Bankless - Ethereum’s Next Decade | Tomasz K. Stańczak, Ansgar Dietrichs, Dankrad Feist, & Danny Ryan

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

This episode showcases four of the most important talks from our Bankless Summit event in Buenos Aires for Devconnect, each capturing how Ethereum is evolving as it enters the real world. Tomasz K. Stańczak reveals the EF’s new priorities around developer acceleration, founder support, institutional engagement, and unifying the L2 ecosystem. Ansgar Dietrichs explains why Ethereum is shifting from long-term exploration to near-term execution, detailing the plan to 3x L1 scale annually and accelerate real-time ZKVM progress. Dankrad Feist makes the case for a DeFi-centric L1 where Ethereum becomes the global liquidity layer for RWAs and high-value settlement. And Danny Ryan closes with a raw, personal account of building proof of stake, surviving an SEC scare, and why he still believes Ethereum can meaningfully reshape global finance. These talks matter because they chart the clearest picture yet of where Ethereum is heading, what the next decade requires, and how its core builders are steering it there. ------ 📣BANKLESS SUMMIT 2025 | SPONSORED BY M0 https://bankless.cc/m0 ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔵COINBASE | ETH & BTC BACKED LOANS https://bankless.cc/coinbase-borrow 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN  https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💤EIGHT SLEEP | IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP https://bankless.cc/eight-sleep ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 4:19 Tomasz K. Stańczak Ethereum's Next 5 Years 28:00 Ansgar Dietrichs Scaling Ethereum 2026: Why & How? 53:22 Dankrad Feist | Ethereum's DeFi Centric Strategy 1:10:22 Danny Ryan | The Last 8 Years: Ethereum, Burnout, & Coming Back ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Welcome to Bankless, and we've got a treat for you on the show today. I'm here in the greatest city south of the equator, Buenos Aires, where over 10,000 people converged for Ethereum DevConnect. A week-long conference distributed all over the city. On the Tuesday of DevConnect, we hosted the Bankless Summit, where we gave 12 speakers the opportunity to deliver their best, most educational, most passionate talk, the talk that they have just a burning desire to espouse to the Ethereum community,

and therefore the world. We are packaging up a curated selection of these talks into two episodes, one episode featuring the talks from all the members of the Ethereum Foundation, Tamash, Ansgar, Donkrad, and Danny Ryan. And another episode, which represents my four personal favorites from the summit, talks from Che Katsver from FlashBots, Lincoln Murr from Coinbase, Michael Dong from Brevis, and Luca Prosperi from M0.

The Bankless Summit was done in partnership with M0, the Universal Sablecoin platform. They sit at the intersection of cypherpunk crypto-economics and the Treadfi explosion of interest in stable coins and stable coin infrastructure. They were just fantastic partners to have at the summit and really helped the whole thing come together. The episode that you're going to hear right now

is the Ethereum Foundation episode where Tamash gives the lay of the land around Ethereum. Donkrad Fice gives his proposed strategy for Ethereum moving forward, his last talk as a member of the Ethereum Foundation before going on to Tempo. Ansgar gives a technical talk how we scale Ethereum,

and Danny Ryan tells his personal hero's journey to where he is today at Ethereumize. So let's go ahead and get into all these incredible talks, but first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. You can now borrow USDC against your Ethereum and Bitcoin on Coinbase. Crypto-backed loans on Coinbase make assessing liquidity seamless for crypto-hoddlers. Powered by Morpho, Coinbase Crypto-Back loans gives you direct access to on-chain financing,

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design for the future of compliant digital finance. Hi everyone. So this will be very much like slides clicking. I think that 150 slides. So I'll try to show you a lot of things around the Ethereum and Ethereum Foundation. I think I was thinking of which topic

finally I submitted says that I'll talk about everything a bit. So it was meant to be Ethereum Finance will be a bit of next five years of Ethereum from the perspective of the foundation. So we celebrated 10 years, 10 years no downtime, innovation and uptime. And I've showed this slides a few times. It was my thinking of how to expand as much as possible what Ethereum should be in 10 years.

thought it should be all the assets in the world in the digital form. So everyone has the permissionless access through Ethereum to all the assets in the world. You don't have to necessarily financialize everything in the world, but you want to give access to the things for whatever automation reasons. All automation, I mean, not only financial markets automation, but also embodied AI, automation of robot taxes, robotics, humanoids, with verification. If you want to make sure that the future is safe, automated, connected to global finance,

for everyone, open source. That's how we do it. Provide ambient trust. So this is more like what Ethereum really delivers the ambient trust for any applications. That's why Ethereum should be around you. So you can always reach for that trust

if you like it from institutions around you. They'll have privacy and security, some of the fundamental values of Ethereum to everyone by default. Make the world open source. And what I mean by that is that every single aspect of the institution, of the government,

financial systems around us becomes open source, and you can participate in definition of that the same way as you work on any GitHub protocol, on any GitHub repository in the world. And yeah, that makes the world permissionless. And what Ethereum Foundation is doing towards supporting the Ethereum ecosystem this year, we've done some restructuring,

and because we had a lot of, I think we had Ansgar and probably have some other speakers that will talk and focus more about on protocol, So I'll show you a bit more on eco-deaf side that is a bit of a change this year as we focus more on communication and talking to various participants of the ecosystem and outside. So ecosystem acceleration part of the eco-deaf is developer acceleration, founder success, app relations, and enterprise acceleration.

And on the developer acceleration side, if you look at work, fantastic work from Austin Griffith and his team and also BINCy supporting the effort. You have things like the Biddle Guild that is one of the reasons why you have some fantastic developer community because there are some fantastic materials to really go through all the aspects of Eterm. This is what they do, all the effort they put into educating developers during DevConnect.

So every day there are workshops, and you see here prediction market, zero knowledge proofs, the forecaster applications, speed running Ethereum, stablecoins. So they really talk about all the aspects, of defy and show people how to build that. And if you go to speedrunetterium.com, then you see the examples that people can go through and the first challenges are the most basic ones

like tokenization, decentralized seeking apps, but they go all the way to teaching people defy from the very beginning over collateralized lending, stable coins, prediction markets, Zika voting, and so on. And then this week, the developers will have the ability to participate in this capture the flag competition. So Austin makes everything super fun to work with for many, many years, working with his team and putting a lot of effort

in making sure that Ethereum feels super friendly, welcoming and fun for the new developers. And it's the type of effort that is contributing to the success in the developer reports. BINJ is doing great work now if you're seeing him as an emcee during the opening talks the whole day. He did 10 years of emce, well, almost 10 hours of emceeing. And he comes to the ecosystem to help the Duran Foundation with his 40,000 followers and has this fantastic voice, which is a mixture of focused on builders, humble, a bit emotional, telling the stories. And it's the kind of voice that we definitely want to see and show people that something more matters,

but also you put your emotions in everything. And developer report, we kind of started trying to own it. We realize that it's very often misrepresented, that we didn't put. an effort to represent everything that happens on Ethereum. Now we push all the repositories that really belong to the Ethereum ecosystem and started preparing reports that combine all the aspects of the Ethereum ecosystem more broadly together. So we want to bring all the L2's developers and Interim developers,

EVM developers, and represented the way that we think represents it your own best. But this is the actual official website of the developer report, and it does show the Ethereum ecosystem leading. And when we publish reports, it's still really, raised a lot of questions about how we really define the Ethereum ecosystem, EVM, L2, what we really support as the Ethereum Foundation. What is important is that when you look at the data, and it's not only over the last, like, years ago,

we were leading on the developer side, developer community side, but also nowadays, when you see new developers and when you combine all the L2s with many of the developers, they are starting through L2s nowadays, right? And then they understand, oh, by the way, I've kind of learned Mainnet anyway, and I'm just building applications on L2s. So then you see the numbers really being top

and also for the new devs. So we wanted to review that claim that Ethereum doesn't really attract new developers anymore. We have the app relations and research team with Jason Chaskin doing amazing work on pushing the conversations with the applications. So when you look at the DevConnect this year, it was really focused on

applications much more, which means that it was a bit of Guacamole whenever the event was appearing on the main list for us for the events that we were announcing that was very much research or infrastructure focused. Somebody at DEF was saying, why? Why not applications? Can we put applications there? And it happened a few times and it had a lot of pushback. But those things, sometimes don't happen just naturally. You have to put a bit of effort to say, let's talk about applications more. And the Ethereum ecosystem tries to focus more on founders. and applications and the success of founders and conversations with Defi, with payment systems,

with stable coins, to show all of you that real world adoption that Ansgar was also talking about. That's Jason. Just to bring more names and more faces for everyone's attention, those people put a lot of effort and will be in the future, the ones that will lead much of the conversation.

More applications focused that I just mentioned on. Application showcases, if you go to lateral, you probably see lots of apps. Let's see lots of app builders. and when we hear from app builders, I think they start to mention more and more often that, yes, we do have founder support, people started talking to us, people started listening to us. Enterprise Acceleration, this is a very new thing for the Ethereum Foundation this year. We started talking to institutions, financial institutions.

We went to Wall Street. We talked to Ethereumize at itself, built much of the Ethereum space for talking to institutions about finance. We created the website, Institutions.etiron.org. just to talk to institutions the institutions way. And then we talked about it a lot recently as well that he realized that we talk about the same things but with different language.

We don't use the words that are very typical for trot-fai like risk, like assets. We say real-with assets. Then we have to explain the things and then we realize actually we talk about the same things and then if we talk about it properly, then the traditional finance realized, oh, by the way, you actually solved a lot of problems

that we're trying to solve and we didn't even know it. the atomicity of the blockchain, the decentralization that you're looking for, no counterparty risk, and so on and so on. It's just different language, but we can sell everything in the blockchain space much better. So we talk that language, we show the quotes from people that are analysts

from the institutional finance world. We show the examples of large institutions that are adopting Ethereum, and we don't talk too much about the underlying technology, they always can reach out to us and learn more. And earlier this year, we've seen that people expect Ethereum to become this new finance layer. And many institutions that we go to say, well, we expect that we'll start disappearing. And it's great to participate in it.

Actually, we've supported it for many years. This is when you talk to people inside the institutional hierarchies and the climbing up just for the future to either merge with the blockchains with Ethereum or simply to continue changes, maybe jump. but it happens less often that people have to leave the institutions to start something in Web3. Now they start disrupting these institutions from inside, not really disrupting, but making that evolution happen and allow the whole transition to happen. I think that gradual disappearance of the institutions in the way that we've seen it in the past. And it's 10 years. And in July, we were celebrating that talking about Ethereum is very strong for the EFCC for the first big announcements of this year.

and we just continue since then all the time, wherever we go. The numbers keep showing Ethereum as super strong. 10 years, over 10 years. It's just when I was preparing the switch from 10.2 years to 10.3 years. So we'll be counting every month and every year forever. 108 billions of the total value securing the network. So this is Take Eve. Lots of TVL on Defi, and this is so much more than any other competing solution.

So DFI is absolutely crushing it on the Ethereum ecosystem. Stable Coins, TVL, 61% on Ethereum Mainnet and high volumes on Dexas. For the first time, I'm just pushing my picture. Okay, but this is Hong Kong FinTech Week. We went a lot to the events in Asia to talk to family offices, to banks, to institutions, talking about tokenizations in Asia, in Brazil, in US, in New York. That was next Finn event, not organized by the Ethereum Foundation, but supported by Deuterion Foundation. Then we organized a similar event in Hong Kong where we invited top institutional CEOs,

CFOs, analysts of the top institutions participating, talking on stage with people from the foundation, from the top defy applications and so on. Founder success team that supports founders with access to capital, with the mentoring, with the first stages, the first first, first, few months, years. So we wanted to transition that path from going to something like a Yves Global Hackathon and then having an idea and then thinking, okay, how do I accelerate from here to launching a product and getting funding and then getting users. So that's the founder success story. And I get Abbas joined recently as just one of a few fantastic members of the team. And one of the

things that they prepared and announced is a founders lab. It happens this week where probably around 20 different founders teams will have access one-on-one without any like panel stocks, just simply access one-on-one to some of the top builders and the most successful entrepreneurs of the Ethereum ecosystem. You see Jesse, you see Sandeep, you see Mike from Etherfi, Binge himself. So the founders will be able to understand how to communicate, how to fundraise, how to organize the companies and so on. And also what we wanted to express was, whenever we start talking about the Ethereum ecosystem,

we want to present L2s, we want to show that all of this is together. So when we talk about founder's success, we sent founders not only to main net, but we show them this is how you can get financing and mentoring from L2s. So we push that through the Ethereum.org website, but not only there.

Also through DevConnect, through LaRue, we invited all the L2s together, and we said one important thing to change compared to some of the previous big events of the Ethereum ecosystem is to push somehow and encourage L2s to be together in one space. So everyone who comes to the Ethereum ecosystem feels like, oh, right, okay, so this is all part of the one. And we keep talking about all the different L2s and all the possible events to say, look, this is all Ethereum. And it's just the messaging of communication and invitation and being friendly that really increases

the feel and the strength of the ecosystem for the newcomers. because now no longer they think, oh, this is all competing, and I have to choose. So Ethereum is actually weak because there is also, I don't know, like base or Bitrum and Starknet. Now they feel like, oh, this is all Ethereum. So this is such a strong ecosystem. I can just join or choose later, maybe depending on the situation. Ecosystem support programs. So we made some changes to the grants and financing.

We push much less on the direct financing and much more on the grants that are supporting through mentoring and from amplification, from visiting, But also if we talk about financing, we collaborate with the external institutions that fund public goods like Gitcoin or Octant or Allo Capital and so on. And we also create a very clear wish list and we'll start working on it further to get all the team leads from the Team Foundation to define very specific wishes depending on the goals that we have set for ourselves that we think. it's something that is really missing in the ecosystem and we'll try to make sure that we never compete with the products that can be commercialized, that you can actually do business and we force more and more people in the economy system

to be entrepreneurial about public goods as well. Ecosystem Unblocking does talk a lot about the outreach to academia. We had events at Shanghai Jatown University at Duke. We also went to PolyU in Hong Kong and we look for more and more institutions, sorry, like academic institutions, universities in Asia, Latin America, but also the US. We want to reach out and for sure, if you have connections to the top universities in Argentina, please always invite or around the world, invite them to connect with the Ethereum Foundation.

We'd like to establish more and more collaborations on bring the students as developers to the systems, but also as founders, not also bringing researchers that can talk about either policy or the cryptography research. everything is really much needed and it's better if this happens in a totally decentralized way Colombia big support for the Columbia Ethereum Research Center this year policy support team

so something that we've been asked for for a long, long time to work with the regulators and answer questions from regulators about Ethereum we collaborated in the past with the Centralization Research Center but also Connor who was leading the centralized research center came to a foundation recently and will lead

the Policy Support Team at the Foundation globally. So support the advocacy group, policy teams, and regulators who reach out to the Foundation and ask questions with workshops, with answers, so we can guide them on like what really defy means, what really decentralization means, why do we build things this way, how do you choose between all twos,

how do you solve the problems when are sequencer issues, when there are forks in different scenarios, and then regulators start to feel much, much more comfortable when they find someone or group of people who are who is supportive to answer all those questions. ecosystem amplification this is all like itrium.org website

but also this year will be sorry next year will want to be a bit more visible during Yves Denver to make sure that we visit some events next year that somehow over the years started being seen as disconnecting from Ethereum Foundation

very often was our fault that we started focusing on something that is like entirely the vision of the foundation and now we kind of reach for more connections, more communication and we'll be super excited if this is the massively successful event in the US next year. They're going to a new venue. The Ethereum Everywhere team is a bit of response

to much of the feedback that was talking about about how we not creating local physical hubs that are focused on founders and supporting founders to be successful and meet regularly, not the events that happen once per year in different cities, but something that happens every week.

So we're opening the Hong Kong hub with S&Z. There are localist fund support for Latam founders. The Ethereum London between Encode and Itterm Foundation and none of mine team, I think. The frontier research with the robot fights underground.

So things that are a bit multidisciplinary that connect people from AI and longevity and biotech and Ethereum and can help them work together. What can I say about the governance of Ethereum now? We try to make sure to continue super transparent and we start to think how to involve more people and more feedback into how we drive the all-core deaths through the reports and support of a full understanding of the ecosystem. So obviously always if research was the driver of the ideas and the Ethereum Magicians is all the IPs forecast nowadays allows you to read through all the transcriptions and understand what happens on the Occardef calls.

But what's also important is that through the Itterian Foundation work of the EcoDev team, we have many more conversations with the ecosystem, with DeFi teams, with all two teams, with institutions, and we collect that to provide in the future very structured reports that say, this is what the main problems are and this is how the industry is trying to suggest to solve them and provide this to the old core devs so they can independency address those issues

and they can start choosing but choosing in a very informed way and not we kind of want engineers to feel like they can silo into this like engineer mode and like researcher mode while being like having access to all the information

from the outside world on what's important what the problems are So many calls, obviously, at the moment when we define how we structure, how we seek that feedback, it can be gameed a bit. We will organize more of the strategic calls with the other participants and we provide those reports. And this will lead to a selection of headliners. Headliner idea is for every single network upgrade will have something that is big enough to talk about, something that really changes Ethereum to talk about otherwise why to push a network upgrade. and this not necessarily has to be a large core development effort.

On the side, a bit independently, there is a linear interim roadmap that shows five years of Ethereum roadmap that talks a lot about solutions around ZK. And talking about the defy space, because this one also promised but I have 30 seconds left, it's okay, I'll probably go over half of the slides. So nowadays, we'll talk more about the hybrid defy, and I think that if we see the examples of the...

recent announcements from Ava with the insurance for the participants, well, read through the details, probably there's some small tax there, insurance of the deposits, then finally have more and more solutions for big institutions and users to combine the traditional solutions and defy. This is etherfi that starts to look more and more like new bank. This is an example of Morpho and Coinbase. And I know the predictions are huge. Two trillions for the stable coins market.

2 trillions on the tokenization market we've expected Ethereum domination and beautiful, beautiful numbers everywhere and really I guess I'll share it and you'll see about everything else I think is mostly

review of the numbers from RWX OIZ that look fantastic for Ethereum everywhere it's like 60, 70, 80% of the market domination and generally whatever other chains, Altil ones were promised they're trying to achieve I kind of feel they didn't

and Interium did this year and it looks amazing when you look into numbers then you realize that you can very, very easily answer any questions about are the things going well on Ethereum? The numbers are great. Scaling you've heard from Ansgar

see those scaling comments about the blobs and all twos. Lean Roadmap shows us how we'll scale 100 times, whatever you've heard on Banclays. A fantastic episode with Justin Tregg about going to gigagas per second for Zika.

This is Kapanek. It's moving much faster than we expected. And you know the... I don't have to click for everything else. There's lots of L2s presented. Look at all of them like 20, 30, hundreds of L2s that are innovating and are super strong.

It feels... We're waiting for the time when we'll be talking about L2 premium on Ethereum. Yeah, I don't want to go too much over time. Thank you, Tomash. Thank you. We got time for one question

before we get Tomash off. to say she's got a question for her, Tamash. Yeah. Hi, Tamash. I have a lot of respect for what you do. I was wondering how you're able to like figure out what the right thing to do and drown all the noise, especially because people are very emotional, especially on Twitter and things like that, when you know prices go up and down and things like that. How do you figure out who to listen to or like what the right thing to do is? So I think it's important to understand a few aspects of it separated. So one is the mood of the entire industry. So, you know, You know, we don't look at prices like as a target or anything in a context of what decisions we are making,

but it's worth to keep looking at the prices almost as a metric that tells you what the mood of the entire industry is. Because very often the financing of the projects of startups and founders is dependent on the under token prices. So if you see that everything collapses on the market, you know that your founders are stressed or need support or need just like someone telling them, these are the examples of the past, this is the founders that were successful for the mer markets and so on. So this allows you to already the filter feedback based on the current mood and also adjust the feedback based on the current mood and understand how you should talk and what you should talk about.

Should you be more excited, less excited, and so on. The other thing is just if you talk to enough people, like hundreds or thousands of people and we start aggregating it, the truth just keeps becoming clear and clearer. So, and especially as you continuously talk to successful founders or the founders that are very perseverance, like pushing for years and years of thinking of like what I'm doing wrong, what I'm doing right. If you hear enough of that, the false ideas, the ideas that don't make sense, some ideas will obviously look false and some ideas will look like they are obviously genius. But that's because you have such a big space of something to compare them to the genius idea. as will become very clear to be genius,

and obviously fault ones will become even more obvious. Thanks, Tamash. Rundablad for Tamash. And in order to achieve that vision, Ethereum needs some scale, which is why we're going to bring up Ansgar to talk about how Ethereum is scaling next year. Yeah, hi, everyone.

Yeah, as David said, I initially wanted to just purely talk about our scaling plans for next year. And then when I was preparing the talk, I actually realized that there is like a bit of a broader theme that is kind of where I think the Ourskant approach to scaling and how that has changed over the last year is really emblematic of that. And so I expanded the scope a little bit

and I want to talk about what I would call going from the decade of exploration to real world Ethereum and how basically scaling is a case study in that sense. But I want to start by briefly taking us to a bit of a painful moment of the last year. Not this tweet in particular, but I think it is emblematic. I think many of you remember this time, like late last year. year early this year, there was a lot of tension in the Ethereum community. And given that Vitalik is basically representing Ethereum, like no one else, I thought it was like

a good discord to take an example. But there was many, many people were screaming at each other, basically. Everyone had this feeling that something was going wrong, but it wasn't quite clear what was the problem. And I basically want to propose one explanation, one narrative of like what exactly went wrong or maybe even just like what the challenge in that moment in time was. but how that actually, I think, is overall a positive and hopeful story. So what I would propose is that basically from the conception of Ethereum,

from basically the white paper, the yellow paper, all the way until maybe sometimes through last year, Ethereum and crypto as a whole was really in this decade of expiration. And negative exploration means most of the real adoption of the technology is still in the future. In a way, you're still in a sandbox. It doesn't mean what you're building is not already real in the moment, but you're still building towards a broader vision. A lot of the reasons why people were in this space at the time was not because they were excited about what was happening, but they were even more excited about the potential for the future.

And I think sometime last year you could really say we flipped and I would call it a phase change, a phase transition, and in my mind, this is the largest phase transition that crypto has ever gone through and probably will ever go through. And I'll try to explain a little bit what I mean, talking through a few examples, and hope to convince you of that as well. But I really think that going forward, a lot of how we have thought historically about crypto, about Ethereum, needs to be rethought, not necessarily thrown away, but rethought and basically mapped into this new time.

Real World Ethereum, the first time I at least came across the term, and I think actually this is where it originates. I couldn't find any earlier mention. Is a good friend of mine, D.C. Posh. He ran a few events called Real World Ethereum starting February of last year and then also throughout last year this year a little bit. And the idea was kind of we had been talking a little bit, and we both had this feeling that somehow,

Ethereum was still kind of like stuck in this sandbox mode when it felt like the real world was finally coming and knocking at the door. And we both had like this some trouble understanding like what exactly does it imply? Like how does that change how we think about the protocol? And I would even maybe go so far, you know, if you compared to AI, it's maybe a bit more like of a punchy kind of comparison. AI existed pre-GPT, right? and there was a lot of very useful real world applications of AI,

but then there was the ChachypT moment. And the ChachypT moment really turned it from an industry where it made sense for you to always live a little bit in the future, plan more for the long term to something where adoption was happening right now and people scrambled to like to build, you know, like famously XAI got started in like less than a year. You couldn't do five year plans anymore. You had to like actually focus on the here and now.

And I would argue that crypto actually, in a way, through last year, it was not one single moment so much, but it had this perfect storm of different factors. The maturity of the tech stack, and that's across, that's the chains, that's the wallets, that's all the standards, the on-ramps. Like everything in the tech step basically got to a point where it was good enough and you could start really using it in the real world. Of course, there was the change in the US regulatory environment that I would say is more like it was a removal of this inhibiting factor that really, I think, had quite a chilling effect in crypto until that point. And then I would say stablecoins, not as the first time crypto hit PMF, but I think the first time it had hit real world PMF, right? The very first time, and obviously stablecoins had been around for a while,

but it became obvious that there's actually something here for the real world, hopefully only the first of many. I wanted to think a little bit through the implications of like how that changed, how we on the L1 side approach things and maybe the broader, what it means for the broader ecosystem. wanted to start where I'm basically the most of an expert, which of course is the Ethereum Technical Roadmap and then zoom out a little bit towards the end. So what does this mean for the technical roadmap? If you look back in history, I think one of Ethereum's core

strengths over the last 10 years has always been that it was basically, it had the right long-term plans. It was always pointed in the right direction. It always had these very ambitious project and it was able to deliver on them, right? It started with proof of stake, the beacon chain, then the merge. People these days forget that those were two separate things, right? Like the proof of stake was a huge effort. And then separately bringing the existing chain into the proof of stake system was also a huge effort. The roll-up-centric roadmap, multi-year project, and more recent ones, ZKVM got started

already as part of the RolpCKM but now we're talking about real-time ZKVM, which is an entirely new level. And it's a huge ambition, but we are making very good progress towards that. and then most recently, an example, lean Ethereum. And I would argue that five years ago, this was all that mattered in a sense, from the L1 perspective, not from the application layer, but from the L1 perspective, what mattered was, are you pointed in the right direction? Do you have the right long-term ambition?

And do you have the technical capabilities to execute on those ambitions? And I think the answer was uniquely yes for Ethereum, and that's why Ethereum did out-compete a lot of the competitors back in the day, right? I think because that was Ethereum's unique strength. but I think in the age of real world Ethereum only ever living five years in the future is no longer good enough and I want to take as a specific example

I said the talk would be about Ethereum L1 scaling so you know you remember these roadmap diagrams by Vitalik right like really really amazing in depth but I would want you to notice two aspects of that this is from 2022 aspect one breadth first right? Like there is no like one, two, three priorities on this list. There's like 50 different topics that all happen in parallel, right? It was a, it was always this approach of like,

we don't yet know. It was, it was basically exploring the technical roadmap of where a smart contract blockchain could go in this like wild exploratory mode. Like let's see exactly like what of these things basically work, which ones don't work, and so on. And then, so breadth first, one observation, other observation, I'm not sure you can probably not read it, but this little box here has on the left snarks for L1 EVM and then on the right increase L1 gas limit. So the point was the L1 gas limit increase was basically like meant as this end point of this multi-year journey, right? Like there's no other box on this diagram that says increase L1 gas limit.

It was the very endpoint. And I think that really like is emblematic for the mindset of the time, which I mean I agreed with like I really think in for 2022, that was the right approach to blockchains. I don't think it's the right approach for 2025 and actually think Vitalik and everyone by now, we all, I think we all have made that adjustment in our minds. And so, yeah, basically, as I said, right? Like long-term plans, breath first,

and then importantly, real-word Ethereum does not mean throw away the five-year plan, because I still believe, and maybe some people have lost conviction, that I still very strongly believe that Ethereum, that is Ethereum's unique strength. I think Ethereum is uniquely good at basically drowning out the noise and understanding exactly where do we have to go long term.

But it is no longer good enough. It is no longer good enough. And the six, the 12-month plans also really, really, really matter. So what does that mean? Again, I said I wanted to take L1 scaling as a case study. So what has happened over the last 12 month? Well, one thing that happened is this is from April. we had this

the changes at the Ethereum Foundation we had Tomash and Shawway come in and in their kind of welcome blog post they were talking about next 12 months here are three priorities right and you notice

different in both of these dimensions it's the plan for the next 12 months not the next five years and it's three priorities not 50 and I think there was a really really important adjustment doesn't mean work on everything stopped, right? It was just saying like, hey, we need to start to also have specific short-term priorities. And then just like a month later, we also specifically took all the teams in the

Ethereum Foundation, all the technical teams, and restructured them a little bit to specifically say, hey, these three priorities, they're directly driving our attention and our resource allocation, right? Like, it really was like a change in how the Ethereum Foundation operated. And I think it was a very important change to align with the needs of this kind of this real-world Ethereum moment. So why even, why is L1 scaling on that list? Like what made it one of those priorities? Well, so what was this, what was the story? At the beginning of the year, we were ready at almost four years of no throughput increase

of Ethereum. We'd been at 30 million gas for almost four years or 15 million before we had the 15-59 upgrade that introduced the target market. and we had the plan, right? We had the long-term plan, the right, the right-long-term plan towards real-time L1 ZKVM, but we were only halfway through that plan, right? And the lesson was, this is no longer good enough,

we have to act now. So what to do? What happened, right? So first of all, I think actually this is one of those moments where, again, that's why I think over the last year and then beginning of this year, there was so much tension, because I really feel like everyone was kind of,

was feeling this change, but it was having a hard time putting the finger on it and so I think a lot of there's a lot of credit as many times in Ethereum's history to the community again and I mean you know Eric had a bit of a crash out afterwards but like still I really think like huge credit to him to everyone here

this was a push that came from the community first to say hey look we need to push the gas limit we had like this there was this pump the gas effort that said look we need to do we need to like do something now. And so that technically already started March of last year. As I said, right, like this conversation happened. These conversations all happened like throughout last year.

And then January, there was a renewed push of like saying, look, it's time. And indeed, I think late early February of this year, we went more of a symbolic, not symbolic, but like it was a 20% bump, 30 to 36 million. But it was basically the signal of like, hey, we really need to scale. Right. And so that's why then also the Ethereum Foundation, like people, on the protocol side, the core devs broadly, not just the EF, came together and were like, look, this really needs to be short-term priority.

So how much do we want to scale, right? On the left, there's a blog post by Vitalik, also from February of this year, saying, like, hey, even within the World Obscenc Roadmap, like say a 10x seems like a good idea, right? Like, we need more scale even just for that. And then we had Dunkrad, I mean, you've heard him just now, like scale is really good. Scale is good for DFI, scale is good for many, many things.

had this proposal, that's 100x over four years. And then Justin, you know, Justin is always on a different scale. Just reminded us that with ZKVM, of course, everything's possible, 1,000x, like, why not? Right? So like 10x, 100x, 1,000x, where are we actually going? Well, actually, I would say those are all not so different, right? Like 10x in two years, 100x and 4 years, 1,000x and 6 years,

that all comes down to 3x per year. And so I think that is basically the target, a realistic target for scaling. And importantly, right, like, I'm not, I would say out of those, out of those different time scales, the one that I may be the most uncertain about, and we'll talk about it in a second, is this kind of medium term, they're like maybe two, three years out. But the point is, again, we have great long-term plan, and now let's not think about two, three years, let's for now just focus on the next six, 12 months, right?

And that I think really was the core lesson. And so we are now six months in, depending on when you start to count, whether the blog post that originally announced the priorities or then the reorg that actually aligned the work at the Ethereum Foundation to help deliver this. We were roughly six months in, so halfway through that period.

And we had, we were just coming up to a second bump that we were able to deliver here. So initially in July, we were able to just find a few easy wins, like client optimizations that took a relatively short time and we went to 45 million gas. And then it took a few more months

to have another batch of client improvements ready, so now we're at 60 million. Importantly, it's not like any increase from this point onwards will take longer and longer time because all of this was in a way hard mode because there was without being able to make any changes to the protocol itself. So the 60 million, we are rolling that out together with the Fusaka hard fog, but it's not yet enabled by anything in Fusaka. That is basically something that we're ready for today, even before Fusaka goes live.

Once Fusaka is live, there's actually some small. small improvements in there that will allow us to go even higher 80, 120 million, some like this, early next year. And then if you think back, right, like we started maybe in May of this year, early next year, we go to 80, 120 million. That's roughly 3x from where we started with the 36 million. So first year, checkbox, we are on track, right? Okay, so it works.

Beyond 12 months, good news. I think we can actually stay on this course for a while at least. Let's see. glamsdam the next hardfork upcoming next year another 3x is very realistic not guaranteed a lot of hard work left but very realistic and then the two hardforks afterwards h star i star how we call them another 3x very very possible very plausible

and beyond that we will start to need help from the zKVM effort most likely but the timelines actually align that this is not unrealistic and i think i wanted to take that opportunity to come back a little bit ZKVM to me symbolizes this like the old Ethereum strength, right? Like the thing we should not give up and just because we are now focused on the short term. And so I just wanted to say ZKVM to me real time, ZKVM is also a really amazing topic that showcases Ethereum's continued strengths, right? So many, many people doing amazing work in this effort, but I wanted to highlight too,

Justin, who I would call our ambassador do the future. I really think he is uniquely able to just always live five years in the future and see where the tech should be going, right? And basically, like, help us bring it from the future into the present. And I think he's been doing an absolutely fantastic job of that in the past and is continuing to do that. And ZKVM, lean Ethereum, amazing. And then we have Kev.

And Kev actually joined the Ethereum Foundation only, like, I don't know, but at this point, like one, two years ago full time, had been doing amazing work before. has invented noir, the that you might know from the Aztec side, absolutely amazing engineer, right? And he's now leading the engineering side of that effort, right?

And so it's no longer just the, let's do the research forever until it's like fully, fully finished. Let's actually prioritize engineering as soon as we possibly can. And let's try to find ways with ZKVM, there's actually a path where we can possibly start to get some of the benefits progressively over time. And so Kev is really spearheaded. that effort and I personally am very, very excited to see where that's going.

And I think, again, this symbolizes this like this, let's not throw everything away, but let's find a way to balance the short term and the long term because that's what this moment in time calls for. So that was the part that I'm the most of an expert on, Ethereum Roadmap. Now I wanted to briefly talk about two other things. The first one is like the smaller concentric circle around that, what some people call Ethereum strategy. And there I just want to say that like in the past, I think five years ago again, right,

like blockchains that were too focused, too obsessed with strategy were doing something wrong, right? Because back then, what you really needed to get right was the tech, was the long-term plans. But now I think it is important that we at least also consider kind of these strategic questions. And I just wanted to show a few up. Oh, that's unfortunate. For me, there was one line, but it doesn't matter. Just a few quick mentions, right? like Dengrad mentioned L1 Defi, right?

Like what exactly, like, what do we need to do on the L1? What do we need to prioritize to be the best continued home for DFI, right? Like how can we best support DFI? Is that more scale, shorter slot times, other things, maybe other non-technical things? Like, right, like what is our strategy behind there, not just the technical side? Real world asset issuance, right? The assets are coming on chain and it's important that we are intentional about it. Like, what is the desired architecture?

Are they supposed to be issued on all the assets? the chains and then interoperate like through intermediaries. Are they supposed to be issued on one chain and then propagate through the ecosystem? Like how are these bridges supposed to work? All of this needs intentional design. And that's something that we need to get right.

L1's L2s. I think it's been a big topic, right? And I think the biggest question there is how can the L1 continue to support the L2 in the best way possible? So that is with data scaling, right? That is also with faster finality. but that might also be

with better interop, that might also be with non-technical things. It also means how can we best help guide the L2s towards the most synergistic outcome with the L1, right? That's also a non-trivial question. And then third, I want to briefly mention this,

maybe it's a bit more controversial, but like, I think the question is also from the strategic point of view, is the L2 is even the right abstraction, right? Like what about these other important allies of Ethereum, Polygon, Gnosis, these kind of chains come to mind, right, they're not technically the L2s.

Clearly they are somehow part of the Ethereum family, like how do we best express that? How can we make sure that broader Ethereum ecosystem is all synergistic with each other? And then, of course, just wanted to mention it, not going to go into it, but ETH Ethereum, what is the relationship, and how can we make sure that is synergistic as well?

And here point is, again, the lesson of real world Ethereum is just to say, hey, we need to keep iterating on these questions, we need to make progress on the timescale of 12 months, not five years. And I'm basically out of time. quickly do like the last point because it's also the one that I'm the least of an expert on Ethereum ecosystem. What are maybe potential lessons for the Ethereum ecosystem?

First slide. I actually had a colleague that wore the sweater a couple years ago, but then I didn't find a photo, so I just searched on X and found someone else posting this as well. I think there was swag a couple years ago. I swear, Mom, my job is real. I thought that was hilarious because I had this exact same problem, explaining to my friends, family, like what my job was couple years ago, almost impossible. And I would say real world Ethereum means that needs to flip now. Like if you are still struggling a lot,

explaining why what you're doing makes sense, that should at least be a warning sign. And I'll pick on like a few examples because they're good friends, the projects, but like, you know, if you do content coins, if you do intersubjective work tokens, right? These can make sense.

I'm not saying this does not make sense. But at least the fact that that might be hard to explain to your mom should now be a warning sign. We have real attraction. We should understand that in the past, a lot of this circular inner words facing attraction on Ethereum was necessary

to build up the interstructure, but now that we have real attraction, let's not get distracted by all the rest. And then last slide, and I am done, that should not mean lose Ethereum's ambition, right? Like that is very core to my heart. Like I think if you look back, there was a lot of these, like this dreamy time of Ethereum

where people really had these like big ambition like chains as these sovereign entities, these sovereign systems, not just infrastructure. ICOs as this amazing way of like leveling up capital formation in a new way. Dow's as the next generation of human coordination. And even prediction markets, you would say, well, aren't prediction markets, at least the crypto success story. In some sense, yes. But if you look at the count examples, I would say they're relatively thin in terms of the actual on-chain part. And even there, I think we could do more.

there were all these ideas around future key, right, using it for governance. We should not just make crypto become infrastructure now that we hit the real world. So that's all for my side. Sorry for running a little bit over, but I just wanted to leave you with Real World Ethereum is here.

Let's make the most of it. Thank you. Thank you. I do want to fit in time for one question if we have a question, yeah, up in front. What do you, what,

will the most successful scenario for the foundation be one in, which Ethereum achieves such a high scalability that offers so much black space

that the transaction cost costs marginally. So finally, the capacity could cost a few ethers to use all the capacity

of Ethereum. Is this the most successful scenario to have so much block space that finally only few

Ethereum can cost all the transactions? I don't think the strategy is to scale the L1 so that

it's the only chain you ever need. That was the question, right? I think even with amazing magical technology, ZKVM and whatnot, I think once the world comes on chain, the demand for block space is huge.

And so one, I think there will always be the need for the longer tail of general purpose compute that doesn't happen on the L1 directly. I think the L1 will always be for more valuable use cases. And then second, and that's in a way even more important, we are seeing a lot, a lot of interest and demand of special purpose execution environment, special purpose L2s, for institutions,

for applications that want to control more finely and the specific properties of the execution system. And so I think for those two reasons, I think the future for L2s is very, very exciting and continues to be very exciting. Thank you, Hans-Gar. Awesome. Ethereum's layer-2 universe is exploding with choices.

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official for the latest updates on blockchain for banking. That's X.com slash mantle underscore official. Hello, I'm going to talk about Ethereum's defycentric strategy. So I want to start by talking about revenue, and I'm going to just say like, I think like

there's a lot of talks about all like talking about revenue, it's bad, like do you just want Ether to be a DCF asset? But like let's just like go back to the basics and say like revenue just like whatever you think is just a good thing. Like everyone can have their own way of valuing an asset and that's completely up to you. And actually you can't really tell to other people how they should value an asset.

Like really like everyone will have their own model and like I guess you can try to convince them to use a different model but there's no like guarantee of success. And in all those cases like having revenue improves the quality of the asset. So if you see an asset as a productive asset by itself, like inequity, for example, then it's the fundamental basis of the value. But even if you think about an asset as a memetic store of value, then like the number of coins decreases. Well, that's good for the store of value, right?

And of course, like there are all kinds of things in between, right? You don't have to, like, even like a single personal entity doesn't have to make a choice between one of these two. They can also say, like, well, it's like a, it has like some productive asset qualities but it has a premium due to its liquidity and how other people value it. So yeah, like this is kind of the basic assumption of this talk that we just want to have some revenue because it makes it better. And yeah, then we can think about like what is good revenue, right?

And so what we want is that the revenue should be sustainable. So like we want to think about things that aren't necessarily forever because that's really hard. like I mean basically no business like if you just leave it forever alone can like just last forever but like we want to think about years and decades scales and we do want it to be from positive some activity like at least me I mean I would feel bad if it's not if it's not that so like we wants to create value not destroy value so we don't want to create a revenue strategy based on meme coins but I think it makes sense like to create a revenue strategy based on real world application.

And the question is like, what if the world's borrowing and landing happened on chain? I think that's like the most natural fit for Ethereum. So let's talk about revenue from DFI. So this is Ethereum's revenue in US dollars in the last few years. And it's maybe not like, doesn't look like the most bullish curve, but it's still a very serious amount of revenue and we'll come like in a bit like why I think it's actually much more much better than it looks

so we still had 2.5 billion revenue in 2024 that is like a very significant amount like to all the people who say oh like we'll never be able to raise serious revenue to like justify our valuation I think that's insane I think like

on that metric Ethereum has been one of the most successful projects in all of crypto And actually the pricing power of Ethereum, I believe, is much, much higher than that. Like, basically when you think about it, the current congesting pricing, you could also call it the minimum viable fee. It's like the minimum fee that you raise just to like make the market for block space on Ethereum efficient. But it's not in any way like an attempt to figure out what the actual pricing power is.

like it's like almost certain that if we just set some minimum fee on Ethereum, like say every transaction costs X, then like it would be much, much more than that. And then overall, defy is the most proven source of fees in crypto. There's a good reason for that. Like, defy leads to,

is first a very high value activity. And it leads to lots of contention. Basically, it's like, if I create states that you can only access by, interacting with that particular chain and you want to do it on a short time horizon so that's why potential fees are high.

Ethereum has historically been the most successful at capturing that and Ethereum still has very high defy-TVL. And even like in terms of new protocols like there are new protocols like fluid that still launch on Ethereum L1. So like why would you even want to give up on that?

Like it's kind of like an amazing thing like in the past we haven't really like from the L1 development side done that much about it but like it seems like we should like it's very natural and then we could ask like well we had a different strategy

like about providing data availability for roll-ups so could the DA revenue replace this so that's the original like roll-up centric roadmap like the applications will live on roll-ups the roops will pay fees to Ethereum via data availability

and so if we look at the revenue from blobs is also significant but it's way, way lower. Like we're talking about maybe one to two million per month and so that's like

Ethereum revenue from Blobs. For comparison we can like look at Celestia. They had like a very big spike initially. I don't know where that comes from if that's real. But anyway it's like basically orders of magnitude less overall despite having much more data. And

So what we can say is, like, Ethereum has a huge premium on selling data will be compared to other DA chains. Like, it's, like, pretty big, 100 to 1,000 X easily. But there's a problem, which is that on an absolute level, at least, we do have to keep the DA pricing low because otherwise roll-ups will switch to old DA. So, like, basically, like, you think, oh, like, it's a huge premium, so it should be an amazing source of revenue because Ethereum is so good at it, but it's just like very low on an absolute

level. And I think like all the analysis that me and others have done on this is that this likely remains the case just because it is like, yeah, like data availability is relatively easy to replace. If you if you like try to charge a lot for it, then roll-ups can find a different way of getting their data availability. And basically since they can provide almost the same UX to use a pretty much the same UX. Like, there's no strong reason not to do that other than, like, some people shouting on Twitter. Okay, so what is the defy-centric strategy?

So I see it like this. Like, we want to build an Ethereum, L1, with a lot of, most of, maybe all of the defy liquidity, and then other chains, L2s, and also L-1s, because, like, they can all do this via, for example, intent interop, can access that liquidity. So, like, Ethereum kind of becomes the DeFi hub for all of crypto, essentially. And maybe even, like, more.

Like, maybe I think, like, the basically the big goal should be, like, L1 is the world's liquidity layer. We want to bring RWAs on chain because, like, together with DeFi, they can provide a valuable service to the world, even for those who are not interested in crypto assets. So like defy without any real world assets has kind of this problem. So you can now borrow things, but it doesn't help you if you're not also interested in holding the assets that you can borrow against.

So we need to bring the real world assets on chain in order to give everyone in the world an actual like defy experience that they would want to use. And yeah, third, we should build interoperability that's focused on providing liquidity to other chains by using the L1's defy ecosystem. Yeah, and so the cool thing is it provides a very natural monetization.

So this way, L1 will provide services for everyone. And I mean, a lot of people have been questioning, oh, like, did we erase Ethereum's network effects by starting the roll-up centic roadmap? Well, with this strategy, we actually benefit from all. of crypto's network effects. Like each new crypto user

will be a new potential Ethereum DeFi user. And so basically L2 value accrual will become all of crypto value accrual. And it also uses Ethereum's existing strength. Like Ethereum is still leading in DefyTVL and Defy protocols. So it is a very natural fit

where Ethereum is now. All we have to do is like actually prioritize it and start working on it. So what does it mean? Basically we have to start fighting. Like I think in the past it happened very naturally, like because Ethereum was the only game in town.

And now the world is very different. Like there are a lot of other projects that also want to fight for the same. So Ethereum will have to start that to embrace that fight. And embrace Defi as the main application that's going to live on Ethereuml 1. So what does that mean? We need to scale. We need to like think about block times and finality. so we need to lower latency.

We need to think a lot about our MavV pipeline. I don't think like the way it works right now is ideal. I think like it's very like I'm very interested in like things like multiple concurrent proposers. Basically anything that makes people think like this is actually a fair layer where everyone can get their transactions in a short amount of time. And we need to think about interop

and I think we should like focus on how do we build the interrupt to like maximize this utility of Ethereum as the liquidity layer. We need to bring RWA's from chain, so we need to think about them. So the important thing is they need to be bearer assets because otherwise they can't be usable in defy. That's how, for example, stable coins work at the moment.

Like if you hold some stable coin, then you're kind of assumed to be the actual owner of that asset, which is like not how it works in traditional finance, where the asset is coupled to your identity. And we need to have liquidity. these reward assets. And at some point in the future, like, in order to actually raise the revenue, we'll probably have to add some minimum pricing.

It's probably not right now that we should, like, maximize the revenue, although I think it's, like, worthwhile thinking about some kind of minimum price. And yeah, so this is kind of, like, the summary of this, like, the broke way is like L2S don't accrue value to Eath. That was kind of like

the big worry last year. And I think, like, if we properly implement a strategy, then we'll get to a world where all chains accrue value to Eith. All right. Big round of applause for Dengrad. Thank you. Who's got a question? We got some time for questions. That was a very fast hand. Thank you. Great presentation. So just question about like, does this approach really play to the L1's strengths? So like one thing you could say is well, yes, you can make the L1 faster. You can scale it. But ultimately, uh, defy people are going to want to do the fastest

possible chain, the fastest, most scale possible block times. And so are we going to be making some sacrifices to really compete with those chains? You know, I think of like lighter or whatever, like new, defy-like speed, basically. And can the L1 compete, really? I mean, I would say it's both. I think, yes, like, you have to make sacrifices. Like, the world is full of tradeoffs and there are some here. And I think, like, there will be some tradeoffs. I don't think the tradeoffs lead us to, oh, we just have to, like, become like a centralized chain in one data center

because there are other effects at play as well like there are network effects which are real on liquidity and like currently Ethereum has them so like we need to keep those and then like the game that we're playing is very different from the one that other chains are playing so I don't think like as a user

like is your primary thing thing like you think oh where do I get the lowest latency no like you want to do what you want to do like I want to exchange this asset or I want to borrow or whatever and that is not that is not equivalent to having the lowest latencies or the highest scale like it those like are factors that add into the amount of liquidity get and so and so on but like ultimately it's the question like where do you get the liquidity for the action that you

want to do further questions here we go I am thanks for the presentation um could you help me understand like landing down what do you mean exactly why liquidity. You mean like, for example, there will be some AMM liquidity on L2s and then ARVERS will, you know, gradually ARV against the main net. The same thing for lending protocols. Like just exactly, you know, considering current DEFI, how would you explain this with existing protocols?

Yeah, I mean, I think like it's basically, in other words, what we want is to maximize the defy liquidity on L1. So like in terms of market makers, we want the ones with the most liquidity to be on our one. Like in terms of lending protocols, the same thing. And I think like basically the experience so far seems to be that they naturally want to be together. Like this is all like one big ecosystem that wants to sit on one composable layer because that makes it more efficient. Like, yeah. Further question ends one more.

You said, why would you give up on your presentation, right? So how is moving to tempo. giving up, that will be one question. And is revenue good not an EF culture? The thing that you started with the presentation was... NEP what? An EF culture, sorry.

Culture. Culture. Yes. Right. Well, first, like, I mean, I'm moving to Tampa for something very different. And like, I think that this is the strategy that I believe would be best for Ethereum. I've tried for

about half a year. I think I've converted some people. I think there's still a lot of work to be done. I am currently seeing a lot more opportunities and working on real world things at tempo. I'm not going to say that can't change in the future, but I think at the moment there's a lot of work to be done on Ethereum. And I don't think like this is currently deep in EF culture. There are very few people. people who think about this, there are maybe like a few more than they were in the past, but it's like a small percentage. Further questions, one more. Hey, great presentation, Donkrad.

I substantially agree with this presentation. And when you look at the factors you describe around the L1 serving as the hub and hub and spokes and the deferral of significant fees until later in Ethereum's growth, either from a block space saturation or maybe the imposition of a, minimum fee. To what extent do you see this overall vision representing a pivot from where Ethereum has just been gradually headed in the past few years? Is this a pivot? Because to me, it kind of sounds like this is what's been happening all along gradually. So you make it kind of sound like this is a radical agenda, but is this not just where things have been headed? Well, I mean,

that's great. If it is where things I've been headed, where what I see is that there are there are a lot of people who don't want to make the trade-offs. I do think, like, basically, like, what is different to, like, a few years ago is, like, what I said before. Like, maybe five years ago, Ethereum was the only game in town, so, like, everything happened naturally on Ethereum. And so Ethereum still has these very strong modes around liquidity and so on, so there's a lot happening. But I do think that if we don't keep improving the chain at a higher rate than it was in the past, then I don't think that will stick around forever. I think eventually Thiem would lose that mode.

And that's where I currently see the problem. One last round of applause for Dankrad. Thank you so much, Dan Krad. Everybody welcome. Danny Ryan to the stage. Danny, come on up. Hello. I actually was at the main venue

and thought that that was where I was supposed to be. So I had to quickly come over here. And on my way, the cab driver asked me about XRP. which is very exciting. I said I didn't know too much about it. He said BlackRock's been buying it every day. So not investment advice. David asked me to speak.

I'm a bit oversubscribed this week. So I said, okay, I'm not making slides. And he said, okay. And I said to myself, what can I talk about that doesn't require making slides? And I was like, oh, I'll talk about myself. I know a lot about that. So I'm just going to tell you about what I've been doing for the past eight years, I think.

I'll actually start before then. I graduated from college. I did do that. Computer science. I went to New Orleans, and my goal in life was to not get a job. So I was like, I'll do some of my consulting here and there. I got somebody to pay me a reasonable rate, hourly rate. And I realized, I did the math and I was like, okay, if I work one hour a day, I think I'm good.

I think I'm good. But actually during that time, I started working with a bunch of small businesses. I helped them like solve business problems. Like honestly, people in Louisiana have never heard of automation before. So it helped them like realize that they probably don't need those three people. We can totally get rid of that job. You shouldn't be doing manual reporting. Sorry.

This is even before AI. I. But sometime at 2016, a friend of mine sent me an article, and it was a New York Times article, and it was for the Dow. Some of y'all probably familiar with the Dow. And I had used Bitcoin in 2013, unclear probably what I was using for in 2013. Who knows what people use Bitcoin for in 2013? But I hadn't really clicked the aha moment. But I read this article, and I was like, Oh shit. This is crazy. And I had that moment.

I mean, probably most of you had that moment where you're like, oh, Ethereum, oh, crypto, oh, programmable, blockchain, decentralized consensus. This is crazy. This is something new. And I got obsessed. And I did.

I sent my first main net transaction. I remember sitting on the couch with a friend. I turned to him and said, this is not going to end well. It was to the Dow. It did not end well. But a crash course. in blockchains and consensus and like social, like, what is consensus?

Consensus is just the social rules and whatever. And I don't, I think probably at the time, I don't even know if I knew what a hard fork was. But I think I was probably pro-Dow hard fork because I lost a bunch of money. But it was systemic, right? And it was very exciting. I learned a ton. And by the end of 2016 is the only thing I think about. like I didn't want to do anything else.

I just the mechanisms and the incentives and the money and the things you can build. And so January 1st, 2017, I got rid of all my clients. Sorry guys, small business owners in Louisiana. And I said, I'll give myself a year to make this my work. I had no idea what that really meant. So I was like, okay, I'm going to go to the New Orleans Ethereum meetup. and I went online and looked for it and it didn't exist. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to make this my work.

I'll make the New Orleans Ethereum meetup. Cool. I'm doing something now. I used a lot of open source software. I was an open source software believer. I'd never contributed before. I was like, okay, I'm going to contribute. So I went online some nice Python repos.

And I was like, okay, I can write some Python and like made things a little bit better. Try to do it a little stuff. I would read docs. fix typos, do random stuff. Just tried to, like, I don't know, make the world a little bit better. Every time I opened and tried to learn something, like, you know, contribute a little bit here and there. And I found that the doors were wide open, like comically wide open. I heard proof of steak was coming.

I was like, I don't know what the fuck that is. I read a little bit about it. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. But I was like, if they're doing it, I should like learn about it. Maybe I could like make a staking company or, or, I don't know, get involved in some way. And there was an open Casper call, Casper Research call,

and they would just, like, drop a link in a public chat. And I was like, well, I'm going to go to that. And so it's like Vitalik and Vlad Zamphir and some, like, wizard that started Archain. And, like, it showed up with a reef case full of cash at one point and bought a, it was a strange time. But I went to this call, and I was like, oh, I had nothing. to say or contribute, but they'd be like, oh, we were reading this blog post and I'd be the guy

that would like, go find the blog post real quick and drop in the chat. It's like, hey, I did something. And now everyone knows the, can see the link. And I just, I sent that year just like trying to do stuff. And I, again, I heard Casper was coming. I heard Proof of State was coming. It was coming right at the beginning of the next year. So I was like, oh, I'll read about it. I'll, like, go look at the code. And there was a bunch of solidity code. That's when Casper, proof of sake, was implement in solidity. And I was like, there are no tests. Is this, this isn't good, right? So I wrote some tests. I made the world a little bit better. And I, uh, I fixed, free factor some code, cleaned up some stuff, made stuff a little bit more efficient. And by the end of 2017, someone reached out from me

from the EF, I was like, hey, do you want a job? And I was like, I'm going to Japan for three months. So I don't know. Uh, and they said, how about 10 hours? said perfect. So I'm in this era where I have an incredible amount of optimism for the technology, an incredible amount of optimism for this, this Ethereum thing, this decentralized consensus, this is going to change the world. A little secret about myself, I'm a bit of a Luddite. I work on, I don't, I already said what I work on, you're going to hear what I work on,

I work on technology, but I, I'm a bit of a skeptic, I'm a bit of a, of a pessimist. Obviously technology does incredible things for humanity, but also the trajectory of technology is kind of terrifying. Like control in these megacorps, these megacorps, maybe you're going to become bigger than the government. Like, what's going on here? You know, I have a slot machine in my pocket.

Like the world's smartest people are trying to figure out how to get me to open this thing over and over and over. It's kind of, I don't know, it doesn't sit well with me. And so when I learned about Ethereum and during this time, I realized we can't turn the technological progress. and machine off, and it's just going, it's going, it's going. But maybe with this technology, we can, like, change the trajectory. So I'm a kind of unbridled optimism for the technology during this era. And I got to work at the EF.

And while I was in Japan, Carl, K. Carl, from optimism, he was at the EF at the time. We were chatting, and he's like, hey, we're in Tokyo. I was like, what? I went to a coffee shop and I'm hanging out with Carl and Vitalik and a coffee shop. And I'm like, what the fuck's going on? I'm just like a random person on the internet, and I'm hanging out with Carl. Anyway, and I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to, like, do what I can. I'm going to try to keep this thing moving.

So I'm like, okay, guys, what do we have to do to get proof of stake live thinking, like, they know the answers? Of course, they know the answers. And, like, I don't know. I mean, so, okay, well, maybe we should write any IP, right? Like, that's what people do. I've never read any IP at that point, but I know they exist. And they're like, yeah, yeah, let's write any IP.

And Carl's like, I said, okay, so who's going to do it? Carl's like, not me. Okay. And Vitalik said, do I have to do it this time? And I'm just sitting there with these two guys and like literally my heroes. And I'm like, I'll do it. I'll write the EIP. Literally never read any IP.

I'll write the EIP. We'll write the proof of stake EIP. And I went from 10 hours a week to this is all I'm doing every day, every day. I met Aya at the time. She had just started the Ethereum Foundation as well. She happened to be in Tokyo. than we're in Tokyo. And she said to me,

when's proof of stake in a launch? I was like, I don't know, like six months. This is the beginning of 2018. I was a fool. So then somewhere, at some point in 2018, I functionally was kind of like running the research team at the Ethereum Foundation, like six months in.

And Hudson, Hudson Jameson at the time, he reached out and we were talking. He's like, you know, you're the only one that responds to their emails. I was like, okay, okay. Turns out communicating was important. Wrangling the researchers was important. And I just, the doors were comically wide open,

so I just kept walking through them. We kept building. We kept working and working and working and working and working and working. And this thing that I thought was going to take six months, took three years. But that was only the phase zero launch. That was the launch of the beacon chain, but like, no, it didn't actually touch main net.

And we told everyone it's mainnet. It's kind of made up, but anyway. Two years later, two years later, we finally do the big thing, the merge. The thing happened. And, I mean, it was an incredible release, right? It's the hardest I've ever worked on anything. Probably the longest other than my schooling career that I've ever worked on anything. It's the biggest thing I've ever done.

Maybe the biggest thing I'll ever do. It was very exciting. Then a couple years passed. I'm still kind of doing the same thing. still running the consensus calls, doing the thing. And at a certain point, I wake up and I'm like, I'm just kind of doing the thing. I kind of did the big thing and now I'm just doing the thing.

And I was also like tired. I was kind of exhausted. Mentally, but also like kind of existentially and physically, like it'd be 10 a.m. and I'd be like, I kind of want to take a nap. I think I might be burn out. And at the beginning of the years, the years are confusing.

sometimes. But at the beginning of 2024, I hit up IA, and I was like, I got to go. I'm sorry, it's time to go. I got to go. And she said, really? I think you should stay. Let's take some time. Take some time.

Why don't you take a sabbatical? So I said, okay, okay, okay. I'll take three months. I'll get my head in order. We'll figure out what I'm doing from there. It'll be fine. Maybe I won't go back, but maybe I'll go back. It'll take three months.

Friday. Day one. I end. I'm done with work. Saturday. I guess that was Friday's day zero. Saturday. Day one.

Okay. I'm going to start thinking. I don't have the weight of the world on my shoulders anymore. Sunday, day two. It's Easter Sunday. My dad and my mom, they're divorced. They come to my house. There's kids running around.

We're having fun. We're cooking. We're literally putting the, dinner on the table, and I get a knock at the door. And I go answer the door. And there's a young woman dressed in like business casual or whatever, and she hands me a stack of papers. So you've been served.

I was served by the United States government. I was served by the SEC personally. And I actually, I can kind of feel it right now. Like, the amount of adrenaline that I felt, like the, I felt fucking crazy. Like I had this stack of papers My family's in the fucking house And I'm like, what have I done?

And I go into the back room And I'm just looking at this stuff And everyone's like eating Like what's Danny doing? What's going on? Who's at the door? It's Easter. And I'm like flipping through these documents

And I'm like, I'm shaking. And like, I was just I'm just like a random guy on the internet. I was just working on stuff that I thought was cool. I was just working on stuff that I thought was going to change. You know, like it's, positive. Like, of course, we want new technology. We want, we want, like, open technology. It's open source. Like, I don't know. I'm not dead. I didn't do anything. And it,

and then I'm like, I don't want to go to jail. Am I going to go to jail? I know people that have gone to jail. And I thought they, they push the boundaries more. Like, I'm just working on proof of stake. I don't know. And it was fucking terrifying. And I spent the next three months of my sabbatical talking to $2,000 an hour lawyers out of New York prepping for an interrogation, essentially. They wanted to talk to me. Like in the document, it said, you need to be in New York on Friday. And I'm like, what the fuck?

This is the U.S. government saying I need to be in New York on Friday. And so the three months that I was supposed to not spend thinking about crypto, I'm now, like, deeper. and it's the only thing you can think about. And it turns out the SEC is a civil organization. The worst I could do is lose all my money and go bankrupt if they find me enough. But it's not criminal. But they said, but be careful.

The DOJ is sometimes lurking right behind the SEC. So I'm like, what the fuck is? So then the ETH was approved. while the SEC is like trying to interrogate me and I'm like, what the fuck's going on here? And then they went from, we want to talk to you yesterday to maybe we'll talk at the end of the summer.

Then a week later, I get a letter in the mail and it says, case closed, don't worry about it. And I'm talking to these lawyers in New York and they say, and they used to work at the SEC, it's kind of fucked up. You work at the SEC, then you become a lawyer who specialize in the SEC,

and they know the people at the, it's really strange. It's called the revolving bore. I think that's illegal in most countries. And they say, never in our history, have we seen the SEC or actively close a case? The best you get is that they just kind of stop talking. And the longer they stop talking to you, the more you go, I guess I'm okay. But they actually sent a letter and they closed them because it was politics.

because it was some political mandate to destroy crypto. I guess because crypto might actually change the world. I guess because it is actually kind of powerful. I guess because it is actually a game changing technology. So now I'm going back to the app after my three months sabbatapal. And I'm still kind of exhausted. So hot piongrey. My head's not on the game.

And I say, I gotta go, I'm all. and so I did it. I wrapped up and I left. And then I still felt terrible. And I was like, damn, we're in now with some real horror. Kind of messes you up. And then I was like,

go I sleep well? And I put on this watch and it's like, no, you don't have to be a lot. Turns out it's a like debilitating sleep problem. Patsada. It felt great. I said,

the next day, I was like, I felt like I was on drugs. I got some sleep trouble. and made it for decades. Um, and so that was wild. Now I'm, like, recontextualizing the past many years,

and I'm like, that was really hard. I was kind of tired the whole time. I wonder if it would have been different if I wasn't so tired. Maybe I would have done a better job. Maybe I would care for longer. Who knows?

But I'm out. Then Trump wins? I was... I thought what was gonna happen, but it's kind of unexpected. Then, Trump was a meme point two days before he's...

inaugurated, and I'm like fucking whiplash, like, what the fuck? Like, literally five months ago, I got served by the SEC by the federal government. And now the, what world do I live in? And I mean, I was like, oh, I'm done. I'm done with crypto. We're definitely done. Not doing that anymore. This is fucked.

I don't want to be involved with this. And I wasn't in the EOP, when I wasn't working on anything, and I was like, okay. maybe I've been threatening to go into the woods for like since I started working in crypto the same time to run the woods and I was talking to a friend and he's like yo I hear this like maybe there's some problems of the EF like what can we do to make it better

and I'm like you know we're give a gap not a de gap anymore and we're talking and we're talking and he's like yo actually it's clear that maybe they should have someone else about it yet and like you should be like no no no I'm not doing or any pretty plans of the seed and like a week later I'm like, shit.

You guys should be there. So I get up Battalick and I was like maybe I should have been it yet? And we're kind of talking for a while, back and forth. Blue Slopes, Sink Shink Shooks, Elite. Got on the internet. It's kind of a fucking disaster. I don't know if you paid attention during that time. People were like,

it was, it was bad. And it was like, I mean, it's very negative. I don't like to be involved in negative stuff. Quite frankly, I and I worked very close to the other for many years, have high trust and appreciate great things during that time. And it kind of accelerated

and put the nail on the coffin, I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to be. And I leaked up with Dutt at the time. Again, I still kind of feel like I'm on drugs, like it starts sleeping, and I guess I could work on something harder, man. Got a minked up with Vivik and Devick is

comes from trap-eye he has like boundless energy so I'm like are you on but that's but he he just he's he's super optimistic

she's willing to talk to everyone in the world and I was like oh that's like really good by complimentary energy the the regulatory stuff

you know it's fucking wild but like there's a lot of opportunity right now we could maybe like actually on board the world let's do it

took on something harder to work on but I'm something exciting and broke on and I find myself but this time I think I'm still optimistic I think I'm

certainly less naive I don't have the unbridled optimism anymore you know the the tool is a tool the tool is a game changing technology the tool is fundamentally new

and exciting and we can do things with it but it's not I don't think it's a it's inherently good. I think it's inherently bad. I think it's ultimately what we, how we choose to wield it. And at this point, I'm, I'm going to wield it. You know, I understand it. I understand things that I want to happen. And I'm going to make it happen. And I'm going to work on it. And I found something exciting to work on. I found something, I think, impactful to work on. and I think, you know, the life is what you make it

and the world is what you make it. So I'm going to go make it. Thanks, Danny. Danny, you have to have a question? Who's another question for Danny? No questions for Danny? Oh, we got one question for Danny. Usual suspect.

So, hey, so what makes you optimistic today? I am optimistic. that if I work really hard, I'm ideal to make certain financial systems more efficient. I'm really optimistic that if I work really hard, I might be able to expand access to certain financial systems and assets that are currently gated. And if I work really hard,

hopefully maybe we can reduce the... having crazy centralizing nature of technology. But I don't know. I mean, I'm definitely much more in the... I'm going to work really hard on something rather than like, this thing's just going to make everything better. I'm a little boss with Danny.