MERGED with Tim Beiko & Danny Ryan

Tim Beiko and Danny Ryan are two of Ethereum’s lead coordinators, and work at the Ethereum Foundation to shepherd the many parts of Ethereum into the future. How are they feeling on the other side of the Merge? What does this mean for Ethereum? Few (if anyone) on the planet are more qualified to discuss the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake than these two, and we use this episode to reflect on the magnitude of the event and look forward to the future of the network. ------ Swell | Liquid Staking for the People https://bankless.cc/swelldiscord ------ SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ ️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: LENS | WEB3 SOCIAL PROTOCOL https://bankless.cc/Lens ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ------ Resources: Tim Beiko https://twitter.com/TimBeiko Danny Ryan https://twitter.com/dannyryan ------- Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Nation. Welcome to another State of the Nation episode where we talk about something big that's just happened, get into the details of it. And David, what could be bigger than the Ethereum merge? Five days ago, proof of work was abandoned, proof of stake executed, implemented. We merged the proof of work chain and the proof of stake chain, and we're here to talk about it. This is kind of a post-game show, I think. Who do we have on? What are we covering today?

• 0:34David Hoffman?

  Of course, none other than Danny Ryan and Tim Baker, the two lead coordinators of this whole entire merge effort, who have been just shepherding the many parts of Ethereum to get this done. And there are many parts of Ethereum, so this coordination effort was no small feat. And so, these people have been, Danny and Tim, have been at the spearhead of this whole coordination effort. And so, we're just going to talk about what are they feeling right now, post-merge? And also, what are they going to do next? When they have been thinking merge, proof of stake, beacon chain for the last, you know, over a year now, what's on the horizon? And also, what drink did they drink after they merged?

• 1:15David Hoffman?

  So, all of these super important questions and more, when we finally get to Tim and Danny.

• 1:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, these are the important questions, I think, David. And in addition to that, I think we want to ask what the future of Ethereum is. So, this is a major milestone, and now it's in the rearview mirror. Where do we go next, is the question. And I actually think one of those areas we go next is, we need to work on decentralizing our staking providers, in particular, our staking pools. Wanted to give a shout out to our friends and sponsors at Swell Network. They are a staking application, similar in some respects to Rockpool and Lido, with some differences, though, David. What is a Swell Network and what can folks do if they're interested in decentralizing staking pools with this new protocol?

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Swell has joined the ranks of Lido and Rocketpool to be a decentralized staking as a service provider slash DAO. It's like Lido in that it's got a permission validator set that the DAO approves or bumps out, but it's also like Rocketpool in that it has a permissionless validator set that you can join if you put up a bond. So trying to do the best of both worlds. And the Swell network is just getting started. So if you want to be on the ground floor of something, you can go and click a link in the Discord. And as a disclaimer, you can see that Ryan and I are also angel investors. So they both sponsored this message. And also Ryan and I are angel investors into Swell.

• 2:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Make sure you check out that Discord. An opportunity to get on the ground floor of something new. So David, I gotta ask you the question, but I think it's pretty obvious what of the state of the nation is today. What is the state of the nation, though, David?

• 2:54David Hoffman?

  No, Ryan, the state of the nation is merged. Importantly, past tense. The state of the nation is also proof of stake, as in much of the DeFi economy was previously proof of work and is now proof of stake. So Ryan, the state of the nation is merged with the future, merged with proof of stake. Overall, just merged in general. Yeah, there we go. How'd you like that one?

• 3:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it. It's music to my ears. And we are going to be right back with two of the individuals instrumental in making this happen, Tim Baker and Danny Ryan. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 3:30David Hoffman?

  Lens Protocol is an open source tech stack for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media. We all have toxic relationships with our Web 2 apps. We want to break up with them, but we can't. These applications own our digital lives and all the relationships that we've made. We need to break through to a new paradigm of social networking applications that we control rather than them controlling us. Lens isn't a social media app. It's a protocol to let 1,000 Web 3 social apps bloom. Lens is a permissionless and transparent social graph that is owned by the user. In crypto, we say not your keys, not your crypto. And on Lens, we say not your keys, not your profile. With Lens, your followers go with you to whatever social media application you want to use. And instead of being trapped by an algorithm chosen by that app, Lens lets you choose the way you want to experience your social media. Lens is the last social

• 4:15David Hoffman?

  media handle that you'll ever need to create. So in order to get started, there's a secret code word in the show notes. Enter that code word in the Google form links and you'll be well on your way to entering the world of Web 3 social. Rocketpool is your decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH in Rocketpool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in DeFi at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by staking it with Rocketpool, but you can get even more by running a node. Rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating Ethereum nodes. Setting up your Rocketpool node is easier than running a node solo, and you only need 16 ETH to get started. You get an extra 15% staking commission on the pooled ETH that uses your node to stake. You also get RPL token rewards on top. So if you're bullish ETH staking,

• 5:00David Hoffman?

  you can boost your yield by adding your node to the decentralized Rocketpool network, which currently has over 1,000 independent node operators. It's yield farming, but with Ethereum nodes. You can get started at rocketpool.net, and you can also join the Rocketpool community in their Discord. You can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there. Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Some of the coolest new NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, while DeFi protocols continue to see increased liquidity and usage. You can now bridge straight into Arbitrum for more than 10 different exchanges, including Finance, FTX, Huobi, and Crypto.com. Once on Arbitrum, you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees, allowing you to explore new frontiers of the crypto universe. New to Arbitrum, for a limited time, you can get Arbitrum NFTs designed by the famous artists Ratwell and Sugoi

• 5:45David Hoffman?

  for joining the Arbitrum Odyssey. The Odyssey is an eight-week-long event where you complete on-chain activities and receive a free NFT as a reward. Find out more by visiting the Discord at discord.gg/Arbitrum. You can also bridge your assets to Arbitrum at bridge.arbitrum.io and access all of Arbitrum's apps at portal.arbitrum.1 in order to experience DeFi and NFTs the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, secure, and fiction-free.

• 6:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are excited to introduce you yet again to Tim Baker and Danny Ryan. These are two of Ethereum's lead coordinators. They've helped shepherd the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum itself into the future, including implementing, most recently, the Ethereum Merge. Danny, Tim, welcome to Bankless. How are you guys feeling?

• 6:35David Hoffman?

  Pretty good.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having us. Pretty good, honestly.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  I had an inclination.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Huge relief, very exciting. It's culmination of quite a bit of work from quite a bit of people. So, and it went well, I would say.

• 6:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think going well might be sort of an understatement in some ways because this thing was like smooth as butter. And I'm wondering if that was kind of like what you anticipated. I'm sure it was what you hoped for. That was on the optimistic side of things. But did you think it would go as well as it seemed to go? Danny first.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  I thought it could go as well as it went. I thought there was, you know, a non trivial chance that a client of moderate use would have had more substantial error where, you know, there's a bit of scrambling, maybe a quick release or maybe like telling 10% of the network, you have to restart your node or something like that. But the fact that, you know, I think we saw like a 4% drop. I think we saw some intermittent node failures on one client, but a few people did have to restart their nodes. But just like, it was very, it was, it was a dream. Yeah.

• 7:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tim, how'd you feel about this? Was it a dream?

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like I, you know, historically, when we have an upgrade, I have to do something in the next couple of hours, whether that's reaching out to some operator or client team. Like, you know, I didn't expect the network to go down. I was incredibly confident we'd like finalize and all of that. But I expected that somebody somewhere would have forgotten something quite important. And like, we'd have to reach out to them and, you know, coordinate. And that didn't happen, which was kind of wild. Like that, he said, you know, there were some minor issues, but like even that 4% drop, I think in a matter of hours, it was back and potentially less than that. So, um, yeah, I, I don't think it could have gone much better.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  It went pretty much better than like most of even the Shadow Forks and whatnot that we did. So.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I think we've had like one or two Shadow Forks go similarly as well. Yeah. You know, and one's later in the process, but just like we've had plenty of times where you're like, oh, 20% of the network's off. The network's fine as a whole, but like we need to, we need to go triage an issue, but we didn't have that.

• 9:03David Hoffman?

  So one of my questions was going to be, what did you think you would be doing immediately post-merge versus what you were actually doing? So Tim, it sounds like you were about to be, you know, picking up the phone, calling a particular like client team perhaps, or messaging them and saying, hey, this thing's going wrong, we have to troubleshoot this. But instead, you were just watching the merge and nothing, nothing going wrong, I guess. How long did that take to set in before you realized like, wait, we had a, you know, a perfect merge? How, how long until, like, were you in disbelief? Like, what was going through your head at the time?

• 9:41Speaker 03

  So we kind of knew as soon as we finalized, and even before we finalized. So there were some people from the research team who were looking at the attestations kind of piling up on the epoch. So before it had officially finalized, we sort of knew we were good. That was, that was like a, a pretty big relief. Yeah.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Each block, like, so you see the first block, and then there's slots, right? Slots are kind of the ticking of time, every 12 seconds. And you can have a block, or you can not have a block at each slot. And so we had a block, and then we had a block, and then we had a block, and then we had a block. And like, every, every slot that ticked by, that we had a block and we had no missed, missed slot, you know, was an indicator that like, the network's online, the network's very healthy, and like, this thing's going through. So like, iteratively, through the course of like, 20 minutes as we're waiting for finality, I think we're just more and more like, okay, it's working. It's still working, and it's still working. I think we missed maybe one slot, maybe two slots

• 10:42Speaker 02

  between the beginning of the merge and finality. You know, and it was only like, on the 30 epoch or something, which is normal if you have, you know, 95 to 99% online. It was just like, kind of shocking.

• 10:55David Hoffman?

  So we're talking within minutes, you guys realize that the merge is going to be perfect, or not perfect, but as good as one could hope?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Iteratively, you know, iterative knowledge until that finality point, you know, but it was looking pretty good.

• 11:10David Hoffman?

  And so where were you two? We were both, I know Danny, you were at the EF office in Colorado because I saw a picture of you there. Tim, you were also there, Tim. You guys were right next to each other, weren't you?

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yes, I flew in to Colorado for this. Yep.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  It turns out it's hard to plan a party around a total difficulty.

• 11:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I can relate.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  We're like, is this going to be a breakfast party? Maybe a luncheon? And then at some point we're like, it's gonna, okay, we can have dinner and then it's gonna be at 8:00 PM. And then ended up at 12:30 AM. So we're just like, we ended up, it's kind of this funny time in between everyone gathering and like waiting. It's like a lot of like, so it's coming. Everyone's like refreshing. There was like, there was a wager pool on when it precisely it was going to happen. People were playing Super Nintendo, you know?

• 12:01Speaker 03

  I had like, my iPhone had 20 different Bordel tabs open. Like, you know how you can go this like Safari view of all your tabs? I would just scroll up and it would just be like Bordels everywhere. Yeah, so that's what I did all day.

• 12:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know Vitalik said he was, he was surprised that, you know, kind of the merge date didn't oscillate as much as some people expected. Were you guys surprised by that?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yes, we did this better than a proof of work hard fork. Like the timing, the, the, the timing when we hit it was like closer than we usually get.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  I mean, it was what? It was just a few hours off of the total predicted time.

• 12:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were aiming for 12 UTC and I think we got six UTC. So we got like six hours from what we made, what we aimed.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was, that was as good as it could have gone as well.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  But Tim, you mentioned Vitalik. During this interim between 8:00 PM and like 12:30 when we were waiting,

• 13:01Speaker 02

  you made it, you made a beverage, right?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, that's what I did. Yes, I spent all evening drinking Vitalics. Because I wanted, you know, by 8pm, I wanted to drink, but I didn't want to like be drunk if the merge was happening at 2am. I didn't want to fall asleep either. So like the Vitalic was actually perfect for this because you had a little bit of red wine, some caffeinated green tea. So it kept me awake and going all the way until the merge hit.

• 13:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what's the Vitalic ratio? Is that 85% green tea and 15%? Am I remembering that correctly?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 13:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have to get that ratio correct, or else it's just muddles the whole thing.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, 84, 16, it just doesn't taste the same.

• 13:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, so I have to ask, how was it?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  It was alright. Yeah, I feel like it tastes a bit like cranberry juice.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  That's like the closest I would, I would put it.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so what, what was the atmosphere like when, when it happened? Of course, I, I think a lot of people listening to Bankless right now, maybe they have seen clips from the live stream, the moment the merge happened, maybe they were even actually up and present for it. What was, what was the feeling? I guess you were, you guys were in the Ethereum office. What, was there like shouts? Was there high fives? Like, how excited were people? Or was it, was it pretty chill? Like, you know, it's a dev group and like just silent nodding and big smiles. Like, what was the reaction to all of this?

• 14:35David Hoffman?

  Dan, you want to go?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Exciting. You know, everyone yelled pandas because we all saw pandas on our, on our logs. And then a bit of like anxiety as we, as it approached finality. I wanted to pop champagne after the pandas had happened and everyone's like, no, you can't pop champagne until finality. But once, you know, call it 18 minutes in, 15 minutes in, finality happened, champagne popped, lots of hugs, lots of excitement and cheering. It was, it was an emotional release for, for a lot of us. You know, I think a lot of people in that room have been working on, or at least following this thing for many years, somewhere between two and five years. And so to see it come together, definitely emotional, emotional experience.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  I sit up till 4 a.m. and I I usually go to bed at like 9:30. So that speaks worlds towards the importance.

• 15:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tim, you have anything, Tim? Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  No, yeah, no, the atmosphere was was great. And I mean, the fact also that it went so well, I was sort of expecting people to kind of be partying, but things not to be perfect. So I would be like, you know, going back to work on my computer somewhere, like reaching out to that stinking pool or, you know, that forgot to update or something. And no, so like, I got to eat cake and like, drink the champagne with everyone, which was nice. And it was just wild. Like, it was kind of surreal that like, you know, it just happened on mainnet. Like, you you kind of see it happen so many times on Shadowforks and whatnot. And the graphs all look the same, right? It's like, it's all, it's all this, it's literally the same thing that happens over and over. But to think like, oh, man, like, this is mainnet, right? Like, it, that was, that was pretty wild to see.

• 16:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you guys have any, like, any, you know, family or friends, like your in real life friends that that you could share this victory with? Like, so so for me, right? It's, a whole bunch of my internet friends, my Ethereum friends, and they're just as excited as as I was, the merge happened, and like, get to share that victory with them, obviously. But then I go to, you know, real life and it's like, no, it's like that meme and and you're the guy in the corner of the party. No, nobody knows the merge just happened, right?

• 16:51Speaker 02

  As I walked with my wife the next day, I said that to her. I said, I feel like the guy.

• 16:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because how big was this, Danny? I mean, we were joking before we we started recording that the merge may have, single-handedly in one night, reduced global electricity consumption by 0.2%? Like, that happened. Seems like a big deal.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, Norway or or Chile or something. Yeah. Yeah, it actually was this moment where at least, because that.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  You know, I think my, my parents and others, they like, kind of know what I do. It's not very clear to them what I do. But they've definitely seen some of like the, the energy narrative over the past couple of years as NFTs became more in the mainstream. I think that became fodder for some of the mainstream media. Like my dad always says, like Bill Maher, like it's who? Talk show person just shits on, on crypto because of the energy. It's all about the energy. My dad's like, so this is like, this is a big deal. This is like a game changer, right? Because, because Bill Maher can't shit on this anymore.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I think, I think so.

• 18:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dad's right, though.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, no. So it's, it's, it is cool. Like they, they had some context. I think they know I very much believe in this stuff. But also like, uh, had seen some of the mainstream media criticisms of the, it, it, it, it, it came together to a certain extent. My sister actually was in there. She joined, um, the party, which was cool. I think she just got to see a, one, she thought it was going to happen at eight and then ended up staying until 12:30 in the morning, um, on a weeknight. But she got to see just some of the energy and see like how meaningful it is to, to this little sub community. So it was cool to, to get a glimpse there too.

• 18:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tim, how about you? Did you get any texts from family, friends, you know, celebrating this with you or they just have no idea like what you do?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  No, my, my friends definitely follow it. Like they, they're not like in crypto, you know, they might hold ETH or whatever, but they're not like, you know, LPing on Uniswap or stuff like that. So they, they all thought it was, it was pretty cool. My dad texted me, he was like, wow, if this went well, why did the price go down?

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, also an ETH holder, but not, uh, far beyond that. Um, yeah. And, and I think, you know, have this. I think it was kind of nice how a lot of the mainstream media actually covered the merge. Like, I think it is one of the cases where things, at least I don't read everything, but like the stuff I saw was like pretty fair. So I felt like, I don't know, people around me who like sort of follow crypto, you know, they read like New York Times or whatever articles about crypto or like Bloomberg. It seemed like they had like a decent picture of what was about to happen and the impact. And so, yeah, that I think that made it easier. Like, I don't have to go and explain all of this to them. They were like, okay, this is switching off.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Seems good. Seems risky, but if it works, you know, it would be, it would be a nice thing. That was quite neat.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. Every time I spoke with someone from mainstream media leading up, they clearly, playing into the risky part, like, they were clearly looking for people to talk about how risky it was and how crazy it was. And they were always trying to get me to validate, like, is this actually like changing the motor of a plane? I'm like, yeah, it's gonna be fine.

• 20:25David Hoffman?

  So how did it feel to remove 0.2% of global energy consumption? Because I feel like if I was one of you two, I'd be like, nice, I did that. I helped.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Very important, I think, to contextualize it, though. It's if the ETH price 10x, it wouldn't be 0.2%, right? It'd be like 2%, the new equilibrium. So it's not just removing like an absolute number today, but like removing this kind of insidious growth that was coupled with the platform that we want to reach like massive global adoption, right? So it's not even just what it does for today, but what it does in the event that Ethereum becomes what we want it to be. Well, you know what it does for that future. And that felt pretty good. Felt pretty good.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  I will, I will caveat this a little bit. So we remove, it's like, this energy still exists in the world, but it's like the world, Ethereum can exist in the world without requiring that energy, right? So I kind of feel good, you know, I I feel the good that we can keep doing our thing here and not have like a disproportionate impact. But yeah, I also, I'm always skeptical when people like push that too far.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  And to a certain extent, I mean, like, obviously, you can use free energy that maybe wasn't being used in some mining, but you're also putting demand on it, which is either going to increase the supply or increase the price for others that are trying to get, you know, act in that supply.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  And I think the growth rate, like you said, is like the, the part for me that like is the hardest to convey. Like, there's all these articles, you know, that were saying like Ethereum reduces its energy impact by 99%, 99.5, 99.9. And it's almost like those articles are understating it because like you take the point today, yeah, you take the point where we're at today and the consumption today, and sure, you can like get a number, even though there's very wide error bars, but it's like 10 years from now, that number would maybe be 10x bigger. And then, you know, even though looking at the energy impact of proof of stake is kind of a weird thing to do, we also benefit from like growth in the opposite directions. Like if computers get better, if

• 22:29Speaker 03

  chips get better, like then Ethereum takes less energy to run, right? Because it just uses computers now. So I think that is like a really neat thing. It's like we, yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And this, this platform that we rely upon the price of the asset for security, like, we no longer have a linear relationship between that thing that we rely on and energy consumption of a platform, like plain and simple. It's a very, very, very, very important. I just don't think that over like a 10 year time horizon that there's going to be much social and political appetite for something that has that type of relationship.

• 23:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we can be very, much more excited about, you know, price increases without all of the baggage that was kind of lingering, right? The sort of the narrative baggage, but also the, the real baggage of inefficient energy is.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, also, just as we saw with one of the first applications to be adopted outside of like our immediate community, NFTs and art use cases, like, you know, even it's very, the farther you are from like the understanding of like the how these mechanisms work, the more you're just like, why the hell are we bringing all this energy? This makes no sense. You know, it's just, it was not going to adoption, I don't think could be adopted, mass adoption of that paradigm.

• 23:45David Hoffman?

  And as you said, Danny, like as if Ether, 10x in price, that would actually have been 2% of energy, global energy consumption, you know, in theory. But then if we, if we eliminated it then, it would have really just been another nine on the other side of the decimal in like how much energy we reduced. So like, what does it really mean to the average person to reduce energy by 99.95% versus 99.995%? Like, it's still the same level of like impressiveness and kind of like loses a little bit of the point. And I think, you know, bankless listeners in the broader Ethereum community, we all kind of know like why we did the merge, you know, it's, it's a more secure consensus mechanism. We're reducing energy consumption. So like, we know what it means from Ethereum for Ethereum at a pretty like

• 24:29David Hoffman?

  concrete level. But I want to ask you guys what you think that it means for Ethereum in a, in a more broad sense. Like what else does it mean for Ethereum? And I remember Vitalik on the, on the live stream, he said, these are the first steps towards Ethereum becoming a very mature system. So just want to peer in your guys' heads, like what, what do you think he meant by that? And what does the current state of Ethereum mean inside of its own trajectory and aspirations to fill its own shoes? Tim, I'll start with you.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  I'll leave the technical roadmap to Danny's stuff because I think he has some interesting perspective on it. I think one thing that like the merge, you know, beyond like moving to proof of stake and like reducing the energy impact, I think one thing that I am really excited about is like, it shows we can ship complicated things. I've grown like much more excited about this over the past two, three years. Like it felt like Ethereum launching was like incredibly ambitious. And then we had like a couple of years where we weren't shipping that much on chain. There was a ton happening, you know, within client teams, a ton of research happening, but like, I was kind of concerned like, will we be able to ship like complex things? Or are we just going to make these small incremental changes to Ethereum? And then, you know, we launched the Beacon Chain,

• 25:44Speaker 03

  which was wild. And I think But we did that separate from like the applications. And then 1559, I think, was also kind of neat because it showed it was the first time since we launched Ethereum that we changed like the format of the network and not just like adding new things in the EVM or whatnot. That with these like flexible blocks and stuff like that. It was kind of neat. And then the merge is just like 10x, you know, 100x bigger than that. But it's like, we're shipping this insanely complicated transition across all of these client teams, which all have to work together smoothly behind the scenes with no downtime. And we did it. And we did it, you know, obviously it took a while, but like, when you think that within like 13 months, we went from shipping like EIP 1559 to the merge.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  It's not like that long, you know, in hindsight. So I'm really excited. It shows like we can ship like really complicated things engineering wise, both from like a coordination point of view, from obviously like the implementation point of view, but also like from getting the community to run this. Not that we shouldn't like try to minimize complexity across all of those things, but you know, if we want to get through this entire Vitalik roadmap diagram, there will be more complicated things to ship. And I'm, I'm much more optimistic than I was, say, like three years ago, that like we can ship all of that. And the merge was like a huge bump on that front.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  To be fair, you could argue we've been attempting to ship the merge since 2018 with the beacon chain. If you actually encompass that complexity into this, right? So like, which, but the fact that for the past year, that the complexity of the merge has not been writing the beacon chain for all these execution layer clients. It's just been like the plugging together, you know? I think that the modularization here is also gives us very much gains in terms of scaling out teams, resources and software.

• 27:39David Hoffman?

  And Tim, you touched on a subject, but Ethereum previously, previously, it's actually gonna be my question, has this branding of like, oh Ethereum doesn't ship, it's full of promises, it's got a bunch of ideas, but it doesn't actually follow through on them. How much like, I mean, I'm talking to the person that is directly antagonist to this, to this idea, but just like, do you think that, that take has any weight left to it at all?

• 28:05Speaker 03

  No, I think it's wrong. Like, and I've tweeted about this before it emerged, but I think, you know, for what Ethereum tries to do, I think even from the beginning, like since Genesis, the execution has probably been like top tier and that like, yes, it was a mess, but like, every, every company that does something complicated is a mess or like project or whatnot. Like it's not, this is not like an Ethereum thing, like it's hard to do complicated things. And I think the fact that it all happens in the open makes it look much worse for Ethereum. Like you don't see, you know, what SpaceX looks like, you know, like, but imagine, you know, what it must feel like to do something like, like what they're doing. So I think that is like a big part of it, like it, it looks worse because it's all in the open.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  And I think the other reason why it looks comparatively worse is there's a lot of shortcuts you can take that don't show in the short term. So you can have like all these other competitors that come and like, don't do the hard stuff and look like they're making more progress. But imagine if you had something like, you know, someone doing that, the SpaceX, the rocket would just blow up. Right? And actually you do kind of see that, you know, like there was Tesla and then there's all these like fake self-driving car companies, you know, who stacked, right? And they all had like all these demos and whatnot, and like none of them actually had like a self-driving car. And I think you, you kind of get a similar effect where like, it's easy to like, look like you're doing as good as Ethereum or like you're 90% of it, but then it's like the equivalent of this self-driving car that was just rolling down a hill. So I think we look worse than like we are.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  And I think even, and I do think we, we have improved significantly and like, yeah, the past like two, three years, it's just been wild, the amount of stuff that's shipped.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  You also, you say, people might say, oh, it's just ideas. It's not just ideas. We certainly, but we certainly have more ideas than we are able to ship. I mean, that's just the nature of like the vibrant research community and the Ethereum ecosystem is like, there's new ideas every day. There's new ways to think about how to solve these problems every day. And like what shipping is, is actually distilling those into simple, you know, what is, what are the requisite ideas to get where you need to go? How do we simplify them as most as possible? And then how do we not break this, you know, hundreds of billion dollar network in doing so? And so sure, like if you're just watching the ideas, you're going to be like, they're never, this is never going to happen, never gonna happen. But that's the point of ideas, is the

• 30:29Speaker 02

  point of research, right? It's also kind of wade through it all.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  And it's a, it's a really good sign if all the ideas, most of them come from like people working on Ethereum, because it's kind of shows you that like, this is where a lot of the energy is going, even though it looks worse from the outside, because you see all these ideas that actually don't.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  I mean, the Ethereum, the Ethereum community is a shocking intellectual powerhouse. It, we call it, um, kind of the intellectual gravity well of Ethereum is strong, and it just continues to suck people into it. Academics, engineers, random people on the internet. It's, the force is coming for you.

• 31:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you, can you guys talk about that for, for a minute? So like, who actually made this happen? How did it happen? So I think, you know, so many people's experience with, with software projects, if they're kind of in the field is, uh, there's some top-down hierarchy structure, right? And we have like agile processes, of course, but you know, there's, there's a budget, and then there's, you know, a program, and there's a set of teams, even complicated projects, like run like this. But it's all very well orchestrated and coordinated and kind of top-down. But I don't get the impression that this was how, how the merge

• 31:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  shipped at all, and how clients are developed in Ethereum at all. I get the impression that's, it's maybe completely different. I don't know if there's an analog somewhere else in the open source world, or you something like Linux, for example. But Danny, could you talk about that? Because I think people are kind of wondering.

• 32:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  The core devs, who are these people? Is it hundreds of them, maybe somewhere? Like, how are they all coordinated? How does the sausage actually get made here?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  It's hard to say, even being in the middle of it. You know, and there are maybe some analogs, like maybe

• 32:29Speaker 02

  some of the like engineering standards bodies that have mailing lists and like

• 32:35Speaker 02

  form new standards that ultimately get adopted by the internet, like SSL and that kind of stuff. Or maybe Linux, maybe Linux has some parallels. They have a, there's a, there's a foundation, they ship, kind of all ship a kernel. There's many different companies that work on it. But ultimately, there's Linus, who's like the, the BDFL, the benevolent dictator for life, who gets to like decide what goes in and uses it for their, you know, Linux Foundation's political agenda to, you know, maybe if you work on the plumbing, we'll put your feature in the kernel, that kind of stuff. So we don't, there's some parallels to this stuff, but I honestly do think it's like a very unique, you know, in this context, in that there are, like we were talking about ideas, starts with ideas, starts with research, starts with

• 33:21Speaker 02

  people thinking about the protocol, thinking about its needs, thinking about the kind of the design trade offs, those becoming posts, sometimes becoming academic papers, sometimes becoming prototypes, and ultimately becoming proposed specifications, right? And there's a number of places where people work on Ethereum specifications. Just because something is a specification doesn't mean it's ever going to mean that. There are probably more specifications that will never make it to mainnet than, than are. Maybe, maybe Tim has the answer to that one. And then ultimately, there are a bunch of people that build software that runs on the Ethereum network. These are often what we call core devs. Who is a core dev? I don't know.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  I think Amin might be able to, might be able to answer that one for you, but. The, you know, there's the, the protocol and the abstract, and then there's people that implement the protocol. And we have tons, we have many, many implementations of that. There's two layers now, the consensus layer and the execution layer. There's something like five teams on each side. Maybe not all of them are production ready, but maybe five, four. And these people kind of through asynchronous processes around the EIP repo and other specification repos, through Magicians Forum, and also through some synchronous processes on our all-core devs call and consensus layer call, hash out kind of the importance of, one, they kind of technically

• 34:50Speaker 02

  vet a lot of these specifications and then try to figure out an optimal configuration of how to bring them to mainnet, you know, balancing what are the most critical things. Often, security bubbles up as like a very, very, very critical thing, you know, without security, this thing doesn't exist. And then there's, but then there's other things like nice to have features, like those might get less prioritized, but sometimes they do make it into, into this process. And so it's this kind of like amorphous process amongst specification writers, researchers, prototypers, and these client developers to figure out how to bundle specifications into

• 35:31Speaker 02

  network upgrades, often called forks, and, and ship it. And the process of shipping it is, is also very complicated. The amount of testing, testing, security analysis, and all, all that goes into that is, is pretty massive, too, and happens also in like a very distributed fashion.

• 35:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Danny, what, what I'm curious about is, you know, so you're a lead organizer here and, and you're kind of also like, I don't entirely know how it organizes. It's, it's like somewhat, it's like some kind of chaotic organization type structure, like, so, so, a, a, and I would contrast that, you know, Tim was talking about, we've entered a new era for Ethereum, and this is the Ethereum can ship era. We've just proved it. We have three recent proof points. Ethereum didn't always have that reputation. And I hearken back to like 2018, 2019, when it felt like the project was almost Almost like stalling out, even though you might say Danny like but research stuff was going on behind the scenes. I remember a very famous and part of this maybe was the the bear market, but part of it was maybe some truth.

• 36:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Famous tweet from Fred Wilson, Uniscore Ventures, and he was like Ethereum just doesn't know how to execute. They have the lead and they are falling.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Call someone call Silicon Valley.

• 36:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. This is not how this is basically what he said, because this is not how you build startups in Silicon Valley. How do you build startups? Well, you have startup organization, you ship fast, you break things, of course, we'll adopt that in the startup mantra. But you have to have governance, you have to have accountability, you have to have some structure. And the idea was that Ethereum would just fall prey to the, you know, tyranny of structurelessness. And it would never actually get anything done. Why? Because Silicon Valley knows how to build software. We did Facebook, we did Google, and that who are these Ethereum people trying to like make this thing happen with like what volunteers around the internet? Like, how does this even happen? Can you?

• 37:26Speaker 02

  It's funny because the internet actually is much more built like that. Obviously, you know, rather than these companies that were built on top of it. Maybe that's the parallel here is that like Ethereum is not trying to be a company. Ethereum is trying to be the internet is trying to be a foundational protocol of the internet.

• 37:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, what motivates them? Why do they get involved?

• 37:44Speaker 03

  But this is like interesting because I think if Ethereum is trying to be the internet, like what a lot of these people are trying to build are like web browsers, right? Like when you think of like a client, it's effectively like a web browser for Ethereum. And the original parity client actually had a UI, like a web browser UI. Now they've all ditched that. But and and I think that kind of gives you a good feel for like, why would they do that? It's like, well, why do people build Chrome or Firefox or like Safari, like, you know, different organizations want to like own the access to the network? Like the interface, you know, to access on the network for a bunch of reasons, like, you know. And and so I think you can get this mix where like you have these organizations that are financially motivated, like consensus is a company.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Sigma Prime is a company, Nettermind is a company, right? Like they need to make money at some point somehow. They don't necessarily make money on the client itself or need to ever do that. But like they very much need to like survive in the long run as an organization and they, I think. They do provide like, the people working on this are not all just like random volunteers, basically. Like, a lot of them, I think, do see themselves as a company, as like professionals who need to ship high-quality software. And, and that's like, we, we get a lot of like, you know, let's say Fred Wilson was complaining about through that. The thing we don't get is like the top-down roadmap, right? Like, this is the other thing that's like 10x easier in a startup.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  You just, you know, you have the VP of products, you know, talk with the CEO, say, okay, we're going to ship these three things. Um, and then that's done, right? And, you know, and, and then you can just kind of execute on them. We can't do that on Ethereum for like many reasons. Like, the first is just like, the people who write the code aren't the people who run the software. As like with the majority of the stake or the majority of the nodes on the network. So it needs to be like this weird sort of conversation across all these places of like, what, what is the thing we're converging towards? And otherwise, you know, client developers can write code for a bunch of stuff. Um, but if the community doesn't want to run the upgrades, then that was useless.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  And similarly, if the, the community might want a bunch of stuff to be possible on Ethereum, but if they can't convince client developers that there's, there's value to it, that it's, uh, Or that it's safe. Yeah, safe is the big one, you know, usually they can't convince client developers that it's safe. But then, then the code doesn't get written, right? And, and it doesn't go live. So I think this is the part where like from the outside, it's incredibly messy. And even from the inside, it is incredibly messy because like, there's no, there's no like VP of product who can be like, okay, we ship this thing.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  But in terms of the contributors themselves, I do feel like most people could like be spending their time doing something else because they're smart, they're motivated. So, you know, they want their time working on Ethereum to be valuable. And, you know, I think that does create a pressure to like ship meaningful stuff.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, there, there are certainly, there are organizations that have structure and are able to ship, but they're like a piece of the larger kind of amorphous puzzle. I think Ben Edgington referenced a, it was an article from nineteen ninety-nine about Linux, the cathedral and the bizarre, and how, you know, the Ethereum process is much more about, is a bizarre, you know, it is a place where there's lots of different specialties, lots of different things going on. And like, sometimes if there's something missing, naturally, somebody's going to kind of show up and fill in the gaps because it's, you know, there's, there's a motivation to kind of be a part of this, this thing. I will say, so you said, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, we weren't shipping.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  There were Herculean efforts going on, on, on Geth specifically. I mean, certainly on the beacon chain stuff, but that was all being worked on. But like, sure, the feature set that users saw being upgraded in Geth was very minimal, but like, the amount of work going on into like sustainability of that, of Geth in the context of mainnet, like state management, state access, database optimizations, all that kind of stuff, so that like, it can't, so that it can handle state growth and not be dost of the network, and optimizations and sync and other things like that, like, that was happening. That was very, very important, critical, but it was just like, it wasn't felt. So all, I think it's important to note,

• 42:07Speaker 02

  as client developers, there's always kind of, there's many streams, but you can think of two streams, like shipping new features and maintaining the client, right? And like, it oscillates between how much they're doing of one or the other. In twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, there was a lot of critical of the, of the ladder, of that maintenance of the client.

• 42:24David Hoffman?

  And maybe that goes back to what Tim was saying, was that, you know, there was a lot of shipping, but if you tell me what an optimization, optimization inside of Geth looks like, Danny, I have no clue what that means.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Sure, because it doesn't, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter to you. It's up that like, it kept the network.

• 42:40David Hoffman?

  But yeah, but yeah, I will notice when the network goes down. And so I haven't been seeing the network go down anytime soon. But Danny, I want to zoom in and just get this a little bit more concrete if we can. The way I've kind of pictured you and your job coordinating the arrival of the merge and proof of stake, and maybe this is incorrect, so we can start there, is like you just go to the heads of the client teams, and maybe, Tim, this is also maybe your job as well, you just go to the heads of the client teams, and just like, alright, like, we need to make sure that this part works with the other client teams. So like, you drill down into Prismatic, and you talk to like Preston and Raul and be like, "Hey, are you guys coordinated with like the other client teams? Are you guys all Gucci over there?" And so like, first question is like, how many,

• 43:23David Hoffman?

  if that's what you were doing, like, how many people were you interfacing with on like a semi-regular basis for like the months leading up to the merge? Like, can we actually like put that into a number? And then like, if that's N plus 1, where you are, and Danny's N, Preston Van Loon and Raul are like N plus 1s, as in people that Danny actually interfaces with, how many people are they interfacing with that are also working on the merge, right? Like, the question really is, how many ETH does it take to make a merge happen? And like, is it possible to put these things into numbers?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  But I don't spend a lot of my time knocking directly on doors, right? I actually, a lot of my time on upgrades is spent writing specifications,

• 44:08David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  and communicating and educating and coordinating around those, so like, and then dealing with the feedback loop around that, right? And a lot of that isn't like, "Hey Preston, have you seen this thing?" A lot of it's like, this is bubbled up as very important, pinging the right people, or making sure it comes up in a kind of a group setting call to kind of work through and get through. So the coordination mechanisms, by default, are very good, right? We have GitHub, we have public channels and stuff like that, so like, I don't have to be a hub, right? Like, I have to, sometimes it's like a matter of knowing what's missing and saying,

• 44:53Speaker 02

  "Hey, can you do this?", or "Hey, like, I really think you should take a look at this", that kind of stuff, but a lot of it is just kind of like... Keeping your eye on, on, on the things and making sure the pieces come together. And sometimes it's a bit more about like seeing, seeing the future in the sense that, okay, we have to write the software. We have to write tests for the software. We have to do test nets, do this and do that. So it's a matter of like, uh, making sure that the people that are going to be involved in this piece of the puzzle are aware that that piece of the puzzle is coming, right? And that, uh, they need to keep their eye on this so they can trigger that piece of the puzzle. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a lot more kind of these like soft things, um, kind of maneuvering around.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  And then, and then also like being, the more that, I think Tim and I both are like moderate to deeply involved in the technical weeds at times so that we can see, so it helps us kind of see how those pieces of puzzle fit together and knowing how to get ahead of things and make sure they come together properly.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Tim, any thoughts on this? I guess to answer your end question, if I had to like my sanity, probably like I must have been in touch with 25 to 50 people. Like indefinitely, like, you know, 25 would be like multiple messages, multiple interactions per week, right? Like, you know, and then 50 is maybe if you're like, you know, once every one or two weeks. And then you probably five to 10x that like in terms of more number of people like for sure, like, you know, a hundred 50 ish people working roughly for like, not necessarily full time on the merge, but for whom the merge was like their main thing.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  That seems roughly right, but then if you add like a bunch of adjacent folks, probably like double that or something like, um, there was not like a thousand people contributing, you know?

• 46:43Speaker 02

  I mean, if you start like thinking about all the like professional node operators and stackers, then you get into quite, quite a many, but I don't think that's what we're coming.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but if you're thinking about like people writing like code that then gets used by professional node operators or, or average node operators, I'd say my upper bound of like loosely involved is like on the couple of hundreds. Um, tightly involved is like on the hundred ish, um, range.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that might be variable even with a, within a client team, you know, they might have like, at the peak have had four or five people dedicated to getting out the core merge feature set and then. For the past three months, four months, might have been more like one to two owning it. And then if they needed backup because there was like some big hole or minor specification change, like more people would be jumping in. So, you know, it's kind of all over the place.

• 47:31David Hoffman?

  The fact that we can't really pin down a number is awesome.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  Well, let me just go to the Ethereum ecosystem org chart. Run a quick analysis.

• 47:41David Hoffman?

  You're muted, Ryan.

• 47:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, honestly, this is what I wanted to kind of ask because I think that there's a like a wisdom here and a resilience and a strength, and I would even say a scalability here that Silicon Valley doesn't benefit from and can't benefit from because this thing is so decentralized. And actually, when you kind of look back and you actually see that, no, it can ship, which is the main charge. If you have like a decentralized community, it can't ship. No, it can ship. Then you look at how actually strong this thing is and how many individuals are involved. Because you not only have all of these separate giga brains in all of the different client teams, you also have the rest of the Ethereum economy working for you, right?

• 48:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like staking providers and, you know, bridge software that's being built and infrastructure applications like Enfura and EtherScan. But then you also have like the rollup centric roadmap, which further creates innovation on, I think, what we'd now call the execution layer of Ethereum with teams like Arbitrum and Optimism and like Matter Labs and ZK Sync and Starkware. And all of these teams with their own set of like giga brains are now economically incented to continue hacking and developing on Ethereum codebase and like bringing that back into the core.

• 49:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so when you start to like, look at the different rings of the onion here, you have maybe like this core team and like these, you know, coordinators in the core dev group. But like, there are so many other layers to this. And this is a scalability that a Silicon Valley corporate structure could not possibly seek to emulate. And it allows you to like-

• 49:36Speaker 02

  It's much more the ecosystem.

• 49:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it allows you to expand in so many different directions at once.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  It also has a resiliency, right? Like Ethereum needs to exist.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  If the EFC is to exist, Ethereum needs to exist if Nethermind closes shop. You know, Ethereum, like this, and that's a design constraint that like Google doesn't have. Right? Like Google, Google exists when Google exists. Like that's the, they, they're, they're the same, one in the same. Whereas Ethereum Protocol and the abstract Ethereum network, um, you know, are independent of any one of these actors. Um, and that, that's, that is a like very important design constraint of Ethereum. And thus it builds and operates in a way that is just fundamentally different than a corporation.

• 50:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Danny, Tim, uh, when we come back, I think we want to talk about what's next? What's next for you individually? What's next for the devs? And then also what's next for Ethereum? We've bitten off the merge. We've successfully completed it. Is that the end? Are we ready to ossify? Is there more ahead? Guys, we'll be right back with these questions for Danny and Tim. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 50:49David Hoffman?

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• 52:14David Hoffman?

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• 53:08David Hoffman?

  And we are back with Danny Ryan and Tim Baker. I think if I were you guys and we were post-merge, I'd be having this like big existential crisis. It's like, what the hell do I do next? How does it feel to be on the other side of it? Do you guys know it? Are you guys taking a vacation? You're going on a break? What's like the next thing? The next chapter of your guys' lives? Danny, I'll start with you.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  I spent a lot of time on Friday and Monday and Tuesday doing a deep dive on the 4844 and withdrawal specs.

• 53:44David Hoffman?

  Wow, no breaks, huh?

• 53:46Speaker 02

  I think I was totally off on Thursday. I was useless on Thursday because I stayed up till 4:00 in the morning. But yeah, pretty much I want us to be in a good position to have Shanghai conversations and keep things moving. I think withdrawals are very important to the community. So there's a bit of testing and refinement going on there, as are scaling proposals like 4844. And you know, again, one of the things that I really enjoy doing, and I think I have a good insight into, is kind of writing and reviewing specifications. So I want to make sure that I get that done so that we can keep moving. But yeah, I need a break. After DevCon, I'm taking a not insignificant amount of time off.

• 54:29David Hoffman?

  Okay, so in the middle of October, second week of October is DevCon. You're gonna take like a month off?

• 54:35Speaker 02

  So like three weeks, um, you know, it may be up for debate.

• 54:40David Hoffman?

  Okay, Tim, Tim, you taking a break anytime soon?

• 54:43Speaker 03

  So actually, I think a break right before the merge. I don't write code for this stuff. So, you know, when my job sort of picks up now, I guess in a way.

• 54:53David Hoffman?

  Oh, now that the merge is out of the way, you can ship so many more things?

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Now we need to talk about what we ship next. And that's, that's kind of what I do, right? So, um, and I think we, we had purposefully like stopped talking about that for the past like four or five months, just because, um, we wanted to focus on the merge and it was so big. Uh, but you can think of it a bit like a dam, you know, like we kind of closed the dam and the pressure has built up. Um, and now people really want to talk about what comes next. Um, so yeah, uh, that's, that's what I, I'll be focusing on. Um, and that said, you know, we,

• 55:29Speaker 03

  we didn't want to have the client teams like jump into planning Shanghai the day after the merge. So like, um, we're going to be canceling a couple of core devs and consensus layer calls, um, in the coming weeks. So people can like have those conversations async and you know, slowly kind of wrap their heads about, around what's being proposed, what are the different options here? Um, but without feeling like they need to kind of attend every week, otherwise they might miss like the whole upgrade scope changing. Um, so I think it's like laying the groundwork so that, you know, after DevCon, like, once people come back and they've, they've had a time to disconnect and kind of refresh. Um, we have a good idea of like the general picture and, and then we can kind of finalize the scope and, and start, start implementing these stuff.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  In some sense, consensus layer teams have been working on the merge for four years straight. You know, ever since they started working on the beacon chain, the beacon chain was always intended to become the consensus mechanism of theorem. That's all they've been working on, you know, is getting it ready for being the consensus mechanism of theorem. So I think. You know, everyone is taking a moment, you know, is that, is that a week? Is that a day? Is that, is that a month? And when exactly? Hard to say, but everyone's taking a breath. A well deserved moment.

• 56:42David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. Super well deserved. Yeah. Four years straight of just proof of stake merge, proof of stakes merge. I'm sure you need, you need to take a break to be able to come back with a new frame of mind. And it sounds like the answer to the question of what's next for Ethereum is Shanghai, the Shanghai hard fork. But

• 57:00Speaker 03

  By definition.

• 57:01David Hoffman?

  But, but, uh, yeah, by, well, yes, by definition, but also that it sounds like the Shanghai hard fork hasn't totally been defined. But Tim, to the best of your ability, can you kind of just like, you know, using our, our, our going westward metaphor? Can you explain what's in the path ahead of us? What is the Shanghai fork mostly going to be about?

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, like you said, it's still very much in flux. And part of the reason why we stopped discussing it is because like three, four months ago, at least on the execution layer side, people were starting to like make decisions about what should maybe go in and whatnot. And it felt like it was so early, like we didn't have the code for the merge done and we were already committing to all these things for, for Shanghai. And on the execution layer, we have this concept of like considered for inclusion, which is like a soft commitment to EIPs because usually we don't know how like big EIPs are until we actually start writing the code. So considered for inclusion is when we say, look, you know, this sounds like a good idea. It seems like it's not going to break Ethereum. We'll try and implement it. And usually if there's no issues, we would, we would move it to mainnet, right?

• 58:05Speaker 03

  If, if we do find something that, you know, we might fix it, but it's not like a strong commitment that we'll, we'll ship this no matter what.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  And then the consensus layer side has a completely different process of just like making PRs to the specs. And I can let Danny chime into that after, but at a high level, from the, from the execution layer side, the main, the two main things we had sort of soft committed to are beacon chain withdrawals. So there's the spec for that is, is pretty much done. I like Danny was saying, you know, he's been refining it and writing tests. And this is something we did like leave out of the merge and, and there was always this idea that like we would have to get to it shortly after. So we have like soft committed to that. It's not implemented yet.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  The second big thing are Potentially not as big, but it's this EIP called EVM object format. And this is like a neat thing. People have been trying to improve the EVM for years. And there's always this question of like, well, what do you do with existing smart contracts? Right? If you add new functionality, are you going to break everything that's on chain? And so the Ypsilon R and D team has come up with like this really smart thing where we can define versions of the EVM on the network and have, you know, contracts specified that they use a new version. And then you introduce new functionality only in those, but everything that already exists kind of maintains its its current behavior. So there's no changes there. And so that's the second kind of big thing we'd already soft committed to.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of other smaller things we've soft committed to, but you can think of them as, you know, basically one line changes. They're not in practice, but you know, they're all very minor features that add. Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  One line, one line of feature and then like 10,000 lines of testing.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. So there's a couple of those. Some of them actually aren't even that much testing because they just add bounds that were implicit on the network. And we just make those explicit. So things like, like, but basically the two big things we've soft committed to are these withdrawals. And then this EVM object format. There's a whole other list of things that's being proposed. There's an Ethereum Magicians tag now called Shanghai dash candidate. So if you go to Ethereum Magicians and you search for that, you can see the whole list of things that are being proposed. And this is what over like the next month, people will discuss and kind of wade through. And then we'll see if, you know, we, we update our currently existing list with other stuff.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  If we remove anything, you know, because we think it's either no longer relevant or because there's some like unforeseen complexity.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  So that's, that's what we'll, yeah, right there. Okay. So if you click there, you see like, say the first one there, you know, Shanghai candidate EIP 374. But then you can see there's a tag under it called Shanghai candidate. So if you click on that tag, oh, you're actually already on the page. So that, that tag will, will show all of them that are being considered.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  And the discussions on them.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  So yeah, so that's basically it on the execution layer. The consensus layer is a bit different. So Danny, do you want to kind of walk through how that works?

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  Right, so the consensus layer, the beacon chain was architected in parallel to the proof work chain. We all know this and then it was merged. But in doing so, the specification process was independent of the EIPs at the time and ended up in its own repo consensus specs. And here, features are proposed as kind of like little branches of code. It's an executable specification where they also do testing and issues and PRs. We discuss them. We do expect this process to over time inherit and unify a bit more with the EIPs. And especially with some of these features like cross layer. So like withdrawals are not just a feature on the sense layer.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  They're a feature on the sense layer that interacts with the execution layer. So again, and I think these things will converge over time. But one of the big things that we have on the consensus side that's been spectated is up for discussion or refinement. Or the withdrawals, the consensus layer analog to the withdrawals. And another feature on the consensus layer that has been spectated is up for discussion is the 4844. Both of those being cross, cross layer. There might be, you know, I think especially between now and DevCon, there could be like a little thing or two that pops up and ends up as kind of, you know, analog to one of those like one line changes, like some sort of like weird edge case that's worth cleaning up. You could expect maybe something like that pops up, but those are the two big ones under discussion.

• 1:02:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the famous ones, the ones echoing kind of the user and investor community in our ears are definitely withdrawals. So people want to know if they can get their ETH back, right? And when, at what point in time? And the other one, of course, is, as you just mentioned, Danny, EIP 4844, which maybe is the most famous EIP since EIP 15.

• 1:03:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  59? 1559, excuse me. Apparently not that famous. Yeah. And so this is one proto dank sharding. And this is all about, we've done entire episodes on EIP 4844 on Bankless. This is all about kind of the scalability of data and providing that as part of the rollup centric roadmap. So this is the big-

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Proto, because it's an iterative way to get there.

• 1:03:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  The first one.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  We get some scale and we lay the foundation to get more scale.

• 1:03:38David Hoffman?

  Just one small point on that. It's also because of proto lambda, right?

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Correct, and it's dank because it's dank. And it's also dank because it's not good.

• 1:03:47David Hoffman?

  Okay, that's just fantastic Ethereum trivia. I wanted to get out there.

• 1:03:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I guess maybe zooming out, right? What problems would you say Ethereum still has yet to solve in its roadmap? Because I think, maybe you guys have a divergent view here, but I think everything we've seen from the core dev community is that Ethereum at a protocol, from a protocol perspective, like will ossify at some point in time. There will be fewer changes over time, right? Like at some point in time, your jobs will be done. And Danny, you could go open that coffee shop that you've always wanted to open, right? But like, that day is not today. It's not yet. So we've gotten through the merge, but what are the other core problems? And I guess the high level of the merge is now we have staking and we no longer have proof of work.

• 1:04:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've cemented Ethereum's monetary policy and Ether's monetary policy as well. But what other big problems are there to solve, would you say, Danny?

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  So my lens, when I'm thinking about what needs to happen to that one protocol is first and foremost, we need to get to functional escape velocity. Patel has written about this, essentially the minimum amount of functionality on layer one to be able to do, extend and build and whatever on top of it. So we can stop changing it. And then my lens from there is, and I talk about this all the time, security, sustainability and scalability, right? Like I think we made a massive leap forward with proof of stake on the security front, also on the sustainability front. Sustainability is nice, encompasses a number of things. Obviously, we've got that environmental standard sustainability stamp of approval, but now-

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  There's other types of sustainability, so like the sustainability of the protocol from the state standpoint of state growth, right? So we need this protocol to be sustainable such that we don't need to intervene with it, abusing that term, because sustainability, environmental sustainability and protocol sustainability is probably a little bit different. But, you know, so we need to, we need to bound state growth, we need to bound node resource requirements so this thing can stay decentralized, and we need scale, right? And so that's, that's rollups with the, the nice L1 data multiplier through, through dank sharding. I, there's probably some other very important things that could manifest inside of Ethereum,

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  like the beacon state root landing in, in the EVM, or BLS signatures landing in the EVM, or things like that. A lot of this stuff, personally, I consider nice to have, and on our ossification journey, maybe they'll make it in or not, but really, for me, it's, this thing needs to be secure, needs to be sustainable, and needs to be scalable. And we need to do the minimum and simplest approach to get those three things in a place where we don't have to touch this thing anymore.

• 1:06:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Danny, are we like, are we like, five years from the coffee shop? Are we 10 years from the coffee shop? Is it, is it longer?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Um, I think five years is actually like very, very, very reasonable. And the nice thing is, especially like sustainability, like the node architecture sustainability, that's something that isn't going to bite us in the ass tomorrow. It's something that we have to fix, but it's going to, it can take time. And then the scalability, we're, we're getting, we're getting scale through all up today, and we're working on multiplying that iteratively over time. So like, it doesn't actually feel like there's a massive fire and that we can do this right, and we can do this over the next three to five years.

• 1:07:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tim, what about from your perspective?

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  I think five years is optimistic, but I think one way you could, you could do this, if, if you really wanted to never touch the core protocol again, is you can segment this between changes that require consensus level changes, not consensus layer, but just like protocol rules. And you can think of something like on the execution layer, like at stateless Ethereum, right? Like, we need to change A tri-structure from one thing to another, this requires a hard fork, potentially many hard forks. But then, once that's done, there's some stuff that you can potentially do outside of the protocol. It's almost like semi-ossification. You can have something where like, example, EIP 4444, which is about dropping the history requirements for nodes.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  But something that doesn't change the protocol rules for Ethereum, it changes the client behavior, right? And it helps to get kind of a more accessible nodes and greater decentralization. So I could see a world where like, you know, maybe we have five-ish years left of like consensus there changes. And then I'm not optimistic that will be done then, but I could see maybe the second half of that decade is like things that clients agree. So like the protocol rules don't change, but the implementations of them all kind of change in tandem to be to be better.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  For example, you could you could have a better sync state sync protocol.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  And that you could do it in eight years and doesn't change Ethereum.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, but even EIP 4444 doesn't need any protocol changes, right?

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  That's kind of like a sync protocol change.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So I could see, and same with something like stateless, you know, you could like frontload all of the protocol changes, but only start gossiping the witnesses and building the blocks separately after that, right? And the rules of the protocols don't change from that. So I could see that. I I don't get it all done in five years, but if you if you give me an extra five or you don't change the protocol rules.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  I, I think we're going to not, I think it's going to get harder and harder. And for and for good, like, because it's just going to be harder and because it for good reason. And so like, things that take 10 years, I don't think are going to happen.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I agree with that. I feel like the the bar that a feature needs to hit or like a potential protocol change needs to hit to be considered.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  It's getting higher.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  And the reason is just there's more stakeholders, right? Like, there's just more people who need to agree it's a good idea. And there's more impact if it's if it goes wrong. And usually, we're also at the point where like, there's not many free lunches anymore on Ethereum. Most of the themes we're considering have like trade-offs. And by virtue of having your trade-off, it's like, you need to get people to agree to one side of the trade-off. And that gets harder and harder as the community grows. So I think we have this natural tendency towards there. And the question is like, how do you strategically fit all the potential changes such that they're like? Doable before the community like is too big and too hard to coordinate for something like that.

• 1:10:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think the message we're hearing from both of you is that there's a lot of work ahead. And like years of work ahead to pull off the entire Ethereum roadmap. And I know we're all here to like, because we believe in crypto. Because we think that Ethereum will make the world a better place. But also, Tim, I know it's your take that that's not necessarily inevitable. And maybe this is a reason that we actually have to put in the hard work. Bankless Twitter account recently tweeted out, what's your most cancelable crypto take? And I thought, Tim, you had a really interesting, insightful take here, which is it's not a given that crypto will actually make the world better.

• 1:10:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is what you said, and we should heavily caveat such claims and push back and and work hard to make sure it actually ends up being the case. That the thing that we are building actually does make the world better. Can you talk a little bit about that, Tim?

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like the bankless Twitter baited me right before this call. Yeah, look, I think, you know, especially with especially with the merge now. And I think in general, like the space we we we we want to believe we're building something that makes the world better. And I think, to be clear, crypto even today brings it on a ton of positives, right? And the question is like 10 years from now, is the balance in that positive or in that negative? I think it's sort of recognizing that, like, you know, there's still many scams. The environmental bit was like concerning up to recently. And, you know, things like privacy, there's a world where like crypto enables mass financial surveillance on a scale that's like never been seen.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  And like lays the lays the path for like central bank digital currencies. You know, we kind of build the technology that like governments would never have thought to build. And then they just co-opted and built kind of the worst possible version of it. And, and, you know, I'm not saying that that's the likely outcome. I'm saying it very much is a possible outcome. And that's something that like, as a community, we should think about. I think somewhat paradoxically, at the protocol level, it's almost where we have the least impact on a lot of this stuff. I think we can help, you know. Anything that helps make joining the protocol and participating as low requirement as possible is good, because it means you just get like a more diverse set of participants and it's harder to

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  capture. But I think, you know, when thinking about like what applications we build, what scaling solutions we build, I don't know, that's, that's something that's very much on my mind, like, are we sure that this is not just going to be used by like some government or just use as is and, you know, force everyone to say use USDC and then that's actually a worse status quo than say bank accounts on many respects.

• 1:13:00David Hoffman?

  The joke I was giving with Ryan is when we were talking about this tweet before the livestream before the livestream, Tim was that, oh, sweet, we just shipped Ethereum to proof of stake. Now our Ponzi SIS platform is like super efficient. It's gonna be great.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uncensorable.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  And I think, yeah, I think, you know, scams are like almost the easiest version to like defend against because like people just kind of learn, like you look at the early internet, right? There were tons of scams that they like mostly went away or got like relegated. So I'm, I'm not, I don't lose sleep over scams. I think like privacy and like financial surveillance is probably the biggest one that I think is, is a, is a challenge. And, and it's, it's, it's a challenge, not only because like the tech is hard, but also because there's a world where you build privacy and that's also like a terrible world, like you, you know, there's very bad ways to build privacy software. So like, yeah, it is.

• 1:13:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's super interesting. There certainly can be with any of these new technologies, many unintended consequences that that become unleashed. I know in particular, of course, you guys, I'm sure have been following like the, you know, AI type discussions and AI ethic type discussions in.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  It's a bit of a cop out to say they're unintended. What I'm saying is, I think, you know, we can very much predict the second order effects. And I think there's a world where like, even, and, and the AI, the AI risk, people will tell you that as well, you know, like with Google and when they'll criticize Google and OpenAI, it's like the people there are very well aware of the risk, but they're driving in that direction, thinking, you know, they will somehow avoid them. But it's not like an unintended consequence. It's just like a second order effect. You chose this, this because you thought you could like navigate around it. And we very well, very well might, but it's, yeah, it's not a given, I think.

• 1:14:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  This kind of stuff breaks my brain a little bit, but Danny, do you have a, do you have a take on this?

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  My take is that without such technologies that blockchains enable, we're on a crash course anyway with the massive corporate surveillance and government surveillance and kind of the manipulation and control going on here. And so at the very least, this intermediates that trajectory and allows us to kind of rethink and re-architect what's going on. Obviously, we could re-architect it badly, poorly. But one thing that blockchains do provide that traditional structures do not is that even if we end up in a weird or bad equilibrium, you can do new things, right?

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  So if we end up in a world where we're using two rollups and they're massively surveyed and controlled, you can actually build another rollup that has privacy, right? So like, there's a certain matter of choice, as long as we have a neutral base layer that the stratum provides for humanity. Obviously, there can be structures beyond that disallow us from exercising that choice. For example, if we were regulated to use the government sanctioned rollup, we might have issues in exercising our choice to create a new privacy rollup. But that kind of extra protocol consideration aside, these protocols allow us choice that does not exist in our current structure. So I'm, you know, I'm a pessimist.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  I'm trying to be the optimist here, but you know, I think that's my optimistic take here.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  And I did caveat my tweet with like a more optimistic one, which is like, it's really hard to have this conversation because when like critics will compare you to like perfect, right, to the perfect world. And they'll say, you know, like Ethereum is like not perfect because of X, Y, and Z. But then like Danny was saying, like the status quo very much isn't, right? So ideally, all you want is like a net improvement over the status quo. But to get that, I think you need to almost hold yourself to like a much higher bar internally. But yeah, it's a very tricky thing to do when, again, all this happens in the open and there's no top down, you know? It's not like I can choose what privacy solutions Ethereum will build, right? Like, you know, I can like-

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Or that, or even more so that people will build on top of it, right?

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So like, you know, like I can do many things like an individual, but it's like, it's not like a top-down thing. So it's like a tricky- Yeah, it's almost harder than the AI problem because the AI problem, you know, you have like a limited number of organizations with enough hardware to actually meaningfully make progress and then you can like steer them. We have like this amorphous blob of people all working on it. Yeah, and that's a harder thing to.

• 1:17:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is interesting. It is interesting that it's kind of out of the core Dev's hands, right? And it's, you know, it's back to kind of the layer zero, back to the community. And I do appreciate something that that you were saying is like, these types of takes are not takes that you'd get canceled for in Ethereum. Like, I feel very proud that the Ethereum community is always one that kind of is its harshest critic at times. And I hope we're able to preserve that that moving forward, because I think that's that's gotten us to the merge and gotten us to this era of momentum around shipping. And Tim and Danny, we just want to want to thank you guys both for joining us and also for helping to deliver this. I

• 1:18:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  know it's not just you, of course. You are flanked by and represented by dozens, hundreds.

• 1:18:30David Hoffman?

  An uncountable number, yeah.

• 1:18:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like developers from around the world who helped make this happen. But as kind of their voice and their face, I think on behalf of a community of users and passionate people, individuals on the blacklist journey, like sincerely, thank you. We appreciate you. We appreciate all of the core devs, all of the researchers who made the merge happen. And it's feeling very much like the the future of Ethereum is bright, thanks to your work.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Thank you. And echo that shout out to everyone involved in this. It was a colossal effort.

• 1:19:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of which, by the way, we are having Vitalik on the show tomorrow. What should we ask Vitalik, guys? Any burning questions in your mind, Danny or Tim?

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  I talk to him all the time.

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  Ask him, yeah, I think Vitalik has been drawn into the AI conversations and where that's going for humanity. I think a lot of people have, but he has some really interesting takes there. So if you have a moment, take a sidestep from crypto and his takes on AI.

• 1:19:41David Hoffman?

  That sounds like some great bear market content.

• 1:19:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we will leave it there, everyone in the midst of the bear market, but we are building. Danny and Tim, thank you so much for joining us and of course, Bankless Nation. Remember, none of this has been financial advice. ETH is risky, so is Ethereum, it always is. Crypto is risky, all of it. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  Thank you.