Griff Green and the DAO | Layer Zero

Griff Green is a builder and community manager in the Ethereum space. He is also a hippie, a former chemical engineer, and Seattle Supersonics super-fan. A true individual, Griff opted out of society after becoming disillusioned with modern institutions, traveling in a van with gold and silver until he heard about Bitcoin. Falling down the crypto rabbit hole led Griff to become a deep Ethereum community member, eventually launching The DAO. The story of the DAO's beginnings, hack, and eventual hard for are the stuff of Sci-Fi. Filled with countless stories, this episode follows the life and times of a deeply fascinating member of Layer Zero. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ 📣 DHARMA | Trade on Polygon! https://bankless.cc/dharma https://bankless.cc/Dharma ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​ https://bankless.cc/go-gemini%E2%80%8B 💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Griff Green & the SuperSonics 13:34 Chemical Engineering 18:20 Bankless with Gold 21:51 Bitcoin & Traveling 29:44 Into the Crypto World 35:07 Crypto Masters Degree 38:00 Ethereum Arrives 44:43 Entering the Community 51:29 Culture vs Price 56:00 Early Ethereum Culture 1:02:43 The DAO 1:07:20 Coming up with the DAO 1:13:25 Exploits 1:16:46 The DAO Token Creation 1:23:20 Explosion & Speculation 1:27:29 The Hack & Hard Fork 1:36:00 Dark DAO and Ethereum Classic 1:40:12 Hard Fork & Edge Cases 1:46:58 Lessons Learned 1:49:24 The Next 4 Years & Giveth 2:02:10 Closing ------ Resources: Griff on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegrifft?s=20 Giveth: https://giveth.io/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:13David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cyberpunk's understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm speaking with Griff Green, who has a fascinating story of journey through crypto. And I think the story really starts in many, many places, but it starts with Griff, living off of the grid and choosing to use gold to store his value in order to live

• 0:53David Hoffman?

  a bankless life. Before Bitcoin was even a thing, or Bitcoin had entered his life, Griff was off the grid, being kind of a hippie, communal-type guy, kind of traveling the world, that really got turned off by some aspects about society. So he just yeeted himself out of society, traveled the world, got rid of all his belongings, put everything in a backpack, and started using gold to store his value, and then, of course, found his way into the world of Bitcoin and then Ethereum later on. Griff has the most fascinating story about the DAO. As somebody who had front-row seats of the DAO, the 2016 DAO, we spent at least the second half, the whole entire second half of the episode, just going through the story

• 1:34David Hoffman?

  of the DAO. And that's actually the first time I've heard that story in such granular detail. So that really was just the absolute highlight of this interview, in my opinion. I had a fantastic time, like, speaking with Griff and getting to know him a little bit more. So, without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into the interview with Griff Green. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum.

• 2:17David Hoffman?

  Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni-grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless

• 3:02David Hoffman?

  and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. The era of proof of stake is upon us and Lido is working to bring proof of stake to everyone. Lido is a decentralized staking protocol that allows users to stake on Ethereum, Terra and Solana and receive an interest-bearing token in return. Stake any amount of your ETH to the Lido validating network and receive ST ETH in return. This ST ETH can be traded, used as collateral for lending or borrowing, or leveraged on your favorite DeFi protocol, and all this without locking up your ETH in a centralized staking service or exchange. That's what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes,

• 3:47David Hoffman?

  you can access the yield offered by proof-of-stake systems and claim your share of network transaction rewards. Do you have 32 ETH and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32 ETH and you need to pool your ETH with others so you can access staking yields? Lido offers a solution to both. Simply go to lido.fi, choose which assets you want to stake and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is making sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible and is committed to decentralizing its own validating networks to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Terra, or Sol and get liquidity on your stake, go to lido.fi to get started.

• 4:31David Hoffman?

  Hey Griff.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 4:32David Hoffman?

  How's it going?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Fantastically, man. How are you?

• 4:35David Hoffman?

  Also fantastic, always fantastic. It's always a fun time to be in crypto. So the last time we talked was in Colorado after M-Con and I have a little funny story to tell you about it because I was talking to you, asking you a little bit about your background and your life. And then I went on a plane ride to New York and I started listening to Matt Leising's book about Ethereum. And then he talks about like the parts of the DAO hack and talks about like this guy Griff Green that was part of the damage control for the DAO hack. I'm like, wait, Griff Green? I was just talking to that guy in Colorado. Now he's like in the subject matter of this book.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, Matt did a, Matt had a lot of fun with that book for sure. It was, it wasn't as accurate as some of the other books that are coming out on Ethereum. It was definitely like, oh hey, let's make, let's have this be like more adventurous and more fun. But uh, yeah, it was fun talking with him over the years too. He's been writing that for a while.

• 5:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it was just fun from my perspective about like, oh, I'm going to this convention, Metacartel convention, and then I'm also just meeting the people that these kind of sci-fi stories about Ethereum are being written about. And it's crazy like how much like literature has been made so quickly about this industry. And then it's also like still happening, right? The stories are still unfolding at the same time.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. So much, man. And yeah, it's a, you know, Ethereum's been around for a long time, surprisingly. There's been a lot of chaos, a lot of adventures. And I have to say, I've been in a lot of them, a lot of these like crazy, crazy times. So.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  And then that's definitely some of the stories I want to get told on the show today. But I think in order to tell those stories, we have to just go all the way back and hear a little bit about Griff Green. So Griff, who were you as a kid? What were you? Interested when you were growing up, what captured your attention? And how did Griff Green come to be Griff Green?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Uh, let's see, as a kid, I mean, I was just a normal kid. My mom was like a waitress. My dad was correctional officer. Actually, my dad was my stepdad. And I met my real dad when I was like 12. And I, I end up having about six parents. Right? And so that was really fun, having this like family of families. So many grandparents, so many socks at Christmas, you know? And I, I was, uh, I, I, I mean, I, we can zoom through it. You know, I used to coach my little brothers and sisters basketball teams. And I was really into basketball and ended up getting a, a chemical engineering degree. The University of Washington. In high school, I was on the-

• 7:02David Hoffman?

  Griff is a, Griff is really tall, by the way, for listeners that don't know that. He's a pretty tall guy.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not that tall guy for sure. He's got me by, by a mile, but yeah, I'm, I'm okay. It's fun on the screen, right? To come out of the screen and meet everybody in person and be like, who's tall? Who's short?

• 7:19David Hoffman?

  Right, it's, it's the fun game, like who's in tall Dow? Who's in short Dow?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that might be a fun game, right?

• 7:26David Hoffman?

  I've, I've been trying to poke the crypto Twitter sphere to start creating tall Dow and short Dow. But I don't know actually where short Dow starts.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 7:32David Hoffman?

  Where would you think short Dow should start?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I don't know, man, as shorter than me, no.

• 7:40David Hoffman?

  Okay, so we'll, we'll keep on zooming through your background. But you said you, you were, had like six parents, six family, like, uh, people taking care of you. Cause a lot of the times I've heard you talk, you have very communal vibes about you.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 7:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, do you think, are those two things connected?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 7:56David Hoffman?

  You think?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Maybe, I'm definitely a sharing is caring kind of guy. But, uh, I don't know, probably. I, I, I definitely like the family vibe and you know, it's just, but it's the same thing. It's like divorced parents and stuff. So it wasn't all communal. It was, it was just like-

• 8:11David Hoffman?

  Wasn't one set of one family of parents.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, the tribal, polyamorous, like, life. No, it was just more, more muggly than that, you know? Pretty normal lifestyle. Yeah, and I don't know, I don't feel like there's- Too much interesting things. I grew up in Spokane, which is like part near in Washington State, near Idaho. You know, nothing wild there. Went to, lived in Seattle for like eight years and actually.

• 8:37David Hoffman?

  Where in Seattle did you live?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Uh, in North Seattle, uh, all over North Seattle. I went to UW for four years. So I was in the U District and.

• 8:44David Hoffman?

  Great school.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Lake City and uh, yeah, just all over Maple Leaf, Green Lake.

• 8:49David Hoffman?

  Now.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  You know, just.

• 8:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we have.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Dancing around.

• 8:52David Hoffman?

  That's, that's where my family is, is Maple Leaf.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Wow. Do you know Pataia, uh, Paya, Payatai Cuisine? It's like a, an apartment building on 90th and Lake City Way?

• 9:03David Hoffman?

  Hmm. I definitely have driven right past it a bajillion times, but no.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  There's a strip, there's a strip club there called Ricks.

• 9:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's still there. That's still there.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Oh, good. In the Shanty Tavern.

• 9:13David Hoffman?

  I passed by, I, I passed by Ricks and I drive up to my dad's house.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, there's, uh, that apartment building right across the street. I lived there for like two years. So that's.

• 9:23David Hoffman?

  Hmm. Okay. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. No, we're, we're, we're from the same part of the woods, man.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Nice. Nice. Yeah. I love Seattle. Um, actually I, I, um, I cut, I'm a, I'm really more of a community organizer in the theorem space. And I cut my teeth with the Save Our Sonics. There was this like, you remember, of course, the Seattle SuperSonics. So. I was a huge Sonics fan, like out of this world Sonics fan. I all, I had a whole room like, uh, when I was a chemical engineer and I like. Moved up to a decent, like, I shared a house with another chemie and we got like a really nice party house for a little bit. And, uh, I had a whole room dedicated to the Sonics. It was just wall to wall Sonics gear, right?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  And I had a, I would carry a Gary Payton rookie card in my pocket everywhere I go and.

• 10:13David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Like cut out the, the only days I didn't wear Sonics gear was the days after they'd lose a game because I was in mourning. You know, it was like, uh, I had all these traditions built around it. My whole life purpose was basically to get courtside seats. Uh, of the Sonics and. And then they were bought by a basket by like this guy in Oklahoma City who said he wanted to keep them there. But also before he bought the team, he's like, I'm bringing a team to Oklahoma, you know? So everyone knew that it was a scam. He he sold off all of the good players and then got a bunch of rookies and stuff and good draft picks like Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And then like because the team sucked, he was like, oh, well, hey, either we get a new arena or we move because this is how it works. And and so for two years I was like general of the fans, working to keep the team in town. So this is like my political movement, you know? And it I was already kind of an Austrian economist, like I I I kind of came from that side of of the scene. I hated the banks, hated all the like, all of the um, all the taxes and these sorts of things that would that were I don't know, challenging to like individual freedom.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  And I kind of like put some of those values on hold so I could try to like get taxes for an arena.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  And and then we actually were about to win. There was this court case that we that we levied where they we paid for some improvements to Key Arena, which they were playing basketball in at the time. And they had a 15 year contract that had a clause in it that's like special purpose. Like they have to stay in Seattle and play games in that arena. According to this contract for 15 years and it only been 13 years. So it was a pretty clear cut case and that and we held a huge rally like that I that I organized. It was like 3000 person rally in front of Key Arena. And, you know, I had to get the permits and all that crap.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And Gary Payton and Sean Kemp were there, you know, and it was like, it was basically this huge, it was a huge thing. And then the day the judge was going to give their ruling that was going to like, keep the team there for two more years. And it would have basically forced the guy into selling the team because we had rallied support against him all over the place. The mayor held a press conference right before the ruling and said, actually, I'm just gonna sign away the team and they're gonna give us like sixty million dollars and that's it. And it was like, I had worked, you know, two years, every ounce of time that I had was dedicated to this, I was championing this cause and then with one stroke of a pen, some politician

• 13:09Speaker 01

  just said, ah, fuck it, you know. Sorry, can I swear on this?

• 13:13David Hoffman?

  Oh, absolutely, yeah. Is that your Blizzard nerfing, the warlock spell that created it? Is that your moment for you?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I basically lost it, you know, and it's, of course, you know, the worst things that happen to you are always the best things that happen to you, you know? If we would have succeeded and kept the Sonics in town, I probably would just be an overweight chemical engineer, like with courtside seats, just, you know, sitting in a cubicle, hacking, building power plants for the man, right? But instead, I was like, fuck all this. I asked to be laid off in two thousand eight, when all the layoffs were coming, right?

• 13:51David Hoffman?

  When was the whole Sonic story? When did that happen again?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Sonic, so the Sonic-

• 13:55David Hoffman?

  I should know this. A lot of my friends were at that rally, by the way.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 14:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  That's so cool!

• 14:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we were in middle school at the time.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess the Sonics would have happened in two thousand nine, and then that would have been like, summer of two thousand nine, I think. And then the layoffs happened at the end of two thousand nine, so it was like a few months later, and I'd already kind of like, it was just like in my mind, like, I don't wanna do this anymore. There's also some stuff with the chemical engineering. I'm a pretty ethical, I'm a hippie, straight up, right? And I had to design an aeration basin for the pollution that was coming out of this aluminum smelter. And like, so I was working for a power plant company that was doing mostly natural gas power plants and also some renewable energy power plants.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  And I felt fine with that because natural gas is basically a waste product, you know? They often just burn it after drilling for oil. So it feels like you're taking garbage and turning it into electricity people can use. I felt okay with that and super clean. But this specific power plant that I was designing and working on was fueling an aluminum smelter. And it was my job to take the pollution from the aluminum smelter and, you know, make it prepared well enough for the ocean. The problem is that this-

• 15:19David Hoffman?

  Prep the pollution for the rest of the world.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  The secret to chemical engineering, a dirty little secret, the solution to pollution is dilution. So the real question was how much seawater do I pump into our pollution before you just dump it out into the ocean?

• 15:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, can we turn it into not waste by diluting it with a lot of things that isn't waste?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I mean, it's still poison, but you know, hey, at least it's diluted. So it's like, oh, and so I actually was, you know, there's a lot of buffers. There's a lot of interesting things with ocean water. It's not like clear cut. If you bring in this ocean water, how will the pollution react with the ocean water? And, and so I kind of cheated a little bit and I made the specification a little conservative on what the pH would be. The regulations in Abu Dhabi were horrible and it was like the ocean was a pH of 8.4 and the pollution coming out, the regulations said it had to be a pH of 6. And that's, that's a logarithmic scale.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  So that's like the, the pollution can be 300 times more acidic than the ocean water itself. That's not cool, you know, like a little, and so I cheated and I was trying, I had like one calc over here and then the calc that was the official calc that would like say, hey, look, an engineer said this would give out these results. And I kind of just like tweaked it so that the pH would be about seven, which is rainwater and totally great. But then the seawater pumps were so big that it didn't really, wasn't very cost effective. And my boss basically told me to redo the caliph and fix it because it's not right. Like, that's just not real. And I was like, ah shit. And so I should have said at the time, if, you know, I was, I was a lot younger than I am now.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  I should have said, I actually don't feel good about this. Can you just make someone else do it? But instead I fixed it and, you know, did the math right. And then now there's a pipe in Abu Dhabi that's like little fish are swimming in front of it and going, ah, it burns. And then, you know. And so that plus the sonics, I was just like, I'm done with chemi, I'm done with all of this chemical engineering stuff. I just want to like sell everything I own and become a hippie, right? So.

• 17:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, society just turned, you just got turned off by society.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:31David Hoffman?

  From the left and the right.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. It's just like, this is, I wanted to exit the banks, exit the American system and the American way of materialism and, and the classic things. And just, so I just sold everything I own. I bought a pop top van and drove around the States for a little bit, had a great time. Uh, went to Burning Man for the first time. This is 2011. And, uh, because I was doing a lot of stuff, I had started a little moving company and I, I was doing all sorts of random, you know, under the tail. Basically started Craigslist businesses all over the place.

• 18:09David Hoffman?

  And just gig work, you were, you were just like doing a bunch of different things to scrape some dollars together just so you could keep on doing what you're doing.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is that about right? Exactly. And I was living off savings, you know, I was a chemical engineer. I, I never really bought a lot of things. I, I was always pretty cheap. And, uh, and also I was buying, I was storing all of my value in gold and silver. And eventually I avoided even having a bank account. And so I just had gold, silver bars. And I would go and go to a, there's Northwest Territorial Mint, which doesn't exist anymore, but down in Tacoma. So I'd just make it run down to Tacoma, buy a bunch of gold and silver. And then like, you know, that's where I would put my money and.

• 18:50David Hoffman?

  That was your bank account?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was doing that beef when I was a chemical engineer too. So.

• 18:56David Hoffman?

  Right. Before crypto was even a thing. So you had gone bankless before Bitcoin had even mined its first block.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. And then when I heard about Bitcoin, well, no, I still had a bank account. I probably went bankless in 2011. Where I had no bank account and maybe even 2010, somewhere in that time, I didn't have a bank account and I didn't have a bank account for years, actually.

• 19:19David Hoffman?

  What motivated, because that's a big pain in the butt. Like, I want to break up with my bank just as much as like Ryan does and as much as I say that I do on the podcast. But like also, I still need to like, you know, pay rent and stuff like that. So not having a bank account would be like really cumbersome, I would imagine.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  It was.

• 19:34David Hoffman?

  Where did the motivation come to just like access your bank account?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  You know, at the time, it was like Occupy Wall Street was going on. There was a lot of things and really this idea of banks being the root of all heathle. You know, like, could we have war without banks payrolling it? You know, the whole banking system being this, being something I didn't want to support. I didn't want my energy to be part of that world, you know? I just wanted to escape. And I was living in a van, right? I was totally off the grid. I didn't, I wouldn't do any, I was doing Craigslist deals back and forth, you know? And just playing the, playing the free market without governments and banks. That was like where I wanted to be. So I made that reality, right?

• 20:22David Hoffman?

  So you weren't a gold bug. You didn't really believe in gold, like going up in price. You were literally just using it as a tool?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I did, I was a gold bug of sorts, but I really was just like the fiat, like you, the Federal Reserve note is garbage. So what can I keep my value in, you know, gold or, and that's the thing, buying and selling stuff on Craigslist that I thought was a good deal. That I could like, you know, hold on to small things and large things and then put it back on and try to make some money here and there. Improve the Craigslist ads, basically, you know? So I would store my capital in things that I thought were good investments. That were not part of, like, not Amazon stock, but, you know, whatever I could.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so it just, and then stuff that I could add.

• 21:12David Hoffman?

  The original NFT flipping?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit, a little bit.

• 21:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, where you're trading physical goods on Craigslist and the way that people are flipping NFTs on OpenSea right now?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. NFTs on OpenSea is so much better. Oh my God. You know, you don't have to go talk with someone and then give them cash. And then they're probably like, they're, half the time they're a scammer and just a time waster.

• 21:33David Hoffman?

  I think it's crazy how much of your pre crypto life actually resembles what crypto life is nowadays. That's really funny.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And that's how I got into it, right? Like, I saw a Trace Mayer video when Bitcoin was $5. And then I was like, oh, this is so cool, you know? I can't believe they made it money outside of the banking system. I want to see this nerd money, you know? But then it was like, to get it, you had to wire money to somewhere in Japan, Mount Gox, right? Empty Gox. And I just, I was like, no, I'm not gonna do that. How is that even?

• 22:08David Hoffman?

  It's not that cool.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And wiring, I don't want to talk to the banks. They don't exist in my world, right? So, but then eventually, one of my buddies figured out how to get Bitcoin from Coinbase. This is in 2013. And at that time, I had left the States completely. I sold my van and I started traveling, went to South America, Ecuador. And I love Latin America. And I fell in love with that area of the world. And then came back to the States, went to Burning Man again, that's 2012. Then I went to Asia, went to India for a few months, went to Kumba Mela, the largest gathering of humans. Every time it happens, every 12 years, 100 million people.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Oh, the bathrooms were gross, man. The bathrooms were, oh, wow, wow. Like, a tin roof, like, kind of cubicle thing with just shit smeared all over the walls.

• 23:04David Hoffman?

  Oh, no.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was atrocious, but interesting for sure. Kind of like a spiritual Burning Man where there's, yeah. Anyway, I can keep going. And then there's, then I went to Thailand. And while I was in Thailand, my buddy, I was just talking to my buddy, he's like, yeah. He was buying drugs on Silk Road, right? And he told me, he could, he was using Bitcoin. Oh, my God. Dude, I want some, right? I had some gold and silver stored with another friend in the in the States. And he would sell it and then wire me money.

• 23:41David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And that's that's how I was traveling. And

• 23:44David Hoffman?

  Okay, so you had a bank account?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  No, I didn't have a bank account. He would wire me money, I'd pick it up at a at a like

• 23:50David Hoffman?

  Ah.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Um, you know, one of those Western Union or whatever. Yeah, money gram places. And uh, and then, and he would sell the gold and silver for me. Usually he'd just buy it from me and then sell it a little later whenever he felt like it. And then, so he's actually gave my friend three grand worth of gold and silver. It's about fifty fifty. And then my buddy sent me three grand of Bitcoin. And I instantly turned that Bitcoin into half Bitcoin, half Litecoin, Namecoin, Purecoin, Primecoin, a Terracoin, Feathercoin, you know, everything that was on uh, on BTCE.

• 24:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Uh, which was the exchange I was holding my Bitcoin on. And this is like, oh, this was right after this, uh, the Cyprus riots, you know, and there was this uh, in April twenty thirteen Bitcoin, I was watching Bitcoin and it had gone up from, you know, fifty dollars to about two hundred and fifty dollars and then crashed down to fifty dollars. And right at the crash uh, is when I made the trade. And so I was able to buy Bitcoin at about like somewhere it was, I bought it a few times at around fifty uh, fifty eight dollars was the lowest price I got. Uh, and most of it was around ninety dollars. Uh, the average price was about eighty. And so I had like three grand at eighty dollars.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  And then uh, while I was, eventually I went back to the States and I got a girlfriend in LA. And so then I was living in West Hollywood. I learned to become a Thai masseuse in Thailand. And so that was what my profession was going to be, I figured. And so I was giving Thai massages in Beverly Hills. I had a like a nice, a clientele that liked me as a bear. You're right, I had like, I passed my card to this one guy and then he passed it to a bunch of friends. And it was like all these gay guys in Beverly Hills. And that was like my big, my big money. So I was getting paid like two hundred dollars um, uh, at massage to go in and like, you know, uh. It was a little awkward sometimes, I'm not gonna lie.

• 25:54David Hoffman?

  I'm sure, I'm sure.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  There's definitely.

• 25:56David Hoffman?

  I'm sure there's stories inside of stories inside of stories, yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  We can keep it, we can keep it PG, we don't need to go there, yeah, that's, that's fine.

• 26:04David Hoffman?

  So, when you traded your gold for Bitcoin, what was the motivation on that? Was it that it's literally a digital form of gold, so it's like the UX for you and your life is better? Or was it more speculation, it was like, I think this thing could go up in price?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  A little bit of both, but mostly speculation. I mean, it had just crashed from 250 to 50, and, and I had seen it when it was $5. So I had a good feeling about it, to say the least.

• 26:29David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And, but the idea, and the promise was there. But honestly, it didn't work for what I wanted to do, because eventually, I had to even interact, I had to get a bank account. Bitcoin actually made me get a bank account. And so, I know, isn't that sad?

• 26:49David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  So sad.

• 26:51David Hoffman?

  But this is why we talk about why we need DeFi, but that's a subject for a different day.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is 2013, 2014. DeFi was a gleam in Vitalik's eye, to say the least.

• 27:02David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  I mean, Ethereum didn't even exist. In fact, it was an interesting time, you know, I, I would, so Bitcoin, I was in West Hollywood, and Bitcoin went from, you know, $100 to $1,000. And it blew my mind, because I turned 3 grand into 24 grand. Mostly Litecoin money was like where the big profit was.

• 27:25David Hoffman?

  Gains, yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I bought Litecoin at $2.50 and went to $42, right? And so, it's just mind-boggling. And I, so I turned 3 grand into 24 grand, and I'm like, I could live off this for a year. Like, well, what is this stuff? You know, I'm gonna stop massaging, massaging and just research Bitcoin. And I'm a chemical engineer, I have a technical background, I'm not a dev, but I would, but I'm a community organizer and with some technical understanding. So I can like, I dove in, and then the deeper I went, the more value-aligned I found myself. At the time Bitcoin was a mix of all, there was no blockchain, no one talked about blockchain.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  They just talked about Bitcoin and all the Ethereum people were in Bitcoin, you know?

• 28:13David Hoffman?

  Right, because there wasn't Ethereum at that time, right?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was no Ethereum, there was no, there was, uh, Mastercoin was coming up. NXT was coming up, there were these other like 2.0 coins, uh, what they're called, uh, like.

• 28:28David Hoffman?

  Vitalik called these, uh, Swiss Army knife coins, right? Like it's where Bitcoin is like a knife. All these other coins came out like were Swiss Army knives where they did a bunch of things. Um, but no one had yet cracked trying completeness yet.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  No, and a lot of people, I, you know, there were a lot of forks of other of Bitcoin too. They were just the Dogecoin honestly was like my favorite community by far. Uh, there's lots of fun stuff going on and people had high vibes. Everywhere else it was so much money, money, money, money. But there were pockets of the Bitcoin community, which turned into Ethereum community, honestly, that were talking about the revolutionary aspects of how you can use this currency to, and and currency creation in itself to actually like change the way we coordinate as a society. And that's where I just was like, yes, yes, yes, we can do, you know, here, we can start doing things.

• 29:24David Hoffman?

  So this moment in your life to me seems like the counter moment to you tapping out of society after the Sonics and the O8 crisis and also the whole like a nuclear power plant thing. Or not, maybe not nuclear.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Um, yeah.

• 29:38David Hoffman?

  So like the one ejected you from, so you chose to eject yourself from society. Now with discovering the ethos behind Bitcoin, you're like, oh, this like I'm, I want to go into this society. I'm like, I'm ready to get back into the world of the world. Is that a fair description?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I wouldn't say get back into that world, but get back, get into the crypto world.

• 29:58David Hoffman?

  Into something, right, yeah, exactly.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  I'm like, how do I do it? And actually, uh, I never, I have very little faith in educational system and certificate. I always thought certifications were bullshit, but, uh, Because I'm like, I want to get into crypto. How do I do it? I took, I made two choices. Uh, number one, I broke up with my girlfriend because she was jealous of Bitcoin. I was given too much attention. I was obsessed with Bitcoin and she wanted my attention. I was just like, I love you, but I can't, I'm obsessed. My man possessed, right? And

• 30:31David Hoffman?

  Wow, I, I think all, there are any crypto wives or crypto girlfriends listening to this might absolutely empathize with that.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I feel bad, but it wasn't gonna happen. So I, I broke up with her and went to Ecuador and was like, I'm gonna be the

• 30:46David Hoffman?

  Is that really the reason? It was like you just couldn't stop focusing about Bitcoin and, and it just drove a wedge in the relationship?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I, I mean, before I was giving her a lot more attention. I would go and massage for two to four hours a day, max. And we would hang out and there's lots of quality time. I mean, there was love, like, you know, love languages, right? Like quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, you know, all these things. And I didn't have the time to do quality time. And so that, that, I don't want to say it was only because of that. There, of course, it's always a very complex thing. But in the end, uh, she wanted to be in LA. And I didn't see like a lot of value in being in LA while I'm focusing all the time on Bitcoin.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And I saw a lot of opportunity to bring Bitcoin to Ecuador, right? And it was like, I'm gonna bring Bitcoin to Ecuador. I'm going to, uh, and, and I'm going to get a master's degree in digital currencies. Those are like the two, that was the path I, I chose to take for the next period of time. And so I went to Ecuador. I started knocking, I, I started just making meetups with the few other people that were into crypto there. I chose Ecuador, number one, because I loved Ecuador. It's my favorite place in my travels. And, uh, number two, they use the US dollars and they have a 5% tax on any money that leaves the country. So I'll be honest and like, well, this is an opportunity, right? Because we have payment rails that the government can't meter.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And it seems like easy money, like, let's just get a, let's get a Bitcoin community here. People, once people trust it, people will use it because there's a 5% reason to use it, right? And so I was gonna start.

• 32:33David Hoffman?

  The business model writes itself.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. I didn't know exactly how or what, but I knew I just needed to meet like-minded people and build something. And so I met like-minded people and was while I was getting this master's degree and ended up like finding out that Ecuador had their own plans for a digital currency of like a phone currency, a dumb phone currency. Also, I found out that it was just really hard to talk to Ecuadorians about like this kind of tech. I would go, I had some success, like early on, it was like, wow, no one has, they're just like a kind of afraid of technology. They didn't trust technology, right? And so I would actually go to, well, where are the tech people?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  I go to colleges and actually just knock on doors of computer science classrooms. I say, hey, I want to give everyone in here a little bit of Bitcoin and tell them about it. And I did this seven times and four out of the seven times they let me in. And I would just like, you know, interrupt their class, which maybe it says something about the educational opportunities in Ecuador. I don't know, like, and then I would just like give a little bit of Bitcoin to a few people and then tell them to pass it on, right? And then so everyone is sending each other Bitcoin in the classroom. I tell them about blockchain.info and show them how to save, create a wallet and save their, save their 17 words, I think it was at the time.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  You know, and everything was, all the standards have changed at this point. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun and I loved it, but then eventually, you know, it was clear that Ecuador was going to make Bitcoin illegal. And the jails in Ecuador, they don't feed you. So I was like, you know, I think I'm gonna bail on this idea and, and just continue my crypto journey elsewhere.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I went to Burning Man, as I do every year, and just kind of bumming around in the States. I decided to live in a van in the States again, actually a U-Haul, and so.

• 34:39David Hoffman?

  At this point, where are you conversing with other crypto people online? Is it on Reddit? Is all on Reddit?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Reddit, yeah.

• 34:46David Hoffman?

  What was the community there like? Was there like reoccurring names that you would like converse with on frequently?

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Andreas Antonopoulos videos were like my crack. I mean, I couldn't get enough. I've probably watched every Andreas Antonopoulos video that existed. I had a, I had a master's program. So there are the people in that program and the teachers and, and all that.

• 35:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that master's program, who was giving a masters in digital currency?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  University of Nikosia.

• 35:12David Hoffman?

  What's that?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  It's a college in Cyprus.

• 35:14David Hoffman?

  Was that literally cryptocurrency or?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, digital currency. So I have a ma, I have the first master's degree in digital currencies that ever existed. First degree in digital currencies that ever existed.

• 35:24David Hoffman?

  Is that program still running?

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, still running, still going strong. Andreas Antonopoulos was part of it and teaches the first course. It's like a MOOC online that anyone can take and.

• 35:36David Hoffman?

  So what, what was actually like the course matter? Because there wasn't, it was in 2013 or 14, there wasn't really much to talk about at the time, other than just like, yeah, how a blockchain works, right?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I would say that it was more of a international finance degree and business degree than it was. You know, I learned about how international finance works, the, you know, the Fed, Federal Reserve system, like, like moving money around, you know, all these different, like, what do nation states do? How do they move money around? And so, and there was, there was some crypto stuff, yeah. I mean, I definitely, like, my first project was, well, later I wrote a white paper for a bike sharing economy, mostly based on the BitShares protocol and, and their terminology there.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  It was like decentralized autonomous corporations. And there, you know, there was like little projects like that and, and, and a lot of international banking laws and legal stuff that you learn about. But honestly, I bet the course matter is so different now.

• 36:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, it has to be. While you were in tinkering around with BitShares, did you come across Rin Christensen?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  You know, I I got to meet Rune uh bef- like while the DAO was happening, but I didn't actually got get to talk to Rune during those days, no.

• 36:59David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  But Rune told me that uh later on, like, because he was in Seattle a lot, and I was in Seattle a lot during the DAO days. And he was like, why are you guys using 16 decimals? That is the dumbest idea ever. You're ruining the standard. Everyone should use 18. And he had a couple of other things about the DAO. And we had, we had like a nice, a nice exchange, maybe arguments, maybe arguments about design choices. Uh, so that was really fun. But yeah.

• 37:28David Hoffman?

  So, okay, so this is a 2013, 2014. When did Ethereum arrive uh across your feed of your life?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is, the, the master's degree was 2014, 2015, 2016. It was a two-year degree. And uh I came about, you know, when I first heard of Ethereum, I thought it was vaporware. That was kind of the resounding opinion of the internet. And I didn't know any of the Ether Ethereum crew. So I was just-

• 37:57David Hoffman?

  What was the alternative blockchains that weren't Bitcoin? What was the vibe like way back then about like non-Bitcoin things? Like, was there Bitcoin maximalism?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Oh, it was fine.

• 38:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, really? No?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  No, I mean, there was a little bit.

• 38:10David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  But that came from uh, that, that was like, what was it? Blockstream, you know? Blockstream really created that. And before Ethereum existed, it was, Bitcoin was much more idealistic. There was still hope that we would change the block size, you know? That was, and that was a debate that started, really, probably even before I heard about it in like 2014, 2015. It was probably there the whole time, just like people expecting it would happen. Uh, and, and then Blockstream, who was paying all the devs and, you know, putting, throwing money around, uh, decided that it wasn't good for Lightning Network and their other investments and said, no. And used a lot of cultural tools to overtake the Bitcoin ecosystem, in my opinion.

• 38:54David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  And, and uh really pushed the, the small blocks uh ideas, which-

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Anyone who wanted to use Bitcoin for anything cooler than a store of value could see that that's a dumb idea. But, uh, you know, I guess it's, I, in the end, it works out fine. I think the Bitcoin crew and the push. During that time, I felt very sad, you know, and, and, and disgruntled because I, I saw the potential of using Bitcoin as a, as a, as the layer of, you know, revolution of, and evolution of how we can coordinate as a society around, like, these public goods is now the terminology, but like, just around like basically placing governments with economies, which is what I was always really stoked about, that what these tools could do.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  And, uh, yeah, and so I was, I was pretty sad about that approach at the time, but now I feel like it's the right way.

• 39:50David Hoffman?

  Did you blame Blockstream?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I, I, I feel like, I mean, they're, they're by far the largest voice, uh, pushing that direction and, uh, you know, it was Blockstream and what was, man, I'm losing all these names and terms. It's been so long. Thalius or the, the, basically the guy, the moderator of the subreddit, RBTC.

• 40:12David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  And our Bitcoin. And he was also the moderator of a few other things, like that guy, uh, was censoring everybody and it got, it just got really ugly, you know, and, uh, but, you know, before, I got into Ethereum, before that all started kicking off, uh, because I wrote, so in my master's degree, there was a, a task to write a will contract using the Bitcoin blockchain, right? And so I was like, oh, cool. Uh, can I use Ethereum instead? I had, so I, let's back up a little bit. So I wrote this, uh, I wrote this bike sharing economy white paper. And it was really cool. The idea was like, uh, it was called bicycles in kind for everyone.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Uh, B I K for E, but the four was silent, so it was bike, right? And, uh, There would be like a currency that would be printed and vested inside a bicycle whenever you would donate it to the network. So you would bring, you would go and get a network, uh, get the bike and you would steward the bike, but the idea was the bike was owned by the DAP, the DAP, because that was the terminology at the time, the DAO.

• 41:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Uh, would own all the bikes. And if you were the first bike, within like a hundred mile radius, you'd get this bonus of extra tokens that would be held in the bike, right? And then, you know, as more bikes were in that area, then the bonus would decrease. And it was this like, you'd be basically printing money to create a bike sharing network, international bike sharing network in cities around the world was the design.

• 41:45David Hoffman?

  Which I think we are definitely now, I mean, there are like electric scooters, electric bikes all over cities, all over the world nowadays. It's just that they're run by corporations, not decentralized corporations.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it'd be so cool. And I think that eventually we will see that reality where these things are owned by DAOs and not corporations. But, uh, the, you know, bridging meat space and crypto space is harder than it sounds. So.

• 42:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's extremely hard.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Hasn't happened yet. But, uh, I made that bike, it was the sharing economy was really interesting to me. And using that as a gateway to like, own the collective ownership by communities without governments, which is, which is always where I've been focusing on. And, uh, I sent that, uh, vid, I made a video explaining the white paper for my class and I sent that to Slocet, which when I Googled sharing economy, you know, uh, Bitcoin, so I Googled, because at the time crypto was barely a term. Uh, Slocet was the number one thing that was coming up. And this was way before the DAO or anything. In fact, Slocet had just had a website. When you Google stuff, uh, back

• 42:55Speaker 01

  then, there wasn't much, you know, when I, I was reading all of the media, I could read all of the media. Cause there just wasn't that many people talking about this.

• 43:05David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  And, uh, so Slocet came up on my radar and I basically would email them every couple of weeks and saying, I will work for free. I wanna, I wanna support you guys in this mission. Like pick me up. I'm getting a master's degree. I'm doing this. Eventually Christoph Yenz, uh, who was a pretty huge member of the, the early Ethereum, uh, community. He, uh, He would, he saw my video and was like, this guy is funny. Okay, cool. Uh, and then like let me work for free and I was effectively their first employee. So it was like Slocket, uh, the three founders and me eventually left or has joined. And this is 2015. And that was my first experience with Ethereum and realizing Ethereum was a real thing.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Before that, uh, everyone, like if you were just a casual Reddit user, Ethereum was vaporware. It will never really work. It was never a thing. They don't have any prototypes. They don't have anything you can use. You know, and, and that was the resounding idea. They did a crowd sale and it's a Ponzi.

• 44:09David Hoffman?

  Right. So that's why I asked about like the culture around like non Bitcoin coins. And it, and it's weird to hear you say that, uh, there was no such thing as Bitcoin maximalism. All these other coins were out there were generally accepted. But then this Ethereum came around, Ethereum thing came around and it was vaporware. How did, why, why do you think people thought it was vaporware at Genesis?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Because people, because Ethereum raised money and they didn't do what you would call now a fair launch, right? Usually most people just, uh, would launch the token. That was the prevailing.

• 44:42David Hoffman?

  It was the mere fact of the fact that they actually just had a raise and they sold the tokens.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. They raised a bunch of money and then, you know, now they have that money and they're working on stuff. Sure they are, right? Uh, let's see where, why aren't you launching something? Where's the, you know, where's the Genesis block? Blah, blah, blah. And so for years, that was the understanding or maybe a year and a half. And then like they started deploying things and, and you could use it. And then it's like, okay, this isn't vaporware. This is interesting. There was also some design choices, man, that I didn't agree with, with Ethereum. You know, it's like there's no checksum in the address, right?

• 45:17David Hoffman?

  I don't, I don't know what that means.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  In every other crypto, uh, the last few digits of the address is a checksum. And actually the last few digits will tell you if the address is a valid address.

• 45:30David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  So like if you change one character in a Bitcoin address. Every wallet could tell you that is an invalid address.

• 45:38David Hoffman?

  As in like there are no private keys that associate with that address?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, or it's more like th- this address is following an invalid format, so it can't be real. Right? Because there's these extra, I don't know if it's like four or seven characters or whatever at the end of the address that are derived from the rest of the address. And so, and credit cards are like this. Every credit card has a checksum and that's how you're, when you type it in online, they know that that is like a valid, you know, credit card number. And so, this is not existent in Ethereum, right? And it's just like, why? And why are there so few characters, you know, and like there's just weird choices, you know, there are weird choices.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  And people at the time when they were talking about these choices, it's just like, why are you doing it? What about the rest of crypto? What we learned and what we determined, you know? Where's the HD wallets? Where are these things? So, yeah, it was easy to hate on Ethereum early on. But then I got into the community and wow, it was so lovey dovey. So I had that will contract, right? I had to write a will contract and because I had started working for Socket, I was like, how about I do it in Ethereum instead of Bitcoin? Is that okay professor? Right? And he's like, yeah, sure, give it a try. And he didn't know anything about Ethereum and he just thought that was cool. And this project was supposed to take like a week and it was, it was a huge project. I did it in four hours on Ethereum and I don't know how to code.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  So like, I mean, I took a coding class in college, but I'm fresh. And, and so I was like, whoa, Ethereum is better.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And while everyone else is like grueling away on this project, I'm like, I'm done. And, and so then I actually made a blog post for Socket that was like, hey, how to make, how I made a will contract on Ethereum. And it was basically my homework assignment, but I was like, I'll make it a blog post and hang out with the Ethereum community. And everyone was so nice. My, my expectation was like, I'm gonna post this and I'm gonna get a bunch of people tell me how shitty it is and how dumb I am and da-da. Cause that's the crypto community.

• 47:54David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  But Ethereum community, it was just all love, like, oh, that's a really nice try. Oh, that's so cool. That's, that's, that's cute, you know, a little bit of that. Oh, that's cute.

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  It's cute you did that, yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then Absa, Alex Vandesan, who works for the Ethereum Foundation, took the time to show, to, and, and was really nice about like, here's a way that you could reduce the number of lines of code, like, because that's really important when you're coding in Solidity. Less surface area of attacks and stuff like that, or I don't remember what he said, but he was so nice about it and he improved it and I'm like, where am I?

• 48:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Is this crypto? This isn't crypto. This isn't even the internet. This is some rainbow fairyland with unicorns jumping around. It doesn't make any sense. And I was sold. Right away, I was sold on Ethereum. I'm like, this is the right. First off, it's easy to work on a non-developer could, I'm a technical person, but a non-developer could come in and actually make something that has utility. And, and everyone's like encouraging me.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  It was, blew my mind.

• 49:00David Hoffman?

  With the other like cryptos that were out there and like you, you talked about how like this homework assignment was meant for Bitcoin, but also in theory you could build anything on any other crypto. As somebody who like watched the development of the communities, of all crypto communities as they kind of came up and about. How did the crypto communities change over time? And then can you also just unpack even more the differences between the Ethereum community? That was created versus like the Litecoin community and the Bitcoin community that came around in the early days?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  I think the biggest difference is the money, the focus on money. And I think that the number one thing that built of such a beautiful culture in Ethereum was having our eth trader and our Ethereum.

• 49:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Having that separation really allowed Ethereum culture to develop in such an organic, natural, lovey dovey way. Where that like, you know, when you, when you. You think about money, it just brings you into that scarcity mindset. And you have this like, ah, number go up, you know, only up, I don't know, you know, and it's, it's this. You know, it doesn't really come, combine well with like, hey, let's advance society together.

• 50:10David Hoffman?

  Pause some games, yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, funding public goods, you know, coordination tools, like that. These two people, these two groups of, of things, like, what's great is you could go and have both. It's not like it's, oh, this person is all about that and this person's all about money. No, it's like when you want to talk about the money and you're ready for that ah vibe. Then you go there and it's like, oh yeah, number go up, cool, cool, cool. But when you want to talk about like, hey, how are we going to make the world a better place? Our Ethereum is there and no other crypto community had that.

• 50:43David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  I don't know who made that innovation, but it's, in my opinion, it's one of the most important things that happened in Ethereum history.

• 50:49David Hoffman?

  From what I remember, ETH trader was created because our Ethereum banned price talk. And so it was in a, uh, we're going to have these two communities build, be built up simultaneously. It was like, well, a lot of people wanted to talk prices and like all the developers of Ethereum, like Vitalik were like, I don't want to talk about prices. I want to talk about Ethereum. So they made, they banned price talk in our Ethereum. And then as a result, people were like, all right, well, we're going to go to our ETH trader and talk about prices over there. I, that's how I remember it happening.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Uh, that's great. Yeah. Because I wasn't part of the Ethereum community, really. I just started working for an Ethereum company, right? So that was be, before my Ethereum time. Other, other crypto communities, Dogecoin was great. I love Doge. Dogecoin with the tip bot and like, you know, bringing the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics and, and.

• 51:39David Hoffman?

  The Doge community, it was also not about money, right? It was about like jokes and vibes.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and those were the two Reddit communities I liked hanging out in. Yeah. BitShares was interesting, but like, I don't know, it didn't. Didn't have the right vibes. I also liked Monero. I liked the privacy focus. Like, I thought that was interesting, you know? But the rest of the communities, like Namecoin, Litecoin, all of those things, it was, they were lame. And then Bitcoin was all, be, just slowly became all about number go up. Like, all the interesting conversations eventually moved from Bitcoin. Those stuff that I would go to our Bitcoin for, they all moved to our Ethereum.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And it was a very natural progression for me to just, like, I just looked at our Bitcoin less and our Ethereum more. And eventually I barely looked at our Bitcoin.

• 52:34David Hoffman?

  Do you think our Ethereum and the Ethereum community kind of like sucked that side of Bitcoin away? Or do you think Bitcoin, the our Bitcoin number go up vibe pushed the builders out of Bitcoin? Or maybe it was a little bit of both?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Definitely both. You know, it's really hard not to be consumed by your holdings or biased by your holdings, right? So everyone had Bitcoins, so everyone cared about Bitcoin, right? No one, no one didn't care about Bitcoin.

• 53:03David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Because everyone has a decent chunk of change.

• 53:05David Hoffman?

  You couldn't not own Bitcoin. Yeah, right.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  If you cared about crypto, I mean, yeah, you really couldn't because pretty much that's how you'd get the money to an exchange. That's how you would, for most people, Bitcoin would, is the fiat, and still to this day, it's the fiat on-ramp and off-ramp. You know, Bitcoin has the, the network, the global network where you can buy and sell it, whether it's peer-to-peer or, or with exchanges, in every exchange, period. You know, I don't know any fiat exchange that doesn't have Bitcoin.

• 53:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  That would be wild. I'm sure it'll come soon, if it's not already there, but at that time, not even close. I think Bitcoin do network dominance was well above 95% for market cap.

• 53:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  For most of the time. So.

• 53:52David Hoffman?

  So I'll tell the story of getting even more just integrated with the Ethereum community.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Well, it was all through the DAO, right? So I was a community organizer and that's what I said I would do for Slock it. I like, I like doing community organization, you know, I, I'm good with people and I have a hug a troll approach, you know, when someone's trolling, it's like, ah, thank you for the feedback. That's so nice. You know?

• 54:13David Hoffman?

  Thank you for the troll. Nice man. Thank you. Appreciate that. Killing with love.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. With sincerity, because I'm not talking to the troll. I'm talking to everyone who's in the chatroom, you know, and it's always good to have that perspective. And, and so if the troll says something interesting, but with a negative tone, people might agree with the troll. So you have to be like, well, that's a valid concern for the people who aren't trolls that actually agree with the point that was poorly spoken, right? And so then it's like, well, duh, duh, duh. And these are the, the stuff that I learned also just from trying to keep the Sonics in Seattle. Surprisingly. And then we built one hell of a community. I'm also an educator. I was a coach. I was a math tutor.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  I was all these things. So, uh, you know, I created a DAO ninja course and, you know, at the time the ERC 20 standard was barely standard. And I, like, the first question in the DAO ninja course is like, what does approve do? You know, which is like basic knowledge now, but at the time I got wild answers, you know? And so we, we would, we had everyone who would, it was basically a test or an essay type assignment. And we graded the homework and different people became DAO ninjas, you know, and dude, all those DAO ninjas are rock stars in the Ethereum community today, right? The guy behind True Blocks, you know, Jordi Balina,

• 55:39Speaker 01

  who ended up, who's does so much and all these, all these OG Ethereum people. It's amazing. And same with the people in Slock it that, well, in the DAO chatroom that like became like insiders in the DAO and kind of in that middle layer. Uh, cause I would, my community management style is more of a fractal nature. It's like, well, let's. Create a group of people who are doing community management and I give them inside information like, oh, hey, here's the blog post that Slocket's gonna publish while it's in a Google Doc, like, what do you guys think? They go in and edit it for us, you know, and they would, for them, they're getting inside information. For us, they're editing our blog posts and giving us

• 56:22Speaker 01

  important feedback and, you know, and then they, they would feel like they're in the know and they could be good community management 24/7. So we had a group of like fif- uh, by the end of it, we had a group of about 50 people that were kind of like on the inside, you know, Cosla and Taylor from my Ether Wallet, my crypto and my Ether Wallet now. And, uh, yeah, and so like, we just, you know, Slocket had such a sexy product. It was the DAO, it was the first DAO. And we were going to build a universal sharing network, uh, which I helped develop a lot of the ideas around, you know, and it was like this idea that we could build a network where autonomous entities or anybody could actually post, uh, requests for, uh,

• 57:05Speaker 01

  you know, for buying and selling things or sharing things, renting things. And it was kind of like Craigslist for anything everywhere. And, uh, it was gonna be so cool. You could just go to a locker outside of someone's house or maybe on a corner that a few people would rent and it'd have a lock that you'd send Ethereum to. Uh, some Ethereum currency and, and then the lock would, maybe you'd send like, maybe there's a power drill in it and there's a lock. The lock requests $50, right? So you send $50 to the lock. And then you get the power drill and then you actually bring the power drill back to some dude who sits on his porch.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  You know, hanging out these times and he checks to make sure it's okay, puts it back in the, in the locker. He gets a dollar and you get, you know, $47 back. You pay $2 to use the drill. And, and then in this way, we can have a sharing economy and we can better utilize scarce resources and, and like manage things. And to the point where maybe you have a drone that comes and opens the lock for you, you know, and the, the drone. Drone collects money and the drone becomes its own autonomous economic agent. And maybe it's owned by a drone DAO and people invest in the drone DAO and the drones are going around providing value. In fact, we had a hackathon in 2015, I think it was the end of 2015.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Uh, where with this idea and the person who won it created a solar panel that would charge phones. Right. And then it would collect money and when it had collected enough money, it would put up an ad on the universal sharing network that would say, hey, connect another solar panel. And then it would check its voltage to see if the solar panel is working and on there. And then when the volt, when that's correct, the solar panel could, would release the escrow. And the person who added the solar panel would get paid and they could add batteries and solar panels. And, and it would just charge things. And they, and then, uh, you know, eventually the solar panel would grow and grow

• 59:10Speaker 01

  until all of humanity is just working on a solar panel and gets to see the light when the solar panel has a need. You know, but, uh, that's the dystopian.

• 59:18David Hoffman?

  This is, this is the, the part of the Ethereum culture that I actually kind of miss. Um, I, I came into 20, into Ethereum in 2017 and a lot, um, by that time, like ICOs had already been like decently tainted. But a lot of like the models for ICOs were crazy stuff like that. Where like, we can have just these global networks. We can put cryptocurrency inside of drones and they can deliver goods. Uh, if you need a drill, you can just go find the nearest drill and borrow it rather than going and buying another one. And then having that be a private good rather than a public good. And then like, it really got people's like imaginations going with like, what happens when we have like these global networks that also have money involved with them.

• 1:00:01David Hoffman?

  Like, I actually kind of really miss that era about Ethereum. Again, sadly, like a lot of these crazy futuristic ideas about what Ethereum could do ended up being, turning into like a white paper and an ICO and then a failure of an actual product to launch. But I really miss that, that, cause you don't really see these crazy ideological like use cases, like what you just discussed in Ethereum land anymore.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:23David Hoffman?

  I, I kind of miss that.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  And I feel like the DAO caused a lot of those problems, unfortunately.

• 1:00:30David Hoffman?

  Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Griff thus far. In the second half of the show, this is where we get into all of the story of the Dow. So stay tuned for that, strap in, it is an absolute wild one. But first, before we get there, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure that you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that you aren't paying high gas costs that you could have otherwise avoided. That's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha routes your orders across all the various DeFi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and gives you the best possible prices without taking any commission.

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• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  You know, like, because the DAO wasn't an ICO. The DAO was a huge raise, right? We raised $150 million, which was way more than we intended. And like, like, we thought, well, Christopher, Kristoff thought it was going to be five to 10. I thought it would be like 30, but obviously 150 was a lot more than all of that. And, and then when we had the hack, there was over $200 million in it at the time because ETH had gone up so much. And, and then everyone used that as an excuse to do ICOs because DAOs aren't safe. You know, Slocket didn't get any money. We raised $150 million and we didn't get anything.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  We were then going to have to request money from the DAO to do the universal sharing network. And it was really hard. There were lots of problems with that.

• 1:04:13David Hoffman?

  What was the relationship between Slocket and the DAO?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Slocket was a service provider.

• 1:04:18David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  So we worked like, you know, for free, basically to develop the DAO. And then we were going to ask funding from it. And the DAO was going to be like a sort of a collective organization that would fund various projects, not just ours.

• 1:04:35David Hoffman?

  And, and the idea was that like Slocket would build the code for the DAO. And then once the DAO was up and running, you would ask for like, hey, because we helped build this thing, can you guys pay us?

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Not, not retroactively. We actually wanted to build the, so the DAO served as our governing body. So we wanted to be an international, the universal sharing network. We wanted to be like, you know, not part of any nation state. We wanted to be governed by the, by the DAO.

• 1:05:00David Hoffman?

  Of the DAO.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so we wanted the DAO to be, we were choosing the DAO as our jurisdiction, which lived on the Ethereum blockchain as the main jurisdiction, and not in any specific jurisdiction, because what if someone puts weed in the locker? You know, like, you know, oh, God forbid, you know, and then what are we supposed to do? And so we just kind of circumvent this, and of course, now legal thought is very different. But to circumvent this, we thought, well, let's just create a DAO. And everyone wants a DAO anyway. And actually, at the time, it was always called, a lot of people were calling it DAO. But I'm a big fan of the DAO de Ching, and I pushed really hard to frame it as the DAO, you know, and call DAOs DAOs, which I feel like very successful at.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Now everyone, it's just a DAO, right?

• 1:05:47David Hoffman?

  Were you were the reason why we went from DAO to DAO?

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  I definitely made a huge push, huge push. At the time, it was kind of, there were people doing both. And, and even the DACs were also acceptable terminology. So then I pushed, and I think the DAO, because of its success, became its DAOs, right? And because I was pushing hard, and I, you know, had some fights, not fights, but discussions with Stefan and Christoph about this to get it to be DAO. But I was like, DAO de Ching, man. And so we got it, we got it through, and

• 1:06:24David Hoffman?

  We'll put a pin in that.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  I do want to say one other little thing on that, though, because the DAO was not supposed to be its name. It was supposed to vote on its name once it had good governance. So the DAO was a placeholder name.

• 1:06:36David Hoffman?

  I did not know that.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a placeholder name because the DAO should name itself. But it probably, once it worked out, it probably would have always been the DAO.

• 1:06:43David Hoffman?

  So I want to actually like go into the story intently. So when was the first time like the DAO came into your, into your brain? Like, when, when did you first run into the DAO?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  When

• 1:06:53David Hoffman?

  Or the concept of it?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  When we were diving into the Universal Sharing Network, we needed a, we need a solution for the jurisdiction. And we kind of always thought that we would have a DAO, but we didn't know exactly how to play it. At first, it was going to be the Slocket DAO, and we were going to have our own entity there. And then it was better, we figured, oh, it'd be better if the DAO was a separate entity, and we were a service provider working for the DAO, and the DAO pays us. And that was, that was, so it came from Slocket. Like, we, early on, I, I don't know if the plan was always to have the DAO.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  But it didn't come in my radar for after until working for them for like a couple of months.

• 1:07:33David Hoffman?

  Okay, so whose idea was the DAO?

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Probably Christoph Yance and like he's probably the main brain behind it.

• 1:07:40David Hoffman?

  Okay, and so he was the guy that triggered the idea to be in other people's brains as well. And eventually people were like, okay, let's do this. How did that story happen? Do you know?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, at the time DAOs were a major use case of Ethereum. That was always like, that was, that was Ethereum is a place where you could build DAOs, you know? And, and so the, the idea was there.

• 1:08:00David Hoffman?

  But also DAOs were very, very different from what we consider DAOs to be now, right? Cause right now DAOs are like a token gated discord and like snapshot vote. What, what did people consider DAOs to be back then?

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I, I think people thought of DAOs more focused on having their own economy a little bit. You know, that it'd be their own, their own token system and a way to collectively govern things. It was, I, I don't think it's changed so much, but I feel like it was less focused on corp- as a corporate entity and more focused on an economic entity at the time.

• 1:08:36David Hoffman?

  Right. I think back to like decentralized Uber, where like Uber, but as code on Ethereum, that's a DAO. Decentralized Airbnb, like that's a DAO. A decentralized drone network that delivers goods. If it's operated by like smart contracts on Ethereum, that drone network is a DAO. That's kind of how I remember it way back when.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I feel like there was just like, you know, there wasn't as much, there weren't DAOs.

• 1:09:01David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  So it was kind of like a lot of people saying, everything could be a DAO or this could be a DAO or that could be a DAO. So it was very dispersed, but I don't know.

• 1:09:10David Hoffman?

  And like the idea behind the DAO was like, all right, there's going to be all these other littler DAOs.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14David Hoffman?

  But what if we had like a DAO that managed the DAOs?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17David Hoffman?

  And that, that was the idea that became like the DAO?

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, part of the, the DAO, one of the names of the DAO that was going to come up was called the Genesis DAO. Because the idea was the DAO could break into lots of smaller DAOs. It would naturally do that because anyone who disagreed with a DAO vote could take their money and make- A child DAO. And then this, so if people, if like a proposal to come out for some like decentralized Uber. Or Golem, Golem was gonna propose to the DAO. And people voted no, like the mass voted no, but people that voted yes could just make a child DAO. And split and take their funds and make a Golem sub, a DAO, you know, a Golem DAO.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  That would be separate, but a child DAO of the DAO, right? Or people would burn their DAO tokens for the ether that's in the DAO and then it would go into the sub DAO and they would do Golem. And so it was kind of this way that we would just like make, here's this self-replicating DAO contract. Where everyone just proposes to the DAO, if they get it, they're part of the big club. If they don't, then they probably just create their own sub DAO. And really, anyone could start a startup in the DAO ecosystem.

• 1:10:30David Hoffman?

  Were people talking about conversations as the DAO as like a new government? Or like a new like

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:10:38David Hoffman?

  Large organi- yeah?

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, that's, that's the direction that I still believe DAOs will take. I actually saw a tweet by my, my, one of my heroes, Michael Sargum, that was like, I wonder if DAOs will, if, if DAOs to, will be what

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  corporation, will be to corporations as democracies were to monarchies. And I feel like, well, actually DAOs will be to democracies what democracies will be to mon- to monarchies. And I really, I really do believe that. It's, I feel like we have this opportunity to like cha- change the way we coordinate around, you know, things that governments do, which is provide public goods. You know, I, I don't even understand why we have to pay taxes, that, that whole idea is broken to me. If a government is creating value, they should just be rewarded for that value. Then we, we shouldn't need taxes, we shouldn't need sacrifice through nonprofits. We should be able to create economic models that reward value creation when it's happening. If people really believe that there's value being created.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  And and I feel like we're at the precipice of that. We're so close.

• 1:11:47David Hoffman?

  Right. So when the the DAO happened and people were like, you know, aping in, it was like one of the first big apes on Ethereum, were were people understanding that kind of like prospect of what the DAO was? Or like, yeah, that was like, oh, this could be like the new like global order?

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  I don't know about global order, but for the most part, it was like there was high vibes, super high vibes in the community, a lot of interest, and it was, it felt like a risk-free investment. I mean, in the end, it collected 14% of all ether in existence.

• 1:12:21David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Right? So 14% of, you know, all ether ended up in the DAO because it was like, well, if it doesn't work out, I can split the DAO and get my ether back. So it's like, I can be part of this super cool club at almost no risk.

• 1:12:38David Hoffman?

  Were there were there people talking about like, were there exploits or hacks or bugs at this point in Ethereum? Or were like the contracts just like not sophisticated enough?

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  There was, there, there were, there were, of course, small bugs and and things, but not things of, there was never anything near the scale.

• 1:12:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  All that was there was the Ethereum multi-sig. That's the only thing, repeated contract that had a lot of value behind it. It's nothing. There's nothing else.

• 1:13:06David Hoffman?

  Right. So like, no, no one really thought about like, oh, if I put my money in this contract, it could get exploited? That wasn't like a thought that people had?

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Solidity was eight months old.

• 1:13:18David Hoffman?

  So no?

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  No, there was, we started the whole smart contract auditing like idea. You know, we actually got an audit, but it was from a normal tech company that said, hey, yeah, there might be rounding errors. You know, that's like, that was all we got.

• 1:13:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  So there was no, there were no smart contract auditors. They didn't exist. We were buddy buddy with all the people who wrote Solidity. You know, Left Terrace and and Kristoff were major parts of that and who are our lead devs. And then, you know, Christian Wright-Wiesner, like, we talked to him all the time. And he invented Solidity. Don't listen to Gavin Wood. Christian Wright-Wiesner invented Solidity and and was maintaining it. So the everyone, Vitalik reviewed our code, you know, it doesn't get better than that, right? So. Uh, yeah, but there and and the DAO hack was not a simple thing, right? It was very complex.

• 1:14:13David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  The DAO hack contracts were larger than the DAO contracts. It was multiple contracts that are exchanging money between each other and exploiting this weird little bug that's in a subcontract over here. Really complicated stuff.

• 1:14:30David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  So it was hard to spot.

• 1:14:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so it was completely unprecedented. Like, not only were there two unprecedented things, the DAO receiving a ton of money, and then like people actually learning like, oh, these things can be exploited.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40David Hoffman?

  In ways that we had no idea.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  I mean, people knew it could be exploited, but the the ways were not known. You know, and that and that was actually what happened when we raised so much money. The DAO curators, the subgroup of the DAO that would allow people, they you had to propose to the curators and get whitelisted before you could propose to the DAO. Uh, they actually said, like, moratorium. Uh, it's too big to fail. We have, we can't let anyone propose to the DAO until we talk about this a little bit more. Right, and then, uh, but you could still split the DAO, which is where the bug was. So, uh, people would split. So so the bug was basically, oh, I'm gonna split the DAO, which is like the equivalent of rage quitting these days.

• 1:15:22David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  And you split the DAO and effectively you say, oh, yeah, here's my DAO tokens to burn. Okay, give me the ether. Ah, just kidding. Okay, here's my DAO tokens to burn. Uh, give me the ether. Ah, just kidding, you know?

• 1:15:37David Hoffman?

  It's like putting the quarter down a vending machine with a string tied around it?

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  With a string.

• 1:15:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Pulling it back.

• 1:15:41David Hoffman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Pulling it back, pulling it back, uh, uh, pulling it back forty times in a transaction. And then the transaction just fails, but you end up with all the ether.

• 1:15:49David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  And so, uh, but then, so the hacker did it and stole about four percent of all ether. And he says, sorry, do you want to set that up better?

• 1:15:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I just kind of want to go through the progression a a little bit. Were you watching, like, when the DAO got minted? Where were you when that happened?

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, when, I mean, I was, I was in, I was in Seattle, I think, uh, right when we launched the the the token generation event, you know?

• 1:16:14David Hoffman?

  Token generation event, right. Is that what they called it back then?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  I think we called it the, I think we called it token creation. I think we called it the token creation event. But.

• 1:16:24David Hoffman?

  And why did you guys do it? Because it wasn't just because you wanted the DAO to function with Slocet. It was more like, what was the motivation behind the DAO? Was it just about like an experiment or like the vision or what?

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  We were excited for DAOs on Ethereum. We were excited for, to play with these experimental tools for sure. I mean, the business model.

• 1:16:43David Hoffman?

  Did you have a plan? And did you have a plan like, okay, now that the DAO is minted, like here's the next steps? Or like that?

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah?

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, our first steps were to, to, okay, launch the DAO and then propose the universal sharing network to the DAO.

• 1:16:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Best, best laid plans, but they didn't.

• 1:16:58David Hoffman?

  But it wasn't about like, all right, like I'm going to be the leader of the DAO, the metaphorical CEO. Okay.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Oh, no, not at all.

• 1:17:05David Hoffman?

  It was just mint the DAO and then have Slocet be a part of it.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Our whole legal strategy was that we were not the DAO.

• 1:17:11David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  And Christoph didn't have any DAO tokens. And no one really, no one else on the team had DAO tokens either, I'm sure.

• 1:17:19David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Uh, but I, actually I've.

• 1:17:21David Hoffman?

  In known wallets, yeah.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, right? I, I mean, I did, I was, I wasn't worried about these things. I've always been irreverent to that shit. But, uh, but yeah, so we, we, we intended the DAO to be a pure DAO. And that was definitely the idealistic like motivation. But at the same time, we had a business model that could back it up, right?

• 1:17:43David Hoffman?

  So the idea was like to basically give the gift of the DAO to the broader Ethereum community. It's like, hey, here's this thing we made. You guys go build it. Also.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53David Hoffman?

  Here's Slocet.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:17:56David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Here, here's this thing we made and we built the community, right? I mean, we had one of the largest slacks in crypto by far. Everything was on Slack at that time.

• 1:18:07David Hoffman?

  Thank God everyone moved away from that, yeah.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, for a while it was chaos. There was people using Riot, there are people using everything. You have Keybase, and then now we've all settled back on Discord. It feels good to be all on the same time. But anyway.

• 1:18:23David Hoffman?

  Okay, so you guys minted the DAO.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24David Hoffman?

  So money starts coming in. How fast did money start coming in?

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Oh, man. A bunch of money came in the first few days. And then it was like a slow trickle until the last. So there was a 28-day period. And the first 14 days were supposed to be like 1 Ether for 100 DAO tokens. And they were, but then there was actually a miscalculation on and off by one error. And the 15th day also had the price of 1 DAO token for 1 Ether. Or sorry, 1 Ether for 100 DAO tokens. And so it was almost like, oh, you got an extra day of cheap DAO tokens, which was another huge push.

• 1:19:07David Hoffman?

  Was it a bonding curve or something? How did the price change over time?

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  It was a step curve. Yeah, and so then, and that's why we had off by one error. Because it was like, okay, and then it'll step to 1.05 Ether for 100 DAO tokens, 1.1 Ether. But the first step was just 1 Ether. It was like, oh, damn it. We totally missed that. And then in the code, you know? And so we just, basically there was this extra day where DAO tokens were cheap, which just allowed way, a bunch of extra FOMO. And I think we raised somewhere around, you know, 100 million dollars at that point, you know? In that first round. And then the next 50 million dollars over the next 14 days where it was stepping up.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then we had 150 million dollars in the DAO. And right before the end, you know, we were all like...

• 1:20:00David Hoffman?

  Did you shit your pants?

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  I was stoked. I was having a blast. I didn't do the, I, I'm not a developer, you know? Left Harris and Kristoff were shitting their pants. Okay. Kristoff, Kristoff actually physically vomited. Oh my god. There's a hundred million dollars in the Dow. He was at a dinner and he had to leave the table and he went and puked because he was so nervous about the code, you know? I mean, a hundred million dollars in code where the language is eight months old, you know? And is, and he wrote it, you know? And it's like him and Left Harris wrote this. Left Harris was a little bit more chill about it. Kristoff was, you know, sweating bullets. Right. And I was having a great time, like all the community, the vibes were so high, you know?

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, we're all high fiving, digital high fives, you know? It's like, this is insane. This is gonna be huge. But then at the very end, there was, uh, you know, the curator, Vlad Zamfier, Imingun Sari, who does Avalanche now, and this guy Dino Marx came out with this thing called the moratorium. And it was like, hey, like we is too, the Dow is too big to fail, basically. We have to like, like stop and rethink things. The design could have these improvements. And maybe since there's 14% of all ether in existence and we plan on doing proof of stake later, we should just like, you know, try to figure out how to upgrade the Dow and make some improvements to it before we go.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  And so that's what Slack was spending most of their time on, like mitigating this thing and being like, hey, like our first proposal was, hey, let's like increase the security of the Dow. Let's have 24/7 surveillance and, and, and like, uh, do better audits and all this stuff. And, uh, we were trying to get whitelisted to, you know, collect some funding to do that. And, uh, that's when I found out, it's actually really hard to get money out of a Dow. You have to, you have to design the Dow so it's easier to get money out of them. Because people don't want to spend their money on things. Uh, it's really easy just to say no to spending money. Right. So. Collect only, collect only, never pay?

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? And that's, that's like the collective, like, yes, of course. But, uh, you know, spending money on security, uh, I don't know.

• 1:22:18David Hoffman?

  Alright.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  And, and I mean, there's nothing that that proposal would have done anyway, though, because, maybe two weeks after the DAO was launched and had all the money in it, and we were like scrambling to figure out how to deal with this moratorium, there was a revision to the docs of Solidity. That was like, oh yeah, we have this call function before all these lines of code. Oh, there's a reentrancy bug. We need to put the call function after all the lines of, uh, code, of, of code. And so, and then we had, and we were like, oh crap, you know, we don't do that in our, in our codebase. So, went, went to Christian and went to other people and like, is this gonna cause any problems? And lots of people looked at it and they're like, no, no, no.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  We made this blog post that was like, hey, there's a bug, but the DAO is safe.

• 1:23:06David Hoffman?

  Oh god.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Oh god. Uh, Stefan really got it for that one, man.

• 1:23:11David Hoffman?

  Do you think, do you think that was the post that alerted the would be the, the future attacker to the fact that there was an exploit there?

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably could have been. I mean, who knows? Uh, who knows? Because no one knows who the DAO hacker is, although there are rumors, of course, of various people that it could be. But no one knows for sure, and I don't think anyone will unless the person actually says, yeah, it was me. Because, you know, it's, it's a hard thing to prove. Different rumors have it like, oh, well, this wallet was associated to this Poloniex account, and it looks like somehow eventually it paid the gas here, so maybe it's connected to this person or that person. But it's like, well, maybe they just sold crypto to some random dude, right? So, it's hard to say. And, and...

• 1:24:01David Hoffman?

  Do you think the, the DAO hacker was a member of the DAO?

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  Prob- they had to be because they had to have DAO tokens. So that, I mean, they could have bought it, they could have bought it in the exchange, though. I mean, I'm, the thing is, everyone was a member of the DAO. There was, Ethereum was the DAO at that time. If you weren't, you, you, you, you didn't hold Ethereum off an exchange, you know, like, and even-

• 1:24:25David Hoffman?

  Ethereum and the DAO were like almost anonymous.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, our DAO curator list was like, the Ethereum Foundation, effectively. You know, it's like, all the who's who, because Christoph Jans was like, you know, he was a, the core tester for all the clients. So he would make sure that the clients were in sync for all the launches up until that point before he started Slocket with his brother and, and brought in Stefan. Stefan used to be the community manager for Ethereum. And it was like, this is, this was the core, you know, a, a huge heart and soul of Ethereum was Slocket, so.

• 1:25:02David Hoffman?

  Right. And Ethereum was all about like coordination technologies, right? So it seems to be like, all right, like now that we have this Ethereum thing, let's do the coordination thing. So it seems like, from the perspective of the early days of Ethereum, it's like, all right, like, we just now, we make a DAO now. That's what we do. Like, we made the, we made the blockchain, now we make the DAO, of course.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. The Ethereum blockchain was for DAOs. It was for coordination. So that was the thing. How can you not? And it's a risk-free investment, right?

• 1:25:29David Hoffman?

  What can go wrong?

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, what could go wrong?

• 1:25:32David Hoffman?

  So after the DAO started collecting like way more money than it was ever expected, did like, the game plan change? Or like, what changed as a result of that?

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  What changed is the expectations of being able to get a decent chunk of change from the DAO. I mean, we were looking for just a small amount of money to get started as a startup. But crypto numbers are just audacious, is what we discovered. So, um, I mean, I flew to Germany. I had never met most of the Slocket team at that point. And I flew, flew to Germany. Well, I flew, first I flew to London to be with Stefan for a week and then went to Midvita, this small town where Christoph Janssen and his seven kids, like Stefan and his brother with his, with 11 kids, you know, like this time, this, yeah, it was a while. It was fun having dinner with the families, you know?

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Uh, and that's where I was when the DAO hack happened. It was like at, at Christoph's mom's house, Uma Jans, you know? And uh,

• 1:26:31David Hoffman?

  So how did that notification come into your brain? How did you hear that the DAO was getting, something, something was up with the DAO?

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Well, a community member was sending links, cause we were in, uh, in, in Europe. So I woke up at like, I don't know, 6:30 in the morning or something. And, uh, but people in the US were already awake. And they had seen something on EtherScan and they're like, hey, is there a bug on EtherScan? And there's this guy Mo, and he sent me that link. And I was like, looking at him like, ooh. Uh-oh, I don't think this is a bug on EtherScan, cause it's on Mist as well, you know? Uh, Mist was the Ethereum wallet at the time.

• 1:27:10David Hoffman?

  I, I remember it, I remember it.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  And so then I send that, I, I'm like, yo, Christoph, I'm like demon dialing everyone. Until I get ahold of, uh, of Christoph's brother, Simon, who's a founder of Ethereum as well. He's the only, he was the first person, other person to wake up. And like, you gotta get ahold of Christoph and everyone fucking else. You know, and we're, I mean, we're alerting everybody that we can, uh, to look at this because it was, it was at least, yeah, I mean, I basically got to sound the alarm, right? Uh, that it was real. And then,

• 1:27:42David Hoffman?

  What, what did you think was happening? Did you say, oh, somebody is stealing money from the DAO? Or like, what, what, what did you, what would you, did you suspect?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  I mean, cause we could, we could see it. It was like a split, the split functions were being called. So it's like, okay, this, I don't know exactly what's happening, but you know, at first it was like, is someone splitting the DAO with that much money? Right? But then it was every, every other block, this function was being called. So it was like, oh no, this is just weird with the same person. And, and so we could, yeah, we knew pretty quickly it was a hack. I mean, Minutes.

• 1:28:17David Hoffman?

  So when there was no hacks before the DAO, how did you guys even know what to do? Like, what was the game plan?

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Asked Vitalik. I mean, that was the thing. We didn't know what to do, but we knew we had to say, I mean, I knew we had to say something to the community. So, but we can't just say something like, hey, we're hacked, we're fucked, you know? We have to give them something to do, something they can do to help. So the idea was that we could slow down the network, we could spam the network as a community and slow down the hacker while we look at other strategies. So I wrote this like little post in the Slack, it's like at everyone, this is not a drill. The DAO is being attacked. Here's what you can do to help us slow down the attacker.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  All the geniuses in Ethereum are on this right now, looking at the, looking at it, seeing what we can do. And, and then now go. And probably within an hour or two after I made that post, Vitalik was already talking about a hard fork being the best solution.

• 1:29:26David Hoffman?

  He figures it out like that.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, totally. It was like, yeah, I mean, in the end, you know, Vitalik is the shelling point, right? Vitalik is the decider. And it's like, well, if he is on board, that's, then that's what we're gonna do. And, and it was the only solution. I mean, before the hack was even over, that, that was the plan, basically, or that was the, the strongest opinion. And then it was like, well, what else can we do? Because hard forks, at the time, hard forks were unheard of.

• 1:29:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  Unheard of.

• 1:29:57David Hoffman?

  The blasphemy.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  No one does that. Yeah.

• 1:29:59David Hoffman?

  Well, they're still, they are, right.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:30:01David Hoffman?

  Well, Ethereum, had it hard forked yet?

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  I mean, it had, it had upgraded to, from, from Homestead to, like, from Frontier to Homestead.

• 1:30:12David Hoffman?

  Homestead, okay.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:30:13David Hoffman?

  Right, so it had had its first, like, upgraded planned hard fork.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16David Hoffman?

  Wait, but you're saying this is like the, gonna be the first unplanned, like contentious hard fork?

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  This is a contentious hard fork. This is like, hey, let's make an irregular state transition and hack the hacker. Hard fork, right? And and and what made that possible was that when the DAO is split, the money goes into a child DAO, which then has its own creation phase, where it can raise money from other DAO token holders for 28 days. And so and then and then from those 28 days, the money would then be released. And then the person would have to call a split DAO function to move it to another place, another address. And that would take five, sorry, that would take seven days. So there was 35 days where the money was guaranteed to be in this one address.

• 1:31:03David Hoffman?

  That is such a crazy property of this story because basically the way that the DAO works is that if you wanted to exit your money from the DAO, you had to have a 28 day waiting period, which saved the whole entire operation. The fact that that was true saved perhaps all of Ethereum, honestly.

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:19David Hoffman?

  Like, there's a potential world where like, without that property about the DAO, like, the DAO hack would have been successful. And correct me if I'm wrong, but like, you, we wouldn't have been able to hard fork Ethereum if the Ether got out of the DAO, got out of the contracts, and then intermingled with the rest of the economy. Because you can't hard fork away at that point in time.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, because then they send it to exchanges. They send it to different things. Their money is not their money.

• 1:31:42David Hoffman?

  Get away with it, right?

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Anymore. And we don't want to take from other people. We want to hack the hacker.

• 1:31:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  And it's not even for saving the DAO and the DAO token holders. Hey, they were investing in something that was risky.

• 1:31:53David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  Whether they knew it or not, it was the truth. So it's about, hey, we're going to go to proof of stake. This guy clearly has ill intent for the community. Do we want someone with with ill intent to hold 14% of all Ether in existence? You know, like, because he only stole a third of it. Actually, that the my, so then I I split up, split off with other DAO ninjas, basically, to form the, first, it was the Robin Hood group, and we stole the rest of the money. So DAO hacker took $50 million. We took $100 million. And we're we're, we hacked the rest of the DAO so no one else could. Actually, we strategically waited until someone else started hacking.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  The DAO, but we had already been playing like war games and had a mass massive capital. So that every one transaction that we hacked the DAO with, we have so many DAO tokens that it's not a quarter. It's like a stack of thousand dollar bills, you know, that we're sticking into the coin machine and pulling out with the string.

• 1:32:55David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  You know, while everyone else is using quarters. So we just, you know, we just dominated the DAO wars, basically.

• 1:33:01David Hoffman?

  And it was like you guys were hacking the money first because you guys were the white hats, right?

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we had all the money.

• 1:33:07David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  So we actually waited till someone else, we waited, we made sure that we hacked second. Um, for two reasons. One was kind of like legal, like, you know, like, oh, we're, we're not choosing to hack the DAO. We're doing it out of necessity to protect, right? And then, uh, the other reason was honestly, I, I wanted it to be messy. You know, like if the, if the DAO, uh, hack was simple, then maybe the hard fork doesn't happen. Because, oh, it's just this address, there's lots of solutions, right? But then when it's like, oh, there's like, and there ended up being about 10 DAO hackers, right? So that's messy. There's lots of money all over the place. And, and in the end, we, we were able to hack all of the small, there were major DAO wars.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  It was crazy, man. Like, it was like, and it was almost like the matrix at the time, you know? Where you're looking at the blockchain and like waiting for transactions to happen.

• 1:34:01David Hoffman?

  Watching the ones and zeros.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  And yeah, the byte code. And it's like, okay, go, go, go, go, go, you know? And, and then it was, it was insane, man. Those are insane times. And.

• 1:34:11David Hoffman?

  That's what an experience.

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ended up being able to hack all of the small other hackers. We, there was this other money aside that was called the extra balance. And we were able to request the extra balance into the DAO. And then make a proposal to actually spend that money into, and to buy DAO tokens in all the sub DAOs. Besides the big one, to give us 51% majority in all of the white hats. 51% majority in all the other child DAOs that had hacked the DAO. And then, uh, take over their DAOs and take the money out of them.

• 1:34:44David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  And yeah, it was, it was, it was nuts, but we, we, uh. You know, right before the hard fork, we, we actually also bought Dow tokens in the dark Dow. And, but then the hard fork happened and we thought, well, the hard fork happened. Then Ether worked, like, we knew E T C would exist, but we thought it had no value. Why would it ever have value? Because, you know, like, everyone who has Ether has E T C. They would just dump it. No one cares about E T C. And then, then we started hearing these rumors and like, and so we could have kept taking actions to actually stop

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  the dark Dow uh on the E T C chain and do like this kind of um basically a game of stalemate. Where we threatened to hack the, the, the dark Dow. So he can never make a proposal to pull money out. He always has to keep splitting into a child Dow, into a child Dow, into a child Dow, and we just try to each hack the child Dows continuously, hacking each other. You just grief them until the end of time? Yeah, every thirty-five days. And that was the biggest argument for why we had to hard fork. Because otherwise, every thirty-five days, we would have to hack the dark Dow to, you know, stop them from pulling out the money. So we just, every thirty-five days, there would be Dow wars.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  Like, you'd mark it on the calendar and that was, that was gonna be our job, you know? For the rest of time? Yeah. I mean, you think there's enough spam on the Ethereum network already, you know? So, uh, so, so it was a clear argument, had the hard fork. But then after the hard fork, we thought Ethereum Classic was dead, so we didn't end up, you know, executing the plans that we need to execute to stop the dark Dow from splitting. And so they, the dark Dow had already split, but uh by the time we, we found out Ether Classic was gonna be a thing. Like, people started, there was like this undercurrent of like, um, people trying to buy Ether Classic tokens from large Ethereum holders for a penny, uh, all over the place, right?

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  And it turns out that was probably someone related to Barry Silbert, who runs the DCG, because Barry Silbert was like the biggest Ethereum Classic maxi that ever existed. And he also owned a large part of Poloniex. And so Poloniex, when, you know, after a while, Poloniex listed Ether Classic as on the air exchange. And, you know, and Barry Silbert's making these tweets like, "I will never hold, uh, ETC is the only altcoin that I will ever hold," you know? And so all these Bitcoin maxis ended up rallying around this idea

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  that, you know, Ether Classic is a way to destroy Ethereum.

• 1:37:38David Hoffman?

  Right. Enemy of my enemies, my friend.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and that like, well, and also this like, uh, social approach. So this is another thing that happened right after the DAO hack. Everything was pretty chill in the DAO Slack. But three days after the DAO hack, there was a mass flood of like internet trolls. And we couldn't control the community anymore. It was a social attack. And we found out later that it was likely this group from Bitcoin that was called, um, The Dragon's Den. Which was like, uh, this under, underground like troll army that would be unleashed on different projects. When, and, and of course, we were targeted after the hack

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  as a, as a, you know, a way to fight, you know, to promote Bitcoin maximalism, probably by Blockstream, which is probably why I have something against Blockstream. But, uh, so, so, uh, that, that was, I felt like this ETC is like kind of a continuation of this. Like how the, this opportunity from Bitcoin maxis to use the DAO as a way to destroy Ethereum and to use ETC as a way to like, basically undercut the legitimacy of Ethereum. Saying like, hey, that, you know, immutability is important. Like ETC is the, is the real Ethereum and, and all that, that whole story.

• 1:39:01David Hoffman?

  When the hard fork was everyone, it seemed that everyone just fell in line with the hard fork idea. How was the hard fork actually scheduled? Was it scheduled for just like the day before the hacker was able to get their money out? Like, when did the hard fork actually happen?

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  Two days.

• 1:39:15David Hoffman?

  Two days before?

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  Two days before, yeah.

• 1:39:17David Hoffman?

  Just because like this, the two day buffer?

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  So it's like 33 days, 33 days after the, after the hard, after the hack.

• 1:39:24David Hoffman?

  And then how did the DAO actually like unwind after that? It was a state transition. And so what state did it change and how did that change the properties of the DAO? And then how did the DAO progress forward after that?

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was an irregular state transition is the technical term. A lot of people think it was like a rollback, like the DAO never happened. But if you go on the blockchain, all those things happened. It was just on this block, I think it was like 1,920,000, 920,000, right? There was this irregular state transition that basically any, any contract that matched the byte code of the DAO, all of the funds that were in it were taken and then given and put in this withdrawal contract. So all of the child DAOs, which there were well over 70, child DAOs, split DAOs that had money in it,

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  and the dark DAO, and all the white hat DAOs, and the DAO itself, which had like just a few ways of ether, right? All of that was taken and put into the withdrawal contract. And anyone with DAO tokens could then withdraw their, their money from the withdrawal contract. But it's not that clean, that's the thing. So I was, I basically self-appointed myself to take the cleanup mission, right? Because there are all sorts of edge cases. The people who had those, the child DAO money, right? They didn't have DAO tokens, they had child DAO tokens. So they couldn't get their money out of the DAO. They had to get their money out of this, you know, out of their own DAO.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  And so they could go to ETC, run some DAO transactions, make a proposal, get the ETC out that they split. But they couldn't get the ether. So we had to make a small contract for every DAO, child DAO, so they could get ether. And basically there was a clawback function in the, in the withdrawal contract. And me, Vitalik, and Vlad Zanfier, and a few other people, I think six other people, were on the, the new curator multi-sig. Which then could clawback money from the DAO contract and make sure that, but just money that there were no DAO tokens for, right?

• 1:41:39David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  So, and then, and so that we could-

• 1:41:42David Hoffman?

  So that, that was a process of just human verification? And that's why it needed to be a multi-sig?

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like, okay, so if there's no DAO tokens to claim the money that's sent to this contract, that's in this contract, then that money would be stuck. So it must be somebody's. So then this multi-sig has to configure all the edge cases. And the, the other edge case was the people that put money into that last half of the DAO raise, the DAO. So then those people would, they, they paid more than one ether for every hundred DAO tokens. So this is the extra balance people. But they actually had a token that they could use then to claim money. So Nick Johnson, who does ENS, Bokey Pooba, and, and, and then us, we, we made sure that

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  there was a, we audited an extra balance withdrawal contract. And actually, one, you know, funny story, I don't know if you know Alexi from TurboGath? He was, he was one of the biggest trolls during the DAO days, biggest trolls. And I, I hated this guy, but I hugged him, you know, but I hated him, for sure. And then he, he didn't, you know, he ended up splitting the DAO. I got, I made, I had a lot of respect for him when I found out that he was trolling the DAO, he was pissed at the way the DAO was organized and structured. And then he wa, he walked the walk. He actually split his money from the DAO way before the hack. But then he didn't get the DAO money out of his split DAO in time.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  So then his money was taken with the rest of the child DAOs. And then he stuffed it up and saved the day for everyone. He was like our number one dev in this like edge case scenario. And eventually went from being like the most hated troll, at least from Slotkin and, and the crew, because he was always really smart and really making it hard, talking a lot of shit. You know, when smart people talk a lot of shit, it's hard.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  So then he he ended up being like our biggest ally in making all the contracts and doing really making really smart solutions for a lot of these problems that we were having of how do we give my people the money back? And and there were

• 1:43:51David Hoffman?

  Is there still money in that contract? Or did all of the ether got claimed?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  No, there's so much money, dude. There's hundreds of millions of dollars that's still unclaimed from the DAO. Although now DAO tokens are have new pneumatic value, right? So actually

• 1:44:04David Hoffman?

  What value?

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Pneumatic like like an old coin, you know?

• 1:44:08David Hoffman?

  Oh, OK, yeah, sure, sure. Like a like a artifact, yeah.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an artifact that is backed by ether, but there's a there's a DAO museum that actually has a unit of kind of a fork of Uniswap. I mean, it uses Uniswap, but a fork of the front end because the DAO token wasn't an ERC 20 token. So it has like it doesn't work well with Uniswap. But it it has enough stuff to use Uniswap if you change the front end and and and the stuff. So he made like a DAO museum and the actual market price for DAO tokens is like well over twice what they're worth if you go and try to pull out the ether.

• 1:44:43David Hoffman?

  Actually claim the ether?

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44David Hoffman?

  I wow, I didn't know that DAO tokens actually had a market value.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:47David Hoffman?

  But yeah, it's probably because it's off the radar due to the uncompliant ERC 20 token standard that it has.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and Psy tokens too, you know, the old dye. I think that's going to have pneumatic value as sure. I didn't sell any of my Psy.

• 1:45:00David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, no, I still I still have seven Psy.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, baby.

• 1:45:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  And I have I have

• 1:45:07David Hoffman?

  Psy is the only thing I'm as bullish on as ether.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah, dude, I think that's a good that's a good call. And and like for DAO tokens, I needed DAO tokens because they would eventually I would need to pass votes in the DAO. People would send DAO tokens to the DAO, you know? And and then but we could try to get them out and then like refund their money, you know? And so for two years, I was cleaning up all the mistakes people were making in the withdrawal process and making sure that like people could get their money back while mostly through Giveit and the Giveit Slack and and helping out there.

• 1:45:41David Hoffman?

  So zooming all the way out. What did you learn?

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  Oh, from the DAO? I mean, well, smart contract development is pretty serious business. Always cap. You know, now I'm working in this token engineering commons, right? And token engineering is a really nascent field of study. And there's a lot of lessons from the DAO in that kind of thing. It's like controlling the configuration space, right? Like, what is possible with your system? Make sure you know and can test what is possible. Like, you saw the Faye explosion, right? Where they raised a billion dollars. But then, you know, that made their governance token, you know, one of the top tokens in crypto for a brand new project.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  Like, come on, and then instant dump and just destruction of the peg and everything went out of control. If they would have just controlled the configuration space, they wouldn't have had that issue. Like, I'm sure they tested to raise, you know, a hundred million dollars or something, but they didn't test to raise a billion. So, these sorts of things. Also, you know, the biggest lesson was immutability is a cultural, like, idea and concept. At that time, everyone thought immutability was a natural principle of blockchain.

• 1:46:59David Hoffman?

  Like, it's a technical property.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but no, it's a cultural value. And in the end, like, it's one that's held dearly, but not as dearly as others, right? So, the community rules all in crypto.

• 1:47:14David Hoffman?

  And that's why we call it the Layer Zero Podcast.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:18David Hoffman?

  Because it's people all the way down. And so, when we talk about immutability as like a cultural icon, I always start these shows off by saying, cypherpunks know that their code they write creates social systems. It's because the buck stops at the humans that run the code. So, it's really important to talk to the humans that run the code.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  And economics is a social science. It's not hard science. This is just the reality of things. Now, I feel like, and this is one of the things we're doing with the Token Engineering Commons too. It's like, you know, we gotta make sure we have conflict resolution. We have to make sure that we have, like, good community building, because that is. What this is all about. We're building communities that have an economic underpinning, but we're building communities. So what do communities need?

• 1:48:04David Hoffman?

  Well, Griff, this was a fantastic story, and I think this is a great place to end it. But you also want to tell the listeners a little bit about more in detail about what you're up to with Giveth and all that action going on over there, and also just where people can find you on Twitter and stuff like that.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. I mean, man, there's a lot of stories. You know, there's a Parity MultiSig hack that the White Hat Group did. Like, let me just give like the next like four years really quick.

• 1:48:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Because, you know, that was 2016.

• 1:48:28David Hoffman?

  Sounds like we're gonna have to do this again.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was a year later, well, we started the DAO, we made a MiniMe contract, we did a bunch of like white hat actions for different ICOs that failed. And then there was the big one, which was the Parity MultiSig hack, where we rescued $210 million and like scared the hell out of the Ethereum Foundation for a little bit. But they, and then, and then gave it all back to everybody. And then there was the next Parity MultiSig hack where they, they just froze all their money. And, and then, you know, there was a lot of efforts to support open source block explorers and scaling solutions that were all done through Giveth. And Giveth has been a fixture of the Ethereum community

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  for a long time, especially in 2018, because we've been running off of donations since the beginning. It was basically the White Hat Group started Giveth after the DAO, and it was the place where people went to claim their DAO tokens and understand like all the basically customer support for the DAO, and then also, also like a charity platform. And the idea of Giveth and what I've been working on to this day since the DAO is really focused on how do we replace, or how do we build a third way to fund public goods? Right now, we have governments and nonprofits. Nonprofits rely on sacrifice and donations,

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  and it's just poor, poor, a poor incentive structure, to say the least, right? And governments rely on taxes, which effectively is sacrifice and the use of force, and they have a monopoly over every public goods vertical. When a bureaucrat collects- Their salary, you know, they get it whether they make good decisions or bad decisions. There's no, it's another poorly designed incentive layer, right? We can do better. And the problem with public goods and the value that governments and nonprofits provide is that they're providing non-excludable value. There's no customers, there's no way to create a business model. But you can create an economic model. And cryptocurrencies have done this all for a decade.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  You know, Bitcoin is basically an open global payment system. Anyone in the world can create a Bitcoin address and receive currency from peer to peer. There's no cost. Don't get me wrong, there's also like to send currency, you have to pay a little bit and stuff. But this is a public good. Anyone can create an Ethereum, can create a Bitcoin address or an Ethereum address. And there's no, there's no cost to that. And there's no, it's, it's non-excludable, anyone can do it, and it's non-rivalrous. It's public good. And it's funded through economic means, printing money to fund the development of the network. And so I think that we can take that into meat space. And Giveit's approach is to start with the nonprofits.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  These are the communities that are really doing it. So we have to educate them. They're the ones creating public goods in a, in a bottom-up, bottom-up way. And so let's cherish them, let's make it easy for them to raise money in crypto. So with Giveit, you can just go on, if you have a favorite nonprofit, they log in with their Google account and they collect, they get an Ethereum address, and then they can start raising money like they would on Kickstarter or Indiegogo or GoFundMe. Same, same process with one difference, they use Ethereum, you know? That's it. And then our goal is to then like, hey, once they've raised a thousand dollars, say, hey, did you know Google can steal your money? Maybe you should download Metamask, right? Just like one step. And then we create a slippery slope.

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  And we're about to launch a Give token, the Give token which will be used for governance over the platform. And the idea is that every time you donate to one of these projects, you'll actually earn Give tokens in return. So, and it, but it's not earned like you can, it's more like a tax deductible donation. You still donate and you'll just get reimbursed a little bit of your donation into this governance token, which then allows you to have, you know, governance rights over the Give platform. We'll use a conviction voting and gardens. Which is a really cool thing that I probably don't have time to go into. But then that will govern the give economy. And but also you'll be able to use the give tokens eventually to stake behind these projects.

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  And so if you lock your give tokens behind a project, then they will get more give backs. Their donors, when someone donates to a project on Giveit, all the money goes to the charity. All of it. There's no like, we don't take a cut. But then we also give give tokens for the next five years. We will be giving away a million give tokens every two weeks to donors on the platform. And if up to seventy five percent of the donation. So it's always a donation. You're not, you're always losing money when you donate. That's, that's still true, but we're going to reimburse us up to seventy five percent of it. And then with those tokens, they can stake behind projects. And the projects that have more give tokens staked and locked for a longer time will end up getting.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  The donors will get more give tokens than projects that don't have any give tokens staked. Everyone will get give backs who donates to verified projects. But the the staking will allocate more give backs to different projects. So we have this curation mechanism. The goal of Giveit and this ecosystem is to replace the government service, the 501(c)(3) government service with an economy, right? And so the but the real dream is that when there's enough give tokens staked behind one of these projects, we will actually use those tokens to initialize a bonding curve, which I'm not going to go into so much, but it's super cool because you can create a micro economy with this bonding curve, where you can have accurate price discovery for low liquidity markets.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  And but anyway, you end up with printing money for this charity. You just give them free tokens. And then the people who were staking give tokens, they also get a bunch of tokens. Everyone makes money because of magic internet money. Sorry, but it's true. And they all make money on paper. All those tokens have to be vested so they don't like have a run on the bonding curve. But then this project, who maybe they started out, they didn't know anything. About Ethereum, they just logged in with Google. But as they advanced in their education and in their success in the Give, Giveith system, they eventually end up with their own economy. And with their own economy, they can start rewarding themselves and their community for the value that they're being created.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  And they can be rewarded and invested into, right? If you, every time a project with a bonding curve will end up with, uh, with, with a donation, the donation still goes a hundred percent to the charity. But the givebacks will go into the bonding curve, create project tokens, increasing the price of the project token. And then those project tokens will go to the donor. The donor effectively becomes partially invested in the future economy of this ecosystem. And people could just come in and speculate on the future donations of this charity. And they could just buy and invest in that economy and have an upside by supporting this charity.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Because now there's a bonding curve, there's an economy behind it. And so, and this has always been the dream of Giveith, is to somehow create the system where nonprofits come in and they educate and skill up and eventually end up with their own economy. And so now we have that roadmap in place and we're just about to execute it. Super excited about that.

• 1:56:02David Hoffman?

  That's awesome. It's, it sounds like what it is, is like a, a flywheel in a box.

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:08David Hoffman?

  It's like, hey, bring your nonprofit, like, we are your flywheel. Just plug in this flywheel and here you go.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally. And, and here's the, you know, it might take years for you to get, you know, educated enough to be able to hold your own keys and, and understand that people don't have to sacrifice to support you as a nonprofit. Like, there's a lot of, like, relearning. Like, your labor has value. That idea is like the hardest part of this whole process. Just like real, just like getting people to appreciate the value that they're, they're creating by, you know, their nonprofit work.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  But, so that's the, that's the Giveith approach. And that's like the kind of indirect, let's like slippery slope nonprofit. It's into economies, but then there's the direct like, let's just build public goods focused economies. And that's the common stack approach. So we have our pilot project with the token engineering commons. And this is will be the first public goods focused economy. That's like explicit. This is what we're doing and this is all we're doing. And the goal is to create micro economies to compete to provide public services. So instead of having a government with monopoly over every public goods vertical. We create a repeatable pattern where anyone can effectively create a public goods startup.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  They can receive investment and basically follow the normal venture capital model. But instead of their venture capital model requiring customers. Their venture capital model is built on an economic system. Where they are providing public goods as the output. But competing with donations for the input. So instead of it being like, it's more like, okay, I want to help orphans. I want to, you know, I want to support a food bank. I could donate or I could invest in this economy. And get governance rights over how the funds are spent. It's way more transparent.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  It's, you know, I can be part of the community and have upside. And this is, this is the framing where it's like, it's not about creating like a successful business. It's about being better than donations. And actually, that's a very low bar.

• 1:58:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  So it doesn't even have to be profitable, even if people lose money in this system. It's still better than donations.

• 1:58:32David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  So it's a, and, and the dream is that you would have these startups, startup economies. That could actually provide public services. And if they're not doing a good job, someone else could spin up a startup to compete with them. And now instead of having a monopoly over building roads, instead of having a monopoly over providing public safety, public health, public anything. You have competing people who care, the same people who are working for public services for governments and nonprofits, the same people. That have the same knowledge, but now they have a, a better incentive system. They have an aligned, they have an opportunity to succeed.

• 1:59:10David Hoffman?

  Is it just like putting the power of competitive markets behind? Behind nonprofits?

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  Pretty much.

• 1:59:16David Hoffman?

  That's really the bridge that's being built here?

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  That's exactly the dream. Free market economies as opposed to free market businesses. Instead of having the economy that all the businesses are competing in, in a free market, where, you know, the Federal Reserve just decides to change interest rates whenever they want. Yeah, it's a free market, you know? But it's, it's the economy. Instead of the economy, you could start thinking of it as an economy. And these are all other economies, but their focus and their intention, they're a purpose-driven economy. And their purpose is what is exciting for people, you know? I mean, just think about all the people who are, they, they get excited about a nonprofit cause and they work and they volunteer and they support, and eventually they get burned

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  out because they're competent. They can go work in the free market and like actually make good money, have a nice house, have like all the, all the joys of society that, that when they're working for the nonprofit, they're like, oh, man, I wish I had like AC, right? But I can't afford it because I'm like, you know, helping orphans all day. Eventually, I guess I'll go get a job and sell out. What if you could sell, what if you didn't have to sell out? What if the value that was being created was appreciated? What if we had systems that gave a fuck, right? That's, that's the dream. And, you know, I'm probably not going to do it wrong. I'm a bit of a, I'm probably going to do it wrong. I'm a bit of a joker, but you know, we're pushing and at the very least, we're inspiring.

• 2:00:45David Hoffman?

  And we definitely know that we learn in this industry from experiments.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:49David Hoffman?

  Everything is an experiment until one of the experiments turns into a success and then it's no longer an experiment. So Griff, I admire your passion and your commitment to public goods. And I find that what you are doing is very in line with the community around Ethereum at large. So thank you for coming on Layer Zero and telling us your story today.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, man. And, and if anyone wants to play with that second side, there are these parameter parties. We're doing this collaborative economics thing. So go follow TE Commons on Twitter, T E C M N S, at T E C M N S.

• 2:01:21David Hoffman?

  We'll put it in the show notes.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah. And there's these parameter parties. It's like- You know, economies have always been designed by people in the back room. Don't get me wrong, I love Ethereum, but who voted on a 32 ether? Right? Like, it's just, it's not, it's not a thing because economies are for smart people to design. But I think that's what monarchies said about democracy, right? Like, you know, so I think that we can end this economic monarchy idea and actually start allowing for a collaborative design of economies. And we're doing that for the first time in the Token Engineering Commons. You can design a bonding curve, complicated conviction voting thing. And we'll, and we will, everyone can, anyone can submit a design. And then we can collectively and iteratively fork it and improve it. So it'll be super cool.

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  And if you want like a real token engineering learning opportunity, it's happening right now in the TE Discord for the next three weeks. So, super cool opportunity.

• 2:02:16David Hoffman?

  There's your call to action. So, thank the listeners, you heard him. Griff, thanks for coming on, my man.

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks. Thanks for letting me rant.

• 2:02:22David Hoffman?

  Of course. Cheers.