Unchained - The Chopping Block: Ethereum's Identity Crisis, Apostates Speak Out, and Is ETH the Microsoft of Crypto?

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Ethereum's midlife crisis hits the podcast as ex-Bankless and ConsenSys insiders unpack ETH's talent exodus, identity spiral, "Microsoft" future, EF shake-ups, and the Solana contender play-all with spicy takes on airdrops, real dev stats, and blockchain adoption drama. 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. This week, it's an Ethereum apostasy spectacular: we're joined by David Hoffman and Max Resnick, who hit the confessional booth to explain why they've left the church of Ethereum.  We kick off with David's viral "ETH is money" post-mortem: why he finally sold, and whether ETH can escape its spot on the yield farm for good. Max jumps in with an OG technologist's view on EF's internal struggles, talent flight, and the move-slow, break-nothing philosophy now gripping Ethereum's core. Is the EF just ossifying—or is it devolving into the "Microsoft of crypto"? From there, the hosts dissect the "second foundation" meme, why Twitter doomers might not matter for the ETH price, and whether Solana has stolen the next generation of devs. Max throws down on Solana's quantum future while the group takes barstool shots at metrics, narratives, and the never-ending "Ethereum is for boomers" debate. Whether you're a ride-or-die Etherean or just here for the schadenfreude, let's get into it. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹David Hoffman reveals why he sold all his ETH and stepped down from the "ETH is money" pulpit 🔹Max Resnick on Ethereum's talent drain, EF's slow tech culture, and missing the Wall Street on-chain boat 🔹Why the Ethereum Foundation's leadership shuffle triggered so much existential dread 🔹The "Ethereum is Microsoft" thesis: ossification, enterprise comfort, and is that a bad thing? 🔹Are airdrops, stablecoin and NFT on-chain metrics just smoke and mirrors? 🔹Developer mindshare —did Solana peak? Has ETH truly lost the next-gen builders? 🔹Will a new "Number Go Up Foundation" for Ethereum change anything? 🔹Solana's post-quantum roadmap: why Max thinks ETH is over-complicating the problem 🔹What happens if Ethereum stops shipping upgrades —can it just coast Lindy-style? 🔹Is the future of crypto "strong" vs. "weak" crypto, and is ETH now firmly a boomer chain? Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest ⭐️ David Hoffman, Co-Founder at Bankless ⭐️ Max Resnick, Lead Economist at Anza “Why I Sold My ETH” by David Hoffman https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2059371247163613489 Timestamps 00:00 Intro 03:12 Why David Sold ETH 05:26 ETH Momentum and Value Capture 07:38 Ethereum Foundation Shakeups 10:18 Max on Tech and Identity Crisis 15:57 Talent Drain and New Blood 19:29 Strong vs Weak Crypto Debate 25:28 Ethereum as Microsoft 30:02 Second Foundation Idea 35:43 Microsoft Era Ethereum 38:20 EF Money Runs Out 42:02 Utility Asset Narrative 46:07 Etherealize Enterprise Push 48:04 Bitcoin Has Saylor 53:32 Ethereum Narrative Whiplash 55:51 Solana As The Yang 58:15 Post Quantum Solana Roadmap Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's such a uninspiring story to someone who's 19. Are you kidding me? You're telling me that this Korean guy in a suit who's telling me number go up is like the most impressive thing you can do. Like, why would you even bother? I'm just saying, like, it doesn't seem like a very inspiring message. No offense.

Like, tell me, this is not an offense to you. You're selling the olds, you know? Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quans. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm named trading firms who are very involved. D5.Eight is the ultimate problem.

DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Chopping Block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. Click intro is first you got Tom, the Defy Maven, and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next to you got Tarun, Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo.

Joining us today, we've got a double feature. First, we've got David. The Cryptoconisor and Tsar of Superstate. Welcome back, David. It's been a while since you've had you on the show. People have been missing you. Thanks for joining us. So we're actually, we're specifically doing an Ethereum apostasy episode.

And so we've got Max Resnick joining us once again on the show, the OG Ethereum atheist. Welcome back, Max. Thanks, thanks. Good to be back. Well, I guess this is my first time, actually. But back talking about the topic everybody wants to know about. We've had you. Didn't we have you on when you were talking shit about when you first transitioned away from Salana?

I'm pretty sure to Salana. I'm pretty sure we did. Oh, really? We did. You're not remembering, but trust me, our guests remember. Or the audience remembers, the audience remembers. I'd like to decline the identity of Ethereum apostate. I still like Ethereum.

Okay. We'll be going through. We'll be going through this. We'll be going through this. Anyway, I'm a seed that head of hype man a dragonfly. We're at least yours investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. please you chopin block that xyz for more disclosures okay so david let me refine that a little bit you're an ethopostate not necessarily in the theorem apostate but you've been gone you've gone viral quite recently

there's been a string of departures from the eF there's been a lot of drama around how is eith the asset doing you know there's been there's been all this back and forth you know max i think you were the maybe the o g in the space to turn your back on ethereum you originally were a very active and loud proponent of the Ethereum ecosystem. You defected over to Solana. David, you've made the waves. Wait, wait, wait, wait. How could you say Max's first?

That Suzu tweet predates Max. There's a lot of people who defective before me. Yeah. Max, Max worked at consensus. Exactly. Max was inside. Max was, he was, exactly. He was in the inner chamber, you know.

He was in the beating heart of Ethereum. And he fought his way out out of pure betrayal. So, okay, David, you're, You're the latest in this string of defections. And many people actually, I asked Twitter as like, hey, what do you want us to ask if we bring David and Max on the show? And they were like, why are you bringing these losers on the show? These guys are turned coats. Like, what do they have to say?

So, David, let me hand you the floor. What do you have to say for yourself? Why have you turned your back on ETHY asset after? And I should give some exposition. You're one of the co-founders of Bankless. Bankless was one of the early podcasts that really proselytized. ETH, DFI, many of the core concepts behind these ecosystems. And you were perceived for many years as being one of these central voices in the media space

behind Ether and the Ethereum ecosystem. So why are you now turning your back on ETH the asset? Yeah. We built Bankless, as you said, and this like thesis around, you know, ETH is money. Ether, the asset will elevate itself to be like Bitcoin, just like money, and it's going to be priced as such. and I think that thesis has to some degree played out. We built that thesis in 2020, 2019, 2020.

It's now 2026. That's about the kind of the time frame that we had, the time horizon that we really had. And really my conclusion, my choice to sell ETH came downstream of the fact that, I think it's going to be hard for ETH to get re-rated up or down in any direction. And so the ideas that we had, the the the thesis that we had, the ethos money thesis, played out with some degree of success. And there were some failures along the way. But really, like, the decision to sell ETH came at just like the opportunity cost of capital, is there are simply opportunities elsewhere.

And I don't really, I don't want to like be branded as this guy who's like bearish Ethereum or just like, you know, a defector. And now he's writing bear post. It's none of that. It's just like, the thing. the thing happened. It had some amount of its success. I was hoping for more. And that's a wrap on the story. The natural question is why now? Why in 2026 announced that, hey, I sold my last Heath? Because to the extent that you're like, look, my thesis was realized, we made this big call in 2020. Absolutely, you did. We nailed it. Ethereum built Dify. They built the cathedral of

bizarre, the ecosystem. We got all the things that we wanted. Mission accomplished. Time to go home. What is it about 2026 that makes us the time to say that? Yeah. In order for, like, Ether to be re-rated as an asset, to have this, like, idiosyncratic jump up and, like, elevation and status, Ethereum and Ethereum and Layer 1 and Ether and everything around it really needs to have momentum. And that's the thing that I think, like, uniquely in 2026, I see harder and harder for momentum to uniquely come back. to the Ethereum layer one. And there's just so much structural architecture against value capture for ETH, like layer two margins are at 98%, for example. You know, the fat app thesis is displacing

the fat protocol thesis. And like as I was writing this article, like Ethereum as a open source project is kind of like a nonprofit. It doesn't take, it doesn't take rate. It doesn't charge fees. It services everything to its ecosystem at cost, which is an incredible property of Ethereum and why I think Ethereum is really going to grow because it does all these incredible things at cost. But for ether, the money to be like the thesis to be fully realized, it would need it to have maintained like a huge market dominance so that it can continue to do things at cost, but while having like 90% of like smart contract revenue and activity share dominance. And now that it doesn't have those things,

things, it really needs, ETH is money in order to be re-rated as an asset. It needs somebody to push it there. Like we need to do work and have strong, executional leadership to push ETH back up this hill, that it needs to climb back up. And that is the thing I'm kind of bearish on, because leadership at the Ethereum Foundation aren't really aligned with these goals. And even if they were, I don't necessarily believe in their capacity to, like, kind of think like a start. and to operate with excellence, is there just a different skill set of people? And so, you know, ETH is in this trough and it needs to be, you know, elevated higher and he needs to be growing in potential energy. And I don't see how it gets pushed there by this like kind of diverse

set of different stakeholders that don't have strong coordination amongst themselves. Okay. So let me, let me recap a bit what's happened with the EF, because that's also been a center of discussion that maybe is partially a catalyst for your, you're coming out and saying that you're departing from Eith the asset. So over this year, we've had Tamash, who's previously been on the show, he was co-executive director and kind of the public face of the Ethereum Foundation. He stepped down after about 11 months. Bastion Owl, I believe is his name, was named the interim co-executive director. Bastion, unlike Tamash, is very non-public. I've never met Bastion. I don't know that he's done any media or he's certainly not active on social media. Then we had Barnaby and

Tim Bako, both are the protocol cluster co-leads. They announced they were moving on earlier this month. It Carl Bequezen, seven-year veteran who worked on the beacon chain in POS. He resigned May 29th. Julian Ma, who was working on Fosil. He resigned after roughly four years there. You also had Josh Stark, who was a co-st steward of the board. Seven years, Trent Van Epps on the Protocol Guild, he resigned.

Pablo Vour-Vart. He resigned. And then Alex Stokes announced he was going on sabbatical. You also had Dankrad, who left the EF a while ago to join Tempo last year, also coming out and being somewhat critical of the changes that have taken place within the EF. And Battala came out with a post addressing this. I think he'd been pretty quiet about what was going on within the EF basically came out to say, look, 2025 things changed. We made some changes in response to what we thought we ought to do in order to be more efficient, be more focused on execution, be more concrete in our goals and shipping. We're doing that now, but the EF is not the number go up or work.

That is not our job. That has never been our job. Our job is the way that Vitalik put it is our job is to make Ethereum impressive. We want to be impressive technology. And that impressiveness comes from our prioritizing the core values of Ethereum that make it distinct from other layer ones, the crops values of censorship resistance and all the stuff you know and love. But his claim is that, look, the EF is going to be a smaller ship than it has been in previous years. The EF only has 16 basis points of all the ether supply, less than many other individual holders.

And so he's saying, look, we're not going to be the central node in Ethereum. If that's what you think the EF is going to be, you're wrong. We would like to see other organizations step up to the plate and take on that role. And we're going to maybe even try to help enable that. But that's not our job, and you should not look to us for that. That was the Talek's statement coming out to all this. So Max, I want to bring you in. I see you smiling inwardly at all of this.

What is your take on the recent conversation around Ethereum? Yeah, so my perspective has always been as a technologist first. And so the reason that I left was because I didn't perceive Ethereum to be making any meaningful progress on the technology. So on the money-ness side, I didn't have a strong opinion about that then. I don't have a strong opinion about it now. I do think that there's tremendous opportunity with the new regulations, with clarity coming along, and there's $500 trillion of securities in the world.

And the SEC is saying we want those to be on chain, and it's a really big missed opportunity to not have people pounding down the door in Washington and at the DTCC and at the transfer agents to make sure that that happens. So I do think there's a missed opportunity there. But I guess I'm very content with the decision I made because I sort of saw all of this coming

it and said, well, that's not the place for me. It doesn't give me any happiness because I still believe in crypto, the mission. I do see a big smile like your face. I will note that. It makes me at least content that I made the decision, but I think it's like bittersweet in that it means that the possibility for the future that we all thought was going to come in with decentralized global blockchains has one fewer player pushing to make that a reality. and they may still be pushing to make something else reality, but it's not basically moving this corrupt financial system

with a ton of mailmen onto a blockchain. And so now there's only a few ecosystems left doing that. How would you characterize what Ethereum is trying to do? I think what happened is that Vitalik is also a technologist first. When I talk to him, I think that part of us, let me see I have to eye on that. And so that's the part that we can connect on the most. and what happened is he built this thing

that was supposed to be technology first and it turned out there was a way bigger thing there which was like the ethos money and I don't think he liked that very much although it turned out very well for him personally but it was like in my opinion a big identity crisis for a lot of the early people at the F where they tried to build this technology

and what they actually ended up building was this like $400 billion asset or whatever it's trading at now and then that thing was so much bigger than the thing that they had been building towards and it kind of broke their brains a little bit. And I think what this is is a real focus on don't mess up the asset.

Like this technology stuff that we're building is like, cool, but it's not really going to be $400 billion technology project. So let's like not mess up the asset. That's my understanding of what they're trying to do is like basically not screw up and end up nuking the asset by, say, taking the chain down or doing some protocol upgrade. They've already done some upgrades that I would argue did do that, like 4844, but we can get into that. But I think at this point, they're basically totally risk off, preserve the value of the asset as much as they can, and not try to take any risk.

Yeah, I totally agree with that description of the Ethereum Foundation and Eats leadership. It's always been, like there's one thing you could say where, you know, the EF is just not really focused on BD and price growth and thinking like a startup or thinking like a for-profit and they're indifferent to that. A deeper kind of conspiratorial take I have is like part of the EF DNA is actually adverse to growth. And Vitalik truly just doesn't want the responsibility and baggage that comes with just all of the economic strength and power. of like a big, you know, Ethereum economy. And it's not really what he signed up for. And it's not really, has never been a priority of the Ethereum Foundation. And so there's actually some amount of like psychological resistance to doing some of that

behavior that would lean more towards the growing the economy side of Ethereum. How much of this is, do you think just like reflective of the fact that ETH price has been so stagnant and kind of, you know, lagging for the past years? versus like, you know, if Heath were really are performing, maybe not even as a result of EF efforts, maybe, you know, a bit minor or something we're doing extremely well. And ETH were just ripping. I mean, it's a little bit of like kind of like the Bitcoin problem where it's like you can be, you can use Bitcoin, you can send it and like it still functions as its thing, almost

independent of like small multiples of the price. So I don't know. I guess when I look at, I mean, one, it does feel like there's this constant identity crisis where every four months, I mean, what was it like four months ago? We got the, you know, what was it like the booklet? It wasn't the infinite. The mandate, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that. And then six months before that, there was no, you know, we're real business and real applications that we'd be built. And like, it's like, yeah, this means nothing because six months from now this is going to have something else versus like, oh, just the asset is, is underperforming.

Yeah. Well, I categorize Ether in a similar category or I aspire to. a category of ether in the same category as Bitcoin, where Bitcoin's fundamentals are the price, actually. And so to some degree, like, the fact that the price is down and it has been sustained, down, or just lagging the market is fundamentals from like an eth is trying to dethrone Bitcoin perspective. And so it's a little bit self-referential. It's just like, yeah, that's actually the problem. You're correct. Turin, what's your take on the Heath identity crisis as it's now been framed? I mean, go to all the events and people have gotten older. There's no new blood.

I feel like that's the real signal, right? If you don't see new people, I feel like that's kind of an ossification sign. In a way that probably means, like, hey, they're not people building new, exciting projects as much. And I don't know, follow the talent. Obviously, crypto has bled talent like there's no tomorrow. But Ethereum has bled more talent than the already fast-slowing crypto talent market, in my opinion. I think that's the simplest answer. Ethereum is the oldest, right?

So it's like if sort of you imagine, okay, the standard tenure at a company is maybe four years, six years on the high side, eight years is a really long time to spend at any single company as a technologist. So a lot of this is like, okay, the names I rattled off, a lot of those people, yeah, they hit four years, they hit six years, they had eight years. So there is some natural turnover that you're going to seize on when there's this other outer shell of a narrative that, oh, you know, the EF is falling apart and everything is terrible and the ETH price is down only. The reality is that like ETH is, you know, since the highs, it's not, performance has not been that different than Solanas. It's just kind of the L1. There's just been an L1 drag.

Like every L1 is down a ton. And like there's it, we're really searching for a story that isolates Ethereum and attributes it. to individual personalities. But I feel like it's a little bit of a just-o story. You know, on the day- I don't know about that. I think, like, to Tom's point, if Bitmind was ripping and ETH was back at $5,000,

yeah, yeah. I still don't think that was... I still don't... I still don't think I would see new entrepreneurs in EVE. Like, I don't think that changes that much if, like, dats are the final story, right? Like, that's such a fucking uninspired. story to someone who's 19.

Are you kidding me? You're telling me that this Korean guy in a suit who's like telling me number go up is like the most fucking impressive thing you can do. Like, why would you even bother? I'm just saying, like, it doesn't seem like a very inspiring message. No offense. Like, tell me, this is not an offense to you.

It's just you're selling the olds. You're not selling the youngs. I would just say the specific names that you rattled off, are all people, if you know this sort of internal political landscape. who are on the side of what David wanted to happen and also what I wanted to have happen way back, which was for B.F to take an active role, for it to push development faster,

for it to figure out ways for the protocol to make revenue. All of these, like, these are kind of the pushers. There's a natural tendency for every L1 to have the people who are very aggressive, who want to move quickly, who want to make the protocol look more like a business, and then the sort of credible neutrality, move slow, keep the thing up.

And we have it at Salana. There is certainly a different queue of ranges of that spectrum on Ethereum, but all of the people that you listed were sort of more on the aggressive side of that spectrum. So it's not just random. You're also on the aggressive side, I take it.

I'm on the aggressive side. I was on the aggressive side for Ethan. I'm also on the very end of the aggressive side of the spectrum for Salon as well. Can I bring up how there's one other variable that I, I want to bring up, which is, like, we're talking about, you know, Ethereum in the context of competing blockchains, right? Ethereum has not done well as Bitcoin. Other ecosystems have grown

further. But also just zooming all the way out, the market environment around crypto collectively has collapsed to some degree. There's a really good tweet that I read about, like, the notion of strong crypto versus weak crypto, where strong crypto is, you know, defy, NFTs, crypto, crypto culture, like, you know, the cypherpunk rebels where we're going to rewrite finance with our own, under our own power. And like, we're doing findings over here. And it's really the culture and activity

that got spawned out of 2021, 2022, just drawing crypto, cypherpunk crypto, you know, fuck Wall Street crypto. And then there's weak crypto, which is, you know, blockchain technology is a back-end efficiency upgrade for some of the world's biggest financial institutions. Weak crypto is doing really well right now. Strong crypto, not so well.

And, defy especially, which is Ethereum's core driver, is the weakest it's ever been with the amount of hacks coming from AI. And so, like, strong crypto, which was the environment in which Ethereum produced and excels in is also under attack. And so it's not just about Ethereum's not really doing as well as this competition. That's one thing. But it's also the environment about what crypto as an industry is is also just not the same. something else that's not quite as conducive to like,

ETH is money and ETH competing with Bitcoin. You know, when was ETH the most money it ever was? It was when everyone was stuck inside during COVID under lockdown. And everyone was forced to be on their computer. And money was like, okay, most. Let me get a word.

Let me get a word in Edgoy's here. So I would completely spewed. This is the problem with having two fucking podcast hosts on a podcast. Well, today I'm the podcast host. So, David, you got to calm down. So, okay, first thing I would say, first thing I would say is that I completely dispute this characterization that, like, defy is the weakest has ever been. I think this is the standard crypto-selective memory is that, like, dude, FTCX exploded like

three years ago. That was, that was a moment where defy was much weaker than it is today. TVL collapsed on chain. TVL has been grinding its way up over the last several years. Now, look, in the last six months, it has come down. but yes, on-chain markets are cyclical, but on-chain and defy look stronger if you zoom out than they have in a long, long time.

You look at trading volumes, you look at on-chain flows. They're actually very robust. And the total amount of TVL on-chain has also been over long periods of stretches of time, very robust. So I think like there's a little bit of like, oh, no, markets are down, therefore everything has been bad and we're rewriting history a little bit. I think that's just not true.

And if you look at Ethereum, I would tell you about a year ago, it really felt like, or maybe even, you know, called a year and a half ago, it really felt like Ethereum was losing the plot and Solana and Bass and, and, you know, Tempo wasn't around back then, but now people were talking about tempo. They were all coming for Ethereum's lunch, and it was just, you know, it was game over. Like the bear was going to come and eat Ethereum alive. And here we are a year and a half later. And do you see Bass eating Ethereum alive? Do you see Salana eating Ethereum alive? Do you see Tempo eating Ethereum alive? Like, I'd say all. All those things didn't really happen. It's still massive, still has vast majority of the TVL. Go ahead, Max, please. I think if you're being honest, on the developer side, Ethereum has been losing to Solana over the past. It may not be Bays. I think Bays has not done very well,

but Solana has been doing pretty well on our developer metrics. Salana's been doing well, but I would not say Salana market share among developers has increased over the last year. I think that's just not correct. Solana developer market share was absolutely, I mean, I can just tell you as a VC, we see the leading edge of what founders are building on. Solana was all-time high probably a year and a half ago.

Like right now, it's clearly crested in terms of the market share of people building on Solana. Now, that being said, that's not necessarily the building on Ethereum Mainnet. There's a lot of other options that are EVM compatible that they're building on. But it's definitely not true that Solana is, I don't know. I mean, Tom, Tarun, you guys tell me what you're seeing. But I think Ethereum is not the place you're going to build, you know, day one. necessarily, but if you're in any way successful, you're going to deploy an Ethereum.

If I were to redo the basis for everyone campaign for Ethereum, it would be Ethereum is for boomers. Because, like, there is a lot of activity, but it is this kind of boring. You have a italics receding hairline, you know, and just like a little screenshot of it. It's just more like what Dave's pointing out, right? It's kind of like this boring stuff that's like Web 2.5.

And that stuff loves Ethereum, right? They're just like, that's the place we're going to go. Where the fuck else would we go? And Solana is making an effort there, but like, if you look at the volume, it's like clearly not even question. Yeah, but I mean, the other thing to keep in mind is, look, the reason why people are so mad at the boomers is because they have all the fucking money. And that's kind of what you see right now in here.

I think that's true. I think that's one version of the world, but there's the other version of the world, which is like, oh, so multiples equals DTCC is multiple. You know, like, it went from like, oh, every new technology, maybe the future of But to what extent is any L-1s, multiple? Multiple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now you're like, oh, okay, like the people who want to use this are all these people

whose equity to income ratios are extremely low. And so it's like, okay, great, we're the infrastructure for all these people who are building businesses with like P.E ratios of six. You know, like, it's not, it's not like a, that's not a, no, no, it is, it's not, I'm not saying that that's like a horrible place to be. That's a good place to be. but you're kind of an established boring business. You're a utility at that point.

You're not like an equity. Right. Okay. So I wrote this tweet. I wrote this tweet that I said, Ethereum has become the Microsoft of crypto. And I think this got a lot of people. I heard some people at this dinner I was at last week really fighting about your tweet, actually.

It was a good Rochartzschex. It was a good Roershack dress. Because I actually didn't mean it as an insult or as a compliment. I meant it as like a purely descriptive claim, which is that like Microsoft, Ethereum is very old. It was the first. It was the original progenitor of the whole space. It is now very enterprise beloved.

It is baked into the bread of things. It's very difficult to remove it from a lot of these flows. It's very safe. It moves very slowly. It's kind of lame. It's not cool. It's not going to be the first to integrate your new fancy thing. But it's not going anywhere, and it's really valuable.

So the reality is Microsoft has been that way for like, whatever, 30 years. And it's also not going anywhere. Still one of the three most valuable companies in the world or four or whatever it is. It's an extremely valuable company. And I think that's kind of Ethereum. That said, like I find it hard to believe that Ethereum is, I feel like my claim is that I think, one, we are over-indexing a little bit on the EF. I think the EF actually doesn't have that much explanatory power for the price of Ether. And I think you can see that because all this stuff has happened, right?

Like, I mean, there's been these EF defections and, you know, David selling his share. all this stuff has happened the last week. And Ethereum hasn't really moved that much. It's not like, oh, man, it's over now. And the great unwashed masses are dumping their effects. For what it's worth, all I'm saying is not necessarily that it's over. I'm just saying it's like you're at the end of the sigmoid. You're not at like a high gradient part.

You're like, okay, we're plateauing. I think what it means is that's fine, right? I'm not, that's not a negative. It just means you're kind of. Yes, yes. Here's what I think it means. I think it means that Twitter is not pricing ETH. we might be pricing, Zach, we might be pricing, you know, Venice, we might be pricing

some of these other things. We're not pricing ETH. So whatever Twitter thinks about ETH is just not where the marginal buyer is coming from. It's not why the price is getting set. Twitter sentiment is kind of like the intelligentsia of crypto. The intelligency of crypto is clearly despondent with respect to ETH. This has to be the dumbest intelligentsia in history if you're telling me CT counts as intelligenceia. I mean our esteemed guess.

I'm speaking of our esteemed. That's what I'm referring to. Yeah, I'm just saying it's kind of insulting to people who... Okay, charming. Charming, thank you. It is kind of poetic when you see people on Twitter also posting these screenshots of like the EF OTC to like Bitminer. And it's like, that kind of says it all, you know?

It's like, your ETH is now, you know, in the youth of, you know, this dat. And like that, that's just kind of the way things are going. And I agree. I was mostly concerned, I think a year ago about all these stable coin chains, basically just eat alive, right? Like we had stable and plasma and arc and tempo. And those are really mostly fallen flat. And I don't really see them regaining momentum in the short term.

I mean, it's, you know, we still have many, many years to go to play this out. But like, yeah, if anything, it's like the inertia kind of keeps doing its thing. And it's, I don't know, I don't, I think on the defy side, I think, you know, like the hyperliquid threat. You know, is kind of real. But in the interim, like, I don't see any of the stablecoin activity, or maybe, frankly, any of the tokenized art of your activity going away anytime soon. All of these metrics are fake. All of this is fake.

Stable coin volume, fake. It's just, it's like totally fake. Like, you just see, you break it down into what it actually is, and I'm not just talking about ether, I'm talking about Salana too. Because that's the one I spend all day looking at. It's like none of these things make any sense because it's people transferring money from one exchange deposit address to another. And that's $100 million of stable coin transfer volume.

And it's not actually a change. People do like the adjusted, people do the adjusted volumes in order to Yeah, they all suck. Everybody's skill issue on the adjustment. Also talking AUM to not in the volumes. AUM is real. AUM is real. No, it's also.

Max, you're all bringing Martin Luther vibes right now about stuff doesn't make any sense. We all spend all our time looking at data. Max is. Max has graduated from just Ethereum apostate to Ethereum and Solana apostate. Just a whole thing, yeah, damn. Max is a good apostate. Okay, so one of the last things that Vitalik mentioned in his response to, or in this big megapost,

is this idea about their potentially being other orgs that might be the number go-up org for Ethereum and that the EF might put their weight behind them or try to help them in some way. What did you guys thought about this? there's always been this idea floating in the air of like a second foundation. And it seems a little bit like what he's alluding to. David, I don't know what your thoughts were about this little tidbit in his post. Yeah. There are people at the EF who are talking about this and thinking about this and like

thinking about how to do this. I think it's going to need like a combination of the actual EF, like getting loud about their support of this second. Foundation, Bitmine also needs to get involved here. Bitmine as like the $1 billion, I don't know what the market cap is, $10 billion entity giving its like endorsement of this like DFI founders. So there needs to be kind of like a rallying cry of, or of legitimacy around this hypothetical new foundation that people are talking about. I mean, we haven't, it hasn't, it's not out yet, but people are working on it.

I'm eager to lend my support because, as I said in my article, and I'll say again, it's like, super bullish Ethereum, the network. And really what's missing is just like a for-profit startup-minded entity who wants to like be a rallying cry for shareholder interest. That's kind of what Ethereum was. But Ethereum only went so far. Part of the Ethereum's problem is it's just like a discordant collection of different layers of sociocultural tech act. And you need a lot coordination across all of them. And so this, to your point, Haseeb, about how, like, everyone was kind of over-indexing on the EF, because kind of like the one thing that we have to point to, we need, like, more coordination around different parts of what makes Ethereum

and having, like, a for-profit foundation or an ETH investor foundation is very, very needed. I just think, like, one issue with it is that the title itself of, like, head of the EF is very important. It's sort of like if you tried to make a new government for the U.S. whose job was to go overseas and get them to invest in U.S. companies, nobody's going to take your meetings. But if you go overseas with the president on the China trip, you can go in and meet with all the people who want to buy your soybeans, right? So I think that was part of what Tamash's role was. And the fact that he was, yeah, I mean, that's what his Sporn was supposed to be.

I don't know if you did that. We have lost the plot if we're not cypherpunk enough to fucking get onion futures. All right, let's be real here, guys. True. Remember our debate, Haseeb, where you took the pro side of Ethereum and I took the bear side of Ethereum,

one of my arguments. And you said, look who is in charge here. The market has forced Fitalik's hand to instill Tamash to, you know, make Ethereum more operationally minded. And like my counter argument was like, you know, Bob Eiger. What was that metaphor?

Something about Disney. Like somebody put Bob Eiger in charge at Disney, but he wasn't really in charge. And actually the market didn't really actually bend over. And in fact, it was, I'm butching this metaphor, but I know Michael Bolito fed me this one. But the idea here is like, is actually, it was Vitalik the entire time. Sure, Tamash is in charge. But if Fatalic and I have the board seats, they're actually the ones in charge. And so, like, it could just be the Ethereum foundation to be this entity, but it would require

Vitalik not having absolute governance over whoever this person is. And, like, that's kind of my fear is Vitalik has so much sway and influence in Ethereum that he can't be doing what he's doing in Ethereum while also giving power to this new differently minded entity. I just think the entity name matters. much. You could take Lily out of Salana Foundation and put her in charge of like salonialize or whatever and she wouldn't be able to do anything because nobody would take her meetings, right? Like people want to be meeting with a person who's in charge. Like people who are in charge want to meet

the other person who's in charge. And I think you could make a new organization that says Ethereum Foundation too and people would be like, I want to talk to whoever's the head of Ethereum Foundation one because that's where the real power is. Yeah. Part of the issue is like, can see Vitalik writing an article and he would just say, I'm not in charge anymore. I'm done. And don't look at me anymore. And then everyone in theory would be like, oh, my God, such great article. I can't wait for Vitalik to write something next so I can listen to what he says next. Like, it's a trap. Like, everyone just loves and follows Vitalik. And he doesn't, he doesn't even want that. He just wants to be some guy who doesn't want this responsibility. It's hard to stop being

Jesus, I guess. Yeah, it's hard. Right. Jesus is Jesus, dude. Look, I think these are very well-made points. You're absolutely right. Creating a second foundation doesn't make it so, doesn't give it the moral authority to be able to go and do the soybean deals with Xi Jinping or whatever it is. And I agree with you, like, Ethereum has got to do some soybean deals

in order to stay powerful and to stay on top. Sorry, I shouldn't say that. It's helpful to Ethereum to be able to do the soybean deals. Also, the soybean farmers are coming to them. though, in a lot of the art of... Right, right, right. And this is what I was going to say. Part of my Microsoft thesis about Ethereum is that, like, look, I think we're kind of

in the Steve Balmer era where, like, Ethereum is kind of dawdling along. You know, it's sort of, it's a little bit, doesn't know quite what it's doing. It's kind of pulling in a bunch of different directions. And it's kind of going to succeed anyway is more or less my thesis. Is that, like, the reason why Ethereum is not because, okay, Vitalik is such an amazing organizational mastermind or because the rank and file of the EF are just incredible executors at everything they do. I think Vatel is great.

I think EF is great at the things that they're trying to accomplish. But I think their centrality within the ecosystem, I think the most valuable thing for blockchain today, the things they're really competing on is not performance. It's not the, you know, how many deals you're landing with Canter Fitzgerald or whatever. The thing that they're competing on is just being the biggest, most trusted chain. and I kind of think that's where the premium is going to come from over the long run. Like, Ethereum is going to be the last guy to get there. They're absolutely going to be incredibly slow and painful to watch in the same way that you saw Microsoft just like fumble mobile, fumble the web.

You saw that like 15 years of Microsoft just bleeding in public and making every single mistake possible. And nevertheless, they just had, they had nine lives because they had the right. to because of how Lindy and deeply integrated into the enterprise Microsoft was. That's kind of my base case for Ethereum. Is that, like, yes, everything you're saying, I agree with. I would love to see a more muscular Ethereum. I'd love to see Tomash still running the show. I'd love to see Vitalik giving more voice and being more thoughtful about the fact that, like,

yeah, you know, a second foundation or having like some head of adoption at the EF is not a solve for the degree to which the EF needs to be more adoption. A thing about the Microsoft analogy, though, is that Microsoft, you know, had this huge upswing.com crash, kind of flat, switch to Steve Ballmer, really flat, and then eventually new leader, and you tried to expand markets, whatever.

And look, being able to make Microsoft teams a horribly dog-shut product that still has 5 million times more users than all your competitors, you know, is a nice place to be. but they did find ways to evolve eventually, right? And I think that that comes from like talent eventually coming in. And so the question is like, where's the new talent?

That to me is like everything you can say. I think, yeah, I think that renaissance for Ethereum comes when the EF runs out of money. They went from, what was it like? Yeah, they went from like, how much was it originally? Like 1% plus? Probably way more than that, right? What was the original? What was the EF have originally?

they had a lot. They had a lot of the ether supply, and now it's down to 15 basis points. So, and they're spending quite, you know, they have, they, it's a little bit of a socialist, 8.3%. 8.3%, okay, they went from 8.3% of the Eth supply to now down to 16 basis points, all right? And because it's a little bit of a socialist utopia over there, like almost by necessity, they do have to start cutting. They have to, you know, it's like the whole Doge thing is happening out of necessity at the EF, which does mean the equivalent to the EF to the extent that there is, equivalent to the F has to get reconstituted through private funds, through private organizations just coming together and saying, okay, the EF no longer has the muscle. It's not happening anymore.

And of course, like the client development still happens at companies that are, you know, they're to some degree funded by the EF, but they also have their own businesses. So like, a lot of this has already been done in part, but I think you will see just over the next few years the EF, and this is what Vitalik is saying in so many words. I mean, he didn't put it this way, But he said, look, the EF is going to get smaller. It's going to be, quote, quote, one node within Ethereum. He points out the fact that there's only 16 basis points. The EF is just going to die.

Like, it just will. Which is always a plan. Which was always a plan. In the same way that, like, the Steve Bomber generation, they eventually died. They literally just, they ran out of energy. They all retired. And then Satya Nadella and the new generation of Microsoft leadership realized, like, oh, fuck.

Okay, we fumbled, we fumbled mobile. We fumbled the web. But let's pick up cloud. because there's still a lot of game left to be played. People don't exist. There is no new, there is no Sacha and Adela joining the ranks of Ethereum

core developers today who will be ready to assume the reins in five years when the EF dissolves itself. I don't think of TOTL. Tom Lee counts for something because the EF is just one node. Again, you're not fucking attracting talent.

Client development led by Tom Lee. You're attracting money. You're not attracting talent. Those things are correlated. Sort of. I think the vacuum itself attracts talent. No, no, no, no. I think the vacuum itself attracts talent.

And like when people see that there's room, like if you go to the EF today, you want to get hired. I mean, Max, I mean, I don't know how close you were to the EF per se when you were at consensus. But like, you go to the EF today, it's like, okay, great, I can be responsible for absolutely nothing and be responsive to like a bunch of, you know, 80-year-old dinosaurs. Right. Like, that's effectively what working at the EF is like. The power structures are there. They are immutable, like Ethereum itself. You have no ability to move anything if you come to the EF.

Give it a few years. But the EF will be gone in a few years, right? And I also think you're very much underestimating the effect of the funding on the client development. I think that most of the client development is funded by funds from the EF, even at companies like, nevermind, have another business. It's just charity work at that point. I worked a consensus. We had clients.

They still have clients there, but those are funded by a grant. So if that grant went away, then would it be funded by the company. Anyway, we can cut the client development teams to like, you know, there's one client. There's one client. It's all written by AI. It's formally verified. Done. No more client development teams needed.

We can go to single client finally. There you go. AI saves us once again. Yeah. I really do enjoy the Microsoft comparison because it expresses what I was hoping to express in my article, which is like, I'm not bearish. It's just going to track the market.

It's not going to go too high. It's not going to go too low. It'll mostly keep up, but it's not going to impress it. It's a utility company that is more or less a fixed income asset with dividends rather than equity value. I think there's no equity values. There's no dividends. There's zero dividends.

It doesn't pay any dividends. I meant it metaphorically. This is not financial advice to be clear. I'd re-underscore that. You're waiting for your theory of dividends. You might be waiting quite a while. I meant it metaphorically. There are these companies that just like all the smart people leave.

They've reached some point. Everyone's like, why the fuck would I stay here? And the new management that comes in to some Harvard asshole who doesn't know anything about how the company actually works. But says, like, you know what? Let's just fire everyone, give out dividends, and then hope the power plant doesn't blow up. And that's kind of what I, same analogy, right?

Who's going to go? I actually don't know. Okay, so let me push back a little bit against the core of this argument, which is that I actually don't know that the problem is that Ethereum is not moving fast enough from a development perspective. I don't think it's like there's a clear problem to solve

that would change their, outcome in their opinion. Which tells me, I think most of the problem is not that, oh, client development's not getting done and, like, Vitalik is slowing everything down. I think it's more that the spiritual leadership, the business leadership, the competitive leadership is what's missing, right? That energy, that drive, that killer instinct doesn't appear to be valued within the Ethereum Foundation the same way that it is among other competitive foundations, right? Tempo has that. Salana has that. A lot of these other groups have that. And if you don't have that for too long, you're going to lose something in, like, you know, the whole make America

great again, we want to renegotiate these deals for America. Like, look, it might be unwise, but the energy behind it is clearly valuable to holding onto your position in the world. You need some of that. You can't have zero of it, right? I think that is more what the spiritual illness at the core of Ethereum is. I think it's more what people are pointing to, not that nothing's ever getting shipped or that there are no protocol upgrades. Like, they're having, Max might have that objection, but I don't think that's the main objection that people have. I think you need talent to come up with new ideas and new things to do also, right? And like that seems to also kind of not.

When you say new ideas, like, what do you mean new ideas? You mean new startups or do you mean new protocol changes? Okay. Simple. You want to keep, we want to really lean into this Microsoft analogy. The Satya Nadella thing was like, stop making people use Microsoft at their data centers. Lean into our cloud product and tell people to stop fucking relying. on licenses for our existing software, which, yes, that carried us for 20 years, and then also just copy every enterprise SaaS software

like Slack and whatever and make a shitty version. So all the lawyers were forced to, like, force all their clients to buy Word because they'll only sell it in legal documents that are fully track changes compatible with Word. I have to use us still. And that, you know, those don't sound that crazy, right?

But they were like, evolutionary, let's say, changes for Microsoft that were completely necessary to get out of the era where Microsoft was like, we're going to build Bing, we're going to build a social network, we're going to build an MP3 player,

we're going to build every fucking thing that doesn't make sense for us to build. And I think like that there's not that energy. There's not like a like, hey, and my point though is you need to structurally be able to attract the talent

that's willing to come into. And you're saying, like, the existence of a vacuum implies the existence of an antiparticle. It's like a positron and it's antiparticle. And it's like, I don't see why the fuck that exists here.

Like, I don't see why the existence of vacuum means I'm like sure. There's so many... I think Ethereumize is the... Is a good example. So look, to the extent that the EF is like, okay, crops, decentralization maxis, like Ethereum is for the dissidents

and the people who are running away from governments. That's what Ethereum is for. It's sanctuary technology. Ethereumize is not sanctuary technology. Ethereumize is we are for enterprises, period, full stop, end of story. You want to make decentralization compromises? We're going to help you do it. That's what we're here for.

We're here to actually get Wall Street on chain. That to me is what you're talking about. That is the, okay, let's violate the sacred cows of the previous administration in the service of adopt. and actually winning the game. Now, Etherialize doesn't run Ethereum. It doesn't, as far as I know, it doesn't run anything besides a company.

But I think what you can see is that if the EF weakens in power and becomes less essential note of Ethereum, things like Ethereum, by definition, become a louder and louder part of the overall footprint. And I think in a way, like, that's, like, you know, when Steve Bomber was in his prime, doesn't, like, Sethia has worked at Microsoft for like 20 plus years. Yeah. There were dudes there. Well, I think that's Max's point.

That's Max's point, though. Who is, are there, is there a pipeline of that now? Not really. Like, that's what it sort of feels like. I mean, look, I'm not, I don't know that there's a, like, obviously it's not exactly the same because there's no CEO of Ethereum that's going to, no reason to step up and become the CEO of Ethereum. No, but someone has to be in the ecosystem to understand the mores and nuances of the ecosystem

for a long time. They're not just going to show up and be like, I'm in charge now. Like, obviously it's never going to work. And the reason why Satya was able to ascend was, you know, he started low, ended high, was because he was able to ride up a for-profit company for that entire time to pay him a salary where there's no equivalent inside of Ethereum. You can do a startup or, you know,

Ethereumize is a for-profit thing, but it's not the thing. Okay, who right now is the spiritual leader of Bitcoin? Sailor. One name. Sailor. It's Sailor, right? Yeah. Why is a sailor? Why?

Because he's pushing Bitcoin up the main quest line. Because there's nobody else who has a strong enough voice to overcome the financial force of Sailor. Sailor has a stronger gravitational force than anybody else in Bitcoin. Sailor is a fucking public company CEO. He ran an enterprise software company,

and he is Mr. Bitcoin now. Everywhere in the world, he's Mr. Bitcoin. So the idea that this can't happen on its own, I think is just insufficiently imaginative. It literally already happened. I think it's different. I think it's different when your asset is like, the entire goal is just to be like we're gold.

Right. And easier for big one. It's much harder for it. I'm like, you do need someone with some technical. I think the reason why it's harder is because the EF exists and because Vitalik is Vitalik, I think if you give it a few years and the EF slowly disintegrates. What if you become the CEO of Ethereum? You know what?

I've got all I mean is the glasses and I can become the Satya Natala. I'm ready for it. I seem to be the only bullish person left who's willing to say good things about Ethereum. No, no, no. The most likely outcome here that Haseeb that I think you're pointing you to is like BitMind takes a far more activist role and works well and pairs well with this second foundation that's on this way. Hasib, I have a question for you. If Ethereum never made another relevant protocol upgrade again, can they still be successful? Are they decreasing, are they like increasing the gas limit or like literally never again?

I mean, let's say that they increase the gas limit by like 30% a year, which is what they're doing right now. And that's it. I think they're probably fine. And why do you say they'll be fine? Are they going to make any revenue? Or are they going to, what are they going to do?

They're not going to make any revenue if they do that. I think what happens is that, like, I mean, look, the thesis that I have for blockchains, and maybe I'm going to hope that this is the thesis that other people have for blockchains, is that it's a classic. you make it up on scale. As more and more people,

more and more assets, more and more value, finds this way on chain, you forego revenue today because when you get much, much bigger and there are many, many more people running through your pipes, you don't need to be charging 2% on every transaction,

which is like what it would look like in 2021. You're charging a very, very small percent on a very, very large economic base. If blockchains don't get there, then we kind of lost. We were kind of wrong about the thesis and blockchains are this weird, little artifact. They're, you know, one of the many things in the world that exist. I don't believe

that. I believe they're not going to be one of the many things in the world that exist. I think they're going to be one of the main things in the world that exists technologically. When you describe how the world works in 15 years, blockchains are going to be a big part of the explanation. If I'm wrong about that, then it doesn't matter what Ethereum does. There's no thing that Ethereum is going to do to be able to hold on to that kind of economic might. I think the only way that it works for any of these chains is to get their own scale. That's my claim. I think the reason why you could get away with the highway robbery that we had in 2021

was because there was no interoperability, there were no other options, there were no escape valves, there was money that was just fundamentally stuck in these ecosystems that couldn't get out. And all the volatility, you know, the sort of the snow globe was shaken up too aggressively that so much MV was getting created that it couldn't escape. I don't think that's going to happen again to the same scale it did in 2021. I think the answer has to be that you make it on scale. What happens if everybody's ready to come on chain? We get clarity and it's time to put the shit on chain.

It's time to put DTCC on chain, okay? And they go to Ethereum and Ethereum says, well, based on our current rate of increasing the gas limit, we'll be ready for you in 3,31 or something like that, right? Yeah. Whatever the date is. And then they just choose to go somewhere else like Solana or hydrolypricid or wherever else they decide to go.

Isn't that a real risk? It is a real risk. It is a real risk. And so that's why I am very supportive and was very supportive of all of the, I can't remember the name of it, but the initiative of let's scale the hell out of Ethereum and let's make it. Let's scale the L1. I was one of the loudest people saying, we need to scale the L1. We need to refocus, move away from the L2 maximalism and redouble the focus on the L1. As far as I know, nobody is claiming that Ethereum has abandoned that goal.

Well, except that all of the people who just left were the loudest of the last. as champions of that goal at the EF. They may well have been. I mean, again, I don't know the politics within the EF as well as you do. So you are, do we even know if the DTC is going to like pick a chain? Why, like NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange both are doing their own internal blockchains? Like, why is it coming on the public change?

Do we even know that? I don't think we know that. I think that's like it's got a half, but we got to pound on the door and get them to do it. I think it's a real risk for everybody that these guys are going to do their own chain. I mean, they charge six cents a transaction at the DTCC just to, like, change the number in the spreadsheet. And they make $1.5 billion a year or something like that. But that's still not really enough to justify theorem's valuation, right? Correct, correct.

And look, another thing that's worth underscoring is like, you know, the narrative for Ethereum has changed over time. So it started as the world computer. Then it became, what was it, super ultrasound money. Now I'm, I don't know what exactly it is. It's like the, there was the L2, you know, whatever, where like the grand bazaar. And then now it's like we're sanctuary technology. I don't know what exactly the new narrative is. And then according to Tom Lee, it's the chat chbt of blockchain or whatever.

Stable coins are the chat chbt for crypto. I don't have to do it. Stable coins are the chat GPT of crypto. Sorry, that's what it is. What is, what is his line about Eith? I don't actually know. And stable coins are on Ethereum, was his... Stable coins are the chat GPT of crypto.

Hey, man, that line took EF from $17,100 to all-time highs. So you can't really laugh at it. I can laugh at it just from one standpoint, which is like, one involved a lot of technical innovation. One involved taking a decentralized technology and making it slightly centralized. Like, what the fuck? How the fuck is that comparison even? That's like an embarrassment to like, I don't know.

Whatever. I mean, I think it's about adoption as opposed to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But like the technical comparison is like, 300. I don't think he was making a technical comparison. Something tells me Tom Lee was not comparing the technological complexity. Yeah. This is why you, this is this, yeah, this is again, how are you going to inspire anyone smart to want to work on this stuff if you're, that's your best selling thing.

Yeah, okay. So, okay, let me, let me, let me, one final question, I guess, is we're running up on time. We had, we had some of the stuff we want to talk about better, no that we're going to get anywhere off this, off of this. Okay, wait, wait, wait, can we get Max's Solana pitch? The pro salon. I want the other stuff, also, right? No, okay. I don't want to hear that.

Explain to us why I want to hear the yin and yang, right? Is that the yang? Is that the yang? Is that the yang? Okay, I guess it's orthogonal. I don't know whether it's the correct yang. It's one of the many possible yanks. I think tempo is the yang, to be clear.

Yeah, okay. Let me give it real quick. There are $500 trillion of securities in the world. They are going to come on chain. I do not believe that the regulatory environment will allow them to go on to basically another centralized thing. I actually, you know, we'll see what happens. But I think that the statements from various members of the regulatory regime have basically said,

you know, we are doing this for crypto, not for your centralized piece of shit. Okay. So I think that's going to be very bullish for decentralized blockchains. And then there's basically two choices, Ethereum or Solana, because everything else I don't even know what it is because it's a zero in their head. It has no activity, it has no mind share. So it's basically Ethereum or slum. Hyperliquid was stated in Congress first, literally in a session of Congress.

What did they say? We want to regulate that? Yes. My point is it made it to there. So like if we go by mentions by Congress people, it's not two. It's three. Don't forget ripple, by the way. Don't forget ripple.

There are basically two options in terms of public blockchain. that you would want to go on that have existing activity, and it's Ethereum and Solana, and Ethereum doesn't have enough scale to accommodate the global financial system at this time. It may in 2013 or 2040 or whenever

they figure it out. Yes. What's a lot? Wow. We've got some Canton Bulls in this chat now, apparently. So, yeah, I think one thing that's happened is basically throughout the history of crypto,

We have had these tremendous network effects on one or two networks. And then the technologists have come in and said, we want to upgrade the network. And then everybody's been like, no, this is our like, we love our network slow and low throughput the way it is. And Solana is the first network that has actual traction on it where they didn't fall into the trap of saying, we love our network the way it is. They said, we're going to make it as good as possible. I think that combination of technologists building good technology and the sort of super vacuum of the network effects that we have in crypto will be very bullish for Solano.

Okay, Max, I got to ask you about quantum because this feels to me like the big kind of, what's the term? What's the opposite of a black swan? It's like a white bull or whatever. You know what I'm talking about? Whatever. there's some term for this of like a very obvious bad thing that's coming. Quantum feels like it's

actually very, very difficult for Solana, given its architecture. Talk to me about what you see for the post-quantum roadmap for Solana. How does it hold on to the properties that make it so special? Quantum is Justin Drake's last masterful gambit. He's like sacking the queen. He's trying to go in for the kill. It just doesn't make any sense what he's saying. First of all, I've looked at the actual implications of this on our architecture. We have one. way more bandwidth. So the fact that we're going to have larger transactions is much less impactful to us than for Ethereum.

For Ethereum, they have a solo stake or Raspberry Pi that can only do so many bits per second. Then they want to take a 4,000 byte signature for every single transaction and for every single vote. And they want that to be passed around in their network that has already no bandwidth. Meanwhile, we're going to use a smaller signature, Falcon, or even smaller one, which is eight time smaller than that. And we have way more bandwidth. I mean, I've just looked at it. This thing is basically a charade. It's true that quantum is coming. I think it will be here sooner than a lot of the sort of 2040 predictions will happen. But we know how to deal with it on Solana. And actually, I think

we have a way better roadmap, which took us maybe like a few days to come up with because it's not that hard to come up with. Meanwhile, they've been working on it for like five years on Ethereum, and you look at the thing as like, did you like, were you high when you came up with this thing? This doesn't make any sense. Okay, so your claim is post-quantum. What is Solana's performance throughput, transaction latency? What is that going to look like according to this design, the post-quantum design that you guys have sketched out? I think you'll see no impact on the performance whatsoever for the end user. I still think we'll be able to get to a million TPS with a 512 bit or 566, whatever it is, like 600 bytes for a Falcon signature.

And we do 32 bytes right now. And ultimately this doesn't matter. We have 100 gigabit nicks on our machines right now. Peli is running 100 gigabit nick. This doesn't matter at all. We can ingest all these transactions. It's very cheap to verify them, actually. It's even faster to verify Falcon signature than the ones that we use now.

now. And so the bandwidth is a problem, the verification time isn't a problem. When we find our consensus, I think we'll still be able to scale to... So your claim is there's no trade-off whatsoever. We get quantum for free? I mean, it's not that there's no trade-off. I can write out the equation for you, but it's a factor of, like, two. It's like ultimately a constant factor, and bandwidth is increasing by a factor of two every two years or something like that. So, yeah, maybe it will change the timeline, two years, but we were not even close to using the full available bandwidth that we have today. So we'll use a little more bandwidth. We have plenty to despair, and we will be fine.

So when do you expect the post-quantum transition for Solana to be completed? I expect it will be considerably faster than Ethereum's post-quantum transition. We're probably not going to do it before we need to. I mean, we're putting all the pieces in place, so we're doing larger transaction size for those larger signatures later this year. We're going to move to a hash so that you can sort of hash your larger public key to that thing.

All this is super boring, but we're putting all those building blocks in place, so we'll be ready to flip the switch when it's time, but we don't feel the need to flip the switch before we have a real signal that this thing is coming. So we'll do it when we need to do it. We'll put all the building blocks

in place, and then we'll flip over probably like in the next five years. My thing, ignoring the space, like the space aspects, like the compute aspects, honestly, once a standard is chosen, like every CPU providers is going to make it a one-click, you know, single instruction kind of thing. And it'll be optimized away the way that, like, Shaw was optimized away. And like, I just think about like 2015 when everyone was like, oh my God, Shaw is the slowest fucking thing ever. And then Intel added the SIMD op code. And then no one ever complained again.

So, like, I believe in tech progress for this quantum stuff. Like, there's no reason to, like, I do agree, though, that, like, whatever the future Raspberry Pi is might not make it. There is some truth to that. Like, the quantum stuff actually kind of kills the Raspberry Pi there. I was looking at it. So they have a million validators on ETH because they shot themselves on the foot with a very poor architecture decision, like 10 years ago.

And a MacBook can verify. It can aggregate 800 signatures in one second. So what are you really talking about then? If you have a million signatures and you need to aggregate a million signatures, you kind of need a big computer, right? Maybe you can sort of aggregate the proofs of proofs and stuff. But still, at the end of the day, you're not talking about a whole lot of performance for their specific chosen scheme that they said, this is the one we're going to use.

And it can only do 800 aggregates. per second and they have a million validators. Okay. All right. Max, where can people find you? I'm on Twitter. I got the at Max Resnick handle from the handle store. No, you did.

No. The first person I've ever heard actually got successfully purchased something from How much do you pay for that? Well done. It was free, actually. It was free. Let's see if it seems available. David, where can people find you?

Probably the currently the most hated person on Twitter, trustless state. Okay, perfect. So if you want to yell at somebody, you guys know where to go. Max and David will put their handles up. Thank you both for coming on and sharing your Ethereum apostasy story. I'm sure it's giving people a lot of courage to go through their own journeys. And there is a, what's the term?

There's like a, what do they call it when like people get together to share a traumatic experience? Whatever. Support group. There's support group. There's a support group that we'll leave a link for in the chat. That's it. Thank you, everybody. We'll be back next week.

See you all. Yeah.