Recap of Devconnect ARG

Audio

Transcript

Introductions

[00:00] Victor: Woo. We are on, and welcome everyone to our recap of DevConnect Argentina. I'm Victor Wong, founder and CPO at Strato. Three CPO? Three CPO, maybe. Three-three PO. I may be looking very robotic. So if I am, then, you know, like yes.

[00:24] Bob: See, 3PO.

[00:26] Victor: So let's go around the horn and introduce ourselves before we kick it off. Kieren, you wanna go?

[00:33] Kieren: Sure. I'm Kieren. I'm our CEO. I guess, you know, okay. So Strato, we have been, I guess, we're hard announcing it now. We are, the Labs company, if you will, has always been called BlockApps, and I'm actually the CEO of BlockApps as we're transitioning to a mainnet open source kind of foundation given project. First, we call that Strato Mercata, because kind of Mercata was sort of a separate product, and we've purposely sunset everything else. So going back to the OG Strato at this time. So I guess I'm the, woo. Now does Strato have a CEO? Like, you know, we're jumping in with two feet, Victor.

[01:20] Victor: Yes. Exactly. Well, I just, I was kinda soft pedaling it, but I didn't know if you want to make the announcement there. That's cool. Well, I, but you said of Strato, so it was too late. That's how we, I think I've already changed it in my mind. So maybe it's not like, and thanks for that, Bob.

[01:40] Bob: Yeah. And that's it. OG, OG. So, Strato was, you know, unveiled at DevCon one. I don't know what exact date that, you know, it might be almost exactly ten years, like, right now. It's very close to ten.

[01:58] Victor: I think it was early December, maybe a week off. No? No. No. It's not even, I think it was in October or November because it wasn't that cold in, it was in London. And I remember it was not miserable yet, which is normal during London at that time. So I will keep looking off to the side, but I, you, you're a resident historian, Bob.

[02:23] Kieren: Continue there on the, see a YouTube video 9/11/2015.

[02:28] Bob: Now there's, yeah. No. Later. They, they got released later.

[02:32] Kieren: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:33] Victor: So well, Bob, you do you wanna do a quick who are you? And who are, I'm, I'm head of ecosystem.

[02:40] Bob: So, you know, joined the, joined the team this year, but, you know, long time, long time friend.

[02:46] Victor: Yes. Long time listener, first time caller. Right? Yes. And, and, Jim, who are you?

[02:52] Jim: I am James. I am CTO of BlockApps and one of the three founders.

[02:58] Victor: Yes. And of Strato too as Kieren has announced. So let's dive right into it. What were your, when you announced? I, I don't know what, maybe I, I stopped announced. I, I pushed, I pushed you over the edge on that one. Right? So let's dive into it. What were your impressions of DevConnect and Buenos Aires? I, who wants to start here?

Buenos Aires impressions

[03:22] Kieren: I guess I can quickly. Hopefully, quickly. I know we all have a tendency to ramble. Yes. Well, one of my big surprises, let's say the city itself. I was surprised to find that I was in Europe. I was expecting to be in South America. And I guess everyone knows this. They call it, like, the, the Paris of South America or something, but quite beautiful place. The, you know, mix of, like, the food varied from really excellent, especially on the steak front. That is all true. For, if if anyone is on the fence about the Argentinian steak, go, go and try it. To, you know, like, medium sometimes, you know, service very slow. The city does not look that big. Like, somehow, you know, like, the all of the hotels near the venue were booked out. So I ended up staying about twenty minutes away by car. And if there's no traffic, it was, like, nine to twelve minutes away, but it was consistently about twenty five minutes away. It's all, like, it's all kind of, like, mid rises. It's, like, four to six or eight stories, and it's like that for, like, a pretty large geographic area, which I found quite interesting. Yeah. It had, like, a little bit of an old world feel. It was kinda narrow. But, yeah, super cool. People are very nice. Maybe except for the slow service. It wasn't like snooty slow service. It was just slow service. You know? It's hard to get things, you had to budget more time than you expected for things, which we found out the hard way, but would go back. Very cool place.

What is DevConnect?

[04:57] Victor: And, and what about dev, dev connect itself? How did you feel about the conference? And, you know, you might wanna mention, like, you know, what was the reaction to prices tanking during the event itself? Like, what, well, tell, tell you the other thing that we should mention first is what dev connect even is. Oh, yeah. So as a resident historian of all things, Ethereum, what is DevConnect?

[05:22] Bob: Yeah. So it's a major conference held by the Ethereum Foundation. There's actually two different conference series, that run now. So DevCon, which was originally developer conference, obviously, has become not a developer conference anymore. I, I don't know when it was last a developer conference. Maybe two, probably dev con two-ish. Maybe I think it getting bigger, getting a bit.

[05:46] Victor: Two was big, but not huge. I'm, I'm thinking in terms of the content, though. You know? No. I know. But they kinda correlated. Right? Like, the more, yeah, yeah, people that wanted to come the lower percentage devs somehow. Well, I kind of remember at two, they had DevCon, and then, like, next to it, they had, like, I think it was called, like, world blockchain.

[06:06] Bob: Yeah. I mean, that one, that one was a combined event. Yeah. Yeah. I, I guess probably the DevCon three probably in 2017 was the switchover where you had, like, a thousand people. So it switched from a, you know, meet, meet your peers, talk about all the different development projects going on to more of a, you know, hey, here are the big talks and, you know, woo. But, but, yeah, we're on to, we have seven now. So, you know, DevCon seven was in, was in Bangkok, yeah, last October, I think. But, yeah, they, they started doing DevConnect as well, which is, is really intended, I guess, to not be a conference, to be a collection of different events connecting, you know, developers and community. So I, I was expecting it to be a fair bit smaller, but it absolutely wasn't. But it did have a, you know, it did have a different flavor to, to DevCon in that you, it was lots of little things, you know, lots of mini events, many under that same banner. Obviously, side events as well, but even if you just got, like, a ticket for the main thing with a theme of world fair, you know, of, of really, you know, bringing people from around the world to, to, to show what they're, they're working on. But I, I didn't expect it to be as big. Like, I think it probably was as big as, as, as DevCon really in the numbers. I mean, what I, I really yeah. I, I, I mean, effectively, I think they've become the same. Like, it's just, you know, basically,

[07:24] Victor: whatever they were trying to kind of keep it small and more developer friendly, it's, and but I think, you know, in terms of signal to noise ratio, these dev cons are probably still the highest compared to more business-y conferences. You know what I mean? Like, in terms of actual getting some technical stuff.

Conference format and venue logistics

Victor: Jim, what were your impressions of DevConnect and, Buenos Aires? You can, I've, I've heard you said you're worried about being too negative, but there is no, yeah, yeah, let it go, for it. Please. Wants to know. Yes.

[07:55] Jim: Well, I, I mean, there was a lot of good stuff down there. First of all, I, I actually, in part to avoid having a huge flight down there, I broke up multiple destinations down South America on the way there. So saw a lot of really cool stuff in, in Central and South America the week before. And Argentina is beautiful. Conference itself had some very cool things there, but I think I really sort of preferred the format of what happened in Bangkok the year before. There were certain things about the format here that, that, that were sort of made it difficult. First thing is that there was less going on at the main venue, and we had to, like, spend a lot of time sort of, like, signing up for all these off-site things. And these off-site things were, like, big and would go on for hours. So would sort of pull you away from the main event for the whole day. Maybe you could kinda come back at the end of the day. But then I tried that a little bit at first, like, you know, I signed up for, like, an off-site thing, and then I kinda came back. And, and once I got to the main event, you're sort of just wandering around, and it was, it was hard. I don't know. Maybe did you guys, like, find a good schedule for what was happening right there? Because mostly, was just walking around and, like, there was one area, I guess, was the, the yellow pavilion where, where the big room was, and you could get a couple small talks there. But mostly, it was just sort of, like, outdoor study areas and, and not as much going on in the main area. I don't know. What did, what did you guys think about that break apart?

[09:30] Kieren: It was haphazard, but the, I liked a bunch of the main stage talks. There were a few good ones on the Friday. There were good opening ones, and then there was a little amphitheater that had some of the good, like, DeFi app talks that, but it, it, I agree it was sort of like a crapshoot. Like, the, the registration procedures, sometimes you had to register for an event that was inside the venue. Sometimes that wouldn't work, but you would go, like, by the booth or whatever, and they would just tell you, like, oh, yeah. Just don't worry. Just show up. You know? And it, so, like, it contributed to an impression of, like, never quite knowing like, agendas weren't really posted for any of these side events. They were not even really posted for the main event until, like, the night before. Like, they were kind of, you know, lazily, I mean, in the computer science sense, updating, the, the agendas as you, as you went, so to speak. So it was very hard to, like, come in with a target and hit everything with that target. You kinda had to just sort of go with the flow and, you know, it, it doesn't, doesn't feel optimal. But I, I actually I, you know, I still got quite a lot out of it, yeah, even with that. But, yeah, it, the endless registrations would, would quite annoy. You know? And the, yeah. There were big side events in the event, small ones. Like, I discovered a couple days in, there was, like, a quite large, like, Polygon side event in the main menu. You know? And yeah. Yeah. It, it was sort of hard to—

[10:59] Jim: Well, I'm gonna get, what I like to is everything was right there together and you kinda walk to something else. That's gonna be way better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You, you, you could kinda test something out, and if it was looking silly, you could just run out and find another room. And so it, it allowed you to, like, kind of, I don't know. It's like, it's like looking for a movie on Netflix or something. You can trial a bunch of movies and then settle on one versus, like, the olden days where you had to buy a ticket to go to a theater, and if you, if you bet wrong, you're out of, out of luck. That's, that's what a lot of this felt like is, like, I would start to sign up for some event, and then that would be, that would be, like, half an hour drive out of the main event. And by the time things would start, you know, if I, if I, if it hit me, I was into something silly, you know, I'd still be like, well, maybe I should stay a little bit longer. I did sign up for this, and I can't sign up for another thing right now. So main area, I hit a couple good ones there, but often, like, just the topic wasn't interested in at the moment. So—

[11:57] Victor: Well, I, I found what was kind of strange was that you signed up for these, like, large blocks of time, and then you wouldn't, the agenda wouldn't be clear when you were signing up. Right? And then you might, like, see one good talk in that, you know? Like, some of them lasted, like, nine till five.

[12:16] Kieren: And, like, so you get, like, one good talk in there, and then you, and people were just hanging out, like, coworking and having coffee and whatever for most of it, and the talks were, like, in this tight segment that they didn't name until, like, much later.

[12:29] Victor: Yes. Exactly. And, and some of them were important, like, you know, saying something, and then the rest of it were, like, you know, hit or miss kind of afterwards. Right? So it was, yeah. I, I tended to find out about Vitalik speaking by seeing that he was speaking. Yeah. Like, I've been sitting there, and then he's, like, coming on and, like, yeah. Like—

[12:49] Jim: I, and I, I kind of would've liked to have seen that too, but the, the thing is, is I had signed up for a thing, and I was, like, across town when, when Kieren mentioned, hey. Vitalik speaking here now. And, yeah. I'm like, well—

[13:01] Victor: Well, that was the day that I, I, that was the day that I probably chose unwisely too. I was, I wasn't happy with the talks I'd gone to that day. Right.

Quantum computing and elliptic curves

Victor: Well, and speaking of that, maybe we can touch upon some of the big themes of DevConnect. Let's start with sort of the headline thing about the tag saying elliptic curves are going to die. That seemed to make a lot of news, and quantum computing was coming for us all. What, what were your thoughts on that?

[13:27] Kieren: It's a Jim question.

[13:29] Victor: I guess, yeah. Let's start with Jim. Bring out that physics background, Jim.

[13:33] Jim: I, I'll pass this to the Kieren.

[13:36] Kieren: Oh, okay. So I will say that both Jim and I have a physics background, but mine was more from, like, the math side where we're, like, good at the beauty of the equations, but, like, don't necessarily have an, as an intuitive sense of, like, the physics people were good at, like, estimating the answer and then, like, back working into the actuality of it, where the, the math people might have actually been better at the math side, though the physicists are quite good at it, but less so. So, nevertheless, I had spent some time in quantum and, like, the machinery on how a quantum computer might work and so on. I still don't have that much evidence that it's coming soon. But would you really, I, I don't know. It's like, it's hard to keep secrets under wraps. Like, I, I think probably governments and private sector researchers are putting, like, a bunch of money into it. But for a long time, there were these, Google got it to 20 qubits, and they stayed together for 10 to the negative seven seconds instead of negative nine. And it computed the divisors of 63 or, yeah, whatever. Something, something like that. Right? And so, yeah. I mean, I think I don't know how we would know when quantum's coming. Like, we, we would know these coins are stolen. But even then, like, you might not wanna do that. I, I think I also think the cryptography tends to come back pretty fast when new cryptanalytic tools come in. Like, I believe there's already quantum resistant stuff. It'll be a hard switchover. Like, but once you knew that the Bitcoin were still getting stolen, you might still have like, I don't know how, like, do you steal them all in one, you know, ten minute segment? Or, like, is it still kinda slow and you have a little bit of time to migrate over, or you just snapshot all the balances at one date when you're pretty sure that, I don't know how we would deal with it, but and, yeah, I'm, I, I guess I'm often skeptical, but color me a little skeptical on quantum happening much faster than people expect, which is the real scenario you're worried about.

[15:42] Jim: It's one of those stories that's always in the news, like, like, always there's some big breakthrough in or, or, or progress in quantum computer. It's coming in a couple years, but that's what they've been saying for decades now. So—

[15:55] Victor: Yeah. And it's like, and it seems like a bunch of people are, I mean, I will say quantum resistance was a big theme. Like, there were a lot of people claiming either research or advances in quantum resistance at, at the conference as well. So it, it seems like Ethereum is probably better situated to implement a quantum resistance. I mean, it would be painful, but, you know, like, it would be very hard to do it on Bitcoin more structurally, I think, than, you know, if, if, they, like, change less. Yeah. Exactly. They, they, it would, but what do you think, Bob? What was your impression of that?

[16:32] Bob: Yeah. I mean, I, I don't know. You can, you can't really tell when the thing's coming up. I, I'm not, I'm not worried, really. Like, it's like everyone's talking about it, so it'll be fine.

[16:40] Victor: Yeah. Everyone's very aware. It's a known problem that a bunch of people are working at it, but, no, it's unknown when it's gonna hit us, I guess, is where I put it. Yeah. I mean, honestly,

[16:50] Bob: you know, that, there are, there are, change the, change that have already got quantum resistant stuff. It just seems to be like a cost thing from what I can see is, yes, yes, is going okay. Well, it's probably not a problem. So why would we make ourselves less competitive now? Like, I don't think it's a market winner of saying, oh, yeah. Like, we're, like, 10x slower, but, you know, we're resistant.

[17:16] Victor: Yeah.

[17:17] Bob: But, but it's obviously, you know, an incoming matter, though the, the hotter matter really is, is privacy. I think that's really—

Privacy on Ethereum

[17:24] Victor: Well, I think the hot, I mean, the other thing in between those two things is. So maybe we can, I mean, Bob, I know you have some thoughts on that? Maybe we can start with you this time.

[17:33] Bob: Yeah. So, I mean, talking about where we went, I was mainly just in the main venue with the exception of the day before the main event where we had the, the second Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, which is a, a good fun event. And the other thing that, that there was on the final day was the Ethereum privacy stack event. So both of them were organized by Web3 Privacy Now. The second one in collaboration with the privacy guys at the Ethereum Foundation. So that is a, a pretty new group. I think about 50 people working on that at the EF.

[18:12] Kieren: 50 people. Wow. Yep. It's, there's a lot of—

[18:15] Victor: A lot of ETH.

[18:16] Kieren: Good for, I mean, good for them. Wow.

[18:19] Bob: So, yeah, you know, pretty serious and in multiple different areas. So they've got the Kataku project, which basically seems to be like SDK and tooling to help with integration of privacy features into wallets using existing projects with Railgun being a, a key one. Basically, like, hey, here's how to plug in privacy into an existing wallet, and we've kind of done most of the work. Also,

[18:47] Kieren: Also—

[18:48] Bob: on that, one of the major main talks that there was on that last day was Vitalik and Roger Dingledine, great name, of Tor, really talking about the Tor-ification of Ethereum, which is planned. So that was a bit of a reveal that there is work underway to look at all of the different levels and components of that protocol stack and work out how to, you know, onion-ify them really or at least make them Tor friendly, including things like the block formation, you know, and the validator, you know, leader stuff and hiding all of that.

[19:27] Kieren: I wanna jump in quickly on the congress. I wanna hate a little bit first. I saw the Infinite Garden appear on the screen again. Like, at DevConnect, you mean?

[19:37] Victor: Sorry. No. No. I'm a, at tech from congress. I'm not sure you saw that one.

[19:42] Kieren: Okay. Okay. Yeah. I took a picture of it for the, for the record. Put it in the show notes. It, we're, we're, like, halfway to a wartime EF, but we've, like, kept the old generals and, like, put them on the, you know, national guard or something, the coast guard. But, you know? And let me connect this to, to sort of, like, a, a broader point. I really liked that you saw a bunch of the old faces at DevConnect. People have been around for a long time. Like, when I watched the Sky and ENS swap talks, they did seem, you know, Sky has always formerly Maker DAO. I'm against this rebrand, but they seem to really take being a DAO seriously, where a lot of DAOs is sort of like marketing and you kinda don't, you know, it's led pretty top, top down, but, like, they, you know, they were, they're up there talking about the DAO way of doing things and, you know, they you've, they've got proposals that you vote on, and I'm, I'm sure it's still, like, a little bit oligarchic, but they really meant it, the DAO part, on some level. I was talking to a cool guy who I need to follow-up with, actually, with Victor, and we're showing him the app on the phone. And he was like, oh, are you getting a whole node on there? I was like, no. Like, those days, we've, we've given up on this dream, I think. Like, it's like, the thing needs to be fast and, like, you're not gonna run the node on the phone. Even if you could, it's gonna melt. Maybe one day, you know, maybe the tech on the watch.

[21:07] Victor: Yes. Node on the watch. Exactly. On the Apple watch.

[21:10] Kieren: But so I'm making fun of it a little bit, but I, I like that these people still exist, and they, it's like 2017, 2015. Like, the same things. And, you know, they are, we, in that same conversation, we're talking to old friend of ours. He's like, yeah. Railgun, it's great, but I want it to go harder. I want there to be one account for the whole network that, you know, all activity goes under, and then you use your ZK receipts to pull out what's specific to you. But I was like, hell yeah. You know? Let's go hardcore dreamer cypherpunk. You know? And, and almost no other conferences like that. Like, I haven't been to, like, a big Solana builder conference, but I assume that those are, like, pretty commercial just from the whole Solana ecosystem ethos. I'm surprised these people are still around, but this is great. So I wanted to, you know, throw a plug out that if you're on crypto Twitter too much, you worry that just, like, literally everything about the industry is price action. And, there are still some true believers. It's kind of the same people that it was in somewhere between 2015 and 2017.

[22:21] Bob: So Lefteris did a good tweet, a good little video clip actually, because Lefteris, you know, famously one of those OG builders with Rotki portfolio management software that he has as his main product being offline. You know? So it's a local app. It was, he, he had a good new phrase as well, which was aligned apps with that alignment being with you, the user, not, you know, some weird Ethereum alignment or anything, but it's saying it's on your side. Tweet that he had was one of the terrible things that was there was the network. Like, the Wi-Fi was just wrecked. Oh, like, many of the days. Nothing. Unusable. Yeah. Data on your phone, pretty shit because there's so many people doing it at the same time. But he, he did a little video saying, the network's down, but my app still runs. Look. But—

[23:16] Victor: I will say, I mean, on that kind of, like, I, I would, not to push back against what you're saying, but, like, I do think the side, the privacy people have kind of gotten more customer aligned than purely philosophical aligned. Like, in the Ethereum Privacy Summit, I heard many times, like, yes. We want consumer privacy. No. We don't want to support North Korea or pedophiles. Like, you know, like, which seems to be the right line to draw. You know? It's like, I think it's—

Privacy pools debate

[23:44] Kieren: Well, okay. There's a debate. Bob, do you wanna jump in? I ran into a mean during the conference who seems to have created this debate. He might have more context on it than, you know, than I do, but I'll, I'll backfill if need be.

[24:00] Bob: Yeah. Sure. So, so I guess specifically there, you have this philosophical question of if you do have a, you know, a privacy tech, should that be, unconditionally, you know, single anonymity set with the whole world? You know, do, obviously, the larger anonymity set that you have, the better security you have with the ideal being it's everything. You know, it's all transactions for, for everything. So, I mean, that's the scenario that you have with, with Monero. Though Monero is, you know, using ring signatures at the moment, there are plans for use of, use of ZK to, you know, it's a full, full membership proof thing that they've got proposed, but right now it's just ring sig. It's on by default, you know, so privacy on by default, mixing with everything by default. On the other side, on Zcash, for example, you can have transparent, transparent, you know, transparent transactions, or you can go into the different shielded pools. So the one that you're talking about in particular is, is privacy pools. So privacy pools, I, I think, was either a suggestion from Vitalik or Vitalik was one of many, he's on the paper. Yeah. Yeah. A number of co authors, but, but, I mean, Soleimani is, is a primary guy and Zach Cole as well. They just did a raise at Oxbow, which I believe raised 3 and a half million. But the approach that we have there, quite a responsible number in the, in the, yes. It's maybe about how much it might cost to develop the technology and a little bit more. But, but, yeah, the approach there, and it was really in reaction to the legal action on Tornado Cash, was really saying, okay. Well, if you do this belonging, privacy approach, you, you do intermingle yourself with North Korea and terrorists and crime. Yeah. And the Monero reaction to that is yes.

[26:04] Kieren: So—

[26:04] Bob: Let me, let me, but if you can back, sorry. Just to finish the thought there. So, yeah, really, a, a primary thing was, like, not, wanting to have that disassociation, but also not wanting developers to go to, to go to jail. And saying if you can credibly show, look, here is a ZK proof that shows that I am not in the same group as these known baddies, then, you know, that, that's a kind of a responsible middle ground. It does affect your anonymity set, but maybe not that much.

[26:36] Kieren: Let me add maybe the flip side argument, but also, so I'm, Monero user of any of these technologies. I'm sure I will test some at de minimis amounts at some, some point. The, Tornado Cache, terrible name. You know, I, I think the, I believe that it actually also contained a capability at least to prove source of funds on one side. So, like, you could prove that your funds were acquired legitimately even if they were obscured later. I don't think you can do a severability with the bad funds. And I, that's the key point that I mean was telling me, is the difference. But, you know, I, I think the, the counterfactuals, what, what the, the hardcore other side cypherpunks would say is something like, well, what about, like, cash? Like, all cash is dirty. It's all been used in some bathroom to get some illegal substance from point A to point B. You know, it's really the preferred still technology for, certain kinds of money laundering and, and all that sort of thing. Hey. There are serial numbers, I guess, but we, we don't go and say cash is the problem. And the anonymity set of cash includes lots of bad acts. Right? And so this sort of kinda, like, presumption of guilt, like, you know, if you're putting your money in the pool, you're aiding and abetting North Korean money laundering. I, I don't buy it at all. And, you know, on the other side, like, you don't wanna seed that argument. And everywhere in the world is trying to seed that argument. Like, the, the banking system definitely has, like, a guilty by default ethos. Like, prove everything about you, and we're gonna surveil every transaction. And, you know, we'll tell you if you're allowed to bank, basically. Is that, I mean, I think, I think there's certainly a—

[28:19] Bob: very valid argument on that side of sort of like this supposition of you going, but, but it wasn't me, sir. Here's my ZK proof, I promise. What's—

[28:29] Kieren: the ZK proof? Like, what are you even talking about? Exactly. So if you pick this, like, half step, you're kind of just saying, oh, you use this privacy tech, but you're, like, one of the easy ones to pick off. You know? Like—

[28:41] Bob: I don't know. And it makes it a permission system again. Yeah. And you could say, oh, it's only a bit. But—

[28:46] Kieren: Yeah. And talking to Zach, it was really, I don't know the details. I mean, said it does break the fungibility, which is, like, kind of a wave, this the same, same and the same. There's, like, it's like a Bitcoin. You have, like, tainted ones and not. You know?

[28:59] Bob: But, but talking to Zach, it seemed the primary motivation wasn't so much as of being compliant as it was we don't want any more of our friends to go to jail. Totally. Yeah. I guess. And maybe that's a passing phase?

[29:10] Kieren: It's that these, yes. At the same time, I don't really know what the Tornado Cache people did other than build software. Could have been more than building the software. You know? There's no way that building some software, like, should count as, like, a conspiracy to launder some money. Like, that, that's never applied in any other case, really, maybe except as regards to crypto industry.

[29:34] Bob: Also worth saying, though, I think, is that many parts of the world are not so progressive as the US on that sort of matter. Yeah.

Agentic AI at DevConnect

[29:43] Victor: Well, I'm, Jim, I, I think we're starting to get, you know, we're a little bit over thirty minutes. Wanted to kind of touch base with you. I know you're still pretty jet lagged on, what were your impressions at the conference, especially since you attended a lot of agentic AI talks too? So, you know, how real is that? What do you think about whether, whether what were your big takeaways from the conference?

[30:09] Jim: Well, I, I was pretty excited to go to, to anything AI. But I, I don't know. We're sort of like in, in the, the hype part of the hype cycle right now. And I went to on the first day to, to one where multiple, I don't know. It was, like, typical people up speaking would be, like, some somebody who had, like, put together a company where they were using AI to, you know, maybe go into DeFi trading or something like that. And it would, like, sort of holistically understand what's happening in the world and try to use that to trade. And, like, I don't know. Like, there were, like, panels of people where, where it was, like, multiple people with a variant of that story. And it was all very inspirational sounding and, and a little bit light on the details, but, but everybody was very excited by it. But I'm sitting there listening, and I'm like, there's no way that, like, this, this stuff is really cool. There's no way they're doing it. So, like, and I remember, like, like, you know, it would be a much bigger deal if, if, if some of these succeeded. And most, it's, it's funny because at these events, can still have, like, like, a lot of marketers are there, but there's still enough, like, geeks there that sometimes people just blurt out honest things. And after hearing, like, lots of marketing speak, I remember I forget who it was, and I probably wouldn't say who it was anyway. But, but one guy, they were like, they were like he, they had been spinning up this whole story again, like, like I had said before, but, but they were like, oh, and this actually works? And, and he got a little too honest, and he was like, like, oh, if this thing actually worked, you think I'd be sitting here right now? And so that, that was sort of like the theme to me. It's like over promising some really cool ideas, but, but it didn't look like it was, actual, well, and this is kind of the case in AI in general right now. There's, like, huge breakthroughs. AIs can do a lot of stuff that would have shocked me, you know, just a few years ago. But, but it's hard to get them to actually sort of complete the whole job for you or, or actually, you know, like, work as advertised. So that, that's what, like, the common theme I, I was seeing there in, in these talks.

[32:12] Bob: Did you say anything with post apps? Any kind of post apps sort of, like, hey. Look. We've, you can just AI drive this and, you know, that kind of text or voice interface as opposed to UI? Nothing's all. Sorry. What is a post app? I'm confused. Yeah. What's a post—

[32:28] Victor: Post applications. Right? You know, soon we won't have applications. We'll just be talking to—

[32:32] Bob: Oh, post apps. Yes. Yeah. Or was it more, was it more infrastructure stuff that you were saying?

[32:38] Jim: That it, it, it looked like infrastructure stuff, what I heard, but there were many, many groups up there talking about it.

[32:45] Kieren: The trading bot are arguably post apps. I mean, you kind of probably tell them what to do when they, like, theoretically give you more money than you had, you know, when you gave it to the, is the, the, like, a little financial manager. But I also, like, I, I think I've said that before, like, when I've test driven Claude and told it to, like, go do a swap on our testnet, it can do it. You know? Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's like it goes pretty slow through the UI. It's, like, understanding it visually and, you know, like, I don't know that it's that much easier than a human, but I think, I think you could mostly give a declarative intention to an AI. Like, hey. Like, I wanna rebalance from Bitcoin into Bitcoin and ETH. Well, I, so they can do it, but it's not like, you know, sorry. Go ahead, Jim.

[33:34] Jim: Well, I guess, I guess there is a subtle distinction between, like, like, an agent and, a helper or just like a, a using AI as the UI. And as, as a, like, an autonomous agent, that's the stuff that seems not quite baked to me yet. But I saw a couple talks where people were talking about just, just, like, using it in place of the, the existing UIs that are out there right now to help you each step of the way do things. And that, that probably is great at. That's we, all, we all sort of use AI and that kind of thing right now. Yeah.

[34:08] Victor: I did hear a very interesting talk by the people formerly Infura, but now DIN, like decentralized infrastructure network, who are talking about really thinking about AI agents as users and how to make it easier for them to interact with the network. So from that point of view, I do think that there's some, I don't think it's really replacing UX. I think it's more targeting a different class of user entirely, yeah, for our AI agents, which I—

[34:37] Kieren: Let me, let me add to that. I, you know, for a long time, I've been worried about our, like, mobile story. During the conference, I was using our app on mobile a bunch. And while I'm still worried about it, I act, I think in many cases, it will be leapfrogged by just like, hey, chat. Like, go do this thing in this app for me. Yeah. And in, in a, there's a downside to that and that there, we have just, like, yet another aggregator, but an upside in that, like, you might not have to make a really slick mobile app. Yeah. And I think that'll continue. And I do, I don't use that pattern much yet, but, you know, it's something we should definitely lean into. And, you know, I, I've also seen, like, pretty funny things. Some, like, B to B SaaS Twitter handle, made some post where it's like, yeah. We sold the, the enterprise, our app. We wanted them to use it more. So we made an AI to use it for them, and they're using it more. You know? So—

[35:34] Victor: Well, the, what you described, though, I, I heard the MetaMask team, they're really talking about intents, like, trying to kind of, like, you know, instead of, like, making you do a lot of clicks or stuff, just tell it, okay. This is what I'm trying to achieve, and then, like, find me the best savings right, and then we'll go and do off all of that stuff.

Key takeaways and closing

Victor: I know we're over time, so I wanna go around the horn and say, what is the biggest takeaway you got from this dev connect? Let's start with you, Kieren.

[36:02] Kieren: Privacy seems, much more viable now than I thought. I've been generally a skeptic even us having worked on it a bunch, but I think there are pretty solid mainnet live use cases for it that work now that we could also incorporate. I honestly think if we're talking about, you know, consumer mass adoption, you can't really have these, like, clear text balances. Like, you know, yes, it's synonymous, but it's, it's, you know, makes everybody uncomfortable. Like, Bob is fond of quoting the time when very obviously one of the Ethereum core devs moved, like, a quarter billion dollars into Binance or whatever. It's like, it's not. So I, I've, I've, ex, tried to, you know, accelerate our privacy road map and response.

[36:50] Victor: Jim, what was your big takeaway from this conference?

[36:54] Jim: I think the, well, the coolest thing that I saw, if it's real, is, you know, ZK is also one of these things which is prone to, to overhyping. But it, it seems like maybe scalability of Ethereum might be solved through some ZK means sometime in the next couple of years. Yeah. If that really happens, you know, I, maybe, maybe I've heard something about that before, but I probably just ignored it. But, but people were talking about it like it's around the corner right now. Looked into it a little bit. It looks, if it does what they said, though, it could be, it could be pretty impressive. So, yeah. That was exciting to me.

[37:33] Victor: Bob, what was, what was the biggest takeaway from you?

[37:36] Bob: Yeah. So, and I think that's true on a few different pieces both, both in terms of that privacy, but, but, yeah, also scaling. Like, I think some of these things have taken so long. You know? Like, here we are ten, ten years in. I just looked. It was November 10, by the way, the, the Strato talk on—

[37:56] Victor: Oh, so I'm years. Congratulations. We passed the tenth.

[38:00] Kieren: Exactly. Almost exactly.

[38:02] Bob: But, yeah, some of these things have taken ten years really to get where we thought would get in a few months even. And, yeah, I think that will be, like, you know, the, the ZK-ification of the L1 that would basically end up with not really doing any execution on the L1. It's just proofs of things that are happening up above in whatever execution that environment that might be. So, you know, if we, if we look back in five years, say, or even three, I think we're gonna be in a, a great place where it's like we're almost feature complete, maybe.

[38:56] Victor: Well, software is never really feature complete. But I would say that I guess the biggest takeaway I had is, like, I think it's ZK proving, which is different than the compilation part, has come way faster and way down. Like, last year when they were talking about it, you know, I think a typical proof took minutes and required 48 GPUs. And, you know, now I'm seeing two GPUs and, like, closer to kind of the ten second real time holy grail that we'll get into. Like, when I looked at the things on zkproof.org, I was really impressed at how close it was and what people are doing there. So I think we'll call it there because we're already fifteen minutes over, but where can we find you? I'm Victor Wong. You can find me at X @vic4wong, W-O-N-G.

[39:43] Kieren: Kieren, where can we find you? K. James on X and most places. Jim?

[39:49] Jim: Still Twitter and I've, I also forgotten my handle again. I should probably, you should remind me next time to look it up. It's what was it? Or something?

[40:00] Victor: I, I may not, I—

[40:01] Kieren: looked it up, but I can't, it was, like, two weeks ago.

[40:04] Victor: Okay. I'm gonna keep asking you. It, you're good. This is a pop, weekly pop quiz for you, Jim. So you better learn it.

[40:10] Bob: Bob, we're looking, look at the notes on our website. I always, like, do the link. I always reply to that and correct it. And so I'm, I'm Bob Summerwill, someone like the season and W-I-L, write your will, on, on Twitter.

[40:25] Jim: And thank you for joining us. Take care. I'm, I'm looking at my handle right now. It's, it's Jamshid Ramos.

[40:31] Victor: Right. Okay. You've, you, you, you get a 50%—

[40:35] Jim: just pass of that. Take care. Even more embarrassing than failing.

[40:39] Bob: Bye. His own.