[2026] S.10 Ep.6 - Vitalik Buterin: Public Goods Funding in 2026 & What Builders Should Do Next

Transcript

Welcome to the Green Pill podcast. If you're just joining us, we are exploring how technology, community, and new forms of coordination can build, fund, and accelerate what matters in the 21st century. If you want to learn more, visit our website at greenpill.network where you can download the Greenpill books for free, play with some of our ecosystem projects, join the Telegram, or participate in the network. Today I am very excited to have Vitalic Bdderin, the founder of Ethereum as a returning guest on the podcast and my co-host Devanch Meta and I are talking about public goods funding in the Ethereum space in 2026 with Vitalik. If you've been a longtime follower of the show, you know that Vitalik and I have done an episode every December for the last several years about the public goods funding ecosystem. And the goal is to

talk about what is going on in public goods funding in the Ethereum ecosystem in the past year to do a retrospective and then to guide builders for what they should be working on in the next year or so. What do we do in 2026? Well, I think this episode was very interesting for hearing Vitalik's thoughts on where the public goods funding ecosystem is going. And in this episode, we talk about what does a reformed public goods funding space look like? Where does the money come from? What are the top mechanisms? and how do we pivot as an ecosystem of builders? And in doing so, in having this conversation with Vitalik, I've tried to make this podcast into a channel through which uh we can have a conversation with Vitalik about how it's going within this space and what trends

he's excited about and where he'd like to see builders focus in 2026. So, that was the goal of the episode. I think that you're really going to enjoy it. Let's cut over to the episode recording now. The next voice you hear will be myself and my co-host Devancha interviewing Vitalik Bdderin about public goods funding and what it should look like in 2026. Enjoy it. Hi Vitalik. Hi Devunch. >> Hi Kevin. >> Excited to talk about public goods funding in 2026. Vitalic, you and I have done an episode in December every year for the last four years and the goal has been to guide builders uh what they should be focused on in the next year.

So my goal is to retrospect 2025 and then to guide people towards where's the alpha, where's the meta in 2026 in public goods funding in Ethereum. So let's start off with why. Begin with why. Why public goods funding? Why is that important to you Vitalik? >> So I think uh there is two answers that I have to this. So first there is the direct uh answer which is basically that public goods are important and uh so many of the things that we depend on in all of our lives are fundamentally based on public goods right you know this uh podcast will be available to everyone most of the algorithms that uh our

blockchains and even our internet uh were are built on are made by people and uh released to everyone for free. You know, in the physical world, you know, quality of water, air, everything. I think particularly in a space like ours that cares about openness and decentralization, the problem becomes doubly important because uh a big part of our goal is reducing reliance on like centralized choke points and like actors that can have power over everyone. Um but that itself uh like removes uh a lot of the more traditional kind of corporate opportunities for monetization because you know if you are at short

points then uh like you can use that to extract value and so in some sense the funding problem is solved right and so if we're saying that we don't want that then solving the problem in other ways becomes even more important and and so the better we can uh fund public goods the better a chance we have at uh pushing the open world to a higher standard of quality and a competitive standard of quality to know the more of proprietary and commercial world. And then the second uh answer that uh I would give is that uh if you step back and uh think about the the spirit of uh

the crypto space and uh the kinds of goals that the crypto space has uh had from the very beginning, right? I think uh there are a few of these key directions that really stand out. I think one of them is uh like censorship resistance, right? and uh basically saying we're going to create these uh alternative systems that give people who are excluded from traditional banks um other kinds of uh traditional systems and alternative uh path that they can take for things like sending messages to each other for payments uh for investment other forms of finance. Um then uh more recently of course and know

there is the whole kind of number goal upside of crypto which is uh you know always very strong and it's the ultimate double-edged sword in a lot of ways because you know numbers going up pays for a lot of things but uh on the other hand it has this constant uh risk of uh compromising the space's ability to provide the other things. And then the third aspect is uh institution design right and uh this is the idea that uh well if we want to give people alternatives then uh like you have to actually create those alternatives and uh if you don't want them to like

basically just be the new boss that eventually becomes the same as the old boss. You have to actually figure out how these things are going to maintain themselves, right? And so there we've had this like long 10 15 year this tradition of thinking about you know look how would you design you know block rewards for a blockchain then we had DAOs how would you govern a DAO how would you govern a DAO that runs an oracle what about running a stable coin what about running a treasury uh what about uh something that's meant to be much more dynamic and uh startup like and and then this includes things like uh quadratic funding and quadratic

voting. This includes all kinds of different voting mechanisms. I think uh a bit further from you know my own corner of the space and more in other corners of the space but people things like conviction voting know have been around for a decade right and uh there's been this like strong desire to use this uh space as an opportunity for figuring out these kinds of designs for how to allocate capital also how to run organizations or generally these kind of you internet based uh structures that uh require adaptability but u also some kind of long-term stability with uh the

hope that these uh solutions can then be applied in other spaces as well right and I think to me yeah public goods funding is also a very important cluster of that >> wow that's a really great response and um I'll follow up on one side of it which is like it's part of the spirit of the crypto space and some of the goals we have. Um, so I think like right now we are seeing like the full narrative of stable coins and DeFi and RWA is really picking up. >> So I guess like why should builders be working in public goods funding as a space when it's when it seems to be on a on an EB and like and why should they focus on this rather than like some of the more mainstream rather than some of

the applications which are becoming more mainstream now. I think uh now is um really the best uh opportunity to uh really reform this uh the the public goods funding space and uh make it much stronger and uh especially make it much stronger by uh using some uh new ideas, new technologies and new principles that uh weren't really in play at all five years ago or 10 years ago. Right? And so I think you know if you make a new D5 project or a new stable coin then uh there is the possibility that you make something extremely valuable and

extremely interesting but uh by default uh you're basically taking the world from 100 decentralized exchanges to 101 decentralized exchanges right and so it's a relatively saturated uh space but with uh public goods funding on the other hand like it's something that uh the world needs and it's uh something that is worth getting into I think precisely because it's uh in this uh kind of lull at the moment right where there were a lot of these previous paradigms and a lot of these previous paradigms have like basically uh run their course and uh like sort of hit their walls in various ways and I

think it's the perfect time it's a a really uh high leverage opportunity to kick uh this part of the space back into gear by like being successful with uh something that's uh really new and that's based on some of the new technologies that I've only been around for like the last two or three years. To get down to the real thorny question that I feel like a lot of people in my network are feeling is um >> where does the money come from for working on public goods funding? Is it just charity? Um, and I'll and I'll say that I think the answer was different in 2021 when you could run these billion-dollar dials just on Vibes versus in 2025 where there's just less funding available for almost everything.

And so in 2026, if I'm working on public goods funding, where can I expect that money to come from? And uh, you know, how do I how do I compensate myself uh along the way? And or is is it more of just like is that something that we're just we're just giving in the form of like charity? So my uh long-term vision for how this uh space works is uh that we can create these uh mechanisms that are robust enough that like we can start plugging them in directly to um like streams of uh funding that have very large scale but at the same time like need a higher a very high level of

stability and legitimacy to be uh be able to accept something, right? So, one I think historically the answer for this has been like block rewards of uh chains, right? And uh like that is a pool of uh funding that theoretically still exists and you know, for example, I know like Filecoin has been uh like they've been very public about their intention to like use uh their block rewards to do public goods funding. Um I mean Zcash know the price has recently been going up and they've been consistent about their intention uh to do that right so that's like historically been one of the

answers but also I would love us to explore more of answers that like stretch beyond the uh crypto space um so we can uh give one example right so let's take software licenses um So like software licenses like and open source software in general is uh something that's this uh very it's a very large there are many trillions of dollars that depend on open source software. there's huge numbers of people that are writing it. And historically, uh, like these licenses have, uh, basically said things like, you know, either you can basically

use the software to do whatever you want or there's been this kind of more copy left version that uh, like I've been warming up to quite a bit recently, at least compared to before. basically said, well, you can use it, but uh if you make derivative works, then uh you know, you also have to share everything that that you make and make it uh open as well, right? And historically, one of the challenges of both of these versions is like they have not really solved the uh monetization problem, right? And uh one of the ideas that uh like I've had for a long time is like potentially you could stick something like a Harbor tax into a software

license, right? And you could have a license that says for example that like ba basically yeah if you just use it then you know you can use it for free but also if you use it in a way that involves any kind of like proprietary exclusion then like you have to pay some kind of tax based on that right and so it's like the ideal way to do it is like some form of like it's basically efficiency increasing taxation in the sense that it uh both brings in money to some kind of a pot that uh if uh you know we assume that the pot is like redistributed to good things by magic and like that magic is know exactly what funding mechanisms are trying to fill in

right then uh like it's helpful from that perspective but then it also creates this uh kind of marginal incentive for people to like basically try to be less proprietary and more sharing than they otherwise would be. Right? So like that's been like one of the ideas in uh my head of and like what like how we can try to like make that ecosystem both uh like more financially self- sustaining and also like explore this uh like design space of uh things like things that still fit into like free and open source software definitions but like try to like capture those uh different pieces of uh the spectrum and kind of nudge people uh

knock toward openness in uh pushes everyone further on the spectrum. Um but then if we do that right then uh like all of these designs they have this problem which is like well if uh there's a requirement that you have to put money into a pot then like how is the plot controlled and uh that requires a lot of uh stability right because if you just say the pot is controlled by the pot foundation then you have to ask well who are the board of directors of the pod foundation and uh if the thing grows to $35 billion then uh will the pod foundation have some kind of open AI situation and uh you know will the governance just suddenly turn into something completely different? will know the plot foundation gets uh

captured by nonprofit people who have a weird ideology that goes in uh one direction and suddenly everything goes into like maximizing preservation of 3,000 year old languages or like some other basically you know do or even like will it just like actually get just like can taken out through corruption right like if you have you know a board that controls 35 billion ion dollars. There's lots of obfiscated ways to convince some of those board members to give you a share of that, right? And so the question is uh like like basically you think of it as uh being like especially if it's a viral license, right?

Especially if it's something like the GPL, then like basically it's sort of like a social equivalent of hardware, right? Like when you make hardware, you're etching some like something into into this piece of silicon where once you etch it in, it's very hard to change, right? And uh like here the know the the issue is similar, right? It's like once you make a a viral license, once you etch it in, then uh it becomes hard to change, right? And like you want something that's uh like stable that you like a pointer to a mechanism that you can actually rely on in the long term, right? And like there's lots of different ways to do it, right? Like you don't even have to make a a

monolithic DAO at all, right? Like you could potentially say something that says, you know, oh, you know, like you have to like if you pay a tax then like basically you have to fund your dependencies. And you could potentially even leave it completely open like which dependencies you fund, right? And uh like the only rule is basically no self-deing. And no self-deing is like kind of vague, but at the same time it's like an area of law that uh nonprofits have already had to deal with for a century. And so it's a familiar territory for a lot of people, right? So you know you could imagine concretely like uh you know an open source license that says something like well if you

build things on top that you share to everyone then know you no conditions like basically you can do whatever uh but then at the same time if you make something that is proprietary yet then you have to put some amount of money yeah into like basically you know funding your dependencies and like you could even say well uh like that just like you you get to choose what the mechanism is as well as uh it's not self-dealing and then you know you could imagine like deep funding gadgets and other gadgets that we're working on right now just like being a nice defaults that a lot of people just end up going for because they're lazy right so you know like that was you know a bit

of a degression into like one particular example right but like I think to me the uh like the core is that we uh should be trying to expand beyond the crypto space and uh like we should be expanding beyond the uh assumption that you know there will be blockchains slloshing around you know like piles of money based off of vibes that uh like we'll be able to keep on using and uh like I think if we find those alternatives that will uh like it'll make the space much more sustainable and it'll make it more real impactful at

the same time. >> Yeah. Just to say your answer back to you uh before we move on. Um if I were to sort of like reduce your answer down to a line or two, for me it feels like in 2021 when Dows were just running off of vibes and it was super frothy, we could do things like quadratic funding or things where there was just sort of a general aperture of public goods and like regen vibes. But now it feels like we're moving to a regime that's much more scarcity mindset and also we have a bias towards uh provable public goods things like cryptographic proof of um stake or proof of work or like deep funding to me feels like much closer to proof of work than quadratic funding.

And so the aperture has just like very much narrowed to the things that are provable and the things that are the core public goods of Ethereum. So like protocol guild and deep funding over things that are more like vibes based like quadratic funding. If I if I were to reduce your answer down into that uh would you push back on that? Yeah, I mean I think in in some ways actually yeah you uh raised a really important points that I didn't even get to right which is uh finding funders that are truly general purpose is hard right and uh if you look at what quadratic funding is fundamentally the mechanism is fully general purpose right uh because the mechanism just says like look here's a formula it's based on the number of humans and so there's nothing in that

mechanism that would that even biases to support like say projects on Ethereum instead of projects on Salana or even instead of uh mil projects on top of chat GPT right and like that that's not really a favorable thing uh for a lot of people to put money into like sort of you could even think of uh quadratic funding as being like it's extremely lawful on the sort of lawful versus chaotic spectrum right like there's a certain kind of vibe sense in which it's basically assuming a world government, right? And uh I think uh both within crypto and in the world in general, I know we've definitely shifted toward

that like both a more scarce and a more chaotic world. And uh we want to build mechanisms that don't assume a world government like I think you know we wants to assume altruism to some degree but uh if we wants to increase the chance that uh like people actually put money into pots then like we have to I think I know acknowledge the reality that it's much more realistic for people to put money into pots that are at least somewhat connected to things that they personally care about as opposed to some kind of general like according to uh wild economics make the world better sort of plot right and

uh you know deep funding sort of does that right because uh you know like deep funding the graph it theoretically stretches over the whole internet right but deep funding as a funding mechanism the funer has to choose the vertex that they're funding right and then the money goes to you know the dependencies and dependencies of that right and I think that's I mean it's a very significant shift that's a very uh meaningful shift right um so like going from uh like assuming a world governance to something that's sort of more robust to a chaotic world is definitely yeah one of those other important shifts as well >> the the sort of visual that's in my mind's eye here is bottoms up uh not top

down and I'm imagining a sort of polyentric structure where the Ethereum ecosystem >> has is polyentric which just means many centers and then it has its L2s and all of the apps that are built on top of that and that's sort of like a tree structure and if each of those were to fund its own public goods very narrowly then the things that Ethereum depends on like open source software and the internet and cryptograph privacy and cryptographic trust uh will be really well funded but if each were to like 8020 like fund its own public goods and then like a wider swath of public goods, you have enough funding streaming out for the things that you existentially depend on, but then also other pro-social things that are good for the world. Any reaction to that visual and then I'll pass the next question to

Devanch. >> Yeah, I mean I think I agree and I think if you do this right, you don't need to hardcode the 8020, right? Because uh like if you take our own ideas seriously and you take seriously the idea that the world is interconnected then uh even just a rule that says fund your dependencies and then uh let that propagate further down the graph like in principle you know eventually like the water being in the world being drinkable is upstream of uh everything including you know go ethereum right um and so in principle Well, like the like you should be able to design a mechanism where sort of each part of it

is local but then it still adds up into something where if uh enough people at a broad enough scale participate then it ends up covering everything. But uh yeah, I think these ideas to try to like like as you said bottoms up, right? like make things that are decomposible into these smaller pieces where within each of those smaller pieces like the people that are participating in it and the people that are like policing that individual piece like they only have to work off of knowledge about that smaller thing that they understand and like you don't have every person on earth you know trying to figure out if uh cleaning the water is uh like more important or

cleaning the air is more important because that's something like most people have absolutely no idea about. >> So I think that brings to like me to another question about like in private goods we have this nice feedback loop where if you build something which people don't like you basically go out of business but in public goods we've seen like especially in the frothy era we saw a lot of projects which died just continue chugging along because they had good social connections. So even in the example of like water like who gets the right to be able to deliver water to the go ethereum developers or maintainers and when should they go out of business because they are not doing their job properly. So how do we create like that accountability and feedback loop in public goods which is so nicely present

in in private goods. >> Right? So this is um the sort of thing that's uh easier in the world of software than in the world of uh you know like physical things right because uh you know in the world of software like you can look at go ethereum and you can see like what are the other things that go ethereum uses and like this gets into more of a judgment call but you can even see you know like what dependencies of gothereum are more important what dependencies of go ethereum are less less important, right? And uh like that's uh the big part that the like more complexity of the deep funding mechanism is uh really trying to address

at scale, right? And so like in principle uh there are people like for any particular object, right? there are people who are close enough to that object that they are able to evaluate those contributions. And so if uh you can do that in a somewhat programmatic way then uh like the hope is that know if uh I make a software library that uh at first gets used by a few people but then it falls away and uh like people stop building on it then the facts that people stop building on it is something that will get noticed right and then the percent like dependency that I get know

like that number will slowly decrease and then eventually over time it will uh get marks down to zero right so like everything of course depends on like what the quality of that mechanism is right but uh the idea is that you try to like have that mechanism and you try to like based it on these uh like much more concrete questions of like to what extent is a thing that I'm building actually being used by other things as you know as opposed to as kind of like large scale politics where like everyone's trying to campaign like hey quadratic fund my thing >> I like the analogy of if you if what you're building isn't valuable anymore then less people will use you as a

dependency which means that your revenue streams will will eventually dry up so I think that's a very clear-cut feedback loop >> thanks yeah Gitcoin started focusing on open source software and how we fund our dependencies and I know that that's something that's near and dear to our hearts And uh it also feels like an existential public good for Ethereum to really focus on. Uh not only because Ethereum is built on open- source software, but uh also because I think that the people who work on traditional open source software are very influential and if there's funds flowing to them from Ethereum, it it's kind of a term offensive in a time where crypto is not very popular in the world. So >> um I guess if I were to segue this into a question, um it feels like open source

software as a public good is a priority right now. I think privacy uh I'm reading the the tea leaves here and privacy is an important public good. >> So privacy is interesting right because it's both a public good but then it's uh like it's something that lots of people care about and at the same time privacy is uh often sort of by default in tension with business models unless you do a lot of uh hard work to figure out how to combine the two. And so there's uh like very inherent uh public goods problems there. But then at the same time, privacy is also upstream of a lot of public goods mechanisms being able to work, right? Because if like all of the voting and uh all of the not like

ranking mechanisms, whatever you call them, are public, that creates like a maximum room for people to influence each other, right? And so like you can have bribery, you can have social games and like we saw all of the all of those things uh happening in like existing mechanisms and existing DAOs and so on, right? And so like actually yeah the when I mentioned at the beginning that you know the space needs to be sort of reformed according to some new technologies and some new principles. I think uh I mean we talked about the the new principles somewhat for the two technologies. uh uh for me the the talk two are uh programmable cryptography and AI right and uh programmable cryptography like basically it solves

this privacy problem right and that includes zk it includes like some f and uh AI deep funding of course the idea is that it's trying to like rank all of these what millions of dependency edges in a programmatic way. And so and then like you have a human jury spot-checking it and uh the question is like what is something that is even capable of uh delivering a million answers uh to questions and uh AI is basically it right and so like that's like one of the ways of using AI rather than the other way of uh using AI is to basically see it as a kind of voter

assist right so like the classic problem in Dows is people are too lazy to vote for like more than five times. And so the idea is like, well, what if you know you can delegate an AI to vote on your behalf, right? And like you're basically replacing yourself with a good enough model of your values and preferences that's uh much cheaper to execute, right? So yeah, I mean those are the two kinds of technologies. Um but actually yeah I wanted to ask a question to you actually maybe to both of you Kevin and Dvash which is I mean this uh idea that uh the crypto space doing the um open source funding is uh a way to like

basically win friends in a space that's really uh I think values aligned with a lot of the spirit of crypto but at the same time that has a lot of people that look suspiciously at it. I mean in your experience like how much has this panned out? Like what have been the uh responses of um like non-crypto open-source developers who suddenly learns that they got you know an X,000 payout from Optimus Retro Funding or Gitcoin or whatever other gadget.

>> Yeah, Devanch, you've been sort of on the the frontier of this with deep funding. So, I'm curious to get your feelings, but my my sort of like highle vibe check is that a lot of people in open source software are completely dismissive of crypto and they just can't get past the headlines about the volatility or the Trumpcoin and there's nothing you can do that will convince them. And if you were to offer them money, they would turn it down if it was crypto because they don't want to have to deal with the taxes or the reputational risk. But I think that there's a little bit like when you're able to click into a little bit more nuance and I'm thinking of the people that I know that go to a conference like sustain oss which is open collectives conference and they're really have an

open mind about these things. I think if you lead with integrity and earnestness and you explore the problems and you show them that you're really in it for the mission like they are then it can turn some heads and so uh you know I don't know what percentage of traditional open source is in the first category or the latter category but there's definitely a non-negligible uh set of people who are open to experimenting and open to having their minds changed. Devon, you've been on the front uh front line of this with with deep funding. What do you think? Yeah. So I think it's like um in policy making we always think in terms of next best alternative. So if we don't do this then what's the next best alternative? And something I'm hearing is there's a lot

of acquisitions going on for good opensource repos. So that's kind of my read of the situation that a lot of people like even KL carvon at open source observer was complaining about how a lot of their own dependencies have got acquired by multinational corporations and conglomerates and they can't use them anymore essentially and they won't like be updated anymore. So I think that's kind of the frame that we should be presenting the problem in that look if you don't kind of try to experiment with novel cryptoeconomic mechanisms you're basically looking at an acquisition by a corporation down the line and is that really the path you want to go down I think uh one of my kind of highle views on this is that it's like always healthier and more successful if you like mix financial

outreach and uh social outreach like it's uh like it it feels more genuine to people when you know you have an actual relationship with them and and then you financially supporting them as part of that than just like totally random out of the blue bribery. And uh you know we're I think uh like we've like as a community we're getting better at the social outreach right I mean even at Dev Connects and there's you know like Roger from tour and like Kim and a lot of other people from some of these more traditional uh I guess cipher punk outside of crypto type of projects. um you know the being

a graphino people have come to several of the DAC events uh like right the so there's like this growing intersection and uh like the dependency funding concept kind of like feels very uh natural with that right because the whole idea is basically that you're funding things that you actually depend on right and so like if I'm writing some random you know like virtual machine optimization library and I've never heard of crypto and then suddenly yeah I get like 1.5 ETH and I'm told that like wait this is like this money is coming

to me because a bunch of projects in the Ethereum ecosystem like actually yeah I'm going to use all of this stuff then like that feels better than just randomly getting 1.58 for no reason right so I guess that That's kind of the hope, right? And uh and then at the same time, I think like we should be trying to find ways to scale this mechanism, but uh not just get these cryptospecific revenue sources. I I guess I'm wondering uh you know as as we're sort of in this place where we're reforming the public goods funding space. I'm wondering, it feels like we're in a little bit of an uncanny valley between the 2021 era where there was lots of funding and good

vibes and this this future where there's some sort of like flowing funding coming from this network tree of bottoms up L1's and L2s and I'm wondering you know what we do in that in that meantime you know what keeps the space alive and what do we do during this liinal time it feels like focusing on privacy and open source those are growth areas right now but you know if I'm a builder in 2026 six. In this liinal time where the the the funding isn't quite flowing yet, it feels like my best move is to like cozy up to a treasury, figure out what they want and it and maybe it's like open source or privacy. You know, what would you focus on in 2026 if you were a public goods funding builder, Vitalik?

Yeah, I think my uh answer here is probably the same as my answer for the bigger question of uh like what would you do if you had like new Dow governance ideas which is that I think uh working with new projects is more realistic than working with some of the older projects and the reason is that uh for any existing project like if you're going to change the mechanism then like you have to fight against existing stakeholders you have to fight against people who are fat and happy under the existing set of allocations. Um you uh have to convince people whose default instinct is well it's not broken so I fix it even when in reality it might be

yeah like actually like a third broken or half broken. Uh whereas with newer projects like not only are they starting from zero but also they're hungry for ways to distinguish themselves and show that they're not just uh the same old thing, right? Um so basically uh you know like I if uh I were just coming into the space as a uh like public goods mechanism designer like I would uh I I would cozy up to Aztec rather than cozying up to like one of the 5-year-old EVML2s for example, right? That's uh like that kind of analogy, right? So that's uh yeah I think that that um that's probably one thing I would also

seriously uh like think like otherwise I would uh also remember to think about the problem as like not just a tech problem but uh also as a uh like interfacing with a traditional world problem potentially a law problem and uh like some of these other domains Right. And uh like basically think through the question of like what is uh a thing that uh would make uh like some of the big existing like open source software developers possibly even you know people making uh open source

LLMs like some of these newer spaces interested in like some kind of licensing model that incorporates dependency funding in some Yeah, I think you know the the big commonality is basically like work with the new rather than uh working with the old because I just expect working with the new is going to be easier. >> As you were saying that the sort of in my mind's eye, I was picturing different layers of sediment from different layers of history. There's kind of like the 2017 ICO era uh history that was built and then the 2021 DeFi DAO era and then now we're in this 2025 era where it feels like AI and institutional funding and stable coins are the new meta and

we're going to have different layers of sediment uh as the ecosystem evolves and the public goods funding you know whatever the dust is from that layer of history is going to be redefined every single cycle. So, I don't know. That's that's at least how I'm picturing the evolution in my mind's eye, but I love the the dictim to sort of focus on the new and and not reforming the old. >> Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of us really uh have to do that this year, right? I think, you know, even in Ethereum, I feel like we've uh you know, renewed the uh ideas, renewed the memes, uh renewed the focuses in a lot of different ways, right? And that's uh definitely something that uh every ecosystem has to do.

>> Great. Um so I think like one thing we've seen from the 2017 2021 and now is like a greater focus on how does this benefit me. So whereas earlier optimism was happy to be a general purpose funer. I think now we are seeing a lot more specific funding like how is this going to benefit my token is the funding mechanism going to involve use of my own specific token and give it utility? Um how is funding going to benefit my bottom line? So I guess like you know when Bitcoin had this analysis which maybe Awoki can talk about it if they had got tokens back from projects that launched it how much would they have earned but does that skew our decision matrix in the first place that we then try to fund projects that could give us

a return so I guess it's like yeah I don't know what the specific question is but like how do we balance the growing trend towards uh how does this benefit me particularly with the fact that some repos need to be uninfluenced Right. Yeah. I guess the answer that I've kind of given so far, right, is that uh like I think the thing that you don't want is like you don't want an explicit like charity percentile, right? Because if you have an explicit charity percentile, then like competitive pressure is going to just like knock that down to like 10% then five and one and then like it gets forgotten, right? I think uh what you want is you want a uh social norm of uh funding your own dependencies in a way

where it feels natural that you're supporting the things where supporting them has a lot of value to you personally but at the same time you're being very positive some with uh the rest of the ecosystem and uh supporting some of these broader public goods. >> Talc I'm excited about Octant. I think funding public goods with yield is an incredible idea and they just launched their vaults product. Wondering if you can comment on that. >> Yeah, I mean I I think Octant is great and I think uh having these treasuries that do things with yield is uh also a great idea. Um I think also coming up with ways where other projects can follow on uh by yeah like basically

parking their capital and uh effectively donating their yield is great. Like I think there's uh a lot of weird structural reasons in the world, right? For why uh like often getting someone to donate a million dollars is harder than getting someone to park um a pile of money in a way that gives you a million dollars of yield. And so you know I think uh that's something that we really uh should be taking advantage of. >> Yes. So I'll continue the rapid fire format that between these three things like which is important in public goods increasing the sources of funding uh figuring out new methods for allocating it or on accountability for projects once you give money. Yeah, interesting.

And I think uh all three are definitely important. Like I think focusing we definitely need to focus more on the first kind of as a percentage than uh we did historically. And uh I mean to me then you know like as I've said right the nice thing about deep funding is that it sort of makes that first piece more tractable like the social norm of fund your own dependencies as opposed to the social norm of pay the tax that goes to the global public goods god right in the second one I think yeah continues to be important and uh like I think it's good for us to continue to have these kind of rigorous themes that keep

mis pushing the mechanisms forward. Um, yeah. And then third, the accountability piece is interesting. Actually, I'm curious how both of you guys uh see that problem. Like I guess what are some successes and also like some examples of failures uh and and like if you don't want to name names, you could even just talk about categories of uh projects that uh you know received some uh public goods funding and then like different directions that they've uh gone with it in the years that followed. Yeah, for me it feels like we're moving from this like sort of like vibes-based accountability model where it's badge holders or quadratic funding donors making subjective decisions around the epistemologically like the epistemology

of quadratic funding's accountability is basically the more people vote for you, the more popular you are, the more money you should get. And that's just kind of like it relies a lot on the wisdoms of the crowd where in reality the crowd is very low information and they just see a brand they like and so they fund it. Whereas something like deep funding I think has a much deeper evaluation, deeper epistemology of whether this thing is valuable or not. So I'd say we're moving from like a shotgun to a sniper rifle in terms of how we build accountability for these things. Devanch, what do you think? >> Mhm. >> Um, yeah, I think the kind of the thing that's been most lacking so far is the nature of the infinite game. Um, so even Optimism, for example, only had its retro programs for 6 months at a time.

So that sets up a bad game theory dynamic where I want like I don't know if this program is going to be around in 6 months. So it like it it doesn't set up that kind of like it doesn't set up the flywheel which is which retrofunding is supposed to set up. So I think that's the first thing that's kind of missing that hey we gave you money 6 months ago. What have you done in these 6 months since we gave you money and then you get for another 6 months. I think that's something which deep funding will also have to address like going ahead that um once we've given out the first bunch of allocations getting some update on what they've done with those allocations and having the human like the human experts or the judgment or the people giving the spot checks them being able to see the

utilization of that money and then making a judgment based on that and AI is also getting access to their status updates. I think that's going to be how things move forward but making things into a continuous game rather than a one-off game. I think that's been the missing element so far in these mechanisms. >> Yeah. And I I I agree actually. I think uh like one of the weaknesses of these has always been that they're kind of designed in this roundbased and like manual kind of halfhazard way where I think like just social pressure constantly leads to like them happening at totally random times. And one thing that I would love for deep funding is to for us to like get as soon as possible maybe within 2026 to the point where the whole mechanism runs on chain and uh you

know including jury and everything and it just does like runs like clockwork and like whether monthly or weekly or something else. Um but I guess another question to kind of fire back on uh accountability like what is like what are the sort of theories of what accountability is that we're working um on right so like is uh or rather like basically like what is the carrot or the stick right so are we saying you know if uh a project underperforms and it stops receiving money um might we once to say that like a project has to make some other kind of explicit it pre-agreements that it'll do something like uh

potentially like staying permanently uh open source or something similar like do we mean something else? >> Yeah. So I think like accountability I found is often linked to motivation that sometimes like when I'm left completely unaccountable uh then I find it harder to get like motivated to do the work. Whereas when someone is there to hold me accountable I often find myself charged up with internal energy. like it's not rational or anything, but that's kind of how it is. And that's kind of the way that I've that's in a sense the healthy way that I look at accountability now.

It's less about someone coming behind you with a stick, but it's more like I don't want to let down these people, so I better like kind of even though I feel like doing nothing today, I'm still going to go out and like do something. Um, >> so the stick is stuck in your own mind. >> Yeah. Right. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that makes sense. like um I'm sure even just uh someone coming and asking like well what has been done since then like even without any financial motives attached will like have a big portion of the effects.

>> And I wonder if like one interesting approach might be that like someone who did a spot check on a repo would basically be able to follow up with them later on as well to like even learn was my spot check correct or not. So in a sense the jurer in deep funding is updating their own knowledge and that's also giving motivation to the like in in like to that open source repo as well. But I think like baking in the accountability question in code is actually super hard. I've not seen anyone like seriously attempt to do it beyond just self evaluation.

>> Yeah, that's interesting. like uh yeah could you uh like ask jurors to make the same evaluation over multiple different uh time periods and then uh make see what changed. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like one thing which I which was very funny exercise I did was uh I would like anonymize the jurors and then I would get on calls with the repos and I would read out the juror comments on their repos and like a lot of them found this incredibly valuable as an exercise like you know some of them like some of it was very critical as well on the repos but they all actually loved it then like just getting this like raw unfiltered feedback. So I think that in

a sense if we can build on that I think that it it's a promising because unlike QF which relies on like low information crowds which no one takes seriously like deep funding is like a few experts giving judgments. So even reposs which don't need the money still actually really value being part of the mechanism just because they get these experts to give judgments on them. >> That's so interesting. I now I wonder like what if we al also create opportunities for AIS to like attach reasoning with their messages. Um right like it's sort of the equivalent of the poly market troll box but for bots.

Yeah, but like I think the you know the benefits would be I mean one is of course like even reading that LLM reasoning from the best traders I'm sure would be valuable for repos but then also it would give uh jurors some place to start. Vitalik uh the open source observer team is working on something called PSL. It's a profit sharing license where specifically if you make over a certain amount of revenue you have to profit share. So, um I'm wondering what you think of licenses like this. They're not technically open source in the in the traditional way.

They're uh they're they're uh profit sharing license and and so uh you know, is that something that you would support? Do you think that that's an ongoing uh source of funding for deep funding or other public goods funding mechanisms that's useful? Yeah. So like the version of that that I would be uh enthusiastic about is uh something that sort of charges uh not based on like how much profit you get but sort of based like based on something that approximates the idea of sort of how proprietary you are right um so it's sort of the kind of Harburger tax line of thinking right where um you know if you make a billion dollars without excluding anyone and without like having any uh any trade secrets then uh like go ahead. But uh like basically the more uh

sort of further away from uh a copy left approach you're taking then you know the more of a profit share you have to do. Um and uh I think the yeah nice thing about the like this kind of approach uh like if we can figure out the the right way to do it is like one it's uh sort of it's efficiency increasing taxation because of the yeah kind of incentive on the margin uh pushes people to be like less open if they don't really care as opposed to being like more closed just in case which uh a lot of people do. And the other thing is that it's like it still fits into the general military OSS like license uh like you know the FSF OSI definitions like you can

describe it as being sort of strictly in between GPL and or a or even like AGPL and MIT in some sense like I'm I'm I'm definitely fine with you know like figuring out the most restrictive uh version of uh something like AGPL as a baseline right and and uh like basically saying you know like pay up if you're not willing to open up to that kind of high standard. >> So if uh someone like listening to this is a lawyer right and uh like a know lawyers are a type of coder and hacker like I would love to see ideas for like some concrete ways to try to do that like I think if uh if that existed I

would absolutely write like write some of my code under it. >> Cool. Uh well yeah Raymond Cheng from OSO is working on that. So uh maybe I'll I'll connect to you at some point. Next question to you Devanch. >> Uh yeah so I guess I'm I've been thinking more broadly about the relationship between security and public goods. Um we see this happen with national governments where um the reason they roll up both these functions is by providing public goods you prevent riots and other things that might otherwise break out. So there is a relationship between security and public goods but um and then that ties into the role of issuance of a currency in general. So I don't know like what are your thoughts on like these three elements of security, public goods and issuance and

the relation between them >> I guess what's the equivalent of issuance for a government like is it uh like some type of spending the like is it spending in general? >> Yes. Yes. So I think like historically we've seen governments spend uh like any new money infused into the economy used to come in the form of funding military or public goods. So security or public goods. But with quantitative easing we've actually seen that paradigm shift where in quantitative easing the Fed puts money into the stock market essentially and stock prices go up. Um but I think those have been the three broad areas that I've seen how the government uses issuance.

>> Right. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it's uh like this uh gets into one of these uh you know, like challenging topics of like what even are the uh incentives of some of these actors and especially how different kinds of technologies might shape that, right? Because uh like one of my fears of uh the next few decades is basically that uh like AI is uh going to push us into uh a pretty strongly anti-democratizing area and uh possibly to some extent like people being fed up with uh like lowquality social media discourse might

even go along with that and uh the uh result of that would basically be that like well you know if the physical world is um secured by being much more surveiled and at the same time the digital world is a world where it's uh like much harder for people to have their voice then like basically could uh a political entity survive itself while only providing public goods for a more limited group. Right? So that's like like this is one of those things that I yeah I mean like like it would concern me if that were were to become a much more long-term feature of uh our world.

And so one of the things that uh like I think is interesting to think about is uh how do we create more ways to guarantee that uh like regular people continue to have power in a way that's like actually useful and actually substantive and uh like actually get gets high quality feedback from people and so doesn't get like exploited by populism or or whatever, right? Like if you look back to previous like technological eras, right? There has been a lot of these arguments that like for example the switch from bows to guns is sort of preheralded the arrival of

more democracy because I mean like bows were only usable by highly skilled people, right? And guns could just be used by like any random person. you could just like pick one up and you're like at the even at the beginning like even if like half as effective as some as some noblemen who put their entire life into training the craft. So then the question is like well which direction are future waves of technology going to go and it's hard to tell right and the interesting thing is like technology to me is not exogenous right technology is itself a result of uh actions that we take and so technology is that that puts uh like regular people in a position where they're actually

able to have their voice heard and uh are able to have if we look both soft power and uh hard power is like that itself is a public good that could be funded right and you know a public good that uh arguably people in the most powerful positions in the world are not going to have that much of an interest in funding um so yeah I think I know there's a lot of kind of complicated loops between all of those three concepts in that way >> feels to me like we're stumbling a little bit into do territory here and I'm wondering if uh what you would say uh to the following question. How does public goods funding relate to DACK?

Does DAK sort of eat public goods funding? Is that just a subset of DAK? How do the two relate to each other? Because it feels like DIAK is a very sort of contemporary meme that people are rallying around. It feels like there's a lot of energy there. And I'm wondering if public goods funding should just fold itself into the DACK umbrella. >> I would say DAC the way it's formally defined is about making the world safe for pluralism. public goods spending is about making the world fertile for our pluralism. Um, if that makes sense. Right? So, they're two very complimentary pieces of the same coin, right? And so DAK is uh answering the question of uh how do we uh create a uh world where like a lot of people can uh continue to be uh not just beneficiaries

but like active participants and uh active shapers of the future and uh make that happen in a way that is secure and that is and that's stable and public goods uh funding is uh I think about how do we uh h how do we have that and make that happen um in a way where the people participating like actually get compensated and uh like the whole thing doesn't just rely on a very small number of donors.

>> Yeah. I guess my my reduction or like the bridge I would try to build is if the D and D do stands for democratized or decentralized or defensive then public goods funding asks the question that of those decentralization democratization and and uh those are public goods and so how do we fund those how do we make sure the people who are working on the D and D act are well funded >> and uh I think yeah I mean the the other reason there is a deep connection right is that the other approach to act which could be corporate EA act or it could be you know what I call a national security act which is basically where you do defensive and acceleration but don't give a crap about decentralized like both of those already have natural funders right and so the uh the D

approach uh does not have natural concentrated funders and so the way it can succeed is uh if it has effect of distributed funding and public goods funding is uh like to me exactly about trying to make that happen. Yeah. So I think the natural segue of this is how we can actually start trying to solve the free rider problem in a concerted way. So that like if we wanted to not just depend on a few then everyone has to give a little bit but um like kind of how we've seen that happen with governments is kind of coercion of the minority by the majority. So if 51% say that we want this person as our leader then all the other people all the other 49% still have to pay tax to that like

to the person appointed by the 51% but um how can we actually do that in systems and is that even a just principle and more generally how can we try to like create incentives other than the incentive to defect. >> Yeah. So the big uh weakness of coercion uh of the minority by the majority is of course what if instead of demanding public goods the majority just demands uh the minority to just give all of their money to the majority directly right and so you have a transaction that is uh zero sum or even negative sum but uh at the same time kind of still gets forced by the mechanism and uh the historical solution to this that I think

like I've been gravitating toward is uh basically uh you know instead of empowering individuals empower mechanisms and uh like embrace an indirection right like basically make a a mechanism where it's harder to express like within that mechanism the idea of like give me money right and uh the uh I mean deep funding is one of those examples of uh of something that does that, right? Like if you imagine a uh like it was an iron law that I mean know you had to fund your dependencies like that is uh not something that creates a

weavers that make it easy for the majority to just uh grab the minorities money for themselves right and so I think uh like thinking about these uh ideas right and uh like basically thinking um about uh how do we express this idea that no we will like of creating strong norms which you know could be just social norms, could be recursive uh licenses, could be some like some kind of sales tax or something else. Um and then putting that into a uh fund your uh dependencies rule. Um and uh then like

actually designing the details of that in such a way that they're not creating levers of power like that like that feels like the approach right that tag both solves the problem but at the same time it does not create the yeah the classic problem with that approach. >> I think like the natural followup to that would be uh who decides what a mechanism is and what a mechanism isn't. So something which like give me all the money like who is going to say that that is not a mechanism you know give me all the money like >> so I guess that's like are we concentrating power in the person who decides what the mechanism is and is >> right right I mean this is super subjective right I feel like the things that I've written in the past on it um one is uh the um article on credible

neutrality the other is like my article a couple of years ago exploring uh sort of among the public like what do people think is an institution versus not being an institution. And there are a bunch of these general principles that kind of add up, right? One is like don't write the names of specific people into the mechanism is a big one. Another one is uh like make something simple like the mechanism should be much simpler than the total set of decisions that it makes. Um another one is h to keep it relatively slowly changing. Uh a fourth one is that it should be open source. I think those are like the four rules for credible neutrality that I had in my original post, right? And then uh in the

uh post on uh like what is an institution like the idea that it's a thing that is impersonal and that has this like stability that stretches beyond the uh individual people that are in the in in the positions was a really big part of it. Right. So I don't think there's like a simple binary answer. I think it's uh a uh kind of complicated judgment that involves a lot of factors put together and like ultimately any mechanism always has a risk of being captured, right? Like any mechanism has a a risk of basically collapsing into de facto being give me money and uh like we as a society do need a means of detecting that that's happening and

delegitimizing it and switching to something else. Yeah, it's like funny how many people in the space have told me can we please create a mechanism called give Vitalic the money and let Vitalik decide and um and like it's something like broadly I've been thinking about like the difference between institutions having money versus individuals having money and I think that's where the crypto and blockchain spaces was so unique that individuals managed to make money from like Ethereum taking part in the ICO taking part in bitcoins initial block whereas with Facebook and a lot of web two it was basically institutions that earned a lot of money but yeah like it's it's something which like is elections the best way like is

is a person like can a person sometimes produce better outcomes than an institution would be like the broader question I think often yes um and I think uh a good institution even is one that uh creates space to have outcomes that give significant uh like control of resources to a person when uh that person proves themselves worthy of uh actually getting that amount of money, right? And uh you know sort of the world as a whole I think sometimes kind of does that because uh like you know your ability to randomly get access to like a hundred million dollars is uh definitely positively correlated with uh you know

technical sophistication. your ability to understands the world, your ability to understand what meets people's needs in various things, but that at the same time it's also very imperfect. Um, and so um, you know, like you don't want uh, you know, a button that uh, says like let's have Duke want to control all the money. Um, I mean we did and you know a lot of people pressed it and they did give Duke one control of their money. Um but uh yeah like you know we want uh I think uh some some better way of uh selecting the the right kinds of people like even if it's super flawed right

like this is the other thing with uh I think public goods funding as opposed to other kinds of governance is that public goods funding is like I think actually quite error tolerant like uh if you give uh the right person um like $10 million to to fund things and then simultaneously you give SPF $10 million to fund things like quite plausibly like that's still a net good, right? Because um you know the the difference between like the best person at making decision like identifying high value opportunities and the average person is like very high and to the point where like even 50% of it being like literally wasted is still okay, right? Like probably the biggest counter-argument of

course is that uh like you know did uh SPF fund things that were incredibly net negative to society and uh you know you like that's a question you can try to explore and uh the strongest case for that is probably political lobbying because I think like any kind of full of uh like big money political lobbying has uh big uh like downsides to democracy in general but uh Outside of that, I think like the harm of uh of SPF had to do much more with uh the fact that he just did basically steal a huge amount of money from uh users, right? So yeah, but like that this is one of those questions where if you're designing the mechanism,

you know, you want to think about, right, which is that by default like I think public like funding is hugely error tolerant because uh by definition the difference between a 1x and a 10x is nine times more important than the difference between a 1x or a 0x. But then, you know, you do also have to ask yourself a question at some point like is there a risk you're contributing to a minus 20x? And uh I mean that's I mean I think my the the statement I'm confident in is that the the arguments that uh the difference between a 1x and a 10x is nine times more important than a 1x versus a 0x is uh more true for public goods funding than it is true for

governance. Like for governance, the amount of damage that you can do by putting the wrong person in charge is uh is much larger, right? It's like the default is on the good side, it's sort of 1x versus 2x and then on the bad side it's like 0x versus minus 100x. Um so that's like this for me has always been like one of the the reasons why like I think it's good to treat public goods funding versus other forms of uh governance differently, right? Um and uh when you get into other forms of governance, I think uh like this is the convex versus concave question, right?

Like you will want to like really think about like where on that spectrum you are and I think that ends up deciding a lot of uh like how you how you actually decide like what the mechanism is. >> My next question is about pluralism. So uh plur pluralism and public goods funding. Um I'm just going to rattle off some of the names of people who have done public goods funding campaigns in the space and then I want to react to the pluralism of them and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. So Mulik Dow, Gitcoin grants, optimism, arbitrum, cult, glow dollar, drips, cello, flow state, dow drops, du ongith, octant, let's see who did I not cover so far,

bloom network, protocol guild, um dow drops, public nouns. So, Vitalic, uh, these are all people who have run public goods funding campaigns and funded hundreds of millions of dollars of funding of public goods just in Ethereum. Do you think pluralism of public goods funding is a good thing? Um, and you know, I know we have this attitude of client diversity lower in the stack in Ethereum. Is it important to extend that up and have a pluralism of public goods funders in Ethereum? and uh or is it just a pain in the ass to have to get funding from all these places and track your grants in 17 different locations and um you know could you just react to the pluralism of public goods funding in the space and uh and whether it's a good thing and what

are the challenges and opportunities introduced by it? Yeah. And I would say in general it's uh much more a good thing than uh a problem. And I think for me the uh the biggest uh kind of fundamental reason why is uh basically because uh for a lot of projects like the the thing that matters is just uh like did we accidentally not give any funding at all to someone who really deserves it? And uh in that sense you know the ability to shop around is a good thing and also the ability to shop around is good for minimizing the authority of uh individual actors which is also important in the ecosystem right like uh I think uh like it's good to be

able to have researchers that uh are feel confident in saying different things and like I think the Ethereum ecosystem is uh better if uh I Even if there is uh you know like entities on the from a very different side of the ideological spectrum and like they support people who are much more accelerationist on protocol issues than I am like I think it's uh good to have to to let all of the different sides have a voice like basically the risk of people who have uh you know the the wrong kind of you being able to express it is much lower than the risk of uh people who have a perspective that's

really needed not being able to express it, right? And like that's I think you know in general been the reason for ideas like freedom of speech and so on. And I think here like a big part of that is making sure that people are like actually comfortable speaking their minds and like that's uh something like like that's a spirit that I think we've tried to support even within the EF and like we have know there's like the core protocol team there's also the silva culture uh group which is uh you know not allocating money but uh there to sort of help uh you know like provide their opinionated like views of uh like what the spirit of Ethereum is and what

should we should be going towards and like they've done a lot to like stand up for you know things like decentralization and trustlessness. Um another thing is um also that like the ecosystem is going to inevitably have very powerful commercial actors that have an agenda. and and that's especially true in this era of the space and we needs to make sure that people have alternatives to that right so that's uh yeah so in general like I would say pluralism good um I would say yeah the thing that uh you wants to avoid I think is like splitting every

like every organization uh so much uh to the point where like you're basically creating a public good spending problem internally, right? Like if you split the Ethereum Foundation into 100 pieces, then like there's a way in which that's uh like that divides each piece's power by a factor of more than 100, right? And then it would uh not be in a good position to counterbalance like say some large corporate user or uh like some large application or L2 or something else. Uh so that's probably one of the limiting principles to me.

>> What do you want more focused on in 2026 which is not there today? Should it be new mechanisms? Should it be new ways of uh creating funding pools for these ecosystem goods like what what type of new in like we've had about one new mechanism every two to three years on average QF and then protocol guild and then deep funding. So I guess like what should be like the next thing on the horizon if anything and what area should people focus on now? >> Yeah. And I think one answer is just you know deep funding to a mature standard of quality. Um might um you know the uh original vision with the tree um you know onchain mechanisms uh m multiple levels uh be a thing that anybody can

plug into uh so that if someone has the problem of like I want to or I have to fund my dependencies what like what numbers do I give to whom they just have a ready thing uh to give them answers. Um yeah, I think uh that's a big part of my uh answer. Um also more mature answers on like sustainable ways of where we get the money from. Um and I think like like I've given a couple of uh examples um and like we definitely wants to move beyond just being block rewards. Vitalik, my last question is about Ethereum localism. So,

there's a bunch of people that are exploring this idea of how can we use open source software, public goods funding, privacy tech in local environments. You know, I've I've been sort of in in part trying to juice this movement a little bit because I think that there's a lot that we can do that local governments and communities don't know how to do already. Um, have you been following Ethereum localism? Do you have any opinions on it? And what do you think the bright spots are that people could be focusing on uh leveraging Ethereum in their local communities? Yeah, I mean I like I admit I haven't been sort of following, you know, Ethereum logism of the flag, but like what what you describe sounds like a good description of a lot of uh individual projects uh that uh I've been following. I mean, I think uh it's good

that we're seeing some of this uh increased work in uh applying some of our governance thinking and some of our economic uh thinking to some of these more like local real world environments. And to me, that's a very healthy and positive thing. Yeah. because there's a lot of these uh ideas where like I would actually think that like real physical environments might even be better test beds uh for them than uh like blockchain dows because like basically I think the the set of goals is often uh like more interesting right because uh especially in uh this kind of uh era like for a lot of token holder Dows like the core

objective is a number go up And then uh like basically there's a debate between different ways to make the number go up and uh like that's something that uh like I would think is in some ways sort of homogenizing and even creates a a pressure against them like these projects being interesting in some deep ways right so I mean that's uh again I think uh one of those places where within the space I think having uh just individual people with uh good uh ideas that are and and visions that are willing to just push them forward really continues to be important. Uh but it's uh within kind of these more real world

and physical environments like you just have people with a lot more goals whether it's uh maintaining some particular public goods within a city whether it's a local um media whether it's like figuring out some kind of local economics um and I feel like this is a space where we've sort of kept poking into for a long time right like I remember back in the day yeah you know there was the quadratic funding round I think for local businesses in Denver. Um, and uh, over the last couple of years, uh, we've been get making more and more inroads into some like small and medium sized country governments on like ZK and digital ID sort of, uh, issues and figuring out like are there

like voting things that make sense to do on top of that. It feels like the technology is uh m getting more and more mature to the point of uh being able to actually do things right. So I think it's a great time to do that. >> Great. Is there anything we didn't ask that you want to talk about? I think I wanted to like ask another question back to both of you guys like uh what what to you would be a realistic success for the uh public goods funding uh space let's say by the end of 2026 like if uh if things uh go well and uh uh satisfy the kind of goals and dreams that you have for the space what would the end of 2026

look like? My goal would be that the median person who has the ability to build a DeFi protocol or any sort of protocol um is experimenting with public goods funding at least on the side and if not full-time. I would I I I think that uh public goods funding in Ethereum uh itself has been sort of underfunded in this liinal time uh between the 2021 era funding and the future where we think this funding flywheel is going to get going and uh I want to be able to make a credible case to PGF builders that this is worth their time that they will uh create a legacy for themselves that they'll be able to feed their

family and pay their rent uh uh by working on PG PGF and then you'll you'll see an inflow of talent and execution and um innovation happening in PGF. I'm working backwards here from what I think is the is a a big risk is that this space kind of dies on the vine um and suffers from a lack of energy. It we need to execute this pivot into the reformed PGF space and then really support the people that are doing the right work in it. So, uh that the the goal for me uh would be then that the median person with smart contract skills can actually work on PGF and um and feel like they're they're doing something good and building their career by doing

it. What do you think to bunch? >> Yeah. So, I think something I've been thinking about in deep funding is whether to focus on horizontal scaling or vertical scaling. So horizontal scaling would be that we get many different teams and D5 builders and products to fund their dependencies using the deep funding method. So in that sense the the pilot run that we have going on right now is more of a demonstration effect that hey this is how you can actually do this in like an easy way but the hope is that like ENS will run its own deep funding instance for its dependencies. Lido would a wood all of them would do that in their own instance. And the second would be vertical scaling where like I think as Vitalik alluded to earlier you could

technically build out a graph for the entire internet and for the entire world uh which which is like a value graph. So that would be more the vertical scaling. So I think on the horizontal front like hoping to see more ecosystems take up deep funding as a method. That's one goal and the second goal uh in terms of vertical scaling would just be that from the initial pilot that we have right now. How much money actually gets channeled through it. How accurate are those weights? How good is the pilot? And like are more and more nodes being added to it? Is it something which is continuous and live? So those are some thoughts right now on that.

>> You any reaction to either of those Vitalik? >> Yeah. No, I think uh I would love to see both of those happen. Um and I think uh the thing I would add from my side is uh like I yeah I would love to see y list one of like one of these things like actually running live and you know distributing money month month by month to projects like I think to me if I had to look back to the the highlight of uh 2025 uh in Ethereum is that like privacy has become a very mature thing And so for me now it's like flipped to the point where the average payment that I make is a privacy preserving payment.

And uh like I would want to see that kind of success. Like I don't think we're going to get to the point where like the average dollar a uh public goods project receives is like from uh one of our public goods funding mechanisms. But like to get to the point where I mean there is a steady value of some level flowing to at least some group of people. >> Yeah. Well, I think that's an excellent place to end it. Uh Devontra, thanks for thanks for being my ride or die co-host and Vitalik, thanks for making some time to talk about this with us and um to everyone listening, thanks for listening to the end and uh we'll see you in 2026.

>> See you in 2026. >> All righty. Thanks for listening to the Green Pill podcast. Very excited about this episode. Vitalic obviously huge influence on the Ethereum ecosystem as the founder of Ethereum but also is one of the reasons that we have public goods funding in the Ethereum ecosystem and this ethos of funding what matters in the ecosystem. So this episode I think there's a lot of great takeaways and I'm curious to hear what you think. But the the notes that I'm taking is reforming the PGF space in 2026 focusing on things that are growing things like open source and privacy and programmable cryptography. Those are growth spaces right now. Obviously, AI and info finance a growth space for the PGF ecosystem right now. Focusing on verifiable truth in things that are

close to the centers of the ecosystems that are being funded. So, in Ethereum, that means not just proof of work and proof of stake. Well, I guess just proof of stake these days, but um not just proof of stake, uh but also how do we fund the open source dependencies upon which Ethereum depends? How do we focus on the verifiable truth of those dependencies? I think is the narrower focus of where we're moving as a public goods funding space in 2026. Um, I think if I was a builder in the public goods funding ecosystem, I would be cozying up to new projects 2025 2026 era projects and solving their issues from a public goods funding perspective, connecting the cost center of uh, open source software and the building and R&D that

they're doing with the revenue center of token generation and supply and just generally getting funding flowing as a default I think is a priority for the space in 2026. Vital also had some feedback saying, "Think of the problem not just as a technology problem, but these are social and law problems too. Thinking through how public goods funding can be uh alpha for an ecosystem, a competitive advantage for an ecosystem is uh is I think part of the problem. So all in all, I think an excellent episode for us to think about reforming the public goods funding space for more relevance and upside in the future. And I hope you've enjoyed listening to the Green Pill podcast. Uh, if you're if you're still here at the end, please remember to like and subscribe. Share this episode with your

friends, especially if they're building in the PGF space. And we'll see you in 2026. Thank you.