Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Anthony Sassano & Eric Conner: EthHub – Ethereum Education and the Quest for Ether Dominance

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

We’re joined by Eric Conner and Anthony Sassano, founders of EthHub. Started in January of 2019, EthHub’s goal is to provide a trusted, objective source of information for the Ethereum ecosystem. The platform is made up of an open-source documentation website, a weekly newsletter, and a podcast, “Into the Ether” hosted by Eric and Anthony. Both active and vocal members of the Ethereum community, they are known to embody what some consider to be Ethereum Maximalism. Topics covered in this episode: What is EthHub and why they decided to start the organization Eric and Anthony’s view on the current state of the Ethereum community The different cliques, factions, and sub-groups in Ethereum The role of the Foundation and Vitalik Buterin as they see it A close look into project funding in Ethereum and the emergence of DAOs for funding Reflections on Anthony’s “Why Ether is Valuable” piece The state of Ethereum 2.0 research and the different parties involved Their views on where the crypto space is heading in the next 5 years Episode links: EthHub website Into the Ether podcast EthHub Newsletter Why Ether is Valuable Is Ether needed for transaction fees? Ethereum Project Funding EthHub on Twitter Anthony Sassano on Twitter Eric Conner on Twitter Epicenter Meetup at TelAviv Blockchain Week – Monday September 16th Sponsors: Vaultoro: Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely starting at just 1mg - http://vaultoro.com Trail of Bits: Trust the team at the forefront of blockchain security research - https://trailofbits.com This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/302

This is Epicenter, Episode 302 with guests, Anthony Sassano and Eric Connor. This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Valturo, the gold hedging platform for the crypto community. Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely, starting at just one milligram. Go to Voltoro.gol slash Epicenter to get early access to their V2 platform and to start trading. And by Trail of Bits, don't leave your project's security audit to just any firm. Trust a team with decades of experience at the forefront of blockchain security research. Go to trail of bits.com to learn more. Hi, welcome to Epicenter.

My name is Sibasankujiu. And my name is Sonny Agarwal. Hey, Sunny. Hey, how you doing? Pretty good. Happy to have you across the table in the studio in Berlin. Yeah. I think it's the first time I've done an episode like face to face.

I'm really enjoying this post-video era. Yeah, it's very different from the video era. era, that's for sure. So we were just at Berlin Blockchain Week and I was actually very happy and kind of surprised to hear people kind of randomly come up to me and be like, hey, you know, it was probably a good move for you to stop doing video. So that was very comforting because I went into this and making this decision with some hesitation. So I was happy to hear that people were totally fine with it. Most of the people I met to, they're like, oh, I didn't, you know, I never listened to it on YouTube anyways. But yeah, so lots to talk about today.

Today's interview is with Anthony Sassano and Eric Connor of eithub. Our interview with them, I guess, maybe about a week or ago or two weeks ago. And yeah, it was interesting conversation. I follow them on Twitter and you get to see sort of the discussions on Twitter, but to get to talk to them in person was interesting. It was slightly, I think maybe it'll be slightly controversial, just because of the things that were said surrounding, you know, parody's role in the community.

I think it kind of ties in nicely with current context of Blenjup Blockchain Week, which was last week, where parity and NOSIS had their events kind of overlap with each other. Yeah, and keep in mind, Eric works for NOSIS as well. Right. Of course. That's a good thing to point out. So what are your high-level thoughts on takeaways on blockchain week? Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a really cool week. I was kind of running around all week from event to event, had a lot of different panels. I guess you could say like the three highlight events were like the Web3 Summit, DAPCon, and then ETH Berlin. But then throughout that, there were just like meetups all over their place. I was speaking at a finance meetup. I was at a governance game.

There was some interoperability stuff. And of course, as all these weeks ago, a lot of, every time you get a lot of crypto people in a city together, there's always a lot of parties as well. Yeah. I think Wednesday there were 20 different competing events and parties going on. It was absolutely ridiculous. I went to Web 3 on Monday. I took Tuesday off, and then I went to DAPCon on Wednesday and Thursday. I mean, I've got a couple of things here, and maybe we can talk about this.

So one of the things that was very apparent this year is that compared to last year, is that last year was when, I guess, the world started becoming introduced to a lot of the D5 protocols that are now pretty commonplace in the space, like Maker, compound, uniswap, you know, air swap. Was compound even out back then? Actually, no, it wasn't. I think Unoswap had maybe just come out and Maker was like less than six months old. So this year, a lot of that stuff has now moved into, well, there's two things. So one is all the UX around that stuff has become much, much, much better.

So we have like wallets that allow you to open a CDP in a few clicks and lend ether and die into compound. So like wallace like Argent, for example, I've really done a really great job there. And the other thing is that a lot of these base level protocols are now themselves being sort of supplanted by other derivatives. And so that's where like a lot of this has exploded, where there's all these other types of derivatives being built on top of compound maker. C-di, R-di, and it's brilliant. There was just L.S. die now. Yeah, I don't even know what I saw it this morning. I didn't even know what that is.

So yeah, there's layers upon layers of derivatives being built on all these. is going to Defi Fundamentals. My other takeaway from this week is that we haven't yet seen the kind of mass adoption that a lot of us, I think, have aspired to in the last couple of years. The user experience around Defi is getting much, much better, but the people that are using these protocols are still very much the builders. And we're still waiting for a massive influx of non-crypto-savvy users. I don't expect everyone in their mom to start using crypto and to start leveraging

defy for investing, but it would be nice to start seeing more of the educated investor class of people come into the space and leverage defy as a high-risk investment, for example. So I hope that we'll look back on the next two to three years as the years where we saw that kind of investor come into the space. And I hope that that will be great for the ecosystem as a whole. That's interesting that you think that what non-crypto people come in to do, is primarily just investment. Not much else. Are there any other use cases other than investment?

I mean, I think in Ethereum, that's probably the primary one. I do agree, for example, with, like, Ryan Selkis that, like, Ethereum is basically reserve currency for a decentralized investment fund. I don't think that's necessarily the case for something like Cosmos or Bitcoin, but I think for Ethereum, that is somewhat true. Would you agree with that?

I don't know. I guess it's still being figured out. I mean, this is kind of what, this episode goes into, which is, you know, these guys, Eric and Anthony, they've been really doing a lot of the work in figuring out this narrative of Ethereum. And not that everyone agrees with them necessarily. Like, you know, interestingly, I was chatting with Martin Copelman from Nosis, as well as Udi Werthimer. By the way, it was super awesome that he was here, I had a really good time chatting with him throughout this week. And even Martin was like, you know,

yeah, he doesn't buy this whole ethus money concept either. And it seems to me that, In this episode, we'll see that, like, you know, I think Eric and Anthony seem to make it think that it's like, oh, this is like the dominant narrative. And I think it may be a little bit of loud voices. But I think even within one company, like I said, Eric works for Gnosis and Martin disagrees with this. And so I think there's still a lot of soul searching to be done for Ethereum. Yeah. Narratives are still changing and evolving over time. And then I think the other thing also that we saw this year compared to last is like just the proliferation of Dow's.

as a way to govern and fund different community efforts. So, you know, we've had, I mean, on the show to talk about Moloch, and we haven't had them on the show yet, but like, like, MediCartel has become a very large organization, both in terms of the funding in the Dow and also, like, the people that are involved there. I think they had an event here with, like, over 100 people. There's a Yang Dow, Humanity Dow. I was actually moderating a panel on governance at DapCon,

as well as on, like, the governance games event that, Anna from Zornologist hosting. And in the past, when I like usually used to talk about governance, the conversation is usually, mostly I felt around protocol governance about like how do we decide how to hard fork in Ethereum versus Tesos versus Bitcoin. This time I just felt all the governance discussion was specifically around Dow's. Yeah, that's true. Right.

Yeah. That's really interesting point too. So it was a great, great week. I think there's a lot of things that we've learned here. We recorded an episode of Epicenter Live, which will go out. We need to get the recording, but I think it'll probably go next week. And I'll also try to get the recording for each of our respective panels so that we can also release those like we did at the ICFFN a couple months ago. So look forward to those.

And one more announcement. I will be at Tel Aviv blockchain week. You haven't confirmed yet if you're going, but I think you should come. Okay. So Tel Avivit Blockchain Week is sort of overlapping over from like the 9th of September to like the. the 17th of September, even over the weekend. So there is the Skidlane Bitcoin conference. There is the Ethereum Summit on Sunday, this 15th, and the StarCore sessions is on the 16th, on the Monday. I'll be there throughout the week. We're going to be doing a meetup. So if you're in Tel Aviv for

any of those events, and we'd like to come and hang out with me and maybe other Episcenter hosts, if Sonny, you decide to come along, we'll be doing a meetup there. And you can go to Epicenter. slash Tel Aviv 2019 to register. We don't have a venue or a date yet, but we'll be finalizing that this week. We had a great one here in Berlin. We had like over 40 people show off. It was awesome. Yeah. I do want to get into that. But yeah, so the Telviv blockchain week meetup, you can go to episode.com.com slash Tel Aviv 2019 to register. And as soon as the venue is finalized and the date also will send an email. But yeah, the meetup was really terrific. And yeah, thanks to everybody who came there. It's one of my favorite things to meet Epcenter listeners. And you came in large numbers this

year. So thank you. So with that, here's our interview with Eric Connor and Anthony Sassano of ETHUB. Hi, so we're here with Anthony Sassano and Eric Connor. They are both founders of ETHUB, an educational platform for the Ethereum community that has some great documentation about Ethereum, a podcast, and a newsletter. And they've been doing ETHUB for, I think, about since January. And Anthony is a product macro-ning manager at Set. And Eric is a product manager at NOSIS. Thanks for joining us, guys. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks having us. So I'd like to ask each of you individually, perhaps starting with Eric, what drove you to Ethereum initially? What drove you to that community? Yeah, so actually initially got involved with

Bitcoin in 2013, which I feel like that's how a lot of people got started, right? And my background's actually in finance. I was working at a bank and ran across Bitcoin and the idea in general just fascinated me. I actually started day trading it at that point, which wasn't the best of ideas because I ended up losing a lot of Bitcoin that I could have today, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons and kind of got very just enthralled with the technology. And, you know, at that time, Mount Gox had got hacked and a lot of my friends that were traders lost a lot of Bitcoin. So, you know, just about that time as well, Vitalik was giving his introduction to Ethereum at Bitcoin Miami conference and we said, you know, why are all these people trading these decentralized assets

on centralized exchanges? It doesn't make much sense. Why don't we try and leverage this new technology to build something better? So three of us set out to build EtherX, which was kind of the first attempt at a decentralized exchange on Ethereum in late 2014, early 2015. Fortunately, the project never fully got off the ground due to some internal turmoil, I guess I'll put it. But, you know, the EtherX is still out there on GitHub if anybody ever wants to revive it or, you know, I think some of the white paper ideas are still pretty relevant today, which is very interesting. But you know, ever since then, I've just been involved in the community, going to meetups, helping build out the community, mainly on social media, like Reddit and Twitter, just bringing

general awareness and learning as much as I can. And then, you know, I met Anthony in 2018. We had the idea of ETH Hub. Like you mentioned, we launched it January 2019 this year. And then, you know, working full time in the space now at NOSIS. So it just kind of has been a slow evolution over the years from just, you know, learning about Bitcoin and then being fascinated about the ideas behind Ethereum and now just full time in the space. So I got started in 2013 as well with Bitcoin, basically discovered it through a friend, you know, bought some Bitcoin, followed it up all the way to whatever it was, $1,000, followed it the way back down. In 2014, I kind of like just sold off what I had and kind of exited the space altogether, which obviously was a very big mistake for me.

And then I rediscovered crypto back early 2017 with Ethereum. I read a few posts about Ethereum and I was like, oh, well, this is like totally different to Bitcoin. Like it does a lot more than what Bitcoin can do or the base layer and everything. So I got kind of enthralled with that with what Ethereum could do. Just spent 2017 basically doing, I guess, you know, very similar to what a lot of other people would have been doing in 2017, which was speculating a lot, especially with the ICO craze and everything. So I don't think I actually learned much in 2017. besides like how to speculate, I guess.

And then obviously after the crash happened again, I didn't exit this time. I thought to myself, I'm not going to make that mistake again. So I basically spent 2018 learning as much as I could. Early 2018, I started a website called Block by Block, where it had like a bunch of resources and research links for crypto that I collected. And I shared that with everyone in the community.

I started a newsletter called the Block by Block Weekly newsletter in April of 2018, I think it was. maybe earlier than that. Yeah, so I started that and I did that. And then towards the end of 2018, I met Eric. We haven't actually met in real life. We just kind of met online, you know, both being involved with the Ethereum community.

And we thought, hey, we should start something because, you know, there's not much for Ethereum at the moment in terms of education. There's a lot of stuff happening. No one really knows about. So we started at Eth Hub together, and that went live early 2019. And we've got the newsletter now on the podcast and everything.

So, yeah, the rest is history, I guess. I only recently joined set in July, actually July 15th was my official start date there. So yeah, it's been quite an interesting journey. Wow, it's incredible that you've never met in person. That's quite a long time working together, not having face-to-face contact. When Brian and I started Epicenter, we didn't meet for, I think, like two months. We met two months after, but, yeah, eight months is a long time. Yeah, definitely.

We joke, hopefully when we meet in person, it doesn't all fall apart since we work so well, remote. I think I was listening to your podcast. You guys are going to be meeting in Berlin. Yeah, the funny thing is, is that we're both, like, really close to each other at the moment because I'm in San Francisco and he's in L.A. But we actually aren't meeting in California. We're going to meet at Berlin.

It's just quite funny. Well, that's a good place to meet. Yeah, exactly. So what was it about the Ethereum community that you guys thought was attractive and that maybe you didn't find in other communities? I guess for me, I mean, when I first got started, like I mentioned, I was more,

got involved on the trading side of Bitcoin. And at the time, to be honest, a lot of the Bitcoin community was pretty just fascinated on price and the wild price movements that were happening. And like I mentioned, saw these exchange hacks. And, you know, I was more fascinated about the underlying technology. I mean, obviously everybody wants to make money and we need these things that go up to secure the networks and all that good stuff. But, you know, at the end of the day, what captured me was this idea that you could start to build applications on top of this technology, right. And that idea just fascinated me. I mean, the possibilities seemed endless. And pretty much at that point, I decided to drop all my Bitcoin and go, you know, dedicate all my time to Ethereum.

So when you say, you know, dedicated all your time, one thing when I met Anthony for the first time, you know, I think at EdCon just earlier this year in 2019 is I was actually surprised to learn that both of you actually weren't like working in the blockchain space. You know, you were kind of following along and you've been working on ETHUB for, you know, quite a while actually. But why did you decide to kind of be very actively involved with the space but not jump in as your full-time job kind of thing? Yeah, I guess for me, it was I guess mostly geographically challenged, I like to call it, because I live down in Melbourne, Australia. There's not much happening there, unfortunately, for crypto in the crypto community. But I think that over the last few months and the reason why I was able to kind of land a job was because crypto companies are much more open to remote work.

than other sorts of companies. So I'm working with Set remotely from Melbourne at the moment. But prior to that, I think I had been kind of looking for a job in crypto. It's just that nothing really kind of came up that would work for me in my case, I guess, just because of like in Melbourne, it's actually a 17-hour time difference from San Francisco, 17 hours ahead, which is quite crazy. So a lot of the stuff that would require me to be kind of like in sync with the team, like at all times, I wouldn't work.

But in terms of like what I do for set now, it's, marketing so it doesn't really require me to be on at the same time as then I work in you know in my own time when I can basically like I'm asleep pretty much like when the business hours are happening in San Francisco so yeah I think that's mainly what came down to for me kind of like finding the right role that would allow me to work remote on such an extreme time difference how do you manage to record a podcast with a 17 hour time difference how is that even possible that's either one of us either has to be up very early or very late it's not the easiest thing in the world. I'm open maybe Anthony can make the move over to San Francisco someday.

That would be the ideal setup. Well, kudos to you guys for doing the podcast for so long and still sticking with it with these constraints. So moving the ETH Hub now, so let's dive into what is ETHUB and why did you decide to start this? Yeah, I guess at the core of it, I mean, to be honest, how it was going to start or how it started was, you know, Ether price was falling from the top of, you know, $1,420 all the way down to 80. And during that time, there was just a lot of, obviously everyone was emotional and kind of freaking out on, you know, whether it be Twitter, Reddit, blog posts, whatever it might be. And there was a lot of misinformation being spread about Ethereum. And, you know, we kind of got together and, you know, how can, there's nowhere

to point people to, like, say, okay, here's what's actually going on or here's what developments are actually taking place. So originally the idea was going to be basically just like a fud fighter FAQ where, you know, we would see our favorite top 10 Ethereum foot items and, you know, rebut them and say why they're not true. It kind of evolved quickly from there into, hey, there's also no Ethereum-based podcasts. There's, you know, very few Ethereum-based newsletters. But, you know, still at the core of it is the documentation. And, you know, I still personally struggle explaining Ethereum to people, family and friends that have never heard about it. There's just not a good place to point people. And it's, you know, we're kidding ourselves.

if we think it's an easy concept to understand, right? Like Bitcoin has done a pretty good job at making an explainable narrative to people. Digital gold is something that, you know, people can understand. Ethereum hasn't quite found that, you know, easily explainable narrative yet. So, you know, I think you still have to consume a lot of information to really understand it. And, you know, at the core, that's the goal of ethub. I think maybe in part that's also because to some extent Ethereum hasn't yet found really, like, like what its primary use cases, whereas like Bitcoin has this digital gold thing where

with Ethereum, it's still a bit fluid and changing with time, right? I do think Bitcoin's changed with time as well. Maybe not as an extreme change, but it's definitely changed with time. Back in 2013, there wasn't really much talk about this store of value digital gold kind of thing. It was more about payments and getting merchants to accept it and all these sorts of things, right? I guess that's what Bitcoin cash is these days, kind of like that community forked off into Bitcoin cash and, you know, they're doing all that stuff over there, whereas Bitcoin's kind

of, you know, solidify itself as digital gold, store value, macro hedge, all that good stuff, I guess. But yeah, you're definitely right where Ethereum kind of, because by design, it can do a lot more. We're still kind of like finding what the best fit is, where, you know, where the use cases are, where the product market fit is. I do think something like DeFi is, you know, really great and found like a really, really great product market fit within Ethereum. Ethereum is pretty much like kind of built for that if I am, if I was to say. say like what I think Ethereum will be going forward as well. But definitely other things like Dow's and just general Web3 apps,

like decentralized social media and all that sort of stuff. Definitely, I think Ethereum can still do that. I just think that the platform being limited in scale will obviously limit those use cases. And I think the finance use cases are probably very interesting to most people because of the fact that you can possibly make money from it. At the end of the day, a lot of people are in the crypto space because they want to make money. I think if we're honest about that, that we can build apps that people actually want to use.

Yeah, and just to add something quickly to that, too, I think one of the problems Ethereum had early on is a bit of mismarketing that we're still paying a bit for. I think we're just getting out of it. But if you actually read the initial white paper, most of the use cases explained by Vitalik have to do with programmable money and financial use cases, right? About a year after launched,

Ethereum went down this path of World Computer and Web3, which I think someday we'll get to, but it was way too early. for Ethereum, right? And so we're kind of recovering a bit from that narrative that didn't really fit early on and kind of getting back to more of the basics on the financial side. And I think, you know, Defi personally, I think is a great narrative for now for Ethereum. This is kind of what I was looking at as well, like during that whole 2017 period where I thought everyone was just way too overexcited by Web3 and all these like decentralized applications and stuff. And when I saw

it as it, you know, I just think that we should focus on the financial applications and To me, smart contracts should be used exactly what they sound like, which is as contracts and like, you know, usually for particularly mostly financial purposes. And if you're trying to build anything much more complex than some basic contracting stuff, I'm not sure if Ethereum is the, is ready today for, to handle that kind of load. If you're holding a significant portion of your net worth in crypto, you're probably waiting for your portfolio to moon at any time. But holding crypto doesn't mean you should be irresponsible in the face of volatility risk.

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like coin, ether, and silver, go to Volturo.gov. That's V-A-U-L-T-O-R-O-D-Gol-S-E-E-Center. We'd like to thank Voltaurro for their support of the podcast. At Ethub, so currently, is it just the two of you, or is there anyone else kind of involved in it today? Yeah, so in terms of like, I guess you could say full-time, I mean, it's a passion project at the end of the day. We started it.

We actually, just us two, of course. but then we had kind of like some core contributors come on board that submitted a lot of content with us. So one of those is Chad Schmidt. He's been very helpful early on in getting a lot of the documentation on there. He's actually currently working on like translating ethub as well, which is really cool. But yeah, in terms of like ongoing maintenance and work on it, it's mostly yeah, Eric and I, but anyone can go to the GitHub repo and submit, you know, pull requests or whatever and content that they want added. The people who have commit access is obviously Eric and I, Chaz, and I think one other person

from memory that can commit these things. But we never really deny anyone unless it's like advertising or something to do with an ICO or something like that or scammy. So anyone can submit like educational content. But in terms of like the podcast and newsletter, that's kind of like centralized. Like I do the newsletter. Eric will do the guest podcast and then we'll do the weekly recap together. I got to say that the documentation website is just fantastic. I don't spend a lot of time in Ethereum as much as I used to or researching Ethereum. So today I just went through all the docs and read everything. And it was such a great refresher on everything that's happening, Ethereum, just get a great

overview. And I think there's someone who's coming into the space or maybe who's coming from another community or even from traditional software development that wants to just spend three or four hours, just learning like 90% basically what they need to learn about Ethereum to be up to date. It's an ideal place to do it. So congratulations on building this really nice, clean and simple resource. Yeah, thanks.

Good to hear. I poked around some of the docs, especially like things around the monetary policy and stuff, which is like kind of the stuff I'm maybe the least familiar with. But what kind of sections do you find personally the most interesting to write or the most rewarding? Or do you think that is really what like brings maybe the majority of your audience? What are people most interested in learning about when it comes to reading the e-tub docs? No, that's a great question. I think as far as like personally rewarding, and I probably, I think, speak for Anthony and myself here, is the things that are very complex topics that, you know, information is kind of spread on GitHub or on Gitter and chat rooms. And we can kind of take that and piece it together and make it easily digestible for most people. You know, I would say the good examples there are around like plasma and layer two solutions and the different phases of ETH 2.0, I think our most popular page. that people go to and ask for are around the transition from ETH1 to ETH2 and how that's going to take place because there's multiple different phases.

And then people are very interested in the transition from proof of work to proof of stake and how that's going to work, how much ether they need. How are they going to run it themselves? What kind of rewards are they looking at getting back? Those are definitely our most popular pages. I mean, as far as like actual hit-wise, we're actually linked on the Ethereum.org site now a few places. So some of the more basic, like how to get a wallet and things are technically our most hit page. But as far as getting the most community interest, I think it's around those, you know, topics that it's hard for people to understand unless it's all put on just one page and kind of like an explain like I'm five type language. Yeah, definitely.

I do second that. I think that we have a section on there called the Ethereum FAQ section, which I think pays a lot of dividends. It's basically just like the most kind of like asked questions that we see on Twitter or Reddit or see that people are kind of like spreading misinformation about. So it's basically just a page that we can, well, a bunch of pages that we can link to people to say, you know, here's the explanation, here's why this is wrong instead of repeating ourselves constantly on Twitter. It's just like this holistic page, which I think has paid the most dividends in terms of like, you know, getting the misinformation corrected and educating more people about like these core things. Like there's a few things in there about kind of do you need ether to, you know, use the Ethereum network as part of gas and things like that and explaining economic abstraction and metatransactions and a few more complex topics. that people sometimes try to spin as like a negative for Ethereum. That's a great idea.

I think I might do that as well for certain topics. So switching gears a little bit, let's take a step back a little bit and look at the Ethereum community as a whole. Can you describe what you see as the sort of state of the Ethereum community at the moment? So I guess it's changing. It's definitely changing. I think that there is definitely. people that are getting that are getting kind of disenfranchised with the community.

They might not feel like they belong anymore. They may feel like they're being pushed out or they don't align with the kind of vision and mission of Ethereum these days. I think that's just like going to be a natural thing. We obviously saw this happen with Bitcoin, right, with the Bitcoin Cash Fork and everything like that. And to an extent the Bitcoin SV fork, there are always going to be people in different groups that have different values that want to do different things.

No one's going to have a holistic narrative. You can't please everyone, I think, at the end of the day, we can only do our best to please, you know, the most amount of people. So I definitely think that's what's happening in Ethereum at the moment, especially with the transition from ETH one to ETH two. A lot of the ETH two teams, especially the ones building clients, are new. They weren't around for ETH one.

They weren't around until recently. So there's, I think, nine teams at the moment, and most of them only popped up over the last year or so, year or two maybe. Whereas, you know, the old guard, as you, you know, as you can probably call it, has been around since the beginning, like the gets and the parodies of the world. And, you know, even in that arena, parodies now moving on. I mean, they're still working on Ethereum, but they also have Pocodot that they're working on now

as part of, you know, with the Web Free Foundation and things like that. So, yeah, there's definitely divide in the community at this point in certain parts of the community. But I think that's just a natural occurrence that will happen to any network that, any crypto network that gets big enough. How does that divide express itself in reality? Where do we see it the most emerge? I think you can see it like, unless you're really in the weeds, it's kind of hard to tell. I think where people are going and where the divides are happening. But I think if you want to see like any obvious examples of divides happening, it may be any kind of projects that or developers that have been traditionally pretty deep in Ethereum, building on Ethereum,

moving over to other chains, maybe that may align with their vision more. But I think the most obvious example of this divide happening and it might be a bit controversial to say but I think parody moving moving on from it from Ethereum and focusing a lot of their time on Prokodot which I consider like I mean people will disagree with me on this but I consider it a competitor to Ethereum and kind of like it's got a lot of the same architecture as Ethereum 2.0 as well so you know I think that's where the most obvious divide is happening right now and I think that puts a splinter in things in terms of friendships as well because traditionally a lot of the people at Parody have been friends with a lot of the other Ethereum community members and things

like that. So I think that's where it's definitely showing most. Do you think that one of the reasons that there are so many E2.0 developers is I pointed this out last year where like, you know, the amount of control that Parity had over the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap was a little bit scary where like it seemed to me what if they, not saying that this is what happened, but if you're going to take a really cynical point of view, what you would do, you know, it seems what a pair you would want to do is stall and like grind their feet until they could get Pocodot out the door and make sure it gets out the door before ETH2.0. When I was at scaling Ethereum this a couple of months ago in Toronto, it seemed that like from what I could tell, the Ethereum 2.4.0 road like design and the Pocodot design are quickly becoming very, very, very overlapping. So I guess this is a general question about the community as a whole. Like how cynical do you think,

we should be approaching. Like, you know, for example, Amin, he likes to take a very, very cynical approach and assume everyone has like the worst intentions, or should we be a little bit more kind of, not forgiving, but more open to like, you know, you know what I mean, a little bit, not as cynical when we approach and assume people maybe have better intentions and they, yeah, what do you think about that? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's something Anthony and I discuss a lot. I think, you know, in reality, I think in general, people aren't sky. skeptical enough. And the reason is there's a lot of money at stake here, right? And when you involve money and these teams in reality are going to want to build out user base and, you know, grow their

chain and they get bigger returns, when you have that, people are going to be playing not nice all the time, right? And, you know, I don't want to call out specific people or groups, but, you know, the biggest issue that I think Ethereum had with the polka dot team is like, and they said parity, you know, they've done a lot of great work for Ethereum for years. They still have the top, second or maybe even the top client this day over Gath. So they're very ingrained in the community. So it's hard to like know, you know, like you said, where they may be intentionally stalling the E2.0 spec.

Who knows, right? But I do think we need to be a tiny bit more cautious than people. A lot of people, I think, just like to assume that everyone's playing nice. In reality, when money's involved, that just isn't the case, right? So I think it's fair at times to question. I don't think it's good to ever get personal or, you know, attack people. and certain people go about it differently. But it seems to me, you know, we went through a weird transition of, you know,

Reddit trying to oust admins that were involved in parity from the Ethereum subredits. And I think we've moved on a little bit. And it seems like the projects have kind of finally split besides parity, obviously having an eth client and, you know, building out an ETH2 client as well. But to be honest, I haven't seen much updates from them on the E2 side recently. What would you say is the most dangerous faction? within the Ethereum community. That's a very controversial question.

Don't we like to do on this podcast? Yes, yes. I think it's definitely from within for sure. It'd have to be like, I mean, calling out an entire organization is a bit hard, but definitely parity from what I've seen, their behavior within Ethereum, if you really do dig into the weeds,

it doesn't seem they have Ethereum's best intentions at heart anymore. As Eric said, they've done a lot of good work in the past for Ethereum, and they still contribute to Ethereum to some extent, but I think most of their time is now focused on Procodot. And you did say that a lot of the designs of both the systems of Ethereum 2.0 and Pocod do overlap a lot, especially if you really dig into the designs, you can see it quite obviously.

So yeah, I do think they may have been dragging their feet a little bit as well, and that's obviously caused. I think the Ethereum Foundation realized this and a lot of people working on ETH2.0 realized this and realized that this needed to be more decentralized. of a development process. So that's why we have so many independent teams now, I think, as well, building out clients. You know, as Eric said, I haven't actually seen much from parity on the East 2.0 side. I know that they were building a Shasper client. They called it. Shasper was, I guess,

the original name for Ethereum 2.0 before we kind of like changed it from that because no one really like that name. But they were definitely building that using their new substrate developer tooling or platform. But yeah, so I think it definitely comes from within. And there are, there are, individuals and groups that may be trying to kind of like subvert if you like different ethereum people and bring them over to their chain and say you know the grass is greener over here come here you'll get paid more or you know you can do more here you're less restricted and all that sort of stuff so uh i think the ethium community traditionally being very open very nice you know very welcoming and everything but i think at this point in time we kind of need to keep that but also be a lot more

cautious about who we let into like the deep spaces of ethereum and who we let influence certain decisions like whether that be politically or technically and things like that, because at the end of the day, you know, there's obviously core groups of people that people look up to as a signal and things like that. So I think we need to be really cautious about who we give that kind of political power to. Since Ethereum 2.0 and Pocod are so similar and they do overlap quite a bit, I mean, ultimately it would be ideal if those two communities were to some way rekindle and become one community because it would just make the entire ecosystem stronger. We would be an a much better situation if we had one strong Web 3 slash Ethereum community rather than two

different fragmented communities in the long term, I think. Where do you think the barriers are for that to happen? Do you think it's already too late? Or do you think people could mend things or certain factions of those communities could mend things in a way that would make that possible? Yeah. I mean, I guess first you'd have to ask Gavin Wood, right? He's the one that decided to swim on. You know, I think, to be honest, I don't see it rejoining. I think the communities could rejoin. I mean, for example, in Berlin, like, Web3 has their Web3 summit. Then there's DAPCon.

Then there's ETH Berlin. And, like, a lot of people are going to all those events, right? Both of those are overwrapping, by the way. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. So I think, like, the community is still cross. I know there's people interested in both. Like, Anthony is definitely interested in both.

He's open about that. And, you know, it wants to see Pocodot succeed as well. but I think in reality the values have split a little bit, right? So Pocodot seems to be focusing more on the on-chain governance aspect, and they're not as, you know, interested in the base asset gaining a monetary premium, which, you know, I think the Ethereum community has started to grow up to. And the Ethereum community isn't that big on on-chain governance and doesn't see it as a feature, right?

So these are kind of two very important community values that I think have essentially split. And, you know, I don't know, Gavin. know why he decided to leave Ethereum and start Poked up, but I think he has more of this vision of this Web3 world where people on-chain are governing this system. And I just don't think that's a fit for Ethereum right now. So I guess I'll follow on from that as well and say, I think we should address to Elephant in the room when talking about parity, right? They have a lot of money locked on Ethereum right now, locked in that multi-siga, not just them. There's a few other parties as well that have a lot of money locked. And I think that was the pivotal moment where

split really happened was when the Ethereum community basically said like a strong no, we're not going to unlock these funds essentially. And I think that, you know, a lot of people, especially like obviously, those affected were like, well, you did this for the Dow, why won't you do this for us sort of thing? And I think that the Ethereum community has, has definitely proved itself in that the Dow was like a one-time thing up until this point. It wasn't a precedent where, you know, if there's a large hack, we'll, you know, reverse that transaction or alter the state or anything like that or do whatever is necessary to get those funds back.

So I think that was when I started noticing a lot more hostility happened between maybe the two communities. Do you think that was a bad decision in hindsight? And looking back on that, do you think the community could have just said, sure, let's reverse that and have the funds go back? No, I don't think so. I don't think it was a bad decision

because I think the damage of reversing that would be a lot worse in the long term than the short-term pain of losing. a really great team, a great engineering team, great core team to Ethereum, but definitely they were already working on Pokrodot, right? So I don't think that would have made a positive difference, giving the money back. I think it would have been very negative over the long term. We're still reeling from the Dow, right? So just doing another one of those, I mean, people call them bailouts, people call them, you know, rescue, people call it censorship, whatever you want

to call it, doing another one of those would definitely be a long-term negative impact on Ethereum. And what about Vitalik? Where do you see his role currently and going forward? Yeah, he seems to be taking just a lead researcher role at this point. I mean, he has stepped back from, he's very rarely seen on core dev calls. He wasn't involved in any of the decisions like to lower block rewards from three to two last year. But he's very active on the Ether Researcher Forum on GitHub and kind of like the top. person as far as eth two research goes right him danny ryan just and drake everyone there doing good work but he definitely seems to have taken a step back from the i guess i'll put it government side of things i mean in 2014 2015 16 you know what vitalics said on core dev calls probably went right and i think he probably realized that and said we need to grow up as a community i'm going to take a step back and it seems like to be honest i think he just enjoys the research side more in general too so um

just kind of what he's settled into now. Yeah, I think that makes sense for him. Now that the community is what it is and as large and diverse as it is, for him to take a step back and be in more of that research role, that makes more sense, maybe for him and also for the, say, the project in general. Yeah, he's definitely taken, like as Eric said, purposely taken a step back within the Ethereum community because he realized he did have this kind of like a centralizing influence,

if you want to court that, where people would look to him and wait for his answer sort of thing and say, oh, is, you know, he's Vitalik on my side or is he on my side, blah, blah, and then people would kind of rally around that as like this beacon, I guess you could call it, which I think was definitely unhealthy. And I'm really, like, obviously happy that Vitalik realized that. But I think that there's a distinction to be made between centralization of development and centralization of, like, decision-making, you know, on-chain and things like that and things like, you know, the parody frozen funds, for instance, and things like that. So I think at the moment, obviously, ETH2 is in centralized development because the network's not live. The research is pretty much

centralized around a core group of people that are more employed by the Eiffurem Foundation. You know, Eric mentioned some of them. But there's also research going on now in other areas such as consensus. They have their quilt team working on phase two research for ETH2. We have the nine independent developer teams as well, the client incuminters and things like that. And so I think Fatalik's just fallen into the background where he, like he commonly just post things on Heath Research that he's come up with because he obviously loves doing the research stuff and he puts it out there and then people will literally read it, think, oh, that's cool, I'll build that and then go ahead and build it, right?

I don't think I've seen Vitalik weigh in on any decisions or anything, like major decisions. With regards to Heath 1, he seems squarely focused on ETH 2 and he's letting, you know, the community basically steward ETH1. And I don't think that if he came back and said something like, oh, we should, you know, save the parity funds, I don't think the community would go with him on that at all, to be honest. Let's talk about security. You know, DAPs are pretty unique because unlike other types of software, they can hold astronomical amounts of value. That's why getting systems audited, creating robust security processes, and fostering a culture of security in your organization

is so important. And to do this, you should only trust experts with real security expertise. There are a lot of security firms in the blockchain space, but few have the experience and track record of Trale of Bits. And they've been in business since 2012, long before things like the Dow Hack were even imaginable. Trail of Bits works with your team to audit every aspect of your project, and smart contract code is just the beginning. They'll help you implement best practices around things like DevOps, key storage, and user-facing applications. And once your software has been rigorously tested and reviewed by Trail of Bits, they'll provide the tools you need to make sure that your code remains safe over every new commit. They can even put a software security expert at your team's disposal who'll give you

advice and answer your questions when you need them. It's like having your own security engineer on staff, but don't take my word for it. Go to their publications repo on GitHub to read their papers, presentations, and security reviews. It's no wonder teams like parody, status, New Cypher, and organizations like Facebook and DARPA trust Trail of Bits for their security audits. To learn more, go to trailfbits.com, and if you decide to reach out, make sure you let them know you heard about them on Epicenter. We'd like to thank Trillipits for their support. One question I actually wanted to ask a little bit earlier, but was about the skepticism in the space.

Do you think that there's an extent where we might be taking it a bit too far? So there was this, the Coin Jazeera article a few weeks ago, one of the ones about like Pocod and stuff. And, you know, I know Coim Jazeera is supposed to be like a satire magazine and stuff. But, you know, they called Lane like a sleeper agent for Pocodot. And do you think that there's a... I don't know, I feel that there might be almost a little bit of Trotskyism going on, where it's like, oh, anyone who like disagrees with the mainstay of what the community says, it's like, oh, they're clearly working for the enemy or something like that.

And do you think that might get dangerous at a point where it's like, for example, you know, I'll admit I felt this sometimes myself where like, yes, I work on Cosmos, but there's a lot of... I worked on Ethereum before I even started working. working on Cosmos. And there's a lot of times where I'd like, you know, I propose stuff where I'm like, oh, I think this would be a way to legitimately improve Ethereum. And then people's direct response is, oh, you know, you're doing it to undermine Ethereum in order to help Cosmos. And do you think that can be a little bit dangerous and maybe disincentivize people from even wanting to contribute?

Yeah, I think that it definitely, you know, it can play out like that where, and I've seen this happen myself for sure. I think, you know, if we, if I don't want to single anyone out, but I mean, Lane's been a pretty big topic lately in the Ethereum community, right? He's taking the other side of basically every mainstay, as you say, like Ethereum narrative and what the Ethereum community rallies behind and everything like that. But I think in the case of Lane, he is actually going to, seems to be going to work for something outside of the Ethereum community, right? And, you know, it's kind of like the timing is curious, right?

When you look at it, it was something like that where he basically is going to work for another project, right? And now he's all of a sudden saying all these negative things about Ethereum, whereas while, he was working with it, he may have taken, you know, the contrarian side sometimes, but he never really did it as he does now. So I think that the timing is what you need to look at and things like that. But I mean, that's just one individual, right? I think most people don't operate like that. I don't think most people have the capacity to do that or want to do that. Like, it's kind of like, when you really think about it, it's kind of like a shitty thing to do. So I think that,

in your case, for example, I don't think, like, personally that you're trying to undermine Ethereum at all. I just think that you have different views about how something should be built. And that's why you're building on cosmos and things like that. And most people are probably like that, right? Even the people working at parity, pretty much like all of them, I would say, don't have, you know, bad intentions or want to cause harm to Ethereum. But at the end of the day, if you're building a platform that you want people to use, like people say it's not a zero-sum game and all these sorts of things, but it does have a distribution where most of the people will use one particular network, right? So we've already seen this play out where Ethereum, even though

it has so many competitors is still the dominant platform by far. Like EOS raised $4 billion, block one raised $4 billion for EOS, right? And from what I've seen, they aren't gaining much traction, you know, even though they have all this money, right? Any of the other competitors don't seem to be gaining much traction. Not to say they weren't in the future, but I think at this point, you know, if you're standing up something, another chain or something, then it definitely is a competitor, whether, you know, the people standing it up want it to be or not.

You know, there might be an interoperable future where, you know, chains, talk to each other and things like that. But in terms of like where the most users go and where like a kind of like monetary premium accrues to the base asset and things like that, it definitely follows that it's like a, I guess a winner take most kind of kind of thing. Yeah. I think a couple things too. I think depending on the market cycle, this stuff's amplified a lot. So we saw the most infighting in the community when price was tanking, which kind of all stemmed out of the funding debate, right so the eFs treasury was drying up a bit at $80 and everyone was saying how are we going to fund all this work you know now that we've bounced back up to whatever 200 or so like that treasury is now inflated back up a little bit

and those debates have settled down a tiny bit but you know also i think in general social media amplifies it too so like you actually go to an ethereum conference or meetup everyone's getting along and you know everyone's there from all these different teams and i think just social media plays plays a role in it too anthony you mentioned this like monetary premium and you think that that's like kind of one of the more important things that these chains are competing on. Could you explain to me like why do you think that first of all is the success of Ethereum dependent on the eth asset kind of you know appreciating in value and yeah how linked are these two things? I think during the phase that we're in right now where it's really early and

speculation is pretty much like most of what people use these networks for. I think it's extremely important. I don't think Bitcoin would be anywhere where it is today if the price didn't go up. Like no one would be nearly as interested. If you look at kind of like Bitcoin as the shining example of why people are involved, you know, people will freely admit that they're involved because they want Bitcoin to go up. And everything they do is to make Bitcoin go up and, you know, educating more users means more people buy Bitcoin, which means it goes up, like theoretically, right? And I think that's what most of the people have been rallying around at this point. It definitely exist in Ethereum as well. People obviously buy Ether because they want to see Ether appreciate.

Like, I mean, you can buy Ether a little bit of ether so you have to use it for gas and things like that to use the network. But like there's a massive premium there. Like no one's really buying Ether for gas unless they have to. They're not buying it and being like, okay, I'm going to stockpile this so I can use the Ethereum Network in the future. No, they're buying it with the hopes of it appreciating. So I think it plays a massively important role in a crypto network, just getting people involved. Like at the end of the day, you know, even in the when we evolve past these people are going to buy these assets so that they can make money. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I mean, we've already seen the biggest use cases on Ethereum being defy, which is all pretty much all speculation. I mean, Dye is used in some capacity, you know, for people to hold US dollars in other countries. Like I know something like Argentina, there's people there that use Dye instead of like so they can get exposure to the US dollar, but in a kind of censorship-resistant way and things like that. But I think that, you know, an appreciating asset prices as everything. mentioned is just great for the overall community, the morale, the kind of network health and things

like that. It definitely, it obviously plays a massive role in the security of the network, you know, especially under proof of stake where obviously the higher the price of the asset is, the more it would cost to attack the network and things like that. So, you know, I put out a few tweets around this where I, where I say that, you know, a higher ETH price brings in the kind of legitimacy to the platform. So if you're like, number, so Ethereum being like number two to Bitcoin and being their number one smart contract platform means that most people will default to just building on Ethereum because of that, right?

And it works as like a signal to the community that Ethereum is going to be around for a long time because there's a lot of money invested and things like that. So there's all these kind of second order effects that happen from attaining a kind of like monetary premium and becoming like this store of value, not to mention all of the social stuff

that happens around people getting like really involved with the Ethereum community simply because they hold ether. Like I mean, that's the reason why both Eric and I got pretty heavily involved. as well. Like we obviously own ether and we'd like to see it appreciate in the future. So we take that as a as a as one motivation to build things like ethub and to keep contributing to the community. So I think that that's a massive driver and you know taking the flip side to that and going back to I think like what lane was talking about on Twitter recently where he feels that people

coming into Ethereum later are getting like a way smaller share of the of the pie right because Ethereum launched in 2015. They had the ICO in 2014 where the public ICU like of obviously was very public. It was available to everyone to participate in, but someone like me who only got in later didn't get to actually participate in that ICO. And, you know, depending on when you bought ETH, you bought it like X times amount

as to who bought it at ICO, right? But I don't think that that's something that these networks can kind of like fix. No one, you know, stopped anyone from buying ether at these low prices. It was just like an awareness thing at the end of the day. So I definitely think that, you know, can cause something disenfranchisement in the community

and things like that. But I don't think it's going to be like a massive barrier to entry into different communities. Yeah, and I think on that too, I mean, we're obviously both big believers in defy, right, and think, you know, ideally this could become the new global financial system, right? And to do that, you need ether, which is basically the reserve asset of this new global economy one day, ideally. You need it to have value because it's securing the, it's securing dye, right?

Dye is essentially stable ETH, and you need ETH to be collateral for everything that's kind of happening in the DFI space. So, you know, and doing that, and if that's the vision you believe in for the future on Ethereum, you know, defy continue to grow and ideally kind of usurping the traditional finance system, you need Ether to have value. And especially because you can even get more basic than that, if we're tokenizing real world assets someday, there's trillions in value secured on the chain. You know, the chain can't be cheap to attack because no one's going to want to secure all this value on a chain that could be easily 51% attacked because the underlying asset is cheap, right? So I think those altogether kind of, you know, that's at least why I believe

Ethereum needs to, or Ether needs to develop this monetary premium. So I think Dai is actually a great example of one of my concerns with the Ethereum model. And maybe, you know, I meant to ask this to ruin on our MakerDAO episode like last week, but there was so much interesting stuff going on, Dai. We didn't even have time to get to that. But here's the, my question. I don't think, die gets any security from Ethereum, because what's happening here is you have two different tokens, one that's being used to secure the operational side of the network, which is ETH, and then one that's being used to secure the governance of the network, which is the MKR token.

And what you would do, if you wanted to attack the system, is you'd attack the lower value system, the lower price asset, which is the MKR. You'd go buy it, controlling share of MKR and, like, just crash the, the functionality of dye. So in this world, like, you get the lower of the two security, but you're paying for the higher of the two security. So you're getting MKR security, but the die holders are paying for our ETH security. Wouldn't it make sense to me, at least, in this case, for MKR to kind of break off into its own chain in which the MKR acts as a staking token for that system? I think this acts true for many applications as well. Like, I think it's true for Rep and

Auger. I think it's true for the zero X token. I think, I think, it's true for a lot of applications. So what are your thoughts on this where eventually like the individual operational tokens of different applications will eventually just want to break off into their own chains? I think it's an interesting question. There's a lot to unpack there, I think, definitely. In terms of like, I know this is like the Cosmos model, right, where things break off into their own like little universes and then connect to like a central hub and things like that. But I think that the Maker system obviously, I think, does inherit the security from Ethereum. So say like Maker was to break off into its own chain, right? And the MKR token's worth, I think, 700 million market

cap at the moment, something like that. So that network would be essentially worth 700 million dollars worth of security if you want to look at it that way or something like that. So, you know, I'm not entirely sure about the technicals of how it works in Cosmos and maybe Pocodot later on about like shared security and things like that. But as far as I know in Cosmos, it's like, you are responsible for the security of your own kind of like a chain, essentially. And then you can plug in and interrupt right with other chains if you want to. So I think the maker system itself definitely benefits from the fact that Ethereum is, you know, much higher market caps.

So there's much higher implied security from that as well. Whereas, you know, being its own chain, the security would obviously be lowered and things like that. But my point is if you want to attack the MKR system, if you want to destroy die, I don't need to attack the chain. I just need to attack the MKR governance. Yes, yes, for sure. I mean, that's definitely a risk there. But I think that moving to, I guess, your own chain,

it would kind of compound these things where you could attack both, obviously, the governance, and that would just destroy the chain itself, right? So you'd be doing, you'd be like killing two birds with Bondstone, whereas Maker being on Ethereum, like you can attack the Maker system, right? But, I mean, it depends like how big Maker is. I mean, it's pretty big at the moment and dies a pretty big part of Ethereum where it will have cascading effects on the rest of the Ethereum network. But I think that even if Maker was its own system that kind of plugged into Ethereum and

die was still used as it is today, it would still have those effects. So I guess I can still see benefits to both ways of doing it, where Maker being its own system means that if it gets destroyed, it's like concentrated there. But I still think it has those on flow effects, whereas if die is still used in the same capacity, it would still have the same effect on it on Ethereum where all the apps that rely on die would kind of go down with it, basically. Yeah. And I think this is almost more of a governance question too, which I'm not personally a fan of much app or on-chain governance.

But, you know, this is more around, yeah, the cost to attack a governance system. And it gets a little tricky with Maker because they technically have a fail-safe switch. And, you know, they have this scientific governance, which technically, you know, it's not totally up to the coin voters because they can fail-switch it at the end there and kind of settle the entire system. So, but yeah, no, I think an important question definitely is like, how cheap is it to attack some of these, you know, applications that have a token voting system, right? And there's a lot of them out there. Zero X, Argon, Maker, you know, Maker's not the only one, right? And for some of these coins, it's very cheap to attack those systems. So I guess, you know, the value of what you capture after the attack has to be there, but it's an interesting question.

So I'd like to come back to this idea of ether having value and try to, to unpack that little bit. So if we look at Ether and the value that it has today and the market cap, it is derived of two things primarily. So one is the demand for gas. And the other is the expectation that Ether will someday power the global financial system and the value that is derived from that. At the moment, I would say that there is a huge premium on Ether,

because I don't think the demand for gas gives either the value that has at the moment. And then all of the overhead there is speculation on what the future either platform could provide in terms of actual value. So if we agree on that, then wouldn't it be the best course for the community to rather than focus on building more applications, more tooling, Dow's, etc., which seems to be the folks now, wouldn't it be, better for the community to be really focusing on the use cases and bringing those real world assets into ether, creating the bridges that allows real financial assets, tangible assets, physical assets from the traditional financial system into Ethereum so that we can actually have real assets backing it and ether having actual value rather than the speculative value. Yeah, I guess to your first point, I don't fully agree. Well, I agree to an extent, but I would

push back and say you can say the exact same thing for Bitcoin. You need Bitcoin for fees on the Bitcoin network. Other than that, it's entirely speculative. I guess Bitcoin holders would argue that it's sound money and it's a store of value, right? So I think that's where we're going in the Ethereum community with, you know, this store of value, ether as money, ether as a reserve currency for the global financial system someday. You know, that's more of where the value is being derived from now, not just gas payments. Because if you believe that, you know, the value would just be dry from gas, like you said, we're way off from that. But the exact same thing can be said for Bitcoin, too, right? So, you know, right now the issuance on both the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks are right around

4 to 4.5%. So there's really not much difference in the asset underlying it other than just the narratives between the two communities. But, you know, I fully agree with you. I think beyond this just like meaming of sound money and store of value, we need to actually. actually bring use cases to the chain. And in the long run, that's going to drive adoption and usage and people are going to want to buy it and speculate on it and use it as gas, right? And I do think that that's why the community is building out more and more on the D5 space, right? If you, you know, we're seeing all these narratives around like Argentina and Venezuela and people are saying, you know, oh, buy Bitcoin. Well, in reality, most of the people who actually live

in those countries are saying they'd prefer to buy the US dollar or die, right, if they were on a crypto network because they want stability. So things like defy are starting to actually do that. And I think the narrative is kind of be your own bank on Ethereum, where you can have your digital asset and actually put it to use for you. You can earn interest on compound. You can invest with it in a set and have that set automatically rebalance across different investment types for you.

I think that's a strong vision that is slowly being built out on the Ethereum chain right now. Yeah, I mean, that's one application. So for example, you mentioned Argentina. And having a stable cryptocurrency that you can use there in the form of die is probably extremely valuable for a lot of people. But it still doesn't give any more value to the underlying asset, which is ether. It gives value to this derivative asset on top of ether. But ether itself as sound money, you know, if we take like the Bitcoin narrative, sound money, cheap transactions, borderless payments, etc. If die is the currency that people are using, ether will never have that function.

And so where does the value of ether then get derived from if all of the value is being created in the layers on top? And essentially it's just a house of cards. If the value of either starts to drop and people start leaving the platform, all this other stuff doubles along with it. Yeah. So I think I'll circle back to a post that I wrote earlier this year called why ether is valuable. Now, your criticisms or I guess like points about, you know, ether itself and, you know, what will drive value to ether? Just to be fair, I have this points or criticisms or observations for every curve to currency, whether it's Bitcoin, Cosmos, whatever.

Yeah, for sure. I definitely think that that rings true for definitely everything. And as I mentioned previously, speculation is like the main driver here of a lot of this value, for sure. But I guess like what I tried to do in my blog post, like the YA3 has value or his valuable blog post, was outline like what use cases, Ethereum is kind of fitting today. So if we actually look at, you know, go back a little bit and look at the history. In 2017, Ether was used for the ICO boom. And I think that's what drove a lot of its value.

It became a kind of like, you know, snowball effect where people would buy Ether to contribute to this ICO. And then they would sell their tokens, whether they profited or not from it back into Ether. And then put that additional Ether back into other ICOs. Now, you know, they could have sold those tokens for US dollars or Bitcoin. But I think a lot of them sold it for Ether because they expected that they just recycle it back into another ICO using Ether. you know have those gains again so i think that's what happened in the second half of 2017 especially when basically you know every iCi was returning these these these insane gains to to a lot of people uh so that's what drove most of the value there and i think that's what actually drove a lot of value

to bitcoin itself too like on flow effect to bitcoin i think that's why bitcoin got to 20k and things like that and then obviously we had the hangover period during 2018 where both of the assets crashed a lot i think eath kind of led the crash there and pulled bitcoin down with it uh you know eat obviously fell more than Bitcoin has still a lot lower than Bitcoin as well. And then I think since then, the Ethereum community has taken a look at why ether is valuable. So what will drive more value to ether outside of its use cases as being used as money. Like I know that's become a bit of a meme at the moment. You know, is eth money or isn't it?

It definitely has been used as money in limited capacities, not enough to justify the, the market gap of ether as it currently stands. And then a lot of people are saying like you are that if Di feels a lot of these use cases, which die is actually a lot better for, I think, uh, feeling a lot of these use cases, whether it's as money or, or, you know, any type of payment is basically going to be, uh, better done in die because it's, it's stable, uh, relative to the US dollar. I think that the value of ether is going to have to come from different things. So, uh, there's been a lot of a, uh, thinking being evolved around this, especially from,

uh, someone that I follow quite closely. Uh, his name's Ryan Sean Adams. Uh, I think a lot of people would have seen him on Twitter. He basically is, uh, I think the, uh, the, the leader in making the case for for why ether should have value and you know where that value is going to be derived from he recently went on a podcast called pov crypto with david hoffman and his co-host there christian explaining that ether has become this kind of triple point asset or will become this triple point asset where it basically serves three different functions as one asset uh so he

outlines these functions as ether as a capital asset so it produces income for the holders uh whether whether it's lending out ether or using it in staking in the future, where you'll get a return on staking it. Ether as a consumable asset, so it's needed for all kind of financial transactions on Ethereum in the form of gas, of course. And in the future, we may have state rent, which is basically paying to use the Ethereum network, paying a little bit of rent to use the Ethereum network if you've deployed a contract or things like that so that the state doesn't bloat out.

It gets with technical, that may or may not happen, so I'm not entirely sure. And then with the gas fees, we may have a new fee market on Ethereum in the form of EIP-1559, which Eric co-authored as well. If you go check that out, it basically describes this thing of burning ETH, so making it, I guess, a more scarce asset in that way. And then he describes Ether as a store of value asset. So similar to Bitcoin in the sense that it can be a store of value, but it also has a use within the Ethereum network as a required capital for things like Open Finance.

So I mean, an interesting stat that I looked at around ether was that either being so valuable right now can allow for these other platforms to get bigger and within defy. So something like Maker, right, has I think it's like 2% of all eth locked up in Maker. It's probably less than that now. In all of Defi, it's about $450 million or 2%ish of all ETH. So if you were to do that on something like Tazos for example, the same amount of dollar value would require you to lock up 50% of all XZT in DFI to do that. So, you know, ether being more valuable allows it to be more liquid and allows it to do a lot more things within the Ethereum network without, you know, having to

put up 50% of the supply, for example, which would be extremely hard to get everyone rallying around that. So, yeah, there's all these different things that can drive value to the, to ether itself in terms of core uses. But I think for the foreseeable future, and I'm talking decades here, it's going to be driven mainly by speculation, just as pretty much every other network is and as I've mentioned previously I don't think that's a bad thing I think that has you know massive second order effects that compound and create these other use cases yeah I think that's a very important point I don't think anybody would say argue that like today you know ether is money across the world and all of its values derive from usage right we'd be kidding ourselves and saying

that I think it's more about setting this up for the future right like something can't just become money and have a monetary premium overnight so how do you assure that you know, this can happen in the future. And I think building out the defy infrastructure, making sure issuance is low. And Anthony mentioned staking. Like that's a big component of this too, right? You're going to be able to stake your capital and earn an interest return on it. So all these things just coming together over the years. I think that's your, you know, monetary premium. And we're just basically in the, I guess, the birthing stage of how we get there. When it comes to the monetary premium, I feel like one of the things that a lot of people have been

doing on Twitter lately, you guys as well, but, you know, other people as well, is I feel there's just been a lot of, like, critiquing of Bitcoin going on, just like, you know, but I feel like Twitter feed is just like constantly just people just sitting on Bitcoin. And to what extent do you think this is like beneficial to the system as a whole, or do you think it might drive people away? Like, you know, it seems that like, even Vitalik, one of the reasons he left the Bitcoin community and like, and created Ethereum was he got kind of turned away from the maximalism that was happening in the Bitcoin community. And I don't know, I just feel over the course of the last year, I see similar trends of maximalism reappearing in the Ethereum community. And do you think this is

dangerous for the community? Well, I guess first, I think the term maximalist has become very watered down these days. I mean, it's basically turned into, oh, you're a fan of it, and then you're a maximalist all of a sudden. I guess still the core reason, if I talk actually left, is he wanted to program on top of Bitcoin, right? So I think it's definitely important to keep that perspective. But you know, I think Bitcoin gets a free pass in a lot of things. And I think it potentially upsets people in other communities, including the Ethereum community. I mean, you know, the same hard questions aren't asked of Bitcoin that are asked of different commodity or currencies that are out there, right? And one of the big ones is Bitcoin essentially has derived most of its value out of this,

what I say is a meme of a 21 million Bitcoin cap, right? There is a lot of study out there that says that that's not going to be sustainable, right? How are you going to pay miners if this is the case? And the answer that is given back a lot is, oh, well, every halving price goes up double. So by the time we get to there, we'll be able to just pay it through fees. That's not a very good security model in my mind, right? So at the end of the day, I think there's just differences in the community and, you know, the Bitcoin community is much larger. Like if, Anthony and I had our Twitters and we were Bitcoin people, we would have five to ten times the amount of followers that we have.

So their voices are just louder. Most of the, what I would say, fud or misinformation about Ethereum that we see at Ethub comes from the Bitcoin community. So it's more of a defensive position in all honesty. And I think it's okay to have people that are advocates and fans of a crypto. And, you know, I don't think Anthony and I are as big ether maximalists as people think we are. You know, I started in Bitcoin. I actually still don't mind Bitcoin. I just think they get some free passes on some big topics. And, you know, we've owned different coins over time. And, you know, I think we're both open to the fact that maybe Ethereum doesn't win this thing, right? But at the end of the day, I think you're just going to get that when people are dedicating a lot of time and passion and potentially money to, right? I think to the same, that's true. And I do agree that a lot of the people who are quote unquote Bitcoin maximalists attract huge following.

So if one wants to build their personal branding, attaching themselves to some maximism ideas, it's probably a good way to do it. Although, I don't know how genuine it is to do that. I'd like to talk to Eric about this spreadsheet you recently compiled and published with all the projects, basically, and how they're being funded through the different forms of community funding that exists. So whether it's the Ethereum Foundation or even like the Molok. Dow or the Aragon Fund or some of the different community funds that projects have. Why did you do this?

And what kind of trends did you observe in this from this analysis? Yeah. So this kind of all stem from this funding debate, which we referenced earlier. And the Ethereum community is trying to find its way of how to fund important work outside of the Ethereum Foundation, right? Like, Ethereum Foundation is not going to be around forever. Eventually, they're going to run out of funds. They're not a for-profit business.

just give funds out. So that's leaking slowly and slowly. So we need to find better ways to fund the community. And I'm personally a part of Molok Dow and Meta Cartel Dow, which are DALs that try to give money out to Ethereum projects. And, you know, there were a lot of this debate around, I think the EF gets a lot of unfair flack. I actually think they're doing a pretty good job at giving out funds. And, you know, there was debates around block rewards, which is something, you know, I disagree with. So the community was like trying to justify what teams deserve more money. And I was just asking like, does anybody have, has anybody actually put together like a spreadsheet of what teams need money, how much they have and why they need more?

And the answer was just no. People were like, oh, we should fund someone to do this. And I just got frustrated and spent four hours. And I just collected all the grants that have ever been given out on Ethereum. And I just built it myself. So basically how it works is I put the teams and projects on there. I think there's like 105 of them or so. and then where they got their money and how much they've raised.

You know, the trends would be the EF has clearly given out the most amount of money. The highest investment so far is definitely around East 2. And the second most would be around layer 2 scaling solutions. Most of the stuff kind of pales in comparison to those two. So, you know, one of the biggest things that we're seeing is this pop up of, you know, outside of the EF, like community grants. So like Aragon has one. Nosis has one.

There's the ECF. There's Gitcoin grants. And then really the emergence of DAOs, you know, I think Anthony said the other day, 2019 has kind of become the year of the DAO. So the community is trying to find ways to, you know, coordinate capital, which seems to be that we can do this through things like the Moloch Dow where people put in funds. And then we have a very simple voting mechanism of how these funds should be spent. So, you know, I think we're getting there. I don't think the answer is block rewards. And there's been a lot of money given out over time.

I mean, there's $21 million that have been given out according to the sheet over the last couple of years. So I think we need to just give it time. And I think we're finding ways slowly to fund important work. I think one of the things that stands out on that spreadsheet that you kind of see when you look at it the first time is that Pocodon actually got a $5 million grant, which kind of ties back to our earlier discussion. But we're not going to get into that. I wanted to ask you, though, but in terms of funding, so $21 million, okay, that's, you know, some amount of money. Some might argue it's not a whole lot. It's not a whole lot. you look at maybe, you know, the available funding that projects could get from raising money

from VCs or investors. Do you think it's better for the ecosystem to approach funding from this sort of ground up, community funded, grants program, Dow's, etc., like the ones we see today? Or do you think it would be more beneficial for projects to seek investor funding, VC funding, where the interest is perhaps more to, build real world applications and consumer applications and applications for businesses where investors could bring some of that experience and perhaps partnerships and sales approach that would lead us towards what we were talking earlier, an Ethereum that is more closely

connected to the real world and where we're building real applications. Yeah, I definitely think teams could do a better job on the VC funding side and finding ways to monetize their platform. So, you know, I'm pretty surprised to see teams haven't started offering like small subscription services and, you know, pro features and finding ways to monetize their platform. And I think especially around ETH2, I mean, you're talking about if you become a top client in ETH2, your user base is going to have hundreds of millions of dollars secured in your software, right? There's definitely ways to sell services to those people and more pro features and you've got all this money sitting there. That's something a venture capitalist would be very.

interested in hearing a pitch on, right? So I'm surprised that we don't see more of it. I'm not, I'm not sure why that's the case. You know, VCs don't have a problem throwing money at people that don't have a monetization plan, right? Like, that's how most seed funding works. So I'm surprised it's not happening. Maybe it will over time. We recently saw like Uniswap raise and I know Anthony's team over at set had raised some money recently too. So I think we're seeing it happen, but it needs to happen more because the reality is we're not going to be able to fund, you know, $20, $50 million a year and Ethereum out of Dow's and less price goes up 10, 20 times from here, right? So it's just the reality of the situation. I mean, Moloch has like $1.5 million in it.

The idea is that you give out funds and, you know, those funds are used to build cool things on Ethereum and the price goes up and you have more to fund. But I hope that teams can find ways to find revenue in different avenues. So we're on that to Ethereum 2.0. Can you tell us what is the state of Ethereum 2.0 generally and the research around that big project? Yeah. So I guess currently, so the spec, the phase zero, 2.0 phase zero, beacon chain spec was frozen back at the end of June, June 30th, I think it was. So that basically means that the client teams can now build off that spec without it

changing every day and build their implementations out and things like that and get more testing going. So we've got a few test net clients out at the moment, you know, from Prismatic Labs, from Sigma Prime. I think status as well has their Nimbus test net client out too. So that's coming along really nicely. They're live. They're, you know, they're fixing bugs, changing things every day to make sure it all works and, you know, talks to each other. And that's one thing actually that their client teams are now focusing on. There was recently a workshop about it, the networking of E2.0.

and how all these different clients are going to basically talk to each other. So that's been a really heavy focus as of late. And that's coming along really nicely as well. There's a really great newsletter from Ben Edgington called What's New in ETH2. That goes out every other week that you can use to follow, basically follow along and what's happening with EF2, basically in the weeds. It gets a bit technical, but it'll keep you up to speed. So yeah, basically once that's fleshed out, I think the target date for launching that on Mainnet for the phase zero, on Mainnet is early 2020.

So there was a date flown around about it being January 3rd, but I don't think that dates, you know, anywhere near concrete. I think it was just like a date given on one of the calls. And some people, including me, unfortunately, took it as like gospel. But yeah, definitely targeting, you know, Q1 there. And in terms of research into the other phases, so phase one specs come along really nicely as well. I think that's, you know, getting completed, like really quickly, actually. And then phase two of Ethereum 2.0 is definitely in heavy research as well.

And new things such as execution environments are coming out too at the moment. They're kind of playing with that and seeing how they can make that work with Ethereum 2.0. So a lot of this stuff is documented on Ethub for those listening who don't know the different phases of Ethereum and what each one means for Ethereum 2.0. So definitely go there if you want to check out more of this stuff. But yeah, in terms of timeline, I think phase zero will definitely, will hopefully go live and Q1 of next of 2020. And then from there, phase one and two can follow rather quickly. I think phase one is the different shard chains going live. And then phase two would that will be basically bringing Ethereum 2.0 to feature parity

with Ethereum 1.0 in terms of what it can do, you know, in terms of having a virtual machine and a smart contracting platform where people can build up some things as they can do on Ethereum 1.0 today. Wasn't there some plans to allow sticking at DevCon 5 this year? I think the DevCon 5 is going to be deploying the contract to Ethereum 1.0. So basically the contract where you send your ETH in to get burned so that you're issued ETH on the ETH 2.0 beacon chain. I think there was going to be like a ceremony around that. But I don't think that would include, I don't think the beacon chain, which is where you can stake your ETH is going live at DevCon.

Okay, I see. What do you think about this roadmap that we're taking on the ETH 2.0? I have like an alternative roadmap that I prefer, which I think a bit more conservative, where I would prefer to see, you know, as someone who's worked on proof of stake for the last two and a half years, I don't trust proof of stake, especially not to transfer, transition a $30 billion network with like so much value depending on it and applications depending on it and real world systems depending on it to an untrusted security system. And so, no, what I would have personally preferred, and I'm, I submitted to talk to give

this, I have to give a talk on this at DevCon. I haven't heard back yet. But, you know, I would prefer to see a system where we test proof of stake on the shards and, you know, we keep the current 1.x chain as the beacon chain. And, you know, so at the end of the day, the fundamental root security is still the proof of work. And then we test proof of stake on shards. What do you think about, you know, why was such a radical approach taken to the current etherpoint over a map where it's like, oh, no, if you want to participate in staking, you have to participate in a one-way burn from the current system to the new system. Where do you fall on this, like, radical versus conservative upgrade procedures? Yeah, for sure. There are definitely concerns

around that, I think. You know, just a bit of history for those who don't know. Ethereum 2.0 was definitely going to be an upgrade to Ethereum 1.0. It wasn't going to be deployed as a separate chain. So it was actually going to be just deployed as a regular network upgrade or hard for, whatever you want to call it to the ETH1.0 chain. And then I think about a year ago, or maybe over a year ago now, that kind of got scrapped and basically the sharding team and the proof of stake team merged together and said, we're just going to build this new system essentially. And I think that approach was done because they realized exactly what you're saying, that migrating this, you know, $30 billion network or whatever it is over to this new untested system or untried system is,

is reckless for lack of a better word, right? So I think that that's why ETH 2.0 is being stored up as a separate chain. Now in terms of like, requiring people to burn their ETH to go over to the ETH 2.0 chain and be able to stake on there, I think that that's not a bad approach

because what basically happens is you have these people, as I like to call the militants that come over from ETH1.O, the ones that are gonna take the most risk, they're gonna be on the front lines. They're going to stake in ETH 2.0 with ether that they know has been burned on ETH1.0, that they won't be able to access

until the other phases are deployed in ETH 2.0. So, and then for that, they'll actually get a higher reward because there will be less people staking so that the reward is actually higher. So I think that doing that approach, which launching a separate chain and requiring these militants to basically be the first stakers and take the most risk is probably where,

where I see it being conservative and things like that, while we have these two parallel chains. I mean, it does add additional complexity with how, you know, something like how exchanges are gonna list these two things. Like are they going to list the eighth one asset as a separate to the eighth two asset and things like that until the migration has been completed altogether because eventually if one, there's a few different ways to kind of fold each one into eighth two. It's either it becomes a shard or it becomes an execution environment or we just copy the state over or you know the technicals of it are a bit deep there. But basically I think that's the approach that we're going with there.

So in terms of, you know, being conservative versus reckless, I think the current approach is quite conservative. And I think the timelines are quite conservative as well. It's definitely taken a lot longer than people would have liked to take. But I think that's definitely being done on purpose for security reasons and for the overall health of both networks, essentially. Do you think there's a chance of, you know, once the splits start to happen, that there's a large segment of the community who wants to continue focusing on each 1.X and maybe taking, for example, a different roadmap or something. and that we actually see a split between the, you know, people who switch to the current E2.2.0 roadmap and people who take an alternative path

and continue maybe the current chain. Yes, definitely. I think that's definitely a big risk. And I actually fully expect whether someone does it to be, or whether a group or someone does it to make money or do it from a different difference in vision, I definitely think that once ETH one, you know, gets folded into ETH two, someone will fork the ETH one chain

and basically continue it on as it currently is. But I think that there are certain apps on Ethereum that have sway over where the community goes. So if you look at it in terms of like Defi, if all the Defi apps moved over to ETH 2.0, as it currently stands, it's not a huge reason for many users to stick to ETH1 at the end of the day. You know, most of the apps that they use have moved over, so they're just going to move with it. The users at the end of the day, I think, have the most power here. You know, they follow wherever the DAPs go. I mean, you could say that the DAPs have the most power as well, where they can migrate over to

this new chain and basically force everyone to go over there. So I think there's going to be a tug of war with certain, you know, aspects of the community. There'll be people who are like, ETH1 maximalist or whatever that don't want to migrate over and think that ETH2 is broken and doesn't work very well. I'm not sure how that's going to play out and things like that. There are definitely people that I know that I've spoken to that think ETH one is good enough as it is. Like, it's fine and things like that.

You know, I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with that, to be honest. Like I think it's obviously ETHBahn is really, really awesome. It enables a lot of different things. But I think that that's, you know, as we, as we, you know, increase usage of the platform, things like that, the scalability issues are really going to rear their head, especially in kind of like the next, if we have another bull market, right, where Bitcoin is definitely going to suffer from the same issues

that's always suffered from from 2017, where the fees are going to go really high again. I think Ethereum's going to suffer from the same issues because Ethereum doesn't scale much better than Bitcoin at the moment, especially because there's more expressive apps you can use on Ethereum. So the gas, you know, you need to use more gas in track with these apps. So it's definitely going to make the fees. go up as well. So all these sorts of concerns is kind of like why I want to see

ETH2 play out because I don't think that ETH1 is enough. Like it's good, it's great. It does like what we need to do today. But in terms of future proofing Ethereum, it's, it's not enough. It definitely is enough, especially if Ethereum wants to differentiate itself from Bitcoin and not just be a platform where it supports ether and you hold ether and you know, ether goes up basically. I think that the theorem has much, you know, grander goals than that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, obviously, Obviously, Ethereum can't continue to grow with the current limitations on scaling. I mean, we saw it in 2017 and presumably things would be much, much worse if there would

be another bull run or another rally for ICOs or something like that. So obviously it has to evolve. But this is a question I like to ask people who are deeply involved in the Ethereum space is with Ethereum 2.0 being so far ahead in the future, the roadmap is about two or three years for, and then for things like cross-shar transfers, I think it's even further out. Do you think that Ethereum risks losing talent and even just general attractiveness to other platforms that are already out there? So Cosmos is one of them. And, you know, Pocodot, which is, I think, probably coming before Ethereum 2.0. And then there's also a lot of other platforms coming from Asia.

and their ability to attract people in those regions. Do you think Ethereum can continue to remain dominant in the space if it has such a long roadmap ahead of it to get to parity, pardon upon, with any of these other platforms? Yeah, I mean, I think what's going to determine that, to be honest, especially as far as developer share goes, is more on the funding side, right? I don't think it's necessarily roadmap-related. I think a lot of these chains have very similar.

problems. You know, Pocodot, we can talk about it and sounds great, but in all reality, the chain's not live, right? So I think who knows how long that could be for them to get up to full speed of what like an ETH2 could look like. But funding is the interesting debate, right? Like these projects have bigger war chests of money to give out to developers than Ethereum does. Now, it's very interesting because Ethereum has the network effect. It currently has the developers. I think there was a report out yesterday that Ethereum has four times the developer. of the second chain in the space. But it has the network effect.

It has the apps and it currently has the users, right? So how strong is that pull, right? I mean, so far it's proved to be very strong. At least it seems to be. But as the years go on, like you're asking, could that like sway of network effect and users, you know, slowly decay? It obviously would if we're talking, you know,

four or five years and not much progress is made. Will one to two years be enough? I personally don't think so. I think, you know, we talk a lot about people just switching for monetary reasons, which is obviously important. People need to be paid, right? But there's more than that to, you know, a lot of people have dedicated years of knowledge building. They've learned solidity. There's, they've learned all the dev tooling on Ethereum. They've just learned a lot, whether it's through like ethub or different education sites. Like there's a lot to, you know, there's community building and going to meetups and like a lot of my friends are in the Ethereum space now, right?

there's a lot to this, you know, that people don't seem to talk about. And I feel like once you kind of get sucked into one of these communities and you're, you know, your full-time job in it and all your friends are doing, you're going to all the meetups, it's more than just leaving for the technology. So, you know, I think you and I were having this discussion on Twitter a few weeks ago where I define, you know, we were kind of arguing about what the definition of a maximalist is. And I defined it as someone who's hesitant to engage in discussion or experimentation of searching for potentially better optimums that may undermine a current system slash asset value. So how much time should we be spending, like, looking for new systems that might be better

than the current systems and that have the potential to maybe, you know, maybe create better global optimums than the current ones, even if it may undermine our current market position or something like that. And what do you think about that definition of maximalism in general? Yeah, that's solid to be honest. I agree with you. I think, you know, how I look at maximumism personally is if you don't think anything besides a certain chain could win, to me, that's the maximalist, right? And I don't, like, it's obvious to me that Ethereum could lose, right? And, you know, something I talk to Anthony a lot about often is I actually more think just blockchain in general could lose. So I'm not even concerned about Ethereum winning, personally.

say, I'm actually just concerned about the whole blockchain movement winning. So I do think, you know, finding better technologies from projects. And the interesting thing, though, is this is like all open source, right? So the Ethereum communities talked about forking parts of Pocodot over and bringing into Ethereum. I think that's extremely valuable. I think where it could start to get dangerous is if you're trying to slosh users around to all these different technologies and chains, like that's the sticky part. That's the hardest to come by is finding users for DAPs, right? Like, that's something we're still struggling with. So are you going to be able to, like, pull these users to a different chain and then, like, bring them to another and back?

Like, that's the tricky part. I mean, ideally, if we could get all the technology shared in one area, that's the winning solution. But it's tough to do when you have six or seven chains kind of competing for the same small user group. Yeah, I mean, on that topic of interoperability, we haven't really talked about it so far, but where do you see our interoperability going in the future? And if we have all of this tribalism already, just in the underlying chains, and now if every chain, every major chain attempts its own interoperability standard, so for instance, Cosmos has IBC. Now, if Ethereum comes up with its own thing and which is not compatible with IBC,

then we just continue along this path where none of the chains are intrapable. where do you see this going and do you think we can at least agree on some form of interoperability standard? Yeah, so basically, I'm not sold on interoperability. It breaks a lot of what we have already, I think, in terms of composability. I mean, as it currently stands, right? Ethereum's main strength, I think, is the fact that everything's composable with each other. Like, obviously, Dye is integrated with a lot of different DFI apps already. And it kind of like feeds off of each other.

and different apps can pull from different other apps and and you know it just compounds like people like to call it money legos or things like that which i think is you know a great way of putting it for sure and you know it doesn't just involve the defy apps as well it involves everything like you could have an aragon dow powering a defy app or another app or something like that but where interoperability fits into what i think um i'm not sure like if you're m2.0 like i'm not sure how compatible that is with with cosmos or polka dot from an architectious point of view if you do look at Ethereum 2.0 as a system of like just the beacon chain being the center and then the shards connecting to it, it kind of looks like an interoperable system where the shards,

there's a thousand and 24 shards, which are 1,024 different blockchains that all talk to this hub called the beacon chain for security basically. And that's pretty much how like Pocaut works as well with the para chains and the relay chain. So the relay chain is the beacon chain, the parochains are the shard chains. And there's the different quirks and things like that. And there's a... Poca dots are different in that they have on-chain government. and limited slots for para chains that can change. Whereas if you're at the start, we'll have 524 shards. So yeah, looking at the architectures of it,

they do look like interoperable systems, but if you're talking about even cross-chain systems, so say, Bitcoin talking to Ethereum and things like that, I think that there's value definitely in that, but I'm not sure like how, like I know the way Cosmos works is it's got the, you know, the harbidden chains can plug into it. So there can actually be an ether chain that plugs into it too. But in terms of compatibility,

there. I mean, I'm sure someone can build it in some way or another, but it just depends. Like, if you're trying to build it into the core protocol of Ethereum itself, I don't think like maximalism or whatever would stop it from being built into it. It would be more around doesn't make sense for Ethereum to add this functionality for other chains to basically plug in easily. And, you know, how does it affect the security of the network? How does it affect the design? You know, is it doesn't make Ethereum more complex. There's a bloat Ethereum out a bit. There's all these other concerns, I think, from an architecture perspective. I don't know if Maximil's Emily plays into a lot of the core devs minds, to be honest.

Like, I think that's more of a Twitter, Reddit, like, I guess a community member thing, rather than a developer thing. I think developers just work on what they find exciting and things like that. There are maybe some of developers that are, you know, can be considered, I guess, maximalists that openly say that they just want Ethereum to win because they love the Ethereum platform and everything like that. But, you know, I don't think they'd be against interoperability. I'm not against it.

Like, you know, I'm not against Bitcoin coming onto Ethereum acting as an asset. on Ethereum. There are some people that are against them say that it's kind of like poisonous to have Bitcoin on Ethereum because it takes away from ETHs monetary premium, right? And things like that. So, you know, I'm not sure if that may, like, you know, that's true or not. It does make sense on the surface level. But yeah, so I think the prevailing narrative at this point in time, I think is that the way ETH2 is being built, you know, it does look like an interoperable system, basically. Yeah, I mean, I would say that if you're like, to your point about composability, I feel like all the problems and the new paradigms you have to come up with for composability in an interoperable system are the same as that you have to do in eth 2.0.

Basically, most of the current applications break apart in each 2.0. And we have to figure out, you know, shards and chains are just two words for the same thing, in my opinion. And I don't think there's much difference there. I think there's been a lot of workmen being done on the consensus side of ETH2.0. But not enough, I don't know, I guess preparing application developers. for the new realities of developing on ETH2.0, which are going to be extremely, extremely different than developing on the current system.

You know, currently you guys focus not so much on the development. Like, I don't think there's many like solidity tutorials and stuff on ETHUB, but is this something that you guys would be interested in, like, pursuing? Yeah, we've spoken about it for quite a while that we want to develop a section of ETH Hub. It's just like what time permits, basically, because having a whole developer thing and keeping it up to date is a massive time sync and I think you know getting people on board and helping with that would be a great way to do it whether that's through bounties or putting out a request for work or things like that

but yeah to your point about you know developer considerations from get gets the east two research team and things like that I think that we're now starting to see that come to fruition in the terms of execution environments which is part of phase two of eth two so this kind of new idea around each, you know, each shard or platform, I guess, on an ETH 2.0 can have their own execution environment and that can be like an EVM environment, you can have an EWASM environment, you can have an environment that just is like acts as like a fee relay out and things like that. So it gets quite technical, but I think there are definitely considerations being made for developers now and how best to migrate developers over.

But I do agree that needs to be a lot more work done and I think there needs to be, especially on ETH2.0, like on ETH1.0, there's a fair bit. bit of work. I think consensus has their website that is like a developer portal where you, there's a bunch of different links there. We have some stuff on eithub. There are a few tutorials out there for solidity and things like that. But yeah, I think there needs to definitely be a lot more work on eath 2.0 side of things and getting developers up to speed. But I think, I mean, in terms of like the way eithub could do it, we'd probably have to wait until phase two, which is the main phase where all these stuff can happen is actually, you know, set in stone and the

specs frozen for that. We actually know what it's going to look like rather than trying to chase the researchers, which is, you know, if you ask any of the client teams, they're going to tell you that chasing the researchers is really hard and it takes a lot of work. So, yeah, that's definitely a consideration. So where can people find eithub and all the wonderful things you guys are doing? And how how can people contribute? Yeah, for sure. So if you want to subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, you can go to ethub.com. The documentation's at dox.ethub.io, but all the relevant links are actually at just ethub.io. So you can go there and find find everything there. In terms of our Twitter, I'm at Sassel ZeroX on Twitter. Eric is at

E-C-O-N-O-A-R on Twitter as well. You can just type in both our names and find us there too. So yeah. Great. So we'll link to all those things in the show notes. And thank you for coming on the show today. Cool. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen.

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