A New Chapter for Ethereum | EFs Co-EDs Tomasz & Hsiao-Wei

Ethereum Foundation's new Co-Executive Directors, Tomasz Stanczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang, join Bankless to outline their vision for the future of Ethereum. We explore their backgrounds, the changing leadership at EF, and the roadmap ahead—from accelerating L1 scaling and improving UX to making Ethereum more dynamic and product-focused. This episode offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Ethereum plans to stay resilient, decentralized, and mission-aligned in a fast-changing world. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 8:19 Career Journey 16:22 What Value Are They Providing 23:39 Continuing the Ethereum Legacy 31:11 Ethereum Foundation: Strengths, Gaps & Calls for Leadership 43:41 The Pectra Disaster 1:00:51 Scaling and Improving the Layer 2 1:06:55 The Concept of "Product Centric Ethereum" 1:11:49 Metrics, Accountability & Operational Leadership at Ethereum 1:14:41 What the Ethereum Foundation Isn't Responsible For 1:18:35 Clearing Up EF Misconceptions 1:26:25 Inside Ethereum’s Upgrade Cycle 1:31:17 Closing and Disclosure ------ RESOURCES Hsiao-Wei Wang https://x.com/hwwonx Tomasz K. Stańczak https://x.com/tkstanczak Ethereum Foundation https://ethereum.foundation/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

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

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Ethereum researchers and developers have been debating for years now. It was going to get shipped in Pectra. In the last minute, it got removed just because people didn't think it was ready. And now there's frustration because some people have spent 10, hundreds, thousands of hours poured into this thing. And now the community changed its mind and now it's not going in.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Particularly the Pectra comment. Many people actually got confused and believed that this discussion about the Pectra release that is coming the 7th of May. But it's actually Fuzaka. We're talking about a thing six months from now. So it's not really a last moment removal. It's a removal of the feature that is designed to go in a fork that is not even fully scheduled. However, we want to accelerate it and say that clearly we'll deliver it for September and October. So the process is still very much about.

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. Today on the podcast, we're exploring the frontier of Ethereum's leadership. Today on the episode, we have the two new co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation, Tomasz and Xiawei. These two new co-EFEDs represents a new chapter for Ethereum, for the Ethereum Foundation, and also for the Ethereum ecosystem too, I would say. This transition at the EF to new leadership has represented one shift of many that are needed for the direction of Ethereum that have left many hopeful about the future of Ethereum's progress. A future in which Ethereum has more operational leadership than it's had in the past, a future where upgrade cadences are accelerated and one where product mindfulness is prioritized.

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  In addition to the two new EFEDs, we, Bankless Station, also get to welcome Ryan back to his first interview podcast since his three months on sabbatical, and it's a good one to return to. Welcome back, Ryan.

• 1:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, thanks for scheduling this at, you know, like 12:00 in the morning.

• 1:48David Hoffman?

  It is currently 12:40 a.m. Our time, welcome back.

• 1:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  David and I are barely getting through this intro because we're exhausted. I think we're gonna have to save the debrief for tomorrow, but I do want to talk to you about this episode because there's a lot in here. I would just say, we got dates, we got timelines, we got, it seems like some operational capacity to deliver.

• 2:09David Hoffman?

  CEO energy.

• 2:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of like, I know not a founder, but like some founder energy here, okay? It's like some operational efficiencies, just, well, actually, Tomasz is a founder.

• 2:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Tomasz is a founder.

• 2:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Tomasz is a founder. He's not the founder of Ethereum, but he's a founder of like Nethermind and a fantastic ETH client. And I think what listeners will come away with is. Kind of what they hope to hear.

• 2:30David Hoffman?

  I think so, yeah.

• 2:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is, there is a direction that Ethereum is going in. And it's three phrases. It's scaling the Ethereum layer one. It's scaling blobs for layer twos and it's improving user experience. It's that simple. All we had to do is that, David. And then, you know, we could celebrate, you know, six-digit ETH, you know, and higher. Yeah, so of course, like, the Ethereum Foundation isn't the entirety of the community, but it is a central point. It is almost like a kind of a compass. It is a essential coordinator of this whole operation. So it's pretty important to hear what they're doing.

• 3:05David Hoffman?

  It's funny that you latched on to scaling the L1, scaling blobs and improving UX, because right before we started this episode, I saw Haseeb tweeted out the idea that the Ethereum pivot now has a motto. Scale the layer one, scale blobs, improve UX. So you are not the only one, like, latching on to these three focus points.

• 3:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you know what this does to me? I think, I guess we're getting into debrief territory, but this is like the delivery of the united chains of Ethereum, right? If you can make the Ethereum federal government, the layer one, a bit stronger. And if you scale out blob space and if you can coordinate it all, build your interstate highways and such, then you basically create what has been the promise of Ethereum, which is these united chains.

• 3:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, to translate Ethereum speak, improving UX is both for layer one users, but also UX for layer twos. And that comes with interrupt standards. And so that's all packaged in UX. And Tomasz, again, more debriefy type stuff. Tomasz, when I asked him about Ethereum's shift towards being a product-centric ecosystem, that's how he synthesizes these three things into one. You know, scaling the layer one, scaling blobs, scaling UX. This is Ethereum turning itself into a product that it wants to sell to the world. And in the moment of time when the world is looking at crypto and institutions are looking at crypto and they are looking to deploy. They are buying block space. They are buying blockchains as a way to like, you know, establish a settlement. Banks are establishing settlements on chains.

• 4:30David Hoffman?

  Institutions are establishing settlements on chains. And Tomasz is, I think, like, viewing Ethereum as a product to bring to the world. And I think that is perhaps what the next phase of Ethereum is. Under the management, under the new leadership of these two new co-EDs. So let's go, let's end our rambling, our 12:40 AM rambling and get right into the podcast. It'll be a little bit better, I promise you, Bank Listers. Let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Tomasz and Xiaowei. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Have you ever imagined Bitcoin and Ethereum truly working as one? Unlocking the full potential of Bitcoin, DeFi and more? Meet Hemi, a groundbreaking modular network designed precisely for that vision. Co-founded by early Bitcoin core dev Jeff Garzik.

• 5:14David Hoffman?

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• 6:42David Hoffman?

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• 7:26David Hoffman?

  bridging crypto into your daily life. Finally, Mantle X blends AI with DeFi to deliver an intelligent, user-friendly experience for everyone. And the best part is that this is all in addition to their already-launched products like Mantle Network, ME, and FBTC. Ready to step into the future of finance? Follow Mantle on X at @mantleofficial and join the on-chain revolution today. Bankless Nation, I'm here with Xiawei Wong and Tomasz Stojak. Welcome to Bankless.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Great, good to see you. What's coming around?

• 7:53David Hoffman?

  So I would like to get to know each of you a little bit better. Maybe we could take some time just to get to know you and then also introduce yourselves to the broad crypto and Ethereum community. What is your history with Ethereum? And how did you come to be in the Executive Director position at the ETH, the co-ED position at the Ethereum Foundation? Xiawei, I'll start with you and then Tomasz will go to you afterwards.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Oh, hi. Thank you for having me, David and Riot. So this is my first Bankless podcast and excited for it. So my background is computer science. I joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2017. At the time that I was the co-protocol researcher and working on the, maybe the first version of the Sharding PoC, the proof of concept. And so I, since that, I worked closely on the Ethereum protocols. When, at another time, it's called just consensus protocol. It was a consensus layer and execution layers. But by the time we have the Bitcoin chain, and since that, I worked more closely with the consensus layer in Ethereum protocol.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  And I contributed to the transition to proof-of-stake, aka the merge, the transition. Um. My role can like the co-lead of Easter Foundation Consensus R and D team. And those mainly focus on the C L, the consensus layer specification. And also like the coordinator between the research side and the C L side case. Yeah, so that's my first six years or seven years. And since last year in December, I joined Easter Foundation Leadership Team. So Leadership Team was the core team to support the Executive Director, Aya.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  So before I joined Leadership, I think the Easter Foundation researcher has a very special role. Rather than just working on the features, working on research. We also do care about how this feature will impact the users. And what this feature can bring the values to Easter. So but ever since joining the Leadership Team, I started to think more and more about. Yeah, to drop my researcher hat and then think about the whole ecosystem. So I appreciate the experience at Research Team. And that helped me to um being the Executive Director with Tomasz. Beautiful, beautiful. Thanks for that. Thank you.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Tomasz, over to you.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, hi, hi, everyone. Once again, thank you for inviting me to your backlist. So my story with Ethereum starts maybe like even before joining with Nethermind, starting a company. I think in like late two thousand fifteen or beginning of two thousand sixteen, I went to a small meetup in London. And there were people launching and installing like some early versions of Ethereum for testing. And I wondered to learn generally about about crypto, about blockchain space. At that time, I was working in traditional finance industry in FX Department of Citi. And I remember I came back, I started reading more and more about Ethereum. And that's probably the next year of my life was coming back home and reading a lot of articles at that time from. I think it was CoinDesk mostly.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  2017, j'ai décidé que c'était le moment de commencer à construire quelque chose dans ma vie en général, de commencer une entreprise. Et en août 2017, j'ai commencé Nenamind. Nenamind est aujourd'hui probablement connu par beaucoup de gens comme une entreprise de développement et infrastructure pour Ethereum. Et c'était mes sept, presque huit ans, construisant depuis 2017 jusqu'à maintenant. Donc, en commençant en 2017, j'avais une idée au début de construire des solutions de recherche. Donc, ce n'était pas appelé recherche, mais trading sur Ethereum. J'aimais trader sur Ether Delta et je pensais que je devrais apprendre comment Ethereum fonctionne sous la couverture. Donc, j'ai commencé à lire un papier jaune.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Et quand j'ai commencé à lire le papier jaune, j'ai pensé que la meilleure façon d'apprendre serait d'implémenter certains détails du papier jaune. J'ai commencé à coder ça en C#. C'était le langage à l'époque que j'utilisais toute ma vie. Et c'était fun, comme je ne pouvais pas arrêter. J'ai pensé que je devrais imposer un peu plus, un peu plus. Donc, j'ai commencé avec UVM. Puis, j'ai commencé à penser à comment tout le travail de la technologie fonctionne derrière les coulisses et j'ai réalisé que j'étais plus à l'infrastructure que juste à écrire l'application. J'ai fait des trades. J'ai commencé à construire des applications, des applications sur les exchanges centrés. Et puis j'ai réalisé que en fait, il n'y avait pas de client en langage. J'ai continué pendant deux, trois ans, très étroitement codant et lentement construisant le groupe qui me aiderait. Aussi, construisant quelque chose à l'époque qui s'appelait Bitamarketplace.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Majeurement imaginant que plus tôt ou plus tard, Ethereum passerait à ce domaine où les finances traditionnelles et généralement toutes les institutions larges demanderaient des outils pour accéder à Ethereum. Donc, accéder à tout de manière professionnelle. J'avais l'impression d'un livre à l'époque, Hedge Fund Wizards, qui racontait les histoires de comment dans les années 70 ou 60, quand les gens travaillaient, il n'y avait pas d'outil. Et vous vous transmettez vraiment de trader sur les nouvelles TV à trading qui est tout à l'heure et basé sur les données de marché. Donc, j'ai pensé que les mêmes règles seraient pour Ethereum, mais très accélérées. Et construire ça, c'est tout pour construire une entreprise. Ok, c'est une longue histoire. Au fil du temps, j'ai commencé à

• 13:18Speaker 01

  During Flashbox in 2020 and that accelerated my journey a lot. I was also building at that time, the project called Euler, which is still like the attempt to build the block space, like gas trading solutions. And around 2020, I think it's all the acceleration of DeFi space and the space for building helped a lot with Nethermind. Nethermind grew to a company of like around 300 people with a huge internship program that brought like 600 people into Ethereum ecosystem. And all that experience building with Flashbox for the last few years, MEV solutions, researching and product managing there, building the company, Nethermind that does security audits, that does infrastructure, that does core development, led to a position where I've been on the core development calls for many years.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  I think I felt like a candidate with a lot of experience across all the parts, right? Like the building applications, building infrastructure, thinking of security of Ethereum, building of the business. And like a few months ago, I had first conversations with Ia, but not about the topic of joining the C O D, but more about advising on the leadership direction. And just this year in February, I reached out and said, that's talk again. And it was a bit of a story, but not sure how much details you would like to know about it. But in the end, I decided, okay, let's do it. I joined, I think Ethereum is asking for a bit of help and leaders to join, so I'll do that.

• 14:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. Welcome, guys. I would say the Ethereum community is really excited to have you in this role. This is the co-executive director position at the E F, a very important role in kind of coordinating everything that goes on with this world computer that we call Ethereum. Maybe we could just give some context to how we got here. So what were you brought in to do, would you say? And as you're arriving in the role, it sounds like Xiaowei, you're kind of internal to the Ethereum Foundation. So you understand kind of the org structure, you've been there for a while. Tomasz, you're kind of coming in outside of the Ethereum Foundation, which makes a nice compliment to fully understand things and get off the ground running. But like some context, why were you brought in?

• 15:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, what are you here to do? What's the role actually entail?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  So I think the role of Ethereum Foundation executive director is a job to think more than

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Just like a company CEO, because this is a nonprofit organization. So in many terms, we have to think longer and the EF itself, what its mission is. So we recently announced several blog posts about Eastern Foundation's visions, about Eastern Foundation's management structure and about what we wanted to do. So for the vision document, I think we highlighted what Eastern Foundation's role would be. It would be like being the steward of the ecosystem. It would be like stand up when the ecosystem needs us the most at some focused area.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  And then also, we wanted to empower the ecosystem, other players to join us. So personally, I believe that, you know, for the EF itself, we need to build the principles to ourselves. And then the principle should not be shake frequently. And then also enhance the resilient charge to be able to flexibly focus on the dynamic topics that we tackled every day. So this is at my high level thinking about Eastern Foundation's role.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're both coming with the experience of thinking about building the entire protocol. But also, I think the roles of May and Xiaoyao are very different, but natural difference. Like if you think how we're splitting the responsibilities as a bit like fluid, like we don't decide it day on day, it just comes naturally. And we'll try to more like double the role of the co-ED and give opportunity to work with any of us to progress things faster. When I think about my story, so why would I come to Ethereum Foundation? Probably to bring that energy of experience of building organization, also working in the ecosystem. You know, my last four years, I've been nomadic, I met a lot of builders. I've been working with lots of people that join the internship program at Dynamite. All of that means that it makes me probably much, much closer

• 17:32Speaker 01

  to people who are building Ethereum, who are like participating in all the hackatons programs. Also, so a judge on many hackatons. So leading the organization, Ethereum Foundation nowadays is also around 250, 300 people. Depending on which of the like organizations collaborate with Ethereum Foundation count as part of this larger project. So I see myself as a like energy that is coming to help with the like internal structure of the foundation of accelerating the processes that happen internally of saying, look, there are some inefficiencies that I see with my experience in management. There's some communication problems. And this was like almost the first thing that I addressed. So even before officially starting, I said, look, there are some minor things that the

• 18:14Speaker 01

  foundation can help a lot. Like there are so many talented people at the foundation that could communicate a lot, that could help to accelerate things. If you look at the team leads in the organizations, like around 40 people that are leading minor teams and giving them the space to say, you are the real leaders of Ethereum Foundation. You're the real leaders that usually people are listening to when thinking about what happens with the future of Ethereum. Giving them space, giving them voice, giving them priority, and also allowing them to to create create structures that help them to understand together where the differences in their vision of Ethereum are. So they communicate better with everyone in the ecosystem. Furthermore, I think with my experience of building Protocol,

• 18:56Speaker 01

  so for three years I was really hands on coding Ethereum client, right, not my client. So that experience helps to maybe look at this technical aspect of what we should choose, how we should work on delivering features of what will happen with VIPs. You see there's lots of challenges. Now we have EOF, we have other things that will be coming in the future. This will be thing. Then the ongoing conversations with the community now. So the last few weeks, I opened my calendars, I invited everyone to give feedback, to provide feedback. Now, very much welcoming that role of us coming and joining the podcast, starting to talk about what we plan. All this is very much the role as well, like to look at the foundation

• 19:36Speaker 01

  in the past, if the one that was not communicating frequently about the roadmap and responding to questions from the media to the one that actually communicates a lot and tries to answer as immediately, doesn't avoid the difficult questions. And I think that both I and Dalek seen it and were very much aware that this might be the situation when they will feel sometimes uncomfortable about how much I want to say about how we operate, how we want to operate. And I think that what they knew that it would make them sometimes uncomfortable for that vision delivery, that they really wanted it because they felt that this is what Ethereum ecosystem is also expecting. So that's one of my roles. And I think there's much, much, much more, right? Like looking at the entire ecosystem, every day there's a bit of a new challenge and prioritizing temporarily for

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Where I really need to contribute will be very important.

• 20:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Tomashi touched on a bunch of subjects that I think we want to spend some time and go deeper on. Before we really kind of get granular, though, I still want to say high level a little bit. Previously, Iya Miyaguchi's era of Ethereum, I think she defined as this addition by subtraction era for Ethereum. And I think that's what really will be her legacy with the Ethereum Foundation. And she really led Ethereum down that path where I think the addition by subtraction era for Ethereum really allowed so much of the infinite garden to blossom. And that that was what really, you know, how Iya's legacy is really defined. And I'm wondering if you guys have put your heads together and thought about something similar for your guys' role. Your the blog post that you guys have recently put out just today at the time of recording talks about the next chapter for Ethereum.

• 21:10David Hoffman?

  And so maybe in, I don't know, how many years, four, five, six, seven years, however long you guys want to be co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation. How do you think we will remember you? What will your legacies be? How will you guys define the Ethereum Foundation and then the Ethereum ecosystem more broadly? Have you guys any thought about this at all? Tomash, we'll start with you and then over to Xiaoyi afterwards.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Sure, so I see my role as a much more dynamic one, like to look at the foundation now for the next one, two years and to bring all the changes that are a bit more short term that show that foundation can be dynamic and can adjust based on everything that is expected from it. Like that some changes may have immediate effect and be a bit maybe less long term. They still have impact long term because whatever changes you now, whatever helps within the first one, two years, whatever is very important for delivery now will define the future of Ethereum. So I don't want to entirely like distance myself. Actually, I want to place myself within this vision of what Iya and Vitalik said for for foundation. And we had lots of conversations about what really the vision is within which I operate.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  I want to see myself more as an executive person here rather than a vision setter. I feel that my vision is there about Ethereum of the future, but I wouldn't like to impose it on what you have wants to achieve, like so that this will be melting together. Every now and then, maybe clashing and leading to some discussions internally. But for me, that feeling can make sense, but maybe doesn't express sometimes the way I see the things that matter now for delivery of the protocol are the most important. But it do describe the ecosystem a lot of the thinking of just centralization of the ideas popping up and leading to lots of smaller organizations growing over time. And I think that Nettamine was example of it, right? Like, so Nettamine existed very, very, very independently from Ethereum Foundation and

• 22:56Speaker 01

  led to a pretty successful contribution to the protocol. So I couldn't really dismiss it. I would say this is exactly the structure within which we thrived. But also now we see Ethereum where already there's lots of organizations and we think of how to accelerate all of this. Like you grew the garden, now you have to trim a bit and organize everything that grows there. So now coming back, like you asked about my vision. So I want Ethereum to be seen as a global neutral layer for all the economy, all the transactions happening in the world. So it's really winning by impacts to bring the values that we really care about. So when we talk about privacy, security, open source access and censorship resistance

• 23:38Speaker 01

  of the protocol, then this matters for us and we cannot make it happen if there is no impact of the protocol, if the protocol is not integrated in all the economy and the governance and in the AI processes of the future. So the coordination of where it's agents or bots, however we'll call them, virtual employees. And this will matter and having the win of the Ethereum mainnet will matter because this will lead to L2s actually being able to benefit from that. And then L2s and L1 together will spread the values of Ethereum and distribute everything that happens internally. So this is the main driver for me, like win through as much impact as possible to bring the values. Think that in the future, everything should work on top of Ethereum, the same way as

• 24:22Speaker 01

  everything works on top of internet nowadays. And to understand also that it exists within the values and vision that really mattered for many years. And I want it to be continuation, but with acceleration of lots of changes.

• 24:34David Hoffman?

  And Xiaowei, what do you want your impact to be on the Ethereum Foundation? How would you summarize the theme of what you are trying to lay the foundation for?

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Right, so you mentioned that IAS legacy. I want to talk something about the legacy part. I told myself that I wanted to lead with clarity and move with purpose and build with our attachments. By attachment, I mean like, so being a co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, it could be, oh, sorry, it's a nonprofit, it's a foundation. It could be seen as like a powerful seed in the community. But I think it's not about my personal legacy. And then I have to remind me of it every time that the things I'm doing here

• 25:27Speaker 03

  is for what the world we want to living. It's like Ethereum is a little one permissionless blockchain, but it should be more than that. It should be more than just a product. It's also about the culture, the world that we want to living. So I think these are the things that keep reminding me of, it's not my personal project. And then speak of the like vision. So I hope Ethereum to be the most decentralized, the most permissionless, the most open blockchain in the world. So in order to do that, of course, we need to grow in some way. So the growth and the principles should be complemented to each other.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  So yeah, that's how I see we will work, focus on in the next few years. Like we have to balance both the principles and how to grow Ethereum with resilience.

• 26:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the principles is something interesting because I do think that the Ethereum Foundation probably scores pretty high on principles. I think external observers would sort of say that. I'll give you a take from like somebody in the community, obviously in the outside looking at the Ethereum Foundation, because it feels like the community's reaction, there's a number of things that I think the EF gets high marks on, right? So the research that the EF puts out is basically like best in class. It's like all of the other chains kind of like, you know, copy Ethereum and really admire the research work that the EF puts out. The values, you mentioned many of them, I think. EF has done a fantastic job enshrining those in the protocol and really like living

• 27:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  out those values. A diverse set of stakeholders, the amount of client teams working on this all over the world is just phenomenal. It truly feels like a vibrant, open source community. I think all of that gets pretty high marks from those in the Ethereum community. What feels like has been lacking, I would say this is a word that Tomasz used a few times, the opposite of accelerate is it's slow. Things feel like they're sometimes they're not moving fast enough. I mean, we always want things faster, right? But the ability to kind of accelerate timelines, to commit to timelines, to deliver, that's something that the Ethereum community seems to want more of from the EF. Communication, that was also mentioned. Communication of the roadmap, obviously Vitalik did a fantastic

• 27:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  job doing that. It needs to be simplified as well. And, and simple delivery of like roadmap in milestone form, I think would go a long way. Even things like the Ethereum Twitter account, which just like recently started firing again. And that's great to see that communication. Saw some communication from Tomasz about, I believe it was just like maybe Pectra deliverables or something. And that was met with a lot of fanfare across the community because they thought it was clear communication. So communication is an area that we've needed. And this last piece is out of the ivory tower. So sometimes it feels like the EF has disconnected from the true use cases of, you know, people like me, people like David, people like in

• 28:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  the blacklist community who are using DeFi on a day to day basis. So there's some fantastic marks for some areas of the EF and other areas where it feels like it's lacking. And the key piece, I guess if I would sum it up is kind of leadership or maybe operational leadership in kind of a phrase here. I'm wondering if you could just react to that. What do you think? It is, I'm giving you my take, but it's also, I feel like informed from the take of many in the Ethereum community, both on the pros and the cons of the EF. But does anything that I've said kind of spark anything in you? Maybe Tomasz first?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. All of it, I think. All of it. So not only you, Said, but I had this like probably around 200 conversations in the last two months to. Sure, I had my own feeling of of what foundation was doing great, what foundation was not doing best. I had my own feeling of like how I feel in the ecosystem. It was important to see, are there some things that they're repeating in my conversations now? If people tell me what the strategy of Ethereum Foundation should be, what the future of Ethereum should be, that maybe I was not paying attention to. So the first three months of this year, I spent mostly mostly in the Bay Area. So I still feel that I may have some bias towards, you know, like American community. But also I had a lot of calls, lots of calls from around the world. And in the past, actually, I was much more present in Asia and in Europe.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I would spend probably like half a year in Asia, half a year in Europe in the last four years. So, yeah, people came back and they said, look, what's the North Star? How can you move faster? How it can work with the eco dev, like ecosystem development to bring the founders very quick to building applications? How can you build the pipelines that are super efficient in keeping people in Ethereum? In in helping them, mentoring them and helping them succeed? How do you talk to DeFi builders, to the leading DeFi applications? How do you answer questions about the clarity of research and roadmaps to people who want to build staking solutions? And want to understand what's the future of staking in Ethereum? The communication in general, like when the tough things happen, is Ethereum feeling like, yes, like ivory tower? Something happens there, but nobody responds, nobody tells what the plans are.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And you just learn from the actual events. And maybe you realize after time that this is exactly not what everyone was expecting from Ethereum as a network platform, a product, however you define it. So all of this, and as for the slowness. So sometimes I imagine like the people are really worried this Ethereum at some point would totally over focus on research and long term only and stop delivering. And and it wouldn't be even decision for a certification of Ethereum, but just like endless exploration of what the end state would be, what the end game would be. But not really collaborating with those researchers who want to solve the problems now and here. And I feel like it's even more important now with a huge technological shift around the AI.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  You just wonder how everything is moving super much faster. And if Ethereum keeps talking about just like five to 10 years, it means that it doesn't participate in this massive shift over the next one, two, three years. And doesn't adjust. Also, it doesn't adjust to maybe like competition and market changes of what people are expecting from us. So everything that people are complaining about is very much true. And I mean, like, because have you understand what the truth is, but just listening to the builders on Ethereum, two partners of Ethereum Foundation, this will be L2s as well, like telling, look, give us clarity on what happens between L1 and L2, how we can build on the platform with thoughtful assurances from researchers and strategists and the foundation, that you know exactly where we'll be going in the next few years and how we can build together.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  So that's my role now to change everything.

• 32:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I ask you, Tomasz, really quick, before we get Shao in here, are these problems fixable from your perspective?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Very much, very much. So first of all, I tell you, like, when coming to Ethereum Foundation, I was wondering what exactly is that? The big problem that you see from the outside that you hear about, and if you come inside the organization, how it manifests itself, like from what it comes, what's the source of all of this? And and I really was relieved at the beginning that some of it is just some, first of all, some small changes to communication internally. Second, some of the burden of the past of Ethereum operating within very hostile regulatory environment. And the same people that couldn't address some of those issues before, where there was that were very much open to address them directly.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Now, and they just thought that they need some support and new faces from the outside to be ready to execute that change within the culture. As for the, you know, like, when you think about slowness, you have fantastic top organizations that are building on Ethereum that want to accelerate and help. If you talk to builders, VCs, like the accelerator organizers, event builders around Ethereum, now on many calls, they say, look, Ethereum needs us. Like, some of them will say, I've been dormant for the last three, four years, but I'm ready to come back and help. And maybe that understanding of how many people want Ethereum to win and think that when I'm needed, I will come and this will make a difference as well. That just gives a lot of like, not even a hope, but like a conviction that, okay, this will be great. This will be a great journey now.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  To show everyone how much of a juggernaut Ethereum is, but also how much of a fast-moving juggernaut it is. And all of the strength combined of the people that our team leads on that change. And you would see like the people internally at the EF were extremely impatient for that change. They wanted to participate in it themselves. So it's not like coming to the organization that has a culture of, we don't want it, we don't want to participate in this like massive shift. You come and all the team leads say, fantastic, fantastic that this is happening. Fantastic that we have this co-IDE setup and we can execute now. Like just, just let us do that. And it was also one of the first decisions. It's like, no, it's not exactly like me and Xiaoy to execute much of it. It's just telling people, look, you're free to go now. You're free to go and execute what you wanted to execute.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  And you're empowered to act as a leader of organization. I think that we already see a bit more of like, if you talk to like Asger and Dunkrat and we say, yeah, it's okay that you have voices that are sometimes seen as controversial, as like counter to some of what other people are saying. But you really have a great understanding of what we're building. But also internally, you have to agree. But you will be able to lead much of the strategy because you have this understanding of where we should go. It shouldn't be me and Xiaoy coming and telling everyone what to do. But very much coming, listening and very fast bringing people like to the decision together, but in accelerated way. So you can still have organizations very, very decentralized, but move much faster.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  And well, people will be asking about decisions here and there of saying, look, there's a stalemate, like they decide and let's move forward. And some decisions will be more public and some decisions will be still internal to the EF, but will be happening. So at some point, we'll decide of how the events of within Ethereum would change everything and how they should change everything. And then we'll communicate over time what exactly happens and why. And sometimes requires a bit more of the introspection about the foundation. So all of it is fixable. We can communicate very clearly. We can invite people to the table to talk about the product in the future. We can hear from DeFi applications, from stakers, from liquid staking protocols, from other researchers, you can invite them to tell us where we should be in two, three years.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And also restructure the all-core Devs format to like talk about Ethereum as a platform, as a product two years from now, and then talking about Ethereum as a delivery of next one, two forks. Any Ethereum is a delivery of the next fork of like the how to deliver the next fork the fastest because I think this was not common in Ethereum that if you had a next fork, the timeline would be accelerated that you set the timeline and you think like, can you deliver it faster? Can you remove something from this fork to say, now we wrapped up with all the most important things. Let's just ship it. All of this is fixable and I try to not ever use like the months or years in timelines. I want to say that if something is to be addressed and we should think, can we do it tomorrow or next week the latest and start seeing results and then maybe adjust.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's the first month, but I think we've done already a bit. And I hope that every week will bring some changes that you enjoy to see in Ethereum.

• 36:45David Hoffman?

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• 38:12David Hoffman?

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• 38:56David Hoffman?

  From what I have heard through the grapevine from around the space is that you are a chronic workaholic, that you work very, very hard, and you have worked very, very hard at Nethermind. And Nethermind has just the might to show for it. 300-person company, as you said. And from everyone that I've talked to who's worked to undo you and with you, just immense respect as a leader, as an operational leader. Now, understanding that, I see you in an interesting position, a tightrope that you have to walk, because I think a lot of people in the Ethereum community are looking for somebody exactly like you to take the reins and to provide operational excellence and clarity and leadership on things in the Ethereum community that Ryan identified.

• 39:40David Hoffman?

  You know, slow cadence of progress, slow updates, you know, coming to consensus faster, moving the ship faster. At the same time, Ethereum has always been built around this idea of like these decentralized emergent ecosystem. How does the All Core Devs Call operate? It operates with rough consensus. And there's this like interesting case study happening right now with the EOF debate. What EOF is, I don't think it really matters. It's this like technical thing that Ethereum researchers and developers have been debating about for years now. It was going to get shipped in Pectra. In the last minute, it got removed just because people didn't think it was ready. And now there's frustration because some people have spent, you know, 10s, 100s, thousands of hours.

• 40:22David Hoffman?

  poured into this thing and now the community changed its mind and now it's not going in. And so in terms of efficiency as an organization, like pretty terrible marks, like we're just burning all of this like man hours, these labor hours for this thing that ultimately just didn't get included. And I think to quote an Ethereum core developer who tweeted out, "To me, the fault is not about doing or not doing EOF. The fault is about the lack of capacity to decide." And so I think broadly, we want this leader to come in and just crack the whip and tell us exactly how it's going to go. And at the same time, this goes against some of the values that you are supposed to uphold as a member of the Ethereum Foundation and what the Ethereum Foundation stands for and the rough consensus that represents Ethereum governance.

• 41:06David Hoffman?

  So I see these two things in tension. Maybe you could just reflect upon that and talk about how you think about that challenge that is in front of you.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Sure. On the communication side, you see how quickly the things spread that confuse people like when observing what happens on ACD. The particular, the Pectra comment, you know, like many people actually got confused and believed that this discussion about Pectra release that is coming on the 7th of May, but it's actually Fuzaka. We're talking about a thing six months from now. So it's not really a last moment removal. It's a removal of the feature that is designed to go in a fork that is not even fully scheduled. However, we want to accelerate it and say that clearly we'll deliver it for September and October. So the process is still very much about the future and it's just that a few weeks ago, we said this, now we're closing the specification

• 41:52Speaker 01

  and planning for September, October fork. And the bigger outreach is that might be like for core developers that they said clearly that they wanted to go in. And now we have discussion about actually after we decided it goes in, then the ecosystem or like the application builders say, look, like, we want you to prioritize other things for a few months from now. We want you to remove it because we're absolutely not convinced that this is what we need. And you have a bit of a clash of thinking how Ethereum should look a few months from now. But coming back maybe first before, before we go too much in details in EOF. So you mentioned that, yeah, working a lot and being very active and energetic. So I enjoy it a lot, right? As I agree with that. I joke very often that

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I replaced me playing too much computer games with me doing a lot on the business side and just feeling like it brings the same kind of like emotions and excitement of like doing something every day and I enjoyed it similarly. So now the question is how not to burn yourself by feeling that you have to deliver everything, but at the same time make this energy work a bit. Amplify itself. So it's not always about you coming and decide for everything and or like rarely it is about this. You do a lot and you actually want to activate as many people in the community as possible. And you want to activate as many decision makers as possible and tell them, look, it's okay to take decisions. And you are the one who should take decision or you're the one who should accelerate the things.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  You're the one who shouldn't wait and just telling people to do that takes a lot of time, right? Because there's lots of people. So having like hundreds or thousands of conversations and then people move faster, like you have this idea, okay, like I execute it tomorrow. No, no, don't plan it for after the release or after the meeting or after the offsite. Like people in the community do it surprisingly often, like they wait for some major conference or some offsite or some meeting. Or some call to execute some actions where they can do that's like pretty much straightforward. The very next moment and this takes a lot of time to prepare people for this space of thinking you never have to wait for things. You don't have to think like annually or monthly about things, but you can think of it like just to as fast as possible.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  So people want it, people want the leaders, yes, but the leaders should maybe how not to wait, how to rush, how to care about things and how to be very open about your own beliefs about where the protocol should go. But also don't be too worried about clashing those opinions like that. Even bringing E O F much faster to this discussion level, which he did. This is important. So as you say, E O F is few years in the making on various levels. He actually was in the all curve F calls four or five years ago. When some of the first E I Ps that nowadays guilty E O F. Were discussed and were actually not delivered also were removed like pretty last moment, like the E I P six six three. Was removed after it was accepted. So.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  The team around the EOF like always was in this very difficult position of of having to decide the changes that are not exactly directly related to what the application developers would build, would think of that they use it, that they would know directly how to use it. And this was always, I complained that they didn't address it directly. And maybe now this is opportunity for me to, well, for sure, there's opportunity for me to say how to finally fix that process and how to bring the application devs to the very early stages of planning the API. And I think it's kind of everyone believes that this happened already. But sometimes you just don't bring the right people that you expect to be the most against what you're building, because you decide to bring the people that represent the same category of

• 45:28Speaker 01

  like, you think applications, but then you think, let's bring those who agree with what I would do, what I would say. But instead, you want to actually find people who would be the most against the feature and listen to them at the beginning and think like, how, how do you build something that is so, so important? So much changing everything for better, that even them will be totally over reasoned by everyone else's opinion that it has to go in. And I think that's what is lacking now at the EOF, that when we have calls, there are core developers that say, we want to deliver that. And from the outside of the core development teams, you have people coming to the calls and saying, we don't want it, we feel uncomfortable about this change. We think that there's much to address here, but this is not the way to go.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And you don't have maybe the same amount of strong voices that come and say, we understand what's the problem here, but we really need it. Like, ship it because this will change everything for us. So we didn't have ZK teams on the call saying, this has to ship because otherwise we don't see the performance improvements that we'd like to see. Maybe because they see performance improvements that are 10x somewhere else, and this is maybe a few percent or 10 or 50%. I'm guessing here, I'm just speculating around what people say, but it feels that maybe this is that direction. Does it mean that I have to come and resolve it immediately and say, this is what we're doing? Um. Over time, maybe I'll do it more and more often if it's needed. Like if there is a stalemate, I'll say this is what I believe in.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Um. Now, I still feel that even with all my experience around the EVM, this was not the topic that I wanted to claim too much of the like clear understanding of the like technical complexities in. And it's just one month in, I covered a lot of other topics like thinking of the organization. I want to move myself a bit closer, back closer to the technical roadmap aspect of it. I might feel that now this will be what people will ask for. How to deliver FISACA the fastest, how to deliver GOMSTERDAM, how to increase the scaling of a one by three X, ten X. People are asking about this, maybe a bit less about the communication, about the organization of the structure of EF. Or we already addressed that many of those components with Shoy.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  So I'll just move again like to the place where people feel there is the most need for for leaders and for guidance and for acceleration.

• 47:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Shoy, I want to get your thoughts in here. How do you see getting involved with this like coordination process that Tomasz was talking about or just generally what came to mind as Tomasz was speaking?

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's back to the first question Ryan shared. I mean, I fully agree with Ryan about that EF has been in a comfort room for a while, the first few years. And then now we are having more challenges that we both want to growth. So I think this COED, the dual executive director plan is that it's actually show like how we wanted to increase our capacity at Eastern Foundation. And then it's like, we want to do more about different areas and then we want to move faster. So like, it's interesting from Tomasz's interview, you can see like, so I want to do like five times faster.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  But Tomasz may want to do ten times faster. So I think that's great. I think that's great that he pushed the team to move faster. And at the same time, we can give each other the context about what's the meaningful things about the first decision that what the impact of it. So this conversation happened in our internal chat every day. So I think my point is that shifting focus doesn't necessarily means like we want to do less in another part. I think it's important to do things more effectively. So it's that if we can increase the efficiency, then naturally we could able to do more things in this new area

• 49:26Speaker 03

  and then in the place that we didn't touch enough previously. So in the past few months, I think it's even if since twenty twenty five, early this year, like the year before, we had identified that application is important and then the communication is important. And then we had some early initiatives to address these problems. But maybe in this leadership transition, then we started to be able to do more actions on it. So like I know we started to know, can not started, but like we know users wanted like better UX, like they need faster confirmation time

• 50:08Speaker 03

  and they want a cheaper and the greatest throughputs in Easter and they want. So these things we identified and then now it's to think how we address them. And about like isolation, like yeah, first is indeed we are bringing some culture change at the Easter Foundation. And it's good that the changes happened. It's likely to be somewhat top down in the foundation itself. And we also hope that this new vibes, the new like. Helping community to be more focused together. It's not just sister foundation, but also all the partners, the builders,

• 50:51Speaker 03

  the other projects, companies that we could learn like, okay, this is the Ethereum in 2025, like we want to move faster. And then to with this kind of spirit, hopefully we could isolate Ethereum's development. And it's not saying we shift to something else totally. Uh, I think research is still important. Research, it's still like a heart of a technical projects, but we wanted to do more effectively.

• 51:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about doing more effectively. And the next 12 months in the blog post you two co-authored, there were three objectives and I like the number three. I mean, it's very easy to remember, very simple. So you've got number one, scaling Ethereum L1. It's the layer one somewhat new. That's the first objective. Number two, scaling blobs. That's of course the block space, the express lane for layer twos. And then number three, improving user experience. I think this maybe addresses some of the interoperability problems across all of the layer two chains, but probably some other UX issues as well.

• 52:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we've got three things there, scaling Ethereum L1, scaling blobs and improving UX. How did you come up with these objectives? Why these? How are you going to achieve them? When are we going to see them? Tamash, what's your take on this?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I think the first time they were expressed that clearly when Joshua Dolf posted a tweet about it. And I thought like, look, this, this expresses the three most important things that I've heard from multiple conversations. And let's start repeating it because it's really brings clarity. And also people reacted very positively to it and both internally and externally. As much as we can read, like everything, you always mean some voices, but it can fail thee. The vibe of change where people want to go. So first of all, the Ethereum mainnet was like one requirement for many people to say, look, like show that you are strong, that you want Ethereum to win, that you think that Ethereum mainnet will always be outclassing competitors on the quality of research, of the

• 53:05Speaker 01

  strength of the protocol, the centralization of the protocol, security of the protocol, but speed as well, like the throughput. Because over time, like the every layer one chain that focuses on speed, like you can have some technology changes that will bring them to the same level. Whatever happens, whenever someone just feels like they're ahead a bit for a while, you can make changes to the protocol and say, this is actually the same speed within a single chain. And then we say, but how do we address questions about L2L1 relationship and just as mentioned, scale, scale blobs really is an expression of the general support for the L2 ecosystem, but also expressing it through its connection with L1, right? So you want to say, we want to support L2s.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  This is a massive success of Ethereum that L2s are scaling and bringing users. And how do you bind it to layer one to Ethereum mainnet? To say Ethereum mainnet will deliver the anchoring, the layer for which, from which the L2s will borrow security, will borrow the all the values. I'll say only for the strength of the layer one, they can bring to the users what they will expect, like the levels of safety, the level of decentralization. So I wanted to strengthen that feel and also now for the UX, you say, you address the concerns about L2 and L1 and didn't feel like one chain for a long time and people started feeling uneasy about it. Also, there were further questions about long-term, what are the always the challenges of like the ease of use of security,

• 54:34Speaker 01

  of managing your assets. So all the novelties, I think UX is there to express all of this. Like, we care about the interrupt improvements over the next few months. And we'll put a lot of initiatives and clear roadmap around it. And it's a difficult topic, like there's lots of technical questions, lots of coordination questions, lots of tough decisions to take as well, because when you want everything to feel much closer, then maybe at some point you have to clearly define where the boundaries are when something doesn't really fit the set of tooling that you want to prefer. So UX comes with, well, decisions of execution with roadmap with technical challenges that will resolve. UX also means security in general, right?

• 55:14Speaker 01

  So user experience, if they feel comfortable using chain, then the experience is better. I think that Ethereum already has an extremely secure chain with all the design that is behind it. But also generally for blockchain, the risks of hacks, especially if you hold like billions or over time, maybe trillions of dollars of assets in a fund, how you address it on the security side. So this will be important as well in UX. The latency of blocks, like the preconfirmations, the feeling around trading within hundreds of milliseconds. You want to improve it, you want to deliver all of this either through L1 directly or for the fact that you prepare all the changes that will be, that will be current by L2s to the users. All of this is part of UX.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  And I feel that DevX to some extent is also UX in the space of blockchain. You want builders to really feel that this is the platform, they are users of the platform, they're users of the network. So they want to have great experience building on the platform. They want to have great tooling, they want to have clarity on the roadmaps, no surprises. They want to have support, they want to have support from the ecosystem. They want to have the feeling that when building on Ethereum, they'll be successful and they'll be impactful. So all of this can be expressed in these three points. There'll be more about the internal structure, organization, the addressing problems, but these are all just to support those three goals for the next year.

• 56:35David Hoffman?

  Part of the UX, part of this, I think draws attention to something that I've just seen as a theme coming out of the Ethereum community is a request towards increasing the value of product in the Ethereum ecosystem. And so like some are calling this like a product centric Ethereum. And I think maybe product is like maybe the opposite side of the spectrum of research, like research being one of the things that Ethereum and the E F has scored so well on. And maybe product is something that Ethereum and the E F has not scored so well on. So maybe, Tomasz, maybe you could just lean into that concept of like a product centric Ethereum. And is this part of improving UX? Is that part of that same effort? Or is this in addition to that? What's your reaction to that?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Probably the product based approach, like when thinking about Ethereum is what makes everything else happen, whether it's free objectives, directions, they'll happen if you have the way of thinking about Ethereum as a product to some extent. What it means that there are people that look at Ethereum and saying, why we make changes, why we deliver new features, what people are asking for, who are the people who will use the Ethereum and protocol? So you make sure that everything that you do is related to some goals that will make an impact on some people. And then while you're doing that, you talk to those people about the changes and you involve them in the process of co-designing. At the same time, also with the product, you think of quality of the product and the core

• 58:02Speaker 01

  values that are long term. So you make sure that you don't over adjust to all of those opinions, but every single of those things has to happen. So this all would make Ethereum more like a product and what it means specifically. So if you think about E O F, sure, you think about the security scalability of the product, all the long term thinking of improving the network. But if you come back to the beginning, how did you start this process? Like, who did you talk to? Who should be involved? Who do you go back to asking about? Are we going still in the right direction? Every month or every quarter, you say, is it still looking like what you're expecting? This will be the changes. This will how it will affect you? Are you aware of this? What you like to raise some concerns? What do

• 58:43Speaker 01

  you think of the quality of how are we executing so far? Can you look at the progress? Is it the quality that matches the quality of Ethereum? And for every other single feature, it should be like this. Like if you want to scale, we want to make it clear of like, does it affect decentralization? How it affects decentralization? If it affects decentralization, which users of the protocol will feel that it goes too far? Or maybe like it makes them uncomfortable, asking them for opinions on it? And bringing them and asking like, do you have suggestions on should we approach it differently? Maybe we picked up some research, but there are easier ways of addressing the same problem. Or actually, maybe this is not exactly the problem or priority.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  So nowadays, I think also we have to define what structures within the organization address it. So how ACT should be restructured to include that product conversation? How to establish the very clear databases, almost like list of people that you want to talk to about various aspects of Ethereum? If you think about DevX experience, how you think about the maybe like the growth hacking, not hacking, but growth and product adoption of Ethereum? And how do you define again, like the super fast process of tracking, monitoring results of you building the ecosystem? Do people feel lost if they if they come to Hackathon? What happens next? Like what happens the next day on Monday after the Hackathon?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Do they start building on Ethereum? Do they feel like Ethereum is a product for them? That's like, it comes with with answers, with clarity of like how to build on Ethereum? What to choose, which technology to start with? And who will help you to build? And how you get funding for all of this? If we have a lot of components of that, any term foundation, but also with other organization? If you have partners that know how to operate within those pipelines? Then all of that feels like you talk about the product. You talk about product for someone, another product that you just imagined.

• 1:00:39David Hoffman?

  You're identified in that the idea of like focusing on goals that have impact upon people, which brings to the mind of like how we actually measure success? In the blog post that you two co-authored, which we will link in the show notes. And if anyone's listening to this, I highly suggest actually additionally reading the blog post. A line that you wrote in your section, Tomasz, you said, "We will focus on speed of execution." Clear goals, objectives and metrics to track. I think these are all kind of the operational leadership that I think everyone is very excited to see you provide to the EF. Talk about the metrics a little bit more, like what high level, I know you're only one month into your role at the EF, but what are these metrics that come to mind as just like high scores of the Ethereum protocol

• 1:01:22David Hoffman?

  or of the Ethereum community that we should all aspire to?

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  I would say that not all of this is ES specific. As you say, it's one month into looking into your organization and now looking at the protocol and thinking of how these goals and strategies and directions that we defined, how they now go to every single team and how they define the metrics of how we measure the progress. And then later creating dashboards internally, they'll tell us what's the progress on every single of those. And for now, we have like some simple targets on the scaling one, right? So we say, oh, it's three X this year and 10 X altogether next year. And Dankret actually suggested this like exponential scaling growth map that says-

• 1:02:03David Hoffman?

  It was 100 X over four years, right?

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yeah. So like if you do it three X every year, I think that's where you get, which means that you start with changes to review of all the clients and how ready they are. And that survey already happened. Then you continue with the changes via EAPs to execution layer, consensus layer. Then you talk about this like three, four years, which is mostly ZK and acceleration through ZK. So those, as you mentioned here, 100 X over four years is a big metric to follow. And now we just make sure that we anchor around it, that this is not just the number that was thrown without thinking of restructuring all the protocol building, all the protocol development and research around this like 100 X. Now you go to every single research team and say, what you're building, how does it refer to this 100 X direction?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Like, are you working on the first year of 100 X or the second year, third year, fourth year? And if you look at the entire organization, how big percentage of researchers and engineers and Ethereum Foundation in the ecosystem are focusing on the first year? Because it should be probably much more than the four year.

• 1:03:05David Hoffman?

  What you just described there sounds a little bit like a North Star, which is like, I think, pretty exciting and coming full circle to the beginning of this conversation.

• 1:03:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Conversation and it does sound like a lot of exciting changes are ahead for the Ethereum Foundation and for the Ethereum community. But I want to ask the question, I know Ethereum Foundation doesn't have infinite capacity, can't do everything. And I think sometimes the expectations of the community can be, well, the Ethereum Foundation will solve this, right? Why isn't ETH price trading at $100,000 right now? That's the Ethereum Foundation's problem. And I'm curious, because I think people don't understand the complexity of this ecosystem, and how many moving parts there are, and how decentralized it truly is, and what is actually in scope for the Ethereum Foundation versus what's out of scope? Maybe the best way to ask

• 1:03:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  this question is, what are some of the things you think that the community expects the EF to do, that you actually aren't set up to do, that you don't do at all, that's kind of out of scope? Xiaowei, you probably have some context hearing many of the things over the years. What comes to mind? What is the EF just not set up to do, but people still expect the EF to do it?

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  So, okay, one controversial one, starting with a controversial one, is like EF shouldn't sell ETH. It's like, we need, I mean, community expect we to hold the ETH, I mean, just hold it. And then, but in order for the EF to operate it and to pay for this, over 200 internal EFers to pay grants, we do need to sell some ETH. So that's something, I think, is like expectation from community and is quite different from we do, but.

• 1:04:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you're saying the community expects you not to sell it, but you have to sell it in order to fund the operational staff? And so that's an unfair expectation?

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a simple one. And then. Secondly, I would say like the EF doesn't do some things directly, but we are willing to do maybe through grants. So for the most critical things that only EF can do, we want more hands on. We will allocate internal resource to do them. But for the second level, like for example, I think the definition of business development is a dynamic metrics. Here for Ethereum is like what kind of development that EF should do directly. I think we would support through grants for some events.

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  And then we will support with like supporting like mentors hackers to onboarding hackers. But in order to onboarding people, I think EFs role is more coordinator to help people to found the correct resource in the ecosystem. But that doesn't mean that we don't want to do. It's like we will willing to empower other people to do more.

• 1:06:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I guess my perception of the EF and what it does versus what it doesn't do is like so. Obviously, the research and coordination for shipping big protocol changes. That's kind of the core of it. Also, you know, throwing developer events, that kind of thing. But EF is actually not doing the engineering work that goes into the consensus clients and execution clients. I mean, some people don't even know that. These are all separate teams that are actually building this. The EF is not a party responsible to do what Michael Saylor is doing with Bitcoin, which is like just like buying more Bitcoin. The EF, from my perception, is not doing a lot of business development and talking to, you know, like Wall Street

• 1:06:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  about how to use Ethereum and how to onboard the blockchains. Like there are separate entities doing some of that work, but it's not really the EF. And I think sometimes people expect the EF to fulfill all of those roles as if it was a centralized company like Apple or something like that. And that's just not how the EF is positioned to work. Tomasz, do you have any takes on this, any insights?

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  I feel very often that like EF should be there where somehow for a moment, for a longer time, there's nobody. So then it means that they maybe, there should be almost anything that Ethereum doesn't do, the foundation doesn't do. However, sometimes it means that O H M Foundation realizes that there is that gap and there should be some organization that deals with it and help these organizations to appear. Maybe sometimes it's just highlighting the problem and saying, look, that's like, it's missing. So how do we build it? How do we start it? And then let it grow and let it handle the things. So you mentioned things like talking to Wall Street. You probably you think of like talking to governments. And while Foundation for sure doesn't want to be like ever coordinating that work. And it's never done in the past.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  However, he wants to be available for answering questions and act as one of the organizations in the ecosystem that is very knowledgeable and can help with that process, right? So if Wall Street, if government institutions, if they come and then ask for help or support in the sense of like, we have those questions and we seeking for the like best experts that can tell us what happens now, what will happen in the future, that we want to be there. And sometimes maybe in the past, Foundation would feel not only we don't want to be coordinators, we definitely don't want to, but also we want to even like avoid any interactions. And this was what I would like to change. Like the interactions are normal and fine. And we just like one of the many organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  So if you ask that, should we be coordinators and seen as like the owners of Ethereum? No, this Ethereum Foundation will number two. I mean, this is like super clear. We're not owners of Ethereum protocol. We're not act as owners, we're not act as like. So here also it refers to those decisions, right? Like if you have decisions to be made, it's all about helping others to take those decisions. Like saying, look, those decisions are not made. And these are the people that are really high agency and are important in the protocol space. And they should be visible and they should be empowered to take those decisions. You mentioned a few other things like the engineering or business development. Or like some people I mentioned also marketing. So the engineering wise, we have GAF team internally. We don't build consensus layer clients, so consensus layer clients are external.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  And GAF team has been building this extremely successful and robust execution layer client since the beginning. And Ethereum Foundation always felt that's like this is extremely important input for researchers to have internally. And it's good to rely on what client in the space. Should Ethereum like initiate more work like this, like building applications or building infrastructure directly in the future, build the tooling? Probably not, so we'll be avoiding a lot of this. But it's not because we wouldn't if it was needed. That's just the ecosystem, it's ready to take care of it. Like, so we can, and I think now like this business development part, we want to be a bit more active here, at least I want to be more active here. And I still like test how much of pushback on it is there in the foundation, that it feels

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  that foundation wants to be a helper, like a business developer in the sense that each talks to much more organizations. It helps the like applications to connect with other applications, applications to find customers, applications to find talent, to find research that they can use for launching products. And foundation is very often the point of contact or like even first point of contact for many of these players that feel a bit lost. So they can go to ethereum.org, but they can also reach out to foundation people. And instead of foundation giving grants every single time as like the only solution, that you can come to foundation, ask for a grant, and you receive like yes or no and the value of the grant. Instead, we like to be much more active in helping founders with particular problems that they're facing very often at the beginning, that are much more valuable than just throwing money at founders.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Like founders can, and we'll like to interact with people that have time for them, that have solutions, like efficiency solutions for them, and know how exactly to accelerate them to the next stage of their journey. And that will make me much more happy about how foundation can be impactful. Like instead of just saying, the only thing that foundation would like to deliver is this treasury, I would like it to cherry the value in many other ways, like by just involving people in the ecosystem, others, accelerators, incubators, VCs, L2s, and take advantage of the fact that they exist in the ecosystem and that they want to help, and they want also to bring capital into the ecosystem. And we can help for that capital and that effort, those efforts of all the participants to be multiplied by just creating the network.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  I mean, like so much of Ethereum is about creating the network, creating the network of the social layer is what foundation can do very well. On the marketing side, I think we don't want to maybe create like branding or advertising style of marketing, but better communication and clarity is also part of of marketing. And I think we're still exploring here of how much on the marketing side we should do. I listen to a lot of Twitter influencers and people who dealt with marketing a lot telling us how to address it. And I sometimes feel that Maybe to grasp the entirety of Ethereum and feel what it means to create marketing campaigns for Ethereum, it's actually tricky. I think that not many people have experienced with a product like this that has to be neutral,

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  that has to be decentralized and to show that those properties for the message, for the marketing message, well, probably you can do each right, so let's try it for sure. So I'm more on the side of Ethereum Foundation should do almost everything when it's missing from the ecosystem, rather than say like there's some clear things and no go, except for that one of like acting as an owner. Or maybe like it should act as an owner, but not be as an owner. That's important.

• 1:12:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Tomasz, if the EF wants to do more, I'm sure some people listening can give you a whole big list of things that could be done. I expect some of that follow up after the show. But Tomasz, Xiaowei, it's been a pleasure getting to know you. And we're certainly cheering you on in this joint role as you take Ethereum to the next frontier. Just a quick question on kind of roadmap and what's coming next. So of course we got our goals, right? Which is scaling Ethereum L1, scaling blobs and improving the user experience. Those three priorities are deployed over a series of hard forks that happens with Ethereum every, how many months? How many months has it been on average? Nine, 12, longer, shorter, something like this?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  We're planning every six months now.

• 1:13:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Every six months now? That would be a change. So how many hard forks have we shipped six months apart in Ethereum so far? Have we done any?

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Not much. I think historically it will be more like between 12 to 18 months.

• 1:13:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, that would be a fantastic speed up in cadence. But the next one is Pectra and is that May 7?

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  May 7th. Pectra, I think that apart from changes it's taking with max effective balance, you're waiting for massive UX improvement via SFS 1.02. So things related to account abstraction. And yeah, like we were very happy to ship it to make sure that it's like fully tested, it's safe. This is the main focus now. Obviously, already for the last few months, all the test nets, verification, and it continues.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  And after 7th of May, we immediately want to spawn the devnet for Fusaka. There'll be also like a larger gathering of all the core developers and researchers working towards accelerating the goals. This became a tradition of like how to accelerate every single next challenging fork or challenging upgrade. It was with the merge, it was then later with the withdrawals and so on. So I want to make sure the PIRDAS comes this year. I mentioned September, October. Now the question is, could we accelerate it? How we make sure that network gets delayed? So then you would have like the 5 months timeline for Fusaka. And it means that we want to start with devnet immunity and we want to start with focus of all the teams and saying like if there is anything that is sneaking into the fork that potentially delays it, no.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  And then there is Glampsterdam that we would plan for, let's think like between March and June next year. Now, I feel like if this is the cadence that we're talking about, this is what we should expect. But people are already thinking about how to deliver the L1 scaling acceleration through Glampsterdam fork next year. So some of it can be done without changes, without the fork, some of the scaling. And some of the scaling will definitely require the EIPs to ship that. So that's the next months. And separately on the ecosystem development side, like James Smith leads a lots of changes into the like pipelines and communication and structuring the ecosystem development that Terra Foundation to address over the next two months, already create those pipelines

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  and address the founders' needs or the builders' needs in building the enterprises. And they want to come to us and ask, what do we do with tokenization or WA? How do we deploy lots of funds on Ethereum? How do you want stable ties? Where do we mean? How do we collaborate with all twos? All of this will be addressed also for that small restructuring that James is executing. Further, Team Byco is already coordinating the Alcor Des restructuring to focus on this very fast testing and deliveries. So if you want to have the six month cadence, we realize that we have to propose something that will be accepted as a much more operational format. And immediately, obviously, the communication changes and involving the DeFi builders

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  and, well, general, like, application builders to tell us what they need after Amsterdam. Because I told you, like, this is what we want to deliver, and they already would tell us we decided. And we didn't ask the... I think that we really, really decided in this aligned with what the application developers need, but we didn't yet decide of what happens next after that. So what happens two years from now after Amsterdam? And process about this fork should be all of, like, really massive participation and this product focus. So the process changes for that should happen as well within the next month, I think.

• 1:16:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, this may have been the most bullish part of the conversation. We've got dates and deliverables for Hard Forks, which is very exciting. And, you know, thank you so much for joining us and giving us all those details. And we wish both of you very well in the future as you develop on this. Exciting times, of course. Bankless Nation, as you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.