Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Ethereum Foundation: Humanity’s Shared World Computer - Hsiao-Wei Wang & Tomasz Stańczak

Episode Date: May 11, 2025

As society evolves, so do its values and principles, but is that desirable for technology that seeks to build the most reliable, trustless and censorship resistant global settlement layer? Ever since the rise in popularity of Solana with its inflow of retail capital in a memecoin gold rush, Ethereum became even more criticized for sticking true to its core values despite the completely divergent demands of market participants. Moreover, the rollup centric scaling roadmap seemed to further silo attention and cause liquidity fragmentation, driving away value from Ethereum mainnet. As institutional demand is expected to grow with the introduction of staking ETFs, a new executive leadership took charge of Ethereum foundation to help steer the protocol’s narrative at the intersection between community demands and Ethereum’s ethos.Topics covered in this episode:Hsiao-Wei’s & Tomasz’ backgroundsHow they became co-executive directors of Ethereum FoundationEthereum Foundation’s role moving forwardDecision making in Ethereum FoundationShaping Ethereum’s narrativeThe layer 2 landscapeScaling Ethereum as the global settlement layerShardingRollup scalability & their trade-offsWhat values drive adoptionL2 interoperabilityFuture goalsEpisode links:Hsiao-Wei Wang on XTomasz Stanczak on XEthereum Foundation on XEthereum on XSponsors: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: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

When you look at Ethereum, it's a bit more like the network effects, connectivity, and the base layer for computation, which starts to remind, like, that's a bit like you would say what would be the vision for the Internet. That's why we also have to talk about this one-tier vision and say it so clearly. Protocol main it is the Ethereum Foundation role, and it will be scalar 1, where scale blobs, and we improve the intraop and UX just to show that network effect on the journey. Builders that they want to build something they should choose Xerun, because it's the most secure, it's most robust,

should be the default for them. I want to improve the UX in order to don't even need to be aware of the blockchain exists in the app. So I think it takes some time to improve our wireless system and it takes time to provide a very good pipeline for the app layer to improve the UX. But I think this world won't be too far away. We increased the L1 block space and still the fees are laws,

So why would you do that? Clearly, this is a commitment to the future, so everyone can be very confident that L1 will scale. So we can build on O1, we can build more L2s, that we are very safe building an L2 that we plan to scale eight times, 16 times, per two times over the years. And an L1 will always be there and will be the best platform to launch L2. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies,

projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Thomas Stanchak and Shaouet Wong, who are both the new co-executive directors at the Ethereum Foundation. So Tomash previously founded a company named Nethermind that builds infrastructure in the Ethereum space, including a very well-respected. Klein and Shaoui has been a researcher with the Ethereum Foundation for ages. actually. And you both have come in kind of after a period of unrest from the Ethereum community earlier this year. So kind of, I'm super interested to kind of hear your visions for how the

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Shai and Tomash, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much for the invitation. Pleasure. The honor is mine. So maybe before we kind of dive into Ethereum Foundation stuff, tell us about kind of like how you guys got here respectively. So kind of like what brought you kind of like to the chair you're sitting on this present day? Yeah, sure. So for me, it was almost eight years' journey at 2017 when I started in the mind. Before it, actually, I joined the interim space of like reading and learning in 2015-16. So I was observing some of the big events of that time.

And at the first three years, at Nathenemind, it was me mostly building with a small group of people at Nandemind implementation of Ethereum client. Fast forward a few years. I went through, you know, DFI summer, all the various events after the long crypto winter, collaborated with FlashBots and Ami Solutions research since around 2021, like Mala is the beginning of Flashbots. And I also worked with Startnet Foundation, built a... twin steak, institutions taking, worked on the Euler, DFI project, and collaborated with Forta. So various projects always more or less related to our work at Nathamind. And for NennaMinds, I got the Start Conversation of Veteran Foundation.

I started this year in March, joined Shailway, and yeah, now we're here. Cool. What about you, Shalway? Yeah, I joined the Eastern Foundation in 2017. Before that, I mean, my background is computer science. And then when I joined the EF, I was working on the Shadding POC, the Sharding Purpose concept. That was very, very aged design. And, yeah, so the time I joined the research team, that was the, small thing and we started, we were working on the consensus protocol mostly. And then

during the time, like the researching has changed a lot. I mean, years, our focus, keep expanding to multiple different domains. And then, you have also changed a lot during the past seven years. And then I was a consensus R&D co-lead with Danny Ryan for multiple years. And then last year I was, I shipped my road from researcher to leadership at Eastern Foundation. And then, yeah, this year, I mean, recently, one month ago, I honored to be the co-stitute of director with Tomash. How did this kind of shape up, kind of like where you approached by Vitilic or kind of to kind of see whether you'd be up for this or kind of like, I mean, there was no open application, right? So kind of like, how did you guys become co-executive directors?

Yeah, I guess for sure. It was maybe a simpler story. She was already in. So on my side, I talked to I for the first time, I think, last year in September in Singapore, around token 2049. But then we discussed, in general, the challenges ahead of EF, the leadership situation after Danny's departure. And we discussed talent management, very various topics. So it was a longer conversation, but we didn't discuss at all, like me joining EF, and I didn't think of it. I was obviously super busy with Nenemite and various cyber projects.

And then, as I was observing, all the situations online around the leadership challenges, still, I didn't think of me joining EF, but I was just thinking of like, who will be there, how it will affect the future of various ecosystem players, net a mind, how not in the mind, how not a mind who position itself in all of this. but I had already at that time various discussions running with Aya Vitalik, some of them are on search, some of them around some enterprise solutions and I reach out asking some questions and then when Aya asked if you could have a conversation about the leadership topic again

and the few meetings, interviews, discussions, meeting with the management team, meeting with Shalway, when we spend a few days together to understand how we can collaborate meeting with the rest of the management team, Bastien, Josh, Julian. So all of that, and then gradually we agreed that. So there was lots of discussions of how to deal with the situation with like

net a mind, conflicts of interest, how I will collaborate with Foundation, lots of discussions, then joining the Ethereum Foundation offside to get that's like soft introduction to the entire team and see. what is the reception, whether people feel comfortable with that in the context of all the challenges of this joint leadership and my position. And I think that we were pretty comfortable with announcing it. So that's the story. And for you, Shaouet, it was more of a natural transition, right? More natural, but it was also not that long-term plant.

I can openly say it. It's like, but Aya did have, so Aya is now the president of the Eastern Foundation boat. Yeah, she has this idea of like to have some transition more than one year ago. So, but during just the EF internal we have so many things to do. So she didn't able, she couldn't make it to be happened earlier. But last year we have several conversations around like, what the EF could be like. And then this conversation helps us to think more about like,

okay, Ethereum 2025, we want to some internal change and how it can impact the ecosystem better. And so such discussion triggered us to form a new leadership system in the same foundation. So, yeah, I think the story is like what much has described it. And then our combination is like there were, I mean, before this, there were some choices that the leadership has been thinking about. But after all, I also participate in some discussion, but it's not my decision there. But after all, I do believe that this combination is the best for everyone and at EF and also for the ecosystem.

Cool. You guys are coming in at a somewhat difficult moment, right? So I think it's kind of, it's well known that Ethereum has got an amazing, an amazing technical community, right? So I think there's no other network that. is as resilient in terms of client development and kind of plurality and kind of network decentralization and so on. So kind of like, I mean, too much, you know this kind of like as a client developer. Kind of there's no kind of like any kind of piece of code that goes in a client is kind of like is scrutinized by probably 20 very capable people and kind of this can, this cannot be set for our networks. Right. So kind of like this is kind of like this level of scrutiny for kind of

like open source software is really rare. So Ethereum really has that going for it. But kind of if you look at how the general blockchain ecosystem has evolved over the past years, kind of other chains have outpaced Ethereum in terms of throughput and usage. And kind of they can do things at a lower cost per transaction. So I think kind of a lot of the unrest that, was kind of like in the community was from this perceived lack of vision. I think there were kind of like some very, I mean, there's always kind of like this very

loud kind of Ethereum as money kind of crew that I don't, I don't think kind of, kind of who are clamoring for more marketing and so on. I don't think that's actually the thing. So kind of, I think kind of like, but, but a clear vision as to how to, how to shape up Ethereum over the coming years. This is something that was clearly lacking. And in part, this is also owed to kind of like how the Ethereum Foundation kind of saw itself, right? It kind of sees itself as a steward, kind of as an enabler, but not as a commander. So kind of like other ecosystem foundations don't see themselves that way. They kind of say, this is the, I don't know, Solana roadmap now implemented. So while in a very broad sense, kind of Ethereum remains technically unmatched usage.

kind of tells a somewhat mixed, more mixed story. So I would kind of like to use this hour to kind of talk with you guys about kind of like how we kind of reconcile that and kind of like how you guys are seeing that in terms of, you know, future for the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum as a large kind of, yeah. So maybe let's start off with kind of the role of the Ethereum Foundation. So kind of the Ethereum Foundation kind of it sees itself as an enabler, not a commander, but it is also the main funder for research, right? So kind of like how do you see the Ethereum Foundation's role evolving?

You say that we are the main funding source for research. And even within the Ethereum ecosystem, I think that's much more complex situation, positively much more complex. There are fantastic researchers at the Ethereum Foundation, And it's definitely there's lots of funding delegated to that research that is within the EF

and through various academic grants and collaborations with other players in the ecosystem. But then you look around and there are fantastic researchers at multiple teams all around. So there are researchers at the ALTO teams, a fantastic level of ZK research that is interior ecosystem, MEV research that leaves all the other

ecosystems behind, if you think about the quality of execution, the quality of market mechanisms that we have on Ethereum, then you have the researchers on engineering, scaling, everywhere in all the different client teams. And the funding sources for those are really diverse. So you have fantastic VC capital coming to Ethereum and still favoring Ethereum as the best of the chains and the best of the ecosystems. This is this also grants from various foundations that are independent of the Ethereum Foundation. I think that we see some Tao's places like Noses that have a lot of support for much of the Ethereum values

that are like the same aligned within between all those different organizations because we believe in angels values of privacy, security, open source, censorship resistance chain, to bring it to users around the world. So now if we think that we deliver that message of the direction of a strategy of scaling 1, scaling blobs, improving QX and interrupt, it's still not something that is imposed on the ecosystem by foundation that we just invented it internally answer to people, this is what we're doing now. There's a result of the hundreds of conversation with the ecosystem of listening through the social media channels, through forums, through telegram channels, groups, conversations at the events, listening to everyone and understanding those voices in depth, why this request,

why these challenges, why the crisis, if there is crisis, what are the opportunities? and then just extracting the essence of all of these and communicating it clearly. So becoming this coordinator, communicator, the voice that many people are looking at to listen where we go together. So it's still the steward role and an enabler role, but it's still the ecosystem that is very decentralized

and still very aligned or unifying in the vision and values that connect us. I think the EF's role is resilient to the conditions in the ecosystem, and it is dynamic changes over time. So, like, we do have a strong research team. We do have some focus, things, features thing in the EF, technical thing. This is, like, this thing should be targeting on the most important. topic that no one else is working on right now.

And I think the EF would never stop, like, to empower other people to do more, but just for efficiency and for what to make the best impact in time, then the EF would focus on multiple things. And also, I feel like the EFs, our, I mean, Tomash and I, in our turn, like, we will like the EF to be more opinionated to some basic topics. Like, if it's neutral, credible as a coordinator to help a steward ecosystem, but like the things we wanted to value, or like, the technical strategy, the strategies, like, we want to target sooner.

that things are we're not getting slowed by optics too much in the next few years. Yeah, I mean, you both make extremely valid points and that kind of like the Ethereum community is so strong also in part because the Ethereum Foundation never played this kind of dictator-like role

in saying, look, this is the roadmap now follow it. But I think kind of, of like having some sort of no star vision to kind of focus the efforts from the community, this is really important because otherwise kind of like it's too scattered and it doesn't really come together. So I totally understand that it's a difficult line to toe, kind of how to focus these smart and independent teams into kind of, kind of, how to focus. smart and independent teams into kind of a coherent vision, but without kind of like letting them run off kind of like completely in

everyone's direction, right? Kind of like, so yeah, I'm 100% with you on that. And I think it's very, it's also important to kind of be extremely mindful of the ecosystem we have, right? So with kind of like two executive directors. is in place. How will you guys kind of divvy it up? Will you just talk

everything out or kind of will you kind of say this is your domain and this is my domain or how we're this work going forward? Yeah, I think it's very regular but at the same time it's regular in a sense that we have

conversations all the time but without some predetermined time. So I think it's casual conversation, collaboration on multiple topics, very natural splitting of responsibilities because I think both of us are just willing to pick up whatever is needed to be addressed. So I think we are able to rely on each other. There's been conversations and collaboration that was very fruitful so far without any problems. And yeah, sometimes as two or three hours conversations on various topics,

internal or external and strategy on vision. Sometimes I'm a bit chaotic with talking about the vision internally at the show. I just like converse it to some super distilled and clear communication. Sometimes we split some of the policies and procedures. Joey has fantastic understanding of the internal organization, of the foundation, of the foundation. We are both super aligned to like things, to budgets, to structure of the organization.

I take advantage of the fact that I'm traveling all the time and talking to a lot of people. So big aspect of communicating through the meetings, reaching out to community ecosystem, partners, traditional finance institutions. This is definitely very often my role, but I think in Asia, Shouet is much more active. Shouai probably will have much to add here. Yeah, I think there's too much to add here. described like and this mutual transparent communication is important. I think we were happy to involve each other to the different conversations with other

with other people's. And then at the same time, we usually would say, okay, this topic, okay, we both involved, but when there's some timing decision needs to be made, maybe one of us, you do it or I do it. And it's usually very simply, then we will divide the duty. And then, yeah, the whole process, the whole collaboration is like a divide and conquer. Like I recently working on some like treasury management stuff and then too much working on some like hiring, like the hiring team establishment, things like that. So we have different domains, but it's like also for the, yeah, for the most important topics, we will make decisions together.

I think this division would happen naturally. Yeah, it sounds like it's a very symbiotic kind of relationship where kind of you talk a lot of things out and then kind of assign responsibilities kind of ad hoc or kind of like in a more structured way. Fantastic. So kind of we've talked about kind of like how you guys kind of work together. Maybe let's talk about kind of kind of this notion of narrative leadership. So kind of like there have been kind of a number of different ideas of what Ethereum is and what Ethereum should be. of like ranging from kind of like the world computer to kind of money essentially.

How have you guys aligned on kind of like which of these visions to support and to kind of build towards? Yeah, I think the Ethereum has this aspect of plurality of visions. So we like when you look at the IS and Vitalics document, it really draws the vision for Ethereum and the values, it really reminds the values of Ethereum. And we keep reminding them. That's all about privacy, security, Alpinsters access, censorship resistance on the chain, on the protocol. So they, within the plurality of visions, I think that many people proposed over many years,

like directions, which were either specific of what they were building or specific of the times of various challenges in the Ethereum space, right? So we were talking about the computer, and I think this was computer with AI is still something that very much resonates with what we're building. There were discussions about ultrasound, the global settlement. And I think when we talk about Defi and L2s and Enterprise, that global settlement layer really has the great meaning and remains very important for Ethereum. And then you had also the visions of really the pure ultra-decentralization, and many people who fight for privacy, decentralization, for maximal censorship for resistance are very important for the vision of Ethereum.

All of that matters, and I think some other aspects of it are very often realized by many L-2s. And I feel that for particular north stars that are slightly more narrow, scope, this for L2s define their North Stars and compete for many of the, many with, sorry, many of the L1s. So you can look at many alternative L1s to Ethereum. Really for us are competing with the leading top L2s that are now scaling, distributing, Ethereum values and reusing what L1 provides as a platform as a base for them. Now for ETHAM, I'm a for ETHIUM, I'm myself see this like both computer with AI, but general like open, autonomous solution for the entire world economy.

This is very broad and I think that it's really showing like how grandiose, how big scale of the Ethereum vision is. But when we talk about the vision that broads, it's a bit harder to tell people like how do you act within it. Like they have to find their own path and maybe for very customizable, special L2s, this is a bit easier. So they can go there and see, okay, this is the aspect of that world economy,

world autonomous computer that I want to build. When you look at the theorem, it's a bit more like the network effects, connectivity, and the base layer for computation, for access to data and computation, and coordination, and the ledger, everything together,

which starts to remind, like that's a bit like you would say, what would be the vision for the internet. Yes, it was connecting people, about it, but then you would say, oh, is it just about connecting people or connecting systems or connecting machines or is it about the network, is about the financial system? And I think with Ethereum, it's also very much visible. It's a coordination, it's finance, and then particular challenges appear. But that's why we also have to talk about this one, one to your vision and state so clearly.

Now we think about protocol. Protocol management is the Ethereum Foundation role, and we scale a one, while scale blobs. Now we improve the intraop and UX just to show that network effect on the journey. So but kind of like if I kind of distill this into kind of like one kind of punchy byline, kind of it would be kind of utility over number go up.

Is that fair? Is the impact and winning for sure? Sure. I mean, when we talk about the values, we know that the values would not have that impact without really winning and showing that you can get adoption. You can onboard users. You can connect systems. You can get network effects. Is it utility in a sense as like benefits for the users globally impacting everyone's lives in a positive way? And in a way that they themselves define for themselves what positive means, right? So not someone defined. turning top-down of what really is good or bad for other people. So when you start talking too much about utility,

then maybe you lose that neutrality of the protocol. And by essentially we have to think about Ethereum as being everywhere and connecting everything, so it can be neutral because if you exclude some aspects of the economy, some aspects of automation, aspects of that word computer, then you're no longer neutral, because how did you end up with that decision

of what is excluded? Why didn't you connect everything? And yeah, in this sense, that utility arrives with everyone who builds on top of Ethereum and scaling Ethereum makes sure that that utility can be immediately accessible, available, and that people want to build more on Ethereum.

Yeah, I hear that. kind of you're already alluding to kind of the different L2s that kind of live on top of Ethereum. Maybe let's talk about this for a while because I think this is one of the, it's one of the really difficult problems for Ethereum right now. So kind of there's this number of ecosystems that kind of live on top of Ethereum that are often usually pretty insular that are not well connected to each other or to Ethereum in fact. And in some sense, they could even be kind of described as somewhat parasitic because kind of like they

kind of take transaction volume away from Ethereum. And often they don't actually kind of, they kind of proclaim the Ethereum values, but often they don't really. see them through, right? So kind of if you're in a situation where essentially you have a centralized sequencer, you have exactly one party building blocks, right? This is very much against the spirit of kind of like openness and resilience and permissionlessness and so on. So how do you navigate that?

I think that's when you say there are situations when you have, when you have the roll-ups claiming to be roll-ups. And then the question is, who agrees that this is a roll-up? Like anyone can claim it, right? So on one side, you want to have that permissionless aspect if anyone can launch a roll-up. On the other hand, you have to provide some guidance of what it means and which roll-ups are safe,

because you care about the security aspect of Ethereum. And the branding of security is important, because the user experience means that you feel comfortable in the ecosystem and you feel that there are some guarantees of security and guarantees that you understand it without understanding all the technical details and without verifying every line of code or every system. Sure, the verification may be the aspect of blockchains in general and the blockchain values, but you also want to have onboarding your users and make it a good UX.

So you have L2B as the review of the stages of roll-ups, right? the stage zero, stage one, stage two, the define different progression of the security of user that moves assets to those roll-ups. And even if you have centralized sequencer on L2, then the questions are if that sequencer fails, if there is a liveliness failure, will the users be able to withdraw assets back to 01?

Like, are there assets safe? So that's why we very often will encourage to mint all the assets on L1 and then breach them to L2. Exactly, but that's not how it happens today, right? So kind of like if you look at, say, for instance, a base ecosystem, almost all the assets that kind of like are traded on base are actually minted on base. And kind of like this idea of kind of like withdrawing to L1, this only works of kind of like all assets are natively minted on L1, right?

You can't withdraw a native L2 asset back to L1. Yes, I think there will be much more guidance on those aspects. So for many high value assets, when you see the real-doil assets, the stable coins and so on, there are multiple approaches. You can have a situation when you really rely on insurer and say that there are the guarantees of your security of assets, what will happen if there is some failure. At the same time, I'm absolutely convinced that any large institution that is issuing on blockchain want to avoid any failures, even if they can later have some kind of social consensus or the corporate or legal way of resolving the situation, they will not want to ever observe it with their customers.

Like, their customers will be really disappointed if there's any failure that you cannot resolve entirely on chain. We have this transparent on Chinway. So that's why we see a lot of those assets being actually minted on 1. And this is like the high value funds that go for Ethereum. And then they bridge to L2s with a lot of restrictions and verification. For many of the tokens, meme coins, coins, those like fun exploration, there you have situations when a minting obviously happened on L2. But even then, like when you have larger L2 protocols with,

with larger liquidity, I think that the situation in the future will be very clear, that you may have this risk-seeking capital that will keep reaching to L2s, but we'll be coming back to L1 for the time of safety. And for every single operator, the capital provider, they'll have some percentage of assets banking that safe zone, settlement zone of L1, which means that when you look at globally at the entirety of the economy, L1 will be the space of the settlements of the largest like liquidity source that you'll be borrowing to more risky escapades in L2s. Also, altus very often don't have this like a global or neutral vision.

So they take some shortcuts, right? So you suggested that this one like centralization shortcut, like might be alignment with some particular jurisdictions, right? Some altus might feel more American. Some of them may feel more Chinese. Some of them may feel more European. Some of them may be targeting particular set of solutions. Maybe some of them will be customized for gaming. Maybe some of them will be targeting some demographic in the way how they market their solution.

While Ethereum for all of them provides that layer of settlement security and providing a global brand. So once again, when we look at the L2s, we will be opinionated in a way. We'll start talking more about what we expect on the sense of security, what we expect, on branding, when you can claim its Ethereum roll-up, what we expect of like contribution to the network effects, collaboration on interoperability, on tooling, innovation back to the Ethereum ecosystem, the way we communicate all about interoperability between the L2s and L1s, but also how open those L2s are to collaborate with other L2s. So this very, very interoperable, friendly ecosystem that has some very healthy competition and innovation on user acquisition.

Altogether will be onboarding to the ecosystem, users, and capital. So I think definitely success of Altus brings developers, users, and capital to 11 and increases significantly the demand for the block space on 01. At the same time, we also have to run a bit ahead. delivered a block space that seemingly, like, because now you have questions, so we increase the L1 block space and still the fees are laws. So why would you do that? Clearly, this is a commitment to the future so everyone can be very confident that L1 will scale. So we can build on O1, we can build more L2s that we are very safe building an L2 that we plan to scale 8 times, 16 times, 30 times over the years.

And now one will always be there and it will be the best platform to launch L2. There's a lot to unpack there. So kind of like I kind of, I want to talk about kind of like the interplay of different L2s in just a bit. But kind of before we kind of dive into that, let's talk about kind of this idea of

a global settlement layer, which is kind of like what you're alluding to, right? So kind of like if you look at Ethereum today, Ethereum processes around a million and a half transactions per day at the moment, right? So if you look at financial transactions between, for instance, banks and large players and so on, which by kind of like your argument should definitely settle on L1, transactions between different L2's emission of stocks and so on. So I think there's on the order of 50,000 listed stocks.

worldwide. So kind of like if you want to do a settlement at least once per stock per day, kind of on L1, if you want to kind of register all new stocks on L1, then kind of there's other things. Like for instance, E&S domains kind of that kind of like, I mean, there's going to be name chain and so on. But in principle, kind of like you should be able to kind of kind of have them on L1 if you wanted to. So kind of like, so I'm just kind of like, I'm not making myself very clear here,

but kind of like if you look at kind of like the global volume of things that kind of like should be settled on L1, a million and a half transactions per day probably won't cut it. So let's talk about kind of like how to scale that up and what the plans are for scaling L1 block space. Yeah, sure. So we have planned for 3x of the L1 block space this year.

So you could target something around 100 million gas per block this year. So this is mostly done for a coordination between the execution clients, verification of like where the some additional optimizations are needed because many of the clients show clearly that they're ready to go there. We see L2s actually using the same technology for scaling. their layer. And now the question is, are there some additional bottlenecks around the consensus, coordination, the networking decentralization of L1 that actually show you differences between how L1 operates and L2 operates? So far we feel very confident about that growth this year. Then we

ask questions about how we go to the next REACs next year. And that you see like Dengret proposed those numbers, but they are not just. south of blue, they are designed based on the conversations with all the clients and understanding what is in the pipeline on the EIPs. So some of the EIPs that will help us, that will ship in Glamsterdam, will help the clients to support this further free X scaling. So you have already like 300, 360 million gas per blog next year and continuation of that. And you mentioned there's 1.5 million transactions per day. So this is very often, there's a bit more complex transactions

because when you look at the payments, like the most basic payments, this will be like 10 or 20 million transactions and the current throughput. And as soon we have 60 million, I expect that maybe in May you have 60 million gas as a block size, the max box size. Coming back to once again to this 1.5 million transactions

and all the equity and what you've, have to have there. So we want to support, like, all the most valuable identity, most valuable identity for people, for agents, for real-bile assets. So you have real estate, you have the, obviously, like equities trading, the high value, like debt, equities, FX trading, or you have maybe transactions of hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions of dollars. So I clearly remember my work at the, um, um, like, technology for the FX task. at Citibank and we would look at the time when the non-form payroll was announced and you would have these like hundreds of thousands of transactions and they you know the minimum

notion of there would be one million nobody would trade anything below one million because this was the ticket size that you would just accuse so whenever you would say one you meant one million and those transactions were flying and within milliseconds and you want that to to have always the easy path to l1 and those transactions nowadays I think the cost, like this data, good to verify it, but I think like it's between $5 and $25 per million of notional that you have, depending on the markets, it can be less, it can be more, but those are the costs in the traditional finance. And nowadays, when you look at the price of transactions on Ethereum on a layer 2, this is like between

one cent and one dollar. But it also means that easily those transactions in the future, they can, first of all, because of all the volumes, when they move to 201, they can feel like any scaling for 10, 100 or 1000 X for the next years. And they will always choose a one first for security. And then for scaling and for the cost reduction, they'll move all the remaining transactions to L2 for scaling. But they'll be settling and keeping the most safe liquidity on 01. Another question is how much of the liquidity we can move to the global economy, how secure, how safe they feel. The more L1 scales, the more also L2s can take off all these transactions that are secondary market of the daily trading.

So all of these movements will take advantage of O1 and O1 will be able to really price those highest value transaction, significance because there will be always willingness to pay for the security and safety on the L1. It's just for now we are in the scaling time, in the growth time, in the user onboarding time, showing support for L2s, and the scale is nowhere there to support the entire global economy, but when we go to this 100x, 1000x, multiplied by all the L2s, successful in Tucson Interim, then you can start talking about this quadrillion dollars of global economy and assets to be very safely transferable to blockchain. And that's why we work on security as well.

that's a really interesting kind of vision for Ethereum kind of as this almost kind of like how we kind of talked about rolled-ups back in the day right kind of like before they kind of became their own standalone ecosystems kind of like we thought of them kind of as these liminal spaces where kind of like transactions would be processed and rolled up and then kind of ultimately kind of everything would come back to Ethereum. So if that's kind of the vision, kind of, will kind of the three time scaling and then three times scaling again, will those kind of suffice, right? Kind of like there's 8 billion people in the world. So even if you kind of expect everyone to at least kind of like have an identity somewhere. I mean, you should probably tell people like for your most valuable things, like do them on L1.

So at least everyone kind of should have an L1 account, right? So that's 8 billion L1 accounts right there. So kind of like, and kind of this is why kind of like way back in the day, and maybe shall wait, kind of, maybe this is kind of like a question directed at you. So kind of where this kind of idea of sharding initially came in, right? Kind of like and kind of when we talked about shards back in the day, we kind of we thought about kind of like, we thought about asynchronously linked. charts with their own execution environments and so on.

So kind of a thousand, twenty-four charts of kind of like, and scaling Ethereum by a factor of a thousand, obviously that would help a lot more than kind of scaling by a factor of three and then scaling by a factor of three again. And so kind of like, and I mean, obviously this also generalizes. So kind of like you could, yeah. So any ideas to kind of bring that old concept of sharding with kind of like standalone execution environments back?

Short-term plan we don't, is no more stay-alone exclusion engine to be added for now. But I think you can see the recent the ZKEV or like RIS 5 discussion. Like we don't, you know, stop to think about what is the better exclusion engine. And then this will be a long-term plan

to, for the research. and the developer to investigate more before we have enough competent to switch the execution engine this time. Okay, but it's something that the Ethereum Foundation kind of thinks about. Yeah, we have many people is working on this topic, and there's also many Xenal, you know, Riggs-5, Zikavian things, are actually prototyping this and the product like this. But I would say this is part of our focus in the next five-year plan.

Maybe not what we will deliver in two years, but yeah, it is in our research role map. Fantastic. Cool. That's super good to hear. Then maybe let's move on to kind of like the current L2 landscape. So kind of like too much. You already talked about how L2 is and kind of like what calls itself and L2 is very divergent. So kind of I also love L2 beat, but I also think it's somewhat sad that we actually need it. Right. So kind of if you look at some, I mean, I mean, clearly kind of like what level of security you want and need heavily depends on your use case.

Right. So kind of like, as you said, kind of like if you're settling, if you're settling debt with kind of like a minimum order size of a million, then kind of like paying five or $10 in gas fees is not an issue at all. So kind of, and you should be willing to do that, right? If you're trading in-game assets, that same level of securities probably not need. I mean, not a gamer. So I won't judge here. But kind of like, yeah. So and kind of being very transparent about kind of like what level of security URL to offers,

probably not so much to users, but kind of to developers who kind of develop on these platforms is really important. And I feel like there's a very wide spectrum of solutions. So kind of like there's kind of like sovereign roll-ups kind of on one hand. and then there's kind of like Tyco on the other end, which kind of like more or less settles everything to Ethereum. And then kind of like there's things in between with kind of centralized sequences and kind of like then federation of sequences and kind of like that there's a question of kind of like whether you can actually escape to L1, whether you can actually have faultproofs and so on,

an escalation mechanism and so on. So how, and if you look at how the ecosystem currently chooses an L2, kind of as an engineer, really frustrates me that kind of apparently DAP developers don't pay this a lot of attention. There's very high value ecosystems on some L2s that are actually extremely centralized. So how do you explain that? And how do you, how do you, do you think there's, there's the need of kind of vocalizing about this more? Yeah, I mean, you started by saying that it's, it's beaded that we need L2B, but it feels very natural. I mean, someone takes decision even at the beginning, whether they choose Ethereum or other L1 ecosystem, and they, they look somewhere for that information. Like, it's there, it's available for blog posts, through Twitter or other social media.

They can start hearing from France. Like, yeah, this is where it's very valuable. That's where the values are. This is where it's safe. But this is a big plague of the blockchain ecosystems, like the entire industry, that it's really hard to get that information. So every venue like LTP helps a lot. And if you make the system permissionless, then anyone can launch anything without any reputation.

And now you seek the information at the beginning of building over time, the resilience and trust in the thing and the trustless thing, right? Trust in the trustless thing that you build over time. So maybe you still have some long-range attacks, but you say, okay, this code base was verified many times. Even when we talk about Bitcoin or Ethereum, we say, look, those systems existed for many years. so are verified and we feel safer. But if the user comes for the first time to the industry, they need something that will show maybe the list of the ecosystem, say how many years they are in,

was the perception of their safety, what their values are. And it's the same for L2. So it's the same for the defy applications. Like if someone deploys a defy application, an AMM on Ethereum, you'd like to compare them. Like, what is the liquidity there, how they're designed? Do they have immutability or proxies? Do they have support from the major auditors verifying and confirming that a codebase is correct?

So I think on every single layer of blockchain, we're looking for this. Until we have some really advanced, high-quality AI models that can give us data assessment independently of any external providers. If you can launch on your own device, like as a device, AI, that will tell you, this is safe to use, this is the blockchain to use, this is DFI2, this is L2 to use. It's really hard to do it the other way. Users, developers will choose some ecosystems when they feel they have the best parameters, so like the maybe the best users, best users for their particular applications, the best liquidity.

What is very important for us is they always check, they will always check how much of that that connection of like how much of that security and censorship resistance aspect from the L1, they have in the ecosystem. And they either can verify it by analyzing the contracts governing the L2 or the design architecture of the L2, or they can check it via L2B or other sources. They're comparable. And this is the aspect of branding of iturium. Like if you claim that your Ethereum roll-up at some point, we have to maybe start saying,

no, this is not a roll-up or not, they aren't insecure. No, they don't interrupt with everything else. and if the interoperability improves, and this is a big challenge for us for sure, like this will be a huge effort of the entire ecosystem to bring that good feel of the same tooling, network effects, interoperability, so those choices maybe are much clearer.

It means that it doesn't mean that you'll be always choosing the same L2, but it will be very clear based on your type of application that you're deploying where you go, and it will be very clear that you always want that connection with L1. So I think that I was exploring recently a lot of conversations with enterprises, like institutions, traditional finance, and very often they push exactly for the values that we're talking about. They are asking about the privacy for the customers.

They asking about the censorship resistance for access to the market and no censoring of the financial transactions. they are asking for variability and an open source aspect of it. And while they're asking for the customizations for that, they want to have control over some aspects of their internal business processes, internal matching, their customers' interactions for their own L2s, they do ask about L1 that they can allow their customers to venture to, to have this global neutral market.

You don't go now to the institutions that ask for their own L2s, rarely adhere that. They see that there's a huge value in participating in the global economy for Ethereum 1. They have some needs for the L2 for scaling, but they always want to provide a lot of like the transactional processes supported by privacy on L1. So when they support all of this, then we also have even more funding for privacy for users, for retail users. So I see a lot of, and you ask about Taika, like the spectrum, right?

So DICO being a base roll-up and Justin's direction towards the native roll-up and base roll-up. It's really important. There's lots of optimists from Justin, from others that look some of the progress on the CKVMs, what you see on the if-proves website. You can go there and you can see how all these CQVMs compete for the performance of proving. All of that shows like a lot of promise that you can accelerate this timeline. So it's five years and this is very reasonable that we, We push constantly that there's technology changing, there is AI, it accelerates our research,

and it means that we see much more of a progress on ZK than we expected already. So maybe this is the same for the future. So maybe in two years we have like super operational based native roll-ups with ZKVM, which is very close to what you were talking about when you mentioned sharding of the past with the composability of multiple L2s within this native rollout containers. I want to believe all of this kind of because kind of like technically it makes sense, right? But kind of we've seen time and time again

that the technically best system doesn't always win, right? Kind of like there's other kind of considerations that kind of play into that. And I think the one that people always talk about is Better Marx versus VHS and that was 40 years ago. But I mean, we have more recent ones to kind of as to kind of like 4G standards and so on. So kind of YMAX was superior to LTE and LTE still won out. So it's kind of like,

this happens all the time that kind of like there's some sort of, there's a solution that is understood to be the better solution, but the other, the alternative still wins out. So kind of like if you are in this position where US presidents kind of launch their shit coins on

kind of alternative protocols does it does it confer enough gravitas and kind of seriousness to kind of take away from that technically valid claim from Ethereum that kind of it's the best solution kind of like how

yeah so yeah I think this is exactly where Ethereum wins I mean, so Iteron very often will be, maybe people will ask about it's, yeah, as the most secure solution, but as maybe a rougher on the ages, like, taking advantage of all the latest developments in the, in like accelerating the blockchain design, because there are, there'll be always some, some fresh and unburdened systems that will say, oh, we do the more transactions per second. So, so on then you would say, does it mean that this, like, best current technology wins, or we are very confident that this is what we all bring to Ethereum with the respect for all the

values because this is how we attract the customers, the users, capital and so on. So almost you can say this is exactly why Ethereum is winning because it has the technology that is really caring about the delivery of everything that matters. And at a speed that we are considering, this is our task to improve that efficiency of delivery of all the improvements. that if there is a lag between the innovation and adoption to Ethereum of some solutions, that's not a two-year lag, it's not a one-year lag, but it's maybe like a few months before we see, oh, this is really functioning and it can go in the next four correct two works from now.

But we know that the developer ecosystem, the tooling, the adoption from the financial industry, the adoption of users, so look at recent announcements from the acceleration of WorldCoin, users onboarding, based on boarding, a lot of users. Starknet recently showing that game, that Focus Tree that's got like 200,000 users, and it's growing in the App Store, massive success.

So all of this shows us like, this technology is winning. Like we see the numbers and it's winning and see, and we have all twos that actually strengthened that and show us that on top of it, we have capacity to compete with any alternative O-1. Through those O-2s, they can adopt even faster any scaling capacity solutions.

They can go to the massively scaled blocks, novel P2P systems, and we bring it also to OMA. So I would say that the trapness of technology, but not in the sense of security or caring about the values and delivering that promise, this is not draft. This is what we always care about. But this sometimes delay the innovation because you need a bit of verification. Is that maps verified? Are those ZK solutions really, really fine? Will it cause the massive bug that you have to keep patching

and then you will not even be able to confirm that everything was fine? We've seen that with ZK technology in the past. We have hundreds of researchers and testers and engineers verifying all the claims about all the IPs that go into the system. if you're kind of championing the L2s in kind of this competition with alternative L1s, how do you see kind of the problem of cross L2 interoperability? So kind of like if currently kind of like I want to exit from optimism and go to Arbitrum, it'll take me a week, right?

Kind of I could probably send a postcard faster. So it's kind of, and kind of the varying. message standards and I mean, so should that should kind of Ethereum kind of institute a message passing

standard or kind of like a kind of because kind of one of the core propositions of kind of having L2s is that having L2 is on the same L1 is that in principle

you can kind of have this cross L2 communication without necessarily kind of going via the L1, right? But we don't see that yet. So kind of we see kind of a number of siloed ecosystems on top of L2, on top of L1 that kind of don't act like a unified ecosystem. So is there a way to kind of make this happen? And if so, make this happen faster?

Yeah, sure. I mean, so there is open intense initiative coordinated by Josh Rudolph. We see the fantastic bridging solutions appearing in the DRMX system all the time. The fact that we need all that many bridging solutions and that we still don't have one that says, yeah, this is like globally acceptable and best experience, this remains a challenge. And this is what will be the major coordination and research effort from the foundation. I totally agree with you that this experience is not best yet. I think that probably the existing bridging solutions,

you wouldn't wait a week. It's just that you would sacrifice some of the security assumptions. You would have some third parties providing the temporary custody or some kind of insurance level. So user experience definitely is not on the weak level, but the user experience with the guarantees of Ethereum would be there. and this will be massive effort. And I think there's lots of challenges there.

But it also means that look, this challenges will wait for any other ecosystem because we expect the growth of the demand to always be beyond of anything that the L1 can deliver, combined with the customization requirements and some kind of control over the chain, that for example enterprise, when they, like the financial institutions,

when they come and they say, we need something where we have more control and we need the global system where we actually have no control because it's neutral and it's censorship resistant. So this together means that any other ecosystem that will compete with it area will face those challenges sooner or later.

And we are spending a lot of effort on this, but it also means that in many ways, we are already ahead of other. who will face that as well. And I think this is a challenge for other alternative ones. Like they look at Ethereum and they think, all right, consistently, the customers that we are approaching, potential customers that we're approaching, or any institution that we want to invite, they say to us,

no, like we use Ethereum because there on Ethereum we feel less like a customer. It's just ours. Like we just take it. So, and we can shape it the way we want. and we can participate in global economy. So it's really hard to compete with that. When you want to treat someone as customer, but they say, no, we just want to use the network

and get all those network effects. And then they get support from L2s that actually come and treat them as customers, and they say you have everything this together. So massive challenge from us, from L2s, inviting L2s to help us with those interrupt standards. There are multiple proposals. We see, I see the op-interrupt proposal,

We see various like bridges that come, like, list many. I wouldn't like to start listing because then I'll omit too many. The Open Intense Initiative, and various solutions in the maybe like MEV order flow space. As you see like the, they're all absurdity solutions and so on so on. So the all of this has to feel unified and it comes also with with tooling like wallets, the user experience, maybe LLMs will come with help. the account abstraction that is coming to to do you know Kim of Impact trial and the first solutions and they'll continue.

All of that together, a lot of work. And that's why we talk scaling everyone and scaling blobs, but also interop and UX, maybe possibly the biggest challenge of all of them. Cool. So kind of if you look ahead, I mean, you guys just started. So kind of like if you look ahead one year and maybe five years,

what does success look like for you guys? So for me, look, my term is two years with a foundation, which means that for me, success means that I really show that, like within two years we can achieve a lot of things that people are saying that are to be solved now. That if we mention those things, like scaling go-on, scaling blobs, and improve and drop UX, that within these two years, it should be a massive change and a feeling that, yeah, this really happened.

And it means that even if we set the goals, then the success for me means go much beyond those goals, right? That it's really absolute win, a huge impact, really great vibes between L2s and L1s and everyone in ecosystem. The funds that will deploy trillion-dollar level fans on Ethereum, The L1 that everyone is excited about, that it's just like, it has such a huge capacity and such a high value set of transactions that it generates massive fees. So all of that together is a success. And beyond that, there's a other story. For me, this is like two years' focus around everything that needed attention, make sure that's communication on all of this feels great. and then I'd be really happy to see others to continue.

Yeah. What about you, shall we? I think it's for short term I want Dish to be the default choice for all the use cases, including that L2 choose what the L1 is. and then it's from application layer, it's from the institution layer, and then it's from all the builders that they want to build something, they should choose Xeran because it's the most secure, it's the most robust.

This is the best trend they should build. When they choose blockchain technology, this should be the default for them. And I also want to improve the UX in order to, for the users that they don't even need to be aware of blockchain exists in the app. So I think it takes some time to improve our wireless systems and it takes some time to provide a very good pipeline for the app layer to improve the UX. So, but I think this world won't be too far away. So if kind of like each of you kind of had to give one number one priority for your, for your term, in kind of like just one, because kind of like we talked about a lot of things, kind of, we talked about scaling block space and blob space and air two into our property and user experience and so on.

So if it's just one priority, what, what, what will. you kind of optimized for? For people to come and see like thousands or millions of applications on Ethereum ecosystem all feeling like one and, uh, yeah. What about you showy? I would say to bring Ethereum alive again. Good parting words. Thank you both for coming on.

We will share kind of like other places you can follow you guys, personally and the Ethereum Foundation on Twitter and elsewhere. And thank you so much for stepping up. Thank you, Frederick. Thank you so happy. Thank you so much. Thank you, Frederica. It was massive pleasure.