Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - ETHPrague: ETH Renaissance - Austin Griffith, Brenda Loya, Joseph Schweitzer, Marek Olszewski

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

After a decade of existence, Ethereum has gone a long way from its initial whitepaper, yet many efforts in scaling and finding product-market-fit have been severely criticized for falling short of their promise. However, despite numerous other ‘Ethereum killers’ being launched over the years, none has managed to attract so many developers and liquidity while sticking true to ethos that (once) powered and united this industry. This year’s ETHPrague plans to confront exactly these existential challenges and steward community culture towards addressing outside criticism and external reality checks. Ethereum’s development, while adapting to market pressures, it always aimed to stick true to its core values in order to remain a technological bedrock for the future of humanity.Topics covered in this episode:The vision for ETH PragueTakeaways from main sessionsHigh-level overview of ETH PragueThe resurgence of PolkadotEuropean crypto summer eventsThe general state of the Ethereum ecosystemCelo’s transition to L2L2 liquidity fragmentationChoosing the right L2 to buildImproving hackathonsLightning roundFinal wordsEpisode links:Austin Griffith on XMarek Olszewski on XBrenda Loya on XJoseph Schweitzer on XBuidlGuidl DAO on XCelo on XTellor 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.

there will be not enough block space for any one L1. And so it's almost the final puzzle piece to make L2s be able to communicate with each other in real time. Developers building cool things and getting rich. And for a touch there, I think that we saw some developers using less decentralized L1s to get rich. And I think that drove more developers to go there and do that thing, running pump and dumps, getting rich. I think that the L2 ecosystem on top of the L1 ecosystem is primed for a huge application summer. Making Ethereum the underdog is a very dangerous thing to do. You're betting against Ethereum.

Ethereum can take the whole game. The L1 is scaling faster than I think people will realize. They may get smack in the side of the head if they miss it. They're not talking about a 2x improvement. They're talking about 100x improvements,000x improvements. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Corse 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Pintera Capital and Ledger, trust Corus 1 with their assets. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos, ensuring your stake, is responsibly managed.

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chain or secure the network with just one G&M. and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at nosus.io. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today is the epicenter at ETH Prague panel, and we have a couple of awesome guests here. So up first is our most elusive co-host, Joseph, who's been our co-host exactly once.

We will twice? Twice. Twice. Okay, you kept count. It wasn't so difficult, huh? we'll have to bring you back on sometime soon. There was one DevCon roundup episode. I have to remember if there were two,

because this is either the third or fourth. But anyway, it's in many years. So I'll defer back and say, I'm delinquent regardless. Cool. So you guys know Joseph. There's also Brenda here. Brenda, maybe two sentences about yourself for the people who don't know you yet.

Yes, so I'm Brenda. I'm the CEO and one of the founders of Teller. We're in Oracle in the space, and we've been in the space since 2019. and excited to still be here. I love that. Fantastic. What about Mark?

Are you also excited to still be here? Oh, yeah. Like a cockroach. So I'm Maric. I'm one of the co-founders of Sello and then more recently one of the co-founders of SelfProtocall, self.x, Y, Z.

Yeah, we've also been building since 2017. So also very excited to still be here. Cool. And who's also been buildings, Austin? I'm Austin Griffith. I'm a builder and educator in the space. And yeah, happy to be here, happy to be traveling around and happily to be educating and building. Super cool. So, East Prague, one of my favorite conferences, I have to say this, but it really is.

So Joseph, what's kind of the vision for East Prague? What's kind of the vibe you're going for? So there are two Josephs that co-organize Heathprog and the other one is the founder. So I'm going to paraphrase what I believe he would say. But when he first announced this event, He wanted to set up a website that was devcon 4.1 site that would essentially rip off EF's 2018 devcon site and try and recreate that vibe. The whole European conference summer season is full of these very buildery events that are a nice mix between community feel, people that are doing things, creating things, but it also being accessible to users, all with their own flair. You know, DAPCon is very DAP focused. HeathPrag had this sort of greener vision around it. But regardless, it brings together both the community folks for those that are newer

to listening at the epicenter, the people that are building out these protocols, you know, it's very, very different than when you go to the conferences that are entirely attended by, you know, maybe big names in the TadFi space that are, you know, product pitching, but not as much that are kind of at the founder level. And it's that bridge between those that you might consider being sort of OGs and buildery and the users that are trying to make sense of these products and projects. Has it evolved over the past seven years or so?

East Prague or just... Yeah, East Prague. East Prague's been around for... This is, I think, it's third or fourth year. So 2018 was DevCon in Prague. Oh, okay, okay. And the joke was trying to recreate that feel. Now, it's hard because that was a 3,000-person event,

and it was EF's event. It's changed a bit. I think it's hard for an event to earn its cred, but also to maintain its soul. That's kind of the balance, you know, because they tend to want to grow. And as they want to grow, they need to get bigger,

they need to grow more and spend more, and then that, you know, creates a whole other kind of host of problems. I know that they care a lot about quality of talk, quality of the folks that are attending the event, and that requires some maintenance. I would say it hasn't changed that much. I mean, it'll change events.

you once in a while, but there is a challenge in the event being as approachable as it was originally, but it not just being a reunion tour for the same folks. So always welcome new people in. Are they planning on adding a new Joseph next year? Three Josephs?

So there are four that are often in the city, and they're all around the same height. There's a great auditing company in the space that any listeners that need auditing services, check out Acki. Joseph Gautomai is their founder. There's another Joseph that works on a Penumbra project. So, you know, come one, come all.

One of the things that has always struck me about ETHPRAC is the level of speakers that you kind of manage to attract. So today was a panel between Wittalig and Tim Berners-Lee, who literally invented the Internet. How do you get these people to come? And I'd like to pretend I'm asking for a friend, but I really am not. For all the old people here, I thought I thought all Gore invented the Internet. This is the Americans left. So I have to let Joseph speak to speaker recruitment. I help on the sponsor side.

You know, I got in because I have a lot of older relationships in the Ethereum space and wanted to help. But, you know, last year we did sort of a Ethereum co-founders reunion. Joseph really wanted to make this one happen. And yeah, when DevCon was in Prague is when they had Stuart Brand here. Reputation matters. I think the legitimacy is worth a lot. So they do put in a lot of good work on this kind of thing. I can't speak to the recruitment process, but happy to build bridges, you know,

if we want good people to attend events in Berlin and elsewhere. You'll put the fireside chat online later, I assume. But did anyone here make it into the very crowded room and can give us kind of the recap? I was there, but I don't know if I could give a great recap. I took off early. But I think there were some really important moments where they were talking about the shape of the early Internet and how it came about and how decentralization was the original goal. But eventually that didn't play out completely. And one thing that they really kind of touched on that I thought was cool was how the structure of DNS could have been improved if blockchain had existed at the time.

And I thought that was something that was pretty exciting now because we have ENS and maybe ENS could be something that starts to put DNS on chain. So there's definitely some like on chain product market fit at the light at the end of the tunnel there. And that was for me the most exciting part. You also saw Brenda? I saw part of it. I cannot say I could hear much of it. It was very popular. It was very difficult.

Yeah. Sorry. Other talks, people should check. out on YouTube? One that I found super interesting was Edmatt, I forget his, Marius, I forget his last name, but he's a mathematician and he talked about mathematics and ethics

and gave us sort of like a framework of how to evaluate what we're doing and whether or not we're doing it right and how to evaluate even numbers that are provided to us by other people and in terms of how we're building, why we're building it and how we're building it, taking all those things into consideration. I don't think we talk enough about ethics in the space, and I found it extremely refreshing.

And I heard the Circles V2 launch was pretty huge, for those who haven't checked it out. It's worth checking out. Upgrade if you had V1, if not, onboard. Invites are available from a lot of people that were at Euth, Prague. I have onboarded. It's a smooth process. Maybe this is a bit biased,

but my co-founder, Remy, of Self-Protocol, gave a great talk that I thought was really nice, So highly recommend that one. I think just in general, at a lower level, there's a lot of good YouTube content for builders out there and just getting, you know, searching Speed Run Ethereum, searching how do I build on Ethereum, looking up some of the content from the Build Guild.

If you're a builder trying to figure out how to build, there's tons of good YouTube's out there for that. Cool. Give us a high-level overview of the event. How many talks, how many builders, how many attendees, how many sponsors? The event over the last couple of years has been around the same number each year.

Somewhere over 1,000 but under 1,500, somewhere in this, it's like the, this is a style of conference that you can manage without it becoming monstrous. What's funny about this year is that Heath Global came to town. So, ETH Prague has traditionally been a hackathon. There are a lot of talks going on,

but there would usually be a second hall with a bunch of people building things. This year, that's happening, and one after the other. So they'll be day three here tomorrow. There'll be Pragma from ETH Global taking place next door. And then the ETH Global hackathon takes place this weekend. So they'll both be about the same size.

But the event's been consistent as far as like how many builders is why I tell the story of the hackathon happening alongside. Attendees around the same sponsors. You know, I'll say that happy to answer sponsor questions. It is good to try to keep events interesting looking. nice, but affordable, not just for the attendees, but also so that they don't turn into, I guess, a mall of booths. It's nice to be able to show off our products and the things that we're building. But at the same time, when the events are affordable for the teams, there's less stress in organizing and fundraising for it. And there's maybe less waste in the end as well.

Yeah, 100%. One of the things that I noticed is Prokadot has a very prominent presence this year. at ETH Prague. Tell us how that came about. This is funny. There's been a lot of controversy in the past of call it alt-at-one at ETH conferences. I think

you know, the Tezzo showed up at DevCon 5 and that stirred the pot a lot. This was an old school controversy. I think ETC was there. You know, support is tough to come by at times and the people here have been very open-minded. I've got to say last year Gav came and did a panel

alongside Vitalik. It was their second year in a row doing it. this is really just, you know, reach out to the folks from last year and see who might want to come back. There were a couple of other Alt-L-1s in the past that participated. I would add, and I think this is kind of important, that in the blockchain space, generally, there are products that are based on science and they're products that are projects that are based on hype. And this is important because when you look back in time, the Bitcoin people hated on the Ethereum people, the Ethereum people maybe hated on the Cosmos people. But when you compare a project that was playing with a different kind of consensus mechanism

versus now we have, if Amazon launched a blockchain and gave half of a percent of tokens to its top sellers but did everything else, this would look a lot like the projects of today were, you know, 40 percent to venture, 20 percent of founders, 20 percent to labs, 20 percent to foundation, and like, you know, a thank you air drop on low liquidity and they kind of go from there. So, you know, those folks, they brought a lot to the table. They're still pitching interesting ideas. They want to be here. And it's about, you know, having a door open, not being elitist to say no and seeing what you can learn from one another. I can maybe add a little bit to that. I think as a former L1, I've always been really impressed by how a lot of the different Ethereum events have welcomed us in the past. And certainly I think that played out

in the long term to Ethereum's advantage because I think that only brought us closer to Ethereum. and I think ultimately made it all the more easy for us to make the decision to transition to become an L2. So I think this is, it's interesting that this is so controversial for me. I think this is like just a really amazing move to pull more and more projects into Ethereum's orbit. Oh, 100%. So kind of like, I mean, as a current old L1, kind of I've never felt unwelcome from these events. It's just kind of I had the feeling that kind of the pushback came more from the other side. there was kind of like that this is more of a move of parkad back towards the Ethereum ecosystem.

That's up to them. But I mean, I will say that like it helps to not put yourself completely in a bubble. This has not been the easiest year for all ecosystems. And, you know, when you're hosting an event and you want to see who's able to, you know, make the event happen, but also not, you know, you can't bring anyone in because it might decrease the quality. of what's going on. But, you know, if you're,

again, if you're bringing substance, I watched a Gavis talk and he's talking about new consensus models. I watched the talk, and it was a really good talk. So absolutely,

he talked about jam. He had a great presentation with lots of emojis, which I super support also. I also want to say, you said all L1. I don't know. Nosis merged the Pectra

merge ahead of L1, which makes it, yeah, which makes it, to me, makes it a canary chain again. So I think instead of all L1, we can go back to canary chain

as long as you guys stay ahead of us on the EIP mergers. For the old school polka dot listeners, it's a Kusama. Nice. So Prague traditionally kind of kicks off the European summer events. So what are we guys endorsing this year?

I mean, Stella's going to have a presence certainly at Berlin Blockchain Week. I, myself, won't be there, but a lot of our team and my co-founder, René, will be there. Then we have big plans at ECC. We're really excited for Ken. I think there's been a lot of, yeah, just, I guess, controversy about the choice of Ken for ECC this year. I, for one, got an Airbnb for a very reasonable price, and I thought, yeah, very, very, I think, surprised by some of this controversy. So I'm looking forward where we have something big that we're going to be announcing

from Self Protocol there that I think will be really interesting to your European listeners and then yeah what's next? I don't know I think there's more events too, right? Yeah, so for me this is the first stop

of my Euro tour for the summer. I usually do Prague, Belgrade and Berlin and then ICCC wherever it happens to land for the year. I booked early enough that I'm I think I'm okay compared to some of the prices that I've seen, but,

oof, I could see why it was controversial. I just want to give a tip. Go to ETHCC's website. I've talked to the event hosts. They have a booking thing on their website, and this is worth pointing out, normal booking sites like hotels, booking, whatever else you guys might use.

Khan doesn't have them on those sites, which may have played into this a little bit. And they have plenty. I just want to make it known, because, I mean, epicenter listeners tend to also be people that are involved in the space, you know, much of the time.

And I did it a few days ago. You're good. You're good. You know, find a four-star place for under 200 euro. It's very doable. Sometimes that works. And sometimes I feel like that's more expensive. Like I always try and like price it out.

But anyway, I'm going there. Just for the listener. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Listeners, yes, for sure. Go. Locked on.

And don't forget Airbnb. I mean, again, we found some really great options for not just me, but a lot of our team. And just to round off the list, I can't believe I forgot, East Warsaw, which usually ends the whole tour. So looking forward to that this year as well. The one thing that we are going to be announcing at some point, we're launching our L1, which is going to be something that, you know, now that we finally are on the test net,

and then everything, all of this happens in January. We've been working on this for like a year and a half, almost two years. It's interesting. Cool. And where will you be announcing this or don't you know yet? I mean, we've been announcing it since September of the last two years. But hopefully at the end of the summer, we'll have, our goal is end of the year,

and that's looking very promising according to my devs. Sounds like you need to go to ETH or so. Cool. So maybe let's move on to kind of like the general state of the ecosystem outside of Prague. If you had a somewhat difficult Q1 this year, it seems like kind of the waves have abated somewhat. What's your feeling as to Morale right now? This may be a little bit of fud, too,

but I think when we think about how developers are growing and moving into the space, and when the electric capital report came out and said that Ethereum wasn't growing as fast as some of its competitors, I think the thing that causes that is developers building cool things and getting rich. And for a touch there, I think that we saw some developers using less, or less decentralized L1s to get rich. And I think that drove more developers to go there and do that thing, running pump and dumps, getting rich. I guess I kind of wish they were running those pump and dumps and getting rich on L2s.

But they didn't exactly. And we've seen some leadership change within the EF. And I think there's other things at play here. But I think that the L2 ecosystem on top of the L1 ecosystem is primed for a huge application summer. And we kind of talked about that last time, but maybe there's more to kind of dig into there too. I'm going to add to this.

I think Ethereum's been through a few rough patches in its 10-year history. Post-Dal, when people moved from asking, could it be built to, you know, would any of these applications work? You know, and then when an early big application broke, is this all too risky to be doing? It's period one. Two is probably post-ICO, craze, and maybe three, after the sort of main years of 2021, 2022. But this is different in that it was a really transitional period. But I will add that I think making Ethereum the underdog is a very dangerous thing to do

if you're betting against Ethereum. Ethereum can take the whole game. You know, if you are building your digital railroads, digital runways, you know, digital high. and whatever layer two system using, if you're building an identity system, if you're launching a stable coin, if you're building a voting system, if you're building a gaming system, whatever it is. And, you know, you have a group of different, look at the enterprise space. You know, if all of the banks start picking up one L2 stack, the other banks are likely to pick up that L2 stack. If you're building some kind of identity system, you want to be able to interact or be composable with other identity systems, you may go there as well.

The L1 is scaling faster than I think people will realize. they make it, you know, smack in the side of the head if they miss it. You know, they're not talking about a 2x improvement. They're talking about 100x improvements,000x improvements. So the foot is on the gas. And, yeah, they've made Ethereum the underdog, and it is still by far the largest ecosystem in terms of development. By far the largest ecosystem in terms of, you know, liquidity and RWAs and stables

and the rest of it. So, yeah, watch out. You know, it's interesting because there's been a lot of talk about, is Ethereum moving too slowly? And, you know, I for one, you know, think that actually there's been a few developments that actually happened quicker than I expected. If you look at over the last three years, the fact that we've been able to accomplish ZK SNARC proving of machine code, of, you know, the Risk 5 instruction set, also the MIPS

instruction set, like that wasn't obvious. So that would be possible. And, you know, a lot of folks built ZK EVMs by, you know, handwriting a lot of circuits because they didn't think that they'll be able to compile Geth or Reth one day into a ZKSnark circuit. And you fast forward to today, not only is it possible, just a few weeks ago, we've now surpassed this milestone where you can now prove these things faster than Ethereum is minting blocks.

So you now have this milestone of real-time proving. And that is actually one of the few remaining things that was necessary. to make L2s be able to communicate with each other in real time. And so it's almost the final puzzle piece that now enables this, you know, L2-centric scaling vision that Ethereum has had for a while that actually now is possible. And it won't be long before we'll have, you know, transactions and users being able to just move seamlessly between all of these L2s while still maintaining Ethereum-level security. And I think if you look at the future where, you know, every company, every business, every person is going to be on chain, there will be not enough block space for any one L1.

Certainly not Ethereum main net and certainly not any other L1 that exists today. And I think Ethereum, because of all the work that it's done on this scalability roadmap, is in the pole position to take all of that block space. I really just have so much conviction that Ethereum will do that and will ultimately become the settlement layer of the whole internet. It's why Selo has transitioned to become an L2. And I think, yeah, it's just interesting seeing all of these conversations while all of this really, I think, technical and difficult infrastructure that maybe isn't the most easy to tweet about or to really grok, but ultimately, I think, is actually putting Ethereum in just a really strong position going forward. So you guys actually became an L2 in March. So kind of you had announced this a year and a half ago at ECC, right?

The last one in Paris, I think. Tell us about that process and kind of like how it then actually happened in March, kind of like while kind of Ethereum Doom was kind of a bound on Twitter. Yeah. So, as you said, we put out a proposal to the SELA community. SELA has full on-chain governance. And so this was clearly a decision that needed to be voted on by on-chain governance. And so at ECC in Paris, now coming up in two years ago, we put out this proposal that was a bit of a leap of faith for us.

We didn't really know how the Sela community would react. And we certainly didn't know how the Ethereum community would react. act. And so we put it out there honestly quite nervous. And to our surprise and certainly delight, both the cello ecosystem just wholeheartedly embraced this idea in that governance vote. And then it just became very clear at ECC. We put out the proposal right before ECC. It was very clear at ECC that the whole Ethereum community was just excited about this and was embracing it as well. And so that gave us a lot of, I think just affirmation that this was the right direction. And so we worked very hard on making this happen.

It sounds maybe easy. And maybe if we were just a vanilla fork of Ethereum, maybe it would have been a lot easier. But because SELO has some unique features that I think make it particularly good for the real-world use cases that exist on SELO, like the ability to pay for gas natively with tokens, like work that we've done around finality, and token duality, and then finally also this thing that we call ultra-green money,

where a portion of all transaction fees goes towards buying carbon-offsy credits programmatically and retiring them. All of that we wanted to keep with the transition, and that required effectively porting a lot of our code to a new stack. We chose OP stack, and then actually building out a migration flow that every full node in the network would be able to trust us, execute in order to transition from one client to another in a way that also enabled backwards compatibility for archive nodes. So you can imagine that the complexity of this just kept growing and

growing and that's why it took a lot of time. And then just getting every full note operator to upgrade when the code was ready, that also took a long time. Actually, I think we underestimated how long that took. And ultimately, just at least half a year of time was spent just getting folks to get ready for this transition. So yeah, it happened this year in March, and you're totally right. That was maybe right before peak doom, as you call it. But I don't think we once question the decision. I think just being in the space, having worked on a lot of these different technical problems, thinking about how to get to stage one, stage two, seeing what was being built by the whole broader Ethereum ecosystem

in order to solve some of these, both scaling, but also interop and composability challenges that ultimately we need to solve as an industry to make Ethereum feel like one chain. Seeing all of that work happening continued to give us conviction that this was the right decision and that there will be no other protocol or chain or ecosystem of chains that will be able to compete once that demand for that block space exceeds what can run on any one chain.

And I mean, there is a lot to be set for having different kinds of L2s, right? It just kind of fastest resilience. But what kind of interoperability protocols kind of do you have your hopes up for at the moment? So kind of what should we look towards? Yeah, so we're OP stack-based and we have a partnership with optimism. And so we're obviously bullish on the super chain, but we're also, I think, excited about what espresso is doing. We think that if you combine real-time proving

with kind of a shared sequencer across all of Ethereum, that operates at a faster block time than Ethereum. So you can still do base sequencing, say, every 12 blocks. That, to me, is really exciting because it unlocks composability, not just within kind of these stack ecosystems, but across all of Ethereum. And that, I think

yeah, there's just a lot of work happening on these types of projects. And I think it's going to really just improve how Ethereum feels collectively. So eventually it just feels like one product. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean kind of the liquidity fragmentation is a very real issue at the moment.

How do you guys feel about this, Brenda and Austin? Any thoughts as to this? Not specifically for Ethereum, but I can talk about our decreedive fragmentation and why we decided to move on to adapt chain. It only does, reach as consensus for information for our Oracle, but mainly what we were facing with is with everybody launching their own chain,

in us having to rely on a bridge to be able to go and support them. Our liquidity was just randomly everywhere, and it wasn't the level of security that we wanted to have at each chain or behind each piece of information that we provide, which mostly is prices at this point for oracles. But for us, that is a big problem because of security, bottom line. And that's why we chose to do this. And I imagine that that is a very similar problem for Ethereum.

We started a smart contract on Ethereum. And maybe we are, you know, for us, it just made sense. Maybe we can talk about more about how hard it was to switch to an L2. But as of now, that it's going to work best for how we're operating in this. Highly recommended. Bring it. So, Austin, how long until we get the pump and dump schemes back on Ethereum? Great, great setup. Well, you can do it now, and it's actually cheaper than on any other chain.

I think that the L2 interop discussion also comes down to developers, and I think we are seeing slight fragmentations of developers, but it's not that bad because all of our stacks are EVM. So whichever chain you want, you can kind of point your tooling at and everything will deploy there. So while developers' attention may be getting divided a little bit between different L2s, the tooling and the stacks all still work. And a lot of times when I deploy an app live and do a demonstration, I like to deploy it across multiple L2s and have the front end kind of do some magic over the top of that, which gives it this extra cool kind of decentralization property. And I think that also from within the EF, I think there's a little bit more push. to create better interop, just getting L2s to get along a little bit better.

And I think kind of putting up the bat signal to draw in a greater than the sum of the parts amount of developers. So L2s aren't squabbling for the same developers, but we're actually bringing in a huge amount of more developers. Going back to the block space will all get taken up, I think that the next big wave of developers

will just saturate all these L2s also, I hope. How confusing is it for new developers coming into the space today? Because, I mean, I think it's confusing at times for us, kind of old-timers, right? But I imagine kind of coming into the space anew and then kind of like being told about kind of like all these different, basically L2 was living on top of Ethereum that don't really speak that well with one another yet, if Mark's correct. kind of how do you guys frame that for the newbies?

I like Merrick's idea of like the one chain. Once it's one big thing and you can move between the two atomically, that's going to be amazing. But right now we just consider it like, hey, it's just a faster, cheaper Ethereum. There's, you know, there's ETHL1, and then if you want to deploy for a fraction of ascent and you want your users to pay a fraction of a cent

to interact with that contract, you can go to any of these given L2s, and they're all EVM compatible, and your app will ship the same to each. each one. And so I think that it's not that scary, I think. I think that we just say it's faster, cheaper, and it's just like the L1, and you just change one little flag when you're deploying, and basically everything works the same on the L2? How do devs kind of choose which L2 to deploy to? Because kind of, I feel like a broken record sometimes, because I've been saying this for at least

three years, kind of that kind of the spectrum in L2 is, or so. so large in terms of kind of security guarantees and kind of like the technical foundations and also the price point to be honest kind of like for each transaction so kind of I mean you kind of you kind of you have kind of the the tycoes on on one end that kind of like do everything on ethereum and then kind of you have the people who don't use data availability and then kind of you kind of it stretches all the way to sovereign roll-ups which aren't really roll-ups at all And then kind of it kind of you have to check whether kind of you have fraud proofs and kind of like all of that, right? Kind of like how do you advise someone kind of like where to go and kind of like what point to choose for what level of security?

Yeah, I think a lot of it has more to do with like less security and more about like what's available on that chain in terms of composability. Like if you need liquidity or you want to have a game that's running, a lot of that. A lot of that I think goes into the decision for the devs. Also, there's just, I think, a little bit more like flirting with different L2s and whichever L2 does the best job of capturing different types of devs from different parts of the world. You're talking about vibes? Yes, exactly, vibes. I remember when I sat down with DC from WorldCoin and we were talking with someone from ZK Sync about why they went. with the chain they went with before they made their own chain,

and Vibes was one of the biggest answers. Vibes are really important, but I think what you mentioned, just composability, right? I think frequently developers want to compose with other projects. They're building not in isolation, but typically in partnership, building on top of the shoulders of maybe other protocol giants. And I think this is certainly a big one.

I think one place where we've seen, for example, lot of interest from developers is just by virtue of having native USBT on SLO. I think we're the only L2 that has native USBT on the L2 itself. And so if anybody is interested in building a project that's targeting users who predominantly like to use USDT, then they frequently come to SELO just to give you an example. And so I think, yeah, vibes and just where you can, what you can compose with, those are the two biggest things that we've seen. I just want to end my own take on this section where it started, which is that there's not one team here.

I mean, we started this with Ethereum and having a tough beginning to the year, right? But just like in one camp, it might feel easy for a little while because there's the dev team, you know, that can the devs do something? Neem is alive and well for most of the ecosystem. In Ethereum world, you have, you know, 10 or 11 clients now, if not more. on the L2 world. I mean, come on, just in the ZK space, maybe the scroll folks are competing with the Tyco folks

are competing with the ZKSync people or competing with the Starknet people and one starts to specialize in gaming and the other one starts to specialize with, you know, Zika Sing is landing bank deals on one side, some identity deals on the other. You've got stable coin proliferation and, you know, with cell an OPE stack

and on and on. And that trial by fire is, you know, something that you can't really, mimic because to have the manpower to manpower, woman power, people power to experiment with, you know, 10 different paths at once in a live environment and to see what enterprises want and what different applications sort of creators of many different types want, there's power in that. So, you know, fruits of that labor are forthcoming, but we're starting to see they're kind of bubbling up here. And I wouldn't take that for granted.

I mean, as a smaller project, we definitely look out to compulsibility making sure that wherever we go and the resources that we spend, we spend them in places where we know that people are building, that we see growth. And that's definitely driven a lot by vibes and ethos. We are very decentralized, so we're very slow in terms of oracles, to be very, very fair and honest. But I don't think we would want it any other way. And it's all good in games until something breaks. So that's when they think of us, and I am happy to be in that space. And that compatibility with the projects that we integrate with has to be exist solely or almost solely in vibes a lot of times. And to double down on Merrick saying Psello had USDT, I think these stables are really important at the price point that they're at.

Now that we're looking at L2s and fraction of a fraction of a cent, we can now do stablecoin, microtranses. streaming. And I think that in itself is going to unlock so many different products that can come on chain that previously couldn't. And so I think you're going to be looking at your L2s for different stable coins and the liquidity for those stable coins. And having native stable coins that you can do tiny, tiny, tiny little transactions with that stable coin is going to open up a ton of stuff for developers like me. Super interesting. So, We heard earlier that the East Global Hackathon is starting this weekend? Yeah, Friday.

Friday. How are hackathons going for you guys? So because I heard over the last year or two, kind of I heard a lot of people complain about hackathons and hackathon attendees and kind of the general quality of projects, how do you feel about this? I mean, you're kind of like the first hand. So I love hackathons, first of all, and I cut my teeth on hackathons. And I was hacking all the way back when Facebook was having F8 and their hackathons. And I was building on that developer platform. So hackathons aren't going to go away.

If dev platforms are out there and platforms are trying to bring in developers, there's going to be hackathons. I think it's just the structure of the hackathons. One thing that we've kind of fallen into a little bit is this idea of hackathon bingo. where the same devs are traveling around picking up sponsor prizes and kind of checking off their bingo card of different sponsors so they can get paid. I think we need to go away from that.

I think maybe we have more developer games that look more like games look, like e-games look, but on-chain, on stage. So I think there are structures to hackathons. I think we need to get a little bit more serious with our hackathons. There were times back in 2019 where a hackathon project would become a product pretty quickly. And I think we're seeing that less because of this like hackathon bingo thing where they're done with the hackathon. They're done with the project at the end of the weekend. And we just need to restructure the hackathons to have different expectations for the builders.

So they're there to start their thing that they're going to finish and bring on chain and make a real product. And that's going to be a lot harder. But we need to grow up and be more serious about it, but we see that coming. I think it would be great to have a podcast episode with folks from, for example, the OD running Heath Berlin Hackathon, the Heath Global, and the organizers, and to figure out, you know, what can you do to transition into stage two hackathons, projects that have been before, one before, and figuring out how to move that forward. Or we have L1 interrupts, you know, application sort of layer interrupts, other things that

gather in-person gathered productivity-based events. But I do still think that great to give them a shout-out. You know, when you can trial 1,000 ideas in a weekend, there's a rate of iteration there that, you know, even if it's not the thing that you built when you were learning how to use the tool, you know, their usefulness in onboarding, in pilling folks to want to participate here and giving first-timers and local computer science students

and ability to see people that they didn't know that they never get to see is pretty cool. I don't know. I, for one, think that the energy of these hackathons is still pretty invigorating and exciting. I really like them. I think maybe just to build on that idea, maybe we should be giving, in addition to these grant prizes, maybe there should just be guaranteed investments if folks continued. I think that could be pretty exciting. But, I mean, in general, I don't know.

Like, we've been continuing to invest in hackathons. I think Heath Taipei, the East Global Event there, was probably our best hackathon in terms of percentage participation in both Selo and South. And so, I don't know, for us, we're pretty stoked by how things are going. So Teller actually started at a hackathon in 2018. Hell yeah. And we did not win. It was kind of hard to actually explain to the judges. And I feel like a lot of times it felt like it was a popularity competition.

or like who could and it was very difficult to be to have a very technical project and actually win. But we we loved it. Obviously we didn't do it just because of the incentives that I do think can be improved for sure. And that's one of the reasons. So we still sponsor hackathons. But I like the longer term ones. I feel like even when I was doing hackathons, the weekend hackathons are so difficult. And also because you have to work so quickly with sometimes,

strangers and you're trying to come up with an idea. So it's not, it doesn't feel like a real team. And a lot of times with these hackathons happening alongside conferences, let's be very honest, a lot of these people are actually here to party. And it's, you know, it's a little bit hard to actually get them to build something that's going to be meaningful and continue to be a team for a longer period of time. When we did a hackathon for a teller, there was two of us, the two founders, me and Nick were, were part of that team and we sort of had a vision for And like I said, I didn't win. But we build our first MVP.

And definitely we would have gotten an investment or something. We would have started much faster than 2019. But it took us a couple of months to actually get going. And we didn't. And I think that there's a lot of people that do have those intentions when they come in as a, you know, a group or a team or somebody that knows each other for a long period of time. That can be really nourished. So I think another thing that we can do better at within our hackathons is founder support. I think we see a lot of coside nerds show up, but where are the entrepreneurs and how do we get them a stage for them to pitch their ideas?

And a lot of times they just need feedback and they need to know they're like, nah, that's not going to work. You need to do it this way. And sometimes they just need someone to show up to help them out. And I think we can do that. We can provide that founder support on top of all this other stuff. Let's have hackathons. Let's have e-sports like on-chain competitions. But let's also have pitch events and let's have even like developer speed dating in a way. Like let's be helping founders meet builders and helping accelerate them to get to the next level.

One of the things that will be really great too for especially like brand new founders, just advice. Like how do you get a business started? How do you actually build something that you can get going? going without getting, you know, it's not just under your name, but you actually build something that it's going to be lasting. And then you have some of that support rather than just like, great, it's going to be a great idea, do this. Like, there's a couple more steps to getting that off the ground than just going off with the feedback. But the feedback is amazing. Like you should learn how to work your idea into something that is marketable. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of, we also found

that with NOSIS, that kind of like we, we kind of stopped giving out grants pretty early on because kind of like in the very beginning, they were very effective, kind of like we had a lot of good teams, for instance, gelato came out of a NOSIS grant and kind of like they're doing fantastic. And I mean, there's a couple of others, right? But kind of at some point, kind of like, you kind of had these, I would say, almost grifters who kind of lived in these hacker houses and kind of traveled from hackathon to hackathon to kind of win these outside. grants. What we then started doing is investments. And

investments was, this is actually, we're still doing that. So kind of we have, we now have a dedicated VC arm and kind of we don't just, I mean, sometimes we just invest, but oftentimes we actually give pretty solid services. So kind of, for instance, we have in-house

auditors, which is not always easy to come by. We have a legal team that can kind of give you advice as to kind of where to set up. We have recruiters who can help you hire for positions that are difficult to hire for, I mean, even just hiring for regular positions, it's a learned skill, right? So kind of having that sort of support,

I think this is what we've seen kind of portfolio companies really relish. And even without the investment, I could add that just providing the support and seeing the people that actually follow through, you know which ones are serious. And they're going to do it or they're going to Google it, you know, or chat GPTN one way or another, and giving them the extra support, you can literally pick out who's actually going to move forward with the idea.

I think because there's so much money moving around our space that it's gotten hard to give grants, because grant farmers are kind of grant farming. Even within the Build Guild, we had this really neat on-chain setup where we streamed to builders and they could withdraw as they were building. And in the beginning, it allowed me to have, like,

50 guys and girls working with me and building. And then it kind of grew to 100. And then all of a sudden, like, we were over indexing on prototyping. And we were shipping, you know, 30 prototypes a week, but nothing was getting to production. So this is definitely something that we at the Build Guild are focused on also is quit giving small grants with no strings attached, tons of mentorship along with the grant. And maybe even I, so I haven't done any personal angel investing, I feel like it's time. Like, it's time for me to, like, put my money where my mouth is and I don't have that much money. But I need to really, like, take the risk and find the right people and mentor those folks and just really be much more serious about it

and be checking in with them all the time and providing that, like, just layer of help whenever they need it. I love it. You might appreciate, we just launched a proof of ship project. So we also moved some of our grant funding towards this proof of ship project. We're rewarding people for shipping. So it can be done. Cool. Super excited for that. Maybe let's move to our last section, the Lightning Round.

You guys are to give very short answers to this, but all of you get to give an answer for each question. So which on-chain metrics are you watching most closely? Developers. Daily active users. I don't know, bimes. I'm with Austin. I just said developers a bunch of times

until they get sweaty. And which ones are overrated? Which metrics are operated? Possibly TVL or something like that. All-time TVL? All-time throughput. Just like this is not the shortest thing. Remember in the old days when Tron and Eos,

they would just sort of have these transaction, essentially transaction cost-free, so they would just move money back, forth, back, forth, back and forth. And they'd have all of the top lists of most use applications across all of the chains. Big volumes, I think, have really damaged a lot of these metrics. And that's why I say like vibes, because I feel like talking to people,

that's how you know what's actually being or happening, what's happening. Yeah. If you could snap your fingers and eliminate one ecosystem problem, which one? On and off. Ramping one. Sorry, it would be Joseph. It would be Joseph. How are we kidding?

No, one. Wait, so he said ramping. I said on and off ramping. So, you know, I think we've made a lot of progress over the last few years. And certainly we've invested in a lot of unoff ramps in emerging markets. But there is so much more ground to cover. And I think the sooner we do that as an ecosystem, the sooner everyone is on chain. I wish I could magically go back in time and not have so many grifters come into the space somehow.

Like somehow if we could have grown more... Even going forward, that would still be used. Yes, yes, yes. I wish when I go to just a highly technical conference and I say the words blockchain or Ethereum, I get some people that give me this griftery look. And there's this really, really interesting and cool and heady technology behind all of this stuff. But when I say it, they think pump and dump. And that's not what I want to be associated with the stuff that we're building. Kill the meme coins for sure.

Yeah, sure. Go back in time and have L2 interrupt from the start. Okay. Cool. Fantastic. Sounds good. Coming home from these sorts of conferences, how do you measure success for yourself? Kind of like what kind of makes you say that was a good conference? Well, the Build Guild is touring and we're doing a ton of developer engagements in a lot of ways. And we do this thing where we get them to come on chain and we put them into a telegram group and we get all their addresses and we start interacting with them that way. So for us, it's like straight up hand to hand, like how many devs showed up in the telegram and how many devs are going through our system and how many devs are deploying on chain.

Yeah, for me, it's usually after each talk, you know, people come and chat and connect and usually just see the amount of people who have come by and talk to me. And then to your point, usually my job is either putting them in telegram groups or connecting them with other ecosystem projects that they can compose with. And so I'm always looking at just how many of those connections I'm making. Yeah, very similar. I mean, TG chats at the end of the week and how many people you get to talk to. It's a major thing in every conference. But guys, that's like TVL. But it eventually, some of the things turn into something.

Yeah. So I think it's hard to place for me because the, did the right connections get made? I think some of the biggest things that have happened in our industry. I can think of these moments where two individuals connected that wouldn't have otherwise connected, and they shared ideas on something that they didn't know the other one was also building. So it's like how many these magic moments happen? And it's tough to recreate. We work in a distributed space where most of what we experience is online, but that leads to bubbles,

naturally. And folks just kind of crash into your bubble at things like this. So it's bringing in really quality people and also new people, the new people end up building things because they met someone they didn't expect they ever meet, and the quality people meet the other quality people and, you know, have a conversation that makes them think in a different way and, you know, massive projects pivot. So it's just continuity of that quality. And I forgot to say speedrunners. So we have speedrunetherium.com. And if you want to learn how to build on Ethereum, you can go to Speed Run Ethereum and start speed running. And we can see spikes after each one

of these events. And so we're always looking for the spikes of new speedrunners at Speed Run Ethereum. So which funky partnership would you like to come out of East Prague? What's kind of the most unlikely match-up that you think would be worthwhile having? I don't have one specific one in mind, but, you know, it's really funny. Sometimes, you know, you'll be talking with some project about a bunch of researchers are talking about, you know, how to do something involving data storage and somebody walks up to them that says, we solve that.

And usually there won't be a there. there, but sometimes there is and, you know, find a way to integrate these things. I mean, it would be bigger than you think. Merrick mentioned a moment ago, you know, sort of advancements in the zero-nology ecosystem that would just render a bunch of interrupt things to be, to move from unsolvable to solvable. It's weird to think that those just happen at events sometimes, but they do. They're still worth our time. It's not all of the events that are always worth it. But we spoke before for the audience, before this podcast, there's, this meme out there right now. It's the, you know, you've got the Open AI, you know,

Anthropic, all the other logos on the America sort of side and the Deepseek kind of China side and the European bottle cap meme, if you've seen it. One of the great things about Europe as a continent, especially in the blockchain space, is Brenda mentioned Heath Belgrade and the Italian company were in Dublin like two, three days ago. There's a hackathon here. Berlin's in a couple weeks. And France is, you know, probably going to have at least six to ten thousand people there. And that is a lot of cross-collaboration that you cannot get elsewhere.

I was born in the States, but East Denver is a very big event. But we're not able to see that kind of that cross-collaboration, that idea sharing move from, say, Denver to Utah to Wyoming, to Idaho and over to California. week period. So it is a special thing that takes place at events like this. And it's healthy that we continue it, but hopefully we find ways to do some of the most productive possible paths. 100%. Maybe just to go back to your question, I think I'm just, again, I'm biased, but I'm very, very excited about all the conversations that we've been having with Self Protocol. I think self, if you haven't heard of it yet, it's a decentralized ZK passport protocol. So we can prove

without a counterparty and in zero knowledge that you have a valid passport, like a physical passport. These passports nowadays have little microchips in them, and you can read that chip with a phone, and you can then do some moon math on top of the data that's in that chip, and you can effectively prove that you have a valid passport without a counterpart. And so anybody who has a civil resistance problem, anybody who wants to prove that someone isn't on the OFAC list in zero knowledge with full privacy. All of these people we've been chatting with, and it's just so fun to see that they have this need

and that we have a production-ready solution that can fill that hole right now. We should talk because I think there's a space for a self-group on circus that kind of admits everyone who kind of has K-Y-Ced with self. And then you don't have to reveal who you are, but people at least know you're not apart. A hundred percent.

Yeah, I think that's a really great use case. And I was already chatting with your team, a whole bunch of people at the Circles booth about exactly that. So, yeah, looking forward to making that happen. Super nice. So final words for this conference this year? I said this last year, so it's hard to say it again. But I think with 7702, L2 interoff, like we're about to see a ton of applications that actually can come on chain. Like they couldn't previously do it.

And now it's time. we should see a huge blossoming of a ton of different applications coming on chain and building cool things on all these different L2s and on L1 in particular instances. So it's application summer. That's what I'm calling. I think I may have called last summer, application summer too. But one of these summers is going to be application summer. Yeah, I would say stable coin summer.

I think just the amount of growth of stable coin activity, especially in the consumer peer-to-peer, here space in emerging markets is getting me really excited that, you know, we're approaching an inflection point where it won't be long before everyone in the world will have a self-custodial wallet that you'll be able to send money to. I think that's the future that's going to happen really rapidly and very suddenly, and I think we're inching closer and closer to that inflection point when all of a sudden everyone you know will suddenly be able to transact on-chain regardless of where they live. So, yeah, I think keep an eye out for that.

I think Minipay is certainly doing an amazing job there. So if you haven't checked that mini pay, I recommend they literally just launched their iOS version a few weeks ago. So it's very timely to take a look. Super nice. What about you, Brenda? Yeah, no. Last words, I think with more regulatory clarity

than it seems to be coming, I think we're going to have definitely stable coincidental. going to be a big thing, more legitimate as thin than ever. And I'm honestly very bullish on that side. Okay, to sum everything up here, I think there's kind of a drumbeat starting. And the first half of the year was what it was. But to go back in time, you know, meme coins were 2013 and 14's thing, the rise of Doge. We saw the advent of democratized fundraising and ICOs. You know, we saw DeFi. That was new. We saw, you know, digital ownership, NFT, that was new. The last year, that wasn't new.

You know, ventures ran back pump and dumps. They had fun. But folks here are talking about regulatory clarity, applications coming to fruition, L2's interop, being interoperable, stable coin leading to mass onboarding events. You know, don't count this ecosystem done. So I think there's a drumbeat starting would be my wrap up. And if you listen closely, it might be a fun in the next couple of years. Super nice.

Oh, yeah.