75 - The ETHCC Experience | Interviews with Ethereum Community Leaders

Did you miss out on ETHCC? Here's the antidote to your FOMO. David interviews 9 thought leaders and builders about the conference, Paris, and the broader Ethereum Community. ------ 🚀 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: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ 📣 SMARTCON | Register for Smart Contract Summit 2021! https://bankless.cc/SmartCon ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 2:00 What is ETHCC? 6:20 The Guests & The Vibe 10:23 The Community & Building 13:55 BTC Miami & ETH CC 20:15 Ethereum Documentary 23:34 Paris, Parties, and Culture 29:00 Vitalik Buterin 32:40 The Magnitude of ETH 39:05 What Vitalik’s Thinking About 42:26 Ethereum’s Social Layer 45:07 Stani Kulechov 48:38 What’s New This Conference? 51:45 Aave Ark (FKA Aave Pro) 54:24 rAAVE 57:12 The Magnitude of Aave 1:00:50 Kain Warwick 1:03:08 What’s Different This Time? 1:06:00 Around the Community 1:10:13 Jerome de Techey 1:15:00 Conferences and Community 1:20:00 What’s Great About ETHCC? 1:24:05 Aya Miyaguchi 1:27:18 The Ethereum Community 1:31:24 The Infinite Garden 1:36:00 Cooper Turley 1:40:09 The ETHCC Vibe 1:42:20 Simona Pop 1:47:40 Status 1:57:22 Joseph Delong 2:00:17 SushiSwap Roadmap 2:04:22 Jordi Baylina 2:08:00 The Hermez Network 2:11:58 Layer 2 vs Sidechain ------ Resources: Vitalik on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin?s=20 Stani on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StaniKulechov?s=20 Kain on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kaiynne?s=20 Jerome on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jdetychey?s=20 Aya on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AyaMiyagotchi?s=20 Cooper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa?s=20 Simona on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sim_Pop?s=20 Joseph on Twitter: https://twitter.com/josephdelong?s=20 Jordi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jbaylina?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.

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. I'm Ryan John Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, standard opener to every Bankless episode, but this is not a standard Bankless episode. You are in France right now as we're recording this intro, and you just attended ETH CC. Dude, we all have FOMO. I wanted to be there. I saw some of the clips coming out of this event. A ton of excitement, and you have promised the antidote to our FOMO. So what are we going to dive into during this podcast?

• 0:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the format for this podcast is going to be extremely different. Ryan, you actually won't be in the podcast because you're not at ETH CC. Yeah, sad. But this is, for those that were not at CC, this is the podcast for you. So these are about roughly 12 to 15 minute clips of just quick interviews with some of the big names that we all know and love, many previous Bankless podcast guests. And so I asked a lot of the familiar names, just what their ETH CC experience is like, and also kind of what the state of crypto is for them. And so I talked to Vitalik, Stani, Kane, and I am Ia Gucci, and so many different people from around the ecosystem, and kind of asked them, what it's been like for you, the guest,

• 1:35David Hoffman?

  the ETH CC attendee, what the experience is like? What talks are they looking forward to? What are they up to in Paris? What after-parties are they going to? So if you weren't able to attend ETH CC, at least you have this podcast.

• 1:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome, man. I'm super excited to listen to it. So I haven't heard any of this, full disclosure to podcast listeners as we're recording this intro, but I can't wait to listen to it. And I've got a ton of questions, but maybe the first is this. For people not familiar with ETH CC, what is the ETH CC event? And David, is this the first real Ethereum physical gathering place event since COVID went down? Was there like an ETH CC event like just prior to COVID as well? Am I recalling that correctly?

• 2:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's right. ECC number three was the basically the last event before everything shut down. And unfortunately, people who went to the last ECC actually contracted COVID there. And that's that's where people realized a lot of the crypto communities like, oh, this COVID is an actual thing.

• 2:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was like February, March of like 2020?

• 2:37David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes, I think March of 2020. And they try and have ECC at every single same time every single year. But they delayed this one to be a little bit further into the summer, just because they needed, you know, more time to pass for for COVID to be a thing. So everyone's still wearing masks in Europe, the vaccination, the rate of vaccinations in Europe's not as fast as it is in America. So masks, at least in America, on the West Coast, like masks are kind of done. But in France and Paris, masks are very much still a thing. And actually, today, which is today's the actual second day of ECC, tomorrow is the third of three days. Today is a more restrictive, you know, rules across all of France. And so yesterday, you could have gotten into ECC without a vaccination card. But today, you actually

• 3:22David Hoffman?

  had to go and show your vaccination card or a negative test to get into the event. So, yeah.

• 3:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you came prepared with all of that, like you knew all of that going in that this could be necessary?

• 3:34David Hoffman?

  Yes. Well, I also needed to bring my vaccination card to even get into the country. They wouldn't have let me into France without my vaccination card. So that's a battle that that everyone's been battling. Some people who went to the event, depending on where they're coming from, had to fight even harder battles. Kane left Australia, Kane Warwick from.

• 3:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very lockdown in Australia.

• 3:53David Hoffman?

  Yes. And so he had to like, more or less like a petition, his government to like, hey, please let me leave. And yeah, and like, say, like, this, this me leaving is going to be economically beneficial to Australia. That's why you should let me go. And so he's here in France. And then he also said that he's also not going to go home right afterwards. He's just going to do a little bit of a tour abroad.

• 4:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 4:16David Hoffman?

  Mario Nocanti, who I've been hanging out with all week, is in that same in that same boat. So he actually literally cannot go home, because they won't let him back into the into Argentina. And so everyone's coming from all over the world, and everyone has like, kind of their own game that they're playing with regards to COVID. And what it's what it took to get here and what it's going to take to get back home. Some people just don't have plans to go home. They're just going to keep on touring around the world.

• 4:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can understand why. So is this, is ETHCC really an Ethereum centric conference? I think so, right? Because ETH in the name ETHCC, but also seems to be more broadly DeFi. So what's the overall tone of the thing? Is it more technology? Is it more applications like DeFi? Or is it more like, you know, base layer Ethereum stuff? Or is it all of the above?

• 5:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's, it's specific to builders. And so all the panelists, actually, there's actually not very many panelists. I actually don't think there was a single panel. It's all one, one speaker giving one talk at a time. And you had to apply to be a speaker. But the, the, you know, common denominator for all the speakers is that they are a builder. And what's unique about this particular ETHCC event, and I haven't been to any other ECC event. So I'm just kind of going by word of mouth here. Is that what the definition for builder is, has really expanded in this particular ECC event. Last ETHCC, and ETHCC is a really hard thing to say. Just say CC.

• 5:43David Hoffman?

  The, the last EC event, you know, there wasn't really this NFT mania or blossomy ecosystem. And there's, there was a lot less like non-DeFi platforms, right? And so this particular ECC, there's a lot more surface area for builders to be builders. And so now we aren't, when we say builders, we're not just talking about just people who can code. But we're talking about people who are content creators like Cooper Turley. We, I interviewed Cooper Turley and he's big in the creator economy. And so I got his take about what it's like to be at ECC. And he gave his own talk and he doesn't code. He's, he's part of the creator world.

• 6:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  And he's going to be in this episode too?

• 6:21David Hoffman?

  He's in this episode, yeah.

• 6:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  How many people did you get in this episode, dude?

• 6:25David Hoffman?

  Nine?

• 6:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 6:28David Hoffman?

  Should I list them off?

• 6:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can, if you can remember them.

• 6:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So of course I got Vitalik. Had 15 minutes with Vitalik, first bankless podcast with Vitalik in real life. So that was pretty cool. Like I said, Cooper Turley, also Jerome, the guy who actually organized and organized ECC number four and also ETHCC numbers one through three. So every single one, that was a really interesting perspective. Kane Warwick, Stani from Ave, Mia Gucci from the ETH Foundation, who speaks really, really softly. So I really had to bump up her audio. Simona Pop and then also Jordy from, from Hermes Network. And then also, oh, and. Joseph DeLong from Sushi and Sushi had a really big announcement here at ECCs. So those are, those are all the people that I interviewed and those are who are the people that you are all going to hear from.

• 7:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so aggregate this for us, David. Like, what's the overall feeling or vibe? I guess the last ECC event was pre-COVID, but it was also pre-bull run. Remember like March 2020, ETH and Bitcoin were just starting like minor ascent. But of course, I don't know, we were still in the 200s, 300s and then COVID totally smashed all of that. Now here we are, I guess we've had sort of a bull run, but we're in crab market, doldrums, ETH price below 2K as we're recording this. But what was the overall feeling or vibe that you felt from this conference?

• 7:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. Yesterday ETH really dipped below to a new low at 1750. And then today it's kind of risen up to 1900. And the only reason why I'm talking about press right now is that I have not had one price conversation.

• 8:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 8:05David Hoffman?

  No one is talking about price at all, right? No one cares. No one cares. And like granted, it's largely because we've still had like a big run up. You know, it's still very much higher than where we were a year ago, like you've said. But this has not been a price conversation at all. That's including at the conference and at the like peripheral events that I've been going to as well. Prices, not, not a topic of conversation, not in the slightest.

• 8:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what is the vibe? What is the topic of conversation?

• 8:33David Hoffman?

  Well, there's so many different tracks. And so there's like the NFT track, there's the DeFi track, there's the, the non-financial use cases of Ethereum track. The vibe, I think I would say, well, there's, there's a ton of energy first off. Everyone is really stoked to be there and everyone's just really chatty. There's, there's like many different rooms for all the different like conference or panels and workshops and talks. And so people are going to the talks that they are like really intrinsically interested in as in like this is, is my like thing that I care about. So I'm going to go to this talk, but other than that, people are out in the halls, they're, they're chatting with other people. There's booths kind of spread around and there's a big like congregation room.

• 9:15David Hoffman?

  And so people are more just hanging out in, in the, in the overall community. And then, and then there's also like an outside area with a nice big tree with a lot of shade. So people are sitting under the tree. People are talking as you would expect. And, and, and the, the energy is absolutely fantastic. I would, I would say the overall ambiance is that. Like I said, this is like a builder focused event where builder is now kind of more expansively, not just not just coders, but just people who create and people, I feel like we all know that there's still so much work to be done. Like everyone has like their builder hat on and everyone is talking about like so many brand new projects that I have never heard

• 9:56David Hoffman?

  of are at this event and you know, people are wearing T-shirts, like you know, repping their, their, their project or their company and a lot of new projects and companies that I've never seen before. So I would say that the vibe is definitely like, we're all here to build and talk about building and also talk about like all the new directions that Ethereum has taken in the last year since the last ETH CC event and, and we all want to kind of pow wow and you know, communicate what we're all up to because we're all builders here.

• 10:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, it, it, it seems like since the last ETH conference in person, there have been so many catalyzing events like, you know, NFTs really came out and, and were a big thing. David, there was a, a raise this week of OpenSea, the first NFT unicorn, like 1.5 billion, billion with a B, absolutely insane success there. And now the Ethereum community has Layer 2 actually humming. So optimism and Uniswap just went live with the first Layer 2 solution of a flagship DeFi application on a rollup, I should say, not the Layer 2 solution generally, but on a rollup. Super exciting. So rollups are here. We also have EIP 1559. We have ETH 2 that's shipped with staking for over six

• 11:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  months. That's gone very well. A lot of positive catalysts ahead. Was that some of the enthusiasm that was felt? I guess that's why the conversation was so varied. It wasn't, you know, we're, we're trying to solve this one particular problems because a lot of the problems are being solved. And like the Ethereum community has sort of spread out in so many different directions. There's so many different avenues that are being pursued mutually at the same time. Was the feeling, was there a feeling of kind of enthusiasm about all of this progress? Or what were some of the main, I guess, topics of conversation when you're having those conversations with people?

• 11:45David Hoffman?

  I would actually say Ether as a topic of conversation, including the EIP 1559 in the merge. That also hasn't, kind of in the same way, prices hasn't been a topic of conversation. Ether really hasn't been a topic of conversation either.

• 11:59David Hoffman?

  And there's definitely a layer two track, so there's a lot of layer two talks as well. But also people, I think, were really, a lot of the builders in this space have kind of considered L2 as like, you know, we've checked that box, actually, that like, that's done now.

• 12:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like it's done?

• 12:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like we

• 12:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about scalability more broadly?

• 12:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, scalability, yes, overall, and so here's, yeah, here's where I was going is scale, like L2's optimism, like Hermes network is here with ZK rollups and Hermes network is about to implement their, their own version of the EVM on Hermes network. So we got smart contracts on ZK rollups, not just on optimistic rollups. And, and so while those are definitely topics of conversations, because everyone's really excited about this brand new thing that we have about, I have on Ethereum. People are looking towards different directions now. So like privacy is a big conversation and other applications of zero knowledge, zero knowledge rollups. I thought there was a booth with the Dark Forest game, which is a game based off of zero knowledge cryptography. And so people are, and so gaming is actually a really big topic of conversation as well.

• 13:05David Hoffman?

  And so definitely a lot of talk about L2, but now people are starting to look beyond the horizons because now, now L2 is right in front of us. And so there's a lot of conversations about, you know, what's next? What's after we have scalability? Because largely scalability is a solved problem. We just kind of need the things to roll out.

• 13:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's incredible. How about ETH 2.0? Any conversation about the merge where what's going to happen in the future of sort of the base layer protocol?

• 13:31David Hoffman?

  Again, like not a lot of talk about proof of stake in the merge. It was really an application layer conference, I would say, not an Ethereum protocol conference. And so it's really projects that are trying to like, you know, market themselves and also like teach the rest of the community what they're up to and what they're doing. Not a whole lot of a protocol level stuff. Except for like cryptography. There's definitely a cryptography element as well.

• 13:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know you went to Bitcoin Miami just a few months prior. So contrast Bitcoin Miami with ETHCC. What like I, and I get that there are different conferences like ETHCC is more tied to builders, but they are both, I guess, conferences run by their respective communities. What are some of the contrast points or similarities?

• 14:18David Hoffman?

  Oh my gosh, there's so much, there's so much. And granted, I only went to the Bitcoin conference for about a couple of hours before I left and started doing like some of the Ethereum peripheral stuff. But first off, ETHCC, the tickets for ECC were $300. And one of the, one of the ethos of the event, when I was talking to Jerome, who organizes ECCs, it wants to be accessible and viable for a broad community of people to attend it. You know, we in Ethereum like to lower barriers. And but also in Ethereum, we understand that there are economic costs to things like the economic cost of ETHCC was roughly $400,000. And so that got funded by, you know, $300 tickets or also sponsoring the events. So that's kind of how they made that.

• 15:03David Hoffman?

  And stark contrast to like the 1,000 or 2,000, depending on when you bought your Bitcoin Miami tickets, it costs you minimum $1,000 and up to $2,000 if you bought them, I think, within a month of the event. And so Bitcoin 2021 was definitely like profit maximization and ETHCC is definitely like, okay, we paid the bills. Right? Like, and so that is a stark contrast as well. Also with Bitcoin 2021, there were, I think, like three basically main stages that people were talking on. But with ETHCC, there's one main stage, but I think there's like eight or nine like peripheral rooms going on. And so if you, you actually might have been caught in a rock and a hard place between going to two talks that were happening at the same time.

• 15:47David Hoffman?

  And if you wanted to attend both, you had to pick one because there were so many things were happening in parallel. And you know, that was also true at Bitcoin 2021, but there was again, there's only three stages and three stages with like, like thousands of chairs in each one, whereas like each CC is like, you know, eight to nine smaller rooms. Some of them have like, you know, only 50 chairs to maybe a couple hundred chairs. And then the main event had maybe a thousand chairs. Also, there were only 500 tickets sold. So, you know, you know, COVID had to bring down the total number of people at the event. Wasn't too crowded. Also Bitcoin 2021 definitely oversubscribed. Way too many people were going there. And it was also in Miami, which was, you know, they in Miami never, people never put masks on in the first place.

• 16:30David Hoffman?

  And France and Europe, you know, much more like conscious about COVID and careful about COVID than I would say. Then I would say about Miami and Bitcoiners at large. And so, you know, masks on inside of the buildings, no matter what. And even some of the workers there would like, have to say like, hey, like, can you put your mask back on, please? And so that's, that was a little bit of the vibe there.

• 16:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  A bit more price talk, I assume.

• 16:54David Hoffman?

  And way more price talk at Bitcoin. Yeah, at Bitcoin. Yeah. Even though even at Bitcoin 2021, like prices had definitely started to dip by then.

• 17:03David Hoffman?

  And more panels at Bitcoin 2021 as well. And overall, like Bitcoin 2021, not a builders conference, because what are you building on Bitcoin, right? Like, people are talking about research and development with like core fundamental like functioning of the Ethereum blockchain, right? Whereas Bitcoin 2021, like I like I say, Bitcoin is not a place for builders. Therefore, the builders have migrated into the social layer. So Bitcoin is building on the social layer. And that's why you, that's where you saw like toxic mask maximalism as a conference topic for Bitcoin 2021. You did not, as you could guess, you did not see that topic.

• 17:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was interesting. It's like, it's like celebrities, right? Like Floyd Mayweather, right?

• 17:46David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 17:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Seeping Bitcoin into the wider mainstream culture. Or the big news coming out of that was El Salvador adoption, right? So it's like not actually building. It's like, we already have this thing called Bitcoins kind of finished. Yeah, we're doing lightning, a few other things. But now it's about seeping this into mainstream acceptance and adoption. It's got to have a completely different vibe than Ethereum at its life cycle.

• 18:10David Hoffman?

  Totally. The biggest celebrity there at ECC was Vitalik, right?

• 18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 18:15David Hoffman?

  He's the only one that had a little bit of a posse.

• 18:20David Hoffman?

  Every and then and then you kind of had the others.

• 18:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does Vitalik have a posse?

• 18:24David Hoffman?

  Well, there was also, we'll get to this topic, but there was also a documentary being filmed at ECC. And so there were, there was some people with decent production cameras, like following Vitalik around, kind of getting some B-roll of him just, you know, chit chatting with, with the conferencegoers. And so like, there was a little bit of like, you know, posse there. And then, and then the other celebrity aspect was just the other builders. Like, everyone knows Mariano Conti, he's like, he's pretty tall, so he stands out and he, he's also public. And, you know, he, he writes really good smart contracts and writes them for a lot of different communities. And so everyone knows and loves Mariano. And so, you know, having him around, like everyone giving him high fives. And then, you know, you had, you had Kane and Stani. And so those were our celebrities. They're like the DeFi builders. And so like.

• 19:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did anyone know, anyone know David Hoffman in Bankless?

• 19:11David Hoffman?

  The shirt really helped, you know? Shirt helped me stand out. But no, everyone, it was hard to like walk more than just like a couple hundred feet without someone saying like, hey, man, I love Bankless. I like, I love what you guys do. And I'm decently like introverted, actually why podcasts actually works well with me.

• 19:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I find that hard to believe. I know we've never met in person, David Hoffman, but like, I find it hard to believe that you're introverted. But I know you've told me that. You claim that.

• 19:35David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. So like coming to an event where people already kind of like know me because I'm a YouTuber. Like people know my face. It actually is really helpful. It's like, I don't actually have to like explain.

• 19:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't introduce yourself. You don't have to wear the name. Hello, my name is David. Name tag.

• 19:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I mean, I still introduce myself because I don't want to like assume and be like overly cocky. But like, yeah, it is really helpful. Just like, oh yeah, like you've listened to Bankless. Like, you know, I don't have to talk too much about that.

• 20:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's funny because I'm sure if they've listened to Bankless, they've probably listened, you and I ramble for like hours, right? So they feel like they kind of already know David Hoffman, right? So that's an advantage when you're attending a conference, I suppose. Well, tell me more about this, uh, this documentary. So is this the documentary that was recently funded on the Mirror Protocol? Made like $2 million in funding, community funding? And it's going to be an Ethereum specific documentary? What's the scoop here?

• 20:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the title is Ethereum, the Infinite Garden, which is a fantastic name. And then really, the word infinite talks about iterative games and versus, and this is a game theory reference where you have one-off games where you just play one match. Or you have games that are recursive and you have, they're iterative. You play match after match after match. And in one-off games, you are in competition with your opponent. But with iterative games, you need to work with your opponent to come together. So you guys can survive in the long term. That's like the, that's the, and so that's the reference of the infinite garden, a garden of growth, new things being born out of this.

• 21:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Garden of cooperation.

• 21:12David Hoffman?

  Garden of cooperation. That's great. That's great. Yeah, it's a great, great reference. So I love the title. And so I met with the producers there. And so they actually filmed me interviewing some of the, some of the key DeFi members, right? Vitalik included, right? And so I had my like dinky little like MacBook laptop, like recording, like kind of hacky, like recording on Zoom. And so I was just the only person in my one Zoom room and Zoom was recording me talking to Vitalik with my microphone. And then we had like this big, big camera like walking around us while they were, while they were recording us. And so if you guys are listening on the podcast, you can go to the YouTube video and check that out. And so they recorded me talking to Vitalik.

• 21:56David Hoffman?

  They also recorded me talking to Jerome, the coordinator of ECC and then also Iya Miyaguchi of the EF. And so there's some bankless content being recorded, being recorded by the, the, the actual documentary. And Ryan, when I, when I met the director, she said like, oh yeah, you, we want to talk to you and Ryan. And so I haven't had that conversation yet, but apparently they want to, they want to talk to us.

• 22:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  With like cameras and stuff?

• 22:25David Hoffman?

  I would assume, I could only assume.

• 22:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess it's a documentary.

• 22:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 22:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's crazy, man.

• 22:29David Hoffman?

  Well, here's, so if they do want to film us, Ryan, here's what I think we should do. I think they should film a meeting in person for the first time.

• 22:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  The first meeting in person.

• 22:41David Hoffman?

  Just for the documentary.

• 22:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, just for the documentary. You know what? That would actually make it pretty epic and definitely a good story. We should, we should do that if they want to. Documentary people are listening. When, when does this documentary come out?

• 22:54David Hoffman?

  I mean, they're still filming it, right? So I don't know much of the agenda or itinerary. I would imagine just like Ethereum, it would change as, as needed. So they're, they're kind of just, they're trying to fill, they're just making content right now, filming content. And then they'll actually like edit it and turn it into something, but I would expect not, definitely not this year. Maybe if we're lucky in 2022, I think. But I don't know what it's like to produce a movie. I only produce YouTube videos.

• 23:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, on Zoom, you know? Simple, simple recording equipment that goes behind the scenes. I guess they'll get a taste if they, if they watch the YouTube or if they watch the documentary as to behind the scenes of, of how a bankless interview works. David, what else you want to tell us about ECCE? Is there anything else?

• 23:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So today, like I said, is day two of three days of ECCE. I'm here until Sunday. This is actually my first time in Europe, kind of a Europe noob. But tonight is

• 23:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  How's it French?

• 23:49David Hoffman?

  Absolutely terrible. So I know a half decent amount of Spanish enough to get by. And so when I came to France, I, I came to France. I was like, okay, I can't speak English. They don't speak English here. What other languages do I know? I'll also start speaking Spanish. Like, oh, no, no, it also doesn't work. No. There's a, there's a decent amount of English speakers here where I've been able to get by. I actually haven't been able to do too many France things. Just because I've been all Ethereum focused, but after tomorrow, I think I might just like straight up turn off like crypto mode and go straight into like French.

• 24:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally should. Don't check any prices. Don't worry about, I got everything covered in the bankless stuff. Just go enjoy Paris, my friend.

• 24:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but the, the event that everyone is talking about is tonight, which is rave. And I talked to Tony, it's Tony about this. Yeah. So Ave is throwing a rave and they're calling it rave.

• 24:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 24:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so I talked to Tony about that because I also talked to Stani about Aave Pro, which has now been rebranded to Aave Ark, to something, something different, fun fact.

• 24:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is their institutional Ave edition, right? Something that compound did recently.

• 24:55David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. But it, but it's cool that Ave is also throwing a rave or rave. But they're also throwing or generating like an institutional level at DeFi app. And so Ave, Ave's got Ave, the, the app for the retails, you know, the, the apes like you and me. And then it's also got Aave Ark for institutions. And now it's got Rave, the rave for the party scene, right? And I would imagine that like, this is not going to be the last time that Ave throws a dope party. And so they're doing it all, man. And so that, I asked Stani that question is like, Ave is just growing tentacles into like all different spheres of Ethereum. And Stani is right on board with us, man, about like, yo, this isn't just like financial applications. This is like community and culture.

• 25:37David Hoffman?

  And, and one of the, the big takeaways I had from my conversation from Stani is he talked about how with the, there's so much new surface area in Ethereum lately. And there's so many new tracks to talk about at ECC. We are no longer talking about like just coding or now just finance, but also NFTs and culture and, and more broader applications. And so he's calling like all the attendees of ECC a society, not just like

• 26:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  A society.

• 26:01David Hoffman?

  A society.

• 26:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's fascinating, or maybe a nation is another tip for this. What, what's so interesting about this, David, is do, do you remember there was a time where we could like count the number of DeFi applications, projects on our hand, right? We knew all the founders, we knew everyone. Every time, every year that goes by, it feels like we have less and there, there's just too, so much more to keep track of. And now it's like, it, it's even, it's impossible to keep track of everything in DeFi plus NFTs, you know, plus like layer two, plus all of these other areas that Ethereum is investing at the same time. It's almost like the internet, right? Like the very early days of the internet, there were just like a few websites, you kind of knew the main ones. Now go try to keep track of everything that's happening on the internet in parallel. That's what is happening with Ethereum.

• 26:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is becoming a digital society of, of crypto natives. Super cool to see that, man.

• 26:54David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. I don't have anything else to add, Ryan. I think we should just go right into the interviews.

• 27:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. Let's do it. Guys, we are going to cut right into these exciting interviews. I can't wait to hear them myself. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 27:10David Hoffman?

  Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the Ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite D apps all in one place, Ledger is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Paraswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. DeFi never stops growing, and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it.

• 27:54David Hoffman?

  So click the link in the show notes to see all the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has, and stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your Ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your D apps all in one place.

• 28:12David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi. If you've been using Ethereum for the past 12 months, you've probably noticed the high gas fees and the slow confirmation times that have been plaguing DeFi. Too many people want to use Ethereum, and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. That's where Arbitrum comes in. Arbitrum is a layer two to Ethereum, which means Arbitrum can increase Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of security and decentralization. This is why people are calling this Ethereum's broadband moment, where we get to add performance onto decentralization and security.

• 28:53David Hoffman?

  If you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs and make an overall better experience for your users, go to developer offchainlabs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. If you're a user, Keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps building on Arbitrum. Arbitrum has been working with over 300 teams, including Ethereum's top infrastructure projects, and will be opening up to all users shortly. There are so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the great migration to the Arbitrum Layer 2. To keep up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter @Arbitrum and join their Discord. All right, everyone, I'm here with none other than Vitalik Buterin on the second day of ETH CC, the first major Ethereum event after COVID.

• 29:37David Hoffman?

  Vitalik, what's it like to be at ETH CC?

• 29:39Speaker 02

  It's it's good to see people again. I mean, well, I saw some people for the last one and a half years, but definitely far fewer than I'm normally used to. So, yeah, and it's always just good to see the lovely and friendly Ethereum community in person.

• 29:54David Hoffman?

  And what about the ETH CC number four? Are you particularly excited about? And also, how have you seen this particular Ethereum event be different than the other ones that you've been to in the past?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Hmm, I mean, I guess it feels like the ecosystem is just slowly and steadily maturing. Like, I don't think there's necessarily like a sort of zero to one sea change happening, but I think that's a good thing, right? Like, I think the ecosystem has already for quite a while now just been on this sort of very good forward course. And the projects keep getting better. The kind of bar of stuff that people actually talk about at the presentations just keeps getting higher and things keep getting more interesting. So I think, you know, things in the ecosystem just keep improving and it's as obvious here as I was hoping.

• 30:49David Hoffman?

  There's a bunch of different tracks for ETH CC, a bunch of different like lines of topics. What's what's new that you are interested in? And are there any talks out there that you're particularly excited to listen into or any talks that you enjoyed yesterday?

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Hmm, let's see, there were just like a scattering of a lot of different and interesting things, right? Like there was, there was the presentation on proof of humanity yesterday. There was a Carl talking about retroactive funding with his usual lovely Carly presentation style. There were, there was that interesting presentation earlier in the morning, like talking about cryptocurrency monetary policy and how cryptocurrency monetary policies could be used to incentivize different things. So, you know, just a lot of different discussion from different people on a lot of different topics.

• 31:38David Hoffman?

  One thing that I've noticed is that we, in previous Ethereum events, we had, you know, topics and conversations about possible products or possible future things. And what is one thing I've noticed at this particular ECC is we have people talking about their next products, not their first products. Have you noticed anything like this as well?

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Hmm, that's definitely true. And then the other thing that's true, of course, is that people not just talking about their next products, but people talking about their existing products, right? There's just so much fun existing stuff to talk about, right? Like in all the previous events, even all the previous online events, like optimism and Arbitrum were future products. And now, you know, optimism and Arbitrum both have live versions on mainnet of some kind, like Uniswap just launched on optimism about a week ago. So, you know, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed, I think is the phrase. And yeah, I mean, I expect, you know, the future, the future that's already here to just keep on getting even a future year over time.

• 32:39David Hoffman?

  Vitalik, Ethereum is six years old and we've been having six years of conferences. And I'm a big fan of ETH Denver. Those were my first Ethereum events. And this is my first ECC event. And the, the community is so vibrant and there's so much energy here. As, as one of the biggest creator of Ethereum, do you ever just sit and reflect on the magnitude of, of what you've created? You've, you've made people fly around the world to come to France, to go to Denver. How, how do you, how do you just think about the magnitude of the thing that you've created?

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Oh, and the Ethereum ecosystem is definitely much bigger than I was expecting it would end up being when I first started in 2014 and 2015. So it's definitely a

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Very strange and very unexpected journey. But I'm happy with what came out. I think there's just so much stuff that's

• 33:35Speaker 02

  happening now, I mean, both at the conference and everyone who wasn't able to make it this time around. But hopefully we'll be at DEFCON when it happens. It will be just so much, many fascinating and like interesting things, you know, not just being talked about in the future, but actually just starting to run. I think it's amazing.

• 33:57David Hoffman?

  Vitalik, in the six long years that we've had Ethereum, how has the Ethereum community and the builders on Ethereum, how have they exceeded your expectations as to what you might have predicted back in 2015?

• 34:11Speaker 02

  The quality of the technology are just the kinds of things that people figured out would be possible to do with technology is super impressive, right? Like even ZK Snarks, for example, right? Like that was still, you know, we called that moon math back in the old days, right? And now, I guess, well, we're, I guess, on the moon. And what next? I mean, well, there's Mars math, I guess, what is that? Is that like obfuscation or something? But no, moon math is just like, hey, what? You just like do some stuff with polynomials and like everyone knows what those are. And if you want scalability, you just make proofs out of them, right? And that's just like one example out of many.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  So just the kinds of tools that people have come up with that we could work with is a lot. And also the kind of collaboration that lets those things be impossible, right? Like ZK Starks, like that involved a collaboration between, you know, academics, Ethereum people, other kinds of mathematicians, software developers.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  All the various people at the company is that it actually made it happen. A lot of kind of cross institutional, you know, cross country, across the world collaboration happening. So it's like that aspect of things, I think, is really great as well. And then obviously even beyond ZK Stark. So like you've just been seeing all of the rise of these Ethereum applications that just all talk to each other. I don't think I was actually even expecting the applications talking to each other part in 2014 at all. I was just thinking about it as more like individual kind of super power, you know, super powerful. I guess decentralized automatons, but no, no, the the automaton isn't any one of the things. It's like all the things.

• 35:59David Hoffman?

  What about the Ethereum community? Do you think we could really work on or what is what needs more attention that you think the Ethereum community should should point their attention towards?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  So one of the things I'm going to talk about in my presentation in a couple of hours is non financial applications. So like right now, the the main non financial application that we have, I think, is NFTs. And like ENS is an NFT, right? So no, no, it's all NFTs, always has been. The but like we could really go much further, right? Like one of the things that we recently released an RFP for was Ethereum based login. So we could use an Ethereum accounts to just to log into other services.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  And like, if you imagine everyone having a social recovery wallet and then using that to log into services, then you know, you have distributed identities that are both more resistant against like basically centralized takeover and control than like Twitter and Facebook accounts. And at the same time, more likely to actually give you your account back if you lose it than Twitter and Facebook accounts are. Like, we could really be out competing centralized systems here. And then aside the decentralized social media and or at least kind of crypto enabled social media of various forms. Like, that's the sort of thing that already exists within the crypto space in various forms, right? Like, you know, like I disagree with the economics of like, you know, the steams and the voices in some places.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  But like, the thing you can say about them is they're not ghost towns. And the I think if the Ethereum community kind of gets into trying to like build better.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Crypto social things, then we could actually come up with some potentially like very powerful and much better things there too. And then retroactive public goods funding, that's also amazing. So I think there's, there's definitely lots of exciting things that we could work on. But like the key theme is, and I've been saying this for a long time, that at some points, we have to kind of really start focusing on applications. But I think this has become both more possible and more urgent. You know, the, the mainstream IFSA run is on the crypto space now, right? Like this, you know, we got like Elon Musk tweeting about the, about the doggies. You know, we got all sorts of celebrities, regrettably, Kim Kardashian pushing Ethereum Max.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  You know, hopefully she rises up, but you're like, if not, then I know maybe we can replace Kim Kardashian somehow. The child, I guess, like a lot of people really are putting a lot of hope into the crypto space to like, actually walk the walk in terms of changing the world and making it more collaborative and open and permissions. And like at some point, we have to actually do that, right? And the good use is that the biggest bottleneck to us doing anything, which is scalability, like that's being solved over the course of this year. So, you know, I mean, there's, there's a need and there's an opportunity and we should just go and do it.

• 39:05David Hoffman?

  Vitalik, you are known for putting your attention on things that the Ethereum, the rest of us kind of figure out a couple of years later. And, and right now, as you just said, we are in our like scalability summer. We had, you know, optimism rollout, we have, or, or soon to be, you know, now you can use Uniswap, soon you can use Synthetix. Also Arbitrum is, is now out there in, in the wild.

• 39:26David Hoffman?

  But what are you paying attention to? And what do you think we will be paying attention to after we're done with the whole scalability thing? What comes next in Ethereum?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Hmm, so a few things, right? So one is privacy. I think privacy still needs to be improved, right? Like the whole like the blockchain is Twitter for your bank accounts thing like I think it's being underrated, but like if someone wants to sort of like put the magnifying glass on that problem in an accelerationist way, they could just like make a Twitter accounts that tweets out whatever someone makes a no, that would actually be kind of mean, but like goodness, if the point is that the people who wants to peek at things are peeking at things and more and more people are going to peek at things and like at some points that we need to actually improve the the privacy situation, but you know, like Umbra exists, Tornado exists, but just ways to do at least basic things on Ethereum without leaking everything to the

• 40:19Speaker 02

  world is something that we need to improve on. Wallet security, I keep harping on about social recovery wallets, but I think like, didn't we do multiple podcasts about those already? But I don't know, I think you know, we just have to like, keep on, I get, well, I guess it's not just about harping, it's about like actually implementing and there's all these account abstraction, like other challenges, but like, I think social recovery wallets just need to happen because like we need noob friendly security and like 24 word seeds are not noob friendly security, like they might, they're definitely friendlier than what came before, but still like, you know, what happens if your house burns

• 41:01Speaker 02

  down? What happens if you accidentally lose that? Like these things happen. So that's another thing that needs to be improved quite a bit. And it's not just a like solving these problems is not just a matter of like having solutions instead of not having solutions, it's also a matter of having decentralized solutions come fast enough that the centralized solutions don't get entrenched, right? Like that's something that I am, I definitely worry about quite a bit.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  What, what, what other things again? Think, no, there's a long tail, like there's just making blockchain applications easier to use. There's like just security on the application side.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  There's, I guess, oh, another one is making decentralized governance that's actually good. Like, I've been yelling against coin voting for years, and I worry that coin voting is just kind of like slowly getting adopted and slowly, kind of, I guess, gaining legitimacy by continuity, even though, in my opinion, it really doesn't deserve to. But like, at some point, someone's gonna, you know, make the vote bribing app. And at some point, it's like these things that looked really just nice and secure by default are just suddenly gonna look much less secure, and people are gonna start scrambling. So I'm just hoping that we can come up with better alternatives before then.

• 42:27David Hoffman?

  Vitalik, there's a growing social scene about Ethereum, and so many different people are coming to the Ethereum ecosystem because so many new things have come to Ethereum. The NFT community has exploded, the creator economy is really burgeoning, and now we're all here in person at ECC. So, you know, tell me about your thoughts and reflections about the social layer that's growing around Ethereum.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think, as is the meme that you've also been spreading many times, layer zero is people, right? And for a blockchain community to prosper, it needs to have a community that people want to participate in and contribute to. And I think that's actually something that the Ethereum community has done really well, right? Like, the community is supportive, it's very helpful and friendly to people just trying to join and do interesting things. And I think that's something really valuable.

• 43:21David Hoffman?

  Vitalik, we are in Paris. How long are you in Paris for?

• 43:24Speaker 02

  I'm in Paris for about another week.

• 43:27David Hoffman?

  Anything exciting about being in Paris that you're looking forward to? After ECC is done, what are you up to?

• 43:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, it's a good city. I'm sure I'll walk around and I'll explore it. It's always good to be here. The food is good, the architecture is good, lots of things are good.

• 43:44David Hoffman?

  And there's a decent party scene that's going around after ECC is over. We have the Ave Rave tonight and a few other parties. Are you going to partake in the party scene?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  So far, I've been kind of like keeping up the nine to five, as in the sweep schedule. But, I mean, I don't know, we'll see.

• 44:03David Hoffman?

  Awesome. Well, Vitalik, we've had you on the Bankless Podcast so many times before, but this is the first time we've been able to do this in person. And it's fantastic to be able to do this in person. And I'm really excited to go to all the other future Ethereum events. For people that have not yet been to an Ethereum event, maybe pitch to them as to why it's unique and compelling and why they might be interested to come to one in the future.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, and it's definitely been just great to be at the event. I think it's just amazing to see all of the people doing, building all of the lovely things that make the Ethereum ecosystem as great as it is in person. And just being able to see in real time like the latest stuff that everyone is working on and everyone is excited about and actually be able to just like talk to all of the other people that are just enthusiasts and fans of the ecosystem. So I think, I think like going to these events once in a while is great.

• 44:59David Hoffman?

  Well, Vitalik, thank you for coming on the show and I hope you have a fun rest of the time at ECC.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  I hope you do too.

• 45:05David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 45:08David Hoffman?

  All right, Bankless Nation, I'm here with Stani, the one and only Stani. And we are here at the second day of ETH CC. Stani, tell us what it's like to be at ECC.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Amazing. I mean, this is my third year here or fourth, I can't remember. But the atmosphere is always good. I mean, you see like a lot of people from the Ethereum community, developers building interesting things and also like you see the whole kind of like community here in real life. And it's wonderful to see again, like so many nerds in a like a physical presence. So, cool.

• 45:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it is a place of for nerds who are also really, really social. And I feel like that's always kind of like the through line of Ethereum events is like nerds who want to hang out and talk nerdy stuff. And so, Stani, you had a talk yesterday morning. Can you give the people who weren't able to watch the talk a little bit of a preview about what that was about?

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. So the talk was more about credit delegation. So now in Decentralized Finance, for example, which AVE has been building for the past couple of years and been contributing to, is about getting liquidity into the DeFi space. So getting dollars into crypto dollars and yield-bearing crypto dollars. And now, kind of like with this credit delegation, we're thinking how you would get this kind of like a big DeFi liquidity pool and use it in real economy and funding things that can be fun before, like young entrepreneurs, emerging businesses. And credit delegation allows to take under collateralized loans and build this trust network. So that's what it's all about. And kind of like showing how decentralization can actually help the real economy and not just the kind of like

• 46:44Speaker 03

  a, like a smaller group of DeFi enthusiasts.

• 46:49David Hoffman?

  I think one of the themes that I'm seeing a lot at ECC is that we are, a lot of projects and presenters are presenting the next products rather than their first products, right? So, you know, ETHland turned into AVE, and then AVE had its use cases built out and proven as its first products. And now your presentation was about, here's a product that I think we should do next. And that's meaningfully different for an ecosystem that needed to, that we are no longer proving out our first use cases. We are now talking about the next products that we are going to build rather than our first products. Do you have any thoughts or reflections on that?

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think like what's, what's interesting is kind of like inspire other people and developers, like what you can build. And the talk of like credit delegation was about like showing like what kind of capabilities you can build. And AVE has reached into a point as a Genesis team that we, we're just finalizing the latest version of our protocol, the version 2.5 or 3, however they can do, and wants to name it. And then we moved to build kind of like a next layer of DeFi and the other protocols. But the credit delegation idea is that we want to show something that is possible and just inspire other developers to build those things on top of the, this functionality and show like the potential. And why we're trying to do this, because we had similar kind of like experience with Flash Loans.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  So, beginning of last year, we implemented the Flash Loan Feature into the AWE protocol and it wasn't used very much. But then when we started to actually promote the use cases, what you can actually do with flash loans. We started to see like different kinds of uh usage. And now there's like a billions of worth of flash loan, flash loans from our protocol during this year. So it's kind of like shows that if you can inspire developers, help them out. And just kind of evangelize the functions like people will start to build.

• 48:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, as it turns out, marketing does work. So we are at ECC number four, which is the first Ethereum DeFi crypto event. Other than Bitcoin twenty twenty one to really happen after COVID. And like you said, you were also at ECC number three, which was the last event before COVID happened. How is ECC four different from the previous ECCs and the other crypto events that you've been to in the past? What's new and how's the energy feel different at this particular event?

• 49:03Speaker 03

  I think during this ECC, definitely like the the gap and COVID and everything. Maybe I would say brought a lot of kind of like new audiences into the space. As DeFi started to scale, we saw scaling with the NFT community creators coming into the space. Essentially, what you saw kind of like I would say new demographics entering into Web three. And what's interesting here is that now we kind of like are expanding the the community, just not being only like nerds excited about decentralization. And you know, like coding, but actually into a community that it that looks like a kind of like a society. And and and I'm very excited about this because we get more professionals, more creators and and just like more diverse ecosystem. And this is what AWE is all about.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  We we are about exclusivity, being able to expand our technology and and just empower as many kind of demographic as as we can. So this has been like the the progress during, and I think it's because a lot of content went to internet. People had more time to research and and explore. This is probably the reason that we we we see this expansion, but we have still a lot of work to do if you want to get Web three to mainstream.

• 50:12David Hoffman?

  Whose talks or the speakers or panelists at ECC are you really looking forward to? What really excites you about the potential talks that are coming out in the next couple of days?

• 50:23Speaker 03

  There's quite a lot of talks and actually there's multiple talks at the same time and various topics. And what I usually do, I try to look at the talks afterwards because I'm trying to be here as available as possible for the community. But one of the talks that is always inspiring for me is what Vitalik talks and mainly because there's always kind of like a this bigger message on what we should build and Vitalik usually tries to also highlight parts that are a bit of like underserved and this is something that how AVE has grown itself. We were always trying to serve like underserved markets and empower communities, whether it's asset listings or whatnot. And trying to just get new demographics.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  This is something which is very interesting if everyone is at home and can watch later. Vitalik's talks are pretty good and of course there's a talk I'm going after this by Dean Egeman and he's talking about memes. So I'm very curious to see what's going on there and memes are very important. I mean, like you remember beginning of AVE, there was just like a lot of memes all the time. And you know, someone said that I'm the kind of like a meme lord of AVE, so.

• 51:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, AVE is one of the projects that made it through the bear market. I think memes are the way that like people keep themselves entertained and keep themselves going through bear markets. And so it's no surprise that like the Ethereum community is like really meme friendly. Before I have a few more questions, but before I get there, I want to ask about AVE Pro. We've been hearing some rumors about AVE Pro. Is there any kind of details that you could share, any release dates or what can we expect with AVE Pro?

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, one interesting update is AVE Pro is now AVE Arc, so we ran the product to be a bit more sexier.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  But one interesting part is actually the AVE Arc is about, it's the same infrastructure, smart infrastructure we have in in currently deployed in Ethereum and in Polygon and tomorrow somewhere else. The only difference is that we added a Functionality called whitelisters, which allows you to deploy a completely new market, so-called private market. So you can decide what kind of liquidity you accept there. So it's not just only asset listing and onboarding, but also you can whitelist the liquidity sources and borrowing, who is providing liquidity, borrowing it and who is liquidating. And this brings the use case of so-called like private pools. If you want to create a market where you have less assets, more assets, or you have certain kind of like additional requirements.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Let's say you want to use DeFi, but you might have some compliance requirements that, let's say you want to use the transparency of DeFi, the ability of using self-executing smart contract instead of paper agreements and having a network of counterparties. And of course, like the liquidity, then you can use the AR market and build yourself this kind of like a market. And what we are trying to like achieve in the longer term is that we get more institutionals to kind of like attest on how DeFi works and how they actually benefit from using decent finance, the transparency, the efficiency of the smart contracts. And hopefully they will forget all the kind of like what's happening in traditional finance with paper agreements and everything and move towards like permissionless decent finance.

• 53:37David Hoffman?

  So what sort of signals have you gotten from institutions that they are actually looking for a product like this? Or are you kind of just building it and hoping that they'll figure it out?

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, this product is completely based on demand. So demand has been very, very strong before the product itself. And once we kind of like, there was more people got interested in it and there was like more publicity about the product, there's even more interest. So we have pretty much from institutional sides, there's hedge funds, market makers and banks. And it's actually very amazing to see that kind of like institutions and banks that I would never expect to even look into DeFi or looking towards the AR market. So that's kind of like very fascinating to see like how much it has drawn traction for them.

• 54:25David Hoffman?

  And on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, Ave is throwing a rave tonight. And how do you pronounce it? Are you calling it the rave or the rave? Or what are we calling this? I think it's rave.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  So yeah, rave. So it's kind of like rave of it. The thing is, we planned in a previous conference in BTC Miami that we

• 54:47Speaker 03

  we want to throw a rave and, you know, we drop coordinates and ask people to do, come there. But then, then, you know, I was the only person there from Ave. And of course, Ajit was there. So we were two, so we were like, okay, maybe there isn't, isn't it stuff, stuff to throw a rave party? So we're going to do it today. And the idea is just kind of like to show that, you know, like the Ethereum community is sort of about building like empowering, but also it's kind of like having fun, meeting people and building new friendships. Because it's not only about like smart contract based composability, but also like human composability is very important. And I mean, this is how we became friends and everyone else in the space. And this is something, this relationship will last longer.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  And what's funny is that some of our like transactioning and kind of like interactions happen on chain. And we can always go back and look like what we did. And, you know, it's interesting to see like how our like human relationships will be like empowered with blockchain.

• 55:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, earlier you talked about how we are as a community turning into a society, right? And like not only, we are no longer in the phase of, you know, builders only in Ethereum and DeFi. We are now also like the culturalists in NFTs. And now there's games and in addition to the expansion of DeFi. I really like how you called that a society. Now we're all parting together. Sonny, how late are you going to be up tonight?

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Well, that's a good question, you know? I guess I, I mean, it's rave, so you know, it's very, very like hard to leave. And I think, I think that will be the case for everyone tomorrow. I have a very early

• 56:20Speaker 03

  meeting tomorrow at 8:00 AM. So it's going to be very tricky and interesting at the same time. But I definitely agree like this is becoming like a very cultural movement. And just like, especially when mainstream are coming more into the space. There's, they're raising questions that are very important, like ecological impact of, let's say, proof of work and things that we need to consider over kind of like as we scale to the mainstream. So I'm very happy that this is becoming a larger culture.

• 56:44David Hoffman?

  How many people are going to be going to this event? How much the capacity?

• 56:48Speaker 03

  I think in total, we are at 500. So there is kind of like a rooftop party first, and then we have a basement where they actually will be. So let's see, there's like a, all tickets went quite quickly. I mean, they're free, of course, and we try to invite as many as we can, but we have certain limitation. And yeah, I mean, I'm very excited to see like a lot of friends there.

• 57:13David Hoffman?

  So Ave has the DeFi app for all the retail people like you and me. It's also building out the institution with Arve Arc. It's also dabbling into the party scene and the social scene. Stani, do you ever just like sit back and reflect as to the magnitude of the thing that you just built? Because it's spanning off into so many, it's got so many different tentacles at like everywhere. And like everyone knows Ave, the branding is phenomenal, that you guys have your own like memes and graphics on Discord. The thing is just turning into an absolute monster. Like, how do you like just reflect on just the magnitude of the thing that you just built?

• 57:45Speaker 03

  It's hard to, it's hard to kind of like even

• 57:49Speaker 03

  even measure it because like it's just growing and DeFi is small, like Ave is still small. I mean, if you look at something like Google with like tens of thousands of employees, you know, we're still like Ave 65, 60 something employees. So it's very small. But I do believe that protocol will be bigger than businesses, bigger than nations because of the advantage of the efficiency. And these protocols will become decentized organizations in a powerful position to actually move, not just move culture, but you know, empower different kinds of societies. For example, if there is a cause in some part of the world, those can actually contribute funding there inflation and actually empower a lot of people. So I guess like we're moving to a very interesting models.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  But as Ave, we definitely like, we are a Web3 builder company. So we, we built the other protocol, which is now the biggest DeFi protocol. And as we have built it and now the community is governing it and continuing to improving it. The next step is pretty much like build the next innovation and just decentralize different kinds of Web3 businesses into something that our community owned, owned by the users and governed transparently on chain. And that's the kind of like a goal that we are trying to achieve. And this goal is the same that, for example, Ethereum has and is in general in Web3.

• 59:10David Hoffman?

  So I need last few questions for you. For people that have never been to an Ethereum or crypto event, pitch them as to why they should consider coming in the future.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Well, there might be a chance that we throw another rabbit.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think it's just kind of like seeing actually the culture that is happening, especially the bigger events are very cool. Death Corn is, might not happen this year. If it happens, nice, but if it doesn't next year, it's a very like interesting to see like how diverse the community is and just see very amazing talks. And there's so many ideas flying around and so many ways to contribute. And this is an event where you can bring your family, of course, after like the COVID and everything is over and just have a lot of fun and enjoy. And I think this is a place where kind of like ideas come together, people come together to build, innovate, get inspired, and just take a lot of things back to home and

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  spread the kind of like idea of decentralization and make, you know, world more transparent and also finance better and other areas where we're trees and yet kind of like touch upon. So there is a lot of opportunities here.

• 1:00:19David Hoffman?

  Sonny, we've had you on the Bankless Podcast, but that was over Zoom. It's fantastic to be able to do this in person with you. And if crypto, and that's the whole point of crypto, right? Like if we don't actually meet in the physical world and take over in the physical world, we all want crypto to take over, but it actually needs to happen in the physical world. And so it's fantastic to be able to talk to you and do this face to face. And I hope to do this many more times into the future.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Totally. Thanks for having me here. It's very amazing and being like this physically. And actually, you're real. So it's nice to see.

• 1:00:51David Hoffman?

  Well, cheers, Donny.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 1:00:53David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, I'm here with Kane Warwick of Synthetix here on the second day of ETH CC. Kane, what's it like to be at ECC? Tell us about your experiences so far.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  It's very weird to be back at a conference, seeing all these people that I haven't seen in like two years. It's but it's been really fun. It's been good to catch up with people. And the vibe is amazing. And some of the talks have been really cool as well.

• 1:01:13David Hoffman?

  So how did you get out of Australia? Tell us about that process.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  It was not easy. I needed to prove to the government that, you know, I was speaking here. There was economic benefit to Australia that we had our offsite in Mexico, which is coming up in about a week. So it was a long process to get out of here and a bit expensive, but well worth it.

• 1:01:34David Hoffman?

  So you're telling me that Anthony Sisano could have made it, but he didn't?

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Maybe he's just not famous enough. I don't know.

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  I think maybe the economic benefit that he brings to Australia is just not quite above the line. So apologies, Sisano, but yeah, I think maybe next time I'll try and help him escape. He can jump into my bags or something.

• 1:01:58David Hoffman?

  Can you have a talk coming up later today for people that won't be able to watch it in person? Can you kind of give them a little teaser about what it's about?

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I published a blog post a couple of weeks ago about DAO capital formation. So, you know, raising funds directly into a DAO so you can start a new community, a new project. So it's going to be kind of covering the highlights of that. And then obviously answering some questions, you know, about specifics of how that whole process works. And yeah, probably also, I guess, answering some questions about my return to synthetics or the return to synthetics. So yeah.

• 1:02:31David Hoffman?

  And then are there any other talks that are being given out today from other people that are you particularly excited about and looking forward to?

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a couple of things probably, I think the obviously Patalix talk is going to be good. And then there's some gaming talks, which are pretty interesting. And I think there is another talk later this afternoon. There's going into like some other governance things as well. So yeah, you know, I mean, yesterday I went to maybe seven different talks and they were all amazing. So it's been a really, really good lineup. I think a lot of people have banked up a lot of content for the last two years, ready to present. So.

• 1:03:09David Hoffman?

  So this isn't your first Ethereum event, but it's definitely the first Ethereum event since COVID, right? So what's the vibe like for you? And how is this particular ECC different than the other ECCs that you might have been to in the past? Or the other Ethereum or DeFi events that you've been to?

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  I think the last ETH event that I went to is maybe EdCon in Sydney, which is pre-COVID. I may have, I may have gone to something else like late 2019. But yeah, like in 2020, obviously no events. It's again, like the vibe is definitely pretty excited. I think everyone's, you know, there's so much that's been built over the last two years. So many things that, you know, had been promised or, you know, people were expecting or whatever have kind of come about. Obviously some other things that are like getting really close as well, like L2 scaling, super exciting. So yeah, I just think like overall, the ecosystem is so vibrant. There's so many people building things and so many, you know, cool projects that I've run into while I've been here. It's been amazing.

• 1:04:09David Hoffman?

  So we are all here in person, which is actually relatively new for us as an ecosystem, at least for the last year or so. And, you know, there's a bunch of faces from crypto Twitter and from Discord that everyone's relatively familiar with. What's it like to be meeting all the people that you've been talking to online for the past year?

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's been really fun to meet people that, you know, I've obviously met before in the past and I've spent time with. But I think particularly the people that I've never met before, it's been, you know, even more interesting, right? Like, you know, we've never met in person and it's kind of weird. One interesting component, I guess, is obviously we don't have mosques on right now, but everyone's wearing mosques.

• 1:04:43David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  So there's been a bunch of people I've walked up to and we're kind of like looking at each other like, do we know each other? Like Martin from Gnosis was like, is that Kane? And I was like, who? And he's like, Martin, and you take the mosque. Oh, okay. So it's a bit of like a mosque parade ball as well. Like you can't tell who's behind the mosque. So yeah, it's been, but it's been fun. It's been super exciting. And then, you know, we've had a chance to hang out with people after the conference as well, which has been cool.

• 1:05:08David Hoffman?

  So when people are coming up to meet you, what are they asking you about? What are people particularly interested in asking you about? Is that stuff or anything else related to that?

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  It's been a range of things, you know? There's been some conversations about governance, like even, you know, today on Twitter, we were talking about like representative democracy versus direct democracy. And I think, you know, that's probably the thing that like has always stood out for me. Like even just then I was talking to Fernando about like liquidity distribution and yield farming distributions. And we were talking about the ins and outs of it like it's always been a very kind of technical, straight to the point questions. Like you, you run into someone, you start having a conversation, you just go down a crazy rabbit hole like really quickly. And I just think from like an intellectual standpoint, it's super stimulating. It's really fun. So yeah, that's been, that, that hasn't changed since, you know, COVID, so it's cool.

• 1:06:00David Hoffman?

  So with all these crypto events that we have, it's not just the event, but it's also the peripheral and satellite events that happen after ECCE. What are you excited about to go do outside of the conference?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  I mean, Rave is on tonight and I think that's probably going to be the highlight of the conference for everyone. It's funny when, when I was leaving, you know, like I've got all these things on my calendar, all these different appointments. And my wife was like, it looks like you're going to a rave, but it was funny actually, because this is how crypto she is. She was like, what's this rave thing? And I was like, oh, she even pronounced it right. So, so yeah, I think, I think people are pretty excited for that. But, you know, I've just like been catching up with people, going for drinks and, you know, going to a couple of events and dinners and stuff. So yeah, just having a chance to kind of sit down with people for a couple of hours in person and chat to them has been amazing.

• 1:06:50David Hoffman?

  So how late are you going to stay up tonight?

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  I'm, I've managed to stay up until midnight. I got to like about 12:30 last night. I'm still a little bit jet lagged. Hopefully I can push through to like two tonight. That's my goal. I know it closes at four, but we'll see if I can stay till two, I'll, I'll think I've done pretty well.

• 1:07:07David Hoffman?

  Awesome. And what are you really just excited for to with the remainder of your time in Paris? Paris, pretty cool city. I don't know if you've been around Europe a lot, but after after ECC, what are you going to do just in the city of Paris?

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  So I'm hanging out here for another couple of nights. There's a few people staying on obviously at the conference and just going to catch up with them. And then I'm headed to New York after that. So looking forward to catching up with the the New York crypto scene as well. There's a bunch of people that have very hit me up. So yeah, so that's going to be really fun. So it's a bit of like a crypto world tour for me.

• 1:07:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, trying to avoid going back home as long as possible, huh?

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think when I when I initially kind of proposed it, they want you to obviously stay out of the country as long as possible. They don't want you kind of coming back. But luckily, we also have our global synthetics offsite. So a bunch of the core contributors in the Western Hemisphere getting together in Mexico. That's kind of my last stop, which is going to be even crazier because there's people in the core contributors and in the synthetics community who I've been, you know, working closely with for like almost two years who I've never met. So it's going to be pretty amazing. So I'm really excited for that. And I'm glad that I could get out and then go and join that conference.

• 1:08:18David Hoffman?

  So for for people that have never been to an Ethereum or DeFi event, maybe pitch to them as to what they might be interested in if they actually did decide to to come out to an event in the future.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  I think someone posted this on Twitter, you know, Bitcoin conferences and even like general crypto conferences like consensus, you know, the talks and panels like in the nicest possible way, they're usually kind of bullshit. There's not a huge amount of value. I think with the with Ethereum conferences, there's so many people pushing the kind of state of the art in so many different directions that it's actually hard to even kind of choose. Like there were multiple times yesterday where I had like conflicting talks that I wanted to go to. One was late and I would like scramble out to the other one. So I think like the amount of content that you can kind of consume in a two day period is pretty amazing. And, you know, obviously, we all read newsletters, we all, you know, listen to podcasts and you read the different blogs and everything. But having

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  someone on stage kind of, you know, pitch it to you directly, being able to then and You know, ask questions, they answer them. There is something about that that like I think you're just kind of sticks with you a little bit more. And so making the effort to like come in person and some of those just serendipitous conversations that happen are amazing as well, but like making the effort to come in person. The amount of like just brain dump that you get after like a two or three day conference is just incredible.

• 1:09:38David Hoffman?

  Kane, we've had you on the Bankless Podcast before, but that was over Zoom. This is actually in person, which is new for me as well. So it's fantastic to actually meet you in person and be able to actually have this conversation face to face.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks. It was it was super fun. And as I said before, I'm I need to go and frantically claim my bank tokens because I've been holding off. I'm procrastinating. So that's my next task after I get out of the studios, jump on my laptop and grab them.

• 1:10:05David Hoffman?

  I've got a few weeks left to do that. They will expire for you, the listener as well. Kane, thank you for coming on the show.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  Amazing. Thank you so much. Great to meet you.

• 1:10:14David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, I am here with Jerome D. Tichet. Jerome is the lead host, the lead organizer of ECC, the event that we all find ourselves at today. Now that ECC is actually here and we're all here, Jerome, how do you feel? Like, are you excited? What's what's going on in your head?

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  I'm mainly feeling relieved, to be honest, like we didn't, we didn't know, not if, but when we were, we will be able to host this thing. So I've been with each conference since the beginning as their president since 2016, 15, and we've been hosting this conference for the fifth, fourth, fourth time. Yeah, fourth time. We did five conferences because we did EdCon in Paris back in 2017. But we're very happy to have this conference as a recurring events that's always happening in Paris, always gathering everyone roughly at the same time in the year in Paris.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  And getting everybody together in Paris is awesome. Like I think it's really, really nice to see everyone coming together after like 15 months of not seeing each other. We had the privilege of being the largest conference of 2020 since we were one of the last one.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  And now, well, opening up the new season.

• 1:11:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, ETHCC was the last event before everything really shut down. And now it's also the first event to really kick things off as things open up again. You know, fingers crossed it stays opened up. So we're all optimistic about that. But as the person that has been to all four ETHCC events, can you kind of illustrate for people who haven't been to any of the previous ones? Or people like me who are, this is my first one. Tell us about the trajectory of, you know, one through four. How have they changed and grown and developed over time?

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we matured at the same pace of the ecosystem, basically. So initially, we wanted to host a conference that would be community-based and recurring at the same times of the year at the same place. Because by the time Adcon was moving every year, DEFCON was moving every year. And we just wanted to say, well, let's make it easy. Like, you don't know if you're going to be able to travel to Bogota, if you're going to be able to travel to Japan. Well, yeah, let's just go and stay in Paris all the time. So we started with this by, I think it's organized by Etm France, the nonprofit that I mentioned before, hosting the Etm France website as well, translating things in French for the French-speaking community.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  And as nonprofits, we basically say, well, we have connections with engineering schools in France. So we just wanted to, like, host an event there, calculate how much it would cost to do live streaming, divided by the number of people that we are thinking about having, and say, well, okay, it's going to be 200 per person, and we are going to have a balanced budget. So we started off in 2018 with this. And the excitement was huge because it was like the trajectory of the previous bull market. So we were like, yeah, sure, let's go to see a conference. And everybody was so lovely, so happy, so easygoing to work with, that we decided to organize it once again at the same place next year. So the first edition had about 700 people.

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  The second edition in 2019 had about 1,000 people. And on the third edition that we did last year, we were thinking about going up to 2,000. We had commitments, we had lots of speakers, and unfortunately, well, COVID hits. So all the speakers that came from Asia couldn't come. Most of the speakers that came from the US canceled, but we still were able to host the conference and have it have it balanced and everything running. And now we are hosting the 2021 season and it's going great. Like we could have probably 5,000 people at the same time. But unfortunately, due to the sanitary restriction, we had to have a hot cup of 1,000. But expect us to run this conference again next year and make it super duper big again.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  And the core value that we tried to convey with this conference is to say, well, it should be accessible. So a ticket to a T C is usually 300 euros or so. So it's pretty, pretty accessible for anyone compared to most tech conference where you pay thousands to get in. And we have lots of talks next to each other, like everything happening in parallel. So we have a ratio of about one person out of five that is a, a speaker. So you meet the doers. And that creates this kind of cool interaction, cool ambiance, where you just bump into speakers all the time. I want to keep growing at this pace, making sure that we stay at least at the one out of six, one out of four people that are coming to speak.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  Not coming to be on a panel and discuss a topic without preparing anything that I'm against on a panel, but you know, it takes commitment, it takes people to demonstrate what they are going to talk about, to really make something exciting. So we are going to continue this, this stage.

• 1:15:00David Hoffman?

  Jerome, you talked about how there were, there's just so many different rooms and panelists and the speakers are also being in, in other speakers. Audiences and the future audience members are the, the next speakers. That kind of just overall kind of reminds me of the Ethereum ecosystem at large, like users and investors and builders, they're all the same. They're all the same cohorts. We're all the, we're all the same people here. Tell, tell me a little bit more about how ECC is like resonant with the ethos that we find in Ethereum at large.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  Welcoming, open, cheap.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  To go lots of great content. That's that's what we want to we want to demonstrate. Ethereum France is a nonprofit, like we aim at balancing the budget, keeping the price of the ticket as low as possible. So I think we are about three hundred euro for the three days of conference. And we want this conference to have the greatest amount of content to take out of it. So here's how we all, we try to have as many as many tracks in parallel that we can. And make the conference long as long as we can.

• 1:16:06Speaker 04

  So the it it ends up with a nice ratio of number of speakers and numbers of attendee. Making it that one person out of five is actually talking about what they are building right now. So if you are new to this field, you end up in this super Ethereum system where you meet all of the people that are building this. You meet rock stars that you've heard about on the internet, or you meet the builders of this, or you meet the guy that just started this. This new new gig and want to recruit.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  And it's it's it's a very welcoming environment. And everybody is easygoing and everyone wants to share. I think we wouldn't have got the same the same crowd or the same the same ethos if we were an expensive conference and doing it commercially. So I'm very happy that we have been long lasting and and sticking to to our to our initial values. And and over the years, you know, we we tried to get different crowds to come also because the price fees improved and the the attention from the media changed a little bit. So for us, we we wanted to continue this education purpose that we have in in our in our main goals at Ethereum France. And it translated into opening an Ethereum VC track.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  So VCs can come to it, but have to pay for it like we are not going to beg them to come and pay them the trip like, hey, you want to meet the come the the community, you just attend like everyone. But you get a a nurtured deal flow of of companies that are coming to speak on technical topics at SEC.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  Being in front of the of the cordages of Ethereum, being in front of the the main doers of Ethereum, well, you get something that's neutral and clean. So they are coming in huge amount of number of VCs, like it's just, it's just mind blowing. We think we have 50 or 60 funds that are attending this year. And so for, for our ecosystem that initially financed it with ICOs and token, token emissions, it's a shift towards, I think, more, more resilience in their financial structure to have some VCs in their, in their rounds. And for us as organizer of the conference, it's becoming future people that we want to sponsor

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  the conference or we want to come every year or we want to do product release here. Ave has done great demo this morning. I think I missed sushi swap demo or well, but yeah, anyway, yeah, everything is happening there and it's really great to see that.

• 1:18:37David Hoffman?

  Are there any panels or guests or topics or talks that you are particularly excited about, anything that comes to mind?

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  Well, the, we don't do that much panels. We've, we prefer to have speakers that come and talk about something they are passionate about or talk about something they've been working on for some time. In our experience with panels that they are great for after shows and great for having many people to come together or rather drink and discuss a topic and then talk with the rest of the, of the assembly. It's easy, most, most of the speakers, if not one of the other speakers are just doing a talk. Like you prepare something, you present something, you give us an abstract to work on and say like, hey, it sounds interesting, like you're not the, the, the, the 100th person that is going to talk about the future of DeFi. Yeah, well, everybody wants to talk about that.

• 1:19:27Speaker 04

  And one thing I'm super excited about is of course Vitalik speaking tomorrow about how to do good with DeFi, well, probably E stake on DeFi is interesting. So this definitely the DeFi year, we have a track, the DeFi track is like three or four times the size of the other track. And it's hard for us to keep it, to keep it well balanced, having, having great diversity in the different side of talks. And I'll go to the, the ZK Snack and ZK Rollup workshops that's going to happen on, on Thursday.

• 1:20:01David Hoffman?

  So there's a lot of people who, you know, had to stay home. Now ECC can't host everyone, but I'm sure there's a lot of people that, you know, maybe they were on the edge and then they decided for whatever reason to not come. Why should they have come and why should they think about coming to Ethereum events like this in the future?

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

  So being totally unbiased, this is the best Ethereum conference in the world. At least last year, it was one of the last on World of the Only, so we keep that to ourselves. I hope to continue to be able to host it this way. The thing is, if you go to Paris, it's easy to reach. So first thing, Paris is a capital that is easy to reach, usually from wherever you are in the world. It's a full week of events, so you get something for the trip. The conference itself, it's not that expensive. We tried to be one of the cheapest of the ecosystem, and you can have a whole week of stuff happening. So the ideal ECC on a normal sanitary situation is that we have a job fair on the Monday, you meet VCs, you meet people,

• 1:21:01Speaker 04

  you meet probably your new player, or you meet your new colleagues. You have three to four days of conference, and then you have a hackathon. And around that, you get parties all the time, like, or events all the time, or side things happening all the time. And if you are grounded, like, if you cannot come, if you cannot travel, we are in open source promoting association, so everything is available online. All the talks are live streamed and available right away, like, one hour or so after the day, directly on YouTube. So, like, check it out. If you cannot come, just be there. Look at the conference from your remote place. And he does on Telegram, he does on Twitter, we're very happy to talk with you.

• 1:21:45Speaker 04

  And do apply to the speaker call that we will probably publish in November.

• 1:21:50David Hoffman?

  So, last question for you, Jerome. After ECC is over, either at the end of today, tomorrow, or Thursday, what other events are you excited about that you're going towards?

• 1:21:59Speaker 04

  So, well...

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  My main party years was 10 years ago, like when I was at school. And back then, the music crowd in Paris was the French touch crowd, you know, the Ed Bangers, Daft Punk, Justice and so on. And the Avi team managed to get all the DJs from this label to come and play tomorrow night. So I'm very excited about that. I still have to work on my presentation for the closing talks, so I hope I don't get too excited during this party, but that's definitely something I will head to. There is the Ledger closing party also that I'm really looking forward to because on the rooftop near the sun, it's going to be a beautiful setup.

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  Well, I think I'm mentioning only parties, but yeah, I need to take some of the pressure off after this organization. And I'm taking a small trip to family place after the conference. But yeah, so I'm mainly staying for a head CC and looking at a couple of side events and being super busy finalizing the last thing that need to be finalized. But I think there is a hackathon, Beacon Guys, this weekend that I wouldn't, yeah, I won't be able to attend, but I think Coinfund is running it and it's a super exciting stuff being built around an FT with them, so it should be cool. I followed that from my holiday place.

• 1:23:30David Hoffman?

  Awesome, Jerome. Well, as somebody who really thoroughly enjoys meeting real-life crypto people in the real world, and I do believe that eventually crypto will come to take over the world, and so we also need to come together in the real world as a community. So thank you for just organizing ECC, you know, for the last four years and continuing to do it into the future as well.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Well, definitely, thanks for coming. Those events, people are coming. We tried to make everything easy so they can come, and so far, they decided to. And that's great for us, and you can count on us to host it again next year. Impossible n'est pas français.

• 1:24:06David Hoffman?

  Alright guys, I'm here and pleased to be joined with Aya Miyaguchi of the Ethereum Foundation. Aya, you just got done with a talk here at ECC and for those that weren't able to attend, can you kind of give them a preview about what you talked about?

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  I spoke about Ethereum Infinite Garden and how I see, like what's the most special about Ethereum, I think. And, and then this was about, like, it's not just about the technology, it's actually the, the people and how, how the community members play

• 1:24:42Speaker 05

  in the Infinite Garden of Ethereum, which is that, um, basically this is not really about winning. This is really, the game is supposed to continue, right? And then, so you play for the purpose of continuing to play. So that was the talk. And then also I introduced one of our fellows of the Ethereum Foundation Fellowship Program. This is the first cohort. And, and then she explained the, the project that she's working on, which is the Giga to, to connect schools with internet and then also provide transparency and also like all the better governance and everything with the power of Ethereum.

• 1:25:23Speaker 05

  So, and then also I introduced her as one of the gardeners of the Infinite Garden.

• 1:25:32David Hoffman?

  I love that, that metaphor about Ethereum as a garden. And in the Ethereum world, we're all about long-term games and iterative games. And we are finally back into the world of more Ethereum events in real life, real, real events. And so now that we are all back as a community in ECC, once again, for the fourth ever ECC, what are you really excited to see or who are you excited to see talk? Or what are you, about ECC, are you particularly excited for?

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  In general, just like everyone knows, I was excited to like get together with, with other people again. This is, it's been a while. And, but also, you know, like EF organized DevCon and we've been like kind of...

• 1:26:15Speaker 05

  Postponing it for for many times and and then we kind of appreciate ECC to organize this like like almost the first first event to happen after the COVID started to happen and then so I think the whole DevCon teams here to learn like what it's like, you know, how people are experiencing this after the time that people were waiting. So yeah, and also like the combination of their thing that I wanted to send, like the message that I wanted to send, which is about the Infinite Garden. And also, I kind of wanted to see how people are enjoying like after a while.

• 1:26:59Speaker 05

  So that was, yeah, that was, that was my my goal to come here. And then I'm also excited about the different talks. And then there are some like they have this blockchain for good track and and and there are some stuff that I didn't know. So I'm I'm looking forward to learn about what they're doing.

• 1:27:19David Hoffman?

  I the Ethereum community is now six years old and you've been with it every step of the way. What are you most proud about on behalf of the community that we've gone that we've achieved in the last six years?

• 1:27:31Speaker 05

  Uh, well, I haven't been, I've been in the crypto space for the entire time, but even before Ethereum, but I'm so um, you know, I haven't been part of the Ethereum thing like for the whole time, but I I think it's even as our external audience for like as a participant, I think it's amazing that how what this community has achieved working like in a fully decentralized way, basically like you have doesn't really manage and um, like we coordinate, that's what we say. And that like still like very continuous effort to make it as decentralized as possible.

• 1:28:16Speaker 05

  That that technical advancements that Ethereum has made is such a hard like

• 1:28:24Speaker 05

  Problem to solve. And you know, like people said in the beginning, oh, there's no way they can do it. And but we are seeing that is actually happening now, especially when the proof of stake is happening. And then, so, yeah, and then now this is actually involving outside people outside. And then they can also see, oh, wow, this is this is actually serious and this is happening. And and so it's great to it's not like I, you know, I'm proud, but I just feel proud to be part of it.

• 1:29:00David Hoffman?

  And on the on the other side of things, what do you think the Ethereum community and ecosystem still needs to work on? What do we have left to achieve that's still on the table?

• 1:29:10Speaker 05

  Hmm. So I don't know if it's left to achieve when they are not a lot of like a technical challenges that still needs to achieve. But that one of the thing that I mentioned in my talk is, yes, there is infinite garden and the way we keep playing this game. But then like unless we are conscious, this this uniqueness can be lost. So I think it's really important for us to remember what's special about Ethereum. And like this vibe you feel at ECC and like you just don't feel that anywhere else.

• 1:29:45Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I think it's very, very important for us to maintain so that this stays very unique and interesting. And really like not about winning. Yeah.

• 1:29:57David Hoffman?

  You said the vibe that we feel at ECC. Can you put that into words? What is the vibe of ECC?

• 1:30:05Speaker 05

  I think there's certain seriousness, like what people talk about, some like, you know, like geeky conversation about technical things, of course, because it's an Ethereum event. But but then there is like always down to earth openness that you get to come talk to anyone. And then they're open to answer to your questions so that you don't feel that. I mean, like we feel that at DevCon too, but we don't maybe feel that at regular business conference or so that the openness openness and the down to earth vibe and also.

• 1:30:42Speaker 05

  Like you basically, people are always ready to be open, to have a conversation with anyone. And, and I always loved that vibe about any Ethereum events.

• 1:30:56David Hoffman?

  That definitely resonates with me. I think the, the moment I realized that I wanted to be in Ethereum was at my first Ethereum event ever, East Denver. And it was just a matter of the conversations and the people that I met at, at the, at the Ethereum events. I made me realize that it's not something that I wanted to miss. Uh, I didn't really know what Ethereum was at the time. I didn't really know what I could contribute at the time. But it, I just knew it's something I didn't want to, you know, read in a book later. I wanted to be a part of it as it, as it grows. And, and speaking of experiencing it, we are on camera here on, at, at Bankless while we are also on camera for the Infinite Garden. So, so, uh, tell us what it's like to be a, a part of a story of Ethereum's first, like, high-production movie documentary. What's that like?

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is, um, very, it's certainly been very interesting because, um, like I explained about Infinite Garden, the idea itself, when I first talking to the team, um, the crew optimists, a team, and then, you know, they were still learning about what is this was about, and then I was learning about them. But we gradually felt like this, this like alignment that, okay, like, I think, I believe this team actually understands. And so I started to trust them. And then it's just like idea, it's not just, I, I gave one inspiration, but then it has evolved in a way that all other community members gave them ideas and it's still

• 1:32:23Speaker 05

  evolving, right? So we don't know because they just started and then they just finished the fundraising, achieved the fundraising. And, um, so it's, I like this, it's almost like an experiment, like this, I don't know, uh, this, how normally regular documentaries made, but,

• 1:32:43Speaker 05

  yeah, it's been like a discoveries for both of us, but also for them to learn about, and then now they actually understand a lot of like,

• 1:32:52Speaker 05

  things in Ethereum that, um, like it's hard to catch up with everyone, um, or everything, but, but, um, but I'm very, very excited how this is gonna come, that I don't even know how this is gonna, um, become, but. But I can see that, you know, like a positive vibe coming from people, from the committee members and the support from everyone. And this is like I heard that, you know, even the creative production side is because this was raised in a way that like a decentralized

• 1:33:30Speaker 05

  way. So, yeah, I'm, I'm actually, I didn't know when we started this, how this was going to go. But I'm very, very excited how things are going. And I'm just looking forward to see the unknown yet.

• 1:33:49David Hoffman?

  So my last question for you, Aya is, you know, we're not totally out of the woods yet with regards to COVID, but you know, we're all here together. We're in Paris. What are you looking forward to in Paris after ECC is over? Do you have any cool Paris plans?

• 1:34:05Speaker 05

  I don't have plans yet, but I'm huge, I'm a huge fan of natural wine. And then Paris is the France is the biggest, you know, place for that. I was actually just in Tokyo before coming over here. Yeah. And then I even saw an event happening tonight that people are going to talk about the Ethereum for good and then also drinking natural wine, that kind of thing. Like, it's just never happens if you're not in Paris. So, yeah, but I, I mean, if I start talking about natural wine, I talk too much. So I will stop there.

• 1:34:44David Hoffman?

  Ethereum for good and natural wine. That's the place I would expect to find I am at Gucci. So, Aya, thank you for coming on the show and telling us your ECC experience.

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 1:34:55David Hoffman?

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• 1:35:40David Hoffman?

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• 1:36:21David Hoffman?

  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. 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

• 1:37:04David Hoffman?

  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 Banklist and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Banklist. All right, guys, I'm here with Cooper Turley. Cooper, how excited are you for ETH CC? Tell me all about it. I am super excited. This time last year, I got COVID at this very

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  Conference, so it's very great to be back, wearing masks, feeling healthy, feeling good, life is great.

• 1:37:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we didn't really have a mask this time last year for ECC, a little bit naive at that time, but we really didn't know what's coming. I know you're excited for the resurgence of crypto events and Ethereum events, but specifically with this ECC event, what are you excited about just on this one?

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  I'm really excited just to hear about the progress that's been made. You know, I think that a lot has happened over the last year. We've been living online. I think this is the first time where people can come and talk about things IRL. For me, that's where you really get a vibe of like which projects have the most attention and energy, just based off what people are talking about at these events. So it's great to go a little bit beyond Twitter, Discord, Telegram, you know, see people IRL and hear what's really exciting and worth paying attention to.

• 1:38:11David Hoffman?

  Definitely one of the biggest innovations in the last year while we were all home is stuff in both DAOs and NFTs, which are largely, you know, status and social games, right? Like DAOs are a social communities and NFTs are largely things that are about, you know, status, which is inherently a social phenomenon. So I think it's actually really cool that a lot of these events that are coming out of COVID are DAO and NFT themes. And I know that you are particularly focused in the world of DAOs and also the creator economy, which is also a social element as well. And you just came out of your talk. So can you got for the people that are, you know, were at home and weren't able to attend ECC? Can you kind of give them a little teaser of what your talk was about?

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So I gave a talk on the future of music. You know, as you said, I think this is an industry that's ripe for social and financial disruption. And so for me, being able to talk about, you know, how NFTs play a role in the future of audience, how governance makes sense in a more broader context. You know, I just love this design space of every creator feeling like they're on the startup now. And so being able to take these tools and apply them in, you know, with crypto and non-crypto native ways, that's kind of the intersection I sit at. How do you take it down, make it understandable to someone who's never used MetaMask before? And how do you use tools like Poop to basically do NFTs at IRL events, despite the fact that no one's ever set up a wallet previous to that?

• 1:39:24David Hoffman?

  And so who and or what panels are you really looking forward to speaking about? And you know, and there's always that funny little line where the audience looks towards one artist, but then that artist is there. They're met like their savant or their person that they're interested in is somebody else. So who's the person that Cooper is interested in seeing on stage talking?

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  I mean, it's going to be a cliche answer, but I think Vitalik is going to be fantastic. You know, I love coming to see him talk IRL because you never know what he's going to talk about. Always gives you something to look forward to a little bit further along. So obviously he's not super active on Twitter. And so being able to hear about what he's been pontificating on over the past year, we've been locked in COVID. It should be a good way to just refresh and see where things are at.

• 1:40:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Vitalik has a habit of delivering always really hot keynotes and I'm also excited for that one as well. For for people that weren't able to attend ECC, can you kind of tell them what's the vibe like from your perspective? And how does this ECC event differ from the one last year and also other crypto events that you've been to?

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think of ECC as a community conference. So obviously there's a lot of developers here. There's a lot of ecosystem partners. You know, where this differs from maybe like a dev con or an ETH global event is that this is much more community focused. You're going to see 100 talks over the course of three days. You're going to hear about a bunch of different projects. While there's a bunch of builders here, I think that this talk is about conference context. Basically leave this conference, feeling like you have a good understanding of where the industry is at. Which projects are worth paying attention to and what people are working on. So as you go back to your digital life, you can have an understanding of like, oh, these people are hanging out with these people. These people are partnering with these people. This event was really cool and there's a nice vibe going to it. And so I just love Ethereum conferences in general. I mean, you'll catch me at every major one this year for the next couple of years of my life.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  If I have something to say about it. And so just being here in person, it's really important to remember our roots, you know? I think that Ether went up a lot this past year and for a lot of people, there's a you know, maybe a feeling that you don't need to be as present at these things anymore. But I think for me, it's now more important than ever to show face and show that regardless of what happens financially, that we're all here for the same reason.

• 1:41:20David Hoffman?

  One of everyone's favorite parts about these crypto events and crypto conferences is that there's a bunch of satellite or peripheral events that happen after the scene. So what are you going to after today or tomorrow or Thursday that you are really excited about?

• 1:41:33Speaker 03

  I'm really stoked about the FWV party tonight. We actually built a tool to be able to do IRL RSVPs with token gated access. So basically you RSVP by holding tokens, you receive a QR code. And when you sign into the event, it still makes sure that you're holding tokens at the event. So I'm really excited about that primitive. That's later tonight. I'm going to be going to Fede Dow with Uniswap and Upshot. Got some awesome DJs that are playing there. The Rave party tomorrow night with Boys Noise is going to be fantastic. And then Thursday night, ECC closing party should be a really great time.

• 1:41:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Cooper is the absolute embodiment of the social scene around crypto and crypto events. And so take a leaf out of Cooper's book. When you come into crypto events, plan ahead because there's so many events that you need to go to. And if you don't plan ahead, then you're going to miss them. Cooper, thank you so much for coming and sharing us your ECC story.

• 1:42:19Speaker 03

  Pleasure to be here, man. I look forward to seeing you.

• 1:42:20David Hoffman?

  Recap and everyone have a fantastic week. All right, everyone, I'm here with Simona Pop from Status and Simona, I have seen just almost at every single crypto Ethereum event that I've ever been to. And so I kind of want to lead with that question. Simona, can you tell our listeners who maybe haven't been to an Ethereum or crypto event? What are they missing out on and maybe why should they go to one in the future?

• 1:42:43Speaker 06

  Hey, hey, thanks for having me on the podcast and great to see each other again. I feel this is such a great time to, everybody's back together, everybody's enjoying, obviously, Paris, summer in Paris is wonderful. But when it comes to Ethereum events, I feel they are

• 1:43:06Speaker 06

  so many steps apart from your traditional crypto event. I feel the atmosphere, the vibe is completely different and it's an incredibly, incredibly welcoming one, which is why particularly for newcomers, I feel Ethereum events are the way to kind of try and test and kind of immerse themselves into the space because everybody's incredibly helpful, everybody's incredibly, you know, welcoming, positive. And it just, that's why I guess I go to all of them because it's such a wonderful time and just catching up with everybody.

• 1:43:46David Hoffman?

  So I've seen you at ETH Denver and I know you've gone to DevCon and all the other previous ETHCC events. And, you know, we just came out of a, over a year-long lockdown with COVID and now we're finally getting into the world of events once again. So with this, the first ETHCC event out of COVID, what are you specifically excited for with this one particular event?

• 1:44:09Speaker 06

  I think obviously the main piece is the, the, everybody getting back together again, seeing each other after such a long time. Is, is a mix of, I guess, joy, a little bit of a, this is so intense after not seeing people for, for so long. But I think the main The main vibe, I would say, is so much has happened in this past year and a half, and there's so much to celebrate going forward that I feel it's that kind of celebration that we're all back, celebration for the work that we've been doing in these stressful

• 1:44:48Speaker 06

  conditions, and also, you know, the future of France and everything that that brings. So just a great, great celebration, I would say, of Ethereum, of each other. So yeah, very, very, I don't know, positive, joyful vibes.

• 1:45:08David Hoffman?

  Shit, what I was gonna ask. So with all of the talks and panelists that are happening, what are you specifically looking for? What panel or topic are you really excited about? And who of the panelists or the speakers are you really excited to see talk?

• 1:45:28Speaker 06

  I think I really, oh, there's, should I start again?

• 1:45:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:36Speaker 06

  I think it's really, as always with ECC, one of the main things that I love about it is it brings together so many different types of speakers, so many different topics, and it's not necessarily just the technical stuff. It blends really, really well with, you know, talks about UX and where that's heading and how we're improving and so on. So I think it's a real good mix of so many different topics and so many different, I guess, forecasts for 2021 and where we're heading. Obviously, from our side, we have

• 1:46:13Speaker 06

  a workshop that the Waku team from Status is doing, and it's all about, I won't say too much, but maybe an integration with Wallet Connect and so on, and how that's kind of going to, again, enable that better experience, that much, much, you know, I guess, setting ourselves up for that mass adoption that we're all looking for. So, so many things. And also, let's remember, there are so many side events. It is a busy, busy agenda packed with so much. So I think, obviously, Ethereum magicians are having their

• 1:46:53Speaker 06

  their event as well. I think it's today. Then there's the DAO event on Friday. So it's just so many things. But again, great things because there are so many interesting things happening.

• 1:47:09David Hoffman?

  I definitely think that should be a big takeaway for the listeners who are looking to experience their first Ethereum event. It's not just the conference, but it's just a litany of just satellite events that happen after the fact. And I'm also really excited for those as well. People think that these things are technical conferences about information and trends. But it's also really, really social. And I see you as one of the social leaders in the community. You're always at the events. You're always talking to people. And you also mentioned status. So kind of give us the update on status. And also for the listeners who might not be familiar with what status is, tell us what status is and why we need it in 2021 and maybe what the future roadmap of status looks like.

• 1:47:52Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And just circling back a little bit to that social element, I think it's such a great way to actually experience crypto and meet so many people and become aware of so many of the great projects that are in this space. And so many people who have, let's say, attended conferences or hackathons remain in the ecosystem. I know so many people who came in 2017, 2018 and are now pretty big deals in the space. So absolutely very, very a meritocracy kind of dynamic. Status-wise, it is a Web3 wallet.

• 1:48:32Speaker 06

  It is a chat, privacy-first chat, censorship-resistant, and a Web3 browser. What that means is you have all of these incredibly powerful pieces in one application. And because we're mobile-first, and this is very important from my perspective, it's that accessibility. For people who may not be tied to their laptops, who may not have a laptop, right? There's so much digital access that happens via your mobile phone. And I personally believe that it is incredibly, incredibly important to have a powerful piece that can almost be the gateway to Ethereum because it does all of the things. And so with our work, for instance, in Latin America, we see this a lot because there

• 1:49:17Speaker 06

  mobile use is the predominant access to digital services. What we're working on, and this is something that I'm incredibly, incredibly passionate about, is a communities feature that will essentially bring all of those three pieces into powering Web3 communities and having those crypto-native flows as part of the experience. So as you'll know, right now, Web3 communities exist on Web2 platforms. And maybe they shouldn't. So I think, again, having that stack and being able to provide that decentralized

• 1:49:58Speaker 06

  privacy-first goodness with those crypto-native flows, let's just, you know, power those Web3 communities with a Web3 stack. Obviously, there's so much to consider when you are building a censorship-resistant thing and also enabling certain levels of moderation. But we're on the right track and hopefully we'll be able to share that with everybody very soon.

• 1:50:23David Hoffman?

  And what parts about the actual status app is actually hooked into Ethereum? What parts of it actually touch the Ethereum blockchain?

• 1:50:30Speaker 06

  All of it. All of it.

• 1:50:33David Hoffman?

  And so like if I, if I, and so it's a messaging app, kind of like Telegram. And so like, how does that, how does my message that I send to my friend, how does that work with Ethereum?

• 1:50:43Speaker 06

  So with the Messenger, obviously, you get it stored locally, right? So it is on your phone, and that's also why it's such an important piece from a privacy perspective, because when you join the app, you will see there's no phone number, there's no email, we ask nothing about your personal details. You get assigned a random three-word name, and then you can store contacts locally so that I can know that it's you, but I'm not divulging your identity to the rest of the network. So that plays a really, really important role, not only from the privacy perspective,

• 1:51:23Speaker 06

  but also from the, you know, from the storage perspective, from where the messages get stored, or how long they're stored for, that you can, we're now working on editing and deletion as well, which wasn't a feature before, but obviously, we recognize that those are incredibly important pieces of the chat experience. And so with all of those combined, I think we can really achieve that level of censorship-resistant protocol, but levels and tooling for moderation at community level.

• 1:51:55David Hoffman?

  And that very much feels like a user's private key and public address, right? Like where you just are given the infrastructure you need without having to ask for permission, right? Right. It's kind of using that same model, but now we are extending this into like the more traditional app layer that people are used to. Simona, it's been fantastic talking to you. I have one last question that I think you are uniquely capable of answering. As the, how would you say, how would you illustrate the trend of crypto events? Crypto events were very different in 2013, 14, 15, and then Ethereum came along in 2015, and it had its own trend or trajectory. How would you say that they've changed into? What is the arc of these crypto events? How are they changing over time?

• 1:52:41Speaker 06

  I definitely feel there is a lot more substance that we're focusing on right now. And also, if you look at everything that is happening even at ECC right now, there's a lot of activations and there's a lot of opportunities to engage with the applications. And I feel obviously we're now at a stage where there's a lot of the applications are live, a lot of usage and so on. So you are able to experience it much in a much fuller way, I guess, versus listening to talks and, "Oh, it's coming." We have it now. And there's a lot of, I mean, I used to do this a lot with, you know,

• 1:53:23Speaker 06

  my previous role with the Bounties Network, do a lot of bounties for engagement. And now I'm seeing people really immersing themselves in those applications, in those activations, really getting a taste for what it is like to literally use Web3 applications now. And obviously, see if we need to improve the UX, do this, do this, do this. But it is a process for, almost for the community, by the community, right? And we all build together, we help each other out. And I think that's also an incredibly, incredibly powerful piece about Ethereum is that we are all in it together, right? And the tide lifts all boats and all of that. So it's an incredibly, incredibly collaborative space.

• 1:54:07Speaker 06

  And I think we're going to see a lot more of those happening, where we collaborate together, projects working together to create engagements. So yeah, I think a lot more immersion in the future.

• 1:54:19David Hoffman?

  I think what I've already seen in that same vein is we are seeing people talk about the next products rather than the first products, right? Stani from AVE comes out and says, "I really think credit delegation is like what's next for DeFi." After he's already, you know, deployed Ethland and then turned it into AVE and already done all these other products. We are now able to talk about, it's like, we already have this first generation of products that we're built on, what comes next? And all of a sudden, we go from like an industry of speculation and, you know, what could be into what is and what is next. And I think that's really just an illustration of the maturity of this industry that we've come so far. So I'd love to give your perspective on that. But also with, going back to the trajectory of crypto events over time, what about attendance? Are they getting bigger and bigger?

• 1:55:05David Hoffman?

  And what's attendance like over time?

• 1:55:08Speaker 06

  I think one of the main things is potentially, yes, getting bigger, but also the piece that is most exciting for me is we're seeing more and more newcomers. And this is a trend that, for instance, I've been judging ETH global events, I think, since their inception, and it's a wonderful kind of way of keeping track of just how many people are coming into the ecosystem, because, I mean, the latest one, I think we had 45% were newcomers, which is incredible. If you look back at 2019, I think we had 10%. So that, for me, is such a great signal that we are heading towards that adoption

• 1:55:52Speaker 06

  and heading towards the fact that more people are interested and they're coming to build and they're coming to, you know, connect and they're coming to actually, potentially, cross that bridge from Web 2 and whatever it is that they're doing now to Web 3 and, you know, the future that we're all building together. And so I think potentially getting bigger, but I would say that's not necessarily the, you know, the metric that interests me is the, what is the, what's that audience profile? Who is coming? What are they doing? And, you know, seeing that engagement from newcomers is perfect.

• 1:56:36David Hoffman?

  I think the combination of having a lot of newcomers plus a lot of products that we are already having delivered and talking about the next products, that's a very different environment from like the crypto events of 2018 and 2017 where we have a lot of newcomers, but it's all, you know, ICOs and speculation on the future. So I hope that these new products that we're all talking about on stages and all these panels make all these newcomers, you know, stickier and they stick around and hopefully we all see them at the future crypto events as well. And Simona, I hope I see you at other future Ethereum events as well, and which I'm looking forward to going to all of them and I'm sure you are going to be there. So, Simona, thank you for telling me your ETH CC story.

• 1:57:18Speaker 06

  Thank you so much and yeah, let's have a great week.

• 1:57:22David Hoffman?

  Hey guys, I'm here with Joseph DeLong of the Sushi Swap Protocol. And Joseph just had a fantastic, brand-new announcement that he debuted here at ECC. And so you've probably already seen it by now because this podcast's coming out a few days later. But Joseph, for people that weren't able to watch you give your presentation, could you kind of give us the elevator pitch of what Sushi Swap just released? Sure. We released a new AMM called Trident. And our new AMM is actually built on top of BentoBox, our platform that allows you to have strategies on the underlying tokens. And so the tokens come in, and applications like Kashi or Trident,

• 1:58:04David Hoffman?

  which is our new AMM, on top have access to a virtual balance. But so you can kind of like do your regular swaps, but underneath, the actual underlying tokens are taken and exercised into a strategy. And so you get extra yield for anything that you have deposited. So that's like you have BentoBox, which is a place where applications come and deposit assets into. BentoBox makes those assets be able to find yield in DeFi. And then BentoBox credits a certain application with the amount that's deposited, right? So it's kind of like a referral system in a way? It goes back to the depositor. It's more like, it's more similar to the banking system. If you think of it like you go and you deposit your money in the bank, right? And then you have kind of like this balance.

• 1:58:49David Hoffman?

  They don't have a shoebox that says David's money, right? They have kind of like one big shoebox, and then some of that money goes in and gets kind of like lent or invested. It's very similar. And so your announcement actually goes even further than that. So tell us a little bit more about the further changes to the Sushi Swap protocol. So we have four new pools. First, I think everybody's anticipating.

• 1:59:15Speaker 04

  Painting that we built a concentrated liquidity pool. Um, and that's great for like, kind of getting best prices on like blue chip assets, but it's more difficult for liquidity providers. Um, and we've kind of like built a whole new interface to make it very simple for LPs to, to stake and set their ranges. The, the next part is hybrid pools. Our hybrid pools are a stable swap pool where you're able to swap like kind assets like USD CT to USDC, um, ren BTC to WBTC, things that are similar that are going to hold a peg together. Um, uh, and those are permissionless and you can create any pool with assets of two, going all the way up to 32, uh, uh, different assets.

• 2:00:01Speaker 04

  Uh, the third pool type, we, we brought back our, our constant product pools with a 15% gas efficiency. And then a two X like capital efficiency, um, because it's built on Bento Box. Um, our, our fourth pool are just weighted pools.

• 2:00:17David Hoffman?

  So this is a turning sushi swap more from just, you know, a fork off of Uniswap B2 into something more of like a suite of services. Can you elaborate on just what do you think this means for the trend of where sushi is going? It sounds like it's doing much more than what it was originally.

• 2:00:34Speaker 04

  So we had had like our own like developments with Kashi and Bento Box and Miso. Um, but we're still kind of like reliant on, um, you know, kind of like this fork legacy code. Um, and this kind of, I think symbolizes like sushi growing up, um, as a platform. And long-term, what you're going to see is you're going to see a platform where all these different services are integrated together. And it's going to be a very friendly experience for users.

• 2:01:02David Hoffman?

  Very cool. And I think it's one of the, the greater Ethereum and DeFi's favorite stories to see sushi swap start as a fork of Uniswap B2 and then completely blossom into something brand new. Uh, who do you think in the, like, what's the average DeFi user that's really going to use, uh, this, these new services that you have? Or is this more of a product for other applications? Where do you think these new sushi swap products are really going to see traction?

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  Well, I think we're going to see it from the LPs. I think that concentrated liquidity positions have proved themselves to give like best prices and that there are going to be active LPs. So we're going to try and capture some of that market as well as like continue using their, I think like each of these different pool types has like excels at a different type of a token. Like for instance, concentrated liquidity positions are good for like D5 blue chips and getting best prices. Our hybrid pools are good for like stable swaps, like like kind of assets, like really excel on those as and our

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  our

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  our constant product pools, those are good for like kind of like long tail coins and then like our weighted pools, those are also good for like long tail coins.

• 2:02:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I'm definitely excited to see just what kind of the where this changes the trajectory of where sushi swap finds adoption. So, but I would like to turn the conversation to some more broader ECC events and topics of conversation. What, do you have any like topics or panels or speakers that you are really excited to hear from coming in to ECC?

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  Oh, there's that like Gath Day that they're going to do like a rundown of Gath. I'm definitely very interested in that. We, you know, coming from a protocol background as well as like needing to build better infrastructure for sushi. I think like the protocol infrastructure is just not there and we need to build something like more robust to give us like better data availability, I think.

• 2:03:06David Hoffman?

  And overall, like are you just stoked to be back at crypto conferences? Before ECC, were you a big crypto conference guy and how is this ECC a little bit different than the other conferences that you've been to?

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, like a lot of people like dump on that. Conferences, I love them and I've always loved them. Right before lockdown happened, the place that I was with the ECC. And it felt like, like in hindsight, looking back, like, you know, like the, the Empire Strikes Back is kind of like the end of Empire Strikes Back. And like, everybody's getting COVID. Well, actually, there's this like new like mystery virus. Everybody's like a little bit scared of, everybody gets it at the conference. The future of DeFi is like, like people like maybe recognize that, but the future of DeFi was uncertain at that time. And now we've come, you know, two years and the future is very certain.

• 2:04:00Speaker 03

  And, um, and we're back, you know, um, and kind of like the world's recovering from this.

• 2:04:07David Hoffman?

  Awesome, Joseph. Well, thank you for coming in and sharing your announcement with us. I'm sure Bankless listeners will go out and find more in the preceding announcements that come out of this conference. And also thank you for sharing your ECC experience.

• 2:04:18Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

• 2:04:23David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, I'm here with Jordi Baylina. Jordi is the founder of Hermes Network, correct?

• 2:04:28Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right.

• 2:04:29David Hoffman?

  And Jordi, we are here at ECC, which I'm really excited for. So tell me, what about ECC are you really excited about?

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's for me, ECC is a very, very special conference. Personally, it's my favorite, it's my favorite conference for many reasons. For example, here is where we start the IDN3 project. That's the, the team that's doing the, the Hermes and so on. So we, we, we start together with my partners here. Paris is very close home. I'm from Barcelona. I'm living right now in Zoo, but it's very close to Barcelona. So it's a very easy trip and,

• 2:05:07Speaker 03

  you know, the, the Paris, you know, I've been this weekend, for example, in Paris. And when you walk in the streets of Paris, you start to feel very good and, and,

• 2:05:18Speaker 03

  You know, going to Paris for this conference, at least for me, it's my feelings starts rising up and very excited and especially after the after the pandemic, you know, I'm so happy that this to be the first, the first conference, the first real, you know, real conference, a conference in place, conference, because, you know, it's this is special and it's like coming back a little bit to normality. I know that we are not still like full normality, but at least we have a conference, a real conference where with the speakers, with the people, we miss, we miss it and I'm absolutely excited about the, about this conference and well, yeah, let's see how they this week, this week works, but

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  we are also presenting a lot of new stuff. We have been working a lot during this pandemic and then it's like, okay, let's, let's just start over again. Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's come up again. So it's very excited.

• 2:06:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's also my first time in Paris and the energy in the city is like pretty, pretty nice to feel. And I also think it's pretty cool that the, the crypto world, the Ethereum world is really one of these first industries that's really planting its flag and saying, hey, we're going to do real life stuff again. So I'm also really happy that, that events are picking up. Is this your first EC or have you come to the other ones before?

• 2:06:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I've been in all of them since the, since the beginning. Yeah. So it's not my first EC for sure.

• 2:06:41David Hoffman?

  So what about this particular ECC? Are you particularly excited for? Are there any speakers or panelists that are on the agenda that you are really interested in seeing?

• 2:06:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think personally, I'm, I'm, I'm very interested because there are a lot of projects, especially in layer two scalability. That's the main, of course, there are other topics, but probably if you ask me myself, this is the, the, the one that I'm more interested from. We are at this point where this technology is available and we are engineering, we are building these scalability solutions. So I think it's going to be very interesting to listen all the projects, how they are approaching these, these, these, these, these, these challenges of scaling and bringing the blockchain technology to main.

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  Because this is not the only one, but probably is the most difficult piece that we are missing for bringing this technology to the to mainstream. So very excited to hear what other projects are doing, what, you know, researchers, different ideas, what's coming on, what applications they are planning and building. I think it's going to be very interesting, at least in the context of this scalability moment that we are living right now.

• 2:08:03David Hoffman?

  As we've been speaking on the bankless world, we keep talking about layer two summer, layer two summer, and we have both optimism and Arbitrum launching sometime in July. We just saw Uniswap go live on optimism. So let's actually dive into a little bit more about the Hermes network, because that's actually something that we haven't actually talked about as much on the bankless podcast. Tell us a little bit about the Hermes network and where it fits in the whole L two ecosystem.

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  Well, Hermes network is a layer two roll up, is a Z K L two roll up, it's not an optimism, it's Z K L two roll up is right now Hermes is for payments, you can do any kind of payments in layer two.

• 2:08:43Speaker 03

  It scales a lot, you know, right now, each transaction controls 2000 transactions and in Ethereum block it feeds 15 transactions. So actually, you know, the limit would be, the actual limit would be to have 2000 transactions per second, which is two orders of magnitude more of what's Ethereum right now. And this is, you know, this is a main net, this is running.

• 2:09:09Speaker 03

  We launched it main net on March. The smart contract already hold at $30 million at a certain point. So from the security perspective, we are, you know, We are getting this point that looks like star being safe, you know, that these things you can never say that something is fully safe, but well, it looks it looks good on on this. We got a lot of experience in in scaling because scaling is not only the like the gene, the main technology, it's also now you need to hold a lot of transactions, you need to have a huge databases, you need to have explorers that holds all this information. So we we got a lot of experience on the mission there. We are, we'd say that from Hermes perspective, we are fully decentralized protocol.

• 2:09:55Speaker 03

  We are ramping up ramping up and and we need more transactions to to fully decentralize the protocol, but the protocol is designed to be decentralized and we hope that slowly we are getting to this decentralization point. And we are also very excited because the if you see the cost per transaction, you know, for verification of the proof and so we are the the by far, we are the cheapest

• 2:10:21Speaker 03

  roll up layer two solution, CK roll up layer two solution solution in listing cost terms. Now the proof is very cheap and the smart contract is very optimized and we are very happy to be to be there. And from here, we are very excited because we are we are not stopping, we are doing a lot of we are growing the the network and while we are here in Paris, we will present the the CK CKBN will be the next version of Hermes where it's where it's going to be possible to run the smart contracts and transactions. We are doing we're implementing the Ethereum EVM byte code to byte code

• 2:11:00Speaker 03

  to just implementing all the byte codes of Ethereum EVM. So you can you should be able to run any smart contract in in in layer two in a roll up. And this is a project. That we are working on and fully committed. We have other projects that we're also building like a token swap service. We are building also instant payments, decentralized manner, kind of payment channels on top of layer two. It's going to be important also to to have a finalities.

• 2:11:32Speaker 03

  To have better finality times for you know, for real time projects. We want to expand Hermes networks to many, many communities, many countries and start working also from the wallets and developers and different exchange and integrating it. So we have a lot of work, still a lot of work to do and but we are fully committed to to the project and yeah, just that's that's what we are doing.

• 2:11:59David Hoffman?

  So often, there's a little bit of confusion between the difference between like a side chain and an L2. So I just want to make the bankless nation completely, you know, up to speed is Hermes network is an L2 with zero compromises to the security and decentralization that Ethereum has, which is what we like when it comes to trustless technologies, but different differentiating itself from optimistic roll up technologies like Arbitrum and optimism. Hermes is a ZK roll up, which has some interesting different properties that the the optimistic roll up side of things don't have. Can you kind of just illustrate and elaborate on what those are and how that kind of changes what Hermes network is?

• 2:12:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, a layer two solution, the idea is that there is a transaction. So it's a layer one transaction that actually packs like many many transactions. So you have a state and then you say, okay, I'm going to process 2000 transactions. So you just put a new L1 transaction saying, look, the new estate, well, after processing all these transactions is this one. And then you you just send that. The difference between optimism and and ZK roll up is an optimism.

• 2:13:07Speaker 03

  The coordinator just say the new estate and it can be good or or or or wrong, I say valid or wrong. He says that the state people, they have to check by themselves some way. And then there is a mechanism for challenging these steps. It's like, okay, if the coordinator have a, have an invalid estate, somebody can challenge that estate. And if he's not able to prove that this is a valid estate, maybe there is some collateral that the coordinator will lose or things like that. This is the idea of optimism rollups. ZK rollups are different. So you you you put the new estate, but you also put a cryptographic proof that this estate is valid.

• 2:13:51Speaker 03

  So you don't have to worry about the all these system. You see this valid, this is okay, it's it's validated in on chain in the same smart contract. That's it, you know, that's that's that's end of the end of the story. You don't have to white or be sure that this coordinator did something wrong. And then you have like to go back and you enter to this gaming, you know, game theory ideas. The problem of ZK rollups, so the ZK rollups for this is much better idea. You just put, just put the new estate and you forget about that. The problem of the ZK rollups is that you have to compute this proof.

• 2:14:33Speaker 03

  And this proof is not easy to compute and you need a lot of computation resources to do that. And this is the technology that actually is growing, the one that we are working. Two years ago, computing this proof was like crazy, it was almost impossible, I would say. Right now, it's, the technology has improved a lot. The, even the mathematical algorithms has been improved a lot. So this is being every time is. And also, for example, for the ZK EBM, you know, ZK EBM, building a ZK EBM in optimism way. It's, I would say, it's quite easy. Okay, it's easier because you just validate the virtual machine and that's it.

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Uh, building that in a, in a ZK rollup where it's a little bit more complex because you need to build circuits that process programs. And this is more complex, but it's absolutely doable. And, you know, as I told you before, uh, in Hermes, we will present and we will explain, I think, quite deeply from the technical perspective, how we are going to build that. A little bit, we are going to show the details of, uh, uh, what are the different pieces that we put together to build this as a rollup and we will prove that, that this is absolutely possible. And not only that, that's we are going to prove also, uh, that we can do it,

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  without changing the, the EBM protocol, without changing the ecosystem. And this is the, to be the new thing that we will present here in the, in the SEC.

• 2:16:10David Hoffman?

  Fantastic. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that different construction coming out. And importantly, I think the, the first difference I think people will experience if they were to use Hermes network is that those withdrawals out of the layer two doesn't have that seven day withdrawal period. That's correct, right?

• 2:16:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, that's withdrawing the, withdrawing Hermes is just a layer one transactions and you just,

• 2:16:34Speaker 03

  withdraw. And first of all, one of the things that's interesting in Hermes is that,

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  you have it, we call it the force withdrawal. So,

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  the coordinator can never lock up your, your, your phones. You know, if you want to withdraw your phones, you can always have, do a layer one transactions and you will also recover the, the, the phones. This is, we're trying to follow the principles of censorship resistance and, and, and this is, for example, one of the properties, of Hermes. And yeah, it's, it's immediate, you know, just to the withdrawal and like a normal transaction. It's a little bit expensive because we don't need to prove that money is inside. So it's a little bit, expensive transaction in gas terms, but.

• 2:17:20Speaker 03

  Not that much, you know, it's just you can you can recover your funds and yeah, that's it.

• 2:17:27David Hoffman?

  And of course, it's more important that you actually have the option to do that rather than actually needing to do that. Having the option is important. Jordy, when ECC is over and you go around and touring Paris, do you have any Paris plans?

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  Any, sorry, any, any Paris plans?

• 2:17:44Speaker 03

  Well, I've been this week, as I told you, I've been this weekend already in Paris. So after the ECC, I'm

• 2:17:51Speaker 03

  going back to Barcelona in this case. But yeah, I enjoyed Paris during this weekend. And as I told you, it's amazing, you know, my, I, I charge myself a lot just being around Paris for this weekend. And yeah, hoping for the next years, you know, for the next year to, to, to continue this amazing conference.

• 2:18:19David Hoffman?

  Well, Jordy, thank you for stepping away for the conference for a moment and coming and talking about Hermes Network to the Bankless Nation. So cheers, and I hope you have fun.

• 2:18:26Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 2:18:28David Hoffman?

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• 2:19:04David Hoffman?

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