From crypto rails to open infrastructure: Ethereum’s expanding role

Transcript

[music] [music] Hello everyone. Can you hear me? Sorry. As I said, uh I lost my voice. So I hope you can hear me also all the way there. So I'm just going to put the microphone I think. Can you hear me? Yes. My name is Sophia and I represent the funding coordination team at the Ethereum Foundation and um this talk has a mixed format for a very interesting reason. I'm going to talk for the first 10 15 minutes about the work that I have been doing so far and for the next for the second part of this talk I want an input from you. I want you to give me

feedback on the things I'm working on and to share the wildest the craziest ideas you have on how Ethereum should expand its role outside crypto and blockchain industries. So first briefly I would like to introduce what funding coordination team is doing. So we are here to increase net new public goods funding supply match fund supply and demand more efficiency efficiently and uh also reduce ecosystem demand on EF um for funding but actually the final the end goal would be for us that the funding into the Ethereum's uh public goods and also Ethereum's maintain Ethereum protocol maintenance and development will come not only from

within Ethereum ecosystem but also from beyond And that's the part that I'm working on. So I'm looking into Ethereum as a protocol trying to find the use cases uh for Ethereum in other industries and as soon as Ethereum becomes a part of critical infrastructure in those industries, we can get eligible for funding from outside. So it's like a two-folded problem that I'm trying to solve. And um here are the things that I already looked into. So I looked into Ethereum as a payment rail of layer for um open source funding um so basically into open-source broader industry. I looked into how Ethereum as a proof layer can work for maintenance sustations and I

also looked into coordination layer for open frontier AI and we will start with looking into payment layer a little bit closer for open source funding. So the hypothesis that I was working on is that Ethereum rails combined with the dependency graph can provide faster more transparent fairer rails for opensource funding. So what does fairer exactly means is that whenever you fund the top level project the dependencies and the dependencies of its dependencies are all going to get funded. You've probably seen this meme many times, but the if I want to put my work in one sentence, I would like with the help of Ethereum to

fund that random person in Nebraska that has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003. And I've been talking to um a lot of companies, a lot of organizations, and I've been trying to look into open source funding, how it actually works in the public sector industry. And um I talked to open source organization companies that work with open source um in the US. I talked with the public sector in the EU because they have very interesting funding mechanisms there. I also uh talked to open source advocacies. In total I think I've talked to 20 to 30 organizations that touch at certain point open source funding. So the finding here is that

yes funding open source is a nice to have but not a priority. So what exactly that means especially this is really relevant for public sector. Um that means that there's a bigger problem we are trying to solve with the help of Ethereum we are trying to solve a problem that doesn't yet exist. The bigger problem is that opensource uh public sector does not use open source at all. So they are very dependent on their proprietary software and imagine they were buying it for 15 years and now all of a sudden they need to find an open source alternative. They also need to try to fund it because uh or the maintainers that would create an um

open-source repository for them that would work specifically for them. Then someone needs to maintain that repository. That's so much headache. They would just pay for proprietary software for the 16th year in the row. And that's the that's the reality. Um also um another thing is that governments cannot donate money. They can only operate in procurement contracts. And uh that is also an interesting part because for every procurement contract they also need to do QIC and AML checks and like generally legal and compliance work. And that doesn't scale. So essentially imagine that I'm coming to the and I talked to governments and I actually came to them

and I said why don't you use Ethereum and dependency graph together to fund open source. And what they were saying to me is that well it's not going to work because I would like to let's say I'm working with a team of open source maintainers for a specific open source project. I do um a procurement contract for five in this team and I do five K QC and AML checks and you're offering me to do that for dependencies which are 4,000 in my project. I'm not going to be doing that and um they would have to do it repeatably once uh by one by one and um as I said it doesn't scale. So this is a very big problem because they have to

spend um a lot of money into it and actually it is a lot of money because I kind of like speculated a little bit with numbers and uh let's imagine the maintainer receives $100 from a government for just working on open source. In fact they will be receiving around $70 to $80. So 20% of it is going to go to as I mentioned legal compliance QC and AML and from that 20% I would say if we put a settlement cost on Ethereum um and crossber payments fees are going to be mainly eliminated with the help of Ethereum we are talking about 2 to 4% savings. So it's not worth for them to use Ethereum to get on boarded into a

completely new ecosystem which is why they're kind of like stuck in their traditional banking environment so to say. Other problems that I've identified is that it's operationally difficult to scale compliance. I already mentioned find dependencies decide where to stop in the graph with their importance and so many more. So at the moment the project is kind of on post. I'm still in touch with the open source community on that. And what I'm trying to do is I'm going to open source conferences and talk to people about what we are working on. What is Ethereum mainly and many people in open source um industry outside of crypto uh they think Ethereum is still a cryptocurrency. They don't think of Ethereum as a protocol and I'm

trying to change their mind. So yeah, I'm trying to solve this problem uh by talking to one person at a time and I hope that soon we will see the results of it. The next uh layer that I looked into was a proof layer for maintenance city stations. That was an interesting one because that was that arose from the first research that I was doing on open source funding because it is about a very specific act that is called cyber resilience act. You would think ah this is the EU cyber resilience act. Why are you talking about it in India? Well, the thing is that if you are a manufacturer that sells software within in the EU, even if you're not coming from the EU,

you still have to document your open-source dependencies because this act specifically works for security and vulnerability checking. But that's not the idea that actually got me into thinking, oh, how can Ethereum be useful here? It's the article 25 um that specifically describes voluntary security at the station. So those are essentially the programs where open source projects provide security asurances to manufacturers and possible schema schema here is that manufacturers could pay maintainers for assurance and I'll show you what it means. This is the sort of schema that I was uh that I created. So we have two actors in this act. We have a manufacturer that sells

software in the U. It could be any of you in the room that has a for-profit organization that sells the software. You have to uh whenever you sell it to the EU, you have to stay legally responsible for your dependencies. So what you can do, you can ask the maintainers of those dependencies through either a signed contract or through a marketplace to work with them to get their assurance for maintenance of its dependence. So basically to get a promise from the maintainer um that they will be uh responding on time and uh they will be managing the software for an amount of years and manufact maintainer sorry um it's a small paid team that works on security triage

releases and compliance. So how do we actually make those um actors talk with each other if they don't trust each other? It's with the help of Ethereum. We can put atist stations there. Um the public repository signals the actual software bill of materials. That's how professionally the dependencies are called. Um this is already available. You can if you have a GitHub repo, you can go and check your own uh bomb your own dependencies there. But the thing is that maintenance commitment this is something that you can pay for. So we are essentially unlocking another way how we can help open source maintainers get paid so that they're not thanklessly working on their software since 2003. Um

this work is actually um currently also on pause for the reason that the U itself doesn't know what to do with those programs. So they kind of like set up that this could be potentially a schema but they don't know they didn't give any recommendations for that. So we are waiting for them to act on the act and uh then we will be able to uh prop propose um uh this attistation mechanism and um if you know a similar scheme in another industry or in your country of um living please talk to me I would be very interested in learning more um about those examples and the last layer everyone is talking about AI and I have to do that too um I

was looking and I'm looking. It's the freshest research that I have. Uh it's the coordination layer for open frontier AI. Uh be careful, there's going to be a lot of memes starting from here. Um so we have a dilemma. We have a closed model, but you have no idea what happens to your data. So you just throw it prompt and you think, okay, I hope that my data is not going to get leaked and uh I'm not it's not going to be shared with anyone, but it's probably going to be trained on my data. has so many problems. But then we also have open models and here you kind of like have a control um over what you're sending but at the same time you can't really verify what is actually running. Um it works

okay for local AI models but what if you need access to open frontier models and they're extremely heavy to download. You can't um uh run them on your local machine. So you still have to trust your inference provider. So essentially both options are kind of bad. But that's not the only problem here. Another problem is that coordination layer for AI that's supposed to be neutral by design is getting bought up by the uh big uh bosses, big enterprises. So I'm once again asking please stop buying enough coordination layers for AI because they have to stay neutral. And I just Googled today in the morning 2026 AI merger and

acquisition deals targeting orchestration and coordination. This is not the full list by the way. This is just maybe half of it. And that is only what happened in 2026. If you Google 2025, you will find more. Next year it's going to get crazier. So yeah, coordination layer is not neutral anymore. But we have to keep it neutral. So the hypothesis that I'm working on in this research is Ethereum should serve as a trustless neutral by design coordination layer for open frontier AI combining payment rails and identity as well as the ability for distributed actors to exchange value and verify verify claims about one another without

requiring a central controlling body. So you probably know that we have a decentralized AI team at the Ethereum Foundation. So they are essentially working on agentic economy. So that would be the payment and identity um layers or sub layers. And I work on attestation and verification layer problems. And it's interesting because I was always thinking, yeah, this only could work for open frontier AI because you need to connect so many pieces together. And um it's not true because we just um received the release of Entropics um blog and research and uh they outsourced open sourced GitHub uh repository with the tool that they've

built and we see that there is um in those interests of open frontier models and closed labs they are aligning on verification. So the tool is called flash proof and it's essentially open- source zero knowledge proofs that a specific model produced a specific answer. So anyone with a prompt and the reply can check and it's really cool because now you can see that um ZK proofs are um getting used for AI for verification. Um okay let me go back. So um yeah that's the research that I was working on. This is very fresh. So if you want to talk to

me about the intersection of Ethereum and AI, please come to talk to me. Please talk about the verification coordination layers that I'm um currently researching on. And I know I gave you a lot of information right now and but we still have 10 minutes left. So now I would like to invite you to participate in uh Mentimeter. So essentially what we are going to be looking into please scan this code um and you will be redirected to the web page um where I will be asking you the questions. So what are the industries that you think Ethereum should shine next? What are the layers that uh you would prefer Ethereum to work? Not just there is a payment layer as well but you can also see other layers and you can uh

fill in and we will see that um online now. Um you can fill in your ideas. It could be super crazy stuff like just go wild, go um crazy and uh then um if you have an idea that you want to talk to me about, please come to me and talk. I'm um here around the whole day, the whole DevCon and today uh you will also find me by my um crops t-shirt that I'm wearing. So um would be happy to chat. So let's do the menty together. I hope that I'm going to scan that too.

And can you please put the menty link? Yes. Oh, nice. We have already some answers. That's amazing. All right. So, um, yeah. What should the fury be for industries outside crypto? And I see that many people voted for payment. Okay. Privacy, verification, identity. Great. I can see I can see that coordination is only three. I'm would be wondering why. Um, okay. This is great. I'm going to make a picture of it as well. I know that I have that saved but just for the sake of that is happening. This is happening live.

This is great. Can we move to another page please? All right. You should be able to see a change of question in your menty. Did it do you have a change? How about now? Yes, perfect. So, where should Ethereum push harder? I selected a couple of industries where Ethereum has been already explored and uh experimented upon. Um but if you're missing the industry where you would like to see Ethereum shine, then um you will have a chance to put it on uh later.

>> Where do you think Ethereum should put push harder? Oh, >> good question. I would like to see Ethereum successful. I think yeah, broader open source industry. This is the first research that I'm working on. It's the hardest one, but it's definitely the most interesting one. Yeah, I think we can see the results here. Okay, that's interesting. We have so many up votes for digital identity and for supply chain compliance. Perfect health data.

All right, great. I hope you all voted. And now let's move to um another question. Oh, there was another upote. Perfect. Great. Um which industry did I miss where Ethereum would actually make sense? As I said, now start going crazy because uh I've been talking to someone today. EMV for taxis and uh decentralized messaging for hotel industry. Just write whatever comes to your mind. Maybe you had already something in your head for uh perfect. Perfect. I can see already some answers coming up. Amazing.

Great. Hi. Hi back. whoever wrote that wellness public. Wow, that's that's amazing. See, you can literally think of Ethereum being everywhere. You just need to find the right angle. And I also think that it is what I want to mention before we stop the presentation actually is that Ethereum is a diamond, right?

And it has so many facet uh facets and basically each facet represents a layer that Ethereum could be useful for. And I feel like that's the power of Ethereum that you can use it literally for anything whatever your mind can create. All right. Interesting. uh a boating, transport, adult entertainment, copyrights. I love it. I love that you're so proactive. Thank you so much. I knew it's gonna work out. I have a great room of uh builders, thinkers, creators. So, thank you so

much for um adding those. Just going to make a picture as well for that too. Live on stage. Amazing. All right. And now I'm moving to a new question which is essentially here I looked into the industry right but now I want you to combine industry and layer and write down the bigger response so to say. So can we go to the next slide please? Combine any industry with any Ethereum property. As I said go crazy the wilder the better. Just write whatever comes to your mind.

All right. I see you're all thinking. You're all typing. I love that energy. I love the I love that people work for me instead of me speaking to you. You know, now my my part is over. I'm done and now you should write me today. Okay, that's interesting. Also, please come talk to me. As I said, I'm going to be here um all the time. I'm leaving on the weekend only. So, please come talk um discuss those ideas with me. I'm super open to just go for the ideas and um yeah, as I said, the sky is the limit. You can do whatever

you want with Ethereum and um apply to anywhere. Okay. Ethereum is open-source digital public infrastructure. Lets nations keep their technological sovereignty, cut cost for society and lo innovation without compromising trust or digital security. Okay, I guess someone is making uh some work on it, like some research or something because this is clearly out of the books and I want to talk to you whoever wrote this. Thank you.

Oh perfect. You know what? I'm just going to keep that on. Um so you can still think about that. I'm just keeping that question on in menty. So you can if you leave the stage, you can just submit your idea. As I said, come talk to me. Can I please ask to put my presentation back because I have two minutes left and I still have uh one slide to cover. I just wanted to um make a conclusion. So I wanted to um um quote Vitalik's Berin post the cryptographic world computer that he wrote in September this year. So basically what we are experiencing right now is a shift from Ethereum as solely a

ledger onto which you can indiscriminately dump computation and data that gets executed to an architecture that combines blockchains with cryptographic privacy and verification and powerful decentralized off-chain components. [music]