Crypto's Speculative Phase & Ethereum's Mass Reform | Expansion Crossover Roundup

Transcript

hey everyone this is a crossover episode between bell curve and expansion we discussed the Trump token launch salon's performance under stress and the ethereum foundation's cultural challenges enjoy as blockchains actually become used and aren't just like research projects it's really important that you have a really strong product voice what are the problems ethereum users or ethereum ecosystem users face today the beam train does not move the needle on that stuff at all have people who actually think holistically about customers are actually the user of the chain think about product and can push back and be like guys like is this research stuff moving the needle ultimately everyone's going to hang on every word that Bic says and I'm sure even if he's not in an explicit position of authority he's certainly in a

position of moral Authority it probably does have to come from him right like I don't think actually anyone else is really capable of stepping in and full like fully changing the direction of the ship in as drastic of a way as it probably needs to be changed this episode is brought to you by Aries markets to learn more about Aries markets follow the link in the notes below hey everyone quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode nothing said on bell curve is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice our guest and I may hold positions in the companies funds or projects discussed all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup of expansion uh

you got me and Nick um and then we've also got Jill and Uma joining us back again everyone welcome great to be here thanks for having us uh this is this is an exciting episode because this is uh the beginning of a new chapter of the expansion Roundup uh where both Jill and um are going to be joining us uh as regulars on the show uh so very very excited about that and um you guys have both already been on the show but maybe could I like put you on the spot to just do a super quick like 30- second intro for both of you so the audience knows exactly who you are and then we can uh move past the fun celebration do you want to go for it um yeah I'm Uma I'm the co-founder and CEO of succinct we're a project building

uh a ZK VM and a decentralized rber network that hopefully will help scale all blockchains and Beyond um and yeah really excited to be here awesome and I'm Jill I'm co-founder and head of strategy at espresso systems we're working on technology to make ethereum more composable um and what that looks like is a confirmation layer to provide super fast confirmations across rollups so yeah excited to bring my perspective and hot takes to the show so in addition to being uh lovely very interesting people I thought this was a great to have both of your perspectives on a very modular focused podcast we've got ZK gigabrain and

someone who knows more about rollups uh or has forgotten more about rollups than I'll ever know so very excited to have both your perspectives on this show um but uh so we we're gonna do some very uh right curve more technical content going forward but we actually have to start with the most left curve story of all time because it was the biggest story of the last week probably the last couple of years um we had a trump and Melania meme coin launch uh now last weekend so it went live Friday at 10m uh I was telling you guys before I probably picked the worst weekend of all time to be offline I found out about all this stuff like 36 hours after it happened uh I woke up to a stream of text from Yano um which I thought was a joke in the

beginning but yeah basically uh actually Yano we talked about this on Ember he actually got a call from the Trump team um on Tuesday saying hey we have a high-profile token launch that's coming up uh can you connect us with a custodian so we had some kind of idea that something was coming uh but then obviously was completely unprepared for when this launched at like 10 pm eastern time on a Friday night um it immediately went to something like 30 billion in fdv everyone was extremely excited about it I would say there were a lot of very hot takes that were happening and um almost immediately after I think 36 hours after the launch of the initial Trump token we had a Melania token um and the market did not like that one bit I think I think Trump sold what did they expect

though I don't know I mean I think everyone kind of had the same take on this right which is hey it's cool the president is launching a meme coin maybe a little bit grifty but ultimately cool and then it was like oh this is an incompetent grift right this isn't even like a competent well thought out well executed uh thing so I don't know the market sold off and now everyone's kind of um I don't know I would be curious there's a bunch of different angles on this story this is uh one maybe there's a little bit of a there was a choice to launch on salana here and how did the infrastructure hold up and actually I've got a bunch of data to show that's tells a pretty cool story uh I think of what it's like when uh you know something of that magnitude happens on your chain

there's a story of what does this actually mean for crypto in the United States um does this mean that anything goes or or does it not actually mean that and I then I guess there's just a story of should presidents be allowed to do something like this but you know maybe we can start yeah like is this kosher uh so I don't know however you guys want to start I would be curious maybe just on what does this mean for crypto RIT large is this some really positive thing are there more negatives to this like what do you guys just think about the implications for especially us crypto here well Mike like you I was actually offline when when all this popped off and I learned about it from a text from a completely Normy friend of mine that said hey what do you think about this Trump token

thing I was like wait what and um so I quickly read up on it and obviously when Norm friends text you like that what they're really asking you is like should I buy this thing do you think it's going to go up and I was like right dude I have no idea like I have this is not Financial advice but what I can say is I think this is really bullish for crypto on the whole for a lot of different reasons one is you know it legitimizes meme coins to some degree uh it draws in a ton of new users and just I mean think about like the whole media storm that went around this Trump thing like it's just attract a lot more eyeballs and attention to the space and then beyond just that it's to me opened up the I guess the Overton window I'm not sure if

I'm using that uh correctly but I think it's it's means that like anything not anything goes but what is acceptable to do uh is like just widen to a level that I don't think we've ever had historically in crypto like you know I think a lot of people would be afraid of launching a meme coin in the US like transparently just even like a few months ago before Trump was elected but now like it's clear that I think we're going to be in a completely new regulatory regime where you can get away with and feel safe potentially launching Whatever Whenever Wherever um so this could mean like a huge influx of like speculation and and new token launches

so that's kind of the way that I see it I think it has definitely expanded that Overton window of what's acceptable I mean a lot of the takes on Twitter over the weekend were okay so now we're doing crime on chain let's go I just I I'm happy to be the mid curve on this one I don't know that this is a good thing I think that uh I'm surprised that there hasn't been more kind of retail anger and backlash at least that I've heard or seen from what's amounted to a pretty massive rug pole one thing that we didn't acknowledge yet is that I think 80% of the Trump meme coin was held by Insiders

like that is again talking from Melania oh my God Overton window acceptability like we were trending towards like it's got to be sub 50 it's got to be sub 40 you know for uh VC coins uh and now suddenly okay but it's you know it's apparently kosher if the president does an 80% Insider aloe like again we haven't maybe seen the backlash at least that I would have expected as the resident midwit yet but I would be surprised if we see more of these and then we don't see that kind of backlash um and I think that that backlash could be even stronger than the negative sentiment that we've seen against crypto

and past Cycles because honestly in my opinion it's kind of Justified this time around like I'm very much in that camp of like if Gary gendler had only made reasonable regulations and expectations for the industry we might not find ourselves in this situation right now where uh where yeah it's being taken to an extreme meme coin specifically or being taken to an extreme on the highest highest profile um curious get your take Ken I know you're also trading in the trenches uh Trump and Melania yes about the trenches I'd love to get yeah your um yeah I think I when I first saw fren

Tech actually I actually thought that was like one of the most interesting projects I've seen this cycle and obviously it ended very poorly and you know the whatever like the UI and the ux for frontech was always very poor but I thought the fundamental thesis of social coins or you know PE famous people having coins and then having communities around them in this very internet native financialized way was always like an interesting hypothesis I'm not saying it's like 100% right or wrong but like an interesting thing to try um and so I was actually really sad when like FR kind of shut down and stuff and I think it was interesting to see that thesis be brought back to life um with the trumpcoin with arguably like one of

the most famous people in the world so that was like cool um I totally agree the Melania thing kind of made it very very grifty I think before that it was like potentially exciting um and like oh what is he going to do with this where is this going to go like maybe that could even be like a top five coin right like I think had he not done the Melania thing it could have gone honestly a lot higher um but yeah the Melania thing kind of made it clear that it was much more grifty maybe more just like a CRA cash grab so yeah in terms of my personal experience I was actually in the office at 7 pm because I'm on the west coast and my co-founder and I were there we see Trump tweet we first thought it was

a hack and then we're like all right we got to buy this so we were in the trenches I haven't actually used salana that much before so I was like transferring from coinbase to saana loading up my Phantom and I I bought a very very very small amount to be clear um and tried out the chain and honestly it worked really great like everything went through transaction landed got it saw the chart going up was like okay this is cool um and then when Melania happened I was actually also in the office on a Sunday and my co-founder and I were also there and we were like all right well the last one went well we have to buy this one too and uh so we we bought Melania actually that time salana did not work well so I believe jeto went

down um or something like that happened and it was a horrible experience uh our transactions wouldn't land um there was insane slippage like totally totally insane slippage um the transaction fees were actually really high it was like a couple bucks um things were reverting I had to like go into Jupiter and like change this I had a salon friend telling me like how to change all the setting and like it was really confusing um and I was like oh wow salana is like completely bricked right now and the chain actually was not functioning I think for you know an hour or maybe even a bit longer so yeah it was interesting to see like those two different experiences like I thought Trump on the inite sped really well um for Trump but for Melania it definitely showed the

network still has like a bit of growing to do yeah this um so I'm sharing my screen there's a tweet from Dan from our team uh so jeto experienced basically Al a three-hour uh period of downtime the median priority fee jumped 5,000x uh transaction count fell 66% um and cus per block which is the salon equivalent of gas per block fell 50% so it shows you just how critical um goo is to the network actually probably the best um analog that I would give you is basically me boost on ethereum like all of the the pgaas that used to happen pre this offchain auction that flashboot run yeah that I would say salana is you know pretty dependent on geeto

functioning especially during these you know periods of extremely high transactions so um what do you guys think would you call it a victory for salana this weekend or a condemnation because I my timeline was totally mixed I had all of my salana friends doing Victory laps which honestly I think is Justified I I think I saw Raj from salana posting that they handled something like 10% of daily NASDAQ volume in in a single day and then as soon as the goo thing happened with Melania I had all of my ethereum friends being like yeah rollups for the win this is the future this episode is brought to you by Aries markets Aries markets

deployed on Aptos in 2022 and is now the largest lending protocol with $280 million in tvl to learn more about AR's markets follow the link in the show notes below okay I think it's a massive win for salana um and here let me actually describe it in charts here so there's obviously in uh what Raj said is right the the deck volumes um absolutely exploded so this is uh you can look at this is a daily they did almost $40 billion do worth of um volume in one day which is yeah that's absolutely crazy numbers wow yeah yeah here's something else that's pretty interesting um if you look at what happened with stable coins on salana um

this is what happened uh you know post the Trump launch so they got about three billion dollars or three and a half billion dollars worth of new Staples that migrated so even if you want to say okay this mcoin trading activity is ephemeral or it's not very good or it's immoral or something like that there is a very very significant amount of new asset issuance in the form of stable coins right which everyone basically agrees is a good thing to have on chain totally um and then the other I actually think the the last like data point that I would show you here is the amount of new wallets that got created on salana or that uh started to trade this Trump coin for the first time so here sorry this is going to take me two seconds to pull up here but it's super interesting

data because anecdotally as well I had a bunch of normies like reach out and ask me like hey that had never bought crypto before they were like Hey how do I buy how do I buy this this trumpcoin right and so this actually comes from I think this is chain analysis that had this data but 50% of trumpmelania holders had never bought a salon altcoin before 47% of buyers created their wallets the same day that they purchased the tokens and 83% of holders own sub 1K of Soul assets so just the onboarding here that happened um and you can also see it with I think another big winner of this was Meteora and moonshot um so there's something pretty clever that Meteora does with uh some of these more celebrity coin launches which I don't

even know if these are meme coins or if they're celebrity coins but you can basically provide one-sided liquidity which accounts which in a concentrated liquidity if you're balancing a pool essentially equates to selling right so I'm sure that's part of the value proposition for these people that are launching with massive percents locked up um but uh I think moonshot got something like 400,000 new users um I don't know I felt like uh and salana pumped to now it's back down trading around 260 but it pumped all yeah alltime highs so I don't know phantom too big win for Phantom as well they held up really well yeah um yeah was my first time using phantom um like for actually trading and um I it well it sounds like I'm retail

because I fit a lot of those characteristics but yeah it was it was it was a it was like a really good experience I think something Phantom does really well is when you create an account uh you can sign in with like your email so the default is actually sign in with email not with like a seed phrase um and I actually did like a kind of product analysis of Phantom versus metamask afterwards kind of to be like okay how does metamask compare and yeah metamask as default is a seed phrase and that's just so much worse because you have to like write it on paper it's really scary it's really like unfamiliar uh where's the Phantom onboarding was really top-notch so I was very impressed by that and Uma you managed to get your

soul out of coinbase that was the other big drama around all of this right is that coinbase's infrastructure I guess is like famously bad around salon and is very highly inen see but that wasn't an issue for you yeah yeah I got I got lucky I guess first mover you were in early well I think it's important that like I I actually wrote a tweet about this I think to yesterday or the day before that I think one really big faum of the ethereum community is that most of the people in charge or most of the people running companies do not actually use the chain and I the majority of volume on chain today is for speculation

and gambling and you know we can have opinions about that but I think it's really important to try out the products as they exist and like form opinions and like understand how things can be better and like you know part of it I I was excited about the Trump coin but like also part of me was like going through the exercise of being like all right this is going to be like a really big event like I want to be a part of it and actually be like part of the users of the products we're building there was a really my own experience oh in terms of Sal versus ethereum or if it's a win oh like if this was a win for salana in general like what do you think I mean I mean obviously it's a win I mean is there any other infrastructure I mean

sure yes they had um they pushed the limits of what their Network can withstand but I mean it's as you've just showed it's like the largest single influx of new users ever probably in in a single day or single like weekend ever for for the industry and and they didn't I mean I feel like in previous eras they would have like just fully halted or it would have I I would have expected fees to spike even more than they did like the fact that it was only a few dollars and it was it was pretty like not that bad frankly for the scale in my opinion but I think it does it does show that there are limits uh to what we can do on chain um still and I do I still think that rollups are the long-term solution

but the the irony of this is that on the on the other side we have like what happened with the anime anime uh coin launch on arbitrum and how that was a much much smaller event and the fees got way way worse so I feel like the ethereum camp it's very doesn't it's not a good look right now to try to like Lord it over salana and be like see you guys need rollups when I think the rollup infrastructure still is is struggling I think a lot of that's due to due to blobs um not necessarily the rollup execution per se at least that's my impression there was uh so here just a little bit of uh a few statistics on the anime token which is linked to isuki um so the TPS peaked at 101 which caused a

spike in median transaction fees to $120 which is 355xi don't know what the quantum is of like the anime token launch but I have to imagine it's you know several ERS of magnitude smaller probably than uh Trump so not meant a knock on arbitrum at all here but there's definitely um maybe still a little bit of work to do and I want to start to transition to more right curve content in a little bit and talk about Petra and also native rollups so Justin Drake put out a super interesting piece uh this week and Uma maybe we're going to call on you for more technical uh explanation of that and try to unpack if there's a better model for rollups and then also Nick try to get how that um like the impact to Celestia on all of this but I had a

there was actually really I was looking for it I couldn't find the tweets but you know the ethereum foundation was obviously catching enormous amount of heat over the last week or so and I think Danny Ryan who is being talked about is coming back and potentially uh starting as the executive director tweeted out what would you like to see ethereum researchers do on chain and Kobe tweeted like three things it was go on rollups and trade in between usdc and the native gas token so like ARB usdc go go on and trade a cross pair right so like Pepe ARB or something like that and then go to salana and try to do the same thing and try to trade profitably and there's this whole back and forth about why do you actually need to do this and why do you need to trade profitably and

his point was that if you're trading in size and you're trying to do it profitably which is what your users are doing you literally can't do it on rollups today but you can do it on salana and it was a very interesting point it actually wasn't intuitive to me I had to hear him like walk through the whole explanation but now when I think about it it's like that's who your power users are right people that are trading in size that want to make money on chain and if you can't do that in a rollup then that's really alling right like that's maybe why it's been I didn't see this Mike what was what was Kobe's uh reasoning or what was the logic is about fragmentation yeah is fragmented so it's not not deep enough to trade in size yeah the spreads blow out after a

certain it's like for for retail users like it probably not for for you and me um maybe not Uma now that she's a trump whale but uh once you basically once you're once you're trading in size yeah I I don't know what this I don't know what the amount is but like maybe say a couple million dollars which is probably what makes sense for you to prioritize from the perspective of a rollup um you know you're not really caring as much about someone punting a thousand dollars but you definitely care about someone trading two to five million um if you can't do that because of liquidity on a rollup then that would be very limited I mean this is something I was gonna say about the Trump phenomenon is I have to wonder what the sort of NPS score like the net promoter score which is

something a lot of consumer companies talk about what is The NPS score of all of those people who came on and traded Trump on salana like you know most of them probably did not make money right um I'm curious I mean most of them probably had a better experience on sana's infrastructure and Phantom wallet today than they would have a few years ago on the eth L1 and metamask uh but I it just to me I feel like there's not enough I'm glad that Kobe is kind of promoting this line of conversation with the EF but I just don't think that there's enough focus on what the actual user experiences also to uma's point like we

all need to be testing this ourselves and we need to be feeling these pain points and we need to understand actually like does it make a difference if the fee is 10 cents versus dollar or is the thing that's really making a big difference the lack of liquidity liquidity fragmentation slippage like these other Dynamics um um so yeah that's really I'm glad to I'm glad to see Kobe taking up that mantle he's he's a busy guy lately Jill can I maybe push back on that a little bit because yeah I I actually think that most people probably get sucked into crypto buying if you're me xrp I know everyone else had more noble first bags than me but uh you know most people basically get sucked into

crypto buy something stupid and lose money on it right I would I would guess that that's the onboarding I mean that was me with Bitcoin in 201 I bought close to the local top there yeah right so and I was out of the money for years so I I agree with that but I think that um I don't think that we are like the norm I don't think that we are the average consumer that we're looking to on board here and I mean maybe we just have to go through enough cycles of this of like burning people and then getting them kind of nerd sniped on it of like what happened there but I don't think that that's going to be the average experience I think that most people who get burned whether it's on a bad trade

or a bad user experience or high fees or whatever they're gonna be like all right this is not like this is not worth my time I'm busy I've got a real job I've got a real life to live I've talked to Jason about this before I would love I don't know if this cohort analysis is even possible to run but I would love to run an analysis on people that have stayed in crypto when got in in different periods of the cycle like I I would guess that most people actually do fit the description that you just gave which is you get in around the tail end of a crypto cycle you end up buying some then then you might you might end up like working I think really what it is that makes it sticky is you end up getting a job in crypto totally and then

that's that's CTO market today is people who work in crypto and then we have these kind of like oneoff events we like to talk about is onboarding events like people buying into the Trump meme coin or I don't know people gambling on poly Market or whatever but I think that those are one-offs and not as sticky as we like to think or talk about but I I think that I'm also talking about uh how do we actually onboard the masses versus like Mike I feel like you're getting at how do we onboard more of these kind of like Niche weirdos like the four of us on the call who did get nerd sniped into this even off of that trade but I

appreciate the push back I I I recognize I totally fit into that archetype too so maybe that is how we draw people in I don't know it's unclear I because I intuitively also hated this in the beginning but I've also just kind of watched it work and uh you know it's it's like I'm waking up you know eight years after being in this industry and this industry is a hundred times bigger than when I first got in um there's way more people there's way more cool stuff going on uh we have Larry that's saying that we should be tokenizing stocks and bonds I don't know I on the one hand I'm with you and it it there's something about it right that I also don't like uh you know I'm basically I'm a foil on both sides of this debate uh whoever is debating me the other way and because I

also don't think gambling is like a societal good uh I just don't think this is like a desirable thing that we should be optimizing for on the other hand it's hard to deny that it's empirically working um and I think over time there will probably just be a transition away from stuff that is more gambling and speculative into hopefully more material use cases but I have a ton of faith that that's what's going to happen eventually I think historically speculation always precedes like the sort of birth of a new industry you know whether it's like railroads or whether that was like trans Oceanic like exploration back in you know whatever yeah yeah the internet exactly so I feel like it's just a phase that every one of these technology

platform forms has to go through um and it just so happens that interestingly in crypto like the speculation is kind of one of the use cases because you can do it on chain in this permissionless way and you can build like these Financial Primitives that enable it but I think I think yeah it's just like a I think people that get overly nihilistic about it are kind of like missing the forest for the trees so they're like a little bit too like short cited to realize that like this is it's a it's a phase that you just go through and and and it's actually it's great because launching Trump is test testing the the rails that we're building and making sure that we can actually handle more serious like large scale use cases in my view I think

where crypto differs though Nick and then we can move on sorry Mike to more right curve content here but I think where crypto differs is that we like to conflate the speculation with onboarding events like that is the word that I keep hearing regarding the Trump phenomenon and like no one during the railroad bubble or during the internet boom of the early 2000s was saying like oh because pets.com is trading it X that means that we have onboarded the masses to the internet or that means that there's real usage there and I think that with crypto it's sort of like the speculative asset and the

product are often one and the same and so we take these moments in time where there is like a spike of of usage and interest as an actual onboarding event so I guess I I just don't know how real or sticky those numbers are going to be for this one but um trust me I'm I'm hopeful that those people stick around on salana and play with other cool stuff on the chain and get defi pilled and all of the rest of it so can I actually give maybe what is a crude analogy here but I think it might actually hold which is actually the number one usage of the internet when it first came out was porn um and there might be an analogy between porn

and meme coins here where actually like even still to this day uh it feels good while you're doing it you regret it not actually when I was going no that's not where I was going but it's porn actually battle tested you they actually led the charge in a bunch of the early like video playing infrastructure around the internet that directly led to social media and it's still 35% of uh bandw worth uh today so I don't know maybe I I sort of feel like maybe that makes an argument for I like I like that analogy do you know what I mean it kind of battl tests the infrastructure it actually weirdly pushes things forward it still is this use case that's kind of a sin use case that no one really likes to talk about but obviously people get there's some amount of Merit uh to it so I don't know

uh now we ended on crazy thing is Mike that I I think porn is still one of the like largest consumers of bandwidth globally on the internet yeah as well it's 30 35 maybe maybe specul just stays stays like a massive part of the industry indefinitely but also do you not think this about Finance sometimes I think that the allergic reaction that people have to speculation in finance is I mean how much of this I feel like there a lot of there's a lot of degeneracy that just happens in trafi isn't there it's just it's just better ass mustache and a pipe and like sort of dresses it up to try and look a little bit more respectable quick shout out to today's sponsor Aries markets Aries markets deployed on apts in 2022 and his now among the top 10 lending protocols

across all blockchains with $280 million of tvl Aries markets has expanded its product Suite to become a fully integrated defi Hub combining lending borrowing and More in 2024 alone Aries introduced several new features to better meet the needs of its users including native usdt support an incentive program and more click the link at the bottom of the show notes head over to Aries markets and tell them that I sent you all right I want to Pivot from from uh from Trump and porn to uh Native rollups so we had a so Justin Drake put out a really interesting piece piece on eth research and this actually the first person that I heard talk publicly about this was actually Martin uh copelan uh back at Devcon this year so when Justin Drake gave his beam talk uh Speech there was

another one from Martin talking about Native Roll-Ups and uh this was actually an older a relatively older concept I think people used to call them enshrined rollups um but it's a little bit of a different construction even from uh based rollups and Uma I saw you going back and forth a little bit with Justin Drake and actually falic on Twitter about this so can you just give us a quick summary of what the post was and maybe give us a little bit of a you know topology here of like what's the difference between you know a rollup versus a base rollup versus a native rollup yeah for sure so basically like well let's start with like tldr rollup basically of eth that gets locked in a contract on L1 then the execution

happens offchain and then they a proof of the execution um either like a ZK proof or a fault proof is used to like verify that you know the state route of the world is you know correct and transactions are processed correctly and then you can withdraw your eth from the bridge contract now most rollups today basically they roll their own like proof system so they have their own method of proving validity to the L1 and the fundamental reason that's bad is because ether is upgrading like every quarter or every half year there's a hard Fork where the evm goes through changes they add features and stuff like that and so if you're a rollup and you

want to stay evm compatible you also have to have a way of upgrading your like proof Logic on L1 to to like keep a pace with all these developments and the way that works today is most rollups have a security Council that's responsible for like basically it's a multisig where people sign off on like a upgrading the bridge contract and a security Council if it's like you know has enough people on it there's a time lock on it is actually maybe not the worst thing in the world but in practice it's bad for a few reasons uh one is if you talk to any rollup team having to maintain a security Council with a list of multisig members is a huge liability um and so that's like one bad aspect and

the other aspect is that it basically like takes away from the security of the l2s like l2s today do not have the same security as L1 because like if there's a bug in the proof system then you're kind of screwed like the money in the bridge can just like be arbitrarily like hacked or taken at will whereas in ethereum if there's like a bug in you know the L1 layer or something then you have ethereum social consensus that can like Fork the chain and so that's kind of what people mean by like the importance of rough social consensus and stuff like that um and so yeah one really interesting fact about like the Practical implications is that John charbono pointed out in a recent piece

that only 2% of eth has been bridged to l2s so it's actually a very very small amount seriously that was shocking to me yeah it's surprising and John charbono kind of states that like oh well there's this myth almost in the ethereum community that like oh rollup security doesn't matter the users don't even care if there's no fault proofs blah blah blah but he pointed out that no actually people do really care and the way they express their preference is like no one's bridging to rollups at all and you have these pretty big eth whales who replied um like I think Cal and stuff being like yeah I I don't feel equally comfortable holding my money on a L2 as I do on L1 and I think fundamentally native rollups completely solve this

problem which is really awesome because now you have like the proof system for a rollup enshrined as part of L1 so it becomes this like I mean we can go into the technical details but it becomes this like pre-compile on L1 and rollup teams can just use that proof system and they don't have to make their own and because that like the way the rollup now proves its validity to L1 is part of the L1 logic it's also governed by ethereum governance so it has like the exact same security properties as L1 itself and now you can imagine like with Native rollups l2s actually inherit security from the L1 they have the basically the exact same secur security um and that now you know it kind of gives a path for people

to feel equally comfortable holding their assets on an L2 as they do on L1 so I think it's that's like the biggest reason it's awesome is it like genuinely makes l2s as secure as L1 why why does it make it as secure as the L1 I mean can't there also be a bug in whatever proof system they choose or is it then that if there is a bug because it's part of ethereum L1 they would like hard fork and fix it is that why yeah because the proof system is part of um the ethereum protocol uh it is also subject to like the rough social consensus of like ethereum upgrad so yeah if there's a bug then it can be like forked uh by the system interesting but how do you feel

about this like I feel like uh well maybe not succinct itself but I mean the whole story of the the development of the ethereum rollup ecosystem to me has been like who has the best proof system you know what I mean like who is we have fraud proofs these guys have ZK proofs blah blah blah whatever and a lot of that I feel like has turned out to not be that relevant because like you know some of the most like successful rollups have just basically have forone any kind of proofs but um does this King make and does this kind of screw over like a lot of the existing rollup teams and everything that they've built no I definitely don't think so um as you pointed out like no rollup has actually managed to differentiate itself based on its proof system right like even though they like to think that uh

they do and that is like usually a big part of their development effort in reality there's actually a lot of other parts of the rollup that matter a lot more uh for example how it gets sequenced or you know think like what's actual user experience or what's your community what's your apps and I don't think rollup teams should really care about their proof system as much um because it's not like a real differentiator to the end user experience that the user feels uh so I actually don't think it rugs the existing rollup teams at all for example they can still differentiate on the sequencing layer like they can have you know oh you know meev free sequencing with like tees or whatever or like oh really low block times or whatever um or you know they can have their own apps

and communities um that are differentiated so I think I actually still think there's like a way to provide a really differentiated feature set um and revenue from sequencing and me uh while using ethereum's like native proof system would you agree though that it's hard to imagine you know polygon or starkware or any of these guys trying to go this direction even just given the sunk cost of many years put into developing their own proof systems it's not an argument against this as like a concept like this can still take off but it feels like it's not something that the big zkm teams are gonna pivot towards easily I mean I think with any business you

have to like adapt or die right so you you just cannot ignore reality and I think I mean okay to be fair I think there's a lot of questions around who's going to ship native rollups what's the timeline is the EF actually in a competent position to execute on this well because if they implement it really poorly then I agree no one's going to use it um but if ethereum does ship it and it's a great product and a great offering and then some rollups move over to using it and now they can say I have L1 security while everyone else doesn't then I think you know that's reality and you just have to like face it and yeah like change your strategy or offer a different set of features or you know go

to zero the irony that or the problem that I see with it is that now in order it's like it's limiting the scope of what kind of rollup you can build like sure you can still have the sequencing side but now you have to be fully evm compatible this one standard and to me one of the selling points of rollups and what's so exciting about like modularity is like customizability and like maybe I don't want to run an evm chain right and and there was a lot of push back and criticism I think rightly so of the rollup ecosystem like late last year about like everything's just like we don't need another evm L2 you know what I mean like we want something like hyper liquid for example um and so I feel like again this kind of misses the mark in

terms of like what the market really wants from rollups it's like we don't just need another evm copy pasta chain like to me this is just like sharding this is like sharding of the e one but in a maybe slightly more permissionless way but like we need to go far beyond that in my op it's explicitly not modular I would say right I I kind of disagree like I think you can still have a variety of other rollups that are application specific and in fact I think this path encourages that like it's saying etherum L1 is going to eat all the general purpose fully evm compatible rollups like we're going to provide like an inine proof system and you know you can play in that game and like do

sequencing and stuff like that to provide a general purpose evm rollup um but I think actually it'll push Builders uh towards building application specific rollups or more specialized rollups to differentiate so like I don't think it's a oh everything has to be a native rollup it's like native rollups will exist they will have great security properties uh they will inherit L1 security but new teams building rollups uh yeah you should go crazy you should customize it and you can still deploy a rollup with the security Council or whatever right like you can still deploy a rollup as an app on you know an L an L1 basically and like there's nothing stopping you from doing that that makes sense to me so it's more about this is an answer for General kind

of general purpose execution that we want and this maybe ends up then either being a path that like arbitrum one and the optimism chain Etc have to adapt towards or you know the EF ends up or somebody the second Foundation whoever ends up executing on this road map but you're saying that there's still very much a path for app specific chains to go a different direction not be native yeah yeah I just view it as like ethereum's offering new product like today ethereum offers you L1 block space it offers roll up blobs um and Now ethereum is offering a product of the

proof system that has L1 security that's governed by ethereum governance so um it's kind of interesting to think about like ethereum is this monolithic chain and then there's all of these almost like applications of it depending on whether you're using it for a combination of I guess da now proving um the based sequence ing side is obviously using the L1 for sequencing um yeah it's it's just kind of a it spins it on its head of of how you think about what an L1 is for I think it's interesting to think about um like a service model like what is the correct service model for an L1 uh to l2s so what do l2s want um from their L1 and I think that a huge my

understanding as well is native uh Native rollups also solve for interop like native intera correct me if I'm wrong there Uma um but I think that's more based but Uma you can yeah it's like I think Justin Drake has like a better articulation but it's like if you do based plus native then you can get native inter off but if you do the Bas plus native then you also foro the meev for the most part right so that would be the trade-off I would guess from the app standpoint yeah I actually talked to Justin about this and his opinion is me anyways is just going to go back to the application so like if you're a rollup team it doesn't even really like in the long term you shouldn't even rely on me um but if you're a based rollup you can

still actually get sequencing fees from even if you're based um and he has this like better articulation of why that is the case I was I was convinced by and Justin is smart so he's probably right about that but yeah he was like oh Bas native rollups can still make money from like sequencing fees yeah I mean this is something we've worked on at espresso of like having a sequencing Marketplace which is think about like the way PBS style marketplaces work today but you just had those across l2s and then L1 validators were able to participate in it um but it's admittedly adding some complexity to the system although maybe not over and above what already exists on L1

today would it be crazy to think about um is maybe a little bit of a leap but uh just to think about eth L1 as a rollup itself right like in this in this world right like wouldn't that effectively be what ends up happening it should I think eventually I mean if if ethereum is wants to go fully modular and like remove like execution from the L1 like this big heavy State machine I think that they need to turn into roll but I I think there have been post some sort of like whisperings of that since the very beginning but again also it's like how long would it take to execute that like when would that actually happen you know what I mean and

that's very scary to do like these billions and billions of dollars like um migrating to sort of a new mode of operation is this kind of like the Mina style of like all execution is happening in a rollup and like the validators only need to validate the proof the the the other thing actually that I'll add is that like um in the original Celestia design The Hope was that we could actually make all of the celesy execution a rollup so it's like basic there's literally nothing happening on chain like all the payments all the staking happens somewhere else but then we we realize that there there is some minimum set of things that need to

happen like on the L1 and those are the only things that we we enabled so like paying for fees staking all those things that need to like everyone needs to be aware of that in order to actually verify the chain um those can't necessarily be spun out but but like any kind of smart contract execution of ethereum uh I think can and should eventually be be migrated but then then I mean then ethereum just starts to look like pretty much like Celestia I think at that point how does this uh conversation intersect with the scaling the L1 um conversation in general I would be curious to get your guys opinion and I it's it's hard for me to really handicap when you when you see some of these

posts what the likelihood of this happening is and what the timeline might ultimately up looking like so I don't know if those are all shots in the dark or Uma it sounds like you've actually spoken to Justin Drake about this but I would just be very curious like yeah both of those things you know down to Brass tax like what is the likelihood of this happening I mean it seems like the ethereum community is pretty excited about Native rollups I'm really excited about it personally I think it makes a lot of sense um yeah there's always the question of turning this like research Direction into like execution who's going to lead it who's gonna spearhead the project and like take it over the line and ship it in a timely fashion my opinion is like I don't it could be six

months with the right team but I mean I'm sure we'll talk about this later too in this podcast with The Ether in Foundation there's always the question of like is there the right team is there the right level of competence are the right people in charge making the decisions and moving fast and that to me is like a bit of an unknown yeah I mean just taking base sequencing as an ex example here I mean this is an area that I was close to when that article came out I want to say like a year year and a half ago something like that it you know it's not like the EF has gone in spearheaded uh task force to implement based sequencing or even you know continue to push the design forward I

think it's really mostly been Justin and then you have teams like Spire Spire was actually working on its own rollup stack and then they fully pivoted to working on based sequence saying we've obviously done some work on base sequencing at espresso I think it's I like to talk about this as like the privatization of the ethereum road map it's like it's kind of like you know the Justin's and the Don rods and whoever of the world come up with these research directions and then it's up to kind of the private venture-backed companies to take it and run with it and unless we see major changes at the EF which like maybe we are seeing that real time I think it's pretty unlikely actually that the EF

does end up coming out with like their own native rollup that's going to compete with optimism and arbitrum one and eat their lunch um even though we were using that a few minutes ago is kind of a hypo hypothetical I think that's pretty unlikely I'm curious um Joe what you think about that model of like the Don CRS and the Justin Drakes coming up with the general direction and then uh this like privatization Dynamic and Nick from your SE in Celestia like is that a desirable like when you guys look at that model in general how do you feel about that the right model um is Celestia pursuing something similar like I would just be curious um just what everyone's opinions are on that general direction or yeah Nick go for

it so I think my perspective has been like one of the one of the benefits of modularity and modularizing the infrastructure stack is is that you can have a bunch of different teams raise capital or or not and and build in parallel a bunch of different experiments um I feel like centrally planned economies always uh sort of like falter or fail in long term when compared to something that's like more Market open market based and to me like you want to have a a free open market for like the infrastructure stack um that said I do think that there's there are certain minimum things that maybe it makes sense to standardized and enshrine

potentially in the L1 I feel like where where The Sweet Spot is is still like TBD I mean on one extreme you have a salana where it's like almost you know like as monolithic as you can be and then on the other side I think you have Celestia which is like as minimal as you can be for now and then ethereum kind of in the middle and I and I think like it's too too early to say which approach is going to work I will say that like for Celestia one of the things that we realized you know in the past year was that uh not having some like I think interop and having some way of like providing better distribution uh and interoperability for applications and and rollups uh in your

ecosystem is something that like is very useful to to build into the protocol and again it doesn't have to be that like you're forced into it but having that option there in a permissionless way um can solve a lot of problems and that's why we've p sued this like lazy bridging approach and the reason we didn't do that at first is because like before there was this idea of like before ZK was really like feasible um it adding that kind of like settlement and like interop feature to the L1 was going to be too heavy uh and open up too many other like you know possibilities of of of things that people could do that that shouldn't belong on L1 but adding this like ZK verification op code is so minimal and

provides potentially so much benefit that it did make sense um but beyond that I can't at least for now don't see any other kind of like additions to the Celestia Bas layer and everything else should should be a a an open market in my view Joe I'm curious to get uh hear your thoughts and then I want to transition and talk a little bit about this uh I'm conflicted on it yeah to be honest I I think that um on the one hand like ideologically I'm inclined to agree with Nick that yeah everything should be like a free open market Market Central planning doesn't work over the long run but I also think if you look at um you know examples of big infrastructural undertakings you need to have some

Central like you need a NASA right and you can have a SpaceX contributing um but you need some degree of central planning to to get things working the right way and up and running and I think that uh anytime you run into a coordin problem which fundamentally Nick I think is what you're talking about here like how do we get interop how do we get composability if we're not all working on the same monolith I think that's where then you need that element of again I'm going to keep calling it central planning but I think that's what salana does really well well just as like a part of its value system um and you can see that in everything from the way the tech is designed all the way up

to the way the foundation works and I think Nick as you say like ethereum has found itself kind of caught in the middle where maybe it veered towards decentralization of governance without fully considering the kind of coordination that the rollup Centric road map was going to demand yeah I think maybe one last thing that I'd add is like if you compare you know blockchain to like a you know government in the real world like there are certain sectors that it makes sense to privatize um but then there are other things you know like let's say like you know electricity and util like basic utilities or roads that everyone needs and it kind of makes sense to keep those

as like just public goods that are operated by the by the government or or very closely integrated with the government I think maybe that's like the right mental model here so like what is the equivalent of like roads and electricity and and things like that for an L1 blockchain um I think that's where the debate is um yeah how would you guys articulate that I would be really curious like this is what uh so I think that maybe one of the challenges that the ro abcentric road map has run into at least on the ethereum side is interop but that's not a hot take um I I would just be very curious um you know when you think about what some of those um Central Services are uh you know what that might be and then we can talk about the right

operating model here and there's just yeah there's a lot uh that's gone on with the ethereum foundation and changes and there might be a second Foundation now who knows um but I would be curious you know from the perspective of an L1 like if the four of us were starting one today you know we'd be like all right this is what the L1 needs to take care of um and then the rest we should leave out to the market I mean I think fundamentally what you want to solve for is a way for all of these different rollups or shards or however you're horizontally scaling to be able to read from each other without having to run each other's full nodes I think that that is I mean that's at the heart of what we're working on at espresso this is what I think is going

to be the most important thing for us to figure out how to provide collectively across the ethereum ecosystem is how if you're operating on one chain you can know and trust what the state is of another chain without having to wait for L1 finality I think that that's what it all comes down to and again it's a huge coordination problem um you know all of these different rollup clusters have their own approaches to it but fundamentally they're all clusters and so it doesn't actually solve it in a unified way across the whole space I think that that's the big thing that's been missed in all of this and I think if we did have a stronger Foundation like literally a stronger EF uh then

maybe everyone would have gotten bullied into some standard that um that would solve for this but that hasn't happened and so now private sector part participants like us are trying to do that but it's hard okay maybe we can actually talk about the ethereum foundation here for a little bit and I'm just going to cave out by saying I'm not the right person to give a history of the ethereum foundation so maybe at some point I don't know if anyone else on this call feels like they could do a you know pretty good history lesson we get Laura Shin on the show she can get we should actually this is what I was like I gotta read the cryptops is what I what is what I need to read and you know a huge part of this also is related to there's obviously the ethereum foundation and

then there's vitalik as the spiritual leader of ethereum um who has some apparently based on at least one of his tweets this week still some amount of Direct Control and authority over the Ean Foundation which I was yeah yeah right but I I really respected that he stood up and just took the authority like that and said I'm goingon to be the one that's deciding this so basically you know just to rewind the clock about a year and a half ago right there or two years ago let's say ethereum was the Undisputed smart contract platform leader um in steadily new like the salonas and the celestial of the world maybe have put a little bit of pressure under ethereum and specifically probably like this last weekend was a really good example of even though we might not love uh our president the US president

launching a mcoin an enormous amount of activity and uh very real probably lasting activity in the form of stable coins like migrated over there okay so there's been an enormous amount of pressure to maybe actually have the ethereum foundation be more forward- facing so um recently uh this is a me vitalic also going on a little bit an interesting U I don't know what you'd call it maybe like an equivalent of a Zuck Arc so he's got a Mady pfp now I think there have been calls for stronger leadership uh you he's tweeting Mady which I don't know if anyone finds that hilarious I find that hilarious weird I think Cog uh forly of scroll uh was was saying how cringe it is that kind of resonates with me but I feel like we're also seeing this movement of

Big Shot CEOs or leaders in Bron's age owning their cringe like they all go on Joe Rogan and do a confessional and then like Zuck emerges the other side and it's just like I'm gonna wear my chains and you guys are just gonna deal with it and like this is who I am I feel like it's kind of the equivalent of that it's ex I was literally gonna bring up the Zuck interview on Joe Rogan because he's talking about like bow hunting uh deer and like looking like Jack harlo with a gold chain on and it's like this could not be different from like more different from the robot who glued his hair to his forehead two years ago like it's just completely uh 180 different um they all have the same PR firm I feel like yeah they must oh do they okay yeah

so there no I I mean I have no idea I don't know but it's I think people just wanted to see a little bit of a firm hand on the stick and I do think that this idea of decentralized leadership is something that you hear talked about quite a bit um in at least ethereum circles and at least I've always kind of wondered if that's a real thing or not um and I do think just to maybe uh empathize a little bit with I think the position that vitalik was probably in back in you know 2015 and 2016 um I I haven't read the book but it sounds I was reading a bunch of Lan's tweets this weekend I think he got really genuinely burned um by being very optimistic and trusting in like the good of people and that didn't end up working out I also would imagine there was

probably a tremendous amount of legal liability um when he was first constructing ethereum there was a ton of value locked up in there and maybe there's an element of just being like not everyone wants to be this like Bronze Age you know uh kind of corporate us CEO leader um and so and also I think there was a tremendous amount of faith and belief in this idea of decentralized leadership and that's why in the ethereum community there are money more Dows and things like that than some of the other newer blockchains like real true Dows and so I don't know I think all of that has kind of coalesced in what I would describe as when there's no clear leader everyone is shouting different suggestions right it feels like it's cacophony of the EF shouldn't be selling anything is like all from the Traders right like you guys selling eth

is ruining ethereum um and then there are people that are suggesting to scale the L1 there are people that are suggesting double down on the ethereum road map it's like every because there's no one who said my hand is on the stick and what I say goes you've got everyone kind of piping up their own solution and so I think what you're seeing simultane there have been a couple of different tweets from vitalik to say hey there's a restructuring going on at the ethereum foundation it's either going to be Danny Ryan or Jerome I'm blanking on his last name coming in to probably replace a maguchi who's been the leader there for a number of years um they're redoubling down on some goals um he had a really funny tweet about not executing a Vibes based pivot from feminized we soy boys to a Bronze Age

mentality I yeah I mean that was an interesting take uh but at least you know he's jumping back in assuming a position of authority here and and making changes which I at least deeply respect and I think is desperately needed frankly from the ethereum community um the other two uh developments that I'm really curious to get everyone's take on is uh one the ethereum foundation actually transferred 50,000 eth um so over hundred million doar uh and they're going to use that to experiment in defi so I think they're testing deposits in a at the current moment and you know what like good for them I mean that actually feels like meaningful change how is it 2025 and they're doing that though I mean I'm with I'm with you on that you know I'm

with you that never yeah it all goes back to um what you kind of opened the show with is that we need to be in the trenches trading the Trump coin in order to empathize with users and understand what the hell we're even trying to build here yeah I think I I tweeted about this earlier this week and I got the sense it really resonated with the community that like the cultural problem at the EF um is that people are not product minded or customer Centric and look that makes sense like vitalik is a researcher and he's he's like a true genius at that and you look at Justin and danrad and these people are you know so so brilliant and

ethereum does have really worldclass people who are researchers but you know as blockchains actually become used and aren't just like research projects it's really important that you have a really strong product voice because like let's examine the Justin Drake Bean chame debacle where like I mean I have all the respect in the world for Justin but you can tell like that presentation was made by a researcher who's not like paying attention to like what are the problems ethereum users or ethereum ecosystem users face today because like the beam train does not move the needle on that stuff at all and so if you just have like people like Justin there you're naturally gonna have like an inclination to only focus on research and have your

road map really like research brain Ivory Tower and I think the lack of product people is really holding ethereum back um and yeah I hope as they're making these big transitions in the EF that they take that into account I I'm not honestly super optimistic that they will just because it's so far from like their history and like their DNA but if I had like one kind of message to send to them it would be just like have people who actually think holistically about customers are actually the end user of the chain think about product and can push back and be like guys like is this research stuff moving the needle okay is it not okay if it's not let's

we're not going to do it for right now um I think that voice is really important and Miss Thing yeah the other thing too that I I uh sort of thinking about is that this person whoever joins as the head of the the new executive director of the ethereum foundation is going to need to be super aligned with v vitalik um and I think a lot of this still does come down to him right this would be the analogy would be you are a CEO that is starting at a company where the founder is still there and everyone twit CEO who joined alongside Elon when he bought it Linda know do you guys remember this I do I don't think she had any like concept of what Elon was trying to do and it was a total total Gong Show totally she's still there

right oh yeah she is still there but not as like the public face of it anymore she might be you know Elson is another example of this maybe who is the uh CE the Disney CEO um Bob Iger yeah yeah yeah yeah you know so Bob Iger retires you know he names his successor a successor does something that was against I don't know some critical he he deprioritized the imagineers or something like that at Disney and immediately he comes right back in replaces the old CEO and so it's I I think this is a really challenging uh role for someone who isn't completely aligned um spiritually with balik here because ultimately everyone's going to hang on every word that balik says and I'm sure even if he's not in an explicit

position of authority he's certainly in like a position of moral Authority um so I think that if this change actually does happen it probably does have to come from him right like I don't think actually anyone else is really capable of stepping in and full like fully um changing the direction of the ship in as drastic of a way as it probably needs to be changed without being aligned with him otherwise i' would imagine they just get undermined right I I think a big element of the early days of ethereum that people have forgotten or maybe just don't even know about was the role that consensus played consensus like sys the company where they were the go to market arm of ethereum like they were doing everything that you see the salana

foundation doing for salana in terms of like incubating applications incubating infrastructure you know they were behind metamask they were behind some of the early dexes on ethereum uh they were behind some of the development of like the early validator infrastructure like whether on the infras side or the appside they really were the user-facing yeah arm of ethereum and that was all Joe Luben Amanda Cassat who now runs serotonin in a like marketing agency um she was there at consensus in the early days and she tweeted this earlier this week that like wow it really seems like people are not aware that consensus was

doing this and then what happened consensus got kind of bloated and they over hired and then they had to go through many rounds of layoffs and they ended up SP out a lot of these companies to be independent things and it doesn't have sort of the clout or the impact uh that it once did but I think that that's what we need that's what we want to see it's not the EF to become the dgen who are developing the next defi application I I think that we need that to be a consensus equivalent all right everyone listen up like I said at the top of the episode Unis swap Labs is rolling out the red carpet and launching a $5.5 million bug Bounty this is the largest bug bounty in the entire history

of crypto to anyone that can find a critical bug with the Unis swap B4 protocol this bug R aims to make it the most rigorously reviewed codebase ever deployed to ethereum now the Unis swap name is basically synonymous with security $2.4 trillion in cumulative volume has passed through Unis swap V2 and V3 without a single hack so Unis swap V4 is dedicated to bringing that same level of security and transparency to the V4 protocol so if you want more information or eligibility or scope or Rewards or payout or any of that good stuff there is a link in the bottom of the show notes I highly recommend that you stop listening right now go to the show notes click the link head over and tell them that I sent you start earning money today so as a piece of anec data

there uh Amanda Cassat government at the time is indirectly the reason blockworks exist because Jason back in 2017 went and listened to her talk about ethereum and came back to me because we were living together at the time no said we should start an ethereum consulting company and that became blockworks uh like four months later so that's hilarious so that type of outward stuff it actually does snowball and it's massively impactful so maybe let's talk a little bit about uh so Constantine lashuk uh who is the I believe founder and CEO of PTP which is you know associated with Lio um and frankly one of the most successful investors and builders in in the space whose name maybe some people don't know um is talk has been talking recently and tweeted

earlier this week about launching a second ethereum foundation so I think he teased this back a couple of months ago um and it got some amount of response and then he tweeted out like second EF today and uh and then he tweeted and said hey there's no plans for this yet but he keeps tweeting about it and other people from cyber fund which is Constantine and vasel uh is their basically family office investment vehicle have been tweeting about it and I think people are genuinely pretty curious about it and it seems like he's relatively serious this is my own opinion I've got no insid or knowledge but I would be curious um what the three of you think about this and if he were to do this and you could have some input or say over what a second Foundation would do you know what would you like

what should it do should it be replacing should this be consensus 2.0 um or you know what would what would the Mandate be I guess from your perspective that's what I I basically think it should be consensus 2.0 I think that it should be maybe using some of sort of EF Style grant funding to fund again like the more consumer and advocacy oriented stuff that the ecosystem needs I would not try to have it compete with the ogf on the research front I don't think that there's a need for more of that I don't think that would make any sense I I well I agree I think the maybe you know the marketing and and like the BD side of whatever

like ethereum needs needs an overhaul but I I still think the culture of the protocol teams and researchers and Builders has to also change um I think that I can't remember who articulated this but uh you know there there's just like a lack of urgency essentially I think around the road map at times and I think like the beam Cham announcement was sort of where that all came to a head um of like oh yeah all these things in five years and you're like dude like what we thought that you know we want this in one year and actually we want more than that in one year and um I think you know the blobs the fact that like they did ship 4844 but the scale of blobs is just order of magn orders of

magnitude less than what the ethereum rollup ecosystem needs today is another example of like dude like I don't know you guys need to like get kick into higher gear and just ship way more um so it's not just a marketing thing it it is a product thing in my opinion and culture thing yeah I totally agree on the culture thing like if your customers your l2s are your customers and they're begging you for blobs and that's the only thing they talk about like why do we even have any other features in the hard Fork that makes zero sense right like or I mean that's a very extremist point of view but like you know there's probably only one feature that matters

like let's ship it as soon as possible um and I think the lack of urgency in the timelines comes from like not ever talking to customer customers cuz like you know if there's someone who's really wanting something and needing it yesterday then you're much more motivated to actually ship it and like the devs then will be like kicked into high gear um so yeah I I totally agree with Nick that like a big cultural shift is very needed and like the cultural shift is not just a problem in the EF like their culture kind of trickles down to like all the other orgs and the ecosystem and um yeah like that that's just generally like not good I would agree I think uh consensus did a

really good job back in the day and actually I remember visiting they had a really funny office back in um in Bushwick uh they actually just rented out a straight up apartment building there so you would like go in and it felt like you were just getting into an apartment building and like each apartment would just be people working and you know it's funny like consensus actually got a lot they weren't run like some centralized command and control economy Joe luin actually wanted to run consensus like a dow um and so there was a tremendous amount of friction and like huge amounts of turnover and layoffs Etc but they still did an enormous amount for ethereum right like they incubated infura um metamask came out of that like so much good came out of came out of that endeavor um and it was interesting because there was some amount of

friction even I think amongst some of the more research oriented Dev oriented people and Joe Luben uh because Joe luin was trying to commercialize a lot of stuff and honestly a lot of devs and researchers really don't like that but it's two sides of the same coin here I think um and you definitely do need more of like a product business orientation to make the whole chain successful but another thing I want to say about consensus is I mean not just they brought a lot of the first like use cases of ethereum or like big things like metamask but they also have brought in an enormous amount of talent into the space like yeah consist like there's so many people that I know that are like OG's have like contributed so much to crypto on the whole way Beyond ethereum who got their start in consensus it

might been only for like six months before they got laid off or whatever but like they brought in so much talent just raw mass of talent into the space I think that they changed the course of of crypto history to me I agree all right I I want to end on this um on a topic around fire dancer Forks um so we had a couple of this has been a rumor for a long time but actually hasn't manifested in the way that I necessarily thought um so there were two announcements this week's for new chains um one was uh Fogo uh chain so this is um a just a fork of uh the fire dancer client which is you know theoretically going to be the Super majority client on salana um and I

actually didn't realize but uh Doug kit um Who I Really respect from ambient he actually wrote the white paper involved in the project and ambient is going to be building on Fogo and I pinged him before this uh where he described Fogo is basically largely uh a fora fire dancer which makes small trade-offs on decentralization for you know an extreme amount of outperformance um in addition to that you also had um so there's a guy named Liam heager uh so he was previously at uh framework um and then he joined fire dancer and one was one of the core um the core Engineers on that team uh so he also spun out um a new L1 which is unto Labs um so uh onto Labs it I think we're

still a little bit scant on details around that um but it's it's clear that they're not creating an svm chain so they're reimagining the architecture from the virtual machine to consensus and everything in between presumably you know there'll be some amount of knowledge or logic that he employed when he was working on fire dancer very closely um it also I guess Bears noting that uh jump is suing uh Liam for his work for violating non-compete uh so but it's most like hedge fund thing I've ever heard I cannot imagine that happening in like Silicon Valley California blockchain scene obviously we don't even have non-competes in this state but yeah I got a kick out of that yeah I thought that too I'm I'm not sure how much they're going to do there other

than Pro they probably just want to slow him down I would guess um but either way uh it's interesting because so I I've been I've heard of rumors of these chains um and I just assumed that they were going to be svml 2s on salana um it is interesting to me that these are both new l1s that are launching here um and I'm wondering if I'm wondering what you like what you guys think about this um you know this was kind of the eventual modularization or modularity that was going to come to salana um I was surprised that these weren't rollups um I don't know if there's a technical reason for that I don't know if there's a social reason for that or I don't know if there's a I want to get an L1 valuation reason for that uh but I would be curious what you

guys think of these spin-offs and uh yeah I just curious what takes you guys have they sound kind of like the monads of uh of salana it's like let's take salana it's been successful and let's just speed it up and I don't mean that in a negative way um but I do think probably there's two reasons why there're l1s uh one is I think definitely the market has a a bit of there's a stigma around being L2 right now um my perspective on it is that like that's a that's a short-term thing I mean it it also depends on what your goal is are you trying to build an ecosystem of its own or are you trying to build like more of an application and I I feel like rollups on the long term

are meant to be like applications uh and not like just another generalized execution thing where you try to copy and paste the same applications from whatever L1 that you're building on U which has sort of been the case and I think also the second reason they they're l1s maybe is because I think culturally and in like the engineering like monolithic mindset like these these teams are coming from the salana worldview where you know and I think they they also love to nerd out on like optimizing consensus and all these other aspects that like you don't do as a as just an L2 and I think they they come from the worldview of like we want to build the fastest single L1 and you know rollups are are fragmented and and

things like that um I don't know that that that's that's the way that I read it Jill I'm curious what you guys think yeah I mostly agree with nck takes um I actually know Liam um somewhat personally and he's a super cracked Dev uh really awesome so um yeah I'm really excited to see what they end up building uh I know it's not a svm like the virtual machine is notm so I I don't think it's like really a fire dancer Fork but yeah I mean I'm excited I think there's going to be interesting experimentation but mostly I'm just excited because Liam's very smart so you

know bet on your smart friends stuff like that yeah I think it's great I kind of love the emergence of new l1s I mean obviously there are some that are still highly anticipated that haven't launched yet and those have been the talk you know like monad and bar chain but mostly the focus has obviously been on rollup architectures over the last few years and um I think it's cool to see the salana ecosystem kind of Spawn maybe its own attempts at becoming Salon Killers much like ethereum did right with um with some of the big chains that have come out of uh you know inspired by the ethereum architecture so yeah I I I do

think that there is like a cynical take on this like oh L1 are the hot thing again and you know that's the the valuation game that people are playing but I also do think that it's a recognition that there's more design space to explore there I think that's good I got a question about the relative valuation game thing do you think that's rational or no um like on one hand I could see you know I I think that uh you know I know blockworks talks a lot about this metric and you know we kind of worked on this with John but re is a metric that applies equally for l1s and l2s and so I could see a world where these are just chains you know no one really cares if it's an L1 or an L2 and it's generally based on the amount of

value that you create on your chain on the other hand I do think there's kind of a persistent uh people like things that feel more full stack um so you get this in like Data Business where you know if you're not actually like for instance in you know crypto data you're you're you get a much higher multiple on your Revenue if you actually run the nodes index the data yourself and then display it to people as opposed to as if you just display it on the top end you might have the same Revenue you might have higher AR growth whatever it is but there's just a premium like people like the idea of like full stack um and I wonder if that's some somewhat enduring when it comes to l1's because it kind of feels like well I've got the base layer I've got the whole thing um so I don't

know do you think it's an enduring thing or just s of Emeral and it's kind of a silly thing at the current moment so I can kind of see it going either way I'd be curious what Nick thinks of this because you guys built an L1 but in kind of the modular space and yeah I don't know if you've thought through the uh the implications of that yeah my view is that um like that's that's a a temporary way that I think things play out and in the long run but what Celestia is is infrastructure for applications that outgrow their infrastructure if that makes sense so it's like you know I built Unis Swap and then it just

dominates all of you know ethereum transactions and volume and all of a sudden it's like why am I even on ethereum I don't really want to run my own chain full stack but I want to be running on a stack where I have the majority ownership of and control of this thing and so I think that's like the model that a lot of these things will follow um you know hyper liid might be an interesting counter example I don't know if they because their plan is actually to to they start as an app chain or like rollup application specific rollup and they want to move to an L1 I don't know I I I I just don't see like the the to me the the thing is that the the trade-off of what you lose by being a rollup on Celestia versus

being your own L1 is almost purely just a narrative thing and like a label versus like anything actually meaningful technically in my opinion so I think that's not a durable reason for like a valuation discrepancy yeah all right team I think that's about all the time that we have for uh this week but this was a very fun um I guess technically second one with this crew but uh Jill and Uma excited that you guys will be joining us uh going forward and yeah a lot of fun covered a lot of ground here we did we actually only covered like half of the topics that we had listed out uh but I actually don't know if the xrp and soul ETFs are actually news I think Eric

balunis of Bloomberg has walk that back a little bit but that the other thing I want to chat with you guys about but we can talk about it next week all right cool well we can end here and uh see everyone next week sounds good thank [Music]