The Merge and After the Merge

Transcript

so for this panel um I thought I wanted I would talk a bit about um topics about the four of us have not yet spent um you know nine bazillion 999 999 times speaking um and uh kind of going into a bit of a different direction and and particularly to think uh talk more about the ethereum foundation uh so I guess uh first question for I uh would be how like what do you see as being the ethereum roles foundation in the ecosystem like what do you see as being the role of the foundation to do what should the foundation support how should the

foundation support things and uh what what kinds of things are ultimately out to the ecosystem um okay maybe I forget thank you uh Yes actually we never have this kind of panel so it's kind of like having a small EF meeting here uh EF LOL before talking about what is the role of ethereum foundation I think it's important to say that I um the role of ethereum foundation should change or accept and it has changed and shifted

and the reason why is that is the ethereum also the ecosystem we support the ethereum you know development of the platform protocol layer but also other things in the ecosystem and that is a living thing it changes all the time so um you know it's it's like uh inverted pendulum like you actually have to shift like to to find the best balance according to the stage of ethereum or the stage of a determin ecosystem what needs to be done and the water already being done and whether we should support things

directly or in directory I think the more in directory the better because that means this ecosystem is more decentralized but at the same time some some things don't really happen organically and sometimes we need to determine originally or even EF was very small and it was a kind of collection of developments and researchers that fit into one loom right that was step on zero was like that and then this ecosystem grew and there are a lot of people who have contributed to contributing to the protocol layer and the EF needs to start supporting those

people outside of EF that's one thing and then a lot of teams are working together even for the merge there are a lot of teams outside of EF are being involved and someone needs to coordinate this these teams that are in don't belong to one company or that's that's like a huge project being done in a decentralized way and that doesn't work effectively without someone coordinating things and so EF needs to support the coordination work whether we do that directory or in directory so there are all those things that someone needs to do and we are

non-profit especially public goods that do not have business model or not normally supported so we try to support those things but if we there are other teams who can do the similar work that EF does that's even better so I think the goal is to make this the the work of building ecosystem decentralized too but then like there are a lot of things that needs to be done still mm-hmm um so let's zoom into a couple of like specific parts of the ethereum ecosystem so first research uh dinkrad what do you see as being the research team's role

like how would you how do you perceive the research team from the inside and how has it changed over time and how do you expect it will keep changing over time yeah so um the research team looks at uh basically the future of the ethereum protocol and things about like what needs to happen uh what upgrades do we want to make and and basically researchers um like their particular Parts say cryptography networking security aspects scalability and so on of these things and in terms of um how it's changed I mean I think like

from my perspective I would say like there was a huge change about like one and a half years ago when um we finally launched the beacon chain basically like at that point um the research team changed from this sort of crazy uh Blue Sky Thinking to like actually shipping things and actually like um being very concretely focused on like things that uh that um that have to happen um but also at the same time uh what we started doing is we started hiring a lot more researchers some of them for example are sitting right here like we started building out the cryptography

team so like something that we didn't really have a few years ago was like expertise and all those different domains um say security cryptography and so on we had like a lot of generalists and now we added people in all these specific domains so like at the same time basically it's kind of part of it has narrowed um to like the concrete upgrades that we've made but part of it has also broadened to like all the different aspects and people who do specialized research um yeah hmm amazing um so Justin um one I think like a unique aspect of the ethereum ecosystem and uh it's interestingly enough a way that we kind

of differ in the same direction from both Bitcoin and kind of some of the newer chains that kind of in just more strongly emphasize higher scalability even at the cost of other things is the multi-client development approach um so how do you how well do you think the multi-client development approach has gone um and what do you think could we have done better and what do you think could we do better right so the model is is pretty unique in the blockchain space as you said but it's reminiscent of the ietf model I guess for the internet so we have this the standards body that's kind of responsible for um you know well-defined specs and then

you have all the different browsers organically from the ecosystem come in and the fact that there's this very clean version of concerns um is good because it gives us more modularity more more robustness um in in terms of the success of the consensus client diversity it's been much much higher than what I expected um you know like we historically it's been difficult for for the execution clients right we've had several attempts historically that have just died out over time and uh we've had this this this gift monoculture at the execution layer

um but the the fact that we have so much kind of diversity I guess is can be attributed maybe to a couple of things one is good design at the at the specs level right so there's like these these in protocol incentives to to not have correlated failures and so it's the actually your rational Behavior to to to be embracing a client diversity and I think the other thing that the community has done extremely well is just a nurture you know to a large extent through education um like and and and and and and and memes and and kind of cultural aspects um

the the importance of of client diversity um and you know one thing that has also been good I think is the the the the funding right so um we have these external teams and we've had this this this Grand program which was pretty um no strings attached I guess um which gave the teams a lot a lot of Independence but it does pose some questions around uh is the is this sustainable um and one thing that ideally would we'd see in the future is that it's not just the efferent foundation providing funding I mean already we is not the case but more

you know I I've uh you know entities you know it could be dials for example it could be uni swap Dao it could be a good coin or whatever like providing uh more funding I guess the final thing that I say that I think has been successful for the from the client diversity standpoint is that we haven't been afraid to be pragmatically more centralized in in some places and I think one one place here is security So within the different Foundation we have kind of this um in-house security team which all the different clients can't necessarily afford to have

um and so we've uh we've been able to keep these teams Nimble while still basically providing a very critical Service uh to them in in a in a support role perspective okay um oh yeah so um one thing that I think we generally value at the ethereum foundation is like the very geographically distributed and uh Global nature of our community like I think we value um you know ethereum being a place where you don't have to like you know physically live in New York or whatever it's a kind of feel like you're at the center of things and especially you know in the context of censorship resistant discussion this is this discussion it's

uh becoming an even more Salient issue um so what do you think like what is the ethereum foundation doing and what do you think we can do more of to try to improve our Geographic diversity um yeah I think it has been one of the challenges for this is maybe for anything let's just for example San Francisco Silicon Valley it's kind of center of a lot of technique things but then a naturally uh like also how ethereum started English speaking regions or Geographic places had a more Advantage so we've been trying to for example like eastern.org has now like 48

languages on the website that's like a you know it it it it it's like a minor it sounds like a minor thing but it's I think a huge progress that the community made to make more making technology and information more um like you know like it's easier access to the information and that's one simple thing but for example so we also support uh one of our EF Fellowship programs fellow is working on this Giga project that is you know run by um UNICEF and and other teams is connecting schools with internet and if you don't

have internet you can really basically do anything with this so that that kind of thing and then they're also using like you know ethereum technology too for to coordinate their work or payment and the finance mechanism between government or cities schools and internet providers so there are many like thing that applications can do but also we can actually proactively support underrated communities or communities if we were already happening but maybe their their voice is not heard enough so we need to kind of like do proactive

workloads to find them but also support them um and then that's another reason that we are blending Devcon this year to Bogota Colombia and then there's huge huge you know communities in um there's activities happening in Latin America and and then it's not like us doing everything it's more like we just are supporting but also our seeding plants there and then just bubbling and Devcon communities are excited there are more things happening yeah so that kind of proactive activities that are very important but it doesn't really just happen naturally

because again always English speaking regions are more dominant naturally and dinkrad um what what kind of uh a person do you find this like generally most able to be happy and productive as a ethereum foundation I'm a researcher or developer and if someone in the audience wants to like join the research and development Community like what kind of advice would you like give them um yeah I think generally it's very diverse I think I would uh speak more for the researcher than for the

developer because I don't know so much about that role but um what I would say is uh um one thing that is very important is that that people are self-starters and are able to like work quite independently I think that's like the one thing where I think it's very hard to make any compromises because I think we just don't have the currently like the infrastructure and ability to like manage people who who don't do that but otherwise I think like um almost anyone can Thrive as long as they're happy with this way of working with like um being very decentralized maybe in most cases not having an office and uh

yeah if they're happy to contribute to that and believe in decentralization then I think like lots of people can Thrive Justin um one thing that you bring to the foundation that um I think I really value is the kind of cross blockchain and cross-institutional cooperativeness that we have right so we have a lot of kind of co-funding and other kinds of Partnerships with filecoin and you know other blockchains um so can you I guess give some some examples of that and also just like what is your general philosophy that goes into you know how we can be a more positive some player in

the ecosystem right um so we have had a lot of collaborations I guess with the the falcoin stack so um one of the interesting things is that we've at the peer-to-peer layer we've just reused the P2P and that's I think being uh been a great success uh at the consensus layer um we've also been you know collaborating on on R D um you know and that you know there were some shares research on accumulators for example shared research on on on on snog uh on snarks uh shared research on on vdfs um and I think there's there's kind of

quite a bit of alignment um in terms of supporting public goods um between different foundation and the the the the falcoin foundation um and I think part of the reason why this collaboration has worked so well is that we're not competitive in the sense that right Falcon is all about this this data kind of storage and retrieval layer whereas if firm is more about small contracts and if you want to build you know a decentralized application then you need both so actually we're we're complementary um in terms of the other blockchains I think a lot of them have had uh you know interesting

ideas so for example you know dfinity was using BLS signatures and that was you know partly an inspiration I guess for for you know pushing them in into ethereum um you know and we can look at other blockchains you know there was algorand for example that had this the secret leader election and you know we try and understand uh and and and and and keep an open eye um the good news the good thing about technology is that we don't have to explicitly opt in to collaborate right because it's all it's all open source um even though one thing that I'll say that is kind of a friction point for for collaboration and it ends up kind of shooting back at these projects

that that don't play Super well is one trademarks and the other one is is is is bad licensing so you know we're trying to encourage folks to license on the you know Apache 2.0 and MIT to facilitate this frictionless collaboration and we also encourage projects to not just not patent any ideas and you know if you look if you take algor around I'm just picking on one but there's many others like the the white paper has like 30 patents and I think one of the realizations for me is that over the last few years is that the technology player actually plays a fairly minor role maybe it's like 20 and then the 80 percent is is the

communities the culture it's it's the legitimacy at the meme layer at layer zero and um if you if you're able to Foster collaboration with with good ideas and good licensing and no patents um then that gives you so much more value at the at the layer zero that um unfortunately I think we've seen a lot of projects um not do so well and and therefore not lead to as many collaborations as they could have been if they um had played this this people's game this meme game better okay um I uh um so what are some things

that the foundation does aside from our research and development that like you think are important to highlight and like what other things do you hope we could be to uh be doing um yes so we do we just don't give grants we do coordinate a lot of things and then that includes so there are r d uh teams within the ethereum foundation but also um there are people who are working on we call it ecosystem development work and and then there are a lot of teams within that cluster uh like you know we say our teams are Loosely coupled but we we have we share the same Mission and

principles and those team actually always try to find ways to support um you know support the ecosystem like what is the best way to support a system and the Devcon team is one of it but then also there are a lot of uh Geo geographical like you know like proactive work or depending on the domains um like what do we need to do for specific domains to to grow kind of things so there are different teams working on different things but and then I think mainly They Don't Really develop like they don't their project is not to develop something but it's more to support so

this work it wasn't necessary when ethereum was really small and then like again like all the teams are working in the digital rights ecosystem and then like someone needs to coordinate the work there are a lot of scaling work happening but then like someone needs to coordinate the communication someone needs to coordinate the discussions and debate so um we we try to add the work that is necessary for the ethereum ecosystem and I do think that's a good increasingly becoming more important because there are so many who can develop and do research outside of EF but who can do the coordination and we would love to have others who can do the

coordination together and then there are others who are doing this already but but that's still one of the important laws of EF okay thank god um so the ethereum research team I think so far as far as kind of sub disciplines right we have just ethereum protocol focused stuff and there's a cryptography team and there's an increasingly like a rig and some of like these efforts around economics do you like how would you how do you think we can improve kind of the parts of the of the research team that like focus on those kind of like specific areas of

study um and are there other like academic disciplines that you think the ethereum foundation should have a research bubble for right um I mean the second question is uh kind of easier to answer I think like one area that um that we need to invest more in we've just started would be networking I think like we've now hired one researcher specifically for that but I think um more are needed here because that's really like a kind of um yeah a point where we're a little bit blind still um uh in terms of uh what the research team could do better I think like um uh one one thing that we're just

learning is is like a better coordination overall because we're we've like become so much bigger over the last one and a half two years so now we really need to like um increase like our skills at actually working together because it's not the same working with five and with 25. okay um Justin um to continue a bit the kind of collaboration topic how about collaboration with things outside of like the crypto space proper so could include Hardware companies um could um include um you know more kind of more General um outside of crypto open source stuff um what do you what do we do and what do

you think can we do right so the the way that I see it is kind of the blockchains the frontier of the blockchain space just keeping on increasing and then kind of gobbling up more and more pieces of the world so just like you know software eat the world um blockchains is the world and um I think one one of the disciplines that has recently Fallen uh in and kind of engulfed by by by blockchains well it's it it started I guess with cryptography right so if you look at crypto conferences you know even the top ones like like crypto um a large portion of papers were motivated by by blockchains and you can

you can do statistics on how many have the word you know ethereum or blockchain in the abstract and it's it's a it's a huge percentage um and not only is it leading to a lot of open problems but you know it's also a source of funding and it's also a source of meaning for cryptographers because um we get to use their work you know pretty quickly like oftentimes as a cryptographer you invent something and then it kind of goes unnoticed for years until maybe if you're lucky it gets used but um you know I think of ethereum as being kind of a a machine um for turning uh what's what's known as applied cryptography which is not really

applied into real world cryptography which is actually applied and there's it's maybe one of the most powerful machines to do so and um cryptographers appreciate us as for that and I think the next stage is Hardware engineers and that's actually related to cryptography because a lot of cryptographic operations are very demanding um from a computational standpoint you know we have snogs today but then maybe in the future we all have you know fhe or or you know IO or you know I have a very interesting things um and where you know even even just for for BLS signatures we we we we we had we were at

a point where we had so many validators you know we we need to be able to support a million validators or even more than a million um validators and that put a lot of pressure on BLS aggregation and we have an initial you know we have this this blast Library which was basically written by by uh Hardware optimization um uh experts and it was good enough to to get us you know to to the point where we are today but we're going to be putting even more pressure on on on on aggregation you know with things like single slots um finality um and when it when when it comes to to to to

ZK Roll-Ups like the right now the the proverb performance is the big bottleneck and so that is a leading quite incredibly to the emergence of a whole industry of of of companies that are doing Hardware acceleration and so I now have a little spreadsheet which keeps track of every single hardware company that approaches me and there's more than 10 of them uh some of which like have raised a lot of money so one one company for example raised 70 million dollars and this these are companies you haven't even heard of because they're all working in stealth um and about half of these companies are actively building towards built like a snark proving Asic so it's it's it's an exciting thing that

you know we've been able to absorb and kind of nurt snipe these developers and it's it's hard to predict you know who we're going to to not snipe off after the hardware Engineers um it could be the networking Engineers as as dancrat said that would be a good outcome um I think we also need a lot of security engineers and and for more verification Engineers like if you look at the complexity of ZK VMS for example it's it's orders of magnitude larger than like Bridges and we can't even get Bridges properly working properly so we're going to need to hire an army of security researchers um to to get where we want to be okay um open question to all of you like what

are some radical and crazy um ideas that you might that you think the ethereum foundation might wants to consider doing like should we invest 20 million dollars into people building secure just general purpose operating systems should there be an ethereum City I mean just anything go I've been crazy one just Justine you're good at crazy it feels like a quest for Dustin yeah well we're already doing this one crazy thing which is to manufacture these um these vdf A6 and airdrop them for free to thousands of people with the hope that at least one person will be running the hardware

um and I think there is maybe a similar model to be had for uh snark proving right because really what we what we need for decentralized snog proving is is dishonest minority thing where we just need one single person to be online and have the computational resources to be to be proving I mean right now it's extremely centralized in the sense that you're going to hire um you know an AWS cluster of of of servers and it's going to be this this centralized approver and AWS goes down your ZK roll up goes down um and so like the the the crazy Vision kind of that I have is uh you know let's

just build these knock proof of Asics so that you can be a home improver with a little box um and the the crazy thing is that this little box doesn't have to even be running the only thing has to do is be connected to the internet and be ready to act as a fallback if the centralized proof goes down so it doesn't even consume electricity doesn't make noise it doesn't produce heat it's just there for for the the credible decentralization um and I don't know if what I can say something like crazy enough but but you know like like uh what Justin is saying and also all

these ideas there are like we say three guiding principles that EF has one is um long-term thinking the one is subtraction and the last one is stewardship of values and there's like a ethereum there are values that ethereum ecosystem believes and hats and it's not like we decided you have decided it's more like it's you know open source um permissionless privacy and all this and how do we maintain that it's it's yes that we need to think about you know that how we can make it we can maintain that by technology but also I think there are

um you know like we need to have more discussions like about this philosophical discussion and how do we make that happen that kind of thing and I always think outside of the technology and yeah and I do I do think that's going to be be increasingly important um yeah because because the ecosystem is going and then it's becoming like a you know like it's it's not a small group in one same Loom so the communication and being aligned is becoming more difficult so we we can invest in this you want to tell us something no just just remember

that one of the crazy ideas that I had maybe a year ago was to um to set up some sort of a large fund um you know that is that is co-funded by by various uh institutions so it could be you know 100 million from different Foundation 100 million from the Falcon foundation and 100 million from the Unison foundation and this large pool of of money would go towards dramatically accelerating the the r d around cryptography because I think you know going back to this idea that you know if ethereum is a machine from turning applied cryptography to real world cryptography it's going to be a much bigger machine moving forward

um because we right we we're building these crypto economic systems and one of the things we we found is that um once you've nailed the the economics Parts you know with just this this really high grade Economic Security then from there onwards is is cryptography and so the the economic part is bounded and contained but the cryptography you know your your imagination is the limit and um you know if you if you look at where we are right now for cryptography we're going to look back in 20 and 30 years and say this is so primitive just like we look back at the cryptography you know 30 years ago

and we had you know hash functions and signatures and that's just so so primitive compared to the nintendency kvms that we're building today um and I think in order to get to where we want to be you know which includes witness encryption it includes IO um it includes like fhe then we we really need uh to grow 10x the number of of cryptographers and this is this is a slow process because um we need to educate these people um it's not just about not sniping them and then they become productive a month later it's really like a whole career you know that might take half a decade and so we need to be planting seeds now if we want to go see results in 10 20

years so um another question to everyone and probably one that would have made more sense as if as a first question than a last question but uh I just came up with it um what are the yeah like uh um what aspects of the ethereum ecosystem or like what things in general motivated you to work at the ethereum foundation specifically I mean I was just nerd sniped um so specifically there was this um this one talk that you gave on data availability and I think um giving talks where we present open

problems is a good strategy to uh to to to recruit people um and I think we have you know uh actually workshops organized uh where like the whole point is you're trying to communicate um these these these open problems but I guess yeah even though I I I came in being nerd sniped I kind of stayed for for much deeper reasons um and I think now what what kind of keeps me keeps me in within the Firm Foundation is like all sorts of ways to to I guess enrich myself and I don't mean this in a financial sense because you um if you want to you know maximize your financial return you definitely did not

join different Foundation but the FM Foundation is valuable you know just from a you know a knowledge standpoint it's also very valuable from from a community standpoint like the people you get to to to to to work with um it's also you know valuable from a reputational standpoint like the fact that we we we get to to participate in these in these panels and talks and what's not um and so the you know there is a a lot of potential value to be to be gotten uh working at different Foundation things that are not not economic but maybe like so much more valuable than than economic returns one thing I would add to that is um I

think two things that I found uh very appealing from the very start in ethereum community is a pragmatism and openness so like one thing that really like immediately when um when I started like first talking to people I think was around uh 2018 it was like people were always interested always open to new ideas but also we're very pragmatic about implementing them and not like um well I mean there is there are things we are also dogmatic about but uh but in many ways like um it's much more pragmatic than other communities um my motivation well my original

motivation into crypto unboxing Before ethereum Time was things like Financial inclusion but currently the ethereum foundation has a very unique position and then fortunate to be able to work with other community members and teams like for example like like a blind who was on the stage from Xerox Park like they're like our family member very aligned with our values but then we are kind of empowering them to to become one of the important institutions and and then teams and then it's not it's what what Danka just said it's also like the great thing but also it's very

hard for us to do it that way like I have this very normal title but it's very far from regular executive director audition and it's we don't really have controller over things in the ecosystem but we we intentionally do it that way so it is definitely challenging and I wouldn't say it's very easy but I'm motivated by those teams um outside of the year for around DF like we were very online and then I kind of like to be here yeah I I I also feel empowered by by empowering them so that's that's a that's my motivation how about you Natalie

okay well no okay okay yeah I mean I mean I think the ethereum community has a lot of uh kind of positive uh values that really set it apart from you know both a lot of other projects in the crypto space but also even a lot of things outside of it um you know the yeah you know the very positive some nature um the um kind of desire to be you know Cooperative with other communities kind of interest in you know openness and freedom and all of these values but you know as uh Dan grad said kind of uh always approached in a pragmatic way

that like really emphasizes you know are we actually accomplishing something useful here um just the general friendliness and um all of the yeah amazing people in the ecosystem um so you know I mean I think it's a lot a lot of those things and you know definitely the just incredibly fascinating math problems I'm at the center of it all continue to fascinate me as well too okay yeah I'm done