Bankless - A New Chapter for Ethereum | EFs Co-EDs Tomasz & Hsiao-Wei

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Ethereum Foundation's new Co-Executive Directors, Tomasz Stanczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang, join Bankless to outline their vision for the future of Ethereum. We explore their backgrounds, the changing leadership at EF, and the roadmap ahead—from accelerating L1 scaling and improving UX to making Ethereum more dynamic and product-focused. This episode offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Ethereum plans to stay resilient, decentralized, and mission-aligned in a fast-changing world. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 8:19 Career Journey 16:22 What Value Are They Providing 23:39 Continuing the Ethereum Legacy 31:11 Ethereum Foundation: Strengths, Gaps & Calls for Leadership 43:41 The Pectra Disaster 1:00:51 Scaling and Improving the Layer 2 1:06:55 The Concept of "Product Centric Ethereum" 1:11:49 Metrics, Accountability & Operational Leadership at Ethereum 1:14:41 What the Ethereum Foundation Isn't Responsible For 1:18:35 Clearing Up EF Misconceptions 1:26:25 Inside Ethereum’s Upgrade Cycle 1:31:17 Closing and Disclosure ------ RESOURCES Hsiao-Wei Wang https://x.com/hwwonx Tomasz K. Stańczak https://x.com/tkstanczak Ethereum Foundation https://ethereum.foundation/ ------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Ethereum researchers and developers have been debating for years now. It was going to get shipped in Pectra. In the last minute, it got removed just because people didn't think it was ready. And now there's frustration because some people have spent tens, hundreds, thousands of hours poured into this thing. And now the community changed its mind. And now it's not going in. Particularly that Pectra comment, many people actually got confused and believed that this discussion about Pecta release that is coming a 7th of May. But it's actually Fusaka.

We're talking about a thing six months from now. So it's not really a last moment removal. It's a removal of the feature that is designed to go in a fork that is not even fully scheduled. However, we want to accelerate it and say that clearly we'll deliver it for September and October. So the process is still very much about... Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. Today, on the podcast, we're exploring the frontier of Ethereum's leadership. Today on the episode, we have the two new co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation, Tamash and Shaouet.

these two new co-EFEDs represents a new chapter for Ethereum for the Ethereum Foundation and also for the Ethereum ecosystem too, I would say. This transition at the EF to new leadership has represented one shift of many that are needed for the direction of Ethereum that have left many hopeful about the future of Ethereum's progress, a future in which Ethereum has more operational leadership than it's had in the past, a future where upgrade cadences are accelerated, and one where product mindfulness is prioritized. In addition to the two new EFEDs, we Bankless Station, also get to welcome Ryan back to his first interview podcast since his three months on sabbatical, and it's a good one to return to. Welcome back, Ryan. Yeah, thanks for scheduling this at, you know, like 12 in the morning. It is currently 12.40 a.m. A hard time. Welcome back.

David and I are barely getting through this intro because we're exhausted. I think we're going to have to save the debrief for tomorrow, but I do want to talk to you about this episode because there's a lot in here. I would just say we got dates, we got timelines, we got, it seems like some operational capacity to deliver. Some CEO energy. Yeah, there's a little bit of like, I know not a founder, but like some founder energy here, okay? It's like some operational efficiency. Well, actually, Tamash is a founder.

Yeah, Tomash is a founder. Yeah, Tomash is a founder. Yeah, he's not the founder of Etherium, but he's a founder of like Nethermind and a fantastic ETH client. And I think what listeners will come away with is kind of what they hope to hear. I think so, yeah. is there is a direction that Ethereum is going in, and it's three phrases. It's scaling the Ethereum layer one. It's scaling blobs for layer twos, and it's improving user experience. It's that simple. All we have to do is that, David. And then, you know, we could celebrate,

you know, six-digit eth, you know, and higher. Yeah, so, of course, like, the Ethereum Foundation isn't the entirety of the community, but it is a central point. It is almost like a kind of a compass. It is a essential. coordinator, this whole operation. So it's pretty important to hear what they're doing. It's funny that you latched on to scaling the L1, scaling blobs, and improving UX, because right before we started this episode, I saw Haseeb tweeted out the idea that the Ethereum Pivot now has a motto. Scale the layer one, scale blobs, improve UX. So you are not the only one like latching on to these three focus points. Well, you know what this does to me? I think, I guess we're getting

debrief territory, but this is like the delivery of the United Chain. of Ethereum, right? If you can make the Ethereum federal government, the layer one, a bit stronger, and if you scale out blob space, and if you can coordinate it all, build your interstate highways and such, then you basically create what has been the promise of Ethereum, which is these united chains. Yeah, to translate Ethereum speak, improving UX is both for layer one users, but also UX for layer twos, and that comes with it interrupt standards. And so that's all package in U.S. I had Tomash, again, more debriefies type stuff. Tomash, when I asked about like Ethereum's shift towards being a product-centric ecosystem.

That's how he synthesizes these three things into one. You know, scaling the layer one, scaling blob, scaling Ux, this is Ethereum turning itself into a product that it wants to sell to the world. And in the moment of time when the world is looking at crypto and institutions are looking at crypto and they are looking to deploy, they are buying block space. They are buying blockchains as a way to like, you know, establish a settlement. banks are establishing settlements on chains, institutions are establishing settlements on chains, and Tamash is, I think, like, viewing Ethereum as a product to bring to the world. And I think

that is perhaps what the next phase of Ethereum is under the management, under the new leadership of these two new co-EDs. So let's go, let's end our rambling, our 1240 a.m. rambling and get right into the podcast. It'll be a little bit better. I promise you bank legislation. So let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Tamash and Choway. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Have you ever imagined Bitcoin and Ethereum truly working as one, unlocking the full potential of Bitcoin Defi and more? Meet Hemmy, a groundbreaking modular network designed precisely for that vision.

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a little bit better. Maybe we could take some time just to get to know you and then also introduce yourselves to the broad crypto and Ethereum community. What is your history with Ethereum? And how did you come to be in the executive director position at the EF, the co-ED position at the Ethereum Foundation? Shiawe, I'll start with you and then Tamash will go to you afterwards. Oh, hi. Thank you for having me, Debbie and Ryat. So this is my first banklist podcast and excited for it. So my background is computer science. I joined the I Therr Foundation. in 2017. At the time that I was

the core protocol researcher and working on the maybe the first version of the shot in POC, the purple concept. And so I think that I worked closely on the

Ethereum protocols. When at the time it's called the consensus protocol. It wasn't consistent layer and execution layers. But by the time we have the vacant

trend and then since that I work more closely with the consensus layer in Eastern Protocol. And I contributed to the transition to PooFoState, okay the merge, the transition. My role kind of the co-lead of Eastern Foundation consensus R&D team. And those mainly focus on the CEO,

the consensus layer specification, and also as a coordinator between the research side and the CL-wide case. Yeah, so that's my first six years or seven years. And since last year in December, I joined the Eastern Foundation leadership team. So leadership team was the core team to support the executive director. So before I joined leadership, I think the Eastern Foundation researcher has a very special role.

Rather than just working on the features, working on research, we also do care about how this feature will impact the users and what this feature can bring the values to easier. So, but ever since joining the leadership team, I started to think more and more about, yeah, to drop my researcher head and then think about the whole ecosystem. So I appreciate the experience at the research team. And that helped me to being the executive director with Tomash. Beautiful, beautiful.

Thanks for that. Thank you. Tamash, over to you. Yeah, hi, hi, everyone. Once again, thank you for inviting me to Bankless. So my story of Eterra starts, maybe like even before joining with none of mine starting a company. I think in like late 2015 or beginning of 2016,

I went to a small meetup in London, and there were people launching and installing like some early versions of Ethereum for testing. And I wonder to learn generally about crypto, about blockchain space. At that time, I was working in traditional financial finance industry and FX department of Cidema. And I remember I came back.

I started reading more and more about Ethereum. And that's probably the next year of my life was coming back home and reading a lot of articles at that time from, I think it was Coindex mostly. 2017, I decided that's like, well, this is a time to start to build something in my life in general to start a company. And in August 2017, I started an an anemite. Not a mind, as nowadays probably known for many people as a core development infrastructure company for Ethereum. And this was my seven, almost eight years, building it from 2017 all the way to now.

So starting in 2017, I had an idea at the beginning of building more like searching solutions. So it wasn't called searching, but trading on Ethereum. I wanted to trade on EtherDalta, and I thought that maybe I should learn how Ethereum works under the hood. So I started reading a yellow paper. And when I started reading yellow paper, I saw like, the best way of learning it would be to implement some details from the yellow paper. I started coding it. In Sischoff, there was the language at the time that I was using all my life. And it was fun.

Like, I couldn't stop. I said, like, oh, I implement a bit more, a bit more. So I started with UVM. Then I started thinking about how all the technology works behind the scenes and realized that I was more into the infrastructure than just writing the application. I did some trading. I started building some apps for trading on the centralized exchanges and then realized that actually there was no client in language. I continue for like the next two, three years heavily coding and slowly building the team that would help me, also building something at that time that was calling the data marketplace. Mostly imagining that sooner

later, Ethereum will transition to that space where traditional finance and generally all the large institutions will require tooling for accessing Ethereum. So accessing everything in a professional way. I was othered the impression of the book at that time, Hedge Fund Wizards, which was telling stories of how in the 70s or 60s when people were trading, there was no tooling. And you really were transitioning from trading based on the TV news to trading that is all accurate, make, and based on market data.

So I thought the same rules would be for Ethereum, but very much accelerated and building it would allow to build a company. Okay, that's a long story over time. it jumped to joining FlashBoss in 2020 and that's like accelerated my journey a lot. I was also building at that time the project called Euler, which is still like the attempt to build the block space, like gas trading solutions. And around 320, I think it's all the acceleration of Dify space and the space for building helped a lot with Nemeyn, Denemind crew to the company, like learned 300 people with a huge

internship program that brought like 600 people into interior ecosystem. And all that experience, building before. flashballs for the last few years, MEP solutions, researching and not product managing there, building the company, none of the mind that does security audits, that does infrastructure, does core development, led to the position where I've been called on the core development calls for many years. I think I felt like a candidate with a lot of experience across all the parts, right, like the building applications, building infrastructure, thinking of security of Ethereum, building up the business. And like a few months ago, I had first conversations with I,

but not about the topic of joining and the COD, but more about advising on the leadership direction. And just this year in February, I reached out and said that stuck again, and there was a bit of a story, but not sure how much details you would like to know about it. But in the end, I decided, okay, let's do it. I join, I think the H.Rium is asking for a bit of help and leaders to join, so I'll do that. That's great. Welcome, guys. I would say the Ethereum community is really excited to have you in this role.

This is the co-executive director position at the EF, a very important role in kind of coordinating everything that goes on with this world computer that we call Ethereum. Maybe we could just give some context to how we got here. So what were you brought in to do, would you say? And as you're arriving in the rule, it sounds like Shaouet, you're kind of internal to the Ethereum Foundation. So you understand kind of the work structure you've been there for a while. Tamash, you're kind of coming in outside of. of the Ethereum Foundation, which makes a nice compliment to fully understand things and get off the ground running. But some context. Why were you brought in, like, what are you here to do?

What's the role actually entail? So I think the role of Ethereum Foundation exclusive director is a job to think more than just like a company CEO, because this is a nonprofit organization. So in many terms, we have to think longer and the EF itself, what its mission is. So we recently announced several blogposts about Eastern Foundation's visions, about Eastern Foundation's management structure and about what we wanted to do. So for the vision document, I think we highlighted what Eastern Foundation's role would be. It would be like being the steward of the ecosystem, it will be like stand up when the ecosystem needs us the most at the sunfocused area.

And also we wanted to empower the ecosystem, other players to join us. So personally, I believe that, you know, for the EF itself, we need to build the principles to ourselves. And then the principle should not be shake frequently. And then it also enhanced the resilient charge to be. able to flexibly focus on the dynamic topics that we tackled every day. So this is at my high level thinking about Eastern Foundation's role. Yeah, I think we're both coming with the experience of thinking about building the entire

protocol, but also I think the roles of May and Shell are very different, but natural difference. Like if you think how we're splitting the responsibilities, as a bit like fluid, like we don't decide it day on day. It just comes naturally and we try to more like double the role of the COID and give a opportunity to work with any of us to progress things faster when I think about my story. So why would I come to Itrium Foundation? Probably to bring that energy of experience of building organization, also working in the ecosystem.

You know, my last four years, I've been nomadic, I've met a lot of builders. I've been working with lots of people that joined the internship program at that I'm mind. All of that means that it makes me probably much, much closer to people who are building Ethereum, who are like participating in all the hackathons programs also. also a judge on many hackathons. So leading the organization, it's around 250, 300 people, depending on which of the organizations

collaborate with the German Foundation count as part of this larger project. So I see myself as a energy that is coming to help with the internal structure of the foundation, of accelerating the processes that happen internally, of saying, look, there are some inefficiencies that I see with my experience in management. There's some communication problems.

And this was almost the first thing that I addressed, so even before officially starting, there are some minor things at the foundation that can help a lot. There are so many talented people at the foundation that could communicate a lot that could help to accelerate things. If you look at the team leads in the organizations, around 40 people that are leading minor teams, and giving them the space to say,

you are the real leaders of Durham Foundation. You are the real leaders that usually people are listening to. when thinking about what happens with the future of Eterium, giving them space, giving them voice, giving them priority, and also allowing them to create structures that help them to understand together where the differences in their vision of our Eterium are. So they communicate better with everyone in the ecosystem.

Furthermore, I think with my experience of building protocol, so for three years I was really hands-on coding a term client, right, not of my client. So that experience helps to maybe look at this technical aspect of what we should choose, how we should work on delivering features of what will happen with EIPs. You see there's lots of challenges. Now we have EOF, we have other things that will be coming in the future.

This will be thing. The ongoing conversations with the community now, so the last few weeks, I opened my calendars, I invited everyone to give feedback to provide feedback. Now, very much welcoming that role of us coming and joining the podcast, starting to talk about what we plan. All of this is very much the role as well, like to look at the point. in the past if the one that was not communicating frequently about the roadmaps and responding to questions from the media to the one that actually communicates a lot and tries to answer

immediately, doesn't avoid the difficult questions. And I think that both I and Vidalik seen it and were very much aware that this might be the situation when they will feel sometimes uncomfortable about how much I want to say about how we operate, how we want to operate. And I think that what they knew that it would make them sometimes uncomfortable for that vision delivery, that they really wanted it because they felt that this is what it era ecosystem is also expecting.

So that's one of my roles. And I think there's much, much more, right? Like looking at the entire ecosystem, every day there's a bit of a new challenge and prioritizing temporarily for where I really need to contribute will be very important. Yeah, Tamashi, you touched on a bunch of subjects that I think we want to spend some time and go deeper on.

Before we really kind of get granular, though I still want to say high level a little bit. Previously, IMAGuchi's era of Ethereum, I think she defined as this addition by subtraction era for Ethereum. And I think that's what really will be her legacy with the Ethereum Foundation. And she really led Ethereum down that path, where I think the addition by subtraction era for Ethereum really allowed so much of the Infinite Garden to blossom. And that was what really, you know, how Aya's legacy is really defined. And I'm wondering if you guys have put your heads together and thought about something similar for your guys's role. The blog post that you guys have recently put out just today at the time of recording

talks about the next chapter for Ethereum. And so maybe in, I don't know, how many years, four or five, six, seven years, however long you guys want to be co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation, how do you think we will remember you? What will your legacies be? How will you guys define the Ethereum Foundation and then the Ethereum ecosystem more broadly? Have you guys any thought about this at all? Tomash, we'll start with you. and then over to Showay afterwards. Sure. So I see my role as a much more dynamic one,

like to look at the foundation now for the next one, two years and to bring all the changes that are a bit more short term that show that foundation can be dynamic and can adjust based on everything that is expected from it, like that some changes may have immediate effect and be a bit less long term. They still have impact long term because whatever changes you know,

whatever helps within the first one, two year, whatever is very important for delivery now, will define the future of itterra. So I don't want to entirely distance myself or actually I want to place myself within this vision of what I and Vitalik said for foundation and we had lots of conversations about

what really the vision is within which I operate. I want to see myself more as an executive person here rather than a vision setter. I feel that my vision is there about interim of the future, but I wouldn't like to impose it on what EF wants to achieve. So this will be

melting together every now and then. maybe clashing and leading to some discussions internally, but for me that it feels kind of makes sense, but maybe doesn't express sometimes the way I see the things that measure now for delivery of the protocol are the most important. But it does describe the ecosystem a lot, of the thinking of just centralization,

of the ideas popping up, and leading to lots of smaller organizations growing over time. And I think the Nandemind was an example of it, right? So, NAMMine existed very, very independently from Hedgeron Foundation and led to pretty successful, contribution to the protocol. So I couldn't really dismiss it. I would say this is exactly the structure within which we

thrived. But also now we see Ethereum where already there's lots of organizations and we think of how to accelerate all of this. You grew the garden now you have to dream a bit and organize everything that grows there. So now coming back, like you asked about my vision.

So I want Ethereum to be seen as a global neutral layer for all the economy all the transactions happening in the work. So it's really winning by impacts to bring the values that we really care about. So when we talk about privacy, security, open source access, and as censorship or resistance of the protocol, then this matters for us. And we cannot make it happen if there is no impact of the protocol. If the protocol is not integrated in all the economy and the governance and in the AI processes of

the future, so the coordination of where it's agents or bots, however, call them virtual employees. And this will matter. And how much. having the win of the Ethereum Mainnet will matter because this will lead to L2's actually being able to benefit from that. And then L2 and L1 together will spread the values of Ethereum and distribute everything that happens internally. So this is the main driver for me. Like wean through as much impact as possible to bring the values. I think that in the future everything should work on top of Ethereum the same way as everything works on top of Internet nowadays. And to understand also that it exists within the values and vision that really matters.

mattered for many years. And I wanted to be continuation with acceleration of lots of changes. And Choway, what do you want your impact to be on the Ethereum Foundation? How would you summarize the theme of what you are trying to lay the foundation for? Right. So you mentioned that I asked legacy. I can talk something about the legacy part. I told myself that I wanted to lead with clarity and move with purpose. built with our attachment. By attachment, I mean like, so being a co-exclusive director of the Eastern Foundation,

it could be, also it's a nonprofit is a foundation. It could be seen as like a powerful seeds in the community. But I think it's not about my personal legacy. And then I have to remind me of it every time that the things I'm doing here is for what the world, we want to live in. It's like Eastern. It's a low-one permission list blockchain, but it

should be more than that. It should be more than just a product. It's also about the culture, the world that we want to live in. So I think these are the things I keep reminding of. It's not my personal project. And then speak of

the vision. So I hope Eastern to be the most decentralized, the most permission list. the most open doctrine in the world. So in order to do that, of course, we need to grow in some way. So the growth and the principles should be complemented to each other. So yeah, that's how I see we will focus on in the next few years. We have to balance both the principles and how to

grow with resilience. Yeah, the principles is something interesting because I do think that the Ethereum Foundation probably scores pretty high on principles. I think external observers would sort of say that. I'll give you a take from somebody in the community, obviously in the outside looking at the Ethereum Foundation, because it feels like the community's reaction, there's a number of things that I think the EF gets high marks on, right? So the research that the EF puts out is basically like best in class. It's like all of the other chains kind of like, you know, copy Ethereum and really admire the research work that the EF puts out. The values, you mentioned many of them. I think the EF has, like, done a fantastic job enshrining those in the protocol and really, like, living out those

values. A diverse set of stakeholders, the amount of client teams working on this all over the world is just phenomenal. It truly feels like a vibrant open source community. I think all of that gets pretty high marks from those in the Ethereum community. What feels like has been lacking, I would say this is a word that Tamash used a few times. The opposite of accelerate is it slow. Things feel like sometimes they're not moving fast enough. I mean, we always want things faster, right? But the ability to kind of accelerate timelines,

to commit to timelines, to deliver, that's something that the Ethereum community seems to want more of from the EF. Communication, that was also mentioned. Communication of the roadmap. Obviously, Vitalik did a fantastic job doing that. It needs to be simplified. as well. And simple delivery of like roadmap in milestone form, I think would go a long way. Even things like the Ethereum Twitter account, which just like recently started firing again.

I mean, that's great to see that communication. It's awesome communication from Tamash about, I believe it was just like maybe Pectra deliverables or something. And that was met with a lot of fanfare across the community because they thought it was clear communication. So communication is an area that we've needed. And this last piece is out of the ivory tower. So sometimes it feels like the EF has disconnected from the true use cases of, you know, people like me, people like David, people like in the bankless community who are using defy on a day-to-day basis. So there's some fantastic marks for some areas the EF and other areas where it feels like it's lacking. And the key piece, I guess, if I would sum it up, is kind of leadership or maybe operational leadership

in kind of a phrase here. I'm wondering if you could just react to that. What do you think? I'm giving you my take, but it's also, I feel like, informed from the take of many in the Ethereum community, both on the pros and the cons of the EF,

but does anything that I've said kind of spark anything in you? Maybe Tamash first. Sure, sure. All of it, I think. All of it. So not only you say it, but I had this, like,

probably around 200 conversations in the last two months to, Sure, I had my own feeling of what foundation was doing great, what foundation was not doing best. I had my own feeling of how I feel in the ecosystem. It was important to see, are there some things that they're repeating in my conversations now, if people tell me what the strategy of I Ethereum Foundation should be, what the future of Ethereum should be that maybe I was not paying attention to. So the first three months of this year, I spent mostly in the Bay Area.

So I still feel that I may have some bias towards, you know, like American community. but also had a lot of calls, lots of calls from around the world. And in the past, actually, I was much more present in Asia and in Europe. I would spend probably like half a year in Asia, half a year in Europe in the last four years. So, yeah, people came back and they said, look, what's the North Star? How can you move faster? How it can work with the eco-deaf, like ecosystem development, to bring the founders very quick to building applications?

How can you build the pipelines that are super efficient in keeping people in Ethereum, in helping them, mentoring them, and helping them succeed? How do you talk to Defi builders, to the leading Defi applications? How do you answer questions about the clarity of research and roadmuffs to people who want to build staking solutions and want to understand what's the future of staking in Ethereum? The communication in general, like when the tough things happen, is Ethereum feeling like, yes, like Ivory Tower, something happens there, but nobody responds, nobody tells what your plans are and you just learn from the actual events. And maybe you realize after time that this is exactly not what everyone was expecting from interior. as a network platform, a product, however you define it. So all of this.

And as for the slowness, so sometimes I imagine that people are really worried that Ethereum at some point would totally overfocus on research and long term only and stop delivering. And it wouldn't be even decision for a specification of Ethereum, but just like endless exploration of what the end state would be, what the end game would be, but not really collaborating with those researchers who want to solve the problems now and here. And I feel that it's even more important now with a huge technological shift around the AI.

You just wonder how everything is moving super much faster. And if Ethereum keeps talking about just like five to ten years, it means that it doesn't participate in this massive shift over the next one, two, three years, and doesn't adjust. Also, it doesn't adjust to maybe like competition and market changes of what people are expecting from us. So everything that people are complaining about is very much true. I mean, like, because how you understand what the truth is,

but just listening to the builders on Ethereum, to partners of the German Foundation, this will be L2s as well, like telling, look, give us clarity on what happens between L1 and L2, how we can build on the platform with thoughtful assurances from researchers and strategies at the foundation that you know exactly where it would be going in the next few years and how we can build together. So that's my role now to change everything.

Can I ask you, Tamash, really quick, before we get Shawa in here, are these problems fixable from your? perspective. Very much, very much. So first of all, I tell you, like, when coming to Eteros Foundation, I was wondering what exactly is that the big problem that you see from the outside that you hear about, and if you come inside the organization, how it manifests itself, like from what it comes, was the source of all of this. And I really was really at the beginning that some of it is just some, first of all, some small changes to communication internally. Second, some of the burden of the past of Eterium operating within very hostile regulatory environment.

And the same people that couldn't address some of those issues before, were there was that were very much open to address them directly now. And they just thought that they need some support and new faces from the outside that will be ready to execute that change within the culture. As for the, you know, like when you think about slowness, you have fantastic top organizations that are building on Ethereum that want to accelerate in health. if you talk to builders, VC,

sectic accelerator organizers, event builders around Ethereum, now on many calls they say, look at Juryum needs us. Some of them will say, I've been dormant for the last three, four years, but I'm ready to come back and help. And maybe that understanding of how many people want Ethereum to win

and think that when I'm needed, I will come, and this will make a difference as well. That just gives a lot of, like, not even a whole, but like a conviction that, okay, this will be great. This will be a great journey now. to show everyone how much of a juggernaut's but also how much of a fast-moving juggernaut it is

and all of the strength combined, of the people that our team leads and want that change. And you would see the people internally at the EF were extremely impatient for that change. They wanted to participate in it themselves. So it's not like coming to the organization that has a culture of we don't want it, we don't want to participate in it's like massive shift.

You come and all the team let's say, fantastic, fantastic that this is happening, fantastic that we have this. like OED set up and we can execute now. Like just let us do that. Andrew's also one of the first decisions. It's like, it's not exactly like me and Shiaoi to execute much of it.

It's just telling people, look, you're free to go now. Be free to go and execute what you wanted to execute. And you're empowered to act as a leader of organization. I think that we already see a bit more of like if you talk to like Asgar and Dunkrat and we say, yeah, it's okay that you have voices that are sometimes seen as controversial as like counter to some of what other people are saying, but you really have a great understanding of what we're building, but also internally you have to agree. But you will be able

to lead much of this strategy because you have this understanding of where we should go. It shouldn't be going to me and show you like coming and telling everyone what to do, but very much coming, listening and very fast bringing people like to the decision together, but in an accelerated way. So you can still have organizations very, very decentralized, but move much faster. And will people be asking about decisions here and there are saying, look, there's a stalemate, like they decide and let's move forward. And some decisions will be more public and some decisions will be still internal to the EF, but it will be happening. So at some point we're decided of how the events within Ethereum would change everything and how they should change everything and then we'll communicate over time what exactly happens and why. And sometimes requires a bit more of the introspection about the foundation.

So all of it is fixable. we can communicate very clearly. We can invite people to the table to talk about the product in the future. We can hear from defy applications, from stakers, from liquid staking protocols, from other researchers. You can invite them to tell us where we should be in two, three years. And also restructure the all core devs format to talk about itterium as a platform as a product two years from now and then talking about Ethereum as a delivery of next one, two forks and Ethereum as a delivery of the next fork of like the how to deliver the next fork the fastest. because I think this was not common in the interim

that if you had the next fork, the timeline would be accelerated, that you set the timeline and you think, can you deliver it faster? Can you remove something from this fork to say, now we wrapped up with all the most important things. Let's just ship it. All of this is fixable, and I try to not ever use the months or years

in timelines. I want to say that if something is to be addressed and we should think, can we do it tomorrow or next week, the latest, and start seeing results and then maybe adjust. So, you know, it's the first month, but I think we've done already a bit, and I hope that every week will bring some changes that you enjoy to see in the term.

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Palmash, this is the first time that you and I have spoken, the first time that we've met, it's great to meet you. From what I have heard through the grapevine from around the space is that you are a chronic workaholic, that you work very, very hard, and you have worked very, very hard at Nethermind. and Nethermind has just the might to show for it, a 300-person company, as you said, and from everyone that I've talked to who's worked to undo you and with you, just an immense respect as a leader, as an operational leader. Now, understanding that, I see you in an interesting position,

a tightrope that you have to walk, because I think a lot of people in the Ethereum community are looking for somebody exactly like you to take the reins and to provide operational excellence and clarity and leadership, on things in the Ethereum community that Ryan identified, you know, slow cadence of progress, slow updates, you know, coming to consensus faster, moving the ship faster. At the same time, Ethereum has always been built around this idea of like these decentralized

emergent ecosystem. How does the all-core devs call operate? It operates with rough consensus. And there's this, like, interesting case study happening right now with the EOF debate. What EOF is, I don't think it really matter. It's this technical thing that Ethereum researchers and developers have been debating about for years now. It was going to get shipped in Pectra. In the last minute, it got removed just because people didn't think it was ready.

And now there's frustration because some people have spent, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of hours poured into this thing. And now the community changed its mind. And now it's not going in. And so in terms of efficiency as an organization, like pretty terrible marks. Like we're just burning all of this like man hours, these labor hours for the thing that ultimately just didn't get included. And I think to quote an Ethereum core developer who tweeted out, to me, the fault is not about doing or not doing EOF. The fault is about the lack of capacity to decide. And so I think broadly, we want this leader to come in and just crack the whip and tell us

exactly how it's going to go. And at the same time, this goes against some of the values that you are supposed to uphold as a member of the Ethereum Foundation and what the Ethereum Foundation stands for in the rough consensus that represents Ethereum governance. So I see these two things in tension. Maybe you could just reflect upon that and talk about how you think about that challenge that is in front of you. Sure. On the communication side, you see how quickly the things spread that confused people when observing what happens on ACD, that particular the Pecta comments, you know, like many people actually got confused and believed that this discussion about the Pecta release that is coming a 7th of May. But it's actually Fusaka. We're talking about

the thing six months from now. So it's not really a last moment. removal. It's a removal of the feature that is designed to go in a fork that is not even fully scheduled. However, we want to accelerate it and say that clearly will deliver it for September and October. So the process is still very much about the future. And it's just that a few weeks ago we said this now we're closing the specification and planning for September, October fork. And the bigger outreach is that might be like for core developers that they said, clearly that they wanted to go in. And now we have a discussion about actually

after we decided it goes in, then the ecosystem, almost like the application builders say, look, like, we want you to prioritize other things for a few months from now. We want you to remove it because we're absolutely not convinced that this is what we need. And you have a bit of a clash of thinking how Ethereum should load a few months from now. But coming back

maybe first before we got too much in details in EOF, so you mentioned that, yeah, working a lot and being very active and energetic. So, I enjoy it a lot, right? I agree with that. I joke very often that I replaced me playing too much computer games with me doing a lot on the business side

and just feeling like it brings the same kind of emotions and excitement that's doing something every day. And I enjoy it similarly. So now the question is how not to burn yourself by feeling that you have to deliver everything, but at the same time make this energy work a bit of amplify itself. So it's not always about you coming and decide for everything and or like rarely it is about this.

You do a lot and you actually want to activate as many people in the community as possible. And you want to activate as many decision makers as possible and tell them, look, it's okay to take decisions. And you are the one who should take decision or you are the one who should accelerate the things. You are the one who shouldn't wait. And just telling people to do that

takes a lot of time, right? Because there's lots of people. So having hundreds or thousands of conversations and telling people move faster. Like you have this idea, okay, like I execute it tomorrow. No, no, don't plan it for after the release or after the meeting or after the offside. Like people in the community do it surprisingly often.

Like they wait for some major conference or some offsite or some meeting or some call to execute some actions. Well, they can do that's pretty much straightforward the very next moment. And this takes a lot of time to prepare people for this pace of thinking you never have to wait for things. You don't have to think annually or monthly about things, but you can think of it just as fast as possible. possible. So people want it. People want the leaders, yes, but the leaders show them maybe how not to wait, how to rush, how to care about things, and how to be very open about your own beliefs, about where the protocol should go, but also don't be too worried about clashing those opinions. Like that, even bringing EOF much faster to this discussion level, which he did,

this is important. So as you say, EOF is a few years in the making on various levels. I actually was in the AlcorDef calls four or five years ago when some of the first EIPs that nowadays built the EOF were discussed and were actually not delivered. Also were removed like pretty last moment, like the EAP 663 was removed after it was accepted. So the team around the EOF always was in this very difficult position of having to decide the changes that are not exactly directly related to what the application developers would build, would think of that they use it. They would know directly how to use it. And it was always, I complained that they didn't address it directly. And maybe now there's an opportunity for me to, well, for sure. There's opportunity for me to say how to finally fix that process and how to bring the application depth to the very,

early stages of planning BAP. And I think it's kind of everyone believed that this happened already, but sometimes you just don't bring the right people that you expect to be the most against what you're building because you decide to bring the people that represent the same category of, you think applications, but then you think, let's bring those who agree with what I would do, what I would say. But instead, you want to actually find people who would be the most against the feature and listen to them at the beginning and think like how, how do you build something that is so important, so much changing everything for better, that even them will be to the overreason by everyone else's opinion, that it has to go in.

And I think that's what is lacking now at the EUF, that when we have calls, there are core developers that say we want to deliver that. And from the outside of the core development teams, you have people coming to the calls and saying, we don't want it. We feel uncomfortable about this change. We think that there's much to address here, but this is not the way to go. and you don't have maybe the same amount of strong voices that come and say, we understand what's the problem here, but we really need it.

Like ship it because this will change everything for us. So we didn't have ZK teams on the call saying this has to ship because otherwise we don't see the performance improvements that we'd like to see. Maybe because they see performance improvements that are 10x somewhere else, and this is maybe a few percent or 10 or 50 percent. I'm guessing here and just speculating around, what people would say, but it feels that maybe this is that direction. Does it mean that I have to come and resolve it immediately? This is what we're doing. Over time, maybe I'll do it more and more often

if it's needed. Like if there is a stainless, I say, this is what I believe in. Now I still feel that even with all my experience around the EVM, this was not the topic that I wanted to claim too much of the clear understanding of that technical complexity. And it's just one-month-in. I cover a lot of other topics, like thinking of the organization. I want to move myself a bit closer, back closer to the technical around-map aspect of which I would feel that now this will be what people will ask for. How to deliver Fusaka the fastest, how to deliver

Gloum, how to increase the scaling of L1 by 3X, 10X. People are you asking about this, maybe a bit less about the communication, about the organization of the structure of EF, or we already addressed that, many of those components with showy. So I'll just move again, like to the place where people feel there is the most need for leaders and for guidance and for acceleration. Yeah, Shaiway, I want to get your thoughts in here.

How do you see getting involved with this coordination process that Tamash was talking about or just generally what came to mind as Tomash was speaking? Yeah. So back to the first question Ryan shared. I mean, I fully agree with Ryan about that EF has been in a comfort room for a while the first few years. And then now we are having more challenging. that we both want to grow.

So I think this co-ed, the dual executive director, plan is that it's actually show like how we wanted to increase our capacity at the Eastern Foundation. And then it's like we want to do more about different areas and we want to move faster. So like it's interesting from Tomas interview you can see like, so I want to do like five times faster. But he too much may want to do 10 times faster. So I think that's great. I think that's great that he pushed the things to move faster.

And at the same time, we can give each other the context about what's the meaningful things about the first decision that, what the impact of it. So this conversation happened in our eternal chat every day. So I think my point is that shifting focused. doesn't necessarily mean it's like we want to do less in another part. I think it's important to do things more effectively. So it's that if we can increase the efficiency, then naturally we could be able to do more things in this new area

and then in the place that we didn't touch enough previously. So in the past few months, I think it's even if since 2025 early this year, like the EF itself, we had identified like application is important and then the communication is important. And then we had some early initiatives to address these problems. But maybe in this leadership transition, then we started to be able to do more actions on it. So like, I know when started to know, cannot start it, but like we know users wanted like better UX, that they need faster confirmation time

and they want the cheaper and the greatest throughput in Eastern Area 1. So these things we identified and then now is to think how we address them. And about isolation. Like, yeah, first is indeed we are bringing some culture change at the Eastern Foundation. And it's good that the changes happen

And it's likely to be somewhat top-down in the foundation itself. And we also hope that these new vibes, the new, like, helping the community to be more focused together. It's not just a system foundation, but also the partners, the builders, the other projects, companies that we could learn, like, okay, this is the Ethereum in 2025. Like, we want to move faster. And then with this kind of spirit, hopefully we could isolate insurance developments. And it's not saying we shift to something else totally. I think research is still important. Research is still like a heart of technical projects.

But we wanted to do more effectively. So let's talk about doing more effectively. And the next 12 months, in the blog post you two co-authored, there were three objectives. I like the number three. I mean, it's very easy to remember, very simple. So you've got number one, scaling Ethereum L1. It's the layer one, somewhat new. That's the first objective. Number two, scaling blobs. That's, of course, the block space, the express lane for layer two's. And the number three, improving user experience. I think this maybe addresses some of the interoperability problems across all of the layer two chains, but probably some other UX issues as well.

So we've got three things there, scaling Ethereuml1, scaling blobs, and improving UX. How did you come up with these objectives? Why these? How are you going to achieve them? When are we going to see them? Tamash, what's your take on this? Yeah, sure. I think the first time they were expressed that clearly when Josh Rudolph posted the tweet about it.

And I thought, like, look, this expresses. the three most important things that I've heard from multiple conversations. And let's start repeating it because it really brings clarity. And also, people reacted very positively to it, and both internally and externally, as much as we can read. Like everything, you always mean some voices, but it can feel the vibe of change where people want to go. So, first of all, the Ethereum Mainnet was, like,

one requirement for many people to say, look, show that you are strong, that you want Ethereum to win, that you think that to determine it will always be outclassing competitors on the quality of research of the strength of the protocol, decentralization of the protocol, security of the protocol, but speed as well, like the throughput. Because over time, like every layer one chain that focuses on speed, you can have some technology changes that will bring them to the same level.

Whatever happens, whenever someone just feels like they're ahead a bit for a while, you can make changes to the protocol and say, that's actually the same speed within a single chain. And then we say, but how do we address questions about L2-L-1 relationship? And just as mentioned, scale blobs really is an expression of the general support for the L2 ecosystem, but also expressing it frees connection with L1. So you want to say, we want to support L2's. This is a massive success of the Ethereum that L2s are scaling and bringing users.

And how do you bind it to layer 1 to it, to Eteroomene? you say to remain it will deliver the anchoring, the layer from which the L2s will borrow security, will borrow all the values, I'll say, only for the strength of the layer one, they can bring to the users what they will expect, the levels of safety, the level of decentralization. So I wanted to strengthen that feel, and also now for the UX, you say you address the concerns about L2, Ceyn-1, and didn't feel like one chain for a long time, and people started feeling an easy, about it. Also, there were further questions about long-term waterity, always the challenges of the ease of use of security of managing your assets. Also, all the novelties. I think UX is there

to express all of this. We care about the interrupt improvements over the next few months, and we'll put a lot of initiatives and clear them up around it. And it's a difficult topic. Like, there's lots of technical questions, lots of coordination questions, lots of tough decisions to take as well, because when you want everything to feel much closer, then maybe at some point you have to clearly define where the boundaries are when something doesn't really feed the set of tooling that you want to prefer. So UX comes with decisions of execution with roadmap, with technical challenges that will resolve. UX also means security in general, right? So user experience, if they feel comfortable using chain, then the experience is better. Within the term already is a extremely

secure chain with all the design that is behind it, but also generally for blockchain, the risks of hacks, especially if you hold billions or over time, maybe trillions of dollars of assets in a fund, how you address it on the security side. So this will be important as well in the UX. The latency of blocks, like the pre-confirmations, the feeling around trading within hundreds of milliseconds, you want to improve it, you want to deliver all of this, either for one directly or for the fact that you prepare all the changes that will be the current developed by L2 studio users. All of this is part of UX.

And I feel the devX to some extent is also UX in the space of blockchain. You want builders to really feel that this is the platform. They are users of the platform, the users of the network. So they want to have great experience building on the platform. They want to have great tooling. They want to have clarity on the roadmaps.

No surprises. They want to have support. They want to have support from the ecosystem. Do you want to have the feeling that when building on Ethereum, they'll be successful and they'll be impactful. So all of this can be expressed in these three points. There'll be more about the internal structure organization, the addressing problems,

but these are all just to support those three goals for the next year. Part of the U.S. part of this, I think, draws attention to something that I've just seen as a theme coming out of the Ethereum community is a request towards increasing the value of product in the Ethereum ecosystem. And so like some are calling this like a product-centric Ethereum. And I think maybe product is like maybe the opposite side of the spectrum of research, like research being one of the things that Ethereum and the EF has scored so well on.

And maybe product is something that Ethereum and the EF has not scored so well on. So maybe Tamash, maybe you could just lean into that concept of like a product-centric Ethereum. And is this part of improving U.S.? Is that part of that same effort? or is this in addition to that? What's your reaction to that? Probably the product-based approach when thinking about Ethereum is

what makes everything else happen. These three objectives, directions, they'll happen if you have the way of thinking about Ethereum as a product to some extent. What it means is that there are people that look at Ethereum and think why we'd make changes, why we deliver new features,

what people are asking for, who are the people who will use the Ethereum and protocol. So you make sure that everything that you do, is related to some goals that will make an impact on some people, and that while you're doing that, you talk to those people about the changes and you involve them in the process of co-designing.

At the same time, also, with the product, you think of quality of the product and the core values that are long-term, so you make sure that you don't over-adjust to all of those opinions. But every single of those things has to happen. So this all would make a term more like a product on what it means specifically. So if you think about EOF, sure, you think about the security, scalability of the protocol, the long-term thinking of improving the network. But if you come back to the beginning, how did you start this process?

Like, who did you talk to? Who should be involved? Who do you go back to asking about, are we going still in the right direction? Every month or every quarter, you say, is it still looking like what you're expecting? This will be the changes. This will how it will affect you? Are you aware of this? What do you like to raise some concerns?

what do you think of the quality of how we're executing so far? Can you look at the progress? Is it the quality that matches the quality in publicarium? And for every other single feature, it should be like this. If you want to scale, we want to make it clear of, like, does

it affect decentralization, how it affects decentralization? If it affects decentralization, which users of the protocol will feel that it goes too far, or maybe like it makes them uncomfortable, asking them for opinions on it, and bringing them and asking, like, Do you have suggestions on should we approach it differently?

Maybe we picked up some research, but there are easier ways of addressing the same problem, or actually maybe this is not exactly the problem of priority. So nowadays, I think also we have to define what structures within the organization address it. So how ACD should be restructured to include that product conversation, how to establish the very clear databases, almost like least of people that you want to talk to about, various aspects of Ethereum. If you think about DevX experience, how you think about the

maybe like the growth hacking, not hacking, growth and product adoption of Ethereum, and how do you define again? The super fast process of tracking, monitoring results of you building the ecosystem. Do people feel lost? If they come to Hackathon,

what happens next? Like what happens the next day, on Monday after the hackathon? Do they start building on Ethereum? Do they feel like Ethereum is a product for that comes with answers, with clarity, how to build on interior, what to choose,

which technology to start with, and who will help you to build, and how you get funding for all of this. If we have all of the components of that in the term foundation, but also with other organization, if we have partners that know how to operate within those pipelines,

then all of that feels like you talk about the product. You talk about product for someone, and the product that you just imagined. You identified in that, the idea of like focusing on goals that have impact upon people, which brings to the mind of like how we actually measure success in the blog post that you two co-authored, which we will link in the show notes. And if anyone's listening to this, I highly suggest actually additionally reading the blog post, a line that you wrote in your section, Tamash, you said, we will

focus on speed of execution, accountability, clear goals, objectives, and metrics to track. I think these are all kind of the operational leadership that I think everyone is very excited to you provide to the EF. Talk about the metrics a little bit more. Like what high level, I know you're only one month into your role at the EF, but what are these metrics that come to mind as just like high scores of the Ethereum protocol or of the Ethereum community that we should all aspire to? I would say that not all of this as ES specifies. As you say, it's one month into looking into your organization and now looking at the protocol and thinking of how this goals and strategies and directions that we defined, how they now go to every single team, and how they

define the metrics of how we measure the progress, and then later creating dashboards internally they'll tell us what's the progress on every single of those. And for now, we have some simple targets on the scaling one, right? So we say, oh, it's 3x this year and 10x altogether next year. And Dunkrat actually suggested this is like an exponential scaling growth map that says... It was 100x over four years, right? Yes, yes, yes. So like if you do it 3x every year, I think that's where you get, which means that you start with changes to review of all the clients and how ready they are, and that survey already happened. Then you continue with the changes via EAPs to execution layer, consensus layer.

Then you talk about this three, four years, which is mostly ZK and acceleration for ZK. So those, as you mentioned here, 100X over four years is a big metric to follow. And now we just make sure that we anchor around it, that this is not just the number that was thrown without thinking of restructuring all the protocol building or the protocol development and research around this like 100x. Now you go to every single research team and say, what you're building, how does it refer to this 100x direction? Like, are you working on the first year of 100x on a second year, 30 or fourth year? And if you look at the entire organization, how big percentage of researchers and engineers in the European Foundation in the ecosystem are focusing on the first

year? Because it should be probably much more than the four year. What you just described there sounds a little bit like a North Star, which is like, I think, pretty exciting and coming full circle to the beginning of this conversation. And it does sound like a lot of exciting changes are ahead for the Ethereum Foundation and for the Ethereum community. But I want to ask the question. I know the Theorem Foundation doesn't have infinite capacity, can't do everything. And I think sometimes the expectations of the community can be, well, the Ethereum Foundation will solve this, right? Why isn't ETH price trading at $100,000 right now? That's the Ethereum Foundation's problem. And I'm curious because I think people don't understand the complexity of this ecosystem and how many moving parts there are and how decentralized it truly is. And what is actually in scope for the Ethereum Foundation versus what's out of scope? Maybe the best way to ask this question is,

what are some of the things you think that the community expects the EF to do, that you actually aren't set up to do, that you don't do it all, all that's kind of out of scope. Shaouet, you probably have some context hearing many of the things over the years. What comes to mind? What is the EF just not set up to do, but people still expect the EF to do it?

So, okay, one controversial one, start with a controversial one, is like, EF shouldn't sell ease. It's like, we need, I mean, community expects we to pull the east. I mean, just hold it. But in order for the EF to operate it and to pay for this over 200 internal EFers to pay grants,

we do need to sell some ease. So that's something I think is like expectation from community and it's quite different from we do. So you're saying the community expects you not to sell it, but you have to sell it in order to fund the operational staff. Right, right. It's an unfair expectation. Yeah, that's a simple one. And then secondly, I would say, like, the EF doesn't do something directly, but we are willing to do maybe through grants.

So for the most critical things that only EF can do, we are more hands-on. We will allocate internal resources to do then. But for the second level, like, for example, I think the definition of business development is a, dynamic metrics here for ECR, is that what kind of dealment that EF should do directly? I think we would support through grants for some events and then we would support with like supporting like mentors, hackers to onboarding the hackers. But in order to onboarding people, I think EF's role is more coordinator to help people to fund the correct resource. in the ecosystem.

But that doesn't mean that we don't want to do. It's like we're willing to empower other people to do more. Yeah, I guess my perception of the EF and what it does versus what it doesn't do.

So obviously the research and coordination for shipping big protocol changes, that's kind of the core of it. Also, you know, throwing developer events, that kind of thing. But the EF is actually

not doing the engineering work that goes into the consensus clients and the execution clients. I mean, some people don't even know that. These are all separate teams that are actually building this. The EF is not a party responsible to do what Michael Saylor is doing with Bitcoin, which is like just like buying more Bitcoin. The EF, from my perception, it's not doing a lot of business development and talking to, you know,

like Wall Street about how to use Ethereum and how to onboard the blockchain. So like there are separate entities doing some of that work, but it's, It's not really the EF, and I think sometimes people expect the EF to fulfill all of those roles as if it was a centralized company like Apple or something like that, and that's just not how the EF is positioned to work. Tomash, do you have any takes on this, any insights? I feel very often that EF should be there where somehow for a moment for a longer time, there's nobody.

So then it means that there should be almost anything that the term doesn't do, the foundation doesn't do. However, sometimes it means that OHM Foundation realizes that there is that gap and there should be some organization that deals with it and help these organizations to appear. Maybe sometimes they're just highlighting the problem and saying, look, that's like it's missing. So how do we build it? How do we start it? And then let it grow and let it handle the thing. So you mentioned things like talking to Wall Street.

You probably think of talking to governments. And while Foundation for sure doesn't want to be ever coordinating that work. and it's never done in the past. However, he wants to be available for answering questions and act as one of the organizations in the ecosystem that is very knowledgeable and can help with that process, right? So if Wall Street, if government institutions, they come and then ask for help, for support in the sense of, like,

we have those questions, and we're seeking for the best experts that can tell us what happens now, what will happen in the future, that we want to be there. And sometimes maybe in the past, the foundation would feel not only we don't want, want to be coordinators, we definitely don't want to, but also we want to even like avoid any interactions. And this is what I would like to change. Like the interactions are normal in finance, and we just like one of the many organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem. So if you ask that,

should we be coordinators and seen as like the owners of Ethereum? No. So this Ethereum Foundation number two. And maybe this is like super clear. We're not owners of Ethereum protocol. We're not act as owners. We're not act as like, so here also it refers to those decisions, right? Like if decisions to be made, it's all about helping others to take those decisions. Like saying, look, those decisions are not made. And these are the people that are really high agency and are important in the protocol space and they should be visible and they should be empowered to take those decisions. You mentioned a few other things like the engineering or business development on like some people mentioned also marketing. So the engineering wise, we have GAF team internally.

We don't build consensus layer clients. So consensus their clients are external. A GAF team has been building that is extremely successful and robust, so executionally a client since the beginning. And Ethereum Foundation always felt that's like, this is extremely important input for researchers to have internally, and it's good to rely on one client in that space. Should Ethereum, like, initiate more work like this, like building applications or building infrastructure directly in the future,

build the tooling? Probably not, so we'll be avoiding all of days. But it's not because we wouldn't if it was needed. That's just the ecosystem. It's ready to take care of it. Like so we can, and I think now like this business development part, we want to be a bit more active here, at least I want to be more active here, and I still like test how much of pushback on it.

Is there in a foundation, but it feels that foundation wants to be a helper, like a business developer in the sense that each talks to much more organizations. It helps the like applications to connect with other applications, applications to find customers, applications to find talent, to find research that they can use for launching projects. products. And foundation is very often the point of contact or like even first point of contact for many of these players that feel a bit lost. So they can go to Ethereum.org, but they can also reach out to foundation. And instead of foundation giving grants every single time is like the only

solution that you can come to a foundation, ask for a crown, and you receive like yes or no and the value of the grant, instead of we'd like to be much more active in helping founders with particular problems that are facing very often at the beginning that are much more valuable than just throwing money at founders. Like, Founders' gamins would like to interact with people that have time for them, that have solutions like efficiency solutions for them and know how exactly to accelerate them to the next stage of their journey. And that will make me much more happy about how foundation can be impactful.

Like instead of just saying the only thing that Foundation would like to deal with is Treasury, I would like it to generate value in many other ways. Like by just involving people in the ecosystem, others accelerateers, incubators, incubators, VCs, L2s, and take advantage of the fact that they exist in the ecosystem and that they want to help, and they want also to bring capital into the ecosystem, and we can help for that capital and that effort, those efforts of all the participants to be multiplied by just creating the network. I mean, like so much of Ethereum is about creating the network, creating the network of the social layer is what foundation can do very well.

On the marketing side, I think we don't want to maybe create a branding or advertising style of marketing, but the communication and clarity is also part of marketing. And I think we're still exploring here of how much on the marketing side we should do. I listen to a lot of Twitter influencers and people who dealt with marketing a lot telling us how to address it. And I sometimes feel that maybe to grasp the entirety of Ethereum and feel what it means to create marketing campaigns for Ethereum, it's actually tricky. I think that not many people have experienced with a product like is that has to be neutral, that has to be decentralized, and to show that those properties through the message, through the marketing message, well, probably you can do it right,

so we'll destroy it for sure. So I'm more on the side of the German Foundation should do almost everything when it's missing from the ecosystem, rather than say, like, there's some clear things and no go, except for that one of like acting as an owner. Or maybe like it should act as an honor, but not be as an honor. That's important. Well, Tamash, if the EF wants to do more, I'm sure some people listening can give you a whole big list of things that could be done. I expect some of that follow-up after the show. But Tamash, Showay, it's been a pleasure getting to know you. And we're certainly cheering you on in this joint role as you take Ethereum to the next frontier.

Just a quick question on kind of roadmap and what's coming next. So, of course, we've got our goals, right, which is scaling Ethereum L1, scaling blobs and improving the user experience. those three priorities are deployed over a series of hard forks that happens with Ethereum every how many months? How many months has it been on average? 9, 12, longer, shorter, something like this? We're planned every six months now. Every six months now, that would be a change.

So how many hard forks have we shipped six months apart in Ethereum so far? Have we done any? Not much. I think historically it would be more like between 12 to 18 months. Okay, well, that would be a fantastic speed up in cadence. But the next one is Pectra. And is that May 7th? May 7th.

Pectra, I think that apart from changes to staking with max effective balance, you're waiting for massive UX improvement via 7702. So things realize it took out obstruction. And yeah, like we were very happy to ship it to make sure that it's like fully tested, safe. This is the system main focus now. Obviously, like already for the last few months, all the test nets, verification, and it continues.

And after 7th of May, we immediately want to spawn the dev net. for Fusaka, there'll be also a larger gathering of all the core developers and researchers working towards accelerating the goals. This became a tradition of how to accelerate every single next challenging fork or challenging upgrade. It was with the merge. It was then later with the withdrawals and so on. So I want to make sure the period has comes this year. I mentioned September, October. Now the question is, could we accelerate it, how we make sure that it never gets delayed? So then you would have like the five-ones timeline for Fusaka. And it means that we want to to start with DevNet's immunity and we want to start with focus of all the teams and

in saying like if there is anything that is sneaking into the fork that potentially delays it. No. And then there is Glamsterdam that we would plan for, let's think, like, between March and June next year. Now I feel like if this is the cadence that we're talking about, that's what we should expect. But people already thinking about how to deliver the L1 scaling acceleration through Glomsterdam fork next year. So some of it can be done without changes, without the fork, some of the scaling, and some of the scaling will definitely require the EAPs to shoot that. So that's the next month.

And separately on the ecosystem development side, like James Smith leads day, lots of changes into the pipelines and communication and structuring the ecosystem development, the Titoa Foundation, to address over the next two months, already create those pipelines and address the founders' needs or the builder's needs in building the enterprises, and they want to come to us and ask,

What do we do with tokenization or WA? How do we deploy lots of funds on Ethereum? How do you want stable ties? Where do we mean? How do we collaborate with all twos? All of this will be addressed also for that small restructuring that James is executing. Further, Team Beco is already coordinating the Alcor Des restructuring to focus on those very fast testing and deliveries.

So if you want to have the six months cadence, we realize that we have to propose something that will be accepted as a much more operational format. and an immediate obviously the communication changes and involving the defy builders and well general application builders to tell us what they need after Glamsterdam because I told you like this is what we want to deliver

and they already would tell us we decided and we didn't ask a I think that really we decided and this aligned with what the application developers need but we didn't yet decide of what happens next after that so what happens two years from now after Glamstardam and process about this work should be

all of like really much massive participation and this product focus. So the process changes for that should happen as well within the next month, I think. Well, this may have been the most bullish part of the conversation. We've got dates and deliverables for hard forks, which is very exciting. And, you know, thank you so much for joining us and giving us all those details. And we wish both of you very well in the future as you develop on this exciting times. Of course, Bankless Nation, as you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.