Bankless - Ethereum’s Strategic Pivot: The Plan it Needs to Win

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Ethereum Foundation researchers Dankrad Feist and Ansgar Dietrichs join David Hoffman and Michael Ippolito to discuss Ethereum’s identity crisis—and how it’s turning the ship around.They break down Ethereum’s cultural and organizational challenges, the pivot toward L1 growth, and the evolving role of the Ethereum Foundation under new leadership. The conversation covers the future of base and native rollups, L2 alignment, and why Ethereum’s unique values still matter in a competitive landscape.------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle🏦INFINEX | THE CRYPTO-EVERYTHING APP https://bankless.cc/Infinex------ TIMESTAMPS00:00:00 Intro 00:05:42 Top Problems with Ethereum 00:12:33 Lack of Growth in Ethereum Layer 1 00:27:49 Ethereum’s Roadmap Dilemma 00:38:08 Layer 1 Scaling Progress 00:39:08 Ethereum L1’s Value Proposition to L2s 00:48:44 Base and Native Rollups Explained 00:57:25 Canonical EVM in a Rollup World 01:01:26 Vitalik’s Vision for L1 Scaling 01:05:59 ZK Scaling Becomes Real 01:08:12 Fast Block Times and DeFi 01:16:59 The Evolving Ethereum Core Culture 01:22:38 Other Interesting Changes 01:26:41 Ethereum’s Direction Feels Different Now 01:30:09 Closing and Disclosure------ RESOURCESDankrad Feisthttps://x.com/dankradAnsgar Dietrichshttps://x.com/adietrichsMike Ippolito https://x.com/MikeIppolito_------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

What does Ethereum get from having L2s, right? Because I think some people are now all the way on the end of the spectrum. They're like, oh, the role of centric roadmap was a big mistake. I think that's wrong. I think we are quite confident. With that imprint, that's the right roadmap. It's again, we just neglected the L1. It's a raw-upcentric roadmap around a very strong L2.

That's where we basically need to get, right? And so what is the benefit of having the L2s? I think there's two that I see. And I think over time maybe we will see two different types or like some differentiation differentiation between the L2s. I think one role L2s can fill is like... Welcome to Banquers, where we explore the frontier.

of internet money and internet finance. And today we're exploring the frontier of Ethereum. Bankless Nation, the Ethereum ship is slowly turning itself around. As the largest decentralized ecosystem, this is a slow process. The signals that something is wrong in Ethereum have gotten stronger and stronger, as other ecosystems have grown in strength and captured the marginal growth of the industry, all while the ETH price has lagged the market for almost three years now. In 2025, it's no longer about whether there is or is not a problem,

but rather what the exact nature of that problem is and what Ethereum should do about it. Joining me as co-host of this episode is my friend Mike Ibelito, who helps me interview Dancrad Feist and Ansgar Dietrichs, two Ethereum researchers who have been going back and forth together about how to reorient the Ethereum project and what to reorient it too. At the end of this episode, I'm left with a newfound optimism about the direction of Ethereum. Despite Ethereum being slow to adapt, it seems that there is already strong consensus about the urgency

and the short to medium-term actions that need to be taken to restore Ethereum to a state of growth rather than a state of complacency. There is still a mountain of work left to do. Still a lot of progress that needs to be done. And my takeaway from this episode is that Ethereum is on the correct path to getting there. Optimizing for short or even medium-term solutions

has never been a part of Ethereum culture, but it's clear to me that shorter timeframes are truly being prioritized. And the exciting thing about this is that once these short and medium-term fixes are in place, then Ethereum is actually ready to finally unleash the deeply technical long-term upgrades that it's been developing over the years. All these long-term research investments that Ethereum made in earlier parts of his lifespan

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Audited by ZK security, the Self app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit Self.xy-Z and follow Self Protocol on X. Bankless Nation, incredibly excited for this episode today. So excited that I'm tapping in some extra help co-hosting this episode. with me, typing in Mike at Bolito from Blockworks. Mike, how you doing, my man? Doing very well. That should be super awesome. Thanks, David. Super awesome, yeah. We are the two guests on the episode today, Onsgar and Dankrad, two researchers at the Ethereum Foundation, who I gather have just talked a bunch about Ethereum

strategy as it has been adapting, kind of like sussing out new directions and new strategies for itself. Onsgar, Dankrad, welcome back to Bankless. Thank you. Thank you. Excited to be here. Okay, so there are just a bunch of topics that I want to run through, and I think we eventually will run through all of them, but most of them, at least through the course of this episode, but I think we need to first start with kind of defining the problem because you can feel a problem in the Ethereum community, and there has been many attempts at defining what that problem is,

people saying it's, you know, we emphasize roll-ups too much, other people will say it's Ethereum culture. There's a whole slew of possible problems that are plaguing the Ethereum community, and no one has really concisely pinned down exactly and diagnosed exactly what the core issue is. kind of want to start that conversation there. Let's first like kind of lay the landscape out of what are the things that we are trying to address broadly in the Ethereum community and also

in this podcast episode. And maybe, Mike, I'll throw this one to you. Maybe you can help set the context and set the landscape. Where are some of the just the top level things that come to mind when we talk about defining the problem in the Ethereum landscape? I think it's been a little bit challenging, actually, to define the problem, maybe because Twitter actually doesn't lend itself to nuanced discourse, who knew? But I think there have been a lot of different voices, in here. And I think it's the old proverb of a bunch of blind men touching an elephant. And I think if you were to listen to some corners of Twitter, you would say that you would hear that it's a marketing problem. There are other great, well, ecosystems out there who just shill, shill,

and get the word out there. Then I think in other corners of the Twitter sphere, you might hear this North Star problem. We don't know what we're building towards and it's actually more of a product problem. And then in other spheres still, I think maybe one that I would be curious Onscar and Donkrad to get your perspective on as a leadership problem. That's one I've sort of thought about for a little bit because generally when you get a whole bunch of discord and voices and we just can't seem to get our rudder in place and a firm direction, I kind of like, well, who's in charge here? Who are we looking to? Right. So I think those are kind of the buckets that you could take a look at maybe, but, you know, Donkron and Ansgar, you two are the experts. I'd be curious wherever you want to

start there. I'm happy to take a step at it. I think like, okay, like I mean, there's one obvious thing and I'm going to just get that out of the way. Like, clearly what everyone like worries about most is that the price is down. Right. This is not what we're going to talk about today. We're trying to get, like, that is definitely also something we all worry about, but

we need to get like to the root causes kind of. And I think this is also like why there are so many different opinions. There are layers and layers and layers of this problem. And so I would say, okay, like what is the big picture problem? It's that, yeah, like, I mean, activity on Ethereum is kind of down, right? And, like, there's not as much app building.

There's not as many users. It is not anymore the obvious default platform for building everything in crypto. And so, like, I would say that's kind of the big picture problem. Or like, that's like, where, like, oh, yeah, this looks like something that we should consider as a problem. And then what I would say, like, the reason why people. look to the EF for it or like when we're now here is I think fundamentally it stems from kind of a long-running problem of the EF and Ethereum kind of being an ivory tower and like doing a lot of like very high brow research. I mean that clearly includes people like me and Anska as well. And not having at the same time a lot of people who like very actively listening to upbuilders and users and users. and all of that. And therefore, yeah, maybe often not really building the right thing,

like not treating Ethereum as a product that should serve its users, whoever those users are. Those users may be L2s or they may be Apple does or they may be like the end users, but like all of those count in some ways. And like instead we are very often very focused on what we think those users should do and therefore, yes, not building what they want in some ways. Mm-hmm. Ansgar, what's your position?

Yeah, so basically, I think I agree with thought what Dankwad said. When I tried to reason about, like, what actually went wrong, because I think it's important to acknowledge that, like, clearly some things went wrong. I think theorem in many ways is in a very good and healthy spot, but, like, something clearly went wrong. And I think the best way I can kind of describe what I think that is, is that we never really took seriously the downside consequences of decentralization.

I think basically, we started out, of course, crypto blockchains decentralized, then there also, I think, was this overall pressure on the crypto ecosystem to like, you really have to look as decentralized as possible, yada, yada, yada. I think Ethereum basically just conveniently stayed in the sphere of no one is in charge, of anything, everyone just has their own little corner to work on. And we didn't really have anyone whose responsibility it was to like make sure the entire picture makes sense as a whole.

And so I think we had a lot of like good research. I think we also like have to make sure to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I think actually like a lot of what made Ethereum so strong in the first place still is very strong. I think a lot of like the research is really good. I think a lot of the engineering is really good. It's just that like no one ever stopped to make sure that it all makes sense as a product. And so you can basically go to all the individual things that Duncan mentioned, all the individual things that people are upset about. And I think often that is the root cause.

Like the role of the EF, it's not that the F failed to execute on its role. It's just that it saw its role not as the lead of the space, but really more just like a public goods funding org. And I think it did a good job as a public goods funding org, but like we need more than that, right? I think we're now realizing that like you can't like win, you can't win against competitors that are a bit more ruthless on this front, that are a bit more willing to just like actually have someone in charge to some of a larger extent if there's no one who's even thinking about all these pieces. And so that to me is kind of like the moment we're in. We now have to like restructure in a ways that we're basically acknowledging that decentralization is important, is amazing. It gives us all these things that are valuable, but Ethereum, but it also gives unique challenges,

and we have to be aware of them and address them. I think it's worth just to carry on with what Dancrad was saying about the price. The price of ETH is why people feel bad and why we are confident in understanding that there is a problem, but going straight after the price itself is obviously not the correct solution. I want to propose the possible idea that it's actually Ethereum growth that is maybe the largest, 100%, because I don't think there's any one single thing,

that's 100% of what the problem is, but it is the lack of growth in the Ethereum layer one specifically that is causing maybe perhaps the majority of Ethereum's problems in the current state of things. And the lack of growth of the Ethereum layer one, one of the main downstream consequences of that is the decreasing ETH price. And especially in crypto, when it is still such a young industry, despite how many years we are into this project, there's still a lot left to do. Marginal growth is being found on non-Etherium layer one blockchains. Marginal growth is found on base, and it is found on Solana. And the ETH price is reflecting that idea that growth is not happening to the Ethereum Layer 1. It is being found elsewhere.

And there's many reasons why there's many inputs why that is true. Maybe it's the ivory tower nature of the Ethereum Foundation trying to find the perfect technical solution that works in 10 to 20 years. maybe it is a lack of product focus. Maybe it is a imperfect medium-term roadmap with a roll-up-centric roadmap. Maybe it's the correct long-term roadmap, but maybe it's an imperfect medium-term roadmap. But really trying to put some sort of like capstone on the idea of like what is the problem. It is a lack of growth at the Ethereum layer one level. That is just my take.

I want to hear your guys' take and reflections around that. Onsgar, you're nodding your head. Just react to that for me. No, I think that's exactly right. But you know what the common phrase that you see. on Twitter all the time is it's self-inflicted. And I actually think that is very much right. I don't think it's like that we've been struggling to have growth.

It's that we rejected the growth. And it again comes back. You said that the Rob Study GroupMab is probably the right medium long-term strategy. I agree with this. I think if you step back, and this is what basically we did five years ago, you simply cannot scale a blockchain to like 8 billion users using it like 100 times a day, you know, like with all kinds of micro-transactions, whatever. At some point, you have to have these like layer twos with, I always call that execution compression.

You take what they do. You compress it. you verified on the L1. It makes sense as the long-term architecture, but at no point did we stop to think, wait, but we only need this a couple years down the road. For now, really, the L1 is the good product. The L1 is what we need more of, right?

And that just wasn't a consideration. And so that's why I think it's not that we're struggling with the growth, is that we rejected the growth, and that's a decision that we have to reverse as soon as possible and with full force. Thank you, any thoughts here? Yeah, I agree with a lot of what was said. I mean, clearly, like, this will be largely the topic. today, like growing the L1 is definitely one major focus that we're going to put now.

I think, like, maybe in terms of the L2s, like, why is base not seen as our growth? Why are people not, yay, base is growing, and that means Ethereum growth, right? Like, people try to spin it that way. And I think we need to answer that as well, like, why this is not obviously the case. And I think, like, there are a couple of reasons for that. And I think like the most important ones are one, like we have so far not built like L2 enough into something that feels like one product, right? Like so far, Ethereum L1 is so obviously one product and that's like how people have perceived it. And like L2 just feel like different chains.

And like there are some technical reasons for that. Like part of this is that the interop is just not as good as it should be. and there are also some more marketing reasons for that actually in the way that they do have another logo on there. And yes, you could also say they pay fees to someone else. But all of these together contribute to the idea that, yeah, like base growth is not really the same as ethium growth. And I think we have to kind of take that into account as well. I have a question for the two of you. Maybe from someone who has a little bit less insight in terms of the culture and the actual org design and makeup

of the EF. Also, by the way, just as a caveat, so much of this is so hard to get right. I think there's a lot of criticism maybe of some of these decisions five years ago, but we didn't know how any of this stuff was going to evolve. So I think it's just really important to say that. We're all making this up as we go. But do you think some of this might be because we're missing some voices in the room? Like this sounds a little bit to me like it could have been partly culturally driven, right? Like if we have a bunch of kind of researchers and even engineers in a sense who love to think about cool stuff, long-term time horizons, like just building the best thing. I can see a bunch of people in that room kind of getting raw-wrought about, that's right.

Like, this is the end game. We should just go there. Whereas kind of in my experience, like, it's kind of like product people and salespeople who tend to be like, yeah, but what about yearly, man? I got to hit my quota. It actually ends up being sales a lot of the time that kind of brings you back down to earth. You're like, oh, shit, yeah, I got to sell stuff this year.

So can you talk to me maybe a little bit about, do you think maybe sometimes having the right voices in the room during some of these pivotal points, you know, maybe cause us to ignore the path dependence aspect of this. And yeah, what do you kind of make of the, what is the DNA and genetic makeup of the EF look like to say? So I think what you said is right. The one big problem is that I think the people in the room in the past never felt like that room was special. I actually think for the last few years, we were in this really weird position where inside of the F, everyone just felt like, well, the F is one place out of many, right? Like it happens to be where a lot of the research coalesces, some of the engineering as well,

although actually if you look at core development in Ethereum, the vast majority of that happens outside of the EF. And so I think the community expected DF to take on the responsibility of where should Ethereum as a whole go. And the F just didn't ever feel like it actually had that responsibility. And so I think there was basically this mismatch. And so, yes, in that room, it was only voices that cared about where should we be in 10 years,

like what are the solutions for the interesting technical questions, these kind of partial explorations. Yeah, again, I think basically we were, were in this paralysis where like no one else did it either because they thought the F was in charge. I think what we're seeing now, at least I don't want to, you know, obviously I don't think either of the two of us can speak on behalf of the organization on behalf of the F. But what I'm seeing now is that a lot of this is changing to some extent. I don't think the F, of course, will never be in charge of Ethereum. Ethereum is decentralized. There's decentralized governance.

But I think the F will feel more of a responsibility to guide Ethereum holistically to where needs to be in terms of the devolved product experience, strategy, all these kind of things. And that means that the markup of what people will be in the rooms at the EF when these types of conversations happen will change a lot and is already changing a lot. Adam Bancred, would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting question. I highly agree with us in the room. And I think like something very interesting happens when Tomas joined the EF.

One of the first things he did is he opened a channel with a lot of people at the EF to talk about everything, to talk about the strategy. And I think, yeah, this felt interesting because this had never happened at the EF. Before that, like all conversations were very small groups, and it often felt actually like, I remember this actually being a very junior researcher. like sometimes you heard about something that just happened, oh, we decided this. And it was like Vitalik in a Telegram channel with three other people. And that was it that had just happened, right? And like it made a very big difference whether you happened to be in that channel or not. And so I think like, yes, it's not even just like are the right people at the table. There was just generally always a very, very small number of people at the tables in the past. And like discussions

happened in quite small rooms. And I think like that's definitely a big mistake. But it's also at the same time a big mistake. Yes, like it was a like, as you said, a very special selection of people. Like it was really very much quite academic researchers and engineers who basically thought about all this stuff. And I do remember actually thinking like a little bit back when the roll-up centic roadmap came out, okay, this is slightly weird.

So like these are going to be, they're going to be. other companies selling this as Ethereum, how's that really going to work? So I had like an inkling of a thought back then, but it came down and it was like, okay, this is what we're doing now. And I think, yeah, these kind of considerations, yeah, never played a big role. And I think, yeah, like for Ethereum, it would definitely make a big difference if there would be a lot more people who thought about this as well. I think like etherealize, it's going to bring some of that energy into the room.

But I think we need much more of it. like we need those people as well and they have so far not been listened to. I do think it's important to stress the point. It's not about I personally would resist the interpretation that the F did a bad job in the past. I think, again, it was a different time. I think the role of the F was to be very defensive. I think looking in any way more centralized than it did look or than it actually was, I think it would have been a huge problem for the space.

So I think in a way it executed correctly on the only option that it had available. and that was just, again, think of it as a public goods funding org. There was the research group, the research group did research. There was this group that did this. There was no tie in between those groups, as Stanko was saying. But that was by design. And I think it's important now that that changes. But I personally think the leadership back then basically followed the only part that was available at the time.

This is something that I've sort of been thinking through, and I would love to see if it resonates with the two of you at all, because you've been there for so long. But I think I agree with you, Onscar. I think, especially at the outset and the creation of the Ethereum Foundation, this made an enormous amount of sense because it's not only what crypto needed. We didn't really know how to scale blockchains 10 years ago. These were big, open, research-related questions. So it was actually very high ROI to perform this type of research, and it disproportionately benefited Ethereum.

There have always been smart contract challenger platforms, but by and large, Ethereum had an enormous share of both developers, mine share, assets, etc. So solving these core scaling-related challenges, from a research perspective, I think, made quite a bit of sense. And then it seems like maybe the meta has shifted. We talk about meta-shifting all the time in crypto, but the meta has shifted maybe for what the foundation needs to be today. And the differences are we basically know the broad directions of scaling blockchains. We don't know all the implementation details, but we have the core lanes here. So maybe we're at a period of time where we can pass some of that off to the private sector, which I think Ethereum has always been very adept at.

And there are more challengers to Ethereum today. Like Solana has a decent share of, you know, dex volumes, stable coins, whatever metric you want to slice. And so the ROI now is a little bit more diluted, right? If we're just being, we all want to do good for the humanity and, you know, advanced crypto, but also that research can need to share it across multiple ecosystems. So is that a fair description of kind of this meta shift and pivot? And if so, how is the EF kind of thinking about tackling and maybe restruct,

maybe this is a good way to segue to get into some of the changes that happening at the EF today. Yeah, I think that's a fair way of thinking about it, although I wouldn't even say, so I think even historically, like three, four, five years ago, I think Ethereum would have already benefited from overall more of a mindset of, hey, we have these challenges because we're so decentralized, who's in charge of this, can we kind of somehow have more clear responsibilities, can we have a bit more of a product mindset? I think these things would have been valuable even back then. I just think that for the longest time, we didn't have competitors that really executed very well on the product side.

And on the technology side, Ethereum was always ahead. And I think we still, I think right now Ethereum has a huge technology overhang in the sense that I think now that we are finally focused on tying it all together into like a very attractive bundle, I think we can execute on this actually relatively quickly because we already have all these individual pieces pre-developed. They just need to kind of come together and someone needs to focus on that.

I do think I agree with you, the meta has shifted in the sense that now having also with the competitor coming in and I think it's important to say, right? I think Solana is really good at product. I think they have a really good product. And I think for the first time, Ethereum really had a lot of pressure from that side. And so it's now especially important

that we ramp up and are competitive on that front as well. I still think going forward that it will be a big benefit Ethereum has that we still have tech that fundamentally has principled answers for this and that has answers for basically, for example, I think we can pretty seamlessly scale from here to 8 billion users if we execute well. And I do think Solana will have trouble once they hit the kind of the limits of what a single chain can provide, right?

And so we will still be able to benefit from what we did in the past, but it's just important that now we basically focus on where we are weak, not where we are strong. I think this part of the conversation I think is really important. So I want to just trace over it once more because a lot of people that have come into crypto came in in the 2021 or later eras. And that has provided them with the context of 2021 or later and not much of the context how crypto was and what crypto was. prior to that. Onscar, you use the words self-inflicted about like Ethereum's approach to itself. And I think we're also understanding that maybe it's not necessarily self-inflicted, but Ethereum was this way for a period of time. And it is still that way. And the environment that Ethereum is has shifted under its feet. Back in like 2013, 2014, 2015, 2015,

like blockchain research, blockchain development, we were running around in the dark. No one really knew exactly what they were doing. There were. like Bitcoin competitors that were like, okay, we're going to make Bitcoin, but we're going to do it with 13 different hashing algorithms. And that's going to be a more secure version of Bitcoin. Turns out that does not matter. But nonetheless, like, you know, millions of dollars of research went into building a blockchain with 13 different hashing functions. And that turned out that was completely futile. And that was the era in which Ethereum was created. And that's why Ethereum research was so valuable because in the era of 2014 to 2017, we did not know about blockchains.

We knew Bitcoin worked in principle, but we did not know, like, really the technology of blockchain. We haven't really figured it out. And so Ethereum research really dominated and won Ethereum, the era between 2015 to about like 20, 21. And I think sometime in 2021, things changed from, we actually did figure out blockchains as a technology. We're no longer, like, fumbling around in the dark. And around 2021, the ROI flipped from investing in research to, investing in product. And that happened around that era where, like, we hit the limits of scale in 2021. All blockchains got congested. And that's when the culture and environment of Ethereum went

from being an advantage to being a disadvantage. And now comparing Ethereum to Bitcoin, where Ethereum is calcified and rigid and on a single trajectory, Ethereum has always been trying to have a roadmap. It's been trying to adapt and grow and follow this long-term trajectory. But I think Ethereum is now kind of running up against some like meta adaptability where the Ethereum has a roadmap, but we can't figure out as a community how to change the roadmap when we are learning that it needs to be changed. And that meta adaptability is, I think, the cause of some of the frictions and consternations and angstance found in the Ethereum community right now because we are learning like, oh, we actually need to pivot the roadmap. And that is a new skill that Ethereum

has not developed, a muscle that we have not flexed, and that is being hampered. by one of Ethereum's greatest benefits, which is its decentralization. These are some raw thoughts. Ansgar, what do you think about them? Interesting. I think actually, I only partially agree. So what I'm seeing is just that, like,

we were slow to wake up, I think, but also that includes the core developers, the researchers, the F, but also the community as a whole. I think it took a long time to really realize that things have to change. I actually am very optimistic that they will change and they can change. I don't think that's as big of a challenge as people make it out to be.

I also think historically, one aspect that's important to keep in mind that now we are 10 years into smart contract platforms, right? For most of that time, well at least for a lot of the early days, it really felt very much. And I mean, I was only community member

for the first half and then only kind of professionally involved for the second half. But it really felt like more of a sandbox environment of like, look, we're still basically developing the infrastructure stack here. We don't really have real world users yet. It's mostly like some early adopters

playing around kind of developing. Of course, there's already real money involved, but it's mostly like meaningless, right? And so I think for the longest time there, the mindset was always, well, you know, it's important that once it matters, the tech is ready. But basically now we kind of like a little bit on the back foot as kind of like, as now the real world is starting to adopt blockchain. Like now it starts to matter that actually everything is ready and we are not quite ready.

Right. So I think that's the moment that we're waking up to. It's like, wait, we can't like be ready in five years. We have to be ready like in six months, right? Like as the institutions look at blockchain, like we haven't talked about this yet so much, but I think we are now very much as a focus on stable coins coming on chain, real-word assets coming on chain, like actual real use cases that won blockchains, and they don't want blockchains that promise them that they'll be ready in a few years. They want them to deliver what they need

today, right? And so I do think in that sense, the matter has changed very recently. That only happened over the last year, really, I think. I think it took us longer than it should have, but I think now we're here, and I'm personally quite optimistic that we can execute on that shift. So what does it take then? If we are now thinking in the short and medium terms, the six-month time horizon, the one-year time horizon, there's a bunch of of things that are being developed in the Ethereum ecosystem. Native roll-ups-based roll-ups, still kind of like technical researchy things, which I would contend are not going to be ready for institutions who are thinking about like where to deploy today. There are meetings

going on behind closed doors in TradFi about what to do about blockchain right now. I think the question for the Ethereum community and for Ethereum leadership is what can we provide right now? What should we focus on in the short and medium term? Donkrad, do you have any opinions on this? Yeah, I mean, we, We had, I think, quite extensive discussions over the past few months on what we need to change in the short term in the roadmap in order to, like, stay on top of this or at least not get further behind. I think, like, one of the things that was, like, very clear at the end of last year and that, like, we've now kind of, like, more or less got good agreement done as just scaling the L1 needs to be a focus. like there should not be any more of like the mistake that we made in, I don't know, 2017 and again in 21. We were just like, oh, you actually want to use our chain?

Oh, good luck. It's very expensive. If you actually want to use it. So I think we are clear now like, yes, we do want activity on L1. L1 is kind of like the economic center of Ethereum at least. There's always going to be space for DFI on L1. like I think what cannot saves us here is and actually like this is where the

Rolab Centric Roadmap really helped is that ZKVMs are now ready and this was not even true like one or two years ago they are coming like within months they're going to be at subslot proving latency and so we actually have a consistent coherent story behind this like I think in the past the problem was always like

yeah we could scale their one and just like make our notes big, but then we lose some really core properties that we think should be part of Ethereum, like verifiable and censorship resistance. But I think like within two years we will be ready that like even if we scale, I mean there are some scaling overhang that we can't do even without that. Like that was just like basically us being complacent and not doing what we could have. But there's going to be a time in about two years or so when we really need to lean into like this deep tech and use it to actually like provide the same guarantees that we have now, even whilst we scale the L1, maybe 100 or 1,000 X.

So this is going to be number one. And what was the time frame for that? So the time frame that I have in my mind, and I think so far it's only confirmed for this year, but this is what I hope to get confirmed through like a thorough vetting for the next few years, is to do at least about 3x per year. So this means this year we will go to about 100 million gas by the end of the year. Then the next year we will get another 3x on that.

So we will be about 10x from where we are now. And then in the next two years, we will do another 10x. So all of these seem very plausibly possible. I mean, like, this is of course like, I mean, you have to remember I'm not the engineer. So like we will have to get a much more engineering-driven culture and you should probably have a podcast with the engineers who are working on this at some point

because these are super important and it's not fair to just talk to the researchers who very high mind and say, oh yeah, you should just do this. But I do think it's very plausible that we can do this and that probably we can go even further than that. And basically in the future, my opinion is we should stop making like an ideological line about oh no, like we cannot scale the L1. I think like that has been like a big mistake in the past. that is also like somehow it got blurred.

It wasn't even always technical reasons anymore. Like a lot of people just opposed to scaling the L1 even for ideological reasons. And like we should just not do that anymore. From now on we should just clearly define what our properties, like what kind of note types and so on we are willing to take into account for this. And then from there it just becomes a technical and research problem

to figure out what is the maximum L1 scale that we can support. Benckrod, where do you think if we, maybe even 12 months ago, were at a point where there was broad opposition to scaling to L1 from an ideological perspective or maybe a lack of understanding that technically it was more feasible now? Where are we now? If we were at a 10 before, are we at a 5, a 4, you know, where are we in terms of acceptance of this idea? And then, yeah, let's start there. I mean, I think in terms of accepting some amount of scaling, let's say 10x or so, we are at, almost full acceptance now. I don't think there's like anyone left who is like a complete

no, we shouldn't do this under no circumstances. I think the further out this is still a process but I am more confident that we're going to win people over because we do have a clear story how we can do all of this without

compromising our values. So I think, yeah, we should just do it. What do you think about on the L2 side of So there's kind of, okay, there's one big bucket here, which is we want to scale the L1, and that's great to hear that there's broad acceptance of that while keeping the tenets of decentralization that we all know and love. And then the other is, you know, we are down this roll-up-centric roadmap. I think the idea of putting L-2's back inside the bottle is neither realistic nor something that we necessarily want, right? So the question is, what should we do on the L-2 front? And, you know, you're starting to hear people say, there's like we should tax the L-2s more, or we should tariff the L-2s, you know? And, you know, Maybe we're seeing how effective tariffs are in real time. But one thing, one framing of this, which has resonated deeply with me, is what services can the Ethereum L1 provide to its L2s?

And that's, I think, somewhere in there is kind of the based roll-up where there's sequencing that the L-1 might do and native roll-ups, right, which is eliminating the need for overhead for security councils and coming up with your own proof system, et cetera. I don't know if that's rough. Maybe that's an oversimplification. But I would be curious from both of your perspectives, what new product or service offerings do you think are promising that the L1 can offer L2s that we're not taxing, we're not tariffing, we're just offering a product or service, which is valuable that L2s might be willing to pay more for, which everyone benefits from. What are promising areas that you see there? So it's interesting. I think I would first ask the question, like, what does Ethereum get from having L2s, right? Because I think some people are now all the way on the end of the spectrum. They're like, oh, the role of centric roadmap was a big mistake. I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong. That's the role of central roadmap. It's again, we just neglected the L2. It's. It's a role upcentric roadmap around a very strong L2. That's where we basically we need to get, right? And so what is the benefit of having the L2s? I think there's two that I see. And I think over time maybe we will see two different types or like some differentiation between the L2s. I think one role L2s can fill is like, like very transparent, generic spillover space from the L1.

And given that, I mean, as Stangler said, even optimistically, we might be able to scale the L1 3X every year. That's good. And I mean, we have basically not scaled the L1 in five years at all. So like 20% this year was the only bump since the merge, basically. So that's good. But like, that doesn't mean that tomorrow we'll be able to handle all the demand that there is in the Ethereum ecosystem, right?

So we need the L2s and we'll need the L2s forever. And so I think there in the short term, it's about making sure that we have very seamless interoperability, that we have standards for assets that say are minted on the L1, are flowing into the L2s, how exactly does it happen, and a long-term vision of how these Rolps can over time become more transparent until, basically, the user doesn't even notice anymore that whether they're on the L1 or the L2, that's all the same, basically, one large kind of infinite compute space, basically. And then I think there's separately also room for special purpose layer 2s, more differentiated

layer twos that have specific roles that they play, that have specific applications, maybe for gaming, for these other types of special applications, those will never, I think, look fully transparent. I think that will always be a meaningfully different experience. For them, I feel like we are maybe already closer today or to the end state there. Like, we will provide DA for them. We will provide settlements based on their one. But that relationship won't change so much over time. Whereas I think with this kind of this first group category of YAL2s, we'll see closer and closer tie in. I think over time, we will have native interoperability solutions that the L1 will offer directly for the L2s, right?

I think that will become a much closer symbiotic relationship. And yeah, at least that's how I see that going. I don't know, Duncan, is that how are you thinking about the L2s? Some things here are still hard to predict, right? I mean, I think like one or four past probably biggest mistakes was like assuming that state doesn't matter at all. And we pretend that it doesn't matter where users like go because all the like they can just be on an L2 or something.

and then it turns out, oh, like, where the liquidity is, where the defires and so, and so, and that matters a lot. And I think, like, these things, I don't think I'm 100% confident to know where they're going in terms of, like, chain obstruction and all that. I think, like, to me, at least for now, I would see it as, yeah, I mean, Elfuth, they are just different chains in some ways. They're still, like, close to Ethereum. And I think, like, the best that we should aim for is that they are very good reasons. why they want to be on Ethereum, right?

Like, there should be, and that's why it's so important that we keep focused on the L1. I think if there is no activity on L1, if there's nothing interesting, then the L2s will say, we might as well be on Celestia or something. And I think, like, we have to have a good reason, like, why is it better? Why can you, yeah, more easily tap into liquidity on L1? So I think, like, we have to get the story around that. So interop, like, all that becomes very important, as well. well as having an economically important L1.

I think otherwise I can imagine like different roles in terms of L2s. Like I think like one obvious ways how L2s could work in the future is that it is more of an app chain, that it is more of a thing like, hey, you have like a great app on Ethereum and like it's very likely that anyone can still launch an app, right? We'll keep scaling L1. That's what we said. We don't really have like very tight limits. but at some point it might just make sense that, oh, you want to save on fees.

It's going to be cheaper. The development costs are worth it to turn it into a roll-up, and now it's like 10 times less gas or something. Okay, I think this is like a story that I think can make sense. And then there are the current L-tools, which are more like generic purpose chains, right? And this was always kind of like a little bit of a, hmm, this is weird, because they also kind of compete with Ethereum at the same time. and at the same time we're saying they are Ethereum.

And I think there are different ways to resolve this. And I think that one of the answers, like currently where Ethereum is like this extremely loose collection, right, nobody really gets to define what is Ethereum or not. You don't have to buy DA from Ethereum right now to claim that you're an Ethereum L2. So like, what does it really mean then, right? That is a very loose connection. So I think in this world, the only realistic answer, in my opinion, is that. is that they are their own chains. They are very free to keep being that,

and they should do a PD, get their own users, get their own app, great. And they are maybe our friends in some way, like being competitive doesn't mean you have to hate each other. And the reason that they are on Ethereum DA is just because it provides the best services. So I think that's one possible world. I think it seems plausible for where we are now. A different plausible world would be that we do, like, lean in

And by the way, this is something that clearly I don't get to decide. And I think, like, Ethereum has been extremely reluctant on that side. So I think this is currently, like, a future that I find quite implausible. But that we lean into very much heavier into someone at defining what Ethereum is, right? Like, that we make some version where someone will actually say, well, you're only an L2 if you purchase EthereumDA or if you do this and this. Or you could, it could be a different thing, right? but like they would have to be some connection to Ethereum of some sort. And then we will tell our users, yeah, like this is Ethereum.

You can use the Ethereum brand and so on and we'll like make some certification program telling you that it's the same as Ethereum. I think this is not a very plausible world, but I would mention that it is another version of this that could work. And just to bear with you mention because I think I personally would not want to lean too much more into this direction of enforce. social alignment, certification, these kind of things,

I think if we want to go to that world, then we need to actually have a product differentiation. What makes it special to be part of that inner sphere? If you think about it, like this inner sphere, if you have like a multi-kind of sphere system, you have the inner sphere of L2s that are just like seamless extensions of the L1, that must actually be a meaningfully better product

than being on the outer sphere where you basically still have these self-controlled L-2s. Maybe they have worse into, you have to actually like a product differentiation. I think we have to stop relying always on this is what is the morally right thing to do, right? I think actually it's time to focus on the product side there. Mm-hmm, right, absolutely.

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With all the L2s that we know, like base, optimism, arbitram. I view these things as layer two that have a very large degree of freedom from the Ethereum layer one. And when we go look at the layer two B slices, the five slices that make up the security models for all these layer twos.

The layer two that we know have all five of them. Now, there are conversations around base roll-ups and native roll-ups. And the way I think about these things is that each one of these things, based and native, actually just eliminate a pie slice from the layer-2-b security model. So base roll-ups, just remove

the sequencer pie slice because it just repurposes the layer one sequencer, and then native roll-ups remove, I can't remember which, another pie slice. And so we're now actually down to three security models rather than five that make up based and native roll-ups. And the way I see this is that these layer two, based and native roll-ups, are much closer to truly being Ethereum than these very high degree of freedom layer twos like arbitrant base optimism. And in the conversation of like what is Ethereum and what is not? I think it's actually important to talk about what the future of base and a native roll-up ecosystem looks like in comparison to the roll-up models that we have today, because you can see that there is desire to truly be Ethereum. You saw this in the fight

between Arbitrum and optimism about EVM compatibility, which then evolved into EVM equivalence. There's always been this gravitational pull for these roll-ups to truly be Ethereum, and that's shown up in the actual branding, like base is Ethereum, optimism, is Ethereum. And I think that same energy is actually showing up in the native and based roll-up models where these things are actually truly truly becoming the shared resources that the Ethereum layer one actually operates on. And so there is actually still, I think, a lot of juice left to squeeze in the base and native future ecosystem where they are layer twos and they also are Ethereum. Onscar, what are your thoughts? Can I actually maybe just

intersect another way of framing that as well. We talked about kind of this meta shift. And one thing that I've noticed just about crypto in general is that when prices are going up, people like to describe things in very grandiose terms, right? We're digital property rights and we're global digital nation states. But when prices going down, we're an operating system and we need cash. It's like very different, right, depending on what the price is doing. And one thing that I actually appreciate about this era of crypto is that you can speak in more kind of plain language about what's going on.

And people really used to kind of shun you and say nasty things when you were pointing out something that was just pretty obvious. And I think one thing that is kind of nice now, the way that I think about this is how can Ethereum increase not only the value that it's providing for roll-ups, but also kind of reduce the switching costs if we're just being like, everyone doesn't like that. It's a competitive thing. But ultimately, I think like a nice thing would be for roll-ups. I would feel better as a holder of Ethereum. It's like, look, if I make this, a based roll-up is very sticky, right? That's the type of thing where, hey, we are giving you a new resource here in the form of blobs. We're going to give you R&D and developer resources to to make L2s much more compatible with Ethereum, which, by the way, Solana has not allocated those same amount of resources. And consequently, you don't seem any L2s on Solana. In exchange for that, right, we want to make sure that we're offering you so much value that it would be tough to rip out of your stack, right?

And I think then from an investor standpoint, you kind of look at that and say, yeah, I kind of like that, actually. And no one feels ripped off because everyone's getting a good deal. And, David, that was the way that I kind of looked at your pie slices argument, right? Which is, okay, right now, if you want to be an L2 that is a stage two, L2, you've got to invest a lot of money and time and internal resources to doing all of those pie slices. If Ethereum could provide pre-compiles, could make DA cheaper, could do whatever it can, so that you don't have to, so that we can invest in resources to make it easier to that stage two.

Maybe that's beneficial for everyone. I'd love to get people's reactions to that because everyone went silent when I said increased switching costs. What do you guys think? No, I think that's exactly right. Because, of course, we do not control DEL2s, right? So basically all we can do is we can offer a path that is attractive to them. actually think that will be a very attractive path towards become like a closer interoperability

with the L1. I'm not sure that all the L2s will go down that path. For some of them, it might be a bit more complicated to get to full EVM equivalents, these kind of things, because that's probably required to be a native rollout, these things. Some might strategically choose not to. I personally would imagine that becoming a very close, tightly integrated L2 will be attractive to most of them and they'll end up doing that. And then in that world, yes, I think it's synergetically beneficial for everyone. I think it means that they will get all the inter-up benefits, that they will continue to be part of the overall Ethereum brand and story, which is, of course, only valuable if we actually make the L1 meaningful and at a growth kind of region again.

And on the other hand, we will also benefit from that, right? Like, we will benefit from having tightly coupled L2s, these L2s where you don't have to have to worry about, will they at some point leave the L1, right? I would expect that that will also have an attractive kind of overall fee story attached to it, right? So I want to basically give them a path that leads to a mutually beneficial outcome. And then, of course, we can't guarantee that all of those L2s will follow that path. I have one final question.

This is a little bit of an out there one, but let's say Ethereum sort of lean to, because one of the advantages, in my view, of scaling the L1, is that you can actually offer additional services to L2s, right? If you think of interop as a service, right? If you can decrease the time to finality on L1, you can decrease the slot time, then suddenly it's easier to solve interop. That hub and spoke model makes a lot more sense, right? Would Ethereum, like, one, if you were to follow that thought process,

and logic far enough, you might actually see a world where what you think of as the EVM today, right, or ETHL1 actually becomes a roll-up itself on Ethereum, right? And there's kind of this base layer that does DA and consensus, and then there's the EVM canonical roll-up. Now, the challenge there, and there are a bunch of, I think, newer L-1 ecosystems, which are kind of thinking through something similar, which is, hey, should I have native applications, right? They're trying to solve the cold start problem, but maybe for Ethereum, it would be a little bit of, okay, we kind of have these things which have been coupled for historical reasons, but maybe they don't actually belong to being coupled. Like, would we ever think of doing, and I know the EF doesn't have any

control of this and neither do you, but how does that idea strike you of like an EVM canonical roll-up? I mean, this is kind of what we're doing with the scaling the L-1, I think. Like, basically, once we use ZK to prove the L1 and put it into blobs, it is actually like technically a roll-up. Wow, it's a goal. Yeah, and I think this has actually been part of the design space for a long time. Because, I mean, people always forget, right, that the merge wasn't necessarily the plan from the beginning.

There was all these ideas around new execution environments and then these one-chain maybe being just like some separate thing with bridges or turning it into a roll-up. So that has always been part of the design space. I would say though, like in a way, it almost doesn't matter. Like, it's like an implementation detail. I do think what will happen is that VL1 and at least that kind of group of native L2s will over time converge on a shared tech stack where basically the way you verify as a node

following VL1, that basically will be using the same ZK proving systems. It will use the same kind of one slot delayed execution and verification. All of that will basically shed infrastructure. And that also means that you can have meaningfully better. you X if you are part of that set of L2s, right? Because that means that you roll back and forth together with the L1. So if you have finality, you have immediate finality, you can have same slot async composability between all these L2s, right?

You actually have a pretty amazing product. You pair that maybe with, I don't know, that's a bit of controversial topic, right? But like Justin's pre-conf work, you can in principle get like literally 100 milliseconds round-trip kind of pre-confirmations for any action you want to perform. So, again, that's not 10 years in the future. That's like two or three years in the future. you can imagine you perform any action on chain, right?

And like, it doesn't really matter whether that is on the L1 or maybe it's some sort of overflow and some of these transparent L2s. You click a button within like 100 milliseconds. You get that confirmation that that action will not technically was performed, but will be performed with a specific outcome. And unless you're sending around a billion dollars, that will have enough economic security attached that like with that 100 millisecond confirmation, your eye will already be able to give you the checkmark and move on in your flow.

So there will be no more like spinning wheel, waiting, all that kind of thing. is basically solved with all of this. And again, it's important that we don't always stick in this, oh, the future will be so beautiful. It's important that, like, on the path towards that, we already tangibly have good intermediate stages and that we also make sure we sprint to that as soon as possible. But I really think that we have something there

that's worth going towards. I'm glad, Mike, that you actually brought us back to the layer one capacity conversation, because I think I still have some questions around this that I think is worth bringing up. Dancrad was giving the roadmap for projected Ethereum capacity increases. and actually wasn't listening because I was looking for a Vitalik tweet that I want to read out.

I think what I heard was like 10x increases for like two years or something, something like that. And you guys are not in your heads, yes, which is pretty great. I want to read a Vitalik tweet that he tweeted out a couple days ago on April 12th. He says, from where I'm standing, there's basically universal agreement among researchers that gas limit increase features are a top priority for Glamsterdam. Glamterdam is the hard fork after Fusaka, and that Fusaka is coming pretty near term, like a month or so. Ansgar and others in the Ethereum Research Community,

this is Vitelech reading again, has had this as their primary focus. The late execution, block level, access list 444-4-4-Gas pricing changes, all things that can together enable a gas limit of 300 million, not 100 million, which is something, I think we are in like the 60 or 70 or 80 million gas limit range right now. So quite a large increase. No, what's the number?

36. 36. 36. 36. Okay, right. Was 30, went up to 36, but we are looking to a 300 million gas limit with Glamsterdam. That's great.

That means the L1 is getting bigger. Just a little corrections. Please. Pectra is the one that's very soon. Fusaka is the one after. That's right. That's right. I forgot about Pekra.

So, yes. I fast forward in my brain. We hope that Fusaka is going to be this year, which is, I think, what we should do, but it's an aggressive schedule already for Ethereum to do another hot fork with a six months, this is the goal. Right, yes.

For those people, maybe interested in the technical side of this, right? So basically, the way to think about scaling is that you can think of it, I would say, in like three stages. One is just without even changing anything about the technology, just using the available headroom. Ethereum has been very conservative in the past, and in part because of like long-term consequences of higher throughput. So, for example, state growth is a really big topic.

State growth is not something that affects you within six months. Stake growth is something where over time it accumulates and becomes a problem, right? Now that we are committed anyway to in the long term have solutions for this, have statelessness via Zika EVM or even maybe before with some targeted solutions like vertical trees. We can afford to basically just take the existing tech and start pushing. And that's what we're going to do this year. So like this year, we already did this from 30 to 36 million. There's a lot more to go. So I think we will hopefully like on the same timeline as Fusaka.

So this fall will go to like maybe another doubling, 72. Then by the end of the year, maybe 100 million. That's roughly plus minus the order of magnitude I would expect there. and that is without any tech changes. Then there's the second phase, basically, for the next open hard fork. So basically, we already closed this fall hard fork for this year. We already close that to features because it needs to now be in implementation testing, that thing. The next open hard fork, the Glamsadam Fork, that's first half of next year, sometime then.

That will be when a lot of these, like this first generation of actual features that give you more scalability will hit the chain, right? And so there's a lot of overhang of just things that are pretty straightforward. that we just have not done in the past, that will allow us to go further without increasing the direct load on the network. So that's things like delayed execution, that's things like access list parallelization, these kind of changes. That's what Vitalik was talking about there. So that's the second generation. So the second generation is feature-based continued scaling. And then we have like the third generation, but then we are talking two to three years out, which is this ZK-based. We're basically, in a way, we do the same thing that is the roll-up trick, where basically the producer

still has high load. So as a block builder, you still need to have a beefy machine. But as a verifying note, now you can be very lightweight. And importantly, like, the weight that you have as a verifying note no longer depends on the overall throughput of the network, at least not on the compute side. So you can basically start to very aggressively scale and still have very lightweight verification. So basically, step one is purely push the existing system. Step two is like individual features. And step three is this like ZK-based big step. And that ZK-based big step doesn't seem so incredibly far on the time horizon. That no longer feels like a long-term thing. That's putting that in the medium-term time horizon, which is pretty cool to see what was once a deeply research

theoretical thing actually find itself like over the horizon that's relatively, you know, you can see that. Dankrod, what's up? Yeah, I mean, I think like the thing you have to be careful with the ZK is so the one thing that we are sitting right now is that the agency is coming down and will very soon be, like, ready for this. What will be the big topic will be how reliable are these systems. Like, I mean, I think, like, it is definitely very scary technology, like, with a huge amount of, like, complexity that we've never seen before. So convincing ourselves that this is safe will be a process.

And that's also why I guess I see it a little bit differently from, like, there's one big step. I think, like, I see it as a very gradual interdial. And actually, like, I hope that we will start it even this year. I hope at the end of this year, you can run a validator without running an execution node, where you can, like, receive those proofs from someone. And now we have a super light validator. And I don't expect that most people will run this at that point,

because, like, most people have powerful enough notes. So this is, like, more for the enthusiasts and most people running on 10-megabit connections or something, and they go, this is like a really nice relief. and Ethereum will still be safe if like 10% of people wrap us which is like what I expect at first and then like from there we can ramp this up over the years and like

the critical point is like monitoring when we get over sort of 33% and 50% because then essentially the ZKVM will become load bearing and like we need to be really really sure that now it is absolutely safe okay so we've talked about the

scaling increases of the Ethereum layer one I think it's pretty incredible that 300 million gas limit is actually a tangible on the horizon feature that is coming. The gas limit and block times are actually different things, though. And I think it's also worth talking about block times, from what I've learned. There are some fancy tricks delayed execution that gives the perception of like instant latency blocks, which is great from a U.S. perspective. But I would also contend that from a product feature inside of DFI, you still need to actually redacted. reduce block times as fast as reasonably possible.

And there's a bunch of reasons around that. Defi as a product is just better with fast block times. MEV is lower in aggregate with fast block times. And overall, like market makers can quote tighter spreads with fast block times. And so in addition to growing the layer one capacity, I think there's also a very valid conversation of like, let's actually reduce the block times of the Ethereum layer one. What's the consensus on this?

What's the state of things on this? Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I think like we're not quite as far. on the thinking there yet. Like it has definitely like also popped up and we were like, okay, yeah, like if L1 becomes the product, then clearly this is essential.

In the past, it was always like, oh yeah, but you can use our tools and they like do pre-confirmations. And now we're like, oh, we need to do this ourselves as well. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it right now is like there are three different pieces to this. There are one, some kind of optimistic pre-confirmations. Like when can you get like some promise, maybe crypto economic, maybe just like best effort or whatever, here is your transaction and it's going to be included and this is the outcome of it. Who's are the best examples for those?

Like actually there's like nothing else behind their pre-confirmations than a sequence of guarantee, but it still provides absolutely great UX as we all know, right? So these basically, they are what's needed if you want great UX, right? you need optimistic, something optimistic, something very quick. The second part is finality. How quickly can you get finality on a block? And I think what that ultimately determines is mostly in some way, like, how quickly L2s can interact, because they depend on some kind of finality. And this includes, like, the other thing, like exchanges are also like, kind of in a very

abstract way, like also kind of L2s. But that's the other thing where you see slow finality, right? you have to wait a long time until they confirm that you send money into the exchange. And then the third part is the time to censorship resistance. How quickly until there is, like right now at least we still have this monopoly lock on a slot, right? Like one slot means one proposer and they can do whatever they want. And that means only after that's over can like, for example, an AMM really know what happened. And so they get this monopoly to arbitrage, and that is basically determined by when there is someone else who can include transactions, because then their monopoly is over.

I think in some ways we want to work on all of these, but there are going to be limitations. I think what is very likely possible, like as one step over like a medium term horizon is to reduce the slot times, which like gives some improvement on all of these. but it's probably not going to be like amazing amazing. I think like six seconds is something that many people find at least not completely unrealistic with the current tech stack that we have. And I think like that is likely it's something we're going to lean into. And the other thing that we will probably work harder on is like pre-confirmations. I think Dustin has done some great work on getting the ball started on this.

And I think like the right way to move this forward is to actually try to make this a core part of Ethereum, like not make this as like a side show where like someone maybe give some pre-confirmations, but we make it part of the Ethereum stack and like handle it. Even if it's technically something optimistic that's not part of like the protocol. We treat it as if it were a part. So these are like kind of the two short and medium term steps that I would take. And again, this is something I have thought much less about so far than the scaling their one topic. And then over a probably more longer term horizon, we have bigger changes coming. Like there are definitely big changes to staking we are discussing. And I think they will probably lead to a massive reduction in the number of signatures that are needed for blocks, which means we can hopefully further reduce slot times,

we can get faster finality. And then there's also the fossil or similar ideas, which will give us much shorter censorship resistance times. So that's kind of like the rough outline of this. I don't know, unscar if you have anything to add. I think that was conclusive. So just really kind of summing it up, what I'm understanding is that I'm seeing prioritization on Ethereum scale

by increasing block size and not block times. I mean, I guess more immediately. More immediately. Like we do want to work on that as well, but I guess like pushing it to like say a Solana. I mean, first, we're probably not going to see 400 million seconds. At least right now they're quite far out. I think hopefully we will also eventually get below four seconds. I don't know if like one second is completely unrealistic.

I think not. I think that's maybe where we're headed. but that's kind of more like very long term at the moment. Like there are quite a lot of things that need to change first. And to be clear, just because it just came up, right? Like the important context here is always that we do all of these things without majorly pivoting what Ethereum at its core is, right? Ethereum still is a platform where everyone on Earth can come in and audit what's happening,

can run a node, can participate, all these things. They do put extra constraints on the system, right? it is easier to get to sub-second slot times if you're willing to just have a few very highly interconnected data center nodes. That's not what Ethereum is doing. I think we can get to a really good product experience without doing these things.

Again, I think pre-conves, like that gives you, give you basically like 100 millisecond roundtrip time kind of optimistic guarantees, plus then fast evolves time to finality is a really, really good alternative approach. But it does mean basically we always have to work harder to make these things happen. Yeah.

But also like maybe like, in terms of priorities. I think, like, maybe, yeah, like I have thought less about it should not mean it's less of a priority. I think it is actually quite a high priority. It's just like some of the things are really hard and we can't do them immediately.

I think it might very well be, I mean, I would actually hope that we decide like a slot time reduction could be a feature for a glam set on. I think it might be the right choice. I think like especially now that we're saying we are scaling, the more immediate thing for product UX is going to be the slot time. And so either via the optimistic reconfirmation or slot time reduction or both,

it is actually something that is high priority. Awesome. I think also just there's an enormous amount of updates to be and upgrades to be excited about on Ethereum. And actually, I think some of the things that the community has been asking for for a long time are not as far away, I think, as many people would think. right? And so, you know, I'm curious maybe to, you know, in our sort of final segment here to just discuss a little bit about what's been going on at the Ethereum Foundation. Like obviously, you know,

don't disclose any state secrets or anything like that. But I think from, you know, the perception of someone who doesn't, it's just kind of watching from afar, it's the last year has sort of been like, okay, maybe there's some folks who aren't, you know, super happy with, there are some problems, right, with the way that the EF is structured. And I think a lot of people assume that Batalik wasn't necessarily involved. And then we found out Batalik was still. involved, and then I. Meyaguchi, the longstanding, you know, executive in charge of the EF moved to president. And now we have two new co-CEO's Tomas and Shao. So, and, you know, we kind of open this episode by talking about some of the cultural changes, right? It's been taking place

in Ethereum and some of these mindset shifts. Like, any insight that you can give us into, you know, the changes that are taking place at the EF as well. And that could be anything from, you know, prioritization of different things on the roadmap to maybe a slight changing culture or org structure or bringing in new voices, whatever it is that you think is most important for the community to know and understand. How do you just describe the change over the last 12 to 18 months? So what I would say is that I think there is a pretty significant change happening at D.F right now. So whatever it looks like from the outside, I think it's probably a bit more than that. But the way I would think about it really is that fundamentally, I think we're seeing a shift

of what the F is trying to be. I think the F, again, I keep repeating it, but think of it as a public goods funding org, even internally, even internally towards a. its own teams, basically just a green meme of people that distribute money for independent projects to operate. And in that time, I think, for example, the role of an executive director was very different. It was much more representative. It was much more about external contacts. It was about facilitating a lot of these, basically just a smooth operation. And I think I did a really good job. I think it was very unfortunate that over the last year, a lot of, I think that always happens.

A lot of people were actually upset and upset for good reasons, but that channeled itself into upsetness about a specific person, a specific role. I think that that was a bit silly. But Twitter is particularly good at that. Right. Yeah. Right. But I think what actually did need to happen is as you try to really change what the org feels responsible for, not in charge of again, but responsible for, it kind of makes sense to bring

in new people, especially because the role of an executive director changed a lot. I think now basically the executive director is much closer, think of it as much closer to like a CEO style role. That really tries to unify all the individual projects, individual teams, into one cohesive, shared kind of product view and shared strategy. I think we have this really interesting setup now with Choway and Tomash. I can't speak for them. I think basically like they're still defining kind of the relative responsibilities a bit more clearly,

but maybe like as a mental model, I would maybe say that Choway is more focused on the parts of the responsibilities of the F that are closer to what it did in the past. And Tomash is maybe more focused on basically building up these new capabilities as well. So I think that that's maybe good first past kind of view on these things. and Tomash is coming in with a lot of energy, a lot of momentum. And so, I mean, I think as we're recording this, his official start date was basically like everything was only finalized this weekend, this past weekend, a few days ago.

So I would expect that over the next month, two months, you will see a lot of updated communication from the EF. You'll see a lot of like changes in overall activities, vision setting as again, the F basically like in a way extends, you can think of it as now like double the responsibility set. It's what it used to do, plus this entirely new category of the product strategy side for it, Zerra. I don't know, Dancoa, does that match how you've been experiencing the last few weeks or months? Yeah, I mean, so far, what I would say is there's definitely been a big shift in attitude. People have become open to this product mindset that was non-existent before.

I mean, I have big hopes, but I'm probably like a little bit more careful than Anska in the that nothing has actually happened yet other than Tomash and Zhaouye becoming edie. So I am very aware that everything is to be proven now. And I think it's not proven yet. Like it's very far from. And I think, yeah, it will require major changes. It's a very different mode of operation than like what has happened so far. I think there are like signs that it could be good.

But the proof is in the pudding. I don't know if you guys have heard of this concept. of a rose and a thorn, but I would love to get a sense from the two of you if what is maybe something that you're excited about or hopeful about or early changes, early signs of a change that you think is interesting to call attention to, but what might still be a lingering concern as well, right? Like it's, okay, we haven't executed on it and I'd really hope we solve this, kind of like rose and a thorn. Whoever's feeling bravest. I mean, the biggest change I've seen, and that makes me feel positive, is definitely

communication. It's been upgraded massively, internally and externally. The way that Tomash basically is open to anyone scheduling a call with him, even Kaisamani signals the shift. Like there's not

any more this like, no, we're in our ivory tower. It is like a clear change instance, like we are listening. So I think that is great. Yeah. I think my throne I've already mentioned. As it happened. The whole shift in engineering and everything like that needs to be proven.

And currently it's TBD. Yeah, I think I would basically mostly just agree with this. I think what is very hopeful is that you can really feel that also a lot of people in the F are actually quite excited about this opportunity to they understand. Of course, I mean, you know, like people inside the F, it's a subset of the same kind of Twitter community that you also see when you go online. People are also upset. People are also like somewhat unsure about where we are going.

they feel like something is not quite going right, even though, of course, everyone is proud of the work they've been doing so far. People want things to change. And I think now you can feel that there's basically like a clear direction where everyone feels, okay, this is a direction we can go into, that's productive, that can actually really have a big impact. So that I'm very optimistic about. It's also you can really see it's activating a lot of people.

And I think actually, for example, I hope that, for example, on bankless, you'll over time maybe tone down the researchers and we'll bring on more other voices as well. from like I think in the F, just as a random example, we have Josh Rudolph, who basically came on initially as just like a PM in the research team. He was basically helping coordinate calls to like initially like very kind of like help on the edges. And over time really like now I think is basically I would consider him our main inter-product guy. He's basically, he's really owning this entire kind of challenge end to end. And I think he's better at asking like what actually

does the user experience have to be than any researcher. Right. And I think those are the people that over time will have much more of a weight in the. the EF than the existing phases. So I think people will have to get used to a little bit to maybe some differences there as well. In terms of concerns, yeah, I really just think the nice thing is sometimes I think having only single path to success is actually clarifying. And for example, just as a side comment, like I think, for example, that helped Bitcoin the asset a lot because they kind of had to go to for digital gold. There was no other way. I think Ethereum has struggled a little bit a little bit that like we were trying to be everything. So anyway, but like similar now

with the AF and Ethereum. I really feel like Ethereum still, it's our win to give away. I think we are still in the lead, but clearly we don't just win by default. We have a clear path to success, and if we don't execute, we will not win. That is very clear to me.

I think that's very clear to a lot of people. And so that is a downside because, yes, that doesn't mean if we don't execute, we will lose. We just will. But it also means that everyone has clarity about that, and everyone knows that they have to make this work. The old trick of, like,

what is the downside? answering with an upside. Yeah. At the very beginning of this episode, we talked about a bunch of vectors of Ethereum that we needed to be addressed. Ethereum needed to adopt a product mindset. We needed to scale the layer one. There needed to be leadership changes and stylistic changes at the Ethereum Foundation.

I think, Connagar, you did a really good job actually kind of just labeling out the different buckets of problems. And I think we've also gone through each of those. And there seems to be, like, meaningful progress in everything that we labeled as the problems that are plaguing Ethereum. I treated it out yesterday this idea that, like, you can feel that the Ethereum ship

is turning around, but it is such a large ship. It is the largest, most decentralized, but yet still coordinated ecosystem that has ever existed. And so, therefore, the turning around of the ship takes just a long time.

And on the back of this episode, my main takeaway is, like, the ship has turned more than I have previously thought. And so maybe you could kind just give your opinion, your take about like the percentage of completion of the turning of the ship. Do we still need to turn it? How good are we feeling about the, you know, where it's currently pointed? Is there still a

lot of progress to go? Or are we basically on course in the right direction and we just need to go forward? So it's interesting that you actually got the takeaway from that episode. You know, I was listening a little bit to us talking while we were talking and I was like, hmm, interesting. I think we're still a little bit too much in research mode in a sense, right? Like it's still too much like the long winding answers. It's the, you know, focusing too much on the tech. I feel like whatever you see the rate of change listening to the two of us, it's probably actually faster. I think actually, Tomash very much does not have this failure mode of talking too much. I think he's coming in, very much focused on action.

I think a lot of people really want action. Of course, at the same time, we still have to negotiate about these things. Again, the F will continue to not be in charge of Ethereum. There will be the independent governance process. And so it's not like anything will just magically be accepted. But I really, really think that we are talking about changes here that will be. start to become apparent on a three months, not a three-year time run. Thank you.

I mean, concretely, how much has the ship turned? I think the problem is not a steering wheel, right? Like, it's maybe like a very old ship. And like, there's a lot more to be done than just like the steering wheel. And I think so far, yes, like the minds have turned, but the actors have not yet turned. And I mean, I guess I agree with Anske that like, Tomaz can probably make a big difference there, but it will require a lot more than that. I think, like, it requires a shift in, like, what most people are doing and how they are working.

And that is a big effort. So my estimate would be, like, in terms of how much has it turned, in terms of, like, the actual path, we're not that far. But, like, definitely the mindset, a lot more has happened. Yeah. Nonetheless, though, I think if I feel good about the ship is turning and it is turning towards the correct desired outcome, at least being directionally correct, and that at least feels good to me.

Yeah, I want to say one last time. I think it's also important. I think sometimes community sentiment always does these wild swings, right? Just as when everything is going well and the token price goes up, people are always shunning anyone who has any critical thing to say. You know, like, I don't know,

people like John Sharp or whatever. Like, you know, they actually voiced reasonable criticisms early on and people are like, please, you know, stop it. And I think that doesn't make any sense. I think now we also see the opposite. I think people have the feeling of everything's bad. Like Justin the other day

had a tweet about like, oh, you know, like we should a thousand XDL1 and people were still like, oh, but you also said only 0.1% of all transactions will be on L1. You are so pessimistic. And it's like, no, I mean, you can go too far to the other side of the spectrum. I still think Ethereum has a lot of core strengths, differentiating strengths

that sets up as apart from many other ecosystems. If we make sure that we don't lose because of our weaknesses, I think our strengths will carry us to the finish line in a strong position. And I really, really think we should make sure that we don't lose sight of what makes Ethereum so special. And so I would just, yeah, I would just ask that people keep both things in mind at the same time. And meaningful change is necessary, but we are also overall in a very strong place.

That's at least my take. Donkrad, Ansgar, thank you guys so much for joining me on the podcast today. I'm like, thank you so much for co-hosting this episode with me. I feel very good about the direction that Ethereum is going in and the story arc that Ethereum is creating for itself. I think hard times create strong protocols. And I think that is what we are seeing today. So thank you for guiding me along this journey about the current change, of course,

for the Ethereum ship. Thank you very much for having us on. Thank you, David. Thanks, guys. Take care. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are headed west towards the frontier.

It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.