Opening Speech

Transcript

Good morning, guys. Thank you guys for coming and welcome to Devcon 2026. We've been doing this on a mostly yearly basis since 2018. Um we've missed um a couple of years um due to COVID. So, kind of we've seen a lot of these cycles. So, they don't worry us so much anymore. The one thing um that does worry me to some extent is if you look at the past year, it's been absolutely relentless for hacks, right? Every other week we've seen a major exploit somewhere or other.

Um and uh it's been it's been a complete battering uh for the ecosystem. Um a lot of these hacks, most of these hacks, presumably, have been AI-assisted, right? So, kind of that begs the question, what do we do about this? Kind of like when you used to to to kind of used to have kind of like a team to kind of conduct an exploit, um now you need cloud code and a couple of ticket a couple of tokens. Otherwise, uh it's it's uh it's become much much easier to kind of find an exploit vulnerabilities.

So, um while I think all of us use AI daily and it's leveled us up kind of in terms of productivity by a factor of 5 to 10, um we also have to deal with this flip side. So, how do we deal with it? And I would argue that the best way to deal with it primarily is to reduce complexity. So, the question must always be, what is the smallest set of things I have a position? Things that we build should be simple enough to reason about. Um and if you think about it, resilience ends up being mostly subtraction rather than

addition. And this is more important now than ever because if you if you think about AI, AI is a hugely centralizing force, right? So it relies on enormous compute on capital, on data, and kind of there's a handful of companies that kind of supply this to us. So intelligence in effect is becoming a utility that you rent from a landlord.

And there's not a lot of landlords. So this in some respect is the deepest platform risk we've ever faced. So we used to spend years worrying about but who who owns the app? Who owns the app? And now really what we should be worrying about is who owns the reasoning. Right? So I would posit that we need Web3 more than ever to counter the centralizing force with kind of the decentralizing force that we can have in this ecosystem where we can give back people ownership

and control over their own digital lives. So please um listen to all the talks and go forth and uh build things that hold. Welcome to Devcon 2026.