Etherealize: Ethereum is Open for Business | Danny Ryan & Vivek Raman

We’ve got the team behind Etherealize on the show today—Vivek Raman and Danny Ryan—to discuss their mission to onboard institutions, governments, and capital markets to Ethereum. We explore how Ethereum is “open for business” with L2 scaling, modular architecture, and a maturing regulatory landscape. The Etherealize team breaks down their dual structure—a for-profit consulting and product arm alongside a nonprofit focused on R&D and policy—to drive institutional adoption. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🏦INFINEX | THE CRYPTO-EVERYTHING APP https://bankless.cc/Infinex ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:12 Etherealize & Its Mission 00:15:29 Clients & Finances 00:20:17 Relation Between Ethereum Foundation & Etherealize 00:21:31 Etherealize's Funding 00:22:43 Etherealize's Competitions 00:26:02 Challenges & Roadblocks 00:28:15 What Success Looks Like for Etherealize 00:29:56 Etherealize's Co-Founders 00:31:10 Ethereum’s Upcoming Era 00:40:20 What Makes Ethereum Special 00:46:00 Political Effect on Ethereum 00:51:33 Community Support 00:54:51 Layer 1 & Etherealize 00:58:36 Hypothetical Scenarios with Ethereum 01:01:50 What’s Next for Etherealize 01:04:47 Some Unturned Stones 01:07:32 Closing & Disclosures ------ RESOURCES Etherealize https://www.etherealize.com Vivek Raman https://x.com/VivekVentures Danny Ryan https://x.com/dannyryan ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I come from Wall Street trading floors. We like winning. We like competition, but it's almost as if Ethereum is already ahead. Ethereum is already winning. When we go in and say Ethereum is the only blockchain without downtime, where you have the most amount of tokenized assets, the most amount of economic security, the most amount of regulatory precedent, the most amount of institutional adoption. Ethereum is the default. We just have to remind people why.

• 0:31David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today, we're exploring the intersection of Ethereum and Wall Street. Ethereum is open for business. After 10 years of the Ethereum network being online without a single instance of downtime, Ethereum is finally ready to go to Wall Street. Now, parts of Wall Street have already noticed that Ethereum is incredibly well-suited for institutional financial products. BlackRock has already put a billion dollars of tokenized treasuries on Ethereum. Franklin Templeton already has tokenized funds on-chain. But these are examples of institutions coming to Ethereum. Now, Ethereumize is bringing Ethereum to institutions. During Ethereum's early transformative years, from its inception in 2015 to the modern era in 2025,

• 1:14David Hoffman?

  Ethereum has made and kept a commitment to being an open, permissionless, credibly neutral platform. A commitment to credible neutrality has been Ethereum's strategy for targeting the world's largest TAM. The more politically neutral Ethereum can be, the more it can attract larger institutions to build on its rails. Ethereum doesn't want just businesses. It wants to host entire governments and nation-state economies on its rails. This is Ethereumize's mission. Ethereum is ready. Ethereum is open for business. Ethereum represents the next steps for civilization to accelerate into the future. Today on the show, we have two of Ethereumize's co-founders, Vivek Ramon and Danny Ryan, to tell us exactly how they are going to fill the void

• 1:57David Hoffman?

  that has been left in Ethereum's early years during its commitment towards credible neutrality, and how they are going to give Ethereum a voice in the room with some of the world's largest institutions. Starting with Wall Street, but expanding globally. Globally to work with governments and economies to help bring the world's largest organizations on-chain. I asked Danny and Vivek how Ethereumize works and what the strategy is. I asked whether Ethereumize has what it takes to go toe-to-toe with Ethereum's sharkiest competitors. I learned about Ethereumize's relationship with the Ethereum Foundation and the broader Ethereum ecosystem. And Danny, Vivek and I all discuss this new era for Ethereum. Now that Ethereum has locked in the largest possible lead of an ecosystem,

• 2:39David Hoffman?

  having established itself as the most decentralized, the most credibly neutral ecosystem, to become an ecosystem that has all of that, but is now also hungry and aggressive and willing to compete toe-to-toe with its shortcut-taking competitors on a playing field in which Ethereum has all the edge if it can just learn how to leverage it. This episode with Ethereumize's co-founders Danny and Vivek is exactly what I wanted to hear to confirm my understanding of the reawakening of Ethereum into its new era. I'll admit, I was uncertain of what I was going to hear from Ethereumize. I did not know if I was going to come out of this episode convinced that Ethereum has fully reoriented itself into the direction it needs to go. But after talking with Danny Vivek and especially getting into Danny's take

• 3:23David Hoffman?

  about how this transformation that Ethereum is going through is also being found in other parts of the broader Ethereum ecosystem. And it once again makes me very excited for what the future of Ethereum has in store. So, if you appreciate this podcast, please subscribe. If you're already subscribed, please open up your phone and just give us a five-star review. This is how we help the world go bankrupt. This will be how we help Ethereum go to Wall Street. And it also gets bankrupt to the top of the charts, where we can be heard by more people. We're going to go here from Danny Vivek right now, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Imagine verifying yourself without handing over personal data. No hacked databases, no unnecessary personal exposure for airdrops, and no AI bots ruining community governance.

• 4:04David Hoffman?

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• 4:47David Hoffman?

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• 5:31David Hoffman?

  most efficient swap without even thinking about it. Whether you're swapping, sending, on-ramping, off-ramping, or bridging, Uniswap's web app and wallet gives you the tools to unlock DeFi's full potential on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Unichain, and more. Use Uniswap's web app and wallet for a more efficient way to use DeFi. You may have already heard about Infinix. Infinix has, in my opinion, the nicest cross-chain swap and bridge feature that you will find anywhere. It is called Swidge, swap and bridge, and we're going to show you what it looks like. First, we're going to log into my Infinix account with a passkey. Now, there's no seed phrases in Infinix. This is just a one-click setup with biometric passkeys. But in addition to that, my Infinix account is fully non-custodial. So bam, I just logged in. It was two clicks, and I'm already into my Infinix account. So let's go make a Swidge.

• 6:14David Hoffman?

  I'm going to go Swidge my USDC that is on Base, and I'm going to buy Bara Chain, which is a completely different chain. So we're going to Swidge this. I'm going to press that button, and then Infinix is going to execute this order, this cross-chain order for me. And now it is done. But actually, I'm not really feeling Barish anymore, so I'm going to go from Bara to Penguins. I'm going to buy Penguin on Solana, so I'm going from the Bara Chain to Solana. See, no transaction signing, no gas to worry about. You just Swidge across whatever chain that you want with Infinix. That was so easy. Go check out Infinix and try your first Swidge today. Bankless Nation, super honored to introduce Danny Ryan. He's a former Ethereum Foundation Coordinator, famous for coordinating and leading the effort behind shipping the merge, which is probably the largest distributed system software update humanity has ever achieved.

• 6:59David Hoffman?

  Danny, it's so great to have you back on the show. I hope your sabbatical treated you well, and it's an honor to have you back.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 7:05David Hoffman?

  And with us as well is Vivek Ramon, co-founder of Etherealize. He has spent a decade on Wall Street doing fixed income trading, leveraged loans, credit default swaps, very deep structural components of the global financial system. And he launched Etherealize back in January of this year. Vivek, welcome to Bankless.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Great to see you.

• 7:21David Hoffman?

  Vivek, I want to start with you. I want to know what the mission of Etherealize is, but maybe you could, in addition to that, just start by explaining what the Etherealize entity setup is like. Is this a nonprofit? Is this a foundation for profit? Legally speaking, what is the structure? And then what is the mission of Etherealize?

• 7:38Speaker 00

  So Etherealize is a Delaware C corp. Our scope is expanding, which is an honor and a privilege, being joined with Danny. So there will also be a nonprofit portion of it. And the ultimate goal is to connect institutions to the Ethereum ecosystem, which is basically broadened out to saying, we now have a really, really unique opportunity to bring the world to Ethereum. Ethereum is open for business. It's upgraded. It's ready with the layer two modular scaling. And now we need to be very, very aggressive on the onboarding process and bring the world on.

• 8:11David Hoffman?

  And then Danny, just picking into your brain, what really brought you to Etherealize? Can you share just what you see in the Etherealize mission? Everyone who knows you, knows you as a beloved technologist, an engineer, a social coordinator, who resonates deeply with Ethereum's mission. Can you share how Etherealize fits into the identity that you have for your work and arc with Ethereum?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  There's a couple of things there. Firstly, the mission of onboarding. Financial institutions in the US, like on the one hand, I look at that, I'm like, is that, is that really my mission? Is that what I need to be spending my time on? But as I was pondering, like, the regulatory shift, I think two things happened here. Like, one, there is a unique opportunity here. Like, the world is ready from, like, demanding these products, as well as the kind of legal frameworks potentially coming in play for them to onboard. And we have this unique window to do so. And there's also something I was, I was pretty worried about at the end of last year was the regulatory pendulum has swung, and there is a lot of opportunity now. But I was certainly very worried about the regulatory pendulum swinging back in the other direction in that four-year

• 9:17Speaker 02

  time horizon, in potentially a very drastic manner. But I realized, if we do actually begin to onboard the world, and we do actually begin to onboard, like, significant real-world assets onto Ethereum, the regulatory pendulum is only going to swing so far. And blockchains will be here to stay, and will be integrated into the fabric of society. So it seemed like it actually is an existential moment and opportunity for Ethereum to do this mission. Additionally, being at the forefront of adoption with these institutions, I think is going to uncover things that we need to do in L1, L2, or even in the application layer, with respect to R and D, with respect to standards, with respect to all sorts of

• 10:00Speaker 02

  things. But we're going to be on the front lines of adoption with a very, like, critical kind of customer and consumer base. And that is going to give me more intel into, you know, what are the real-world blockers? What are the things preventing Ethereum from being global, neutral, you know, civilizational infrastructure? So we want to kind of kick that feedback loop from being on the front lines back into what Ethereum needs to be. So it does kind of fill in that previous mission of what are the more, like, fundamental things that need to happen? I think we're going to have a really good lens into that.

• 10:34David Hoffman?

  Feck, I want to go back to you and kind of just make the idea and mission of Ethereumize just a little bit more concrete. I think the branding around Ethereumize, what people understand about Ethereumize is we are trying to connect institutions with Ethereum. We're trying to get institutions more comfortable with Ethereum. But that's also kind of just a nebulous idea. I want to make that just really concrete for myself and the listeners. What does that actually look like? And I asked the question about what the legal structure of Ethereumize is. As a Delaware C corp, my understanding is that that is a for-profit entity with this mission to onboard institutions to Ethereum. Can you just kind of color in all of that a little bit? How does all of that kind of fit together? And what does that actually look like? What does success look like?

• 11:13Speaker 00

  So I always wanted crypto to have a home in the US. And I think we have this over to window shift where now it's de-risk to actually build lasting crypto companies in the US with real fundamentals, with real business models, with the ability to thrive and be sustainable. And that is the most exciting over to window shift that I've seen. Ethereumize started pretty narrow scope and it's expanded as the demand increased. We started with institutional marketing and business development for the Ethereum ecosystem. So that's basically going around to Wall Street institutions and saying, blockchains are actually a backend where capital markets can settle, where assets are going to be tokenized, where assets are going to be traded, where we're going to have a one-time upgrade

• 11:57Speaker 00

  and shift of the financial system from physical old settlement, which I saw for 10 years while I was at four different banks. I mean, we laugh about interoperability being difficult on blockchains. You look at bank interoperability and you look at backup systems and it's still from the Stone Age effectively. So this wonderful new technology, this blockchain substrate is now ready for adoption. The regulatory window is now open and saying that banks can now adopt blockchains, banks can custody tokenize assets. All of this experimentation has happened with the banks for the last 10 years where they've had internal private blockchains. We now have a shot to put it all in a public blockchain. I think Ethereum is the endgame for that. So, starting off with business development and marketing and educating them about Ethereum

• 12:41Speaker 00

  was the primary directive. After a month or two of that, though, we realized very, very quickly that Ethereum is more than just shilling an asset or showing a technology. It's ready for adoption and we need to help banks and institutions and TradFi players actually build the products to bring their assets and bring their user bases onto Ethereum. So that's where the product side started, saying that we need to hold people's hands. We need to get our hands dirty. We need to actually go in, do the off-chain part, do the on-chain part, actually build the systems needed to make this one-time phase shift from legacy finance to blockchains. And so that's where the for-profits part came in, saying that we actually want to build products. We actually want to say that we're building things

• 13:23Speaker 00

  for Ethereum. And then when I very serendipitously connected with Danny, he said, let's expand that scope even more beyond for-profit to a nonprofit arm, saying that R and D and specific application based R and D, things like policy, things like more broad marketing and ecosystem, that needs to happen on a perpetual basis. And so that's another segment that we're setting up as well. And they all interplay really, really well, because it creates a flywheel of adoption that I don't think Ethereum has done before. And I think it is very, very mission critical to do that now.

• 13:55David Hoffman?

  Okay, so if I'm understanding your answer, is Ethereumize on the for-profit side, kind of like an institutional consulting entity that helps institutions, you guys just hold institutions' hands, help them understand Ethereum, learn what they can do on Ethereum. And then the nonprofit side is a little bit more like lobbying and more policy work. Is that a way to understand Ethereumize?

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Yes, expanding that a little bit. It's consulting and product development.

• 14:18David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  We have a pretty epic engineering force that can build products for institutions. And then on the nonprofit side, it also includes R and D, which I think feeds Ethereum's not Bitcoin. It can keep upgrading, keep getting better, and blockchains can't get stagnant. If we can help drive some of that and help shape the roadmap, that'll be beneficial for the whole ecosystem.

• 14:38David Hoffman?

  And so in order for the Ethereumize project to work, you guys need clients. Like you guys are going out to Wall Street, trying to acquire clients that's going to pay for the salaries, that's going to get the job done. And then you guys grow the client side of the business, which helps fund few Add energy to the nonprofit lobbying side and that is that flywheel that you guys are talking about. Whereas one grows, the other one is more legitimized, has more distribution and you guys can get bigger and better clients. Is that the idea here?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, also the flywheel and the interplay between, you know, if we're going to onboard the world, which is the goal here, it's not just knock on the door and educate. It's not just knock on the door and build them some products. It requires things across the stack. It requires making sure that law is going in the favor, open, neutral, decentralized systems. It's ensuring that the learnings on the front lines of reward adoption is feeding back into R and D so that the stack becomes what it needs to be. And so really it's like this full kind of integrated process to make sure that we can onboard the world.

• 15:39David Hoffman?

  Who are the target clients then? Vivek, you've been on Wall Street for a decade. I think having Danny on your team as somebody who understands Ethereum almost more than anyone, maybe perhaps more than anyone, is an incredible asset. Who are like your ideal clients? Are you working with banks? Are you working with people like BlackRock? Who are your ideal clients? And then what are the kind of things that you are helping them do?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  So Wall Street's a starting point. Wall Street is not the endpoint. It's a subset of the world. That being said, it's important to have focus at the start and then with Danny, where as a team, we're able to tap all of it. Starting with Wall Street though, there are sell-side banks that have been experiencing specifically with Ethereum instances, but also with blockchain adoption for 10 years. They're very familiar with blockchains. They know what the use cases are and they know what the benefits are. Plugging them into public Ethereum and making that one-time upgrade is one very, very large customer base. The other side is the asset managers. So the players that actually hold funds that want to start tokenizing them and putting them into a public blockchain. So you can unlock the benefits of tokenization, faster settlement, more access,

• 16:43Speaker 00

  having digital assets that can all interoperate and then start to play around in DeFi and start creating structured products and create this flywheel of financial innovation. That's the other side of it. That's the quote unquote buy side. There are also a bunch of different players in between and too, from brokerages to mid-market funds. And we're going to a cross-section of all of them, saying that capital markets. Are going to move on to public blockchains. We think it's very, very important to highlight that Ethereum is the most neutral, the most secure, the most global blockchain for that adoption. So we're ringing that bell pretty hard. And going around to the whole cross section of financial institutions. From there, the sky's the limit. We can go across fintech, we can go across governments. We can put the state, local, international level, et cetera. So it really is a full-on business development blitz.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  And then what are success metrics? The more assets that are tokenized on Ethereum within the Ethereum economy as a result of our efforts, that's a win for the ecosystem.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  And not just tokenized, but utilized.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  We're not looking for vanity metrics. We're looking for people actually doing and helping people actually doing meaningful activity with these financial assets in a blockchain environment.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Which is super important. That's one thing that's missing from tokenized assets, that you need to bring assets there, but you also need to create a flywheel of adoption. The more L2s that are built on institutional scale. L2s are this wonderful business model for institutions where they can plug into the Ethereum economy of liquidity and they can also have their own customization, their own privacy, their own parameters. The more L2s that pop up as a result of our efforts, that's another metric of success. And lastly, just awareness about ETH and Ethereum. ETH the asset is important. ETH the asset is important for the security of the Ethereum ecosystem. There are all these amazing ETF issuers that have vehicles to distribute ETH to the world by the ETF wrapper. And simplifying narratives and creating more content and research

• 18:33Speaker 00

  to educate about why ETH is a good portfolio asset in conjunction with something like Bitcoin is really, really important. And it's part of that flywheel of having the asset and the Ethereum ecosystem linked together. So those are some of the things we're working on on an ongoing basis to grow the pie.

• 18:49David Hoffman?

  I want to ask about the Ethereum Foundation. Is there any relationship like formal or pseudo or informal or otherwise between the EF and Ethereum realized, do these two entities work together? Are you guys just friends? Like, what's the relationship there like?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  So as you know, I was at the Ethereum Foundation for nearly eight years. I have some deep relationships with the folks over there. And first and foremost, certainly, as seen by the grant to Vivek's early Ethereumize efforts from both Vitalik and the EF, they're certainly keen for this type of work to happen. Right. They're certainly aware that there is a vacuum and that some of this work is on the critical path, a disinflection point for Ethereum to, you know, whether Ethereum ends up being the thing that's adopted or not. In terms of a formal and ongoing relationship, there's a lot of like communication ties, a lot of relationship ties. And as we dip our toes into some of the

• 19:43Speaker 02

  R and D sphere, certainly relationships and ties on working in those capacities. But in terms of an ongoing formal relationship, you know, ongoing conversations, we shall see.

• 19:54David Hoffman?

  And so the question of how did Ethereumize get funded is the answer to that. Well, first, there was an EF grant and then future funding just comes from clients and work that you guys do with your guys' clients. Is that how it goes?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. We wanted to make sure there was actual demand and actual product market fit. And that's why the grant from the EF did a couple of things. One, it signaled legitimacy, which especially when going to Wall Street, especially when going to TradFi. TradFi wants to speak to Ethereum. Wall Street institutions want to speak to Ethereum. Ethereum is this decentralized, incredible technology that in theory shouldn't need business development, but now that the Overton window has shifted and there's competition now. There's other players that are more centralized that are companies that are going and doing BD, found very quickly that Ethereum needs to do that, too. So that was what we figured out using the grants to get us started. Now it's time to make that sustainable and now it's time to make that organic. And as we scale up the organization and have Danny and other really, really talented engineers

• 20:49Speaker 00

  coming on board and business development and salespeople and everything, we will scale that up.

• 20:54David Hoffman?

  I've got a concern about Ethereumize that I'd like you guys to address. Part of Ethereumize's mission, of course, is to be in the room with institutions, to be a resource to help guide institutions for how they can work with Ethereum. And of course, as you guys know, one of the issues previously is that Ethereum's more centralized competitors are doing BD behind closed doors, likely talking shit about Ethereum. And since Ethereum is this voiceless, credibly neutral protocol that does not do BD, there's been no one in that room to advocate for Ethereum, this silenced protocol. But Danny, Vivek, I kind of contend that the people doing BD in these rooms are like way more sharky than I think is in the DNA of Ethereum people.

• 21:39David Hoffman?

  Just the natural disposition of Ethereum people is just to not be that sharky. And so the question that I have to you guys is, do you got what it takes? Do you guys have what it takes to go toe to toe with the sharks that are in the water that surround Ethereum via its competition? What would you respond to this?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  These people understand Ethereum from a baseline perspective. They understand that it's secure. They understand and actually care that it's decentralized. They understand that it has very high uptime. So we have like the technology that they kind of think that they want and do know from a certain basis, we have that on our side. And so like being a steward, being somebody that can show up and guide them through this thing that they have a natural inclination for allows us to be, you know, honest, reasonable, you know, maybe buttoned up players in this environment that they're just like very eager to communicate with and jump on board. I think that that changes the approach that we have to take in relation to some of these others.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Some of these others, like they're hungry and they're trying to convince them of something that maybe they don't yet know, or maybe is not true. And so they have to play a different card, whereas we can play like a very leveled hand in relation to a technology that they already kind of believe is the thing that they should be using. Vivek, what do you think?

• 22:58Speaker 00

  I come from Wall Street trading floors.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  We like winning. We like competition, but. It's almost as if Ethereum is already ahead. Ethereum is already winning. When we go in and say Ethereum is the only blockchain without downtime, where you have the most amount of tokenized assets, the most amount of economic security, the most amount of regulatory precedent, the most amount of institutional adoption. Ethereum is the default. We just had to remind people why. Because right before, when there were fewer people in the room, you can have other centralized blockchain companies going and pitching their case, and they will do it at Ethereum's expense. We like to hit the high road, but we also like to be winning. And it's a competitive ecosystem, so we'll evolve as needed.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  I guess Vivek is saying Vivek himself is a shark. And I will complement that with, you know, a level-headed view on Ethereum.

• 23:49David Hoffman?

  When you guys are having some of these conversations, I don't know how many of these conversations you've had or how many entities, institutions, organizations that you've talked to.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Hundreds.

• 23:59David Hoffman?

  What are the common roadblocks or the friction points that these entities see, maybe broadly speaking, just about the crypto industry as a whole? And then also mainly with Ethereum too. Are there any Ethereum-native roadblocks or frictions or hurdles that you help them get over that you frequently see? And then also just with the crypto industry as a whole?

• 24:17Speaker 00

  I'll start it off. The largest thing was regulatory. The thing about Ethereum is we also have to remember Ethereum was and is the default. The internal blockchains that many, many banks have been running for 10 years are all EVM-based, are all EVM forks. And so they are actually familiar with EVM. They're familiar with smart contracts. They're familiar with Ethereum. Regulatory was the biggest hurdle. That is now starting to clear. Like now, we're going to very rapidly, A, we saw the SEC drop a lot of cases. B, we're seeing a lot more willingness to have tokenization rules. C, we're seeing stablecoin legislation that probably will pass this year. And then market structure legislation that will probably pass this year too. So what we really need to do is handhold and say, and teach these institutions that Ethereum is open for business.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  We're an open line of communication. Anything you want to do within Ethereum, tokenized assets, deploy apps, deploy L2s, we can help you with that. That is the bridge from idea to actual execution that we Want to facilitate and not just leave it in the ideation phase. So the roadblocks are largely falling away. And then all of the operational work, the KYC work, the regulatory work. We're in the room, we're not afraid to roll up our sleeves and do it.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  In that answer is, again, it's easy to like tokenize an asset and toss it on chain. The hard work is figuring out how to navigate their existing processes, their existing like order flows, existing trading processes and actually like figure out how to do meaningful things that fit into their, you know, existing and how they want to evolve in the world.

• 25:48David Hoffman?

  So maybe if Ethereum is successful, not only are more institutions kind of just doing the table stakes things of putting some of their business logic on chain. Not only are they just tokenizing some of their assets, but they're doing uniquely synergistic things with what blockchain technology can offer to them. They're not just doing the table stakes, they're actually pushing the frontier. Is that kind of like a way to understand success for Ethereum?

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  That's the end game. It's one of those things where I'll go back to like my personal entry into Ethereum. Cause I'm later than Danny, I'm later than you guys. I traded the old way, the Wall Street way for 10 years. And then when I used Uniswap the first time and I saw that I just connected a wallet and I had an asset that could permissionlessly trade, that was the biggest lightbulb moment that I think I'd ever have. That is a whole new financial system. We want to guide institutions to have their Uniswap moment with the caveat that DeFi is not going to be the first stop. That's maybe a few steps ahead. So tokenize your assets, build layer twos, have blockchain ecosystems that you can customize. But ultimately getting them to that utility, as Danny's been saying, that's the most important part.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Having them actually use the superpowers of blockchains, which is DeFi, which is permissionless borrowing, lending and permissionless trading, and then being able to programmatically structure products. That's where the magic is unlocked. I have zeroed out that banks will all be DeFi pilled in the medium term. But first they have to all get on chain. So the long term is definitely to unlock the magic of DeFi and to crypto pill all of them. And I think it'll happen.

• 27:18David Hoffman?

  Now, there's two other Ethereum co-founders. There's four total to my understanding. Vivek, maybe you can just fill. And they're not here. Who are they? What are their skill sets? What are they doing? What's their leadership like?

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Grant Hummer has been with Etherealize day one. He is very, very, very close with the EF, with Vitalik. He's been in the ecosystem for 10 years and he is just a diehard. He wants to see Ethereum win. He's been a very, very, very vocal and effective advocate and he was there at the birth of Etherealize. He is going to help with all things Ethereum ecosystem and helping amplify the entire ecosystem to the world. Zach Obrant is one of the best product engineers out there. He's one of the best security researchers in the entire Ethereum ecosystem. He's a force. He's a force. Unbelievable. And he's going to come help us do our product build out and our services and help actually figure out all the engineering that we're going to need

• 28:13Speaker 00

  to walk institutions from idea to actual engineering products. It's an unbelievable team. I couldn't be more inspired about it.

• 28:20David Hoffman?

  The creation of Etherealize is happening in parallel with two new executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation, two new co-EDs, Tomas and Xia Wei. Talk about that relationship because I think the era of Iya Miyaguchi has done amazing things for Ethereum. The addition by subtraction era for Ethereum really set the tone, set the credible neutrality emphasis and baked that into Ethereum's DNA. And now I think the Ethereum ecosystem broadly is asking for a new kind of era with a little bit more aggressiveness in terms of just like business development and growth. Maybe Danny, you can kind of just add to the conversation here about like this new era for Ethereum with, I don't know as much about Xia Wei,

• 29:02David Hoffman?

  but I do know that Tomas, from what I've heard, is just an incredible operator. Just an absolute grinder and in terms of just like business operations and business development. And I see that being highly synergistic with your guys' effort here at Etherealize. Danny, maybe you can just like add to this conversation about where you see the synergies here, not just for Etherealize, not just for the EF, but just broadly for the era that Ethereum itself is walking into.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when I stepped away last year and finally came up for air and got out of the EF and observed things as an outsider and with a fresh look for the first time in a long time. You said it. My intuition was, okay, it is time for a new era. And you also said another word that came to mind quite a bit, sharks. Essentially, the Ia's era and impact on Ethereum was to leave room and to ensure that we had resilience across the ecosystem. We had many different voices in R and D, many different voices and technologies in the client space, leaving room for DeFi to grow and blossom and not control it.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Having other companies step in, like Nethermind, Tomasz's blockchain company, step in and build critical infrastructure and do all sorts of interesting things. And ultimately, like, I think we very much achieved the goal of like a diverse and resilient Ethereum ecosystem from all across layers. At the same time, the world grew up and changed around us, right? Competing blockchains showed up, VCs with vested interests are kind of all across the stack. The regulatory regime changed and all of a sudden you have people seemingly all over Washington, right? And the happy world outside of Ethereum increasingly silver sharks.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  And where the EF previously keeping a low tone on its voice and placement was probably net beneficial to Ethereum. My thought is that we can move into a new era where the Ethereum Foundation is more opinionated, does act more as a counterbalancing force to these very powerful forces out in the world. Again, not in a way that the EF takes control. I don't really think that's even possible at this point, but in a way that they do exist and there's some utilization of its voice and its stature to provide, again, an anchoring and a counterbalancing force to what is a increasingly very complex world.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  And so I do think that Ia shifting out, becoming, I think, the president of the board. She gets to still kind of help set the tone and steward values and some of these like deep. Philosophical points that she's helped layer in over the years, but we get some new blood. And the coed is certainly an interesting choice, but Xiaowei Xiaowei is one of my closest collaborators over the past eight years. She's on the research team. She's closer to myself with Justin Drake, Vitalik, Doc, Red, the whole cast of characters. And then really in the room, helping push and figure out the future of the Ethereum protocol. At the same time, she's very anchored in kind of the EF's philosophy and position.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  And so she really provides like an anchoring into the protocol and anchoring into some of the philosophy that kind of Aya has set forward. Whereas Tomasz, deep Ethereum guy, understands everything kind of inside and out, but has spent the past many years building what is certainly a very successful and operating, very successful business in the broader kind of Ethereum and blockchain space. And so he comes in with an outsider energy. He comes in with a let's get shit done perspective. And I think the combination of the two, we get to turn to this new era of the EF still being very grounded in its philosophical views and its relationship with the ecosystem, but willing to be a bit more aggressive,

• 32:53Speaker 02

  willing to have more opinions, willing to more rapidly distill the conversation and try to raise up what the consensus is so that we can meet the world head on, right? There has been a phase shift in the world around us. There are sharks from top to bottom, but the world is also eager to adopt. And so I think the EF is through this change, embracing that and moving forward. And at the same time, I think the EF and the ecosystem are acknowledging that maybe the expectations of what the EF does, but what the EF actually does is probably somewhere here. And Ethereumize and others need to fill in that ring and they need to fill in the void. And they need to make sure that Ethereum is meeting the world head on at this critical juncture.

• 33:34David Hoffman?

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• 34:19David Hoffman?

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• 35:04David Hoffman?

  Frax isn't just a protocol, it's a digital nation powered by the FXX token and governed by its global community. Acquire FXX through frax.com or your go-to-decks, stake it, and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of DeFi? Visit frax.com now to start earning with Frax USD and staked Frax USD. And for Bankless listeners, you can use frax.com/r/bankless when bridging to FraxTal for exclusive FraxTal perks and boosted rewards. Danny, there's a conversation that I think I really want to pick your brain on. Because as you said, the world is changing around Ethereum. And Ethereum has stayed the same, right? Ethereum has really emphasized credible neutrality. And I think the thing that truly sets Ethereum apart from all of its competitors is its concavity.

• 35:47David Hoffman?

  It's a concave system, it's really balanced. It doesn't emphasize really any one particular design element. Bitcoin is convex. Bitcoin optimizes for 21 million. Solana optimizes for I B R L. Like, Celestia optimizes for data availability. And Ethereum balances between all of those things. It's just generally a balanced ecosystem. And I'll contend that we are entering a world, not just in crypto, but broadly, broadly speaking, especially kind of marked by Trump. We are kind of entering a more extreme era where balanced, moderate opinions are kind of out. And to me, this illustrates that Ethereum is not with the times in one way.

• 36:29David Hoffman?

  As in, like, it's not following this, like, more extreme disposition. But that actually is resembling why we need Ethereum the most. Because it's a bulwark, a credible neutrality bulwark against the changing times. And I think that's really marked by, like, especially that recent Solana ad video, where Solana tried to position itself. It branded itself as, like, anti, like, gender, pro-innovation, which is really just the current thing, the current moment in the time. And this is just something that I think Ethereum really represents as just like something it does not do. It stays balanced, it stays true to its long-term vision. Maybe you can, like, carry this conversation forward and how you see it and how you see is relevant for what you're doing here at Ethereumize.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  So something our co-founder Grant Hammer says is that Ethereum is our best bet at civilizational infrastructure. Open, neutral, decentralized, and ultimately, like, something that can last for decades and decades and be counted upon. We can't throw that out the window. Like, that is the value proposition. The value proposition is like, what programmable environment are you going to lock up assets for a decade, 15 years? Like, there's only one answer. Where are you, you know, expecting to have the absolute most uptime? Where do you expect, no matter what jurisdiction you're in, that your assets cannot be seized from you in an unexpected way due to the kind of stratum of the blockchain and who's running

• 37:56Speaker 02

  it? And I think there's only one answer. I think that answer is the best for the global economy. I do think that's also best for the US economy. I think that's the place where you're going to have the most opportunity for innovation, the most opportunity for plugging all of the pieces of the global economy together in a reasonable way and not creating something with a brittle foundation. That said, there's a path dependency to whether Ethereum is adopted or not, right? And if Ethereum doesn't hit this kind of adoption curve right now, something else will. And then Ethereum becomes maybe in the tail risk scenario when the brittle thing crumbles. Maybe it's the thing that people end up adopting.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  But I think if it does not hit the right path dependency on this adoption curve, you know, it doesn't matter how good, how neutral, how kind of perfect that foundation is. And so I think at this point, we have to balance between ensuring that Ethereum stays neutral and what is, you know, an appropriate platform for civilizational infrastructure, while also knowing that we have to be in the room. We have to make sure that critical decisions are made in a reasonable way. And that reasonable way is picking the most open, neutral, and decentralized infrastructure that is Ethereum. And so I think that we can do that without removing what is special about Ethereum. I think that players like Ethereumize can

• 39:25Speaker 02

  show up and be the room. I do think that, given the resilient Ethereum, given the multi-client nature, given the many voices across the globe, that the EF can have stronger opinions. And I believe there's actually room for many other players to enter into this arena to make sure that Ethereum seizes this opportunity. And there are many, right? Like, all of the L2s have very strong teams and can go out there and build business. There are incredible daps across the stack that, at this point in the oblection curve, should be shifting, you know, towards thinking about, you know, who are our non-native blockchain consumers and how do we get things in front of them? Similarly, wallets, like, we've kind of been in this wallet paradigm where people that

• 40:08Speaker 02

  use blockchains have a very vested interest to use the blockchains and kind of will deal with whatever UX, but it's at this juncture that we need to kind of hit that transition point and think about the world more broadly and how we get them to use these things and what are the interfaces and standards and things like 7.702 that are going to like change the game to onboard the world. So across the stack, we need to take this beautiful, actually decentralized thing that we built and make sure that we're meeting the world head-on.

• 40:35David Hoffman?

  One of the concerns that I have, Danny and Vivek, is as a result of the Biden administration and Operation Choke Point 2.0, much of the industry has moved towards, maybe not towards the right, but in support of Donald Trump and his administration. And now, as an industry, crypto outside of the industry is kind of branded as this more right-wing, more Donald Trump-aligned industry. And, I mean, it's really hard to argue it with when, especially when like the Fair Shake SuperPact poured hundreds of millions of dollars into, you know, bipartisan races, but primarily like Republican conservative races. And so, one concern I have is that as an industry as a whole, the industry is aligning with a certain

• 41:18David Hoffman?

  political disposition, which is inherently, like, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu in the world of politics, and so you kind of have to make these choices. One thing I'm concerned about is that there is a political pendulum, and it seems to be swinging pretty aggressively. And right now, we have made some huge wins, and we are currently reaping the benefits of placing our bets on the right side of the political aisle. And in addition to how Having some like chaos with a meme coin launching president, we are also getting some very real progress done in the SEC and the CFTC and the market structure bill. And so that is great. I think our bets have paid off and we place our bets correctly. One thing I'm worried about is that the pendulum will swing eventually in the opposite way.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 42:04David Hoffman?

  Maybe Danny, you can talk about Ethereum's positioning as an ecosystem when that pendulum inevitably swings back.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  There's a number of things there. I talked about it at the outset of the podcast a bit, but if we onboard financial institutions and real world assets in this window, the pendulum can only swing so far. Right? Like the US economy will have a dependency on blockchains and there's only so much at that point that this can be attempted to be essentially undone. And so I do think that it's time and we have to use this opportunity to ensure that we meaningfully do onboard the world in this window. So that, you know, the benefits of decentralized blockchains become apparent to large economic players and increasingly to consumers en masse. And at that point, you know, I think the game's kind of done. So we have a window and we need to make sure that we seize the window.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  That said, I think that from an Ethereum standpoint, we need to play the long game. And the long game is focusing on real value for institutions as well as consumers. It's focusing on sound mechanisms that provide value to these people in these environments, but do not scam the hell out of them. And it's focused on the Ethereum protocol not being owned or controlled by any entity such that it can be ultimately captured by a political institution or even shut down by another one. And we have like a very strong basis for these things to be true today and to remain true tomorrow when the pendulum swings.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  But we need to be careful during this, essentially this blitz, like we have this opportunity, but we can't throw it all out the window. Just because we have this unique opportunity, we need to be very careful.

• 43:47David Hoffman?

  Vivek, what would you add to this conversation?

• 43:50Speaker 00

  I would add that technology is bipartisan. I mean, the thing that is most inspiring is that the US and the world is open to adopting blockchain. Finally, they're open to crafting rules. These rules, they benefit both parties. Having stable coins as a distribution mechanism for the dollar globally benefits everybody. It benefits the US, it benefits the world because the dollar is a great store of value. Having tokenization rules benefits everybody. Making assets digital and having them trade globally is an unlock for the whole world. So although crypto is short term political and will swing in short term, I do think it's very, very important that we represent the institutional demand,

• 44:32Speaker 00

  the institutional interest, actually advancing the technology forward that the whole financial system is upgraded. I don't think either side can argue with that. And we just want to make sure that if the pendulum swings towards a regime where companies that run blockchains have a seat at the table, Ethereum is also very, very prevalent in the room. Because at the end of the day, as much as there's arguing on Twitter and as much as there's tribalism, institutions, they think long term and they know the value of decentralized systems. They know the value, the security that they bring. They know the value of having the opt-in. They know the trade-offs that Ethereum has chosen to remain as neutral layer. And it is the default for the world's assets. We just have to make sure that despite whatever the political regime is, Ethereum is choice number one.

• 45:16David Hoffman?

  How can the Ethereum community support you guys? Because I think there are, you know, many people in the Ethereum community are listening to this podcast episode, listening to, and they want to help you guys succeed in your mission. How can we do this? In what ways can we offer support? In what ways can we help?

• 45:31Speaker 00

  It's been an absolutely inspiring reception. I mean, like this thing started as a small grant through Vitalik and the EF to say, let's go experiment, let's go see if we can do some business development and marketing for Ethereum. That was received very, very well. When we launched, the community was very, very supportive and that was absolutely incredible. When I had the fortune of joining forces with Danny, and now this can actually become more of an Ethereum institution, the potential is very, very, very great now and it's a great responsibility and we're super excited about it. Our tagline is Ethereum is open for business. Bringing opportunities, bringing what we think we should be doing on a global scale, whether it's RFPs for other governments, whether it's bringing certain tokenization

• 46:16Speaker 00

  projects that are in contention with other blockchain projects to Ethereum. Helping funnel all that over to us would be an amazing thing from the community because we want to tackle as much of it as we possibly can and then resource and staff appropriately so we can actually be effective in doing that. So bringing opportunities, our way that think should be within the Ethereum ecosystem. We'll tackle a lot of it. We'll tackle Wall Street. We'll tackle government. We'll tackle, but we obviously can't get all of it. Ethereum community is the most global. It's the most widespread. It's the most decentralized. So bring those opportunities would be an amazing ask.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  So one thing that comes to mind is the reason that Ethereumize has been so well received and that there is kind of so much demand for what's going on here is that there was otherwise a vacuum. There was this void in the space and that goes back to, you know, maybe an expectation that like the EF should be doing it or maybe the expectation that, oh, in the Ethereum community, we don't have to do that. We just build the tech. And I think that something broadly in the Ethereum community that we need to be doing is identifying what are these vacuums? What are these things that no one is doing and picking up the mantle? And Ethereumize is one of that and filling a particular vacuum or two or three, but there are many, many other places, you know, whether that's creating

• 47:32Speaker 02

  some sort of like application incubator or being a voice in, you know, identity type solutions in a global manner. There's all sorts of things that need to get done and we just as a community need to much more proactively address them and meet them head on. And again, from a technological standpoint, yeah, we build great shit. We build incredible things that crypto users want to use. We build modular environments that scale in elegant ways. But at this point, like the juncture of actually meeting the world where it is, there's a lot of gaps and we just all need to proactively be filling them.

• 48:09David Hoffman?

  And then how can the Ethereum layer one, the actual protocol itself? How can it fulfill its end of the bargain? Is there anything about the current state of the Ethereum Layer 1 that is constraining in your mission or getting in the way of you guys doing your job? So like, what's on Ethereum's end of the bargain here to help Ethereumize in its mission?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that everyone's going to run up against if we get the flywheel spinning and the world actually starts wondering about these systems is scale. Scale, efficiency at Layer 1 and Layer 2 are just like, they're on the critical path. I mean, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen and I think we're really rallying around that as the critical thing right now. And I think we're going to see a lot of good movement, but we'll also, we'll help where we can on that. But it's not just at Layer 1, right? It's also in wallet standards. You know, how are we going to manage the complexity of Layer 2s and users existing across these environments? Others is, you know, having a phase change and stepwise change in how we're handling privacy in the application layer. You know, I can navigate privacy in a reasonable enough way and I also have vested interests

• 49:13Speaker 02

  to use blockchains, but as we onboard institutions and as we onboard consumers across the globe, privacy model, you know, has to evolve. And that might be going all in on certain like tools like Noir that might be actually figuring out how to have wallet standards managed secrets in reasonable ways. And that's also like us figuring out like, what is the reasonable juncture between this and the law, right? Like, we're going to have to address these questions head on if we're going to onboard the world. And so there's just a number of things in this R and D landscape that we've been able to kind of sweep under the rug because we're crypto native, but we're not going to be able to anymore and we need to address them head on.

• 49:54David Hoffman?

  Vivek, anything from you on this?

• 49:55Speaker 00

  I think L2s create the ultimate experimentation zone for Ethereum. I think as long as we are pushing forward on all fronts and the cool part about fragmentation is we can run thousands of experiments in parallel. The less cool part is how do we unite these all? That's part of the interop standards. Everyone's working on it. As Danny said, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. We're going to get some really, really cool standards, both for synchronous composability, async, intense, et cetera. But at the end of the day, as long as L2s are all experimenting across the spectrum, maybe we have some proof of concept native rollups. Maybe we try the whole spectrum of base rollups. We keep running all the optimistic, but we also go more and more ZK and see if ZK layers can interoperate.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  I'm just a very positive some person like blockchain adoption has not even hit its critical threshold yet. Hopefully we'll be a big force to push that. But as long as there's L2 innovation and experimentation at that layer, we can take the best of that and plug into L1. And I think the faster we can do that feedback loop, the better because it is a competition and we do want to stay competitive and ahead. I think it'll all work out in terms of interop, in terms of value accrual, and in terms of having one unified Ethereum that's represented by a lot of different quote unquote states underneath.

• 51:11David Hoffman?

  Danny, I think there is a parallel universe out there where you are the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. In that parallel universe, what shots would you have called? Like, what decisions would you have made on like day one or week one of that job? What do you think ought to be the highest priority inside of that role?

• 51:27Speaker 02

  First of all, honestly, a better decision was made. Tomas, complimented by Xiaowei, bringing in the outside energy, bringing somebody that's run a large and profitable business before. I met up with Tomas the other night. He's a total badass and he's exactly what the EF needs. So I don't really think a lot of my calls and shots are going to be at odds or necessarily even better than what Tomas is going to implement.

• 51:53David Hoffman?

  Your calls would have been to put Tomas in.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  I mean, ultimately, it wasn't in the realm of what I was considering. But at the end of the day, he's a really, really good choice. He's a badass. Yeah, I think that I talked about a little bit before. The resilient Ethereum and then the very adversarial world outside of it can handle the EF having a stronger voice. It can handle the EF saying, we don't just steward these values in the abstract, but like this is really important. And hey, yeah, y'all have that opinion over there, but we need to anchor on this opinion over here. And essentially because previously they wanted to just let the scales balance themselves out and often did in the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  But now there are so many vested interests and things putting pressures on the scale that the EF and others should be exercising their voices a bit more to make sure that we end up and stay in a balanced reality. So that's the big thing. The other is, and this is something that Tomas is eager to do, is help just more rapidly distill the conversation. You know, that's something that in the proof of stake world, working on the launch of the beacon chain and the merge, I played that role a lot. Like, we had this extremely critical thing that we needed to do. And often, what I had to do was, okay, these are the things on the table, this is what these people think, this is whatever, like, I can distill that, this is what we need to do. Or these are the two things that we need to debate, and we need to debate it quickly,

• 53:25Speaker 02

  because it's time to make a decision. And I think that the EF, to the extent possible, should bring some more of that energy here in the way that they're kind of communicating and operating. So, we shall see. It's a complicated ecosystem, and it's a complicated org. But I'm honestly, like, best outcome. I'm super excited to be at Ethereumize. I think there's an incredible amount of good work and excellent work to do here. And Tomas, complimented with Xiaowei, like, they're gonna be a force. This is good.

• 53:53David Hoffman?

  So, guys, it is the 21st of March. What does work look like for you today, right now? We're about to wrap up this podcast. Y'all are gonna go back to working on Ethereumize. What's it that actually look like? What's like the nearest term priorities? Just so I can like, kind of get an understanding, the listener can get an understanding of what boots on the ground actually feels like. So, Vivek, in just a few minutes when we're done here, what are you going to do next?

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Immediately, keep calling up institutions. Keep saying that anything you want to learn about Ethereum, anything you want to build in Ethereum, anything you want to do within the Ethereum ecosystem, we will help facilitate that. We will be very aggressive. Well, shit, I mean, I'm in New York City. We'll come to your office. We'll facilitate whatever you need to onboard any part of your assets or user base to Ethereum. And rinse and repeat that forever on a treadmill until we have global adoption. That's it. It's, we have a hammer. That hammer is a spectacular piece of technology. We're gonna run around with it and say that we need to get network effects where Ethereum is the default go-to for all assets, and the race is on. And I feel a lot of that urgency.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  So, that is the day-to-day until Ethereum is, as Danny said, and as Grant said, is civilizational infrastructure. That's the backbone of the financial system to start, and then ultimately... All the amazing world computer applications that are beyond that.

• 55:12David Hoffman?

  Danny, same question to you.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  You know, part of my time is just diving back in, right? There's a lot of conversations I'm having catching up with all sorts of folks across the stack to understand the label and understand the needs of Ethereum, understand the blockers and helping where I can. There's also a lot of work in understanding existing processes, technical processes that happen in Wall Street with financial institutions, you know, where are they faxing documents? And how can those processes be kind of upgraded into this new financial system? And how does that actually look in terms of the suite of products and things that exist today on Ethereum? As well as the things that need to be built in the future.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Another big item is as we increasingly show up in the room on the Hill in Washington, what are those things that we're pushing for? What are the strategic plays in relation to the most important things that can happen for Ethereum? And ultimately for decentralized technology to be adopted. So playing a bit across the Ethereum ecosystem into the TradFi Wall Street world, and then figuring out where all of that kind of meets in policy is what I'm working on.

• 56:26David Hoffman?

  Danny, Vivek, we've covered so much in this podcast. I've learned everything I think I've wanted to know about Ethereum. Before I let you guys go, is there anything I did not ask about? Any stone that I did not unturn, maybe just open ended? Vivek, I'll start with you, open ended. What else is worth bringing up in this conversation?

• 56:43Speaker 00

  I think you touched on it earlier when you asked, did we have what it takes to represent Ethereum? And in a very positive some way, but very, very focused way, we want to say that this is the dream of bringing some new blood, which I'll bring, I'm not an ETOG, with the best of the ecosystem who, I mean, Danny's accomplishments speak for themselves and overseeing one of the greatest software achievements ever done civilizationally and combining that with some commercial aggressive attitude that Ethereum needs. I don't know, I'm thrilled about it and I think we have the perfect balance of team to go actually achieve adoption. And Make Ethereum aggressive again.

• 57:25David Hoffman?

  Danny?

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Where it matters.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Where it matters.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  You know, I'm excited to be back to all the friends and colleagues and all the future people interact with. What's up? Hit me up. Talk to you all soon.

• 57:36David Hoffman?

  Last question, is Ethereum alive hiring?

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  We want to build the best, the absolute best team. And we've started with a pretty incredible basis of co-founders. Again, Zach O'Brien is like, he's unbelievable. His mind is quite incredible. And then we do intend to kind of layer into the engineering team. We do intend to think about and bring on some critical players on how we can impact R and D and figure out how to partner with some folks in an existing kind of trad buy world to help elevate and accelerate the mission. So we're looking for the best of us.

• 58:15David Hoffman?

  Vivek, anything to add to that?

• 58:16Speaker 00

  The Avengers, we want to grow the Avengers. The receptivity from the community has been unbelievable. We do want to bring again, as Danny said, the best of Ethereum, the best of Wall Street. And one day, these will be synonymous. One day, the financial system will be an Ethereum system and I want to hire everyone we can to make that a reality.

• 58:33David Hoffman?

  Danny Vivek, thank you for joining me on the show today.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Appreciate it.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Thanks for having us.

• 58:37David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal, crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but you can also lose what you don't put in. And that's why Ethereum is open for business. We are headed west. This is Frontier, it's not for everyone, but we're glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.