Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Crypto ETFs: Trojan Horse or Big Win? - Austin Griffith, Mona El Isa, Peter Van Valkenburgh

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

The approval of Ethereum spot ETFs sent shockwaves through the industry as policymakers pivoted abruptly from threatening to veto FIT21 bill, to a pro-crypto discourse. One could say their hand was forced by the imminent US elections, but Ethereum is now officially classified as a commodity, nonetheless. As the regulatory hurdle seems, for the time being, surpassed, one should not forget the values promoted by the crypto movement from the get-go: decentralisation and permissionlessness. However, everyday users tend to overlook these aspects in favour of a more streamlined user experience. As technology evolves and scaling solutions mature, better UI & UX represent crucial goals in the race for end user adoption.Topics covered in this episode:Crypto regulations: FIT21 & Tornado Cash trialEthereum spot ETFIs Ethereum a commodity or a security?Scaling solutions & end user adoptionThe importance of decentralisationHow Web3 lowers barriers of (permissionless) competitionRegulatory and legal hurdlesEducating ‘normies’ & UXTechnology: depoliticising moneyBerlin blockchain week & Dappcon 2024 wrap-upEpisode links:Austin Griffith on TwitterMona El Isa on TwitterPeter Van Valkenburgh on TwitterSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Brian Fabian Crain.

Crypto is maybe a little less partisan than we were afraid it was becoming, and that's a very good thing. Fit21 is like reasonable regulation of custodial intermediaries to prevent another FTX from happening. I'm actually quite bearish on ETFs, as in I don't think they're necessarily a good thing for the space. Aggressive clamp down on anything that is sort of privacy enhancing, even if the thing that's doing the privacy enhancing is immutable software on the Ethereum blockchain. It didn't make sense to do that when it costs $5 every time you made each interaction with that. But now that it costs a fraction of a cent, a lot of weird things like that that we weren't even thinking about, I think can go on chain. Anything that needs that kind of credibly neutral layer can now settle on chain for very cheap. This is a very tricky question because there's a lot there and it's sort of like you don't need decentralization until you need decentralization.

I actually don't think it's going to be the values behind what we're building that bring users in. I think it's going to be, you know, depending on the industry, content, performance, UX, UI. This episode is brought to you by NOSIS. NOSIS builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. With a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like Safe, CowSwap, or NOSIS chain, NOSIS combines needs-driven development with deep technical expertise. This year marks the launch of NOSIS pay, the world's first decentralized payment network. With the Gnosis card, you can spend self-custody crypto at any visa-accepting merchant around the world.

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Thank you all for coming to the DevCon debrief episode for Appetter. Maybe you can do a very quick round of introductions. this guy you may know the name is Brian Brian what do you do well aside from being co-host the web center so the main thing I do is I run a company

called course 1 so we run like staking infrastructure for you know maybe around 60 different networks and yeah I'm also on the deep involved in cosmos and then in orbit as well as I'm board of the orbit foundation and pretty involved in that ecosystem

I'm Austin Griffith. I'm supported by the EF. I focus on developer onboarding. We have speedrunetherium.com. We have scaffoldeath.io, and then we give a lot of grants to ecosystem builders, trying to bring in more builders and nourish them with education and funding. I'm Mona. I founded Enzyme Protocol in 2016, or was known as Mellon back then,

which is the first decentralized asset management protocol. And I still contribute to enzyme, but I now focus most of my time on avant-garde finance, which is an on-chain asset manager, and we also support Dow's with Treasury management and advisory. I'm Peter Van Valkenberg. I've been on an episode or a few times. And I work at Coin Center, which is a Washington, D.C., based nonprofit that educates policymakers in Congress and the agencies about cryptocurrencies and advocates for good policies that preserve the freedom to innovate since 2014. Oh, yeah. So, Everyone who is on this panel is a true crypto-o-G.

I don't even know who's been in the space longest, but I think... Not me. I'm the earliest, probably. Yeah. I think. Like 2017 is when I came in. Yeah. And you'd be the latest, I guess.

Yeah. That's right. It's been here for like 10 years plus. Yeah. It's like ancient. It's crypto. Yeah. I'll listen to the old farts, talk about this.

Yeah. I really came in watching you guys on Epicenter. It was awesome. That's how I learned a lot. So maybe let's start with you, Peter, because there's a lot of things currently happening in the U.S. Or it seems like there may be a lot of things happening soon in the U.S. Can you kind of catch us up on that?

So there's sort of like two like dominant trajectories right now that almost move in different directions. I think there's a lot of people talking on crypto Twitter about the recent vote in the House for Fit 21 and the recent vote in the House and the Senate to repeal the staff accounting bulletin from the SEC. We don't need to get into the details of these particular pieces of legislation.

Suffice it to say that Fit 21 is like reasonable regulation of custodial intermediaries to prevent another FTX for happening. That also does include sensible and well-written carve-outs for things like Defi so that we don't apply aggressive permission-based regulation to defy software developers. And I think what's notable with Fit 21's vote is you have 71 Democrats in the House, which is a substantial minority of Democrats, but a substantial number nonetheless voting in favor of Fit 21. And I think people see,

this is part of the reason it passed, because with just a bare support from Republicans, it probably wouldn't have passed. I think people also see it as symbolic. that crypto is maybe a little less partisan than we were afraid it was becoming, and that's a very good thing, and that maybe aspects of the democratic leadership are warming to a less aggressive anti-cryptop position and more of a reasonable moderate regulation. And these things, you know, if we put guardrails in place, these things will be good for people in the long run. So that's promising. The countervailing trajectory, aside from the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party, like embodied by Elizabeth Warren, that want to simply just regulate to the point of banning effectively.

If you look at the bills that she's proposed, they're not things that people could ever comply with, so they're really not regulations. They're just bans. But aside from that, you also see very aggressive prosecutions from the Department of Justice in the Southern District of New York against tornado cash and against most of the recently, Samurai Wallet, there was an indictment. And in both of these prosecutions, you see an extremely broad theory of culpability for money laundry, culpability for unlicensed money transmission, and for sanctions evasion, at least in the tornado cash case, sanctions evasion,

not in the Wasabi or a samurai wallet case. And I think what this seems to represent is aggressive clampdown on anything that is sort of privacy enhancing, even if the thing that's doing the privacy enhancing is immutable software on the Ethereum blockchain. It doesn't matter. People should be held responsible for having written that software, for having encouraged people to use those tools, and they should ultimately be held equally culpable with the bad actors who did use those tools, even though it was not their expressed intent for bad actors to use those tools. And the implications of those prosecutions, if they move forward and the defendants lose their defense, are pretty profound and broad for the crypto space.

Because it could mean that any kind of defy development, short of just publishing a GitHub repository maybe, which would be pretty firmly protected speech. But going anywhere beyond that, deploying things to the chain, these sorts of things can leave you culpable for money laundering, prosecutions, leave you open to a lot of criminal liability. And the chilling effects there would be, I think, extreme. Do you think these questions are going to get settled on the Supreme Court? or how will this be resolved? I mean, we've written multiple research reports at Coin Center on the constitutionality of prohibiting people from building privacy tools. We wrote a paper called Electronic Cash Decentralized Exchange of the Constitution.

We wrote a whole paper on the constitutionality of overbroad application of the Bank Secrecy Act. And in these papers, we go through recent Supreme Court opinions on First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights. And we say, look, it's going to be hard for justices who've stood up for these principles to not equally apply these principles and protect software developers in these contexts, depending on the specific facts of any particular case. And so I think I would be happy if some of these questions made their way up to the Supreme Court. It could be very sad because it could mean that people are in jail and trapped in an appeals process for years. But I do think the Supreme Court would actually vindicate the rights of developers in

in many factual contexts. I'm ultimately going to depend on which case makes it up to the Supreme Court and are the facts good for us or bad for us. These things could also, I mean, the best outcome for the Romans in Southern District of New York, the developers are tornado cash, would be that the prosecution is just dismissed. They've filed a motion to dismiss the charges saying that the DOJ has insufficiently allegated criminal conduct. And so it would honestly be better if it didn't go up at Supreme Court.

It just went away. Coin Center has also sued the Treasury for the sanctions designation of Tornado Cash. We're arguing that as Americans who just want to use the immutable pool contracts for our own private purposes, our rights have been violated by the announcement of these sanctions. And that Aipa, the statute that gives the Treasury authority to sanction persons and property, cannot be stretched to sanction things that are not persons and property. that are just immutable smart contracts. That lawsuit could also progress up, potentially up to the Supreme Court. And we think we have a good chance of winning in the long run. We are currently on appeal.

We lost at the district court. We're on appeal in the 11th Circuit. How long will that take? I mean, I'm not a, this is my first rodeo. But I'm not the lead attorney. And I'm at work, we're at coin centers, the plaintiff. We have excellent lawyers. So they'd be the best to answer that question.

but it's definitely on order of years and not months. So to get all the way out that is. Is there anything community-driven being done to support the actual developers being indicted? Because it feels like this is a really, you know, big thing for our industry. Like, if they're not protected, you know, it's just a failure on our parts in a way. There's a group called Justice Dow, I believe. I've talked with some of the organizers of that that are raising funds. to support Alexei Pertsov's defense in the Netherlands and also the Romans in the Southern District

of New York. Coin Center, the Defy Education Foundation, or Defy Education Fund, rather, and the Blockchain Association all filed amicus briefs in the Southern District of New York case, arguing that the prosecution is way off base here and the rights of developers in general are being endangered. So we've received some donations. I think. in part because of our support of that and the Justice Dow has received donations. All of these nonprofits that I've mentioned, I think, are bona fide good actors and deserve more donations. I'm selfishly saying that from Point Center's perspective, but I think we're doing good work

and important work. And so those are the best channels, I think, right now for community action. I mean, the U.S. elections are there coming up soon. And do you think if Trump wins, what will the impact of that be on like the regulatory environment in crypto? I mean, there's a lot that's unpredictable about President Trump. It's very kind of you. I probably would have read it this way stronger. Yeah.

I hesitate to make any firm predictions. It could be a plus the unpredictability. What I would say is this is that generally speaking, he's actually probably less ideologically motivated than some other politicians. And so I don't see him ever being on a warpath against crypto. And as we've seen lately, it's the complete opposite. You know, he's actually sold NFTs. And maybe because that's been beneficial to his campaign finance efforts,

he's now, you know, happy about it. Is he going to be a lasting and strong ally? That would be a harder, a harder case to sort of defend. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, the most, well, he certainly has never shown. any proclivities to like regulate stuff, right?

To me it seems like the most likely scenarios it would just like sort of not do much. But I don't know what that would. Yeah. And I mean, I think no matter what, the fact that it's an election year is a good thing. I mean, we've we've had at the agency level a number of political appointees who are fairly entrenched

and fairly anti-crypto. Many of them sort of they run with Elizabeth Warren, if you will. And even if Biden wins the second term, it is a very well-established norm that you sort of hand in your resignation and you hope to be reappointed, even if your party's the incumbent in a lot of these agency positions. So even if Biden wins re-election, it's not at all clear that we would get another cycle of Gary Gensler as chair of the SEC. It's not at all clear that we would get the same staff within or the same political appointees within Treasury. who have potentially sort of like pushed for these sanctions. A lot is up for grabs. And an election year generally means that like we're going to see change.

And right now, given how bad things got over the last few years with respect to crypto policy, change will hopefully only be able to go in one direction, which is improving. But if I sound still somewhat less optimistic, that's because that's just sort of the nature of the space, unfortunately, right now. Yeah. Knock on wood. There's also rumors flying around about Ethereum ETFs being approved imminently. Yeah.

Are these credible? I don't work at the SEC. No one's given me any non-public information. I think, you know, there's reasons to believe that by approving a Bitcoin ETF, the SEC is sort of boxed into some inevitabilities as to how they interpret approvals of other ETFs for other cryptocurrencies, right? And so even if you have a fairly hostile perspective towards crypto embodied in the chair's office, there's limits as to what they can do within a constrained system that still, in theory, operates under the rule of law. And so the cynical way of looking at this is not that suddenly the SEC's bullish on Ethereum, because that's definitely not the way they tend to operate is, you know, is on like mania. I think the more sober way to look at this is there's certain inevitable. as to how they enforce the law evenly across all potential investment products that could lead to an ETF being approved.

I also think, I mean, if we keep the cynical hat on for a second, ETFs, I'm actually quite bearish on ETFs. As in I don't think they're necessarily a good thing for the space. But ETFs, they're basically just fitting this, like, amazing new technology into like old finance. and if you want to be cynical, that's a way for the SEC and the government to control crypto participants again. But in a way, it kind of, it sways more people into being pro-crypto, which then kind of makes taking these really hard anti-cryptos dances much, much harder, right? Yeah, I know, I see that side of it, but the other side of it is like you're removing, like, oh, yeah, yeah, 90% of the benefits that are you.

crypto. Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. You could see a lot of money flowing into ETFs for people who want to invest in this technology and simultaneously crackdowns on any kind of like host your own wallet technology, at which point we become a much more inefficient version of Venmo or like Charles Twob and it's kind of sad, right? I mean, then it literally becomes a casino, right? It's a casino, but it's a casino that's gotten sort of the noblese-so-blige, you're the casino that's allowed to operate in our jurisdiction because we tax you, you pay your taxes and you follow our regulations. It just becomes a speculation, speculating. But I don't know.

I feel more like ETS just bring a lot of money into the space, right? And that is a good thing, right? Because it will accelerate development. And then I think also agree on the political protection aspect. And so, I don't know, I think it's a positive thing. I think that the two things. to balance each other and generally I'd be in favor of the ETF approval, not that they're going to ask me for my...

And speculating on whether it can happen, we should be watching the prediction markets. Some of the past apps we see on Ethereum are these cool prediction markets and they seem to be able to predict these things better than us. There was a comment on Polymarket a couple of days before the price action and the renewed filings and so on saying, friend's uncle works at the SEC. The easier VETF's almost been approved. Gary Gensler won't leave his office.

So, yeah, so alpha on the potty market. We'll never ask. We question the reliability of comments on the network. The comment doesn't have the fountain. But the people buying into the prediction market, they've got money where your mouth is. But if this easier METF is approved, does this mean anything can.

for the recent reclassification efforts of Ethereum as a security or maybe then not a security. Yeah. So to sort of strongman that argument, the suggestion is, well, if there's an ETF and the underlying asset is EVE and it is a commodity because the ETH is based on commodities futures and other things, that means that ETH can't also be a security, right? Yeah. And there's a different regulator on point. It's the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, not the SEC as far as regulating the secondary markets and that sort of thing. That's the strongman case. The problem is the way the U.S. Code is drafted doesn't really say that once something is a commodity or once something is regulated by the CFTC, it can't also be regulated by the SEC as a security. Has there been

precedence for this? The most extreme examples are situations where you have something that's definitively not a security, like say certificates of deposits issued by banks. But a company, Merrill Lynch in the in the case that's on point here, is offering these certificate of deposits with additional promises. Like a CD has a maturity date of, say, five years. We, Merrill Lynch, will sell you the CD, but if you want to get out before five years, we'll buy it back from you. Or we'll maintain secondary markets where we won't buy it back from you, but we're pretty sure someone else will buy it back from you. Or will claim the FDIC insurance in the event of the default of the underlying financial institution. If you sell the CD with those additional promises, you fit into this case Gary Plastic and you are selling a security because of the manner of sale of a non-security asset and the additional promises that people are relying upon, relying from you upon. And so you could make the argument, and I'm sure, you know, the SEC, especially, say, Chair Densler, who seems to take a very broad view of the SEC's jurisdiction here, I think it's non-controversial to say that, that when you sell or issue, say, Ethereum might itself be a commodity, but if you make additional statements upon which investors rely about, say, an impending switch to proof of stake or something like that, your manner of sale.

is nonetheless securities issuance, even if the underlying isn't a commodity. So that would be the counter argument to this because they've approved the ETF, eat as a commodity, and therefore is not a security. That's not at all that simple, unfortunately. So every world market, we kind of see this now mainstream adoption and so on narrative. We see this again right now, kind of with forecasts and kind of like, the rise of kind of like wallets that are targeted towards actual retail investors or retail users. How do you guys see that?

I think it's, I always, I was saying this years ago also. I think it's going to happen and we're going to get a ton of mainstream adoption. It seems like this cycle. All the pieces are in place, yeah. But I said that last cycle and I don't know. So, but we've got smart contract wallets and that kind of gets the account abstraction stuff kind of gets the. of the elephants out of the room about if you lose your key, it's gone forever, if you leak your key, it's leaked forever. There's some things that Normies just can't deal with and that fixes

that. Also the pricing on L2s, it costs a fraction of a set to interact with a smart contract. It costs a couple pennies to deploy a smart contract. And that allows us to build way more things on chain and bring way more people on chain. And we have cool culture creators on base and We have Farcaster and a bunch of other L2s that are coming up in different ways. So personally, I'm very excited about the new kinds of apps that you can build on chain and the users that those will bring. Can you talk about the kinds of apps that you think will happen first? Because, I mean, in principle, there's lots of things that could benefit from kind of a permissionist platform.

Exactly. It's like a credibly new, it's weird because when we're trying to teach developers what to build on Ethereum, It takes a while for them to stop using it like a really expensive database. And I understand it's more about like auth and permissions and it's more like a registry. And we were just talking about a Dow could put their entire website on chain. And it would actually render from the chain. And you would never do that before. You would never have like a sponsorship place for your Dow that's an NFT that someone buys.

And when they buy that NFT, your actual website updates because of that. And it's all coming from a chain. That makes a lot of sense. for a Dow to do that, but it didn't make sense to do that when it costs $5 every time you made each interaction with that. But now that it costs a fraction of a cent, a lot of weird things like that that we weren't even thinking about, I think can go on chain. Anything that needs that kind of credibly neutral layer can now settle on chain for very cheap. I'm excited because it's been very hard to convince even friendly politicians who their default positions, their default

position is maybe this is good. Technology tends to be good. It's been hard to convince them that there's real innovation here because if you show them something like Coinbase, you say like, look, people can buy and sell these assets. It looks a lot like online banking. And if they then ask like, so this is decentralized, you're like, well, no, this is just Coinbase. They run a central server.

They've got a cool wallet product. I'm not knocking Coinbase at all. I'm just saying it doesn't seem that revolutionary. aside from that there's these non-state assets, which a certain politician might be excited about if they're highly skeptical of Fed policy, but most in the U.S. government don't care about. And in general, the non-financial use cases are important to show that this is more than just a big online casino to be very pejorative or a big experiment in private money to be somewhat less pejorative, because the non-financial use cases show that there's like similar patterns of

innovation here to the early web with like when the mosaic browser comes out now anyone can build you know a massively important tool for communication look how great that turned out maybe it didn't I don't know um but I remember one of our early briefings with member of the House of Representatives Tom Emmer who's um the Republican whip right now uh so he's he's actually a very high-level Republican, actually. He was a early on enthusiast about the technology. And so he, he, like, asked for a briefing from Coin Center. And we were like, what can we show you? It would be fun to show you something cool. We did organize a staff briefing where we showed micropayments on the Lightning Network, because it was the only way to, like, sort of show that there was something different here. You could pay for a tiny

little bit of candy out of a machine. But that use case only makes sense with scalability. And then the other demo we did for him was peeph. Yeah, a little social network, little penguin. Yeah, it was supposed to be decentralized Twitter long before Farcaster. And that demo went okay. Tom Emmer, member of the House of Representatives, did peep. All right. That's what it was called.

But I think we did pay like $4 in transaction fees and it didn't show up on the blockchain for like a while. And it was kind of like, oh, great, you've built a very inefficient Twitter. That said, to represent. Representative Emmer's credit, he got it because there was a lot of talk at the time about whether social media platforms are manipulating elections and in sort of like whether the government is pushing these major intermediaries to favor certain political messages over others. And the idea of a censorship-resistant social media platform that was credibly neutral was powerful, even if you have

to pay $4 per tweet. But if you don't, it's much better. And that's where we're moving into is a world where it only made sense to make financial apps until just recently, unless you were deploying to maybe like Nosis chain where it was cheaper. But now we kind of have L2s that are selling to L1s that have the same security and they cost a fraction of a cent. So you can now have these credibly neutral social layers and lots of non-financial apps that still use blockchain on the background to be censorship resistant. Yeah. Incredibly neutral. To inject a tiny bit of skepticism at what is otherwise a pretty positive conversation. I do worry, you said the same securities assumption, security assumptions. Yeah. I do worry that some of these projects may be intermediating a bit.

Like decentralized sequencers or centralized sequences? Or you mean like the there's a whole conversation to be at about how decentralized are the scaling solutions. Yep. And right now there's a lot of centralized sequence. To the extent there's still a lot of centralization, that could be itself a kind of legal and regulatory risk, especially if that isn't made clear and disclaimed and because the last thing you want is to say, oh, it's all just software and then when

it turns out that actually like a guy had the key, and they turned the key the wrong way, everyone in government will hate us again and kind of for the right reason. And the guys do have the keys. So basically every single L2 is mutable and I mean for good reasons right because Ethereum is still changing

so much. So for instance you introduce new concepts like Vercaltries, it can break You want to be able to upgrade it. But yeah, so basically best case currency, it's from a mighty sick. Worse case, it's from a single address. And both of these exist. Scary.

Yeah. I think the lack of disclosure is scary as well, although it's starting to get a bit better on that front. I think we're really excited about, I think, is, you know, we've been in the space as builders now for nearly eight years. And I think, you know, we've experienced ups and downs, like markets three or four times now together. Yeah, there's. But I remember a couple of years ago we were talking about, like, okay, we've always said, okay, enzyme is this like layer that people can build on chain asset management products and verticals on. But we never really had the tooling that made it easy for people to do so. And so what I'm really excited about, and I'm assuming a lot of other projects are at the same place now where they've been building for a few years. And finally, the toolings to build on top of infrastructure have become like so much easier to use. And we're really seeing that now. Like for the first.

time ever we're seeing projects spin up on top of enzyme like in a few days or in a couple of days and it's because the tools are finally there and that's something that we've never seen in the past it's always been like you know a few months to market before you know the tools weren't there we need to help you we need to handhold you we need to like figure it out on our side um so i'm hoping you know it's not going to be like we're not going to solve everything in this bull market but i think that there's definitely a lot of innovation and it's the barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been so You're speaking my language about tooling. This is our policy I'm a long ways from.

I'm working with developers, but tooling is where it's coming together. And we've built ScaffledEath on Ethereum, and it goes to any L2 or any L1. You sit down and write your smart contract, and your front end auto adapts to your smart contract. Then you build a little React. You do one line to deploy it. You do one line to put your front end out there. And you can build a decentralized app like that website idea in a matter of hours, rather than a matter of weeks or months.

So it's much less about the tools now. It's about the other stuff and the fear of building things and other things that are stopping us. But now you have the tools for developers to build stuff. Yep. So let's talk about the users who we actually want to use this, right? What will be the tangible benefits to them rather than using the equivalent Web 2 product?

This is a very tricky question, because there's a lot there, and it's sort of like you don't need decentralization until you need decentralization. And I don't think that, like, Farcaster, I don't think the people that are using Farcaster right now are thinking that any moment they could get kicked off Twitter so they're over in Farcaster.

And that kind of is the reason, but maybe not. Maybe there's more to it. And I just don't know. It seems to me like a huge chicken and egg problem with decentralization and how to bring in users and how to sell decentralization to users. I mean, what we need is a massive, awakening

because the people who use Instagram and Twitter I think they all I think like most people are actually pretty smart they know like okay there's an algorithm it's biased

it's Zuckerberg trying to force feed me content that I will become addicted to and want to see more of so that they can target me with ads and that's the monetary model for these giant corporations and yeah maybe they'll even let, you know, powerful people in government or corporations

put the thumbs on the scale of the content I should see if it's like morally appropriate or inappropriate for me to see certain things. But they just don't care because the tool was built to be addictive. Like the infinite scroll on Instagram where like 30 minutes in, you're like, why am I still looking at this? And you have that moment. I think I'm a reasonably like well-informed netizens, if you will. But I'm like, Jesus, what did it?

I just, I have kids, I have responsibilities. Why am I looking at this garbage? And so I'm becoming increasingly angry about the way Web 2 is built, the incentive structures behind it, the user interface techniques, which are straight out of casino playbooks. Not that Defi is immune to that problem either. Unfortunately, that's the only area where we've seen Cryptotech off is in casino-like apps.

But like we need to have a real serious awakening. of like what are the systems we're exposing ourselves to daily on our phones? See, Fabian is doing it right now. And, like, should we use systems that are credibly neutral, have back-end revenue models that aren't based on, like, addicting you to targeted ads, maybe cost a little bit, but are worth it because the information systems you expose yourself to ultimately, like,

change the way you see the world and the way you interact with it. And that's something that matters. That's a public good shouldn't be left to the hands of a major Web 2 corporation like Google or Facebook. But as like as nice as that whole ideology is and we all know like yeah, the benefit. I mean the non-censorship, the you know, transparency, decentralization. We all like, you know, you don't need to sell to anyone here at DAPCon those, you know, qualities. But the users, the majority of the users, I don't think they care. Like, frankly, I don't think they care. I know, like, people in my own family, extended family, are addicted to Facebook, you know, and I say to them, I shot my Facebook account years ago.

I had one briefly. And they're like, why aren't you on Facebook? And I tell them. And I get these blank looks like, you're so weird, you know? And they're like, but how do you stay in touch with people? How do you know when it's somebody's birthday and blah? So I actually don't think it's going to be the values behind what we're building that bring users in. I think it's going to be, you know, depending on the industry, content, performance,

UX, UI performance in the case of on-chain asset management, you know, those are the things that are going to bring people in. Unfortunately, there's only so many people you can sell the sort of Web 3 Vision to. And after that, you know, there's just a huge amount of people that simply don't care. I mean, I feel like the whole, actually the social network thing for me has been for like a long time. I felt like, well, that could be like super powerful if you did it in a decentralized way. And I feel like the probably the two biggest things I see there as like, you know, really massive benefits that people would care a lot about is I feel like one thing is sort of the

aspect that you could have it owned by the users and you can, you can like use the economic. Because in the end, right, you will have like users that, you know, really get a lot of people onto these platforms and they do a lot to grow them. But then the economic benefit goes to the platforms themselves. So I feel like if they then proportionally had like tokens in their platform and were incentivized and like I think that would be. But that's what I mean. That's monetization.

That's that's monetization that's driving them. It's not any of the Web 3 values. It's like, oh, there's something in this for me. Well, it is the Web 3 value also of like feeling that you like you own a part of this thing. Right. The two are connected. And I agree with you. I am most of the time fairly cynical about whether people will like wake up from their stupor

and realize that they're using tools that exploit them and destroy their privacy and autonomy. Because unfortunately, if the tool is really engaging, addicting even, and cheaper and faster than the alternatives, which is almost always true between like something that protects your privacy versus something that doesn't, they're just going to keep using the easier tool. Yeah. But I think it's cynical to think that the only way we can address that is by building tools that allow the market to sort it out that ultimately are faster and even easier and maybe even reward the user through monetization.

I think we also need to, we need to be even broader in our advocacy. You're right. It's easy to convince people at DAPCon about the importance of privacy and autonomy online. we need to get better at having a more mainstream audience. Yeah. This happened, I mean, some of this happened in the 90s. Like, with the dawn of the internet, there was a broader social consciousness about, like, the way we consume information and how the internet could revolutionize that for the better. And we lost our way.

People started using crypto then, too, SSL. Like, SSL became ubiquitous. Yeah. Right. And we didn't have to sell it to them. It was just a better option. And we had an uneasy partnership with the lumpy big, big players in the space. Like, for a while, the interest.

of just an individual user of the internet were actually fairly aligned with Google because Google didn't want aggressive enforcement of copyright because it destroyed their search business and the user didn't want aggressive enforcement of copyright because they just want to watch a YouTube video and you're not actually like violating some artist's copyright if there happens to be a snippet of a song in the background.

Like there were aligned incentives there. I think that movement can happen again, but we have to do a much better job of convincing your average Joe on the street. that there's some really important shit at stake here. Like, your kids are going to have these phones in their pockets, and you can decide whether they're fed garbage from a corporation that's beholden to the shadier elements of the U.S. government

or whether they're going to use an application that actually, like, respects their child's privacy and feeds them information that they want to be fed and that is good for them in general socially. Yeah. No, I think going back to your point earlier, I think there is a big chicken and egg. situation and I think there comes a tipping point where so many people are now using Web 3 that, you know, there's more content available on Web 3. There's more, you know, news information,

et cetera, available on WEN 3 that you don't need Web 2 anymore because everything is on Web 3. But how we get there, I think we're not quite there yet. I think there's still, like you said, a lot of education, a lot of work, a lot of maybe incentives that we need to like promote across the ecosystem. I'm sure like there's going to be a lot of innovative ways to bring users across. You know, if you're, you know, if all the interesting content you want to follow is still on X, then you're on X. You're on X. The thing is, though, like I felt like I was at best only telling half-truths and at worst, a liar. If five years ago I went around saying, everyone should be on Web 3.

Yeah. The systems are ready. We can replace all of these Web 2 exploitative intermediaries because it just wasn't true. Yeah. If you directed people to these apps, they would then spend $5 per tweet. If they got their medical mask hooked up. And it would even work well for them, but they'd probably just lose a bunch of money. And so, and that kind of advocacy is very dangerous then because then you appear to say, like, say, if I'm going into Congress and I'm working with a more liberal, you know, Democrat office and I'm saying this is actually good for financial inclusion.

This is good for fairness and equity on platforms. But then they see it. And all they actually see is like their constituents losing money to systems that either don't. work or are actually deliberately designed to defraud them, which some of the worst stuff out there were doing. There's still a lot of risk of that kind of overpromising, but at least now you can credibly say that there are systems that now actually have enough scale and enough low cost to start building these alternatives.

And the systems are transparent and immutable, if built correctly. Right. But they're not transparent to anyone, right? So basically, in principle, you can look at them and kind of understand what they're doing. kind of, yeah, I mean, it's very much a niche kind of skill, right? But I totally agree on the take of decentralized ownership. I think the other thing that kind of Web3 can really offer to people as individual agency. So I mean, there are all these use cases where kind of people are kept out of things

more or less deliberately because of people or entities and positions of power. So we can start kind of with the social media example. of like on Twitter, you have two options. You either take the algorithm that they give you. It's kind of the for you tab. Or it's kind of like everything in sequential order and you see all of these things that you don't really want to see. But you can't really ask for a different way of ordering the things like in the for you tab. Right.

In principle, there could be like an entire host of algorithms that you could choose from, for instance. Or even things like that we don't. don't actually see as products anymore in this space. So, like, access to a dollarized account, like coding USCC, right? This is, this is something that is not possible for large parts of the world population because it's kind of, it's, having a dollarized account as a status symbol in, in many countries. So kind of like, maybe kind of like, what I often see and where I feel like we've heard somewhat is kind of like this, oh, we need to make everything decentralized. And I think kind of decentralization in itself is not a value, right? Kind of what are you achieving

with it? So what are you actually making better for people? And I think kind of like this decentralizing ownership thing, kind of like not everything you do automatically accrues value to like the same five corporations and the US dollar. And the individual agency kind of just empowering you to do things that previously you couldn't. And I think kind of like doubling down on these things and seeing how we can kind of get them to as many people as possible, I think that should be the way. I agree. And you're right, the decentralization in and of itself is not a value.

That said, the permissionless aspect of decentralized, like when these things are properly designed, I feel like I'm usually forced into talking about decentralization when I actually want to talk about permissionlessness. And the permissionlessness of these protocols is core to their ultimate. value proposition. That one is a value in itself because of the autonomy part, but also you were saying like the 4U tab versus the following tab, shouldn't there be something in between? This won't solve that, but what permissionless networks, especially if they can scale, which now we're finally saying they can, is they lower the barriers to entry for competitors in the space so that somebody

could, with relatively low cost, build the in-between tab of a otherwise public Web3 social media data feed. So that's something we also need to do a much better job communicating to policymakers, because there's lots of people who are very worried about, say, like, monopolistic corporations and their exploitative practices, and they're very interested in competition policy. Like antitrust for this century. Right. But they also see crypto as just another giant, like, money-making scheme to defraud the consumers. And so they don't see the potential alliance here that we're lowering the barriers to competition and we'll actually see naturally more competitive markets,

hopefully for information with these systems finally reaching maturity and scale. Yeah, I mean, permission or like, it's just also composability, basically. You can build on top. I think that is one of the most powerful things, too. If we just provide an example of that, with Farcaster, the way I follow people is probably going to be different than the way I follow people within Twitter,

I would like to see all of my followers and then do some kind of second check about how many people I follow, follow them, how many of them, just like some of my own metrics. And I just could not do that with Twitter. I couldn't build that in and I couldn't sell that within Twitter, but it's permissionless in farcasters. So I can build that in. And then if somehow there's an incentive layer there, the combination of those two things, like the permissionlessness where I can get in and build, and then some kind of incentive structure for me to build those things for people to use will create,

a whole, like you said, composable ecosystem of really neat extensions on really good, extensible, immutable, permissionless platforms. Like the Farcaster frames thing is just an unfurl. All they did was add, if you put in a link, it's going to unfurl. Usually, it used to do like a Twitter card and it was just an image. But on Farcaster, they're like, all right, we're going to make these frames. And when you paste in a link, it's going to go out to the web server and serve you a picture, but it's going to have some little extra buttons.

It reminds me like HyperCard way back in the day. But just by making that small change, it like blew over. It was like, wow, because it's so composable. Any developer can make their web server catch this stuff and display some neat stuff in line with the person's feed. And you never had control enough to display things in line in people's feed now. And just by adding that little turn to things and making it more composable, it kind of opened a lot of eyes to how this composability layer could work.

on Web 3. You know, it's so funny too, because the divide between Web 2 and Web 3 is actually quite amorphous. Like, Twitter started out as sort of a protocol, and they had an open API, and they wanted devs to build on top of Twitter, and you could build your own verb. Like, TweetDeck was originally just a third-party software developer who said, like, I could surface content on Twitter better. And they were happy to keep that API open because you get the network effects, and you get the differentiation and, like, people will experiment with things, and end users might end up finding that some third-party plug-in to a product is actually better than the product itself. And then inevitably, they buy the third-party plugin, and then they close the API, and

like, that's the end of the innovation cycle. And now the thing will just grow old and decrepit and eventually become shitty and die. The nice thing about Web3, to the extent there's something fundamentally different here, is that maybe we can keep that innovation cycle going longer and hopefully even perpetually, because there won't be ultimately a way to sort of lock the thing down once it becomes highly profitable and then you can exploit your users. Okay, now we have usability through permission as innovation, decentralized ownership and individual agency. What are the blockers? Regulation? I mean, so, you know, it's interesting. I was thinking about the motions in the defense of Roman Storm, the motions in the criminal

proceedings and how like we need to make this argument that they, there's a massive First Amendment issue here. And it's hard because people who are not native to crypto and don't understand how these systems work think that couldn't be a First Amendment issue. Like these are clearly businesses for profit doing a lot of things, not just publishing software. And when they're doing things in an agency like relationship, in a traditional fiduciary relationship, of course they can be regulated without First Amendment implications. This is not my argument. This is the other side. The best way of exemplifying that argument is to say that, and I think it's actually in the reply brief that the DOJ filed to the motion to dismiss, if the tornado cash theory of the First Amendment triumphs here, banks will be able to escape all regulation because everyone uses online banking software. And that's an absurdity, actually, because if a bank actually did fully disaggregate itself into just software, it should.

should get the benefit of First Amendment protection, A, and B, that's not how online banking software works. In fact, the Bank Secrecy Act will hold the bank liable for violations. It will not hold the third-party software developer of the bank's software liable, because why would they? That's insane. The difference here is that a bank is actually a trusted agent. They're doing a lot of business things in the background. In the case of Tornado Cash, they're not doing a lot of trusted things in the background. Arguably, they're doing none. There's a fact-intensive inquiry here that will ultimately determine the liabilities, like there were relays. There were some humans in the loop, though they were not associated with the devs who were being charged with criminal liability.

So ultimately, you are coming down to an actual pretty clear First Amendment argument that if what you did was published to a GitHub repository, a website that you maintained and deployed the code on chain, which is just another way of saying published it, do you still have robust First Amendment protections? And the answer has to at some point be yes, certainly with the GitHub repository. Otherwise, it's game over for the First Amendment and software development being something that we promote and protect in America at least. The answer as far as these other aspects is a little bit more nebulous.

But it's really important because it's pretty clear just from the prosecution in the Netherlands and the prosecution in the U.S. And from me spending time here in Berlin talking with developers last night at Sea Base, people have the shit scared out of them. People who want to build tools just to allow people to maintain their own privacy and autonomy don't want to build those tools anymore

because they don't see where the line is. I mean... I think that's the whole point from the prosecution side. And if that's the point, this is absolutely unconstitutional. That is just straight up viewpoint discrimination. And there's some really important cases. I mean, there's this case Creative LLC versus Alanis in the U.S.

where the Colorado law said you can't discriminate based on sexual orientation in your business. And the person who started Creative LLC was in the business of web development. And they made wedding websites. And they sued. They said, I'm deeply religious. I don't want to make a wedding website celebrating a homosexual couple. I personally think that that's an abhorrent, like, moral viewpoint. But should they be legally obligated to make websites for homosexuals even if they don't want to?

No. They have a deeply held belief. I happen to disagree with it and think it's wrong. But they have a right to express that belief, including in the way they write software. And that case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said the Colorado law has to go on this particular account. The Colorado law can't force software developers to write software that does certain things and doesn't do certain things. And that's, to me, a politically charged edge case because some of my best friends are

homosexual. I think there's like extremes of that where they shouldn't be not served at restaurants and things, like obviously. The privacy case seems like it should be so much. simpler. Like if what you're doing genuinely is I believe that we used to have a lot of more freedom and autonomy when most of our transactions were made using cash and then fast forward to the 1970s and 80s and 90s and now everyone's doing all their transactions using their Visa and MasterCard, and that hurts their privacy on autonomy because it obviously does, I just want to build tools that create an alternative that allow us to reclaim some of our protections for ourselves and you, the government, say, those are the kind of tools we don't want you building. That's not just you, the government regulating conduct or regulating

businesses. That's the government explaining what kinds of information content they want to see in the marketplace for ideas. We don't want certain ideas. And that's patently unconstitution. So assuming the regulatory issues were all fixed, Mona and Austin, do you see any barriers to kind of mainstream adoption, I mean, in terms of like purely technology, technology and culture and psychology of people using it? Psychology is big. I think we've failed multiple cycles

to bring in the right kind of people. And we have like NFT hype and all this other stuff that we now have to deal with for the rest of our time. When I go try to onboard somebody, they have to wade through 95% of our history that's embarrassing. Before we get to the five,

percent that's really important. So I think there is definitely, when you said psychological, there is some psychological stuff we have to get through also in onboarding users. I think it's still a big educational element as well, as much as I hate to say it. But like, you know, I think there's still, you know, there's still lots of people in my network who still haven't understood what Bitcoin is, you know, maybe they don't need to understand. Exactly. But again, I still think it comes back to the chicken and egg situation. And, you know, for the shift to happen without any education necessary, the content has to be, the product has to be

really good. Exactly. So should they have to understand what Bitcoin is? No. Or it kind of like the internet where kind of we go out there, even at DepCon and you ask, explain TCPIP to me. I mean, there's probably three people out there who can explain it to you in any queer way, right? Yeah. Everyone uses it. Everyone knows the advantages of using it. Yeah. Same for most technology that we use, kind of like you use Google Maps and it magically tells you where you are in the freaking map. Yeah.

Like can you explain how that works exactly? It's not solving problems for people or like giving them an experience that they really, really enjoy. And those are, that's why NFTs took off of it because they're like, there's not much to understand. It's just cool. There was, you know, it's easy to understand.

It's like some form of art. Collectible. It's a collectible. Everyone understood it. It's very easy. It's very new novel. Easy to understand. the product was

well not all of them but some of the products were good and you know it got people interested at that level I think you know with social media apps and maybe more complicated things like asset management apps and things like that

it's still you know we're still not quite there maybe with the product the products are not there outperforming you know the Web 2 experience or the financial Chadfly experience and yeah and I think like I mean, it's an interesting question.

Like, to what, to what extent do people need to understand what's actually going on? And I think if crypto is about people having more, like, ownership and control over their assets, it also means they have more responsibility, right? And if things go wrong, they're like, you know, maybe they can't recover it and things like that. And that they trust less, you know, they put less trust in some other third party. And I think that just does require, like, having some understanding of, you know, maybe what's a private key and like how does this actually work? I mean, maybe it's not necessary if it's, you know, just some easy consumer

application and that's like on Web 3. But I think as soon as, you know, people actually have some kind of more substantial amount of maybe assets in there that they manage, I think. I think I would actually, I would be comfortable debating that. Yeah. Because I don't think people actually understand how money works. And this is kind of like, this kind of declares that argument absurd, right? So because if people don't understand how money, I mean, people know how money works from person experience. They don't understand how money works kind of like at a macroeconomic.

Do you want to? Does anybody? Exactly. That's exactly the point. I've heard it can be exchanged for goods and services beyond that. Exactly. And that's kind of like the personal experience, kind of like you can run out of money, like as soon as long as you have money. But where does it come from? Where does it go? How is it created? Kind of we decides how much is created.

Even if you kind of look at politicians kind of debating things like the state deficit, they kind of, they often treat this. Like this is like a person, you know, a person's spending habits that are under review, not kind of like the entity that's kind of somehow. You know, it's interesting. I think you need people to. take a greater interest in the inherently political choice of the technologies they choose to use, right? Because actually, even non-crypto people, even more casual internet users, do sometimes develop that kind of awareness. I would want to say clash consciousness, but I sound like a Marxist, but I'm in Berlin. It's okay, yeah, it's fine. You know, and we've actually seen some fairly successful efforts at boycotting.

in the U.S. is chick fillet that's associated with very sort of far far right Christian and probably anti-homosexuality views and things like that. And like for a while people were like, stop buying chick-fil-a.

Like this is maybe not the best example, but there have been moments in time where people start to realize that yeah, the chicken's good here, but what when I use this chicken, what am I actually doing in the world? And we need to have that moment. with Facebook and with Instagram and with Google.

Like, why am I making Mark Zuckerberg rich? Why am I doing it? Like, I don't like him. And, you know, he's actually one of the less bad guys maybe. But like, he certainly doesn't need more of my money. And I'm not sure what he's built is healthy for my kids. So it's a really interesting point. And, you know, the first thing it makes me think of is how dependent we,

we've become in the space on the US dollar. Yeah. So like if the US government is taking a regulatory direction that we may be in Web 3 disagree with like what's happening with Tordano Cash, what's the first thing you'd want to boycott the US dollar? Can any of us imagine? It's going to be kind of hard for me. Well yeah.

So I said it, I said it to my husband the other day. I was like, you know, I think we should divest out of all of our dollars. And he was like, okay, tell me how. And I was like, you know, I like, I got like. one minute into my speech and then I was like, yeah. He was like, what about that stable coin fund? What about this? And I was like, yeah. The fact that we're even having these conversations is important. Yeah. Because I don't think until recently, I don't think a lot of people said like, well, it actually, like the currency you choose to use actually is a political choice that has pretty big implications in the world. People are just like, no, I use money. It's the money that's around me. That's the thing I have. I guess. And you know, people would say this. I think during the Vietnam War,

people would say, like, not just by paying taxes, but also by, like, being an active participant in the U.S. economy, am I furthering what is, like, a really disgusting violent conflict that's not actually achieving, like, justifiable ends? And there were boycotts, right? And God knows, there's a lot going on right now in the U.S. on college campuses with respect to Israel, Palestine. And I'm not going to voice anything here because I don't want to wait into that. But, like, the best way to actually. move your political agenda is to choose technologies and tools and things in the world that because of the way they operate, support your cause. I think that's actually more effective and more powerful often than being very vocal and loud and blocking highways and things that actually turn a lot of people against you. Not to get too profound, but like that was, from my limited understanding why Gandhi's nonviolence movement in India was successful is like making your own cloth at home is a huge political protest that also if done in mass undercuts the powerful and exploitative British fabric companies like that's interesting

and it gets in the headlines and it's important right yeah I think there's a lot of that happening too though but yeah point taken I think boycotting is a very like or divestment is a very powerful tool and I think probably one that even we are not practicing in many ways like when And we, you know, we are Web 3 native. I don't think. I think most normies in America are not thinking very politically when they're thinking about their money and their software. I think that we, you said back to the 90s and that was the time. What were they thinking and why was it different?

And how can we get our society more lined up with TCIP and SSL and RSA, all these crypto things that we're already using? It's happening a little, though. I mean, people left Twitter in mass when Elon bought. I wasn't exactly sure what the idea there was. But it happened. Some people stayed. A lot of people went to Mastodon. A lot of people went to Farcaster.

And there was a politics there. There was like a billionaire just bought this thing, and I don't like some of the things he's said on it, and so I'm going to go somewhere else. But most of them just tweeted something in all caps at their friends. Right. And went on with their day. And then they still come back to X when they want to actually reach a larger audience.

but things are getting frothy and weird. I'm optimistic. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I agree. I think kind of there's a lot of people who were kind of just ape into it when they think it's the next cool thing. Maybe you just need a couple of people kind of make a point and kind of just kind of drive this kind of in the right direction and kind of like 98% wouldn't have done it on their own. but they're happy to kind of ape into it, especially if they're early and kind of they get to kind of, you know, virtue signal that they're no longer using, I don't know, Gmail and they have instead migrated to proton mail.

We'll get Tom Brady and Matt Damon on a commercial. Yeah. There's a very successful book in the U.S. at least. It might be more popular globally, too, called The Anxious Generation. And I've sort of like tacitly quoted from it throughout this podcast, so I should give some credit to it. by Jonathan Haidt, and it's about what social media has done predominantly to the Zumer generation, whose brains came of age and matured with Instagram and TikTok plugged right into their visual cortex. And the statistics are actually really scary and sad, especially amongst teenage girls,

the rates of self-harm and suicidal ideology have spiked. And the interesting thing is in the research, Jonathan Knight goes through it and says, look, you can actually do interesting controlled analysis. Like there's always a lot of correlation versus causation, but Portugal got high speed internet wireless for things like social media with this two-year delay compared to Spain. And you can control for a lot of things and there's similar cultures there and you see the spikes in self-harm at the exact same lag. And like, I read this book and I have kids myself and now I'm like, I'm actually, starting to question some of my more libertarian ideas about technology regulation. I don't know if I would strongly object to more robust age verification requirements and things like maybe outright bans for providing certain tools to people under a certain age, if it's fairly clear that there are real harms happening here. And an interesting question is, like, are there ways that our space can actually better comply with some of those by, say, giving parents true cryptographic control, if you will, over the information that their kids are consuming on their phones. And can we maybe,

through regulation, take the wind out of the sales of the giant Web 2 corporations? Because they're going to cry bloody murder. You can't force us to do this. You can't force us to do age verification. you can't force us to give our users choices because that kills their revenue model. Well, maybe their revenue model deserves to die. We're running out of time on the case. I would love to keep talking about this, but let's briefly touch on Berlin Blockchain Week

and DapCon and sentiments you picked up here and kind of what other events you're looking forward to this summer. I'll start with just hackathon stuff. I love seeing hackathons. I love the energy around just builders around here. We see kind of, it was about 2019, 2020. We saw people quit reinventing everything and started using components. And now we're at a different stage where we have L2s and AA and not just components,

but like high level protocols and paradigms of how to go about building an app. And it's way easier to do. So we're much more at the like F around and find out kind of stage. And I think it's time for that. we like it's all lined up and I'm probably overly optimistic about it but I'm really excited to see what developers do this year and I mean you go to a lot of hackathon so I think I mean it's it's not like wish we're thinking right right you actually see this I see a lot of stuff getting built but it's getting users that's the hard part I think and I think getting users in a way that's not

you know you're overly speculating on something or you're gambling but getting users in a way where this is an incredibly neutral layer of permissionless software that's composable. And because of those things, we can do these new things and let's build stuff that people can use. I think we're still zooming in on what that looks like and still trying to figure it out. But I think everything is lined up. It almost needs society to figure out like, oh, shoot, you know, this other way isn't working. But I don't know if society is going to move that way. I just see, like, the only, going back to you only need decentralization when you need it,

the only way they have that personal experience is if they actually get kicked off of Instagram or something. And then they have to go, oh, well, where do I go? I can't go anywhere. I'm in the dark now or whatever. And that personal experience roots a whole bunch more behaviors. But without that, I don't know if we'll have this big shift. But I'm hopeful and optimistic that that does happen. Yeah.

I mean, from my side, it's been a great week. it's been, I mean, I always love DapCon because it's like it's not too big and it's not too small and you have like this. It feels very cozy and you see a lot of, it's just so much easier to meet and talk to people without that kind of loud echo in the background. But a couple of things that I'm, one that I'm cautiously optimistic, interesting, how much there is going on in the intersection of Web3 and AI. I say cautiously because I recognize there's probably a lot of hype in there too, but I'm really excited to see how AI agents can and will be incorporated into other apps and DAPs moving forwards. I'm also really interested, and maybe that's because

of the perspective we're seeing on enzyme is we're having a lot of interaction with liquid staking and restaking protocols who want to leverage enzyme to build on top of other restaking projects with risk management overlayed. And again, I'm really excited about that because I think diversity, diversifying the liquid staking or just the staking environment in general is a positive thing for the ecosystem and then I'm kind of cautious on the other side because obviously that has to be done in a risk managed way so we you know wanting to encourage that to be done in a good way but really excited to see like you know even like new protocols like nectar coming into the space you know which hopefully will I think eigenlayer has been great for the space but you know it's great to see other players

coming in like nectar to prevent another Lido-like situation with market shares. So that's been interesting to observe this week. So I've just been sort of very gratified to find a community of developers where there's a number who are deeply interested in privacy. There's a lot of tornado cash shirts around. Yeah. And that's not always the case at crypto events. Like I'm going to go to consensus next week.

And maybe I'm being unfair, but I don't think they'll be quite a. as many like true cypherpunks, if you will. And this has been a sort of double-edged sword for me, because as I said, I've learned sort of firsthand how many people are now scared to death of building the things they think would make the world better. And that's sad. And it's scary that some of them who've already built some of these tools

might end up on the wrong side of prosecutions and potentially even be arrested in front of their kids at dinner time, which is apparently what happened to Roman Storm. And that pisses me off and makes me angry, but I have to bring up a silver lining. Like, if these are unfortunately the stories we need to share to make people understand that this is a battle of ideas and the government's trying to put their thumbs on the scale. And that's un-American and unconstitutional. And this has happened before with PTP, right? I mean, we have fought this exact same fight before.

And it's the right fight. So I'm sad, but I'm. I'm sort of doubling down on my commitment. What about you, Brian? Yeah, no, I've really enjoyed being back here. So I lived in Berlin for many years and then moved to Portugal like three and a half years ago. This is my first time I came back. And that's been great.

It's also nice to see a whole bunch of different events. I think when I stop by the East Side, Decentral Science event today, and there was some, you had the Finoa yesterday. I gave a talk here. So it's like a whole bunch of different. And it feels pretty vibrant. And I heard from people that said there was a lot more going on this year. Yeah, no, it's, I agree. It's in principle a good ecosystem.

And there's even people coming back from Portugal, like, for good, which is nice to see. Cool. Fantastic. Thank you all. Have a fantastic last day at Dabcon and a fantastic rest of your Berlin Blockchain Week. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank.

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