Pod Insights Bankless StarkWare Sessions #4 | Briq and StarkNet Governance with Sylve Chevet About this episode Sometimes, the frontier is at a crypto conference. We’re returning from our adventures in Tel Aviv with nine exclusive interviews with some of the key players in the StarkNet space.
Wish you could make it to all the crypto conferences, but don't have the time? Don't worry, Bankless brings the frontier to you.
Sylve Chevet is the CEO of Briq, an NFT-building protocol with broad ambitions of becoming with building blocks of the metaverse. Sylve is also a steward of StarkNet governance, helping oversee the decentralization of the protocol, community, and ecosystem.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:50 Briq
8:30 How it Works
11:00 Starknet the Enabler
14:20 Silve’s Story
15:15 Decentralization of Starknet
18:51 On-Chain Governance
20:00 Stark Token
22:25 Devs and Governors
26:00 Vibes
30:00 Get Involved
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Resources:
Sylve Chevet
https://twitter.com/sylvechv
Briq
https://briq.construction/
StarkNet
https://starkware.co/starknet/
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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://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 David Hoffman? Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And sometimes, that frontier is at a conference. Like last weekend, where over 1,000 developers, founders, builders, and investors attended the Starkware Sessions in Tel Aviv in order to participate in growing the Starknet ecosystem. This is Bankless's Starkware Sessions series, which are nine bite-sized episodes interviewing the founders, builders, and ecosystem developers of Starknet. Every once in a while, in the crypto world, a conference happens, but not everyone is available to attend. Don't worry, Bankless has your back, because I go to basically every conference that's out on the frontier, and I bring an entire podcast studio in tow with me, in order to make sure that the Bankless nation stays on the frontier of what's happening in crypto. In this episode,
0:46 David Hoffman? I'm talking with Silva, who is a governance facilitator over at the Starknet Foundation, as well as building on Starknet with his project BRiQ. That's B-R-I-Q. We kick off this conversation talking about BRiQ, and it is composable, one-of-one-by-units of NFTs that he hopes will be adopted by surrounding Starknet applications. But the meat of this conversation is really all about Starknet governance, which we turned to pretty quickly in this interview. Silva is a Starknet governance facilitator, a steward, if you will, of Starknet governance. And this was one of the first experiences I had when I landed in Tel Aviv. I landed in 10:00 AM in the morning, and I immediately walked over to the hacker house to see what the hackers were hacking on. Not too long after I got there, it was announced
1:31 David Hoffman? that a governance workshop would happen in about 30 minutes in the room next door. And so eventually, people started to trickle over, and these two governance facilitators sat down, literally crisscross applesauce-style, and started to talk about what was the plan for Starknet governance and how governance would roll out. And the TLDR of that plan is that the community needs to come together and help them create a plan. And so this is why, in my article, if you read this on Thursday, and other areas of the Starknet Sessions interviews, I talk about Starknet as a governance platform is just learning how to stand up. But these developers are learning that not only can they do really cool things on Starknet, but that doing cool things on Starknet has
2:15 David Hoffman? imbued them, empowered them with ownership over the protocol. So developers are learning what it means to feel ownership over Starknet. And the Starknet Foundation is learning how to give their developers and their protocol devs a voice and control and power over Starknet. So we are in the very beginning days of Starknet community governance and learning how to stand up and walk. And this is where I got a large amount of my impressions and information about overall what the community and ecosystem feels about the protocol that it's building on. I'd sum it up as excited, slightly intimidated, but very optimistic and very early, of course. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Silva from the BRIC team and as well as
2:59 David Hoffman? the Starknet ecosystem governance facilitators. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Kraken has been around for almost as long as crypto itself. As crazy as crypto is, Kraken has remained a rock for its clients, building out a platform designed to stand the test of time. Kraken is all about proof, not promises, which is why they've pioneered a proof of reserves, a system that lets Kraken's customers verify for themselves the solvency and responsibility of the Kraken exchange. And for this reason, and many more, we've chosen Kraken as Bankus's strategic sponsor for 2023. And once you're done using Kraken to get your dirty fiat money into pristine crypto assets, perhaps you should check out Arbitrum, where so much of the frontier of crypto innovation is taking place.
3:40 David Hoffman? Arbitrum just announced their Stylist Initiative, which is their brand new programming environment that lets developers deploy apps using their favorite programming languages like Rust, C, C++, alongside regular old solidity EVM apps. Stubs can use any coding language they like, and it simultaneously drops layer two fees by an order of magnitude. It's a big deal. So many of your favorite DeFi apps have already deployed to Arbitrum, like Uniswap. But did you know that Uniswap isn't just for ERC20 tokens anymore? Uniswap is also an NFT aggregator too, to make sure that you are getting the best price on your NFC purchases. Uniswap gives NFT collectors and traders powerful tools, all from the cozy, comfy Uniswap interface. By the way, it's also got a native fiat on-ramp. It's also deployed on like every layer two, and it's got this nifty, cool thing called a universal router.
4:25 David Hoffman? ensures that you always get the best price on your trades. Crypto protocols like Arbitrum and Uniswap are becoming super powerful. So make sure that you're also using a wallet that's equally as powerful, or else you'll be missing out. If you're looking to upgrade your wallet experience, check out Phantom, the number one wallet of Solana, which has recently come to both Ethereum and Polygon. Phantom has native NFT support, giving you your own NFT gallery from inside the wallet. Phantom is both a browser extension and a mobile wallet, and is also the only wallet to span both the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems. Check it out at phantom.app. And now, let's get into the interview. Back at the station once again at Starkware Sessions in Tel Aviv, Israel. And I am here with Sylve, who's got a couple hats on. And so we're going to talk about both of them today. One of them is BRICK, and the other of them is a governance facilitator
5:09 David Hoffman? over at the Starknet Foundation. Sylve, welcome.
5:13 Speaker 01 Nice to be here.
5:14 David Hoffman? So which one do you want to talk about first? BRICK or your role at the Starknet Foundation?
5:18 Speaker 01 Let's go for BRICK.
5:18 David Hoffman? BRICK, okay.
5:19 Speaker 01 For ethical order.
5:20 David Hoffman? What's BRICK?
5:21 Speaker 01 So BRICK is an NFT building protocol. So think Lego or construction game, but running entirely on the blockchain. So the thing that we wanted to do is twofold. First off, we wanted to solve composability, because you have all these axes and they don't do anything with CryptoPunks. Now, on the other hand, we wanted to give people a way to act upon NFTs. And right now, we can buy them, consume them, but it's pretty difficult to build them. And so the thing we thought is like, okay, NFTs behave a little bit like physical items. What's the equivalent in the real world?
5:47 David Hoffman? Right.
5:47 Speaker 01 And like in the real world, people don't build stuff. They build with Lego, because that's made for this. And they're composable, because they're made for that. So we replicated this exact system, this composability system, but running on chain. So you get 100 bricks, you build a house. It's an NFT. Just assemble them, get 100 bricks, build something new, assemble it with someone else. It's yours.
6:06 David Hoffman? Okay, so what? An NFT is the smallest unit of construction? Is that the idea?
6:11 Speaker 01 Yes, sir.
6:11 David Hoffman? And we're not actually talking about Legos. Is that a metaphor?
6:14 Speaker 01 It's a metaphor. It looks like a voxel. So it's Lego-like, but every single brick is represented as a voxel. So you put four of them, that's a line. And this thing is an NFT.
6:24 David Hoffman? Okay. Wait, but we are literally talking about bricks.
6:28 Speaker 01 We are literally talking about bricks.
6:30 David Hoffman? Okay.
6:30 Speaker 01 Like, they actually look like that.
6:32 David Hoffman? Okay, and so when we're talking about compositability, you're literally talking about Legos stacking upon each other.
6:37 Speaker 01 I was actually talking about Legos and compositability like that.
6:38 David Hoffman? Uh, why? What can you, what, what, take us, where should our imaginations go here?
6:43 Speaker 01 Um, the way you should think about it is, the very reason we built it is because we think the way people have thought about compositability so far has been dead wrong.
6:52 David Hoffman? Okay.
6:53 Speaker 01 The way you should think about compositability is not, if you, if you compare this to like a real world example, it's like, oh, I want my Axi to be with a crypto bank and something happens. It's a bit the same thing as if you took like a Go piece and you put it in chess. It just doesn't work.
7:07 David Hoffman? Right.
7:08 Speaker 01 Uh, so I have a question for you. What's the most composable game asset in the physical world?
7:14 David Hoffman? The most composable gaming asset in the physical world? Um, me?
7:21 Speaker 01 You're gameable.
7:22 David Hoffman? The human person, the human player?
7:24 Speaker 01 Close, it's a, it's a deck of 52 cards.
7:26 David Hoffman? Oh, of course, okay, sure.
7:27 Speaker 01 And the reason it's very composable because of like thousands and thousands of games all across the world that we use that same asset is because it's super dumb.
7:35 David Hoffman? Okay.
7:36 Speaker 01 It's over specified. You get a color, a rank, and a type, and that's it. And that's just something that gets interpreted.
7:43 David Hoffman? Sure.
7:43 Speaker 01 Whereas the way we think about compositability is, oh, let me actually build 70,000 different standards that I attach to my item.
7:50 David Hoffman? Okay.
7:50 Speaker 01 And you don't interpret it. It's all about building something that is underspecified and allowing people to interpret it.
7:56 David Hoffman? Okay, so it's like inverting what compositability means.
8:00 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
8:01 David Hoffman? Okay, uh, what, when, what use cases do you imagine? Or is that kind of antithetical as in like, it's the whole thing?
8:09 Speaker 01 I think it's the whole thing.
8:10 David Hoffman? Okay.
8:10 Speaker 01 Right now, we wanted to help people just build assets without them having to be like a software developer or a graphic designer. It's just you go and build that construction, you start stacking cubes, and you've built something, you've built an NFT. So we have a surprising amount of like people who are like, oh, I have my kids playing brick and like build a house or something. Because that's a way for you to act upon these things. You don't, you just need to know how to stack like cubes, so it's fairly easy.
8:33 David Hoffman? Is, is calling this a Minecraft metaphor?
8:37 Speaker 01 It is.
8:37 David Hoffman? Is that right?
8:38 Speaker 01 It is, yeah.
8:38 David Hoffman? Okay, is it, so how, how should people envision this? Is this supposed to be like a virtual world that I play in?
8:45 Speaker 01 That's a really good question. We're not a game, we're not gonna rebuild Roblox or Minecraft. We're a protocol to help people build assets. So for instance, like for stock recessions, shit, where are they put it? Okay, we have a QR code that we're doing with Cotridge. You just scan it and you get an NFT, like it's a little PoW that is entirely built out of bricks. That's just one thing you can do. Otherwise, you should have had like graphic designer, I just did that on the UI, minted them. And so if you disassemble the, you got your bricks again and you can build like a treehouse or something else.
9:15 David Hoffman? Okay, so there is a physical, a 3D rendering and this is a thing for me to go and play around and build and construct and deconstruct.
9:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:23 David Hoffman? And then the individual units are actual assets on Starknet.
9:27 Speaker 01 And everything is running on chain, like when you're building something, we actually store the shape on chain and we can make like checks and verification. So for instance, if you want like the 2D attributes, we can actually verify it on chain thanks to Starknet's computation power. And the fact that it's extremely cheap, that the construction that you've made is actually very, very, is just flat. So it's the same thing as the deck of 52 cards. It's like you have a very simple structure in the end, it's just like a matrix, X, Y, Z. Is there a brick there? And you build rules on top of that.
9:57 David Hoffman? Okay, so is this composable with broader Starknet or is this more siloed into its own thing?
10:02 Speaker 01 It's completely composable with the rest of Starknet, like we're integrated with all the different wallets. We're working with different NFT projects to work together. So think of Brick as like NFT matter that just helps you build stuff.
10:14 David Hoffman? Okay, so say I've got my NFT avatar. Can my little NFT avatar like walk around the Brick world and go into a Brick house? You're like, what's going on here?
10:24 Speaker 01 So for now, it's just an object. It's like completely static. So we're not rebuilding a metaverse or anything else. Like, we're all working with metaverses so that you can bring any construction that you have inside a metaverse. But think of them as just like items that get reinterpreted.
10:39 David Hoffman? Okay, what are you hoping people do with Brick?
10:41 Speaker 01 Honestly, I want them to surprise me. To give you an idea, like we have one extremely talented person who's building an entire PFP collection with bricks. It's like one little duck a day. They've been doing this for like a year now. That's the kind of stuff like, oh yeah, but like I don't know how blockchain works, I don't know how NFTs work. So I just started using the cube, then it just clicked and it worked. So that's the kind of thing I really wanna, I wanna see people do.
11:07 David Hoffman? Okay, these possibilities are so endless that I actually don't know how to proceed in this interview. Like, what other parts of this universe are, I haven't illuminated yet that we should talk about?
11:17 Speaker 01 Uh, that's about that. It's both extremely like simple and weirdly complex. It's like you're just putting like matter on the blockchain. So it doesn't go much farther than this. It's more like a tool for imagination that you can reuse, recompose, rebuild.
11:32 Speaker 01 It's just there for the taking.
11:33 David Hoffman? But of course, Starknet uniquely enables this, right?
11:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we, we're one of the very early projects to launch on Starknet. We launched in like October 21. We more or less crushed Darknet mainnet when we launched on December 21, so that was a whole, that was a whole thing. And initially, we wanted to go on Stark, on Starknet because I knew the Stockway team. Uh, I worked at the job before, I knew the team. Um, and we decided that we wanted this not running on a sidechain because of bridging issues. Uh, and we very much believe in validity rollups, known as ZK rollups back in the day. And the only functioning testnet was Starknet. So we just deployed, it worked. Uh, it was so early that not even like Argent, Bravo, so the other worlds were not even there. It just worked, like the community just grew around us. There are a lot of very cool, uh, on-chain gaming projects like Artridge, uh, Realms, for instance.
12:20 Speaker 01 So it's uniquely interesting for us because the more on-chain things you have, the more it makes sense to use BRICKS for this.
12:28 David Hoffman? Why, why does it make sense? Can you, can you, for, can you just unpack that a little bit more? Why does it make sense to use?
12:34 Speaker 01 So for instance, let's say you build a little house with BRICK and you build a whole verification system to verify that it's like, a game could say, "I would only accept assets that follow certain standards." Like they have to be brown, they have to be in 2D, they don't have to have that, this or that color. Because we're putting all of that on-chain, and these games have the power to actually use this logic on-chain. It just makes it like uniquely positioned as, uh, an asset building.
12:59 David Hoffman? Okay, so I can build a particular shape of a BRICK thing? And other parts of the Starknet ecosystem can accept my, my shape if it works inside of their ecosystem?
13:09 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah.
13:10 David Hoffman? Okay, and so you're literally trying to go for the most, smallest unit of composability? And hoping that the rest of the ecosystem starts building stuff?
13:18 Speaker 01 Exactly.
13:19 David Hoffman? Okay.
13:19 Speaker 01 So composability just starts from like the lowest unit rather than building something that is overly complicated and try to build standards.
13:26 David Hoffman? Okay, how do I get my hands on BRICKS?
13:28 Speaker 01 You go and build that construction and we're gonna drop another collection soon. And we're working towards like fully decentralizing their protocol. So if you build something that looks like nouns DAO, so you can build bricks, anyone is able to build a collection on top of a brick that you have Lego Star Wars. I want to have brick nouns, uh, brick board eight, absolutely anything. So you'll be able to build bricks, you'll be able to, uh, fund the DAO, choose what gets prioritized in terms of developments, the whole shebang.
13:53 David Hoffman? Are all the bricks the same size?
13:55 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah.
13:56 David Hoffman? Okay, what, how do you, how do you measure size?
14:00 Speaker 01 Um, think of it as like it's a resolution problem. Like if you can build the same thing with like 3,000 brick or just three bricks. It's just a matter of how you, how you size it.
14:09 David Hoffman? Is one, is one brick a one by one unit?
14:11 Speaker 01 Yes, sir.
14:12 David Hoffman? Okay.
14:12 Speaker 01 It's like a voxel thing. It's like Minecraft.
14:14 David Hoffman? Cool. Okay. Okay. So one brick is one, one unit, no units.
14:19 Speaker 01 It is, yeah.
14:20 David Hoffman? Okay, cool. Okay, Sylvie, you're, you're also part of the Governance Facilitators for Starknet Foundation. How did you come to find yourself there and what does that even mean?
14:29 Speaker 01 If I have to be completely honest, I think it was my shitposting abilities on Starknet that got me this job. So, uh, thanks, mom. It actually worked.
14:39 Speaker 01 But I've been in the ecosystem for a bit of time now, um, know a lot of the other builders. And so the Starknet Foundation reached out to me and said, we're setting up, uh, to be like fully centralized. We want to have like a gradual, open way of doing this. So we want people from the community involved in the Starknet Foundation to shake things up towards a full-on decentralization. So my capacity is that I help along with two other people, Devin and Manor,
15:08 Speaker 01 to help prepare the first votes on Starknet and prepare what Starknet Governance is about to be, uh, is about to be like.
15:15 David Hoffman? Okay, that, the decentralization of Starknet is a huge topic. Uh, how does this conversation even begin? How do you even do your job?
15:23 Speaker 01 The first thing you have to keep in mind when we talk about decentralization is that you have two main components. The first one is protocol decentralization, and it's the ability for anyone to run a node, participate in consensus. So that's the technical meaty part. That's one part of the equation. The other part is, how do you choose what gets implemented in that decentralized protocol in a decentralized fashion? What do we prioritize in the roadmap? What kind of updates get upgraded to production? How do we agree on like standardizations, what we call SNPs? It's like EIPs on Starknet. It used to be called SIMPs, but we obviously changed that name.
16:03 David Hoffman? SNPs is a great, great way.
16:04 Speaker 01 SNPs is a great name. I just used the emoji. I'm really happy about it.
16:07 David Hoffman? BIPs is pretty good. EIPs, not so great. SNPs, I think, takes the cake. It's the best. It's the best one I've heard.
16:13 Speaker 01 I'm really happy about that one. I'm happy we chose it. To give you an idea, like, there is an ongoing snip about, should we write Starknet with a lowercase "n"?
16:21 David Hoffman? Right.
16:22 Speaker 01 It sounds dumb, but it's something that we have to decide upon. So the way we're approaching it is, the first phase of governance are going to be about, we're going to allow token holders, delegates, and everyone who's like involved in governance to choose what goes into production. So for instance, the first vote on Starknet will be about Starknet version 0.11, and the question is, does it go into production or not?
16:47 David Hoffman? Right. Okay, so the current round of token governance with the Starknet token is really just giving the community a voice to veto protocol upgrades, which are coming from the more centralized part of the Starknet ecosystem.
17:01 Speaker 01 Absolutely. It's as if we're introducing like a democratic friction in the process. In the end, it's still business as usual, as it stands today. Software creates the upgrades, but we're introducing this so that we actually get a warm-up. People get used to it. People can build a track record. We understand what works and what doesn't. So that we can, like, let's say, move up the release stack, and we can actually at some point decide what gets prioritized, get feedback very early on. And in the end, the way I think, I started to better understand how governance worked when I pictured the foundation as like a government. Like you're, but you're not managing like a country. You're managing a public good, and that public good is Starknet. And so you start to realize why it's pretty difficult because it's fairly rare that governance are created. And how do you acquire, I do
17:45 Speaker 01 think, for instance, for a company, the most important thing is efficiency, but for a government, it's legitimacy. You can be slow, you can take your time, but the moment you lose legitimacy, you're just done. So that's why the Stockton Foundation has decided to be like very gradual, open and responsible in the way it's approaching governance, just to make sure that we're keeping that nugget of legitimacy.
18:08 David Hoffman? And it's probably good that we're starting with things like, should we have a capital N or not a capital N? Because we're at the very beginning, right? We need the community to learn that they have a voice and be able to learn how to express that voice.
18:20 Speaker 01 Absolutely, absolutely. Just start small and then we'll just continuously increase the scope of what we want to govern about. So it's funny because the current discussions are also about meta-governance. What do you govern about? What is, what can you legitrate about? So it's funny because like, well, basically we're inventing the real. Do we need a bicameral system? Do we need a Supreme Court? How do we vote? Even the delegate system is exactly like the parliamentary system. So there's a whole range of inspirations we can, we can, we can take from.
18:52 David Hoffman? Something that's unique about StarkWare is it's a token vote. It's on-chain governance. So the token is the governance asset. How is the token distributed? Like where is the token?
19:02 Speaker 01 Yes, so at the moment, it's 50.1% is at the foundation. The rest is distributed between Stockton Investors, StarkWare and partners and core contributors. During that first phase of governance, in order to make sure that a broader set of people are represented in the vote, the voting powers are going to look like a third for token holders, a third for core contributors excluding StarkWare, and a third for the foundation. The third of the foundation is 20%, 23% for the Builder Council, which is like a voter block of 17 builders that have been on the ecosystem for a long time, and 10% for delegators that the foundation is choosing.
19:43 Speaker 01 What we hope to achieve this way is to attract people who want to be involved in governance and get them like training. Voice their opinion, agree, disagree, how should we change things on a very limited scope at the time, but that will be gradually expanded.
20:00 David Hoffman? And so there's always this question of, people love tokens, people also love airdrops. It doesn't sound like there will be an airdrop. It will sound like if there is an airdrop, it will be because the foundation decided to do that with their own allocation, which will be something that governance determines. And so whether or not there is a Starknet airdrop is probably going to be determined out in the public.
20:24 Speaker 01 It's probably going to be determined in a more decentralized fashion that what we're gonna do right now. It's not gonna be Starkware that randomly decides, oh, by the way, Ron gets a token and you get a token and so on and so forth. It's going to be decided in a much more open fashion and both for like community retributions, for partnership programs, for grants, for events, the whole thing.
20:49 David Hoffman? And Starknet actually has the privilege of having a very vibrant and alive development community, which actually probably makes it easier to decentralize the whole system because there's actually a community of people to decentralize it too. And so there's actually like people there to catch it on the other side. And so really, who shows up in these governance decisions? Who shows up as a builder? It's probably easier for that token distribution to start centralized and diffuse into these builders because you know who they are. They're the people here who have shown up at Starkware sessions or the people who have shown up on-chain on their development activity. What kind of philosophy has arisen, I know it's in the very early days,
21:30 David Hoffman? what kind of philosophy has arisen as to like how this token becomes distributed? Is there anything there to talk about?
21:38 Speaker 01 At the moment, it's actually not something I am currently working on, so it's not something I'm gonna be very useful on. But the one thing I actually, I really wanna drill down about what you said is it's a very dev-centric ecosystem at the moment, but a government is made up of a whole range of diverse opinions, so we, if you haven't written Cairo, it doesn't mean that you cannot become a delegate. Anyone can be involved in governance. Governance, anyone can voice their opinion, anyone can say, for instance, right now, there's like a group of people who want to be like, oh, I want to be able to be like an ambassador for Starknet. I want to represent, I want to talk about this with all the companies. And this is not necessarily very, it's not techie, it's not about, oh, I want to build like a Ross program or something, but it's just as important. And these are people that have to be incorporated inside the governance process of the Starknet Foundation.
22:23 David Hoffman? So the, the two camps of archetypes that I've seen in the Starknet ecosystem.
22:29 Speaker 01 Oh, I'm curious to know.
22:30 David Hoffman? Yeah, it's like you, you have the protocol devs who really care about the actual Starknet protocol, how it's designed, sequencing, you know, stuff like this. The technical details, the base chain details, you would call these protocol devs, core devs on the Ethereum layer one. And then there's also, so that's the first camp. Second archetype I found are the Cairo devs, application builders.
22:49 Speaker 01 Yep.
22:49 David Hoffman? And these compose most of Starkware, but I think what you alluded to is this third camp that's starting to arise. It's people who care about governance for governance's sake, as in like, I'm, maybe they're not even technical, but they are governors.
23:03 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
23:03 David Hoffman? And they can actually, and that is the new surface area that's been created in the Starknet ecosystem for people to arise to, is that right?
23:09 Speaker 01 Absolutely. If, if you take people like such as Polinia on Twitter, who keeps on repeating that he's not a technical person, but he, he's a very technical person.
23:18 David Hoffman? They, by the way, we don't, we don't know actually if it's a he or she. Yeah, they're completely unknown.
23:25 Speaker 01 This is the kind of profile that we would want to have. It's, even if you're not technical, your area of expertise can lie somewhere else. And it is a valid opinion that has to be voiced and it can just benefit the overall community. And to your point about the app builders, this is why the Builder Council is mainly constituted of app builders. Because we felt that the protocol devs were already well represented in the roadmap. They, they obviously they talk with the rest of the community and the app builders, but we wanted to have the app builders as more like the, where the buck stops. It's like, this is where governance is going to be, and this is more or less who you will answer to for the technical choice that have been made upfront.
24:07 David Hoffman? So this is probably a call to action for the governance-minded out there, that there is a lot of need for governors of Starknet. And so for those people that that sentence just piques a curiosity, how can they become self-actualized? How can they find an agency in Starknet?
24:23 Speaker 01 Absolutely. The way to do it is to go on starknet.io. All the blog posts about governance are over there. This is like the plan. And the next step is you go on the governance forums. The link is on the website. And you will be able to see all the discussions that happen, from the capital N to lowercase n, to the, oh, should we use standard mental something else for the concession protocol? And if you want to apply as delegate, anyone can apply to be a delegate. There's a delegate thread post over there. You just post your profile and get started.
24:53 David Hoffman? So you've committed a certain amount of your personal energies into Starknet. You're building BRIC, you're also a governance facilitator. Why have you decided to give up some of your human energy to Starknet? What about Starknet called to you?
25:08 Speaker 01 Oh, that's a good one. One thing I'm really proud I've done in the ecosystem is that I gave a talk in Lisbon, and I came up with the sentence, "Keep talking, it's strange." And I think that's something that really resonated with me. And it's, you have a weird amalgamation of builders that just want to try new things. And it's extremely endearing. It's a very, I mean, there's no meme about, oh, everyone's a giga brain, etc., etc. But I think it's mostly about having, I think it's strange people. They try to do things differently. There's a vibrant gaming, on-chain gaming community. People are trying to do something different because they were like, even the thought of, oh, I'm actually going to learn Cairo, which is completely different from the, any other ecosystem, then try something.
25:51 Speaker 01 I think it's really what appealed to me, doing something differently. Doesn't mean that it's like completely superior or anything else. It just, I was very interested in doing something relevant and different.
26:04 David Hoffman? One thing I've noticed and one of the first experiences I had coming to Tel Aviv was going to the Hacker House and watching you lead a governance workshop. And I thought it was pretty cool when you and Devin, your co-facilitator, the first thing, I don't know if you intentionally did this, but the first thing you guys did was sit down and cross your legs on the ground. And I thought it was very, very appropriate for a governance workshop. It's like, alright, everyone, kumbaya, we're gonna talk about governance.
26:31 Speaker 01 We've been shitposting about this for a few weeks, like, oh man, we need some lore about the governance, it needs to be fun to have governance. And so I look at Devin, I'm like, I'm actually gonna do it. So next time, we're gonna have a speech baton that everyone has to have.
26:44 David Hoffman? The talking cube?
26:45 Speaker 01 Exactly. I'm sorry, you don't have the cube, you cannot talk right now. We want to have something that is quirk in, that we want people to be involved in. It doesn't have to be clinical, it doesn't have to be boring. I mean, if you're like even in the history of governments or parliaments, like, it's all full of injustices. This is the kind of thing that we really want to replicate and have, like, something that has a soul.
27:08 David Hoffman? Yeah, and really, it was striking to me just seeing what, I keep on using Balaji's words, network state, in ways that I'm not sure he would have used them, but I'm using them this way. And that seems to be what we're seeing here in Tel Aviv at the Starkware Sessions. It is a cultural meeting place of the network state of Starknet. And so this thing is, in its infancy, it's learning how to govern itself, it's learning how to think about itself, but that's kind of what I see today. Is that what you see and where do you see this going?
27:37 Speaker 01 I completely agree. And like, one advice I'd give to builders or anyone who wants to be involved in blockchain at large is, if not on Starknet, go on any leg or two. I mean, that's what Vitalik said at ECC last year, it was, L1 is going to become simpler, more ossified, but that means that the innovation is gonna get driven to the edges of the network. So that's why on Starknet, for instance, we have like native kind of abstraction, and that just allows a whole bunch of things. We have a, there's a very, very young team called the Starknet ID, who have found a way to like implement SBTs with a kind of abstraction. And so they're finding all kinds of new tricks and new ways of doing it. So it's like a way for you to make a name for yourself. There's always like, oh, you have to be early and so on.
28:22 Speaker 01 It's more than that, it's... You get to build something and be there and make yourself heard from a... Like, there's just so much cool stuff to build. That's what's really cool.
28:36 David Hoffman? So what are you looking forward to over the next few years over in Starknet?
28:41 Speaker 01 The one thing I'm really looking forward to is seeing governance shape up, seeing more people stepping in, seeing how we're gonna decentralize the whole thing. The thing I said is, I came on Starknet for the tech, but I stayed for the vibes. So I'm looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to all the... Like, these weird new synchronicities that the community is gonna come up with. There's this meme about everyone being French, which is honestly half true. It's only 70% of the ecosystem at this point.
29:10 David Hoffman? Yeah, between Israeli and French, that's most of what we got here.
29:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, we have like three official languages, like Cairo, French, and Hebrew.
29:19 Speaker 01 English is only tolerated at this stage. I mean, it's color-coded already.
29:25 Speaker 01 So that's what I'm looking... And like, all the cool technical stuff. And the one thing that I'm really thinking about these days is, when you get into like L3, L4 territory, it's more, okay, now that we have verifiability, what can we do that is different from a blockchain? Do you need blocks anymore? Can you just do like checkpoints that you send every hour? That's definitely something that we're looking for on the gaming side, like do what I call like game channels. We could play a game, a provable game, just the two of us sending each other Cairo programs, an approver in our browser, and just at the end of the game, we just send something to the chain. And that's super cool. That's just like, all this area of experimentation is what really drives me nuts.
30:06 David Hoffman? So if we've piqued the interest of any listener so far in this conversation, where should they go? How do they get started getting sorted into the Starknet world?
30:14 Speaker 01 So I think the best way for them to start is, obviously, the doc, "Hello Cairo", really well-written. The hits don't actually matter if you're reading the doc. Then the next step should be Starklens, which is like a great tutorial that was built by the Only Dust team, which brings me to the third step, which is start contributing to open source projects on Only Dust. So these people, they're organizing all the open source contributions on Starknet. And it's actually great, to give you an idea. You have people who are like, "Oh yeah, I would like to drop my web 2 job to like work in web 3." And these people find like paid contributions, open source contributions for you to like ramp up on all these things, find a job. I mean, even my brother-in-law is now working on Starknet, so that's how built I am.
30:59 Speaker 01 So I think I would say like, "Hello, Cairo, Starklens and then start contributing."
31:04 David Hoffman? Or maybe they got peaked by Brick, or maybe they just want to follow you on Twitter. Where should I go for that?
31:09 Speaker 01 I'm Silve, S-Y-L-V-E-C-H-V, and it's BrickNFT with a Q.
31:15 David Hoffman? Silve, thank you so much.
31:16 Speaker 01 Thank you much.
31:17 David Hoffman? Cheers.
Previous What's going on with Canto? Next StarkWare Sessions #3 | Account Abstraction & EIP 4337 with Yoav Weiss Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
