Bankless - Etherealize: Ethereum is Open for Business | Danny Ryan & Vivek Raman
Episode Date: April 7, 2025We’ve got the team behind Etherealize on the show today—Vivek Raman and Danny Ryan—to discuss their mission to onboard institutions, governments, and capital markets to Ethereum.We explore how E...thereum is “open for business” with L2 scaling, modular architecture, and a maturing regulatory landscape. The Etherealize team breaks down their dual structure—a for-profit consulting and product arm alongside a nonprofit focused on R&D and policy—to drive institutional adoption.------📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium------BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFihttps://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAINhttps://bankless.cc/unichain 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELFhttps://bankless.cc/Self 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORKhttps://bankless.cc/Mantle 🏦INFINEX | THE CRYPTO-EVERYTHING APPhttps://bankless.cc/Infinex ------TIMESTAMPS00:00:00 Intro00:07:12 Etherealize & Its Mission00:15:29 Clients & Finances00:20:17 Relation Between Ethereum Foundation & Etherealize00:21:31 Etherealize's Funding00:22:43 Etherealize's Competitions00:26:02 Challenges & Roadblocks00:28:15 What Success Looks Like for Etherealize00:29:56 Etherealize's Co-Founders00:31:10 Ethereum’s Upcoming Era00:40:20 What Makes Ethereum Special00:46:00 Political Effect on Ethereum00:51:33 Community Support00:54:51 Layer 1 & Etherealize00:58:36 Hypothetical Scenarios with Ethereum01:01:50 What’s Next for Etherealize01:04:47 Some Unturned Stones01:07:32 Closing & Disclosures------RESOURCESEtherealizehttps://www.etherealize.comVivek Ramanhttps://x.com/VivekVenturesDanny Ryanhttps://x.com/dannyryan------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I come from Wall Street trading floors. We like winning. We like competition. But it's almost as if
Ethereum is already ahead. Ethereum is already winning. When we go in and say Ethereum is the only
blockchain without downtime, where you have the most amount of tokenized assets, the most amount of
economic security, the most amount of regulatory precedent, the most amount of institutional adoption,
Ethereum is the default. We just have to remind people why.
Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today,
we're exploring the intersection of Ethereum in Wall Street.
Ethereum is open for business.
After 10 years of the Ethereum network being online
without a single instance of downtime,
Ethereum is finally ready to go to Wall Street.
Now, parts of Wall Street have already noticed
that Ethereum is incredibly well-suited
for institutional financial products.
BlackRock has already put a billion dollars
of tokenized treasuries on Ethereum.
Franklin Templeton already has tokenized funds on chain,
but these are examples of institutions coming to Ethereum.
Now, Ethereum is bringing Ethereum to institutions. During Ethereum's early transformative years from its
inception in 2015 to the modern era in 2025, Ethereum has made and kept a commitment to being an open,
permissionless, credibly neutral platform. A commitment to credible neutrality has been Ethereum's
strategy for targeting the world's largest TAM. The more politically neutral Ethereum can be,
the more it can attract larger institutions to build on its rails. Ethereum doesn't want just
businesses. It wants to host entire governments and nation-state economies on its rails.
This is Ethereum's mission. Ethereum is ready. Ethereum is open for business.
Ethereum represents the next steps for civilization to accelerate into the future.
Today on the show, we have two of Ethereum's co-founders, the Vecraman and Danny Ryan,
to tell us exactly how they are going to fill the void that has been left in Ethereum's early
years during its commitment towards credible neutrality and how they are going to give
Ethereum a voice in the room with some of the world's largest institutions, starting with Wall
Street, but expanding globally to work with governments and economies to help bring the world's
largest organizations on chain. I ask Danny and Vivek how Ethereumize works and what the strategy
is. I ask whether Ethereum has what it takes to go toe to toe with Ethereum's sharkiest
competitors. I learn about Ethereum's relationship with the Ethereum Foundation and the broader
Ethereum ecosystem. And Danny Vivek and I all discuss in this new area.
era for Ethereum. Now that Ethereum has locked in the largest possible lead of an ecosystem,
having established itself as the most decentralized, the most credibly neutral ecosystem,
to become an ecosystem that has all of that, but is now also hungry and aggressive and willing
to compete toe to toe with its shortcut-taking competitors on a playing field in which
Ethereum has all the edge if it can just learn how to leverage it. This episode with
Ethereumizes co-founder, Danny and Vivek, is exactly what I wanted to hear,
to confirm my understanding of the reawakening of Ethereum into its new era.
I'll admit, I was uncertain of what I was going to hear from Ethereumalize.
I did not know if I was going to come out of this episode convinced that Ethereum has fully
reoriented itself into the direction it needs to go.
But after talking with Danny Vivek, and especially getting into Danny's take about how
this transformation that Ethereum is going through, is also being found in other parts of
the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
And it once again makes me very excited for what the future of Ethereum has in store.
So if you appreciate this podcast, please subscribe.
If you're already subscribed, please open up your phone and just give us a five-star review.
This is how we help the world go bankless.
This will be how we help Ethereum go to Wall Street.
And it also gets bankless to the top of the charts where we can be heard by more people.
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Bankless Nation's super honored to introduce Danny Ryan.
He's a former Ethereum Foundation coordinator,
famous for coordinating and leading the effort behind shipping the merge,
which is probably the largest distributed system software update humanity has ever achieved.
Danny, it's so great to have.
have you back on the show. I hope your sabbatical treated you well, and it's an honor to have you back.
Yeah, thanks for having me. And with us as well is Vivek Ramon, co-founder of Ethereumize. He has spent a decade on Wall Street doing fixed income trading, leverage loans, credit default swaps, very deep structural components of the global financial system. And he launched Ethereumize back in January of this year. Vivek, welcome to bankless.
Great to see it.
Vivek, I want to start with you. I want to know what the mission of Ethereumize is, but maybe you could, in addition to that, just start by explaining what the Ethereumize entity setup is like.
Is this a nonprofit? Is this a foundation for a profit? Like legally speaking, what is the structure?
And then what is the mission of etherealize? So etherealize is a Delaware C-Corp. Our scope is expanding,
which is an honor and a privilege being joined with Danny. So there will also be a nonprofit portion of it.
And the ultimate goal is to connect institutions to the Ethereum ecosystem, which is basically
broadened out to saying we now have a really, really unique opportunity to bring the world to Ethereum.
Ethereum is open for business. It's upgraded. It's ready with the layer two modular scaling.
And now we need to be very, very aggressive on the onboarding process and bring the world on.
And then, Danny, just picking into your brain, what really brought you to etherealize?
Can you share just what you see in the etherealized mission?
Everyone who knows you as a beloved technologist, an engineer, a social coordinator,
who resonates deeply with Ethereum's mission?
Can you share how etherealize fits into the identity that you have for your
work and arc with Ethereum.
There's a couple things there.
Firstly, the mission of onboarding financial institutions in the U.S.,
on the one hand, I look at that, I'm like, is that really my mission?
Is that what I need to be spending my time on?
But as I was pondering, like, the regulatory shift, I think two things happen here.
Like, one, there is a unique opportunity here.
Like, the world is ready from, like, demanding these products, as well as the kind
of legal frameworks potentially coming in play for them to onboard.
And we have this unique window to do so.
And there's also something I was pretty worried about at the end of last year was the regulatory pendulum has swung.
And there is a lot of opportunity now.
But I was certainly very worried about the regulatory pendulum swinging back in the other direction in that four-year time horizon in potentially a very drastic manner.
But I realize if we do actually begin to onboard the world and we do actually begin to onboard like significant real world assets onto Ethereum,
the regulatory pendulum is only going to swing so far, and blockchains will be here to stay and it will be integrated into the fabric of society.
So it seemed like you're actually an existential moment and opportunity for Ethereum to do this mission.
Additionally, being at the forefront of adoption with these institutions, I think it's going to uncover things that we need to do in L1, L2, or even in the application layer, with respect to R&D, with respect to standards, respect to,
all sorts of things. But we're going to be on the front lines of adoption with a very, like,
critical kind of customer and consumer base. And that is going to give me more intel into,
you know, what are the real world blockers? What are the things preventing Ethereum from being
global, neutral, you know, civilizational infrastructure? So we want to kind of kick that feedback loop
from being on the front lines back into what Ethereum needs to be. And so it does kind of fill in that
previous mission of what are the more like fundamental things that need to happen. I think we're
going to have a really good lens into that. Fifek, I want to go back to you and kind of just
make the idea and mission of etherealize just a little bit more concrete. I think the branding around
Ethereum is what people understand about etherealize is we are trying to connect institutions
with Ethereum. We're trying to get institutions more comfortable with Ethereum. But that's also
kind of just a nebulous idea. I want to make that just really concrete for myself and the listeners.
What does that actually look like? And I asked the question about what the, you know,
legal structure of etherealizes. That's a Delaware C-Corp. My understanding is that that is a for-profit
entity with this mission to onboard institutions to Ethereum. Can you just kind of color in all of that
a little bit? How does all of that kind of fit together? And what does that actually look like? What does
success look like? So I always wanted crypto to have a home in the U.S. And I think we have this
over-to-window shift where now it's de-risk to actually build lasting crypto companies in the U.S.
with real fundamentals, with real business models, with the ability to thrive and be sustainable.
And that is the most exciting over to window shifts that I've seen.
Adytherly's started pretty narrow scope, and it's expanded as the demand increased.
We started with institutional marketing and business development for the Ethereum ecosystem.
So that's basically going around to Wall Street institutions and saying blockchains are actually
a back end where capital markets can settle, where assets are going to be tokenized, where assets are going to be traded,
where we're going to have a one-time upgrade and shift to the financial system from physical old settlement, which I saw for 10 years while I was at four different banks.
I mean, we laugh about interoperability being difficult on blockchains.
You look at bank interoperability and you look at back off the systems and it's still from the Stone Age effectively.
So this wonderful new technology, this blockchain substrate is now ready for adoption.
The regulatory window is now open and saying that banks can now adopt blockchains, banks can custody tokenize assets.
sets. All of this experimentation has happened with the banks for the last 10 years where they've
had internal private blockchains. We now have a shot to put it all on a public blockchain.
I think Ethereum is the end game for that. So starting off with business development and marketing
and educating them about Ethereum was the primary directive. After a month or two of that,
though, we realized very, very quickly that Ethereum is more than just shilling an asset or shilling
technology. It's ready for adoption. And we need to help banks and institutions and tradfai
players actually build the products to bring their assets and bring their user bases onto Ethereum.
So that's where the product side started saying that we need to hold people's hands.
We need to get our hands dirty. We need to actually go in, do the off-chain part, do the on-chain
part, actually build the systems needed to make this one-time phase shift from legacy finance to
blockchains. And so that's where the for-profits part came in saying that we are
actually want to build products. We actually want to say that we're building things for Ethereum.
And then when I'm very serendipitously connected with Danny, he said, let's expand that scope
even more beyond for-profit to a nonprofit arm saying that R&D and specific application-based
R&D, things like policy, things like more broad marketing and ecosystem, that needs to happen
on a perpetual basis. And so that's another segment that we're setting up as well.
And they all interplay really, really well because it creates a flywheel of adoption that I don't
think Ethereum was done before, and I think it is very, very mission-cortive to do that now.
Okay, so if I'm understanding your answer, is etherealize on the for-profit side,
kind of like an institutional consulting entity that helps institutions, you guys just hold
institutions hands, help them understand Ethereum, learn what they can do on Ethereum,
and then the nonprofit side is a little bit more like lobbying and more policy work.
Is that a way to understand etherealize?
Yes, expanding that a little bit. It's consulting and product development.
Okay.
We have a pretty epic engineering force that can build products for institutions.
And then on the nonprofit side, it also includes R&D, which I think feeds Ethereum's not Bitcoin.
It can keep upgrading, keep getting better, and blockchains can't get stagnant.
If we can help drive some of that and help shape the roadmap, that'll be beneficial for the whole ecosystem.
And so in order for the Ethereumized project to work, you guys need clients.
Like you guys are going out to Wall Street trying to acquire clients that's going to pay for the salaries, that's going to get the,
job done, and then you guys grow the client side of the business, which helps fund fuel,
add energy to the nonprofit lobbying side, and that is that flywheel that you guys are talking
about, whereas one grows, the other one is more legitimized, it has more distribution,
and you guys can get bigger and better clients. Is that the idea here? Yeah, also the flywheel
and the interplay between, you know, if we're going to onboard the world, which is the goal here,
it's not just knock on the door and educate. It's not just knock on the door and build them
of products. It requires things across the stack. It requires making sure that law is going in
favor, open neutral, decentralized systems. It's ensuring that the learnings on the front lines
of reward adoption is speeding back into R&D so that the stack becomes what it needs to be.
And so really, it's like this full kind of integrated process to make sure that we can onboard
the world. Who are the target clients then? Vivek, you've been on Wall Street for a decade.
I think having Danny on your team as somebody who understands Ethereum almost more than anyone,
maybe perhaps more than anyone, is an incredible asset. Who are your ideal clients? Are you working with banks? Are you working with people like BlackRock? Who are your ideal clients? And then what are the kind of things that you are helping them do?
So Wall Street's a starting point. Wall Street is not the endpoint. It's a subset of the world. That being said, it's important to have focus at the start and with Danny. As a team, we're able to attack all of it.
Starting with Wall Street, though, they're sell-side banks that have been experiencing specifically with Ethereum instances, but also with blockchain adoption for 10 years.
They're very familiar with blockchains.
They know what the use cases are and they know what the benefits are.
Plugging them into public Ethereum and making that one-time upgrade is one very, very large customer base.
The other side is the asset managers.
So the players actually hold funds that want to start tokenizing them and putting them into a public blockchain.
So you can unlock the benefits of tokenization, faster settlement, more access.
having digital assets that can all interoperate and then start to play around in DFI and start
creating structure products and create this flywheel of financial innovation. That's the other
side of it. That's the quote-unquote buy side. There are also a bunch of different players in
between and two, from brokerages to mid-market funds. And we're going to a cross-section of all
of them saying that capital markets are going to move on to public blockchains. We think it's
very, very important to highlight that Ethereum is the most neutral, the most secure, the most
global blockchain for that adoption. So we're ringing that bell pretty hard and going around to
the whole cross-section of financial institutions. From there, the sky's the limit. We can go across
FinTech and go across governments. We can put the state, local, international level, etc. So it really
is a full-on business development blitz. And then what are success metrics? The more assets that are
tokenized on Ethereum within the Ethereum economy as a result of our efforts, that's a win for the
ecosystem. And not just tokenized, but utilize. We're not looking for
vanity metrics. We're looking for people actually doing and helping people actually doing meaningful
activity with these financial assets in a blockchain environment, which is super important. That's
one thing that's missing from tokenized assets that you need to bring assets there, but you also
need to create a flywheel of adoption. The more L2s that are built on an institutional scale,
L2s are this wonderful business model for institutions where they can plug into the Ethereum economy
of liquidity, and they can also have their own customization, their own privacy, their own parameters.
the moral twos that pop up as a result of our efforts. That's another metric of success.
And lastly, just awareness about ETH and Ethereum. ETH the asset is important.
ETH is important for the security of the Ethereum ecosystem. There are all these amazing
ETH issuers that have vehicles to distribute ETH to the world by the ETF wrapper.
And simplifying narratives and creating more content and research to educate about why ETH is a good
portfolio asset in conjunction with something like Bitcoin is really, really important.
part of that flywheel of having the asset and the Ethereum ecosystem linked together.
So those are some of the things we're working on an ongoing basis to grow the pie.
I want to ask about the Ethereum Foundation.
Is there any relationship like formal or pseudo or informal or otherwise between the EF and
etherealized?
Do these two entities work together?
Are you guys just friends?
What's the relationship they're like?
So as you know, I was at the Ethereum Foundation for nearly eight years.
I have some deep relationships with the folks over there.
And first and foremost, there's certainly, as seen by the grant to Vec's early etherealized efforts from both the Talek and the EF, they're certainly keen for this type of work to happen.
They're certainly aware that there is a vacuum and that some of this work is on the critical path at this inflection point for Ethereum, you know, whether Ethereum ends up being the thing that's adopted or not.
in terms of a formal and ongoing relationship, there's a lot of like communication ties, a lot of relationship ties. And as we dip our toes into some of the R&D sphere, certainly relationships and ties on working in those capacities. But in terms of an ongoing formal relationship, you know, ongoing conversations, we shall see. And so the question of how did Ethereumize get funded is the answer to that. Well, first, there was an EF grant and then future funding just comes from clients. And,
work that you guys do with your guys' clients. Is that how it goes? Yeah. We wanted to make sure there
was actual demand and actual product market fit. And that's why the grant from the EF did a couple of things.
One, it's signaled legitimacy, which especially when going to Wall Street, especially when we're
going to Tradfai. Tradfai wants to speak to Ethereum. Wall Street institutions want to speak to
Ethereum. Ethereum is this decentralized, incredible technology that in theory shouldn't need business
development, but now the Overton window shifted. There's competition now. There's other players that are more
centralized, that our companies that are going and doing BD found very quickly that Ethereum
needs to do that too. So that was what we figured out using the grants to get us started.
Now it's how to make that sustainable and that's how to make that organic. And as we scale up
the organization, have Danny and other really, really talented engineers coming on board and
business development, salespeople and everything, we will scale that up. I've got a concern about
Ethereumize that I'd like you guys to address. Part of Ethereumize's mission, of course,
is to be in the room with institutions,
to be a resource to help guide institutions
for how they can work with Ethereum.
And of course, as you guys know,
one of the issues previously
is that Ethereum's more centralized competitors
are doing BD behind closed doors,
likely talking shit about Ethereum.
And since Ethereum is this voiceless,
credibly neutral protocol that does not do BD,
there's been no one in that room to advocate for Ethereum,
this silent protocol.
But Danny, Vivek, I kind of contend that
the people doing BD in these rooms are like way more sharky than I think is in the DNA of
Ethereum people. Just the natural disposition of Ethereum people is just to not be that
sharky. And so the question that I have to you guys is, do you got what it takes? Do you guys
have what it takes to go toe to toe with the sharks that are in the water that surround
Ethereum via its competition? What would you respond to this? These people understand Ethereum
from a baseline perspective. They understand that it's,
secure. They understand and actually care that it's decentralized. They understand that it has very high uptime.
So we have like the technology that they kind of think that they want and do know from a certain
basis. We have that on our side. And so like being a steward, being somebody that can show up
and guide them through this thing that they have a natural inclination for allows us to be, you know,
honest, reasonable, you know, maybe buttoned up players in this environment that they're just like very
eager to communicate with and jump on board. I think that that changes the approach that we have to
take in relation to some of these others. Some of these others, like, they're hungry, and they're
trying to convince them of something that maybe they don't yet know or maybe is not true. And so
they have to play a different card, whereas we can play like a very leveled hand in relation to
a technology that they already kind of believe is the thing that they should be using.
Vevac, what do you think?
I come from Wall Street trading floors.
Yeah. We like winning. We like competition. But it's almost as if Ethereum is already ahead.
Ethereum is already winning. When we go in and say Ethereum is the only blockchain without downtime, where you have the most amount of tokenized assets, the most amount of economic security, the most amount of regulatory precedent, the most amount of institutional adoption.
Ethereum is the default. We just have to remind people why. Because right before, when there were fewer people in the room, you can have other centralized blockchain.
and companies going and pitching their case,
and they will do it at Ethereum's expense.
We like to take the high road,
but we also like to be winning,
and it's a competitive ecosystem,
so we'll all as needed.
I guess Vivek is saying Vivek himself is a shark,
and I will compliment that with, you know,
a level-headed view on Ethereum.
When you guys are having some of these conversations,
I don't know how many of these conversations you've had
had or how many, like, entities, institutions,
organizations that you've talked to.
Hundreds.
What are the common roadblocks?
or the friction points that these entities see,
maybe broadly speaking,
just about the crypto industry as a whole,
and then also mainly with Ethereum too.
Are there any, like,
Ethereum native roadblocks or frictions or hurdles
that you help them get over that you frequently see
and then also just with the crypto industry as a whole?
I'll start it off.
The largest thing was regulatory.
The thing about Ethereum is we also have to remember
Ethereum was and is the default.
The internal blockchains that many, many banks have been running for 10 years
are all EVM-based.
are all EVM forks.
And so they are actually familiar with EVM.
They're familiar with smart contracts.
They're familiar with Ethereum.
Regulatory was the biggest hurdle.
That is now starting to clear.
Like now we're going to very rapidly,
A, we saw the FSA drop a lot of cases.
B, we're seeing a lot more willingness to have tokenization rules.
C, we're seeing stable coin legislation that probably will pass this year.
And then market structure legislation that will probably pass this year, too.
So what we really need to do is handhold and say and teach these institutions
is that if you're going to go for business,
we're an open line of communication,
anything you want to do within Ethereum,
tokenize assets, deploy apps, deploy L2s,
we can help you with that.
That is the bridge from idea to actual execution
that we want to facilitate
and not just leave it in the ideation phase.
So the roadblocks are largely falling away,
and then all of the operational work,
the K-Y-C work, the regulatory work.
We're in the room.
We're not afraid to roll up our sleeves and do it.
In that answer is, again,
It's easy to like tokenize an asset and toss it on chain.
The hard work is figuring out how to navigate their existing processes,
their existing order flows, existing trading processes,
and actually like figure out how to do meaningful things that fit into their, you know,
existing and how they want to evolve in the world.
So maybe if Ethereumized it's successful,
not only are more institutions kind of just doing the table stakes things of putting
some of their business logic on chain,
not only are they just tokenizing some of their assets,
but they're doing uniquely synergistic things
with what blockchain technology can offer to them.
They're not just doing the table stakes.
They're actually pushing the frontier.
Is that kind of like a way to understand success for Ethereumize?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's the end game.
It's one of those things where I'll go back to my personal entry into Ethereum
because I'm later than Danny.
I'm later than you guys.
I traded the old way, the Wall Street way for 10 years.
And then when I used Uniswap the first time and I saw that I just connected a wallet
and I had an asset that could permissionously trade,
that was the biggest light bulb moment that I think it could ever have.
That is a whole new financial system.
We want to guide institutions to have their unit swap moment with the caveat that defy is not going to be the first stop.
That's maybe a few steps ahead.
So tokenizer assets, build layer twos, have blockchain ecosystems that you can customize.
But ultimately getting them to that utility, as Danny has been saying, that's the most important part.
Having them actually use the superpowers of blockchains, which is DFINs,
which is defy, which is permissionless borrow and lending and permissionless trading,
and then being able to programmatically structure products,
that's where the magic is unlocked.
I have zero doubt that banks will all be defy-pilled in the medium term,
but first they have to all get on chain.
So the long term is definitely to unlock the magic of defy and to crypto pill all of them,
and I think it'll happen.
Now, there's two other etherealized co-founders.
There's four total to my understanding.
Vecbethic, maybe you can just fill in, they're not here.
Who are they?
What are their skill sets?
What are they doing?
What's their leadership like?
Hummer has been with Ethereumize Day 1. He is very, very, very close with the EF, with Vitalik.
He's been in the ecosystem for 10 years, and he is just a diehard. He wants to see Ethereum win.
He's been a very, very, very vocal and effective advocate. And he was there at the birth of
Ethereumyelize. He is going to help with all things, Ethereum ecosystem and helping amplify
the entire ecosystem to the world. Zach Obrant is one of the best product engineers out there.
is one of the best security researchers in the entire Aetherian ecosystem.
He's a force.
He's a force.
Unbelievable.
And he's going to come help us do our product build out and our services and help actually
figure out all the engineering that we're going to need to walk institutions from idea to actual launching products.
It's an unbelievable team that can be more inspired about it.
The creation of Ethereumize is happening in parallel with two new executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation,
to Nucoedis, Thomas and Shaouet. Talk about that relationship because I think the era of
Ayamaiyuchi has done amazing things for Ethereum. The addition by subtraction era for Ethereum
really set the tone, set the credible neutrality emphasis and baked that into Ethereum's DNA.
And now I think the Ethereum ecosystem broadly is asking for a new kind of era with a little bit
more aggressiveness in terms of just like business development and growth. Maybe, Danny, you can
kind of just add to the conversation here about like,
this new era for Ethereum with, I don't know as much about Choway, but I do know that Tamaz,
from what I've heard, is just an incredible operator, just an absolute grinder in terms of just
business operations and business development. And I see that being highly synergistic with your guys'
effort here at Ethereumize. Danny, maybe you can just like add to this conversation about
where you see the synergies here, not just for Ethereum, not just for the EF, but just broadly
for the era that Ethereum itself is walking into. Yeah. So when I stepped away last year,
and finally came up for error and got out of the EF and observed things as an outsider and with a fresh look for the first time in a long time.
You said it.
My intention was, okay, it is time for a new era.
And you also said another word that came to mind quite a bit as sharks.
Essentially, the IAS era and impact on Ethereum was to leave room and to ensure that we had resilience across the ecosystem.
We had many different voices in R&D, many different voices.
and technologies in the client space, leaving room for defy to grow and blossom and not control it,
having other companies step in like Nethermind, Tomash's blockchain company,
step in and build critical infrastructure and do all sorts of interesting things.
And ultimately, like, I think we very much achieved the goal of like a diverse and resilient
Ethereum ecosystem from all across layers.
At the same time, the world grew up and changed around us, right?
competing blockchains showed up. VCs with vested interests are kind of all across the stack.
The regulatory regime changed and all of a sudden you have people seemingly all over Washington,
right? And the happy world outside of Ethereum increasing with Silver Sharks.
And where the EF previously keeping a low tone on its voice and placement was probably net
beneficial to Ethereum, my thought is that we can move into a new era where the Ethereum found
is more opinionated, does act more as a counterbalancing force to these very powerful forces
out in the world. Again, not in a way that the EF takes control. I don't really think that's even
possible at this point, but in a way that they do exist and there's some utilization of its
voice and its stature to provide, again, an anchoring and a counterbalancing force to
what is an increasingly very complex world. And so I do think that
Iya shifting out, becoming the president of the board, she gets to still kind of help set the tone and steward values and some of these deep philosophical points that she's helped layered in over the years.
But we get some new blood.
And the co-edee is certainly an interesting choice, but Choway, Choway is one of my closest collaborators over the past eight years.
She's on the research team.
She's closer with myself with Justin Drake, Vitalik, Dachra, the whole cast of characters.
and been really in the room helping push and figure out the future of the Ethereum Protocol.
At the same time, she's very anchored in kind of the EF's philosophy and position.
And so she really provides like an anchoring into the protocol and anchoring into some of the philosophy that kind of Aya has set forward.
Whereas Tomash, deep Ethereum guy understands everything kind of inside and out, but has spent the past many years building what is certainly a very successful.
and operating a very successful business in the broader kind of Ethereum and blockchain space.
And so he comes in with an outsider energy. He comes in with a let's get shit done perspective.
And I think the combination of the two, we get to turn to this new era of the EF still being
very grounded in its philosophical views and its relationship with the ecosystem, but willing
to be a bit more aggressive, willing to have more opinions, willing to more rapidly distill
the conversation and try to raise up what the consensus is so that we can meet the world head-on,
right? There has been a phase shift in the world around us. There are sharks from top to bottom,
but the world is also eager to adopt. And so I think the EF is through this change,
embracing that and moving forward. And at the same time, I think the EF and the ecosystem are
acknowledging that maybe the expectations of what the EF does, but what the EF actually does is
probably somewhere here.
And etherealize and others need to fill in that ring.
They need to fill in the void,
and they need to make sure that the theory
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Danny, there's a conversation that I think I really want to pick your brain on.
Because as you said, the world is changing around Ethereum.
And Ethereum has stayed the same, right?
Ethereum has really emphasized credible neutrality.
And I think the thing that truly sets Ethereum apart from all of its competitors is its concavity.
It's a concave system.
It's really balanced.
It doesn't emphasize really any one particular design element.
Bitcoin is convex. Bitcoin optimizes for $21 million. Solana optimizes for IBRL, like Celestia
optimizes for data availability. And Ethereum balances between all of those things. It's just generally a
balanced ecosystem. And I'll contend that we are entering a world, not just in crypto, but broadly,
broadly speaking, especially kind of marked by Trump, we are kind of entering a more extreme era
where balanced moderate opinions are kind of out. And so,
to me, this illustrates that Ethereum is not with the times in one way, as in like it's not
following this like more extreme disposition. But that actually is resembling why we need
Ethereum the most, because it's a bulwark, a credible neutrality, bullwark against the changing
times. And I think that's really marked by like, especially that recent Salana ad video where
Solana tried to position itself. It branded itself as like anti-gender pro-innovation.
which is really just the current thing,
the current moment in the time.
And this is just something that I think Ethereum
really represents as something it does not do.
It stays balanced.
It stays true to its long-term vision.
Maybe you can carry this conversation forward
and how you see it
and how you see it's relevant for
what you're doing here at Ethereum.
So something our co-founder, Grant Hammer,
says is that Ethereum is our best bet
at civilizational infrastructure,
open, neutral,
decentralized,
and ultimately like something that can last for decades and decades and be counted upon.
We can't throw that out the window.
Like that is the value proposition.
The value proposition is like what programmable environment are you going to lock up assets for a decade, 15 years?
Like there's only one answer.
Where are you, you know, expecting to have the absolute most uptime?
Where do you expect no matter what jurisdiction you're in that your assets cannot be like seized from you?
in an unexpected way due to the kind of stratum of the blockchain and who's running it.
And I think there's only one answer.
I think that answer is the best for the global economy.
I do think that's also best for the U.S. economy.
I think that's the place where you're going to have the most opportunity for innovation,
the most opportunity for plugging all of the pieces of the global economy together in a reasonable way
and not creating something with a brittle foundation.
That said, there's a...
path dependency to whether Ethereum is adopted or not, right? And if Ethereum doesn't hit this
kind of adoption curve right now, something else will. And then Ethereum becomes maybe in the
tail risk scenario when the brittle thing crumbles. Maybe it's the thing that people end up
adopting. But I think if it does not hit the right path dependency on this adoption curve,
it doesn't matter how good, how neutral, how kind of perfect that foundation is.
And so I think at this point, we have to balance between ensuring that Ethereum stays neutral
and what is, you know, an appropriate platform for civilizational infrastructure,
while also knowing that we have to be in the room.
We have to make sure that critical decisions are made in a reasonable way.
And that reasonable way is picking the most open, neutral, and decentralized infrastructure.
that is Ethereum. And so I think that we can do that without removing what is special about Ethereum.
I think that players like Ethereum can show up and be the room. I do think that given the resilient
Ethereum, given the multi-client nature, given the many voices across the globe, that the EF can have
stronger opinions. And I believe there's actually room for many other players to enter into this arena
to make sure that Ethereum seizes this opportunity. And there are many, right? Like all of the
twos have very strong teams and can go out there and build business. They're like incredible
daps across the stack that at this point in the abliction curve should be shifting, you know,
towards thinking about, you know, who are our non-native blockchain consumers and how do we get
things in front of them? Similarly, wallets. Like, we've kind of been in this wallet paradigm where
people that use blockchains have a very vested interest to use the blockchains and kind of
will deal with whatever U.S. But it's at this juncture that we need to kind of hit that transition.
point and think about the world more broadly and how we get them to use these things. And what are
the interfaces and standards and things like 7702 that are going to change the game to onboard the world?
So across the stack, we need to take this beautiful, actually decentralized thing that we built
and make sure that we're meeting the world head on.
One of the concerns that I have, Danny and Vivek, is as a result of the Biden administration
and Operation Chokepoint 2.0, much of the industry has moved to.
towards, maybe not towards the right, but in support of Donald Trump and his administration. And now as an
industry crypto outside of the industry is kind of branded as this more right wing, more Donald Trump-aligned
industry. And I mean, it's really hard to argue with when, especially when like the Fair Shake
Super Pact poured hundreds of millions of dollars into, you know, bipartisan races, but primarily,
like, Republican conservative races. And so one concern I have is that as an industry as a whole,
the industry is aligning with a certain political disposition, which is inherently, like, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu in the world of politics. And so you kind of have to make these choices. One thing I'm concerned about is that there is a political pendulum, and it seems to be swinging pretty aggressively. And right now we have made some huge wins, and we are currently reaping the benefits of placing our bets on the right side of the political aisle. And in addition to having
some like chaos with a meme coin launching president, we are also getting some very real progress
done in the SECC and the CFC and the market structure bill. And so that is great. I think our bets have
paid off and we place our bets correctly. One thing I'm worried about is that the pendulum will swing
eventually in the opposite way. Maybe, Danny, you can talk about Ethereum's positioning as an ecosystem
when that pendulum inevitably swings back. There's a number of things there. I talked about it at the
outside of the podcast a bit, but if we onboard financial institutions and real world assets
in this window, the pendulum can only speak so far, right? Like, the U.S. economy will have a
dependency on blockchains, and there's only so much at that point that this can be attempted to be
essentially undone. And so I do think that it's time, and you have to use this opportunity
to ensure that we meaningfully do onboard the world in this window, so that, you know, the benefits of
of decentralized blockchains become apparent to large economic players and increasingly to consumers en masse.
And at that point, I think the game's kind of done. So we have a window and we need to make sure that we seize the window.
That said, I think that from an Ethereum standpoint, we need to play the long game.
And the long game is focusing on real value for institutions as well as consumers.
It's focusing on sound mechanisms that provide value.
to these people than these environments, but do not scam the hell of them.
And it's focused on the Ethereum Protocol, not being only controlled by any entity,
such that it can be ultimately captured by a political institution or even shut down by another one.
And we have a very strong basis for these things to be true today and to remain true tomorrow when the pendulum swings.
But we need to be careful during this, essentially this blitz.
Like we have this opportunity, but we can't throw it all the window.
just because we have this unique opportunity, we need to be very careful.
The fact, what would you add to this conversation?
I would add that technology is bipartisan.
I mean, the thing that is most inspiring is that the U.S. and the world is open to adopting blockchain.
Finally, they're open to crafting rules.
These rules, they benefit both parties.
Having stable coins as a distribution mechanism for the dollar globally benefits everybody.
It benefits the U.S.
It benefits the world because the dollar is a great store of value.
Having tokenization rules benefits everybody. Making assets digital and having them trade globally is an unlock for the whole world.
So although crypto is short-term political and will swing in short-term, I do think it's very, very important that we represent the institutional demand, the institutional interest, actually advancing the technology forward that the whole financial system is upgraded.
I don't think either side can argue with that.
And we just want to make sure that if the pendulum swings towards a regime where companies that run blockchains have a seat at the table,
Ethereum is also very, very prevalent in the room.
Because at the end of the day, as much as there's arguing on Twitter and as much as there's tribalism, institutions, they think long term.
And they know the value of decentralized systems.
They know the value, the security that they bring.
They know the value of having the opt-in.
They know the tradeoffs that Ethereum has chosen to remain this neutral layer.
And it is the default for the world's assets.
We just have to make sure that despite whatever the political regime is, Ethereum is choice number one.
How can the Ethereum community support you guys?
Because I think there are, you know, many people in the Ethereum community are listening to this podcast episode, listening to, and they want to help you guys succeed in your mission.
How can we do this?
In what ways can we offer support?
In what ways can we help?
It's been an absolutely inspiring reception.
I mean, like, this thing started as a small grant from the Italic in the EF to say, let's go experiment,
let's go see if we can do some business development and marketing for Ethereum.
That was received very, very well.
When we launched, the community was very, very, very supportive, and that was absolutely
incredible when I had the fortune of joining forces with Danny, and now this can actually become
more of an Ethereum institution, the potential is very, very, very great now, and it's a great
responsibility and we're super excited about it. Our tag on is Ethereum is open for business,
bringing opportunities, bringing what we think we should be doing on a global scale, whether it's
RFPs for other governments, whether it's bringing certain tokenization projects that are in
contention with other blockchain projects to Ethereum. Helping funnel all that over to us would be
an amazing thing from the community because we want to tackle as much of it as we possibly can.
And then resource and staff appropriately so we can actually be effective in doing that.
Bringing opportunities our way that think should be within the Ethereum ecosystem.
We'll tackle a lot of it.
We'll tackle Wall Street.
We'll tackle government.
We'll tackle, but we obviously can't get all of it.
The Ethereum community is the most global.
It's the most widespread.
It's the most decentralized.
So bring those opportunities.
This would be an amazing ask.
So one thing that comes to my is the reason that Ethereum has been so well received
and that there is kind of so much demand for what's going on here
is that there was otherwise a vacuum.
There was this void in the space.
And that goes back to maybe an expectation that like the EF should be doing it
or maybe the expectation that, oh, in the Ethereum community,
we don't have to do that.
We just build the tech.
And I think that something broadly in the Ethereum community
that we need to be doing is identifying what are these vacuums,
what are these things that no one is doing and picking up the mantle.
And it theorizes one of that and filling a particular vacuum or two or three.
But there are many, many other places, you know, whether that's creating some sort of like application incubator or being a voice in, you know, identity type solutions and in a global manner. There's all sorts of things that need to get done. And we just as a community need to much more proactively address them and meet them head on. And again, from a technological standpoint, yeah, we build great shit. We build incredible things that crypto users want to use. We build modular environments.
that scale in elegant ways.
But at this point, like, the juncture of actually meeting the world where it is,
there's a lot of gaps, and we just all need to proactively be filling them.
And then how can the Ethereum layer one, the actual protocol itself,
how can it fulfill its end of the bargain?
Is there anything about the current state of the Ethereum layer one that is
constraining in your omission or getting in the way of you guys doing your job?
So, like, what's on Ethereum's end of the bargain here to help etherealize?
in its mission. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that everyone's going to run up against,
if we get the flywheel spending and the world actually starts wanting to adopt these systems,
is scale. Scale efficiency at layer one and layer two are just like, they're on the critical
path. And there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. And I think we're really rallying around
that as the critical thing right now. And I think we're going to see a lot of good movement.
But we'll also, we'll help where we can on that. But it's not just at layer one, right?
It's also in wallet standards. You know, how are we going to manage the complexity of layer two's
and users existing across these environments.
Others is having a phase change and stepwise change
and how we're handling privacy in the application layer.
I can navigate privacy in a reasonable enough way,
and I also have vested interest to use blockchain.
But as we onboard institutions and as we onboard consumers
across the globe, privacy model has to evolve.
And that might be going all in on certain tools
like noir.
That might be actually figuring.
figuring out how to have wallet standards, manage secrets in reasonable ways.
And that's also like us figuring out, like, what is the reasonable juncture between this
and the law, right?
Like, we're going to have to address these questions head on if we're going to onboard the world.
And so there's just a number of things in this R&D landscape that we've been able to kind of
sweep under the rug because we're crypto-native, but we're not going to be able to anymore.
And we need to address them head on.
Vive, anything from you on this?
I think L2s create the ultimate experimentation zone for Ethereum.
I think as long as we are pushing forward on all fronts,
and the cool part about fragmentation is we can run thousands of experiments in parallel.
The less cool part is how to we unite these all.
That's part of the inter-op standards.
Everyone's working on them.
As Danny said, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen.
We're going to get some really, really cool standards,
both for synchronous composability, async, intense, etc.
But at the end of the day, as long as L2s are all experimenting across the spectrum, maybe we have some proof of concept native rolloves.
Maybe we try the whole spectrum of base rollups.
We keep running all the optimistic, but we also go more and more ZK and see if ZK layers can interoperate.
I'm just a very positive some person.
Like blockchain adoption has not even hit its critical threshold yet.
Hopefully we'll be a big force to push that.
But as long as there's L2 innovation and experimentation at that layer, we can take the best of that and plug into L1.
And I think the faster we can do that feedback loop, the better because it is a competition, and we do want to stay competitive and ahead.
I think it'll all work out in terms of interop, in terms of value, accrual, and in terms of having one unified Ethereum that's represented by a lot of different, quote-unquote, states underneath.
Danny, I think there is a parallel universe out there where you are the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation.
In that parallel universe, what shots would you have called?
Like what decisions would you have made on like day one or week one of that job?
What do you think ought to be the highest priority inside of that role?
First of all, honestly, a better decision was made.
Tomas, complimented by Shaouet, bringing in the outside energy, bringing somebody that has run a large and profitable business before.
I met up with Tomosh the other night.
He's a total badass and he's exactly what the EF needs.
So I don't really think a lot of my calls and shots are going to be.
be at odds or necessarily even better than what Tomas is going to implement.
Your calls would have been to put Tomash in.
I mean, ultimately, it wasn't in the realm of what I was considering, but at the end of the day,
he's a really, really good choice. He's a badass. Yeah, I think that I talked about a little bit
before the resilient Ethereum and then the very adversarial world outside of it can handle
the EF having a stronger voice. It can handle the EF saying,
we don't just steward these values in the abstract but this is really important and hey yeah you all have
that opinion over there but we need to anchor on this opinion over here and essentially because
previously they wanted to just let the scales balance themselves out and often did in the Ethereum
ecosystem but now there are so many vested interests and things but in pressures on the scale that
the EF and others should be exercising their boys is a bit more to me.
make sure that we end up and stay in a balanced reality. So that's the big thing. The other is,
and this is something that Tomas is eager to do, is help just more rapidly distill the conversation.
You know, that's something that in the proof of stake world working on the launch of the beacon
chain and the merge, I played that role a lot. Like, we had this extremely critical thing that we
needed to do. And often what I had to do was, okay, these are the things on the table,
this is what these people think, this is whatever.
I can distill that.
This is what we need to do.
Or these are the two things that we need to debate,
and we need to debate it quickly,
because it's time to make a decision.
And I think that the EF, to the extent possible,
should bring some more of that energy here
in the way that they're kind of communicating and operating.
So we shall see it's a complicated ecosystem,
and it's a complicated org,
but I am honestly, like, best outcome.
I'm super excited to be to theorize.
I think there's an incredible amount of good work
and excellent work to do here.
And Tomash, complimented with Shaouet,
they're going to be a force.
This is good.
So, guys, it is the 21st of March.
What does work look like for you today right now?
We're about to wrap up this podcast.
Y'all are going to go back to working on Ethereumize.
What does that actually look like?
What's the nearest term priorities?
Just so I can kind of get an understanding,
the listener can get an understanding of what boots on the ground actually feels like.
So, Vivek, in just a few minutes when we're done here,
what are you going to do next?
immediately keep calling up institutions. Keep saying that anything you want to learn about Ethereum,
anything you want to build an Ethereum, anything you want to do within the Ethereum ecosystem,
we'll help facilitate that. We'll be very aggressive. I mean, I'm in New York City. We'll come to your office.
We'll facilitate whatever you need to onboard any part of your assets or user base to Ethereum.
And rinse and repeat that forever on a treadmill until we have global adoption. That's it.
We have a hammer. That hammer is a spectacular piece of technology. I'll run around with it and say that we need to get network effects where Ethereum is the default go-to for all assets and the race is on. And I feel a lot of that urgency. So that is the day to day until Ethereum is, as Danny said, and as Grant said, is civilizational infrastructure. That's the backbone of the financial system to start. And then ultimately, all the amazing world computer applications that are beyond that. Danny, same question to you.
You know, part of my time is just diving back in, right?
There's a lot of conversations I'm having, catching up with all sorts of folks across the stack to understand the lay the land, understand the needs of Ethereum, understand the blockers and helping where I can.
There's also a lot of work in understanding existing processes, technical processes that happen in Wall Street with financial institutions.
You know, where are they faxing documents and how can those processes be kind of a process?
integrated into this new financial system. And how does that actually look in terms of the suite of
products and things that exist today on Ethereum, as well as the things that need to be built
in the future? Another big item is, as we increasingly show up in the room on the Hill in Washington,
what are those things that we're pushing for? What are the strategic plays in relation to
the most important things that can happen for Ethereum and ultimately for DCA.
decentralized technology to be adopted. So playing a bit across the Ethereum ecosystem into
the Tradfi Wall Street world and then figuring out where all of that kind of meets and policy
is what I'm working on. Danny Vivek, we've covered so much in this podcast. I've learned everything
I think I've wanted to know about etherealize before I let you guys go. Is there anything I did not
ask about any stone that I did not unturn, maybe just open-ended Vivek, I'll start with you,
open-ended, what else is worth bringing up in this conversation?
I think you touched on it earlier when you asked,
did we have what it takes to represent Ethereum?
In a very positive some way, but very, very focused way,
we want to say that this is the dream of bringing some new blood,
which I'll bring on Nodemito G, with the best of the ecosystem,
who, I mean, Danny's accomplishments speak for themselves
and overseeing one of the greatest software achievements
ever done civilizationally and combining that with some commercial aggressive attitude that
Ethereum needs. I don't know. I'm thrilled about it and I think we have the perfect balance of
team to go actually achieve adoption and make Ethereum aggressive again. Danny?
Where it matters. Where it matters. You know, I'm excited to be back to all the friends and
colleagues and all the future people interact with. What's up? Hit me out. Talk to you all soon.
Last question.
Is etherealize hiring?
Yeah.
We want to build the best, the absolute best team.
And we've started with a pretty incredible basis of co-founders.
Again, Zach O'Brien is like, he's unbelievable.
His mind is quite incredible.
And then we do intend to kind of layer into the engineering team.
We do intend to think about and bring on some critical players on how we can impact R&D.
and figuring out how to partner with some folks
in an existing kind of trot-by world
to help elevate and accelerate the mission.
So we're looking for the best and best.
Vivek, anything to add to that?
The Avengers.
We want to grow the Avengers.
The receptivity from the community has been unbelievable.
We do want to bring again, as he said,
the best of Ethereum, the best of Wall Street.
And one day, these will be synonymous.
One day the Finnish system will be an Ethereum system.
And I want to hire everyone we can to make that a reality.
Danny Vivek, thank you for joining me on the show today.
Appreciate it. Thanks for having us.
Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal.
Crypto is risky.
You can lose what you put in, but you can also lose what you don't put in.
And that's why Ethereum is open for business.
We are headed west.
This is the frontier.
It's not for everyone.
But we're glad you are with us on the bankless journey.
Thanks a lot.
