. So obviously, he's not super active on Twitter. And so being able to hear about what he's been pontificating on over the past year,

Starting point is 01:40:00 we've been locked in COVID. It should be a good way to just refresh and see where things are at. Yeah, Vitalik has a habit of delivering always really hot keynotes. And I'm also excited for that one as well. For people that weren't able to attend ECC, can you kind of tell them what's the vibe like from your perspective? And how does this ECC event differ from the one last year and also other crypto events that you've been to?

Starting point is 01:40:20 Yeah. That's a great question. I think of ECC as a community conference. So obviously there's a lot of developers here. There's a lot of ecosystem partners. You know, where this differs from maybe like a devcon or an ETH global event is that this is much more community focused. You're going to see 100 talks over the course of three days. You're going to hear about a bunch of different projects. While there's a bunch of builders here, I think that this talk is about conference context, basically leave this conference feeling like you have a good understanding of where the industry is at, which projects are worth paying attention to and what people are working on. So as you go back to your digital life, you can have an understanding of like, oh, these people, are hanging out with these people, these people are partnering with these people. This event was really cool and there's a nice vibe going to it. And so I just love Ethereum conferences in general. I mean, you'll catch me at every major one this year for the next couple years of my life if I have something to say about it. And so just being here in person, it's really important to remember our roots. You know, I think that Ether went up a lot this past year. And for a lot of people, there's a, you know, maybe a feeling that you don't need to be as present at these things anymore.

Starting point is 01:41:12 But I think for me, it's now more important than ever to show face and show that regardless to what happens financially that we're all here for the same reason. One of everyone's favorite parts about these crypto events and crypto conferences is that there's a bunch of satellite or peripheral events that happen after the scene. So what are you going to after today or tomorrow or Thursday that you are really excited about? I'm really stoked about the FWB party tonight. We actually built at school to be able to do IRL RSVPs with token gated access. So basically you RSVP by holding tokens, you receive a QR code. And when you sign into the event, it still makes sure that you're holding tokens at the event.

Starting point is 01:41:45 So I'm really excited about that primitive. That's later tonight. going to be going to Fedade Dow with Uniswap and Upshot. Got some awesome DJs that are playing there. The Rave party tomorrow night with Boys Noise is going to be fantastic. And then Thursday night, the ECC closing party should be a really great time. Yeah, Cooper is the absolute embodiment of the social scene around crypto and crypto events. And so take a leaf out of Cooper's book when you come into crypto events.

Starting point is 01:42:08 Plan ahead because there's so many events that you need to go to. And if you don't plan ahead, then you're going to miss them. Cooper, thank you so much for coming and sharing us your ECC. story. Pleasure to be here, man. I look forward to seeing the recap and everyone have a fantastic week. All right, everyone, I'm here with Simona Pop from Status and Simone, I have seen just almost at every single crypto-Etherium event that I've ever been to. And so I kind of want to lead with that question. Samona, can you tell our listeners who maybe haven't been to an Ethereum or crypto event, what are they missing out on and maybe why should they go to one in the future?

Starting point is 01:42:41 Hey, hey, thanks for having me on the podcast, and great to see each other again. I feel this is such a great time to. Everybody's back together. Everybody's enjoying, obviously, Paris. Summer in Paris is wonderful. But when it comes to Ethereum events, I feel they are so many steps apart from your traditional crypto event. I feel the atmosphere, the vibe is completely different and it's an incredibly incredibly welcoming one, which is why particularly for newcomers, I feel Ethereum events are the way to

Starting point is 01:43:25 kind of try and test and kind of immerse themselves into the space because everybody's incredibly helpful, everybody's incredibly, you know, welcoming, positive and it just, that's why I guess I go to all of them, because it's such a wonderful time and just catching up with everybody. So I've seen you at East Denver, and I know you've gone to DevCon and all the other previous East CC events. And we just came out of over a year-long lockdown with COVID, and now we're finally getting into the world of events once again. So with the first ETHCC event out of COVID, what are you specifically excited for with this one particular event?

Starting point is 01:44:08 I think obviously the main piece is the everybody getting back together again, seeing each other after such a long time is a mix of, I guess, joy, a little bit of a, this is so intense after not seeing people for so long. But I think the main vibe, I would say, is so much has happened in this past year and a half, and there's so much to celebrate. going forward that I feel it's that kind of celebration that we're all back, celebration for the work that we've been doing in these stressful conditions, and also, you know, the future of France and everything that that brings. So just a great, great celebration, I would say, of Ethereum, of each other. So, yeah, very, very, I don't know, positive, joyful vibes. Shit, what I was going to ask.

Starting point is 01:45:12 Oh, yeah. So with all of the talks and panelists that are happening, what are you specifically looking for? What a panel or topic are you really excited about? And who of the panelists or the speakers, are you really excited to see talk? I think I really, oh, there's, should I start again?

Starting point is 01:45:36 I think it's really, As always with ECC, one of the main things that I love about it is it brings together so many different types of speakers, so many different topics, and it's not necessarily just the technical stuff. It blends really, really well with, you know, talks about U.S. and where that's heading and how we're improving and so on. So I think it's a real good mix of so many different topics and so many different, I guess, forecasts. for 2021 and where we're heading. Obviously from our side, we have a workshop that the WACU team from status is assuming. And it's all about, I won't say too much, but maybe an integration with Wallet Connect and so on and how that's kind of going to again enable

Starting point is 01:46:29 that better experience, that much, much, you know, I guess setting ourselves up for that mass adoption that we're all looking for. So, so many things, and also let's remember, there's so many side events. It is a busy, busy agenda packed with so much. So I think obviously if you were a magicians are having their event as well.

Starting point is 01:46:54 I think it's today, then there's the Dow event on Friday. So it's just so many things. But again, great things because there are so many interesting things happening. I definitely think that should be a big takeaway for the listeners who are looking to experience their first, you know, Ethereum event is like it's not just the conference, but it's just a litany of just satellite events that happen after the fact. And I'm also really excited for those as well. People think that these things are technical conferences about information and, you know, trends, but it's also really, really social. And I see you as like one of the social leaders in the community.

Starting point is 01:47:35 You're always at the events. You're always talking to people. And you also mentioned status. So kind of give us the update on status and also for the listeners who might not be familiar with what status is. Tell us what status is and why we need it in 2021 and maybe what the future roadmap of status looks like. Absolutely. And just circling back a little bit to that social element, I think it's such a great way to actually experience crypto and meet so many people and get, become aware of so many of the great projects that are. that are in this space and so many people who have, let's say, attended conferences or hackathons

Starting point is 01:48:13 remain in the ecosystem. I know so many people who, you know, came in 2017, 2018, and are now pretty big deals in the space. So absolutely very, very meritocracy kind of dynamic. Status-wise, it is a Web3 wallet. It is a chat, privacy-first chat, censorship-resistant, and a Web3 browse. What that means is you have all of these incredibly powerful pieces in one application. And because we're mobile first, and this is very important from my perspective, it's that accessibility for people who may not be tied to their laptops, who may not have a laptop, right? There's so much digital access that happens via your mobile phone. And I personally believe that it is incredibly, incredibly important to have a powerful piece that can. can almost be the gateway to Ethereum

Starting point is 01:49:10 because it does all of the things. And so with our work, for instance, in Latin America, we see this a lot because their mobile use is the predominant access to digital services. What we're working on, and this is something that I'm incredibly, incredibly passionate about, is a community's feature that will essentially bring all of those three pieces into powering Web3

Starting point is 01:49:37 communities and having those crypto-native flows as part of the experience. So as you'll know, right now, Web3 communities exist on Web 2 platforms, and maybe they shouldn't. So I think, again, having that stack and being able to provide that decentralized privacy first goodness with those crypto-native flows, let's just power those Web3 communities with a Web3 stack. Obviously, there's so much to consider when you are building a censorship-resistant thing and also enabling certain levels of moderation.

Starting point is 01:50:15 But we're on the right track, and hopefully we'll be able to share that with everybody very soon. And what parts about the actual status app is actually hooked into Ethereum? What parts of it actually touch the Ethereum blockchain? All of it. And so, like, if I, if I, and so it's a messaging app kind of like telegram. and so like how does that, how does my message that I send to my friend, how does that work with Ethereum? So with the messenger, obviously, you get it stored locally, right? So it is on your phone, and that's also why it's such an important piece from a privacy perspective,

Starting point is 01:50:54 because when you join the app, you will see there's no phone number, there's no email, we ask nothing about your personal details. you get assigned a random three-word name, and then you can store contacts locally so that I can know that it's you, but I'm not divulging your identity to the rest of the network. So that plays a really, really important role, not only from the privacy perspective,

Starting point is 01:51:23 but also from the storage perspective, from where the messages get stored, or how long they're stored for, that you can, we're now working on editing and deletion as well, which wasn't a feature before, but obviously we recognize that those are incredibly important pieces of the chat experience. And so with all of those combined, I think we can really achieve that level of censorship resistant protocol, but levels and tooling for moderation at community level. And that very much feels like a user's private key and public address, right?

Starting point is 01:52:02 like where you just are given the infrastructure you need without having to ask for permission, right? Right. You're just kind of using that same model, but now we are extending this into the more traditional app layer that people are used to. Simone, it's been fantastic talking to you. I have one last question. I think you are uniquely capable of answering. How would you say, how would you illustrate the trend of crypto events?

Starting point is 01:52:26 Crypto events were very different in 2013, 14, 15, and then Ethereum came along in 2015, and it had its own trend or trajectory. How would you say that they've changed into? What is the arc of these crypto events? How are they changing over time? I definitely feel there's a lot more substance that we're focusing on right now. And also, if you look at everything that is happening,

Starting point is 01:52:50 even at ECC right now, there's a lot of activations, and there's a lot of opportunities to engage with the applications. And I feel, obviously, we're now at a... at a stage where there's a lot of the applications are live, a lot of usage, and so on. So you are able to experience it in a much fuller way, I guess, versus listening to talks and, oh, it's coming.

Starting point is 01:53:16 We have it now. And there's a lot of, I mean, I used to do this a lot with, you know, my previous role, with the Bounties Network, do a lot of Bounties for engagement. and now I'm seeing people really immersing themselves in those applications, in those activations, really getting a taste for what it is like to literally use Web 3 applications now and obviously see if we need to improve the U.S., do this, do this, do this, but it is a process almost for the community by the community, right?

Starting point is 01:53:50 And we all built together, we help each other out, and I think that's also an incredibly, incredibly powerful piece about Ethereum is that we are all in it together, right? And the tide lifts all boats and all of that. So it's an incredibly, incredibly collaborative space. And I think we're going to see a lot more of those happening where we collaborate together, projects working together to create engagements. So yeah, I think a lot more immersion in the future. I think what I've already seen in that same vein is we are seeing people talk about the next products rather than the first products, Stani from Ave comes out and says, I really think credit delegation is like what's next for defy. After he's already deployed Heathland and then turned it into Ave and already done all these other

Starting point is 01:54:36 products. We are now able to talk about, like, we already have this first generation of products that were built on, what comes next? And all of a sudden we go from like an industry of speculation and, you know, what could be into what is and what is next. And I think that's really just an illustration of the maturity of this industry that we've come so far. I'd love to give your perspective on that, but also with going back to the trajectory of crypto events over time, what about attendance? Are they getting bigger and bigger? And what's attendance like over time? I think one of the main things is potentially, yes, getting bigger, but also the piece that is most exciting for me is we're seeing more and more newcomers. And this is a trend that, for instance, I've been judging Heath Global events, I think, since their inception. And it's a wonderful. kind of way of keeping track of just how many people are coming into the ecosystem.

Starting point is 01:55:33 Because, I mean, the latest one, I think we had 45% were newcomers, which is incredible. If you look back at 2019, I think we had 10%. So that, for me, is such a great signal that we are heading towards that adoption and heading towards the fact that more people are interested and they're coming to build and they're coming to, you know, connect and they're coming to actually potentially cross that bridge from Web 2 and whatever it is that they're doing now to Web 3 and, you know, the future that we're all building together. And so I think potentially getting bigger, but I would say that's not necessarily the, you know, the metric that interests me is the, what is the, what's that

Starting point is 01:56:25 audience profile? Who is coming? What are they doing? And, you know, seeing that engagement from newcomers is perfect. I think the combination of having a lot of newcomers plus a lot of products that we are already having delivered and talking about the next products, that's a very different environment from like the crypto events of 2018 and 2017 where we have a lot of newcomers, but it's all, you know, ICOs and speculation on the future. So I hope that these new products that we're all talking about on stages and all these panels make all these newcomers, you know, stickier and they stick around. And hopefully we all see them at the future crypto events as well. And Simone, I hope I see you at the future Ethereum events as well, and which I'm looking forward to

Starting point is 01:57:11 going to all of them, and I'm sure you are going to be there. So, Simone, thank you for for telling me your ECC story. Thank you so much. And yeah, let's have a great week. Cheers. Hey, guys, I'm here with Joseph DeLong of the Sushi Swap Protocol. And Joseph just had a fantastic brand new announcement that he debuted here at ECC.

Starting point is 01:57:32 And so you've probably already seen it by now because this podcast's coming out a few days later. But Joseph, for people that weren't able to watch you give your presentation, could you kind of give us the elevator pitch of what Sushi Swap just released? Sure. We released a new AM. called Trident. And this, our new AMM is actually built on top of Bentow Box, our platform that allows you to have strategies on the underlying tokens.

Starting point is 01:57:58 And so the tokens come in and applications like Kashi or Trident, which is our new AMM on top, have access to a virtual balance. So you can kind of like do your regular swaps, but underneath the actual underlying tokens are taken and exercise. into a strategy. And so you get extra yield for anything that you have deposited. So that's like you have BentoBox, which is a place where applications come and deposit assets into. Bentobox makes those assets be able to find yield in DFI. And then Bento Box credits a certain application with the amount is deposited, right? So it's kind of like a referral system in a way. It goes back to the depositor. It's more like it's more similar to the banking system. If you think of it like you go and you deposit your money in the bank, right?

Starting point is 01:58:47 And then you have kind of like this balance. They don't have a shoebox. It says David's money, right? They have kind of like one big shoebox. And then some of that money goes and gets kind of like lent or invested. It's very similar. And so your announcement actually goes even further than that. So tell us a little bit more about the further changes to the Sushi swap protocol.

Starting point is 01:59:10 So we have four new pools. First, I think everybody's anticipating that we've built a concentrated liquidity pool. And that's great for like kind of getting best prices on like blue chip assets, but it's more difficult for liquidity providers. And we've kind of like built a whole new interface to make it very simple for LPs to stake and set their ranges. The next part is hybrid pools. Our hybrid pools are a stable swap pool where you're able to swap like kind assets like USDT to USC, RenBTC to WBT, things that are similar that are going to hold a peg together. And those are permissionless and you can create any pool with assets of two going all the way up to 32 different assets. The third pool type, we brought back our constant

Starting point is 02:00:05 product pools with a 15% gas efficiency and then a 2X like capital efficiency because it's built on Bento Box. Our fourth pool are just weighted pools. So this is a turning sushi swap more from just a fork off of Uniswap B2 into something more of like a suite of services. Can you elaborate on just what do you think this means for the trend of where sushi is going? It sounds like it's doing much more than what it was originally. So we had had like our own like developments with Kashi and Bento Box and Miso, but we're still kind of like reliant. on, you know, kind of like this forked legacy code. And this kind of, I think, symbolizes like sushi growing up as a platform.

Starting point is 02:00:49 And long term, what you're going to see is you're going to see a platform where all these different services are integrated together. And it's going to be a very friendly experience for users. Very cool. And I think it's one of the greater Ethereum and DFI's favorite stories to see sushi swap start as a fork of Uniswap B2 and then completely block. into something brand new. Who do you think in the, like, what's the average defy user that's really going to use these new services that you have? Or is this more of a product for other applications?

Starting point is 02:01:22 Where do you think these new sushi swap products are really going to see traction? Well, I think we're going to see it from the, from the LPs. I think that concentrated liquidity positions have proved themselves to give like best prices and that there are going to be active LPs. So we're going to try and capture some of that market as well as like continue using there I think like each of these different pool types has like excels at a different type of a token like for instance concentrated liquidity positions are good for like defy blue chips and getting best prices. Our hybrid pools are good for like stable swaps like like kind assets like really excel on those and our constant product pools, those are kind of like long-tailed coins,

Starting point is 02:02:14 and then like our weighted pools, those are also good for like long-tail points. Yeah, so I'm definitely excited to see just what kind of the, where this changes the trajectory of where Succi Swap finds adoption. So but I would like to turn the conversation to some more broader ECC events and topics of conversation. Do you have any like topics or or panels or speakers that you are really excited to hear from coming in to ECC? Oh, there's that like a Gath day that they're going to do like a rundown of Gath. I'm definitely very interested in that. We, you know, coming from protocol background as well as like needing to build better infrastructure for sushi,

Starting point is 02:02:56 I think that like the protocol infrastructure is just not there. And we need to build something like more robust to give us like better data availability. I think. And overall, like, are you just stoked to be back at crypto conferences before ECC? Were you a big crypto conference guy? And how is this ECC a little bit different than the other conferences that you've been to? Totally. I mean, like a lot of people like dump on the conferences. I love them and I've always loved them. Right before lockdown happened, the place that I was with the ECC and it felt like like in hindsight looking back like um you know like the the empire strikes back is kind of like the end of empire strikes back and like everybody's getting COVID well actually

Starting point is 02:03:40 there's this like new like mystery virus everybody's like a little bit scared of everybody gets it at the conference the future of defy is like like people like maybe recognize that but the future of defy was uncertain at that time and now we've come you know two years and The future is very certain and we're back, you know, and kind of like the world's recovering from this. Awesome. Joseph. Well, thank you for coming in and sharing your announcement with us. I'm sure bankless listeners will go out and find more in the preceding announcements that come out of this conference.

Starting point is 02:04:15 And also, thank you for sharing your ECC experience. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. All right, guys, I'm here with Jordi by Lena. Jordi is the founder of Hermes Network, correct? Yes, that's right. And Jordy, we are here at ETHCC, which I'm really excited for. So tell me, what about ETHC are you really excited about?

Starting point is 02:04:37 Yeah, for me, ECC is a very, very special conference. Personally, it's my favorite conference for many reasons. For example, here is where we start the Item 3 project. That's the team that's doing the Hermes and so on. So we start together with my partners here. Paris is very close home. I'm from Barcelona. I'm living right now in Zook, but it's very close to Barcelona. So it's a very easy trip. And, you know, the Paris, you know, I've been this weekend, for example, in Paris. And when you walk in the streets of Paris, you start to feel very good. And, and, you know, going to Paris for this conference, at least for me, it's my feeling starts raising up and very excited. And especially after the, after the pandemic, I'm so happy that this to be the first, the first conference, the first real, you know, real conference, a different conference in place conference,

Starting point is 02:05:41 because, you know, it's this special and it's like coming back a little bit to normality. I know that we are not still like full normality, but at least we have a conference, a real conference where with the speakers, with the people, we miss, we miss it. And I'm absolutely excited about the, about this. conference and well yeah let's see how this week this week works but we are also presenting a lot of new stuff we have been working a lot during this pandemic and then it's like okay let's let's let's start over again that's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's come up again so it's very excited yeah it's also my first time uh in paris and the energy in the city is like pretty pretty nice to

Starting point is 02:06:18 feel and i also think it's pretty cool that the the crypto world the ethereum world is really one of these first industries that's really planting its flag and saying hey we're gonna do real life stuff again. So I'm also really happy that events are picking up. Is this your first EC or have you conned to the other ones before? Yeah, I think I've been in all of them since the beginning. Yeah. So it's not my first ECC for sure. So what about this particular ECC are you particularly excited for? Are there any speakers or panelists that are on the agenda that you are really interested in seeing? Yeah, I think personally I'm very interested because there are a lot of projects, especially in layer two, scalability. Of course, there are other topics, but if you ask me, myself, this is the one

Starting point is 02:07:03 that I'm more interested from. We are at this point where this technology is available, and we are engineering, we are building these scalability solutions. So I think it's going to be very interesting to listen to all the projects, how they are approaching these challenges of scaling and bringing the blockchain technology to mainstream, because this is not the only one, but probably is the most difficult piece that we are missing for bringing this technology to the mainstream. So very excited to hear what other projects are doing,

Starting point is 02:07:43 what researchers, different ideas, what's coming on, what applications they are planning and building. I think it's going to be very interesting, at least in the context of this scalability moment that we are living right now. As we've been speaking on the bankless world, we keep talking about layer two summer, layer two summer. And we have both optimism and Arbitrum launching sometime in July. We just saw Uniswap go live on optimism.

Starting point is 02:08:15 So let's actually dive into a little bit more about the Hermes Network, because that's actually something that we haven't actually talked about as much on the bankless podcast. Tell us a little bit about the Hermes Network and where it fits in the, whole L2 ecosystem? Well, Hermes Network is a layer 2 roll up. It's a ZKLL2 roll up. It's not an optimist.

Starting point is 02:08:33 It's with ZKL2RAP. Right now, Hermes is for payments. You can do any kind of payments in layer two. It scales a lot. You know, right now, each transaction can hold 2,000 transactions. And in Ethereum block, it feeds 15 transactions. So actually, you know, the last. limit would be, the actual limit would be to have 2,000 transactions per second, which is

Starting point is 02:09:00 two orders of magnitude, more of what's Ethereum right now. And this is, you know, this is main net. This is running. We launched at main net on March. The smart contract already hold at $30 million at certain point. So from the security perspective, we are, you know, we are getting this point that looks like start being safe, you know, that these things, you can never say that something is fully safe, but well, it looks good on these. We got a lot of experience in scaling because scaling is not only the like the engine, the main technology. It's also, you know, you need to hold a lot of transactions. You need to have a huge databases. You need to have explorers that holds all these information. So we got a lot of experience of information there.

Starting point is 02:09:46 We are, I would say that from the Hermes perspective, we are fully decentralized protocol. we are ramping up and we need more transactions to fully decentralize the protocol, but the protocol is designed to be decentralized, and we hope that slowly we are getting to this decentralization point. And we are also very excited because if you see the cost per transaction, you know, for the verification of the proof and so on, we are the, by far, we are the cheapest roll-up layer two solutions, ZK roll-ups layer two solution in listing cost terms.

Starting point is 02:10:28 Now, the proof is very cheap and the smart contracts is very optimized, and we are very happy to be there. And from here, we are very excited because we are not stopping. We are doing a lot of, we are growing the network. And while we are here in Paris, we will present the ZK, ZKVM, and will be the next version of Hermes, where it's going to be possible to run the smart contracts and transactions. doing we're implementing the Ethereum VM bytecode to bytecode to just implementing all the

Starting point is 02:11:01 bytecodes of Ethereum VM so you can you should be able to run any smart contract in in layer two in a roll-up and this is a project that we are working on and fully committed we have other projects that we're also building like a token swap service we are building also instant some payments, decentralized manner, kind of payment channels on top of layer two. It's going to be important also to have a finality, to have better finality times for real-time projects. We want to expand Hermes Networks to many, many communities, many countries, and start working also from the wallets and developers and different exchange and integrating it. So we have a lot of work, still a lot of work to do.

Starting point is 02:11:51 And we are fully committed to the project. And yeah, that's what we are doing. So often there's a little bit of confusion between the difference between like a side chain and an L2. So I just want to make the bankless nation completely up to speed is Hermes Network is an L2 with zero compromises to the security and decentralization that Ethereum has, which is what we like when it comes to trustless technologies. But differentiating itself from optimistic roll-up technologies like Arbitrum and Optimism, Hermes is a ZK roll-up, which has some interesting different properties that the optimistic roll-up side of things don't have. Can you kind of just illustrate and elaborate on what those are and how that kind of changes what Hermes network is? Yeah, well, a layer two solution. The idea is that there is a transaction.

Starting point is 02:12:41 So it's a layer one transaction that actually packs like many. many transactions. So you have a state and then you say, okay, I'm going to process 2,000 transactions. So you just put a new L1 transaction, say, look, the new estate, well, after processing all these transactions is this one. And then you just send out. The difference between optimism and ZK roll-up is an optimism. The coordinator just say the new estate and it can be good or wrong. is a valid or wrong. He says that the state, people, they have to check by themselves some way. And then there is a mechanism for challenging these steps.

Starting point is 02:13:23 It's like, okay, if the coordinator has an invalid state, somebody can challenge at the state. And if he's not able to prove that this is a valid state, maybe there is some collateral that the coordinator will lose or things like that. This is the idea of optimism roll-ups. Ziki roll-ups are different. So you put the new estate, but you also put a cryptographic proof that this estate is valid. So you don't have to worry about all these systems.

Starting point is 02:13:54 You see this valid. It's okay. It's validated in on chain in the same smart contract. That's it. You know, that's end of the story. You don't have to white or be sure that this coordinator did something. and then you have like to go back and you enter to this gaming, you know, game theory ideas. The problem of ZK. Roll-ups, so the ZK. Roll-ups for this is much better idea. You just put,

Starting point is 02:14:26 just put the new estate and you forget about that. The problem of the ZK. Roll-ups is that you have to compute this proof. And this proof is not easy to compute and you need a lot of computation resources to do that. And this is that technology. that actually is growing, the one that we are working. Two years ago, competing this proof was like crazy. It was almost impossible, I would say. Right now, the technology has improved a lot. Even the mathematical algorithms has been improved a lot.

Starting point is 02:14:59 So this is being every time easier. And also, for example, for the ZKBM, you know, ZKBM, building a ZKBM in optimism way, it's, I would say, it's quite easy. Okay, it's easier because you just validate the virtual machine and that's it. Building that in a ZK roll-up where it's a little bit more complex because you need to build circuits that process, programs. And this is more complex, but it's absolutely doable.

Starting point is 02:15:30 And, you know, as I told you before, in Hermes, we will present and we will explain, I think, quite deeply from the technical perspective, how we are going to build that. We are going to show the details of what are the different pieces that we put together to build this as we can roll up and we will prove that that this is absolutely possible. And not only that, we are going to prove also that we can do it without changing the EVM protocol without changing the ecosystem. And this is a little bit the new thing that we will present here in the SEC.

Starting point is 02:16:09 Fantastic. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that different construction coming out. And importantly, I think the first difference I think people will experience if they were to use Hermes Network is that those withdrawals out of the layer two doesn't have that seven-day withdrawal period. That's correct, right? Exactly, yeah. Withdrawing the, withdrawing Hermes is just a layer one transactions and you just withdraw. And for example, one of the things that's interesting in Hermes is that you have it, we call it the force withdrawal. So the coordinator can never lock up your funds.

Starting point is 02:16:48 You know, if you want to withdraw your phones, you can always have a dual-layer-one transactions and you will also recover the phones. This is we're trying to follow the principles of censorship resistance. And this is, for example, one of the properties of Firmis. And yeah, it's immediate, you know, just with a row and like a normal transaction.

Starting point is 02:17:11 It's a little bit expensive because we need to prove that money is inside. So it's a little bit expensive transaction in gas terms, but not that much. You know, it's just you can recover the funds. And yeah, that's it. And of course, it's more important that you actually have the option to do that rather than actually needing to do that. Having the option is important. Jordy, when ECC is over and you go around

Starting point is 02:17:37 touring Paris. Do you have any Paris plans? Any, sorry, any any Paris plans? Well, I've been this week, as I told you, I've been this weekend already in Paris. So after the ACC, I'm going back to Barcelona, in this case. But yeah, I enjoyed Paris during this weekend.

Starting point is 02:17:56 And as I told you, it's amazing. You know, I charge myself a lot, just being around Paris for this weekend. And, yeah, hoping. for the next year's, you know, for the next year to continue this amazing conference. Well, Jordan, thank you for stepping away for the conference for a moment and coming and talking about Hermes Network to the Bankless Nation. So, cheers. And I hope you have fun. Thank you very much.

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Bankless - 75 - The ETHCC Experience | Interviews with Ethereum Community Leaders

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