Anthony Sassano & Eric Conner: EthHub – Ethereum Education and the Quest for Ether Dominance (#302)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 302 with guests Anthony Fasano and Eric Connor [Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by vulturo the gold hedging platform for the crypto community trade goal to Bitcoin instantly and securely starting at just one milligram go to voltar o gold slash epicenter to get early access to the v2 platform and to start trading and by Trello Fitz don't leave your project security audit

to just any firm trust a team with decades of experience at the forefront of blockchain security research go to trail of bits comm to learn more hi welcome to epicenter my name is Tobias ink module my name is Sonny augur well hey Sonny hey how you doing pretty good happy to have you across the table in the studio yeah in Berlin yeah I think it's the first time I've done an episode like face to face I'm really enjoying this post video era yeah it's very different from the video era that's for sure so we were just at Berlin blockchain week and I was actually very happy and kind of surprised to hear people kind of randomly come up to me

and like hey you know it was probably a good move for you to stop doing video so that was very comforting because I went into this and making this decision with some hesitation so I was happy to hear that people were totally fine with it most of people I've met too they're like oh I do you know I do I never listened to it on YouTube anyways but yeah so lots to talk about today today's interview is with Anthony cesano and Eric corner of a table our interview with them I guess maybe about a week ago or two weeks ago and yeah it was interesting conversation I mean I follow them on Twitter and you get to see sort of the discussions on Twitter but to get to talk to them in person was interesting it was slightly I think

maybe it'll be slightly controversial just because of the things that were said surrounding you know parodies role in the community and yeah I think it kind of ties in nicely with current context of blends up blushing reek which was last week where our parody and gnosis had their events kind of overlap with each other yeah and in keeping my Eric works for gnosis as well so right of course that's a good thing to point out so what are your high-level thoughts on or takeaways on on watching week yeah I mean I thought it was a really cool about week you know I was kind of running around all week from event to event a lot of different panels I guess you could say like the three highlight events were like the web three summit DAP con and

then East Berlin but then throughout that they were just like meetups all over the place I went I was speaking a bi Nance meetup I was at a governance games or some interoperability stuff and there's of course there's all these weeks ago a lot of time to get a lot of crypto people in a city together there's always a lot of parties as well yeah I think Wednesday there were 20 different competing events and parties going on it was absolutely ridiculous I went to web 3 on Monday I took Tuesday off and then I went to Def Con and Wednesday and Thursday I mean I've got a couple of things here and we can talk about this so one of the things that was very apparent this year is that if compared to last year is that last year was when I guess the world started becoming

introduced to a lot of the d5 protocols that are now pretty commonplace in the space like maker compound you know swap air swap and these was compounding you've been out back then no actually no it was the unis often maybe just come out maker was like less than six months yeah all so this year a lot of that stuff has now moved into well there's two things so one is all the UX around that stuff has become much much much better so we have like wallets that allow you to open a CD PE in a few clicks and lend ether indica and dye into compound so like well it's like argent for example I've really done a really great job there and the other thing is that a lot of these base level protocols are now themselves being sort

of some plant supplanted by other derivatives and so that's where like a lot of this has exploded there's all these other types of derivatives being built on top of compound and maker edye our guy Berlin there's just LS die now yeah I don't even know what I saw this morning I don't even know what that is but so yeah there's layers upon layers of derivatives being built on all these gonna defy fundamentals my other takeaway from this week is that we haven't yet seen the kind of mass adoption that a lot of us I think have aspired to in the last couple years the user experience around defy is getting much much better but the people that are using these protocols are still very much the builders and we're still waiting for a massive influx of non

crypto savvy users like I don't expect everyone in their mom to start using crypto and to start leveraging defy for investing but it would be nice to start seeing more of the educated investor class of people come into the space and leverage dphi as a high risk investment for example so I hope that we'll look back on the next you know two to three years as the years where we saw that kind of investor come into the space and I hope that that will be great for the ecosystem as a whole that's interesting that you think that the what non crypto people come in to do is the primarily just investment not not not much else not like at any other use cases other

than investment I mean I think in aetherium that's probably the primary one I do agree for example with like Ryan sulcus that like aetherium is basically reserve currency for a decentralized investment fund I don't think that's necessarily the case for something to cosmos for Bitcoin but I think print a theory and that is somewhat true would you agree with that and I guess it's still being figured out I mean this is kind of what this episode goes into which is you know these guys Eric and Anthony they've been really doing a lot of the work in Drive and figuring out this narrative of aetherium and nothing everyone agrees with them necessarily like you know interestingly I was chatting with Martin compliment from gnosis as well as a duty Wertheimer

out by the way it was super awesome that he was here I had a really good time chatting with him throughout this week and even martin was like you know yeah he doesn't buy this whole ethers money a concept either and it seems to me that in this episode we'll see that like you know I think Erika and Anthony seemed to make it think that it's like oh this is like the dominant narrative and I think it may be a little bit of loud voices but I think even within one company like I said Eric works for gnosis and Martin disagrees with this and so I think there's still a lot of soul-searching to be done for aetherium yeah narratives are still changing and evolving over time yeah and maybe I think the other thing also that we saw this this year compared to last is like just the proliferation of

dows as a way to govern and fund different community efforts so you know we've had I mean then the show to talk about Moloch and you haven't had them on the show yet but like office like medic cartel is becoming a very large organization yeah both in terms of the funding in the Dow and also like the people that are involved there I think they had an event here with over a hundred people there's a yang Dow and and you know I was actually moderating a panel on governance at DEFCON as well as on like the governance Games event that Ana from Sur knowledge is hosting and in the past when I like usually used to talk about governance the conversation is usually mostly I felt around protocol governance about like how do we decide how to hard fork and aetherium versus

tezo this was a Bitcoin this time I just felt all the governance discussion was specifically around Dow's yeah that's true right now that's really interesting point two so it was a it was a great great week I think we there's a lot of things that we've learned here we recorded an episode of episode live which will go out we need to get the recording but I think it'll probably go next week and I'll also try to get the recording for each of our respective panels so we can also release those like we did at the ICF event couple months ago so look forward to those and one more announcement I will be at Tel Aviv watching week you haven't confirmed yet after ago but I think you should come okay so Tel Aviv blockchain week is sort of overlapping over from like the ninth

of September to like the 17th of September even over the weekend so there is the scaling Bitcoin conference there is the ethereal summit on Sunday this 15th and in stock or sessions is on the 6th on Monday I'll be there throughout the week we're gonna be doing a meet-up so if you're in Tel Aviv for any of those events and would like to come and hang out with me and maybe other episode of hosts if Sonny you decide to come along we'll be doing a meet-up there and you can go to epicenter rocks slash Tel Aviv 20:19 to register we don't have a venue or a date yet but we'll be finalizing that this week we had a great one here in Berlin we had like over 40 people

show up it was awesome yeah I do want to get into that but yeah so the Tel Aviv blotching we meet up you can go to episode about rock slash Tel Aviv 2019 to register and as soon as the venue is finalized and the date also was an email oh yeah the meetup was really terrific and yeah thanks everybody who came there it's one of my favorite things to meet ups on your listeners and you you came in large numbers this year so thank you so with that here's our interview with Eric Connor and Anthony cesano of eath Hub hi so we're here with Anthony cesano and Eric Connor they are both founders of eath hub and educational platform for the theorem community that has some great documentation about aetherium a podcast

and a newsletter and they've been doing eath up for I think about since January and Anthony is a product marketing manager at set and Eric is a product manager at gnosis thanks for joining us guys yeah thanks for having us thanks having us so I'd like to ask each of you individually perhaps starting with Eric what drove you to a theory of me initially what drove you to that community yeah so actually initially got involved with Bitcoin in 2013 which I feel like that's how a lot of people got started right and my backgrounds actually in finance I was working at a bank and ran across Bitcoin and the idea in general just fascinated me I actually started day trading it at that point

which wasn't the best of ideas because I ended up losing a lot of Bitcoin that I could have today but I learned a lot of valuable lessons and kind of got very just enthralled with the technology and you know at that time Mount Cox had got hacked and a lot of my friends that were traders lost a lot of Bitcoin so you know just about that time as well vitalic was giving his introduction to aetherium at Bitcoin Miami conference and we said you know why are all these people trading these decentralized assets on centralized exchanges it doesn't make much sense why don't we try and lever just a new technology to build something better so three of us set out to build ether X which was kind of the first attempt at a decentralized exchange on a theorem and late 2014 early 2015 fortunately the project never fully got

off the ground is it just some internal turmoil I guess I'll put it but you know the ether X is still out there and github if anybody ever wants to revive it or you know I think some of the white paper ideas are still pretty relevant today which is very interesting but you know ever since then I've just been involved in the community going to meetups helping build out the community mainly on social media like Reddit and Twitter just bringing general awareness didn't learning as much as I can and then you know I met Anthony in 2018 we had the idea of eath hub like you mentioned we launched it January 2019 this year and then you know working full-time in the space now at gnosis so it just kind of has been a slow evolution over the years from just you know learning about Bitcoin and then

being fascinated about the ideas behind the theorem and now just full time in the space so I got started in 2013 as well with Bitcoin basically discovered it through a friend you know bought some Bitcoin followed it up all the way to whatever was a thousand dollars followed her to way back down I in 2014 I kind of like just sold off what I had and kind of exited the space altogether which obviously was a very big mistake for me and then I rediscovered go back early 2017 with the theorem I read a few posts about a theorem and I was like well this is like totally different to Bitcoin like it does a lot more than what people can do all the base layer and everything so I got kind of enthralled with that with what if your own could do just spent 2017

basically doing I guess you know very similar to what a lot of other people would have been doing 2017 which was speculating a lot especially with the ico craze and everything so I don't think I actually learned much in 2017 besides like how to speculate I guess and then obviously after the crash happened again I didn't exit this time I thought to myself I'm not gonna make that mistake again so I basically spent 2018 learning as much as I could early 2018 I started their web site called block by block where it had like a bunch of resources and research links for crypto that I collected and I shared that with everyone in the community started a newsletter I called the block by block weekly newsletter in April of 2018 I think it was maybe earlier than that yes

I started that and I did that and then towards the end of 2018 I met Eric we have we haven't actually met in real life we just kind of met online you know both being involved with the human community and we we thought hey we should start something because you know there's not much for a theorem at the moment terms of Education there's a lot of stuff happening no one really knows about so we started eighth hooked together and that went live early 2019 and we've got the newsletter now on the podcast and everything so yeah the rest is history I guess I only recently joined set in July actually Java 15 plus my official start date there so yeah it's been been quite an interesting journey well it's incredible that you've never met in person that that's quite a long time working together not having

face-to-face contact when Brian and I started epicenter we didn't meet for anything like two months we met two months after but yeah like eight eight months is a long time yeah definitely we're we're we joke hopefully when we meet in person it doesn't all fall apart since we work so well remote I think I was listening to podcasts you guys gonna be meeting in Berlin yeah the funny thing is is that we both like really close to each other at the moment cuz I'm in San Francisco and he's in LA but we actually aren't meeting in California we're gonna made it Berlin this is quite funny well that's a good place to meet yeah exactly so what was it about the if you're in community that you guys thought was attractive and that you maybe you didn't find in other communities I guess for me

I mean when I first got started like I mentioned I was more got involved on the trading side of Bitcoin and at the time to be honest a lot of the Bitcoin community was pretty just fascinated on price and the wild price movements that were happening and like I mentioned saw these exchange hacks and you know I was more fascinated about the underlying technology I mean obviously everybody wants to make money and we need these things they go up to secure networks and all that good stuff but you know at the end of the day what captured me was this idea that you could start to build applications on top of this technology right in and that idea just fascinated me I mean the possibilities seemed endless and pretty much at that point I decided to drop all my pick point and go you know dedicate all my time to cerium

so when you say you know dedicated all your time one thing when I met Anthony for the first time you know I think a TED con just earlier this year in 2019 is I was actually surprised to learn that both of you actually weren't like working in the blockchain space you know you were kind of following along and you'd been working on a table for you know quite a while actually but why did you decide like you know to kind of be very actively involved with the space but not jump in like as your full-time job kind of thing yeah I guess for me it was I guess mostly geographic geographically challenged I like to call it because I lived down in Melbourne Australia there's not much happening there unfortunately for crypto in the crypto community but I think that you

know over the last few months and the reason why I was able to kind of land a job was because crypto companies are much more open to remote work than other sorts of companies so I'm working reset remotely from Melbourne at the moment but prior to that I think I had been kind of looking for a job in crypto it's just that nothing really kind of came up that would that would work for me in my case I guess just because of like you know in Melbourne it's actually a 17 hour time difference from San Francisco 17 hours ahead which is quite crazy so a lot of the stuff that would require me to be kind of like in sync with the team like it at all times I wouldn't work but in terms of like what I do for set now it's marketing so it doesn't really

by me to be you know on at the same time as them I working you know in my own time when I can basically like I'm asleep pretty much like when the business hours happening in San Francisco so yeah I think that's mainly what came down to for me kind of like finding the right role that would allow me to work remote on such an extreme time difference how do you manage to record a podcast with a 17 hour time difference I was that even possible that's either one of us either has to be up very early or very late it's not the easiest thing in the world I'm open maybe Anthony's can make the move over to San Francisco someday that would be the idea so well kudos to you guys for doing the podcast for so long and still sticking with it with with these

constraints so moving that eath hub now so let's dive into what what is eath hub and why did you decide to start this yeah I guess at the core of it I mean to be honest how it was gonna start or how it started was you know ether price was falling from the top of you know thousand four hundred twenty dollars all the way down to eighty and during that time there was just a lot of obviously everyone was emotional and kind of freaking out on you know whether it be Twitter reddit blog posts whatever it might be and there was a lot of misinformation being spread about aetherium and you know we kind of got together and you know how can there's no where to point people to like say okay here's what's actually going on or here's what developments are actually taking place

so originally the idea was gonna be basically just like a fun fighter faq where you know we would see our favorite top 10 a Dearing flood items and you know rebut them and say why they're not true it kind of evolved quickly from there and to hey there's also no a theorem based podcast there's you know very few aetherium based newsletters but you know there's still at the core of it is the documentation and you know I still personally struggle explaining aetherium to people family and friends that I've never heard about it there's just not a good place to point people and it's you know we're kidding ourselves if we think it's an easy concept to understand right like Bitcoin has done a pretty good job at making an explainable narrative to people digital gold is something that you know people

can understand aetherium hasn't quite found that you know a easily explainable narrative yet so you know I think you still have to consume a lot of information really understand it and you know at the core that's the goal of Etha I think maybe in part that's also because to some extent aetherium hasn't yet found really like what its primary sort of use cases whereas like Bitcoin has this digital gold thing where with aetherium it's still a bit fluid and changing was time right I do think bitcoins changed with time as well maybe not as an extreme change but it's definitely changed with time back in 2013 there wasn't really much talk about this story

of value digital gold kind of thing it was more about payments and getting merchants to accept and all these sorts of things right I guess that's what Bitcoin cash is these days kind of like that community off into Bitcoin cash and you know they're doing all that stuff over there whereas bitcoins kind of you know solidify itself as digital gold store a value macro hedge all that good stuff I guess but yeah you're definitely right where aetherium kind of because by design it can do a lot more we're still kind of like finding what the best fit is where you know where the use cases are where the product market fit is I do think something like DFA is you know really great and found like a really really great product market fit within aetherium I theorems pretty much like kind of built for that if I am if I

was this to say like what I think theorem will be going forward as well but definitely other things like dowels and just general web 3 apps like decentralized social media and all that sort of stuff definitely I think if you're in can still do that I just think that the platform being limited in scale will obviously limit those use cases and I think the finance use cases are probably a very interesting to most people because of the fact that you can possibly make money from it right at the end of the day a lot of people are in the crypto space because they want to make money I think if we're honest about that that we can build apps that people actually want to use yeah and just to add something quickly that - I think one of the problems that theorum had early on is a bit of MIS marketing that we're

still paying a bit for I think we're just getting out of it but if you actually read the initial white paper most of the use cases explained by vitalic have to do with programmable money and financial use cases right about a year after launched the theorem went down this path of world computer and web 3 which I think someday we'll get to but it was way too early for a theorem right and so we're kind of recovered from that narrative that didn't really fit early on and kind of getting back to more of the basics on the financial side and I think you know defy personally I think is a great narrative for now for aetherium this guy what I was looking at as well that giving that whole 2017 period where I thought everyone was just way too overexcited by web 3 and all

these like decentralized applications and stuff and when I saw it as it you know I just think that we should focus on the financial applications and to me smart contracts should be used exactly what they sound like which is as contracts and like you know for usually for particularly mostly financial purposes and if you're trying to build anything much more complex than some basic contracting stuff I'm not sure if etherium is the is ready today for to handle that kind of load if you're holding a significant portion of your net worth in crypto you're probably waiting for your aportfolio to moon at any time but holding crypto doesn't mean you should be irresponsible in the face of volatility risk that's where Volterra comes in Volterra is the leading gold hedging solution for

the crypto community and as a stable asset trusted for millennia gold is the perfect long-term hedging solution an epicenter we've been using volt row since 2014 to protect a portion of our company's assets against volatility now you might ask why not use a stable coin sub which is a great point and don't get me wrong stable coins are great and a real benefit for a crypto adoption but algorithmic stable coins are still very new and experimental asset type and some asset back stable coins have been scrutinized for being under reserved with volt or your gold is 100% insured and secured in vaults deep in the Swiss mountains protected by Brinks every single gram of gold is audited and holdings are made transparently available on their website for anyone to verify and most importantly is quite

literally your gold you can choose to have it delivered to you at any time to learn more and to get access to volt rose brand new v2 platform which includes an interface overhaul and trading in - like coin ether and silver go to volt or gold slash epicentre that's v-a ult oro gold / epicenter we'd like to thank vulturo for their support of the podcast at youth um so currently is it just the two of you or is there anyone else kind of involved Danette today yes so in terms of like I guess you could say full-time where where I mean it's a it's a it's a passion project at the end of the day we started out we actually just asked to of course but then we had kind of like some

core contributors come on board that submitted a lot of content with us so one of those is Chaz Schmidt he's um have been very helpful early on in getting a lot of the documentation on there he's actually currently working on like translating heat up as well which is really cool but yeah in terms of like ongoing maintenance and work on it it's mostly Eric and I but anyone can go to the github repo and submit you know pull requests or whatever and concert them then what added the people who have commit access is obviously Eric and I Chaz and I think one other person from memory that can commit these things but don't like we never really deny anyone unless that's like advertising or something visible with an ICO or something like that or scare me so anyone can submit like educational

content but in terms of like the podcasting newsletter that's kind of like centralized like I did the newsletter or equal to the guest podcast and then we'll do the weekly recap together I gotta say that the documentation website is just fantastic I mean I don't spend a lot of time in aetherium as much as I used to or sort of researching aetherium so today I just went through all the docs and like read everything and it was such a great refresher on everything that's happening in theory I'm just get a great overview and I think to someone who's coming into the space or maybe who's coming from another community or even from traditional software development that wants to just spend three or four hours just learning like 90% basically what they need to learn about aetherium to be up-to-date it's it's an ideal place to

do it so congratulations on building this like really nice clean and simple resource yeah thanks good to hear I've poked around some of the docs especially like things around the monetary policy and stuff which is that kind of stuff I'm maybe the least familiar with we're not quite what but what kind of sections do you find personally the most interesting to write or the most rewarding or do you think that is really what like brings maybe the majority of your audience what are people most interested in learning about when it comes to reading the e top Docs that's a great question I think as far as like personally rewarding and I probably I think speak for anthing and myself here is the things that are very complex topics that you know information is kind of spread on github or on git er

in chat rooms and we can kind of take that and piece it together and make it easily digestible for most people you know I would say the good examples there are around like plasma and layer 2 solutions and the different phases of East 2.0 I think our most popular pages that people go to and ask for are around the transition from E to 1 e 2 and how that's going to take place because there's multiple different phases and then people are very interested in the transition from proof of work to prove a stake and you know how that's going to work how much ether they need now how are they going to run it themselves what kind of rewards are they looking at getting back those are definitely our most popular pages I mean as far as like actual hit wise we're actually linked on

the etherium org site now a few places so some of the more basic like how to get a wallet and things are technically our most hit pages but as far as getting the most community interest I think it's around those you know topics that it's hard for people to understand unless it's all put on just one page and kind of like an explain like I'm 5 type language yeah definitely I do second that I think that we have a section on there called V theorem FAQ section which I think pays a lot of dividends it's basically just like the most kind of like ask questions that we see on Twitter or read or see that people are kind of like spreading misinformation about so it's basically just a page that we can go a bunch of pages that we can link to people to say you know here's

the explanation here's why this is wrong instead of repeating ourselves constantly on Twitter it's just like this holistic page which I think has paid the most dividends in terms of like you know getting the misinformation corrected and educating more people about like these core things like there's oh there's a few things in there about kind of you need a fatu you know use the etherium network as part of gas and things like that and explaining economic abstraction and meta transactions and a few more complex topics that people sometimes try to Sabine there's like a negative for a theorem that's a great idea I think I think I might do that as well for certain certain topics so switching gears a little bit let's let's take a step back a little bit and look at the theorem community as a whole can

you describe what you see is the sort of state of the etherium community at the moment so I guess it's changing it's definitely changing I think that there is definitely people that are getting that are getting kind of disenfranchised with the community they might not feel like they belong anymore they may feel like they're being pushed out or they don't align with the kind of vision and mission of aetherium these days I think that's just like going to be a natural thing we obviously saw this happen with Bitcoin right with the Bitcoin cash fork and everything like that to an extent that Bitcoin sv4 there are always going to be people in different groups that have different values that wanted two different things no one's going to have a holistic narrative if you can't please

everyone I think at the end of the day we can only do our best to please you know the most amount of people so I definitely think that's what's happening in a theorem at the moment especially with the transition from eighth one so if - a lot of the if - teams especially the ones building clients I knew there weren't around for eighth one they went around until recently so there's a nine teams at the moment and most of them only popped up over the last year or so you're - maybe whereas no the the old guard as you you know as you can probably call it has been around since the beginning like the gets and the the parodies of the world and you know even in that arena parodies now moving on I mean they're still working on a theory abut they also have

polka dot that they're working on now as part of you know with the word free foundation and things like that so yeah there's definitely divide in the community at this point in certain parts of the community but I think that's just a natural occurrence that will happen to any network that any crypto network that gets big enough how does those divide express itself in reality where do we see it the most emerge I think yeah you can see it like unless you're really in the weeds it's kind of hard to tell I think where people are going and where the divides are happening but I think if you want to see like any obvious examples of device happening it may be any kind of projects that or developers that have been traditionally pretty you know deep in a theory and building on a theory moving

over to other chains maybe that may align with their vision more but I think the most obvious example of this divide happening and it might be a bit controversial to say but I think parody and moving moving on from it from aetherium and focusing a lot of their time on polka dot which I consider like I mean people will disagree with me on this but I consider it a competitor to aetherium and kind of like it's got a lot of the same architecture as aetherium 2.0 as well so you know I think that's where the most obvious divide is happening right now and I think that puts a splinter in things in terms of friendships as well because traditionally a lot other people that parody have been friends with the lovely other theme community members and things like that so I think that's where it's

definitely showing most do you think that one of the reasons that they're so many 2.0 developers is I pointed this out last year where like you know the amount of control that parody had over the etherium 2.0 roadmap was a little bit scary where like it seemed to me what if they not saying that this is what happened but if you're gonna take a really cynical point of view what you would do is you know it seemed go pared you would want to do is stall and like grind their feet until they could get polka dot out the door and make sure it gets out the door before e 2.0 when I was upscaling aetherium this a couple of months ago in Toronto it seemed that like from what I could tell the etherium to pour in our road

like design and the polka dot design are quickly becoming very very very overlapping so I guess this general question about the community as a whole like how cynical do you think we should be approaching like you know for example Amin he likes to take a very very cynical approach and assume everyone has like the worst intentions or should we be a little bit more kind of not forgiving but more open to like you know you know I mean a little bit not not as cynical when we approach and assume people maybe have better intentions and they yeah what do you think about that yeah it's a great question I mean it's something and and I discussed a lot I think you know in reality I think in general people aren't skeptical enough and the reason

is there's a lot of money at stake here right and when you involve money and these teams in reality you're gonna want to bail out user base and you know grow their chain and they get bigger returns when you have that people are gonna be playing not nice all the time right and you know I don't want to call it specific people are groups but you know the biggest issue that I think @dm had with the polkadot team is like in they said parity you know they've done a lot of great work for a theorem for years they still have the second or maybe even the top client this day over death so they're very ingrained in the community so it's hard to like know you know like you said where they may be intentionally stalling the e 2.0 spec who knows right but I do think we need to be a tiny bit

more cautious than people a lot of people I think just like to assume that everyone's playing nice in reality when money's involved that just isn't the case right so I think it's fair at times to question I don't think it's good to ever get personal or you know attack people and certain people go about it differently but it seems to me you know we went through a weird transition of you know Reddit trying to oust admins that were involved in parody from the theorem subreddits and I think we've moved on a little bit and it seems like the projects have kind of finally split besides parody obviously having an 8th client and you know building out an East to client as well but to be honest I haven't seen much updates from them on the e2 side recently what would you say is the most dangerous faction within the

etherium community that's very controversial question do we like to do on this podcast yes yes I I think it's definitely with from within for sure and it'd have to be like I mean calling out an entire organization is a bit he's a bit hard but definitely parody from what I've seen their behavior you know within aetherium if you really do dig into the weeds it doesn't seem they haven't through theorems best intentions at heart anymore as Eric said they've done a lot of good work in the past for aetherium and they still contribute to with you to some extent but you know I think most of their time is now focused on polka-dot and you did say that a lot of the design over designs of both this is with um 2.0 in poker got do overlap a lot especially you know if you really

dig into the designs you can see it quite obviously so yeah I do think there may have been dragging their feet a little bit as well and that's you know obviously cause I think these um foundation realized this and a lot of a lot of people working on earth 2.0 realize this and realize that this needed to be more decentralized of a development process so that's why we have so many independent teams now I think as well building out clients you know as Eric said I haven't actually seen much from parody on the East 2.0 side I know that LR building arm ash a spur client they they called it Jasper was I guess the original name for etherium 2.0 before we kind of like changed it from that because normally like that name but um they were definitely building that using their new substrate developer tooling or platform

but yeah so I think it definitely comes with within from within and there are there are individuals and groups that may be trying to kind of like subvert if you like different etherion people and bring them over to their chain and say you know the grass is greener over here come here you'll get paid more you know you can do more here you're less restricted and all that sort of stuff so I think the human community is traditionally been very open very nice you know very welcoming and everything but I think at this point in time we kind of need to keep that but also be a lot more cautious about who we let intellect the deep spaces of a theorem and who we let influence certain decisions like whether that be politically or technically and things like that because at the end of the day

you know there's that there's obviously core groups of people that people look up to and as a signal and things like that so I think we need to be really cautious about who we give that kind of political power to since the theorem 2.0 and polka-dot are so much more similar and they do overlap quite a bit I mean ultimately it would be ideal if those two communities were to some some way rekindle and become one community because I would just make the entire ecosystem stronger we will be in a much better situation if we had one strong web 3/2 theory and community rather than two different fragmented communities in the long term I think where do you think the barriers are for that to happen do you think it's already too late or do you think people could

mend things or certain sub factions of those communities could mend things in a way that would make that possible yeah I mean I guess first you'd have to ask Gavin wooden right he's the one that decided what I'm but uh uh you know I think to be honest I don't see it rejoining I think the communities could rejoin I mean for example in Berlin like web 3 has their web 3 summit then there's DEFCON then there's East Berlin and like a lot of people are going all those events right so both of those are all wrapping by the way yeah right exactly yeah so I think like the communities still cross I know there's people interested in both like Anthony's definitely interested in both he's open about that and you know it wants to see polka-dot succeed as well but I think in reality the values have split a little

bit right so polka dot seems to be focusing more on the unchanged governance aspect and they're not as you know interested in the base asset gaining a monetary premium which you know I think the etherium community has started to to grow up to and the internal community isn't that big on on Shane government government Henson doesn't see it as a feature right so these are kind of two very important community values that I think have essentially split and you know I don't know Gavin I don't know why he decided to leave aetherium and start polka dot but I think he has more of this vision of this web 3 world where people on chain are governing this system and I just don't think that's a fit for aetherium right now so I guess I'll follow on from that as well and say I

think we should adjust the elephant in the room when talking about parody right they have a lot of money locked on a theory right now locked in that multi-sig not just them there's a few other parties as well but have a lot of money locked and I think that will the pivotal moment where the split really happened was when the human community basically said like a strong note we're not going to unlock these funds essentially and I think that you know a lot of people especially like obviously want those affected we're like well you did this for the Dow why won't you do this fast sort of thing and I think that if you community has um has definitely proved itself in that the Dow was like a one-time thing up until this point it wasn't a precedent where you know there's a large hack will you know

reverse that transaction or alter the state or anything like that or or do whatever is necessary to get those funds back so I think that was when I started noticing a lot more hostility happen between the maybe the two communities do you think that was a bad decision in hindsight and they're looking back on that do you think the community could have just said sure let's reverse that and how the funds go back no I don't I don't think so I don't think it was a bad decision because I think the damage of reversing that would be would pay would be a lot worse in the long term than the short-term pain of losing a really great team a great engineering team great core team to aetherium but I'd but definitely they were already working on polka-dot right so I don't think that would have made a positive

difference giving the the money back I think it would have been very negative over the long term we we're still reeling from the doubt right so just doing another one of those I mean people call them bailout people call them you know rescue people call it censorship whatever you want to call it doing another one of those would definitely be a long-term negative impact on aetherium and what about the talaq where do you see his role currently and going forward yeah he seems to be taking just a lead researcher role at this point I mean he stepped back from he's very rarely seen on core dev calls he's he wasn't involved in any of the decisions like to lower block rewards from 3 to 2 last year but he's very active on the III

searcher forum on github and kind of like the top person as far as to research goes right him Danny Ryan just and Drake everyone they're doing good work but he definitely seems to have taken a step back from the I guess I'll put it governance side of things I mean in 2014 2015 16 you know what vitalic said on core dev calls probably went right and I think he probably realized that and said we need to grow up as a community I'm gonna take a step back and it seems like to be honest I think he just enjoys the research side more in general too so just kind of what he settled into now yeah I think that makes sense for him now that the community is is what it is and and as as large and diverse as it is for him to

take a step back and be in more of that research role makes more sense maybe for him and also for the state of the project in general yeah he's definitely taken like as Eric said purposely taken a step back within the human community because he realized he did have this kind of like centralizing influence if you want to call it that where people would look to him and wait for his answer sort of thing and say eyes you know he's batalik on on my side or is he on my side baba and then people kind of rally around that is like this this beacon I guess you could call it huh which I think was definitely unhealthy and I'm really like obviously happy that batalik realized that but I think that there's a distinction to be made between centralization of development and centralization of like decision-making

you know on chain and things like that and and things like you know the parody of frozen funds for instance and and things like that so I think at the moment obviously if - is he's in centralized development because the network's not live the research is pretty much centralized around a core group of people that are work or employed by the inhuman foundation you know Eric mentioned some of them but there's also research going on now in other areas such as consensus they have their quilt team working on phase two research for Earth - we have the nine independent developer teams as well the the client implementers and things like that and so I think that Alex just fallen into the background where he like he commonly just post things on a3 search that he's come up with because you he obviously loves doing the

research stuff and he puts it out there and then people will the truly agreed it think oh that's cool I'll build that and they go ahead and build it right I don't think I've seen vitalik weigh in on any decisions or anything like major decisions with regards to eath one he's pieces he seems squarely focused on - and he's letting you know the community basically should eighth one and I don't think that if he came back and said something like oh we should you know save the the parody funds I don't think the community would go with him on that at all to be honest let's talk about security you know gaps are pretty unique because unlike other types of software they can hold astronomical amounts of value that's why getting systems audited creating robust security processes and

fostering a culture of security in your organization is so important and to do this you should only trust experts with real security expertise there are a lot of security firms in the blockchain space but few have the experience and track record of trail fits and they've been in business since 2012 long before things like the Dow hack were even imaginable trail of bits works with your team to audit every aspect of your project and smart contract code is just the beginning they'll help you implement best practices around things like DevOps key storage and user facing applications and once your software has been rigorously tested and reviewed by trail of bits they'll provide the tools you need to make sure that your code remains safe over every new commit they can even put a software security expert at your

team's disposal will give you advice and answer your questions when you need them it's like having your own security engineer on staff but don't take my word for it go to their publications repo on github to read their papers presentations and security reviews it's no wonder teams like parody status new cipher and organizations like Facebook and DARPA trust Trello bits for those security audits to learn more go to trail viscom and if you decide to reach out make sure you let them know you heard about them on epicenter we'd like to thank trail of bits for their support one question actually want to I want to ask a little bit earlier but uh was about the skepticism in the space do you think that there's an extent where we might be taking it a bit too far so

there was this the coin jazeera article a few a few weeks ago one of the ones about like polka-dot and stuff and you know I know coin Jazeera is supposed to be like a satire or magazine and stuff but you know they they called lane like a sleeper agent for polka-dot and do you think that this is I don't know I feel that there might be almost a little bit of Trotskyism going on where it's like Oh anyone who like disagrees with the the mainstay of what the community says it's like oh they're clearly working for the enemy something like that and do you think that might get dangerous at a point where it's like for example you know I I'll admit I felt this sometimes myself where like yes I work on cosmos but there's a lot of I worked on a theory on

before I even started working on cosmos and there's a lot of times where I'd like you know I propose stuff where I'm like oh I think this would be a way to legitimately improve aetherium and then people's direct responses oh you know you're doing it to undermine a theory I'm in order to help cosmos and do you think that can be a little bit dangerous and maybe disincentivize people from even wanting to contribute yeah I think that it definitely you know a can play out like that where I've seen these happen to myself for sure I think you know if we if I don't want to single anyone out but I mean lanes been a pretty big topic lately in the few community right he's taking the other side of basically every mainstay as you say like the theorem narrative and one theme community values behind and

everything like that but I think in the case of ladies actually going to seems to be going to work for something outside of the etherium community right and you know it's kind of like the timing is is curious right when you look at it was something like that where he basically is going to work for another project right and now he's all of a sudden saying all these negative things about aetherium whereas while he was working with it he may have taken you know the contrarian side sometimes but he never really did it as he does now so I think that the timing is what you need to look at and things like that but I mean that's just one individual right I think most people don't operate like that I don't think most people have the capacity to do that all want to do

that like it's kind of like when you really think about it it's kind of like a shitty thing to do so I think that you know in your case for example I don't think like personally that you're trying to undermine it aetherium at all I just think that you have different views about how something should be built and that's why you you know you're building on college most and things like that and and most people are probably like that right even the people working at parody pretty much like all of them I would say don't have you know bad intentions or want to cause harm to aetherium but at the end of the day if you're building a platform that you want people to use like people say it's not a zero-sum game and all these sorts of things but it does have a distribution where most of

the people will use one particular network right so we will say already seen these play out where if you're an even though it has so many competitors is still the dominant platform by far like Eos raised four billion dollar block one race all billion dollars for EOS right and from what I've seen they aren't gaining much traction you know even though they have all this money right here me are any of the other competitors don't seem to be gaining much traction not to say they won't in the future but I think at this point you know if you're standing up something another chain or something then it definitely is a competitor whether you know the people standing it up want it to be or not you know that there might be an interoperable future where you know change talk to each other and things like that but in terms of

like where the most users go and where like a kind of like monetary premium accrues to the the base acid and things like that it definitely follows that it's like a I guess a winner take most kind of kind of thing yeah I think a couple things too I think depending on the market cycle this stuff's amplified a lot so we saw the most infighting in the community when price was tanking which it kind of all stemmed out of the funding debate right so the EF Treasury was drying up a bit at $80 and everyone was saying how are we gonna fund all this work you know now that we're we've bounced back up to whatever 200 or so like that Treasury is now inflated back up a little bit and those debates have settled down a tiny bit but you know also I think in general social media

amplifies it too so like you actually go to an aetherium conference or meet up everyone's getting along and you know everyone's there from all these different teams and I think just social media plays plays are rolling it to antha you mentioned this like monetary premium and you think that that's like kind of one of the more important things that these chains are competing on can you explain to me like why do you think that first of all is the success of aetherium dependent on the eath asset kind of you know appreciating in value and yeah how linked are these two things I think during the phase that we're in right now where it's really early and speculation is pretty much like most of what people use these and that works for

I think it's extremely important I don't think Bitcoin would be anywhere where it is today if the price then go up like nine would be nearly as interested if you look at kind of like Bitcoin as the shining example of why people are involved you know people will freely admit that they're involved because they want Bitcoin to go up right and everything they do is to make Bitcoin go up and you know educating more users means more people buy Bitcoin which which means it goes up like theoretically right and I think that's what most of the people have been rallying around at this point it definitely exists in a theorem as well people obviously buy ether because they want to see either appreciate like I mean you can buy ethos a little bit of ether so you have to use it for gas and things like that to use the network but

like there's a massive premium there like no one's really buying ether for gas unless they have to they're not buying it and being like okay I'm going to stockpile this so I can use the etherium Network in the future know they're buying it with the hopes because I'll be depreciating so I think it plays a massively important role in a crypto Network they're just getting people involved like at the end of the day you know even in the future when we evolve past these people are going to buy these assets so that they can make money and I don't think there's anything wrong with that I mean we've already seen the the biggest use cases on aetherium being dfi which is all pretty much all speculation I mean dyes used in some capacity you know for people to hold US dollars in other countries like I know something

like Argentina are there's a few people there that use dye instead of like so they can get exposure to the US dollar but in a kind of censorship resistant way and things like that but I think that you know an appreciating asset prices as Eric mentioned is just great for like the overall community the morale the kind of network health and things like that it definitely it obviously plays a massive role in the security of the network you know especially under proof of stake where obviously the higher the price of the asset is the more it would cost to attack the network and things like that so you know I put out a few tweets around this where I where I say that no higher eighth price brings in the kind of legitimacy to the platform so if you're like number so if you're and

being like a number two to Bitcoin and being a number one smart contract platform means that most people will default to just building on a theorem because of that right and and it were just like a signal to the community that the fumes going to be around for a long time because there's a lot of money invested and things like that so there's all these kind of second-order effects that happen from attaining a kind of like monetary premium and becoming like this aura value not to mention all the social stuff that happens around people getting like really involved with you in community simply because they hold ether like I mean that's the reason why both Eric and I you know got pretty heavily involved as well like we obviously own ether and we'd like to see it appreciated in the future so we take that as one motivation to build things

like ether band to keep contributing to the community so I think that that's a massive driver and you know taking the flipside to that and going back to I think like what Lane was talking about on Twitter recently where he feels that people coming into aetherium later getting like a way smaller share of the of the pie right because etherium launched in 2015 they had the ICO in 2014 where the public ICO like obviously was very public it was available to everyone to participate in but someone like me who only got in late I didn't get to actually participate in that ICO and you know depending on when you bought eath you bought it like X x amount as to who bought it at I see oh right but I don't think that that's something that these networks can kind of like fix it no one you know stopped

anyone from buying ether at these low prices it was just like an awareness thing at the end of the day so I definitely think that that you know can cause some in disenfranchisement in the community and things like that but I don't think it's going to be like a massive barrier to to entry into different communities yeah and I think on that too I mean we're obviously both big believers in defy right and think you know ideally this peak could become the new global financial system right and to do that you need a ether which is basically the reserve asset of this new global economy one day ideally you need it to have value because it's securing the it's securing dye right dye is essentially stable eath and you need it to be collateral for everything that's

kind of happening in the d5 space so you know and doing that and if that's the vision you believe in for the future on aetherium you know defy continuing to grow and ideally kind of usurping the traditional finance system you need ether to have value and especially because you can even get more basic than that if we're tokenizing real-world assets someday there's trillions and values kid on the chain you know the chain can't be cheap to attack because no one's gonna want to secure all this value on a chain that could be easily 51% attacked because the underlying asset is is cheap right so I think those altogether kind of you know that's at least why I believe that the air means to or ether needs to develop this monetary premium so I think dye is actually a great example of one of my

concerns with the etherium model and maybe you know I meant to ask this to ruin on our maker down episode like last week but there was so much interesting stuff going on dye we didn't even have time to get to that but here's the Mike my question I don't think dye gets any security from etherium because what's happening here is you have two different tokens one that's being used to secure the operational side of the network which is eat and then one that's being used to secure the governance of the network which is the mkr token and what you would do if you wanted to attack the system is you'd attack the lower value sis the lower price asset which is the MKR you go buy it

controlling share of em care and like just crash the functionality of dye so in this world like you get the lower of the two security but you're paying for the higher of the two security so you're getting MKR security but you're the dye holders are paying for our eath security wouldn't it make sense to me at least in this case for MKR to kind of break off into its own chain in which the MKR acts as a staking token for that system I think this acts true for many applications as well like I think it's true for rap and augur I think it's true for the 0x token I think it's true for a lot of applications so what are your thoughts on this we're eventually like the individual operational tokens of different applications we'll eventually

just want to break off into their own chains I think yeah it's an interesting question a lot of time back there I think definitely in terms of like I know this is like the cosmos model right where things break off into their own like little universes and then connect to like a central hub and things like that but I think that the maker system obviously I think does inherit the security from aetherium so say like maker was the break off things were own chain right and the MKR tokens worth I think 700 million market cap at the moment something like that so that network would be essentially worth 700 million dollars worth of security if you want to look at it that way or something like that so you know I'm not entirely sure about the technicals of how it works in cosmos

and maybe polka dot later on about like shared security and things like that but as far as I know in cosmos it's like you are responsible for the security of your own kind of like China essentially and then you can plug in and interoperate with other chains if you want to so I think the maker system itself definitely benefits from the fact that if you use these you know much higher market cap so there's much higher employer security from that as well whereas and are being its own chain there so this treaty would obviously be lowered and things like that but my point is if you want to attack the MKS system if you want to destroy die I don't need to attack the chain I just need to attack the MK our governance yes yes for sure I mean that's definitely definitely a risk

there but I think that moving to I guess is the own your own chain it would kind of compound these things where you could attack both you know obviously the governance and that would that would just destroy the chain itself right so you'd be doing you'd be like killing two birds with one stone whereas maker being on aetherium like you can attack the maker system right but I mean it depends like how big maker is I mean it was pretty big at the moment and Di's a pretty big part of a theory and where it will have a cascading effects on the rest of the etherium network but I think that even if maker was its own system that kind of plugged into aetherium and daya was still used as it is today it would still have those effects so I I guess I can still I can still see

benefits to both ways of doing it where maker being its own system means that if it gets destroyed it's like concentrated there but I still think it has those on flow effects whereas if diastole used in the same capacity it would still have the same effect on it on aetherium where all the apps that rely on die would kind of go down with it basically yeah and I think this is almost more of a governance question to which I'm not personally a fan of much a poor on chain governance but you know this is more around yeah the cost to attack a governance system and it gets a little tricky with maker because they technically have a fail-safe switch and you know they have this scientific governance which technically you know it's not

totally up to the coin voters because they can fail switch it at the at the end there and kind of settle the entire system so but ya know I think an important question definitely is like how cheap is it to attack some of these you know applications that have a token voting system right and there's a lot of them out there 0x are gone maker you know makers not the only one right and for some of these coins it's very cheap to attack those systems so I guess you know the value of what you capture after the attack has to be there but it's an interesting question so I'd like to come back this idea of either having value and try to unpack that a little bit so if we look at either and the value that it has today into the market cap it is right of

two things primarily so one is the demand for gas and the other is the expectation that ether will someday power the goal financial system and they value that is derived from that at the moment I would say that there is a huge premium on ether because I don't think the demand for gas gives either the value that has a moment and then all of the overhead there is speculation on what the future ether platform could provide in terms of actual value so if we agree on that then wouldn't it be the best course for the community to rather than focus on building more

applications more tooling dows etc which seems to be the focus now wouldn't it be better for the community to be really focusing on the use cases and bringing those real world assets into ether trading the bridges that allows real financial assets tangible assets physical assets from the traditional financial system into aetherium so that we can hex actually have real assets backing it and ether having a textual value rather than the speculative value yeah I guess to your first point I I don't fully agree why I agree to an extent but I would push back and say you can say the exact same thing for a Bitcoin you need Bitcoin for fees on the Bitcoin network other than that it's

entirely speculative I guess Bitcoin holders would argue that its sound money and it's a store value right so I think that's where we're going in the etherium community with you know this store value ethers money ether as a reserve currency for the global financial system some day you know that's more of where the value is being derived from now not just gas payments because if you believe that you know the value would just be drive from guess like you said we're way off from that but the exact same thing can be said for Bitcoin - right so you know right now the issuance on both the etherium and Bitcoin networks are right around four to four and a half percent so there's really not much difference in the asset underlying it other than just the

narratives between the two communities but you know I fully agree with you I think beyond this just like memeing of sound money and store value we need to actually bring use cases to the chain and in the long run that's gonna drive adoption and usage and people are going to want to buy it and speculate on it and use it as gas right and I I do think that that's why the community is building out more and more on the d5 space right if you you know we're seeing all these narratives around like Argentina and Venezuela and people are saying you know oh by Bitcoin well in reality most of the people who actually live in those countries are saying they'd preferred by the US dollar or die right if they were on a on a crypto network because they want stability so things like defy are starting to

actually do that and I think the narratives kind of be your own Bank on aetherium where you can you know you can have your digital asset and actually put it to use for you you can earn interest on compound you can invest with it and asset and have that set automatically rebalance across different investment types for you you know I think that's a strong vision that is slowly being built out on the etherium chain right now yeah I mean that's one application so for example you you mentioned Argentina and having a stable cryptocurrency that you can use there in the form of thigh is probably extremely valuable for a lot of people but it still doesn't give any more value to the underlying asset which is either it gives a it gives value this derivative

asset I'm talking either but either itself as sound money you know if we take the narrative sound money cheap transactions borderless payments etc if the dye is the currency people are using either will never have that function and so where does the value of ether then derive get derive from if all of the value is being created in the layers on top and essentially it's just a house of cards of the value either starts to drop and people start leaving the platform all this other stuff tumbles along with it yes so I think I'll also go back to a post that I wrote earlier this year called why ether is valuable now your criticisms or I guess like points about you know ether itself and you know what what will drive value to each it can be

fair I have this points or criticisms or observations for every curve the currency whether it's Bitcoin cosmos whoever yeah for sure I definitely think that that rings true yet for definitely everything and as I mentioned previously speculation is like the mum the main driver here of a lot of this value for sure but I guess like what I tried to do in my blog post like the way through is about it has value or his valuable blog post was outlined like what use cases the theorem is kind of fitting today so if we actually look at you know go back a little bit look at the history in 2017 ether was used for the IC o---- boom and I think that's what drove a lot of it's about you it became a kind of like you know snowball effect where people would buy ether to contribute to this IC o----

and then they would sell their tokens whether they profit it or not from it back into ether and then put that additional ether back into other I cos now you know they could have sold those tokens for US dollars or Bitcoin but that I think a lot of them sold it for ether because they expected that they just recycle it back into another IC o---- using ether and then you know have those gains again so I think that's what happened in the second half of 2017 especially when basically you know every IC o---- was returning these there's these insane gains to to a lot of people so that's what drove most of the value there I think that's what actually drove a lot of value to Bitcoin itself to like on flow effect a big point I think that's why between got to 20k and things

like that and then obviously we had the hangover period during 2018 where both of the assets crashed a lot I think it kind of led the crash there and pulled Bitcoin down with it you know eighth obviously fell more than Bitcoin has as still a lot lower than Bitcoin as well and then I think since then the human community has taking a look why ether is valuable so what will drive more value to outside of its use cases as being used as money like I know that's become a bit of a meme at the moment it you know is eath money or isn't it it definitely has been used as money in limited capacities not enough to justify the the the mic cap of if there is it currently stands and then a lot of people are saying like you are that if daya feels a lot of these use cases

which dye is actually a lot better for I think feeling a lot of these use cases whether as money or or you know any type of payment is basically going to be better done in dye because it's it's stable relative to the US dollar I think that the value of ether is going to have to come from different things so there's been a lot of a thinking being evolved around this especially from someone that I follow quite closely his name's Ryan Sean Adams I think a lot of people have seen him on Twitter he basically is I think the the leader in making the case for for--why ether should have value and you know where that value is going to be derived from he recently went on a podcast called POV crypto with David Hoffman and his co-hosts there Christian

explaining that ether has become this kind of Triple Point asset or will become this Triple Point asset where it basically serves three different functions as one asset so he outlines these functions as ether as a capital asset so it produces income for the holders where whether it's been its lending out earth or using it in staking in the future where you'll get a return on staking it if there's a consumable asset so it's needed for all kind of financial transactions on aetherium and in the form of gas of course and in the future we may have state rent which is basically paying to use the etherium network paints a little bit of rent Tuesday's here in network if you've deployed a contract or things like that so that the state doesn't bloat out I guess with the technical that may or may

not happen so I'm not I'm not entirely sure and then with the gas fees we may have a new fee market on a theorem in the form of p IP 159 which Eric co-authored as well if you go check that out it basically describes this thing of burning eighths so making it I guess a more scarce asset in that way I then he describes ether as a sort of value of assets so similar to Bitcoin in the sense that it can be a store of value but it also has it use within the etherium network as a required capital for things like open finance so I mean an interesting stat that I looked at around ether was that ether being so valuable right now can allow for these other platforms to get bigger and within defy so something like maker right has I think it's like

2% of all earth locked up in maker it's probably less than that now you know and all of defy it's about 40 or 50 million dollars or 2% ish of of all earth so if you were to do that on something like like Tasers for example the same amount of dollar matter value would require you to lock up 50% of all activity in defy to do that so you know ether being more valuable allows it to be more liquid and and allows it to do a lot more things within the etherium Network without you know having to put up 50 percent of the supply for example which were being trimly hard to get everyone rallying around that so yeah there's all these different things that can drive out the to ether itself in terms of core uses but I think for the foreseeable future and I'm talking decades here it's going

to be driven mainly by speculation just as pretty much every other network is and as I've mentioned previously I don't think that's a bad thing I think that has you know massive second-order effects that that compound and create these other use cases yeah I think that's a very important point I don't think anybody would argue that like today you know ethers money across the world and all of its values derived from usage right we'd be kidding ourselves and saying that I think it's more about setting this up for the future right like something can't just become money and have a monetary premium overnight so how do you assure that you know this can happen in the future and I think building out the dfi infrastructure making sure issuance is low and Anthony mentioned staking like that's a big

component of this too right you're gonna be able to stake your capital and earn an interest return on it so all these things just coming together over the years I think that's your you know monetary premium and we're just basically in the I guess the birthing stage of how we get there when it comes to the monetary premium I feel like one of the things not a lot of people have been doing on Twitter thank you guys as well but you know other people as well is I feel there's just been a lot of like critiquing of Bitcoin going on just like you know but I feel like rid of it it's just like constantly these people just sitting on Bitcoin and to what extent do you think this is like beneficial to the system as a whole or do you think it might drive

people away like you know it seems that like even Vitalik one of the reasons he left the Bitcoin community and like and created a theorem was he got kind of turned away from the maximalism that was happening in the Bitcoin community and I don't know I just feel over the course of the last year that I see like similar trends of maximalism reappearing into at the rim community and do you think this is dangerous for the for the community well I guess first I think the term máximos has become very watered down these days I mean it's basically turned into you're a fan of it and then your maximalists all of a sudden I guess still the core reason if I talk actually left is he wanted to program on top of Bitcoin right so I think it's definitely important to keep that perspective but

you know I I think Bitcoin gets a free pass and a lot of things and I think it potentially upsets people and other communities including the etherium community I mean you know the same hard questions aren't asked of Bitcoin that are asked of of different commodity or currencies that are out there right and one of the big ones is Bitcoin essentially has derived most of its value out of this what I say as a meme of a 21 million bitcoins cap right there is a lot of study out there that says that that's not going to be sustainable right how are you gonna pay miners if if this is the case and the answer that is given back a lot is oh well every happening price goes up double so by the time we get to there we'll be able to

just pay it through fees that's not a very good security model in my mind right so at the end of the day I think there's just differences in the community and you know the Bitcoin community is much larger like if Anthony and I had our Twitter's and we were Bitcoin people we would have 5 to 10 times the amount of followers that we have so their voices are just louder most of the what I would say fun or misinformation about aetherium that we see hub comes from the Bitcoin community so it's more of a defensive position in all honesty and you know I think I think it's ok to have people that are you know advocates and fans of a crypto and you know I don't think Anthony and I are as big either Maximus as people think we are

you know I started in Bitcoin I actually still don't mind Bitcoin I just think they get some free passes on some big topics and you know we've we've owned different coins over time and you know I think we're both open to the fact that maybe a theorem doesn't win this thing right but at the end of the day I think you're just gonna get that when people are dedicating a lot of time and passion and potentially money to right I think it's a if that's true and I I do agree that a lot of the people who are gonna quote Bitcoin maximalist attract huge following so if one you know wants to build their personal branding attaching themselves to some maximalism ideas it's probably that equated to it although I don't know how genuine it is to do that I'd like to talk to her about this

spreadsheet you recently compiled and published with all the projects basically and how they're being funded through the different forms of community funding that exists so whether it's the theory foundation or you know even like Malik Dow or the Eragon fun or some of the different community funds of projects have why did you do this and what kind of trends did you observe in this from premise analysis yeah so this kind of all stemmed from this funding debate which we referenced earlier and the theory in communities trying to find its way of how to fund important work outside of it theorem foundation right like a theorem foundation is not gonna

be around forever eventually they're gonna run out of funds they're not a for-profit business they just give funds out so that that's leaking slowly and slowly so we need to find better ways to fund the community and you know I'm personally a part of Moloc DOE and Medicare tell Dow which are Dallas that try to give money out to aetherium projects and you know there were a lot of this debate around I think the EF gets a lot of unfair flack I actually think they're doing a pretty good job at giving out funds and you know there were debates around block rewards which is something you know I disagree with so the community was like trying to justify what teams deserve more money and we're just asking like it does anybody have has anybody actually put together like a spreadsheet of what teams need money how much they have and

why they need more and the answer was just know people are like oh we should fund someone to do this and I just got fresh straight and spent four hours and I just collected all the grants that I've ever been given out on a theorem and I just built it myself so basically how it works is I put the teams and projects on there I think there's like a hundred and five of them or so and then where they got their money and how much they've raised you know the trends would be the EF has clearly given out the most amount of money the highest investment so far is definitely around East two and the second most would be a violent lair to scaling solutions most of the stuff kind of pales in comparison to those two so you know one of the biggest things that we're seeing

is this pop up of you know outside of the EF like community grants so like Aragon has won gnosis has one there's the ECF there's get coin grants and then really the emergence of douse you know I think Anthony's said the other day 2019 has kind of become the year of the Dow so the community is trying to find ways to you know coordinate capital which seems to be that we can do this through things like the Moloch Dow where people put in funds and then we have a very simple voting mechanism of how these funds should be spent so you know I think we're getting there I don't think the answer is block rewards and there's been a lot of money given out over time I mean there's 21 million dollars that have been given out according to this sheet over the last couple of years so I

think we need to just give it time and I think we're finding ways slowly to to fund important work I think one of the things that stands out on that spreadsheet that you kind of see when you look at it the first time is that poka actually got the five million dollar grant which kind of ties back to our earlier discussion but when I can get into that I want ask ago but in terms of funding so 21 million okay that's you know some amount of money and some might argue it's not a whole lot if you look at maybe you know the available funding that projects could get from raising money from VCS or investors do you think it's better for the ecosystem to approach funding from this ground community funded grants program dows etc

like the ones we see today or do you think more beneficial for projects to seek investor funding VC funding where the interest is perhaps more to build real vacations and consumer applications and applications for businesses where investors could bring some of that experience and perhaps partnerships and sales approach that would lead us towards in what we're talking earlier in a theory of that is more closely connected to the real world and where we're building real applications yeah I definitely think teams could do a better job on the VC funding side and finding ways to monetize their platform so you

know I'm pretty surprised to see teams haven't started offering like small subscription services and you know Pro features and finding ways to monetize their platform and I think it's especially around eath - I mean you're talking about if you become a top Klein in East to your user base is gonna have hundreds of millions of dollars secured in your software right there's definitely ways to sell services to those people and more Pro features and you've got all this money sitting there that's something a venture capitalist would be very interested in hearing a pitch on right so I'm surprised that we don't see more of it I'm not I'm not sure why that's the case you know VCS don't have a problem throwing money at people that don't have a monetization plan right like that's

how most seed funding works so I'm surprised it's not happening maybe it will over time we recently saw like uni swap raised and I know Anthony's team over at set has raised some money recently too so I think we're seeing it happen but it needs to happen more because the reality is we're not gonna be able to fun you know 20 50 million dollars a year and a theory amount of douse unless price goes up 10 20 times from here right so it's just the reality of the situation I mean Moloch has like 1.5 million dollars in it the idea is that you give out funds and you know those funds are used to build cool things on the theorem and then the price goes up and you have more to fund but I hope that teams can find ways to find revenue and different avenues somebody

on that to energy point oh he tell us what is the state of your Jupiter generally and the research around that that big project yes so I guess currently soda spec the 5:08 2.50 contain speck was frozen back at the end of June June 30th I think it was so that basically means that the client teams can now build off that speck without it changing every day and build the implementations out and things like that and get more testing going so we've got a few tests in their clients at at the moment you know from prismatic labs from Sigma Prime I think status as well as the Nimbus testing that client out to so

that's coming along really nicely they're live they're you know they're fixing bugs changing things every day to make sure it all works and you know talks to each other and that's one thing actually that their client teams are now focusing on there was recently a workshop about it the networking of a 2.0 and how all these different clients are going to basically talk to each other so that's been a really heavy focus as of late and that's coming along really nicely as well there's a really great newsletter from Ben Edgington called what's new and e2 that goes out every other week that you can use to follow basically follow along what's happening with these two basically in the weed so it gets a bit technical but it'll keep you up to speed so yeah basically once that's fleshed out

I think the target date for launching that on maintenance for the phase zero on main net is early 2020 so there was a date flown around about it being January 3rd but I don't think that dates you know anywhere near concrete I think it was just like a date given on one of the calls and some people including me unfortunately took it as like gospel but yeah definitely targeting you know q1 there in terms of research into the other phases so phase one specs come along really nicely as well I think that's you know getting completed like really quickly actually and then phase 2 of aetherium 2.0 is definitely in heavy research as well and new things such as execution environments are coming out to at the moment are they're kind of

playing with that and seeing how they can make that work with um 2.0 so a lot of this stuff is documented on a thoughtful for those this thing who don't know the different phases of a theorem and what each one means for thorium 2.0 so definitely go there if you want to check out more of this stuff but yeah in terms of timeline I think phase zero will definitely will hopefully go live in q1 of next year of 2020 and then from there phase one and two can follow rather quickly I think phase one is the the different shot chains going live and then face to what that will be basically bringing if you're 2.0 to feature parity with during 1.0 in terms of what it can do you know in terms of having a virtual machine and a smart contracting platform where people can build ups and things

but as they can do one if you're in 1.0 today wasn't there some plans to allow sticking at DEFCON 5 this year I think the difficult 5 is going to be deploying the the contract with you in 1.0 so basically the contract where you send your eat into get burned so that you'll issued eath on the east 2.0 baking chain I think there was going to be like a ceremony around that but I don't think that would include I don't think the bacon chain which is where you can stake your eat is going live at Def Con okay I see what do you think about this roadmap that we're taking on the ether 2.0 I have like an alternative roadmap that I prefer which is I think a bit more conservative where I would prefer to see you know as someone who's worked on

proof of stake for the last two and a half years I don't trust proof of stake especially not to transfer transition a thirty billion dollar Network with like so much value depending on it and applications depending on it in real world systems depending on it to an untrusted security system and so no what I would have personally preferred and I somebody to talk to give this out to give a talk on this at Def Con it has a I haven't heard back yet but you know I would prefer to see a system where we test proof of stake on these shards and you know you we keep the current one point X chain as the beacon chain and you know so at the end of the day the fundamental root security

is still the proof of work and then we test proof of stake on shards what do you think about you know why was such a radical approach taken to the currently 2.0 roadmap where it's like oh no if you want to participate in staking you have to participate in a one-way bird from the current system to the new system where do you fall on this like radical versus conservative upgrade procedures yeah for sure there are definitely concerns around that I think you know just a bit of history for those who don't know a three-room 2.0 was definitely going to be an upgrade to or through in 1.0 it wasn't going to be deployed as a separate chain so it was actually going to be just deployed as a regular network upgrade or hard fork whatever you want to call it to the

eighth wonder chain and then you could bet a year ago or maybe an over a year ago now those kind of that kind of got you know scrapped and basically the sharding team in the previous take team merged together and said we're just going to build this new system essentially I think that approach was done because they realized exactly what you're saying that migrating this you know 30 billion dollar network or whatever it is over to this new untested system or an untried system is reckless for lack of a better word right so I think that that's why 2.0 is being sought up as a separate chain now in terms of like requiring people to burn their eath to go over to the 8th 2.0 chain and be able to stake on there I think that that's not a bad approach because what basically happens is you

have these people as I like to call the militants they come over from Earth one dot are the ones that are going to take the most recent gonna be on the front lines they're going to stake in either 2.0 with eighth of the bait no has been burned on eighth one day they won't be able to access until the other phases are deployed they need 2.0 so and then for that they'll actually get a higher reward because there will be less people staking so that the ROI is actually higher so I think that doing that approach which is launching a separate chain and requiring these militants to basically be the first stake isn't take the most risk is probably where where I see it being conservative and things like that while we have these two parallel chains I mean it does add additional complexity with how much that

you know something like how exchanges are going to list these two things like are they going to list if one has said as a separate to the if to assert and things like that until the migration has been completed all together because eventually if one there's a few different ways to kind of fold each one into if two it's either it becomes a shard or it becomes an execution environment or or or we just copy the state over or you know the technicals of it are a bit deep there but basically I think that's the approach that we're going with there so in terms of you know being conservative versus reckless I think the current approach is quite conservative you know and I think the timelines are quite conservative as well it is take them taking a lot longer than people would have liked to take but I think

that's definitely being done on purpose for security reasons and and for the overall health of you know private networks essentially do you think there's a chance of you know once the splits start to happen that there's a large segment of the community who wants to continue focusing on eath one point X and maybe taking for example a different road map or something and that we actually see a split between the you know people who switch to the current eath 2.0 roadmap and people who take an alternative path and continue maybe the current chain yes definitely I think that's definitely a big risk and I actually fully expect whether someone does it to be or whether a group or someone does it to make money or do it

from a different difference in vision I definitely think that once eighth one you know it gets folded into eighth - someone will fork the eighth one chain and basically continue it on as it currently is but I think that there are certain apps on aetherium that have sway over where the community goes so if you look at it in terms of like defy if all the defy apps moved over to a 2.0 as it currently stands it's not a huge reason for many users to be to stick to eighth one at the end of the day now most of the apps they use have moved over so they're just going to move with it the users at the end of the day I think have the most power here you know they follow we're about the adapts go I mean you could say that the dabs have the most

power as well where they can migrate over to this new chain basically force everyone to go over there so I think there's dead there's going to be a tug of war with certain you know especially the community the we people who like f1 Maximus or whatever that don't want to migrate I don't think that Heath to is broken and doesn't work very well I'm not sure how that's gonna play out and things like that there are definitely people that I know that I've spoken to that think each one is good enough as it is like it's fine and things like that you know I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with that to be honest like I think it's obviously if Barney's really really awesome it enables a lot of different things but I think that that's you know as we as we you know increase usage of the platform

things like that the scalability issues are really going to rear that head especially in kind of like the next if we have another bull market right where Bitcoin is definitely gonna suffer from the same issues that's always suffered from from 2017 where the days are going to go really high again I think if you're gonna start from the same you doesn't scale much better than Bitcoin at the moment especially because there's more expressive apps you can use on a theorem so the gas you know you need to use more gas to interact with these apps so it's definitely gonna make the fees go up as well so all these sorts of concerns is is kind of like why I want to see who play out because I don't think that is one is enough like it's good it's great it does like what we need to do today but in terms of future

proofing etherium it's it's not enough there definitely is enough especially if a Tyrian wants to differentiate itself from Bitcoin not just be a platform where it's support ether and you hold a phone you know ether goes up basically I think that the theorem has much you know grander goals than that yeah that makes a lot of sense I mean obviously if the etherion can't continue to grow with the current limitations on scaling and we saw it in 2017 and presumably things would be much much worse if there would be another bull run or another reality - for icos or something like that right so obviously it has to it has to evolve but this is a question I like to ask people who are

deeply involved in theory space is with the etherium 2.0 being so far ahead in the future the roadmap is about two or three years for an ember things like cross start transfers I think it's even further out do you think that etherium risks losing talent and even just general attractiveness to other platforms that are already out there so cosmos is one of them and polka dot which is I think probably coming before he came cuboid oh and then there's also a lot of other platforms coming from Asia and their ability to attract people in those regions you know do you think etherium can continue to remain dominant in a space if it has such a long road

map ahead of it to get to parity pardon the pun with any of these other points yeah I mean I think what's gonna determine that to be honest especially as far as developers share goes is more on the funding side right I don't think it's necessarily roadmap related I think a lot of these chains have very similar problems you know polka dot we can talk about it and sounds great but in all reality the chains not live right so I think who knows how long that could be for them to get up to full speed of what like a nice - could look like but funding is the interesting debate right like these projects have bigger war chests of money to give out to developers than aetherium does now it's very interesting because the theorem has

the network effect it currently has the developers I think there's a report out yesterday that the theorem has four times the developer of the second chain in the space but it has the network effect it has the apps and it currently has the users right so how strong is that pull right I mean so far it's proved to be very strong at least it seems to be but as the years go on like you're asking could that like sway of network effect and users you know slowly decay it obviously would if we're talking you know four or five years not much progress is made will one to two years be enough I personally don't think so I think you know we talk a lot about people just switching for monetary

reasons which is obviously important people need to be paid right but there's more than that too you know a lot of people have dedicated years of knowledge building they've learned solidity theirs they've learned all the dev tooling on aetherium they've just learned a lot whether it's through like etho or different education slaves like there's a lot to you know there's community building and going to meetups and like a lot of my friends are in the etherium space now right there there's a lot to this you know that people don't seem to talk about and I feel like once you kind of get sucked into one of these communities and you're you know your full-time job in it and all your friends are that you're going all the meetups it's more than just leaving for the technology so you know I think you and I were having this discussion on Twitter a

few weeks ago where I define you know we were kind of arguing about what the definition of a maximalist is and I defined it as someone who's hesitant to engage in discussion or experimentation of searching for potentially better Optimum's that may undermine a current system slash asset value so how much time should we be spending like looking for new systems that might be better than the current systems and and that have the potential to maybe you know maybe create better global Optimum's than the current ones even though if it may undermine our current market position or something like that now what do you think about that definition of maximalism in general yeah

it's solid to be honest I agree with you I think you know how I look at maximalism personally is if if you don't think anything besides a certain chain could win to me that's the Maximus right and I don't like it's obvious to me that a theorem could lose right and you know something I talked to Anthony a lot about often is I actually more think just blotching in general could loose so I'm not even concerned about aetherium winning per se I'm actually just concerned about the whole blockchain movement winning all right so I do think you know finding better technologies from projects and the interesting thing though is this is like all open source right so the theorems communities talked about forking parts of polka dot over and bringing into aetherium I think that's extremely

valuable I think where it could start to get dangerous as if you're trying to slosh users around to all these different technologies and chains like that's the sticky part that's the hardest to come by is finding users for taps right like that's something we're still struggling with so are you going to be able to like pull these users to a different chain and then like bring them to another and back like that's the tricky part I mean ideally if we could get all the technology shared in one area that's the winning solution but it's tough to do when you have six or seven chains kind of competing for the same small user group yeah I mean all that topic of interoperability we haven't really talked about it so far but where do you see our interoperability going in the future and if we have all of this tribalism already

just in in the underlying chains and now if every chain every major chain attempts its own interoperability standard so for instance cosmos has IBC now if theorem comes up with its own thing and which is not compatible with IBC then we just continue along this path where none of the chains are interoperable where do you see this going and do you think we can at least agree on some form of interoperability standard yes so basically I'm not sold to hunt interoperability it breaks a lot of what we have already I think in terms of composability I mean as it currently stands right a theorems main main strength I think is the fact that

everything's composable with each other like obviously dye is integrated with a lot of different defy apps already and they're kind of like feeds off of each other and different apps can pull from different other apps and and and you know just compounds like people like to call that money Legos or things like that which i think is you know a great way of putting it for sure and you know it doesn't just involve the defy ups as well involves everything like you could have an aragon cow powering I defy harp or another apple or something like that but where it where interoperability fits into what I think I'm not sure like if you're him 2.0 really I'm not sure how compatible that is with with cosmos or polka dot from an architectural point of view if you do look at a theorem 2.0 as a system of

like just the beacon chain being the center and the shards connecting to it it kind of looks like an interoperable system where the shards are there's a thousand and 24 shards which are at thousand 24 different block chains that all talk to this hub called the beacon chain for security basically and that's that's pretty much how like poker God works as well with the power chains and the relay chain so the relay chain is the beacon chain the power chains are the shard chains and this is the different quirks and things like that and there's a polka dots are different in that they have on train governance and limited slots for power chains that can that can change whereas if you're at the start will have the thousand 24 shards so you're looking at the architectures of it they do look like controllable systems but if you're

talking about even cross train systems so say Bitcoin talking to aetherium and things like that I think that there's value value definitely in that but I'm not sure like how like I know the way the way cosmos works is it's got that you know the hardwood and chains can plug into it so that they can actually be an ether chain that plugs into it too but in terms of compatibility there and I mean I'm sure someone can build it in some way or another but it just depends like if you're trying to build it into the core protocol the theorem itself I don't think like maximalism or whatever would stop it from being built in siddur it would be more around doesn't make sense for aetherium to add this functionality for other change to basically plug in easily and you know how does it affect the security of the

network how does it affect the design you know is it doesn't make it theorem more complex as a blowy theorem out be it now there's all these other concerns I think from an architecture perspective I don't know if maximal zoom really plays into a lot of the core Deb's minds to be honest like I think that's more of a Twitter reddit like I guess the community member thing rather than a developer thing I think developers just work on what they know find exciting and things like that there are maybe some developers that are you know can be considered I guess maximalists that openly say that they just want to through him to win because they love the theorem platform and everything like that but you know I don't think that'd be against interoperability I'm not against it like you know I'm not against Bitcoin coming

with you acting as an asset on aetherium there are some people that are against then say that it's kind of like poisonous to have big coin on earth um because it takes away from each - very premium right and things like that so you know I'm not sure if if that made it like you know that's true or not if that does make sense on the surface level but yeah so I think their prevailing narrative at this point in time I think is that the way if 2 is being built you know it does look like in your interoperable system basically yeah I mean I would say that if they're like to your point about composability I feel like all the problems and the new paradigms you have to come up with the composability in an interoperable system are the same as that you have to do in

Eastern Point Oh basically most of their current applications break apart in e 2.0 and we have to figure out you know shards and chains are just two words for the same thing in my opinion and I don't think there's much difference there I think there's been a lot of workmen being done on the consensus side of eath 2.0 but not enough I don't know I guess preparing application developers for the new realities of developing on e 2.0 which are going to be extremely extremely different than developing on the current system you know currently you guys focus not so much on the development like I don't think there's many like solidity tutorials and stuff on e table but is there something that you have to be interested in like

pursuing you were spoken about it for quite a while that we want to develop a section of 8th hub it's just like what time permits basically because having a whole developer thing and keeping it up to date is massive time sync and I think you know getting people on board and helping with that would be a great way to do it whether that's through bounties or putting out a request for work or things like that but yeah it's your point about you know developer considerations from get against the East - research team and things like that I think that we're now starting to see that come to fruition in terms of execution environments which is part of Phase two apiece - so this kind of new idea around each you know each shard or platform I guess on a 2.0 can have their

own execution environment and that can be like you can have an AVM environment you can have an it was an environment you can have an environment that just is like actors like a fee theory layouts and things like that so it gets quite technical but I think there are definitely considerations being made for developers now and how best to migrate developers over but I do agree that needs to be a lot more work done and I think there needs to be especially to point out like on earth $1 there's a fair bit of work I think consensus has their website that is like a developer portal where you there's a bunch of different links there we have some stuff on 8th hub there are a few tutorials out there solidity and things like that but yeah I think there needs to definitely be a lot more work on is

2.0 side of things and getting developers up to speed but I think I mean in terms of like the way a thug could do it we probably have to wait until phase through which is the main phase where all this stuff can happen is actually you know set in stone and the specs frozen for that we actually know what it's going to look like rather than trying to chase the researchers which is you know if you ask any the client teams they're gonna tell you that chasing the researchers is um is really hard and ahem it takes a lot of work so yeah that's that's definitely consideration so where can people find Eve of and all the wonderful things you guys are doing and how having people contribute yeah for sure so if you want to subscribe to our newsletter and podcast you can go to

a pub sub stack calm the documentation at docs.bmc.com x on twitter eric is at ec o n o AR on twitter as well i can just type in both our names and find us there too so yeah great so we'll link to all those things in the show notes and look thank you for coming on the show today cool thanks for having us thank you thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to

podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them well thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week [Music] [Music]