Unchained - The Chopping Block: Ethereum’s Civil War, L2 Taxation, and Vitalik’s Milady Moment - Ep. 776

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. In this episode, we dive into Ethereum’s growing identity crisis as frustration mounts over the Ethereum Foundation’s leadership, vision, and sluggish innovation. Is Ethereum losing its edge while Solana, Base, and Tron take over? We also break down the Second Foundation drama, discuss Justin Sun’s wild L2 taxation proposal, and debate whether Ethereum needs a CTO-style overhaul to stay competitive. Plus, Vitalik Buterin’s unexpected embrace of the Milady NFT movement and what Gary Gensler’s exit from the SEC means for the future of crypto regulation. Show highlights 🔹 Ethereum Civil War? The Ethereum Foundation (EF) faces internal and external backlash as Vitalik defends its “WEF soy boy” ethos. Critics call for leadership changes, faster innovation, and a more aggressive growth strategy. 🔹 Second Foundation Fakeout: Rumors spread that Lido’s founder was launching a rival EF, briefly pumping ETH before being debunked. The buzz reignites calls for governance changes. 🔹 L2 Taxation Debate: Justin Sun proposes a 5B ETH tariff on rollups to fund buybacks, sparking debates on Ethereum’s fragmented ecosystem and lack of value accrual. 🔹 Vitalik Goes Milady: Ethereum’s co-founder embraces the Milady NFT subculture, changes his profile pic, and adopts the meme’s signature sign-off, fueling speculation about crypto’s shifting cultural landscape. 🔹 Ethereum’s Identity Crisis: With Solana, Base, and Tron dominating user adoption, is Ethereum too slow and academic to compete? Calls for an Ethereum “CTO” or more centralized execution grow louder. 🔹 Gensler’s Next Move: Gary Gensler exits the SEC and returns to MIT to teach AI & finance. Crypto celebrates his departure, while an AI-generated rap video mocks his legacy. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Disclosures Links Hayden Adam’s Tweet:  https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/1884134669265891433 Justin Sun’s EF Plan Tweet: https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/1881999625990836229  Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and Beyond by Vitalik Buterin: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/01/23/l1l2future.html  Zen and the Art of Shifting Mindsets in Technology: Aya Miyaguchi interview in Wired Magazine: https://wired.jp/article/the-next-innovators-4-aya-miyaguchi-en/  Timestamps  00:00 Intro 01:47 Ethereum Foundation's Civil War 05:53 The Bronze Age Mentality 07:32 Community Criticism and Governance 10:03 Vitalik's New Persona: Embracing Milady 14:33 Future of Ethereum and L2s 37:39 L1 vs L2: Do People Really Care? 42:12 Ethereum's Strategy and Colonialism Analogy 46:10 The Role of the Ethereum Foundation 58:34 Gary Gensler's Move to MIT and His Legacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And I think that's what you're seeing is all these people voicing really loudly, hey, the meta shifted. It shifted a few years ago, but like it's definitely super fucking shifted now. So like, please, this big pile of resources and money and institutional capital that we have in Ethereum can do a lot. But right now it's not structured to be able to do any of the things that we needed to do to advance Ethereum. Not a dividend.

It's a tale of two quons. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. unnamed trading firms who are very involved. D5.Eight is the ultimate. DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block.

At least the number three podcast in crypto, according to Robert Leshner. So the four of us, every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insight's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes.

Hello, everyone. Next, we've got Robert, the Cryptoconisour and Tsar of Superstate. Good evening, everybody. And we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. And finally, I'm Hesib, the Headhite Man at Dragonfly. We're Oeusage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment

advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping block that X, Y, Z for more disclosures. Okay, so it's been kind of a crappy month. Markets have been bleeding down. There's all sorts of chaos in the broader stock market, fears that China. China is catching up on AI and they're going to take all of our jobs, even before we were going to take all our own jobs. Now China's going to take all of our jobs. But in the meantime, in Crypto Land, crypto has just been kind of bleeding downwards. And we've been talking a lot about

meme coins, about Trump, about Melania, and of course what's been happening with regulation. But there's been another big drama playing out in a corner of the crypto world that we used to spend a lot more time on, which is Ethereum Land. So at the same time that Solana was hitting all-time highs and having this crazy, just, you know, orgiastic experience with a launch of the two biggest meme coins in history. The EF, the Ethereum Foundation, which is the organization that originally launched alongside Ethereum and stewards a lot of capital to support the Ethereum ecosystem. The Ethereum Foundation has been broken out into a bit of a civil war. So we're going to talk a little about the Civil War and try to reflect on it as investors.

And, you know, I think the four of us have probably seen the many. iterations of the Ethereum Foundation and what's led to it becoming what it's known as today. So the typical thing that people describe the Ethereum Foundation as is that it's very, very slow-moving, it's very research-oriented, it's very kumbaya, it's like quasi-socialist. They focus very much on giving a lot of grants and supporting community efforts and the DevCon, which is the main Ethereum conference. They always find some emerging city that doesn't really have a super strong local ecosystem to host it. So it's very much focused on trying to raise the floor within Ethereum.

I think that's kind of the vibe. It's not so much oriented the way that the Solana Foundation is on just increasing adoption, increasing price, increasing, you know, all the important metrics, increasing TVL, supporting defy. The Ethereum Foundation doesn't really focus on that quite so much. And this lack of focus on the adoption of Ethereum has really started to grate a lot of people who have held Ether and have seen the Ether price gradually bleed down. Even as Ethereum, or sorry, even as both Bitcoin and Solana have been hitting all-time highs in both price and in market cap.

So I think one of the triggers, one of the mini triggers for this was an article of the current Ethereum Foundation director whose name is Ayah Miyaguchi. And she was quoted in an article in Wired saying that it was important in part of the philosophy of the Ethereum Foundation to say no to the culture of competing and winning. Now, according to Vitalik, this was a little bit of a mistranslation because this was in Japanese. And so it's not exactly what they said, but this was the way it was quoted. And this kind of became the game of telephone that was transmitted everywhere around the world. Be like, oh, my God, look, it's in, it's directly in the bloodstream of the Ethereum Foundation that they just, I think the way that they don't want to win. And the way that Vitalik described it is that it's the W-E-F soy boy mentality of the Ethereum Foundation of, oh, you know, they're this kind of socialist, kumbra. by hyper-feminized organization.

He said that in a good way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me get to that. It would not evolve past the W.E.F. Soyboy version of themselves towards the base and red pills. The bronze age mentality. The bronze age mentality. The bronze age mentality.

That's right. So this became a bit of a meme. So Vitalik coming out in defense of the entire internet and everybody with their Ethereum bags down, you know, down bad, came out with pitchforks to come after I. I.M. Gucci and say, like, look, this is the reason why Ethereum has been failing is because of this feminized leadership, blah, blah, blah. And Vitalik is like, look, we hear you that things need to change.

We're going to try to take a more muscular effort and maybe we will decide to change the leadership at the Ethereum Foundation. But as Robert said, we are not going to move away from this, you know, W-EF soyboy mentality towards this Bronze Age, Bronze Age thing of just, you know, token go up or, you know. I feel like you should explain what that means to our audience this huge. I don't know how that I can. I think actually Nick Carter explained it most elegantly where he said, look, I think what we ultimately need for Vitalik here to get the Ethereum Foundation back on track is to

get Vitalik to start working out, take a tasteful amount of gear, and basically start doing a personal male transformation akin to Mark Zuckerberg. Get him to start wearing chains. You get him to start doing his hair. And if he does that, he thinks that the Ethereum price will hit all-time highs. So, look, there's a little bit of, I think this Bronze Age mentality, as Vitalik put it, is right now particularly beloved in crypto. This is a big transformation from what it felt like in 2017.

In 2017, in a way, I felt like Bitcoin was that Bronze Age mentality. And Ethereum was the W.EF. Soyboy socialist, like, developer-focused, the unicorns and the rainbows was actually at that time very severance. That was very different. It was very, like, they were countercultural at that time. Now it feels like the Bronze Age, you know, hypermasculine stuff is actually the counterculture. And Ethereum has somehow found its way to becoming the rainbows and the unicorns are the mainstream culture, that now this new generation of blockchains that are more almost masculineized. I kind of strange it even describing them that way.

Wait, wait. At the end of this episode, can we assign genders to different blockchain? just to see if we're all aligned on this? No, we cannot. No, we cannot. The answer's no. Why? We absolutely cannot do that.

Well, we've clearly in this conversation indicated that Ethereum is a feminine blockchain and Bitcoin is a masculine blockchain. Like, I think he was just using Vitalik's word, but I feel like we're going to go down a rabbit hole of getting canceled by every party. I do not want, I do not want to deal with the. In the name of self-preservation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

In the name of the AI programs ending. we can we can yeah that's right that's right look dea programs are over we don't have to we don't have to bring them back you know i feel like we're going to we're going to do more harder than good um okay so so two more pieces that i want to that i want to mention here before we get reactions um so in response to this whole drama about the ethereum foundation and maybe a passing of the guard um there was a there was a rumor that a second foundation dropped that this kind of crazy how do you have a second foundation, right? A second foundation would mean that there's a big pile of ether. You know, the foundation owns a huge amount of ether. It's been also slowly selling that

ether, which also got a lot of people upset because, you know, it's like, oh, how could the foundation be selling when the price is down? So the second foundation supposedly was being started by Constantine, the founder of Lido and p-to-p.org. Now, it turns out this was fake news. It was not true. But ether started pumping. And there was all this excitement about, oh, my God, there's a second foundation. The community is kind of turning everything around. This is going to be crazy. Since then, although the second foundation story is not true, this meme that somebody pointed out, it created this energy, this drive for a lot of people to start critiquing the foundation and describe how they might do it differently. So Justin's son came out with a plan that was,

you know, brilliant. I love Justin's-esque plan. Michael Igorov, you had some criticism from the paradigm team. A lot of people suddenly weighing in on how Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation ought to be governed. And this all culminated in this idea that Danny Ryan, a very well-respected researcher, who was one of the people at the forefront of the proof-of-stake transition, Danny Ryan was encouraged to become the main director of the Ethereum Foundation. And there was actually an on-chain vote, kind of a soft vote, didn't mean anything, but kind of akin to the Dow Fork. There was a place where you could signal your ether to vote in favor of Danny Ryan becoming the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation.

And he right now has, I think, about $160 million of ether that's voted in favor of Danny Ryan becoming. Now, this is not a real vote. This is just kind of some people doing some stuff on chain. And Vitalik himself came out saying, look, let's say moi. I am currently the one who's going to be deciding who's going to be the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. That's also where he made this comment about, look, we're not going to become Bronze Age blockchain. but look, we hear you and stuff's going to happen. Chaos right now in Ethereum land and a real lack of a sense of direction

about what's going to happen with the foundation. How do you guys reflect on this? Where do you think it's going? Give us your, I told you so's. Because that's apparently what we're all here for. Well, to add a couple more facts that I think you missed, one is in the midst of all this towards the end, Vitalik changed his profile picture and adopted a new,

crypto Twitter personality and mannerism of speech for himself. Tom, do you have more details on that? As the expert in this domain? I believe they're called... As our NFT correspondent. I believe they're called Speaking of which, I got my Malady coaster right here. Amazing.

Yeah, it's funny. I don't know how that happened. And then he started ending every tweet in Malady even though I don't think the tweets really Malady coded. They're Tom. Can you explain what is what is Malady for the audience that is not familiar with this? In fact, in fact, my ex-RP loving friend in Brooklyn sent me five messages today being like, what the fuck is a milady?

And I was like, my best investment in 2022. And he's like, what the fuck is a milady? And I sent him the end of the collection. And then he said, Vitalik is a Malady. Yeah. So I'm happy you're doing this description. So I don't have to do it. Yeah, it's a 10K PFP collection with a Neochibi aesthetic.

And they're really this kind of deep state. of the internet is kind of how I would describe it. You know, the power is wide, the power is also unknown. And really, just like to hang out and have fun with their friends on the internet. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I really respect it. And I love to describe it to a milady. Yeah, what is this description?

It's, I think, pretty factual. You can go on the website and check it out. You can go to Malady Chan, message board. You can go on MaladyCraft. It's a Minecraft version of Malady. It's a Malady version of Minecraft. Okay. So it's really...

I feel like the audience became more confused. Okay. You know, it's hard to... It's like dancing about architecture. It's a cult. It's not a cult. Talking about Melody is like dancing about architecture. I don't really know how to convey it with this particular medium.

All right. Here's my interpretation of Malady. It's basically this slightly sarcastic and subversive corner of crypto of people that are sort of in the know like Tom who have these ironic... I think it's pretty genuine. Everything I say is meant to be taken literally. really. I think, I think, okay, here's how to describe it. It is like intentionally very ugly edge lord NFT collection. Edgelaw, yes. They're not ugly. Yes, very edge lord.

They're very ugly. Neathebe aesthetic. Yeah, exactly. Just like, that's what I mean. It's like edge lord. It's an edge lord. Can you give us the coaster again just for anybody who's tuning in the video? There you go. Yeah, that's that is that is what a milady looks like. Right. I got my Remilia deep state hat too. I got all that money. Yeah. Tom's bought in. He's like super.

I got these. Tom's part of the cult. Yeah. He's all the lady all the time. Wow. He's getting censored. Tom is being censored. Tom is being censored.

The deep state cut off his camera access. Dude, my fucking opal just crashed. Hey, don't hurt. Don't curse. Hey, hey. Sorry.

This is what the lady does to people. Yeah. It's true. It's wrong. It's true. Dude. Okay. Well, your descent begins.

The first side. is you get a milady and then suddenly you start dissenting into madness right well vitalic became a milady and he changed his profile picture to a milady and one of the mannerisms that this community uses is they ends their tweets with just the phrase milady and so vitalic started adding this on the end of like posts about the future of ethereum and scaling solutions you know it'd be like you know we're going to implement you know this advanced concept in 2026 milady that is true uh that was that was kind of his thing even though, yeah, I don't really know if he fully embraced the, you know, milady mindset and the milady culture.

Is Vitalik not accepted into the milady inner circle? No, he's absolutely accepted. I'm more, you know, I worry that maybe, you know, the community is not accepted him or he's not accepted the community. I mean, yeah, that's more what I'm worried about. Charlotte and Vitalik had some interesting tweet threads with one another. That's what I would say to anyone who wants to go. Okay, well...

The other thing I know about Malady is that they have the best raves. I've never been to one, but that's what I've... I've been told of very good authority that every good rave in crypto is run by... A good authority that's in this...

In this video right? Allegedly on this... Their name might be Tom. Okay. I'm writing about that. Anyway, back to Ethereum and the foundation and the second foundation

and all of that. So... Yeah. So, Robert, what's your take as Ethereum OG, as a defy insider. Yes.

Tell us. Here's my take. One of the laws of crypto is that narrative follows price and not vice versa. And the reality is that, you know, you said this at the beginning. Ethereum has been bleeding out relative to Bitcoin, relative to Solana. And Ethereum is still a long way off of its all-time highs. And I think there's a lot of angst in the community. And I think that angst is creating this narrative that Ethereum is failing in some way.

because this narrative follows the price action. And I think in a different environment, even if the Ethereum Foundation were doing these exact same things, even if the developments going into Ethereum were exactly the same, even if the roadmap is exactly the same, I don't think we would be at this juncture if the price was doing something different. And within crypto, price can be a little bit random, right? There's so many reasons why things are going up and down, like a pinball machine. And I don't necessarily think, you know, it's,

fair to the Ethereum foundation that there's somehow this like crypto Twitter crisis that seems to have come out of left field probably just- Fair to them. Hold on, hold on. I don't think it's fair to this crisis has come out of left field like all of a sudden and mostly because the price hasn't gone up while Salina and Bitcoin have, right? I think it would have been fair to, you know, really raise these issues over the last like three years because it's been slow moving over the last three years.

I mean, Ethereum today looks similar to how Ethereum looked three years ago. I mean, ever since the merge, you know, it's been pretty much the same. same Ethereum. And so, you know, I think there's genuine criticism that, you know, there's a lot of new L-1s launching with extremely minor technology, extremely different designs, extremely different approaches. There's L-1s that have launched a long time ago. At this point, Solana is a vintage chain, right, that's still maintaining a velocity as though they're an upstart in a lot of ways. And so, you know, I don't think it's fair to Ethereum. This is like now suddenly like a crisis that's come out of nowhere.

These are longstanding issues. You know, I don't think they've suddenly reached a crisis stage. Very little has changed over the past couple of weeks besides a huge wave of angst has swept a community of token holders over price pretty much alone. And, you know, I think that Ethereum will navigate it, right? I don't think the culture will change. I mean, frankly, culture is way harder to change than a technical milestone is. you know, I think Ethereum will always stay the sort of rainbow and happiness-coded ecosystem.

And at a certain point, you know, the pendulum swings the other way and people are going to say, oh, we want, you know, a super friendly developer ecosystem and not this, you know, bronze stage warrior, you know, ego vibe thing. Drew, do you agree with that take? Or are you more critical? So I think my kind of other take is like the Theorem Foundation has been kind of tasked with like many different things, right? Like one aspect is like either Bell Labs of some sub areas of applied

cryptography research, which I think is actually the place that they've been the most successful at. The other is sort of like maintaining clients, getting developers. And those tasks, they sort of distribute amongst many teams, right? There's like consensus, nethermind, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, right? And I think those tasks are the one that are most visible to people because those are like the things that go into your wallet tomorrow, right? Versus like the advanced cryptography stuff is still very far,

either far from production or it's in some nested so deep thing that the end user doesn't care. So I think that disconnect, especially to people who's like most of their exposure to Ethereum is like buying NFTs, buying ETH using Defi and not really thinking about like scalability problems. You know, I can see why there's a disconnect because like frankly, the other organizations aren't very good at representing what Ethereum. Because they're running as engineering teams, but they're not out there marketing what they're doing.

So it's not very obvious to people. The second thing I would say is that if you read Vitalik's posts, was it this week or late last week, about kind of improving things and roll-ups, I would say we've watched the evolution of Ethereum's L2 roadmap go from you know, we want a million roll-ups, each with their own sequencer, and Ethereum is the cheapest possible data settlement layer in terms of have separating execution space versus Bob space. And I think over time, people have realized that that only works if the roll-up market can attract sufficient demand to compensate for like the lost revenue and fees and MEV and all of these other things that Ethereum holders get, right? And this goes to Justin's son's sort of joking, but not really at all, plan to save Ethereum, which I actually loved, and we can come back to that.

But I just want to put a pin on exactly what you're saying, being the foundation. We can come back to it. We can go back to it. I'm only just going to add two other things. So I've noticed this trend of going from like roll-ups in 2020, which are like sequencers, single sequencers, but you as the user can always withdraw the mainnet to like over time. It's like more and more of the roll-up operation goes to mainnet values. So you have based roll-ups where they're sequenced by the valider.

You've native roll-ups where they're generating proofs for the roll-up. And in general, all of these things to me represent this idea that Ethereum never, you know, I think they kind of, you know, you would never see a tech company give away all of its revenue to its affiliates. Like it's creating value for its affiliates who are the roll-ups. Like it's creating a central standard standards, creating an inter-op effectively for them in the worst case, but it's giving them basically 99% of the revenue in terms of revenue share. And I think all of these newer kind of things people in Ethereum care about are basically

ways of kind of trying to tax roll up slash bring more of the revenue back to main net without slowing, without relying on improving main net too much. And that's why there's this huge tension between do we improve the L1 so then we can get more L1 revenue and have the L1 be kind of still usable, or do we kind of try to make the roll-ups have to pay more either indirectly by using base roll-ups or native roll-ups? And I know neither of the proponents of those would say it's taxing, but realistically it is, right? You're going to have to pay the validators more versus the L2 sequencer you're paying now. And or explicitly taxing. And so I think Vitolix Post actually even explicitly mentions

like L-2's sort of, I think he called it donation, but it is a little bit of a taxation system realistically and and and and and and this probably dovetails into what rob around talk about yeah i mean to your points for and i mean i think this is part of the community's angst is that everyone has watched ethereum enable all of these l2s to basically be born on top of ethereum while contributing very little value back to it and so you know just to go through the just and in fact they spend a lot of time fighting over who contributed more value to Ethereum, like if you've seen in the last week. Right.

Yeah. And they contribute like, you know, a thousand dollars in gas fees, you know, to have an entire L2. And like, if that's the future of Ethereum, you know, scaling, we're going to have, you know, hundreds of L2s that have tens of millions of users. And the total fees and transaction volume and MEV on Ethereum will probably go down from where it is today, right? That's not success in the minds of the community.

Which brings us to the plan to save Ethereum, according to Justin's son, which I've, I viewed this as very Trumpian in that he basically is taking this like, you know, Ethereum first mindset, just like we've taken an America first mindset in politics. His plan is basically like, you know, a couple things, but the most interesting and important one was heavily taxed layer two solutions, you know, basically tariffs, tariffs on L2 and charge them for how much value they're getting from Ethereum. And his views are, well, we tariff them $5 billion, you know, and they'll pay it to Ethereum. And, you know, imagine.

You didn't have a specific proposal, though, right? This was all really vague of like, oh, we'll figure out how to do it. Yeah, I mean, of course, like the devil's in the details. But like, you know, and again, like this is like a half ingest, you know, plan to save Ethereum that I don't think, you know, was meant to be taken super seriously. But it does inspire a good conversation. And the plan is tax L2s to the tune of $5 billion, that $5 billion is used. used to buy and burn ether and add to the deflation of the underlying asset.

And honestly, it's interesting. And honestly, I think it's directionally completely correct. Tom, what's your response to the Justice Sun? Yeah. Let's tariff. Let's tariff the altars. Let's tariff the altars. Yeah.

I actually, like, I don't think any of the kind of discussion, even beyond Ethereum, but for other tokens around like, buybacks or revenue. Like, I, that's just, I don't think what the market is using to price these assets. Like, is Solana being priced on some sort of like PE ratio? Like, no, people buy Seoul because they are optimistic about the future of Soul. Maybe they want to use Soul. Maybe it's a little but memetic. And so I, like, on the one hand, I hear you that, hey, like, you know, the kind of revenue story for Ethereum doesn't look great if the future is all these L2s that are paying basically nothing. But I'm like, I don't think it's actually the issue. I think the issue is they

basically outsourced their go-to-market to a bunch of third parties who have end relationships with users. And the result is you get this really fragmented narrative, this really fragmented brand. And that's actually kind of the issue. Like Solana, Solana is like, you know, Mac and, you know, Ethereum is like Linux, where, yeah, maybe, you know, Ethereum can serve more different use cases. And in practice, it's creating more utility and it's serving more users. But like, hey, if you're, you know, talking to your parents and you guys and what computer do you should I get. You're probably telling them to get a Mac. Like, you know, don't go and get a, what's that?

You know, like a new desktop and building yourself and installed GENTU and okay, actually, well, GENTU is like built with the Linux kernels. They're actually using Linux when you use it. And it's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like this is a very, very small percentage of the population that understands what's going on. And so I don't think it's a revenue story. I think it's like a brand memetics. Just sort of like complete brand package story.

I also have had a very strange, I think, how much ownership people feel like they should have over the F. This isn't a Dow. You don't have a legal or programmatic entitlement to these funds. Like this is a separate entity. And people are like telling it how to spend its money. It's not like someone who's looting the Dow and spending it and, you know, misappropriating funds. It's like, no, this is like a private organization. And granted, I agree they need a lot of reform.

But it's like everyone on Twitter feels like, oh, it's their money. and they should be able to direct how it's being spent. And that was, okay, so I will defend, let me defend that. Let me defend that because the EF, I don't know actually what their charter is, but for most of these foundations, the charter is to advance the interest of Ethereum blockchain or Solana blockchain or whatever. On some level, like, obviously they have their own interpretation of what that means, but I think it does matter what coin holders think it means or what the Ethereum community

thinks it means to be advancing the interest of Ethereum. So to the extent that it is a nonprofit with that particular charter, again, I don't know what their charter is. Their charter might be do whatever Vitalik wants. But if their charter is to advance the interest of Ethereum, then it's important for people who represent how Ethereum has changed since the inception of the EF to today. I think that's the most obvious thing in my mind is that we learned so much about how blockchins work over the last seven years, right?

Like when the EF was originally, you know, to Turun's point, being the sort of the NSF of crypto, where it was funding all these cryptographers and all these new experiments and, you know, getting people out of all who get people in Argentina. or people in Iran or whatever to start using mobile wallets and we'll see what happens. This was a good use of funds at that time. It was the right structure and the right way for them to think about what a foundation ought to be doing to advance the interests of Ethereum and of crypto. Because at that time, Ethereum was crypto.

It really was basically everything that was not Bitcoin was Ethereum, right? To basically do a rounding error if you're talking about smart contracts. Today, that's not true. Today, actually, you know, where is most of the end user adoption of crypto coming? The answer is Solana and Tron, right? That's like, and then base, you know, basically. Like, those three are where most human beings are actually interacting with crypto. And or obviously through sexes, right?

Sexes are obviously by far the number one over those two or, you know, those three. So what does that mean? So one thing I think it means is that we've actually learned from the other foundations, what a foundation should be doing in order to advance the interests of the, the underlying blockchain community. And the EF seemingly has really not changed at all in the last seven years with respect to the way it thinks about its priorities. And that seems incorrect.

It does seem correct that like, hey, Solana has shown incredible effectiveness at their ability to just go into communities and advocate for the adoption and usage of blockchains. Seven years ago, maybe that wouldn't have been a very good ROI for a blockchain foundation to do that because, like, well, no, we need we need to solve more foundational problems than that. I also think it's an overdue window. I think it's an overdue window shift, too. I think, like, if the Ethereum Foundation in 2017 operated how the Salonaner Foundation was operating today, people would just rip it to shreds. Like, even the concept of there is an ICO and there is a foundation.

Like, that is so sacrilege to, you know, Bitcoiners, which is kind of how this whole thing, what's the whole thing spun out of it? I mean, if we look at the other L-1s that did raise, like, 2017, right? like the Tezos, Pocodot, et cetera. Like, none of them have had usage adoption or success. And they were kind of the Corpo L1 of that era, right? Of that era, yeah. Of that era, right? So, like, as a, to data supporting that is that people who are trying to do that,

it was the wrong timing also. And like, arguably the wrong benefits, right? Because, like, what users did not care that much about a lot of the benefits, like most of the other L-1s were going for. And Ethereum had the same. thing where it was the easiest place for developers to start. Whereas Salon seems to have the thing where it's the easiest place for like a 19 year old, 17 year old to trade meme coins, right? Like, like it really is like something changed somewhere. Here's maybe a different analogy I would also

offer is that in the early days of the internet when Google became really big, Google's interests were basically the interest of the internet itself. If they increased the adoption and increase the GDP of the internet, I mean, now that's the kind of Stripes thing, but really it was Google's thing back in the day was let's just make the internet on the whole more efficient. Sure, sure. But that meme of like, okay, the internet is our business. And the bigger the internet gets, the more successful we become. That really was the Ethereum Foundation, you know, six, seven years ago. Like, that was, that was a correct interpretation of the world. It is no longer a correct interpretation of what the Ethereum Foundation's main goal should be is to just increase the GDP of like blockchain

technology. Clearly that is no longer, like it's just true. Just we'll look at the math, right? the percentage of non-Bitcoin value that is represented by Ethereum gets smaller and smaller every passing year, which tells you that it does make sense to the extent the Ethereum Foundation is advancing the interest of Ethereum, the project. It should be more inclusive of this question of how do we increase the adoption and how do we increase the value that actually the Ethereum holders are able to capture. Now, I don't think that's obviously not its explicit goal. It's not to make the ETH price go up. And so there's some tension there. you have to resolve that tension in some way. But it does feel right to me. I don't think it's

just a, oh, you know, there's a Bronze Age, you know, hypermasculine thing that there's been a vibe shift and now, you know, we don't want feminized organizations. I don't think that's the right way to understand the difference. I think the difference is that in 2017, the Ethereum Foundation was shaped correctly. And there is no longer shaped correctly. And all institutions have inertia in being able to adopt to the underlying meta-shifting. And I think that's what you're seeing is all these people voicing really loudly, hey, the meta-shifting. And I think that's what you're seeing, is all these people voicing really loudly, hey, the meta shifted. It shifted a few years ago, but like, it's definitely super fucking shifted now. So like, please, this big pile of resources and money and

institutional capital that we have in Ethereum can do a lot. But right now, it's not structured to be able to do any of the things that we needed to do to advance Ethereum. Well, to add on to that, I don't think most foundations are equipped to evolve, right? Foundations have charters and they have staff and they are very slow evolving organisms that are not meant to be, you know, a corporation with shareholders that, you know, they report to and they change their mission and they have to, you know, move very quickly. Foundations are meant to be long lasting, long chartered, long gold. And maybe it's just that, you know, we're starting to see the cracks of the fit between foundations and develop in general. The Linux analogy is really,

kind of the most fitting, right? Because Linux was an unopinion, Linux foundation, for instance, unopinionated foundation that's like, use the Linux kernel anywhere. And to Deeb's point earlier, their goal when they started was like, grow the GDP of computer usage, right?

And they did that by having other people distribute Linux. I had Red Hat, I had Gen 2, at Ubuntu, all these people. But then the problem was like, each of them specialized in something different. You couldn't like move, you know, things weren't portable, the UX was worse. In a lot of ways, very similar to the roll-up type of thing.

And then the people who came in and made more opinionated, centralized decisions did end up winning the end user in the sense of Microsoft and then and Mac to some extent. But then Linux found this niche in networking and then kind of completely dominated that. So there's kind of this thing where it sort of feels like that's what's happening more than anything else. Like there's just going to be different markets for both. parties. And the problem is everyone sees the shiny thing in the other side and is like,

I want that. And maybe you can't get that. Tom, what are you going to say? What Robert was saying around foundations, I think the other issue is there's really no feedback loop with foundation, like there is with a company, which can be good and bad, right? If you have a very long-dated, long-term thing, often times maybe a company isn't well-suited because, hey, you're not going to see immediate quantifiable success in a short term, or maybe there's some greater good or some of the other philosophical reason why you have this foundation. But if you're Ethereum, what is that feedback loop?

If you don't hit your ship dates, if you don't do the thing that you want to do, if you don't hit your metrics, if you don't do whatever, like what actually happens to the foundation? It's like, there's a very sort of soft, noisy feedback loop with like maybe, you know, devs leave, maybe the price of eco-economic. goes down. I don't think it's specific to the Ethereum Foundation, but maybe the answer to Robert's point is like a foundation mindset or foundation model is like actually maybe not what you want right now, which is, again, I think kind of a little bit of the consensus vision way back in the day.

And it's like maybe that was also sort of a missed time. Yeah, I think on some level, the fact that there is the Civil War and there's all this public pressure now on the Ethereum Foundation, it is the feedback loop that you need because, you know, to your point, there is no, there are no, there are no, there are no, shareholders who can actually, you know, directly intervene into what's going on with the foundation. And so you need this kind of external social pressure, right? Because no matter who you are, even if you're, yeah, you work for a nonprofit, your, you know, your wages are relatively secure.

Everybody is terrified of being yelled at. Totally. It kind of doesn't matter. The internet's a scary place. It's the most powerful thing in the world. It's just people on the internet are mad. And they're so mad that Vitalik is now being dragged into it. They're so mad that Vitalik is now a milady.

Yeah, exactly. So now, I want to come back to this thing, the Justin Sun proposal that you were referring to, Robert. There obviously been a number of different proposals of what the Ethereum Foundation should do differently. I think almost all of them tip their hat in some way to like, hey, Solana is probably doing this the right way. And, you know, they're in some way of like, okay, how do you get Ethereum to be more focused on adoption and more focused on, you know, driving fundamental value to the blockchain itself? I think there was also the announcement of this organization called Ethereumize, which is, quote, quote, a new marketing arm for Ethereum to institutions, which I think is a great idea.

And I think this idea that Ethereum maybe should become less consumer focused and more institution focused in terms of like their direct go-to-market and direct marketing probably also makes sense because it does feel like the place where they have a comparative advantage because just, you know, it's more mature, it's older. It's like, hey, Solana goes down, has meme coins competing for you with attention. and block space and whatever, to take way to QOS and all the stuff. Whereas Ethereum is relatively stable.

We've been around for so long. All the other institutional quality assets and RWA stuff is listed here. And you don't need meme coin level throughput to trade these very big pools of capital. The overall thing, though, the idea of like, okay, Ethereum should adopt this Ethereum first kind of MAGA perspective and start tariffing the L2s.

To me, this is like obviously a pipe dream. This is totally wrong, right? Like the idea that you're going to jack up fees, like already so many of the L2s are like, hey, let's find external DA because, you know, the blobs might just be getting too expensive. And there's been no backlash. There's been no, you know, accusing them of the intern coats.

There's been no public pressure. Nobody cares at all where L2s are putting their DA. And I think you see, you know, with movement, I think you guys are in movement labs. I want you to tweet that. I want you to tweet that because there will be all of these people in your replies telling you that that's not true. Okay, maybe we'll see, we'll see if they show up in my replies without me directly goading them.

I would guess that they don't show up in my replies because I don't think that many people care. I don't think many people even know where their DA is or even, I don't know if it's even verifying the DA is being posted anywhere. I bet there's like script out there that's doing it, you know, altruistically, but that's about it. All right. I'm excited for you to tweet this. Let's see.

Let's see what happened. Okay. All right. We'll see. Like, I mean, one of the things that I wrote in my, in my 2025 predictions was that the distinction between L1 and L2s is going to erode even further than it already has. And that most people don't know the difference between what's an L1 and L2. And I don't know that they ever really cared.

I think it was a little bit of Ethereum, it was a little bit of Ethereum philosophy that people were kind of accepting unthinkingly that they were supposed to care. But I feel like that as the Ethereum ethos has weakened, the people's willingness to, like, openly profess that, like, yes, I really care that this L2 is, you know, whatever. The reality is the trust assumptions around L2s, for the most part, is still pretty high. You know, they're also on training wheels, as Vitalik, likes to put it. And I think what you will see, for example, to take Movement Labs, which originally was positioning itself as being a layer two.

Now, they haven't launched their main net yet. So it's all a little weird. But they originally were saying, look, we're a roll up with fast finality gadget, which is basically a side chain. but now they're saying, no, no, no, we're just going to be an L1. We take it back. We're not going to be an Ethereum roll-up. And to me, this is, okay, why is this happening?

Why is there an L-2 that this whole original story was to be an L-2? And now it's pivoting and saying it's an L-1. And nothing bad is how, like, it certainly hasn't been a bearish thing for movement, as far as I can tell in terms of the overall sentiment. I think I was talking to somebody else, totally unrelated to another startup. And they were asking like, oh, should we do an L-2? Should we do an L-1? And their advice that they got from somebody else who was another investor was, oh, you should become an L1.

And they were like, why? You know, we don't really want to deal with infrastructure. You know, I don't know if it really matters. It's not very important to us that we're in L1. Well, L1s get higher valuations. The answer was that L1s get higher valuations. They do. And that alone, that enough is enough to shift the meta.

It's just, oh, so people are just saying. And I don't know whether or not it's true, to some degree like maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. I don't know. Movement in some sense is the only. real randomized control trial, not randomized control trial, but the only real like sort of difference and difference experiment you can run and say, okay, we announced that we're an L2, we announced that we're an L1, what did that do to our evaluation?

Sellow is the only one I know of that went in the other direction. They were an L1 and they announced that they were in L2. But that was a different time, right? Now is kind of the peak L2, Ethereum, malaise. And it seems like maybe, I don't know, you guys tell me, but it seems like movement saying that, okay, we're going to be in L1 now. seem broadly positive and or nobody cared, which to me mostly is like, okay, that's a bad sign for where the L2 meta is going.

So I think unless you have, either one, you have some type of broader ecosystem effects from being an L2. Like, for example, you know, you're part of the super chain and that gives you these additional benefits or you're part of the, you know, the ZK stack or the polygon ag layer. So, okay, you've got some of these other benefits from. the liquidity mode or the connectivity or whatever interoperability. But just being a vanilla L2, just hanging out there, like, you know, the way that movement is or one of these Salana or SVM L2s that are living on Ethereum, I think we'll kind of pass the point that these things are

net positive for your marketing or market share. I mean, just to go back to your question about the differences between L2s and L1s. I mean, from the user perspective, there is no difference in my mind. L2s will become L1 at some point. If they're super successful, right? But then what that implies that this idea that you can tax the L2s is wrong. No, it's not wrong. No, they're going to, they're going to pull a movement or they're going to eventually uproot anyway, but it's incredibly hard.

It's incredibly slow. Like to actually, I think, evolve is not easy. And I think the inevitable state is that they eventually detach once they're successful anyway. Because- You think is inevitable. All other two do that. You think base will eventually do that.

Probably. Give it like 10 years to, I think base is... I think the nation state analogy is actually worth bringing up here, which is like, if there was really good interrupt. No, no, if there, well, if there was really good interrupt that was provided somehow by the L1, right? then that's like your interstate commerce, you know, clause in the Constitution. Because basically it means like, hey, you're getting some value for your taxes. But if you're just getting taxed for the blob space and the blob space is getting commoditized and your users are also not even knowing what front end they're using, then, yeah, you probably can't tax.

But I think there is sort of this weird thing where like some of the roll-ups do really get monetary premium from being like very Ethereum focus and I may be based on O.P. I put in that camp for sure. And and an arbitram too, I think. And and I think for those roll-ups, they don't really have a choice. So they're kind of, they're in the union, you know, they joined the U.S. And some of the roll-ups are subsidizing some of the other ones. And that's, that's just a okay. Okay. Okay, I like that analogy. Got it. So yeah, yeah, all right. So one of them is like Hawaii or Alaska. Kyle Samani, don't yell at me for making an analogy. No, no, no, no, we're going full analogy.

We're going full analogy. I think colonialism is actually a very good analogy for L2s is that you try to tax a shit out of, you know, out of Philippines or something or, you know, one of these colonies. And they're just going to break away. Like, they're distant enough. They have a loose enough affiliation with you. And Ethereum is no war machine. How can you keep somebody as an L2?

Look, we're jacking up your tariffs. We're taking 50% of your M.V. Remember when you wrote that blog post? force that. Remember when you wrote that blog post in 2020 or 2021 that was like blockchains or nation states or whether our cities? Yeah. Yeah. I think you should write you should write this colonialism one. Is this that this is a good. Okay. Yeah. It's a good. It's a good follow up. I liked Hayden's tweet that you should just buy out some of the L2s and and D5s and or D5 protocols and nationalize it. I didn't see this. And nationalize it. That's a brilliant

idea. I like this. I like this. I didn't see this tweet. So explain what this feels like the war. This feels like the war is the colonial wars though now again. Yeah. Actually, there will be a revolutionary war if you start. No, no. This is like Hawaii. This is like, no, no, no. This is like Greenland. This is like Greenland. Greenland? Could be Greenland. You know, it's like, it's voluntary. Right. Like they both agree. They both agree. They're like, cool. We'll come into the Ethereum Union. It's by us out. Oh, you know what? You know what this is basically the plan for? This is the plan for Ethereum canto. Yeah, basically.

Oh, this is for, no, hold on this is not the L2, this is DFI projects. Yeah, this is and and and, and, and, and, and L2s and L2s. And L2s and L2s is super different. And L2s and L2s. And L2s. And L2s.

Yeah, yeah, and two. I think these are so different from each other. You're so different from each other. One of them is nationalizing businesses, right? This is like, okay, we're gonna run the railroads now. Like, that's a terrible idea. Do not do that. That's absolutely horrend.

us. But being like, we are going to go and negotiate and purchase new territory. That's dope. That's like manifest destiny of like Ethereum is going to cover wall to wall. All of the EVM real estate that anybody could possibly want is going to be all brought under Ethereum. I would love to see Hayt. And I'm going to be launching forever. Unfortunately, I would have recorded this podcast today. Otherwise, I would have gone to this event where I would have seen Hayden and Ethereum, Hayden and Vitalik debate something, which may, I could have made me this. Damn.

This is what I guess for recording late to see. Yeah. The things that I guess is show. Yeah. Yeah. Our podcast for other things. But this is a great Robert's fault. It's not my fault.

Not my fault. The timing, the timing, I mean. Oh, well, fine. It's my fault that we scheduled for this exact time. Anyway, I think this hate and tweet is awesome, simply because I like the idea of all radical experimentation. for Ethereum. Yeah, I mean, look, unfortunately, the reality is none of these things will happen.

Of course not. Of course not. Theirin Foundation is incredibly risk-averse, and they're living in a basically the world of a decade ago. Like, the Thierin Foundation was literally created in what, 2014, 2015? So, yeah. So, look, I think last go-round real quick to cap up this thing off. What do you expect to happen?

Let's just get, like, okay, we've talked about all these amazing things that could happen, what maybe ought to happen. There's always a question of what will happen when it comes to Ethereum, which is usually much more modest. We'll just go around real quick. Robert, what do you think happens? I think Ethereum is more of the same for now.

Honestly, I don't think there's a genuine plan. I think there might be very light leadership change, you know. But like whether or not, you know, Danny Ryan comes in or whether, you know, Aya stays there, whether or not Battalic takes a more active role as, you know, leader at the EF. I think in general what's going to happen from a how does Ethereum evolve perspective, you know, how quickly does it move? I don't think there's going to be that much of a difference, frankly. I think Ethereum is relatively, you know, stuck in its ways. It is like a

cruise ship that's trying to very lightly turn, maybe, you know, depending on public feedback. And I think, you know, one of the nice things about Ethereum is that, you know, it is, you know, it is battle tested and it is resilient. It doesn't have to move as quick. You know, I personally believe that most of Bitcoin's value comes from. I think of the COVID ships. Yeah, yeah. But like, I think of Bitcoin's value as for the most part, it's ossification.

And like, yes, there's still like things coming that could like evolve it a little bit, like OBCAD or whatever. But it's like it's a pretty much hardened system that works. And Ethereum is kind of that for EVM. And that's a good thing, too. And I think the narrative will also change. I think price is relatively random and at a certain point when there's slight outperformance of Ethereum's price, people are going to say, everything's fine, actually.

You know, like maybe this is the right strategy after all. And I think there's a randomness to this that we're discounting. All right. Tom, what do you think happens from here? Yeah, I think you said a little bit of what was on my mind, which is, I think culturally, it is extremely risk-givers. I actually think what has happened more than anything in the past few years is actually not a ton of ship.

I think the merge was basically the big thing. And other than that, really, if anything like the scope can you use to get cut and things that people wanted to add or wanted to ship actually get cut or pushed out or like, oh, someone else is going to solve that or we're going to have your third-party teams do that for sometimes technical reasons, sometimes philosophical reasons. And so really it's a question of culturally that shift, do they want to shift to a culture of let's try things and see if they work and let's ship things and take a little bit of risk? Frankly, I think a lot of this does come from Vitalik

independent of who's at the head of the EF. Like if you look at a lot of what he's focused on, it's I think technical, philosophical, academic approaches to solving these sort of core blockchain issues instead of like what is a product that people want to use or how do we make this extremely easy for developers. It's like, how do I play the thousand-year game? And if you're playing the thousand-year-game, actually, you know, your goal is to survive. It's not to try to, like, maximize market share. So unless that changes, I also agree.

I think the horse is going to be, you know, more of the same. Yeah, I unfortunately agree with you guys. I think almost nothing changes. I think Danny Ryan will be slightly faster, but I think it's just so hard for people who are not natural wrecking balls to really change the makeup of a very bureaucratic and very kind of stayed institution like the Theorem Foundation. I think people are overly optimistic about what can be done with an organization that's ossified to that extent.

I will say, you know, and a lot of people who work there or work there, there already were a bunch of changes. And I feel like this whole reaction actually happened even after some of like a bunch of people left and like some of the different suborgs were kind of sized down. Reactions are a reaction to price, not the underlying fundamentals of an organization. I know, I know, I know. But that's why I think it's kind of funny because there have been all these changes. I think the market is just like not paying attention to or something because like the

interesting thing is like the difference in engagement between Vitalik and anyone below him in who works, who's associated with the F is like so high. that you actually see that. A lot of people don't like know kind of the rank and file devs and researchers and stuff. And so there's actually been a lot of changes there. So I actually, I'm willing to take a, I'm willing to take a slightly more contrary interview to you guys, which is I think there will be changes.

I think the question is whether the community at large wants to still continue to be like the dominant research community or whether they're willing to trade some of the research stuff for being an engineering org. And I kind of just don't feel like that tradeoff is very easy to do, but it's possible that that ends up being more important. You're already kind of seeing all the side orgs, like paradigm consensus, et cetera, all trying to push that switch. And so I would actually argue that the organizations on the side may actually be the ones

that have more control over this transition over. time. There's going to be a CTO. That's what you're saying. I mean, that would be awesome. I'm saying that there's going to be something closer to a CTO. I'm not going to go all the way to CTO. To run for the most optimistic about things changing. Yeah. I think because things have changed internally, you know, like, I think they like, give me an actual claim. They size down a lot of the claim. Like, what do you think it looks like in the difference between your perception and our perception of how the EF changes from here.

Give us an output, not an input. Yeah, I guess the output maybe is not necessarily the EF, but I think the output is that some of the other orgs become more like engineering and marketing orgs versus like pure engineering orgs, right? Like when you have one of the main Ethereum clients that has like 20 or 30% market share, basically unknown to all the people complaining, which is in like, nethermind, I just, think you just sort of have this thing where like clearly no one even pays attention. Whereas I do think in Solana an interesting thing, and maybe this is the Bronze Age, whatever thing that people

are talking about, is that the developers themselves are very vocal and build their own following and stuff like that in public. And I kind of think Ethereum has always like relied on the researchers to be the public face and the engineers are always in the back or kind of forgotten. And I think like if that, I think that we're going to see that switch to look more like what we see elsewhere, which is it sounds incremental, but I actually think that will be a big change in like perception of like what's getting done versus not done. Because I do think it's being a little unfairly like you've done absolutely nothing, whatever. It's like I feel like there's that there's a lot of polemics here.

I don't think that's the claim. I'll just leave it. I'll leave it with one last thing. I think there's basically no way at this point that Ethereum about faces on the roll-up centric roadmap and the, you know, kind of seven-step roadmap that, Metallic is embraced, despite the fact that overwhelmingly, even people within Ethereum now seem to acknowledge that the Roelpscentric roadmap is probably suboptimal for Ether as a blockchain and ether as an asset.

But all of these new types of roleups. I think that was not foreseeable in advance. I think all of these new types of rollups, base, native, et cetera, all of them are marching in the direction of enshrinement of like some set of rollups, which I think that that is a prediction I'm willing to make. There might be an enshrined roll-up intent. years, five years, five years. Ten years.

That's it. I have the same ten years predictions, you know, they're going to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, even like the beam chain, which was this thing that we were all excited about during DevCon, feels like that is completely just left the window of attention. The reason, that's the reason I gave you that long time scale. But my point is, like, I think if the engineering orgs on the side chose that as a mission, which they don't.

I don't think they all agree with it. That's the other thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they agreed on that as the direction, the timeline to be a lot faster. Sure, sure. But here, let me, let me make the point that I want to make, and then we can, we can move on to one last topic.

I think, I think most people at this point acknowledge the roll-up-centric roadmap was a mistake, and it was impossible to have known that. Like, you could not have guessed how this was going to play out. Now we know, we have a lot more data. We have a lot more information. We have a lot richer of mental model of what roll-ups and the relationship to the mother chain work as. In 2017, it made a lot of sense to say, look, Ethereum is not scaling.

Let's create these, like, subsidiary, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, very much analogous to colonialism. I say, look, you know, Great Britain is not scaling. It's too small. We need to expand horizontally by adding more countries and having this loose. And it's like, oh, shit, this doesn't work. It's a bad idea. Cut off the colonies and become like a financial hub, right?

And like that's basically what Great Britain did and that's essentially what U.S. did. And what all modern superpowers do is they issue, you know, distinct colonialism in favor of becoming this financial super center of a globalized world. How does Ethereum do that now? How does Ethereum say, look, we're not making money from the roll-ups. It doesn't actually accrue value back to Ethereum. What's the pivot? I don't think this is really a bit articulated within the Ethereum Foundation or within the Ethereum philosophy. And to me, this is where a lot of the problems with the EF come from is that the core of the direction. It's not just like, oh, there's too many bureaucrats or, oh, you need to fire people, you need to do some reorgs, right?

Like, I don't think that's the problem. I think on some level the problem, in a way, like, kind of stems from Vitalik himself, which is that he himself doesn't believe that the theorem, the roll-up-centric roadmap is a mistake. They're still all in on the roll-up-centric roadmap. It's just, oh, we have to do it better. We have to make them base roll-ups instead. We have to, you know, whatever. Like, there's all these marginal things that need to change.

But, you know, to realize, like, oh, fuck, we're IBM. And our core bet is incorrect. And if we just keep going in this direction, we're going to bleed. out to everybody else who basically have adopted the view that, no, no, no, no, no, the layer one itself matters and you have to reshift your focus of layer one. I don't think Ethereum has really done that, and I don't think it's going to. And I think that is the fundamental mistake. I agree that it's not going to.

Right. Like that about phase is not like a cruise ship, like reorienting itself. It's almost like turning 180 degrees, like to head backwards in the past. Yeah. And I think, you know, to me, to be clear, you know, I've said this. previous show, if Ethereum were to say, you know what, we're going to acquire Monad or one of these new generation EVM layer ones, and that's going to be the new Ethereum. I think Ethereum, we're going to take, you know, 2% of the Ethereum supply or 5% or whatever, and we're going to

use that to just like buy out this whole team and this whole tech stack, and that's going to be the new Ethereum. That would be a total rejection of the, of the Layer 2 roadmap. I mean, Hayden's proposal is kind of the step in that direction, right? I think it's quite different. I think it's quite different. I think it's the opposite. It's it's more aggressively going to the role obstetric roadmap and becoming more territorial and sort of more colonialist and say, you know, we're going to go all the way. We're going to, we're going to fucking move our people directly into the colonies. So who is the British Empire here and who is the U.S.? The British Empire is, is Ethereum. Ethereum is the British Empire.

100% the British Empire. Is it? Because I don't know. I think Ethereum is kind of like Antarctica. It's a resource that everybody else has the potential to take from. What? But, all right, this is terrible and actually, all right. All right. Let's keep that. I hope that one gets quoted on Twitter. I'm excited to see that. Yeah, let's get, let's get piece of wisdom from Uncle Robert. Ethereum is like Antarctica, the resource rich place that everybody's extracting from. All right. All right. All right, lay off the drugs before we start the show, Robert. It's important.

No, it's just past my bedtime. Okay, okay. Or past your bedtime. That makes sense. All right. Speaking of Pastor bedtime, one last story. So our good friend, friend of the pod, Gary Gensler, has lovingly moved on from the SEC.

Obviously, he is no longer, he is no longer chairman of the SEC. He voluntarily stepped down before Paul Atkins was to, you know, Paul Hicons is not getting confirmed yet. But as his next step, moving on from the SEC, he is now a professor at MIT, which was where he was used to, he used to teach before at MIT. He is now back at MIT teaching a class on tech and AI in finance. And as his last FU to the crypto industry, some people created an AI generated rap video that has gone viral on the internet.

as a kind of homage to Gensler in his last days. Tom, you want to play the clip? Yeah, this should be clear, this is not a genera. This is 100% real. Oh, oh. That's no lady to directed. Hey, Gary's on the beat, ho. Hey, Gary's on the beat, ho.

We know why this criminal fired beat, bro, chart down. Markets started screaming, oh, geez, bro. Need you back, save us from this shit. Gary, please. No. Fucked them little crypto bros asking for hugs. Tried to laugh me out the SEC. Especially they want to eat at EFs, pump funds, levered options.

No, it's Trump's can. Marching coins. Somebody stop there. Stop there. All right. I think it's good. Got enough. All right.

Beautiful. So I think the internet has been very excited to see Gary Gensler, you know, entering the stalwart halls of MIT as a fully tenured professor. I don't know if he's tender. But, Turin, what's your reaction to seeing Gensler back in the hall? I got to say that the title he has sounds like a fake title. It sounds like an almost adjunct title, FinTech AI at C-Sail with no spaces. It's either like someone who's like 70 who's like, how do I write like the kids on the internet? Or it was like, well, we have to give him a title,

but there's none that we can think of. So we're just going to shove a bunch of buzzwords together and then add at the C-sales at CS department there. But I kind of, I thought it was kind of funny. Obviously, everyone I know who's an alumni is pissed off, but maybe that's obviously my sub sample. But my sub sample of alumni is generally trying to revolt. I think it's actually, I think it's actually huge. I think like, Gensler is pissed off so many young people. Like, I don't think it's like, oh, we live in a crypto bubble. I think it's just actually true that he's incredibly unpopular. Yeah. The internet just hates this guy. He has a 0.1% approval rating, mostly from Elizabeth Warren, as his sole supporter.

Like, he has a 99.9% disapproval rating. And the better markets guy. I forget what his name. Yeah, Dennis Kelleher. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are his two supporters, and that's it. Tom, any reaction to Dean Ganser? I've, you know, Gary Gensler, come on the pod.

We'd love to have you. I'm sure it'll be a good time. Yeah, if you can stand the heat, I would love. So yeah, that would be incredible. Would love to interview Gary Gensler. That'd be so good. I have so many questions about finance and AI. This is perfect.

And public policy. Yeah. Totally. I mean, last cycle in his teaching, he shilled Algaran. You remember that class he gave where he was. I do remember that. So the question I want us to end on this. I mean, that's the MIT coin.

He also said that most crypto assets are not securities. What, what crypto thing is he going to accidentally shill this time? in class by accident. Accident. I want to see the polymarket odds on what probability there is that he actually starts this job. I think it was, who is the guy who was in confirmation hearings? Oh, Letnik. I think it was Letnik.

He was in confirmation hearings. And he was like, oh, I think AI is going to solve blockchain scams. And blockchain scams will go away now that AI is here. And I was like, oh, okay, good. well, I wasn't aware of that. So I think there is a, I can imagine that that maybe ties into AI and finance. It's like, oh, you know, scams will automatically go away. Yeah, AI took Gary Ganser's job.

AI took it. Oh, wow. They saw R1 drop and they're like, Gary, you know, you're redundant. We don't need you. Sorry, yeah, you're redundant. Yeah, yeah, first casualty of Doge. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, um, it's, um, What would one say?

Yeah, I don't know. The thing that's most fascinating to me is that Gary Gensor could not have enjoyed his time at the SEC, right? Like, I've never in my life scene. I think he loved it. Like, he was making those videos. Yeah, some people like me. He reveled in it.

He reveled in, remember on April Fool? It must have been difficult. No, remember April Fool's when he changed his Twitter profile pick to be like the deal with it meme? I mean, he reveled in his antagonism and opposition. to the crypto industry and innovation. He bathed in the blood. I mean, he was not somebody who disliked every moment of it.

He genuinely enjoyed being a hostile force. I think that when you are in government and you feel like the private sector is fighting you, you get an us versus them kind of mentality and you sort of see like, oh, you know, there are these wild animals who are trying to scam each other, and blah, blah, blah. So I can see how just being an institutional actor you would have that kind of

perception. He didn't go after the wild animals scamming each other at all. He went after the good actors in America trying to. Obviously, I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with you. But I think psychologically, right, I think you're underestimating how difficult it is to just be yelled at all the time constantly. Like, I have to imagine that. Crypto founder here. Crypto founder here. Okay. You know, you know what it's like. You know what it's like. And I mean, look, all of us who live in the crypto trenches, we've all experienced at some point or another, like, the people are mad. And they are at your doorstep, sub-tweeting you every single day and just like constantly in your comments, talking about what a horrible person you are. And that, like, it's exhausting, you know. And you're, you came into public office. You worked at Goldman. You're used to being a high status, impressive person. And you were teaching a class at MIT and your students think you're so great. And you're like, oh, I'm on the cutting edge of technology, and I've done all these great things in my career. And you were SEC chairman for four years.

And now everybody hates you. Everybody hates you. Everybody who's any way, like, below the age of 70 thinks that you're just an absolute horrible human being. That's got to suck. It's, it's well, it's well deserved. He brought it up on himself. I'm trying to get just a modicum of, like, any empathy for this man. and his life.

I have zero empathy. He could have left whenever. He didn't need his job. Yeah, he's one of the rare. I think he enjoys the villain arc. 100%. He's one of the rare bureaucrats that will permanently tarnish

the reputation of the institution that he worked for. And I think people will work hard to rebuild the reputation. But he... I think Gary Gensler was a very bad SC chairman. I think he did a very bad job,

but he's still a human being. He's going to have a glowup. He's going to get chains. Hasib's going to have a hair. Hasim's hair plugs. Yeah. You just want to interview. I'm ready for bronze age.

Bronze Age Gary Gensler. I'm ready for that. I'm ready for that. Let's have the show of interns. I think I think this, I think his rap album drop is the first start of the reinvention, the glow up for Gary Gunzler. I'm down. All right.

I think on that, it's a good note to wrap for overtime. So we'll end it there. Thanks, everybody. You know,