Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Lefteris Karapetsas: Rotki – From Ethereum Devcon 0 to Building Rotki

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

We are, arguably, still early in the crypto industry, but some people were really…really early. One of them is Lefteris Karapetsas, who joined EthDev in 2014 and contributed to building the Ethereum ecosystem, since before the genesis block. His crypto journey is one for the history books, as after EthDev he joined Slock.it, right around the time of The DAO raise…and hack. Lefteris remained a core supporter of decentralisation and an active member of the Ethereum community, being involved (and delegated) in multiple projects’ governance. More recently, he founded Rotki, an open source portfolio management app that aims to preserve user privacy. We were joined by Lefteris Karapetsas, true Ethereum OG, to discuss his 10-year long journey through the Ethereum ecosystem, from joining EthDev (pre-Devcon 0) to founding Rotki.Topics covered in this episode:Lefteris’ backgroundEthereum’s beginningsJoining Slock.itThe DAO r(a)ise and hackEthereum classic hard forkBrainbot & Raiden Network eraFounding RotkiCrypto accounting privacyThe challenges of building a local appRotki membership tiersUpcoming portfolio management on RotkiFuture roadmap for RotkiHow Ethereum’s culture evolved over timeEthereum public good funding. Optimism governanceHopes and fears regarding Ethereum’s futureEpisode links:Lefteris Karapetsas on TwitterRotki on TwitterSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/533

This is Epicenter, episode 533, with guest Left Harris Carapetzas of Rodki. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Left Harris, who is a true crypto-OG and the founder of Rodky. Rodg is an open-source tool for accounting and portfolio tracking and management that focuses very much on price. ever see. Before I chat with Left Harris, let me tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by NOSIS. NOSIS builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. With a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like Safe, CowSwap, or NOSIS chain, NOSIS combines needs-driven development with deep technical expertise. This year marks the

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networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, Celestia and DYDX. More than 100,000 delegates stake with Chorus 1, including institutions like BitGo and Ledger. Staking with Chorus 1. not only gets you the highest years, but also the most robust security practices and infrastructure that are usually exclusive for institutions. You can stake directly to Quarice 1's public note from your wallet, set up a white table note or use the recently launched product, Opus,

to stake up to 8,000 eth in a single transaction. You can even offer high-year staking to your own customers using their API. Your assets always remain in your custody, so you can have complete peace of mind. Startsaking today at chorus.1. Hey, Left Harris. It's good to have you on. Hey, hey, Federica. Nice to be here. We had you on, incidentally, for the first time,

on the 10-year episode, because we talked about whom would we like to kind of have on, who's a true OG, who's been here forever, And your name was very much at the top of the list. And kind of we reached out to you and he said, you're super happy to come on. But it's a little bit weird because you've never been on before. So here we are to make up for that. Left Harris, you've been in this ecosystem literally since the very beginning.

Tell me about your background and how you first entered the space. Yeah, so indeed, I've been here for quite a while. I entered the crypto space first by mining some Bitcoin back when it started, but I lost the hard drive. Yeah, it's, well, it's happened. And like, for real, though, I got interested when I was in Berlin looking for a job because I had a job at Oracle Gmbha, which is the big American Oriental. Oracle, the giant, and it was really boring. And I just wanted to do something fun.

And then I saw an ad by Gavin Wood for the Berlin Ethereum office that was just starting to work on this thing called Ethereum. And I was like, okay, that sounds interesting. Let's go. So in 2014, I joined the F-Dev, so the Foundation's Development Army in Berlin, and started working on what was it? Mostly on Solidity, basically. really interested in compilers. I had even written one. It's still in GitHub. An early version of

Rust, but before Rust existed. Yeah, I started working on Solidity and then later a bit on the C++ client, which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore. And yeah, this is how I started the trip into Ethereum. And this was literally before the Genesis block, right? So you started at the end of 2014 and Ethereum went live like July of 2015, right? Yes, that is the disconnect. What was it like back then? Because if you kind of look into the Ethereum space now, and I mean, we say this all the time, it's still early and so on, but back then kind of it was like literally very, very early.

How did you guys kind of see Ethereum and kind of how did you feel about the prospect and the chances of Ethereum making it? Yeah, that's a good question. So I thought it's a game. Back in the beginning, I was literally thinking it's just a fun game. Let's see how it will work out. We were playing in the TestNet and I remember like double-spend bugs or suddenly money appearing in some account,

etc. It was just fun in games. I didn't really realize the scope of what we were building until maybe DefCon 1. because that's when I actually saw the interest by outside people because as you know so there was in like so I started either third or fourth quarter of 2014 and we had Tfco.0 in November so Q4 2014 and that was in Berlin in the very first office that that was in Valder Maastrace and there there were only 25 30 people all just geeks working on Ethereum

and I was like, okay, this is like a meetup and it really was just like a meetup. The only outsiders that I can remember was probably Golem. Some people from the Golem Foundation, well, then it was not a foundation to us, you know, a project. And it was just people talking about

how awesome Ethereum is and what we are doing. But other than that, there was no... It was very difficult to actually see how this would be applied in the real world later. because there was no other developed smart contract platform back then. As I said, so this slowly started changing from the release and until DevCon 1,

because you started people seeing, you start to see people use it, deploy smart contracts, make first DAPs, and yeah, that got really interesting slowly. Yeah, so DefCon 1 was then in London about three quarters of, a year or so later, right? Yeah, probably November again in 2015, yeah. That was shortly after Ethereum had gone live in July. And then kind of, you stayed at the Ethereum Foundation until the end of the year, and then you move to Slokit.

And you only spend like eight months there or something. But I mean, now we remember. but Sloket mostly for the Dow, almost exclusively for the Dow. Tell me about why you decided to move over to Sloket and kind of what the promise was. Well, I mean, so the reality with Slokit is that back in, there was a lot of drama in Ethereum Foundation back in DefCon 1 because they were running out of money. They had spent already too much of the money that was raised. and so Ether wasn't doing that well

or at least they were spending more than they had and so the F-dev leadership basically decided at the moment to just fire everybody and so everybody was fired back then and this is how I ended up in Slokit I just was looking for another job for the firing it got undone

afterwards and there was a change of leadership and people actually ended up staying but I had already accepted an offer to go to Slokit and went there. So what was Slokit supposed to be? So, Christoph Gents, one of the three founders of Slokit, he was advertising in DevCon, even in DevCon 1, like this Ethereum computer that would be this kind of hardware that we would build, and this is what I really liked,

the connection between hardware and the software world, where you would have it in your home and you could control various things via blockchain transactions and the famous or infamous thing right now that also gave it its name, the Slokkit, it was this smart lock, right? And they have this demo

and we also saw it later in some other events where there is this lock that you do a transaction on Mainet even because it was a bit cheaper back then and the transaction gets mined and then the Ethereum computer sees it and unlocks the lock. The idea was, you know, you would do an Airbnb kind of style of renting an apartment

and it would all be on the blockchain and verifiable and all that. And I got really interested in working on this Ethereum computer. Because I'm still a bit, but back then I was a lot more interested in very long. low-level backend stuff. So it was supposed to be written in C and all that. But what

they ended up getting famous for is how to fund this thing, which they announced also since DevConwan, that they would fund it through what they call the DAO. And it's not like what they do right now. Like

everybody makes a DAO that just airdrop people tokens and they have a foundation somewhere in the Cayman Islands and then they have the lion's share of that token. It was a really pure and maybe naive idea

that you would create this Dow that would be an investment vehicle that would invest in many projects, products, including the Ethereum computer that's lock it would make. But it will be completely up to anybody who participates in the DAO, so everybody who puts money in,

in order to decide if they would ever end up funding slog it. So this fundraise was actually incredibly successful, right? Basically back then, there wasn't actually all that much you could do on Ethereum. And so like 15% or so of all ETH actually ended up in the DAO, sometime, I think kind of they started their token sale in April or so. And then, but by June, the contracts had been hacked. And you were very much at the forefront kind of when that happened. You and Griff and a couple of others.

There's actually really good coverage of this and also kind of like the Ethereum Foundation situation that you alluded to earlier in Laura Shin's book. I think kind of you were one of the main. sources for that book. Do you think it's accurate? Yeah, yeah, it's very accurate. At least for the stuff that I was involved in, it was very accurate. For the Ethereum Foundation stuff in Switzerland, I can't attest anything about this because I never went, actually never went to the street's office. Ah, okay. But all the drama that affected Berlin and all that, yeah.

Okay. So tell us about the hack. What happened? And kind of how did it go down kind of like from a first person perspective? So there is a lot of background to the hack, like the problems that were found with the idea of the DAO that it could split to other sub-DAOs. And you could exit the DAO essentially by saying, okay, I want to, you know, like they have now in Molok Dow, the rate's quit. you can just quit and take your portion of the funds that you put in into a sub, like a child DAO, I think they called it. And there were lots of game theoretic problems that some people suggested and they even had to call the moratorium to the DAO, so to stop it. But you could not pause the DAO. There was no admin key, there was no pause button, it was impossible to stop it.

And so this faithful day, I don't remember exactly, but someone in June, in the morning I just wake up to Griff's call telling me that the Tao is being drained and like, what? What, what, what, what? Good morning. What's happening? And, yeah, so what ended up happening was that there was an exploit that was found. That was a recursive call inside this exit of the Tao, like you take your funds and go. that you could essentially drain the entire amount.

And yeah, so it happened that it was being drained. We tried to understand what's happening. In the first hours, I think, I managed to recreate it in the TestNet, but at the same time, they stopped. So whoever did this stopped, for whatever reason, we don't know. And they drained something like 30% around, I think, of the Dow and 70% was left. And then we were like wondering what to do now

because I had recreated on the TestNet and had the contract to White Hat Kit. But yeah, there were questions because I was member of Slokit back then. So should we do this as Slokit? Should do it as someone Ayn? Should we not do it at all? Is it legal? Is it okay?

And so we were really just not doing anything for first days. And we were really scared about the implications. What would that mean? Were you worried that someone else would recreate this? So basically, even if the kind of the initial hacker, I mean, they got 30% of the Tao Eath, but I mean, basically it was clear that there was an exploit and kind of there were probably not all that many, but probably on the order of like 10 or 20 people who could have just recreated this. Yeah. Yeah. So this is

what worried us that copycats would eventually pop up, right? I mean, once you see what happened, so I recreated fast because I had also written part of the contract, right? But if I took a few hours, someone can do it in like double

that time or a day. And indeed it happened. Like a few days later, there was the start of copycat attacks and there was like two or three sub-dows being created. They were kind of sloppy because they probably didn't do something, right? And they were starting, draining very small amounts because it really

it was such a funny exploit because it really depended on how you write the contract you have to be very careful to put some parameters correctly and also how much so you needed a capital to run it because you essentially are running capital through the Dow to drain so the more

you put in the more you could take out so in the end at some like I don't remember how many days later but not too much later we decided to act and we weren't so nobody said who we were except

for so Avsa agreed to be the face of this of this white hat attack because he didn't want to and he was writing that to so Afsa Alex van der van dersen

that he didn't want people to think okay that's another black hat so I don't remember he wrote a Reddit post that the Tao is being safely drained or something like this and people were saying why should we believe you, who are you guys and all that. But we drank basically the rest back then. And Alex back then was with the Ethereum Foundation, right?

I think so, yeah. And I mean, he later co-founded ENS. But, yeah, so I think he was at the Ethereum Foundation at the time. And then kind of the other people who were involved were Griff, obviously, Christoph and his brother and Stefan Tuol, and Jardy. So it depends. Like Stefan, Tual,

Christoph and Simon Jens were the three founders of Slokka. Zordi helped with the... He didn't help so much with the first white hat attack, but later than he was a lot more. And he basically helped a lot in the aftermath of... There was quite a few more stuff that was heard afterwards. Super cool. I recently found some Tao Ish.

And I kind of, I hung on to it kind of just as kind of like a reminder for old time's sake. Yeah, the Tao talking, they are kind of a collector's edition. Absolutely. Fantastic. So the kind of the entire drama actually led to the split of Ethereum to Ethereum Ethereum Classic. What did you think about this at the time? Yeah, that's a hard question because I was much more in the camp of let's do the Dow Wars and the soft fork and let's try to get it somehow through counter-hiting the hacker. We had so many nice plans. I even gave a talk about this in, what was it, like,

Le Nuit du Huck in Disneyland Paris in July. I had this nice slides and all of them explaining what we can do, etc. But it turned out that the soft fork was infeasible as an idea because you could, we had the idea of kind of making it so that all the miners agreed to throttle the transactions that would be sent by the attacker. Left Harris, maybe let's kind of clear up the term soft fork here. So we all know what a hard fork is where kind of the network splits. and in a software for kind of like some transactions are censored, right?

Exactly, exactly. So the idea was that there would be some kind of agreement with the majority of the miners to censor transactions that would be sent by the attacker and to favor ours. But the problem with that is that it actually allows the network to be deduced. And there was one more problem that I don't remember. So it was infeasible as an idea at the end. And otherwise, the Tao Wars would just end up in an infinite hacking and anti-hacking thing, allowing probably the funds to never be recovered by the guy, by the attacker,

but also by anybody else. And it didn't make sense. So it was either at the end to accept the loss or to do the hard talk that led to Ethereum Classic. I assume if something similar were to happen today, maybe the decision would have been made differently. But at the time, do you think kind of with them the two remaining choices left? So kind of either kind of just giving up the funds or kind of doing the hard fork. Do you think the right choice was made?

Looking at the aftermath, I hate what happened for the next year or years with the Ethereum Classic and how the community split, this was pretty bad. At the time, I felt that probably we shouldn't do the hard work because from a completely personal point of view, I only had, I don't know, $100 or $200 inside the DAO, and I could just lose it. But also from the point of view where, you know, you felt responsible. I felt responsible and probably also the others in Slokit

and the team felt responsible for the loss of funds, it was a relief because then you wouldn't have to feel, okay, all these people lost money for us. So I was really torn between those two, and I still am. Ideologically, I didn't like it. That's quite true. I didn't like it. But it kind of also proved that it's not all about the code, but it's also about the social consensus of Ethereum.

if something like that happened right now I have no idea what would happen we are getting the question right now right what if there is a GIF if Lido gets hacked or something no this thing is right now in Twitter about the minority bug sorry

the square majority client bug I mean that could burn more not 15 but 25 right now percent no wait 25 is staked and if 34 percent of the 25 is in Gith, let's say that all of it would burn, the worst case that would be

20% of all ether. What would happen in that case? Well, to go with this, I don't know. As you said, there weren't too many applications back then. Right now there is so much and there is so much capital inside

the ecosystem to just burn 20% of the eth that is also backing a lot of the LSTs and the DFI and what that will do to the price of it. I really don't know if that would be acceptable, let's say.

Let's say we don't find out. Yes, yes. So basically one of my main things when I see the current situation is like we should not even have to question this. We shouldn't be in a place where a buck can actually get us to that. Yeah, absolutely. So you spend probably the longest eight months of your life at Slocut. I'm sure you kind of aged like by 10 years or something.

And then kind of just after the heck, you actually moved to BrainBot, which was a company. So basically at the time, you were working on Radin, which was kind of posited as a payments channel for Ethereum. So basically back then we kind of distinguished between. between state channels and, yeah, so basically, yeah, so basically it was meant to address kind of the scaling slash interoperability space. And BrainBult was very much at the forefront of that. But then somehow completely missed the boat later. So kind of when it actually took off, tell us about your time at BrainBot who were hugely involved in the space, right? you guys developed one of the clients.

You guys were kind of involved deeply with the Ethereum Foundation. There were quite a number of different projects you kind of did in-house. Yeah, so basically tell us about your time there and where you think kind of it went wrong and ultimately failed. Yeah, sure. So one correction, I didn't go to Brain, but after the hack, the longest period that I spent and the worst was basically from the hack. until September, because that was the really complicated stuff where there were attacks in the Dow after the Hartthork because someone put money in the Dow after the Hartford by mistake. And then the whole thing with Ethereum Classic and the Dow was there because we were called

to help there because there the heart fork never happened. And that was basically the entire summer. That's a very big story. which you can read in Laura's book. But after that, indeed, like in September, October, I joined BrainBot. And I joined to help with building Riden, basically.

So Riden was, as you said, the payment channel solution, right? So what is payment channels? If anybody knows Lightning, the Lightning network to Bitcoin is what, Riden is to Ethereum. It is extremely simple

that you take stuff off-chain and it's just for payment. And you say, let's say, I have a payment channel with you, Friterica, and I just sent you... We deposit in this payment channel, which is a contract.

I deposit 10th, you deposit 10th, and then we can send those 10th to each other as much as we want off-chain. And if ever there is a problem, we just settle it on chain. Yeah, so basically, you would actually have to sign each transaction. We just wouldn't put it on chain.

And then basically if you were to dupe me or whatever, I could kind of prove this because I kind of had you assigned transaction, right? Exactly. And it's a network because it's not just between us too. So this is a single payment channel. And it's a network because then you may have one with Martin and then Martin has one with Christoph, let's say, and then I can send directly to Christoph through all of your channel.

So we spent quite a very big. of time developing. Now, why did it ultimately fail? I still like the idea of payment standards, but not as an entire network to be used as an L2 solution. It's a different thing. As we see now from the roll-ups, you want the full EVM experience to be scalable.

So you have the contracts, you have the defy, this would be only for token transfers from to somewhere. One of the reasons was that BrainBot was probably a very development-oriented company and not at all user-facing. So it was mostly like some Giggs striding code. So I think that this hurt a lot because there was no contact with the actual community. Another is that it's actually a lot more complicated than it sounds to develop this. there is so many edge cases

and so many problems that it becomes very difficult to actually make this production ready I remember our issues probably they are still open like half of them about every single edge case that we hit or could think of and you know like

it's a very difficult technology to actually scale because of all these edge cases but I mean you guys as a collective had thought so much about kind of the constraints and what had to go into it and kind of you were there for kind of like all of the talk about plasma and scaling and so on. So in principle kind of like when the L2 revolution came, you were in almost the ideal place to kind of launch your own L2 and kind of make it big. Why do you think that didn't happen? I can't answer this. I really don't know because so I

wasn't in, so the problem with brainboat is also that it wasn't, it was basically top-down organization, so we had no say into what is done. There was like the management decided and I was just a developer there and we just did what the management said. I think that we missed the boat for as a project because it was too slow to finish riding and then there was no pivot at all even when staff changed. when it was obvious that there should be a change. Well, for example, at the same time, like we had plasma, as you said,

that popped up from the generic state channels, that state channels, people, which we also cooperated with, had started, they went from state channels to plasma, and then later to, basically I think it's a very big part of the same T that's evolved with optimism right now.

So they pivoted every time, while, well, Brambo just stayed on right, And so for this, I guess, the lack of pivoting is what killed it. You then kind of moved on to kind of start Rodki, which was your own baby. So as we said in the very beginning, kind of Rodki is an accounting and portfolio tracking and management software. Why did you put, why did you choose that niche for your own startup? Good question. I don't like accounting. I hate taxes. I hate accounting, but I just needed to do them. So I didn't even want to make a startup. I just wanted to do my taxes.

Well, that escalated. I never intended to start a startup. It's just that I actually started this, as you can see from the commits in 2017. So two years before I left. left right in. It just was a side project helping me submit my taxes to the Penanzum. In the beginning, it was just a command line interface. And the question came in 2017, when I first realized that we have to actually, you know, submit taxes on all this stuff, back from 2014, 2015, etc. And I was thinking, so how can I do this? I had no idea. And I think back then the only thing that was available was Bitcoin.com. tax and I go there you know Bitcoin. Tax what is it okay website you know upload CSV or give me

all your addresses and I'm like wait why should they give you the addresses download something and calculate it all locally and then send it to an accountant or to the finance on directly and the lack of such a tool existing is what pushed me to create rotkeys a command line interface basically in the beginning to just you know locally calculate everything and not say it with, I don't know, someone else, because then they know, you know, it's not like, it's not like with banks, with crypto is a lot more sensitive because you are setting your transactions and with them your addresses. So everything you have and because everything is so public, everything you will ever have in crypto unless you use tornado or you go through Krakken or Coinbase. Because someone who actually really wants to follow you, they can just take all this and then just monitor what you are doing like years later while you wanted to do your tax reporting in, I don't know, 2017. So I consider it like extremely sensitive data and I never wanted to share this.

So this is how I started working on Rodki. And there's now quite a suite of kind of competitors, right? So basically there's most of those you actually. actually use by still inputting your addresses in a centralized framework and they kind of calculate things for you. And you are definitely sharing your data with them. Do you think kind of the space has professionalized in terms of kind of like data security and data privacy? Or do you think it's still as dire? It's a lot worse. like instead of having one way to suit yourself on the foot,

now there's a hundred ways to shoot yourself on the foot. It's really bad. I'm actually very sad that I... So I don't consider any of them actual competitors because nobody does what we do. I would love to have a competitor. Actually, there is one called Ghostfolio, I think. It was shown by one of our users to us.

I think it's more UK focused or something like that. but there was one that had exactly the same ideas, but written in a different language or something, but they had basically exactly the same problem and same idea. And if I could say at anybody's competitor, it would be someone who offers the same thing that we offer, which is basically privacy and keeping it local. Yeah, so I started like that,

but I never actually wanted to make a startup, as I said. I don't know what happened. It's just that after having, to leave a brainbot, I just thought, you know what? So there were many problems I don't want to go into that. But after that I was like, I would like to work for myself. So what do I have? And I'm like, okay, I have Rodki.

And by then it had, you know, quite a few, like actual users and even paying users. And I was like, wait, I have never made a startup. So maybe I should try that. And just started it along with, um, So even though he's not a co-founder, he was basically the first dev, a friend of mine and a quite good developer, who is doing the front-end in,

I mean, he's not the only one doing the front-end, but he's the front-end lead and lots of other stuff in Rotki. What are the main challenges behind running a tool like you guys are? Wow, where can I start? Okay, there seem to be a lot of challenges. Choose anywhere you want. Probably the biggest one would be the choice of being local and privacy preserving actually limits you a lot in the development processes.

So while every other tool that offers similar solutions to a user, they can just have a website, right? And then in the website, they just roll it. out an update and then another update. You don't need to download anything. You don't need to do anything. It's just auto-updated. It is a problem both for our users and for us. It's really, really annoying that when you make a local application, you have to create binaries, people who have to download them, and it's not just that you have to create binaries. You have to create binaries for Windows. You have to create binaries for Linux, for many different distros. Then for

Apple, Mac OSX stuff. Then later, when the silicon stuff came, this is a different binary, because it's a complete different architecture. So you need to do. have two binaries for Apple. So developing local software though it's I believe as a user it has a lot of benefits.

As a developer, it's a pain in the behind, right? Because I like it takes basically it costs more money in the end because it's more dev resources, more time while you just make a website and you just update it.

So it this is probably one of the biggest challenges. The other would be, but this is something that everybody says. So I have talked also with founders of, or developers of other tools that are completely online. When you want to track crypto, I mean, there is a new protocol or a new primitive,

completely new idea popping up every week or so. And the users are extremely demanding. And they are also very entitled. like they are like, wait, why doesn't it track this protocol that only I know very well? Why doesn't it do this? So trying to keep up with crypto and its developments in this field is so fast that it's extremely difficult. Yeah, I can see that. You guys have a free tier and a pay tier.

So how does it work? As a user, what can I do with the free tier? from which point onwards you actually have to pay? Yeah. So this tier will change because it's unsustainable. The free tier is way to cheap. It's 10 euros per month plus VAT wherever you are. Because for example, for Germany, we have to start 19% VAT.

If you are in Portugal, a different one. If you are not in the European zone, it's 10 euros. We've got a feedback that you can get a lot done with the free version and that we should actually change that in order to get more money from users but it has limits so it has limits on the amount of events that you can process

so if you have more than I don't know a thousand or something or 500 I don't remember you will see a notice saying okay we can't process more than this please upgrade to the to the premium version

and there is some features that we have also in the premium version like a staking, I think. And another one is that we allow, and this is one of the features that people really like for premium, we allow to upload your database to our server and then download it from another machine. And this is completely private because the database,

so all of the data in Rottkeys encrypted using a password that you give. So we just see a blow of data where you can't treat it. We just act as a cloud where you upload a thing and then you download it somewhere else. You also said that you don't just do accounting and portfolio tracking. You will also start doing much more portfolio management. How does that look like? So Rodki right now is mostly a tracker, right?

An accounting tool. There is many ways that you can take it. But we are a really small team, so we are resource constrained. We can either try to do a lot more accounting. you know there is so many jurisdictions this is another one of the problems because people say okay I want to do accounting right but I am in the Netherlands

so I have these rules please help me or I'm in the UK I have the bed and breakfast rule what is that oh here read it it's you know the ATSRM website you know a PDF of a hundred pages please implement it I'm a premium user I'm paying 10 euros per month please I want this increment it from you so it starts getting it

getting extremely difficult because every country has its own rules. So we try to have generic accounting customizable a bit as an accounting solution approach and we want to make it configurable for users and users can make PRs even and add their stuff. But for management side, it's including myself as a user and other users have told us, so I open Rodkey, I see what I have in Krakken in Coinbase or in DFI, why can't I actually manage it from Rodkey? Rodkey has the Krakken API keys. It has the Coinbase API keys. If I want to make a trade in Krakken to sell F4 euro, why can't I do it from Rokke? Why do I have to open Krakken, sign in, put my 2FA and not do it from ROTKi? So the idea is to actively manage your funds by making

both on-chain transactions and trading on the exchanges from Rotki. This is not possibly yet, but this is a direction that we would like to take it towards because it would make it much more useful tool for everybody. Yeah, I can see that. And I think it's also something that a lot of portfolio trackers

kind of a path that they have taken also to kind of increase monetization, right? That's true. Like for other portfolio trackers, this is mostly for Defi only, because they are like Defi oriented, but yes, indeed they're turning to wallets. Yeah, absolutely.

So since you started this, there have been enormous developments in the privacy sphere, right? So basically back in 2017, when you kind of started this as a CLI project, there was no ZKPs. And now kind of we're talking about fully homomorphic encryption, right? Do you think these cryptographic tools could help build something that is easier to maintain, but still fully private for the user?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know the technical details of ZKPs. enough to answer. Okay. What are the plans for the future for work key? Yeah. So the plans for the future is to basically capitalize on having a local tool by going towards

the management side because another thing is like you wouldn't sell your API keys, active API keys with an exchange, with a centralized website. People have done it once at this three-comas thing. And if you've read, like they had this trading API where you had a, what was it like, some kind of website where it aggregates trades from different exchanges. It's called three commas.

And they got hacked because, and they lost a lot of money from the customers because their database got hacked. So active API keys were leaked and boom. While with Rodkid would all be locally, okay, someone can put a key logger on. your machine but then it's your fault. It's not someone leaking your data and with it access to your funds. So we really want to capitalize on this a lot. Keep offering more accounting solutions

because this is probably one of the things that our current users want the most and figure out a way to allow for easier to capitalize on the open source part, allow for easier contributions and maybe also incentivize them somehow because if we as a project do good so maybe also our contributors could could somehow profit so we're thinking of ways that we could achieve this and change the architecture of the tool again capitalizing on the local part so make it multi-processing we want to we are working on different demons underneath doing other things because it's i mean it's a it's a back-end and a front end and it's doing

so many things, so many calculations underneath that it's already at the limits of the current process and it's slow in many things. So we're going to basically go to a multi-service architecture. Some services are written in different languages and we're looking at trust right now

in order to well I mean my computer has how many cores and I run Rodkey on one Python backend. I mean you know how Python is a single process. Though this is changing with newer versions of Python. Still, we want to

go to a multi-service architecture to get rid of these limitations. Cool. Yeah, no, that's super interesting to hear kind of what the plans for Rodki going forward are. Maybe let's kind of change gears a little bit and talk

about Ethereum culture and the general ecosystem. So you have been in the ecosystem for 10 years. You kind of joined in 2014, now it's 24. How has the culture changed in your eyes? So we grew a lot, right? So I don't know what to call Ethereum culture anymore. It's so many people compared to how it was

before. It's so many new people. We have different subcultures right now inside the Ethereum. We have the regions, the the traders, the gamblers, I don't know, like the builders and then we have the builders who are okay, you know, we don't need open source, let's go closures. The builders who are like

me like open source. We have others who are like, okay, maybe let's go somewhere in between. So there is, it's so big as an ecosystem right now and I'm very happy and proud of that, but I can't really define what is Ethereum culture anymore. It's just a lot of subcultures. Yeah, I think that's a very fair point. If you kind of think about kind of like the Ethereum OGs from back then.

So I recently saw again the picture from DevCon Zero. And as you said, as you said, there were literally like 25 people there. Of those, there have very few leftover. Do you think that's kind of like natural churn? And people are just doing something else now? do you think it's something that's particular to this ecosystem? And is there anyone you miss in particular?

Anyone you really wish would come back? Yeah, yeah. Wow, from Demko Zero. Yeah, I don't know. I loved Jeffrey, Deffrey Weekly. Basically, the first developer of Keith. She's a really cool guy. if I were to say anywhere from that picture that I just remembered

as for the turn it's logical to the world he's completely out of the ecosystem right he doesn't completely out like the only time that I saw his name was when someone accused him of selling it in order to fund his I think he's doing a game right now like a software game and because they tracked his Ethereum address from back in Genesis and they, you know, try to name, shame him in Twitter for selling if.

Bastard kind of selling the East that legally belongs to him. Yes. What? We were talking about maybe a year or two ago. So, yeah, there is definitely a natural alternative. I mean, people being 10 years older, if you're now, it's 40s or 50s, I mean, at some point, you're like, okay, you know, middle-age crisis. Some get married, some have kids. the journey is natural.

On the other hand, there is also something that most of the people there, if they actually had if and kept it, probably don't need to care about anything anymore. So maybe this also shows who was interested in it for just, you know, like, okay, let's just make something cool, but make money and then retire. And who is still here and is just building, because this is something really interesting. And I mean, this thing that we're building is really interesting.

And the people who still are here in one way or another, I find it really nice. Yeah, no, it's always good to kind of run into old faces. Yeah. You're a very active tweeter on Twitter. And the things kind of you cover a lot are kind of like things like privacy and free speech. kind of tornado-style kind of projects

but also security you're also pretty big in the Ethereum public goods and protocol governance scene so you're one of the largest delegates for a number of projects how do you choose which issues to get involved in

and what makes you passionate about them yeah that's a good question I never plan to actually become a As they call it Tao politician or governance politician or... I have no idea how that's happened, really. I really have no idea. For example, it turns out that I'm the biggest delegate in Diva.

And they do a distributed staking validation protocol, right? Exactly. I have no idea how. Like, someone told me, hey, do you know that you're a delegating Diva? I said, yeah, remember that I said, okay, if anybody wants to delegate to me, do that. And then someone tells me, hey, can you come to this telegram? you to vote because you're the biggest delegate. And I'm wait, what? But everyone knows you, right?

Because you're so active on Twitter and kind of you seem, I know I've delegated to you in the past because kind of you seem to kind of think things out well. And, you know, I don't have bandwidth to kind of look into all of these things. And I know that if you kind of looked into it, I would probably end up agreeing with you. So kind of, I think these are the reasons for which people. delegate, right? Probably, probably, yeah. It started probably with DNS and Gitcoin, I guess,

because a Gitcoin is something that I really love. I stopped actually being a delegate there because of issues with the governance. I just said, okay, I don't want it anymore. I'm just too tired. But things that try to change the world like Gitcoin, because I find it amazing that it can basically, it has so many flaws. I have criticized it as many times as I have said that

They love it. But it's amazing that you have this idea where, okay, you gather people from all around the world and you fund projects and then there is a matching pot and these projects get more funding from the pot. And we have funded with this even things outside of crypto. Like I tweeted the other day about URL Lib 3, which is a very basic library in Python. So it's really amazing to see how these primitives that we have created in crypto can help people build amazing stuff and fund them. So I guess that's how I got into it, just wanted to influence its direction. How much time does it take up for you? Because kind of like following like all the forums, I'm involved in way fewer.

projects and even I struggle to kind of keep up. I don't follow forums as much as people probably think. If governance relies on needing to follow forums, I probably don't or like step away from that particular project. So actively, actively I think I'm mostly in optimism. In ENS, this is probably the most active ones that I am active in right now

and one really cool thing that I have asked of every doubt that I'm involved in I'm also involved in hope a bit, etc. is to get delegates having a mailing list. So like what happened? Like we weekly sum up. This is beautiful because I can just go through it and see,

okay, that's it. Good, good info. it's a game changer are these published somewhere? Yeah I think everybody can just like with a mailing list right you can subscribe and then you get it I think so it's not just for delegates

no no no no no it's like governance weekly or something like that it's pretty it's pretty helpful if you're a delegate because then you actually can know what's happening without having to be on the forums every time and then you see okay so this particular proposal is something that I should look at.

But it does take time and unfortunately some things take a lot more time than they should. So ENS for example it's pretty smooth. They have this subgroups or working groups. They are mostly running the Dow and then they're asking the delegates to vote on staff

and when there's a big vote that's when a lot of thinking needs to happen. there was now with the service providers. But mostly it's hands off. Optimism is so much work. I don't know what the heck I'm doing there. It's like so much work. Are delegates compensated for their time?

Well, and this is another problem that. So, ENS, I mean, it's too little. It's not too much work, but like there is the best of work. Optimism is really a lot of work. they say that they don't so for optimism they don't want to compensate but maybe there will be retro PGF

so they have this kind of bait of sorts to get people more interested in governance but for me it would be much better if it was like okay so this is the how much I get compensated not like retro PZF because it's a different

I think they're completely different things they shouldn't work like this because it really takes a lot of time. Optimism is, I find really cool and annoying at the same time. So, optimism has the foundation behind it, and it's not hands-off. It's very hands-on. So this is something that I don't like. A lot of the times it feels like decentralization theater

as opposed to actual governance. They are taking feedback well and they are changing it. They're really trying. They have voting cycles, they have seasons, and every time it gets better and better. Still hands on. The question would be if Optimism Foundation wasn't actually guiding this,

would it be chaos? Maybe it's better this way? I don't know. Optimism does it in an interesting way. The most cool thing about optimism and something that I find it really interesting is that they have a bi-camera or bi-chamber governance,

So they call it the token house and the citizen house. The token house is the usual delegates. People delegate up to someone and these are the token house delegates. Then there is the citizen house which is supposed to fight the plutocracy by having recognized citizens as one person, one vote. Right now there is 125 people. I think, and they in the beginning only voted in retro BGF. So all retro BGF rounds were actually voted only by the badge holders, so the citizens.

But right now from this season, they start to have a voice in the actual governance too, and they can basically vet almost everything. So they tried to have to experiment with this idea of two different chambers of governance so that there is no power of plutocracy completely on the token holders and that cannot be captured. Or if it gets captured so that it can be saved by the citizen house. It's a really interesting approach. I find it unique and I really want to see how it goes.

Yeah, I think governance is going to, there are going to be so many. If this is to work, there's going to be so many upgrades. So kind of like this one person, one vote, and then kind of the delegates and kind of, it's kind of, it's too easy to break and to spam. And it's, yeah, so I'm super curious to see how that will go in the future. What makes you hopeful for the road ahead for Ethereum? And what worries you?

So hopefully. Hopful, I guess. Hmm. all the cool stuff. Like, we're really building really cool stuff. As, like, I saw a tweet by Peter, and I kind of agreed with it. Peter from Geph, C. Peter Silagi.

Yeah, I'm not going to try to. Okay. Sorry if you watch this, Peter. But, like, I also was a bit against the EIP 1559 because I didn't think it would work or that, you know, like, it didn't make sense to me. but, you know, like, it's a resounding success as an idea, and it shows. So, EIP 1559 was the fee market, right? Yes, yes, that's correct.

Sorry, yeah, I hate it is when people do that and I shouldn't have done. It's like all these numbers, you know, like, you know, 1547 and 46, 33. And I'm like, okay, what? Yeah, I know exactly. What is this? Yeah, so the fee market one, it has worked amazingly. So I think that it's probably this also goes back. to the people. So like there's so many smart people in this field. There's so many people smarter than

me, younger, talented and, you know, hungry for building beautiful stuff. I think that this is the hope. Like all this new, new generation that is inside this ecosystem that we built back then. It's, this is making me extremely hopeful for the future. It's really beautiful to see all those young people trying to build cool stuff. Ah, and also how generous people are about helping good causes. Like now with the tornado, right, you see how both back when it was just Alexei Perchev's case, but now it's both cases with Perchev and Roman in the US, how everybody just opens up and says, okay, yeah, let's donate, let's help defend open

or that they've had privacy. So this kind of reactions and this kind of people in the field really make me extremely hopeful and proud to be part of this ecosystem. I love the way that you frame the kind of what makes you hopeful because I think kind of like young and smart people in the ecosystem, I think you're spot on. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. It's really cool to see. And people who are still in and for the right reasons, right?

So basically, I mean, intermittently, we always kind of have these phases where there's a lot of money bros. But yeah, by and large, there's still the people who are in it because they just believe in the vision. Yeah, yeah, that's true. For what worries me, I guess a lot of things again.

Like, supermoderity of Gith, in staging this. I had totally forgotten about it and now that it became a Twitter thing again, I'm like, oh, wow, that's really serious. That really worries me. Like, the moment I realized that it's so bad, I'm really worried about this.

So things like that. Like, they call it a black swan event, but it's not really a black swan if you actually talk about it and expect it may happen. If you can see it coming, yeah. Yeah, I find it weird that you would call it a black swan event. But also, you know, the other thing would be the image that we have towards the outside. This

saddens me maybe more than worries me but also worries me because this image so we tend to have a very negative image right

outside of the crypto space they just somehow associate us only with crime or scams or

gambling you know very negative words while in reality it's not like that. Although there is a lot of scams, a lot of

bad stuff in crypto for sure. It's like developers that are just working in other non-crypto fields seem to actually hate developers working in crypto. There is a lot of actual hate. I have been attacked in, let's say, issues in GitHub.

When they realized, so, you know, reporting a library issue somewhere and then they realize that I work in crypto and they are extremely like unkind tell me to you know get off that they don't want to help me I have heard this happen multiple times

and I mean this I find it extremely worrying because this translates later into what we see in the political scene in the US because if many people associate something with crime then they can push it to be banned or to have well

a lot of political consequences. And this actually really worries me because the misinformation there can do a lot of damage to our sector. And it's often strongest in groups that should in principle be values aligned with us. So kind of like the people who kind of came out from the original cypherpunk, so kind of like the CCC in Germany

or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, almost everyone is extremely Web 3 critical. So, yeah, I feel you. I also find that very worrying. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. And I don't know, you know, I normally don't worry if I have a solution and I know, okay, let's go work towards that.

I don't know what to do here. Because I don't understand why this is happening. Okay, no, I mean, I can understand why. Yeah, I also understand why. So basically, I think kind of like being on the inside, there's a lot of scams that we're not even privy to. So basically that kind of like regular people are the target audience for. And we don't even, we'd never actually end up hearing about. So there was like this runaway hit podcast, I think made by the BBC last year, the crypto queen or something.

And I had, it was literally a project that had apparently. lady, right? Yeah, exactly. I had apparently raised billions of dollars, and I had literally never heard of her, like, zero time. So I think kind of, we're kind of like, we're very much in this bubble, where there are largely well-intentioned people. And kind of like all of this scammy underbelly of crypto,

we're not privy to it. So I think probably for every legitimate project that we know and love, there's 20 scam projects that we've never heard of. And I think this is very much kind of how this image of crypto actually rises. And I think kind of the way to kind of dig ourselves out of this whole, I hope is by building genuinely useful application for regular people. And I think kind of this is kind of where we need, whereas an ecosystem kind of we need to get to, right? Yeah.

Yeah. that's true but I don't know how to get there because even if we do like we have we have a lot of stuff like I mean okay now

like advertising is something that you guys work on in Gnosis like the Gnosis pay right like this is amazing this is going to be super cool based on Monarium which I have actually also used right and these are really

like the payments unlocking payments it's it's yeah but it's still it's still a promise, right? So basically it still hasn't found, I mean, it's, so kind of, we're very hard at work to kind of make it usable for anyone who's kind of on a regular neobank account. So maybe not for your grandmother, but kind of for kind of regular people our age, who have no crypto background,

should be usable without them having to know kind of what is heat phrases and so on. But we're not there yet. So kind of, if you kind of look at actually users in crypto, kind of, kind of, of people who are there to kind of use the products because they are legitimately better than the Web 2 equivalent, I would, I think there's literally zero. And I think kind of moving from a place, I think I'm super hopeful we can get there and we can get there maybe this year or next year, basically having real applications with real users who are not in it because it's crypto and it's cool, but because it's better than what they used to have, I think we can get there. And I think this is, this will have to be the way to kind of get out of this, you know,

public relations nightmare that we're in at the moment. Yeah, yeah. We need to find like, well, not exactly find PMF, but it would be nice to have a good, good applications. But I still think of there is stuff that crypto does a lot better than anything else, right? now which is, I mean, payments. Nothing can do this as well as crypto. Like paying people outside of the EU,

paying people in Africa. So we have some independent contractors in Rotki that work some hours for us, right, and we pay them through crypto. If you try to pay, Africa sometimes, Asia also, right? Yeah. So we try

even with, I don't know what other solutions are there, like PayPal or wise transfer. We try to Otherwise, oh my God, it's first of all so slow, then expensive, the percentage on the amount. And the second payment that we tried to send, it took about a month because it got somehow flagged and then we had to talk with support. Look, you're preaching to the choir here. I totally agree.

But I think then if you look at the other side, the question is kind of like, how do you off-ramp it? How do you make the stables accessible so that you can actually spend them for groceries? and your rent. And I think this is still way too hard. So I think kind of, yeah, I mean, I think kind of its potential improvement is definitely there. And I think we can get there, but I think kind of making it more usable, I think this kind of needs to be kind of like priority one for now. Yeah. Yeah. For countries, like for Asian countries, from what I heard, they just use, you know, like exchanges. Like I do normally for off ramping. In Africa, it's extremely interesting.

use this like P2P stuff. They just do crypto P2P. Just like we used to do not so much anymore, like local Bitcoins and local Ethereum. Yeah, local Bitcoins. There was a fun time. Yeah, cool. Left Harris, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you and have you on this podcast for the first time for real after 10 years of kind of working together.

if people are interested in trying out Rodki or contributing, where should we send them? So for contributing, it would be GitHub and Discord. So GitHub to see the code and Discord to basically chat with us, ask us any questions where we're extremely welcome to contributors. And to download it, you can also download this from GitHub, but we have it on our website like Rodki.com. You can just go there and press download,

depending on the, it will probably detect your operating system and then download the proper binary and just try it and then come to Discord and tell us what you think. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on, Left Harris, and see you soon. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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