Unchained - As Ethereum Turns 10, Where Is the Foundation Focused Next? - Ep. 877

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Subscribe to the new Bits + Bips channels! 📺 YouTube  🎧 Podcast → Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Fountain🐦 X / Twitter  Ethereum turned 10 on Wednesday, capping off a decade of trials and travails — but also triumphs. After years of being the heart of crypto’s onchain economy, Ethereum stalled last year, losing mindshare and market share to Bitcoin and Solana. During that time, some long-time supporters publicly aired frustrations with the Ethereum Foundation. Now, there’s a palpable shift in energy. In this episode, Tomasz Stanczak, the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, reflects on the 10-year anniversary and talks about what’s ahead.  From internal strategy overhauls to his plans to tackle Ethereum’s UX and developer experience, Tomasz shares how the Foundation is trying to re-center Ethereum — and why he’s betting on it for the next decade.  He also lays out what he calls a “secondary roadmap,” including bold ambitions like building Ethereum into a platform for AI, machines, and even a new kind of open-source society. Thank you to our sponsors! Ledn Mantle Guest: Tomasz K. Stańczak, Co-Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation and Founder of Nethermind Links: Unchained: Ethereum Turns 10 Years Old Tomasz’s tweet about the roadmap Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🎉 7:46 How Tomasz is reflecting on Ethereum’s 10th birthday and its recent struggles 🧠 10:41 What Ethereum means to Tomasz and how he explains it to the normies 🏗️ 17:28 Why the Ethereum Foundation plays a different kind of role in crypto development 👔 22:59 How Tomasz ended up as co-executive director of the EF 🗣️ 27:25 What he learned from hundreds of conversations about how Ethereum could improve 🎯 29:47 Why the Foundation is now focused on three core goals 💼 36:34 How and why the EF is also embracing business development 🪙 42:40 Why Tomasz wants people minting directly on Ethereum Layer 1 📣 46:14 How the Foundation’s communication strategy has changed and why it matters 📉 52:48 Why the EF isn’t focused on ETH’s price—at least not directly 🧾 57:50 Whether the Foundation is worried about Ether’s shifting asset narrative 🔗 1:03:34 How the EF is working to fix interoperability issues within Ethereum 🏦 1:05:59 Why the Foundation sold ETH to SBET and how its treasury strategy is evolving 🏛️ 1:14:09 How Ethereum became the chain of choice for institutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I feel that as a director or anything or as a leader, you can be stubborn and not humble and think that you have best ideas and that when other people tell you something, you think that you know better. Or you can be humble and understand it actually, you know, in the ecosystem there's so many smart people so they know better. Most likely, they repeatedly tell you something that you just, your talent should be aggregating this. So that's where it comes from, right? So when you understand what you'll do with RWAs, with communication, with BT, then it's just responding to all of this. And being willing to do that, it creates that more servant role of the executive director rather the one that tries to build a vision.

Hey, everyone, this week for Ethereum's 10th anniversary, we have two interviews. The first one is being released today, and it's with, Tomash Staunchek, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. Tamash and I talked about a lot of things, both retrospective for Ethereum and also forward-looking. One of the sections of our discussion that really struck me was about the relationship between the Ethereum Foundation and the price of Ether. Chatting about ETH's price was actually a big no-no during the early years of the Ethereum Foundation, and last year, it felt like at least some portion of the consternation in the Ethereum

community came from the underperformance of ETH compared to the ETH. to Bitcoin and Saul. On top of that, the price of ETH, of course, has an effect on security due to Ethereum's proof of stake system. But surprisingly, when I asked him about it, he said the foundation doesn't touch on the price of ether, except when discussing the foundation treasury. I guess I had expected some change in that regard since, you know, the period when my book ends, which is in early 2018. But it sounds like it's the same old MO, which maybe Ethereum people are with. I'd love to hear from all of you if you think it makes sense for the Ethereum Foundation to, you know, I guess, I don't know if ignore is too strong a word, but at least not prioritize

the price for any purpose aside from managing the foundation's own treasury. The other few notable moments to me were when he talked about how one of Ethereum's biggest problems is solving interoperability. As he was speaking, I had this thought. but I did forget to verbalize it in the moment, but I'll say it here. So his background, he had recently tweeted that the three main priorities for Ethereum and the short term are scaling the layer one, scaling blobs, which means scaling L2 activity, and improving the UX. So if one of Ethereum's biggest problems is interoperability, then, you know, the thing that I was thinking was that those first two priorities to scale both the L1 and blobs, it's kind of, like keeping a theorem on the same path without addressing the interoperability issue, almost like kicking the can down the road. So, you know, maybe people disagree with me,

but, you know, let me know in the comments what you think about that. And on a related note, Tamash also said that he advocates that all assets be minted on the L1. And he gave some examples of, you know, creators doing so. And, you know, I asked him like, would he, Also say, for instance, that like these new creator coins that are being minted on Zora on base should instead be on the Ethereum L1. He kind of seemed to support that notion, which was interesting. I guess we'll see as time goes on whether or not that becomes a standard. And the last thing that I found especially memorable from my discussion with Tomash was that he kept connecting Ethereum to the coming wave of innovation and AI, mentioning that Ethereum could be used to help resolve issues with AI centralization.

I'm interested to see where that goes. Hopefully it'll be before our robot overlords conquer us. As always, I hope you find this conversation illuminating. Let me know what you think in the comments. And we may quote your comment on the show. Hands up, everyone. We've got exciting news. Bits and Bips, our Macro Meets Crypto show,

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I'm your host, Laura Shin. This is the July 31st, 2025 episode of Unchained. Today's guest is Tomash Stanchic, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. Welcome to Amash. Hi, Laura. Great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. All right. So, as we just mentioned, today is the 10th anniversary of the Ethereum blockchain. It's a monumental achievement. I tweeted that the chain has had 100% uptime. It's number one in client diversity, number one in TVL, number one in ecosystem developers. So the Ethereum community has so much to be proud of.

And we're recording this at this moment when Ethereum has kind of like a new outlook on life, I would say. Last year was maybe one of its tougher years. Obviously, we saw that it lost ground against Bitcoin and Salon in various ways, both price-wise, but even for Solana, even lost some developers compared to how much Solana grew in that regard. Ethereum was also not at the center of the last crypto-craze, which kind of was the first time to happen in its history. And then, as I'm sure people are aware, toward the end of the year,

there was kind of a mini revolt, I guess you could say. We saw some long-time Ethereum leave the community. They were publicly criticizing the foundation, demanding change. So, Tamash, you now join the Ethereum Foundation, and you are part of this revitalization of Ethereum. I know you've only been in this co-executive director position for a few months, but you've been making palpable changes. So here we are.

We're at this moment where the price has gone up at an accelerated pace the last few months. We've seen inflows in the ether ETFs outpacing inflows into Bitcoin ETFs. There is a whole slew of Ethereum treasury companies that have been launching. Just like literally, there was another one yesterday. So I'm just so curious to hear your just general thoughts on this, you know, big birthday, your thoughts about Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation, and just reflections on this milestone. Yeah, that's definitely a great story the last few months. And I think that, as for me, joining for months ago and suddenly you see that much happening

gets definitely a lot of a lot of lack or good timing, good timing to join and just enter into the stage where everyone was already preparing for it. I think that there are so many builders on Ethereum that were just activating in response to the crisis mode. They all take, took a few weeks or a few months. to start and build. And when you see all the treasury companies, obviously that's been in the making probably for a while,

Joe Lubin has done amazing work in that space. And you've seen probably a lot of effort and effective work from Vitalik and AIA and the AF management and all the team leads that realized, oh, okay, there's lots of push from the community to move faster. to react to the changes in regulatory framework. And then, I think me and Shellway taking over on the leadership side was just coincidental

with everyone realizing that we have to react faster to everything that happens in the interim ecosystem and the entire ecosystem thinking like, oh, we want to help. And lots of people are deleting from the stealth mode, from the shadow, from a retirement, like, oh, gee, is coming back and thinking they have to help. So it's great to celebrate it now. I think it's super important that 10 years of Ethereum happens when everyone is in better moods. That we think that we achieved something on the side of 10 years ago. Everybody was talking about the centralizing finance.

And this was really big thing. Let's say going back to Bitcoin times when we've seen all the bailouts, all the challenges, you have the global financial systems, not maybe having the oversight or decentralization that we would love to see. the permissionless access, sensory resistance, disappearing potentially with the growth of the digital economy. And we had to react,

and we see the community achieving so much together. And this is the celebration, and I think it sets beautiful timing for the next 10 years, as it gives a feeling that if we dream big, we can achieve big things. So if we dream big now for the next 10 years, and if we understand what the fears

and the biggest challenges of nowadays are, and I think it's all around the AI, decentralization, then this is great. Again, we can feel like we're writing white papers, like we're gathering together the communities and starts having discussions. I don't know, like the fireside conversations. All of this is so cool about this technology

and the movement and the community. Yeah, so I'm so glad you mentioned narratives because I'm sure you're well aware. There's been so many narratives for Ethereum over the years. We've all heard these phrases, a world computer, a decentralized app store, an infinite garden. And I was just so curious, like, what is Ethereum to you? And I would love also, so it's a two-part question, if you were to describe Ethereum to somebody who isn't in crypto, you know, just pick any random person on the globe, but at least let's give them a bare minimum of like, you know, a smartphone or the internet or whatever. I'd love to hear.

So what is it to you? And then how would you describe it to whatever random person you'd like? like to describe it too. So first answering the question about all the different narratives, I think it's also part of the Ethereum that there are many narratives, that plurality of Ethereum is expressed by people dreaming their own vision of the world or their own changes that they want to introduce to the world through Ethereum. And thinking about that part of Ethereum that describes best of the one to build,

definitely the worst computer feels very natural. And if I go for one, probably I would see the world computer. The one that evolved into understanding of what world computer would be nowadays, are in the next years, that this is something related to AI, that this is something related to the AI governance, AI coordination. That is something that transcends between the physical and digital, that it connects, maybe automation, robotics, automation, and the finance system. And then now even with emergence of pushing ideas directly to chain and monetizing ideas,

like what you've seen on Zara recently, that's also part of it. So now coming back to how to talk to people about Ethereum when they want to understand it better. I think best to describe it would be as a technology for the global coordination of economy, for allowing everyone to connect permissionlessly to the single coordination layer of everything that's happening in the world allowing people to to buy, sell, invest, crow, share, coordinate, whether financial ideas or scientific discoveries of the governance on any level, either on the hyperlocal level or on the global level. So that's how each term works, such as delivers us a set of,

such of agreements of how we can build all of this together, like a set of standards. And it just exists there and it should be less and less visible, but what we're building on top of Ethereum is more and more visible and more and more impactful. So, you know, earlier when I asked you kind of about this milestone, I was curious, you know, what your perspective is on how Ethereum has evolved, like what you feel like the various stages of its development is,

and what you think the current stage of development is. Yes, it was saying today that in a way, Eterium hasn't changed because there were many visionaries 10 years ago, and I think they've seen the world that we see now. But the progress in bringing those dreams and those visions into reality definitely at some stages of maybe in the past it was more of an experimentation stage and then realizing that you have unique time. to bring the approach to the infrastructure to building that is a bit more robust,

a bit more really long-term security and resilience-focused. So I think we have much of it nowadays. When we celebrate 10 years without interruption, it means that we celebrate 10 years of a lot of dedication and effort from people that are ready to just without specific coordination in a given moment, but more like the long-term coordination, being connected to the network to just be ready to wake up in the night, in the middle of the night and think, like,

is an a thing on the Ethereum network that requires attention. And generally, the network itself doesn't require any single person or in group of people to wake up in the nights. It's like going for the forks, going for the changes. And then you have, like, thousands of companies that runs the validators or solo stakeholders that just keep, paying attention to all the life metrics of the network and building and adding and thinking many years ahead about the security and the risks like the process of design of the network the discussions

on the old core devs are always with the with the security in the first place and like if you scale how do you harden the protocol not to not to scale with risks to the network and this is the stage that says okay so it's a mature network to onboard global finance, to onward global economy. And now we see the stage of adoption as well. So, right, you had experimentation. You had lots of experiments going wrong, but with like lower, sorry, like the smaller amounts of money

or bigger amounts of money as well. And now here. Yeah, the down amount. Like if we calculate it in the nowadays terms of like, nowadays price of the term, but like I think if we go back at that time, like everything was smaller. really in the context of global economy.

And at that time, I remember 2017, 18, 19, people were asking me, like, so what will be happening with Ethereum and why would not everybody start competing with those indigenous builders? With the builders that's just our card is there, why

the banks are not coming to take everything away from others. Like when they started companies. And I said, like, the money was just too small at that time. So even if we think that was big, for many, financial institutions that was just too small. It was nascent technology.

You have small numbers. Now the numbers are bigger. We're talking about multi-trillion dollar economies. We're talking about multi-trillion dollar stable coins products. And we see global adoption. And it's even not there yet, but it feels unstoppable. And this is beautiful. And the next stage, what will be next stage?

I think the next big challenge is. And as I mentioned, the fear of AI centralization, the globalization of coordination networks, like those AIs and robotics merge into one thing. And we want to ask where the humanity goes with this. And I think Ethereum was always ready to attract thinkers that want to discuss really big topics, like big threats to humanity.

It's just finance was the first thing. And so I'm curious, like, when you look at all these stages and you're looking at this current stage of adoption and looking forward to what Ethereum will be, what do you think that, EF's role has been at those earlier stages, and what do you want its role to be now? As for the foundation, when I look back, I think it was very important as a coordinator. It has been very important as a coordinator.

And so I'm thinking about my journey. I used to be at Netamind, so starting Netomind in 2017, and then the Foundation existed there and gave us some grants after one or two years. And then obviously, as I joined all Cardiff's journals, there were some people from the foundation helping with coordination, but at the same time, we were totally independent, and our interactions with the foundation were very limited,

which even as important in a context of when one was joining as a coexative director, people were saying, oh, at that time, the foundation was failing because it was not attached with the builders like me or others. but I felt always great a foundation is there, but I don't want to feel that a foundation is coordinating my work. I mean, is managing my work. It's great.

It would be coordinating greater efforts. But like many people, I think I was building some part of Ethereum that felt like my Ethereum or our Ethereum. And many people in community do that same thing. They don't want the foundation to say, at Ethereum belongs to foundation. And Foundation never tried to do it. So the role doesn't change much.

And I think my role as a co-executive director is to simply make foundation as efficient and more successful in its own mandate in what it wants to achieve, which means just help Ethereum to grow, help to focus Ethereum on the values of privacy, of security of open-source solutions and censorship resistance. So if we set those four values very soon, we understand there's really, there are really lots of gaps among what people are building. They're unfilled in those values areas because it's very often the public commons problem. It's public goods, funding, it's coordination towards the right values and long-term thinking.

So we continue doing this and then underneath all of that coordination of protocol as something that is very robust, resilient, wanting to lean for impact. being just built in confidence that Ethereum network, the protocol itself will always be the strongest and never accepting the weakness of the layer one and eternal protocol. I think that's the foundation's role as well to help to do that.

All right, so in a moment we will learn how Tamash became co-edee, but first a quick word from the sponsors to make this show possible. Hands up, everyone. We've got exciting news. Bits and Biffs, our macro meets crypto show, is officially spinning off into its own podcast feed, YouTube channel, and X account. If you've been enjoying the deep dives into interest rates, monetary policy, and how they intersect with the crypto markets, make sure to follow bits and bibs wherever you get your

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Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Back to my conversation with Shamash. So you said originally that in the process of becoming ED or co-ED, you had a conversation with Aya, the previous executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Ayamiyukuchi. And it was more just like, I think, informational just a conversation. Maybe she was, you know, just trying to hear more from the community. And then she reached back out.

And it was after that that you became co-edu. So it was curious, like, what was the process for you and Shaoui to become? these co-executive directors, and why did the foundation decide to have two co-executive directors? I think the process was very different for me and for Choway, because Joey has been in the foundation for many years. So I'm pretty sure that she's built a lot of trust in her own abilities and in the way she collaborates with I, I would be tallic, with the management, while working on the research team and contributing to the merge

and many other consensus research aspects. So it might have been clear internally within the organization that there was trust that she will be great in that position. And then I think at the same time, Foundation was looking for someone who would be coming with more of combination of business, and an understanding of Ethereum role. So, look, I think I understand why everything that I've been doing before

really combines nicely into a profile that is good for the co-executive director role. So it's building business in Ethereum. It's working with a lot of other businesses in Ethereum because of building infrastructure, which means that you did you collaborate with many of the Defi builders. I worked on my own Defi project.

I've been working with many L2s and for Net of Mind working on infrastructure, launching also with the traditional finance businesses for Twin Steck. So this is institutional staking. All of this together, it seems like, oh, okay, touched really many,

many aspects of Ethereum. And on also being a builder myself, right? So my first three years or even four years at the other mind was just, just building, developing every day. I was, I picked up yellow paper and I picked up tests from Ethereum. Oh, you see, this is the important role of the Ethereum Foundation. All the tests and yellow paper, they were prepared for the foundation. You can pick them up and it's like a spec and you can build it yourself. And then maybe it's easy to think like, oh, it just appears magically on the Internet. So for four years,

I was coding the first one and a half year or so it was like totally independent. I didn't even know that the all-core devs that I could join it. And I was coding the application of the Netamite client. I'm now asking about the process. So yes, I think first time I talked to Ayah at Token, 2049 in Singapore. Oh, maybe at first I talked to her at Tief Tokyo in March, and then I talked to her at Token, 249, when she asked for some kind of discussion when I could provide feedback on how

foundation can work better with the with attracting talent, with the leadership, a finding leadership after Danny was stepping stepping down. And then again, I was reaching to discuss with the foundation some of the some of the arrangements related to bringing some TrotFi to work with the foundation treasury. And that's when when I respond by saying, oh, actually, let's jump on a call and have a discussion about something. And then I learned that something was about whether I would like to discuss the position of the executive director. And then it was very, lots of conversations about the conflicts of interest, about my vision of how to execute and understanding best the vision of Aya and Tali.

And after talking to all the management team, a few days together with the management team. So when you started, you did this sort of like listening tour. You talked to hundreds of people in Ethereum. I heard you say, I don't remember when this podcast came out, but I think you said 400, like maybe a month ago, to Camry Russo. Yeah. I don't know what the number is now.

I slowed down with the one-on-one conversation. So I think around May, this starts slowing down. I started focusing more on the, on some of the execution, the very particular outreach where I had conversations, and also there was lots of events in June. I think there was Berlin, Prague events, IFCA and FCC. So it was a slightly different format. I think it might have been 500. Okay.

And what were people saying in those conversations? Lots and lots of things, but obviously some of them were aggregated. into very coherent vision. So people were saying, what about the communication, marketing, visibility, what about L2s, about the fee secret to L1, what are the future exciting things to build on Ethereum? What about the founder's support, onboarding developers?

You would ask about how about the presence in US, how about the DevCon, diff connect, or events in US? where how will build the Ethereum Habs, like the communities that will exert founders, why don't we engage with DFI enough, what will do with allocation of treasury, why no transparency, how we can support institutions on privacy?

Some people would say, what about privacy, what about losing values potentially if there are traditional finance institutions and there's capture of it, why don't we scale, why we scale, everything, right? So, but there will be probably like 30, 40 common terms that started being like the, some design aspects, UX, interrupt was coming all the time. So then after a while you start realizing, okay, we have more or less everything and we just

start addressing one by one. Every single thing has to be addressed. And so, you know, at this point, like you and Shaouet have. kind of released the main things that you're focusing on, which is scaling the L1, scaling blobs, which means, you know, enabling more activity on the L2s and improving the user experience. So, you know, I was curious, like, how you decided upon those and, like, why those three felt like the three most important things to focus on. Yeah, we had some conversations recently when Vitalik was almost,

saying that like, oh, it was an act too rushed decision. So you see the decision making here is really pick up what everyone is saying and just feel it and understand why it's important for everyone and start pushing in that direction, but also understanding that this is short term and you have a long-term things that have to follow straight after. And now when we say scaling a 1, scaling blobs and interrupt ux, we said that this will be 12 months of focus. And this was three months ago when we started talking about it, which means that now we have

Fusaka and then Glomstardam. And there should be two forests that will really show that we can deliver that. And much of it is helping with the ACD, like foundation of how it should participate in ACT and how foundation should express what we've learned from the ecosystem to ACD as well. And for the interrupt event that we organized in Berlin. So we had, okay, okay, coming back. So you asked me, how did we decide? At some point, Josh Rudolph posted something like this on Twitter.

He said scale of one, scale blobs and interrupt UX. And I saw like, oh, he picked up, he captured the essence of what everyone is saying. And I just like retweeted it. And I felt that everyone felt it. And there was like no real complaint among many, many conversations that I had. it's going the direction. I started repeating, and people liked it.

I said like, all right, it represents the mode of the community. But then we also realized that, well, realized that we had lots of discussions with the board about this might be potentially

losing some of the protocol hardening aspects. Like, did we talk enough about security, about censorship resistance? And I realized that, yeah, for the short-term focus, I will have to prove that this has to stay.

While we build understanding of the community, that some things are really eternal and always there underneath, whatever we say, you cannot really treat it as an override of those values of security, privacy, censorship resistance. So now the messaging is probably much more consistent. We show that protocol hardening.

We show that this 12 months is also having a transition. I will start talking about it much more during DefConnect, that there will be transitioned to the multi-year, a roadmap into protocol hardening, the post-wantum security, the budget models for data availability, and many other things. We also started that one-tri-Len security program about thinking about further hardening of the protocol security of Ethereum. That's just as what's really many institutions or users are saying because it's very important,

security of the network. So let's say double down on it. Like just it's probably very important when you start thinking about things like products or marketing wise, then instead of trying to to suddenly appear in the areas that people don't consider that you belong there, you should really focus on the areas where people think that this is your advantage, this is why you exist, and just say that you're getting even better there. So that's why you want to show you on dollar security. That's why we continue. you're talking about privacy.

You see that we, that is very important for me, for the Jury Foundation, within all of those, to be brave in statements and very open communication, never feeling timid and expressing opinions of everyone in the foundation, but at the same time also understanding how to do that with appreciation for the entire community.

So with understanding of the entire community, so all the researchers should be able to say what they're working on, but also when they work on it, they should understand how it affects everyone else and how it will be understood and whether you communicate clearly enough. Because just such, I'll think about your ideas that you have without analyzing their impact might not be best from the foundation perspective because there is some attention to the thoughts

that are flowing from us. So, wow, I drifted away from the early topic. So, you were asking. I mean, honestly, that's really interesting because, you know, this almost, gets to like, so I'm just going to make an analogy, you know, there was a period where Bitcoin kind of went through the laser eyes period. And it sort of felt like this sort of number go up kind of philosophy overtook some of the things that make Bitcoin Bitcoin, which is the decentralization and the security aspects and things like that. And, you know, now, you know, we do have like real

concerns about Bitcoin's like long-term security. And I don't mean to talk about Bitcoin, but I'm just saying that, like, when you said, like, oh, you know, this person's tweet kind of captures the conversations I've been having. And then now it sounds like, you know, the discussions you're having internally make you realize, like, oh, wait, but, you know, we can't kind of sacrifice these other values or ideals that we have. And so there's sort of like a moment where you're kind of like blending the two or you're just, yeah, trying to integrate them, like one in a more short term way, the other, like in a long-term way, something like that. So it just feels like it doesn't feel like you're drifting.

It feels like you're adding to the conversation that people have been having. And I do think that there is a little bit of a push pull with these systems. Like I said, you know, with the Bitcoin one, I, you know, I feel like, yeah, these communities generally, they do, yeah, kind of, it's like a pendulum, you know, like price, price matters to people. That's kind of why people say that crypto communities almost feel like religious. You know, you show your conviction in your faith by buying and holding an asset or, you know, whatever it might be. So, yeah, I don't feel like you drifted. I feel like you kind of gave added context.

But I did want to ask, so this is kind of more like a cultural thing. But it sort of just ties into everything we're talking about, which is, and you may be. have heard this. Like, I don't know if you ever interviewed any people who had worked in Ethereum but decided and moved to Solana. I have talked to some of those people. And by the way, so just because I know people are so triggered by the name Max Resnick, I am not talking about Max Resnick right here right now. I'm just to make 100% clear. These are other people who worked in Ethereum and then moved to Solana. But, you know, some of them felt like the Ethereum ecosystem was not super friendly to builders, that there was kind of a lot of inertia, that it was not necessarily supportive

of like startups or of a more competitive atmosphere. And, you know, I heard you say on bankless that you wanted to do more business development. And I wanted to, you know, and, you know, coming from the foundation, that's kind of like from the Ethereum Foundation, let alone like anybody, you know, like I'm not talking about other foundations, which are much more into that kind of thing. But historically, the Ethereum Foundation has not been like that. So, you know, I was curious, like, what does that mean to you? And, you know, what kind of shift do you, are you trying to signal to the community around

that type of thing, you know, in terms of like how you would like the foundation under your, under your term to be? Sure. Starting with a question, whether I spoke to people that moved to Solana, maybe, you know, some of them that moved to Solana entirely in a way, yes, I met them for the journey also the last few years as a Nell Mountain visiting all the different communities. And also in the last months, at least I spoke to some fans or accelerators. They started working more with Solana over a interim. Well, very often it was just addition of Solana to Trum and it started saying, hey,

we start feeling it be done easy because there is a pressure. So we moved to Solana, but like very often they would add, but we want to stay only two. So let's do something that please listen to us. So definitely there were conversations. And then I was also talking to people simply from Solana community directly, right? Like I had a call with Kyle. And there was lots of learning, lots of learning of what they pay attention

to how to work with founders, how they started all the different solutions. And I think much of it was like many of the comments, the positive comments about Solana were about the efficiency of business coordination and marketing efforts. And I thought that marketing on the foundation side, on Interim side, probably is mostly visibility on Twitter, because foundation started maybe like rejecting Twitter over time to some extent. And I felt that still the communication with the outside of the web-free world

happens on Twitter a lot, Twitter and LinkedIn and then also talking to all the media. Right? Like if foundation is under attack, then maybe it starts like hiding and saying, oh, like, we'll not, we'll not talk to everyone because like, because of some past wrong articles or so. So that was one change of saying from now on, you just like talk openly to everyone because actually everyone is friendly when they say some tough questions when they post some tough questions. It's just like we should be ready to answer to all of those tough questions. There's also that part of bravery in communication. Now we should be super. real advantages to just understand what are the concerns. So coming back to the topic of what we wanted to do on the business development side. So very early when joining Foundation and talking to people, I realized that James Smith had very nice vision of how to accelerate the ecosystem development functions and how it's the structure those. and we've asked James to help us to structure eco-deaf,

ecodef cluster of the foundation. So it's a foundation nowadays, splits into four clusters, the operations, protocol, eco-deaf, and LPSC as well came back to foundation. So Eco-Dev now has founders acceleration. It has a drum everywhere, which is about events, which has very specific function of academic secretariat, and eco-def automation, so improving the process

and tooling that we have available in the end. You can think of a bitrum as a network and then building the network on top of a technical network with a network of people, network of founders, is probably a super important aspect. And I always thought of myself as like I have to grow into the role of cyber connector, like ultra-connector when traveling around the world.

That's why I was doing a lot for, for Netermine in the past, just appearing and asking people what you need to build and then thinking of who can help them and just building that the network of connections everywhere wherever I was going and thinking that if you do that, then naturally you're embedding yourself in many of those connections, but without pushing yourself, without selling something, but just being there ready to help and then people know you and they reach out if they need help. And that is very, very satisfying way of building business and also a seemingly satisfying way of building the network

just very divided of thinking about building your own name or your own company, but just thinking you're helping the ecosystem to grow but just connecting one by one, all of those different things. And then business development in this aspect, it's no longer about business, but it's a role of connecting others in the ecosystem. You're doing the same job, but instead of connecting yourself with others all the time, we're just helping others connect with each other. And that's the role that James is understanding perfectly,

and he also built a fantastic team, like for enterprise, for founders, for developers. And you see effects of this already, but probably soon even more because some of them just started. Yeah, well, you know, I saw also you tweeted about what you called a secondary roadmap. So some of this kind of BD or culture stuff might also play into here. I'm just going to list some of the beginning ones that you mentioned, which are always mint assets on L1, which I found interesting.

This would mean like no NFTs on like layer twos or something, I'm guessing? No, it's an indication to mint on L1 and then immediately move to L2 for larger and more valuable assets. So thinking that whatever is you have higher value, you would just uncorate on L1 and then move it for like if you want, if you want to trade it very, very rapidly, or maybe even in localized markets or with some innovation to the U.S., then you go to L2s.

So it was an invitation for many of the institutions to say, okay, we choose an L2 that we feel a right way for branding and some particular solutions, innovations, but we'll just mint on the one and bridge to L2 immediately. So we felt that it would represent best the security model for Ethereum for the larger value assets. And it's the same for the high value identities on NFTs. So if you want to play for NFTs in a commercial sense,

maybe something like, you know, when you, I remember that from childhood when I would buy a bubble gum that would be something inside that I could collect. So this is, let's say, commercial NFT. So then probably you want to go to an L2 and have something that has that value over time, but it's more collectible aspect than Bramik building. But if you are, if you're famous, like,

sorry, like verbal respected NFT artists, I think of like Rafekana doll or the people, like that's, you want to tell them, no, definitely L1 is where you mean. And for many other artists, it will be always L1, but then it can move the assets to L2, bridge them and make them like somehow embedded into this L2 economy. So like, right now, for instance, like, creators on Zora, like if they're not known, like you feel like doing it on base is fine,

but once they get to a certain kind of, you know, level of fame or whatever, then you would advise them to do it on the L1? I think it's always Floyd, because it's interesting concept. You're asking here, when you create something on Zara, obviously, like, even if there are connectibles in the bubble gowns, like from 50, 60 years old, some of them might have grown into like a million dollar value because they have some like a, uh, low-print particular value because they appeared and people didn't even expect how much it will blow up culturally.

So the same things may happen on some L2s. I think that when you start seeing the value over time, that you want to somehow anchor is still one, you understand. So not always you can predict where the value appears. And I think that many fantastic things will appear in Zara will appear in many L2s. And then at some point you realize, oh, okay, it's really very very. valuable item and then you want to somehow mark it on 01. Maybe you might be reached there and back or sell or wrap it around the L1 value wrappers.

I think not all of those models were yet designed. But that's my thinking and I'm still exploring it a bit with researchers of understanding is it really a correct way of thinking about it? So I think that too much extended is. Okay. Okay, well, so also in this list, you put WinRWA real world assets, which feels like it's already happening for at least some things. You know, if you look at what the Biddle Fund is doing, what securitize, you know, obviously that's that was sort of like the first big one. You also wrote Winstables, which, again, that's a BD thing.

It's very, you know, right now I'm sure you're you're very well aware of everything going on. stable coin land and how people are on TV. Tom Lee is talking on TV about how Ethereum is the stable coin chain. And you also wrote Com's improvements, which I think is probably one of the bigger gripes that people had with the previous iteration of the Ethereum Foundation. So can you just talk a little bit about your philosophy? Because I feel like BD and comms are sort of they're tied. So yeah, just be interested to hear more of your thoughts on how you think about how Ethereum will win.

in those areas and how, yeah, that ties to your BDNCOM's philosophies. Yeah, I feel it all comes back to those conversations, right? So I feel that as a director or anything or as a leader, you can be stubborn and not humble and think that you have best ideas and that when other people tell you something, you think that you know better, or you can be humble and understand that actually, you know, in this ecosystem, there's so many smart people so they know better. most likely they repeatedly tell you something that you just, your talent should be aggregating this.

So that's where it comes from, right? So when you understand what you'll do with RWAs, with communication, with BD, then it's just responding to all of this. And being willing to do that, it creates that more servant role of the executive director, rather the one that tries to build a vision. Look, Eurym has fantastic visionaries. I mean, it has Vitalik, right, Zer, who started the thing. And you don't want to just push it in 2000, so visions and no execution.

You want to have people to come and say, like, we'll just execute or continue, we'll listen and we think how to do it best. So this is about communication. I think that communication on my side is just telling people, you know, instead of focusing too much about sharing your own views, think about everyone and why we're building that and how we can reflect it and how it can answer questions and how you can listen rather than just talk.

And this is not the most standard approach, I think, in Web3 because we're used to thinking that the growth is through building your own branding and sharing your controversial opinions very often as just this engagement, looking for engagement. So I think this is the way to lean And this represents also very well The collaborative aspect of it during

And it also responds to many of the questions About L2-L-1 And then it's funny how the single concept How it touches so many different things When people come to you and say like How about the L2 versus O1 Is it it's not versus? Let's just start communicating

And sharing and thinking, behaving On the human level like it's one network And it's the first It's the first response to the intro. Because technology for interrupt, sure, it's very challenging and complicated. But if you just build a technology, but people feel like they're not working together, then there's no intro.

Yeah, so this is aspect of winning. And you were asking about this and you were asking about, I think I missed like half of your question here. The communications, like your philosophy around how the EF should communicate to people. So that's that thing, yes. that's what I mean by that, but listening mostly and then responding to what people want to hear. Every now and then you talk about vision, sure,

we can say now we really want to have an attention to the next 10 years. But even when we start talking about the next 10 years of Ethereum, I think instead of focusing on what Vitalik says, what Justin Drake says, what anyone of us would say, we started asking questions more and more like, what's your vision for the next 10 year of Ethereum? like what's your white paper, what you're building, how you envision the world in the next 10 years. We invited all the communities to meet together around the world and probably they had those conversations, right?

So that was me talking about, instead of thinking about the past 10 years, think about the next 10 years. It's not because there's no appreciation for people that build it here. There's massive appreciation. And I know people give their lives, professional lives to Ethereum. and they breathed with it and they sometimes burned and they sometimes burned and came back and this is beautiful. When I say, let's talk about next 10 years, it's just to spark again that feeling that, you know,

even as we see how much has been built, there's like also nothing has been built but not in the sense we haven't achieved so much more. And it's just growing because the vision is so broad. So this is the aspect of communication. and giving the voice to everyone, and this is also the centralization of voice, and amplifying it.

So acting as a super-efficient amplifier connector of voices of people, building spaces to work on it, building technology to work together. It works. It helps founders because founders have to be excited about something, right? So it's sure the money is there always in blockchain space, but I say that even whenever now I see OGs that somehow reject the money and get a bit disappointed with the approach of new founders coming

and just like grabbing some quick wins at the beginning or are chasing some coins. I said like, look, I'm like, you can study the history of almost every single OG and that's how they started. It's just the people so quickly realized that they just thought that this is what drives them, but this is not what drives them. Like they start and after one month, they just forget what they did. Like they invested in something, bought some coins.

here and then they realized, oh, okay, actually I bought it because I was excited to build, and I started to build, and I almost forgot. And this is why people keep it forever and they never sell because they stay for everything that brought them here. So I also wanted to ask, you know, the Ethereum Foundation has had, we'll just call it, an interesting relationship to the Ether Price throughout its history. I do think, you know, from my book, it became very clear that the Theorem Foundation had this sort of like fear about the SEC from the crowd sale and all these things.

And so during that time, there were actually kind of like strict, you know, admonitions to not talk about the ether price. And, you know, I wondered like what your perspective is on that. You know, how much do you think the Ethereum Foundation should consider the ether price when making decisions? What kinds of decisions do you think should factor in the ether price? And, you know, when you, like, what would your vision be? for what people think about Ethereum,

sorry, ether, the asset. And I'll just throw in the phrase, ultrasound money, pose that question. Because yeah, I'm just curious, like, how you think people should think about it. So I know three-part question again, sorry for the complexity, but how much do you think the Ethereum Foundation should consider the ether price

and for which decisions? And then, yeah, how do you want people to view the ether price? So the foundation doesn't really talk eternally about EtherPrice. Since I joined, I don't think we ever talked about EtherPrice in any other aspect than thinking about the Treasury on spending. So obviously, the interim foundation holds at the moment around $800 million in Ether, and now it's allocating in DFI protocols, which means that the price of Ether affects our,

our spending, our planning and budgeting. And this is how we talk about either price. It's never being talked about, unless in the management level and the context of decision making or strategizing. And I think that nowadays, and this is beautiful about Ethereum, I don't think we have ability to influence beyond just like influences like anybody else. And again, influencing the price is really, aspect of the markets really and a perception of the protocol.

And if you think of the perception of the protocol, when people start treating it as a whatever they define it, like as a store of value, they think like, will it, will it be resilient, will it exist forever? If they think of the term or iterative and asset as participating in DFI because it's being very naturally native token of those very rich DFI ecosystem on Ethereum, used as collateral, used for staking, its aspect of security,

it's used in burning. So you have all those different functions of each other that just being observed by others and everything that we do about the protocol is, I guess, as long as the protocol provides the promise of the security and resilience of the thriving system, then I guess some people will think that this is connected, some matters will think not, and you have so many different interpretations from various institutions. Wait, and I'm sorry, when you say some people think this is connected, but you mean the ether price to the security of the network?

No, that's, this is partially, obviously, this is obvious that ITER is designed to be securing the network, right? Like, that you stake ether to secure the network, and then the ITER defines the level of economic security. There are some nuances of this. How much of this directly converts into the security of particular DFI protocols and particular L2 protocols, and they have risk-taking on top, and the complexity grows as the economy of DFI and Niterium starts being canalized more deeply.

And I encourage everyone, actually, to join the aspect of understanding this new economy of Ethereum. So, no, I say that different, different funds, if holders, or people who use if for whatever purposes will have their own interpretations. So this is normal in many markets. I'm like sometimes the assets are much easier to understand. I think I think Ether is quite complex, at least to the way I go for that journey. So then if you go back, I think that the foundation understands that foundation goals are clear. It's about the impact of Ethereum network in delivering the values of Ethereum to the global community to everyone on Earth. And this is the privacy, this is security, a sense of ship resistance. It's open-sars solutions. And when you push for that,

I think that it's simply being seen as very positive for Ethereum and for anything that is related to Ethereum. And so, but do you think that Theorem Foundation should try to kind of actively shape the narrative around, you know, what gives ether value. And that's why I mentioned like the ultrasound money meme because that, you know, like EIP 1559, like a big part of it was, I think, to kind of, yeah, sharpen the monetary policy of ether and tie the value of ether to activity on the network. And then with Den Kuhn, it feels like that relationship got weakened, I would say. So, you know, at this point, like, is the foundation thinking about doing anything else to strengthen the link?

So no, the role of the foundation is not to think about it, but to think about the general success of the protocol. When you think about 1559, it's a good thing that I was really involved in 1559 at that time, right? who as a core developer, as a builder, I participated in all the discussions about introduction of 1559 and was analyzing the outcomes and the impact on the network. And sure, you had all the people talking about ultrasound and burning, and Justin Drake would be definitely one person that you could place here as a leader of this way of thinking. But then I really like to place Justin as a designer of some future of Ethereum and as a finger of many, many of the ideas and memes around, but you cannot just identify just internally just this is Ethereum because many people inside Ethereum or Interim Foundation or the ecosystem will not always agree with whatever Justin says, because Justin has so many successful visions about what will happen in terms. three years and very often he's really on spot on the on the timing on the technological shifts

but we we not always agree on how to talk about it. Coming back to 1559, so I've seen it at that time as the massive improvement to the U.X if like I was using the term obviously a lot for sending transactions before 1559 And since 1559, I never have to think about setting the gas price, right? So, and this was a huge improvement to the UX. There were some things that were lost because of that particular mechanism, the sponsor transactions, like zero gas transactions became a bit, either more complicated and impossible.

Some of the block space derivatives projects were impossible after 1559. But 1559 for pricing, for automating the pricing and allowing people to have a very reliable mechanism for sending transaction was fantastic and and I still think it was a massive success. Now when you say Dinkun, so first of all, Dinkun's role was to help the L2s to scale and to deliver solution for the L2s to have data availability and to finally deliver those like below one-send transactions. And then when I think about it would be last September,

token 2049, remember some interviews with Italic with others when we said, look, it's a massive success. Finally, we have all those transactions that happen on the fraction of a cent. And now we all benefit from that. So it's a massive celebration, but what it leads to, like that temporarily you have

extremely lower price of executing transactions. So this is successful, but when you start treating Ethereum as oh, it's all about fees, then the success of the fees dropping might be seen by, like, twist it in a way into understanding that it's a failure that a fees dropped, but not.

It was massive success, and it also allows it to scale, and then it sets us for the roadmap of this, like, global adoption of a interim ecosystem to get with all twos. You can move the fees up in the future easily for various systems. redirect more to a one if this is valuable for the network security. I think that's just also seen now in clarifying for Fisaka, the pricing, the block pricing.

So setting the floor for that. And it's always for building the very robust, resilient protocol that will give everyone this expectation that the protocol is there forever, that it may be seen as a sort of value that any aspects of the fees are just like the absolute base. base level of what it's true really means in the long term for everyone. Yeah, I mean, I think it's more like tradeoffs. And the fact that the price of either was no longer tied to the activity was cut or not no longer, but just less tied was more like a side, an unintended or

yeah, I'll just call it a side effect. But anyway. Yeah. But I think the good thing is that so many people started suddenly seeing like, like, oh, okay, we can finally just remove these shackles of thinking about it, Ether and Ethereum this way. And they started thinking about it as this like Bitcoin-like asset of the long-term storebody. So I think this was positive because everyone started thinking,

Ethereum economy is the one to stay with and to be around and we want to participate in it and if we'll be very much embedded into this entire global economies. Yeah, but I do, so I do think that this problem plays into the interoperability bit that we also started to touch on. So how are you thinking about that problem? Like how do you, or just how is the EF at the moment thinking about how to resolve that problem? I think interoperability is the hardest of the free challenges that we are talking about, maybe because the scaling one scaling blobs are continuation of something that people have been thinking a lot. And it's very well-defined within the protocol,

which areas you have to touch. And intraop and UX is like a thousand small pieces and coordination of those between L-2s and the ones and solving some problems that are being solved also in many different ways by meta-productals and top of iturium. So interop is a challenge that we're working on, and I think that at DefConnect will have a lot of cool things to present. I know that the coordination teams in the AA and interrup space,

such as Josh Rudolph and also AA team from Yoav at the Foundation, are working on two major solutions that will show how the interrupt in the HRM ecosystem may work much, much better. Why is it also a challenge? Just because you're answering questions of how similar L2 should be to L1, how much innovation they could bring. What if they start introducing their own interrupt solutions ahead? How do we adopt some of the improvements back to 201?

What do you really call an L2? Is it just an EVM solution or is it non-EVM solution that is settling on it around? Obviously, we want to have this broader scope for broader innovation, but also it creates more challenges for particular introp aspect. So if we do it right, then we have this. a large thriving Ethereum ecosystem with lots of innovation and and a bit of this fashion and branding aspects of L2s that can go to the users, to the niche aspects to the regions

where you can build hyperlocalized chains. And still all of that borrowing the liquidity, providing very secure breaching, spreading security of Ethereum properly. So I think this is where we pay technically the most, I pay the most attention to in the last weeks the e-drop. So I did also want to ask, and again, this is relating back to the ether price. So here we are at this moment in time. There's all these new crypto treasury companies popping up just seems like every day there's multiple.

Many of the recent ones have been ether vehicles. So aside from Sharp Link, which is I think the biggest one, or sorry, BitMine is the biggest. I think Sharp Link is the second biggest. I'm forgetting, actually. They're at the top two. I know that. So BitMine is the one that's, you know, led by Tom Lee, SharpLink, Joe Lubin. There's Bit Digital as well, Ether Machine, GameSquare, BTCS, Ether Machine, Edizilla.

I'm sure there's more. And, you know, you guys did sell, let's see. So you sold 10,000 Ether to Sharplink. The price was about $2,500, but this was only a few weeks ago. And today, you know, Ether's trading at 38,000. So you know, you clearly could have gotten a much better price, made a lot more money from that sale. But you know, I see like people, you know, this goes back to just in general how the foundation's MO has been to kind of convert into dollars by just selling the ether rather than just trying to use defy to hold on to the asset. And so I was wondering, you know, why it is that you guys still feel like that is something that you want to do.

But then in particular, why you would sell it to a treasury company when a lot of people are just talking about how they feel like this trend may not end well. You know, there is a situation where some of these companies might take on too much leverage. They might have to liquidate some of their ether, which could then cause the price to drop, which could cause other liquidations. You would get this cascade. And it just seems, yeah, like a sort of risky, like vehicle in which to, to, to. to hold ether. So yeah, again, multi-part question. But, you know, why is it that you would continue to just sell rather than try to hold on to the asset and then why sell to one of these vehicles that people view as being in a little bit of a bubble? Sure. So starting why, like

what was the strategy for selling if so and whether we use defy for getting yields? So first of all, yes, we published the Treasury policy and the Defi Strategy and the Defy Prime Guidance, where we said that from our holdings of Eve, we'll be delegating it to the Defy Protocols, and we expect the yield from all of these allocations. So we'll hold some Eve undelegated, we'll stake some Eve with our own staking solutions for the DevOps teams and the Yves Pan DevOps teams at the Foundation. and the rest of it will just allocate to defy protocols.

Then separately we also announced that we'll want to maintain around two and a half year of the runway of all the Eterium Foundation spending in Fiat. And this is when you think of the resilience of the foundation as the global environment, politics, regulations that keep changing and sometimes if you believe the foundation and many other organizations are a bit more. at risk of any like adversarial regulatory actions, as you've seen in the past, right,

with us see before the changes from last year. So we need to be ready for the stages where we can cover expenses, operational expenses, both in Fiat and Enif. So that announcement of two and a half year gave pretty clear numbers, right? So we said we were holding, I believe $120 million in Fiat.

And then we wanted to extend it to around $250, $280 million in Fiat. So it would give you like around the number from $160 million to the dollars worth of you to sell. We didn't set any specific timeline for that. So you can expect that maybe it will happen over a year, maybe maybe slightly longer. So I just want to go in that direction. And then there was this first sale that we felt like it can either go for what foundation used to do, which would be sending into the centralized exchanges and doing the LTC trade there. Or go to the SBAT.

And SBT felt like, first of all, it's Jolubin, it's something big an interior, and it's a single OTC transaction and it was executed at the TLAB price for a day. like when you set that price to $570 or something that was simply agreed ahead of time that on that day we'll calculate the TWA price and we'll execute that at that time. So then coming back to why, maybe one thing that I'll add is we are preparing now the operational documents of how to execute the sales in the future and we're just connecting with all the all this, like, if strategy companies and all the, also with various OTC tasks at exchanges.

I want to make sure that we have a lot of venues where we can go to and ask for the quote. So the RFQ Foundation is really trusted, credible partner, so it can get really the good pricing when selling Kiv and it should seek the best execution among all of those venues and treat them equally by just simply asking for a quote and executing at the best price. So this one should use much more

more clarity of why we execute were and just requires a bit of operational improvements. Now, that last aspect of your question, which was about the risks around the strategy companies. I think that we started discussing it internally of how to encourage the community and the financial markets to provide as much scrutiny as possible of how each of those companies operates underneath. like what, as you say, what kind of leverage they do, like what kind of defy interactions do, how much of the wrapping of the wrapping of the wrapping you have.

I agree with you. I mean, when I told before that there's not necessarily that the blockchain people are just better than the Trutfi people of the past. It's just like we can claim that there were this massive financial markets collapses, the bailouts and so on. And this is people, like people stay people, and it can happen also in the blockchain space. And we've seen massive failures in the blockchain space,

and we should always be very much aware of those risks and see them. This beauty of blockchain is that it brings a lot of transparency to lots of interactions, but the strategy companies, treasury companies, where you often combine merge the decentralized markets and decentralized markets. It's like a hybrid of TritFi and Defi. So it doesn't yet have this all beauty of transparency of defy, which means that you still want to have maybe some rating agencies, many like additional auditing and scrutiny into how exactly they execute custody is taking and so on.

So obviously lots of risks, but they are buyers and from the foundation perspective operationally to find the best buyer when selling beef without affecting the markets. stupid way. Like when you sell large amounts of assets, you can do really stupid things. I just, just go directly to the spot markets and the illiquid exchanges or sell. We just don't do that, but then we don't take really in selling if, I mean, we don't try to be opinionated. I'm saying that we sell if for a particular reason, I just go to the market. Okay. So last question. I know we've gone over time, but obviously, you know, Ethereum, it's not only just on this upswing price-wise, but it's like really in the news for just being the chain that all of these huge corporate

partners are using. So obviously, the most recent announcement was the Robin Hood one, where they're announcing this Robin Hood chain. And, you know, behind the scenes, I guess people are saying that they originally were going to go with Solana. You know, Coinbase, here they are. They have been building with base. Now, they're really all in on this. everything app with base. And, you know, at the same time, it's kind of interesting because just in crypto, overall, we're seeing that crypto is sort of at this inflection point. Like the Apecoin Dow is going to, you know, move to a centralized entity.

Jupiter paused out voting for six months. A16C wrote up a blog post saying that they felt the foundation model was broken. They felt that it creates more friction than decentralization. So I was just curious, like, you know, Ethereum really. has been one of the biggest proponents of the decentralized ethos. And I just wondered what you thought it meant that we're sort of seeing the shift more towards centralized options. And just generally, like, how Ethereum thinks about its partnerships with those centralized

entities. Like, what is it that they add to Ethereum or to crypto? So from a foundation perspective, obviously, as we see, said that now we're communicating more and we're executing this BD-like role. It remains that Foundation doesn't go to those entities and doesn't try to arrange some kind of commercial relationship, like transactional approach. We just come and help to connect with other players in the ecosystem. We help to, like by answering questions, we mentor them and we listen to like what is needed

in the protocol to address the, well, we are with assets, life problems. And the protocol has to respond to the real world and the core developers and the infrastructure builders, they not always understand everything that happens in the world. So listening broadly is very important. Now, many of those large institutions that you mentioned, whether it's Robin Hood or others, they barely ever communicate with the foundation. I think this is part of their design of how they want to launch and prove that really they are in control and they They borrow the security and they use the global neutral network, but they don't take the risks of going to the network where you have to have this active conversation of the foundation, which means that a particular for Robin Herod, practically, I never had a conversation until like a few days before and just reached out and asked them, but it said, you know, it was like really nothing here. So they had everything planned, and I said, that's great.

So we want to see that. We want to show that we are available, but we don't want to be active in saying, like just bring it to Ethereum. We encourage people to convince them, like to show them the reasons why everyone is moving to Itterium, why they're choosing Itterium or why we're building it in the way that is the best solution design that we encourage.

And now coming back to your question, when you say those institutions are launching, how they do that why they would go to the foundation model. I think that still you have the L2s in Ethereum that participate also in the BD process and because they have this more like branding competitive niche aspects, so they may enter into like commercial arrangements or they may like compete with each other. So that helps also the Ethereum ecosystem with innovation, with bringing on board other institutions or like guiding them for models.

So maybe like L3, L2, their own L2 or on. one of the L2s, and the institutions will be choosing how much control they want to have. And we have to serve the guidance of like looking at every single of those networks, answering questions. Are they really delivering what they're claiming on the security side, on the decentralization side, on the safety of assets? And this is really important role of the foundation. So you see L2B providing this guidance on the stages of different trial apps.

you will see our work on security and pointing out where are the problems working on introp and showing where the interrupt works where it doesn't work. Lots of challenges may come in the future from institutions really at some point

not going for this analysis of what is really delivered from different designs of L2s. That's why also we try to preemptively address it with collaborations with L2B and with other institutions and by providing also very deep research and analysis and guidance on it. Okay. All right. Well, Tamaj, thank you so much for talking at length. I really appreciate it. It's been such a pleasure having you on Unchained. Thank you so much. It was an extreme pleasure. You're so knowledgeable and so well-prepared and

the questions are great and the atmosphere is great as well. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today to learn more about the Ethereum Foundation and Tomash. Check out the show notes for this episode.