Onchain Oracles: Live from ETHDenver

Audio

Transcript

Opening and conference vibes

[00:00] Victor Wong: Are we having technical issues?

[00:02] Kieren James-Lubin: We're good. We're good.

[00:03] Bob Summerwill: Okay.

[00:03] Kieren James-Lubin: Okay. So yeah, definitely much bigger than the first venue. I think it's been here for a few years.

[00:11] Bob Summerwill: Well, this is the third venue.

[00:12] Kieren James-Lubin: This is the third.

[00:13] Victor Wong: Yeah, the third.

[00:15] Bob Summerwill: You missed out on all the middle one.

[00:18] Kieren James-Lubin: So if you come here you will see horses, representations of other cattle and also smell them as well.

[00:25] Victor Wong: Smell them.

[00:25] Kieren James-Lubin: You could mistake it, other than the mountains, for being in Texas in this part of Denver. So I think great to be back. I would say builder-heavy vibe this year. We can go into that shortly. Yeah, but we were both at MetaMask Builder Nights last night. It was full to the brim and a lot of enthusiastic people. Very suit light. It's always been suit light at ETHDenver, but especially so I would say.

[00:57] Victor Wong: And Bob, we were both here last year but we've been to a couple. How are you feeling about the vibes this year?

[01:04] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, I brought numerous different Denver T-shirts prior years. Quite a nice black one. There was a pink one as well. Lots of pink vibe. And yeah, so 2019 was my first.

[01:19] Victor Wong: Okay.

[01:20] Bob Summerwill: So I've been to most of them. After COVID I maybe missed one. But yeah, I mean this venue, very close to where it was for the last few years but just a bit bigger and single layer.

[01:37] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[01:37] Bob Summerwill: So you've not got rabbit holes of places to look for. But yeah, no side events for me yet.

[01:47] Victor Wong: Okay. Well you were building the Museum of Ethereum which we will talk about shortly. But yeah, I mean it's interesting. For your guys' reference, it's a lot smaller this year than it has been in previous years, which is both a good thing and a bad thing I think. It can get too crazy. But I think we can discuss why that is. Obviously the price of ETH is a big factor.

Attendance, pricing, and travel factors

[02:14] Kieren James-Lubin: The timing too, right. I think the unwinds, it's probably about when people were finally committing to what they were going to book. Probably everyone was like, oh, let me just watch this for a bit. And it's just been a slide since then.

[02:27] Victor Wong: Yes, well, and the other weird thing is that it started on Chinese New Year, which is the time when we spend with our families, right. My wife is none too pleased that I'm here.

[02:40] Kieren James-Lubin: So many right after Hong Kong too.

[02:43] Victor Wong: Much didn't do both. Yeah, exactly.

[02:46] Bob Summerwill: Valentine's Day as well.

[02:48] Victor Wong: Valentine's Day for the early travelers. Yes. So all of these factors, I think, and the whole immigration situation in the US is a little bit uncertain.

[03:00] Colin de Picker: Yeah, especially from like Europe. A lot of people are like, I wouldn't say scared, but they find it like maybe we skip the US for a while now. And I mean EthCC is coming up in three weeks. So many people are just going to EthCC and skip the US one.

[03:18] Kieren James-Lubin: EthCC is earlier this year.

[03:20] Victor Wong: Right?

[03:20] Colin de Picker: Yeah, because of the heat. They don't want to have the extreme heat anymore. So it's going to be in three weeks. So I think that's also a reason why there are less people.

[03:27] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[03:28] Kieren James-Lubin: DevConnect was quite full.

[03:31] Colin de Picker: Yes, absolutely.

[03:32] Kieren James-Lubin: And maybe the prices were better then. But also maybe people kind of blew their international travel on that one.

[03:39] Victor Wong: But I do think probably the biggest thing is prices.

[03:41] Kieren James-Lubin: Prices. Definitely the prices.

[03:43] Victor Wong: Yeah. Everyone's a little bit more nervous than usual. And I think you have a lot of people who don't even have a ticket who show up at the last minute when prices are high, but with prices down, not so much.

[03:58] Kieren James-Lubin: We've heard side events went from 900 to about 200, something like that. So there's also less to just jump into.

[04:06] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[04:07] Kieren James-Lubin: Which again, it makes the quality better, right. So the ones that are too big, it's too diffused. You're running all over the city, can't get a seat, can't get into anything.

[04:18] Bob Summerwill: And also not knowing when you're going, what you're going to get.

[04:23] Kieren James-Lubin: Exactly.

[04:23] Bob Summerwill: In the worst of those, it's like they've got a Luma page. They don't even have details of what's even happening when you turn up.

[04:34] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[04:34] Bob Summerwill: Let alone bothering to have a Twitter handle or a website or any of that. It's just like a day before it, it's like, here's one paragraph.

[04:44] Victor Wong: You want to come? I will say I think the signal to noise ratio is better because of this. The best is obviously the DevCons, DevConnects. But last year I watched a lot of talks and I think only like one or two of them had anything that I really took away from that was—

AI narrative at ETHDenver

[05:07] Bob Summerwill: In Denver last year.

[05:08] Victor Wong: In Denver last year.

[05:09] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[05:10] Kieren James-Lubin: I can run to that theme for a second. So there were AI talks in Buenos Aires. There are AI talks here and they went from silly to useful to, to me, in my day to day work.

[05:24] Bob Summerwill: Yeah.

[05:25] Kieren James-Lubin: And that's not a long period of time in between.

[05:27] Victor Wong: Well, and I'm also pretty amazed at how quickly the event itself has responded to, like, OpenAI. What launched two and a half weeks ago?

[05:37] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[05:40] Victor Wong: They have a complete open contract.

[05:42] Kieren James-Lubin: It's a gigantic lobster. I don't think—

[05:46] Colin de Picker: Yeah, she knows.

[05:47] Victor Wong: They have the giant lobster. They have a virtual Vitalik bot.

[05:51] Kieren James-Lubin: Oh, they do have a Vitalik. Yeah, they used one of the voice services. I think they trained it on Vitalik.

[05:59] Bob Summerwill: Oh, fantastic.

[06:00] Kieren James-Lubin: In the opening remarks, they had Vitalik's voice talking to the governor, which was entertaining.

[06:08] Victor Wong: And by some, Vitalik — some would describe his speaking style as robotic to begin with. So it worked very, like, it was seamless, basically.

[06:16] Bob Summerwill: Do you remember that there used to be a Twitter account which was called Metallic Buterin? And it was somebody—

[06:24] Kieren James-Lubin: I have a vague memory of that.

[06:25] Bob Summerwill: And it was somebody doing a kind of trolling account.

[06:30] Kieren James-Lubin: I was writing a blog post and having some of the models score both my writing and then writing influences against how AI-generated they sounded.

[06:41] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[06:42] Kieren James-Lubin: And Vitalik got up pretty high, AI-generated.

[06:48] Bob Summerwill: Right, right.

[06:48] Victor Wong: But I do think, back in DevConnect there was some practical stuff, but it was very much like, when AGI comes, then we will start building something real.

[07:03] Bob Summerwill: Well, I think it's the timing of the models, right. So GPT-4.5 and Opus came out very late November, early December.

[07:15] Kieren James-Lubin: And then that recent—

[07:16] Bob Summerwill: Wow.

[07:16] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. I completely forget the previous model as soon as there's a new one.

[07:20] Bob Summerwill: No. So I mean, that was the timing on those. And then you've got Codex and Opus. We're in like January. OpenAI is in January. It is literally that takeoff, right. When you talk to AI-skeptical people, they've usually got old information, i.e. not even that old. It's just like if you were doing stuff in October, then you might be like, yeah, it's kind of a bit garbage. Like some is useful.

[07:47] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[07:48] Bob Summerwill: I'll tell you the other thing on that theme, saying about that from that DevConnect timeline — where the fuck's all the privacy stuff gone?

Privacy vs agentic UX

[07:55] Colin de Picker: Well, exactly.

[07:58] Kieren James-Lubin: Yesterday I missed it. I was gonna go. I think they didn't approve me for one, but I'm sure I could have shown up. But it was sort of — Dustin and Michael were saying it was kind of a debate format and it got a little bit heated maybe and a little all over the place.

[08:16] Victor Wong: You had to put your phone in like a Faraday bag, right?

[08:20] Colin de Picker: Yeah, yeah, that was true. But I feel like at DevConnect they pushed the privacy machine maybe a bit too hard. You had the Web3 Privacy Congress and then they also did an extra privacy summit at the last day or one of the last days. And then the prices crashed and then everyone taking off for the New Year and Christmas periods. A lot of people started to get into vibe coding because they got a lot of work. I mean I saw a lot of posts on X of people exploring vibe coding by then and of course with the launch of OpenAI now, I think it's really like a booming narrative, like a crazy hype narrative that's popping up. So yeah, we'll see where it's heading to. I mean, could be next month we're talking about something else again. But yeah, we'll see how it goes.

[09:03] Kieren James-Lubin: Well, it might be a little top down at DevConnect. I think it's because the foundation had more creative control, if you will.

[09:11] Colin de Picker: Yes, exactly.

[09:13] Kieren James-Lubin: And so they were making a big investment there. I think they want everyone to know about it and it was useful, like it convinced us to expedite our privacy work and we're pretty close to having integrated native privacy, like you're opted into it by default sort of thing. But yeah, to your point, the space narrative is just like they're shorter and shorter, but you got to just keep going on what you believe. It'll come. The coins are down maybe a little bit, but it's going to come back. True, 100%.

[09:46] Colin de Picker: And I feel also like the Ethereum Foundation had more control over the topics in DevConnect and also DevConnect is a whole different type of vibe. It's more for devs and privacy was a big topic and it's useful for devs. But for example, at this type of conference where also more non-devs come to, it opens doors for people to learn how to build their own things with these AI models. And I think many people are interested in that. I mean, I think if you would push privacy here hard, it would even lose more people. I think so. I mean it kind of makes sense at the moment with the narrative. Well, like I said, maybe in a few months we're doing something else or it's also going down a bit or relatively under narrative. So yeah, we'll have to see.

[10:29] Victor Wong: I do think in a world where agents are doing a lot of the transaction volume, privacy, at least at the start, you kind of want to understand what they're doing. And so maybe that's one of the reasons why that privacy narrative has taken a backseat. As an individual, I certainly want my balances not to be public, but I also want to—

[10:52] Kieren James-Lubin: You want to know what the bots are doing.

[10:52] Victor Wong: I want to know what the bots are doing. It's like, I don't want to give them free reign yet. I'm still in this mode of trying to figure out what they're going to do.

[11:02] Bob Summerwill: I think you're going to have a massive backslide in privacy, actually, because many people's agentic setup, they're just, here you go, here's all my logins and everything.

[11:14] Kieren James-Lubin: We could teach the agents, if it's easy, just kind of API-driven, to use privacy tech. Yeah, I think it would be hard right now. All of the setups are kind of intricate at the moment and they can do everything, but they might do a bad job handling all the material and so on. We've got folks like Railgun in production for more than five years and have a lot of shielded assets, but not easy by any means. I mean, not really API.

[11:46] Bob Summerwill: I mean, even beyond blockchain privacy, just in general privacy is just like many, many people — you're only going to use frontier models because you want the best performance. So that means it's a hosted service and you're sending all of your data up to them. And people are just going to be like, yeah, but the benefits. So it's privacy.

[12:11] Kieren James-Lubin: You kind of have to just compete, right? It's like a weird world.

[12:14] Victor Wong: We were at that AI security audit conference yesterday. People were putting up their hands and I think they were like, how many of you use agents on a daily basis? The entire audience. And it's like, how many people let your agents trade for you? I think I was the only person that raised their hand. But of course, I set up different accounts and I don't YOLO it with everything, but it's interesting though.

[12:39] Kieren James-Lubin: Some of our staff YOLO it.

[12:41] Victor Wong: Absolutely. And I think some of the contest participants, yes, absolutely YOLO.

[12:48] Kieren James-Lubin: But I think people are gonna YOLO it.

[12:52] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[12:52] Kieren James-Lubin: We're just gonna box them in to the extent that's possible. They're always breaking containment as it is. You have the experience of like, approve this web search, approve this file change. You just, you're just like, all right, do it, come on.

Agent safety and guardrails

[13:07] Victor Wong: Exactly. Especially when you're using like Telegram or some other interface. When it's not in front of you, you run into that.

[13:16] Kieren James-Lubin: So yeah, you got to kind of box them to the extent possible. But I suppose so. I haven't done my — I got an air-gapped machine. I have not set it up yet. Maybe this weekend for my OpenAI setup. I know Vic has made just net new GitHub, email, Telegram, all that. So at least keep it out of the—

[13:36] Colin de Picker: Also people say you need to be careful with it. I heard about stories of people connecting it to wallets with a lot of funds and it just vanished. So people making a lot of mistakes with it. And I think also it's important, I hope over time there is coming proper guidelines about this and courses and proper, like people can do proper research to this because otherwise the other side of this is that you're going to get a lot of trouble with this also. People using it for the wrong cases, people trying to explore with it but then miserably fuck up in some way and then lose a lot of funds or just doing nothing with it. So yeah, I think that's also important.

[14:14] Victor Wong: Well, I think part of it also is things are moving so fast. Part of the thing I think that the newer models unlocked is that they themselves are using it to code.

[14:25] Kieren James-Lubin: So the model that's recent, where they really move the model making the next model—

[14:30] Victor Wong: Like we've really come to the point where up to now I was able to at least try pretty much every major model, open weight model, new iterations, and now I just can't anymore. They're just coming out way too — I'm like halfway through playing around with one and I'm talking like in a day and then a new one comes out, right. Like three came out last week. So it's just like, of the open weight models.

[14:57] Kieren James-Lubin: To your point on safety, sort of a plug for the MetaMask people. I know they're working on a good way to hook like a hard policy to an LLM, which is really like a spend limit or something slightly more complicated than that.

[15:09] Colin de Picker: Yeah, sounds good.

[15:10] Kieren James-Lubin: A lot of — so if you compare like an agent to a pure LLM, also like even what Cursor is doing, it's got a little internal state machine that's running it in a loop and there are deterministic parts of it wrapped around the genius but unreliable LLM. And that's the thing we have to get really good at, just giving it enough guardrails also. They just perform better when you've got hard, like, here's the success criteria and it's a number.

[15:42] Bob Summerwill: Well, it's just constraining the problem like that.

[15:44] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. And so I think we're all going to get good at it, but it's just — right now you just kind of want to throw it at it. But they could still hang themselves.

[15:54] Colin de Picker: Well, I think with time everything will fall in its place eventually. Just now super chaotic and it's going super fast. Every week it's changing. I mean I've never seen something in my lifetime change so quickly and go so quickly to an advanced version. It's almost impressive to see. So yeah, I think just gonna take some time.

[16:14] Bob Summerwill: It's incredible. Honestly, amazing. I've been programming since 1984 when I was 10 and it's just everything there's been is like nothing. All look, new paradigm, new thing. They're just little tiny blips and it's like, whoa.

[16:30] Victor Wong: I mean, I do think it's a super exciting time. The only time I can think of that is even close is like when in the '80s when personal computing first came out.

[16:44] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[16:44] Victor Wong: Because there was an explosion of languages and machines and hardware and all of these things and you just felt like, I'm drinking from the fire hose. I just gotta kind of try and keep up with it. But it's exciting. Okay. Aside from agentic AI, is there any other theme that we've picked up on here?

Return of the builder

[17:06] Kieren James-Lubin: I think related to the price theme in part, it's Return of the Builder. So I think there was the perception that things were getting too corporate. You got like the Stripe L2.

[17:22] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[17:24] Kieren James-Lubin: Corpo chains, L1 stables. Stripe's is an L1. Which one's an L2?

[17:28] Victor Wong: No, Tempo is an L1.

[17:29] Kieren James-Lubin: Tempo's L1.

[17:31] Victor Wong: Tempo is PayPal, right. Stripe is — Stripe's is—

[17:34] Kieren James-Lubin: I guess there are enough of them that we can't keep straight.

[17:36] Bob Summerwill: Circle's.

[17:37] Victor Wong: Stripe is Tempo. Okay.

[17:38] Colin de Picker: Yeah.

[17:41] Kieren James-Lubin: And so there's the fear that they're just gonna gobble this up this time. It doesn't feel like that's gonna happen. I think having been an enterprise blockchain player for a long time, there's great things about the enterprise. And this wave kind of rhymes with the previous. And it seems more serious and more likely to get somewhat big. But you just don't get the, like, give me a bunch of crazy dudes with dreadlocks or just like angry over a thousand Google engineers in terms of change the world sort of thing. You gotta have both, of course. So I don't — I think there was a feeling that there would be this big capture. And also sometimes when the prices dip, you see the more conservative big corporates lose interest a bit because it's like, oh, this is not gonna hit the P&L in the next year or two. The execs are not excited anymore. They don't finish a thing that could have worked.

[18:46] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[18:46] Kieren James-Lubin: So builders are back. Tomas's speech was kind of about this. I think that's real. I mean, there was the — okay, so Base is no longer going to be on—

[19:00] Victor Wong: Wait.

[19:01] Kieren James-Lubin: Arbitrum. Optimism.

[19:03] Victor Wong: I think it is, yeah.

[19:05] Bob Summerwill: They're migrating.

[19:05] Colin de Picker: Texas, I think. Arbitrum. Yeah, I think.

[19:08] Kieren James-Lubin: What to? Are they going to be an L1? It's unclear.

[19:11] Colin de Picker: I don't know. Yeah.

[19:12] Kieren James-Lubin: Maybe Vitalik's announcement about L2s and L1s is like presaging this a little bit. I don't know. Like, why now? Are they losing a lot of fee revenue?

[19:25] Colin de Picker: Well, I think also the problem is a bit like with L2s. I mean, everyone saw the post of Vitalik, of course, and I think that L2s have been not exploring further enough. I mean, what is possible on Ethereum actually? And I think there's way more possible than we have explored now with L2s. They've been playing this game of, oh, it was the cheapest and everything. And now, especially when markets are down, they are not really exploring for, like I said, this USP. And that's actually what Vitalik meant in this post. Like, L2s should be looking more for their own USPs and how to play that out in the right way and many people picked it up wrong. They saw he's criticizing L2s, so crazy, and oh, at the same time he's selling Ethereum and people made a big FUD about it, which is totally wrong, of course. So yeah, I think we're going to see maybe over time like a reintegration of how L2s are going to move in the space and what they are going to do. So yeah, I'm quite interested also to see that apart from all the AI stuff and privacy stuff. I'm also quite interested on what's going to be built on Ethereum for the next five years. Are they going to come up with new ideas that we haven't seen in the past and how is that going to go further on? So yeah, quite interesting to see.

[20:36] Victor Wong: One interesting thing going back to the agenda part is the recent launches have been fast. They launched that AI registry, these kind of things quickly, whereas typically those would have taken a year or something to come out. So I do think Vitalik in his talk today seems fully committed to changing in that direction. And he was saying it's like he thinks of it as paradigm shifting, like ZK is kind of thing. So yeah, well, we need to discuss a little bit about the Museum of Ethereum, which is the first thing you see when you walk through the door. And it's mostly thanks on this group due to Bob. Bob, you were up almost all night trying to get that up and running.

Museum of Ethereum and EF era shifts

[21:25] Kieren James-Lubin: Yes.

[21:26] Victor Wong: So yeah, what's the best reaction or feedback you've gotten to it so far?

[21:36] Bob Summerwill: Seeing people clustering around. So there's the Hall of Fame, which is the first piece, which is a — I mean, I guess to take a step back. A lot of this stuff has come out of Early Days of Ethereum. That's where a lot of the source material has come from. But yeah, the first wall is this grid of all of the people that have profiles on that. So it's over 200 people, basically trying to identify everyone who was involved with Ethereum prior to the creation of the foundation and then all of the foundation people through to the end of Ming Chan era. Yeah, but I've seen a bunch of people looking, oh yeah, oh yeah, I haven't seen him for ages. And you remember when we did that—

[22:25] Kieren James-Lubin: It's funny, the era, it's whimsical.

[22:28] Victor Wong: Did you come up with those names?

[22:29] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, so the epochs are my creation. So yeah, I mean I'm very fond—

[22:36] Victor Wong: The Ming era. Ming Dynasty.

[22:40] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, that's right.

[22:40] Kieren James-Lubin: There's the Infinite Garden.

[22:44] Bob Summerwill: That's right. So I mean, these era names largely coming from the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation in that period.

[22:51] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[22:52] Bob Summerwill: Because surprisingly, that does have a massive impact on the general culture and theme, decentralized ecosystem. But the foundation have still got like an overweighted kind of presence on that.

[23:05] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[23:06] Bob Summerwill: And saying there with Infinite Garden, and this is something I can't remember if I've spoken about ever on the podcast, is — so Infinite Garden started with Aya arriving in February 2018.

[23:20] Victor Wong: Oh, yeah.

[23:20] Bob Summerwill: And then Infinite Garden has become like the memetic theme that's often been used. We're not in the garden anymore. The garden ended. Maybe the people doing the memes haven't kind of clocked it, but that era ended, right, with Aya moving upstairs to become the president and then with Tomas and his other co-ED coming in in March 2025. But he left as well, like a week or so ago.

[23:54] Victor Wong: With Tomas leaving, is that the start of a new era?

[23:57] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, well, I would hope not, because to my mind, he has been the best—

[24:03] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[24:04] Bob Summerwill: ED that there has ever been. Primarily because he's actually got a — he's run a real business on Ethereum.

[24:10] Colin de Picker: Right. Well, I think it's a bit like — I've spoken also with Tomas, and I think I can feel a bit like he's not a person who is made for the management job. I mean, he's maybe super good in it because like I said, he's experienced with building stuff on Ethereum, but I think he wants to go back to being an actual builder. And I think he has been seeing and thinking about stuff lately that he maybe wants to build himself or help building, and he maybe sees other people who potentially could take over his job at Ethereum Foundation. I mean, I forgot who they chose.

[24:40] Bob Summerwill: Bastian.

[24:41] Colin de Picker: Yeah, exactly. I mean, if they're convinced he can do as good a job as Tomas did, I don't see any reason why it would not be good. I mean, Tomas, also from personal experience, if he would have kept doing it and be unhappy, I mean, that's also not good, I think. So I think it's from a personal perspective from him to leave this and go back to building.

[25:00] Bob Summerwill: I mean, my hope really is that it just doesn't backslide because it was such a positive forward step where it was like a really serious attempt on moving things forward, right. Getting away from the pussyfooting around and not wanting to hurt people's feelings and trying to include, resulting in many, many years of very, very slow progress. And then what we saw instead in that era was really seriously taking these things on to like, right, privacy. There you go, 40-people team, let's hack on it. We're really going to go. Decentralized AI group, whatever, the trillion dollar security thing, just in many, many of these areas going, okay, we've got a load of money, spend the money, build big serious teams and get these things moving forward. And also bringing in community people into that, that was a new thing of saying, well, outside of the EF, there's all of these other ecosystem teams, many of them building really big and important things and going, hey, can you come and help with the base? Let's pull everyone in. So that's been awesome. So I really hope that we do not exit what I'm calling wartime CEO phase and backslide to more ivory tower.

[26:24] Kieren James-Lubin: To Colin's point, it is still kind of a political position. I don't know that it's — it's probably kind of a fun job, but there's a lot of, even in wartime there's a lot of people to keep happy.

[26:37] Bob Summerwill: Yeah.

[26:38] Kieren James-Lubin: In a way where you're a builder, often you're a bit of a control freak.

[26:45] Bob Summerwill: I think he was able to say, right, we're going, yes, come.

[26:50] Kieren James-Lubin: But yeah, I could see it being draining.

[26:53] Bob Summerwill: Oh absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

[26:55] Kieren James-Lubin: A lot of coalition management.

[26:57] Victor Wong: Yeah. But also like with this agentic era, there's never been a better time to build.

[27:02] Kieren James-Lubin: You gotta go build.

[27:03] Victor Wong: You have like superpowers now. You can think of something and create it in a minimal amount of time. It's unbelievable.

[27:10] Colin de Picker: Yeah. I think, like Bob said, he did so much in one year. I think it must have been a very intense year for him as a person. I mean he has been doing so much. He's been doing more than like in years happens, very positive stuff. He made his whole tree structure with all these different teams. Like you even have now an EF Everywhere team. They're building hubs and stuff and all these kind of different things like people going to fund new projects and stuff. He has been making really moves with the funds of the foundation, which didn't happen in the past. So I think I just hope that the person who's taking over can continue what he has been doing and then maybe Tomas can take a small step back and keep building on Ethereum. I think that's what he wants to do and what he loves to do. And maybe we will see him back at some point.

[27:57] Bob Summerwill: You never know. Noticeably as well, saying about the teams, the thing that happened for the first time in this last year is there was actually an org chart published of the EF and who's in the EF and what are the teams exactly. Was never public ever. I mean, that was a tricky thing. When I was doing my first research in 2017, 2018, there was nothing of that for the current, let alone historical. Just an absolute shroud of mystery as to who the teams were, what they were doing, what the funding was, who the board were, what the governance was. None of that was public. And that did change this last year, which is great because it's an accountability thing. Look, you're sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars that were raised in the crowdfunding for building this project. Have some transparency.

[28:51] Colin de Picker: Yeah, I mean, exactly. That's also what I love so much about the Ethereum museum that Bob has been building. It gives kind of an idea how it went in the past. I mean, when Ethereum launched, I was 10 years old, so I have no idea what happened then. No, yeah, but it's true.

[29:03] Victor Wong: And then you're making that sound — feel very old.

[29:06] Colin de Picker: Many people who will come to Ethereum in the next years, they would have never had an idea of how it looked like at the beginning because so much information went lost, nothing properly documented, no proper information findable about it. And I mean, Bob has been doing a great job to bring that back to the light and give people a kind of idea how it looked like. And I'm super happy that the EF is finally taking the time to build a proper, visible infrastructure of who is where, teams, okay, how does it work and everything. And I hope they continue with doing and even expand it more. So we're going on the good road, I think.

[29:42] Victor Wong: Yeah, I think on that note, Kieren, you're the inventor of the Early Days of Ethereum. What inspired you to come up with the idea? I think—

[29:56] Kieren James-Lubin: Okay, so we were, it was kind of around a time where we were transitioning business models as a company. And so there was a little bit of revisiting the roots going on, but also, in our B2B days, we were not — we were sort of purposefully not super loud. It was sort of direct marketing, look respectable, maybe downplay the cypherpunk beginnings and so on. And the B2B market, I mean, it's back a little bit in a different way, but I think it was sort of killed by the pandemic. And it took — sometimes you have long contracts, took some time to die, and now it's all about payments basically. And a lot of the — there's a bunch of these companies that went like us, sort of like supply chain to NFTs to and so on. And a lot of the sort of enterprise workflow use cases never really happened. So it was sort of a return home, if you will. But I was also just like, okay, I have a sense that we're going to need to get some content out there. And our side of the story had not really been told. I think everyone, maybe not everyone, but everyone in Ethereum feels a mix of an insider and an outsider.

[31:22] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[31:23] Kieren James-Lubin: Like we were building. Sometimes we would just wake up and hear about stuff like, oh, here's a giant protocol change that was discussed somewhere in Europe or, yeah, tests were at 99%. They're at 74 now. So this—

[31:43] Bob Summerwill: In the pre-mainnet launch.

[31:44] Kieren James-Lubin: In the pre-mainnet launch, there was like a — are we in it? Are we not? It syncs now.

[31:50] Bob Summerwill: Proof of concept.

[31:51] Kieren James-Lubin: We're in Skype. There's this new algorithm for the mining coming in. We did a bunch of activity with Vitalik at that time. So kind of the genesis of BlockApps for us was even before it was a company and before we were part of ConsenSys was really January 2015. We did a bunch of conferences at the same time in the Bay Area and there was proof that there was a lot of interest kind of across different sorts of people from the business community to hardcore crypto types.

[32:30] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[32:31] Kieren James-Lubin: So yeah, I think people don't really know. A lot of characters kind of came in and out. Thankfully most everyone stayed friendly, but as compared with a company, tremendous churn. And it kind of probably went well for everyone, at least to some extent, but still a lot of bitterness too. So it's like, it's home but it's — so anyway, story had to get out. I know, Bob, I know you were one of the main archivists also for Laura Shin's book.

[33:06] Bob Summerwill: Yep.

[33:07] Kieren James-Lubin: And I think you had a similar experience, right. Like, the — it was more of an open world then, more of a blank sheet of paper product and the idea was great and that just held everything together where there was a goodness to the decentralization at the time, but it was also haphazard, insane, amateur, not efficient in the slightest. So yeah, people should know.

[33:34] Bob Summerwill: So it was September or October of 2023 that you guys first two videos.

[33:41] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[33:41] Victor Wong: And we invited you on the third.

[33:43] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, yeah, I came as a guest on the third because I'd done such voluminous notes and links and everything off those first two. So yeah, I was a guest on the third which again was that year, maybe November or maybe even October. They're all very close together, those first three. But then nothing for like two years.

[34:02] Kieren James-Lubin: Yes. Yeah, they were labor intensive to do. Well we had a couple others. We had Julio on. Yes, we might have done four or five.

[34:15] Bob Summerwill: I won't have seen those because maybe they were—

[34:18] Kieren James-Lubin: They might have run on my—

[34:19] Bob Summerwill: They might have been elsewhere YouTube.

[34:21] Kieren James-Lubin: I also — so I started doing a weekly after that.

[34:24] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[34:24] Kieren James-Lubin: We had — I wouldn't say we had saturated our early days but we didn't want to keep hitting the same each week topic and we weren't going to track everybody down as you have done.

[34:38] Bob Summerwill: And so it was quite coincidental really that the stuff picked up again because we were doing weekly spaces and then just one week it's like, well what are we going to talk about? Has anyone got any ideas for topics? And I think it was me that said, well, maybe we could do another Early Days of Ethereum. Talk to Taylor Gerring, maybe he'll come on. So we spoke to Taylor and then a few weeks later, okay, maybe we'll do some more. And then it was Texture and then I think number six was Christoph Jentzsch. Yeah, I did some interviews when I was in Prague last October that got very delayed until they were released there. So that was with Jakob Czepluch and then with Michael Parenti and then Ryan Taylor. So all of those were done in Prague and released two or three months later. Oh, and Amir Taaki as well. And yeah, so we're now into a cadence of about every two weeks, getting more done. So talking to Assaults tomorrow. So that will be another live one. We were live with both Texture and Taylor. But then more recent ones were all recordings. But yeah, so when we started doing those, I thought, okay, well, am I going to write another blog post of the details for Taylor's? And then it's like, oh, this AI coding. Maybe I can make a website. Can you make me a website that takes my prior WordPress things and then brings in these videos? And then it's like, oh, we can do transcripts. And it's all sort of taking a life of its own, really just starting last August.

[36:37] Kieren James-Lubin: It's a good case in point. Content is so labor intensive, especially if you're trying to have the quality really high. As far as the experience, the transcripts — I read sometimes, I don't watch the long episodes.

[36:49] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[36:49] Kieren James-Lubin: It's very valuable and it could get indexed in the search engines, in the LLMs.

[36:54] Victor Wong: But I think other people who are writing — we were just talking to people who are writing, still writing books about Ethereum, and I think it becomes a valuable resource. But I will say it's helped me kind of contextualize the experience because I think there's a natural tendency to do like a heroic figure that started something in the garage and they were the lone hero and brought everything. But this was truly like decentralized from the start, which made it incredibly confusing, but also really exciting to be a part of because no one would really stop you if you wanted to try something, which is exciting.

[37:33] Bob Summerwill: No. And I mean, I think that that is a really important narrative that I've wanted to have as well, is Ethereum was the work of many hands from the very, very earliest days. A whole bunch of people coming in the December, just weeks after the white paper.

[37:51] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[37:51] Bob Summerwill: And then in January 2014, a whole massive chunk of people appeared before you even had the conference to announce the thing.

[37:59] Victor Wong: Yeah.

[37:59] Bob Summerwill: And then again through February, March and all of those many months through to July, it was all volunteers. Nobody was getting paid for anything. It's literally, hey, here's a thing. It might work, it might be cool. Do you want to come and help? You might get some tokens back, but they might not be worth anything or it might—

[38:22] Colin de Picker: Yeah, that was just like absolutely no infrastructure yet. I mean, it was quite chaotic from what I can hear from everything. Also, one suggestion I have for a guest you guys should get on. It's William Mougayar. He's also one of the—

[38:35] Victor Wong: We were just talking—

[38:36] Colin de Picker: He's here. I know.

[38:37] Victor Wong: A few seconds ago.

[38:38] Colin de Picker: Yeah, I think he has also some great things to add to this whole concept of the Early Days of Ethereum.

[38:42] Kieren James-Lubin: So I won't snipe anything, but I know he has an announcement coming, so.

[38:46] Victor Wong: Yeah. Oh, okay.

[38:48] Colin de Picker: Amazing, amazing.

[38:49] Bob Summerwill: I was looking back through old photos of my own from 2015. So that was when I was living in Toronto for six months and I went to a bunch of meetups and all this stuff was happening. Including ones around the mainnet launch. And William I saw for the first time in one of those and I noticed that month was actually when he became an advisor for the EF as well, I think because they'd connected in those meetups around that launch and he got involved. He's saying he's got some of the original black and white T-shirts, the black shirts with the—

[39:26] Victor Wong: I forgot to bring my sticker. I should have.

[39:28] Bob Summerwill: He says he's got about four of them, but he doesn't wear them, like he's keeping them pristine.

[39:33] Victor Wong: Put some behind glass.

[39:34] Kieren James-Lubin: That's right.

[39:35] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, yeah.

[39:37] Kieren James-Lubin: So, are NFTs back? We should be maybe minting them off.

[39:43] Colin de Picker: They will be — a lot of things.

[39:44] Victor Wong: Colorado has just announced that they're doing an NFT collection for their 150th birthday, so—

[39:50] Colin de Picker: Early Days of Ethereum NFT collection. We'll go up a lot, I think.

[39:55] Victor Wong: Well, okay, so to wrap up, how are we feeling about the future of Ethereum based on what we're seeing here and what we've gotten out of kind of putting everything in context with the history too? Maybe I'll start with you, Bob.

Future of Ethereum

[40:11] Bob Summerwill: Well, talking about these bear periods and lower numbers but more signal to noise and builders. I think this is the kind of period where Ethereum does shine and many of the other more shilly, shitty ones just kind of die off, right. Because many of them are hype driven, throughput driven, but not differentiated, to Vitalik's point. And yeah, I think that is the period where Bitcoin and Ethereum shine and maybe not even an awful lot more. I mean, stablecoins on those L2s around, but many other L1 chains, it's like, what have you got? Really, what have you got? So yeah, don't get too depressed, people.

[41:04] Victor Wong: Yeah. How about you, Kieren?

[41:07] Kieren James-Lubin: I think I agree with that general point. I would say part of what — and this is much more of a thing with Ethereum than Bitcoin — part of what you're buying in a sense is that there's some huge number of people contributing and they don't really stop contributing when the prices go down and they figure out various parts of the roadmap kind of semi-autonomously. And you're also definitely going to see — we've got this leapfrog capability that's happening and a lot of the value of — and by the way, there's going to be huge security problems. I'm sure that you can vibe code a pretty good app now and you can have agents use apps. That probably is the thing that will cause the leapfrog to the next X number of users. I was in a conversation yesterday in which a lot of, at least the higher in the stack apps, are kind of competing with Robinhood. It's not just competing with other crypto, it's sort of the global share of wallet. And I think there's this wedge moment where you haven't really figured out how to tie the LLMs into the legacy system. You will. I know they're piloting it a little bit. Like Visa said, they've done like hundreds of card transactions with LLMs.

[42:30] Victor Wong: Hundreds.

[42:31] Bob Summerwill: Amazing.

[42:32] Kieren James-Lubin: Yes. It's like what's the throughput? 20,000 a second or something like that, but they're just not going to be ready fast enough. And crypto people — we were at Builder Nights the other night. It seems like everyone is starting to just view agents and human users more or less on the same footing. There's going to be extremely fast adoption there and I hope you get — I think DeFi is maybe 70, 80% of the use case that's going to bring everyone through and it's just been too hard. Sharp edges, hacks, all that. And so the hope is the regular person gets the benefits without the costs and the thinking. I think that's going to happen.

[43:17] Bob Summerwill: The agents can hit all those rough edges and make a nice kind of smooth thing on the outside.

[43:22] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, yeah. And so I think that'll be what a lot of the next wave is about, but I think there'll be a malaise for a while.

[43:29] Victor Wong: Yeah. How about you, Colin? What do you think?

[43:32] Colin de Picker: Well, yeah, to add to what Kieren said, I think first of all, over the past years some great infrastructure has been built on Ethereum. That may not really reflect into major results now for the outside world, but things are happening and I think over the next years we're going to see better and more adoption to Ethereum. They have been building the whole tech for it. Now is a question like indeed, with the AI models and with how all the projects are going to add the UX, how they're going to handle their UX, how are they going to handle their onboarding. Depending on that, I think we can see some amazing onboarding over the next years and not only talking about institutions because those are already getting on board. And I mean when the Clarity Act passes, I think we're going to see a huge upgrade in volume on that side. But I think if we speak about the everyday consumers, I hope we can onboard the masses over the next years and I see an opportunity for that. I tell everyone always Ethereum is that lifetime opportunity that is still there and that we have to grab with all of each other. So yeah, I'm positive for the future of Ethereum.

[44:41] Victor Wong: Yeah, I mean I'm actually really positive, I think because of two things we talked about and we've seen these go in another direction at different times. One is governance. I do feel that the governance is managing things in the right way. They're thinking about, they're really not just an ivory tower. They're really thinking about how we can execute things faster. You can see that with recent EIPs. But the second thing is that everyone is really thinking about the agentic opportunity in the right way. And I think given that Ethereum is the largest ecosystem, it's going to come up with the best solution for that first. And so I'm really optimistic right now. And in some ways, not to say a winter is good because people are nervous, but I think we needed some time to absorb what's going on because things are moving so fast, right?

[45:40] Colin de Picker: Yeah. Also to get all the trash out. I mean it's a good period now to get all the nonsense out and focus on what really matters. And I think that's good for the future.

[45:48] Victor Wong: Yeah, exactly.

[45:48] Bob Summerwill: Well, I think we got to wrap up.

Closing

[45:50] Victor Wong: We got to wrap up. But where can we find — you can find me on my Twitter handle, Vic the number four Wong. So—

[45:58] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, Bob Summerwill, like some of the season will. And it's earlydaysofeth.org.

[46:06] Kieren James-Lubin: KJamesLubin on X. We're also Strato Nexus, yeah, S-O-R-A-T-O on X.

[46:12] Colin de Picker: Crypto019 and on Telegram ShibatarzanBooEat.

[46:18] Victor Wong: Thank you very much.

[46:20] Bob Summerwill: Cheers everyone.

[46:20] Victor Wong: Take care.

[46:21] Kieren James-Lubin: Thanks.

[46:21] Colin de Picker: Yeah, I got it now. Everything vanished.

[46:28] Victor Wong: That'll be funny.