Validated | The Philosophy of Ethereum According to Bankless' David Hoffman

Just a quick note before we start today we recorded this episode with David on May 3rd which is about a week before the recent finality incidents on ethereum’s Beacon chain David Hoffman welcome to validated cheers thanks for bringing me here different side of the microphone this time yeah yeah I actually like being on the other side of the microphone I don’t get the opportunity too often yeah I think this is going to be a lot of fun

I’ve been excited to have you on for a little while um totally has been on your show before um so I think it’s kind of fun to have you on this one this time so I want to sort of start out talking about both your your journey into Bangladesh I

Know you guys have covered a few times before but specifically here on on the role that’s like Grassroots media organizations have played in crypto I think when you guys started there were very few let’s call them professional reporters or professional analysts covering the space since then that space

Has gotten more crowded but there’s still been this like very important role that bankless has has sort of filled in the space so uh I kind of want to start talking about like what was that process like both deciding hey we’re going to start a show here and then sort of how

That’s changed as more folks have entered the space yeah sure so um Vegas was actually my second podcast in the crypto industry yeah uh my first podcast was called POV crypto which was hosted by me uh it was indeed um a sex joke uh I was less less

Professional in my early years in the crypto world uh uh but it was also it also was point of view crypto right uh and uh me and my college friend uh who was a staunch bitcoiner just disagreed all the time and when we were getting

Into crypto it was me and him and our friends chat group and there was maybe 10 or 12 people uh just we were all on the crypto Journey but it was really me and him that were kind of leading the charge and he just felt really compelled

By Bitcoin and I just felt really compelled by ethereum and we would like fight and debate inside of this chat room that we had and eventually we turned that into a podcast and that was our uh that started off like I think our first episode got like 10 views or

Something yeah as one as one goes when they don’t have any other supporting platform to get started but just through the process of consistency and also authentic debate from two perspectives that like if you get the average Bitcoin or an average ethereum ethereum like into a room together especially back

Then like it’s Nails on a chalkboard but because it was me and my college friend we were actually able to like yell at each other and debate in like semi-aggressive ways but also with love at the same time right uh and so like that’s that’s what actually made it like

An enjoyable process even though like legitimately we were yelling at times it was still fun to listen to not just like pain to the ears uh and so we did like 150 episodes of that uh and it was like a bear Market it was like a it was like

The biggest bear Market podcast between 2018 and 2020 because like Not only was get a quote unquote like coming of age story for both me and my co-host because like our first episodes were under a year into the industry and so he was trying to teach me his perspective about

Bitcoin I was trying to teach him my perspective perspectives about ethereum and we would he would bring on a Bitcoin or guess and then I would later would bring on an ethereum guest and so it was a Melting Pot of conversations and that’s really where I learned like what

I’m good at in this industry uh which is not uh uh like what I thought it was going to be which was like coding I thought I was gonna have to learn how to code but then it was turned out it was content production uh and that was kind

Of like my first foot in the door that ultimately came to to lead into bankless yeah it’s it’s funny you talk about that way because one of the things that I think bankless has historically done a nice job of is that sort of like let’s disagree about stuff but in a way that

Doesn’t feel either overly academic which a lot of like the Twitter threads can feel or the conference conversation patients can feel and doesn’t feel overly antagonistic which is also a thing that happens on on Twitter a lot but that’s a really fine point to navigate and I think if you look at like

The post bull market world of crypto influencers and crypto media outside of folks like coindesk and the blog because those are sort of a separate Beast here but like the bit boys of the world right the YouTubers of the world the majority of them are pretty disgraced at this

Point either from pedaling let’s just call them what they are peddling coins or these sort of like overly Rosy uh analysis of what a specific asset might do you guys are kind of one of the few left standing that has for the most part navigated that well at the same

Time you do take sponsorship money you do host ad reads um how do you kind of navigate that sort of ethical relationship not necessarily with like the World At Large but with the actual viewers of the show yeah when we started bankless uh uh it was under a

Paradigm where like the typical crypto content producer influencer type uh they made money and they made upside by like dumping on their followers dumping on their listeners right right uh that was like the status quo business model so when like the bankless media platform came out in the podcast and we had

Sponsorship it’s like there’s we get Flack for our sponsors today but I’m like guys remember what that means remember like the sustainable business model that this implies right and so the the philosophy on like the bankless business model I didn’t really fully like answer your original question which

Was like the role of Grassroots media organizations um Bank list we strictly call ourselves like not journalists like that J word we definitely throw Flags like not not a journalist um I call ourselves optimistic storytellers of Frontier Technologies um uh a thesis-driven media company if you will where we have versions of the

Future that we would like to see arrive and then we tell um the the show like give our Theses for why we think that that future is the most likely future and also a good future um and so with the bank list is a dual business model uh Media Company

Um so subscribers uh pay subscribers who pay for perks and extra content and just access uh and then add also subscription Revenue uh and the idea is like these are polar opposing forces right the idea is that like we want the ability and we retain the ability to fire a sponsor at

Any moment in time if we feel like they are misaligned or trying to attempt to have undo influence right uh and so like freedom freedom from sponsor capture and then also uh there and then and so we in order to make sure that we have that freedom from sponsor capture we need to

Make sure that we are providing sufficient value to create subscribers so we need to make sure that we are not too dominant on one side of the business because if we start to be like 90 sponsor revenue and only 10 subscriptions from uh listeners that means the access of power has tilted too

Far in sponsorship’s favor and we need to increase the value of our product to our paid members who and also it means like we’re misaligned as in like people aren’t paying for the product on an individual level only sponsors are paying for the product and so having

This as close to 50 50 as possible is where we kind of find ourselves walking like the line between the yin and the Yang which is always where you want to be yeah so this is a little little inside baseball but as you know the cpms in crypto the basically for those who

Aren’t familiar with the space the advertising amount you can charge per listener in crypto is very high relative to most other podcast mediums um I think it’s the number one uh industry for podcast forever podcast advertising like if you go in like the the athletic greens or the uh like

Nordvpn they are not paying anywhere near podcast Advertiser or cpms and so what’s interesting here is balancing those two things between sponsorship revenue and membership Revenue the membership uh model most media organizations have found it actually doesn’t work for them because the amount of money they can generate from memberships is so much

Lower comparatively to sponsorships like people don’t realize this but YouTube premium actually is a money loser for YouTube because even when you’re paying 12 or 15 bucks a month that’s nowhere near the amount they would make from ad revenue on you uh you know the same thing works

For like oh why doesn’t my favorite website have a model where I can just pay them five bucks a month as opposed to showing ads on the websites like well they actually make more money from showing you the ads than they would from your membership fee so how do you guys

Kind of balance that do you just uh de-prioritize Revenue to maintain a ratio or how does that kind of work out yeah so the idea is that the revenue that comes from the sponsorships we can uh fuel our team growth to increase the value of the product from the pay

Subscriber base so not too long ago launched our website for the first time ever after being a company for like three years right but a very spiffy uh high production website right we’re all super proud of it and then since launching that website we’ve been able

To roll out um I think like three products now ever ever since like so now we actually have like a hub right and so we have um literally the token Hub so that’s like token ratings by the analyst team on the newsletter so bullish or Barris or underweights and then there’s also

Like me Ryan and uh two analysts on the bankless team uh do the bankless bankless bags it’s like our personal investment club we all put money in uh and then we elect to buy or sell certain tokens and so like if you want to see the bankless bags got to be a premium

Subscriber uh and then so like it’s putting our money where our mouth is and that is a premium feature that’s a feature for the bankless citizens and then there’s the um the debriefs so every after every Monday podcast there’s a 30 to 45 minute extra podcast where Ryan and I as soon

As we’re done with the main podcast uh we say goodbye to the guest and then we just hit record um no ads uh totally uncut unprepared unfiltered thoughts um I swear a lot more on that version um and that only goes out to the premium feeds uh and to the premium feed right

And uh and so like that is owned and uh that’s owned by the Bay citizens so the idea is that like even when the um balance of podcaster Revenue comes from sponsorships and starts to overweigh we’ve seen it go back and forth a number of times when it starts

To overweigh premium subscribers really that just means is that we actually have more resources to fund into to making and improving the product for premium subscribers um and so it naturally kind of keeps itself in in some sort of equilibrium there yeah so you kind of brought up a really

Nice segue into your editorial process which I know you guys say you’re not you’re not journalist but I want to talk a little bit about how you manage the idea of what needs to be disclosed what doesn’t need to be disclosed um as you mentioned you you literally

Now have a product for premium subscribers that’s like here’s what we’re investing in the traditional journalism world you’re not allowed to do that right or if you if you do it you have to have it sort of in a passively managed fund or you have to have like

Big disclosures about like how much of a specific asset you guys own um in the influencer world it’s never disclosed at all right people uh short tokens that they’re telling people to buy all the time so how does that sort of process work for you guys internally

When do you think you need to say like to the public hey I’ve acquired a bag of let’s pick a nice safe coin usdc um uscc nice good old bag of usdc hope it doesn’t go down yeah um so what do you think about that like disclosure process do you have something

Formal is it just sort of as you guys feel a need to yeah so um the I think we bankless has the best disclosures in the crypto industry uh so you can go to bankless.com disclosures and while you and you will see the bankless bags fund portfolio you’ll see us yeah you will

Not see percentages um interesting although if you were a good enough Snoop you could find that you could find the addresses on chain and you could figure it out uh but then also in addition to that it has all every single one of mine and Ryan’s Angel Investments it has all of our

Personal token Holdings so we have like the best disclosures in the industry I would say yeah um and then there’s like there’s another additional component which like uh when Ryan after doing like 500 plus episodes and each of them or almost 99 of them are over an hour long like people get to

Know us pretty well uh like you start to get to know the people behind the microphone in the camera and that I think is unique in this industry because uh it’s a crypto is a constant conversation and so I’d like to think I hope that um bankless long-time Bank

List listeners can see the authenticity that me and Ryan try and lead with um hopefully I’m not being naive in that but like we are here to make the world a better place that’s why we started bankless uh also we started Bank list to make crypto a better place because we

Can’t take we can’t make the world a better place understanding the current state that crypto’s in uh with all of our volatility and scams and rug pulls right like we need to fix that right and so like we want to lead by example um and then like we’ve built up a lot of

Social Capital just like people trust us because of our track record like we don’t we don’t buy and dumb tokens we don’t do the pump and dumps uh we stick to we stick to our guns we stick to whatever what we’re good at uh and like

Yes I could have a private wallet that everyone doesn’t know about and I could be like counter trading uh the bank list Nation if you will but then if you actually look at the content you would actually see not very many like Mo like Mo impetuses of just like David

Really just talked about that token one at one point in time and then he talked about it again and again and again like that that’s actually like never really happened and so you can kind of just infer I think from our behaviors that it’s just like not a game that that we

Play in um and now I guess I can I’m just kind of stating that like without like true deep evidence but that’s kind of why I go back to like yo there’s 500 plus episodes thousands of hours of me and Ryan on YouTube and I think you can kind

Of come to a pretty decent character judgment from all of that yeah you also can’t prove a negative right you always could have a dark wallet somewhere right so yeah yeah I I hear you on that so as both The Listener basis of banglas has grown as you two have gotten sort of

More involved in these other parts of bankless um your influence has increased in the space and there are you know one of I think the the hardest parts is realizing that you now have more influence than you had to and maybe that means you have a different level of responsibility both

To your listeners but the industry at large than maybe you did before jokes you could make you know in your first podcast now if you make them someone might write about it it might become something that’s read in a senate hearing right the the scope of what

Bankless reaches now is much bigger than it used to be how have you thought about navigating that responsibility and sort of the the dangers that come with a larger audience yeah so there are on this conversation there are like easier things to prune off from behavior that I don’t feel like

Impacting me as a person and so like the the easiest one like one point in time like I got a couple comments from um bakeless listeners that I need to stop swearing on the podcast at some point like the podcast grew large enough to the point I was like okay I should

Stop doing that um yeah and that didn’t feel it didn’t feel like I was being censored it didn’t feel like that that was an undue oppression upon my individual expression uh and then also at some point in time I realized that like yo like people in Congress and Senators like listen to

Bank list and so like at some point I have to be a representative for the industry um also I don’t want too much of that in my life uh because like bankless is supposed to be like a lifestyle business the only one of the reasons why banklist

Works is because it’s fun for me and Ryan like it is a fun activity uh and so I don’t want to have too much oppression just because I have a large listener base that infiltrates and controls my character uh and so like every once in a

While on the weekly roll up I’ll slip out that uh one of my favorite ft’s is a crypto dick butt like love crypto dick butts uh and I’m Unapologetic about it and yeah uh not necessarily able to control my own personal like uh impulses to talk about the things that I really find

Interesting and fun and and mimetic to talk about uh and it’s it’s a little bit of a growing up story of just like uh you can talk about crypto dick butts but you can’t talk about them all the time um and it’s just like annoying for some

People and so like I have to keep myself uh with guardrails on um but at some point in time like I do ultimately get to be patient for the opportunity to talk about whatever I want to talk about and it’s more about choosing my moments right uh and I could

I could probably take more consideration to like the weight of the responsibility of uh crypto as a whole is like PR uh the influence and reach that bankless has but I think one of the reasons why people like bankless or at least one of the reasons why I like that people like

Bankless is that me and Ryan are super authentic um and again that goes back to like bankless is a lifestyle business this is our lifestyles this is who we are and at some point if like bankless stop scaling because people don’t like Who We Are

It’s so be it like I can do some sort of like management of myself and Ryan can do the same but at some point um it just becomes untenable yeah that’s interesting do you think this would ever stop being fun or let me ask that a different way what would have to change

For this to stop being fun yeah so like if we did another bull market and it looks like this last one where uh it was all good on the run-up and then uh The Innovation started to get replaced by scams that’s going to happen the pattern is going to happen

Um but if man if that trajectory doesn’t improve it’s gonna yeah be frustrating um and like right we are techno optimists we are crypto optimists and so like even with all the scams in the rug polls and if they do come like there’s always still the underlying structure of what

Makes a blockchain at blockchain and I believe that a blockchain is inherently an optimistic piece of technology and even when you have put scams on top of it like that doesn’t change the nature of these things um still like if if another four to six years pass and like we still kind of

Have like a negative PR like it was really cool for a moment in time from 2020 to 2021 to say I was in crypto and I waited for four to five years for that to be the case and I only got one year of that uh and uh I would like that to

Not be the case yeah you know it’s funny I I used to think I used to feel worse about that industry cycle than I do now and I think it’s because what we’ve seen unfortunately is everything outside of crypto is also going through that same cycle and I

Think that like makes me more bearish on like the macro future of like this entire system that we’ve built but you know we see this with banking right now too right where it’s like oh like just like clockwork a bunch of banks are failing again and just like clockwork a

Bunch of valuations that you know it’s kind of these things where it’s like you can say that there are a bunch of overvalued tokens and then you can also say like well Netflix is down 85 and you know are we really going to say that like uh either Netflix being down 85 is

Justified or Netflix having the the top that it did was justified and so there’s this very kind of uncomfortable thing where I thought crypto was going to mature into something that resembled the more traditional markets and the more traditional markets are actually starting to resemble crypto more yeah

Yeah um that’s actually the theme we’ve cited quite a lot on Bank list is like as crypto is becoming modestly more stable the stock market’s becoming modestly more volatile um as uh like people get more internet Savvy with the natural Arc of the internet crypto becomes more usable so

These things are like converging together um but like what would make it less fun is like if uh my expectations about how fast the collision between society and crypto is is actually way slower than I thought um I mean I’m still gonna do podcasts but like yeah maybe I’d talk about other things

Like once upon a time I did a food podcast I kind of maybe I’ll do more of those if crypto is still running in slow motion that’s interesting so I want to take a little bit of a hard Fork here into the world of actual blockchain um so I think

For those who don’t listen to bankless their perception is it’s sort of The Unofficial eth Maxi show right yeah ethereum nation and state contest yes yeah that content yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah it’s the North Korean media arm of the ethereum foundation which uh you know I I think there is uh

You know there’s some interesting history there about sort of the way you guys sort of grew up with ethereum and sort of those competitions between the only bitcoiners and then like no there’s actually a role for smart contracts that sort of growth in of ethereum um but you know crypto is inherently tribal

Yeah how have you guys thought about navigating that as there are more and more competitive systems that are either doing things that ethereum can’t and by that I mean things like are we right storage networks that are designed to do something very different that run smart contracts and then alternative you know

Both layer ones and layer two systems out there nowadays yeah um I think like the average Solana Community member to to blanket statement to archetype like missed the part of crypto’s History where like the bitcoiners and the ethereans were really going at it that was during like 2018 to

2020 and that part of cryptos as an industry’s trajectory in ethereum as a trajectory missing that part um also gives you a um an incomplete understanding about why banklist is the way that it is um markets as a concept markets have memory in them uh so like markets are

Based off Market participants and Market participants have like innate reflexes when something causes a market when some activity some event causes a market pain then fast forward a few number of years later and that a similar event happens that market will behave in the same way

It’s like a learned system and I think it’s really important to view blockchain communities under kind of these similar um similar like Collective intelligences like the ethereans this is why the tribe tribes are just Collective intelligences ethereans uh were born in like this Crucible of just being absolutely having

The haste out of us by bitcoiners and for and some of it was super dumb and some of it was super valuable and that was one of the things like the why my first podcast was so so uh useful in that moment was that it actually produced productive conversations

Between bitcoiners and ethereans to allow like there was this camp in the ethereum world and there still is traces of this of like eth isn’t money eth is gas we just need ether a token is an is a means to an end and we just want to

Forget about it as much as possible because we just want to do uh run Unstoppable applications on ethereum and so like the eth isn’t money Camp these are like the uh I would archetype these as like the woke lefties of the crypto world world to use a blunt

Um a a blunt abstraction uh and like a certain members of the ethereum community came together in that time I was like this is ridiculous like blockchain’s needs security you get the security for the the value of the coin the bitcoiners are totally right that the whole like point of a blockchain is

To produce a money and the money is related to the security and so part of this compose system and people who are like eth is just gas ethos and money are one of the biggest threats to the ethereum system as a whole and like you can hear me getting

Animated and that’s what that’s what like 2018 to 2020 was right yeah was like we had like conversations about ethereum nodes we had conversations about Austrian economics we had uh uh like conversations about like theories of money uh and and that was like The Crucible that a lot of ethereum culture

Was born in and that’s where Ryan and I were born in uh and so like we were like pounding this drum not to could not to convince outside community members about like what we thought was true about ethereum but to convince ethereum itself like ethereum itself didn’t have

Consensus about what it was back then and so we had to have our own internal conversations about the theory of a blockchain and ethereum had its own internal tribes that needed to like come to consensus about itself and that was like a big learning moment for a lot of

Us because no one really knew the truth but we were all slowly iterating in conversation uh ethereum is very pluralistic we have a lot of internal tribes and we still do to to this day yeah um but like I feel like over the era of 2018 to like 2020 2021 the

Internal tribes settled a lot of internal disagreements and came to consensus about what makes a blockchain a blockchain why we’re designing ethereum the way that it is uh and just like the overall like crypto economic philosophy that has turned into like the ethereum North Star and so I think like

When the newer communities come and see bankless as like state-sponsored ethereum media media part of it is like a we’re stuck in that mindset to some degree like we are to some parts of us like stuck there like it’s like a part of our soul and we

Haven’t actually like been able to like leave that like it’s like it’s like um fixation on that that part of the the crypto trajectory yeah so one of the things though is that the ethereum of today is incredibly different from the ethereum you guys you were arguing about

In 2018 and 19. and you know like we’ve gone from a world where ethereum’s Hallmark was it was a smart contract platform in one Global state with atomic composability right and World computer we kind of have a cosmosification of ethereum that’s taking place and this

Sort of the the ethus money thesis is a lot more tenuous in a world where ethereum is a data availability settlement layer and 99 of transactions don’t happen on Eve they happen elsewhere and get rolled back onto ether settle down to e through an L2 or roll up or something along those lines

Um so do you think the ether’s money thesis still is valid why would that make the ethos money thesis invalid because the utility of ethereum has changed from an execution layer to a settlement layer I think that that is actually what makes ether’s money as valid the settlement

Layer of the ethereum layer 1 settlement implies like okay what are you settling uh money and value uh and so like this slowness and decentralized nature of the ethereum L1 is in blockchain crypto economics terms synonymous with money-ness in in the world of crypto money and so like the execution layers

Like the op the the layer two tokens op arbitrum yeah like all those are not money those are capital assets uh that help settle money to the settlement layer uh and but it’s the the slow decentralized nature of the ethereum layer one that is similar to money like

The only two like things that I think can claim crypto money in this industry are Bitcoin and ethereum and all also the slowest and most expensive blockchains picture it’s not that expensive uh uh but in theory it would be uh the slow the slow expensive blockchains are Bitcoin and ethereum and

Those those properties I think are are synonymous with with money-ness when you’re kind of looking at this space so from that thesis right there there’s a there’s a value in being a a layer for which other things settle to um what does that settlement have to

Look like for it to be a legitimate use of those properties so the reason I’m kind of like talking about it in this way is like we have a lot of things nowadays that are some form of ethereum scaling right we have we have Roll-Ups we have CK Roll-Ups uh we have proper

L2s we have side chains with Bridges right we have a very complicated series of things that you can get to basically settle back to eth the one commonality between all of them is they are highly centralized um whereas ethereum is a quite decentralized Network everything that is going to become the

Usability layer for ethereum is built in ways that are are super centralized and that’s you know not that’s not kind of one of those things where it’s like not necessarily a knock on them but like no one has permissionless sequencers yet no one has built decentralized layer twos

Yet many of the layer two is uh or even sidechain systems they’re capped at like 100 validators because that’s a that’s the you know for polygon you can’t fit more than 100 signatures in a block so therefore that is what polygon has in terms of a validator capacity that’s not

Changing so how do you think about kind of the relationship where like up until this point folks who’ve been using ethereum have been settling and executing transactions on a decentralized layer and now the sort of future of this is like actually people are going through something that is

Close to a centralized as a traditional Financial provider even if the end state is settled onto ethereum that process of getting there uh it’s being mediated by a lot more intermediaries than sort of the original versions and Visions for ethereum right so the there’s um an Infinity different number of ways

To settle on ethereum uh coinbase supercentralized settles on ethereum uh me a one of one person centralized in the 101 uh settles on ethereum um Hybrid decentralized models that we can think of uh State channels between two parties settle on ethereum and varying varying levels of decentralization right you can you can

Go across the spectrum of centralized to decentralized yes settlement onto ethereum there is like the archetype for layer twos which like the the East types like myself say like Layer Two as well as uh in a decentralized capacity uh scale ethereum and when we say those words we’re actually using like the

Archetype of layer twos and not actually the specific implementations of layer twos as they say today yes the the way that that and that’s the way that ethereum people talk about layer twos like the a layer two archetype and why we talk about that is that like

We we claim we believe that layer twos on ethereum have the most credible path towards decentralization regardless of the state of things that they are today like once upon a time ethereum in 2015 to 2016 Super centralized and had a ton of work to do and took an unfortunately

Long amount of time way longer than we thought to get to the point that it is today um and to also just slowly over time decentralized as in some sort of correlated fashion to the way that the technology developed yeah we we think as ethereum people that the same exact road

Map is going to happen in microcosms for layer twos um they are going to be built slowly with the intention of and capability to fully decentralize into the grand scheme of things in the way that all these ethereum people are talking today like when I was writing my

Um even before Bank list I was writing articles about ether as an asset and I would talk about proof of State and I wrote something like my core pieces that like may turn to me from a no one to a someone in this space I would talk about

Like ether the triple point asset and one of those properties was proof of stake I wrote that article in 2019 like a full like three years between before ethereum actually turned proof at stake and I got just like Haze by the bitcoiners because they were like he’s

Just talking about a version of ether that doesn’t exist they’re just the the you know there goes bankless again like spinning narratives and then fast forward to where we are today all of the historical articles that I wrote about ether just become true because eventually I

Made a bet that it would be eventually become this and then it became that and when all the ethereum people just talk about like layer twos and a version of themselves that isn’t here yet but we all think they will be we’re more or less making the same bet

Yeah I guess the the challenge I’d push to that is the layer two systems have a very different economic structure behind them than a layer one does and so I think we see this a little bit in the cosmos space where there’s a lot of incredibly interesting things being

Built on Cosmos and it’s sort of this all this this network of a lot of semi-independent networks that are semi-connected as well but the decentralization just isn’t there at anywhere near what you see from other L1 ecosystems because each each Cosmos world is its own thing same thing on

Polka dot with parachains right that like with the minute you start to simplify the types of things that are running on the network or the number of different subnets or you know we can call you know for the sake of argument here right any type of ethereum scaling

Solution is its own network and so for those to actually reach the levels of decentralization that you would need there there are some core technology innovations that haven’t been done specifically around things like sequencers right that’s just like uh no one knows how to do this yet

Um there’s a few theoretical papers but no one has figured out a way for permissionless sequencers to sort of exist and run um but the other piece is like you know and maybe just the answer is like this is a a further Market Evolution that’s needed but

If you break up the value chain associated with L2 is the incentives to decentralize them if they’re purely execution layers are a little bit thin right because you know in most execution layer systems have significantly fewer players and are significantly more centralized than settlement layer plays so I’m kind of

Wondering like if we sort of expect these systems to be settling back down to ethereum is it reasonable to expect them to also be decentralized right and so I think I think we’re going we’re zeroing in on probably the thing that we probably disagree about with which is like the

Whole point about a layer two is that it doesn’t actually have to be as decentralized as the layer one that’s why we make it a layer two and so the whole idea is that ethereum optimizes for decentralization and then through what makes a layer two a layer two combination of cryptography and crypto

Economics and Layer Two can actually sacrifice decentralization because the higher Court of the layer 1 checks on it and it makes the layer two makes commitments to the layer one about how it’s going to operate and then the layer one make sure that it follows the rules

That it committed to originally and so you get the decentralization for all the layer twos because of the layer one and so the layer twos can reduce their level of decentralization and then take those points that it has now like skill tree points take them away from decentralization add them to execution

Uh and so that’s always been the the ethereum like layer 2 philosophy yeah it’s interesting because I think another another way to sort of put this would be that a lot of the architecture of Solana and the values of the Solana ecosystem are are much more focused on real-time censorship resistance and

Real-time decentralization than cockroach decentralization right like then what decentralization like cockroach decentralization like bitcoiners are all about like uh what is the like like a cockroach is the most likely animal to survive a nuclear war right right so like the long term like how can we make sure that even in a

State of you know World War III the Bitcoin Ledger survives and there’s a very high likelihood that the Bitcoin Ledger survives World War III much higher likelihood than like the polygon Ledger surviving World War III or the arbitrary uh ledgers as well you know than any side chain layers uh surviving

World War III and it sort of seems like the the argument here is that it is sort of very similar to the Bitcoin world where the point of decentralization that matters is on the survivability and Global availability of The Ledger over necessarily the ability for someone to

Transact on the network in real time because you need decentralization of the execution layer if you want to maintain censorship resistance in in real time as opposed to sort of the longevity aspect do you think that’s kind of a fair uh assessment of kind of where where implicit values are shown

Yeah um I might need you to ask the the question again but like the the idea should be like if we lose the arbitrum Ledger in the archetype of layer twos the the future versions of layer twos The ethereum Ledger will be able to um settle your transactions right so if

You had money on the arbitrum layer two uh the ethereum layer one the the Supreme Court of the ethereum network of chain system will always be able to pull back your money from wherever it is in its network of layer twos Layer Three is there four layer fives

Um if even all your layers yeah even if you’re Layer Two through five you know gets banned by China Russia and the United States right yes and so like uh you can always have the freedom to exit right that’s a super core philosophy of ethereum it’s like you can exit to the

Layer one and so if you can’t access the layer two three four five six from the user interface or they get shut down or they get censorship censored the idea is you can just route your transaction through the layer one and then the layer one will pull you back your your your

Money and so it’s that and that’s why like the properties of decentralization censorship resistance at the layer one or like of the utmost importance and why in a properly constructed Layer Two it’s okay to compromise those things up at the stack yeah it’s interesting because I think there’s a level of like

Access versus like what’s the term here um access versus accessibility like Harvard is technically uh everyone in the United States has access to Harvard right very few people are is it accessible too right in these sort of differentials there I guess part of the the thing I’m wondering about is like

That technical ability to exit to the layer one is a very important philosophical grounding principle for folks who are very heavy into blockchain in a world where we’re looking at this technology to disrupt let’s let’s just pick the name of your show bankless right if we’re actually talking about

Um normal folks switching over from using centralized regulated U.S banking institutions to building something fully on chain the amount of technical know-how needed to exit to the L1 is pretty high so how do you think about that relationship between what is technically possible and then what a user could be

Expected to know like the fact that the exit to L1 in the banking industry is the FDIC comes in and buys your bank and suddenly there’s money in your account just like there was yesterday is a pretty elegant failure state from the perspective of a user yeah yeah yeah uh

I mean it’s just a technical problem right uh on all technical problems can get solved right the the big the big team working on this is is Layer Two beat right in bartek uh and so the inter the the solution landscape for pulling back your money from from the layer X

Down to the layer one that’s just like that’s a that’s a startup question like call for startup uh and okay maybe maybe we naively Waltz into the future of a bajillion chains on ethereum and like no one builds that but if it is technically possible and then we need it someone

Will build it right so that that I would just put that into the the market of the responsibility of the startup world to fix the matter is that like you make sure that it’s possible to build it on the chain and then maybe we don’t need front-end uis to actually get that done

Because we actually never actually see the censorship of layer two layer three is layer fours um and maybe that’s the world that we live in but the idea is that when the time comes the the fact that it’s possible will create the demand to exit if that if the

Demand to exit ever comes about and people don’t know how to do it someone will build that because it’s pretty easy to just like hey I’ve built yourself an exit button also it charges you 0.1 or one percent of your exit right like that’s just an incentive yeah I guess it’s like

My core thesis here is that layer twos are easier to kill and they’re easier to kill because they’re more centralized and like so for example if usdc on ethereum were hacked I think there’s a I’m curious your your response there’s a very very low chance that the ethereum

Community would vote to rewind the chain and fix the bug because I think mine probably that that feels close to zero although that would be an interesting experiment right but I think that the chances there is it would probably be fixed in a different way whether it be

Like a snapshot and then the usdc would burn them and reissue them there’d be there’d be something that wasn’t you know rewinding the chain to fix the problem I think in an L2 or in an application specific you know chain that settles back to ethereum they would rewind the

Chain and today’s current state of things yeah probably yeah yeah and that that for me that becomes a a place where the model of fractal scaling can become one where governments are able to assert more control and more influence through the risk of regulatory actions like no one’s going to convince the global

Ethereum Community to Fork out a bunch of transactions that settle a few months ago that might be different when you’re talking about you know a more decentralized or a more single-use scaling solution yeah I love this question actually I love this conversation so the idyllic layer 2 optimistic arbitrary

List because like these these two chains are supposed to be ethereum equivalent if you’re like evm equivalent they are supposed to be ethereum yeah but more more block space and so that actually means like at a very deep level in the ideal case of these layer twos you

Actually don’t really see a big line drawn between when ethereum stops and when optimism starts and so like right now we’re having the conversation of like oh yeah what if usdc on optimism was hacked what would we will roll back your chain and today we would say yes

And Once Upon a Time in ethereum in 2016 we also said yes fast forward to today we would say no and like the whole process about the idea of Layer Two is like I said earlier like once upon a time I wrote about ether as a proof of stake currency back

In before in its proof of work format and then today all of my articles are correct even though I wrote them when they were wrong and that’s the same thing about Layer Two it’s like once upon a time in the future there might be some exploit

On optimism and in the future it will be more sufficiently decentralized than it is today the same trajectory that theorem took and at some point in time the conversation maybe I’m back on this podcast and you’re talking about okay I don’t think player threes can stand up

To nation state layer of resistance and I’m like yeah you’re probably right and then I’ll come back a couple years later I’m like I don’t think they’re force can stand up to nation state censorship resistance like yeah you’re probably right and the idea is like the margins

Of crypto are always super Fragile the newer thing the newest things are always fragile and they take time to harden this is just the nature of Open Source Code and as these things become more robust and as we finish building them they will slowly Harden and calcify as crypto

Economic systems do yeah I think that I think that’s a super super reasonable point to look at the future of kind of how these things how these things scale out right because like at the end of the day everything starts small enough to kill and the goal is to get to a place

Where it escapes that censorship choke point as fast as possible and I think I mean yeah there’s no L2 Solutions today that are remotely close to that but ethereum is very clearly surpassed the point where it could fall to that sort of a system right and ethereum also

Presents the model for Layer Two so because ethereum did it we actually have we’ve done it once before so now all the layer twos also have been shown a path as to how to do it like optimism recently got their second client uh for the op stack uh arbitrary I’ve been

Pretty sure is working on something similar um ZK sync is working on uh on um parallel validation I can’t remember the word but the idea is like um with like uh this new like uh evolution in in cryptography that all these crypto cryptography nerds are super hyped about

Called Nova the idea of ZK roll up parallel processing becomes a lot more feasible et cetera et cetera et cetera right so like we have all the in the same way that once upon a time we finish the r d phase for ethereum and then it just became an engineering challenge we have

Finished the r d phase for layer twos and now it’s just an engineering challenge you know it’s funny I I wouldn’t say we are done with the r d phase for layer twos yeah not as a hook because like layer twos are so multivariate right yeah yeah just like yeah but it’s also

Interesting because you know the scale factor that a lot of these l2s present now are do you think they’re sufficient like the the perception So like um yeah like back in 2020 like I was uh you know you know Victor as well I was at bison

Trails working with him on a bunch of this stuff and a bunch of the work I was doing was on eth2 infrastructure for uh you know Kraken and coinbase and all these companies that needed to get ready to do the staking and the estimates that folks were giving in terms of the

Scalability you would get from ethereum layer twos were several orders of magnitude above what we’re seeing today in production environments like there are only a few that are pushing three digits of throughput nowadays and it’s low three digits at that like do you think the scale is has has matched what

You were expecting to see at this stage of the L2 process no promise by the ethereum community has ever come on time ever like I remember in 2019 yeah or no 2018 things like 2018 State comes next year that’s great yeah yeah no we’ve never the ethereum world

Has never made a promise that it’s actually made on time has never made a promise that it hasn’t also kept yeah so so there’s been a lot of versions of this though right like the um the sort of active road map developing is a very interesting piece of culture

Um and this sort of I think you guys play a really big role in this is sort of the story that the ethereum community tells itself about what the ethereum world is doing and I’m always fascinated by this because there’s a level at which from the outside it can feel

Um either like a very open and honest software development community that sort of says well we thought execution layer sharding was going to be a thing but actually no it’s not actually their data only layers actually they’re only right and and you know at the same time the other

Version of that is this is a community that’s consistently willing to change the narrative and sort of support whatever you know that that sort of meme of like I support the latest thing is like the ethereum community on whatever the foundation sort of sets as the new

Scaling Direction how do you think about both the role bankless plays in that and like what that sort of very active evolution of scaling looks like yeah um I think it’s important to um start this conversation off with at least what I believe which is these crypto economic systems are alive

Systems these things are like organisms the first like a live thing that the internet ever created was like a computer virus that could replicate and live on the internet now from then on out it’s like single single cell organisms on the internet with like agents I mean if you believe viruses are

Alive yes yeah let’s have a separate conversation um uh eventually we’ll figure out how to compare and contrast ethereum and Consciousness but we’ll save that one for a different day um then the the multicellular organisms of the internet are like crypto systems they got organs they got components they

Got inputs and outputs blah blah blah blah blah and so like Bitcoin did the same thing like Bitcoin peer-to-peer electronic cash in the written in the white paper is now like we are the current Narrative of Bitcoin the current thing of Bitcoin is completely different from that like

Is it digital gold uh online store of value like different bitcoiners will give you different answers at one point in time there is a division between these two people one people wanted to be digital cash other people wanted to be digital gold we call this the the block war debates the Civil War

Um ethereum had the ethos money isn’t money debate uh it had the roll-up Centric road map versus uh you know the execution charting on the layer one debates um and so like if it’s if it’s not your tribe it’s moving the goal posts yes if it is your tribe it is

Narrative development and understanding which do you think it is I I think it’s narrative development under understanding and so like the idea is like these crypto economic systems have uh a desire to maximally express themselves they have they are alive they have autonomy they have an agency and

They want to be something they want to be some version of itself and so ethereum as a core developers are like the stewards of this thing that’s blind but tells the core deaths what it wants and so then the core devs discover things they discover mechanisms we were

Feeling around in the dark around how to scale ethereum and we came up with plasma and we felt that that was like kind of right but not totally right yeah like plasma implementers calls oh my God too many of those times um and so like feeling around in the

Darks like we think we’re like warmer warmer and then like optimism has this aha moment like optimistic roll ups found it right uh and so then we we build that and then like the ethereum community like sees this was a discovery optimistic roll apps uh there’s consensus that this is

By the community about this is the right path um same thing with like eip1559 like we uh lowered The Ether issuance from five to two per block or five to three per block three to two per block and then discovered eip1559 and then The Narrative of around ethereum monetary

Policy was like first a absent and then B slowly became minimum viable issuance right and so that was us discovering something that we deem to be optimal about ethereum uh and so the ethereum community is discovering what ethereum wants to be and we are letting this organic research and development process

Actually Define ethereum so like like you said like Fast Forward into the years of today from the years of when ethereum the white paper started it is a very different um machine although there actually is a lot of parallels but there is like the implementation details have changed and

Iterated and developed over time and I think that that like if we had rigidly stuck to the ethereum white paper we would have like built this like bastardized version of ethereum and also it’s worth noting that like it’s the ethereum community that’s worth that is actually the only community that can actually determine

And discover what ethereum wants to be and then the ethereum community tribal as it is looks towards bitcoiners and be like you guys are moving the goal posts and it moves there’s a lot of people like you guys are moving the goposts even though these communities are also

Engaged like in the exact same behavior about the discovery of their particular blockchains yeah it’s you know the crude analogy is we’re all just slime mold right and when it finds a bit of food we all yes 100 I love I love that analogy yeah yeah it’s really interesting uh I

Mean I do say the decision to say we’re gonna fracture the ethereum state was a very very interesting one because that was not execution charting uh yeah yeah exactly right the the this idea to say that like ethereum for all of its history has had one Ledger and one Global state that you

Could read from right execution charting always confused me yeah right but like but like the current the role of centric road map of ethereum where you have data sharding and then you have Bridges between uh roll-ups it’s actually the same thing it’s like two different strategies to approach the same conclusion

It does it still scares me I would say though because like uh so State proofs are still fairly immature and state proofs will help a lot once those get developed out but like the one of the Hallmarks of like the blockchain ecosystem I know and love has

Always been that there is one state and there’s this interesting thing happening with ethereum like on many other networks that pre-date ethereum uh sorry ethereum two many of us have predate ethereum too um the state was always fractured right like polka dot fractured State near fractured State all of these like

Systems were using a pure parallelization of State model to scale Solana is one single Global State that’s trying to just be as fast as possible and the ethereum version is a little bit of a hybrid right that there are isolated states that are interoperable and you can sort of establish trust

Between them using systems that are bridges it’s definitely a better world than the pure sharding ecosystems but it’s I think it’s still very interesting that sort of a lot of the tooling to make that work doesn’t exist yet right transacting between arbitrary and optimism is not

A solved problem at this point and so I think it’s the part to me that’s really interesting is that the community and the developer Community right who makes these calls was very willing to sort of try something very different that isn’t proven out yet and doesn’t have like uh

You know oh here’s the compatibility layer like the check box is checked we’re good yeah um I mean uh the the bridges are addressing us as as incomplete with as the Roll-Ups um with the same overall trajectory right if like they kind of need the roll-off signature and then the bridges

Can mature but like the idea is like open source software gets better over time gets more secure over time we learn more over time and eventually like these cross-linkings become more robust and start to go from like one-off to uh one-off implementation so like actually enshrined infrastructure yeah it just

Sort of so there was a very cool piece of tech that was developed um built on the Wormhole that was sort of how this xdap framework and it existed for two weeks and then went away and you’ll you’ll you’ll see why in a second but it allowed someone to call an

Anchor contract on Terra from Avalanche using a beachhead contract and so there didn’t need to be a full copy of anchor deployed on Avalanche you just could simply do a messaging call back to it and that would sort of interact with that contract and produce your results on Avalanche and I always

Thought that was a very interesting model that I wish had sort of been deployed elsewhere where like solving this problem of how do you communicate between multiple roles multiple layers like deploying uniswap on every Roll Up is definitely not the solution right for one you’re fracturing your liquidity in

A really really rough way but second it just the attack surface you end up creating at that point is much much larger um so I’m really curious to to think about what that looks like in the future why is it why is multiple implementations of uniswap increasing attack service

Uh unless you’re truly bit bit compatible with the evm engine which most of these are not you technically have to re-audit and you’re introducing runtime vulnerability I guess each time you deploy in something that’s not bit compatible sorry what was the original question oh uh just sort of like

Um when you’re looking at these sort of these structures and systems like there’s a I think there’s a thesis you can come to here where this type of scaling is actually the hardest version to do where like you’ve taken something that was the core of what made ethereum

Special and you’re saying we’re actually going to break it into parts and eventually it’ll come back together when the tooling’s there but for now interact in your own ecosystems like what do you think is a growth model for what are right now like arbitrary has to build its own ecosystem optimism has to

Build its own ecosystem polygon POS has to build its own ecosystem but eventually they’re going to all kind of come together for the folks you’ve talked to who are thinking about what growth and what adoption looks like over the next few years before that connective fiber is sort of rebuilt uh

What are folks thinking about from that perspective it’s kind of a tricky problem to navigate yeah I think the the way that this model of like Layer Two scaling and growth like happens in the near term is that each one of these ecosystems wants to build interoperability inside of itself before

It starts to span across layer twos so like you have the optimism super chain and then you have the ZK sync hyper chains yeah basically they’re all just like fractal scaling um ethereum spawns the optimism main net layer two and then with the op stack you get multiple layer threes and then you

Know square root that for layer four square root that for for layer fives and you get this like tree-like structure um Arbitron with the launch of the Arboretum down is uh built out their layer three models so anyone can build a layer three of arbitrum on Arboretum CK

Sync and in the CK roll-up world has like the same thing with like their circuits and and like what they call hyper hyper hyperscale hyper chains it’s all the same model so it’s like tree tree structure and to me the the reason why I feel resonance with that is because

That’s how the ledgers of traffic work right you got yes the Central Bank digital Ledger and then you got the commercial Banks and then you got fintech and then you got I don’t know some more some more ledgers after that and it’s a tree structure and so like if

Silverana wants to be this like one single Global state at the bottom settlement layer why can’t you also like it’s going to reach from its maximum capacity right unless unless the the design philosophy of Solana is that it hits infinite scale maybe maybe that is what it is but like

The idea is that like if you can build a Solana you could also build a Solana on top of a Solana right you could still do the the fractal tree structure even with a design philosophy of like maximum scale on every single chain and like you’re going to increase

The scale it doesn’t matter what the scale of your chain is like you can just always add more uh and so it’s and the the other I think like useful perspective I don’t think we have the time to go into it but it is like biomimicry in crypto economic systems

And I think that like the the biomimicry of modular chains where each module can be broken up into a competitive Gene if you will and each gene is competitive uh and like that’s kind of like what the op stack is going after we start to build like higher

Expressions in more app specific layer two layer three layer force uh that can fit into corners of the internet uh and then so all of these like optimism because everything’s built on the op stack base the open source Tech standard the interoperability between optimism chains is like as synchronous and coherent as

Composable as we hope what would like Solana as a shared single settlement layer would also be like there’s technical implementations but that’s the idea yeah so you know this is the piece I think that like we probably disagree on more than anything else which is that

I I think that the bio tree system is super interesting it is the way Trad five is built it is also all of tradvice failings come from that fundamental architecture right that when Robin Hood users got rugged from being able to transact with GameStop um that was because the tree you know

The the the brand one branch down failed right that was when their Clearinghouse was like you do not have enough liquidity for this we’re going to turn off your right to do these types of Trades so was it the structure that failed or was it the censorship and in

Lack of transparency of the structure in that particular part of the structure that failed I think that they are functionally one and the same that anytime you’re building a nested tree system even if it is fully transparent the the points of censorship like for for example your L4 can get censored by

Your L2 right that’s just a a fact of a stack right every time you’re building something on a foundation that Foundation needs to be solid and that I think there’s a there’s a a a interesting architecture there to say like can we take our tree and then can we build another Tree on

Top of it and can we shift them 90 degrees and suddenly build a lot more interconnects between them but in the absence of that sort of inter-branch and interleaf fiber um we do get into a place where every layer you move up is you know inheriting the security of

The layer below you is also inheriting the censorship ability of the layer below you 100 yeah yeah and like this goes back to the idea of just like so once upon a time in the future we are going to solve ethereum’s layer 2 centralization and censorship issues and

That will become a solved problem of course plan Aflac once we solve that problem I think it’s a fair statement for the right it’s like it’s not another new engineering problem to take that solved problem and apply it to a layer three or to a layer four right what the new engineering problem

Is is dropping the cost of spinning up a new chain lower so that you can have an order of magnitude more chains at the layer three and then you know say like hopefully the bull case for this whole system is that it costs you a hundred dollars to spin up a new chain

Yeah and then and so the idea is like once we crack that nut of the layer two you don’t actually have there’s no new engineering problem to apply that at the layer three at the layer four at the layer five and according to the protocol sync thesis one of the Theses that we’ve

Developed at bank list is that the most trustless and censorship resistant and credibly neutral protocols become the most adopted protocols because of those properties and so if there’s two layer threes and one is still censored and one is censorship resistant then people will adopt the incredibly neutral censorship

Resistant one over the censored one and so the idea is that like once you crack that you don’t think that’s true I said I hope that’s true but we saw it what we saw in the bull market is that it’s not necessarily true yeah and also crypto

Has a lot of progress to make yeah it’s fascinating um yeah you know I think I think that’s kind of interesting I would say my my my my potential critique of it is that it’s a theoretically very elegant architecture and the question is do users have the discipline to do it

Correctly like if we start building the l3s and fours sorry if we start adopting the l3s and fours before the l2s are decentralized it’s basically a can we walk and chew gum and that’s always a hard question in crypto of can we walk and chew gum

So I’m curious to see how it works out in the future too but yeah there’s no doubt that like there’s no technical reason an L2 can’t be as decentralized as an L1 there’s just um economic considerations and adoption considerations to see yeah I also say like there’s a the flip side of the

Conversation with like there are use cases for chains to be censorable right like yes 100 a bank would like if if we ever put a bank on a roll-up that we’re going to have to make compromises about this the centralization and censorship resistant nature of that particular roll

Up and the idea is like some some like Service uh some like audit auditing service like layer 2B will tell you exactly what the compromises of that layer two are or layer 3 or layer four or whatever and so the idea that we can uh like again the op stack is a module

For open source change you can put in different modules and replace them and if we need compromise modules in order to increase the use cases of certain use cases of change we can do that and that but that will always be on the margins and that’s like I said like the margins

Will be the most fragile part of this and this is how like trees trees grow like the furthest branches out are the tiniest and the easiest to break and the trees that are furthest away or the leaves that are for this away are going to be the first ones to fall off when

The times get stressful right this is a natural response to stress uh and and so like as Central as layer two layer three layer fours get built um the they will stay they will stay further out on the margins they will naturally say further out on the margins

And this is a way for ethereum as a system to be flexible to optimize for both completely cypher-punk censorship resistant use cases while also allowing for banks to ultimately come be included into the same system yeah I I think we should we could talk about this for four more hours but uh we

Should probably move on to the next topic because I think this is this is super fascinating though and I would love to kind of dig into this more with you at some point because I think there’s a lot to talk about here 100 brother yeah uh so I want to talk a

Little bit about your journey into experimenting with stuff on Solana um I think over the years you guys and I’m using you and uh you know your co-host synonymously here but the bankless Persona has had a few run-ins with the salon ecosystem oh yeah um totally’s been on the show once or twice

You guys have had some opinions about the network in general um but you recently bought I think your first Solana nft one of the Mad Lads mints yeah uh what convinced you to take the jump Oh I thought they looked cool yeah I like the the 20s Noir uh I also like the

The project itself made an ambitious attempt to actually look like real humans that’s a hard thing to go after uh I thought they looked cool so I bought one that’s that’s super Fair um what was your experience transacting on the network what uh what were you surprised by what did you expect did

Anything fall short of what you were hoping for uh uh was in coinbase sold some eath for Solana uh and then uh opened up Phantom wallet on my browser and sent the Solana there uh and then opened up the marketplace that um was it I think it

Was magic Eden even though there was I think a different dedicated Marketplace towards this particular project that uh I didn’t fully go down that rabbit hole um uh opened up magic Eden I shopped around for a little bit like kind of compare some properties tried to get the

Layer of the land for what the ones looked like that I liked uh and then uh we bought the one that looked like me and that was that cool pretty open and shut I will say that like I’ve had absolutely terrible experience with metamask and Ledger it says for like two

Years actually what’s going on with it yeah I don’t know what the hell’s going on man and so like I did not run into that uh and so that was lovely um everyone in my ethereum circle is like dude just use frame I’m like uh I’ll just like wait for the problem to

Go away and I’ll sleep on it and like usually that works so there’s a bunch of like uh I would say you know you’ve engaged with some of the technical conversations around how salons architecture is different from ethereum um one of the questions that we kind of got in that sort of tweet

Beforehand was like there’s a lot of folks in the ethereum community that comment on Solana architecture that haven’t put in the time to understand it right yet um and so a lot of their critiques there are legitimate critiques of any blockchain architecture out there but a

Lot of the ones we get about Solana are they seem like they’re from folks who haven’t really read up on it don’t really understand what the trade-offs are of the network architecture do you feel like you have a good grasp of that Network architecture of Solana the specific implementation details of

Solana no okay um so as you’re going through that process like uh you know you guys have developed a lot of sort of opinions about all sorts of different types of Networks what is that sort of based on how do you navigate that that difference between like you know we’ve talked extensively

Here about sort of the technological philosophies that ethereum is built on and sort of your your faith from a from a from a philosophy of building perspective of that network is something you believe in Into the Future um when you’re looking at something like Solana I think sometimes from from

Tweets or some of the comments you’ve made you you don’t necessarily view the network in the same way is that accurate or has that been sort of taken out of proportion by the internet sorry in the same way as what as ethereum that like this is a fundamental architecture that

You have faith in is sort of the state that you you know your statement on ethereum what about Solana either uh do you believe that about Solana or are there are there questions you have what what are sort of some of the trepidation that comes up both on the show and then

Some of you are tweeting right into more directly uh uh technical gibberish uh the the person that like brought up this question and was like um what was that tweet it was something along the lines of uh does David uh is it David like uh able to comprehend the

Actual technical details of Solana and then they like finish up like when he when the correct answer is no putting the words in my mouth although that is what I said uh can you ask him why he continually comments on it right and like it’s a in the other people in the

Solana ecosystem is like Dave is just a podcaster like why is he talking technical stuff about to be fair like I think that it’s completely fine to comment on something that you may not have the utmost technical understanding of I think really like that the subtlety

In the question it wasn’t exactly asked this way is like you have commented on the technical architecture of Solana before what about that either um motivation of that yeah yeah yeah just and just to pick up on like the podcaster note right like uh it’s really easy to go after podcast

Answers and be like they don’t know anything they’re just podcasters um I think like if you looked back at like in my historical writing um it’s pretty technical as far as someone who does not code I still hang out with like eth Dev Giga brains right like Tim Baco Danny Ryan

Justin Drake Preston Van Loon like I’ve been talking to these guys for years and yes I don’t know how to code but understanding crypto economic architecture like crypto economics as a study is real new like it was born real recent and so like while I don’t have a well I don’t have like

Coding skill set and I’m not a developer actually understanding these systems as a pattern is where my particular skill set comes in if I wanted to get really narrow and precise my particular skill set is understanding the relationship between human code and cryptoeconomic excuse me human culture and crypto

Economic code that’s the thing that fascinates me the most and so like why do I feel confidence making comments about the architecture of Solana when I actually can’t articulate about the nature of it right yes it’s a big meta question why do I feel confident in that um it’s because like

What one of my one of my core beliefs about this crypto world is that if we like re-rolled the dice of the human experiment if we were like in a simulation and we just hit refresh refresh refresh refresh and we arrived at the moment where humans uh discovered cryptoeconomics and this crypto industry

My belief is that the ethereum design philosophy the role of centric road map Layer Two is layer threes fractal scaling all smart contracts proof of stake those properties that the ethereum research team has like I said emergently discovered the humans would re-emergently discover that 99.9 of the times that the simulation is refreshed

And so like that gives me confidence about ethereum why do I make confident statements about Solana is because it’s easy to lump Solana into other similar design architectures that I think are attempting to find what is like the true resonance with crypto economic design that I that I believe that ethereum has

Discovered and otherwise like lumps Lana into a camp that we’ve seen others fall into the Trap of which is like the juice layer one trap and so understanding a Solana as like what I would call a juice layer one it will start to exhibit the behaviors of all the other similar juice

Layer ones because of the compromises that it’s made and so even without understanding the technical nuances of Solana I can still categorize it as a juice layer one and it’s made similar compromises that many other Jews layer ones have even if it is the most advanced juice layer one well let’s not

There no no so I think there’s kind of two pieces I want to dig into here one is that you sort of we’re talking about some of the innate characteristics of ethereum and implicitly there is that there’s characteristics of that that Solana doesn’t share I just want to like

What what are those just kind of to start there uh a intentionally decentralized constrained layer one is probably the big common denominator that’s different ethereum is intentionally constrained at the layer one uh say more about that uh okay so um small small blocks this is the small blocks archetype don’t go back between

Like the Bitcoin Wars and the ethereum people like small blocks or small throughput at the layer one produces decentralization uh and therefore also security and settlement guarantees I’m not sure that’s necessarily accurate right and so the only reason I’m going to push you on this is like that that

Can feel like a goal post moving I think to say that like ethereum is intentionally small blocks and to a certain extent yes but the surge on ethereum is literally about creating more data availability and more block space so there’s an intentional movement in ethereum to add on the log space on

The layer one yeah it puts the blob space for eip4844 which is like the main yeah the main character of The Surge is about creating a new class of block space that layer twos can maximally leverage so like the extra block space comes because layer twos can leverage uh blob space

Better than anything else better than the layer one can and you would consider that not part of ethereum uh no I would why well because in that expanding block space then later but the idea about layer twos is that you have compression right so yeah yeah you make

A bunch of transactions on layer two and then they get compressed into a bundle and then place down to the layer one and so the block space stays the same but the economic density of transactions is higher but there’s only uh what 0.1 megabits per megabytes per second of Da

On ethereum and the plan is to expand that to have more actual space to settle on the L1 right that’s still the compressible space right correct right but like the actual so like the actual data rate per second of ethereum is going to go up from point one to I think

I don’t remember exactly what the number is but there are a number of proposals to actually literally add more data availability to the L1 itself right yeah and if you go into like the details of like okay but then the blocks are going to get bigger it still doesn’t change

Like this small block can strained base layer throughput philosophy of ethereum uh so I guess like there’s two pieces here one is like from when when ethereum was on proof of work sure certainly in the move to proof of stake we’ve actually seen and you know this is this

Is from someone who worked on eth2 infrastructure at bison Trails right we have actually seen a massive consolidation in eth2 infrastructure it’s still the most decentralized proof of stake network but we’ve gone from hundreds of thousands of nodes around the world to less than ten thousand when

You look at the number of actual not validators because eth2’s terminology is different than the rest of the industry but you know networked boxes that are running software on them yeah yeah yeah full nodes that are also consensus participating um as opposed to just like archival nodes we’ve seen that number drop and

We’ve seen it consolidate onto Cloud providers um we also have seen the system requirements to run a a node start to creep up like if you want to track the full world of the ethereum state now you actually have to run multiple different networks at the same time to make sure

You have a real-time version of what that state looks like so I’m just challenging this a little bit because some of that sort of philosophy you’re talking about I think applies very well to eth1 but in this sort of new version of Pro post proof of stake migration a

Lot of those characteristics are actually starting to resemble something that’s a lot closer to to Solana or Cosmos and that the requirements to run these machines are getting heavier and heavier and also the bandwidth requirements are starting to increase so I just want to like push back a little

Bit on that because I think there is there’s maybe a subtlety of what the present is versus what these new directions are yeah I think it’s important to focus on just like why do the East developers build a blockchain in the way that they do and yes there are technical changes and

Ethereum in the layer one is getting more complex and now we have different two different types of blob space and this blob space behaves differently and now the the validator requirements or the node requirements the computational resources are also changing and also perhaps like the uh progressing then

There’s also like the part of the ethereum road map like The Verge which is like okay let’s also prune a bunch of yeah and also make like like clients that that you don’t that you can run on your cell phone right and so like it’s always there’s always a yin and

Yang to ethereum no development and well sometimes we add computational costs and resources and computer requirements and then sometimes we take them away yeah but like it’s still when you zoom out you will always have a constrained layer one philosophy even if like in a temporary if you zoom in and like look

At it in a narrow band of the Year 2023 we’re like oh ethereum’s like increasing its node resource requirement after it’s done a bunch of like uh mitigation work right and and so like there’s always just like we could we could juice ethereum to layer one up to

To the tits right but we don’t do that and so like yeah like the constraints of the ethereum layer one can can shift left and right but the the philosophy of a constrained layer one will always that is an ethereum philosophy even when we use different tricks crypto cryptographic

Tricks distributed networks tricks et cetera et cetera to eke out optimizations I will say like eking out optimizations uh is still not the same as changing a philosophy about whether you have a constrained layer one or not what do you mean by a juice player one

Uh turning up the data throughput of a layer one up to its theoretical maximum uh like before it topples over somewhere somewhere around that band like understanding where it would topple over and then going like not that far interesting like like redlining redlining it I’m redlining a chain

And what do you see is the problem of that uh fragility interesting like DDOS attacks spam attacks um and then there’s also the the conversation of just like uh with increased validator requirements uh and like uh then then you have like you reduce the ability to who can run a node you

Can also reduce the ability who can participate in consensus uh and so like when you have a constrained validator set and also just like the Genesis of the Soul token as in my opinion compared to the Genesis of the eth token is also just like different stories and one in my mind is

Has a much more uh a much longer and Rich history of distribution than the other right and so like you have this combination of like the salon of validator requirements and also the centralized Soul issuance um versus like the lighter validator requirements of ethereum and the five plus years of Highly distributive proof

Of work and so like when you compose all these things together it just like tells a story and one is like well in my opinion Solana is tilted towards like some winners oh and and produces some losers and ethereum it’s all every economic system is always going to be

Tilted there’s no way to produce a completely balanced economic system the idea is like how balanced can we get it and in my mind ethereum is maximally balanced and also in my mind Solana is tilted in a way that I don’t think you can put a large structure on top of a

Tilted foundation and that is like my main uh critique of Salon yeah it’s interesting I mean so so one of those is like ethereum would not be able to launch today like it did back then 100 yeah no lawyer would let ethereum if it launched today launch like it did originally and

So that is definitely a huge Advantage there have you read a Teo lebowitz’s uh macular Ico paper yeah yeah super good yeah no it’s super awesome but I think like it’s funny because like looking at some of the other stuff you were you were sort of talking about here

Um so in your mind the hardware requirements are more important than the asset requirements because like again two participating consensus on ethereum you need 32 each which is not a little amount of money right now granted it you can consider that an investment as opposed to a

Capital cost but it still is you know the amount of money you’d need to run a consensus participating each validator 95 of the world can’t afford that right and which is not to say the hardware requirements of something like Solana or something 95 of the world can afford but

Like the three thousand dollars to buy the hardware to run a salon of validator is much less than the 100 you need to buy the hardware to run an eth validator but also the 32 eth is a pretty serious Capital outlay to actually participate in consensus but you sort of view that

As a better trade-off than having higher Hardware requirements yeah because that’s not really the end of the story to say that the end of the story is that you need 32 East to participate in ethereum of validation uh that’s only at the actual that that’s um ignoring a lot of like further

Innovations right uh and so you actually there there’s ways for the actual ethereum protocol to reduce 32 down to 16 down to eight and there are discussions on each research forums how to do that so that’s one factor of decentralization then the other Vector of solution for this is you have

Something like DVT technology distributed validator technology we call this squad staking uh and so if if you need 32 each you can grab four friends who all have eight and you can create a virtual node and then the limit is eighties or actually whatever the limit

Is whatever you need to produce 32 to get to to get to that number sure but that’s not really running your own validator right I mean this is sort of the argument which is like uh you know all of those same types of things also could apply to a network like Solana

Where it’s like ah you can get four friends together and then suddenly your three thousand dollar Hardware cost goes down to 800 bucks right which is still it if you split a Solana validator into four and have those four validators spread around the world how are you able

To keep up with the chain uh it would be a single validator but on ethereum it’s still one validator right oh you’re right like it is one validator yeah you’re right yeah yeah you’re right so you’re right about that yeah okay yeah I think it’s just interesting to

Look at like uh what the long term of these things kind of look out to um because one of the things that you know I was a real big believer that like everyone was going to run their own ethereum node but you look at like node

Watch or you look at some of the other like node trackers and like uh one of the weird things about Solana is because the hardware requirements are higher it runs very poorly in the cloud and so we actually have a very low amount of cloud penetration relative to

Ethereum where over 50 of the ethereum nodes are run in the cloud nowadays which I think is just like this is not to say like it’s good or bad ethereum validator nodes and not full notes yeah like yeah that’s actually settings yeah okay yeah because when you can run

Things very easily it’s also very easy to run on AWS which is some a very sort of interesting like yeah like there’s decentralization philosophy which is like the ethereum version of like let’s make it really low and easy for people to run nodes which is super credible and then there’s so

The Solana argument which is like if it’s too easy for people to run nodes they’re going to run them in the cloud and so it’s it’s very interesting to see like these two communities coming at the problem space from two very different directions yeah that is an interesting

Nuance um I do remember really in my early formative years of crypto uh bitcoiners would always yell at ethereum people because we would run our nodes in the cloud and back in those days ethereum was proof of work when they talked about nodes they talked about just just downloading the chain ethereum

As a chain was too untenable to manage at the solo level that people just run the nodes in the cloud I usually I usually don’t give too much Credence to the whole runs in the cloud thing because like Cloud servers are like water it’s like it and things just flow

Downhill right since they were either easiest to spin up uh naturally you’re going to see us supply of virtual nodes just and naturally be spun up it makes that’s a stronger argument for non-validating nodes just like quote unquote full nodes than it is for like when act 32 eth is actually there

Um but like the what I would say to that is like it’s easy to withdraw your 32 eth and yeah it’s always easy to create an ethereum node if the day actually comes when these cloud service providers are censoring and the data that comes at the nation state is turning

Authoritarian the ability to exit is always there and that’s because of the design philosophy of ethereum yeah I think this goes back to the thing we were talking about before about sort of real-time censorship resistance versus like cockroach or nuclear winter decentral uh decentralization where it’s

Like you know we keep coming back to this thing where like the Solana implicit choice is uh you know availability in a real-time format and this sort of idea that like as long as one copy of The Ledger survives we can get the rest of the things spun up again

And you know the the place you kind of keep coming back to is like that ability that even if the network is you know heavily censored for a two-day period of time because it’s easy for folks to spin it up in their in their home it’s like

The recoverability part is more it was where you seem to wait more as opposed to the real-time censorship resistance that’s interesting yeah um yeah I think the the it’s always funny when different tribes talk because we use different words yes um uh I don’t see like ethereum because of the vector of

Attack of uh AWS nodes ultimately creating censorship in that one moment of time I don’t see that as like something as something that like Could Happen um I’d have to think about this more but then like my critique my response my critique would be like okay so it’s

Really nice that Salon is going for real-time censorship resistance but maybe it should keep its chain up more often oh sure right but like this is so this is kind of the really interesting part because like if a if AWS got a court order tomorrow that said you need to block every single

Thing on your services talking to the ethereum network you know 40 of each stake would go offline if not more right and ethereum as like a responsive system would adapt relatively quickly and then it wouldn’t probably it probably would not fall into that trap again yeah yeah totally within a day or

Two I imagine most of that would have been moved especially because so much of it’s run by Kraken and finance and like folks who are like and and you know coinbase folks who are like very professional operators on this stuff but it’s very interesting because like we

Would sort of argue I think at the Solana Foundation that that is functionally the same thing as trying to push the bounds of technology and sometimes the network goes offline for for you know 12 hours which is interesting I don’t think that’s the same thing so why not like a

One-time hypothetical censorship event censorship event of ethereum’s nodes is not the same thing as what appears to be a systemic inability to keep up the chain so so I want to actually like get into this little bit because I think this is super interesting because the technical ability to exit to the L1

Right or the technical ability to reconstruct The Ledger and move things over and get things going again that is functionally the argument of why the downtown on Solana while it’s not desirable and needs to be fixed I’m not making any excuses for it is not existential because each individual

Validator in each individual participant of the network they have a copy of the state they know what the state is they know the state’s secure they know their account exists in the state that it is and that that is very structurally similar of an argument to say that like

Uh you know the layers on ethereum like it’s okay because you can exit to the L1 even if there is a problem we have a fallback solution I just think it’s very interesting like uh you know I’m not gonna defend uptime and say that it’s not a problem but like ethereum test net

Has gone down many times right and and it is eventually there will be a problem with ethereum proof of stake and there will be periods of long unavailability either while the network slashes itself down to resolving a fork or if there’s manual intervention required this is a property or proof of stake networks

Right and so it’s interesting to kind of look at these sort of two perspectives on uh on what that and what’s valued at that point right yeah and I think uh I’ll invoke the other part of the conversation that we had where like yeah at some point

Solana if it is in it’s maximally successful case will be saturated and why not just deploy another salon on top of Solana right but then the choices of the layer one uh the choices to be a quote unquote juice layer one real-time censorship resistance whatever that design

Philosophy is are then imparted upon the layers Layer Two Solana right and so ethereum the layer 1 just immediately concedes to the fact that it will not have uh it will not be a juice layer one it will have it will be a slow decentralized chain and what that does

Is that allows one thing one very important thing to be not censored further up the stack which is the layer two gets a decentralization the layer three it’s the decentralization and so like it’s just a I guess a matter of emphasis and values about how to construct a chain

Sure yeah I think it’s I mean it’s super interesting too to look at like these different philosophies and have this conversation here totally yeah I always enjoy these things yeah um so my last question before I go to this I know we’re way over is what do you think other ecosystems are doing

Well that the ethereum community could learn from and what can other ecosystems learn from the ethereum community my answer to like what other other ecosystem is doing well that ethereum could learn from is going to be not as good as the other the other answer just because like I’m just not as

Familiar with with other ecosystems um one of my bigger biggest regrets in this last bull market is like being the get off my lawn Grandpa uh don’t build your chain in the way that’s not right uh approach um you will pay the gas fees and you will like it stance

Um and so I apologize for that uh those previous transgressions in the bull market uh and I think so so like maybe one things that the the the newer change the faster chains the Solana Solana type chains are doing well is like onboarding the people that ethereum wish that we

Had onboarded in the bull market uh and so like that that was uh there’s always like this gatekeeping in in crypto tribes uh and so like you know if you’re gonna if you’re gonna be in a theory and you better walk and talk like an ethereum and that’s fundamentally unsustainable

Uh and so Solana is like the newer chain with a newer generation is more resonant culturally probably with like the more expansive world and so ethereum if we intend to maximally succeed in the ways that we intend probably need to like do the whole uh compromising on on how we approach newer

Communities and stop being so like militantly about militant about values probably I yeah I think that’s I think that’s fair because like the slow chain thesis is like a very credible thesis the other thing is is like you’re not going to onboard the world with three dollar transaction fees right yeah yeah

Or or I think more importantly more saliently you’re not going to onboard the world talking about like the the crypto values yeah I have been I have been called by I can’t remember I think it was like one of the up only uh community members that

Like David is just like ready to wrap people’s Knuckles if they like commit transgressions against the sins of uh crypto economic philosophy uh and so like that one that one hurt a little bit like I remember that comment uh and so like that that is something I’m trying

To take to heart yeah yeah okay so what I would say that so the uh the other community should learn about ethereum like like I said towards the beginning like man I really wish it’s too much content to go back into the archive of like POV crypto and early Bank lists

Like there were some like famous conversations in the 2018 to 2020 bear Market there was like uh Austin like how’s you know hazy right yeah uh what crypto tribe would you put him in oh boy using the modern definitions yeah like a big big Bitcoin ethereum

Like like what what train do you would you think that he has alignment towards it’s more of a philosophy hmm what do you what would you say okay so when I was growing up in crypto he was a bitcoiner yeah he was a bitcoiner today I would say he’s an ethereum and yeah

It’s a philosophy thing yeah uh and there was just like this famous conversation between Ryan my co-host and hazu when hazu was a bitcoiner and hazu talked about like ethereum culture is Downstream of Bitcoin culture um ethereum people are waking up to the idea of block space as economically a

Dense transaction space the idea of the Native currency is money uh and he was a Bitcoin in this time and like the entire ethereum Community was like but hazu you’re so smart why are you a bitcoiner and eventually like we won him over right and they were like these yeah just

Big conversations that the entire industry was would have about what is money why do you do that in blockchain what it why do you do blocks small blocks right and I wish that like this the salon in community had the time to go back into the archive life and find

These really important formula of conversations that we had and so like they could experience that for themselves because to me it feels like Solana has like skipped into the year of like 2020 to 2021 the Solana Community has and has been formed in those years and they haven’t like discovered like

Why we are the rest of the industry that came before it is the way that it is and so like then then they see like the the toxic Heath Maxis who are telling them that they need to pay our gas fees and enjoy it while they do and they’re and

Then naturally they just like say well you like I’m going to go on to my own chain that that treats me like I’m a real person that also has one cent transaction fees that are is clearly good ux and I’m gonna feel good about that because you guys are and like

Very natural reaction yeah understandable and also there’s a reason why we are the way that we are and have become the way that that we’ve become and so my ass of the to the salon Community is like it is worth going back into the archives and exploring these like very early conversations

Well David thank you so much for joining us on validated Austin this has been a great experience it’s been a lot of fun cheers excellent

In this episode, David Hoffman (Bankless) and Austin have an honest and multi-faceted conversation about the differences between Solana and Ethereum’s decisions, community, and future. David makes the case for an Ethereum-dominant future, and in doing so, illuminates much about Ethereum’s philosophy of design and the culture of its most fervent believers. Naturally, Austin makes a similar case on behalf of Solana. This is a conversation between two people who have mutual respect for each other, but fundamentally different opinions about how a blockchain should be built.

0:00 – Intro
3:56 – David’s early days as a crypto podcaster
6:20 – The Bankless business model
13:02 – Managing ethical disclosures
16:41 – How Bankless views its responsibility to the crypto industry at large
22:46 – The historical animosity between Bitcoin and Ethereum maxis
24:50 – Disagreements within the Ethereum community about its own identity
27:49 – A debate on “slowness as a virtue”
30:15 – A debate on the long-term decentralization of L2’s
36:57 – Solana’s values of real-time censorship-resistance
39:32 – The exit to L1 design philosophy
41:44 – More on the centralization of L2’s
46:04 – Do current L2’s meet scaling expectations?
47:19 – Narrative development of blockchain cultures
52:08 – The fracturing of the Ethereum state
55:16 – Communicating between Ethereum’s layers
1:05:16 – David’s first Solana NFT
1:06:16 – Why David feels confident commenting on Solana’s architecture
1:14:51 – A defense of Ethereum as a “constrained Layer 1”
1:19:11 – The hardware required to run Ethereum vs. Solana
1:26:52 – Why network downtime is not an existential threat to Solana
1:29:06 – What different blockchain communities can learn from each other

DISCLAIMER
The content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives. All opinions expressed herein are the speakers’ own personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of any entities.

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