The Breakdown - 2 Groups Now Control Ethereum's Future. Here's What They Want.

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

David sits down with Paul Dylan-Ennis — lecturer at University College Dublin and member of the Ethereum Foundation’s Silviculture Society — to map the split between the EF and the newly-formed ETH Labs. TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (00:41) EF Silviculture Society (03:28) Full Cypherpunk (14:15) Roadmaps and Governance (17:58) Capture Resistance Concerns (24:19) What is Ethereum Success (27:13) New Primitives and AI (32:32) Ossification Timeline FOLLOW THE SHOW › David — https://x.com/dcanellis › Paul Dylan-Ennis — https://x.com/post_polar_ › The Breakdown — https://x.com/TheBreakdownBW › The Breakdown Newsletter — https://blockworks.com/newsletter/the-breakdown DISCLAIMER As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice.

I think this is like probably one of the more underrated, fascinating moments that we've ever had, at least in Ethereum, that will be looked back upon as like extremely consequential. So I do see Eat Labs is the culmination of that populist revolt. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy of cell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and interviews expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Welcome back to The Breakdown, everybody. I'm your host, David Pinellas, as always. With me today is returning guest Paul Dylan Ennis, lecturer at the University of College of Dublin. Thank you so much for joining us today, Paul. Yeah, very happy to be back. Cool. So, I mean, yeah, Ethereum is the topic. And I mean, anyone who's been following this as well, I mean, there's been kind of a restructuring of the

Ethereum Foundation. I mean, not just recently, but over the past six months as well. And we've had now a subset of the Ethereum Foundation, quite senior, kind of split off and start another nonprofit called Eath Labs. I mean, how I started, I'm interested to how you style it in your own thoughts, but I'm kind of like styling this is like a biz dev nonprofit for Ethereum for want of a better term. And I have some ideas about what really they're trying to do.

But I'm wondering before, if we could just start with your experience with the Ethereum Foundation, because like I have this tweet for the Ethereum Foundation. I think it was about this time last year. When was it February 2025? That named you part of the EF Silver Culture, society, which is described as a loose collection of individuals from outside the foundation who provide informal counsel to the EF intending to the dark or otherwise forests in the

infinite garden of Ethereum to make sure we sustain the core values of open source privacy, security and censorship resistance. Is that still ongoing? I'm curious, like your experience with the EF to date. Yeah, I mean, many times in the past I've had to tell people that I don't work for the Ethereum Foundation. The difference is I researched the Ethereum. Foundation. So that's my, a lot of my academic work has either, it's mostly on like Ethereum governance, but then that also means that effectively, let's say, I'm, the main entity that I'm most interested in is going to be the Ethereum Foundation historically. And the civil culture society is effectively, I guess, a cypher punk external advisory group. I think that's the,

what the idea behind it is. Now, the, actually, what has. happens we're not allowed to speak about, right? So we're not actually allowed to talk about what goes on in the discussions. But I think you can kind of imagine what we're talking about. Effectively, I guess when the Aterian Foundation makes decisions, they can come to us and ask us, does this sound like something which is maybe deviating from the traditional cyphor funk values? And because we're external, and I think also it's important that all of us are,

like, fairly independent-minded people, as in like we don't really have any vested interest. like we're not working for any projects, myself working at a university. I'm a tenure professor, like I say what I want, including to the Aterian Foundation. And so that's the general idea. And yeah, so I mean, it's still ongoing. There's still kind of questions that get asked of us every so often. But I do think that it's less relevant now than maybe it was in the beginning. So it arises around that time that there's a populist revolt against the Aetherian Foundation.

So you do have this group of, say, post-ideological practices. pragmatist people, more focused on ETI asset, more focused on institutional adoption. And they're arguing against the Aterian Foundation. And then they effectively get Tomash in as a representation of this cultural faction, let's say. And that's when the civil culture society is inaugurated. And I guess maybe the idea was, is, like, is the organization going to shift too much in this post-ideological pragmatist direction? And then, you know, the more cypher-punk-minded people in the Tearyan Foundation,

would be able to ask the external observers what they think of their direction. Nowadays, where Ethereum Foundation is effectively, you know, has one executive director now, which is Bastion. So Bastion is very cypherpunk. In fact, I would call him a hard-line cypherpunct, like even more cypherpunct than myself, like on the spectrum, such that, you know, you could say the Aetherian Foundation has become a cypherpunk organization. Actually, in a way that goes far beyond that I ever actually even imagined myself as

somebody who's long advocated for cypherpunk values. Even though Thomas, you know, he leaves. Now, why he leaves is a little bit ambiguous, but it's clearly some kind of reassertion of the like hardline cypherpun position by the Aterian Foundation. And yeah, so yeah, so now I feel like with the civil culture society, it's a little bit, you know, redundant to kind of suggest, like, art of decisions that the Aetherian Foundation are making cypherpunk

and orientation, I think that's now very unambiguously clear that that's the only focus that they have, that they are staying out of things. So one of the interesting changes is that they no longer, let's say, intervene in any non-crops-related debates. So Defi United, this was that big issue. The E&S debate, you know, people, I was looking on Twitter, people are saying, like, why isn't the Talek saying something? And I think this is a policy of the modern Ethereum Foundation that it's not related to Cypherpunk, it's not related to crops at the Ethereum layer one, maybe layer two, to some extent apps, then they are disinterested. We are now the stewards of the crop sanctuary, whichever way you want to think about it,

whatever is outlined in the Ethereum Foundation mandate. The mandate, of course, itself is a very, very clear statement. It's, I guess, I remember reading it for the first time. And even though I'm morally opposed to the pledge, I thought the pledge was a stupid concept that you would have to pledge to a document, especially in a crypto culture, it seems very, kind of counter. But, and that would be the kind of thing, I guess you would say, a civil culture society person might, you know, say, well, why have a pledge?

But we didn't see the mandate, which is interesting. So the mandate was something that wasn't brought before us. The mandate is, like, it's a granular analysis of cipherpoint values at a very detailed level. But the main message of it is this message of what we will get involved in. And it's effectively just this idea of it's, if it's not related to sustaining the L1, getting us to the point of ossification, and even to a sense, like the Ethereum Foundation, getting to the subtraction and disappearing,

then they are not interested in it. So that I think is the current EF cypherpunk culture. Yeah, it's super curious because, I mean, and I'm just going to give a very basic, like, you know, a distillation of what I think is happening. And please correct me if I'm getting this wrong or it's too facetious. It's just, to me it just seems like the EF does not want to, worry about ethie asset. So and effectively what ETH labs and this is just going from from some of

the podcast appearances from people high up in the in the ETH labs over the past week is it essentially they're kind of tasking themselves with figuring out how to bring value accrual to ETHI asset. And it's kind of like it's it's like it's passe for Vitalik and the EF to to worry about how to how to come up with strategies and systems to make sure value does accrue to the ETH token because that's not really the point of the whole crop stuff and stuff like that. I mean, the token price doesn't really come up in crops at all. So if the EF doesn't want to entertain,

like the different plans and plots to boost the price of ETH, because it's like really cheesy and it's like antithetical to the whole public's good stuff, like how effective can ETH Labs really be in really affecting that change? Because it seems like, well, they're just going to, write proposals and because they do have a lot of high profile people behind them and a lot of thought put into that those proposals might be taken seriously and it's kind of like plausible deniability for the EF to then kind of like either you know back to those kind of changes or not is is that how you're viewing this this kind of split with the ETH labs in the EF?

Yeah I mean I see them as and I think this is like probably one of the more underrated fascinating moments that we've ever had, at least in Ethereum, that will be looked back upon as extremely consequential. So I do see the Eat Labs is the culmination of that populist revolt. If you go back to that story, again, right, it is focused on EAT the asset institutional. And then if you look at, say, then we have Thomas's nine months,

then he comes up against, I guess, the EFs limits around what it can do. This is also related to the Treasury, right, the EF's running out of money as well. that's another factor in all of this, and nothing like money to force a situation. But, yeah, so, and then if you look at the people who support Eath Labs, so the names that are listed there, so Bitmine, Joseph Lubin, and then just, you know, David Hoffman, let's say, from Bankless

and all these different kind of cast of characters, Anthony Sasano. These were the people who traditionally were involved in the crypto-twitter version of that critique. So they were the ones who were calling for the EF to be more hands-on, to be more pragmatist, to be less ideological, right? Like, it's fine to be cipherpoint, but actually, ETH is the most important thing. And without ETH, like, what's the point? And, you know, more market-oriented.

In a way, I've often taught about it as the business school faction as well. So I either use the term post-ideological or business schoolification for this kind of group of people. Because it is the people that are, you know, market-oriented. It's not just in the sense of their, obsessed with the price, they're not basic DGens. There are people who believe in, say, the efficiencies of the market. In some sense, they're kind of even interested in ideas around more like centralized

movement, like getting things done more efficiently by being like maybe not less decentralized but somewhat less or somewhat more centralized in certain areas. And so that, that's who's backing it. So they've culminated, there's a culmination here of that revolt where we now have, instead of a co-executive director situation, which was probably untenable, right, trying to do this two different factions and leading the same organization. Instead, what's happened is they've just extracted themselves from that and now they've got their own organization. Now, if you look at the names on the actual R&D team, so people like Casper and Ansgar, Barnaby, Julian, these are all

people who are very monetarily focused. They're economically minded. In fact, most of them have involved themselves at some point in the issuance debate over the years. So in a way, you could even say this is the issuance kind of faction as well, robust incentives group, that kind of group of people. So this is the by temperament, it's effectively like a part of the Ethereum Foundation who by temperament are more suited to be working on ETH just by their natural inclination and interest in markets, you know, monetary policy, I guess maybe it's a bit of, a bit of a loose way. So I think that that's roughly what has occurred.

Now, in the sense of the Ethereum Foundation, I think it's very useful for, we're thinking about this strategically or pragmatically, to have this escape valve. So you can just say, well, you know, we focus on crops in the L1. Well, we have ETH Labs. They're the ones who are supposed to be doing all the EATTS stuff.

So I think that's worked out really well for the Aetherian Foundation. And then from the ETHLAS perspective, we don't know enough yet, right? The documentation is relatively ambiguous in terms of like concrete plans, which I guess is natural in the beginning, right? So they probably just formed, they probably just got their backing,

and they probably want to get moving as quickly as possible, which again would be in their temperament. But the list of things that they're going to focus on, you know, like protocols, scaling, it's not like radically different than the kinds of things that you would see in, you know, Ethereum governance discussion at the moment, but they do have a little bit more of an emphasis in the FAQ that ETH is going to be our focus.

But that is, yeah, a little bit of a double-edged sort because you then become the people who are in a way responsible for the market performance of ETH in the eyes of the community. So I guess it's a careful what you wish for situation. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is really early. So it's so hard to even read into what the power dynamics are actually going to be, which we're trying to make it frustrating. And yeah, and I suppose we do just have to have to have to wait. a few months to see what actually like is going to be substantially different. Because like when I listen to what the messaging is right now, a lot of it is just, well, yeah, we're, we're an emphasis on scaling the L1, I understand that.

But also it is, it's like a rebranding of the of the layer two scaling roadmap as well. In a sense that that is effectively what the strategy is. So it's like it would be best if the layer two's could. I mean, there's no specifics, but it's like it's obvious that we're headed. to a place where L2s would have to, like roll-ups would have to pay more fees. So a lot of that flows back into ether asset and everything like that. But there's clearly going to be some tension, though, because the EF still sets the roadmap.

So it's like, and the roadmap doesn't really have a lot to do with, with ETH asset either. Do you see how, like where this could break down, like this relationship between ETH Labs and EF? And I'm going to get into this as well because, I mean, who's backing ETH? Labs, it is a lot of for-profit companies as well. I know there's investors as well, but is it something that can coexist quite easily having these two nonprofits? Like how are you viewing how easy it will be to gel these two, these two? I mean, they're both going to have separate roadmaps at some point also it feels like as well. Yeah, and I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. So one of the, I guess the issues that I have traditionally had around the roadmap is that it's like very,

In a way, it's an abstract document that everybody looks at. It's a planning document, but like a very, very long-term planning document. So we think about Metallics version of the roadmap where you just see like a lot of boxes to be filled in. And some of them are very, very downstream. We also have the straw map, which is, you know, Justin Drake's kind of version as well. And let's say there's like a contradiction that I've always found in terms of like the emphasis. So let me talk about crops as it's being introduced. So censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security.

If you look at those aspects that are supposedly part of the Ethereum Foundation mandate, privacy, for example, is not like a huge part of, say, the roadmap as it's currently positioned, even though lots of people in the Ethereum Foundation, like the privacy stewards of Ethereum, are working toward privacy. So there are people working toward aspects of Ethereum which maybe don't figure majorly on the roadmap itself. So you have all these different subunits which are pursuing their own interests. And I think that that's like a healthier position than everybody feeling that the EF determines the direction only. So having a competing roadmap, I don't think that necessarily would be a bad thing, even if it does cause like little clashes.

In fact, I would like to see more of that. I would like to see, say, at conferences where you have representatives of different positions actually debating with each other. They used to do this at DevConnect and ECC from time to time. but I haven't seen it in a little while. And like Ethereum events could probably use a little bit of this governance discussion drama about the long-term future of the protocol. It might be a way to bring these different, these two competing cultures together. So there are pragmatists and there are cypherpunks and increasingly they feel like

slightly different communities to such an extent that we have split them according to protocol and asset. So we've basically done the classic thing where people say, whether you have the blockchain and then you have the asset. But we've done that but at a cultural level and that maybe is something that needs to be some kind of link between them could be introduced would be a good direction.

But I don't expect that it will be, I don't expect there to be major, major clashes based on the, let's say, the particular cohort of people who are actually the researchers and developers. There's even people on the funding list who are like part of the Ethereum Foundation. Justin Drake is on there. So it's not as, let's say, contentious as like a, we're like splitting away and we're going

to direct in a certain direction. Now, the other thing is governance might be the most interesting place to watch. So Ansgar, I believe, is a moderator of maybe ACD, is part of the kind of governance process. Some of the people listed in the funding as well, they're also involved in governance. That's where I would really be interested to see what happens in the all-core death's call. Like, will we see factionalism? Will we see people actually begin to take serious those positions? So being the chair, being the moderator,

this becomes like historically, that's as someone in the EF is in that role. Now, there is cases now where that's not the case, so there's people who maybe war at the EF and so on. But now I think people are going to be more and more conscious about that because it becomes more of a power, let's say, dynamic. This is where the questions of capture really would begin to come in. So if I imagine there being a dispute, it will probably be around,

It will probably start in this kind of question of like how the discussion is being determined in the, let's say, more obscure governance forms that people don't pay attention to until something goes askew. Yeah. And I was going to bring that up as well because, I mean, this is my understanding of the crops thing because there's two, there's two seas in crops or maybe it's two ours. It's like originally it was just censorship resistance. And then it became also capture resistance. And it was like this was kind of included, I think, maybe a few days or a week after the original mandate came out. And I mean, and I'm not, you know, I don't think this is actually the case.

But if you were in a, if you were at the EF, very cypherpunct minded and you were in a particular mood and you saw, you know, a proposal come out or some kind of language come out from someone like ETH Labs that is a non-profit. So that gives you some plausible deniability that it's not just a for-profit business trying to make, say, tokenomics changes or something. something like that. But it is heavily funded by people who work at for-profit companies. So, you know, you have Joe Lubin, you've got Sharplink, you've got, you know, consensus, that if you are spiritually offloading some of the considerations around ether asset to this other system,

and then that system is funded by a lot of capital, at what sense, at what point are you being captured in response to how you design specifically like an asset as well. And I think you're right, that is where it is going to become contentious at some point. It might not in the first few months or the first year or so, you might not see it. But eventually, if you do have this resistance to pushing the value of an asset, that has to come to a head at some point. Is that what you mean by the capture resistance and the tension around there? One thing I will say is I don't think people at the Atheir Foundation are disinterested

in that they want Eid to perform well, even if it's only because of like the economic security and maybe even just for themselves, like just they're obviously usually holders and believers. It's just that it doesn't interest them as much. You know, like if you're actually trying to like have a conversation with like a bunch of Ethereum Foundation people, then like beginning by talking about ETH is probably not your best best. It's more like a disinterest, I think, whereas the other guys are like lit up by it. That's the exciting topic, you know. Now, when it comes to crops, that censorship resistance and capture resistance double name, this is a classic, I guess, Ethereum issue, which is, you know,

like you get a definition and they begin changing all the time. So sometimes it's security, sometimes it's secure. So for me, as an academic who research is this, it can be pretty frustrating. But I do think the capture resistance one is interesting because they define censorship resistance in the traditional sense in the EF mandate. So they say, you know, it's about transactions or should all be equal. You shouldn't interfere with downstream applications like Tornado Cash. So Tornado Cash is all over that document as an implicit topic. And then they also include this interesting part where you can be in a durable, non-competitive position in relationship to say if you're builders and relays where there's only like one or two that are actually doing all

of the action. So even if you're not censoring at the moment, even though some of them actually did censor tornado cash, but even if you're not doing it at the moment, being in a position where there's like this like no competition and you could censor is itself a kind of capture resistance. So like capture can come in different forms. It can come in the lack of competitiveness. And I I like that because it's a rare competitive type argumentation, but it's like a social, political capture understanding. So, yes, people can be interested in these kind of topics, but really when it's about like Ethereum the protocol, that's what gets them kind of excited about it.

At this point, I suspect that the, you know, there's very few people in the Ethereum Foundation who are not like strategically aware of their duties. the mandate seemed to have been, it's written for two audiences. The message for us, right, as the external non-EF people, is we're not working on all this stuff, right?

You're going to have to do it yourself, whether you're ETH Labs, materialize, defi United, or whatever. We're going to focus on crops. But the internal message is, like, our job is to secure these properties, to make sure that the layer one is sacrosanct,

and then do our best with everything else. We'll try, but actually all that really matters is this. And I suspect then that once, decided that we're laying off a bunch of people, we're going to be lean, but not in the way that they, the non-ideological pragmatism being lean, but lean crops, cyphabunks, that, that implies a giving up of power to a certain degree. It's an admission that to accomplish air-specific goals to be laser-focused on crops and nothing else means we have to seed ground with the other aspects. And probably, and this is one of those things where I can't know, but I just sort of speculate

based on, let's say, being around the Ethereum kind of culture, the Ethereum Foundation type culture, is that they want to know who the other people are, like bringing them out and making them into an organization that's recognizable. So, like, strategically, Eath Labs is, and all of those names, is basically like a list of everybody on the other side. You know, so, like, it formalizes who the post-ideological pragmatists are and the, like, who is like a little bit more onside there versus like, you know, on air more like OG cypherpunk side. So those people always existed. So it's not your, you're seeding ground to a group of people who are always, you know,

always kind of up to these things anyway, but now you actually can recognize them in a formal organization. And also, in a way, because there is this nice overlap of like Exeterian Foundation people, and the, you know, there is a, in the FAQ, they say something like a complimentary and collaborative. I think that that's probably going to be true. up until whatever issue, you know, divides. But of course, some issue would have come up eventually anyway.

But it will probably be something like issuance, let's say, for example. But up until then, it will probably be exactly that complementary and collaborative. But I do think there's a certain value in knowing and formalizing who the, let's say, the other cultural camp is. It is just always this tension between the utility of something and the market price. And so the easiest way to, because I'm curious. like how you consider success for Ethereum because I mean I mean I think a lot of the people tuning in and a lot of the audience and I mean just in general across crypto is that price is the

most popular way to gauge success for Ethereum but it's like you know it's not like any other layer ones are really popping off right now either so it's very and and Ethereum came before so you have different trajectories and different different cadences for those trajectories due to when it when these other chains launched. And so, of course, Ethereum is going to be in a different spot in the market compared to others because of those growth trajectories. But it's different because it's very easy to style. This is fractured governance. But what you're describing is actually strengthen governance because you do have all of a sudden a formalized additional voice and a lack of competition is a form of capture,

like you said. So you do need to have this real. enforcement of the decentralization of of governance. So so with that in mind at the same time, you know, crypto is not really a growth sector right now. I think I think most people can agree with that. It's like robotics and space and and defense and and those kind of areas. So but at the same time, like to me and it's and it's maybe it's just like the the crypto boomer in me because you know, it's this infinite garden stuff. It's like the world computer computer thing where in a hundred years you're going to have this public goods, this public good chain of Ethereum. And if you have all these societal functions being ported onto Ethereum, then that would have to be success for Ethereum.

And that doesn't really, I suppose there will be indirect functions of that would accrue value to ethie asset. Maybe. But it depends on how much volume there is interacting with the chain to satisfy those functions of public goods. So I just wonder like how you view success for Ethereum. And it's not like there's not on-chain successes. I mean, Morpho is really big. Like perps, dexes and tokenized stock trading, that appears to be happening elsewhere. And it's very difficult to imagine from here that Ethereum could capture those users again.

Like it would take some kind of catastrophic failure of Solana or Hyperliquid in order for people to come back to Ethereum for that kind of stuff. but the same time like peer-to-peer lending is really I mean morpho is really strong on Ethereum too I mean and we spoke about it before before the show it's like the community aspect of crypto is like really seen as old hat and passe as well so I'm wondering how you what is it that defines success for Ethereum

maybe it is just the cypherpunk stuff but I'm curious how you view it yeah I mean the first thing I would say is you know I'm just as much a hype Solana person as anybody else, even though everybody, before I meet them, they all think I'm going to be this like heartline, Ethereum Maximilist, and I only believe in Ethereum. But I'm just as much interested in all of those. And particularly with my students, actually my students are the ones

who really give me the indication of where things are going, because I remember like a few years ago, like, that's what they were mostly talking about. They want to do perps on chain because like they're young and maybe they don't want to do it through their Revolut, like our version of Robin Hood. They want to do it in a way which is like on chain and like relatively straightforward. No K.C. All of those kind of things. So there's a little bit of like a DGN aspect to that as well, of course. But the and then even the other areas that I watch say more like AI, like render,

these like kind of little plays that I'd be looking at and think. The classic thing of you're trying to be smart and, you know, predict ahead and so forth. But at the same time, overall, like even though there are these small successes, you don't really get a sense of one of those major bull runs coming soon, or at least I've taught about it a few times in the past. I've been like disappointed like so many times in this cycle where I taught maybe things were kind of like coming back, but it really feels like a genuine tall or crypto winter, as we used to say back in the day. So when it comes to Ethereum, I mean, this is where I kind of disappoint people because I guess like as somebody who like is a researcher

and teacher of crypto, they maybe have some idea that I have, like, you know, maybe a, some kind of solution to this problem. But then I have to admit that I'm, like, basically at this point, like, really at a loss as to exactly, like, what Ethereum is supposed to be for. So if it's the, let's say, the cypherpunk part, like, I think that's generally, let's say amongst the old school is in agreement that we still value those, like, properties of it's like the most credibly neutral chain, that it's the chain where, let's say, we can imagine it being a more private chain in the future. We get Kohaku, the wallet, with railgun integrated. That's like coming soon. Maybe it'll be more secure and so forth. But there's no, yeah, the sort of use case,

like the exciting use case is a little bit ambiguous. And there needs to be some new primitive. So every major, let's say, at least for Ethereum, every major upturn usually corresponded to some new primitive being invented like Dow's Defi NFTs. And then prediction markets, I guess, would have been a natural home. So you could imagine a time when prediction markets, if it had happened a little earlier, probably would have been on Ethereum just because that was just where everything was done. But I think, yeah, it comes down to this, like some new primitive. but if I knew the answer to that, then I'd be like a founder maybe instead and coming up with it. My intuition is that like something I've been thinking about more, this is not just the Ethereum, but the crypto industry,

becoming a little bit of a subgenre of artificial intelligence. So there are aspects of crypto which do seem to facilitate, so our understanding of GPUs and CPUs and compute, like storage, also agentic payments. A lot of that stuff, you can see, there's, some discovery going on around this. And I can imagine at some point as the AI, like the AI industry is presumably constantly searching around for opportunities. And like we're probably on the map somewhere. Like they're trying to figure out like how they can kind of gobble us up and make us part of their wider world. And which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. It might

be bad for our egos. But it's like not like, I think it's like not inconceivable that we become useful to this like much, much larger story, which at this point, we should admit has effectively, like the reason why there isn't so much exciting excitement around us anymore is because there is a new cooler kid on the street. So maybe we should try to kind of like hang out with the cooler kid a bit more. It's funny. It's like, I mean, it's just the case that crypto has been around for so long and Ethereum has been around for so long that the world has just changed so much around it. So it's just trying to figure out how to how to be useful within that and specifically useful outside of the world of trading and and you know, and that seems to be where the power of of

Ethereum is, is everything except trying. It's really just a throughput thing. And I just thought it was like, it was just so telling that, you know, all this drama around Heath Labs and, you know, is it a takeover and what's going to happen? And then, I mean, Vitalik dropped like a hundred page theoretical research report on privacy. It's like it's it's conceptual at this stage. You know, so it just, it just goes to show like how how far down the road, you know, really the focus is. I mean, of course, I mean, there's all these, you know, stalling things and there's a hard for coming up and everything like that too. So there is like really pragmatic changes being being done to Ethereum at the same time. But again, the goal is ossification.

Like you said that earlier in the chat. It's like, I mean, in your view, how. far away away from that ossification? Yeah, this has reminded me that like I guess that question maybe one of the things that the Ethereum community should be demanding from an organization like Eat Labs is an answer to that kind of question, you know, like that.

Now, should there be people at Eat Labs who are essentially just like ETH market price people? Like that would be an interesting organization or maybe even someone whose job it is just to find like the market research on the best application. So, because like the

the organization is effectively like a protocol roadmap organization. So when it comes to authentication, I think maybe like 10, 15 years, something along those lines. Now, I actually don't think we'll ever really have pure ossification. It's not really possible because, you know, ultimately any protocol, whatever Ethereum, a Bitcoin or Solana is, you know, effectively a bunch of GitHub repositories run by people. So there are maintainers. At any point, you know, you could effectively fork like the protocol as a way to upgrade or revive or something on those lines.

So and also I guess there would always be night watch people. So just, you know, they're kind of keeping an eye in case some bug emerges at some point. But I don't think like if it's not like 15 years is like almost like too generous, but that's probably the pace that a lot of these things will come out. I also think a lot of things will get dropped. So at some point, the more ambitious ideas will either migrate somewhere else

or just run out of steam. And then eventually the, you can kind of see this in some of the recent EF discussions with that downsizing tweet that we're just going to really focus on like a few core things. I think that will become, that will make the timeline

a lot shorter and like probably get it done in about a decade. Yeah, it makes sense to me. Cool. I think we're going to leave it there, Paul. Thank you so much for joining us again. This is a great discussion, and hopefully we'll have you again soon. Yeah, for sure. Awesome.

Cool. Thanks, everybody.