Bankless - The Unified Architecture of Ethereum | DH + RSA

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Welcome back to Bankless Takes! On the show today we walk through David’s recent article on the unified architecture theory for Ethereum.  Where does Ethereum stand in a world of many chains? How does ethereum compare to Bitcoin, Solana, Celestia, and many others are fighting for users in the space. The comparisons and top competitors might surprise you. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  🔐 SAFE | ATTEND SAFE{CON} https://bankless.cc/SafeCon  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku  ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Start 02:08 Reason For This Article 06:32 Bitcoin Block Size Wars 17:51 Modern Day Big vs Small Blockers 22:06 Sophisticated Vs Primitive Blocks 33:19 Functionality Escape Velocity 37:17 The Root Of Trust 45:57 Cosmos, The Lost Tribe 56:02 Sovereignty Escape Velocity ------ RESOURCES Davids Article: https://www.bankless.com/the-unified-architecture-of-ethereum  Vitalik Article: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/12/26/mvb.html?ref=bankless.ghost.io  Ryans Tweet: https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1778865602121060863  L2 Beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/risk  Cosmos Tweet: https://twitter.com/hxrts/status/1774504453682405467  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Today we have a bankless take talking about David's recent article, the unified architecture for Ethereum. Where does Ethereum fit in the world of many chains? We got Bitcoin over there. We got Solana, we got Celestia. We've got other layer twos. What is Ethereum's future there? Also, what functional escape velocity means and why it's important?

And finally, David's conclusion. Eventually, everything becomes a branch on Ethereum's tree. That's what he says in the article. It's safe to say today's episode, I think David It's going to be a bullish Ethereum episode, but I would say, at least from the tone and tenor of the article, it also acknowledges the design choices of other chains and the spaces that they have carved out and will continue to occupy. I don't know. Would you say this is an eth-maxie episode, David? I think you can see many things in this article. I think somebody else could rewrite this article

from a perspective of their particular chain. And so it's one part, like, hey, here's how I've come to the conclusion that I've come to. about Ethereum, but parts of this article are universal. So we can always place chains in relations to other chains on a particular axis. And then I've also proposed an axis for like kind of understanding where chains kind of fit in relation to others. I'll talk about like why I wrote this article and what listeners I think can get out of it in a second. But first, a message from our friends and sponsors over at SAFE.

This is a message for all the devs out there. Safe is of course, formerly known as NOSA safe, securing billions and billions of dollars in the world of Ethereum and on its layer twos. It's also leading the transition to the world of smart accounts, making embedding wallets super easy to integrate into your daily crypto activities. And SAFE wants you to build with SAFE smart accounts. They also want you to go to the SAFECon happening during the Berlin Blockchain Week,

which is going on at the third week of May. If either these two things interest, you click the links in the show notes to get started building with SAFE today. All right. So when is that Berlin conference? The third week of May, you said? Third week of May, yeah. All right. We're back in conference season, sounds like. All right. Why'd you write this article, David? Yeah. So I've had this article in my brain for like almost two years now. And it is kind of carrying forward a very early conversation, probably the earliest big conversation in the crypto space

that I think really ever emerged, which is the Bitcoin block size wars. Bitcoin, block size wars were just, the wars were just concluding as I was given. into crypto and some of the fallout was starting to happen. This is right when Bitcoin cash started to become a thing. It's right when the Bitcoin camp divided into two based off of philosophical differences. And I think that a lot of people coming into crypto in modern times don't really have this lesson of like the Bitcoin block size wars and what it means for crypto is kind of something that this weird thing in history. But I think it's actually much more emblematic of a lot of the tribes that we've seen today. Like Bitcoin split into two tribes

based off of philosophical differences. Now in crypto, we have like a plethora of tribes. We probably have too many tribes. Each one of these tribes believes something, some philosophical truth about the design construction of chains. And so I kind of attempt to define the landscape of tribes based off of what was one of the original like cellular divisions of the Bitcoin camp, one going to the small block camp, one going to the big block camp. And then I also kind of explain the grand unified theory of design architecture for blockchains is like an allusion to that whole grand unified theory of everything in physics, but for design architecture, I explain like why Ethereum occupies this particular spot in this tradeoff's landscape that tries to maximize

for everything and incorporates everything, which is why you get the tagline. Eventually, everything becomes a branch on Ethereum's tree. So that was motivation here. Well, let's get to it. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange for 2024. That is, of course, Cracken. Go check it out. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security

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description to get started securing your generational wealth. All right, David, let's start here. We got to go back all the way to 2015 through 2017 when something called the Bitcoin block size wars was going on. These were formative days for me in crypto. As for you, but this was a debate that was really like occupying all of the mind space, all of the mind share of crypto, I would say for like a good 12 to 18 months at least. Take us back there and tell us what that was. Give us the context. Yeah. Interestingly, I think the first ever podcast I ever listened to in the crypto space was Laura Shin moderating a debate between a big blocker and a small blocker. And I was like, somebody tell me how a blockchain works.

You didn't understand any of it? I did not understand. understand a damn thing that was going on. That was like my first introduction. Let me ask you. When you first heard that on like unadulterated like virgin ears, whose side were you on? Were you like? I was too early for any of that. I was I was trying to understand anything. Like the words were not going into the brain. It didn't did not compute. Do you know whose side I was as probably default on or more receptive to? I'm going to guess. Go. You were a big blocker. Yeah. It just sounded like. I was like, big blocks.

Yeah, like, why have small blocks when you can have big blocks? It's just like, and the, this was Bitcoin Cash. You had sort of the argument for big blocks. And that's what that tribe and that fork sort of became. But it was just they're like, we can do so much more with block space. If only we had more block space. Yeah. And so it seems like, there was a, like a tribe of like old grandpa Bitcoin people,

you know, crumudgeons that were just like. shaking their canes and saying, no, we want small blocks. That was my default, like, no knowledge sort of, I'm just hearing for this first, for the first time, quick judgment. I quickly refined my views after learning a bit more about it. But that was my immediate reaction. I think that was my introduction to the space as well. Arguing with my first podcast, Go host, who was a big bitcoiner, and I came into this base and just like immediately identified with Ethereum, my arguments to him were like very big blocker arguments. And so like maybe we can go in and define like big blockers and small blockers

because like a lot of people to arguments about how you should build crypto or what crypto should look like can be characterized as like a big blocker or a small blocker argument. And so big blockers in the Bitcoin space advocated for this basically was a debate of like how do we scale Bitcoin. Bitcoin is this thing now in 2015. In the future, we want it to support the entire globe. And you know what?

Because gas fees on Bitcoin were getting really expensive. Like transaction fees were getting expensive at this time. And people were angry about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So famously, there was always this like one sat per byte or like the lowest possible fee for Bitcoin, basically free.

And then in 2015, 2016, they started to creep up. And then all of a sudden people were like, oh, like, how are we going to scale Bitcoin? How are we going to take the world and put it on top of Bitcoin? How do we scale the network? And so two philosophical debates, forked in the Bitcoin culture to become the big blockers and the small blockers. So the big blockers advocated for just increasing the raw size of Bitcoin blocks from one megabytes to eight megabytes, allowing for like theoretically eight times more transactions, which would lower transaction costs.

Small blockers advocated for keeping the block size the same and argued that increasing the block size would compromise Bitcoin's decentralization, because if you make blocks bigger, you make blocks harder to verify, which is a core principle of blockchains, is that the blockchain should be trivial to verify for users. Users need to be as sovereign as anyone else in the system.

And when you increase the scope of the complexity of the layer one, then you actually make it more difficult for the long tail of humanity, the long tail people, to partake in the validation of the Bitcoin system. Well, let's define what that means

when you say users, right? Because users cast a very wide net. You could be a Bitcoin user by just holding Bitcoin. You could even be a Bitcoin user in a way by holding Bitcoin on the exchange, right? It's not like the deepest use case, but like just holding Bitcoin, you know, yourself, self-custody keys. That makes you a Bitcoin user. I would certainly argue that. What you're talking about is a more advanced type of user who is not only holding Bitcoin,

but also running a Bitcoin node to validate the transactions from the miners, all the proof of work miners, they put out blocks. This gives somebody who wants to choose to run the Bitcoin software, the ability to validate that those transactions are in effect, you know, correct. So it is a user, but it's a slightly more advanced user because it's a user that's actually running Bitcoin software. Yeah, I would contend with one nuance of that, which is that you say like slightly more advanced user.

And a big blocker would, philosophy would actually make that, like a much more advanced user, where a small block philosophy would be like, well, no, actually, that same user that's holding BTC on Binance or Coinbase, they could become the same user that's verifying the actual layer one because it's not that hard to do.

Because the node requirements are light. You can run a Bitcoin node on a... Therefore, the hardware requirements are light. So your shitty PC from 1992 can actually become a Bitcoin node. Oh, wow. You think so? 1992? I don't know.

I just made that up. But the point is, is like, if you desire to, if you are merely a Bitcoin holder, but you also desire to become a validator of the network, which is different than Ethereum, validator, validates. It's just processing the Bitcoin transactions self-sovereignly and verifying them. That's not a complex thing to do, and you could become that person because it's trivial to do. Yeah, you're democratizing that, right? Whereas the big block path, where it eventually leads, eventually is no one can

run a node unless you have like state of the art compute. And maybe the end of that is like you're in a data center somewhere. And so you know, no normal person is able to actually validate the blocks. That's where big blockers kind of end up if they continue to, you know, 8x block size. Right. And so the small blockers would also point to the big blocker argument saying like if you just raise the block size of Bitcoin from 1 to 8 and allow for 8 times more capacity, that's like still not anywhere close to enough. Like, we eventually need infinity transactions in order to scale this to the globe. And so small blockers advocated for a different scaling strategy.

They called this alternative path Segwit for segregated witness, which is basically a mechanism for just removing signatures from transactions and then bundling them together. It was a block optimization strategy. So rather than increasing the size of blocks, you would keep the blocks the same, but be able to do more with the blocks. So more transaction density inside of the same size of blocks. And this would also open up scaling solutions

outside of the Bitcoin core protocol called layer twos. This opened up like Lightning Network. This is what made Lightning Network more feasible, more possible. And now many other like Ordinals. Ordinals are like a lot of Bitcoin expressivity

comes out of this Segwit thing. So just like really the two points of emphasis here, small blockers wanting to scale Bitcoin in two ways, increasing block density by making individual transactions more valuable, more compact, more economic, more efficient. And then also scaling up layer two, creating room for functional off-chain scaling solutions. And so they just pointed out, if you just increase a raw size of Bitcoin blocks, it's just like increasing lanes on a highway. You're just actually going to induce demand and you're actually not going to actually solve any of the problems of scaling.

And in fact, you're actually going to make Bitcoin less decentralized. Fast forward to the end of the Bitcoin block size wars, Bitcoin Cash, forked out of Bitcoin in 2017. And we all know the price action of Bitcoin Cash. Actually, it's like still in the top 25, which is kind of crazy. It did really well at first. It did really well at first. And then it's been down there was talk of like Bitcoin Cash flippinging Bitcoin and like who is right. Right. And like eventually it kind of failed off and like what is Bitcoin today? No one talks about Bitcoin Cash. Yeah. But that was like a lesson in history. Right. And so this whole small blocker, big blocker debate, I think like ring through the halls of crypto history and still persist to this day. All layer ones exist somewhere on a

continuum between small blocker and big blocker philosophy. And maybe don't really often define it as small blocker or big blocker philosophy. We use other terms. But these the this ideologies, these two different ideologies do come to like they presentate more strongly with some tribes other than others. Well let me just this wasn't in your article. So it's a brief side quest by I think it's is important is in terms of how that decision was effectively made. Like, what is the canonical Bitcoin. Because an alternative Bitcoin, Bitcoin 4 called Bitcoin Cash actually had a lot of legitimacy in the early days. And some of that legitimacy was coming from the community, of course. Some miners preferred that as well. Many exchanges were on board with that. And, you know, a fact, like, I think Coinbase,

and at one point in time was sort of more on board on board with the Bitcoin Cash, like Brian Armstrong. came out supportive-ish of Bitcoin cash. As I recall at the time, at least the small blockers charged him with being overly supportive with that. But how was the decision actually made? Because this as well is kind of like a victory, let's say, for a decentralization or some sort of check on power. What wasn't it, David, the case that the nodes themselves sort of like voted and decided

the outcome of what the true Bitcoin was? Can you describe that a little bit? Yeah, even a large supply of the Bitcoin miners were more in favor of Bitcoin Cash because if they did the calculus, they did the napkin math, and they determined that they could actually make more fees with bigger blocks. And so a lot of the hash power of Bitcoin miners went over to Bitcoin Cash in support of Bitcoin Cash. So there was a large number of just like institutions and players in the space that were

like, oh, yeah, let's, I'm be happy with a big block outcome here. But ultimately, it came down to people running notes. people running the Bitcoin node software, and more individuals running the Bitcoin node software elected to stay on the Bitcoin, the small block, the original instantiation of Bitcoin. Now, notably, I think possibly we could have ended up in a world with Bitcoin as like 8 megabyte blocks

under a different set of starting conditions. I think if Bitcoin started with 8 megabyte blocks, and then small blockers came in and said, hey, we should fork Bitcoin into becoming 1 megabyte blocks, I think the small blockers were to lost. My opinion is actually that, like, it's because of Bitcoin doesn't want to be changed. And so Bitcoin started off as one megabyte blocks and the big blockers wanted to change Bitcoin to be larger. I think whichever side was going to win was the way that Bitcoin already was from Genesis.

That's kind of like in my rationale. So let's talk about modern day. So this is somewhat ancient history in crypto diva. It's almost like 10 years ago that this happened. Okay. So like why does any of this? not experience this. No, and they don't care. And like, whatever, it's Bitcoin.

I mean, we're talking about other networks now. It's nothing to do with Ethereum, is it? Or nothing to do with Solana. So what does this look like in modern day? I think the easiest example to extrapolate into is the Solana versus Ethereum camp. Salana is the big blockers. Ethereum are there. We're the small blockers.

There's also other axes that have also emerged. So now this is not just like the only axi for viewing a chain. But this is like one of the original. continuums that was a point of contention between tribes, between debates. And so, like, we'll talk about some other axes that also kind of help define what a blockchain is, but, like, big block for a small block is, like, the original tradeoff design space that facilitated a bunch of debate in crypto. I mean, like, we see some of these same arguments, right?

Like, the Solana camp says that Ethereum is too expensive and too slow to get the world on chain. Consumers aren't going to use crypto until transactions are instant and free. And we need to engineer as much capacity as possible into the layer one. Sound familiar? Yeah. Increase the size of the blocks. Increase TPS, transactions per second,

fit more stuff like inside of the blocks that this layer one produces. Right. The Ethereum camp says that this is a fundamental compromise on decentralization and credible neutrality, creating an enshrined set of winners and losers and ultimately produces the same set of socio-financial stratifications that we're trying to get away from the world of Treadfi. So instead, we should focus on increasing the density and value

of layer one blocks, fees at the layer one and four scaling up to the layer two's. So the whole point is like this debate is nothing new. We have different like playing fields, different landscape to have this debate. But like debates are always the same. The debates have never really changed. Yeah, it's interesting because Salon is of course not a fork of Ethereum. So it's a little bit different in that way, but it's a similar philosophy. Right. And so what compromises exactly on decentralization and credible neutrality? Do you think that Ethereum would say a big block chain like Solana is actually making here.

Yeah, I think this debate is even, it's even easier to see in Ethereum versus Solana than Bitcoin versus Bitcoin Cash, because even though Bitcoin Cash was eight times larger than Bitcoin, in this grand scheme of things compared to like the monolithic layer ones that we have today, Bitcoin Cash is like a small block blockchain. Because the size and capacity and sophistication of Salana blocks and the Salon of Virtual Machine has like, it's literally trying to optimize for the furthest end of the spectrum. And so like, and it's better engineered, right? Because it's not just the straight

Bitcoin for, which was just like not meant for parallelization and like high TPS anyway. Bitcoin Cash was just absolutely not optimized from an engineering standpoint to do anything that Salana is doing. So Salana is like, hey, let's, let's engineer this from first principles, which sets Salana off at like a much better position than like Bitcoin Cash ever, would have, right? So like, hey, let's build a brand new virtual machine that's hyper optimized for scale, right? Let's build this piece of engineering that's hyper optimized to run on this very particular set of hardware, these very bits, strong bits of hardware. And so, like, that to Salana's benefit, like, has been able to, like, construct a big blocker design

philosophy from first principles where Bitcoin Cash never had that opportunity. And that's why Solana is what it is. It is like big blocker philosophy taken to its logical conclusion. But how does this manifest into the charge that it's like, why not do that? You know, like Ethereum says it's not decentralized enough. And one bit of difference between the Bitcoin, big blockers and small blockers, is with Ethereum, with the move to proof of stake, anybody with a certain amount of heath can be a validator in the network, not just verifying the transactions and running a node, a non-validating node, but also producing blocks.

they can be a block producer with Bitcoin. That's kind of blocked right now. You can't be a minor. You can't produce blocks unless you have data center and access to superchip. You can't produce blocks unless you have economies of scale in the Bitcoin system. Does it come down essentially to Ethereum by constraining its block size is basically making it such that anybody with consumer hardware has the ability to run a node that produces blocks to be a validator, essentially. Is that what it comes down to when you talk about decentralization? Yeah, Ethereum, you can, with consumer hardware, can both produce blocks and independently,

in a self-sovereign way, check the validity of other people's blocks. So you, you aren't trusting any intermediary to tell you which block is correct or what transactions are correct. You are doing it yourself. And Salana, like, you could do it yourself, but it's so much harder. The hardware and sophistication is just a much higher threshold to get over. and this is the tradeoff that the Salana ecosystem has made. Like we're like users aren't going to do it anyways.

So we're just going to go ahead and like trim that feature of like user self-solvering verification from the blockchain because they're just not going to do it. So we're going to juice this thing and we're actually going to fit more people on chain. We're going to have lower transaction costs and higher fees. I mean, this is a point of detail here because some people contend with with that, right? Which is like, no, David, you can run a Salana non-validating node from your home. Like you totally, you totally can do that. It costs more. It's not, you can't run it necessarily on your just like your standard MacBook Pro like, you know, cheap edition. But, you know, spend $3,000 or something or $5,000 get a beefy machine, more beefy machine. And you can run it. Of course, you have to, you know, increase your bandwidth maybe. But you could still sort of run a non-validating Solana node from home. So like, what's the big deal? Yeah, I guess it's just a debate as to like how far away from end consumer verification, we. are willing to get. And, like, I think it's actually bandwidth. That's the biggest bottleneck to, like,

um, just stronger salana decentralization. And bandwidth is just like, all right, what's the topology of the world? And how good is the bandwidth across, across, like, you need some fiber. You know, you need higher, higher bandwidth, that kind of thing. Yeah. I think like the actual hardware is, is, so you need good hardware and you need to be proximate to bandwidth. And so we've started to meaningfully, like, constrain the possible validating set of humanity to Solana. I think it's just important to note, though. This is a sliding scale, right? Right, no, sliding scale.

Like, you still can't run a Bitcoin node on, like, you know, hardware that's 15 years old, I would expect. Or maybe you can. But, like, you can't run an Ethereum node, not validating node on a 15-year-old computer, right? And then Solana moves it, like, farther in terms of, to the right, to actually, like, in terms of resource consumption to run a non-validating note. But it's all a spectrum.

Yeah. I think maybe to define it, like with Ethereum, Ethereum wants to make it sufficiently easy to verify the Ethereum blockchain so that, like, you don't have to try to verify the Ethereum blockchain. The background processes of your typical consumer hardware can verify the Ethereum blockchain.

So you don't have to actually really try. With Salana, like you have to actually be meaningfully motivated to verify the Salon of blockchain. And, like, maybe it's not that hard. But, like, the point is, is, like, you actually have to, like, produce, like, coherent effort to actually make that a thing. And so that's kind of, like, defining the gap between these two chains. And so this is just modern-day big blocker, small-blocker stuff, right? I want to also introduce a second axis into this, which is related, but also meaningfully different,

which is the inclusion of a virtual machine. Bitcoin does not have a virtual machine inside of Bitcoin Core. It has individual op codes that can do computation, but the computation is constrained into whatever that op code does. And so there is, there's no virtual machine there. Celestia also does not have a virtual machine inside of its blockchain. And so Celestia just accepts arbitrary data. It just accepts blobs and puts blobs into Celestia blob space. And that's what Celestia does.

And so now we have like this two trade-off axes. We have block, what I'm calling block sophistication or block complexity, which is having or not having a virtual machine. And then you also have small blocks versus large blocks, whereas Bitcoin occupies the corner of a very non-complex block state, as in like verifying internally to Bitcoin. It's not that complex. There's not that many op codes. There's a finite number of op codes. And it's also got small blocks. Celestia, massive blocks, one gigabyte size blocks.

You can put, you can put a gigabyte. of data inside of a Celessia block is massive. It's crazy. But it's actually pretty true. They're so simple. They're just rudimentary, primitive by design, intentionally simple blocks or dumb blocks. And what that does, it pushes sophistication upstairs up to the layer twos. And so that that, so Bitcoin and Celestia are small blocks and large blocks of simple blocks. But then you have Ethereum, which is small blocks of complex blocks, because it has a virtual machine. And then Solana is much more complex and much larger. So it has truly optimized for like the,

and this is why Celessia occupies like this, most complex type of layer one blockchain, which is why we call this a monolithic blockchain. Some other analogies for, you know, block space, the complexity of the block space is expressivity. Like, you know, how much can you fit in express or programmability of a particular block? You know, a couple of analogies that people have used in the past is

if Bitcoin is kind of like a ledger or, just an Excel spreadsheet. Well, Ethereum is like an Excel spreadsheet where every, every individual cell is like a program is like a macro that you can, like you can run, right? Or if like a non-vm unsophisticated blockchain is to me sometimes I look at what's possible on Bitcoin. I'm like, wow, it's amazing what you can do on top of like a Ti-83 calculator. You know, like I just have like friends who would just like play Doom on their TI-83 calculators. It's like versus a computer. right where you can have much more sophisticated types of like technologies but but even there the difference is like small block and big block expressivity versus on like non-programmable block space

yeah and i really just want to dive into this like last point block complexity so block complexity which is like do you have a virtual machine do you not have a virtual machine how many op codes do you have like prior this is was the ethereum like introduction to the space is like it was the first blockchain with a virtual machine in it. All blockchains before Ethereum were just like, hey, we'll add features by adding more individual op codes, like a finite serial number of op codes. And like, oh, we just discovered this new feature. Let's make an op code out of it. And Metallica was like, this is silly. We're just going to make op codes into infinity. Let's just make a virtual machine and put a virtual machine in the term. Turring complete.

It became very popular there, which is kind of like a nerdy turn, just to say that you you could do anything you can program inside of the block. Right. Yeah. And so this, to Bitcoin philosophy, adding a virtual machine inside of Ethereum was just like, how dare you? Like, deep sin. Don't do that.

It's adding complexity to the blockchain, which reduces people's ability to verify the chain. So this is why Bitcoiners, like honestly, to this day, don't like virtual machines in their blockchains. It'll be hacked. Like, there's problems with it. Risk surface area, like all this kind of stuff. And so it actually is a reduction of the user ability to verify the validity of transactions themselves. And if you remember going back into like 2017, 2018, like the Ethereum community was relentlessly

bullied by the Bitcoin community because you could never run an Ethereum node. Like the state bloat was going to get too large. Like you can never catch up to the chain. Like you can run it now, but your change just start in the future, this is going to just expand out of control and you can't run a node. There's also like a lot of Schadenfreude. after the Dow hack when they said, ha, see what happens when you make your blocks programmable.

Somebody can hack a key contract and take a large portion of supply, right? And what do you have to do? You have to, like, work or a fracture will enter new community. So I think many Bitcoiners felt very vindicated in that era. Yeah. Interestingly, like, to this day, basically every single new layer one blockchain is a smart contract for virtual machine blockchain. Like ever since Ethereum, everyone's like, okay, we do smart contracts now,

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Okay, I want to get into this Vitalik article where this is where we go next called base layers and functionality escape velocity. And this is where I start to like put in some more opinions into this article that are from me. my personal crypto investment thesis, and I think you agree with me, Ryan, is that the blockchain that incorporates both big block and small block philosophy and its design will ultimately win.

This is why I think Ethereum is going to eventually flip in Bitcoin. I think both... Wow, you still believe that? Of course I still believe that. This is a maxi show. Okay, okay. Both big blockers and small blockers are correct. It's not about who's right and who's wrong.

They both have valid points. the point is to build a system that maximizes both of them. And so Bitcoin, as an architecture, was not able to fit both big blockers and small blockers into its system. The Bitcoin small blockers said like, oh, scaling is going to happen on layer two's. All the big blockers should just go build on Lightning Network. But Lightning Network was a dud. It literally could not house. It was not a tent for big blockers. Big blockers couldn't achieve their goals there. And if you understand anything about psychology, if when you cannot access your goals, you cannot achieve your goals, you go elsewhere. You do something else. Like, if you're blocked, you go around it. And so a lot of

ultimately what became Bitcoin big blockers, a lot of them became Ethereum people when the Ethereum was around. So Ethereum, like, absorbed some of the Bitcoin big blockers. And so the constraints of the Bitcoin layer one could not house big blockers. And so that's why that's why the thing forked. And so a couple of quotes I want to read from Vitalik's article here. He basically argues for minimally increasing the functionality of a layer one in order to produce highly functional layer twos. So two quotes, while a layer one cannot be too powerful, as greater power implies greater complexity and hence greater brittleness,

a layer one must also be powerful enough for the layer two protocols on top that people want to build to actually be possible in the first place. keeping the layer one simple and making up for it on layer two is not a universal answer to blockchain scalability and functionality problems because it fails to take into account that layer one blockchains themselves must have a sufficient level of scalability and functionality for this building on top to actually be possible. So this is actually Vitalik saying, hey, from the Bitcoiner perspective, we need to have more big block philosophy in the layer one, but not too much more. And so like this is how I would summarize this article. We need to

increase the scope of layer one blocks beyond small block maximalism in order to ensure that layer twos can achieve functionality escape velocity, which is like we need block sophistication. And then we should also not increase the scope of layer one blocks beyond the point of achieving layer two functionality because this unnecessarily compromises on layer one decentralization and credible neutrality. Any additional utility on layer one should instead be pushed to the layer two. And so we need block sophistication. We need block sophistication. We need block. complexity because that is increasing the functionality of the layer one to the benefit of the layer twos. And then after that, we should maintain a small block philosophy. And this to me represents

a compromise between both parties. Well, isn't he just re-articulating what you just said, which is like small blocks that are expressive, yeah, like this top rate quadrant. It's just re-expressing that. This post was written in 2019. And I would say it capsulates the Ethereum design philosophy in general. Right. There are other people who disagree with them. tribes that disagree with them. Bitcoin says, yeah, we like the small blocks, whatever, that's cool, but we don't like the expressivity, right? And then Salana says, we don't, we want big blocks and expressivity. And more expressively. We can do it. We can do it too. And why are you artificially constraining your, uh, your blocks in the first place? So to me, that's just Vitalik,

um, explaining, uh, Ethereum philosophy. I guess that's your point though. Yep. Yep, that's exactly right. And it's also why Ethereum became Ethereum. And so like, if you agree with philosophy, you end up in the top right quadrant here, which is like the Ethereum quadrant. And so, like, this ultimately gets into, like, what has emerged as the way that a lot of the core devs view the Ethereum layer one, which is as a, what they call a root of trust, which is also like a technical engineering term. A root of trust is a source that can always be trusted within a cryptographic system. That's the definition of a root of trust. Sounds like the Ethereum layer one. So, like, the Ethereum one, layer one maintains its small block philosophy by

leveraging advances in cryptography to produce functionality, escape velocity at higher levels. And then it accepts fraud proofs and validity proofs from layer two's onto the layer one. And then it can compress an effectively infinite number of transactions from its layer twos into this very easily to verify bundle. That's what a ZK proof is. That's what a fraud proof is. And then those proofs are then verified by a decentralized network of consumer hardware. So whereas, like, we typically have been talking about this like big block.

small block tradeoff continuum, kind of like as a horizontal landscape, like Bitcoinian on one side, Solana on the other. In my mind, Ethereum actually flips this continuum vertical and it says, hey, put the small blocks on the bottom, call that the layer one, and then put all the big blockers, all the big block chains on the layer two's. Remember when Jesse was like, hey, with base, the base blockchain, Jesse from base, we are going to target one giga gas a second, which is a 400x increase in base transaction capacity. That's a huge big blocker philosophy. And it is putting all of its assets and its proofs onto the Ethereum layer one.

And so to me, this is actually where a lot of these synergies blossom because we have big blocks on top and a small blockchain that is the anchor to this whole big block universe up top. Right. So I guess one implication of that, and this is a term I think we learned back in like 2019, I would say, economic density of the blocks on the layer one themselves, right? So if you have small blocks, but they collapse the transactions of an entire chain's worth or entire chain ecosystem's worth of economic activity, where you have incredibly economically dense blocks, right? So these are these are like neutron star level like density types of blocks. And that's been

both Ethereum's philosophy, but it allows the end bitcoins, but Ethereum, but Ethereum, allows for enough expressivity to make layer two's actually like possible and like easy. Although I would say now Bitcoin is starting to hack in ways to store data inside of its op codes and create layer twos as well. So it's sort of like a tree is springing up, maybe like a twig, like the root of a tree, an early stage seedling is springing out out of the Bitcoin layer one too. It's not as mature and robust as Ethereum's tree. But like that, starting to happen as well. Do you have any takes on that? Yeah, it's actually been really interesting to see Bitcoin discover data availability. This is what happened when Ordinals was

birthed on Bitcoin. Ordinals basically created this idea of Bitcoin as a data availability layer and you could just inscribe JPEGs to it and we could have fun with that. Babylon is a Bitcoin restaking platform that wants to build the Cosmos vision on top of Bitcoin, which also is what Celestia is doing on top of its layer one. PM as well, which makes actually like some kind of a like poor man's optimistic rollup happen on Bitcoin, which is kind of neat. And so Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Celestia are all like leveraging their own layer ones as a data availability layer to build more or less the same ecosystem on top of them, which I think is like super interesting that like we have three different types of layer ones. And they all want to build more or less what is the cosmos vision on top of each respective layer one. But doesn't all of this point to kind of the convergence aspect of all of this, which is like Bitcoin's

going to converge on Ethereum strategy. And also, if you go to the far big blocker like side of the equation, Salon, there's no reason Salana can't have hypothetically layer twos that settle down to Salana. I'm not sure about that, actually. Why? Why don't you think that's possible? Well, because the whole big blocker philosophy is like, if you need a second layer, you've, you've effed up on your first layer. This is actually like what I think what Anatolian Mert like almost exclude like that is their narrative. It's like a second layer is emblematic of failures of the first layer. And so Solana of these of these three quadrants, Salana is the one that doesn't want layer

twos. It's going to have layer twos for sovereignty purposes, but not for technical purposes. Is like the Salana maximalist approach. Do you think that's true? Like just because there are certain Anatolia or Mert kind of like want that, you truly don't see a layer two network kind of like emerging on top of on top of Solana because there's no technical reason why it's not possible. And if Solana truly is like permissionless.

Okay. So like the whole idea of like it's difficult for users at the layer one to verify the blockchain, a user can be another blockchain. And so if Solana, if you make it a difficult to verify blockchain, layer two is also have that difficulty of keeping up with a Salana chain and actually being a part of the Salana system. You can build a layer two on Solana. It's just immensely more difficult than it is to build on a much more slow, decentralized, easy to verify a layer one.

Why is it more difficult? Just because the technical capacity of the layer two has to also keep up and verify the state of the Salana layer one. The speed at which... Right. And so if you have an optimistic roll-up on Solana, like, it's probably going to be easier to do a ZK, but you have an optimistic roll-up on Salana. Like, you need to be doing computation and you need to be doing...

a lot of computation, both on the layer two and the layer one, in order to even produce the fraud proof. I wouldn't mind, like, vetting that. I bet that there's some sort of, like, Salana's answer to layer two, but let's take that aside. I think, I think you're right from a narrative perspective. Definitely the Salana big blocker motif is like, why have layer two's? Layer two's are dumb. Like, the botanlytic chain is like another way or integrated chain as, you know, like maybe a different way of putting the same thing. One quick side quest on this, David, is, I think in the interim for Ethereum, one thing to note that it is moving in terms of its use case. So I think Ethereum layer one used to be for people and individual users.

So the time we got into crypto, you know, 2017, when we started using it like a lot in the early Defi, you did everything on layer one, right? Like users used to now because Ethereum is moving to this high economically dense. root of trust type of configuration, Ethereum really isn't meant for average everyday people anymore. Like, it's unaffordable. You have to be a whale. You have to be an exchange. You have to be some sort batch of transactions. You have to be a fund. You have to be a chain. You have to be something. And the users can go use layer twos and layer threes, but it's still going to be expensive to use Ethereum. One thing that that leads people to is the conclusion that Ethereum is too expensive. I'll put that in quotes. But I actually think that's a really bad take because it kind of depends who you are.

If you're looking at it from a chain's perspective, if you're the base chain, here's some stats for you. The base chain has already made $40 million in terms of revenue. A few days ago, in one single day, it made almost $700,000 in revenue. And how much did it pay Ethereum for that? $2,500 were the root of trust costs, $2,500 to settle to Ethereum. So an entire chain is making like, you know, 700K a day, and its costs are 2,500 to Ethereum, right? From the chain's perspective, from base's perspective, that's really, really cheap. And from users' perspective on base, so long as their transaction fees also are low, they will be cheap for them as well.

Anyway, what it leads to, I guess, is my point is there's this awkward transition phase that Ethereum is in right now where it's like moving from a settlement layer for people to a settlement layer for chains. And it's causing a lot of like this cycle, a lot of narrative like pain for it. Because it almost like feels like a pivot, I think, to the community. Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, I actually want to put a pin in that because I think we're going to get to that exact point. But I want to start there with talking about the cosmos vision. We're talking about like Celessia, Bitcoin, Salon, Ethereum. What about cosmos? Why aren't we talking about Cosmos? Why aren't we talking about cosmos. Cosmos, the way that Cosmos people explain it is actually not a technology.

There's no Cosmos chain. There's no any one particular thing that is Cosmos. Cosmos is the way that Sam Hart articulates it is actually a choice. It's an idea. Cosmos is the choice to build a sovereign application that seeks to interoperate with others. And so the more sovereign your layer two is, the more that you've embodied the choice to become a Cosmos app. And so there's a lot of like resonance with the Ethereum Layer 2 landscape and the Cosmos vision. Because again, just to articulate, the Cosmos vision for the world is many, many, many, sovereign chains that desire to interoperate with other sovereign chains.

And so as you were saying, like, base is a sovereign chain, except for one small nuance that we'll get to, but it's highly economically secure because of the benefits of being an Ethereum layer 2. And you can also interoperate with other chains via the Ethereum Layer 1. And so, go for it.

Yeah, I would say it feels really sovereign. Like for base, they have the ability to deploy their chain. They can take all the revenue, whatever. They just have to pay some sort of defense fee to Ethereum. And it's not that expensive right now. Which is the main point that base is actually not perfectly sovereign. And so in the same way that there's a tradeoff landscape between functionality escape velocity that Vitalik defined, I think there's also a sovereignty escape velocity kind

of phenomenon where, like, layer twos do make some sacrifices to their sovereignty to a common shared settlement layer that we call the Ethereum Layer 1. So all of them, this is the model for roll-ups, not all of them are doing this, but they all will do this, will create fraud proofs and validity proofs. These are cryptographic proofs, and they will commit to posting them to their bridge contract on the Ethereum Layer 1 or onto the blob space. And so there is this some internal operation that they commit to some external like landing zone, the Ethereum layer one. And so that is the tradeoff that layer twos have made that make them not perfectly sovereign. Some other chain has control over their

forked choice rule. Some other chain is where they post their fraud proofs. But by making that tradeoff, they become highly interoperable via a cryptographic, via cryptographic assurances. And so there's like this image that I pulled from Harry Potter. I don't know if you're a Harry Potter fan, but like the unbreakable vow that you can make an unbreakable vow in Harry Potter. if one person breaks the vow, then they die. So, like, fraud proofs, validity proofs. He's a cryptographic proofs. Like, you can't break cryptography.

And they formally, like, connect the Ethereum layer one to all of its layer twos. And so this is the tradeoff that Cosmos, a pure Cosmos vision with complete sovereignty does not do. Because it's, there, cosmos itself is so incredibly optimizing for sovereignty. But the Ethereum role of landscape does make this tradeoff. It does make the sacrifice that, like, hey, we're going to commit to an. external root of trust, an external reference point to ensure our security. I guess to see that, to see that tradeoff, right, I guess maybe a contrast point is what's the difference between like being an app as a smart contract on top of Ethereum or on top of

Solana? And to like what level of sovereignty do you have there versus being your own chain? Right. And I'm just like thinking through this in my head, but it seems very much like being your own chain, you have much more, like, sovereignty there. You don't have complete sovereignty, which is like almost as it should be, like users want the ability to exit. And the entire point of layer two is that there's some level of user protection and like decentralization that is preserved. But like, is that more? I think it's more than a smart contract app on top, built on top of a layer one, right? Because like as we've seen with certain smart contract apps, the Dow being notable example.

Like rollbacks or, what do they call it? Was the term used for that? A regular state transition? A regular state transaction, like transition can actually happen. And like that's a breach of sovereignty. Anyway, I guess that's a contrast point. So you'd say you have more sovereignty as your own chain than an individual smart contract deployed on top of the layer one.

Yeah. And like I think you won one day there will be a uni chain and that will be an application that is looking to seek more sovereignty for itself and become a chain. We're not there yet. There's a bunch of hurdles that we need to get through in the Ethereum ecosystem to get there. But you can see how like the desire for sovereignty will produce chains, not applications. And like again, the cryptographic proofs kind of tie like arbitrum and optimism are not tied

together except through the Ethereum layer one. And so they are interoperable with like the central settlement hub. Like my kind of claim is that, well, the cosmos vision has kind of like floundered. It's like a big idea that hasn't really scaled. And so I think if you make the small compromise to sovereignty just by saying, hey, we'll allow the Ethereum to check our fraud proofs, you actually produce more total sovereignty because that is the tradeoff that produces the Cambrian explosion. Yeah, it seems very clear to me that like between Ethereum and Celestia and all of the layer two is they have totally co-opted the idea of Cosmos. It's just like, like, so you have complete sovereignty of chains. You just have like this root of like trust, right?

Which is really interesting. You say in your article that there are a few things you get from this unbreakable vow as a as a layer two. So we talked about chain security already. There's two others though. One is composability. It feels like that hasn't really kicked in yet, David. Composability. So all the layers like chains.

Well, it's true. It's like all the layer two chains. I actually don't think it's true. Okay. So tell me why. Because we've done an entire episodes on how Ethereum has a massive fragmentation problem in its layer two's. And the steps that, like, solutions that are coming online to sort of like fix this fragmentation problem. So in like, maybe it's not as fragmented as cosmos.

But then Cosmos has IBC as well, right? So like, yeah, what what gives you the sense that right now being in a layer to you increases your composability? So, yeah, Ethereum gets critiqued for being fragmented, but ironically, Ethereum is the only network that's out there that's actually stitching together chains through cryptographic proofs. So, like, by contrast, the many layer one space is complete and total fragmentation, whereas the Ethereum layer two space is fragmented actually only by latency. And so the Ethereum, it's actually the only system actually binding together chains through cryptography. So it's actually the only system that's composable. The difference, like, why Ethereum gets a critique for being fragmented is because, like, this is the Salana narrative, which is, like, don't use many layer ones, just use our layer one. There's no fragmentation here because we are the monolithic layer one.

We have as much capacity as possible, and we have as much sophistication as possible. We have, like, the Salon of Virtual Machine, and we have, like, zero fee transactions with as much capacity as possible. So why would you need any other chain? So it's only fragmented from the perspective of like a single layer one that you are having that perspective from. But if you look at the totality of all layer ones, Ethereum is the most composed network. I want to go back to the comment earlier because you say another thing, the third thing that you say layer two's get from this unbreakable vow as a layer two is a unit of account, ETH being sort of like money. You can, if you have a trustless bridge in your layer two as backed by ZK proofs or validity proofs, you essentially have like crypto-native eth, like trustless eth.

And by the way, we should caveat this. This is the state on layer two beat of like how decentralized the layer twos are. For anyone says, but layer twos are just a side chain. Like, first of all, that's too simple a narrative. Right. But it's also too simple a narrative to say layer twos are maximally decentralized and they're exactly like Ethereum block space. Like both of those are wrong.

this is the current state of layer two, I would say decentralization, right? And Arbitrum is closest to being like most closely, almost fully decentralized and kind of like a stage, stage one needs to get to stage two. The OEP ecosystem is still in stage zero. So anyway, you can go to layer two beat if you want to see sort of like what the centralization vectors are still are for some of these chains. But anyway, back to my point. So, ETH is money. Like, that's a benefit to the layer two's.

When I put out this tweet and I said, hey, yesterday, base made almost 700K and only paid Ethereum $2,500 for that, people responded and said, that's a mega bearish Eth. Like, it's cannibalizing itself. It's losing all its revenue.

Right. Like, that's terrible. Now layer twos are kind of like becoming the tail that wags the dog. Like, they get all of the, revenue and what about poor eth like block validators right where their revenue sources kind of like dropping to zero um so what what's what's your take on like i mean maybe this was the kind of the right move for decentralization david to be in this upper right small block uh like vm type of quadrant

but maybe that was the wrong decision from an eth value accrual perspective what's your take on this So what were those numbers for the base chain? They made $700 or $673,000, and then they paid $2,500 in a one-day window. On one particular day when markets are heating up. So, like, again, this is just like not a trend line. You can extrapolate and just be like, oh, yeah, this profit margin is going to exist forever. But all those things aside, yes. Yeah.

Okay. So what happens when the cost of producing a chain is $2,500 a day? and that same chain is generating $700,000, $600,000 of revenue. What do you think happens? I think we're getting a lot more chains. You get a whole lot more layer two. You get a ton more. And so this isn't some sort of like, hey, we're going to have layer twos because of sovereignty.

No, we're going to have layer twos because it's profitable as hell. A good business model. It's a good business model. And when we have many, many, many layer twos that are all independent sovereign chains except for the cryptographic proofs that provide strong settlement insurances between the layer two and the layer one. Those are all ETH monetary networks. This is like if Visa is a monetary network,

spreading around like dollars or whatever unit account you want to run through Visa, all layer twos are monetary networks around ETH. And so like, yeah, the Ethereum design philosophy is like, take off the brakes for layer twos, let a thousand layer twos bloom. They all use ETH's money.

They all like suck up ETH. Like look at how many, all the ETH that's being sucked up by it. But they don't have to use ETH's money. Back to your comment on, Sovereignty. And like even, do you remember StarkNet announcement? They're using their own Stark token for gas. They're not necessarily using ETH's money. But yes, this is a choice. They still have to pay. They still have to pay their taxes to Ethereum. And it makes like block space, basically the fee is denominated in Ethereum. But they're not fully ETH's money. They have sovereignty over that. But even still, you think, I think what you're saying is like the tradeoff is worth it. Right. You make it up in volume. Make it up in chain volume. This is exactly. exactly what Salana says. Right, totally.

About their fee market. The reason why, like, fees on Salana are sort of sustainable, you know, according to someone who is a salonable is in the fullness of time, you'll have, like, like, hundreds of thousands of transactions per second on your, on your layer one. You'll have so many transactions that will be super cheap. It'll culminate in, like, some pretty decent revenue. You like, in addition to, you know, M.V and the ordering of blocks and the revenue, you for there. It's kind of the same thing. It's kind of the same argument. Yeah, except one produces

many, many, many layer two. One actually produces more net new blockchains into the crypto space, and one does not, which is why I kind of just philosophically align with the Ethereum design strategy, because it's both. It is the big tent chain. It is small blockers on the bottom, big blockers on top. So you just identify with the philosophy, is what you would say. But are you also making the argument that this is kind of like the winning philosophy? Yeah, so this is why I call this the grand unified theory of Ethereum architecture. It is, oh, you have a philosophy. Yours fits inside of the Ethereum design architecture.

Oh, you have a belief system. It can fit on Ethereum and be composable with the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem. What do you believe? We have room for you. Yeah, I guess my take on this is you may be right. And it's certainly something that, like from a thesis perspective, I also probably subscribe to, I guess the best take. But I think that the fight, that battle and the convergence that we're seeing,

we're already seeing Bitcoin become a bit more like Ethereum, right? And like in some level, I think Salana will also become a bit more. Like, you know, I think there will be a Salana L2 community, let's say. Like, that's what I think. I don't know if that's true or not. But I think it's kind of like this endgame type of convergence that's going to happen. And so to prove out your thesis, it's going to take years. It's going to take decades.

And in the meanwhile, I think these four quadrants that you set up where you have like non-vm small blockchains and then VM small blockchains and you have non-vm large blocks and then VM large blocks, they are still going to occupy important in niches in niches in crypto and fight each other. Like they're going to fight for the next like couple of decades. decades, right? And we might end up, David, in a world that is a multipolar world where there's not like a power law winner of these types of things. It's just like similar to kind of like, I guess, the multipolar world that the world is moving to where US dominance is kind of like

falling, where you have like this nexus of architecture approaches and like zones of influence and that kind of thing. So it could play out that way as well. I think that's right. I don't think Ethereum invented this endgame, Ethereum discovered it. And the reason why we're seeing convergence towards this, what I think is the conclusion of blockchain design, which is a small block anchor for a big block universe, or trivially easy to verify layer ones with a sovereignty landscape of layer two's. The reason why we're seeing conversions there is because everyone is trying to like feel out this like, you know, blindfolded feel out the walls of this universe, this crypto design architecture universe, and they're all kind of independently coming to the

same conclusions via their own routes. But like the pull, the gravitational pull of this design conclusion pulls on all of these systems nonetheless. One thing that I would add for the Bitcoin and Ethereum camp that I would say that just sort of maybe, at least in my own mind, kind of like supports the thesis is, I think it is much harder to do kind of like max decentralized, kind of low layer, settlement layer, high economic bandwidth, like small block layer. I think it's much harder to do that and keep that decentralized the entire way than it is to do something on the large block side of things. Right.

You see a fierce competition in the large block layer one monolith. This is how I've always seen it. For me, that occupies like a moat. Like go try to be more decentralized. Launch your VC chain and go try to be more decentralized than Bitcoin. today or Ethereum even today. Like, go try that. Imagine, like, being a layer one designer and be like, hey, we're going to start with, like,

really slow, expensive transactions. We're going to max decentralization, right? Yeah. You can't do that. We're going to do 10 transactions per second, and they're going to each cost a dollar. Right. And why would any VC fund that? Because you can't bootstrap that way.

Right. So I see the just the moat there. So long as people actually value and, like, the world values, like, decentralization, there's just like a massive castle wall, like, level boat there. Whereas in some of these other quadrants, like even take Celestia or Solana, okay, your value proposition is high TPS. Right. And so what I've seen with Solana is like, again, this is own personal take.

So like, you know, Salana Maxis will hate this right now. But Salana is going to have to defend itself against new higher TPS entrance that are VC funded. And it's like the way it defends itself is network effect, its ecosystem, developers, developers, developers, community, all of these things. Right. But like it's going to have a lot of competitors. And even now does, like move, suey, monad, which is like coming online, doing like high TPS. So that space is, I think, on this board here going to be hard, harder to hold.

At least that's a hot take. That makes sense to me because like block complexity, like, block sophistication and block size, there's actually no, like, maximum upper bounds there. You could always make a, like, a more monolithic layer one. You can always, like, engineer more capacity into your layer one. And so, like, there's always going to be competition there. It's always going to be trim. Before Solana, there was Eos, right? To Salinas credit, I've been very impressed with the staying power and the, and the, uh, mind sure that it's had. It does seem to have something that is a cut above other high TPS, uh, like big blockchains that have started in the past.

All right, David. Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd say to kind of like wrap this whole thing up? Yeah, I think I've said this point, but I kind of want to reiterate it one more time. The Cosmos conclusion actually wins at the end of the day no matter what. Like, Cosmos actually just started at the end game. And now Celestia and Ethereum and Bitcoin are now all kind of competing to get this Cosmos universe to be built on top of their blockchains. And so you kind of got to give some credit to the Cosmos people because they just figured this all out.

They just kind of like skip to the end a little too soon. And they didn't build the anchor to like compose everything. But the Cosmos endgame is ultimately what all three of these like ecosystems that want layer twos to be built on top of it. That's what they want. They want the Cosmos universe. And so like Cosmos is just waiting at the end game. Like, oh, you guys have finally arrived.

But the thing is like they weren't able to compose themselves before either Bitcoin or Celestia or Ethereum showed up. I just think it's super interesting like how it's playing out. Some of those you get the architecture right, but you don't have enough of kind of like it's too, it's too much anarchy. You don't have enough coordination to kind of glue it. all together and actually make it happen, which is interesting as well. All right, guys, this has been bankless takes. Hope you appreciated it. Got to end with this. Crypto is risky.

You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everybody, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.