Bankless - Devcon #1 - Vitalik Buterin | A New Era for Ethereum

Starting point is 00:00:00 Bankless Nation, welcome to the DevCon 6 experience. I just got back from DevCon Bogota, and it was my first DevCon, and I had a ton of fun. And this is something I do. Every time I go to a conference, some big conference, I try and come back with as much content and interviews as possible. So this trip, I come back with about 10 interviews between 10 to 20 minutes in length from a variety of members throughout the Ethereum community. I want to give you the experience that I had and many other people had if you were not able to make it to DevCon. Or maybe you were able to make it to DevCon, but you were just too busy doing the hackathon, attending the booths, and you didn't get to talk to everyone that you wanted to talk to.

Starting point is 00:00:40 So I pulled in as many different people I could to get their perspective as to what DevCon was for them, what they're paying attention to in the future, and overall, just how much fun do they have while hanging out in Bogota, Columbia? First up in the list, Vitalik Buterin, of course. And we talk about a number of different things throughout DevCon. He's been to every single DevCon.

Starting point is 00:00:58 So I asked him about the history of DevCon and how DevCon has progressed forward as Ethereum has progressed forward. And I also make the point about how DevCon isn't really just a tech conference. It's also something much more than that. So what does DevCon actually do for the Ethereum ecosystem? And then we just go through the list of a variety of other subjects as well, such as what are developers focusing on now, now that we are post-merch? And also, what does he think about the arbitram acquisition of Prismatic Labs?

Starting point is 00:01:24 And overall, what's he going to do in Columbia once DevCon is over? And what does Vitalik Beteran do when the sun goes down? and everyone goes to parties? What does he do? Does he go to parties? So stay tuned for all of those questions and more. But first, we're going to talk about every single sponsor that makes this show possible and a fun and creative speed run. So here we go. TrueFi is leading Defi into the future of on-chain, uncollateralized loans, opening up Defi to the $8 trillion global credit market. Whether you want higher yields on your lending or you're a fund manager who just wants access to global liquidity and the cost savings of Defi, TrueFi is here for you.

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Starting point is 00:04:05 It's a nice city. It's a nice conference, so good. So developers convention, DevCon, would give the air that it is a tech conference. But I don't really think that summarizes what DevCon really is enough. What is DevCon? DevCon is kind of the, you know, it's a decentralized everything conference. Maybe that's what Dev stands for. It's, you know, there's just,

Starting point is 00:04:26 all kinds of different communities that are coming here. And, you know, sometimes are even kind of intentionally brought together here, right? Like there's a whole bunch of different developers, you know, layer one, layer two, cryptography, you know, programming languages, everything. There's local community people from, you know, both Latin America and plenty of other places. You know, saw a couple of people from Iran a couple of days ago. And, you know, big shout out to all the brave people. protesting there. There's people

Starting point is 00:04:58 from all kinds of different industries, there's intellectuals of various kinds. We kind of brought in, you know, Bruno Masaj and Venkatesh Raoulos here. And, you know, they've been kind of walking around and doing some presentations and kind of blabbing their thoughts on Twitter. And it's just been fun to see their outsider impressions of, you know, what's going on here.

Starting point is 00:05:20 So, yeah, I think in general it's just this, you know, really cool and weird events where all kinds of people get to see other people that they would not normally get a chance to see. And that's certainly the experience that I've been having. And many other crypto conferences out there pick cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, but DevCon has always picked off-the-beaten-path cities. Here we are in Bogota, Colombia, previously it was Osaka, Japan, and also Prague and the Czech Republic. And what's the thought process behind how cities are selected and why are we going across the world rather than being in the United States?

Starting point is 00:05:58 I mean, we definitely do intentionally try to move the continents around every year. I think part of that is a, it's a very intentional strategy to kind of empower the Ethereum's global community and to try to give people from all these different regions a chance to be able to come to at least one of the events. easier and, you know, share their side of, you know, what crypto is doing for them. I think, you know, having a geographically decentralized community is, just has to be part of having a decentralized community in our modern world. And, you know, we get an opportunity. It's just see, you know, kind of talk to all kinds of people that I think we would not be able

Starting point is 00:06:45 to if it was just happening in the same place every time. Certainly. And Ethereum, of course, is technology and software. Yeah. But it's more than that, right? It's social coordination. And this brings it beyond the areas of just like FinTech and coding stuff and much more deeper into the world of culture. I think that's what I've really been enjoying here in Bogota. And many of the other Ethereum conferences is it's one part tech, but it's also one part experience. And I think that's what really Ethereum is emblematic here to do in this world is, you know, produce new technology that is really just to enable to facilitate culture. And so I think it's really important that we go around and experience different parts of

Starting point is 00:07:20 the world that you know you don't you're not going to get in new york or san francisco absolutely and so this is my first devcon actually and even though i've been in the ethereum space for about four or five years the other devcons have sadly escaped me but i'm wondering you're uh if you could give us a trajectory of the development of the devcon coordination and my take here is that as ethereum has become more and more coordinated and organized still has devcon how are the previous defcons and how is this one different yeah so in defcon zero was like actually kind of the equivalent of what we do now with things like the M4 retreat in Athens, right? It was last year, it was just this, you know, private events,

Starting point is 00:07:57 kind of 50 people get all of the developers together, just kind of get all of people working on Ethereum itself in sync. And that's pretty much all that we could do, because, you know, the Ethereum community was just so tiny then, right? Then DefCon 1 in London, first public one, which was exciting. This was also the time when Microsoft was doing lots of Ethereum things. and they were doing their enterprise blockchain stuff, and they sponsored a DevCon,

Starting point is 00:08:25 which was just mind-blowing for everyone at the time that a company as big as Microsoft would grace a tiny little movement like ours, even to the point of being willing to sponsor it and send a bunch of people to speak. And a lot of developers, a lot of applications, just a lot of different tracks, then DefCon 2, Shanghai, definitely the kind of first, you know, out of a lot of people's comfort zone one. And they're trying to make kind of better relations with the Chinese community.

Starting point is 00:09:00 And, you know, that was interesting. And I feel like the Chinese community has been kind of doing more and more, you know, great things in Ethereum since then, right? You know, we've got like scroll and soul wallet and, you know, all of these things happening now. then Cancun, you know, we just wanted to be in North America and, you know, Cancun is more accessible from people from down south than doing it in, you know, U.S. or Canada. And we also wanted to, we always keep in mind, you know, trying to not host events, like, too often in places where the visas are too restrictive. And, like, that's, you know, one of the challenges that, you know, the U.S. unfortunately has, right? There was that famous story where Adi Shamir is like one of the literal grandfathers of cryptography got rejected for a visa for a cryptography conference. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:50 But each time the events got bigger. There are kind of more and more tracks. There's more and more attempts to kind of be intentional about promoting all of the different parts of the Ethereum community that would not naturally get promoted by themselves. Then, you know, DefCon 4 in Prague was the really big one. like twice as big as anything that happened before. And that was also one that I remember, I was the first one where we made a really serious attempt to kind of bring in interesting thinkers from the outside, right?

Starting point is 00:10:23 So Corey Doctoro was there. Glenn Weil from Radical Exchange was there. So a bunch of speakers and, you know, also speakers who had kind of interesting and, you know, not just positive, but also kind of important. cautionary things to say about crypto, which I think is important for us to engage with. Then, you know, DefCon 5, Osaka, that's, I feel like it was a continuation of things that were there before. And, you know, also interesting people, also more, both developers

Starting point is 00:11:00 and all kinds of other projects. And then here, this is like the first one in three years, right? So that by itself makes it really big. And there's, I think, in efforts to really take the best from the previous ones, right? So, you know, developers and really interesting and fascinating people getting into, you know, the deep end of polynomials. And, you know, polynomials are important, right? As I said, you know, I'm a polynomial, you're a polynomial, we're all polynomials. And, you know, people from all over the area, is local communities and people talking about different kinds of application. and then people on the philosophy side.

Starting point is 00:11:39 And there's just all of that. It feels like the venue was pretty successful, right? Like just, you know, as a venue, it was effective at venueing, which is something that has not always been true in the past. It's, you know, close to hotels, convenient for a lot of people to stay. Probably the biggest weakness of the venue is that, like, I found myself when I get dragged off to, like, various, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:04 side dinners and events and so forth. Like, there's one specific district of Bogota about 7.5 kilometers to the northeast of here where just like everybody wants, right? Yes. And it seems obvious that, like, if we could just teleport this place, I mean, or 7.5 kilometers to the northeast, like, that would have, you know, Tewks improved it even more. But, you know, there's never perfection. And, you know, still in the grand scheme of things, I mean, it feels like everything has worked out.

Starting point is 00:12:30 I mean, obviously, a lot of people came in worried about issues like safety. but so far I think there have been fewer serious incidents of that type than I would say even the bulls expected. So, you know, hopefully, yeah, you know, the event even gave a lot of people a chance to kind of see Latin America better for what it really is. Yeah, no, I'm happy. Lots of people, good conference. I mean, I hope we can do more excellent ones like this in the future. Yeah, certainly. And this is also an interesting time in Ethereum's history that we're,

Starting point is 00:13:04 We're having DevCon right after the merch, right after proof of stake. Because this seems to be a new chapter for Ethereum. And so it's just great timing that we can put everyone into the same spot and kind of come to consensus about what is the next era of Ethereum now that the proof of stake era is, well, underway, but also now behind us because it's done. 2021 was kind of the year of shipping proof of steak, ultrasound money, and now those boxes are checked. So what boxes aren't checked that we are going to be going into in 2023, that's the

Starting point is 00:13:34 conversation here at DevCon. Solving scalability is number one. Fees have been low for the past six months, so it's a bit easier to kind of backburner the problem, but I think if Ethereum succeeds, we're going to have another bull, and we know what bowls mean for transaction fees, right? From the point of view of a user, some, you know, bowls can even be something to dread just because of how it makes transaction fees, you know, shoot up to $50 or $100 or whatever. And, you know, there is a kind of ticking. clock on us to solve the issue. And, you know, we don't know how long the clock is going to keep ticking. And, yeah, it's, you know, our responsibility to really make sure that scaling is

Starting point is 00:14:13 figured out before then. So scaling. Privacy is, you know, another one. The base layer censorship resistance is another one. Account obstruction is another one. And, you know, there's all kinds of complicated ways in which these problems intersect and tie in with each other too. On the positive side, zero knowledge proofs as a technology have just, you know, seen a huge amount of progress in the last three years, right? There was kind of this big leap that started, I feel, in September 2019, when Plunk was introduced, right? Because, like, from the user's point of view, it's like, okay, Plank, there is another snark protocol. It looks like it's a little bit niftyer than before, but, like, from a, you know, like deep practitioners' point of view, it's like this

Starting point is 00:15:01 very deep philosophical improvements in how we think about snarks, right? Because, like, we're able to basically think about, you know, converting things that we want to prove into abstract polynomial equations and then separately figuring out, okay, how do we prove the polynomial equations? And it turns out that, like, you know, both of those areas are, you know, you can do lots of deep improvements on. And things become, you know, conceptually much cleaner, becomes much easier to progress when you do really start thinking about those two

Starting point is 00:15:27 separately, right? And, you know, one side can think about, you know, how do we turn? problems that we care about into polynomial about the other side. Since then, we've seen amazing stuff like Flukup and more and more interesting things lately, and then on the other side there is the problem

Starting point is 00:15:43 of like, okay, you know, you have a polynomial equation and, you know, the polynomials are big, but you know, how do we prove it? And that's seen a lot of progress too, and there's amazing stuff happening with Starks and all that, right? But this conference, I feel, has to some extent, sort of

Starting point is 00:15:59 been a victory lap for the just the facts that that technology exists and has practical use now, right? You know, everyone is talking about synarchs, and it's increasingly a default thing that you stick into applications that you're building. And that's just totally not what the discourse was like five years ago. Right. The thing I want to check with you is before getting into proof of sake, shipping proof of stake, it seemed to be the focal point of all of the developers.

Starting point is 00:16:25 Like, it was the thing we were focusing on. And now post-proof of stake, I mean, we're definitely focused on proto-dank charting and dang charting EIP 444 as the big one, but it doesn't seem to be a monolith, right? It doesn't seem to be attracting everyone's attention. And so would you say that we're going from all of the core devs and Ethereum devs focusing on proof of sake to now focusing on a variety of things all at once?

Starting point is 00:16:46 And so perhaps we're getting into an era of parallel development in Ethereum. How do you like that take? I think that's true, though, I think that also underestimates how much parallelism there was already, right? Like even the merge, I mean, there's all this work on the execution clients. There is work from the consensus clients. said there was work from the MEV people, right? It's, you know, actually a pretty big project. And then, you know, there are sort of, you know, sort of de facto precursors like the EIP-1559, which is, like,

Starting point is 00:17:12 you know, it doesn't have anything to do with proof of stake technically, but it kind of, you know, exercised a lot of the muscles of being able to make significant changes to the protocol. I think one way to think about post-proof of stake Ethereum development is to think about what the kind of long-term North Star of, like, like, what Ethereum could look like from a technical perspective, right? And like, I have this, you know, fairly simple description that I, you know, gave on stage a couple of days ago, right? Which is, I'm like, so Ethereum in 2032, you have a node. Your node runs on your phone. Every 12 seconds or 32 seconds or whatever number we agree on, you download 3.6 megabytes of data. You hash it. You do a couple of elliptic curve equations

Starting point is 00:17:53 to check a snark. That's it. You know the block is valid. Wait 12 seconds, get 3.6 megabytes of data. hash it, do some elliptic curve operations, verify the snark, and valid. 12 seconds later, data, hash, elliptic curve check, valid. So from the point of, like, the whole process just becomes incredibly sleek and seamless to the point where, like, literally a phone could even do it, right? Because it's incredibly light on computation. The only thing that it's heavy on is data, and data just happens to be the thing that, you know, phones are increasingly getting insanely good at it will get even better at over the next 10 years, right?

Starting point is 00:18:28 So in that kind of a world, you know, we have extreme protocol simplicity. We have high decentralization from easy ability to run a node, easy ability for anyone to stake. Hopefully, you know, simplify the fork choice down. We have single-s-a-lot finality. You know, everything about accounts and abstraction and all these things just work, right? And the protocol does just like get to a state, to this kind of stabilized end state that just looks really beautiful, right? So, like, that to me, is what I see the final goal being from a protocol standpoint. And then the challenge is like, how do we figure out all these different five strands that will actually get us there? Sure, sure. One of the big pieces of news that happened at the stepcon was the acquisition of Prisalabs, Prismatic Labs, by Arbitrum. And there's two takes here.

Starting point is 00:19:18 There's one where, yes, we've solved funding of client teams. Like we figured it out where we can have a relationship between a layer two perpetually fund the development of layer one clients. And so that's always been a problem that's plagued Ethereum Thought's history is how do we fund our client teams? How do we fund our open source public goods developers? The other half of that equation is there's now this commercial entity that is operating a very important piece of the Ethereum layer one client. When you saw this news, what did you think? How do you think about these two things? Yeah. I mean, I think on the funding aspect, I mean, it's obviously great that there are kind of non-etheria and validation sources of

Starting point is 00:19:53 funding for these projects. And obviously, this will give any future client teams a story that they can tell to investors for why they should get seed around. So it's, I'm going to help people in all kinds of second order ways. From a governance capture viewpoint, I guess, I think there's like multiple different things that it's important to keep in minds, right? Like one is that, like, arbitram is not kind of, you know, uniquely threatening or kind of, you know, scary or whatever here, right? So, you know, like, optimism had been, uh, how much. participating in EAP 4844 and put a couple of developers toward it. Consensus has, you know, literally funded entire client teams, right?

Starting point is 00:20:32 And then the question is, like, well, what's the difference between buying a client team and just incubating a couple of them yourself, right? There's a long history of, you know, all kinds of projects. I mean, obviously, you know, the parody running the parity client and, you know, also having the PolkaDOT network, right? So, like, this isn't unprecedented, though, I mean, at the same time, you know, like obviously what our Trump did is kind of bigger than, you know, what optimism has done and so forth. But it's not like, you know, we're entering a scary new unknown or anything, right? But at the same time, like,

Starting point is 00:21:04 it is, it's definitely important for us to be vigilance, right? Like the sort of dystopia that I have in mind as traditional internet governance, right? If you look at, you know, the DUP3C and so forth, there's a lot of precedent for public goods organizations where their funding model basically is we get funding by people who are buying governance leverage. And that does funds them, but that also leads to some often not very nice governance outcomes. There have been a bunch of scandals about introducing sort of the equivalent of protocol layer DRM into various internet protocols. and that gets pushed by the Yelvar's corporations that have seats at some of these organizations. So, you know, the concern here basically is, like, can we avoid that, right? And, you know, I'm not sure I have a good answer.

Starting point is 00:21:58 Like, I think it's important for us to start thinking about the question. Like, it is important to not be catastrophist about it, right? And, like, also just remember the reality that, like, all of these people who are participating in any event, and the people signing the checks and buying these things up and funding the client teams. They are well-meaning people and are still aligned with the Ethereum ecosystem. But we have seen how divergences of alignment happen over time and how even the Internet itself felt like a crypto-e idealistic happy family in the early 2000s. And then it split into all kinds of things that ended up having often bitterly opposing objectives. And yeah, it's time to kind of start, you know, thinking and being vigilance and, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:46 at least asking the question of, like, what it means to have a governance process that's robust against these kinds of things. Sure. And might a positive second order consequence of this be an actual stronger incentive mechanism for more client diversity if we have shown to the world that, hey, if you build a client, you might get acquired and have a payday? Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely, I think.

Starting point is 00:23:08 Yeah, the question is, like, what part of all the... client teams and developers get funded in this way, right? Like, I think, you know, zero to 20 percent is an improvement, but like 75 to 95 would, I think, be like a massive threat, right? Yeah. So it's one of, you know, those kinds of situations where, you know, we want to kind of cheer the first step of the journey, but kind of recognize that we don't want to over-rely on this, which is like something that has happened in the internet and that has lots of problems there. At Roll Up Day, which was hosted by Scroll on Monday before DevCon, you talked about how historically almost everything about crypto and software in general is slow to ship. You know, the proof of state came much later than expected and, you know, I could repeat seven other examples of the same thing.

Starting point is 00:23:52 But then you said that it's been the ZK teams, the ZK roll up teams that have really astounded the trajectory of development. Why is that the case? Like, what was the magic secret sauce that has really accelerated the ZK EVM? Because we saw two ZK EVM test nets announced by Scroll. in Polygon. ZK Sync announced their layer 3 test net and main net in like in 15 days or so. How did this happen so quickly? What do you credit the success of all of these teams? I think there's some things that are slow and there's some things that are fast, right? And it feels like different types of technology. It's just like naturally have different speeds,

Starting point is 00:24:27 right? You know, if you even compare like the rate at which AI has been progressing over the last year versus, you know, supersonic flight where, you know, we're going to, looks like we're going to have it again, but we're going to have to wait until, you know, close to the end of this decade, right? And, like, that's obviously a big difference between kind of atoms and bits, but, you know, within the world of bits, there's different kinds of bits. And it does feel like once the tools are there and once kind of, you know, the basics of zero knowledge stuff get abstracted enough, then the rest of it is just like something that can, you know, just like start running pretty quickly, right? So I'd say, yeah, Pluckup probably has been really important, right? Like five years ago,

Starting point is 00:25:05 the attitude toward these ZicavMs is probably, you know, we're not going to even try because we just know that the overhead of literally sticking an EVM into a snark is going to be totally infeasible. But, you know, since then, you know, we've had Plunk and we've had Pluckup and we've had all of these theoretical improvements. And, like, that's actually gotten us to the points where, like, it makes sense for people to start writing the circuits and, you know, the circuits start getting written, right? So, That's nice, but then it is important to be cautious and remember, like, it is very possible that we're going to have ZKAVMs with bugs within a year, but getting to ZKAVMs without bugs is going to take, you know, another five to ten years. So, you know, still, it's a huge amount of progress and it's definitely really something that we should all be taking advantage of.

Starting point is 00:25:51 Certainly. At conferences, there's always two parts, right? There's the conference during the day, and then there's the fun activities at night. People go off and have dinner, sometimes small dinners, large dinners, sometimes they go to parties. What does Vitalik do after the conference day is over and the sun goes down? Generally, I've been trying to have, like, fairly quiet dinners and go to sleep fairly early. Yeah, I don't know. I'm realizing, like, I'm definitely not a fan of the late night stuff, possibly because I'm just, like, totally out of energy from talking to people that, like, I don't want to do any more of that.

Starting point is 00:26:22 Yeah. Is it draining to be at a conference where everyone is hounding you? Absolutely. Yeah. How have you managed this? Have you learned to juggle this? I mean, realistically, just like try to be aware of when I have the energy for this stuff and when I don't and like when I don't hide, you know.

Starting point is 00:26:41 I don't know. It's probably better to hide than to like just go out anyway and have some risk of accidentally being mean to someone. Right. Exactly. Vitalik, yesterday on our account extraction panel, I asked you to introduce yourself because every single time you introduce yourself in a different era of Ethereum. you have a different way of doing it. Who are you in Ethereum in 2022?

Starting point is 00:27:00 Well, I mean, I guess yesterday I said I'm a fashion influencer and travel blogger. I don't know. What will I be in 2023? Who knows? You know, my circle back to being a white paper author. I don't know. Well, there's always more white papers to write, you know. Fatalek, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it. No, no, thank you too. It's good to be here. Cheers. Cheers.

Bankless - Devcon #1 - Vitalik Buterin | A New Era for Ethereum

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