Bankless - EthCC #1 | Vitalik - "The Merge Isn't Priced In"

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

🇫🇷 Welcome to the Bankless EthCC 2022 Experience 🇫🇷 With fantastic guests from all corners of the ecosystem, this 8-part series is an exploration of crypto culture and the current state of Ethereum. This first episode is with Vitalik himself, in which we discuss his takes on the Ethereum roadmap, developer morale as we approach the Merge, and his incomparable drip. ------ 📣Rhino.Fi | Massive Mystery Airdrop https://bit.ly/3o9trRE ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🌱 LENS | ACCESS CODE: WAGMI https://bankless.cc/Lens 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌉 JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ⚡️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 2:30 Vitalik’s New Meta 8:45 Ethereum Builds Faster 14:27 Developer Morale 17:11 Vitalik’s Drip 18:55 The App Layer 28:08 Surviving Conferences 29:45 Improving Communities ------ Resources: Vitalik on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin Vitalik’s EthCC Talk: https://youtu.be/kGjFTzRTH3Q ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Welcome Bankless Nation to the ECCC experience. I just got back from ECC and I've got over three hours of content with me that I recorded with All-Stars from around the crypto ecosystem and we're bringing them to you all at once right here, right now. Each episode is about 20 to 30 minutes long and because they were all done in person, they are particularly exceptional and fun. Each one of these conversations is candid and also for some reason during in real life interviews, I just asked questions that I wouldn't have otherwise asked.

So, for example, y'all remember when like Kane, Warwick, and Suzu were fighting over reasonably sized houses on crypto Twitter? Well, we talked about that with Kane. There's also been controversy with the Starkware team about whether or not they'd ever do their own layer one or migrate off of Ethereum. Well, I asked that to Uri and Ellie of the Starkware team. I also asked Vitalik about developer morale, his vision for the Ethereum roadmap, and why he's got the best drip in crypto. Each one of these episodes is being released separately for optimal content candy to you. the listener. We usually do our pre-recorded ads for these, but instead I'm going to do them right here, right now. So here it goes. And we're going to start with Rocket Pool. Rocket Pool is

Ethereum's decentralized validator network where you deposit ETH and you get R-Eath in return and you can take that R-Eth into a defy. And if you run a node, you let other people deposit their eth into your node and you get to charge them 15% for staking rewards as payment for your node operating services. And then you can take that R-Eath and use the across bridge to join over $2.3 billion in the Arbitrum ecosystem. Across, of course, is the fastest cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge and one of the safest ways to bridge your hard-earned assets in the world of crypto. And of course, Arbitrum is where you want to be. With over 35,000 contracts and one million unique addresses, Arbitrum is leading the way into the age of roll-ups. You know how I know

these numbers? Because I watched Arbitrum's talk at ECC, which you should also go watch, but not before you're done watching this. But when you do watch that video, make sure it's on a privacy the first browser, which is why you should be using Brave. It blocks all the browser ads. It's got a native Web3 wallet, and it puts the user first the Web3 way. You know what else puts the user first? Ledger hardware wallets and the Ledger Live ecosystem. I know Ledger is a great product because I have literally nine of them and I have 99% of my crypto assets on my ledger wallets. And the Ledger Live ecosystem is all you really need when it comes to living a bankless life, such as buying with Fiat, swapping, and staking. But for the rest of you that are sitting on stable coins because the market

is scary right now, make sure you're using a decentralized bankless stable coin. May I suggest die from Maker Dow, the most tried and tested stable coin in existence. But with Maker, you don't have to hide your stables on the Ethereum layer one. Maker is building die portals so you can mint thai natively across all the layer twos, so you can make sure that your assets don't go down another 90%, but you still get to go do all the defy things across the L2verse. And I hope you use all of these sponsors on your request for going bankless, and now I bring you my in-person conversation with Vitalik Buterion. What's up, Vitalik, how's it going?

Ceiling. How are you? Sealing? Yeah. It took me a second. Okay, Vitalik, last year at ECC, you gave a talk, which was about the non-financial use cases of a blockchain. And then, like, the industry sat on that for about six months. And then all of a sudden, Lenz Protocol, the Decentralized Social Media Protocol,

came about. And then after that, we had this, like, fervor and soul-bound tokens. and it really like kicked off a new shift of focus in the crypto space. And you're about to go have your talk here at ECC in about like 30 minutes or so. What's the new meta going to be after this talk? Well, no, this time I'm actually going to talk about other stuff. Like basically, yeah, kind of a longer term future of the Ethereum protocol. And my hopes that we, you know, do the upgrades that we have to do, but also don't

normalize, like just constantly adding more and more features because that'll like make the protocol super complicated after like 20 years. So, yeah, just kind of thinking about, you know, what is division for the medium term, what's division for the long term? How can we make sure that we sort of shift gears into like actually valuing decentralization more? And like, you know, not just as a slogan, but like as something that gets a lot of development effort. Certainly. And coming out of the mania that was 2021 back into a more depressed time in the crypto space, depressed usually is kind of a, you know, assume the bad word. But there's a lot of people who were here before 2021. They're like, oh, thank you. gosh, I think God, we're like, we're finally, like, quiet. How do you feel in the middle of

2022 with the state of just, like, the attention of crypto? Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely relieved that, you know, things are quieting down a bit. I mean, I think, I mean, it is important to remember that, you know, these bubbles and boom periods, like, they have costs. Like, on the one hand, they attract lots of people, which is good and they get people excited. But on the other hand, And they sometimes give lots of people like way too much of an impression of what the space is promising. And that leads to people getting disappointed sometimes. They get attention from unsavory characters. They get attention from, you know, governments that decide that because it exists, it's their business.

And it gets tension from a lot of places. And there's a benefit to kind of quietness. And there's a benefit to, I think, the crypto space kind of being its own little land. for a while and only yeah really breaking out once it's actually yeah kind of fully ready to and i mean i think you know the scalability stuff definitely didn't come fast enough for this cycle but i think um you know when the next one will comes like you know it all will be right like uh we've already been seeing lots of improvements in roll-ups we've been you know proto dink charting is advancing um you know validiums are advancing the zk roll-ups and zk evm stuff is um advanced

A lot of the stuff that I was like yelling about for the last a few years people seem to kind of finally slowly be taking seriously So like one example of this would be I remember just yelling at like I think both optimism and arbitraim people for a while basically telling them hey guys like You need to care about compression and you need to care about BLS signature aggregation because like those are the two things that you need to do to actually bring down the Data cost of a roll-up transaction from like a hundred to 200 bytes down to 16 bytes. And I mean, that stuff's actually happening, right? Like, optimism, I think a couple months ago added, like, basic zero-byte compression, which knocked their fees down by, like, somewhere between 20 and 40%. I think, I'm not sure what Arbishop status is, but I think they either, like, have some kind of

compression or they're close to it. And then ERC 4337, the account abstraction EIP, right? I mean, you know that stuff because I've, like, yelled about the need for social recovery wallets on bankless, many times as well. But, you know, there's like actually a really great and kind of exciting community around that now. And it's even kind of branching out further. So one of the things that's been happening in ERC4P37 land over the last like month or so is they're starting to add like built-in signature aggregation. So like smart contract wallets would be able to like basically specify and say like, hey, this wallet uses, I mean like BLS signatures or uses like, snark aggregation or some signature aggregation. And, you know, miners or nodes that are

kind of gathering those transactions, they wouldn't just be packing transactions. It would actually be taking the signatures aggregating them. And like it would all, you know, actually add up in the aggregation would work. And that's really nice because then you get, like, you know, you get all the space savings. Like, you know, we're talking about, like, 65 bytes of a transaction, like going down to one byte. And then once you add some work compression, then it goes down even. more and like basically you know we're talking about roll-ups getting potentially another five times cheaper well with just the year c4337 stuff like it'll be another three times cheaper but with that and more compression it'll be like somewhere between five and ten times cheaper and that's uh that just like

really amazing right like there's that happening and then there's protodinic sharding happening and then there's full dink sharding happening and then there's voladiums happening and then there's uh just ongoing improvements to Ethereum software. And, but you're finally getting to the point where the system actually will be able to, you know, handle the just incredibly massive amount of usage that, like, an actual, I mean, quote, mainstream adoption cycle is going to demand. So say what you will about the state of the crypto markets, a lot of every first cycler comes in and they're probably focused on the pain of prices.

But as soon as you stick around for more than a single cycle, you start to get a little bit deeper and you focus on, well, how fast are we building more than like how fast are the market's moving? And I'm wondering, since you've been here since the very beginning, the iteration of Ethereum building seems to, in my opinion, I've only been here for one cycle, only gets faster and faster and faster. And now it seems to be there's so much Ethereum development that's happening in parallel beyond what I can even like comprehending and keep up with. And so I'm wondering, what's your take on the rate of development of not just like the app layer, like straight up the Ethereum protocol. Like, are we getting faster at this? I think it's like both

faster and slower. Like, I do think that our results have been pretty mixed so far, right? Because if you compare the process of getting the beacon chain out the door to the process of getting ETH 1.0 out the door, like the ETH1.0 took 20 months, right? From, like, myself writing the first version of the white paper to a launch. Like here, like, we're looking at a merge that will take, like, maybe about 22 months or 21 months after the original launch of the beacon chain. And of course, the original launch of the beacon chain itself happened after a development process. Sharting still taking a while, you know, things like account abstraction or taking a while. But on the other hand, like EAP 1559, that's something that was like a huge economic reform.

And it's one that's had like actually pretty very significant consequences, right? That's been great for fee stability. It's been great for fast inclusion. It's been great for lots of things. but, you know, that took like three years to get through, but, you know, now it's finally there, right? So I think there's kind of these two opposing pressures that we as a community have to deal with, where one is kind of this pressure that speeds things up because there's more awesome researchers, there's more awesome developers, there's like a lot more effort going into all these problems,

but then there's also the pressure slowing us down, which is like the desire to, you know, not break things, the desire to kind of implement stuff across multiple clients to make sure we have all of these test suites and also the desire to kind of simultaneously build all of the surrounding infrastructure, right? Like when Ethereum launched it did not have like this massive ecosystem of block explorers and like side infrastructure that the beacon chain has already. So I think like both of those pressures exist and like to some extent that's healthy and like to some extent of this actually gets into stuff that I'm going to talk about in this presentation, which is that I think it's, like, healthy for Ethereum to have a bit of a move fast and bring things attitude, like,

specifically over the next couple of years, because, like, you know, we do need to radically change stuff, right? Like, switching the consensus algorithm, moving over to sharding, moving over to, like, a very different model for how transactions get included. But at the same time, there's kind of this longer term desire where, you know, we do want L1 to kind of settle down into something that's, like, very stable and dependent. and like it's not something that kind of wins by outmaneuvering the alternatives. It's something that wins by outlasting the alternatives.

Certainly. Yeah. So I guess we're both, you know, doing all of the good work that needs to be done to kind of get through all of these kind of big stages at the beginning. And at the same time, like there's also this question of like, you know, how do we properly set ourselves up for in this longer term future where the layer one starts to become this a bit of a more static thing. and, you know, the improvements are more incremental, they're more kind of, you know, technical and safety-oriented. And once that happens, then, you know, Ethereum will just get slower and that's fine, right? But then, you know, layer two work is only going to get faster, I think. Like, we've seen already, there's, like, five ZKVMs now.

And, like, basically, you know, there's so many ZKVMs that they're starting to care, like, almost as much about debating which one of them is a real ZKVM as it. about actually building the product, which is in some ways actually a great place for an ecosystem to be. Yeah, I know. So, you know, I think that things are going well. And I think, you know, the recognition that stuff like the merge does actually need to happen on a timetable, like I think that's also something that's peaking up, the recognition that, you know, things like scaling are something that needs to kind of happen on a timetable, right? And, you know, I think I've sometimes, like said before,

like, you know, you can lose a billion dollars from a hack, but you can also lose a billion dollars from everybody just needing to pay way higher fees than they have to. And one is more flashy and glamorous, but, you know, the other is also actually really serious kind of drain and tax on the ecosystem. But I think, you know, people are working on that. And it's, you know, just constant good news every couple of months. And, you know, I'm confident that we're actually getting to an Ethereum that's pretty great. That is something I've certainly noticed lately. I think it started before DevConnect, but it really felt very, very vibrant at DevConnect in Amsterdam.

Just morale around Ethereum development and around the Ethereum developers seems to be really high. And I'm only seeing this from a periphery standpoint because I just like talk about these things and hear what the developers are saying. But for somebody who's a little bit more tapped in, like how would you illustrate the morale around the developers at the moment? Right. I mean, it's sometimes hard to tell because you have to like distinguish between sort of like forced high morale where everyone kind of realizes that, you know, they are the elites. And if they present an attitude of low morale, the whole thing breaks. And so they got to have kind of, you know, keep off everyone else's spirits versus like genuine really high morale. And I do think we have had periods of the first kind, right? Like a lot of that time in, you know, 2018 and 2019, maybe, you know, the time around like the Dow Fork and the Doss attack. I mean, there have been definitely periods where people have been kind of disappointed by sole progress, but now I think it's definitely like all genuine. And the merge is like looking more and more in the front view mirror.

And it's looking more and more like, hey, this thing is going to actually happen. And once the merge actually happens, then, you know, I expect like more I was going to go way out, right? Like I basically expect that the merge is going to be kind of not priced in, by which I mean like not even just like market terms, but even just kind of like psychological and narrative terms. Like pretty much. Careful with that word. Yeah.

Right. Right. Yeah. Like in kind of like in narrative terms, I think it's not going to be priced in like pretty much until like you like after it happens. Like there's like you know, we see even even today like a lot of people kind of act as though, you know, this environmental issue is this fatal flaw and yeah, sure, Ethereum mubble some noises about proof of stake.

But come on. They've been saying that since forever. and it's not going anywhere, but like, no, no, no, no, it's going to go somewhere. And at this point, I think the only way to just convince a huge number of people that it's going to go somewhere is just by actually going there. Sure. You know, once that happens, it's going to change a lot of minds. Betelik, are you ready for like 17 crypto media publications to quote you and say the merge is not priced in? Oh, fine. The media is quoting me.

Now I wonder what other fun things I can say. Everyone should buy Bitcoin Satoshi's vision. The best crypto out there. Yeah, yeah. It's got the vision in the name. Fatalek, how does it feel to be the best-fitted person at ECC? The best-fitted person. Yeah, your outfit.

Oh, I see it, right, because I got the unisox and the shirt, and I guess the kiddie watch. I don't know, they're fun. I don't know. I wish. You'd have more fun socks and more fun shirts at some point. I will say if there's something that crypto conferences have, it's definitely socks. We have a lot of socks here. This is, yeah, socks are actually like good, right?

I mean, the thing with shirts is, like, one is that you just get so many of them. And like for me, you know, I've got my backpack and I have like a centimeter cubed budget of eight shirts. And like I'm already over by one. So, you know, don't actually necessarily want to kind of, you know, keep shirting around. Right. Oh, and then also there's this other issue, which is that like I really like those, I mean, you know, the ultra thin unikis that are like actually like a big improvement both on centimeters cubed and on kind of you know ability to kind of go outside and ability to kind of survive 40 degree heat right then like even this

like this is like made out of like fancy athletic fabric but like that's even better than that um so that's an east denver sure right it is indeed it is a uh yeah yeah what year oh this is this this year it's the most recent year yeah yeah no let's see what other fun that's the way can we do we can do hats, we can, well, pants. Pants are underswags. I don't think, yeah, the crypto industry has not delved into pants yet. Yeah. Maybe you can include that in your talk so that in six to nine months we'll have some good pants from now. Yeah, I mean, I tried to, you know, advertise those. I get like Fox or Shiba, you know, or whatever they are pants, but, you know, I'm sure it'll keep going well. Let's talk about the app layer for a little bit because the app layer is

where a lot of lessons get learned, I think, every single cycle. Yes. The app layer was where the ICO mania happened. The app layer was with the defy, like food farms happened. Right. What would you say are the biggest lessons that we've learned in the app layer in 2021? Right. I mean, I think one of the big lessons for the community has been around the kind of

stable coin and Luna stuff. Sure. Like, I think we actually got to a point where what we might call principles-based thinkers kind of got a bit demoralized, right? Because, I mean, if your principal's based thinker, then you're going to say anything that offers more than 10% ABI is like basically unsustainable at best, a scam at worst, because, you know, nothing in Fiatlands can stably offer 10% returns with like very low risk of losses. So why the hell do we think that crypto space can do better, especially given that there isn't really kind of much of a real economy backing up those growth rates.

But at the same time, you know, in 2020, 2021, we just saw this kind of, of ongoing, you know, yield farming craze and you just regularly get like, you know, 90% APYs on yield farming, USC or whatever, and just kept on getting crazier. And like, that's demoralizing, right? Because, like, I think a lot of people even started thinking, like, wait, okay, you know, maybe we're in a new paradigm and maybe this whole, like, sanity and logic thing actually is just a Fiat World Web 2 prejudice. And then, you know, boom. And Luna suddenly taught people that like, oh, no, no, no, principles actually do matter and we actually do live in reality. So I think, you know, I'm very happy that that incident happened just in time.

I mean, I wish that it had happened a few months earlier and blew up like $5 billion instead of $50. But, you know, even still, it's better that it happened now than if it happened later when it could have blown up $500 billion. Right. Because, like, you know, when something blows up $5 billion, it's like, okay, fine, it's a bunch of rich computer geeks and they're kind of playing around. It's their fault. At $50 billion, you know, people get more scared. But at $500 billion, there's just a huge pressure for, you know, all the big mainstream actors to consider the events to be their responsibility. And then, like, crypto is just going to completely lose its room to maneuver. So I think this is one of the reasons why, like, I've also never really joined this kind of enthusiastic, like, desire to get a Bitcoin or an Ethereum ETF. Because I think, like, we're not ready for it.

Yeah, to some extent. And like I think in these phases, like crypto kind of deserves to have a longer period of time. And like, well, needs to have a longer period of time during which like it is in ecosystem where, you know, this is the frontier. This is the West. And I don't know. All of those. I've heard this before. Indeed.

You know, this is not financial advice. You can lose everything that you put in and all of that. And once you start kind of plugging it into me, mainstream infrastructure where like funds representing random 72 year olds start throwing money into this stuff by default, then you're just entering a different ballgame. And like that's not really a ballgame though we should be trying to enter that quickly. Yeah. Like basically, like if you have to choose between kind of two regulatory evils where one of those evils is, you know, regulators coming in and telling the industry what I can and can't do. And the other one is the crypto industry gets freedom. but it gets firewalled off of, you know, reality, then, like, I choose the second over the first, like, any day. Right. So, fortunately, I think, you know, Luna broke before it managed to kind of get to that level of scale where it really started kind of, you know, jumping outside of the firewall.

But it's, you know, even still, the collapse kind of reminded people that, like, yes, reality matters, that, yes, fundamentals matter. Yes, principles matter. Yes, this thing that you're throwing your money into, that promises 6% returns and has been consistently giving you 6% returns for the last like two years might actually be something that's worth getting out of. And that's, you know, good that we learn those lessons. Certainly. Six percent year over year, over year definitely beats out 20% in one year, but zero going to zero at the end of that year. Yeah, exactly. The like,

the question I sometimes like ask myself with like all of these weird opportunities is like, taking a long view, right? What is the probability that nothing bad will happen to this thing over 10 years, right? And let's say maybe the probability is like 75%. Okay. If the probability is 75% that nothing bad will happen over 10 years, 25% chance that like, you know, it drops to zero. That's equivalent to an interest rate of negative 2.5%. Right.

Are you really, like, is the difference that you're getting really worth 2.5%? And often it isn't, right? But like I think in order for it to be kind of like easy for people to start thinking in that way, you know, like sometimes you do need to just have like memorable examples of like the bad thing actually happening. But, you know, the good news is now we do. I mean, what's the, that U.S. quote about tyrants? You know, the blank of sanity has to be refreshed by the blood of people getting wrecked, essentially. Are we ever going to like break out from that meta? That's a good question.

I think we will. I mean, I think we are slowly getting into it. Yeah. I think basically what's happening is that, like, the fact that there is a permanent frontier and the fact that the permanent frontier is permanently risky is obscuring the fact that the frontier actually is moving. Sure. And the number of specific things that's been de-risk and is safe is actually increasing

all the time, right? Like, back in 2014, just in exchange was part of the frontier. Right. Right. Right. And now, you know, like, that's totally not true, right? And people just, you know, like, hey, yeah, you know, uniswap works and it's safe, you know, keep stuff in your wallet and, you know, just use you a disrupt. We need to trade things. And

otherwise, when you need to move between Fiat, like an exchange is just to pass the real. Like, you could use it, but you don't want to huddle stuff there. Um, the ability to just reliably hold your coins has been improving, right? Like, we've moved from, uh, you know, lots of crazy stories of like coin theft in 2013 and 2014 and now we're, things are better off with hardware wallets. And I think two years from now, things will be like, even better with more social recovery wallets. Multisigs for organizations have been quietly getting mainstreamed. Multisigs for individuals, not quite yet, but I think that's a UX problem.

But multisic for organizations, I actually remember when multi-sig smart contracts on Ethereum were part of the frontier. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the hashtag parody. Yeah.

Was that, was parody a multi-sig? Yeah, it was. It was a non-nosis multi-sig, right? Yeah, yeah. They made their own multi-sig. and remember it was like someone made that bug report it was like subject line anyone can kill your contract text oops i accidentally killed it and uh just that one transaction that blew up a library and four hundred fifty billion dollars became inaccessible but like that was the frontier then and like now multisigs are just totally trusted right so like uh

you know on the one hand it's like this is the frontier this is the west but on the other hand it's like the west is moving west right um you know this like it's not like um you know the west in america where you get to California and you're done, it's like, I mean, know, Singapore where like they literally just keep on building land that at this point, 20% of their country is like stuff that they've built. Yeah, yeah. So we can keep like biddling safety areas way. So I think, you know, that trend's going to continue.

And I think like the set of things that you actually can do safely is going to just keep going up more and more. And it's the sort of thing that we won't notice because like the sign of that happening isn't used. The sign of that happening is a lack of news. but like if once you kind of get that kind of skill of learning to pay attention to lack of news it's an interesting skill to acquire by the way like if you just try to get up-to-date information about like any event where there's a lot of propaganda and a lot of like highly incentivized

discourse going on like listening to what doesn't get said is often like one of the most revealing things And, I mean, here, like, what's not getting said while there's industries that or like subparts of crypto that used to be completely crazy that are just, I mean, actually settled down and doing quite fine today. Vitalik, there's something I'd actually like your advice on because this happens most conferences where, like, you know, we have this podcast, people, a lot of people listen to it. And so, like, therefore, we get pitched a bunch all the time. Like, people like, oh, like, I'd love to show you what I'm building. And then I have this game that I plays. I rate conferences by like the number of seconds it takes for somebody to start, like in a conversation to start pitching me.

I'm sure for you, it is a hundred times worse. How do you survive this? How do I survive this? I mean, I guess like, you know, don't want to actually spend too much time conferencing. You know, like it's the conferences are, it's actually more like in a Theorem City for a week. And I don't know if there's stuff that you want to talk to. You can, your people you want to talk to, you can actually go and talk to them. It's so like the, yeah, like the presentations are almost not even there for the presentation.

They're just there to make a shelling point, you know? Right. And, you know, especially in this kind of reality where it's like 10,000 people want to come, but a thousand people can come. It just sort of turns into that by default. Right. Yeah, but, you know, there's also, well, just, it's good to also go around and talk to people, and it's good to kind of get the general vibe.

and just like you get a feel for what kinds of things people care about, what kinds of problems people are working on, what kinds of things, you know, people think are solving and what kinds of solutions people think are important. So I think it's good to get that, but we also don't want to get too much of that. Certainly. We've already talked about what the developers are up to and the importance of having a timetable, for example, is perhaps a takeaway from this. But just for the broader Ethereum community, perhaps like the non-protical devs, the non-core devs, maybe people in the app layer, but also people like me and Ryan who aren't builders but still do stuff, what would be your general request for the broadest part of the Ethereum community? What do we need to do to just be a better community in 2022 and beyond? I feel like my advice is the same as my advice has always been, which is like elevate meaningful stuff.

There's just all of these projects, like even, you know, the ERC 4337 team, right? Like, they don't have a token. They don't have a glamorous marketing department. They're doing stuff that, like, I think could be revolutionary, that I think could, you know, greatly improve the state of wallet safety and could even, you know, make optimistic roll-ups three times cheaper. You know, people like that deserve some love. People who are, like, activists in random countries for who, crypto actually is a lifeline to avoid being deplatformed.

That, like, I've just, like, gotten to know more and more of those from, I mean, all kinds of places over the last couple of years. And, you know, like, I've, like, I talk to a bunch out of Russia, obviously, but, you know, there's, like, lots of different places. And, you know, people like that are part of the community. people trying to you know even make better

social media platforms where the goal isn't just like hey you know this thing's going to be magically better because it has a token but to like have some interesting perspective about like you know hey you know what in particular makes Twitter unproductive and toxic to the extent that it is and like how do you remove that and how do you replace that

with like some positive mechanic and look there's just all of these different kind of corners of, uh, if they're Amelan that are doing interesting stuff. And I think they, uh, I mean, sometimes they need funding. Sometimes I think they just need kind of attention and they need help in kind of finding other people who care about the same thing. Um, and I mean, they, they need moral support. So the more that we can do to help them, I think, the better. Certainly. Vitalik, there's a talk that I have to go get to. It happens to be yours. Uh, so we have to conclude this interview. So thank you for joining me. Yeah, thank you too.

Cheers.