Unchained - How Ethereum's Sprawling Pectra Upgrade Will Boost Its Ability to Compete - Ep. 805

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

As Ethereum deploys Pectra, it faces stiff competition and community criticism. Ethereum Foundation Research co-leads Alex Stokes and Barnabe Monnot map out the chain’s direction. Ethereum is well on its way to some major upgrades, with Pectra and Fusaka introducing a number of performance improvements in the near future. But will it be enough to stay ahead of the competition? Ethereum Foundation Research co-leads Alex Stokes and Barnabe Monnot join the show to discuss: How Pectra and Fusaka will improve Ethereum’s performance What it means that its launch on two testnets failed Ethereum’s “north star” — decentralization Whether Ethereum can retain its top spot in the smart contract space As Ethereum adopts native rollups and data availability, does it create competition with existing L2s and DA providers? The new direction for the Ethereum Foundation leaders and whether Etherealize can bring Wall Street Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! Bitwise Guest: Alex Stokes, Co-Lead, Ethereum Foundation Research Barnabe Monnot, Co-Lead, Ethereum Foundation Research Previous appearances on Unchained: 5 Things to Know About Coinbase’s 2021 Links Previous coverage on Unchained of: Etherealize advocates for Ethereum Why Ethereum’s New Marketing Arm Is Convinced Wall Street Will Adopt ETH Ethereum Foundation contemplates comeback Ethereum Is Lagging. Here’s How It Could Finally Shake Off Rival Solana 2025 Will Be a Year of Crypto Competition. Can Ethereum Make a Comeback? What Ethena means for Ethereum Ethena’s L1 Shows Fat Apps Are on the Rise. Can They Beat Fat Protocols? The Chopping Block w/ Guy Young: Lessons from USD0, Ethena’s Bold Vision, and DeFi’s Future The Pectra Upgrade Ethereum.org: Pectra Testnet Announcement | Ethereum Foundation Blog tim.mirror.xyz: AllCoreDevs Update 17 Ethereum.org: EIP-7691: Blob throughput increase Ethereum.org: Holesky and Hoodi Testnet Updates | Ethereum Foundation Blog Coindesk: Hello, Hoodi: Ethereum Welcomes a New Testnet  Fusaka on the horizon Github: EIP-7805 proposed for Fusaka Native rollups versus non-native rollups Youtube: The Future of Ethereum Scaling: Native Rollups Explained Reddit: Native rollup debates L1 and L2 debates Vitalik.eth.limo: Reasons to have higher L1 gas limits even in an L2-heavy Ethereum Vitalik.eth.limo: Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond Ethereum Foundation Leadership changes X: Barnabe Monnot and Alex Stokes announcement X: New EF titles X: Fixing the Core Dev process Ethena’s Converge news  John Wang’s tweet Camila Russo’s comment Timestamps: 👋 0:00 Intro 🪝 2:05 How Barnabe and Alex got hooked on Ethereum development ⚙️ 6:37 How Pectra will change Ethereum 🪴 10:35 How does increasing blobs boost Ethereum? 🪲 13:22 Pectra fork bugs on Holeski testnet 🔮 18:38 What’s in the upcoming Fusaka upgrade? 🤯 22:42 How decisions get made in Ethereum and which groups are involved 📈 30:34 Can Ethereum keep up with the competition? 🏁 39:16 Can Ethereum compete by scaling the L1? 🤓 44:02 What are native roll-ups and how do they help Ethereum compete? 🤺 49:26 Native rollups and expanded data availability on Ethereum vs. non-native options ⚰️ 52:22 Is Ethena building its own blockchain the “nail in the coffin” for Ethereum? 👬 1:00:05 Shaking up the EF’s leadership 🤔 1:06:14 Will Etherealize fix Ethereum’s problems? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Velocity is important, and I do think we like, well, we could definitely do better. And like you mentioned, yeah, you can imagine we try to do more frequent upgrades. That's, yeah, definitely something to move faster. I think what's probably more lacking is just simply, you know, there's this notion of North Star that people like to go around. And so, you know, if you look at like even ACD today, I think different people have different visions for like where a 3M should go. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today, we have one from C-MOSC-C-89 on YouTube, responding to my interview with Ryan Watkins on the future of layer ones. C-Mosk C-89 says, I don't know why a TradFi app needs a blockchain app at all. Just start a company and keep them on centralized exchanges. they still have counterparty risk anyway.

To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall or leave a comment on our video on YouTube or X. This is the March 25th, 2025 episode of Unchained. Crypto moves fast. It's why Bitwise launched the weekly CIO memo, a jargon-free summary of what's moving crypto markets, written by one of the best in the business, CIO Matt Hogan. Get up to speed in five minutes or less. Check it out at Bitwiseinvestments.com. slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks

associated with crypto before investing. Today's topic is Ethereum, its roadmap, and its future in an increasingly competitive landscape. Here to discuss are Alex Stokes and Barnaby Mono, co-leads of Ethereum Foundation Research. Welcome, Alex and Barnaby. Thanks for having us.

Ida, thanks for having us. So before we dive into the more technical discussion, How about each of you tell me and the audience about yourselves, your background, how you got into Ethereum, and how you became research co-lead at the foundation? Alex, why don't we start with you? Sure. Yeah. It's a long story. So I've been following Ethereum for a very long time. And, yeah, I think my first entry point was I had just heard about Ethereum on the Internet's, like, Reddit or something way back in the day.

And it sounded interesting. At the time, I didn't understand what a blockchain was or crypto or any of this or, like, more importantly, what it like meant like for the world. So I just thought it was like a very interesting like technical exercise, I suppose. Then that led me to the white paper. Then I like kind of gone to that. And I remember like looking through some of that. That one led to the yellow paper.

And there was like a essentially index that's like enumerating all. these different computations that we call pre-compiles. And it just was like so fascinating to me because you could, you know, I'm not sure this is actually a pragmatic idea, but you could imagine having like any possible computation enumerated in this like shared state space. And maybe a way to like link this to what we call today. This is like the real computer. So fascinated by this idea. And over time, I just got more and more interested in it. I realized what was possible with Ethereum. And yeah, I just kept getting hooked. So then fast forward a few years. and there is this thing called ETH2.0, which is now just Ethereum today.

We've had the merge and proof of stake in all this, but it seemed like an interesting way for me to get more involved. There was a lot of research at the time that went into how to actually ship the beacon chain that we have today, and how it would fit into Ethereum. So I started doing that. And then, yeah, I guess like another next step. I joined the EF to work on an ETH2 implementation. I found at the time. We've since deprecated that client,

but that's what I caught my sort of foot in the door with CEF. And given the nature of the domain, I kind of had one foot engineering, one foot in research, like from the beginning. And over time, that's kind of skewed a bit more into like research and things. And yeah, I guess we can jump forward even a bit further. And that brings us to it today.

And then I guess the question about the co-weed. So, yeah, maybe we'll get into this a bit more, but ultimately we had a bit of a refactor with how we like structure a theory of foundation research one output of that process was barnaby and myself as coelutes that's one reason perhaps why we're here today yeah i think the idea is to just account for the fact that like a theory and foundation research does do a lot of stuff there's stuff that's maybe on the more theoretical end there's stuff that's and they apply them. It is this huge umbrella of many different things that we do.

Yeah, so essentially there's an opportunity. I could bring the skills that I have to help the EFs and also the research teams of the EF. And here we are. Barnaby. Yeah, I guess for me it started in 2017. Back then I was doing my PhD in Singapore, in mostly Game Theory. And I learned about Ethereum.

I thought it was cool. So I told my advisor about it. And my advisor told me that he had just randomly met Vitalik in a conference room in an incubator in Singapore, working on some of the designs of proof of stake. And yeah, he also thought it was very interesting. So I was still doing my PhD until 2019. But over time, I started getting more and more into the community, went to DefCon, went to more conferences. And when I PhD ended, I applied for a position there. I joined what was a new team at the time.

That was created when I joined the robust incentives group, which then I became the team lead of about a year later. So that was 2020. COVID happened. Everything was, yeah, I didn't meet my colleagues for a long time. But, yeah, got my foot in the door, started doing more things at the foundation over the last, let's say, four years. And then as Alex described, we had this three factor of, EF research, which is this umbrella around teams like the Robust Incentives Group,

cryptography team, a consensus team, protocol security team, Alex's former team, which is applied research group. And we, yeah, decided to formalize a little bit that entity that we call and that many other people call as well, EF research and, yeah, became the co-leads of this entity and really trying to push it forward now. All right. So yeah, let's now switch to something that I think most people in Ethereum are looking forward to, which is this Pectra upgrade. As far as I understand it, I am not a technical person. So I did my best research, but feel free to correct me if at any point I misspeak. But this Pectra upgrade is about to go live on the, is it called hoodie test net? Or how do you pronounce that? Yeah, hoodie. This is the new one we have. Yeah. Okay. And I think. And I think. that's happening in March 26th, which is the day after this podcast will be published. And maybe if that goes well, it will launch an Ethereum roughly a month later on Maynet.

So describe for me kind of just like at a high level overview what the major changes are that will be added to Ethereum in that upgrade. This is a good question because there's quite a bit. So Petra is one of the biggest upgrades we've had in quite a while. It touches, yeah, many things on the consensus layer, many things on the execution layer. And the fun bit is that there are these sort of cross-layer EIPs also in the mix. So that's quite a big upgrade. Yeah, I don't even know if I'll be able to remember them all off top my head, but some things

that, you know, to call out would be on the consensus layer. A big thing there is this change with the max effective balance. So if you follow Ethereum at all, you know that we now have this proof of stake consensus mechanism. And there's this notion of validator. And when the beacon chain was first launched, let's say, every validator, was basically the same shape or the same size. And one part of what that means is that they have this notion of effective balance,

which is the way to think about it is like the stake you put in the system to be a validator. This was capped at 32Eath. Again, I'm sure you've heard this 32th number if you follow Ethereum. So the reason it's there is because, again, it makes every validator look the same, which is very helpful for reasoning and thinking through like security of the protocol. That being said, what that means then is that if you show up to the protocol with more than 32Eth, you now have to make multiple validators, even if there's just sort of one logical operator.

So this is not ideal, or at least, you know, we could imagine doing better simply because the situation described leads to one way to think about it as a bloat of the validator set. And you can imagine not having this float. And so one change is what we're calling max effective balance. It's raising this max eb to some much higher threshold. So rather than 32, it's now 2,000. of 48. And the idea is if you have, say, a number of these 32-8 validators, you can not consolidate

them to, like, one bigger validator. That being said, this touches like a bunch of sort of different variants in the beacon chain. And so, yeah, it's quite a big change, both in the spec and implementations. But, yeah, I think that's all I'll say about that. It's been a fun one. There's another one that's refactoring how attestations look on the network. And these are the messages that validators sign that actually, like, contribute to the proof of stake. consensus mechanism. One way to think about this is that you can just like essentially pack more attestations into one message.

And this helps with scale in a lot of different senses. There's way too many, honestly, for me to just go through one by one. But let me jump into the execution layer. Well, yeah, I don't know. I can keep going, but maybe we don't want to spend this much time on it. I'll just call it a few more. So on the execution layer, then yeah, yeah, maybe I'll just touch on these like cross-layer ones that are interesting.

So there are a number of things that you would think about wanting to do to your validator. So let's say you are in the group stick mechanism. There's a number of things you might want to do with your validator. And yeah, essentially the way you do this today is you go through the consensus layer. We've added a number of functionalities with a couple of new EITs to basically let these validers be controlled from the execution layer. So for example, withdrawals, exits, and then also this consolidation mechanism that I talked about with MaxCB. And anyway, there's actually a lot more. It's a very big fork, and I'll just stop there for the save of time.

Barnaby, do you want to add any? Maybe I can add one, which is the blob increase in Petra. So today, blocks can deliver up to six blobs, but on average, three blobs. Blobs is, like, very important for scaling L2's roll-ups. It's basically the raw material that L-2 is used to get secured by Ethereum. And so, yeah, scaling the blobs is super, super. important to provide more scale for this L2 economy, for reducing their cost and just allowing more users to transact there. So Pectra comes with essentially doubling this capacity. It's still

probably short of where we need to be within a couple of months. So we are looking to increase that even further. But I think it's already nice that in Pectra we deliver this upgrade. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about some of the times when like BASE was maxed out and Stefan, I was like, I don't know if doubling it is going to cut it, but yeah, at least delivering something for now. One other one that called out to me was EIP-7702, which has to do with giving externally owned accounts, which are ones that are managed by a person manually, they can now access the benefits of account abstraction, which previously you can only do with a smart contract. So for instance, externally owned accounts or EOAs would soon be able to take

advantage of sponsor transactions where, like, I guess the gas is paid for by, you know, that that you're using. They could do things like send multiple transactions with one signature. They could be usable with pass keys, which, you know, offers more security, like through your phone, like with biometrics and stuff. So obviously, like this is, I feel like it's very different from other upgrades that kind of had one singular focus. This is sort of just combining a bunch of stuff that had been in the queue and trying to put it all together. But one thing that happened recently was there was a hiccup with the testing, which is why people may not have heard previously of the hoodie test net, because prior, you know,

you'd been using Sepolia and is it Holeski, Holeski? How do you pronounce that? I think the most correct pronunciation is Holeski. Okay, okay. Before I heard somebody using this name on a podcast, I thought it was Holeskai. I. It's an appreciation of a check word. And so it's, yeah, I hear different pronunciations all the time. Okay. Okay. But as far as I understand what happened on these two testaments, we're actually separate issues. Like, sorry, when you had moved Pectra to these two testaments, they caused separate issues.

So I wondered if that made you concerned for launching Pectra. And if you could explain, like, what happened on the two testaments, that would be helpful to. Yeah, I can make a pass at it. So we've touched on a number of. functionalities. There are more AIPs that we haven't even discussed. So pectures quite big. Big forks are risky. And if anything, this is what we're seeing with the test-na upgrades that we had. So let's rewind a few weeks ago, we had the Sipolia and LSD test nets. And one way to think about them is their staging grounds for main net or like production. If sort of you're coming from a web two context. And with these test nets, yeah, they have different like flavors or focuses. So I'd say

Sepulia is more of like a very stable application for a test net. So if you want to test your app, Sapolia is there. There's like essentially very high like uptime guarantees from the operators, the validators of Sepolia. So it's the app's a super solid network. So you can just focus on the UVM layer and do what you need to do there. We also have a leski,

which is more staking focused or like seal forward. The idea there is that you could, you know, anyone can come and be a validator and it's more to test like your staking setups. How many like staking pools use this as a testing ground? And yeah, so we have these two test nets and they went through the Pectra upgrades themselves. The idea of being we do this on test not first before we go to main net. If there are bugs, we catch them there before we go to main net.

And this is good because there were bugs. So first we forked Holeski and that was a fun one. So essentially what happened was, let's see, I believe with Holeski there was an issue with the configuration that basically caused essentially a bug. in the EL. And it was the catch is that it was not just a one execution lawyer client, but three. And what that meant then is that we started to have a majority of the stake go off on an invalid fork of the chain. That chain started justifying. It didn't finalize, but it started justifying. So it was getting dangerously close to that. And this is kind of one of these nine-mer scenarios that you can think about with the theory of is that we finalize an invalid

chain. That's quite bad. That would likely require some kind of manual intervention and we definitely don't want this. That being said, we avoided finalization of this bug on LSC, but started to get there. Obviously, all the core devs immediately jumped, you know, to their laptops and we're trying to figure out what's going on and try to resolve the issue. But essentially, because of that, yeah, it led to like a number of cascading issues, but essentially, Elski now is in like an interesting state. For a while, it was not finalizing because a number of validators who were off on this in Valid Chain, and it's directly rejoined the valid chain.

We've since recovered finality on Holeski, which was a big lift. Shout out to the EFandops team and many of the other core devs that were focused on this. We restored finality, which is good, but now there's many validators and essentially this execute on the beacon chin with Holeski. And because of that, we'll get to this hoodie test net. I'll speak briefly about so there. We use a different, like a custom deposit contract on Sipolia. And maybe I won't go to into the details for time's sake, but essentially, There's a social deposit contract that lets you join the perfect sync mechanism.

And yeah, essentially it's custom on Sepulia. And because of this, there is essentially like an edge case that just we hadn't seen anywhere else or no one had really considered. And that became an issue on Sepulia. The damage on Sepulia was much less because, again, the bug was like quickly resolved. And yeah, there's no issue with like justifications on invalid chains or anything like this. So we restored Sepulia to normal working operations very quickly. And yeah, so Petra is live on Sepulia and it looks good. So, yeah, I don't know.

Do you have any questions there or I could then speak to Heddy? Yeah, Barnaby, do you want to answer that last part about whether or not that makes you concerned about launching on main net? Because to my mind, it's like, oh, if you had two different errors on two different test nets and then you're only doing one more test on a single new test net somehow, I don't know, for me, I'm not even an engineer, but that just naturally, as a person, makes me nervous. The errors that we saw on the two test net, they were test net errors. So, yeah, we haven't ruled out that there are no errors in the in the fork itself, but at least we know that the errors that

happened, like, are not related to the fork itself. Test nets are not also the only place where you do this test. You have a lot of dev nets first where you really, like, rule out a lot of the bugs that are inherent to the to the fork itself. So yeah, that's my view as someone who's much more of an external observer to do this than Alex or other people working on this. But I would say if we do have hoodie launched and that going like flawlessly, I would feel pretty confident with moving forward. Okay. Yeah, I did also see. Maybe I will just one more comment to be clear. the issues that we saw on Cipolia and Oleschee were sort of intrinsic to those test nets. Like the same issues would not be on Maynet at all.

So yes, it's not great, but they are quirks of those test nets and not Maynett itself. And so maybe to segue the next bit about Hoodie, if that's where we're going, but hoodie now is launched and the idea is to match Maynet in every way that we can. Oh, okay. Okay. So now I understand that makes, like it's a little bit more. confidence. Yeah, but overall, this particular upgrade has a little bit for a bunch of different constituencies. It's like validators for users slash L2s and then users more directly through the EOAs. Like there's just a bunch of different, yeah, aspects that are going to be improved here. However, the funny thing is this, this is such a huge upgrade even after what was originally supposed to be included got split into two different upgrades. So there's another one upcoming called

Fusaka. Is that how to pronounce that? And why don't you explain a little bit what some of the major improvements are in that particular one and also give your best projection for when we might see that go live? Yeah. Interesting question. So this kind of falls off from what Barnaby was saying. So, you know, we have the blobs. We need to get more blops for roll-ups and various consumers of this data. This is the top priority in everyone's mind. You mentioned base. And like, yeah, again, we have these different roll-ups who do want to use Ethereum because of the benefits it gives them.

But then they come to the protocol and it turns out that, yeah, at least today, they don't have the data families that they may want for the scale of their role-up, let's say. So the next iteration of the roadmap to scale this data plane that the Ethereum protocol has is with this feature called Peerdos. And it's a change from how we do DA today or data availability. and in itself, it's like a pretty big change. But yeah, so given that and then also it's important just to provide more jobs as quickly as possible, that is, well, I'm a CEL person, so I'll say that's that liner. There's also another, you know, there's an ELEIP with EOS, which is a big upgrade to the actual virtual machine of Ethereum.

And so right now these are the two. Yeah, EOF stands for EVM object format, just for listeners who, yeah. Yeah. And I can speak a bit about that if you'd like, but essentially, yeah, these are the two EIPs that are currently included in Fusaka. The idea is to basically just laser focus on distance two things, ship them as quickly as possible, and yeah, keep scaling Ethereum. You asked about timelines. This is a very tricky question because it's hard to predict the future. I will say personally, I would like to ship Fusaka by the end of a year. That might be a little optimistic. We'll see. So Pranambayant, do you have anything to add on the projection or on, you know, any further explanation of what will be included in Fusaka? Nothing to add on the timeline. I guess one point is, yeah, we want to scale the blobs as aggressively as possible, like to have as much scale as possible. Right now, there's a question of how much of an increase Fusaka brings. So we already said that Vectra brings us 2x in the best case. case, it seems that we can move Fusaka to bring us eight times that.

So if we ship that by the end of the year, that means we can increase the capacity 16 times compared to where we are now. So that's really like an order of magnitude increase. I really think we should be pushing for that number, 8x in Fusaka. I think one practical way to de-risk that and to give us maximum confidence that we can achieve it is to launch the dev nets at this capacity. as soon as possible. And I think right now there's a lot of work on just getting Pectra out of the door. But once that's done, I really hope that, yeah, we really focus on testing and strengthening the

network at this ATEX blob capacity. All right. So I feel like this is a good jumping off point for talking about timelines generally, because that has been a bit of a talking point around Ethereum for the last year or so. But I actually I just wanted to zoom out to give listeners a sense of even how we get to a point like this where we're about to push through these massive upgrades. So I know this is, this first all, involves a lot of different stakeholders and a lot of different communities, a lot of different entities within Ethereum that are that are not, you know, all controlled by the foundation. So, you know, just without like, you know, taking ages to do it, despite the fact that, yes,

I understand this is complicated. Walk us through how changes get decided on, what are all the different entities that play a role. You know, I'm sure people have heard like the all-core devs called. Obviously, you guys are part of the foundation, but there's like Ethereum magicians. There's cat herders. There's just like all these different groups. So just talk, you know, about what roles the community plays, which ones are from the foundation, and then how the priorities get set and, and,

the actual upgrades end up occurring. This is probably going to be a somewhat long answer and maybe not super structured because I understand it's not always the same way. But yeah, either of you can kick it off. I can make a pass. So this is, yeah, this is a very big question. And we could spend the whole hour, let's say, talking about it. But yeah, so, you know, to kick this off, Ethereum is actually decentralized.

And what that means is like no single person or party controls the protocol. There's, yeah, just a almost in. seemingly endless number of different people who participate and come to the table and have some opinion or some view. So because of that, yeah, like it's, it's nice that this is an unstructured question because it's somewhat of an unstructured process. So that being said, you know, I have some mental models I use to push structure on it. I'm a big fan of this notion of like a pipeline. So you can imagine then that one of the pipeline, there's like, you know, it could even be like blue sky thinking that's like, okay, how can we like do consensus better? and just start with like central broad prompt.

From there, there's like research that's done to like resolve these questions. And then that can kind of end up more in a number of different ways, but maybe a concrete way to think about it is like say a post on a research. From there then, you know, different community members and this is like core dabs. This is researchers at the EF, researchers outside the EF. This is even community members like, you know, for example with EOF, you're going to get like people working on compilers like solidity like Piper, all these different parts, smart contract programming languages, looking at a proposal like that.

And when you said it starts with a post on the Ethereum research firm, it could be like by kind of anybody, right? It doesn't have to be by somebody at the foundation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a proposal that just came up, well, again, this is probably way in the weeds, but there is someone who, as far as I can tell, it's just a Ethereum enthusiast who has this really a nice proposal for essentially how we encode data on the networking layer and it should actually help you put quite a bit and this is just some person yeah maybe this is jumping back but like for me this is something that I find really exciting about Ethereum is it is such an open process like anyone come at the table you know you then have to like filter out spam and things but like otherwise if you

have a good idea like it will generally get picked up and we'll debate and try to see where it fits into the protocol so to go back to this pipeline research would have been yield some kind of like spec or EIP and yeah I'm skipping a bunch of steps honestly but in the interest of time let's start with say we get to some EIP EIPs then go to ACD this is the all-core devs process that we've had forever now and this is a group of core developers also researchers and again it's very much the same diverse composition you have people at the EF people outside the you have representation from all the different client teams to actually maintain the core at their software. They all come every week and we talk about different EITs and, yeah, essentially how to bundle them in a way that

becomes an upgrade along this process. Barnaby mentioned DevNets. So as we start to have some notion of an upgrade, for example, we mentioned Fusaka. You would then have a set of the IPs of Fusaka, in this case, let's say, Tiredos and EOF, you start with client implementations. You start doing like sort of local testing on your client. Maybe you start peering with like one of their clients and do early interoperable. You then have this notion of DevNet. And this is where again, like Barnabey was saying,

a lot of these like early bugs are found and resolved. So Dev nets are just like bespoke networks that we can just make up in a pretty lightweight way. And you can actually run the code. You can run test on the live network and see what happens. From the Dev nets then, yeah, you keep refining this until we feel like we're confident for a test nut. And again, this is generally set by people on, you know, this is how we got to the Sepoli

and Holeski Pectra upgrades is that we had done Pectra for quite a while. We felt like we were ready. And so we decided to shove it. Then, yeah, after the test sets go well, you then think about Maynuts and the upgrade goes live. Barnaby, do you want to add anything about any of the groups involved or about the process or frankly even how long it takes to go through the process? Yeah, it takes some time. I have a similar mental model.

I think of it as a bow tie. So on the one hand, like you have a ton of research that's done, not just at the foundation, but even in other ecosystems, in academia, like the space of all the stuff that you can do with your protocol. And on the other side of the bow tie, you have the users, the applications, like all the things that people want to do, like using this protocol. In the middle, like you're trying to marshal all of these ideas into, into basically just one thing. Like there's only one Ethereum protocol that people need to come to

consensus over saying, yeah, what is this protocol? What does it do? What other features? What do we put in forks? I think that's a lot of the process to me feels like it's trying to force us to make the right decisions at that critical point of like, yeah,

just deciding what goes into a protocol and what doesn't. And the closer you get to that center, like you have things like, yeah, EF research, I think, is a team that's very involved in figuring out, like, integration of these major features into the roadmap. But then you also have the codev that obviously, like, they have part of the answer by knowing the limits of what's possible given the software and the capacity to make these changes. But, yeah, I feel that forces us also, like, to be really responsive to both ends. Like, we have to be aware of other things that are happening, like over research, over ecosystems, like over,

renovation, you also have to be aware of what users want, what applications want, and figure out a way to make that whole thing fit. And so all these groups that you describe, like, really their single purpose mission is to just like figure out what to put inside this big dish, I guess. And I do think it's worth elaborate and just one more comment. It's worth calling out the users, actually, as well. So, like, we have mentioned research. You've mentioned core developments.

But, you know, definitely users also play a big part of this picture. as well, right? So you mentioned 7702 and there is like so much back and forth on Ethereum magicians where different people who are either wallet developers, people who use wallets, say intimately in their applications, even just people like us who use wallets to use Ethereum, right? Like we have opinions or preferences on how these things look and work and so they also come at the table and chime. Users is very broad. It can be like, yeah, applications either on L1, you can think about L2s and like roll-ups as users, right, because they knock, from the swap space. And yeah, there is really just this like huge zoo of different

interested parties. Yeah. So in a moment, we'll talk a little bit more about how set at least some people would like this process to change. But first, a quick word from the sponsor to make this show possible. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of crypto asset manager Bitwise. Look, crypto can be confusing. There's so much noise and the space changes so quickly. That's why every week, I write a five-minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto in plain English. Why is Bitcoin up or down? What are people missing? Where should investors look next?

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review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube or X. Back to my conversation with Alex and Barnaby. So I'm sure you guys are well aware that when Justin Drake made his beam-tube, you know, proposal at DevCon back in November, he had targeted to be finalized in 2029 or 2030. And the reaction was largely disappointment, even outrage, that the timeline was so slow. There were other reasons people weren't super happy with what he was proposing. But, you know, I know the foundation is already moving to try to do two hard forks a year rather than one. But I wonder, do you think that's going to be sufficient to keep up with competition, you know, what else do you think could be done to update this process in a way that

will allow Ethereum to keep its top spot amongst smart contract chains? Because I'm sure you're aware, it has been slipping. You know, new devs went to Solana more than Ethereum for the first time this past year. And obviously, the kind of center of the hype cycle was on Solana this time. So what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, there's a lot here. Maybe you add some context on the beam chain first. So I think the way that Justin presented it, yeah, was a sort of five-year plan. And I can see how that, you know, doesn't meet expectations for any people.

That being said, like to me, the beam chain is, yeah, it's almost like a destination to go to. It doesn't mean we're doing nothing in the meantime, right? I also think that as we go through time, like what the beam chain actually. means could like change a bit. So this might not have been that clear. But for example, many things with the beam chain are like things that we're also thinking about today for Ethereum. And so you could imagine if we like, for example, if we like do research into single stop finality and like have SS ready. So, you know, earlier than that timeframe, we would just pull it forward and we'd upgrade main net today without thinking about the beam chain. So I understand that was the framing,

but I don't think it's the full picture because yeah, the message is not we're doing. thing. The message is this is like almost a very nice non-experiment around if you started it from scratch, like what would this look like? Yeah, but I guess like some of the other criticism I saw was around how it was people, I know this is like an engineering term, but people were calling it a refactoring, which at least as far as I understand means like fiddling on the margins, kind of like optimizing, but not doing a bigger change, whereas I think people are looking, And again, you know, it's really Salana, I think, that at least for now, all eyes are on. You know, if you compare it to their 400 millisecond block times, going to like a four second block time, it just does not feel competitive, especially when they're there now.

And then five years from now, a theory might go to something that's much longer. So, you know, I know my question was more about like the timeline. Yeah, but since you did bring up the beam chain, I don't think that that was their only concern. I think it was, yeah, just about, it's, it's like, how do you do an upgrade, but also how do you do it quickly enough where other chains aren't, you know, kind of outpacing you? Yeah, maybe we'll jump to that question then. And I think it's less about like, obviously velocity is important. And I do think we like, well, we could definitely do better. And like you mentioned, yeah, you can imagine we try to do more frequent upgrades.

that's yeah definitely something to move faster. I think what's probably more lacking is just simply, you know, there's this notion of North Star that people like to throw around. And so, you know, if you look at like even ACD today, I think different people have different visions for like where a 3M should go, right? And so because of this, you don't have as much alignment as you would otherwise. And that means you might move a little more slowly than you could. So if anything, I think it's really exciting to see all of the interest around, say,

like, Pyrados and like scaling the blobs, because it does give us one simple thing to focus on. And we can then think about, okay, rather than spend, you know, some number of weeks debating, you know, those buffet of BIPs, we can now just say, okay, we're going to put those on pause for now because they're not as important. Again, sort of quote the North Star here is the blobs, so we focus on that.

So I guess short answer is focus is the way to do better. Yeah, and focus at different speeds as well. So I think beam chain is really like a bit like this terminal vision of where the chain can go. And it's important to have these at the back of your head to orient like broad directions. But I think it cannot, you cannot just have that. Like you also need much more sort term pragmatic choices to make sure that you respond to current user and infrastructure demand. And so, yeah, two of these are, well, it's basically scaling, I would say at the moment. and that takes two shapes.

One shape is scaling the L1 first. I think people have correctly noted that that hasn't happened enough over the last few years. So it's not enough to have great designs for 2029. You also really need to beef up what you currently have, less you lose the game. So scaling the L1 is very important. And I would say there's very primatic designs to get too much farther than where we are now within the next months and years. And the second part is scaling the blobs.

So scaling the blobs, increasing capacity for the L2s, making sure that the Ethereum economy is as wide as possible with the scaling solutions. And for that, again, I think we have some very pragmatic and very short-term solutions that address, maybe not all over the demand. Like, there's just a lot of it. So there's always going to be like overflow. I would say address enough that we should feel secure in our value proposition. And what about this notion of trying to figure out some way to generally speed up timelines?

Because I did see people when I asked on Twitter what I should ask you. And somebody said something like, you know, why doesn't the Ethereum Foundation hire a bunch more engineers to, you know, implement more upgrades faster? I don't even know if that would necessarily work to me. I don't know. And that's how it goes. Right. It doesn't. Yeah, I mean, I think it's tricky because, like, again, Ethereum is decentralized.

And what this means is there are many different parties that participate. And so, you know, there is overhead to coordinating these entities. Like, why do we do this? We do this because, you know, it makes the system stronger in the long run. That doesn't mean that there aren't sort of speed bumps along the way, just, you know, to sort of get this, like, much longer ranging property. So, yeah. don't think just adding engineers sort of like oil to a fire is like the best step.

I do think it comes back to focus. I think we have a lot of games just from like focusing on like the core things. We think you're going to make Ethereum the best it can be, both in the short and the long term. Otherwise, yeah, there are things we can do around thinking about, okay, how can we, yeah, be more flexible with like ACD. And I think there's like a number of different ideas played around with various people at the moment to explore different avenues here.

but at the same time, you also don't want to, you know, like, ACD is structured the way it is to preserve these properties that we do care about around Ethereum. And so you have to, like, change them very carefully. All right. So let's also now talk about scaling the L1 because, you know, I've seen that people are concerned by how much activity the L2s have taken from the L1, obviously mostly post-Den-Koon, both in activity and then by extension, of course, in fees, a sequence or fees. And this has actually caused Ether to become inflationary again, even after EIP-1559, which had kind of more closely tied activity on the network to the burning of Ether, which would have like a positive effect on the price. So what is the foundation looking to do to scale the L1 and how quickly do you think those changes could be implemented again to make sure competition doesn't take more users? Yeah, maybe I can start by taking that question and zooming out a little bit because we hear a lot about this.

Yeah, L2s are taking activity from the L1 and I think sometimes it's not super clear like why we would allow this to happen in the first place or why this choice in a way was made. And so I think it's useful to come back to when we're designing the merge and this project that was if 2.0 and this idea of we'll have the merge and then we'll have this thing of like sharding, provide like a ton of scale at the time, 2020. money, defy summer, gas fees were super high, users were paying a ton of money to transact on Ethereum. So yeah, you had like this grand design of providing massive scale, but it was super hard. So sharding is just very difficult lift. We had, we would have had to basically commit to like a very specific solution. At the same time, we had this roll-up design that was appearing and telling us, well, actually, you can let the market figure out like some of these, some of these questions, like roll-ups just need this data availability to secure themselves.

And then they can decide like a lot of things like they can be sovereign over and over their economic organization, their VMs, the fees, their value proposition, et cetera. So it's a mixed effect, obviously. Like on the one hand, that means we can reallocate resources that we are committing on sharding like to doing other things and to, yeah, just push on other front. On the other side, it does mean that you're giving to other people like the rest of, responsibility of solving your problems. And the bet is that this grows the pie, and I think it's still the right bet.

But to really stack the odds in our favor, I think there's two things to do. One is, as you say, make the L1 stronger, but not just because we're trying to pull back the cover towards us that the L2s have taken for us. I actually think the reason to make the L1 stronger is also benefits the L2. So I think of the L1 as the core of this Ethereum economy, the stronger that core is, the more everyone benefits, including VL2. So I think the L2s themselves should see it in their interest for the L1 to be as strong as possible. And then the second thing we really need for that bet to pan out is just better infrastructure.

And part of it is the blobs, scaling them. Another part is doing all of this work of interoperability between the L2s to ensure that, you don't have value things in that L2 economy of somebody who is just like able to to capture and protect their value over time. So yeah, so that's, let's say the broad lens. And then the more like focused vision of that, how do we actually scale the L1? I think there's a lot of things that we need to do. Some are more, let's say, architectural. So we have to design like new mechanisms to just push the efficiency frontier like beyond what it is today.

and we have some options here one of them is the execution so trying to buy ourselves more time within the

block time for the nodes to execute more transactions we have things like multi-dimensional fee markets we have a lot of

options to just really like get more juice out of the nodes that are on the network in the second

axis I would say is just like raw performance engineering so benchmarking just being better at running experiments, at like high gas throughput or blood throughput,

and just making sure that the network is airtight, even when it delivers much higher performance. And so I would say, yeah, a combination of being clear on like what's the right roadmap to deliver like these new mechanisms, these architecture changes, and at the same time making this work of just pushing the machines as far as they can go.

I think that will take us like, where we need to go. So for some specific proposals that I've seen around this, people are talking about native roll-ups. As far as I understand, there's people using this term for two different things. Maybe you could help me sort this out. So Martin Cappellman proposed something with that name, again, at DevCon.

This was for roll-ups that were to be developed by Ethereum. I did see that Justin Drake said that he thought, what Martin was calling native roll-ups should be called execution sharding. And then I was listening to Justin and Uma Roy on bankless, who recently talked about native roll-ups. But their vision, I think, is a little bit different from Martins. They were saying that it's basically like an EVM pre-compile, which you can explain what that means,

but I guess it's like tooling or something that's available kind of out of the gate for roll-ups so that when they launch, they don't have to have their own security counsel. They don't have to create their own fraud proofs. They don't have to set up their own governance. But, you know, regardless of how people are using this term, just generally, what do you think of these two different ideas? And then do you think that either one of them could, you know, help Ethereum in its competition against other other blockchains? But also, will that hurt the relationship that Ethereum has to existing layer twos? Like, will it kind of, of create competition between them. Or some people think they're only competitive. So perhaps

further the competition between them. I can take some of that. Yeah, there's many questions in there. I know, I know. I start with the one about native robots. So yeah, first, researchers love to debate definitions of terms and try to really label very precisely like what different things mean. It actually harks back to what we were discussing earlier around this idea of sharding from like the protocol planning perspective. So like execution charting versus letting more market-driven solutions take care of it.

So yeah, the Martin Coppelman version looks a lot more like the protocol designers are designing like roll-up that's scaling Ethereum and so really just that roller becomes part of the protocol much more in a much deeper sense than roll-ups today are

as more let's say market-driven solutions. And then you have a just-ind-reg version which yeah is beside of having a function in the protocol that roll-ups and call to essentially get a checkmark to say that their execution was valid. So today that check-mark is something that the roll-ups need to design themselves. So optimistic works with the fraud proofs, validity roll-ups with the validity proofs or the verifiers.

And the idea of native relaps in that sense is to enshrine part of that infrastructure so that users on that on that order are guaranteed that yeah it's it's it's more than the market that's like securing this thing it's it's it's actually provided by the same people

who provide to you the Ethereum experience and just guarantee that yeah if there's a fault at that layer it's it's as big as a as a protocol fault and so and so that should just like increase the security guarantees you have when you when you transact on

on rollups that use this this precompai it doesn't necessarily mean that you're creating two tiers of rollups. Like, they're still, I mean, it's a market, so market differentiation happens and users are free to decide, like, where to go. I think it just strictly augments the space of options and the space of designs that Rolups have to launch themselves and settle on Ethereum, which is a good thing, generally.

Alex, do you want to add anything? Yeah, there are many questions. Maybe just on this distinction between, like, execution sharding and native roll-ups. So one way to think about it is like with execution sharding, you would have the L1 today, the execution environment that we have today, and it would just in substance be bigger. One thing that this means, for example,

is that you have the EVM and you can't really deviate from it. Whereas with native roll-ups, that's, you would start in a similar place where you would have essentially this like EBM inside the EBM pre-compile that gives you this execution checkmark, let's say. But then you could imagine there's more flexibility for more customization around this.

And this is where it starts then to be like a value add for rollups because they can still retain some of the customization they have while then getting the benefits of the government's monetization of the proposal. So you can imagine yet differences in like derivation function, which is like how you map the roll-up chain, sort of let's call it into the actual thing that's subtle cell one. This is again, more of an experimental idea. But you could imagine even like customized VMs like within the native roll-up construction. So then you start to get some of the customized ability that roll-ups have today.

And yeah, so, you know, these distinctions are kind of subtle, but they are there. From there, yeah, then you would also still have like the ability to have your own, perhaps we say like unentrined or non-intrined roll-up today. So when you think about the roll-ups of today, they have no special support within the L1 for their operation. They're just like they just look like other applications that are just out there. And, you know, this is nice because you have like a lot more flexibility to like customize different parts of your roll-up. But then also, yeah, you do, for example, then out things like having to govern these roll-ups and, yeah, everything that it tells. And what about the notion that adding these to the layer one could affect the relationship that Ethereum has to roll-ups to the existing layer twos?

Yeah, I don't really see. Yeah, maybe we're trying to make some like competition argument. The thing is, is that they would just be inhabiting different parts of the. the design space and or like the market structure let's say is where we put it of what it means to be a roll up so you know if you basically want to look like something that scales the l1 you can be a native roll up if you want to be something that uses a theory on liquidity uses the network effects of the l1 but then otherwise like customize a bunch of different things then you would be this you know non-native roll-up and so because of that it's like they're just kind of different things and so

for us to like compare them in competition it'd be like kind of kind of I can bury apples and oranges, right? They are just different things with different tradeoffs. And so depending on your application, why your users want and what you want for your platform, you can pick one or the other. And what about the data availability bit? Because I know Ethereum does also plan to move into the data availability space.

And Justin Drake has said that he views DA as, quote, the only sustainable source of flows for L1s. And again, I wondered how this could affect relationships with, like, Celestian eigen-D-A. Well, Ethereum already provides, is already part of the DA providers. Like, by providing blobs, Ethereum already has its offering of DA. The problem is that, yeah, it's quite small at the moment. So it needs to be, it needs to be larger.

There's these questions of, like, should there be a mean fee for the blobs? Like, should Ethereum, in a sense, take revenue from, from the provision of that resource, which is DA? I personally feel it would be a bit short-sighted. Like, I think it's basically a volume game. Like, you want to have as much DIA as possible, as much economic activity as possible on a platform that's at the start, let's say, fee neutral. I think the question of doing that, I would postpone that to much later.

I don't necessarily think the only sustainable source of funds. Like, I think economic activity that happened on your platform can just seep into the revenue of the infrastructure as a whole. Like we see that with MED for instance. Like that's essentially what powers a lot of the infrastructure that we have. And when I say infrastructure, I mean the nodes, but also even like the Ethereum asset itself. So if, yeah, so there's a lot of questions attending to that.

I feel like today they are not clearly resolved mostly due to the fact that we just are not providing as much DAS as we should. And I expect the picture will look very different. And now thinking around it will also look very different when we get to much higher provision. So I did want to ask about some recent news that is kind of along the same theme. I'm sure you guys heard about how Athena and Securitize are building their own blockchain for institutional players. It's going to be called Converge. I saw some interesting tweets about this.

John Wang, who I wasn't actually sure who he was. He tweeted, quote, this is the nail in the coffin for, ETH for me. Tradfai will use Ethereum because they care about security more than cheap fees, was a lie. Institutions with size were the last hope for Ethereum as an execution layer. Now it's actually going to be fully deserted. Camilla Russo of the Defiant wrote, this new L1 converge maybe makes sense for Athena and securitize if they seek to maximize profit and Ena value, but my initial take is it's pretty bearish for defy and Ethereum. Here we have one of the most innovative and successful recent defy protocols, and they're taking their $7 billion market

cap in tokens from Ethereum and porting them to their own chain with a set of permissioned validators. So what do you have to say to people who, you know, view like what Ethereum has given to the different, I guess in this sense, it's an app, but still that they're not always getting back what it is that they've, or they've not always been compensated fairly for what they've provided. Sorry, that Ethereum hasn't. Yeah, I'm not familiar with that specific example myself. When I hear, I do know Athena as an app, but yeah, when I hear apps living Ethereum, obviously, it doesn't make me happy. I think it would be best that most of the economic activity happens on the network, especially the one that's already there.

I would be curious to understand, like, yeah, why they made that choice. I think there's a couple of different, let's say, pressures, forces that make you want to own more of the stack of your own application versus relying on infrastructure that's provided by a protocol like Ethereum. I think the value proposition of Ethereum has always been to, yeah, be a network that's as neutral as possible, as censorship systems as possible. I think it has mostly delivered on that and is on track to deliver more of that. Scale is an issue, obviously. That's something that we're actively trying to fix. And then another thing that applications may want is this idea of really customizing their user experience, like from end to end. And being your own thing gives you sometimes more leverage to do that.

I think now we're seeing a lot more ways that that can happen, like through the L2 stacks, with a lot of these differentiated features. Yeah, maybe it's not enough in that specific case. I'm not really sure what was the deciding factor here. But yeah, the top of my head, like, I guess this is, what's probably on the nine of people that are weighing these choices right now. Yeah, I'm not familiar with, yeah, the reasons that they've lived out with this myself either.

But in short, we do have this question. Yeah, you know, you can either like go to, again, this economic hub that is Ethereum or you can kind of go your own way and like see what happens. You know, maybe that's beneficial for you. That being said, there's like a whole host of different strands of R&D that are addressing issues like Barabar's mentioning. Like if you want to customize your application or its runtime, then also at the same time providing scale so that it can meet the demands of your application. One thing I can say generally is it seems, I don't know. I mean, it does feel a bit short-sighted. And again, without knowing the reasoning, I'm not sure why,

but the reason that you come to Ethereum is because of the liquidity there, the attention, and essentially the values that it has. And so, you know, it's a distinct choice to go and like have a separate blockchain or application different from Ethereum. And, you know, when the liquidity is fragmented like that, then is that still, can that still be a draw? Well, it depends on how it's structured. So like, and again, I'm not, I don't know the details of Athena, but you could imagine that

if they're an application at L1, then like they have access to liquidity at L1 that they do. If it was a roll-up, then, yeah, there are issues then of like having liquidity fragmentation. There's a whole host, again, of research ideas around like making, you know, the situation better. Native rolloops like we touched on, you know, as part of this picture. There's a lot of work around Interop to basically figure out how to make these roll-ups more seamless. And point being is, yeah, like there's liquidity at the L1, and I think for many of these financial applications, that's like their draw. And so it is like a strict choice to move away from that. You're basically making it bet that you can, you know, have some better life off on your own.

And it may work out for them. It may not. You know, I think at the same time, we do see a number of different applications join Ethereum, quote unquote, as L2s, right? Because they realize the benefits of connecting to this network, this liquidity hub, yeah, both in terms of like financial senses, but also with users and the attention on Ethereum. Yeah, I just recorded a podcast with Ryan Watkins of Syncrasy. capital and he has an interesting theory, which is, and I guess it's not even quite a theory because it appears to be playing out. But he was saying that you could see, like, because, you know, for a long time we had this fat protocols thesis, that protocols would always be bigger than the apps on them

in the Web 3 world. But what he was saying is that really now you can see these apps just amass a certain user community and then use that to actually become an else. L1 to build their own infrastructure. Like it's really about the users. And I think that's this tension that we've kind of been, you know, discussing a little bit through this podcast where Ethereum now, yes, it, you know, it's still kind of in a theoretical sense has all these users. But really the users are mainly on the L2s, which is I think, you know,

what people view is this like tension between Ethereum and the layer 2s. And again, this is why. Ryan's theory is that now we will start to see that when certain applications gained users, then they can use that to actually kind of grow vertically. Just a quick comment on that. So me, the group where most of the value should accrue is always the users. And so my understanding of the fat protocol physics was that you're looking at the web to world where users are basically stuck in certain apps and they can't switch out of them.

So then the app obviously has like there's a has a relation of power over the user like force. And then if you have these protocols that are sufficiently composable, interoperable, like let's say Ethereum or other protocols, you rebalance the power away from the app and more towards the protocol. But that still should be dwarfed by, let's say, the user value that the user receive. And so it's still totally possible that the balance of force between the protocol and the app, it can go both ways. So apps can become stronger. They can be better at like walling the value that their users provide inside their own, their own garden.

And then it does put them in a position of saying, yeah, we can just be our own thing and we don't have to rely on a protocol itself. But yeah, so I'm neither a believer in the fat protocol or the fat app thesis. I think it should be like the fat user thesis. And hopefully they are fatter when they live on protocol. rather than in World Gardens. Yeah, well, let's also now talk a little bit about kind of the overall direction of Ethereum because that is, you know, something else that a lot of people in the Ethereum community

were taking issue with, especially in the latter half of 2024, you know, people were feeling this kind of competition and feeling like Ethereum was not necessarily winning at it anymore. And, you know, one of the kind of like, what's the word is just a little kind of fire that flamed up out of nowhere because of, I think, this general feeling people had was when, you know, this interview that Aya Miyaguchi, the old Ethereum Foundation executive director had done in Japan of all places. I mean, obviously, I'm not saying that it's strange. I'm just saying it's not even like a Western publication. It wasn't in English. But she had made some comments about how Ethereum wasn't about winning and stuff like that.

And that just really kind of made people upset because, you know, I think they had been feeling this concern about Ethereum's competitiveness. And so during that time, we saw calls for Danny Ryan to be executive director, you know, just generally some kind of shakeup in leadership and tone from the top. Now we have Shawe Wang and Tomas Stonsak. I don't know how to produce. I'm not sure either. I think Stonchak maybe.

I've never heard any like to say it. Well, I guess we will find out later once this gets published. But, you know, they are the two new co-executive directors. And I know it's so early. I think this is like quite possibly their first week or something. But I don't know if you've already noticed any kind of change in direction or if you, you know, as people who have been employed at the foundation, have been feeling like, like some kind of change in direction was needed or change in tone?

Fred answer yes. I mean, maybe a few things. So the statement by I that you called out, I believe was a mistranslation and probably also taken out of context. That being said, that's maybe a different thread. So either way, right, there's a question of like, yeah, does Ethereum want to win? Should Ethereum win? And then the questions that follow from that.

And yeah, there was a bit of a, there was some drama on Twitter because of this. And one output in this process then when, is these new co-executive directors at the F, so Shaw and Tamash. And yeah, I mean, they're great. And I do think they're bringing a lot of new energy already to the situation. Yeah, even already, like, you can see both of them are like much more active on Twitter and engaging both with like comments and different things. This is maybe a random observation, but I think Tamash put out simply to talk to your

critics. So, you know, he's like definitely trying to quote be in the trenches and really like hear things from all perspectives. And it is early, but generally I think everyone that these, and also outside what I've seen are like super excited by the choice. And I think we're really optimistic and the places things are going to go. Yeah. And I share that definitely.

I also think people sometimes talk about Ethereum competitiveness or if you like desire to to win and then look at the foundation and ask, does the foundation match that? Or they think that the foundation is the one that impulses by dynamics to the ecosystem as a whole. And to some extent, the foundation is still a pretty important part of the Ethereum ecosystem. So obviously, how it behaves and how its own posture is going to influence that. But there's also the other direction that I think people underwrite, which is the Ethereum ecosystem,

like informing the way that the foundation has a whole and within it the teams that compose the foundation, like behave, structure themselves, like how they organize their activities. And at least for us specifically in the EF research team, having gone through this refactor that terminated with Alex and me, like being colleagues, like all of that happened from the, let's say, the start, the middle of last year. So we really like put down on the floor, like trying to understand, okay, what are we doing? Like what is important for us to do? Does this group like has meaning?

Like how should we think about our relation to the ecosystem as a whole and to like these big questions of competitiveness and progress that we need to answer? And so, yeah, I feel that shift, at least to me, feels informed by what I was reading outside, just the community, talking to people, talking to apps, and understanding that, yeah, they needed to see, like, just more from us. And I think that that spirit just, yeah, has carried through not just EF research, not just EF leadership, but a ton of things in Ethereum today is reorganizing around, like, this pattern of just, yeah, we actually have solid ideas, like there's a lot of exciting stuff that's in the pipes, we probably have too many solid ideas and that's also part of a problem, like this

too many North Star things. But we just need to, okay, get our ducks in a row, understand what we should be doing, and just deliver on it very aggressively. And I would say we're well positioned to do that. All right. Last question. I did also want to ask about an organization and or just generally Ethereum's presence kind of like outside of this technical world, outside of this research world outside of like just what the protocol is about. And I'm sure you saw, again, this goes to kind of that competitive bit, you know, in the latter half of last year, or really towards the end of last year, Ethereum was founded to kind of sell or at least kind of inform Wall Street about Ethereum and to help onboard institutions. And that's eventually where Danny Ryan went as

a co-founder. And, you know, similarly, I'm sure you guys have seen ever since Trump was elected, there's a big presence by a lot of different crypto communities and founders in D.C. Ethereum is not necessarily part of that. In fact, as far as I understand it, has not been a part of that at all. So sometimes, you know, I do see people kind of saying like, oh, they don't have a presence there. Like, this could hurt them, blah, blah, blah. You know, I have to say my personal take is, I don't know if I view something like Ethereum's something that's going to solve Ethereum's problems. Like to my mind, it's really more about

where the users are going. I feel like Wall Street is going to follow where the user activity is. So I feel like actually the areas where you guys work is probably more important for actually determining what Ethereum's long-term success is. But I was curious,

how important do you view the efforts of something like an Ethereumize or something like lobbying in DC or whatever? Like, you know, what role, do you think that they should play in Ethereum and how do they either complement what you're doing? Or do you think that in a decentralized world that those kinds of efforts are not necessarily important? I wouldn't say they are not important. Even if it's decentralized,

it doesn't mean that, yeah, we should think only about certain use cases and not about other use cases. To me, at least I want this protocol that we're building. to be maximally useful to the greatest number of people. And that includes just like retail users using the apps with just like small quantities of value on them and the institutions like that are just adding leverage to this whole infrastructure. So yeah, I'm really happy that we're covering like kind of all the all the sectors. I also don't think we should be over indexing on any of them. It depends.

Like it's very dynamic. like from sometimes you feel like there's a bit of a lack in, let's say, institutional adoption, and then you want to shore up that a bit more, and probably that's where we're at now, and it's great that something like Ethelializes out there doing this work. Sometimes it's a regulatory perspective that needs to be a little but more understood, or at least, yeah, that we need to engage with more. And when I say we, it's not like me or the foundation, but it's really like any party in the Ethereum ecosystem, but there should be one at least.

So, yeah, I don't think we can afford, like, saying, oh, we're not participating in that because we don't care. It's not important enough for us. But, yeah, I just think we, so far, we've been somewhat strategic about where our attention should be. It's not always been perfect success. But I think, yeah, we're just adjusting and hopefully, like, we get it right. And to me, it feels like we're not, yeah, we're not so far off the mark, at least today. Yeah, maybe to continue. Like, I guess I'll speak to the, yeah, as far as I can.

I mean, I think the EF does want to really believe the values that Ethereum has, right? And so one of these is, yeah, this notion of both neutrality and then sort of how decentralization falls out of that or is reinforced by it. And so what this means is rather than like the F sending someone straight to D.C, you know, maybe the EF supports people who do that. And yeah, have that be like the route you go rather than just like have the super top down approach, right? So then what that looks like in practice today is you have things like Ethereumize and other entities that, that I have picked up this charge. And yeah, it's, I think it is important. I wouldn't say, you know, I forgot your phrasing, but, you know, it's not that like,

oh, or this is the centralized protocol that will magically, you know, have this adoption. Like, you know, I do think there are benefits to Ethereum that buy us in that direction, but we have to put in the work to make it happen, right? So that being said, then, you know, Ethereum does invite all these different players to come to the table and help, you know, build the whole, the whole community. in this way. You made a point about like, you know, Wall Street, follow the users and sort of the role of institutions. It is interesting because I think if you talk to like Ethereumizer players like this, like this is what they're doing. They go to institutions. And my understanding is that

institutions essentially immediately turn around and say, well, we need this or this or that, right? Like some protocol features or some, you know, tooling to like right applications or things like this. So, yeah, there are big parts of, let's say, this market or like that part of, of the market that are interested in using Ethereum. Like, for example, I think they really like this notion of roll-up because they have their like sort of customized, you know, analogies, the internet where it's like there's a public internet, but then you can have private intranets on top, right?

And this is like a model they're familiar with. So they see this on Ethereum and they find it really attractive. From there, you can build in things like privacy, which would obviously be important for these more, you know, traditional institutions and, yeah, all these types of things. So there's lots of cool synergies here. And, yeah, it is like a, a pretty, it can be a very complex landscape to navigate it, as Barnaby was saying. But yeah,

I'm optimistic about it. All right. You both, this was such a great conversation. Where can people learn more about each of you and your work? You can check out our new website, research. atphorium.combe. Foundation. You'll find the list of all the people that are in the team and all the teams. And yeah, that's where our work is, mostly. All right. And do either of you want to plug your X account or anything like that? Sure. Yeah, our Alex Stokes. It'll probably be attached to this podcast in some way. But yeah, follow me on Twitter and, yeah, definitely check out the research website.

Vannebinole on Twitter, just my name. Okay, well, it's been a pleasure having you both on Unchained. Thank you, Laura. Yeah, thanks, Laura. Bye. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about Alex, Barnaby, and the Ethereum Foundation research. Check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, both out from Matt Pilchard, Wander Manovich, Megan Gavis, Pamma Jimdar, and Marka Curia.

Thanks for listening.