Ethereum Beyond the Foundation | Ethereum Korea One: Genesis

Transcript

Other players other than the Foundation are helping us in this system. I'm Jay, host of Ethereum 3.0.1 and also head of the ETHGlobal. Would you guys introduce yourself and then your team? Sure. So my name is Jerome. I founded a conference called EthCC. I run a French company called Ethereum France. I recently joined EthCoordinate, another co-founder, who is one of their first helpers. In EthCoordinate we try to do two things. We map the ecosystem and we bring the coordinates so you can build your features.

And we also help coordinate in the form of an orchestration on the difficult topics, so typically forecasts that you may have or may not know about, EIP forecasting. It's the kind of thing that we try to maintain. And we also steer complex discussions, like the complex discussion that we're having about issuance and the complex discussion that we're having about account abstraction right now. Yeah, very happy to be here, it was a nice commitment, and we hope it was a good one. Hi everyone, I'm Mashal.

I lead marketing, growth and grants at Octant and Golem Foundation. And Octant has run 14 funding rounds and has given out over 4,000 ETH in grants to areas with most impactful teams with attached. And on the Golem Foundation side, this has been made possible through staking yield from 100,000 ETH in Treasury. We have consistently supported through financial and non-financial programs as well, and also with a lot of real estate and public transports. that covered, probably one of the first, I want to say grants, performed those covered programs across the industry and all the funding that goes into the programs.

Hey everybody, I'm Kartik, one of the co-founders of ETHGlobal. And ETHGlobal runs developer events all across the world. We started doing this thing nine years ago and we've got over 350 events in Canada. This country is a whole lot harder to build in this space, and while it ultimately looks good in the dark. And yet you also include non-developer audiences. And so far, from the most physically in-person events, we brought on over 20,000 people into the space. I know that's the universe of it. Thank you. So the first question is, what is something the Foundation is doing?

OK, I'll start. start. Well... No filters. Just go. We have a foundation at Ethereum and it's very common to not be nice to the foundation, to be extremely critical of the foundation. But we also have a habit in the ecosystem of washing out the delivery, doing out the delivery in public. One of the things that amazes me about Ethereum is that we are number one on everything but… That's a good thing.

So if we can say the foundation is responsible for some of this, at least we are part of it. So as we are pinpointing what the foundation is doing wrong, what the foundation should be doing, what the foundation shouldn't be doing this, shouldn't be doing that, that's us being very critical on that question and sometimes we take some reference from other protocols and be like the foundation of this protocol is doing so great, so this and that. It's extremely difficult for a foundation that is number one on everything, but on the world that is number one on everything but market cap to be properly judged on its action.

Typically at Ethereum France, we run EthCC, we try very humbly to run a conference. We want to run a conference as a non-profit that's accessible to the largest possible crowd and it boasts its regularity every year. This is super hard and this is what we'd like to do because we don't think the foundation should be just continuing to do that every year. It creates friction and different problems. So we are not doing the business development, sometimes the foundation is a bit busy in relation to the business itself.

We are doing a lot of the education, but it is also super hard for a foundation that is like a traditional school, that is sometimes located in a specific area, to be knowing about everything that is going on in the different markets and knowing exactly how to address different markets. So, for example, the foundation could be running an event in India in a few months, yeah, in two months, and I've been running it in... Two weeks. Two weeks. A few weeks. Two weeks. One month. You're scaring me. I need to get my visa in order.

But we are in Colombia, they hosted an event in Bogota, and I was like, The foundation has tried really hard to be able to kickstart hubs in different cities. Sometimes with success, sometimes with relative success. In Onirid we felt like it could be more efficient to run events in the same region, in the same place. People take every year at the same time in order to kickstart a hub. So we try to do this with Eiji and we hope to contribute it in the adoption of the program.

So, and I say this with... No filters. I know it's easy to tweet bad things about the foundation, but it comes from a place of care and passion. Because we want to see the real one. I want to see the real one. When I talk to the average person, especially when I speak to college kids and just random conversations they go on and forth, Ethereum has not been the first thing they mention. They'll mention Ripple, they'll mention Solana, and then Bitcoin, of course. So that is tough because I feel like the foundational values that got me into Ethereum are incredible.

And I think open access to technology and to finance and just so many other things that Ethereum makes possible is something that is great that anyone in the world should be able to have. And so I have tweeted many times just expressing my frustration in nice ways. I want to quote you more than once, but it always comes from the perspective of like, I would like to see Ethereum winning and to keep winning and winning. And I think that will be a positive, maybe sound like my quote, probably to the person that's on crypto.

But I think a couple of things that my perspective has changed on now is from seeing the foundation and just constantly feeling like the foundation could be more of a messaging perspective and a storytelling perspective, to believing that we don't have so many other nodes in the Ethereum ecosystem that are responsible. and that can make that change and that can lead to that adoption and that visibility and awareness and we're already seeing that. So what have we done over the last couple of years? We've done a ton.

One is obviously been funding. We have funded over 200 teams in Ethereum and we have consistently funded four teams in protocol guild. We have funded storytellers through funding rounds to make Ethereum's message more accessible. we have funded research to make even grants programs more effective. We've done so much of that work, but outside of that, we actually built an accelerator to help teams become sustainable financially. So we are taking in our grantees.

We did that in 2024. We graduated 24 projects through that, and that was at a time when funding was starting to... Like right now, I think we're one of the last public funders and one of the last programs to run around like this. But at that time, funding was existing, but we could see the trajectory was going to change. So that was one of our first attempts to do that. We have worked with a lot of collaborators even outside of crypto for them to be more open to, again, a lot of financial aspects, but also just the programmability aspect of it.

and then on the funding side, well not financial support, because funding is just funding, it doesn't solve teams getting better at more usage adoption and really getting better at for attention to teachers as well, so we've created a lot of programs and a lot of educational elements there too. And then we have funded a lot of creators to help work with these teams to make their messages accessible too. So I want to say a lot of non-financial support layers and then obviously financial support layers. And then if you are an Ethereum user, our funding rounds that we run every quarter, you can have an opinion and help direct matching pool of the funding that we give out to whatever teams you can reserve that funding.

So we have made it accessible. You know, people say that Ethereum Foundation should fund this. Do you now have a way to actually help direct this funding through Octant funding rounds and Golem Foundation and not just the whole funds, through the epochs that are running? And they're accessible if you have GLM and participate. So there are ways that you can do that too, and I think that's a pretty great way to make this happen. So part of the reason we started ETHGlobal was the premise that the founding team for ETHGlobal were developers and engineers, And we've kind of been in the middle of the ecosystem and we've seen how startups have started and how they've grown.

And fundamentally, the obvious thing to us was that there was a lot of platform and we care about the operating system. And there are a lot of things that we can do as part of contracts. And if you have that as a premise and you're looking at it as a platform and not as just money, the thing that you need to do to grow it is actually make it good and better. and you have to give them feedback loops, and the lucky part of all this is that these are things that have pretty good interest now, and even 10 years forward. If you are running an API, you know how to market this, you know how to get feedback, you know what you need to do, give it space for any other company, and everybody knows what it looks like to improve your product and create a

feedback loop, and we just didn't see that as happening. And our premise was that this is cool, others should know about it, we don't see anybody else doing it, but we know what has to be done to make this come into one. And we just believe that this should be a great start up on the community developer relations team and this is what the origin of the problem is. Thank you, thank you. So five years from now, should the foundations for the existing system be smaller or bigger? Thank you.

So in five years, it brings us to 2032, so we are fully post-quantum, we are fully lean, ossification is on the way, our consciousness is on the internet, and we are a world super graphic computer. I hope the foundation will be bigger in funding. She is holding a lot of ETH. So likely ETH will go up and the foundation will have a lot of money to continue the maintenance of the different clients that will be out there.

So what I wish for the foundation is to continue to figure out where ETH should be heading and fund the research that needs to be done in order to do so. And for that to be feasible, the price of ETH has to continue to go up. Otherwise, we need to figure out a way to fund the foundation. Public research funding is extremely hard to figure out and we are lucky that the protocol was successful.

The money that the foundation had is currently being used for post-quantum research and privacy related research. As those research programs come to a conclusion, eventually to the implementation of the protocol, some things will remain to be researched afterwards. I'm not sure which direction it will be. Definitely something that needs to be done and I hope that if it's still relevant for the next 20 years, so that we can make sure that we continue to be successful at it and the price of this will continue to go up.

I don't think the foundation wants to exist in five years though. They are increasingly cutting down everything that they have, right? And I think part of that is financial reasons, but more so the subtractive philosophy. So will it exist? You can't make someone who doesn't want to do something, you can't really force people, right? So, it probably won't exist, but I do think there will be sustainable funding means and systems that still allow a lot of the core teams to get funded for the work that they do.

And I hope that will be what continues along the way. And I do see a lot of other players taking a more active role in the funding for a lot of these core teams. So I do think there is that almost roadmap that's been built. And you know, what I'd like for the foundation to consist of, I'd love for them to have some things for the foundation as well. I would think. I would definitely. But, you know, we can. And then on the other side, I think two people like teams like E-CLAS and E-Constitutional and E-Cystems are doing really good work advocating for what I feel like the foundation's role could have been and would be.

And I mean, a lot of these teams have been, and were previously part of the EF, now they're not, but they're still continuing the mission that you're in. So I think that will still continue to exist, and if anything, these teams can be more influential, will hold more credibility, and will hopefully be so legitimate that the foundation will not be the most important like, you know, crowning organization as well. I don't personally have a good answer to that question in the sense that I know what I think will happen, but I can't give you a real justification for it. But I think in five years, be as big as it's ever been.

And I think it will be by choice. If we're betting on Ethereum becoming what it is that we're seeing as a trend for the institution side, I think we will have to expand to a world sort of an orderly request to that a new system is trying to create. and I so far am not convinced that external organizations will be able to fill that gap. I remember back in 2016 we were arguing about what Ethereum will become at Dev Con 2 and the best answer, the most common given answer was the global clearinghouse for the future of assets. Is that taking this direction?

It is that direction, it's just a timeline. So, again, if this was built on Linux, would you expect the Linux Foundation to go down? Well, the other correlation for my answer is that, if anything, the Linux Foundation has only gone bigger per year. And this is kind of the general belief I'm bringing, and I'm going by the same sort of reference points, but it's not how it's going to be. All of what they do do, speaking of the Linux Foundation, is they do fund other teams that they believe can allocate funds better. And the team.

So if it does take that long, there might be a lot of funding that may be not directly managed. I see. I have a question. You run the EthCC project, making it. So tell us a little bit more about your 10 year journey and what 10 years of COVID have been. So it's our birthday in April and it's going to be our decade of EthCC. We managed to run this conference called Head & News. some years it was like the last conference before COVID and the first

conference after COVID. So we were quite lucky on the dates. And this year we are very happy to be able to partner with BIF Korea to help bridge more the gap between the different communities in Asia, Europe and the US. So what about it? But it's quite a journey. They came to see how the crowd involved, to hear about stories that happened at EthCC. It's a great pleasure to meet someone.

I said, I met my husband, I met my wife, met my significant others. We are all kids. We met at EthCC. We needed to go there and so on. So we started with just a gathering community of people that just wanted to get to know how to use ETH, what can you do with this, I can do this, and so on. Just a bunch of very cypherpunk mentality, and then slowly we evolved into more suits. For reality. Excuse me. And we kept embracing the trends that happened as the years went by.

I remember in 2020 we were like, we started meeting at video games in the area. Then there was the DeFi summer 2021, and we were like, let's go for DeFi and so on. But one thing that we tried to stick a lot to is our cypherpunk value from back in the days. We were taking for granted that if we continued to be cypherpunk oriented, open source first and so on, we would prevent the institution to come in. The contrary is actually happened.

Last year we had Societe Generale, taking a sponsorship, coming to the conference, sending different people. This is so refreshing, this is not what we are used to. We love being there. We met the guys from this port that we didn't know about. We met the guys from Turkey. This is our destination. This is our tryout of leading with culture. We are coming with this new form of world computer, it comes with the people that are building it, and you should get to know them because they are thinking well, they mean well, and you pay attention to what's going on.

So in our case we are very cautious about our budget and very cautious about how we run things. EthCC belongs to a non-profit in France so it cannot be alienated from Ethereum France. And we continue to be run as such and I can definitely say for sure that we are going to be there for the next 10 years. So as long as there is an Ethereum 3.5 that will be in EthCC. I hope to have more people from Asia coming to EthCC. The year before COVID, I've been touring Asia, I've had all the conferences, all the meetups, getting people to come to EthCC, going to come to EthCC, and the year after, we had COVID.

So all my efforts went down. Soon I knew like, why should I go out and do it? I hope this year we get a lot more speakers and attendees from Korea and the countries around. And I just want to say, I mean, both of you guys have been such a key part of making people, just introducing people to Ethereum, but also just I think with a lot of the hackathons that have happened and so many events and just years of community building too, I have to say like it's been such a refreshing, not even refreshing, but I think just like seeing the fact that y'all have survived is such a big thing because it's been a rough, rough period for a lot of community events, for a lot of paper events too.

a lot of companies who have been down this path, it's been really tough to sustain themselves. So I think it's a testament to doing the work, but I also just like to see it all kind of try to perform to seeing people have legitimacy. That's what I would call perfect. Thanks again. You're right. One of the reasons we were successful is also because we were able to propose a third decade of info. There are times when I question why I'm already full of answers. sad. Did you say you're always still in the middle of hackathons?

Yeah, most of where our time and energy goes is in the middle of the developments. It's just that one of the things that has always happened is that for us, we want to obviously make sure that we don't refuse the demand that is incoming. And the hackathons will stay where they are in terms of consistency and growth, but we're not getting more and more institutions coming in to understand what's happening in the rest of the world. And also what the developers are curious about. So we just get to experience more things that we don't. That's kind of where our new plans come in. One interesting trend I observed, and I have an organizer, I have good memories of hackathons in the early days of Ethereum where the hackers were actually the protocol developers or people who were

protocol adjustments and testing like, oh we need to do a proof of concept of the beacon chain, let's hack this up at the end of the weekend. Those are definitely my favorite memories where a lot of the attendees from the early first three years were founders that are people that you know and we've known them as people who come in for just a few t-shirts and stuff. And as time went by we had more and more application oriented hacks. To some extent that, well the last two to three years have been very rough for the startups. with VC funding dried out and thus there would be potentially less appetite for less fund prices that would be active longer in the weekend and so on.

But what I expect personally with the switch with more institutional players coming in is that those institutions would say, okay, let's go to EthCC for a week and then keep the team on the ground on the weekend so they can hack around something. And do hackathons after that. That is actually exactly what's going on. Sometimes when we have calls with companies, they're mostly interested in understanding how these events work and the common response is, let me send our blockchain team to just hack for fun just to see if they can understand what's going on and then we'll also find a way to participate.

The trend is very clear that this is finally happening. and we will just talk about it in a few years, and we know that this will happen. The output in terms of human capital being produced for teams that are usually either ivory towering their own principal institutions or large institutions is tremendous. The contact with the rest of the teams is better. As you guys just mentioned, it's always a question for a tech consultancy. Given that some programmers and some engineers want to do the work, you guys have a lot of different activities.

Would you give us a picture of the whole thing? Absolutely. So the initial goal was to always just get more developers to build on Solidity, so we could see what should be fixed in Solidity itself. And just kind of have that feedback with the foundation side of things from protocol to programming language. And that's kind of where most of the hackathons go. And a few years ago, we started just seeing that shift of more non-crypto sort of default companies were asking us, hey, what's the non-credit rate of fault?

And we sort of saw that click about it right now. So I mean, hey, Valorant is interested in your email route. They want to know what they can do. and that's kind of where we saw early signs of, hey, this is already expanding. And three years ago, we launched Pragma, which was our conference that was focused on the non-dual varieties. And we kind of saw these in those countries, and that's kind of how we started this, and we sort of continued doing that right next to the platform. And that's kind of what has grown over the last two or so years. And where most of our time is going is one of our sort of biggest production for next year is going to be ETHConf, which is the biggest institutional Ethereum conference in the world.

And the focus here is to keep things in New York, really get all the financial institutions and banks specifically to do all the protocols that we usually work with on the Hackathon side and not venture anywhere from the heels to just figure out what they can do directly and hear from sort of the right person directly. And one of the other things we've done is expanded our focus on actually getting more people to learn what's happening in our space, and that's at our community events. So most of you know the bigger hackathons that you go to, but on average, we've put those two events in the middle of the day.

And we've kind of found a way to go to the people who attend our events in person and help them anywhere in the world as a diverse community. How to support the existing events that we're doing. That's what we've expanded our reach to the world. We do that for a year and a half now. So on average we get a thousand new people per week coming into the space. And that's a pure funding specific thing which is that if we had more money we could have more events. We want to get to one and taste something in the world and that's where we found ways to make this more accessible. After that, we get all the time to show it to the audience.

When you have a few people in EthCC, what foundation do you need to develop? Just taking a small budget. Yeah, I have a question to Mashal. How do you decide on that? What criteria do you use to? Yeah, that's a really good question. So we started off running generic rounds, and they were quite big intentionally in terms of scope.

But very quickly we realized that when you have a very generic themed round, you get all kinds of applications. And you cannot compare the work that a community organizer is doing to what a technical research team is doing. And it can be really tough to, one, select and decide how we're going to choose and just even get better at understanding the progress that they've made and compare how effective the funding that went to these teams was. So for the last couple years we started experimenting with themed rounds and there are two areas we look at.

One, we look at what areas of funding we see gaps in and two, who are the partners or experts that we can work with to define that. So we've worked with the Ethereum Foundation's funding coordination team for example for some of our epochs and we've done a lot of funding just across the board. I mean, like, one of it was in front, for example, because we felt like, you know, core teams did not get as much focus. After that, we did something that's a little bit more, but like our current one is focused on privacy. We feel like that's super important, and just also seeing where funding is going down and where it's being removed.

And then what's important when we choose these rounds is understanding different stages of funding. So we don't want to fund projects that have a lot of capital to pay for this. Because one, if you've already done a VC round, and two, if you have a token, your incentives are gonna be a little bit different. And there are more deserving teams that could benefit from that funding. So we do look at effectiveness, what has been your proof of work and just achievements, and has the team proven that they can get something done if they're saying that? Because a lot of our funding gets dispersed right when funding ends.

So in a way it's almost like you have to trust the team that they will deliver. So past work is a big part of it. Due diligence and technical diligence too. So we have a few different phases where we verify the work that they're claiming they've done. We dig through that. There's references sometimes as well that we look at. And then we look at what they're saying they want to achieve and if it's realistic from the timeline. And a lot of times that's the tougher part because everyone thinks they are entitled to a lot of funding and they believe they are the best project in the world.

But if you're competing with other projects making much more progress in the same exact space, we'll have to make a choice and we're accountable for the final selection that the community votes on and allocates to. So I think a lot of it is just based on showing proof of concepts and progress that they've made, and that's usually how the round selection goes. And then if we have a partner that we're working closely with, then we decide the allocations together. For certain themes, like the media round that we did, we wanted it to be geographically diverse because we felt like there are a lot of hubs that could benefit from funding accessibility there.

So that went into that. And what it's turned out to be is really just looking at the board and seeing, you know, is there going to work in this, you know, this board and so on. Thank you. For the last question, so 3rd and 4th year 1 just started this year in Vancouver. And we'd like to make it a. Do you have any advice or suggestions for that? It's nice to know. Charge tickets. FERS.

Yes, but I think one of the things that, this is kind of the most common question I get from so many kind of different cities and communities, my general advice to everybody is that it's a lot easier to see what EthCC has done, what ETHGlobal has done, what someone else has done, and say let's do the same thing, which ends up being effectively a way to look at, oh, I'm just going to make the biggest event in my country, in my city, and that should not be the goal. It should not be for many metrics like this is the biggest show in the world, or this is going to be the best, or whatever else.

You want to optimize for long-term sustainability on just the quality of the people that you're bringing in. ETHGlobal events did not start with 100,000 people coming in. Our first event was 400 and that was the biggest Ethereum event in 2017. And that's going to help you grow. And what you want to do is make sure that you are focusing on the people. And it's fine to have a small event. It's actually better to have a small event and doing it more often than just once a year.

and that's when you actually get to see how everybody is improving and how they run in the right direction. And I think this is something that helps us to stay on the right way to that scale and in order for you to not just go for big numbers and focus on the volume of the return. Yeah totally. Totally plus one everything that Kartik just said. Specifically if you look at EthCC and the footage from Robin Hood showing the wedding and you're like, I want to do this. I remember the first EthCC there used to be a team photo of every attendee and we would fit in a photo.

I'm just as scared by it. So you have to accept it. You cannot really compare what it is today and what it has to do to become this. Typically, if you're in France, as the host of EthCC itself, we have a monthly meetup. It's just something small, it's a monthly meetup that we kept with frequency. It's like if you ask a social media influencer how he built this brand, he's like, I just post every day, every day, every day, every day.

So focus on making sure that you have long-term sustainability and carry on, carry on. Every month, if you can, every week, maybe if you can, but every month, like have a regular rendezvous on the first Wednesday of the month for example like let's go to uh let's go to the pub and let's have a presentation let's invite people to talk and get connected with the rest of the ecosystem. Korea is a booming market on many different aspects so you will have a lot of people from the blockchain and the blockchain industry that will visit Seoul in this case and tell them hey you will come to Arbitr and then you know like those guys are And those movements are really happy to just say, hey, sure, I'd like to meet the local community.

So if you have a local running group, if you have a different sub-strict, that would be the base for the foundation of what will be your event every year. And it will be a good for the people who are the high-end lawyers of the markets, but more importantly, the faculty that is committed to the program, and it's growing and it's growing and it's wanting to connect with the rest of the ecosystem. Thank you. I mean I have more of a sponsor perspective. But I would probably say the quality of people makes a big difference and the quality of people that are doing it as well.

I've seen, I look at decks and I'm really, it's a new event that's always pitching for sponsorship and most times the mistake that they make is they don't look at what your goals are and what is important to you as an organization. They just want to push whatever they're building instead of trying to understand. And as a marketing person who's accountable for the budget spent from a marketing perspective, I am answerable for the budget spent. And so I need to ensure that we're getting good results and whatever our goals are are being met with whatever we do choose to participate in or have an activation.

So I think sometimes I see numbers that just make no sense to me. And that might just be because our budgets aren't big enough. And we're pretty concerned with how we make the most of our budgets. And so I think the fact that you've done this event, thinking about the next time watching comes around, around thinking about who would be good to get on there. And thinking about potential sponsors. I think if you've got the sponsorship side, a lot of people get involved with speakers, that's probably a matter of finding the right people. But that's probably one thing.

And it seems to be doing a really good job. We've got a great lineup today too. If that feels like, I mean, it's not really people, but you've got a room full of people. That's an achievement to be really proud of. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing how you guys are helping me. Thank you for joining this session.