Layer Zero | Justin Drake

Justin Drake joins the third episode of Layer Zero to discuss coining ‘Ultra Sound Money,’ which sent supersonic waves through the Ethereum community. Unsurprisingly, Justin is a deeply compelling individual with a powerful drive to work hard and pursue individuality. From Quantum Computing to engineering Layer Zero, Justin’s holistic approach to the space really comes through as we discuss what it means to work for a meme. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 4:30 Justin Drake 9:05 Coining Ultra Sound Money 12:37 From Layer 1 to Layer 0 15:10 Working for a Meme 24:14 The Purpose of the Meme 27:27 The Gini Coefficient 31:17 Proof of Stake and Distribution 35:22 A New Age Cypherpunk 43:30 Scalability 49:30 ETH and the Dollar 57:13 Quantum Computing 1:00:30 Burning MEV 1:04:19 The Efficiency DAO 1:08:11 Bitcoin FUD Dice 1:15:38 Layer 0 Engineer 1:18:20 Layers 3 and 4 1:20:00 A Workaholic and a Father 1:24:14 Citizen of the World 1:28:18 An Emergent Individual 1:34:15 Closing & Disclaimers ------ 📣 SoRare | Collect and Play! https://bankless.cc/SoRare ------ Resources: Ultra Sound Money Website https://ultrasound.money/ Modeling Ultra Sound Money https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-sotn-44-modeling-ultra-sound-money The Bull Case for Cryptography https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-moon-math-the-bull-case-for-cryptography Ultra Sound Money https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-ultra-sound-money-justin-drake Justin on Twitter https://twitter.com/drakefjustin?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Ethereum is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the Ethereum community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm speaking with Justin Drake. Justin, as we all know, is the founder of the ultrasound money meme, and we go through the creation process of the meme itself, as well as how Justin Drake has moved across the different

• 0:48David Hoffman?

  stacks, the different layers of Ethereum, first as an entrepreneur, then as an L1 dev, and now what I call actually a L0 engineer, a memer, if you will. He is tinkering with the Layer Zero of Ethereum by committing himself to the ultrasound money meme. And so we start this conversation off with what does it mean to work for a meme? This is what Justin Drake considers his current role in Ethereum. He's working for the ultrasound money meme, and not only that, but he's recruiting other people to also work for this meme, which is just like, kind of breaks the brain to anyone who doesn't really understand the role of memes in money and markets and finance, but Justin Drake definitely understands

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  that. We also just kind of overall have an Ethereum technical conversation. It turns a little bit more into a more traditional bankless podcast where we talk about, you know, a little bit more of the code than what I advertise on Layer Zero, but all of that context for, you know, further innovations on Ethereum, staggering shards, putting oracles at the base layer, all this stuff. It actually turns into, towards the end of the conversation, a conversation about Justin Drake, the personality himself, his sort of rebellious nature, his lack of a nation-state identity, and also how that is reflected in his kid.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  As well and how those values are also instantiated in Ethereum himself. And so the first two thirds of this podcast is all about ultrasound money. And in Ethereum, the protocol, a little bit tech focused, but then it turns into the actual personality disposition of the man himself as well as his kid. And kind of the story of his life and how it relates to Ethereum. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Justin Drake. I really enjoyed seeing the man behind the meme. And I'm pretty sure you will as well. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Justin Drake. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap.

• 2:52David Hoffman?

  Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap.

• 3:33David Hoffman?

  Just look at the size of the Uniswap Treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni-grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. Balancer is a powerful platform for flexible automated market makers. Typical AMMs just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool, which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in DeFi. With Balancer, you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one single AMM,

• 4:18David Hoffman?

  which unlocks an entirely new playing field of possibility. This makes Balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases. Balancer pools can make asset indices, but instead of paying fees to portfolio managers, Balancer lets you collect the fees from traders who use your portfolio for liquidity. Additionally, Balancer smart pools can be programmed to have properties that change according to predetermined rules, such as changing the swap fee based on market conditions, or even liquidity bootstrapping pools, which can help you launch and distribute your token with day one liquidity. At Bankless, we use a liquidity bootstrapping pool to sell our BAP t-shirts to much success. Balancer V2 brings powerful new features that makes your money work even harder for you. In V2, idle tokens are capable of generating yield

• 5:01David Hoffman?

  in DeFi without sacrificing liquidity in the pool using Balancer's asset managers. Balancer's Vault architecture lets you trade between Balancer pools at a fraction of the cost versus trading on other platforms. Balancer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in DeFi by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange. Dive into the Balancer pools at app-balancer.fi. All right, Bankless Nation, welcome to the third episode of Layer Zero. Here, we're bringing on Justin Drake. You guys all know him as the Ultrasound Money Man, and I feel like I think that's the right place to start off this conversation. Justin, a fun little story for

• 5:43David Hoffman?

  you. After we recorded our Ultrasound Money podcast with you, me, and Ryan, I turned to Ryan and was like, this is about to change the game like forever. And every single week on the Bankless newsletter, we have like the Market Monday piece, which is like a short little blurb to that usually I write it, but sometimes Ryan writes it, sometimes somebody else writes it, but usually I write it. And in the piece, it was the week before we were going to drop the Ultrasound Money podcast that we've recorded with you. And so I usually write it, and then Ryan comes in and edits it and changes things up a little bit. And in the Market Monday piece, I had written, "The Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum narrative

• 6:27David Hoffman?

  will forever change as a result of..." of this podcast and I use some like really like big language and Ryan like asked me he he DM me I was like are you sure you want to make some like this grand of a statement and this grandiose of a statement and I was like absolutely absolutely I do and he did he did walk me back a little bit but it turns out that that was exactly right like Ethereum as a ecosystem has fundamentally changed ever since the ultrasound money meme really like took storm and it was it was you know it was a collaborative effort between many people but it was really you so how does that feel how does it feel to be like the ultrasound money guy that like changed the trajectory of his of Ethereum?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Well, I guess, you know, I I still think that we're at the very beginnings of the ultrasound money meme. I would agree with you that it has kind of rallied the Ethereum community specifically, but it hasn't grown yet that much beyond the borders of the Ethereum community. I mean, there was, you know, some brief mentions on Bloomberg and on CNBC and whatnot, but you know, I believe the meme will educate 100 million people. And so we're at the very, very beginnings of that. I mean, how I feel personally, I mean, the meme has kind of infected me. It's kind of taken over my life and in a way, you know, like in the same way that a virus takes over its host,

• 7:55Speaker 01

  you can think of memes as, you know, the equivalent of genes that take over their host. And I've been taken over by this meme and I'm kind of spreading it to other people and other people are themselves spreading it to other. I mean,

• 8:07David Hoffman?

  Are you like patient zero of this meme? Is that is that where your role is? Patient zero of ultrasound money?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. But, you know, maybe I'm patient one in the sense that Vitalik had a very, very similar meme before he infected me. He his meme was supersonic money. And that, you know, that was good, but it didn't really catch on in the same way. I think partly because, you know, it doesn't reuse the word sound verbatim, as we have with the Bitcoiners with sound money. So yeah, this is kind of interesting, you know, like just like genes mutate memes mutate as well. And you can have a totally kind of non-viral meme with lots of potential that just needs this one little mutation and that changes the game. I mean, it's a little bit

• 8:53Speaker 01

  like monkeys and humans, right? We're like 99.9% the same genetic material. It's just these few tiny tweaks that make a lot of difference.

• 9:04David Hoffman?

  So the supersonic money meme came around before ultrasound money and you're saying it actually mutated into the ultrasound money meme. But you were the mutator, right?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's correct. Basically, you know, we were chatting in a Telegram group and, you know, Vitalik was mentioning this meme. I was like, oh, well, it's a good meme, but it didn't really catch on. And then Vitalik was like, hmm, maybe we should try harder, you know, to bring it out to the community. And then like a few minutes later, I was like, ha, I've got a better version of the meme. And, you know, from that point onwards, a lot of my time has been just spent, you know, trying to make this meme a reality, I guess. And, you know, I have a very obsessive kind of personality, kind of addictive personality.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Like when I do something, I want to do it like right and really go deep. And, you know, it's very different from what I was doing previously, you know, like, you know, when I joined the foundation, I was doing, you know, crypto economic research. And then kind of I went deep into cryptography and, you know, I've done all sorts of other things. But now, you know, I'm kind of doing something totally different, kind of going down the stack from layer one to layer two as a to layer zero. And actually, I'd say more and more of my work is at layer zero, interestingly. So, for example, one of the things that I've been doing is recruiting, right? That's something that just needs to be done at the

• 10:44Speaker 01

  foundation. And for some reason, you know, I've been one of the, you know, the biggest recruiters of the of the research team at the foundation.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  And yeah, so recruiting, I guess you can think of the the ultrasound money meme as kind of being the decentralized version of of marketing. And you know, these two things, kind of HR and and recruiting and marketing were things I kind of despise. And I didn't really see myself doing these kind of roles. But you know, in a decentralized context, they're they're kind of different. And you know, actually very interesting to to to to dive into these these new fields.

• 11:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the the world of marketing historically has always felt like top down. It's like, here's our brand, here's our image, let's like shove it down your throat. But like in the world of of crypto marketing, it's very much of just like an infinite amount of just like A B tests, A B C D E F G tests. To like figure out which one works. And it only ever works if like the world adopts it themselves, rather than have it just like shoved down its throat by like trillions of dollars of ad spend.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, there's these algorithms called genetic algorithms where basically you just try tons of mutations and then something sticks. And then it just conquers the world. And it it feels like, you know, the the FM community had a lot of of previous failed attempts. You know, that kind of laid the ground, you know, the the ground was very, very fertile in the sense that the FM community was trying to find itself and it desperately wanted kind of this this this meme. And once it found it, it kind of embraced it.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  And I I think that's partly why it's grew it grew so fast. But you know, again, I think it's it's it's still a baby meme. It it is, it has to grow a bit more.

• 12:34David Hoffman?

  So you're, from my perspective, you're like a genius cryptographer. Your big brains like can code all the things, talk about all the crazy like cutting edge technology that this industry has to offer that gets like way outside of like whatever I can even like comprehend. Yet you are, like you said, going from that from layer one down to like layer zero. Why do you think that you are most suited there rather than back up at the like cryptography level?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I kind of have a bit of a founder, kind of entrepreneurial mindset, kind of builder. I just like building stuff. And actually, before I joined the FM Foundation, I was an entrepreneur of a company. And you get to do everything, you know, as a founder. And I'm kind of this jack of all trades in that sense.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think part of the reason why I like doing different things is because I'm, I guess I'm quite curious and I want to try and understand the full stack. You know, when you, when you look at computers, for example, you know, it turns out there's like, there's like 20 stacks, right? If you go, you know, all the way down to the transistor or to the silicon, you know, all the way up to, you know, the website, there's just so many stacks in between. And oftentimes, people will focus kind of on maybe three, four, five stacks, layers of the stack. But, you know, I want to, I'd much rather try and get a full understanding of all 20 stacks. And I guess, you know, this is part of just my, my personal journey in the FM ecosystem

• 14:10Speaker 01

  to try and understand every, every single layer of the stack.

• 14:14David Hoffman?

  Interesting, yeah. And every single layer of the stack has like, it's its own rabbit hole, right? With its own rabbit holes upon rabbit holes. But like we say, like, everything kind of always leads back to layer zero. So I kind of, I think that makes sense that like, that's actually where you found yourself.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And actually, if you think of me as an entrepreneur, I was kind of at layer two, right? So I was, I was trying to make OpenBazaar, which is this decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace built on top of blockchain such as Bitcoin. And then I went to layer one and now layer zero. And, you know, it's possible that, you know, once, once we're done, you know, shipping Eve 2 and all the good stuff there, then maybe I'll go full circle and go back to layer two and build something cool there.

• 14:59David Hoffman?

  And just re, maybe we'll go through the cycle like one more time.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 15:05David Hoffman?

  So you said you kind of like work for this meme now, as in like, it's kind of your, your full-time job. Illustrate that, like, how, how, what is it like to work for the ultrasound money meme?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, we have these two pieces of infrastructure. Like one is the ultrasound dot money website and the other one is the ultrasound money at Twitter account. And the basic idea here was to try and do things as decentralized as possible. So, you know, try and get, you know, different team, you know, different people to contribute, to join the meme. And I think I mentioned basically the story here, which is that, I think it was at the end of your, the second ultrasound money bankless podcast, I said, you know, I bought this domain ultrasound dot money. I'm looking for a team and like 10 people came in.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  And one of the crazy things is that I had to do zero filtering on these 10 people. All 10 people were invited to contribute. They were all very high quality. And I think part of the reason they were all very high quality is because in order to get to the very end of the second podcast, they had to go through four hours of content. And so only like kind of the most enthusiastic people made it to the end. And actually more and more people have started to volunteer, you know, through the Twitter accounts, you know, they say, oh, you know, we love your movement, we love what you're doing, how can I help? So, you know, at this point, there's maybe 15, 20 people, you know, who volunteered to contribute.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think a lot of the work that we do at different foundations is coordination. You know, very similar to what Danny is, you know, really, really good at. And I'm, you know, I've tried to help coordinate this team, but also, you know, provide kind of the initial impetus and, and, and I guess maybe inspiration to get this idea out of the gate.

• 17:10David Hoffman?

  With a, so what kind of talent has shown up at the gates? Like, is it like dev talent or marketing talent? Like what's, is there any sort of through line? Like, talk about all the skill set that has like come to the ultrasound money meme.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's quite a lot of deaf, so you know, back end and front end. But we have also some non deaf. So for example, there's this artist Rodrigo, who just makes awesome, awesome art. And actually, I think one of his pieces was auctioned on the on the bankless Dow.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  And you know, this guy just just created, you know, this this art totally for free. And he had no expectation of financial returns. And, you know, he didn't even really have, you know, expectations of, you know, building much of a name for himself. He just he was just trying to contribute and and and do something interesting. You know, at the end of the day, it turned out pretty well for him because he sold, you know, so many copies of of of his of his NFT. And then I guess, you know, we've also had in the non-technical field, like someone who I think wants to remain anonymous, who basically is this this meme lord,

• 18:26Speaker 01

  who, you know, is behind, you know, a bunch of memes behind the Twitter accounts.

• 18:35David Hoffman?

  That's that's awesome. So how do you have goals? Like, what is the goal of this, like, emergent organization? Like, what is the goal with ultrasound money?

• 18:46David Hoffman?

  Like, if it's a business and you're an entrepreneur, like, what do you? What's on the horizon? What are you trying to go towards?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I think the KPI is like, how many? How many minds can we infect? And, you know, this is largely kind of an educational thing. It's like, how far can we spread the meme to educate as many people as possible?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, one of one of the the metrics that we track, for example, is, you know, what we call kind of the ultrasound fam, the fam wearing the kind of the bat signal, which is the two emojis, which, you know, you're you're the grandfather of, which is very cool.

• 19:26David Hoffman?

  That's pretty cool. I am honored to have that spot. Yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And you know, the fam has been growing incredibly. You know, we have 3,300 fam members, I think, right now. And it just keeps on growing, you know, at a steady rate every single day. And actually, if you want to compare it to other Ethereum memes, it's pretty striking. So for example, there's this other kind of Ethereum meme on Twitter, which is that you're going to use your ENS address, you know, as your Twitter name. So for example, vitalic.ef. And so one of the things we did is that we went ahead and scraped all of Ethereum Twitter. So that's about 3 million accounts, including kind of like the 2 million accounts that Vitalic follows.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  And we found about 6,500 ENS, well, Twitter accounts with an ENS. And so, you know, you have one of the most powerful memes, I think, in Ethereum, which is the ENS, which kind of grew to 6,500 over kind of four years. And then this ultrasound money meme, which kind of in just a matter of, you know, four, five, six months, grew to over half the size.

• 20:41David Hoffman?

  That's fantastic. Yeah. And so just for the listeners that are a little bit unfamiliar, the ultrasound money fam is if you have the bat emoji followed by the speaker emoji. Does it also work in reverse? If you were you also scraping for speaker emoji and then bat emoji? Or does the order matter?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  So there's tons of creativity and there's lots of flexibility. So it turns out there's like three different speaker emojis. There's like one with three lines, one with one line and one with zero line. People also kind of change the ordering. People sometimes kind of put a comma in between, kind of open brackets, the bat. And people kind of do all sorts of crazy variations, like, you know, for example, people will use the dolphin and then the speaker, because dolphins also produce emojis. I mean, I kind of like to keep the dolphin separate for the flipping. So maybe at the flipping, we can, you know.

• 21:41David Hoffman?

  We can all pivot.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  We can all pivot for a day or two or a week or two.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  And then, you know, people change the, the, actually, I have a, you know, a regular expression here on my computer. But basically, like, people will swap out the emojis and be quite creative. And like, people will put it in unexpected places. So for example, people will put the bat emoji in the location, which is something that we didn't scrape. And so now we're gonna need to go ahead and scrape that as well.

• 22:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I didn't think I finished my thought, but what Justin is talking about is the ultrasound fam is those that have the bat and then the speaker emoji in their like Twitter header, their Twitter name, right? And so if you are a part of like the E N S clan, you have like your name dot eth. And then now generally it's followed by the ultrasound money like, like bat signal, which is the bat. And then the speaker emoji, usually with three lines. And it's interesting to see on the ultrasound dot money page, you have all of the top followed accounts that are Twitter accounts that are followed by people who have the ultrasound money meme in their Twitter account. And so like, it's funny to see like Anthony Cisano actually recently flipped Ryan Sean Adams as the number one person

• 22:52David Hoffman?

  with the most ultrasound money fam followers. But I will have to say, I have the met, I have the highest ratio of followers to ultrasound follower fam on there as well. So I would like, I would like people to know that. But it's a fantastic way to make a fun little game about just like putting a personal identifier on your Twitter profile, which is like kind of what that Twitter biospace is for.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, one of the, you know, one of the things that we've had is sometimes we've had kind of spam attacks. So like people like very low quality accounts, like accounts that participate, for example, in a lot of giveaways, add the bat emoji. And so we try to filter those off. And like, one of the simplest and most powerful kind of quality metrics that we found is basically how many fam members does this account have that follow them? So we call them fam followers. How many fam followers do you have? And, you know, as you can see on ultrasound dot money and you scroll down to the fam,

• 23:58Speaker 01

  like, you can clearly see that these, when you start ranking the fam members by this, like the, really the high quality accounts stand out. And this is true, not just for the top fam members, but kind of for the whole thing.

• 24:14David Hoffman?

  We all know, like, so what is the purpose of the ultrasound money meme? Like, why is that so such an important thing to like dedicate your time to?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  So I think part of the reason is basically the realization that

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Ethereum is not pure technology, right? There's if you want, if you want utility, if you want things like like security, if you want economic bandwidth, then the monetary aspect plays a key role. And this is something that I think the devs, myself included, very heavily under appreciate.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  And so,

• 25:02Speaker 01

  you know, what we're basically, what I'm, what the meme is trying to do basically is educate people on the monetary aspects of Ethereum. And now, why is this important? The reason it's important is because money is a meme, right? It's you need, in order to achieve this monetary premium, this magic meme energy, you somehow need to have, you know, coordination across the, across the community. And memes, which are basically just ideas that replicate, are ideal for coordination. Because basically, they all program us to think in the same way.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  And so we're in a position where everyone knows that everyone else thinks the same way. And so we can all kind of be on the same wavelength and be coordinated around making ETH a monetary kind of shelling point. And then, as I said, once you have this monetary shelling point and you achieve high monetary premium, you're in a position where you can provide a huge amount of utility. And one of the reasons is because you can have very, very high economic security. Basically, it will be, you know, impossible even for a nation state to attack Ethereum. And so, you know, some of the, the kind of code is law and immutability and kind of all these nice properties and life-ness and safety.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Have more credibility behind them. But also because ETH is used as collateral money, the fact that the money appreciates unlocks economic bandwidth. And so if you look at, for example, MakerDAO, it's actually, in a way, disappointingly small. There's only, quote, "only" 6 billion DAOs that are out there, especially when you compare it to a system like USDT, which has 10 times the amount, 60 billion. And one of the key limitations is that we need this trustless collateral

• 27:12Speaker 01

  and we need 100 more times, 1,000 more times more collateral. And the only way to get 1,000 more times more collateral is for the token to gain this monetary premium.

• 27:27David Hoffman?

  So here's a question that I don't think has been asked before. Do you think the existence of the ultrasound money meme will, has, or will impact the Gini coefficient of Ether?

• 27:47David Hoffman?

  That's a hard question to just come out of left field with you at. Okay, so while you think, I'll kind of explain the Gini coefficient to users. The Gini coefficient is just a measure of the distribution of Ether or any currency or any unit ever, right? And so if you have a strong Gini coefficient, I can't remember if the number is high or low, it's a measure of how concentrated ownership over a certain supply of things are. One of the best things about the Ethereum ICO, regardless of what Bitcoiners will say about it, is that the ICO actually allowed the Gini coefficient of Ether to be pretty strong for an asset that was just birthed. Usually, assets that are birthed have a terrible Gini coefficient because they're in the hands of a few.

• 28:32David Hoffman?

  But the ICO was a mechanism to distribute Ether into the hands of many, many people, which is really, really important if we talk about it. About the properties of money. It's good to have money distributed. Because as we all know, like it's easier to get people on board on a particular money if more people have it. Do you think so? Yeah. So back back to the question. Do you think like this ultrasound money meme has impacted the future current or state of or the future state of the Gini coefficient of ether?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think to to a large extent. Kind of early adopters don't need much more conviction, you know, they already have extremely high conviction. And I think the the meme maybe it kind of crystallizes, expresses kind of an intuitive feeling that they had. And kind of confirms. And so in that sense, hopefully, you know, it might not make these these kind of early whales, you know, not want to sell anymore that they they they previously did not want to sell.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the things that I'm that I'm hoping is that kind of the the meme brings on, you know, many, many more people. And especially give them access, for example, to very fresh revenue sources, which are which will which will lower the the the Gini coefficients and in particular, you know, staking. So, you know, with with staking, we're in a position where we can really distribute ETH to many, many people.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  And and and, you know, one of the reasons is because the the barrier to entry to staking is so low that anyone can participate. And the other reason is that the profit margins are very, very high. So basically, when you combine these two, anyone can come in and anyone can enjoy the fruit of of staking. Then basically, this this this new issuance is kind of going to dilute dilute the the the existing the existing holders.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  And I guess another aspect of this dilution and redistribution is basically from those who use the network to the stakers. And the reason is because part of the transaction fees will not be burnt, kind of the MEV portion. And so that is another force towards circulation of funds.

• 31:18David Hoffman?

  Do you think that the concept of proof of stake, as it's applied to Ethereum, impacts the Gini coefficient? Or is it kind of a wash and it's just kind of doesn't actually impact it all that much?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Tough questions, huh?

• 31:33David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. No, these are questions I'm just kind of thinking up on the fly, but I think they're interesting to ponder about.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so, I mean, because, you know, again, for the same argument, because staking is really open to all and because the profit margin is so high, then we have this natural kind of redistribution of things.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very, very hard to tell, basically, what percentage, like, the existing holders will be staking. Like, one of the policies that we have at the Ethereum Foundation is that we basically want to be staking roughly, as a percentage, roughly what is currently being staked. So, for example, if there's 10% of all of that is staked, then the Ethereum Foundation would like to stake about 10%. And the reason we kind of have this kind of unofficial policy is because it gives us kind of neutrality. We're not favored, you know, we're not biased in one way or another towards staking.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  And so... You know, the, the, the question is, you know, are, are these, these large holders staking more or less than the average?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  And, you know, actually, you know, just, just to, you know, personally, I'm, I'm staking actually a little bit less than, than, than the average. So there you go.

• 33:16David Hoffman?

  What's the incentive? Why aren't you staking all of your ether? Like, why, why haven't you just ape all the way in?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  I, I think part of the reason is that when you make the sausage, you, you know how it's made.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's, there's, there's a bunch of, of, of tail risk, you know, that is, that is, that is difficult to, to quantify. You know, one, one of the things that I've, that I've been doing at the foundation is, is trying to build as, as quickly as, as, as we, as we can, basically a dedicated security team to really harden the, the beacon chain. So I, I think we're going to provide a little bit more, you know, transparency through blog posts and things like that. But basically, you know, whenever you have new software, especially when you have, you know, four different clients and, and quite a bit of complexity, you know, there's, there's bound to be bugs and vulnerabilities and things like that.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  And I think we're, we're in a privileged position with, with the, with the beacon chain where, as far as we can tell, no attacker has really, like no black hat attacker has tried to, to break this. So, you know, we, we, we have had, you know, a, a quite, you know, significant number of, of reports from, from, from white hats and we've been, you know, fixing. And, you know, things are definitely getting much, much better, you know, like the, the frequency of reports is going down. The severity of the bugs is going down. It's more and more kind of edge cases that are hard to trigger and things like that.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  So yeah, in in in general, like, you know, se- security is one of our our big goals. And where we're working as as as fast as we can to get security to a high enough

• 35:11Speaker 01

  we can actually do the merge, right? It would be totally reckless to do the merge if we don't have high confidence in the beacon chain. And this confidence is is is increasing very rapidly.

• 35:23David Hoffman?

  So I I've been asking a lot of questions about Ether, Ultrasound Money and Ethereum. And I actually want to kind of revisit the layer zero aspect of this podcast, which is more about you, you, the individual, but also keeping in theme with the ultrasound money meme. You you talked about how like the importance of the ultrasound money meme is to secure Ethereum, right? The the value of Ether implies the security of Ethereum. That is good for everyone that's building on top of Ethereum. Therefore, the role of somebody who's working on the ultrasound money meme, it becomes really, really important. It's like if if you are focused on securing Ethereum, you might actually step away from the code and actually start to work on the memes, which is kind of sounds like what you've done. And I kind of think that that is a expansion or an extrapolation

• 36:07David Hoffman?

  of kind of like the original cipher cipher punk vision, right? Cypherpunks used to be all about math and code and cryptography, except now the role of what a cypherpunk is with the emergence of crypto economics has expanded into new realms. It's like unlocked new territory that it comes into. So I kind of think of you, Justin, as like a a leading new age cypherpunk. How do you feel about that that label?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a very grandiose label. And, you know, I'm not sure I'd put it on myself. But yeah, I'd agree that, you know, the the economic aspect has has unlocked kind of this this new design space. And actually, there's there's kind of this impossibility result. There's there's certain things that you we just can't do with cryptography alone. And so we need to make these concessions, right? Like when when we have this, you know, the the protocol sync thesis, cryptography and math are like one of the lowest layers, you know, they're super robust. And then you have like the more mushy layers, which is the the economics. But, you know, having the the the these two layers combined, like the really hard layer and the the mushy one gives you like these these these superpowers.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And yeah, this is something that I've only, you know, appreciated, you know, I guess relatively recently. And and I mean, I guess one of the reasons why why I'm I'm working at this layer is because there's there's a little bit of of taboo and resistance, I guess, from other technical people. You know, it's I feel like I'm in a unique position to be doing the work that I'm doing, partly because no one else is really keen to do that that work. You know, it's kind of seen a little bit as as dirty work.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  But I I kind of see it as as as very important.

• 38:02David Hoffman?

  We in the bankless world, we often use like the pioneer as a metaphor. It's like, come on, we're all going west, like grab your favorite leader and and go west with them. Sounds like that you are specifically trying to be like the pioneer for the other like code and math and technical minded people specifically trying to like corral them and being like, no, guys, like, this is the way this is where we're going like, let's let's all go westward.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. I mean, it's not like I I kind of pioneered and completely invented this this this idea that the memes are super important, you know, like it turns out that this goes back, you know, even to to gold, right? Gold is just to a very large extent, just a meme. And and Bitcoin took it to to to to an extreme, you know, like really emphasizing the the memes.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, I I, you know, you know, in the Bitcoin land, there was this kind of this debate. Should we do small block, big block? And I think both sides have have very, very good arguments, you know, on, you know, and and and I think the the the big mistake of Bitcoiners is is thinking in very kind of black and white is is like either either one or the other. But it turns out that it it's both, right? Like, we want the transactional utility. And, you know, how do we get this transactional utility? We get it with scalability, with privacy, you know, with programmability.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  With economic bandwidth and all these things. But, you know, in addition to the raw transactional utility, you also want the monetary premium and all the memes. And these things are actually symbiotic. They reinforce each other. And the reason is that in order to achieve monetary premium, you need to distinguish yourself in some way or another. And like one way to distinguish yourself is basically to have like to maximize utility. If you are like, you know, the substrate for the internet of value and you're settling, you know, the world economy, then, you know, you become the natural selling point to become

• 40:15Speaker 01

  this money for the internet. And vice versa, you know, once you've achieved this monetary premium, as I already mentioned, that provides utility for the utility in the sense that it provides security and economic bandwidth.

• 40:31David Hoffman?

  Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Justin Drake so far. Coming up in the second half of the conversation, we talk about both Ether and Ethereum's march towards capital efficiency and what that means for the holistic system if we always are going towards more and more efficiency. We also talk about the quantum computing threat as it relates to both Ethereum, but also more importantly towards Bitcoin as the thing that can't really adapt or change or overcome obstacles. And then we also talk about what Justin Drake thinks about the current state of the layer zero of Ethereum and also where he thinks it's going to develop into the long term and where he hopes it develops into the long term. We also talk about layers three and layers four, what those are and how they relate to the layer one and the layer zero.

• 41:16David Hoffman?

  I thought that was a particularly interesting topic of conversation. And there's a call to action to any graphic designers who are interested in illustrating this concept in an actual design that we can actually look at. So there's that. And then we also talk about Justin Drake's kid and also Justin Drake himself and his lack of identity with any one specific nation state or any one specific culture. And how that is a result of how he grew up and how that relates to what he works on Ethereum. He has a distaste for politics, yet we all know that governance is a part of this thing. So we parse apart those details. We also talk about Justin Drake's non laptop related hobbies. And it turns out he likes to tinker on the piano.

• 41:59David Hoffman?

  And even that has something to talk about as it relates to Ethereum. So I hope you guys are enjoying this conversation. And the second half of the show, in my opinion, is even more fun than the first. So let's go ahead and get right into it. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide. And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid die markets.

• 42:38David Hoffman?

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• 43:19David Hoffman?

  And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after signup, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com/go-bankless. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. AVE version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the AVE protocol even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of DeFi money Legos, yield and composability all in one. On Aave, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have

• 44:00David Hoffman?

  supplied collateral. Here you can see me borrowing 200 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different DeFi tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on Uniswap, and then deposit them back into Aave. With Aave, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of Aave at ave.com. That's A-A-V-E dot com. After like having our first and second podcast with you, the first being Moon Math,

• 44:44David Hoffman?

  all about cryptography, and the second being all about ultrasound money, my mind has actually kind of become convinced that like, the only viable crypto economic system is a smart contract enabled system, which promotes utility and actually promotes like the reasoning for using the thing in the first place, and then also proof of stake, because it's also the, you know, the system that requires the least amount of operational costs to secure. And so I feel like if we, if we go and through and we're living in a simulation and we run through all of the possible simulations, we will end up at a smart contract proof of stake system every single time. Do you agree with that?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  So it turns out there's like some technical reasons as to why, for example, smart contracts are not necessarily fully required. And the reason is because, once you have the data availability layer, and once the blockchain has one single functionality, which is the ability to verify SNOWs, you can do everything, because you can do ZK rollups.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  But you know, I guess that's just a minor technical detail.

• 45:51David Hoffman?

  But is that also the future of Ethereum in your mind? Is that where we're going as an ecosystem?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I think it's definitely possible. Like, the reason is that, you know, in the short and medium term, we're taking this roll-up approach. And I believe that, you know, the long-term winners are going to be the ZK roll-ups. But like, one of the very, very... So one of the problems with Ethereum, which is one of its greatest strengths, but also one of its weaknesses, is the EVM. The EVM has so many, many quirks, and it's arguably, you know, badly designed in many, many different ways. And, you know, each of these ways are not a deal breaker, but there's like a laundry list of 200 issues with the EVM, and they start to add up.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  And so, you know, one of the things we've been looking into is like, is there a replacement for the EVM? And it turns out that, once you have snocks, you can basically have arbitrary VMs. So, and this is something that we're starting to see. Like, for example, Starkware came up with Cairo and kind of their own VM. And then, you know, like there's the Matter Labs, they have their own ZK sync. And then, and so, in theory at least, you can take any VM, for example, Wasm, and then you can snarkify it, and then you can start running it on the EVMs simply by verifying the snocks.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  And so, this has actually two advantages. One is that you get the scalability of ZK roll-ups. You know, you just have to verify one single stock, which is very, very cheap. But the other advantage is that you get to escape the EVM, right? You have, it's kind of this wormhole that allows you to go explore.

• 47:51David Hoffman?

  Like a portal into a different VM.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So I think this is definitely a possible future. One of the things that we're, you know, heavily considering is basically,

• 48:04Speaker 01

  if and when we have a VM which really stands out, for example, is really, really snark friendly, meaning that it has very, very good performance in this snarkification world. And it has all sorts of other advantages. Maybe it's more death friendly like Wasm, or maybe it's more friendly to formal verification, or maybe it's more friendly to optimistic approaches, or whatever it is, then we can take this awesome VM and kind of enshrine it at layer one. So that could give us, you know, various advantages like,

• 48:37Speaker 01

  you know, a natural shelling point to avoid, you know, too much fracturing of the ecosystem. It could provide lower latency, it could maybe provide better security guarantees, it could provide maybe performance optimizations. There's all sorts of things that get unlocked once you're happy to enshrine a VM. But I think at this point in time, we're very, very happy with the situation we're in where we have the EVM. Okay, it's not perfect, but you know, it's the natural shelling point for all smart contracts in, you know, way beyond Ethereum. And so there's this very powerful network effect. DVM is good enough in the sense that it unlocks all these these parallel worlds that you can go explore through snarkified VMs.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  And then maybe in the more distant future, we can enshrine a really awesome VM. Maybe have, you know, one instance running per shard or something like that.

• 49:32David Hoffman?

  So I know that there's a small ideological debate going on between, I think you, Vitalik, and a few other of the core Ethereum contributors about like the long-term expressivity of Ethereum. I remember you, once upon a time, submitted an EIP to instantiate the ETH price at the protocol level. And then also in our episode, our first cryptography Moonmath episode, you talked about like staggering all of the shards so that there's one shard making it finalizing every like one second. So you actually get really quick finality over time. And so like you seem to be looking towards Ethereum with kind of like a high-touch approach. Let's, let's just turn this like machine that we have into the most like

• 50:17David Hoffman?

  Decently complicated, well-oiled, fantastically capable machine. Or others, I think Vitalik is more in the camp of just like, let's just make it what we need and then stop touching it. Do you see this as a future issue that some of the core Ethereum contributors are going to have to get into a table and discuss about what they want to do? Or where does this story go?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so just a couple of things. One is that the Staggering is something that this consensus on.

• 50:50David Hoffman?

  Okay, I didn't know that.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something we're likely going to go ahead with.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I mean, actually, there's, I think, much more alignment than you kind of portrayed it there.

• 51:04David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  I think, I think everyone wants maximum simplicity and basically just build what's enough. And so I think everyone falls into the Vitalik kind of camp and philosophy. I think the real debate is, you know, what do we really need?

• 51:23Speaker 01

  And like, one of my, one of my heuristics, I guess, is that if, if you can't do it at layer one, we should very, very seriously consider doing it at, if you can't do it at layer two, very seriously consider it doing it at layer one. And trustless oracles is, it turns out to be one of those things. Like, as far as I know, there's, there's no really like fully trustless way of, of doing oracles at, at layer two. Like, the best that we have is Chainlink. And, you know, while Chainlink might be kind of good enough, you know, in the short and medium term,

• 52:01Speaker 01

  is it really kind of the long-term technical solution that we want, you know, to, to power, you know, stable coins? Like, you know, liquidity and, and, and stuff like that? I mean, I, I think the answer is.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Maybe it's good enough, but it's not convincing answer. And and so, you know, on the other hand, you know, we don't want to enshrine all oracles on the one, it doesn't make any sense. And so really, what you want to be doing is you want to look at this kind of this long tail and you want to you want a solution with like kind of 1% of the complexity that gains you 80% of the value. And I think if we were to enshrine one single oracle, it would probably be kind of the if USD price. And it turns out that you can kind of leverage the the the the the basic security assumptions that we're making at layer one to get an oracle with very, very similar security assumptions.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And so if you're using Ethereum,

• 53:07Speaker 01

  you don't have to pay more in terms of security assumptions if you want to use this oracle. Whereas if you're using Chainlink, now suddenly you have two assumptions. One is you're you're you're paying the the platform of Ethereum, but you're also paying the platform risk of of of Chainlink.

• 53:26David Hoffman?

  How would the US dollar price of Ether actually become instantiated in the protocol? How what's the technical process behind that?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Right, so you know, one way to do it, for example, is with committees. So we have this, for example, this honesty assumption in Ethereum where we assume that, you know, half the stake is honest. And what we do is that we sample committees, which are large enough to be statistically representative of wider population. And then these committees of so-called attestors are going to go vote on on various things. And we basically assume that if the majority of the committee members vote on something, then that's reflective of of of the wider population and it's kind of true.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  And so we could have these committees basically vote on what they think is the price of of US dollar. I mean, the the the big problem here is that basically the the the the price of of ETH in in US dollars is is subjective. And and and kind of one of our design goals is to be kind of World War Three resistant.

• 54:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  And there's kind of some of these edge cases where like there there is legitimately a a definitional question as to what the USD is. So for example, in Argentina, there's kind of there's the kind of two market rates for the Argentinian peso. There's kind of, I forget what it's called, but like blue market and black market or whatever.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  And so if you're if you're in a situation where, you know, the the US economy goes crumbling, there could be a lot of chaos and we don't want this kind of chaos around the US dollar to be a systemic risk for for Ethereum.

• 55:12David Hoffman?

  Right. There's also the topic of just like the US dollar is an arbitrary anchor in of itself, right? Like the choice to include the dollar is also subjective in the first place. So I think maybe maybe the big debate behind this thing is like, do we even include subjectivity into the layer one at all?

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Like the the the the simple approach, the purest approach is to say just no subjectivity whatsoever.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, like, I mean, if you if you look at at a deterministic virtual machine, it it it's extremely powerful, right? It's too incomplete, you know, it has everything, but actually it doesn't have all the superpowers that you want. And more specifically, it doesn't have the oracles. Now, there's there's various types of oracles that are very, very familiar to a computer. Like if you if you take a phone, for example, it's aware of things like what is the time? It's it's also able to gather randomness. It's also able to, you know, gather, pick up the temperature or whatever. Now, in the context of, you know,

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Decentralized finance, for example, and the intent of value, knowing what the time is is very important. Having access to randomness is very important. And the blockchain being aware of its own price, I would argue, is also very important. I mean, we are definitely improving in terms of these oracles. So, for example, EIP 1559 gives us an oracle. More specifically, it gives us a base fee oracle. So basically, the block DVM is aware of itself as to how valuable its block space is. And I think

• 56:59David Hoffman?

  In ether terms, yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  In ether terms, exactly. And so the more we have like these really, you know, important oracles, I think the more complete the DVM will be.

• 57:11David Hoffman?

  Interesting. That's a fantastic. Are there any other like parts of like the Ethereum future roadmap that is are kind of like up for debate as it comes to like high-touch versus low-touch styles?

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Hmm, right.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I think one thing that we have a kind of consensus on is that we need to do a quantum upgrade. This is not negotiable. I mean, some people will say, oh, and I mean, this is a diminishing population, but some people will say quantum computers will never arrive, that kind of skeptics. And our position is that even in that scenario, which is not the consensus within kind of quantum physicists, that we still need protection against quantum computers. And the reason is because that blockchains are meant to be these ultra-conservative pieces of infrastructure. And, you know, we need at least kind of 10 years of heads up in order to do all the upgrades,

• 58:10Speaker 01

  because these things are very, very slow to upgrade, especially if, you know, in, let's say, five, 10 years, you know, Ethereum has a $10 trillion market cap. It is going to be especially difficult to change it. And so this is one of the actually high-touch kind of things that we need to do, like taking out the guts, the cryptographic guts and changing them for post-quantum cryptography could have quite, quite big consequences. In terms of where there's still kind of Debate, I mean, one of the the big ones which which we we talked about is basically,

• 58:50Speaker 01

  do we want to enshrine a a VM other than the the EVM? And I'm I'm leaning towards yes, and part of the reason why I'm leaning towards yes is that,

• 59:05Speaker 01

  you know, the the the power of innovation is is is so huge, and we've only just scratched the surface in terms of VMs that are custom designed for for blockchains. And, you know, we've also just scratched the surface in terms of VMs custom designed for snuggification and and and for more verification and things like that. And so I'm I'm optimistic that, you know, in in in five, 10 years' time, the EVM will look completely outdated, and it will kind of be kind of, it will kind of be stupidly obvious, so there'll be this natural shelling point that, yes, this is this is like 10, 100 times better, and we should just all adopt adopt this new thing. And enshrining it at layer one will will help achieve this this this shelling point.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  I mean, another thing that you you brought up is, you know, this this this this idea of a parallel universe where, you know, proof of stake is a necessity because it's the most economically efficient. EIP1559 is a necessity because it's the most economically efficient. And it's it's it's definitely possible that we'll find ways to be even more economically efficient than we are today. And like, one one possible way to do that would be to find a way to to burn the the MEV.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Now, it it, this is kind of an alpha leak, I don't know when your when your podcast will go out.

• 1:00:32David Hoffman?

  Got three weeks, three weeks.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so in in three weeks, it will definitely be published. So basically, we have this this kind of MEV intern, which we hired kind of three months ago, and it's quite possible that he actually cracked MEV.

• 1:00:52David Hoffman?

  That is a

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Which is a huge

• 1:00:54David Hoffman?

  That's a massive statement, cracking MEV?

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:59David Hoffman?

  That's like stuff that dreams are made of.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, kind of totally out of left field, he came up with this super simple kind of genius idea to basically do what's called MEV smoothing. So like the big, the big problem of MEV is that it's, it's, it's highly volatile and spiky. And this spikiness, um, basically, um, is a liability for the security of the consensus layer. And so if you can smooth out the MEV, suddenly it starts becoming very similar to issuance, right? This, this grade A fuel, which you can be, you can rely upon, uh, and it's kind of injected at, at a constant, um, rate.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  And so basically his idea is when you produce a block, like all the MEV shouldn't go to the block producer. It should actually go to all the validators that help get this block on chain, namely the block proposer and all the committee members that are voting to include that, to basically attest.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  In a position where actually the MEV is spread out, is kind of smoothed over the, the, the, the whole committee. And so, um, you know, that actually turns MEV from a liability into an asset, right? Um, from a security standpoint, um, so.

• 1:02:27David Hoffman?

  It just, it just turns into staking yields, right?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it turns in, in, into something very, very similar to, to issuance. Um, so, so it, MEV today is already staking yields, but it's like highly volatile yields. Um, and, and, and this volatility basically incentivizes reorgs and forking and, and, and very, you know, kind of nasty things. Once you're in a position where you, you, you smooth things out, then it's, it's kind of the, really the, the, the position you want to be in to, to maximize, uh, uh, security. And this, uh, so another consequence of, of this idea is that potentially we could burn the MEV.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  So we'd be in a position where the protocol, um, kind of has some knowledge, you know, very similar to this oracle idea, right? The, not only is the EVM aware of the base fees, but it's also aware of how much MEV there is, because it's capturing it and spreading it to the whole committees. And so we're potentially in a position where we can burn the MEV. And so we could take kind of the the ultrasoundness, as it were, to the next level where, you know, right now, like the the the data suggests that the the fee burn is about 70%. So of all the fees, we're burning 70%. Well, maybe we can burn this extra, you know, 30% as well.

• 1:03:54David Hoffman?

  So we can approach 100% of the burn rate of transaction fees?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, potentially. I mean, I don't want to oversell this right now because it's still kind of a early research. But yeah, I I at least the the the aspect of turning MEV from a liability to an asset seems very, very promising. And there'll be an E research post coming soon.

• 1:04:18David Hoffman?

  And this this kind of speaks to like the the DAO nature of Ethereum. The word DAOs are are kind of misused when we talk about them nowadays, like bankless DAO, Uniswap DAO, not a DAO, just a digital organization. The only two DAOs that I think are truly functioning at this point in time are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Those are the DAOs, as in they are decentralized and they're autonomous and they're some emergent bottom up organization. And like the the direction of the Ethereum DAO tends to always go towards efficiency. Right? And so if you're telling me that we like, we're working towards efficiency and security,

• 1:05:00David Hoffman?

  and this is just another innovation that we've been able to unlock, that lends towards that idea. And we all know that like DeFi is on a relentless march towards capital efficiency of the assets that finds that find themselves inside of DeFi. And so like, and so like, going back to that, like, if we run the simulation over and over and over again, the block, the crypto economic system that makes it, that you discover, whatever we call it Ethereum, or whatever name we want to to name this in these different universes, the number one thing that you will find inside of every simulation, every trial of the simulation is that each economic system gravitates towards efficient, maximum efficiency every single step of the way.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, another way to rephrase that is just trying to absorb innovation as much as possible. And I think one of the killer features of Ethereum is, you know, kind of Turing completeness is this this awesome innovation sponge, right? And the reason is that you can you can build any program you want on the EVM.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  But yeah, like the the the other aspect of this innovation sponge are, you know, the throughput from a data standpoint, you know, we're improving that greatly with

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  with sharding. There's also the economic security aspect, which we've talked at length and we're improving. And then there's also the monetary aspect, which we've talked at length. And it turns out that, you know, in in in each of these these four kind of that directions, we're just making incremental progress and we're we're very, very open to to absorbing absorbing the innovation. And I think that's that's partly kind of, I think, one of your previous questions was where, for example, is there disagreement within the EFM? I think that there is some disagreement is as to when, you know, Ethereum will be considered kind of done. Like my

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  my kind of gut feel is that we've only had 13 years of blockchain innovation and there's there's at least another 20 years of very, very fruitful kind of exponential kind of innovation. And that you know, most likely Ethereum won't be kind of, you know, totally done, you know, anytime anytime soon.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, like the the the quantum threat aspect, one of the good things about it is that it's it's widely accepted. And so even the Bitcoin is kind of accepted. The ossification maximalist will will accept it.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  And so it's it's, I think, that might be kind of one of the last times where we do it. So if we assume, for example, that quantum computers will arrive in 30 years, or let's say 25 years, then in in in, let's say, in 15 years, this will be kind of our our last chance to get all the good gadgets that we want. And thanks to this this kind of forced massive revamping of the system because of quantum computers.

• 1:08:04David Hoffman?

  And external ice age, if you will.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:08:10David Hoffman?

  You said that even Bitcoiners tend to accept the quantum threat. Nick, have you heard of Nick Carter's FUD dice?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. I love his FUD dice, yes.

• 1:08:21David Hoffman?

  But he has quantum computing on the FUD dice.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:08:26David Hoffman?

  Why are they on the FUD dice if you say that Bitcoiners are generally accepting of the quantum threat?

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, interesting. I think the reason why it's on the FUD dice is because Nick Carter is myopic. And the reason that he's myopic is that he only thinks kind of 10, 20 years into the future. Like, you know, another kind of similar issue is the low issuance. Like, okay, low issuance is not really a big deal, you know, we'll just kick the can and we'll think about it in 20 to 30 years. And, you know, I think that that attitude is actually okay if you're happy to embrace innovation. Because basically you're saying if there is some massive innovation in the next 20 years, which is very, very likely, because we live in this exponential innovation world, then we can just go grab the fruits and do the upgrade.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  But, you know, you can't have this relaxed attitude if you say that, you know, whatever was created on day one is what we're going to have for the rest of time.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  I mean, when I say that quantum is accepted is like, I don't think the stance of the Bitcoin technical community is that quantum computers will never come, hence it's not a threat. I think they do acknowledge that they will come.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  But the reason why they consider it FUD is because it's, you know, it's so far in the distance. And in that sense, they're a little myopic.

• 1:09:53David Hoffman?

  Interesting. To me, if you put quantum computing on the FUD dice and you think that Bitcoin can overcome that via technological changes, like you're committing to a hard fork, would you agree with that assumption?

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can do all sorts of crazy gymnastics with soft forks. You know, if that's the technical distinction that you're putting forward. So, you know, soft forks and hard forks are not too dissimilar from a capability standpoint. But yes, like some sort of massive fork that radically changes Bitcoin, yes. And not just from a technical standpoint, it's also fundamentally a social thing. Why is it a social thing? The reason is that there's lost coins and we need to decide what to do with these lost coins. Like, part of the Bitcoin ethos is we're not going to do any kind of rescue. And actually, this is very, very similar to the DAO, right?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  The problem with the DAO was that you had one single entity, the DAO attacker, which had control over, let's say, I forget what it was exactly, but let's say 10% of the supply, like a huge amount of the ETH supply. And here, it's basically would be a similar situation. A quantum attacker, which could be a single entity or maybe a small handful entities, could have control over 10% of the Bitcoin supply, this 10% being all the lost Bitcoins.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  And it's interesting because, you know, if the Bitcoiners are going to be kind of intellectually consistent with their past observations, they would reject the idea of, you know, of confiscating these coins and just destroying them. They would say, oh, no, code is law and, you know, the Bitcoin script was cracked and, you know, we just need to run the scripts as they're programmed and 10% of the supply is going to go to this quantum attacker. But of course, you know, this is just impractical, especially if you want to be like, you know, money for the world economy.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  If you're going to have a 10, you know, $100 trillion of monetary energy stored in the Bitcoin network, it's kind of inconceivable for a single entity to have $10 trillion. You know, kind of the half the size of the M3 supply of the US dollar or something. It doesn't make sense.

• 1:12:22David Hoffman?

  Interestingly, it would go, all of those 10% of the Bitcoins would go to a an end of a single entity that would have the maximum amount of like, like hashing power, which is kind of like equivalent to proof of work, right? But instead of going through the actual proof of work route, you're just, you're just running proof of work through private keys, right? Just now you're just doing it with quantum computers. Which is interesting to think about how like the other way to get a bunch of Bitcoins is to like maximize your computational power. But now it's just in a, in a quantum field.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Hmm, I mean, yeah, you're right. It's kind of stretching the analogy, but yeah, it's an interesting point, but.

• 1:13:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's no, it's a round, it's roundabout proof of work, unintentional proof of work, not intended proof of work.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  But if you take your comment literally, there's actually, this is a very deep observation, which is that proof of work is broken on the quantum computers. If you have sufficiently advanced quantum computers, then, then, then, then proof of work is, is, is essentially broken. And so, you know, one of the, the kind of the, the long-term kind of I, I, I, I, ideas of how Bitcoin is secured is basically you have these, these ASICs, Moore's law is broken. So that, you know, you, it's basically equivalent to, to, to, to proof of stake where, you know, you have, you know, fairly, you know, homogeneous distribution of, of these ASICs.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  And it turns out that this, this vision is going to get potentially disrupted by quantum computers in the sense that all the ASICs will become worthless from one day to another. And you have to go through the same growth phase and maturation phase that, that we've gone through. So in, in the traditional silicon world, there's been four kind of maturation phase for proof of work. We've got one from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs and then ASICs and then kind of the, the end of Moore's law kind of ASICs, I guess, five phases.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  And then as soon as you you you change the paradigm, you know, you in this quantum paradigm, then suddenly you're you you you go back to to to to almost the genesis from a security standpoint where, you know, proof of work is is just like Satoshi was the only miner at the very beginning. At the very beginning of this quantum era, there's going to be a single miner. And yes, there is going to be the difficulty adjustment and things like that. But your decentralization is basically going to go down to zero.

• 1:14:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's just going to be going to be a complete reset of the entire proof of work system, right? It's going to start from like day one again.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes. And Bitcoiners will say this is far, you know, because maybe, you know,

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  one of the observations is that you you you need quantum computers, which, you know, I potentially much more advanced than the ones that can break the private key. So, you know, it's maybe an extra 10, 10 or 20 years after the

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  after these these these first generation quantum computers. But, you know, it's still very much a possibility that they will come and and reset the proof of work.

• 1:15:38David Hoffman?

  I want to pivot the conversation to back to layer zero. So you you used to be a layer one engineer, and now I kind of view you as like a layer zero engineer. So with thinking into the long term about the layer zero of Ethereum of this community that we're all a part of, do you have any like long term projections or wishes for the layer zero of Ethereum? What do you want it to turn into?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  you know, I really like the layer zero of today. I think the Ethereum, you know, community and and culture is just just so, so, so great. And I think there is a risk of of dilution, right? As soon as you you grow, then then you might dilute. But there's potentially a way out, which is basically abstraction. Like if we're in a position where many, many, you know, billions of people can use Ethereum without even knowing that they're using Ethereum, then they'd be in, they'd effectively be.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  At layer two, but not at layer zero. You know how I said that, you know, we're going full circle basically between layer zero and layer two, because it's kind of people on both sides. But actually, these are different people. Like, you can be part of the community and not a user, and vice versa. You can be a user and not part of the community.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  So I think the ideal scenario is basically where the the layer zero grows very significantly, but the quality stays very high. And I think there is actually a a possibility to to do that. And basically, the the kind of the filter is kind of geekiness or kind of intellectual curiosity. Like, it's it's very difficult to get into Ethereum if you're not very multidisciplinary and intellectually curious. And so you kind of the, in a way, the the barrier to entry is maybe relatively high, and that could be kind of a filter.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  And then everyone else who just wants to use Ethereum for its utilitarian values can just use it without understanding. And so I guess it's very similar to planes, like everyone uses planes. But I guess the plane community, like the ultra geeks who knows how, you know, every single button in the cockpit and, you know, how the engines are made in the in in the jets and and things like that.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  That's probably a very special community, which is relatively small and and, yeah, kind of pure in that sense.

• 1:18:19David Hoffman?

  It seems to be that with that perspective, like, the whole purpose of Ethereum is to, like, let a thousand layer zeros be born on top of layer two, right? So like, infinity layer threes, if you will, just infinity communities built on top of layer twos, which are built on top of layer ones, which are built on top of the Ethereum community, which is like the layer zero.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  Hmm, I see what you mean. Okay, so tons of communities built on top of layer two. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:18:49David Hoffman?

  Each each one with its own sets of values and principles, which they're allowed to choose from, because Ethereum allowed them to choose from the full set of all values and principles, because that's the value and principles of the layer zero.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Hmm, yes, I like that. I mean, maybe, maybe we could call it layer four. And the reason is because in my mental model, kind of layer three is the service layer, right? So you need all this middleware between kind of the the smart contract and the user that which is kind of layer layer three. And so, for example, Coinbase is layer three, right? They're they're they're kind of connected to the blockchain. They make deposits and withdrawals and also things, but they provide this this this service. And then I guess layer four would be the the the the communities that are built on top of that.

• 1:19:43David Hoffman?

  Whoever, if there's anyone listening who wants to turn this into a graphic, especially if you're in the bankless Dow, I'll tip 5,000 bank to whoever's in the bankless Dow who wants to turn this into a graphic, so we can deliberate about this on Twitter. Justin, I want I want to go into a little bit more detail about about what what you get up to. I'm sure, like many people in the Ethereum world, you're more or less a workaholic. And so you're probably in front of your computer, like, I don't know, anywhere between six and 18 hours a day. But when you close the lid of your laptop, like, what happens next in your life? Like, what do you go do?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Right. So that is correct. I am a workaholic, which is, which is, you know, is great in the sense that I love what I do, but it definitely have has downsides, you know, in terms of of of health, for example, and just Just friendships outside of work and and and things like that. But you know, I I do have a family, so I I'm I've I've been married for six years and I have a um I have a young kid. Um, and you know, I guess a a lot of my my time is just be being a parent, you know, just

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  spending time with my kid, dropping him to school and teaching him, you know, stuff like like today, for example, we were we were flying a quadcopter. Um, you know, I'm at my my parents' house, um, and like kind of teaching him, you know, what goes into a quadcopter, for example, the fact that the the specific quadcopter that we have has a has a has a GPS uh and it uses GPS so that if there's a bit of wind, it can it doesn't it doesn't drift away, it kind of stays where it is. And so I explained to him that basically there's these, you know, satellites that every second produce a pulse. And then all these different, you know, satellites are slightly, uh, the pulses come at slightly different times.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  And then the GPS chip will kind of analyze when the pulses are received and then using that it can determine its position. And and so, you know, I guess it's just uh uh this distilling a lot of the the the the complicated technology that I've enjoyed learning kind of uh on my own and passing it on to to to to my son.

• 1:22:01David Hoffman?

  Well, is he a technically inclined individual? Does he like all the, I mean, all all boys to some degree love gadgets. Uh, what what part of like, uh, Justin Drake, the cypherpunk, do you see in in this kid?

• 1:22:15David Hoffman?

  How old is he?

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Um, he's six.

• 1:22:17David Hoffman?

  Six, okay.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  So, yeah, he's

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  you know, I mean, maybe every parent will say that, but he's he's he's pretty, he's pretty sharp. Um, and um, he's he he's capable to appreciate many different things. Um, like at at one point, he was uh He was really into mathematics and I think partly because of memetic desire, you know, like I, you know, someone told him that I studied mathematics and then he wanted to do some mathematics and then like, but now it looks like, it seems like he, he, he, he's, he's, he's moving on like now, now he's really into art and, and, and crafty things and, and stuff like that. Um, he's also very much into languages. So my family is kind of uh, e- extremely international. So like I, I, I, to kind of illustrate this,

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  I, I say to people that I was born in the UK from a British dad and an Argentinian mother. Um, and then we, we lived in China and um, I'm also Italian uh, by, by, by blood. Um, and uh, you know, my, my wife is Russian and she, she speaks Japanese, which is what she studied at university. And so he, he's kind of inherited this, this, this international aspect, um, you know, through, through learning all sorts of different languages. Um, so he has one, for example, grandmother who's, who speaks to him in Fran- in, in French, and then another grandmother who speaks to him in, in Russian, and then I speak to him in, in, in, in, in English and, and, and stuff like that. With, and he really

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  appreciates the, I guess, the, you know, being read, you know, books in different languages and uh, yeah.

• 1:23:56David Hoffman?

  That is hilariously appropriate for somebody who's like working on the layer zero of Ethereum to have like a, uh, such a diverse background of culture that like you don't actually have one specific culture. That is like the most resonant thing with Ethereum that I can actually think of.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I've kind of almost lost this nation state identity, um, in the sense that I don't even speak a single language without an accent. So I-

• 1:24:29David Hoffman?

  So awesome.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  So I I lived roughly half my life in France, you know, from one years old to fourteen years old. And when I was fourteen, I guess I would consider myself kind of French.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, and then I I went to live in China and then I I came back to the UK and I studied there and and I've I've spent, you know, fourteen years now in the in the UK. And, you know, I I I can't really say that I feel like I'm a true Brit or or or a true Frenchy. I'm just a citizen of the world, I guess. And and this is even more true where, you know, I I adhere to, I guess, the the the bankless nation, right? The the this is my nationality. And and I also try to, you know, detach myself, you know, from the nation state. I actually, you know, I feel that it's a very early idea, but the the idea of of network state from Balaji is just so mind blowing. And this is this

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  is something, some sort of a meme I want to contribute towards, right? Maybe in in twenty or thirty years, I could see myself trying to build a network state with all the infrastructure that we're building today.

• 1:25:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, I think with this massive like regulation conversation that has arisen lately, like, it's only going to accelerate the desire for people to have the options to opt out of their like nation state identities. Like, I would never, I don't really consider myself like a patriot. I don't fly the United States flag. And I think a lot of younger generations resonate with that inside of the United States, where like, being a proud supporter of America is like no longer cool for a large part of the population. And we're kind of looking towards online identities to like find, to fill that niche, right, to fill that void.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I personally really dislike politics and I try to minimize it in my life.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think governance is is a fundamental part of layer zero. But what I what I like about blockchains is this govern governance minimization. Right? So, you know, it it could be argued that governance has, you know, in the lifetime of a firm, only really kind of stuck its neck out, you know, in in a big way once, which was for the Dow.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  You know, let's hope that this this these kind of events don't happen very often and ideally just just this just this one time and really try to to to to minimize the decisions that the humans have to make and and maximize the the just the autonomous programmable, you know, inspectable, whatever.

• 1:27:14David Hoffman?

  I think I think it's very, very telling that when we talk about it at the nation state level, we call it politics. But when we talk about it at the crypto economic level, we call it governance, which is like, oh, the governance has a purpose. Politics is a game and everyone hates politics. But governance is like, it's like this, the the chores, like this, you got to brush your teeth, you got to fold your laundry, you got to do your laundry, you got to participate in governance. But if we can minimize governance, it's just like minimizing all the chores that we have to do every single like week of our lives.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think governance kind of highlights the utilitarian aspect of it, right? We want to do upgrades. Upgrades are fundamental because we live in this in this exponential world and also because we need to fix the various bugs.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Whereas, you know, as you say, politics is just is just become a kind of a shit show, really.

• 1:28:09David Hoffman?

  Right. I mean, a meat space shit show. Yeah. Depending on every every person has their interpretation of politics and it's generally always negative. Okay, so going back to my original question, like when you close your laptop and and what you get up to, but excluding your family, say, Justin, Justin Drake has some like alone time, some Justin, some Justin time. What is what's Justin time look like?

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Hmm, okay, um, I mean,

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  one of the things that I that I do is improvise on the piano.

• 1:28:40David Hoffman?

  Really?

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Um, so, you know, I I I used to take a piano lesson when I was younger, but, you know, I I I kind of find it constraining to to have to adhere to what's written on on the page and and the specific notes. And so, you know, at one point I was like, you know, I just want to do my my my my own stuff. And and I think creativity is is is one of the things that, you know, I I I do a lot in my daily job and, you know, I guess it makes sense to try and reflect that in in in the in the in the music.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  But yeah, so it took me it took me some time to basically

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  have the the confidence, you know, I I at first I was just playing random notes. It was it was kind of a genetic algorithm, right? I was I was playing these these random notes, but then suddenly I started making patterns. Uh, and then I started making, um, kind of these these small snippets. And then now I'm in a position where, you know, I can go on the piano and just just just improvise for, you know, for hours.

• 1:29:49David Hoffman?

  Do have you, uh, do you connect those dots between like your lack of interest of being aligned to a nation state, which is generally like a top down ideology, to like your lack of interest of being taught how to play piano and rather your desire to like be more creative and improvise? Do you connect those two things at all? Or or or any other like aspects of your life that fit into that pattern?

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  No, yeah, absolutely. I've I've always been a little rebellious. You know, even in the French education system, like the the French education system is very, very top down and rule driven and kind of bureaucratic and whatnot. And I I just very naturally just went against the the the the the rules. I mean, I mean, sometimes, you know, I I had a teacher which would kind of embrace this aspect of me. So, you know, there was this story where, I mean, it's a little.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Oh, ashamed to say it, but basically there's a the my my

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  the teacher, as I had in kind of in in in in middle school and my brother asked like, was there any kind of genius in in in your in your class? So he has a teacher and the teacher said, no, no, there was no one I I I and and then she said, oh, actually, maybe that I did have one genius, but only in one specific domain, which was the mathematics. And that that was, you know, me. And and the reason she thought I was a genius is because I was I was I'm not I'm not not really a genius. But the reason why I gave the impression that I was a genius is because whenever there was a math problem, I would solve it in a completely different way than the way I was taught. So basically, it was kind of a roundabout way.

• 1:31:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  And and the teacher didn't really understand what I was doing. But she always said, Justin came up, always came up with the right answer, but kind of the wrong method.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  And she kind of embraced that and and was fine with it. But a lot of other teachers in the French education didn't didn't like it so much. And so that that caused a little bit of tension, I guess.

• 1:31:58David Hoffman?

  It it's really interesting to connect us again. This podcast is called Layer Zero. And so we have this like non nation state identified rebel who likes to be creative and we're and route around problems to discover the right answer. Like too many of these things are lining up with like how Ethereum and and crypto economic networks like operate at scale at large, like throughout the layer ones and and the layer twos. And like part of my goals with this podcast with Layer Zero is to like discover the ways that like the DNA of of humans and the neurons of humans relates to the code that we write. And so I'm seeing a massive like direct one to one connection with like kind of the stories that you're telling me and how like these this whole entire industry is like built upon.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'll say that I also have kind of a bit of a hacker mindset. You know, I try to find the vulnerabilities, I try to find the cracks. I try to take a route which no one expects and is kind of hidden.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  And, you know, I'm kind of proudly have a kind of a $1,000 bounty for reporting a pretty bad Google Chrome vulnerability that could basically allow an attacker to basically take screenshots of your desktop remotely.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  But I also kind of use this hacker mindset in research, right? Because in research, oftentimes you have a problem and it looks like there's some sort of impossibility result, like you can't do something. And like the way that you escape impossibility results is kind of by redefining the problem or redefining the assumptions. You really don't want to take for granted things that other people took for granted and basically relax the problem in very subtle ways where suddenly you open up a design space. And so, yeah, this is something that I like doing is kind of taking something where people seem stuck, you know, they're not, they're no longer making progress, they've thought

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  about it for a long time, and they believe it's impossible, and then kind of coming in with fresh eyes and saying, and a new perspective and saying, actually, if you tweak your viewpoint just a little bit, there is a way around it.

• 1:34:20David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Fantastic. Well, Justin Drake, it's been a wonderful time having you on Layer Zero, and I hope this is not the last time that we hear, we talk about this and all these subjects, and I hope to have you back for more.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Fantastic. Thanks for having me.

• 1:34:35David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:34:37David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:35:22David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.