Onboarding the Next Generation of Ethereum Builders with BuidlGuidl

Transcript

GMGM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of Devantel. So, if you didn't know, Devantel is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between and the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I am really ecstatic to welcome Austin Griffith, who you may know as the founder of Bidd. So, Bidd is a curated group of Ethereum builders creating products, prototypes, and tutorials to enrich the web 3 ecosystem. So, you stick around for today's episode. You'll get to meet Austin, get a chance to ask him some questions live, and uh learn about Bidd Scaffoldies 2, Ethereum speedrun, and more. All right, let's do this thing.

[Music] GMGM, welcome to the show, Austin. I am really ecstatic to have you on, man. Oh, yeah. What's up? Yeah, >> how are you? >> Uh, doing well, man. And, uh, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come chat with us today. I'm uh, really looking forward to it. I know um Bidd Scaffold Eyes um Speedrun they've all gone through a lot of iterations since at least the last time I uh took a look and took a spin.

Uh so uh really looking forward to kind of hearing um and and seeing um um what's kind of evolved since then. There you go. Now now we got t-shirt >> here. Look it even like matches the color. I got the color scheme going. >> Oh yeah. Yeah. Node running here. Got the green. A lot of green. Got the nerdy streamer vibes. Yeah. Yeah, man. This is the way. >> Yeah. Uh, so I guess um if some folks are are new to the um crypto web 3 space um and aren't familiar with yourself, would you like to just give a brief introduction?

>> Yeah, I'm Austin Griffith. I run developer growth at the Ethereum Foundation. I am focused on catching developers as they orbit by Ethereum and teaching them the way we how to build on Ethereum, why to build on Ethereum, what to build on Ethereum. Uh we do that through speedrun Ethereum which is a curriculum that has taken me years to build through lots of sessions one-on-one figuring out what resonates with developers. But it kind of teaches you how to build on Ethereum while showing you many different projects.

Kind of like the the TLDDR we found is like people need to just ship things over and over. There's kind of a tour of duty you have to do and you have to just like learn all these weird things about Ethereum like way ETH first way. Uh the fact that like nothing is automatic. You always have to poke it. Uh to get someone to poke it, you can't just have one server checking in to poke it. got to have like an incentivization system and millions of computers all like interacting and you're building things that are massive multiplayer for an adversarial group of people to coordinate. So figuring out all those aha moments and then delivering those to people through speedrun Ethereum and then we have scaffold ETH which is our app building tool. And then just recently we launched the Ethereum on

tour. It's tour.ethereum.org. We're going to college campuses uh and and giving giving them the good word of of Ethereum and building decentralized apps and why to build a decentralized app. And you know, we we need more younger folks in the space. There's too many old dogs like me in Ethereum and it's it's time for some young blood to start uh innovating. And so we're we're pushing that a lot. >> Amazing to hear. Yeah. Uh I definitely agree. uh need a bit more of the younger folk uh kind of in in the space and um yeah getting taught with the the right types of foundations like um like what you're providing for folks. So um yeah, man, keep keep doing what you're doing.

I really love to see it. >> Yeah. >> Heck yeah. Heck yeah. >> Uh and I guess I'm just curious um before all all of this with Bidd and the Ethereum Foundation, like how did you get into the technology space in general? like did you start in like the web two >> side of the world and kind of move in here or or yeah what's the story there? >> I mean get into the technology space. I was you know born you know I don't know it's like technolog is all all around us these days but I you know I was born into we had a computer at our house and I figured out how to you know mess around with spreadsheets and we had a modem and I could dial up and get

internet. So, I feel like I've been into programming since I, you know, probably like basic way back in the day. I think my dad showed me basic, but I had a great teacher in high school that took me through tons of different uh languages. We wrote a lot of C and C++ and uh I had like a my you know customuilt Linux machine back then. So it's like since I can remember I've been into technology but uh I I think before Ethereum I was deep in the like dev ops world. I was building uh like a scalable infrastructure system for teams that allowed them to have microservices that could scale to the cloud where you would

have them locally and they would all run locally and then you just boop hit a button and it would deploy to your AWS cloud. and uh my boss wouldn't let me open source it and it kind of weaponized me toward open-source and then I found Ethereum and it was like programming money and decentralized ethos and all of those things altogether. The first time I saw a smart contract, I was like, "Oh, wow. I'm building apps that will last forever and no one can censor them and the code does exactly what it's supposed to do and there's, you know, billions of dollars as a bounty to break it and no one can." So, that was really exciting to me. So I think I was really I was really Ethereum pill around 2016 and

then I got in in 2017 and built a bunch of things. Did like Metatransaction uh Devril and did the burner wallet at ETH Denver in 2019. Uh did ETH.build which was like a nice teaching platform you can kind of like drag things around and wire them up. And then that led to scaffold ETH which led to speedrun Ethereum which led to the Ethereum tour. Everything's kind of connected in a weird linear timeline, I think. >> Yeah. I mean, uh, thing things end up working out for a reason. So, um, it's it's awesome to see kind of where you've landed and, uh, you spoke on Ethereum and I believe you have a Ethereum node running behind you. Is that correct?

>> Yes. This is a this is a is a build guild client. It has the little castle and everything, right? Castle up. >> Yeah. So that is running ref and lighthouse, but it's a buildg guild client. We have a piece of software that runs both the the e and the cl and makes it easy for you to it's just like a oneline command. You go to client.buildguild.com. You copy paste it right into the terminal and you get this super nerdy uh node. And if you dig deep enough, you'll find that this is also powering our uh apps. When you build something with Scatalie and you deploy it to mainet, it's using mainnet.rbc.

rpc.buildgill.com and that is basically a DRPC and anybody who's running a buildg guild client can opt into being part of that RPC network and uh that powers all of our apps. So, we make it really easy to run a node and the node looks cool and nerdy and you can be part of this like cool peer-to-peer system, but also you can opt in by saying-owner ATG.eth whatever your ENS is and then you're like uh opting into our DRPC system and and that's a whole thing, too. But very nerdy, doesn't it? It looks super nerdy, right? I love it.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I I dig super nerdy. So, that that's that's freaking awesome. Uh, yeah. Just before we kind of get into the um meat and bones of Biddle Gidd and Speedrun, um, just curious to kind of hear your thoughts on I I know you said um kind of how you got started with Ethereum, but uh I think Ethereum's kind of grown up um since like four years ago or since its inception really um and it's kind of evolved and is still evolving. um just just want to get your thoughts on um what you think of the Ethereum ecosystem um today and kind of what you think um or how how you think is kind of going to evolve um going

forward. >> Yeah, it's there's a really interesting tension I think between like these cippher punk ideals and banks adopting Ethereum, right? We have stable coins and we have enterprise coming in and we have a lot of interesting new developments that I think are good and I don't think that maybe ETH has been great at like BD, you know, we're not BD bros. We're not very good at that. We're we're cipher punks with our hoods on and we're trying to to hack things. So I think that we're trying to build the future for humanity in one way, but some of that means going to people where they are and I think doing uh more enterprise uh engagements and helping banks come on chain and I think previously they all

thought like you know when your boss tells like blockchain was hot and so your boss would say we need to be on blockchain but also it needs to be p private and so they would like get a private blockchain and then like years into it, they would realize that's dumb. It doesn't make sense and you need a credibly neutral set of rails that everybody can use. So, you need a public blockchain. So, I think that like all roads will lead back to Ethereum and and hopefully the EVM. And I think that like uh Ethereum is growing up. Yeah. I think that we are kind of we're still kind of playing that dance of the the tension between, you know, keeping our cipher punk ideals and also onboarding the world. And I think that's it's it's a

tough it's a tough thing to figure out. And I think we need we need both sides. We need the cipher punk privacy. Everyone owns their own data. Everyone is in control of their own stuff. But also we you know the the world starts uh through a lot of these like enterprise and government interactions. So we have to figure those out. >> Yeah. And yeah, well said. and and yeah, uh I I I noticed that um that kind of more I don't know uh if it was a lack of BD or or maybe it was just like there weren't enough BD folks in in the space.

Um but yeah, I'm definitely seeing more um more engagement from the Ethereum folks like whether it's IRL or or doing things like uh like you're doing going to campuses and kind of just like getting in getting into the into into the trenches uh so to speak. Um, but yeah, it's it's really uh great to see and uh yeah, I hope it keeps continuing. Um, >> yeah, the ecode dev department of the Ethereum Foundation is growing and they're doing a lot more interactions. I think that that's that's really exciting to see. >> Yeah, 100% 100%. And uh yeah, I think this is a good segue to kind of um get into all the nitty-gritty of everything kind of that you do at the Ethereum Foundation here. Um, so, uh, I want to

give you an opportunity to kind of share your screen and, um, take us through. I think this is the best way to kind of see and experience, uh, uh, Biddle Giddle and and all the great stuff. So, I will bring your screen up. >> There we go. Ethereum on tour. >> Thank you. Yeah, this is, uh, so this is kind of like one of our recent things. It's just like going to campuses, doing lots of virtual engagements. Uh if you or your university are looking for uh Ethereum to come visit, you can sign up at tour.ethereum.org and our email is universitythereum.foundation.

So hit us up there. Seam will catch your email and and schedule some stuff and we'll figure it out. Also just like I just tweeted a session if you want to see what a session is like or you want to just have your students watch the video. Like I I do a very similar talk for a lot of universities where it's like most of it could just be a video, but people don't want to like bring their whole class together and watch a YouTube. It's like got to be this interactive thing. So I try to make it as interactive as possible and have people ask questions, but sometimes it's just me mansplaining the same concepts over and over. But that's that's maybe what you got to do to get the word out and and that's what we're doing. So yeah, it's tour.ethereum.org.

Hit us up. We'd love to come talk to as many campuses as possible. all around the world. So, so that's available. And then, uh, yeah, BuildG Guild, we talked about Build Guild a little bit. Uh, so kind of gosh, we were talking about the burner wallet metat transactions kind of like around that time. I got an airdrop. Oh man, the burner wallet's probably not even up anymore. You can still do like punk wallet which is like a burner wallet like wallet but uh the the burner wallet at ETH Denver was kind of like this private key and local storage magic UX but totally insecure like good way to lose your money. You don't want to put a lot of money on a punk wallet like 10 bucks or something but it's fast and

cheap and uh really easy. Uh, and what happened there is in the burner wallet there was this swap where you could go from ETH to die to XDI right natively in the app and it was really smooth. But what that did is it qualified you for the unis swap airdrop and so I got a bunch of airdrops on a bunch of brain wallets basically and uh I wanted to give back to the community. I had kind of grown up in Ethereum and uh Vitalic called me the first quadratic freelancer and early rounds of Gitcoin uh with quadratic funding kind of uh you know propped me up and gave me enough money to live and I kind of lived off of that quadratic funding for a while. So after

that airdrop after some of my success I wanted to give back I deployed this custom smart contract to Ethereum. I went and looked at it the other day and there are 193 deployments of this exact same contract. Kind of embarrassing. I didn't do a cleaner version of that. But that contract allows uh a builder. So basically I deploy it and a builder can withdraw from it and and it's and when the builder withdraws they type in what they're working on. So, it's a very like loweffort way for me to yolo to lots of builders that I have identified as high leverage and give them the freedom to build what they think is the most important and then withdraw from that stream and uh you know thrive hopefully.

And that's kind of where the build guild was born was out of those contracts and me finding good builders and uh you know those good builders I kind of picked you know the best small a small amount of them and kind of brought them in tighter to now what what the build guild is is now a very tight organization. It's like a very small DAO, 10 or 15 people that are uh building educational content, traveling, you know, I've I've created 15 Austinins basically, you know, re recreated myself over over 15 times and now they're traveling and giving workshops, they're building uh educational content, they're building tools and different things like this node here too. And uh you'll you'll find

us all at DevConnect by the way. We will there's a build guild at Devconnect. Basically, if you go look at the schedule at Dev Connect, there's like a big chunk that says build guild right at the top. Come find us. We will have a room. We'll have a workshop room at the main venue. Uh looks like it's going to be called the yellow pavilion. I don't know what that means, but look for the yellow pavilion. We're going to have a ton of great uh like programming at the um at the event. But probably the most uh hardcore and for all you like hardcore devs out there, come come win a thousand bucks at the capture the flag.

We're gonna have last year we did a capture the flag. Carlos built it with with a team within the build guild and they're highly technical challenges and we didn't think anybody was going to finish and like a team finished the first six in like the first minute. We thought something was broken or hacked or something like that. But uh the capture the flag is going to be even harder this year. But come come check out the capture the flag and all the other programming, you know, introductions to building your first apps all the way to how to build a stable coin or a prediction market or zero knowledge proof voting system. Uh Farcaster mini apps. We're going to have like a student and company fair and

founder speed dating. If you're a founder or an idea guy looking for a developer, come find us at at founder speed dating. Uh but yeah, the build guild is building lots of cool things with speedrun Ethereum with our batch program, our small grants program. We have like a whole pipeline of um you know developer enrichment and and nourishment sending them hopefully to to get a job in Ethereum or even better you know found a product and build something that that gets actual users. Yeah, lots of stuff here. I don't Yeah, the buildg guild client lot lots of stuff at buildgild.com. I think our main key offering, sorry if I just keep mansplain rambling here, but our our key offering

is speedrun Ethereum. I think this is the the curriculum. It's fully open source. You can just go to GitHub and get it. We don't even collect email addresses or anything like that. You connect your wallet and you sign when you uh finish a challenge and you don't even have to do that. But when you do, we run it against our autograder and we give you a little credential and you earn XP. Let me see if I can go to my my portfolio here. you can earn XP and you can submit new builds and you can track your your progress and there's lots of side quests that kind of get you into you know using a mainet using mainet using L2 swap on a DEX lots of fun Ethereum first steps that you need to do

uh with your account and and it's all just like geared toward that idea that like you just have to build a bunch of things and you have to go through that tour of duty and sure you you understand the syntax you you know you went to solidity by you went to solidity by example and you found how to do you know how to build Ethere on Ethereum and you can write a smart contract but like what do you do and what kinds of things do you build and what kinds of things have product market fit uh scaffold or speedrun Ethereum is going to teach you that you go to speedrun ethereum.com and you crush through all of these challenges and then you you you almost basically have the the right to start building right once you have all of this

Then my uh uh uh advice to developers is just to take scaffold ETH or their stack of choice and build a whole bunch of things and deploy things to mainet, deploy things to L2, deploy things that actually move money around. And of course, you have to be careful and audit all of that, right? But uh build things and ship things. And I think uh scaffold ETH will help with that. So go through speed and Ethereum and then take scaffold ETH off the shelf and ship a whole bunch of things.

>> Well said. Yeah. And uh on this topic um David actually says he loves he loved the prediction market challenge and broke a lot of things while tinkering with it and and yeah, prediction markets are pretty hot uh these days. So it's awesome to see you guys have a um a demo there or a project there. Yeah, it's fun to go through these challenges and even like learn how to teach them. You like a prediction market was sort of like, man, how does that work? And then when you get in and learn that it's basically just like deploying two meme coins with the promise to rug one for the other one, then you you realize like, oh, these are pretty simple. Even even the stable coin I think when you look at you know maker and die back in the day the the coin was

like obfuscated and it was it was meant to be hard to understand and that's hard for a builder to learn right and as we have new organizations and banks and companies coming in trying to build their own stable coins it should be easy to figure out how to build a stable coin right so we we made it super easy to understand the mechanics and and the mechanisms and the oracle and everything that that make that coin stable and and keep uh people incentivized to either hold it or LP it or all of those things. So yeah, definitely check out those challenges on speedrun Ethereum.

>> And you mentioned um a grants program. are are these quests on uh speedrun Ethereum kind of tied to those grants or are grants more like free range people can build whatever and potentially get uh funded for that. >> So I think uh you know as Austin at Ethereum I'm looking to give grants to high leverage builders. um those are kind of rare like it's it's about finding the right people and you know my budget is is extremely limited so I have to be very you know smart about how I allocate funds but uh as Austin at buildg guild the the grants program is basically for people who are running

through that pipeline of the buildg guild uh curriculum I think it's grants let's go to grant I spelled it wrong grants.buildgild.com buildgild.com. These are basically for people who have finished the speedrun and are at that stage where they need to build a bunch of things. And a lot of times their first like grant idea is not very good. And you have to be like, "Okay, good start. Put it on the shelf. Let's do another thing. Okay, put that on the shelf. Let's do another thing." kind of when you first come into Ethereum, you think you have the idea that's going to make you rich and you think you just can kind of halfass build it and you're going to make a whole bunch of money or even like whole ass build it and you spend six months like in the trench with no one around in a silo building the

thing and then when you come up for error you realize that no one cares or they can't use it or you know a myriad of other things could could be the problem there. uh you kind of have to build in public and you kind of have to go through this tour of duty duty of learning what kinds of things work and how things work and uh gain connections, right? Like as much as crypto Twitter is gross, you need to be on crypto Twitter and you need to be tweeting about your projects and you need to be building a following. So then when I go to give a grant, I can see like how many mutuals do we have? How, you know, how many times have you tweeted something? What did your GitHub look like? How many things have you built? I can't just like give a grant to this, you know, if

you're Yeah, I don't know. It's It's hard to explain, but you you kind of know it when you see it when you see a good builder. And it takes a lot of work to get to that point. So these grants are kind of like pushing good builders to keep going and and make something cool and like keep shipping and and you know often you build the first few things and you have to put those on the shelf and then you you uh you know keep trying and go for new things. So the these are kind of uh for builders that have gone through speedrun Ethereum and it's part of our pipeline and it's just kind of an incentivization layer after you've finished everything else until you get to that we call it like there's definitely a chasm there of I can build

a smart contract really well but I I haven't built a mainet protocol yet and to get to there you just need to ship a bunch of things. So, this is meant to just incentivize that and give folks a push. But sometimes you don't even need that. You just need to grab the tools off the shelf and build a bunch of things and show them off on Twitter and get your first 10 to 100 onchain users. >> Yeah. And and I think you you touched on a great point and hit the nail on the head. um your th this um this advice and and kind of sentiment is is I I've seen it like many people who've come on this show kind of give the same same advice just like start building things share it with with your circle and um like it

will eventually hit uh the right amount of of eyes to kind of gain interest. I mean, um, the entirety of this podcast was basically built on this, like for people who are building cool things, but might not necessarily have a big following on on on Twitter back then or X. Now, um, just build things, share with your friends and and you never know what will happen, right? It's like the right if it's meant to be the right eyes will uh kind of land on it. And uh yeah, I think yeah, it's a really really uh powerful message to kind of ingrain um especially if you're a builder just starting or somebody's just starting in in any uh any field really. And it it takes more than you think like that that

guy. I remember myself going to ETH Denver 2018 with this really cool mobile game that worked on Ethereum. Like it was onchain, there was movement, there was massive multiplayer. It was like a cool game. and no one cared. And it's not that they didn't care, but like our space is full of trash and our space is full of people trying to grift. So, you have to understand that anybody who's giving grants, anybody who can help you with that next step is getting hit with 10 terrible pitches every day or more, right? And so, you as the builder can't just like kind of wave your little thing around and hope that that they see it and they're just going to get it and fall in love with it. You have to kind of I don't know. I don't I don't know

exactly what it is, but you have to push harder. You have to say like you you got to see this thing. Here's what I've built. And you have to understand that maybe it isn't the thing, right? Also, you may not have something that's that cool and you may need to put it on the shelf and build the next thing. And it and it's a a tricky dance to figure that out. The best way to do it is to get it in front of a hundred people. And if five of them use it and they're still using it the next day and they're still using it the next day, you might have something. But if you put it in front of a hundred people and no one's using it in a week, you probably don't have the thing and you probably need to iterate or try something new or try a different

angle and you have to be honest with yourself. So it's it's harder than you think and I you know you want to just like put that out there. Go ahead. Sorry. >> Yeah. No worries. Yeah. Yeah. I I think you're spot on and and the fact that maybe you're not getting any feedback that's like data in itself, right? It's like um I think Brian Armstrong from Coinbase said it best. It's like um like actions uh yield data or or might be paraphrasing there, but basically you do things and then you kind of assess what the results of those things are and you kind of iterate on that. And um to your earlier point of like the crypto Twitter kind of being full of grifters, like it's got for me personally, it's gotten

to the point where I just assume most things are like fake or scam. Like for example, the like Cloudflare uh I think last week or the week before they're like, "Oh, we're coming out with the stable coin." >> No, this can't. Yeah. Like, "Yeah, yeah, these guys got hacked." Like, "No way." Like, "What? What the heck?" And then it's like, "No, this is actually legitimate." I'm like, "Oh, okay." >> Pretty sweet. Yeah. >> Uh Yeah. Um >> hopefully it's EVM compatible. >> Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um but uh yeah, I I I I guess like coming coming back um what would you say um it would be um the best kind of quest or or maybe like a starting place for for people who want to just pick up uh speedrun Ethereum

today or or just mess around with scaffoldies. >> Yeah. No, I think it it is speedrun Ethereum. I think just go to speedrun ethereum.com. go. I mean, there there's this first challenge that's basically like just minting a token and sending it around. So, it's going to teach you about uh just wallets and the the framework and here's the front end, here's the smart contract, here's how you deploy the smart contract. Uh but but really like getting in and building this this staking app, which is really like more of a crowdfunding app. Building this crowdfunding app really helps you realize that you're you're you're creating a simple set of rules for an adversarial group of players.

Going back to what we were talking about, there's just like these aha moments. You have the the automatic like the web three cron job like everything has to be poked like nothing is automatic. You just kind of have to get these like aha moments that come to you as you build these things. And we've kind of baked them into the the challenges here. So you really kind of get these aha moments as you go through and learn these things. The DEX is one of the really big ones, right? Like the the fact that when you're deploying a DEX, you're just like deploying kind of like the hardware of a vending machine with all the rules written correctly.

And for the swaps to work, like the swaps are kind of like the the business in the front is everyone wants to be able to swap from token A to token B. But to make that work, you need a bunch of reserves. And to make a bunch of reserves work, you basically have to incentivize LPS to provide those reserves, right? And so you have to write all these rules where LPs are incentivized to have those reserves locked up and and you create that incentive by making a fee system between the swaps and that's it. You just write the rules correctly that say you can get token A for you know at some price for token B or token B for token A and every time you do that you're going to pay some fee and that fee is going to

go to whoever p provides the liquidity and anyone can get in and provide that liquidity. But this is a really neat thing because like usually when you think of a vending machine at the school, it's like it's a vending machine that one dude with a comb over and a sweet like set of keys, key rings, he's the one running that thing, right? And uh this is not how a DEX works. A DEX is basically anyone can provide the chocolate and the money for the vending machine and they're going to earn a fee on that. So it's it's like a massive multiplayer system both on the swapping side, but also on the LPing side. you're creating like the world's largest co-op of of a company that is LPing these swaps and all of you collectively are

earning these fees and that's a that's a really neat system and you know then it gets into lending and all the other stuff that you you can go through here but this this DEX is really this big aha moment of the kind of thing you're building. >> Awesome. And and yeah, uh folks, uh I mean the weekend is coming up, so no better way to to kind of uh spend a little bit of time uh just getting into the week. >> Sorry. Go ahead. >> No, no, no, man. Yeah. I I I love your vibe, man. Uh yeah. Uh I guess um kind of uh as we're approaching the the end here uh what if any uh anything can you share around perhaps the the road map

around build guild and some things that might be um coming up um I know you got the big big event at Dev Connect. Um yep >> but anything you can share perhaps going into 2026. >> Yeah I think AI is huge right? I think that now if you if you pull down uh scaffoldies and you clone something demo, you uh are maybe going to use AI for the whole thing soon, which is a little scary. And everyone's like, you should not use AI to write smart contracts. And they're probably right, but eventually they're going to be wrong. I think eventually uh these models are going to be able to write

smart contracts better than humans can. But uh with scaffold ETH, it comes with a cursor rules. It has the the hard hat or foundry uh contract orchestration already wired up to the Nex.js front end with uh you know buttons that run functions on smart contracts. So you have the front end, you have all the wallet handling stuff. We even have like extensions for like if you're using you know ponder like if you're using indexers or you want to uh get into like using Porto I think is my new favorite extension uh from uh yeah if you yeah go here. I think the new Porto extension let's see if I can find

it. I'm really excited about uh pass keys and mainstream audiences don't want to mess around with 12word seed phrases, but they can easily, you know, fingerprint in to make a transaction. So, scaffold ETH is is going to have all these extensions that allow you to quickly spin up these apps. Uh let's see. But but I think the the key here is like the AI is going to be so critical and such a big part of this. It it's so much easier to yolo an app now. I basically have let's see I have my foundry up here. I have my Nex.js here and then I'm you know already deploying a contract locally and if I want I can open up that with cursor and claude and

I basically prompt claude and cursor to build you know whatever I want them to build. Now I can't just say like build me a protocol that's going to make me money. you kind of need to go through and iterate and it takes time. But uh yeah, you you can kind of prompt it to build some kind of app. Even if like we want to build a simple counter that counts up plus+ and a button and display in the front end like this is really Oh, whoops. The front end. I don't know if that's going to work. This is really simple and stupid, but this thing's going to go to work. It's it's got a cursor rules. It's it's going to tell it like what contract to go edit. It's going to give it all the hints about what kind of hooks to use. We have VM

and Wagme under the sheets here. Uh, but you basically prompt it and it's going to go oneshot this app for you. It's going to give you the smart contract. It's going to give you the front end. Uh, and then you can go tinker with that. The the cool thing about Scaffold ETH is it has this. Let's let's open it up. If we go to localhost 3000, we'll be able to see the the app here, which is fired up here. I think I think I clicked it. We're just waiting for it to load here. Um, but you can tinker with your smart contract. It kind of comes with this nice debugging page out of the box. So, whatever smart contract you deploy, it's going to hot reload and be uh adapting to your contract as you add new functions and variables to your contract. That debug front end uh if we

go to it here is going to uh allow you to see that contract and see all the read functions, see the address, see how much money is in it, and then and then actually poke at it. And in in this one, it comes with a greeter contract. So, let me actually disconnect my wallet. Uh, it also uses burner wallets out of the box. So, you don't have to have a wallet connected and have it on the right chain or any of that. Let me zoom in a little bit. You basically get a wallet out of the box. And you click one button and that wallet has money. And then if you say hello world over here, if you're setting, you know, your first uh greeting, right? We want to update that greeting. You hit send and the greeting updates. Notice I'm not getting any wallet popups. It's not telling me

I'm on the wrong chain or the wrong network. I'm just incrementing that counter and it's working. Click, click, click. And if you like have some only owner function and you want to test that, you can open up an incognito window and go to localhost and you'll get a different wallet. You'll notice this is kind of purple pink guy. This is kind of pink and green guy. So then you try it as that guy and it says not the owner, you know. So this a good way to kind of test your assumptions. Make sure the contract works how you think it does. play around with with everything, but then also oneshot, right? How's our how's our counter app looking? Is it working on something? I don't know. Uh what happened over here? Uh did you build the front end?

Uh let's see. I I feel like it did not build the front end for us. Bad demo. That's a bad That's a bad clotting cursor. Uh I'm so zoomed in. I can't even see what's going on. Uh let's see. Did it make Did it make our smart contract uh counter increment? It looks like it just uh made a increment function. Uh please please make the front end too, bro. Maybe Oh, maybe it made Oh, it did. Oh, it's right here. Here it is. It's right here. And if we click increment, our counter increments. That's weird that it put it down there in a thing. Uh, of course you would make a more interesting application, but this thing was able to oneshot a silly counter. Uh, of course,

like that's a stupid simple example and something much more advanced would take a little bit more time and and prompting, but yeah, we we were able to oneshot that app. And then you just yarn deploy-work arbitrum and you push that thing out to some network. You yarn verify your smart contract on arbitrum. Then you yarn ipfs and that puts your front end out uh on a live network or yarn versell. So all of these commands let you tinker and play around but also you're dangerously close to shipping it to production when you're ready.

>> That's awesome. That's awesome. And uh we did all this in like five minutes. So that's pretty that's pretty amazing. >> Yep. And uh like on that earlier like the your first point around like whether or not like AI um should be used to make smart contracts. I I don't know. I I I think I think it's going to be way more way more used and uh just because like the big AI labs they they train on like public data, right? And most of the big time verified audited smart contracts are open source. So technically those models should be trained on that. So, uh, I mean, it you're still going to want to still going to want to have a human pair of eyes on it before you

deploy anything moving big chunks of money, but, um, I think it can, you know, I I I think it'll be all right. >> And even the the big platforms who get $10 million audits are still getting hacked from time to time. and getting something small out there with sane guidelines or guide rails on it. You can only put $500 in this thing at first, something like that, uh, helps it get lendy and helps other people play with it and helps you get, you know, your first users and traction. So, yeah, there's there's a scary gray line there in how AI can help and how, you know, what the best way is to get your app finally deployed. Uh I I can't give

great advice on that because I'm not running a million-dollar protocol. I'm just doing education and yoloing simple counter apps. But uh keep building and keep shipping and don't be afraid to put that thing out there. >> Awesome. And uh yeah, I think that's uh that's a great way to kind of end things off here. Uh thank you Austin so much uh for taking the time out of your day again to to come chat with us. Um yeah, and and all the resources and and and whatnot that Austin has shared, um they'll all be shared in the description below. Um if it's not there, it will be added shortly. Um and yeah, you'll definitely want to at least uh I know

I'll be taking a little bit of look uh around speedrun ETH. Uh maybe build a projection market. Uh maybe build a new stable coin. Who knows? Over the weekend. >> Do it. Do it. Yeah. Make a launch make a launchpad for something. Make a >> I don't know. make a privacybased prediction market launchpad, something cool. Go build it. >> People like even even given scaffold ETH and AI and everything, people still have a hard time of like shipping the app. What people really want is like a website they can go to where other people have already shipped a few of them and they're making money and they want to hit a button and they want to do something creative and they want to ship that thing. Like make a launchpad for something and get it out there. I think that's that's like super uh hot right

now. Yeah. Yeah, honey, you're 100% correct. And yeah, may maybe someone watching here today will build that over the weekend. Who knows? >> Go get rich. Go get rich. You can do it. Go get rich. You can do it. >> Send me 32 weeks. Just kidding. Don't really do that. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. >> Yeah. Yeah. All good. All good. Uh yeah. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a uh very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be. FYI, for those who are still keen on uh entering our Dev Connect giveaway, you only have about three three-ish hours left uh to be able to sign up for that. Um the link for that is also in the description of

of this video. Um and uh why not uh you have a chance for winning up to two 2K USDC um to go to Dev Connect. And >> why not go hang out with Austin? Yeah, why not go hang out with Austin? >> Yeah, look for the build guild. We'll be there. >> There you go. Uh, all right. Uh, hope you have a nice Friday, nice weekend, and we'll catch you back here next week. All right, all. Cheers. >> Thank you.