Danny Ryan | Layer Zero

Danny Ryan is an Ethereum 2.0 researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, but he is also a cat owner, husband, and outdoors enthusiast. With some of the longest hair in crypto, Danny is solving extremely difficult and important problems at the protocol level for Ethereum. He is a communicator and a thinker—he is technical but also personable. Danny is a human at the center of this movement, navigating through high-stakes subjective decisions and surrounded by smart, passionate people. This conversation also covers what it’s like working for a protocol. What’s it like working without a boss and concrete job description? Danny’s answer? He cares a lot. ***** 📣 POOLTOGETHER | DEFI LOTTERY https://bankless.cc/PoolTogether ***** 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ 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 🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Danny Ryan & His Hair 8:50 Coding & Building 12:45 Communicating 19:37 Subjective Decisions 25:05 Existential Risks 31:35 Work Culture & Accountability 38:08 After Ethereum 41:21 Proof of Stake 45:36 Social Interactions 51:42 More Proof of Stake 55:40 Bitcoin 58:10 Clean Money 1:00:15 Happy Devs & the Mock Merge 1:06:01 Personal Stuff 1:14:55 Closing ------ Resources: Danny on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannyryan?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. CypherPunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm talking with Danny Ryan, who is the coordinator of the Greater ETH2 effort. And Danny is in an interesting position. He's one of those people that can go deep into the weeds with code, but then also zoom all the way out and explain it to

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  the non-technical folk like me. And so, we went through a little bit of Danny's pre-Ethereum history and where he got his skills from, and then it turns out he's got a little bit of an entrepreneur in him. And then, we asked some greater questions as to why Danny feels, as somebody who works for the EF and kind of doesn't really have a boss, where he gets his accountability from for waking up every single day and contributing to Ethereum, when no one actually forces him to do that. And then also, expanding that to the other developers as well. We also talk a lot about this recent Dev Interop event, and what it's like to be there as a developer, and then also, I share my perspective as what it's

• 1:30David Hoffman?

  like to view these things from the outside. And then, we finish off with an interesting conversation about, I asked Danny whether he is an introvert, or excuse me, whether he is an optimist or a pessimist, and what about the world makes him what it is. And I thought his answer for that was pretty interesting. So, without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into this conversation with Danny Ryan. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Matcha, everyone's favorite DEX aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common ETH and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Matcha are Free, and that's why you should be using Matcha.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

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• 2:58David Hoffman?

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• 3:39David Hoffman?

  borrow Al ETH against your deposits while having your advance gradually paid back over time. V2 is rapidly approaching, which will allow for even more collateral types, plus a variety of yield strategies to choose from. Harness the power of Alchemix at alchemix.fi. That's A-L-C-H-E-M-I-X dot F-I. Follow Alchemix on Twitter at @AlchemixFI and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemix V2 and to get involved in governance. Hey Danny. How's it going?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Pretty good.

• 4:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Having a good time? Yeah.

• 4:17David Hoffman?

  Where's your basement? Where in the world is your basement? Can I dox you as the first thing I ask on the show?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's reasonable. I don't think it's a secret. Boulder, Colorado.

• 4:26David Hoffman?

  Ah, one of the Colorado clans, huh?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I've been here for a couple of years.

• 4:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the Michael Wong, the guy who does culture and memes at Bankless jokes about how all the Colorado people are really into public goods and have long hair.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Well, I won't pull it down, but I think I have the longest of the hair.

• 4:46David Hoffman?

  Longer than Milwaukee?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. My hair is to my waist.

• 4:51David Hoffman?

  What?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yes, I'll actually pull it down.

• 4:54David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, really?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's usually in a braid if it's down, which, you know.

• 5:00David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, it is the longest hair. Wow, you have the longest hair in all of Ethereum. Look at that.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I think I'm right, yeah.

• 5:08David Hoffman?

  Well, that's great. How long have you been growing that thing out?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I don't really know. I mean, a while. I think.

• 5:15David Hoffman?

  Before you were in Ethereum?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but probably like three years ago, I cut off like six inches.

• 5:23David Hoffman?

  Just, I just wanted to be six inches shorter. Three feet too long.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  You're just to trim it to keep it healthy, but I know I don't follow the guidance.

• 5:33David Hoffman?

  Well, wow, I've already learned something new about you so early into this show. Danny, I want to hear about your time before Ethereum. What did you do? What were you doing right before you got into Ethereum?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  I was doing a mix of various like software and business consulting. So my niche was probably like not just being a hired hand, but also like working closely with small business CEOs to like help them figure out how technology could actually make their their lives better. Some of this was like

• 6:07Speaker 01

  helping like literally small businesses in like Louisiana that like didn't know databases existed or like how to track customers and things like that. And that was, you can make a big impact. But I also like, I also did a lot of work with a company called Kidding Co., which was like an Airbnb knockoff for families traveling with kids. So I built a lot of that stuff and like worked closely with the CEO on.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I don't know, strategy and that kind of stuff.

• 6:31David Hoffman?

  Were you like working as an individual or was it under a company?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Um, always, I mean, as, as a company, but just as a front for myself, you know, limits and limits and liability and help with taxes and that kind of stuff.

• 6:45David Hoffman?

  And so your, your typical client was like a kind of a boomer that didn't really know technology is what it is. Is that, is that the vibe?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  It was, it was a bit of a mix. Yeah. I think it was, it was actually not boomers. It was probably like 30 somethings that were like, you know, go getter businessmen that just hadn't awoken to all the things that technology could do for themselves.

• 7:08David Hoffman?

  Was being an entrepreneur, one of like, have you always been an entrepreneur? Or before that, did you ever like work for a company, ever worked for a nine to five?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I've never had a, a real job. I don't think.

• 7:20David Hoffman?

  Really?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  I started a screen printing company when I was 15. Uh, it still runs today. And that's.

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  No way.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:29David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  My business partner and best friend, that's his full-time gig, but I'm still involved somewhat.

• 7:36David Hoffman?

  No way. Okay. I was just, this is like apparel, right? Just like making cool shirts and then stuff like that. You started that when you were 15?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we primarily do it for other people. So like they can take the risk on of like their cool shirt and try to sell it.

• 7:49David Hoffman?

  Just make it.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  You know, we, we do like a hundred to 10,000 piece orders for all sorts of different entities. Got a shop in Louisiana.

• 7:58David Hoffman?

  Okay. So, so would you say that you've always had some sort of entrepreneur DNA part of you?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  I would, yeah, yeah. And I've always had the desire to not have a normal job and to dictate my time on my, my own standard. And this is probably the most normal of a job I have. I mean, it's like, I work for an entity. I, and I, I, um, you know, I don't, I don't have hours, but I have things that I'm trying to do and I get paid to do them. Uh, but that's, it's entrepreneurial sense that like no one tells me what to do.

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And I just, uh, see, I see what needs to be done and I kind of try to bring the value where I can.

• 8:38David Hoffman?

  Definitely. Yeah. So you are, you are your own leader, even though you have a paycheck, which is a, the fact that the EF is the most normal job you've ever had is absolutely insane.

• 8:51David Hoffman?

  When did you learn to code?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  In college, actually, I've always like used computers and was like a power user probably, but I never dipped into into coding until I had to take a computer science course for a mechanical and aerospace engineering degree I was doing. And then, and this is my sophomore year of college, and I I loved the class and switched my major and went all in. And I, you know, and was like, felt like a late bloomer, you know, like, I'm never going to make it in computer science or programming because like, people have been doing this since they were two. But it worked out. It's working out.

• 9:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah. What about code just resonated with you?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  It felt immediately like the most sane way to get through college because it's fun.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  I guess I was doing the mechanical and aerospace engineering degrees, I thought, because I thought I would like build things. But you didn't really build stuff at my school until junior or senior year, whereas day zero of the programming class, I was like building cool little things. And that just kind of struck me. And it felt like solving puzzles. And I felt like I could, I could spend the rest of my college career solving puzzles and it would get me, get me through school at least.

• 10:09David Hoffman?

  So the, is the builder DNA also in you as well? Like, whatever you, whatever medium you have to build something, the easiest and the fastest is what resonates?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Probably so. I don't know. Sometimes I think I'm a builder and then I see my wife, who's like sewing and like making dresses and like, it's always building shit, like literally always building shit. And I'm like, I'm not much of a builder.

• 10:34David Hoffman?

  You don't think you're much of a builder?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  I am a communicator. I'm a prototyper. I like to think deeply out hard problems. But like, at a certain point, I'm also not the guy who builds it, you know, and nor do I think I'm the right one. Like, if you look at the, say, like, the Sigma Prime team, you know, Paul's a builder. Paul, like, wrecks building lighthouse and like, is it can, is just constructing crazy shit. I mean, Proto, Proto's a builder, too. And I build things, but I do a lot of other things, too. And like, I, if I spend all of my time trying to build things and trying to bring something totally to production in terms of my own hands, it's, I don't get.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I have a hard time doing that. I have a hard time like focusing quite like that. So I like the mix of stuff I do.

• 11:24David Hoffman?

  I made this mistake with Kevin Owoke once, or maybe it's actually Ryan that alluded to Steve Jobs and Kevin was like, I don't, I don't like that analogy, but I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it anyways where Steve Wozniak was yelling at Steve Jobs saying, what is it that you actually do? Like, what are, what are your skills? Like, you don't actually build anything? And Steve Jobs gives this anecdote of like, somebody going up to a conductor of an orchestra and asking more or less the same question, like, what do you do that a metronome can't do? And the orchestra, the conductor gets really, really offended, obviously. And he goes, well, you know, the, the trumpeteer plays the trumpet and then the, you know, the flutist plays the flute.

• 12:08David Hoffman?

  I play the orchestra, right? Like that, that's his instrument. Would you say that that metaphor is kind of apt for how you are the conductor of all the ETH2 client teams?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I, I will not take like the Steve Jobs analogy direct. I cannot accept that, but I will say to a certain extent, because like the conductor probably played an instrument most of his life and knows and knows music inside and out. You know, knows how to communicate about the music and things like that. And so to a certain extent, sure, yeah. You know, and I, I enjoy that.

• 12:45David Hoffman?

  So what has it been like to be the?

• 12:50David Hoffman?

  I kind of, so the other metaphor that I think I have for what I think you do is like, kind of like a traffic control man.

• 12:58David Hoffman?

  For all of the, the different, just like packets of communication data that all the different client teams talk about, we were, me and Ryan were just got out of done recording a weekly roll up and we were reading one of the ZK rollups, like announcement blog posts. And we were just trying to unpack their blog posts over and over and over again. And like, it was very, very clear that a developer wrote this blog post, not a communicator. So like, as somebody who's a good communicator, how is it, how, what's it been like to like, communicate with all these like, you know, developers who speak in this very, very like technical, non-communicative way?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  That's fun. I mean, I can speak the language and I don't just communicate like in this interrupt last week, like I did a lot of communication. I did a lot of kind of organization stuff, but I, you know, I'm in the weeds like figuring out like the optimizing the engine API, right? And like figuring out how that's actually going to run and like some of the edge cases and stuff. And so like, I think if I could not get deep into it, that I would be, I would not be effective at what I'm doing or what I've been doing the past few years. And so on the technical side, it's very fun. And then I really enjoy explaining things. I really enjoy teaching. And so I really enjoy like finding the right metaphor,

• 14:21Speaker 01

  the right like thing analogy to communicate a technical concept to people who maybe aren't as deep in the weeds. And so because I get to be deep in the weeds, then I also get to then turn around to the other side and communicate outward.

• 14:34David Hoffman?

  So when you're at these dev interrupt events where everyone there speaks code, like speaks developer, you don't need to use metaphors, right? Like that's, that's metaphors are for you to communicate to people like me. Or do metaphors, are they useful in that environment? Like what are the communication skills there?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  That's an interesting question. The metaphors are different, but they're still valuable. They're still like, sometimes you're talking about something very complicated. And like if you can abstract it and be able to talk about it more from a higher level, like one, you're going to get the three people in the room over here that knew what was going on and the four people over here that didn't quite yet, you're going to help expedite that process, which is good. And also just it helps, like we all have to think about different, like we have to be able to think about different layers of abstraction. So like, once we have a good metaphor, even though we've like worked on the minute details of thing A and thing B, but once we have a metaphor for how thing A and thing B kind

• 15:34Speaker 01

  of live together at a higher level, once you have the details worked out, then you can talk about that higher level and not have to worry about the details unless you like need to open it back up and go back in. So they're very, they're very valuable. Yeah. They're not the same metaphors all the time. Sometimes they cross, you know, sometimes they're good for educating an outside audience and for communicating amongst themselves. But they're certainly valuable. Computer science is all about abstraction and that's metaphors in a certain sense.

• 16:01David Hoffman?

  Is there a specific event that comes to mind when like you just could not figure out how to get two teams to communicate, or you couldn't communicate with someone? Was there ever like a big like breakdown in communication that's happened? That's a story you can tell us about? Anything come to mind there?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  There are some things, and these types of things, or if you talk to my wife, would be the things that over the past three years, three, four years have like stressed me out the most is this communication breakdown. I will probably, I will not go in too deep about any one of them. I will say that early on in the ETH2 beacon chain journey, we had done a lot of work on consensus, a lot of work on the core security, the core state transition, how these things come together, but the networking was not in full view. And there was a bit of a lack of expertise on the networking and ownership over it. And when we got there, that was probably one of the hardest times.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  It's just that there were parties on both sides of the aisle that thought very, very different things about how the networking should be built and how it should look. And it like almost drove me crazy because I could not, I could not like, it took probably months to get past and resolve an issue and ultimately came down to just being like, we're gonna do it this way, we can't do it both ways, sorry. You know, and usually we're better at compromise, usually we're better at finding a solution where all the parties are like, eventually all the parties are like, oh yeah, that makes sense, because, which is really good. I think, I think in Ethereum, most people operating at this layer one, like, they truly want to find the right solution.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  And like, often we propose solutions and that get iterated on or just totally shut down. And like, you have to do that, and most people are very good at that and don't bring a lot of ego to their solutions. And because of that, I don't think we get to these like weird impasses where we're just bike shedding to death. I mean, we bike shed, certainly, but like not about the important things.

• 18:04David Hoffman?

  What's bike shedding?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  It is a term used quite a bit, that the idea is, we're building a bike shed, you and I. And obviously bike sheds foundation, they probably need a concrete foundation, they need walls, they need a door, all sorts of stuff. You maybe even need locks for your bikes, for your security. But like, instead of dealing with all that, we're sitting here arguing about like the color we're going to paint the shed. You know, and the shed doesn't even exist yet. And so bike shedding is when people get hung up on some sort of minute detail that like, doesn't really matter. And we're not like, we're not even getting to the meat of it. So like, the name of an API endpoint, like that could be the thing that is bike shed to oblivion.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Because there's no, there's no correct name. There's literally no correct answer. Like there's, there's, it becomes a matter of opinion. And once you get to these areas that are a bit more of a matter of opinion, rather than like, some sort of absolute correctness. And nothing has an absolute correctness, but there's certainly things that like, get closer in that direction. But when you get farther away from that direction, like naming, things like that, you get, you get into bike shutting. And if you look at like all core dev calls, sometimes it'll be like, 20% meat and then 80% bike shutting.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  But then if you say that people are bike shedding, then somebody that really cares about the issue would be like, this isn't bike shedding. This is really, really important.

• 19:31David Hoffman?

  Right, they don't think they're bike shedding, they're, they think that they're presenting the objective, like, yeah, right. Okay, so I want to unpack that a little bit, because building Ethereum, no one knows what Ethereum is. It's kind of like the internet and like the future of Ethereum is like what Ethereum should be is a subjective thing, right? We don't have any objective, like, reference point for what we are trying to build when we're building Ethereum. So like you said, all, all choices are subjective and some are, some are easier to come to consensus to versus others. Would you, would you say like, one way to describe your role is that like, you are the facilitator of all these subjective decisions?

• 20:14David Hoffman?

  Some of these subjective decisions, all the teams have consensus on, so we can just leave that, you know, we can put that in the rearview mirror. But perhaps a lot of them need to have, you know, powwows and deliberation and debriefs about how and why choices are made. So would you say like, your role has been to be the facilitator of these conversations about these subjective choices?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  That's, that's one of my roles. I'd say that's one of my roles. And the

• 20:44Speaker 01

  We like, it is subjective. There is no absolute as to where we're going, but there are design considerations. There are like deep philosophical things that are guiding us. Obviously, like, we don't have to all agree on them all, but like, you can go, we can, you can begin to cite, you'd be like, we've been working on proof of state for like six years. And like, it has these, like, these, these are things we're trying to achieve. And like, the ethos of the community is kind of rallied around this, you know, and so that becomes something to help you, help guide you. But also, there's other design considerations, like, complexity is the enemy of everything in consensus systems. And so like minimizing complexity, even at the

• 21:24Speaker 01

  cost of, of some advanced feature set, or like, some optimization often, you know, is a guiding light. And that, you know, is generally agreed upon, you know, but you, maybe there's 5% of engineers in this process that like, they're not afraid of complexity at all. Right? So there, you know, there's a bit of, there's like a compromise that has to happen there. So, so yeah, subjective, but there's this, there's this like ethos and philosophy and, and kind of design guiding, guiding, like guiding light that's guiding us. And sometimes I have to help try to contextualize that. Sometimes I have to help try to figure out what the community thinks is designing light or the priorities. And like, I don't know, it's all messy.

• 22:10David Hoffman?

  All right. So yeah, you said values and ethos will help guide the decisions. How much, how well defined do you think that actually is? Because like, if you really want to get down to it, there's no actual source of, single source of truth for anything in this universe. Like, are there any very, very concrete things that like, well, this choice abides by this set of values? Obviously, like decentralization is perhaps a very concrete value that no one disagrees with. Are there any other values that like you can like name for, for, for us here?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  But even decentralization is, is on a spectrum. And so like, you know, the Bitcoiners might say that we've, we've like gone off the deep end on, you know, in terms of it being some sort of centralized process or centralized protocol or something like that. And I don't, I don't agree with that. But then I think other protocols have gone off the deep end in terms of centralization and design considerations and things like that. So.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Decentralization, certainly, top one. Decentralization, also, there's many different things that can mean. Often, in protocol design, we're considering like it not being able to be captured by powerful interests, it not being able to be censored, and things like that. And the, I would say, there's an ethos of Ethereum of assuming that the world as it is today, and the way the world interacts with blockchains today, is not as the world will be in five, 10, or 20 years. So you end up seeing protocols that they make what I would, what people consider pretty

• 23:50Speaker 01

  large compromises because, well, this is how it works. No one's doing this, no one's doing that, like, it's gonna be fine. Whereas, there's a very strong ethos in Ethereum, assuming that something that can be captured will likely be attempted to be captured if it's valuable enough, and we're attempting to build things that are very big and very valuable. And so, we're not, we're trying to think about, like, you know, what happens when a state actor cares? What happens when, you know, some mega cartel of some of the richest people in the world care? That kind of stuff. What happens when the banks are trying to shut it down? Whereas, and so that's definitely, it's definitely a design consideration.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  What are the other philosophies? That proof of stake's better than proof of work? Yeah. I mean, I could, I could- That seems pretty binary. Yeah, I mean- There might be a spectrum there. Yeah, it might be a spectrum. We were trying to do hybrid proof of work, proof of stake at one point, so that's, that's the spectrum, although I don't think that was actually a good idea, even though I wrote the EIP. But the, yeah, I mean-

• 25:02Speaker 01

  It's messy. It's messy.

• 25:05David Hoffman?

  What's something that could be captured? Because like, obviously, all of Ethereum is like, or like, you know, enough stake to validate the chain in ways that you deem appropriate. Like, having enough ether, that's one way to get capture. But like, what are the other like mechanisms that like, maybe somebody that's not developer minded like I am, wouldn't think of that is like an attack point that you guys try and harden up?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Well, you would, well, I think that this is, this is something you would think about, which is capture the governance process.

• 25:35David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  You know, like, the fact that you can upgrade Ethereum is dangerous. The fact that we can upgrade Ethereum is dangerous. And it hardly becomes increasingly so as the powers that be give a shit about this stuff. You know, like, there's, there's a bunch of developers, a bunch of community members, there's a bunch of signals and stuff. And, and those, I'm certain could all be manipulated. And I don't think that's what's happening today. But I do think that that could happen in the future.

• 26:05David Hoffman?

  Right. What about something that actually involves writing code in a specific way? Where if we write the code this way, like, it might be open for capture in the future?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  One thing that comes to mind is, is P2P networking, you know, it's, we make assumptions about the amount of honest actors on a network. We make assumptions about being able to connect and being able to get in and actually find the right network. And some of that, the P2P stuff in general actually becomes a bit like, a bit more, a bit harder to define in an objective way, like consensus mechanisms. You can be like, if two alternative chain histories were created, a minimum of this amount of stake is slashable. Like that, you can make, you're very clear to find it. Whereas like, defining someone being

• 26:59Speaker 01

  griefed on a P2P network and, and the, all the vectors there and are being eclipsed and things like that is usually a bit, usually a bit tougher. And so, definitely places that you have to,

• 27:13Speaker 01

  it's easy to not harden that, I guess, is the, is the point, but you, you gotta spend the time doing that. Let me think, dependencies, that's an interesting one. Reducing your, the, the software dependencies that you have

• 27:28Speaker 01

  reduces the ability for people to kind of make their way into your code unsuspectingly. Like, for example, if you had a dependency for a big integer library, some random library, and like, one guy maintains it, and like, your client is, is running on this. Then all of a sudden, that one guy can potentially like, get a bug in that dependency that then affects all the arithmetic in your client, which could then lead to XYZ bug, you know, printing a million ethers, something like that. Multi-client helps us there, but it's, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot of different entry points.

• 28:07David Hoffman?

  Not even attack vector that I even knew existed.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  That's called a, a supply chain attack on the, on the software itself. But there's hardware supply chain attacks too. And apparently, you know, well, there's a lot up there, but the, like,

• 28:26Speaker 01

  you could imagine there being some sort of box that people love to stake on, and you literally just bug the hardware and you still can use keys.

• 28:33David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, but that's not your responsibility.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  It's not, but it's worth considering if there are safe ways to try to prevent that. I mean, one consideration for that would be like the separation of, of the active stake and key and the withdrawal credentials. You know, by doing that, by, by having the ultimate ownership of funds being a key that could be much colder, and maybe on a hardware wallet, you know, protects you against certain supply chain attacks, at least, you know, you could, these, those attacks could still potentially steal keys. But, and could get you slashed, but you maybe lose one ether instead of 32 ether. So there are protocol design considerations there.

• 29:12David Hoffman?

  What, what you're talking about, I think for, for listeners who didn't follow that, is that when you stake your 32 ether, you predetermined the outgoing outbound Ethereum address where, when you unstake that ether, where that ether actually goes. So when you unstake your ether, rather than just like, unstake my ether and send it to this address, you actually give your Ethereum address that it will be unstaked to when it is unstaked. That was right, right?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:38David Hoffman?

  So you talked about how there are some assumptions that are made in the Ethereum protocol, and this is of course a subjective decision that must be made. Historically, with all these client teams and making these decisions, are people generally come to consensus about these things, about what the assumption level should be? Or is it a bunch of, like, is there disagreement, or tend toward disagreement, or tend toward agreement? What's that process like? Case by case basis?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of case by case basis. I think that the people that are working on, you know, the proof of state consensus aspect of this protocol, one inherited a lot. So it inherited a lot of the philosophy and a lot of the design considerations from ETH1, from the existing proof of work chain. And, you know, a few core people wrote a lot of the initial specifications. So like myself, Vitalik, Justin Drake, and others. And so those initial specifications are grounded deeply with a certain philosophy. But then, design and considerations ripple outward from there. So one, you know, we iterate quite a bit on specifications with engineers and teams.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  And then, the specifications only contain so much, so engineers are ultimately making decisions. But I think they are grounded very deeply in a certain ethos. But you do see a bit of a, you see different philosophical decisions coming out in different clients. So maybe like an enterprise client might cut corners here or there to make things nice for enterprise, or make, you know, some user experience really nice. Whereas like a client that wants to be running on, you know, unstoppable embedded hardware and like routers and all sorts of stuff all over the world, like, they might have like a different, you know, standard that they're holding to, and maybe it makes the UX worse.

• 31:35David Hoffman?

  Switching gears a little bit here, although I think this conversation is going to weave in and out a little bit is

• 31:41David Hoffman?

  the culture around all of these client devs.

• 31:46David Hoffman?

  None of them work for the EF. They kind of, they, correct me if I'm wrong here. Like they all kind of have their own internal treasury that they use to pay out all of the developers. But I feel like the vibe of the job is they're all kind of, kind of what you described your job at the EF is like, well, you receive a paycheck, but you don't really answer to anyone. You kind of just have your, your job. So everyone's a lot more loose, loosely organized. Everyone kind of just like gets up and works loosely works. What's, so like the, the answer is probably obvious is, but like when you get up in the morning and like, I don't, I don't, I don't think you have a boss. Or maybe you technically do, but you probably doesn't feel like you do.

• 32:29David Hoffman?

  Like what keeps you accountable? Like why, what, why does Danny actually do the things that are in his job description?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I ask myself that sometimes. I don't, I don't have a job description, but I

• 32:43David Hoffman?

  Perceived job, job description.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, because I care. I care a lot and I don't know why. I mean, I think I know why, but sometimes, you know, throughout the years it ebbs and flows in different directions, but like I cannot help myself. Like I cannot, I cannot not wake up and immediately like figure out what the new problem is. Or wake up and like realize that if I don't do X, Y, or Z, that the merge literally might be delayed by two weeks. Because we're like trying to get the specs out and stuff. And like, I just, I, I care. And then I care because I care about the technology, but I also like the way it's all structured is it's all this, it's all this open source project that we're building together. And, and, and it's a community. So like,

• 33:30Speaker 01

  The accountability doesn't necessarily come from a direct boss or anything. The accountability comes from the fact that I'm a member of this community, building this thing. And, and I have, I have this emergent responsibility, building this thing with these people. And if I, if I didn't do what I thought I could do and do my best to do so, I would be not giving, giving my, my all to this community that I, I care about and I'm deeply integrated in. And that's, there's a community angle. There's the like, I care about shipping this piece of technology. And then I, I don't know, there's, there's a certain level of, of obsession that I, and pretty much everyone else I work with has.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And that's probably because of the community thing. It's probably because of the impact. But it's just like, someone, someone mentioned it, like Ethereum is just the ultimate nerd snipe. And I, I, the word nerd isn't even the right word. Like, I don't necessarily consider myself a nerd, but just the like, it is such an interesting problem. It is such, like, the combination of, of economics and cryptography and game theory and, and programming and distributed systems. Like, it's unbelievable. It's like hilariously interesting. And it's captivated me for many years now.

• 34:52David Hoffman?

  I just had to look up nerd snipe. So for, for, for those that also needed to look up nerd snipe, nerd sniping is a slang term that describes a particularly interesting problem that is presented to a nerd, often a physicist, tech geek, or mathematician. The nerd stops all activity to devote attention to solving the problem, often at his or her own peril. Danny, do you feel like, do you feel in peril at some, at times because of Ethereum?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Sometimes. Sometimes I feel like Ethereum-

• 35:22David Hoffman?

  Think twice if Ethereum holds you hostage.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  I think it might. I think it might. I'm, I'm serious. Like, I, I've been infected, you know? Like, the, the memes, the, this is, but the memetics, like, the infectious idea, like, that, that thing, like, you know, I've definitely been infected. Like, I cannot, it's hard for me to think about other things. I have to, like, rip myself away and, like, go, go to the gym or go hike in the woods to, like, force myself to not think about this thing, which is incredible. I never thought I'd be so wrapped up in something and care so much about something, but it's also like, it's also a lot.

• 35:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 35:59David Hoffman?

  Do you like if you went and just like effed off for the day like went to the beach or just like whatever like maybe two, two days in a row like, would you feel like, would you feel guilty? What, what emotions would you feel while you were not working on Ethereum?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  No, I don't think I definitely some anxiety because like it all keeps moving like because, because I'm going to open my phone, even if I didn't look at it for two days, I'm going to open my phone, I'm going to have literally 500 messages and like many of them are going to be in like interesting technical conversations that one, I want to follow and two, I often, I often have very strong opinions about all of these conversations. And so like, I want to make sure that I help steer in the direction that I think is, is good. And so, you know, if I, if I disappear for too long, you know, who knows, it might be steered in that direction. I have to like, try to right the ship.

• 36:52David Hoffman?

  Right, right. Somebody might have influenced a depass EIP or something.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I don't mean to, I don't mean to imply. So I think I work a lot. I do. And I love, and I enjoy it. But I think I actually have like a pretty good work, life balance compared to some. Like I go to the gym almost every day. I love camping. I love hiking. I got a beautiful wife that we hang out, out with, you know, plenty of friends, that kind of stuff. So like I, I, I pride myself in having a good work, life balance. But I also think I work a ton. So I don't know. There's, I don't know where the line is.

• 37:25David Hoffman?

  Right, right. Yeah. The cool thing about Ethereum is like when I think everyone who finds a job in, oh, probably greater crypto too, is that no one actually feels like they're working. I mean, I'm sure some people do. But the, the perhaps why this thing has been so sustainable when it comes to infecting your brain is that because like it doesn't actually feel like work?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  I, yes, I agree. And simultaneously, it does not feel like working, but it can still be exhausting.

• 37:55David Hoffman?

  Sure. Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely. There's, yeah, plenty of things that aren't work are very, very exhausting.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Running a marathon is exhausting, but it's, it's not technically my job.

• 38:05David Hoffman?

  Right. Have you ever thought about like what you're going to do with yourself once Ethereum calcifies?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  I will either not be in technology or I will be working on open source technology. I'm not, I will not be working on closed source technology ever.

• 38:26David Hoffman?

  I know. As a matter of principle?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it just doesn't interest me. And also, one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing is because I'm trying to make an impact on the world and I don't think closed source software is the right way for me to make that impact.

• 38:42David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  But it's, we'll see, we'll see. It's hard to imagine doing something else, although I certainly will do something else eventually.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  And

• 38:58Speaker 01

  yeah, I, my guiding principle is to work on things that I, I care about and to try to create value, not in the sense of like lining my pockets with cash, but like fundamentally try to create value. And in doing so, I will continue to open doors and be able to work on interesting things. That has worked out for me so far. I'm also a very fortunate, very lucky person in many respects, but I figure if I keep doing what I'm doing, keep working on interesting things, keep working with interesting people, that whatever that next door is, it will, it'll be, it'll be a good one.

• 39:33David Hoffman?

  Do you see yourself putting the entrepreneur hat back on and building something on Ethereum?

• 39:40David Hoffman?

  And now, now that you've finished the, the foundation, build, build a product?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  I think that that would be, it'd be the right thing and have to be the right people. You know, if there was a person or two that I really, really wanted to essentially hack on a project with for a few years, then, then I would. But I'm not, I'm not certain. There's a funny, a funny, so I got into proof of state. So like I, I work on a lot of things, but like I really focus on proof of state, stake implementations and research and specifications and security and all that kind of stuff. In 2017, right at the beginning, I got rid of all my clients because I had become obsessed with Ethereum and I was going to figure out how to make it work, how to make it my job.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  And

• 40:35Speaker 01

  I for that first probably half year, I was just kind of bumbling around. You know, I was, I lived in New Orleans at the time and I thought to myself, if I'm going to be serious about this, I need to go to the New Orleans Ethereum meetup. And there wasn't one. So I made, I made the New Orleans Ethereum meetup, you know? And then I, I was like, I had never contributed to open source before, which is crazy because I was a believer in open source and I used it a lot in my projects and stuff, but I had not like gone to a project and just contributed back. So I was also like, just start contributing to anything and everything, you know? I contributed to Piper's web three dot py library of Python tooling library for Ethereum. Um, and, and started just contributing to things. And I, I was wrote a few smart contracts, trying to figure out, maybe I'll, maybe there's a business opportunity there.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  And then I, then I was like learning more about this shift, this proof of stake thing coming. And my first thought was that's never going to work. That doesn't make any sense.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  But then two, two days later, two weeks later, two months later, I don't remember. Uh, it, I was like, oh, I get it. You know, both of these are proof of dedication of economic scarce economic resource to the protocol. You know, it's easy to prove that about mining hardware and electricity. And it's also easy to prove about the end protocol asset itself. And so I was like, okay, this is starting to make sense. And so I thought,

• 41:58Speaker 01

  maybe I could make a staking pool. And so I started, I started digging into proof of stake because I thought it was coming in like five months. And I thought I could make a staking pool. And so like that, that opened up my, my contributions like that, that, that is why I got into proof of stake because I was like, there might be a business opportunity here. And uh, it turned out there was a lot of work to still do. So I had to kick the can down the curve on the business opportunity. Um, and I will, I will say wholeheartedly at this point, I have zero intention of making a staking pool. That does not interest me at all at this point. Uh, but that's the, the business opportunity was what actually made me do the dive, the deep dive on proof of stake to begin with.

• 42:42David Hoffman?

  That's, that's pretty funny. Here, I also in 2018, thought about like a model for a staking pool company. And I actually pitched it to this ICO advisory company that I worked for at the time. And Peter Vestness, who was the, the owner of the company, New Alchemy, he said that proof of stake is years away. And I was like, no, it's not, Peter. No, it's like right around the corner. It's like six months away. We gotta start building this thing. And that was again, in 2018.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I helped write EIP 1011 hybrid proof of work, proof of stake. And at the time, I, and I was in 2018, I was like certain, main net by the end of 2018, no problem. Like no problem.

• 43:27David Hoffman?

  It's really funny that like, the 2017 bull market, at least inside of the Ethereum land, everyone was like buying Ether and Ether was running up to $1,400 because people were like speculating that staking is

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Casper's coming.

• 43:40David Hoffman?

  Casper's coming. It's like, it's right around the corner. Right? And in 2020 and 2021, it's the same thing.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  It's really coming. It's coming.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  I went to the, I went to the merge interrupt and, and saw some beautiful things. It is actually coming.

• 43:59David Hoffman?

  How was that, by the way?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I was thinking about it when you said that work doesn't feel like work. Because multiple times during that week, and we were in Greece, I was like walking back to my room and just, and I get overwhelmed just with like a, I'm having a fantastic time. Like, I'm having a great time. And after having been spending eight hours like in a room with 30 other people, like thinking about hard problems and debugging software and all that kind of stuff, which like, I don't know if, I don't know if I'm allowed to consider that having a great time, but I was having a great time. So it was awesome. It was like, exactly

• 44:41Speaker 01

  the right time, exactly the right group of people, and five times more productive than our wildest dreams. So it was, it was very, very excellent.

• 44:53David Hoffman?

  Is the in real life component with the reason why it's so productive, you think?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  I would say yes, except, yes, with an asterisk. The asterisk being that it has to be the right time in a project. It has to be the right group. Like, it made a lot of sense because we're done with London, we're done with Altera, and we have the, we have like the core specs for all the stuff. And there was a little bit of lead time so that people could work on and lay the foundations in their software before that. And so like all of that, doing all of the other stuff before probably would have wasted time if we were together. You know, whereas we got together and we had this like very interesting structure in Interop where a lot of the software work had been done leading up to it. And what you're doing is you're kind of like pairing off with different groups and, and you're like, can our software work together? Oh, let's fix the bugs.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And then, then you switch and you go with other group and you kind of like architect this pyramid of, of increasing complexity throughout the week. And at the same time, having conversations to iron out, okay, now that everyone has implemented the specs, what are the issues? You know, what do we need to refine? You know, so we could have very deep conversations about ironing out the last bits of the specs. And at the same time, also like do this like culmination thing where we, we get to this mega milestone at the end of the week. And, and so, yes, there's magic to being in person, but I, I'm also like a decentralization maximalist for, for a lot of it too, because like the value in what I can do at home and

• 46:26Speaker 01

  writing software and stuff, like it's just a different, it's a different type of exchange. And you don't want one or the other all the time. And, but it was really nice coming together after like two years of being apart.

• 46:36David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. I think a lot of people had very similar feelings in New York recently for, for main net where a lot of people are literally just coming out of their homes for the first time since COVID. And also crypto is very, very different in 2021 than, than pre-COVID times. Like we've actually blossomed into some sort of like society. And just the, the richness of the social interactions.

• 47:03David Hoffman?

  As a result, maybe as a result of that, or just maybe just in general inside of crypto, for some reason, social interactions in crypto seem far more rich than all the other social interactions I've ever had in any other context. And I think maybe it's because everyone has like shared stories, shared values, shared like purpose and is also intellectually intellectually curious. I think everyone in crypto is generally intellectually curious. And then like when you like hide people away for two years and then get them and then pump their price, their asset prices by 10x and then put them in a room together. Turns out they have like a lot of things to share.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, that's all, it's all very true.

• 47:44David Hoffman?

  Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Danny thus far. Stay tuned for the second half of the show where we talk further about the dev interrupt event and also Danny's optimism or pessimism about the future of the world and what he can do about that. I had a fantastic time talking with Danny here, but first, before we get there, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. And now it's live and has over 100 projects deployed. Gas fees on Ethereum L1 suck. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. And that's why teams like Arbitrum have been hard at work developing layer two solutions that makes transactions on Ethereum cheap and instant. Arbitrum increases

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• 50:31Speaker 01

  The thing about the interop and about some other similar events is like how much everyone gives a shit.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Raises the level of engagement, the level of conversation, level of just enthusiasm and fun. Whereas I could imagine being in a more traditional business context and like people are there like do their job, but you know, there's not, there's not that, that giving a shit that that's there. Also, just everyone's so aligned on shipping the merge philosophically. From a perspective of climate change, like all sorts of angles, like everyone there was like, like they're on a mission. Like we are doing this thing. Whereas you could imagine other things, even in Ethereum or in crypto, there's like less of that, like deep, deep, deep mission.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Like state expiry, I mean, state expiry is incredible. Like we, we need, we need a sustainable state solution, period, end of discussion, but doesn't have that as much of this like world changing feeling to it, but I'm also very biased. I love proof of state.

• 51:42David Hoffman?

  Why is proof of stake so grand when it comes to meaning and impact for so many people at the DevOps event and or just the Ethereum devs in general?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  One of the big things was was climate change. A lot of people just like, and I hadn't, I hadn't expected how much most of the people at that event were were feeling impacted by that. Like, I talk about, you know, proof of stake, making things more secure, more sustainable, and more scalable all the time, you know, and I mentioned the the reduction in energy usage by like 99.99%, you know, and and I think it it makes an impact to some, but I was surprised, and I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised throughout the week how often various developers were just like, this is literally the most impactful thing I will ever do with respect to climate change in my life. Like, I will not be able

• 52:36Speaker 01

  to like, outstep this this accomplishment, you know. So there was just this like, feeling of actually being able to make an impact, especially when you look at estimations and Ethereum uses like, as much energy as Poland or something, you know, and climbing.

• 52:53David Hoffman?

  Is it simply just a function of Ethereum using less electricity? Or is there a deeper like, relationship between proof of stake and climate change? Or is it simply as simple as just moving away from proof of work?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's if we have crypto economic consensus mechanisms and which the asset securing it, the quantity and capital securing the protocol scales with the value of the protocol. When that is energy consumption, you quite simply have this like, tough relationship between energy consumption and the and the security and value of the protocol, which like, we all want the security and value of the protocol to increase. And so, there's a bit of a, I guess, a dark side to it. And I look, I, you know, we could, I'm

• 53:44Speaker 01

  I don't buy the Bitcoin or green energy thing or that Bitcoin is going to usher in the new wave of green energy. I don't buy that. I think there is probably some nuance to the argument. I think you could have like an interesting debate as to like, if you have these proof of work mechanisms, what does the future look like in 20 years? You know, does it look like Bitcoin using 50% of all the energy in the world? Probably not. It's like, it's hard to imagine that that becomes the reality. And so maybe there's like more nuance into how this this actually ripples outward. But nonetheless, I would I would make a pretty grand bet that 80% or more of Bitcoin and Ethereum's energy consumption is not clean. And making an impact on that seems meaningful. I think there's

• 54:28Speaker 01

  also, there's other components, not just the, not just CO2 emissions, climate change, that kind of stuff. I mean, there's also the, the access and the potential, like the amount of people that can participate in a proof of stake protocol in a meaningful way is probably much larger than proof of work. It's also more equitable in a sense that I can very purely turn capital into an equitable participation in the security of the protocol, whereas in proof of work, like that scales very poorly for small actors. So like, the more capital that you have, the more entrenched you can get into real world supply chains, the more return you can get on your capital and the economies

• 55:12Speaker 01

  of scale. And so like, you know, fundamentally, even you set the energy stuff aside, that asset being grounded so much in the real world, in not the metaverse, means that you don't get kind of the same equitability in the crypto economic consensus mechanism, which one is maybe not nice from a philosophical standpoint, but it's also not nice from a security, security standpoint.

• 55:40David Hoffman?

  Was there any conversations at this Interab event about Bitcoin and how Bitcoin is like bad or needs to change or should like should be shut down or any sort of like resistance towards Bitcoin as a, as a system?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Um, we don't spend too much time on Bitcoin. It's certainly.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  It's about a joke sometimes. I think people that are working on Ethereum proof of stake find Bitcoin probably pretty uninteresting. It's very interesting because it moved the needle, you know, went from zero to one. But people also, I think, tend to find it very uninteresting. And then there's certainly toxic, there's toxic members of any community. I think if you look at Twitter, there's a lot of loud, toxic Bitcoin members, community members. And so I think that sometimes when conversations come up with that type of group, like we would focus on that, where instead of focusing on maybe some of the good, but I don't think we see a lot of the good because we don't, we're not deeply rooted in the community.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  We just see the loud, toxic people. We, there, in conversations, we were, there was a running joke about writing a proposal, maybe a Bitcoin improvement proposal, to utilize not, not our beacon chain, not Ethereum's beacon chain, but a beacon chain, you know, and instantiate, instantiation of the same technology to do a merge for Bitcoin and to help them get off of proof of work. There are some complexities there in how you actually lock your, lock your stake. You might actually, you might need a new op code, and I know they're pretty resistant to that, but I think it'd be pretty fun even to just take.

• 57:29David Hoffman?

  As a social experiment?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, literally just like, you know, in 2017, there were 100,000 Bitcoin forks, like Bitcoin Diamond and whatever the hell. You could, you could, you could make a, you can make a Bitcoin fork. Once Ethereum has proven that you can safely move and prove for it to prove the stake, you can make a Bitcoin fork and try to, try to rally the world around it using the same technology that we've used in Ethereum to, to secure it.

• 57:55David Hoffman?

  I think, who does that really, really matters, right? Well, why not you?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  That's what I'll do. Once the theory of Massef is I'm gonna, I'm gonna help Bitcoin.

• 58:07David Hoffman?

  Move to proof of sake.

• 58:11David Hoffman?

  What about Rune Christensen's blog post was a recent blog post? I don't know if you read that or not. Was that a topic of conversation at the interrupt event?

• 58:20Speaker 01

  I don't know the blog post. I'm sorry.

• 58:22David Hoffman?

  He was proposing that Maker Dao with its efforts to go into the real world in search for a real world collateral specifically finds climate aligned collateral. Right? So Maker Dao has already financed like a $2.4 million loan, die loan to a solar panel farm in New York. And then he talked about like, you know, more philosophically Maker Dao should find a collateral, like find opportunities to finance and get collateral that is climate aligned and can actually like move the needle with regards to climate change.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  It didn't come of conversation. That's interesting. I mean, there's two different angles there. One is like, ride the hype, like maybe you, you get, you get good press and it helps Maker Dao to just like have this aligned basket. But there's also like, I think it's more interesting if you can make a compelling business case, you know, maybe the, the thesis is that these are actually the, the types of collateral and the types of businesses that are going to be very fruitful over the next 10 to 20 years. And that's why, you know, Maker Dao is being aligned.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  You know, I don't, I don't know. I don't know exactly his angle there.

• 59:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah. My, my angle on it was that like, there's a lot of, uh, very far left social justice warrior cancel culture types that are also very, very anti-capitalism. And what, what happens if you can like create a money that fights climate change where if you use this money, you're by proxy fighting climate change. Like you actually might onboard some of that demographic into the world of money and finance and say like, yeah, we do, we do know that money and finance is corrupt and bad, but not this money and finance, like this money and finance is actually good. It's the inverse of that.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Why don't you learn to use money and finance and new coordination techniques to create the world you want to see?

• 1:00:13David Hoffman?

  Totally. So, one thing about the DevA Interop event and overall, like, I was joking with, I think both Ryan and Anthony Sizano in different contexts about this, like, from, you know what it's like to be there and actually to experience it. A lot of us, the non-tech types, view it from a distance, right? View it from Twitter and we just see the pictures. And so, like, from our perspective, it's like this semi-regular, like, ceremonious time where we see pictures of all these developers looking at this projected screen with a bunch of code on it. And they're all happy. They're all happy and clapping. And so, like, all the devs are, like, looking at the screen and they're all, everyone's smiling. And then, like, everyone

• 1:00:53David Hoffman?

  else is seeing the smiles on the devs' face. And so, for us, it's like, yay, the devs are happy. I don't know what's going on, but like, they're happy. So, that's nice.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  I showed that picture to my sister last night. And I showed her the other picture, from Ben Edgington's tweet, and I showed her the other picture of, of the screen we're all looking at. And she just cracked up. She thought it was hilarious. She's like, of course, of course. For context, I don't know if it was on that picture, but one of the pictures that were shared, the key was there's a tiny little piece of text that said, "Proof of Stake stage entered," or "Entered Proof of Stake stage," you know? And that's what we were all cheering about.

• 1:01:30David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. Okay, so, this is the first mock testnet or actual testnet for the merge? So, you simulated the merge? Was that what happened?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Right. So, we kicked off a Proof of Stake beacon chain that was not merge, you know, like the beacon chain is today in production. And we kicked off a Proof of Work chain that was not merged and was run by Proof of Work. Both of these things hung out in parallel for a while. And then, they, they did the dance to take the valuable things inside of Proof of Work and to instead put them into Proof of Stake and stop listening to Proof of Work and finalize and move on with its business. So, it was, it was the, what we were cheering was kind of the culmination of the week, which was, we had a lot of very short-lived Devnets. So like even just transitory, I have two nodes running on my computer,

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  like running an experiment for 30 minutes. And I'm like, okay, the experiment worked. That's good, you know. And we had, like I said, we had a lot of these different client pairs where like Geth and Taku would like pair up for a bit and like make sure the software worked together. And Nimbus and Nethermind would pair off and like make sure their software worked together. And like, we were building out more and more complex versions of all the interactions throughout the week. And but often, you know, with two or three nodes, like nothing crazy, like very small toy networks. And what we did at the end of the week was Perry, who is a DevOps wizard at the EF, who has been increasingly taking ownership over test nets and automation and all sorts of good stuff. He'd been working all week on on automation of all this stuff.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  And so he took all the configuration and automated a 100 node deploy around the world. So like 100 different cloud instances around the world with different client pairs and builds and like automated the creation of the beacon chain network and the proof of work network and and and kind of kicked it all into motion. And then it was about, I think they ran independently for about an hour. And then we had it on the projector when they when the the trigger event came together and they and they merged. And so it was really that like taking it from a toy on our laptops and, you know, different like

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  reduction in complexity of different configurations. So like bringing it to something that really, you know, felt real. That network, I think, was torn down yesterday. And there's a new one, Pythos, which is the supposed to be a longer standing one. That is was launched literally like an hour. It was launched this morning, but like the configurations became available about an hour ago. And I already started seeing some of the East Staker guys, I think Lamboshi was on it. He was already running nodes. And you know, so now the the community can also interact with it.

• 1:04:23David Hoffman?

  Can you tell us what the sound was like when in the room when that proof of sake mode entered happened like was it was it like oh yay neat or was it like more of an roar of people like what

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  I mean it was it was legitimate like legitimate joy legitimate like clapping not not just like a little golf clap but like clapping cheering I people people literally hugged each other you know it was it was it was an incredible energy and we actually we had this closing dinner at 7:30 that night and the the timestamp that we we did the merge because you proof of works especially when you're CPU mining a proof of work chain it's like hard to fully gauge the timing but it was 7:29 it was T minus one minute till dinner like we were either gonna go to dinner like super fucking excited and floored about what just happened or like kind of with our heads hung like the last chance of running this experiment

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  it failed and it was a success and like we kind of we all just went to dinner after and had a had a great evening celebrating

• 1:05:30David Hoffman?

  that's so yeah a minute before you you have to go to dinner so I'm sure maybe some amount of clapping was like oh thank God we get to go to dinner

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  I don't even I mean I doubt I mean I think we were all a bit late for dinner but it was the the timing couldn't have been couldn't have been better it couldn't have been more suspense inducing

• 1:05:49David Hoffman?

  and dramatic yeah do you get shivers

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  I probably not I got something I got one needed to go

• 1:06:02David Hoffman?

  in a completely different direction is your wife a crypto person

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  yes

• 1:06:09David Hoffman?

  okay does she understand like what you're up to

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  my wife works for the Ethereum Foundation

• 1:06:15David Hoffman?

  oh okay so she oh there's the answer to that question yeah was she there with you

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  she

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  She used to be a pastry chef in a French restaurant in the French border of New Orleans. And I started traveling a bunch for work. And so us being, you know, young and having fun was like, well, definitely quit your job and come travel internationally a bunch. And she got to know some of the people on the grants team and they needed someone to help like, answer emails and stuff. So she started as the person who helped answer emails and stuff. And then like three or four months later was the team lead.

• 1:06:54David Hoffman?

  Nice. Very cool. So like when you, when you were like, I mean, you work at home, but when you quote, come home from work and like vent about stuff like, she's like, oh God, the, the guys from Taku were just so annoying today. Is that some of the conversations that go on?

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  We, some, yes, I certainly, she knows what I'm, when I'm bitching about something, she knows what I'm bitching about. And, and she understands things enough to like, when I describe some issue, I'm banging my head against the wall. She like understands the domain of the issue. But it's also, sometimes we'll be like driving into the mountains for, for a weekend. And we'll just be like talking about Ethereum and be like, we gotta stop. We, like, I could literally talk about Ethereum all day to the people on the internet. And then I can like go have dinner and talk about Ethereum more. And it's, it's very cool.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  But it's also sometimes a little much.

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

  Eric Connor, who is the first ever guest on Layer Zero, we were talking about this dynamic where like you literally can wake up and do Ethereum things until you go to bed. And then repeat that for years. And then you get what we call this thing called Ethereum brain, where like, you know, you just have like toxic levels of Ethereum going around in, in your brain. But you said you have good work, work, life balance. So, so maybe you don't have too much Ethereum brain.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  I.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  I have a good work-life balance. I do, I do get a step away from the computer. I do make sure I have nice little trips and things like that. And I, I do go out to dinner and stuff, but I also am, I'm probably toxically infected.

• 1:08:43David Hoffman?

  When you say you guys go to the mountains, are you hiking or backpacking?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  A bit of both. It just kind of depends. Sometimes we'll go stay at a motel in the mountains and hike around a bit and putt around some towns, or sometimes we'll go backpacking. And my favorite thing is to swim in very cold alpine lakes. So often we'll be hiking up to 13,000 feet to find a nice lake to jump into.

• 1:09:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, which was like recently snow a few weeks ago?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it just, it just depends. I mean, sometimes there's like snow on the, on the outside of it still. It just depends on the time of the year. I, you know, I think we're at minimum, the minimum snow, I take them.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Three weeks ago, and I think it snowed up in the mountains about a week ago. So the cycle has begun.

• 1:09:28David Hoffman?

  If your, if your cat hadn't come on screen, I was gonna ask about it. So.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  That's Tycho.

• 1:09:36David Hoffman?

  Tycho?

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38David Hoffman?

  How old?

• 1:09:40David Hoffman?

  The.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  He's eight.

• 1:09:42David Hoffman?

  Eight? Yeah. The image I have of you, we were on Zoom at some point in time, but there was this time where you had, you had Tycho and Tycho was facing the computer. So he, he. He was facing the computer. So like, kind of like pseudo looking at the camera and you were just like massaging his head. It was like at least 20 minutes long of like you. Yeah, just like massaging your head while Tycho like kind of looked into the camera right in front of you. I thought it was absolutely hilarious.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there he is.

• 1:10:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I tell Tycho sometimes, Tycho, you're my best friend. And I mean it, and not in a sad way. Tycho's my best friend.

• 1:10:23David Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. He, he's, he's spent, spent a lot of time working on proof and stake with me.

• 1:10:29David Hoffman?

  Nice. Yeah. More moral support. Danny, you can do it.

• 1:10:35David Hoffman?

  Danny, so what else do you do for fun other than backpacking and hiking? Are you a gamer at all?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:41David Hoffman?

  Nope.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  I probably left gaming behind when I was about 13.

• 1:10:47David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  I was, I played, I think Diablo 2 and StarCraft were my main games at the time. I played a little bit of Counter-Strike and stuff, but I, um,

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  music and girls became much more interesting way to spend my time, so.

• 1:11:02David Hoffman?

  Playing or listening?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  To girls.

• 1:11:05David Hoffman?

  No, to music.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:11:08David Hoffman?

  Playing, what do you play?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Um, these days I play mainly piano, but I, in high school, I played a lot of piano, but also bass. I played in like jazz bands and metal bands.

• 1:11:20David Hoffman?

  And you still play, play piano to this day?

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  When I was 18, I went to school and I stopped playing music.

• 1:11:27David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  And about four years ago, I got a piano and I've been, I play about every day. So I took a hiatus, but I, I play most days now and I, I very much enjoy it.

• 1:11:38David Hoffman?

  What kind of piano do you play?

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Hmm, I learned some classical pieces and, and play that. I also just kind of mess around and I, I do, actually when we launched the, the Beacon Chain, I bought myself a present. I got this like Moog synth. So I have a piano and I have this synth next to each other and like, you know, I kind of mess around and make weird electronic stuff between the two.

• 1:12:04David Hoffman?

  Have you, have you heard of, um, uh, Ben from Optimism, his Ethereum song?

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 1:12:14David Hoffman?

  Ever thought about, uh, writing something like that?

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm not.

• 1:12:18David Hoffman?

  Or is that, or is that tainting of something that's wholly, that doesn't need to be mixed?

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  It definitely, I think it definitely doesn't need to be mixed. I also, I, I don't think I've ever played the piano and sang at the same time. So it would be a challenge. It'd be a new challenge. Maybe I should try.

• 1:12:33David Hoffman?

  So I think this question's always much more fun when somebody's actually a musician. What kind of music do you listen to?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  So in college, my music taste changed because I started coding.

• 1:12:48David Hoffman?

  No shit.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  So I stopped listening to music with words, like almost entirely, and started listening to a lot more electronic music. And I listened to like ambient electronic music most of the time.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  Very experimental, like very like kind of out there sounds and soundscapes and things like that. And I can definitely attribute that to like being in college, drinking that cup of coffee, putting on my headphones and just like coding. And like getting into coding for the first time and like what, what got me going when I code and like I, that radically has changed my music taste. And over the past couple of years, I've like tried to reintroduce, not what I'm coding, but like if I'm in the car or different things like that, like I'll put on,

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  I don't know, Talking Heads or put on like the Beatles or put on something where somebody's literally saying words. To like pull myself out of the, uh, the ether, but.

• 1:13:48David Hoffman?

  Is it because the words are distracting while you're coding or is there something else there?

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  I think so. I think that's probably it. I mean, it's not just that the words are distracting, it's that these soundscapes are like enhancing.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Like I, oh, here's a good one. When I first, in 2017, when I got rid of my clients and I wanted to figure out how to make Ethereum my work, I would listen to all the, all core dev calls. And the opening is, um, "Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears" by A Winged Victory for a Stolen.

• 1:14:23David Hoffman?

  That's a mouthful.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  So that, that became like my anthem for a while, like that album, like every morning I would just like, I'd drink a cup of coffee, put on the headphones and like figure out how to make Ethereum, you know, where to bring value to Ethereum. And I would just like listen to that album and something about the fact that it's the opener to the all core dev call. And that it also kind of fit my ambient soundscape mode, like it became like my, uh, my power music.

• 1:14:53David Hoffman?

  That's, that's awesome. That's a great story. Andy, Danny, as we come down to the end of the show, I have just a few more questions for you. Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  I I used to be an optimist. So when I was a kid, very extremely optimistic. And I think it served me well. And I've realized, actually, probably over the course of the past ten years, I've become less of one. So I'm very optimistic about

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  my life. So like I, I, you know, I have a good life. I have a great cat, got a cool wife. I have a great job, all that kind of stuff. And so I'm definitely optimistic in social relationships and kind of the the microcosm of my world. But I definitely like the old man like shaking his finger at the rest of the world. In a certain sense, like I don't. I, you know, I'm super pessimistic about politics. I'm super pessimistic about like our, you know, mass surveillance capitalism. I'm super pessimistic about a lot of that kind of stuff. And to to to a way that I I need to make peace with, because I think it like gets me a little bit too much.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  And I also sound like the whack job when I'm talking to regular people. But

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  the but that's also one of the reasons I work on Ethereum. You know, if you asked me in in 2017, why why I wanted to work on Ethereum, one, nerd sniped totally. But two was just like, I don't, I don't like the trajectory of the world. I don't like what's happening with with big technology. I don't like how we're all super manipulated by our phones. And like, we have these little slot machines in our pockets, and they're just like abusing us. And like, I don't think Ethereum solves all of those problems. But I do think that Ethereum and related technology might help change the trajectory. And I think it might help change the trajectory for good. You never know. You never know. I do worry about that sometimes, you know, like the tools that are that are built are often co-opted by the powers that be to kind of

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  continue doing business as usual. I do think that Ethereum and related technologies allow for new ways to interact and maybe kind of help avoid some of those previous issues. But, you know, I'm also naive.

• 1:17:15David Hoffman?

  Well Danny, I think that that is a fantastic place to end this conversation. So thank you for joining me on this Layer Zero.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. Very much enjoyed it.

• 1:17:23David Hoffman?

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• 1:18:08David Hoffman?

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