138 - What's Next? Vitalik Buterin | Part I

Transcript

well like I don't think there is one vision for what ethereum could do I think there's many different visions and I think once ethereum manages to solve its scaling problems it's going to be in a much better place to help be the substrate that allows all of those missions to happen welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet Finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the opportunity this is Ryan Sean Adams I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless what's next with vitalik buterin that is the topic today we're doing this episode in two parts the focus is what's next in general and specifically what's next for

ethereum in part one which is being released today we're going through the ethereum road map from a technical perspective this is the short to medium turn in part two we touch on the social the philosophical some of the deeper questions around the thing that we've built called ethereum and its impact for the world that's going to come out on the following Monday I'm going to give you a teaser of part one before we get into it and also part two part one that's today's episode we're going to get vitalik's reaction on the merge it took eight years to get here how did he feel we asked him that question ethereum also no longer Burns energy what are the green Arguments for proof of stake

vitalik makes them and is this whole sustainability thing really a big deal we get into that subject why did Proof of stake take so long it's in the back of all of our minds we ask vitalik that question as well and he describes the journey to get here to the merge to proof of stake what's left is another question we review the entire road map from a technical perspective we also ask about some concerns is vitalik concerned about staking centralization for instance is he concerned about ethereum's future censorship resistance that is all in part one that is what you are about to hear today in part two we get into the social and philosophical we zoom out we talk about ethereum

holistically is it a network state is it like a country is that what we've created a whole digital country or is it a Dao a decentralized autonomous organization if it is a Dao how in general should Dao's be governed should we govern should we learn from the corporate world and Institute some sort of corporate governance policy or are there lessons for us from the political science uh side of things we ask vitalik about that we also end with which I think is a really interesting topic I've never heard vitalik cover what's next in AI in artificial intelligence we ask vitalik to speak about AI apparently he just went on a recent trip to Silicon Valley talked to some of the foremost experts in the AI field so we asked come

I mean the basics on everyone's mind is AI coming to destroy Humanity or there will there be some peaceful coexistence will there be an intersection with crypto is it crypto versus AI in a cage match crypto representing decentralized interests and AI on the centralized side also this was interesting to me why vitalik thinks Advanced AI might actually be happening sooner than he previously thought we talk about all of those things on what's next that's in part two that is coming out the next Monday David what were your thoughts in this episode yeah well done on that Intro by the way that was the longest intro that we've done on the podcast thank you uh yeah what what's next is a really good

question and it's definitely the thing that people are asking the current state of crypto as there doesn't really seem to be too much on the horizon in terms like a narrative uh the inflation narrative is gone uh you know Cove is over uh the merge is over with so what is next but there is plenty of things that are next on the ethereum roadmap so this is an updated review part one updated review on the ethereum roadmap just to get that resynced and downloaded into your brain but I really think it's that second part they said the the episode that's going to come next week uh that I think is the more interesting things and as the world seems to be accelerating Ryan like technology seems to be getting faster uh I know Arc is

down in price but doesn't mean it's down in thesis and Kathy's word thesis that the future is coming faster than people expect it to I definitely subscribe to I think vitalik does as well and that start to be be shown in some of his conversations with people outside of the crypto space um like you alluded to in the AI space all of these things are around the Horizon and so we need to be aware of them because if you're not seeing them coming at you they're gonna Blindside you and you're not gonna be ready for it and so understanding these conversations is the intersections of crypto and AI how Dows operate and how they should be governed and what is the long-term Network state road map for ethereum and what it may become in relation to that I

think if you understand these questions you are so far ahead of the rest of the world and so that's the episode that we try to produce here on this week and next week I will say in the first part there is a section where the terms get a little esoteric and and Technical for you that's where we go through the road map with the merge the Splurge The Purge The Verge etc etc you'll hear it when we get to that part there is another episode that we did with vitalik going through this entire road map more in layman's terms and we'll refer to that there'll be a link in the show now show notes for that some terms like DVT which we didn't defined or SSV this is a distributed validator technology shared secret validators this is about decentralizing the validator network of course we've

also done episodes entirely on this EIP that's an ethereum improvement proposal called 4844 which is basic sharding proto-dang sharding so this scales up the transactions per second on Roll-Ups that ethereum can support one last thing for you premium subscribers a special gift we've actually released both part one and part two today for you so you don't have to wait it's all available on the premium feed you also will have raw access to the debrief where Dave and I give our thoughts on the vitalik show these are our unfiltered shot thoughts on the episode that was uh and there's a link in the show notes if you have not gone premium upgraded your membership from free to premium you can go do that

and get access to the full episode now well without further Ado our episode with vitalik buterin but first a word from our sponsors rocketpool is your friendly decentralized ethereum staking protocol you can stake your eat with rocketpool and get our eth in return allowing you to stake your ease and use it in defy at the same time you can get four percent on your eat by taking it with rocket pool but you can get even more by running a note rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating notes running a rocket pool node is easier to set up than running a solo node and you only need 16eath to get started why would you do this you get an extra 15 staking Commission on the pool to eat so your apy is boosted so if you're boldish

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appearing on bankless in a post merge world he also has this fantastic blog on his website you gotta check out I read whenever an article is published at vitalik.ca uh and there's a book out called proof of stake which is a compilation of many of those blog posts came out earlier this month he also happens to be the guy who wrote the ethereum white paper vitalik welcome to bankless post proof of work post merge how you doing uh great I'm you know obviously yeah we're really happy that this uh big long eight year journey is uh finally at its completion

um you know really yeah happy that proof of stake is uh here and it's fully here it's running it's uh actually powering the ethereum chain the whole transition seems to have happened even far more smoothly than pretty much anyone including myself expected and you know just happy that that whole chapter and you know the chapter of all of the various uh trolls on the yadsworth are doubting whether or not river stake is even possible is over in the ethereum ecosystem it now gets there I'm gonna move over and start focusing uh Full Speed Ahead on the next thing yeah so what are the trolls going to uh focus on after the merge is done now

that we have proof of sake because they're not gonna they're not gonna just uh you know wave the right flag right they're gonna move on to the next thing that's a good question yeah I mean I think uh if I was a troll I would probably be waving one of two flags so like one of the flags you can wave is obviously that uh proof of stake is actually bad and uh the other flag you could wave is that sharding will never happen right and you know like if you want to wave the flag of uh sharding never happening then you know there are arguments that you could make about how like oh you know the yeah peer-to-peer networking of data availability sampling is actually complicated and that stuff is uh not gonna happen in actual ethereum is going to hit scalability bottleneck soon and uh you know blah

blah blah blah but like betting against the ethereum ecosystems ability to produce technology is something that clearly does not have a very good track record so I think uh yeah I know if I was a troll I would definitely kind of stick to the ideological side and just try to argue that Brew mistake is bad somehow uh vitalik you said that this the merge was even smoother than you expected uh so I'm wondering if you could just like put us into the mind of italic as we were going through the merge because this has been I mean the beacon train launched of course in December of 2020 but proof of stake as an idea has been along even longer than that and efforts on the beacon train has been uh you know

started before the beacon train launched of course uh so this has been a long time coming uh so how does it feel to be in the post-emerge world and uh what was it like to be watching this thing go through uh and also what was it like to be watching the world watch ethereum In This Moment yeah so I think one of the reasons why we're all surprised that the emerge went really well is that none of the test that merges really quite went that amazingly smoothly right like the yeah most recent merge before the uh real one I think it was uh think the robsten merge uh yeah it even did not finalize for about an

hour because uh slightly more than a third of all of the nodes did not make it through the transition and there was some code glitch and they had opted um one of the merges before like it only had something like 80 online like there was always some client combination that just did not survive the transition um and you know there were various bugs I think uh one of the reasons why that ended up not carrying over to the mainnet and the main that ended up going great actually is that a lot of the bugs were not really bugs with the implementation there were bugs with the settings right this is the test Nets they all tend to have you know various weird and like settings choices and people are just less used to connecting in the test that's and uh update making

sure they're connected in the right way than they are with the main Network and so we ended up having a lot of bugs on that side but if you're just watching as a more naive Observer from further away you might think like oh you know every one of these tests that merges had at least a bit of an issue and uh you know surely the main one is gonna have even more problems just because it's a much bigger ecosystem and you know it's all of these thousands of people and we don't have as good an ability to immediately reach everyone but you know no and uh actually the main that merge just went incredibly smoothly so I mean the process of what waiting for the merge to happen you know it was uh in some ways surprisingly uneventful

like uh you know there was a call there was a zoom call and uh everyone will or at least lots of people were on that call and I'm sure lots of people are on other calls as well and uh we were just uh you know talking about what the merge is talking about what the merge means for the world and uh then you know after we got through a few speeches it's like oh wait okay now we're less than uh five minutes away and then everyone just started waiting for the countdown and uh eventually you know the total terminal uh the terminal block which is the block that surpasses the total terminal difficulty was hit so that's the block that like surpassed the threshold for

basically how many hashes the proof of work chain is supposed to do before it turns off uh and uh that was hit and then immediately after that the first proof of a stake block happened and everyone celebrated and then we waited um you know it's 12 minutes for it to finalize and then we finalize and then everyone celebrated again and uh like that was basically it that's really not so simple yeah easy right we should have done this years ago but but uh vitalik um to David's kind of second question part of I I think the interest from the ethereum communities is watching the world react to the merge right and and you were mentioning the trolls earlier and you know if you were a troll what you'd do is probably like uh argue that

proof of stake is a bad idea entirely as I was like looking at the world's reaction that there was one thing that kept popping up in mainstream media and that was this energy reduction narrative this decrease in electricity cost and I do think that trolls at least from a mainstream perspective right are going to have a hard time arguing with mainstream that proof of work is superior to proof of stake from a you know a green perspective from a climate change perspective but what's your take on this the whole eth energy reduction thing do you think that is overrated do you think that it's it's underrated how much does this actually matter in the scheme of things

yeah and I think there's a couple of uh levels at which you can look at that question one is the object level issue of like how important uh the climate issue is and how big of an impact the switch to approve of stake is on the climate right so I think my view on the climate issue is kind of fairly boring and moderate which is like it's not a literal existential risk in the sense that you know it's uh not going to kill anywhere close to the number of people that like you know something like World War III would but at the same time it's a like a really crappy and terrible thing and uh if you look at you know the studies of uh what worst case global warming could lead to it's like reducing the GDP of some of the already poorest countries in the world by like a factor

of two or three right so it's uh a uh you know quite a a big deal as far as big deals that actually exist in the world are concerned and I think anything that we can do to try to move beyond our carbon heavy presence is uh definitely a good thing and I mean obviously there are all these um arguments that uh proof of work proponents uh like to trot out that like oh you know actually this is incentivizing uh green energy production or actually this is using energy that would not be used for other purposes because proof of work is really good at like finding the energy that would not

be useful anywhere else but now generally when I look at those arguments from far away they always have this kind of feeling of self-serving bias it's like it just feels like the algorithm that these people are running is like not like oh you know let me neutrally figure out whether or not proof of work is good or bad it's like oh let me yeah try my best to come up with Arguments for as you know like soldiers in this uh rhetorical war of and you know like help me justify the cause I already decided long ago I stand for but you know you're saying it's in a convenient rationale it's like oh it's really convenient that proof of work people think that proof of work is green totally like it's the arguments to me feel like imagine if uh someone from uh

Philip Morris came to you and said like hey you know Philip Morris is actually an incredibly ethical company because we're contributing to the incentive to cure lung cancer right right like this is basically what happened yes um and then you know there's all of these like methane like flaring things and uh I think the the challenge with them is that like you can always identify you know like these really specific situations where there's something really unusual about the yeah energy Market but like the more you zoom out and like think about this in the one game it's like you know no if if if you consume energy then that Inc on it increases energy consumption and

uh energy consumption for the next while is is going to contribute to climate issues and you know there are going to be like this little discrepancies in uh both directions but the little discrepancy is over time they're just going to I think average out but just like the one big fact in the center of it is the thing that's going to dominate uh so ye I think yeah like you know people argue that you know proof of work is like a good at sort of grabbing those little nooks of energy that nothing else is because proof of work has this special property that you can do it from anywhere but at the same time proof of work has this property that if you want to make good use of your Hardware you have to keep it running 24 7. right like this concept of

oh I'm going to only turn on my Hardware at those specific times when there is spare electricity and otherwise I'm going to shut it off like that's total BS right because just because like the heart proof Hardware cost is a big portion of the all proof of work cost and so if you want to be competitive um you know you have to use your machine and you have to make good use of your machine until uh Moore's Law causes that machine to expire and requires you to replace it with a better machine uh so it yeah in general I'm I guess uh on the whole not convinced by any of that and I think you know reducing energy consumption is uh good and great and I'm immensely glad that we as an ecosystem

have done it so that's the first level of the question right the second level of the question is uh I guess from a kind of more selfish ethereum ecosystem uh point of view like obviously yeah the fact that we're not contributing to Breaking the environment anymore is uh good for for ethereum from a narrative perspective and uh I think there are lots of signs that this is actually true like I've personally talked to a bunch of people in you know corporate and government contexts and just lots of different voices that are like hey we want to do blockchain stuff but there's just too many people within our organization that are really don't want to be contributing to um you know making the planet blow up

and you know if the merge completes then like a lot of them have even said like you know yeah I'll be much more excited about using ethereum and I think a lot of that's true I think the subconscious line of thinking that at least some of these people that I'm kind of dismissively referring to as trolls as uh referring to is trying to make is like oh you know this environment thing is like a centralized World economic Forum ideology and uh chances are if you're into that stuff then you're into a centralized World economic Forum stuff uh generally and so like most of people who care about that are going to also care about um you know making sure we have Global

Financial surveillance because they think that's the only way to prevent crime or whatever and so why are you even trying to go after those people and uh so you know the people that you crypto should be going after are like these sort of Steely based people who understands that like that centralized World economic Forum ideology is uh is total crap and like actually the environment's gonna be fine and like methane is great for the environment and everything's going to be solar within five years anyway and so like I think there's this sort of implied subconscious viewpoints that you know really there's just two kinds of people one or the other and uh the yeah the world economic Forum bug eaters are

a lost cause and so you might as well go after the baseball people and the base cool people don't really care about the environments and so you might as well use proof of work but I feel like that Viewpoint is just false like I've just didn't I don't know if I you know talks to lots of people I've been to like 53 countries now and uh you know chatted with all kinds of people in various Industries and governments and like I don't think it's true that like there's this binary and I think there's plenty of people that like really do deeply believe in the uh you know the freedom thing and the open source thing and the uh you know decentralized uh like censorship resistance Global Mutual platform thing but it's like also do you

care about like not blowing up the planet at the same time and like I feel like the ethereum and community in general is probably a sort of more you know on average uh it's also toward that middle though there's definitely people on uh on all sides of the spectrum so I mean you know it it sort of ties into the uh social and cultural bet that I think uh ethereum is making that uh some of those kind of Hardcore proof of work proponents are taking the opposite side of the bet so you know I'm happy with the side of the BET I've made and I yeah I keep making it so we'll see by the way for YouTube viewers the reason David and I have a smile in our face is because we just noticed a

vitalik's login name is uh Adam back which is uh maybe one of the CEOs yeah of the Philip Morris is fighting for proof of work uh but vitalik can can I ask you um is it material like it is the difference between ethereum switching from proof of work to proof of stake is that does that have an actual material impact I think you tweeted out a Justin uh Drake figure and I'm not sure where he got this number where he sourced it something like a 0.2 reduction on worldwide electricity consumption which feels very material what kind of numbers have you seen and are these actually material numbers or do you think it was like Much Ado About Nothing All Along

and uh the 0.2 percent figure definitely roughly lines up with other statistics that I've seen right like we've seen statistics that like ethereum mining uses about as much electricity as my thank you as either half of Singapore sometimes or Austria sometimes and like those countries are about 0.1 percent of the world population but they're a wealthy 0.1 percent uh so I think uh if you just look at all those different estimates like somewhere vaguely in the 0.2 percent range does make sense um I mean the one argument that I have seen people make is that like oh that hash power is not going away it's just going to go to ethereum classic but and that's clearly true to some extent in the short term but just obviously can't

be true on the medium or long term right like in the medium or long term like we've basically reduced the amount of uh Eve um reward that goes uh gets paid out to people who participate in like GPU style proof of work by probably a factor of 10 right and so in the medium and long term the amount of effort going into that style of proof of work is also going to go down by a factor of 10. yeah yeah we've certainly reduced the incentive therefore it should it should follow that there will be less minors in the future we were talking to Danny Ryan and tobacco yesterday on on the live stream uh and Danny gave out this metric that I want to run by you where yes we killed 0.2 percent of global electricity

consumption but he said that if ether price went 10x then it would have actually have been two percent and I'm wondering if that's how the math checks out and and so like really it's like yes we killed it at point two percent but if we believe that ethereum is going to be the global settlement layer of the future of everything then the future energy consumption that we eliminated it's actually much more significant and that is actually the bigger story I'm wondering if that math checks out on what you think about that yeah I think I fully agree with that I mean it you know obviously all depends on your projections for just how big the ethereum and uh crypto thing is going to get uh but uh in the bold cases where ethereum keeps

becoming a more and more significant thing then yeah absolutely it's a much bigger savings than 0.2 percent mm-hmm vitalik um like like we alluded to earlier the road to proof of stake has been long and winding uh with a few dead ends a few backtracks and then moving forward to where we ultimately got here today um but for the listeners that came in during the 2021 bull market or later in 2022 uh they might not know why ethereum proof of stake took so long so I'm wondering if you can kind of just for the listeners that weren't here in the eras of 2017 to 2020 kind of give a recap of to the journey thus far like why did Proof of stakes take so long and what were the uh the dead ends and the

roads uh that we almost went down what were the some of those that path like yeah you know so the road map public really did change a huge amount over the last few years right like the at in the 2018 17 to the beginning of 2018 there was this whole Casper FFG concept where we would basically build the proof of stake system as a smart contract on top of the proof of work chain um and then step one would be to kind of get that running and then step two would be to you know have this kind of separate charting chain and then we would really slowly migrate the thing and then before 2017 the roadmap was

something even more different it's like hey let's start a new chain from scratch and then basically just completely retire the existing one and uh demand all of the applications to actively move over the in and then in the middle of uh 2018 um Justin Drake made this post on a pragmatic PLS aggregation where he argued that the ethereum blockchain should make really heavy use of BLS aggregation in order to support as many validators as possible and be able to be a more decentralized chin and that I think ended up being a really prescient decision ended up

really simplifying the architecture and helping us a lot but the one of the consequences of that meant that we would not be able to actually yeah build the thing as a smart contract and instead it would make much more sense to build a new chain and then find some way to like migrate the ethereum system over to it over time and so work on the beacon chain started now then simultaneously there was this parallel track of uh working on different ways of how to transition existing ethereum into the yeah Beacon chain right so in 2018 to 19 there was this concept of execution environments where it's like you can think of them as being sort of like

Roll-Ups except much more in shrines and where where the chain would not just provide data it would also provide a minimal execution layer and the idea is that the existing ethereum system would become one of those roll ups I think back then we were also really contemplating trying to upgrade from the evm to webassembly and that's one of those things that we ended up dropping over time right like one of the unfortunate things that I think was necessary as part of the merge was that there were a lot of dreams that kind of got dropped and the ambition did end up decreasing a bit so the desire to improve the VM ended up kind of dropping off and part of that

was definitely just us noticing that out of all of the East Killers the only ones that really had significant success were the ones that just uh accepted the evm and the ones that that tried to argue that oh the evm is total crap and will replace it with something much more performance it ends better look those maybe with the exception of uh Solana ended up kind of falling off mostly um because there's uh obviously the question of like just how many other things we could use the merge as an opportunity to reform and I think we did manage their reform some things but a lot of other things did manage to like basically stay again as they are I mean like we if right now the ethereum

clients are still processing the pre-emerge chain right and there was a desire I think to use the merge as a reset opportunity and uh allow ethereum clients to not have to process that history and I think that still will happen with eip444 but that's something that we're gonna have to wait a bit longer for um so there's just a lot of these little things on which uh the ambition of the yeah project decreased a bit but it slowly turned into a more and more realistic thing and then you know finally we settled on a design and we even settled on a very simplified design for the merge uh and then we went for it and the design that we finally settled

on the one that we know of today which is now current ethereum do you think if we had like waited and like thought about it more and done some more research we would have found a different design or do you feel like the design that we settled on is like the final logical conclusion of ethereum proof of stake so there's two questions there I think one is what is the better long-term form of uh proof of stake and the other is if the research team and only the research team had had 500 years to spin its Wheels could it have come up with a better way of managing the transition uh so for the first question I think the answer is like no we are currently very far from uh what a truly optimal

ethereum Brewer's sake would look like right and you know recently we've been having these uh discussions about a single sword finality which is just a big redesign of the consensus uh there's all of these designs around like Merkle trees and different ways to implement charting and different ways to implement deposit and withdrawal logic and all of this stuff um so still a lot of improvement work to go and I think we do still have the opportunity to keep working hard over the next few years to make that Improvement actually happen but then on the question of uh was the merge as it was done the best way to do the transition I would say maybe yes maybe no right so I think if I could like give

myself a research Time Capsule back to 2014 I probably would have said um don't bother with the Casper FFG design and instead Implement a simpler version of chain based proof of stake first and so that you can move to that in like maybe around 2018 and then like properly yeah improve proof of stake later later on a yeah a more relaxed schedule but like I do think that we set ourselves uh goals that were a little bit too high for the proof of stake that we moved to for the first round and we even ended up not accomplishing some of those goals right like there's a lot of these security issues that uh arose from the specific design of the chaos graph

of G system in the way that The lmd Ghost and Fork Choice side and the Asia bft consensus side like uh interact with each other and that's one of the bigger things that we're going to have to resolve with the single sword finality change but um so yeah basically I think uh create a simpler and a less powerful proof of stake and move to it earlier would have been one of the bigger changes that I would have made but the format of the merge I think was uh excellent like I still don't think that there's a better merge format that we could have come up with and I definitely hope that other chains like uh you know Z cash and Dogecoin are probably to a proof of work

chains that occurs core deaf communities I talk to a lot and I'm pretty friendly with like I hope they learn from the merge and they yeah move over to proof of stake over the next four years or so so a vitalik if if you could go back in time it sounds like one thing you might change is you would have simplified the proof of stake kind of conception and maybe got it in the road map uh a little bit earlier deployed it a little bit earlier I mean as you mentioned we're here now and that's fantastic but we did have some false starts and some meanderings uh along the way and it I think for everybody involved it took longer than we thought I mean eight years and proof of stake had been in the ethereum social contract from the beginning yet there was also a benefit

and maybe that benefit came in the form of like proof of work distribution right so more eth stake was distributed over uh you know a greater number of entities I I guess we would assume or suppose with with proof of work distribution so that was a benefit um I mean overall is there anything else big that you would go back and change are you satisfied with how this turned out I mean it definitely had we known the results of the meanderings it would have been a great if we could just skip to the results immediately right so the design of the proof of stake system and all of the choices of like should it be a chain or a smart contract or something else as one side of it the other side of

it is the layer two scaling roadmap like I think optimism and arbitrome could be could have been finished and fully trustless by now had we known from the starts that Roll-Ups are the way to go and um you know we had not spent as many resources kind of going down the interesting channels and plasma rabbit holes like I think going down those rabbit holes was useful from the point of view of like inventing 10 000 ways not to make a light bulb and I do think that state channels make a lot of sense in some specific use cases but I definitely think that we made a false step and uh like At first really yeah hoping that that would be the way that ethereum applications would scale in general and then was plaused by like there was this hope that we could find

some way to generalize it but that ended up just not working and then two years later I think we ended up learning that like well actually pretty much nobody wants a scaled ethereum that's just a payment system everyone who's in it CRM already wants something general purpose and so there's no points in making even a roll-up unless it's a general purpose one vitalik you know we use this uh going west metaphor we're on a journey into the frontier there's it's a there's a dark uh fog of War ahead of us but some of the guests on the podcast are people that have scouted into the unknown and come back to tell us what's in the future and so as somebody who knows the history of ethereum very very well and also understands cryptography and crypto

economics very very well can you like Place Us in history or on like you know a map or a journey of where we are going and where ethereum is uh I remember you saying something along the lines of post proof of stake ethereum is about 55 completed could you talk about like where are we in ethereum's trajectory and where are we in crypto's uh relevancy to the world uh sure so I think one way of looking at it from a trajectory we have the protocol point of view was to look at the road map from last year and basically asking how much progress has been made right uh so if let me just Google this now and I'll check ethereum

roadmap on Google Images and I'm sure it'll be yeah up there there it is um click click and as you're talking uh vitalik we will be uh we'll be viewing this on on YouTube so we can see and and you're referring to the merge surge Verge Purge so if we want so just start looking at the five tracks right we can go uh through the tracks one by one uh so the merge is uh completed now um the things in the merge section that are not completed are um one is the post merge hard fork with withdrawals right that's um obviously

the yeah one of the next big priorities right after the merge it's a pretty simple hard fork and uh like we basically again know what to do there's a spec um I think the main debate at this point is to do it at the same time as 4844 or do it um earlier and then do a 4844 a bit later um but you know otherwise that's like we're not far from it um distributed validators I think uh still still progressing actually haven't checked up on that team uh for a while but I imagine they've made quite a bit of progress though it's not quite 100 Done Yet DVT from opal is that like is that what that is yes it's a DVT AKA SSV SSV right

right cool yeah right so and then if we look in the longer term extras a single secret leader election there's been some great work on the cryptography there the cryptography itself has been uh published um single SWAT confirmations or what we now call single Swan finality that's uh a bigger item and I think it's an item that has been really moved uh earlier in the roadmap because people just recognize the value and the importance of it much more and I think this is one of those things that we are going to have to kind of have a big public discussion with the community at some point because uh there are huge benefits to a Sega wasawat finality but at the same time there are some costs so like for example

some compromises either to the 32 East validator balance property uh or to the level of economic finality that you we can expect and just like different trade-offs of What kinds of things would have to be sacrificed if we want to be able to uh actually uh like have a finality in like say yeah 32 seconds or something like that and then better signature aggregation is just a subset of single solid finality at this point so that's the merge uh basically the entire left half of that box is finished and the right half of the box is still

to go which is great um The Surge uh so there um I think uh things have obviously been reshuffled a bit right so uh back then there was the whole 4488 versus 4844 stuff and I think uh lately 4844 has been winning and uh it's basically fully specified it's just awaiting an implementation and and so that would be I would call 4844 the equivalent of uh basic sharding though I think one of the interesting things with Dank sharding which happens after this roadmap is that dank shorting really moved us away from

the concept of having discrete shards like shards as individual units instead we're just moving to this more amorphous concept of like there's these big data blobs and there is a distributed procedure for verifying the data blobs but uh you know otherwise there's just blobs and there isn't like a hard point where one of the one section of a blob ends in another section of a blob begins um so I would say there um you know I would uh say he had the short term called it expansion box got short circuited a bit the basic charting box that's that green bar is probably a bit further and then the uh basic sharding and data availability sampling like that's a really big research area

uh so you know it's still a quite a bit of stuff left to go um then the verge of vertical trees that one is um interesting in that I think there's been a lot of uh progress on implementing uh Virgo trees the main sticking points at this point is that the transition from our existing tree structure to a Virgo tree is going to be something that's like a big engineering challenge to implement and there's still debates about how to do it and I think in general it's been de-prioritized a little bit uh relative to getting scalability out because scalability is just like so incredibly important to the core to ethereum um The Purge

um is uh so history expiry eip444 um making some grid progress um Banning self-destruct I think I may at some point we just have to pull the trigger and say we're gonna do it um State expiry State expiry has been a deprioritized a lot because of uh proposer Builder separation like basically if you have PBS and you have statelessness then the number of actors that actually have to hold the entire state is really tiny right regular validators don't have to hold the state because regular validators would just have to verify other people's blocks they're not creating their own blocks and so

that's something that's uh where the order of operations also got reworked a bit right but uh you know which is a good thing like I think a state state expiry being deep prioritized that does give us a lot of freedom to figure out all the other stuff first um and then all of these other things about just like making the ethereum protocol cleaner and like getting rid of rlp cleaning up the block structure like there's people who like I think wants to do them but they're kind of low priority and uh I think uh ethereum is going to be in a place where it's able to do these uh kind of thing these sort of more aesthetic things that

just have to do with making the protocol simpler and a lot cleaner but probably would need another like a year or so of firefighting right like this is one of the big things that big changes that's going to happen with ethereum protocols development over the next five years which has really moving away from firefighting mode and uh moving from you know we got to get this fast fast fast the community's angry at us uh you know people really really want this stuff and now to this kind of more calmer uh a trajectory of you know like really valuing stability and sustainability and I think the merge already like really reduces the pressure on the yeah but I think a successful uh transition at least to proto-dink sharding is gonna

be yeah the rest of the way and then you know full dank sharding can happen on its own Time Queen UPS can happen on their own time vertical trees can happen on their own time and so uh that you know the the pressure on the ecosystem to do those things quickly it can uh for at least be a bit lower and then the Splurge uh so TDM yeah before we get to the Splurge can we just kind of summarize for folks and uh I'll remind bankless listeners that we did an entire episode on the ethereum road map where we went through the merge uh surge Verge purging Splurge in extreme detail so make sure you catch that episode but high level here the the functions of these various categories the merge is

about transitioning to proof of stake and that's pretty much done there are a few things to tie off but we're getting real close it's almost done the surge is about scalability of the ethereum network ethereum economy in the form primarily of roll-up scalability and the big uh functionality to watch there is uh um the proto-dink sharding EIP 4844 uh is did I get the EIP right 4844 no sorry what's the yes uh the eip4844 for proto-dink sharding which is maybe upcoming I don't know when yet but that's the search and then the Verge is about statelessness and that helps us

further decentralize the network allow individuals to run nodes and so does The Purge it increases the it eliminates some of the the technical debt allows us to run nodes better and when we have the merge The Surge The Verge and The Purge that's kind of the the base functionality I I wanted to just pause there and reiterate that before we get to the Splurge because it feels like the Splurge those that's the goodie bag those are all of the extra things that we'd like to implement but the core of this thing from a roadmap perspective is probably the first four categories uh is that you know approximately right is that in in the ballpark vitalik yeah I think that's fair

um I mean I do think that it's like one connotation that it's important to get it away from is the connotation that the sporge is uh or anything in the Splurge bucket is less important than the other four um I think uh no there are the individual items are smaller but a lot of them are quite valuable so like for example account abstraction is very valuable um PBS or some kind of uh like stabilization of the Mev situation is obviously super valuable and uh with the discussion of uh censorship resistance it becomes even more important evm improvements are um like that's a smaller one but you know like evm big

into arithmetic it can be a big deal uh basically let us uh do a lot more cryptography inside of the VM and probably get half the benefits of what we wanted to do with wazama back in the day um ZK snarking everything is like actually a really big deal uh so like I think for if I had to choose between giving up the Verge and giving up CK snarks I would probably give up on the verge uh the yeah yeah like the one of the the reasons why is because uh like Zeke's narcs could give us a sort of poor man's Verge where basically we don't bother with vertical trees and we solve the witness size Problem by us and

our King the witness instead and now that that approach like it's very ugly it has a lot of weaknesses it'll require a far larger amount of uh like work for the Stark provers than would otherwise be necessary but like it at least kind of works and get a stage you get to see objective and snarking in general is just incredibly valuable for making it easier for people to verify stuff on chin uh but uh that's something that um yes that's something that's uh really valuable like zks and arcs are I think I've said this before in my opinion they're as big a yet and as important to technological block breakthroughs

blockchains are and uh we're gonna start seeing them more and more over the course of the of this decade but um you know it's still I would take a while until the technology gets to full maturity so you know fingers crossed and hoping that it just keeps on progressing peacefully and uh we'll see the brave browser is the user first browser for the web3 internet with over 60 million monthly active users and inside the brave browser you'll find the brave wallet the secure multi-train crypto wallet built right into the browser web3 is freedom from Big Tech and Wall Street more control and better privacy but there's a weak point in web 3 your crypto wall and most crypto wallets are browser extensions which can easily be spoofed but the brave wallet is different no extensions are required which gives Brave browser

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Twitter too at zksync so that is the roadmap progress graphic and we've we've looked at that kind of lens on what ethereum looks like next what ethereum looks like moving forward um there are a few other lenses we might want to put on this this topic in this question vitalik before we tie it off one is the economics maybe the economics of staking um are they now set in stone the econ the economics of ethereum or are they you know scheduled to change at some point what's if change what sort of changes might you envision that's definitely a good and very important question

um so changes to the economics of staking that I could see happening one of them might be that I think there are ways to make the deposit and withdrawal cues faster at least in the normal case um so things like allow a huge amount of deposits and withdrawals to happen if the chain finalizes so that'll just make the experience for validators easier and that'll also reduce the incentive to participate in stake pools and it'll make it easier to have smaller and more decentralized stake pools for example so that's one then number two would be changes to the Mev

um architecture would obviously affect the economics of staking like even today the uh Mev revenue is a pretty significant portion of us taking uh Revenue rate and like there is some economic benefit to participating in Mev boost but that's uh something that'll obviously change a lot and especially if the ethereum protocol includes some form of uh enshrines proposal Builder separation and then if Justin gets his way and we also add Mev smoothing which is like a in a change that basically forces Mev Revenue to get redistributed to all of the EGF validators instead of being concentrated in one of them then that will reduce the

variance of staking Revenue which also reduces the incentive to be part of a stake pool so a lot of our little changes like that I think are going to happen as a result of some changes to staking that can happen these system requirements of having a staking node hopefully will decrease over time especially as things like statelessness come in and probably even more one size zika Snorks come in right like I think my longer term dream for ethereum is basically that's uh all that a Staker will have to do is just download and verify a bunch of data verify once an arc and then sign something and if that's the case then like staking on mobile phones is going

to be extremely viable right like like even if you have a phone on the go most likely because uh it it will not consume a huge amount of amount of battery the only thing it'll consume a huge amount of his band was right but I think it will take five or ten years to get there but you know I'm hopeful I think uh and we also have um BLS signature aggregation which can allow us to go from the 32 East stake down to 16 maybe down to eight so like the future sci-fi version of ethereum is I'm just like walking around with my phone with a ether verifying the network right so this is um this actually gets into one of these uh bigger challenges um and uh like trade-offs in the single swad finality roadmap right so in the

single muscle watch finality roadmap basically the idea would be that uh instead of uh some like instead of all validators participating over the course of 32 slots uh you would have uh validators every validator is taking and uh sending a message during every individual SWOT and if you do that then there's basically two ways to do this right one way is what we call Super committees uh where basically you don't literally have every validator uh staking in every slot you have like some subset but it's a pretty big subset like it's about four million ether worth of validators but then you just rapidly rotate all of the

validators in and out to try to make it fair over like even pretty short time scales and so that's one approach and if you take that approach then it should be very possible to reduce the minimum each deposit size at the same time the other approach would be to say well you know we are just going to literally have every validator stake in every slot and this is something that realistically would read um um do some combination of increasing the load on the network and reducing the number of validators that the network can support now one nice thing that I'll be able to do is it'll be able to

basically remove the need for individual validators to have multiple slots right like someone who has ten thousand each they'll be able to just have one SWAT that's just ten thousand each and there's some technical reasons why we can't do that today that have to do with log shuffling and committee assignments but both of those things would go away if we have a single sword finality and if we have uh dank Chardon or even proto-dink sharding and so then like basically you'll be able to have um you know validators with like 10 eth alongside validators with a 10 000 eth so the one Nuance though is that we would not be able to like have a hard guarantee of uh 32 East

um being like of it being possible to stake with 32e thread basically because like we would not be able to know what the distribution of other stakers is right like we'd be able to support a maximum of um you know maybe about 130 000 uh validators or maybe a bit more but if it just so happens that everyone who has a lot of Youth still chooses to support their ESOP into mx32e it's just uh you know either because the wealth distribution turns out that way or because like some people just want to be mean and take up more slots then like unfortunately the minimum stake to staking amount might end up like increasing a little bit higher than the 32 youth right and that's one of the risks of that approach but at the same time the benefit of of that approach

will be a lot more protocol Simplicity a lot more security the chain would like finalize and you would get up to maximum security after like 32 seconds would be a number that uh I think could be realistic to hope for um and yeah like basically the yes so you know there would be a a lot of benefits but at the same time there would be this cost but on the other hand you know if you wanted to try to optimize for having some native ability to stake with like one ether four years than we would need to talk about much bigger uh validator set sizes and uh bigger like needing to handle a larger

number of validators at the same time um but and but also having this like super Community mechanism and then there would be more complexity and there would be more different kind of kinds of trade-offs and yeah so basically you know you either get one really good thing and you sacrifice a bit on the other side or you get a different uh really good thing but then you sacrifice in other ways um if you want a more detailed document that describes this trade-off I think let me just uh look this up and I check uh check this right now I think it's like uh to single slide finality I think it might be the doc yeah so if you just search paths towards single sword finality

um I will actually just uh hear us um send it uh send it to you right there uh then uh like we talk about uh the like base the two strategies um in there the uh super committees versus uh Global uh validator set and I try my best to uh explain to readers what the benefits and the disadvantages of each approach are but I think like because this affects not just the technology because but it also affects the economics and it also affects the Staker experience I think it's important for this to be a community-wide discussion so I would uh really welcome people to read that document and kind of

start you know making their own views heard on like what things they can't value more and what things they value less and we can keep trying to improve these proposals into something that can you know hopefully come close to satisfying everyone let's flag that for the bankless community in the ethereum uh Community which is uh we'll include a link in the show notes to the the post pass to single slot finality it sounds like there's going to be a lot of conversation around that in the months ahead as we you know figure out as a community what to do there and those trade-offs are are real fatalic it is always difficult to adjust you know magic numbers like 32 eth up and yet there seem to be some real benefits to doing that and there are also benefits in in terms of decreasing the uh

decreasing the minimum amount to stake as well but I want to ask you more broadly from another lens on this I mean we've gone through the product roadmap lens from almost like a developer's perspective the features that need to implement but I think there are like maybe three questions in people's minds or three different topics that have come up recently about ethereum's future the one is this concern or question over centralization of stake which we can get to another is censorship resistance which has become a popular topic over the last few months and then the third is looming the background is layer twos and how have they lived up to the hype are they really working let's start with

the first centralization of stake and the concern here vitalik is coinbase Kraken large staking pools they are going to own all of ethereum steak or a majority or you know some number that kind of like breaks these security guarantees of ethereum are you concerned about this and uh what are your thoughts on how the roadmap can can mitigate it if you do have concerns yeah um I think it's definitely always a concern um I do think that the concern is over hyped a bit right like uh the the literals do sometimes uh for example uh try to kind of sneak in this uh depiction depiction of Lido as being a

single centralized actor and like I think a lot of people in the ethereum research team are critical of some aspects of Lido but I think it's important to like defend it in the sense that it's definitely not true that Lido is a single centralized actor right like there isn't it one um you know owner or CIS admin or Dev that has the ability to flip the switch and turn all of the yellow Idol actors into participants in some kind of attack right like it's a protocol that distributes a stake between uh somewhere between like 19 or 21 or like some pretty big number of sub validators we are each of those subvaluators only has a few percent of the stake uh so

vinyl does have some pretty decent uh decentralization internally um obviously even taking a Lido out then like coinbase plus Kraken plus a bunch of others do uh add up to it quite a bit and it is a concern um I think in the short term the good news is that uh like you know these are good people and they're people who love ethereum and they do want to ethereum to prosper and so I think the risk that they're going to do something terrible in the short term is uh pretty low I mean Brian has even been willing to say that like he would rather shut down the coinbase staking a service than sort it into an engine of censorship right

um so uh I mean obviously the like that's uh like those kinds of commitments or commitments that we should hold the ecosystem to like every single um centralized estate staking provider even but obviously the good intentions of specific people are not something that we want to rely on in the long term because we are about being a decentralized ecosystem and I think in the longer term there are some good Solutions right so one thing to point out is that like Bitcoin uh proof of work decentralization and even pre-merge ethereum proof of work decentralization like they were not they're not that high either right like I think uh Bitcoin is uh well controlled by like more than 50

percent of it is like two or three mining pools um let's see I'm gonna go up on the internet again and check btc.com stats pool Foundry USA 23.3 and pool 18 F2 pool 17.1 binance pool 14.3 via BTC 9.5 so like three pools control more than half the Bitcoin Network and five pools control like 80 percent of it right so those are pretty scary numbers they are no less scary and probably even more scary than uh ethereum uh proof of stake now people do sometimes uh reply by saying oh come on you can't say the proof of work pulls and proof stake

pools are equivalence proof of workminders can switch pools at any time but stakers can't but the reality is that we're like months away from Australis and withdrawals are going to mean that you know yeah if you're not happy with your staking pool you absolutely can withdraw and you can immediately redeposit into a different one um there is uh actually even the possibility to add a feature to the protocol which is even better than a withdrawal like basically give stickers the ability to transfer their staking power immediately um now the one uh caveat of that approach is that the Staker would still be vulnerable to being slashed by the old by their previous staking provider for some amount of time

um right but aside from like the in terms of the kind of power in the network like they would be able with this kind of feature they would be able to actually move it over uh very quickly right so proof of stake absolutely can be upgraded and can be designed to make it possible to move stake between different pools and different providers and even change your own Keys very quickly so that's something that will increase practical decentralization quite a bit withdrawal is being enabled is also something that will uh practically like really increase increase the ability to for people to solo stake because as a solar Staker like you're not going to

have this uh kind of this liquidity problem like you'll be basically have the same ability to withdraw your money quickly that even uh or almost like the same ability in the normal case uh as a participant and Widow does right in an exceptional case where the chain is like under attack or whatever then you know if you if you signed up and you're a Staker at the same time as an attack is happening then like you know sorry yes this is what you signed up for and you have to stick around and validate for a couple of weeks but aside from that exceptional situation you know you will be able to just go and leave right so as proof of state gets upgraded I think uh over time you know we are going to keep improving this uh stuff uh more and more and I think proof of stake is going to

get pretty close to a gas system where you will be able to just like start and stop staking whatever you want and I think people are underestimating the extents to which the very real weaknesses of the current uh proof of stake system are something that's going to stick around for the long term metallic would you make the claim that like just as soon as proof of work was kind of Switched Off we fully transitioned to proof of stake that proof of stake even in its current form with maybe some centralized actor controlling more stake than than we'd want is still more decentralized than the former ethereum proof of work Network would you make that claim I would say absolutely um I I would say that for a couple of

reasons um I mean one is um that once you take into account all of the solar stickers and delighto's internal decentralization I think it's just a true as a matter of fact that post-emerge ethereum is like better on any reasonable decentralization metric than uh proof of stake ethereum or sorry proof of work ethereum or even a proof of work Bitcoin the second thing I would say is that proof of stake has much better recovery from 51 attacks right because if a 51 attack happens then you know you can so shall we recover from it you cannot partially automate recovering from it you can do a lot of uh there's a lot of

recovery options that exist that just don't exist at all in a proof of work right improve of work like if half of the miners start attacking you're pretty much screwed right like there's this arguments that like oh you know the the good guys are gonna all come together and they're gonna offer hundreds of millions of dollars of uh like capital and try to like start like bringing the chain back toward the good guys but like come on you know it's uh like just why would you even make a system that relies on that when you can make a system where if an attack happens you can just delete the bad guys at stake and keep going right it's it like just the Practical ability of uh doing it I think is uh just uh much stronger so the uh you know if a 51

percent attack us take attack starts like the amount of actual walking that it has is much lower what's always interesting to me about like popular crypto narratives is um you know you always have to look at them from first principles and kind of think rationally about them because as as a matter of fact it does seem like people were not complaining about how centralized proof of work ethereum was in mining pools Etc in similar form to to bitcoin and yet ethereum through proof of stake has become more decentralized and now people are complaining about it and that's not to say that ethereum doesn't have a ways to go and needs to work on this problem I think it absolutely does but if you just look at the upgrade that just happened you'd think that ethereum just

became kind of a you know a centralized um uh you know controlled uh apparatus of the wef in the state with like with the transition that has not happened but can we talk about a second maybe looming threat which is people are wondering about censorship resistance what about censorship resistance is that still a problem ethereum needs to solve I think censorship resistance is absolutely an important issue and I think there is absolutely a risk that we should be worrying about that like particularly with the switch to like Mev boost type architecture where people validators are going to be Outsourcing

responsibility for uh which blocks to produce that basically we're going to enter a world where almost all blocks get produced by a couple of centralized actors and they're those centralized actors end up censoring um so this is something that has been talked a lot about internally both in the ethereum research community and in the flashbots and MVP community and the good news is that there are a lot of mitigations right so one of the lot mitigations is this concept of a transaction and collision lists akacr lists which are allow validators to say hey I'm going to Outsource responsibility for creating a

Blog but whoever does it has to include this uh this set of transactions right and so you as a validator if you identify transactions that are being censored you can add them to an inclusionalist and like they just are going to be included in whatever block you accept there is even a version of this where the validator adds their transactions to the end after the Builder has already submitted their block right so basically giving the validator extra freedom to add whatever they want to the end of a uh of a builder's block so the Builder doesn't even have to realize that there's like particular transactions that the validator is intent on adding in the same slot

um there's uh all the longer term stuff around the decentralized builders and sgx Builders and um NPC and Zig and snark Builders and all of these uh different concepts uh so basically a lot there's a lot of these different ideas to try to like bring back more autonomy uh to the validator and make sure that the validator still has control and the ability to force uh transactions that they saw to be included despite Builders having control over transaction ordering so that's one major mitigation another major mitigation I think is just ensuring that the Builder in real ear markets are as competitive as possible

and that's something that I think we've seen a lot of good work on over the last couple of months right like there are also the blocks route Builders there's a couple of other builders there's a couple of other relayers that are involved um I think there's some Dash dashboards somewhere let me just see if I can find it again um I forget might it be yeah uh mavboosta.org has uh has one if you look at top relayers and uh top Builders uh so the flashbots relay is uh making 81 of the Mev booster box but then uh blocks throughout Max profit is uh making more than half of the remaining ones and then uh blocks

followed by blocks throughout ethical followed by blocks route regulated uh and then block native manifold and even are still uh managing to make blocks uh at least once an hour so Vitality so like Dave and I run our uh oh nodes via rocket pool and it's been really interesting because like you you have to pick your relay and your block Builder right of this list basically these are some options and there's an interesting like question is like blocks route regulated is like oh flak ofac compliant um your version of a builder and a relay and blocks throughout Max profit is not for example and so the individual validator chooses now are some of these decisions going to be like enshrined in

protocol so that a builder relayer cannot choose to be kind of like oh fat compliant or something like this because what what happens is it does seem to present a a choice uh to the validators do you want to do the blocks route regulated or do you want to do the blocks route Max profit like ofac compliant or not and if you're Brian Armstrong or a coinbase and you're under some regulatory pressure I'm betting you're going to pick the regulated option does this get solved in protocol in some way good question um so first of all I think the concept of relayers is going to go away well no we have in protocol PBS right this is uh I think something that's really

important right so relays are this thing that's like very public and they have like these publicly available names and you have to consciously choose them because relays relays are this trust demanding role where if you as a validator sign up to a relay that's cheating then that really can do a whole bunch of nasty things to steal money from you or cause you to lose money uh within a protocol PBS that trust component is going to go away right and so relays or uh are gonna go away and the only thing that'll be around will be Builders uh so Builders I mean even today the builders uh they are just like zero access something and they don't

really have uh public identities right I mean obviously you are going to be a able to discover the public identities of some of the builders and you know you will there may be some validators that will decide to refuse to accept blocks from some of the builders but otherwise the market of Builders is uh already looking more quite a bit more competitive than the market for Relay relays and hopefully the market for Builders is going to get even more competitive right like any competitive Builder Market the level of uh the email for the amount of room that even winning Builders have to censor is actually very small because if they

start censoring more than a tiny amount then that decreases the maximum bids that they can afford to make and so if you censor it more than a tiny amount even as a winning builder then you would just naturally start producing lower bids than some of the non-censoring builders and so uh validators would just automatically start choosing blocks from the non-sensoring builders just because the bids that they offer are going to be higher so with relayers as this kind of unfortunately centralized a trust providing function removed I think a lot of the problem is going to go away that's good to hear all right let's get to the the last lens of ethereum problems that need to be solved and this is one that was already underway pre-merge but maybe uh with proto-dink

sharding 4844 uh gets kind of accelerated and that is the roll-up Centric roadmap and I just want to ask you a question about LT to progress and in general have l2s so far layer twos that is have they lived up to your to the hype have they lived up to maybe even your hopes I think my answer was mixed um I think they've they have done a lot in I'm like actually having a yeah like a thriving ecosystems around them and better and better ability to bridge between them starting to add some of the ideas around compression uh the l2s the zke VMS have amazed the mail you

know they've gotten uh um the points of where they are like much faster than I was expecting that they would so you know they're just incredibly smart people that have been doing incredibly good work there um the one thing that's probably happened slower than I expected uh by uh quite a bit is uh work on fraud proofs right like uh both optimism and arbitrome like they haven't taken off the training wheels yet and from what I understand Sprite and uh it's even in some cases looking like it's going to be quite a while until the training wheels come off right and so this even makes me wonder like if this is the case and like if it turns out that making a good fraud

proof is like actually almost as hard as making a good ZK VM then are we even going to see this like leapfrog situation where some of these optimistic Roll-Ups are just gonna at some point move straight to ZKA even before the training we also fully come off on the optimistic roll-up I mean if so then that would obviously be a really fascinating outcome um but uh you know at the same time then that's obviously a huge win for like ZK Roll-Ups as a concept um over optimistic Roll-Ups as a concept but you know we'll see Tyler we've done a good job summarizing the ethereum road map talking about the post merge world and and also the the things that have been in conversation

lately censorship positions layer twos and state consensualization of stake of course and this really I think does a good job summarizing the last two years of ethereum I think there was the era of proof of stake and shipping the beacon chain that was like 2020 to where we are now in September of 2022 what do you hope that the era of 2023 to 2024 is for ethereum what what should the developers be focusing on what should the Paradigm of development be and also what role should the community have uh people that are not technical people like me and Ryan uh the content creators and the content consumers and the generalized ethereum Community what role do they

have over the next couple years sure so I think there's two big priorities one of the priorities is to get scaling figured out and I mean that at all layers of the ecosystem like getting the ethereum protocol uh fully roll-up ready which includes things like prototank sharding getting Roll-Ups themselves to be fully ready for users getting applications on top of them getting good Bridge infrastructure between them getting all the wallets to support them I'm not just helping the transition to a fully roll-up Centric ethereum complete and then the other one is a transition from ethereum being in Rapid developing firefighting mode to ethereum being instability mode I think it's a transition that has to happen and

uh I yeah like I do think that to some extent it's uh an inevitable transition because as the ecosystem grows the cost of changing things increases and then they start being all these regulatory uh concerns and uh lots of existing stakeholders and so there is this kind of narrow window to get a lot of important changes through but at the same time like the ecosystem really needs to get out of this kind of firefighting like you know hey the community is yelling at us to get something now now um and so like you know let's make a totally stripped down pragmatic version of it and ship it uh mode into a mode of like much more deeply caring about making sure that every single step that the uh as roadmap takes is on the path

towards some kind of more stable uh form of uh long-term uh roadmap that leads toward sustainability um and aside from those two there's obviously some like smaller items like uh you know the The Verge The Purge and the Splurge um I came with abstraction uh ZK snarking things continuing to improve proof of stake uh but uh those are kind of separate they're also kind of a uh I mean they're they're kind of the same thing right they're protocol changes and in a lot of cases that are geared more toward uh long-term sustainability than toward like putting out fires that exist today

um but uh you know they uh they need to happen and uh you know they will happen and we can just kind of be fairly calm and careful about it uh make sure not to put too much strain on the development teams both because that'll cause them to burn out and uh because uh we don't want it to like become not become possible to create a client a big a new client at some point in the future because there's so much work to do um so yeah those are the goals as I see them so I think what you're saying is and what I'm also seeing is the era of when merge is over but also more broadly the era of when is over and I think that's

because like you know communities the masses they like they like the token stuff they like the prices and the merge was fundamentally from the community standpoint about reducing the eth issuance so that's going to be the thing that impacts the thing that they obviously care about the most which is ether and now that's in the rear view mirror like win merch like we already did it uh so they're like when sharding doesn't really have the same ring to it uh I don't really see as many people going when charting when charting not gas prices the slow David yeah not with gas prices well that's a good point but I think for telling what you're saying is that um like the whole when when when part of the ethereum communities in in the rear view mirror and now that we've shipped proof of stake if we shipped a

good version of it it's working well and now these The Meta of ethereum developers can be a little little bit more relaxed and intentional as to what actually and per and and maybe even more of a perfectionist as to what actually does get shipped on chain and so we can make sure that we get 4844 absolutely perfect we can make sure we get PBS absolutely perfect because we are in a slower and and more intentional uh Paradigm of ethereum development would you relate and resonate with these statements I would say so I would say that's a very good summary beautiful hey bankless Nation as we alluded to in the beginning we're cutting up this episode because it was so long and we've gotten

the feedback that y'all don't like the long episodes uh so we're cutting it up and and splitting it into two different episodes uh the second half of this conversation is coming a week from today next Monday and this is the conversation about ethereum as a platform for Network States uh ethereum and its intersection with AI and overall how Dows should be governed and what a Dao really is so stay tuned for that conversation it's happening in seven days days if you are listening to this on Monday but also if you're a bankless premium subscriber it's in your feed right now so switch over to the premium RSS feed to finish that conversation otherwise I'll see you all in a week hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to

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