Entering Ethereum’s New Era | Tomasz Stańczak

If I think about Ethereum winning, it's a bit of like, not a bit of everything, it's on the top of everything. Like really winning everywhere, feeling that because the economy will be there, because it's programmable, because you can execute everything with security and because it's so global and neutral, then you can win in all the aspects.

Hey guys, unfortunately no regular roundup this week as both me and Santi are traveling. We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, we have this episode of Bell Curve with Tomasz. At the Ethereum Foundation. So I hope you enjoy and remember to go check out the Bell Curve podcast by clicking the link in the show notes and tell them I sent you. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk, terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. Explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. Hey guys, Jason here. Just to let you know, we have Permissionless 4 coming up in June from the 24th to the 26th at Industry City in Brooklyn. This is a conference for the developers and builders where we'll be focusing on the DeFi Renaissance, applications, token design, and much more. Click the link in the show notes to grab your ticket today and use code EMPIRE10 for 10% off.

All right, everyone. Welcome back to another, uh, Bell Curve Weekly Roundup edition. You got Michaels 1 and 2, Vance, and we have a very special guest, uh, joining us today. Uh, today we're joined by Tomas, uh, Stončuk. If I got that last name pronunciation right, Tomas. Uh, thank you, Vance. Uh, one of the co-executive directors of the EF. Uh, welcome, welcome, welcome.

Thanks for coming. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Yeah, excited for this.

Where are you right now?

In Italy. I'm in Italy. So I'm just after a nice espresso. So fresh and ready.

What's going on in Italy right now?

In Italy now? Well, I'm here just for a few days and I'm running back to some other European countries, I guess. Sure. Good weather. Oh, well, I did a short trip on the worst day of the year, probably. It was just raining 7 hours straight. And then the next day when I was sitting in hotel, I was just looking at the sunshine outside.

Beautiful. I mean, looks like you're going founder mode on the timeline. You're asking a lot of questions about who's the best person for this Ethereum initiative or that Ethereum initiative. It's great to see. It's amazing to see. What's the plan there? Just putting out the public Batman call or what?

I know I had serious conversations today with Dankrad, with Ansgar, with Tim and Alex and Shoaib. So we've been discussing about the roles that we would like to fill in Ethereum Foundation to show all that focus on product and delivery, on engineering excellence. And we started thinking how to give a bit of a signal to the community that we're looking for bringing the top executors to join us and that we want to structure the entire organization to be focused on winning and delivering what we want to focus on.

Man, it's a great change. It's a great vibe. It's good to see.

Yeah, one comment we had a couple of weeks ago was your Twitter comment on stepping in. I think Matt Hogan from Bitwise was asking who would be good to talk to about all of this. And you said, how can I help? Reminiscent of the Suárez, mayor of Miami, comments, and exciting to see for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Yeah, I have so many conversations. I feel like hundreds of conversations the last 2 months, almost to the level where now I try to just switch a bit to more of a focus mode and discussing the strategy and writing things down and making sure that everyone is having all the communication that even taking notes and then delivering those notes to everyone else. So you have context shared among all the team leads at the EF. It takes time and sometimes I went for crazy, crazy amounts of meetings, but it's then when you start feeling what are the common patterns of complaints, of asks, and it does repeat. Then there are some also interesting insights in every single conversation and it helps a lot. So, I'm really privileged position of being able to talk to all the fantastic people that accumulated over many years, some of the feedback that they would like to deliver to Foundation and ask for improvements. So it's fun. It's fun. I love it.

How did you get this job? Like, did you apply for it? Or like, obviously there was kind of like the public, like, you know, who was going to take this over, but maybe talking a little bit to the process of that would be interesting.

Hmm. I think that like, In September last year, it was one of the first times, if not the first time, that I talked to Aya, and we were discussing the general, like, sharing ideas about the leadership and how I've been building Netamind and how we address the questions about the talent management and so on. So that time, absolutely, we didn't discuss any of, like, my role at Ethereum Foundation, but I was already exploring, like, what What does it mean when Donnie Ryan was leaving for sabbatical and potentially leaving? So I think they were looking for answers of how they can look for leaders. And then we started just being, we were in touch for the next few months, maybe we met once or two times in Tokyo and somewhere else. And I was reaching out in some discussion around some enterprise project. So I reached out to Ethereum Foundation leadership asking, like, oh, this is what Potenshi would like to deliver with large financial institutions for an end of mind. And they said, oh, actually we would talk to you. And then we started talking and that was the discussion about the Ethereum Foundation co-executive director position. And there was a few other meetings with Vitalik and the rest of the management team. Yeah, that's a story. Nothing special, really.

No, it makes sense.

Tomas, I'm curious, um, you know, how has the culture changed? Or like, where would you like to see the culture of the Ethereum Foundation go? And obviously you have much more of an inside look than, uh, certainly me, and I think Michael and Vance as well. But, you know, from the outside, it was kind of, um, you know, my sense of the original, the OG culture of the EF is it's very, uh, research-oriented and very idealistic and very concerned with building a decentralized ecosystem and protocol. And it feels like there's been like, hey, we like that, but we also want to push to do more BD-oriented things and go out there and speak to institutions and get the ETH ETF in people's hands and stuff like that. And, you know, I'm curious, like, has it felt like a cultural change inside of the EF? Like, how much of that is actually real behind closed doors? Like, talk to me about what it feels like on the ground, what the change has been like.

Yeah, sure. Maybe before I say that, in 2016, '17, when I was joining Ethereum space, it felt like it was exciting on both sides. There was a space for builders and experimenters thinking that all others like building other smart contracts and composition and just having fun. And then also you've seen a lot of announcements from the EEA at that time, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, with all these big names saying we'll be building on Ethereum. So So that excitement was there and there was a feeling that, yeah, there is space for everyone. And it means that there'll be composition of our traditional finance and what people are experimenting. So you're changing the world. And maybe recently you've heard a lot about, oh, Ethereum Foundation starts to distance itself from the places where you can maybe win by making money or where the big money comes in. But that was also part of genesis. Why Ethereum was growing. So I think this was a major complaint. And then joining Foundation, understanding the internal structures, I think that it's not like people love DeFi and are very open to DeFi. Like, I couldn't find a single person that would say, no, no, like DeFi is something wrong. As for traditional finance, sure, there's always like a bit of people being afraid that there will be a capture and transition of a system towards something that that maybe doesn't deliver on the values that everyone is fighting for. But then you talk to the institutions and they say, look, you know, well, actually what we care about is the privacy for our customers, is the censorship resistance. So we can deliver all our transactions and not be censored. So there's a fair market access. So it's funny enough, it's the institutions that are pushing for all those values of Ethereum to say, that's why we choose Ethereum. And it means that also it's much more easy to start opening people within the EF to say, oh, let's keep talking to those, builders, they actually want to participate in the product definition and the governance systems. And you've seen that in the past also when Coinbase Base was more open to participate and build on Ethereum. And it's the same as all the L2s on Ethereum go to institutions. They want to do the BD effort. And now the same Ethereum Foundation is changing that direction. So you're asking about the culture. There was Probably, but not enough communication and openness to difficult questions, to conversations with big institutions, with other big research centers or big development centers within the Ethereum ecosystem. And I think that always comes from maybe like some fears that some bad memory from the past comes back again, that someone will put too much pressure and you will not know how to maintain neutral stance. And I think that nowadays I'm trying to make sure that we show strength by being very convinced that we know how to maintain those values and that we're not afraid to tell people because we know that no pressure will really affect Ethereum because Ethereum is already like sufficiently decentralized in the sense of how many institutions appear that are, that are significant, that have big money to, to build, that have a lot of thought leadership established. So that's the opening now, but built on the strength of those values and thinking that, yeah, we have that lot of confidence.

I think the values, sometimes it feels like the values of something like a Solana is more like Bronze Age mindset kind of type, like Americana vibes. But Ethereum, it's kind of more incredibly neutral, Switzerland style type identity. And I think Those values haven't gotten ETH to directly where it is today, but they've culminated in the building of the system, which happened with DeFi Summer, and things just are on ETH today. It's like there's the most stablecoins, the most DeFi, the most TVL, the most fees generated from DeFi. And so they have culminated in that. And I guess it's like now you have all these pieces of people are bringing liquidity to ETH because it just happens to be where all these things are today. And there isn't any more rational versus that. But how do you kind of push things forward from a network perspective where you're hiring for a director of product or someone to think about product? What does that mean for Ethereum in terms of pushing the ecosystem forward as it is today?

Yeah, I think that when we have all of this, and it's unquestionable that we actually see DeFi being very strong on Ethereum, see the real-world assets on Ethereum, stablecoins winning, and especially when you look at Layer 1+ or 2 is that it's even more of an advantage. But now what I care a lot about is never to think that, oh, we're winning now, so it's safe, but actually what's the momentum? Where are we going? Where the other ecosystems are heading? Will we be able to have all of this impact and distribution and the users onboarding and being continuously excited to the developers to build on Ethereum, to integrate? And then it's like product, UX, interop, all of this. And when we start seeing it a bit more broadly, I would say, oh, UX is perceived security of the network. Like, it's like people really care. What is the experience of the risk? Like, how comfortable I am there when I hold lots of assets as a fund on Ethereum. UX is how many applications I see that I can use when I come to the network and open the wallet. And is it nice design, but also is it a lot of choice? And then on the interop, I think that's something that I started realizing Just today, like in some conversations, like, look, everybody talks about the interop of Ethereum with L2, but maybe also we could talk about the interop of Ethereum and its L2s with the traditional finance, with fiat assets, right? Like, so not only you feel like it's a single financial system when you're using your wallet and moving assets between L1 and L2, but also when you off-ramp, on-ramp assets and you feel that Ethereum is just like very natural on-ramp, off-ramp space wherever you are in the world. And it's because of this. Neutral aspect of being globally accepted as something that's not just localized to a single region. And I think it's a real strength of Ethereum to be in the East, to be in the West, to be in the South, and so on.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X at Skale Network. That's Skale spelled with a K. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Solana holders with the best staking rates on Solana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Solana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance, use Marinade to earn rewards on your Solana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Solana staking with Marinade's best-in-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimized delegation via Marinade's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes.

I've got a question for you guys. Maybe we can open it up. I would love to— to maybe kick it off with your opinion here, and then Michael and Vance, get you guys to weigh in. There have been a couple of debates on Twitter in the last week, and one is about Ethereum and this idea of kind of should it try to mimic the sort of cult of Bitcoin. And so actually, a friend of Blockworks and the pod, Ryan Sean Adams from over at Bankless, He sort of took a little bit of time off Twitter and then came back with a big post called like the Blue Gospel. And it was basically, hey, the Bitcoiners have had an enormous amount of success, basically just creating a massive cult around Bitcoin. And we have all these debates around Ethereum about building businesses and generating fees. And REV was another huge debate of the last week. But Bitcoin doesn't generate any fees. And look at how valuable it is. It's actually crushing everything else. And so There have been some— at the same time, Tomas, it's felt like there's a push from you and Don Kradt to scale the L1. Let's focus on bringing businesses and RWAs and creating kind of fundamentals. Seems like there's another corner of the community which is advocating, let's just evangelize ETH the asset and kind of run this guerrilla-style marketing campaign that admittedly has been wildly successful for not only Bitcoin, but the Cardanos of the world as well. Not picking on Cardano. There's not a lot of fundamentals. It's very richly valued. So I'm just curious, where do you three fall in this debate? Should we be evangelizing ETH the asset here? Should we be focusing on the fundamentals? Are they not mutually exclusive? What do you think about this kind of push towards more of the cult of the blue coin?

My critique is I think Ethereum is in this interesting space where it kind of lives within the continuum, somewhere in the middle between the continuum of Bitcoin on one end, which is maybe 100% monetary premium. There's no tangible like REV that you could ascribe to a discounted cash flow value analysis of the value of Bitcoin. On the flip side, you've got DeFi protocols that are literally valued on Token Terminal or DeFi Llama based off of their the fees that they're generating and the value that they're passing back to tokens. Ethereum kind of lives somewhere in the middle. And I think that's one of the beauties of Ethereum, the asset, which is it kind of has a little bit of everything for everyone. Where if you— and over the last, whatever, 9 months, with some of the changes to the blob fees and the network, it has gone inflationary again. It's more recently gone deflationary again. There is value that you could ascribe to analyzing what the fee base will be and what the token burn will be. But you also should think of it as the most widely used collateral asset within DeFi. You should also think of it as historically what people have paid for, for NFTs, or what they're using to pay for things on-chain. And so it kind of combines a bunch of different valuation methodologies or asset identification methodologies into one. And I don't want or ascribe to the perspective of we need to put it in a single box. I think it can be a lot of things to a lot of people and it may not be the perfect DCF. It may not be the perfect monetary asset as a standalone, but the combination of the multiple different angles, I think, is the value of it.

I think I'm really happy that I see much more people being very optimistic that what Ethereum Foundation has to do is make sure that the protocol shows that resilience and the long-term growth scaling and we understand what we're doing and we'll continue supporting protocol indefinitely. And then they can build that confidence into understanding that, okay, so then there'll be a massive global economy that people will be building the programmable money solutions, that they'll start onboarding stablecoins, more of the real-world assets. And over time it'll be massive. Like it can move 10, 100x of the size of economy that is executed on Ethereum. And that while we, also ensure security, then everyone else thinks, okay, so what happens if all of this, all of these assets flow to Ethereum? What happens if all of those transaction flows happen within the Ethereum ecosystem? And then they start building that confidence. Oh, wait a moment. And then this is really big. And then they start bringing probably a bit of this feeling of memetic Bitcoin style. And maybe if I think about the Ethereum winning, it's a bit of like, Not a bit of everything. It's on the top of everything, like really winning everywhere, feeling that because the economy will be there, because it's programmable, because you can execute everything with security and because it's so global and neutral, then you can win in all the aspects. Sure, it's a big dream, big expectations, especially now when many people claim like, oh, there is a crisis, you have to react fast. So sure, at the foundation, we'll be targeting this. Next 1, 2 years to show that we can have perfect execution. But I'm very optimistic when I see everyone else thinking like, oh, this gives me the fuel to feel that it's all very powerful and it goes in the right direction.

It's crazy to hear just like, you know, next couple years type deadline or not like deadlines, but like schedules from the EF and like, you know, we're going to demonstrate, we're going to win. Like it's a very different change of tact. The only thing I would add to kind of the 3 points made are, I think, like a lot of Ethereum, the original values of Ethereum, at least for me, were more about futurism than cyberpunk. And I think they're kind of close cousins of each other. But I think a lot of the futurism that's happening that we see outside of crypto is, frankly, very expensive CapEx infrastructure. So, like big data centers, next-gen energy. And I think a lot of those pair naturally with the very deep capital markets of Ethereum. And so, we talked to energy projects that want to issue things like bonds on-chain. The natural home is Ethereum because the capital markets are deep. And I think just prioritizing the intersection of Ethereum is futuristic technology combining with other groups of futurism folks and pushing the boundaries on energy and RWAs and AI and data center CapEx. I think there's a lot of optimism to be found at that intersection, which is also just like way— not more tangible, but just like it just has an impact. It's a lot different because you're bringing more people into the fold. They are not—

and it's like by far the fastest growing component of the economy. I mean, like even today we're reporting this on the 21st, you know, you got the OpenAI acquisition of basically Johnny Ive for $6.5 billion. You've got—

there's an Easter egg in this podcast for eagle-eyed listeners, actually.

Yeah. Yeah, there is.

We did pre-announce that, I guess.

We did, yeah.

Yes, that is true. But I mean, look, there's no other place that's growing as rapidly as that is happening. You know, the amount of CapEx spend, like we're talking to some of these startups that are, some of them are usually literally using venture dollars to buy GPUs. And, you know, other examples like CoreWeave are issuing convertible bonds at 19%, like SOFR plus 11. And it's just like crazy the amount of capital that's going into some of these angles, some of these areas of the economy. But when we talk to the decentralized components or the ones that are wanting to assemble capital to help go after these opportunities, they're all talking about Ethereum. And so like, REV, I think, is an interesting term for real economic value. And it's more of like a measure, I'd say, of GDP on an ecosystem. But it's hard to measure too, because it does imply the fees that are being extracted versus the economic value that's being transacted. That, I think, is a hard one to amass, but TVL is a wonky metric for that. But there is an element of where is everything that has real value, tangible value going to exist in the future, and that's, at least from what we can see, forecasted for Ethereum.

Yeah, it's a bit of everything here, right? So we're talking about the massive investments in the technology of the future and definitely Ethereum is a space there for decentralization of that. And look, we also talk about the DAG format. So Vitalik is spending a lot of time with communities around the world. You mentioned Switzerland, actually the Switzerland style of Ethereum being a bit, and there was Switzerland just last week when we were discussing those questions about privacy in the future, governance of the future. How AI and governance collaborates and how you decentralize access and make sure that you still have many of the Cyberpunk values. So this exists on Ethereum. And I think the neutral aspect of Ethereum is also that you have a massive layer servicing people that really care about privacy and cannot be connected to some of the other layers of the economy. And that those can safely exist on the chain that's like remains absolutely neutral with the global financial markets that are allocating big money and moving things. With understanding that there are obviously risks to acceleration, but they're like protocol almost like doesn't want to be too opinionated about what can be executed on protocol itself. As long as it, I think culturally does encourage a lot of communities that ask questions about how decentralization protects protects communities, protects us, all humanity, against the risks of accelerated AI. But there's a question: is blockchain just the space for that safety and for additional opportunities on building something novel? When we talk about AI, there's like one of the categories, so the verification of AI and so on, or blockchain is just becoming this source of slowing things down. I think it's the former.

I also, um, I actually, I want to get into the real-time proving announcement from Systinct this week. But, you know, one thing that I, I don't know, Bitcoin may be a special snowflake here, uh, I, I have no idea, um, in the long run. But I do, I don't know, I, I don't want us to learn the wrong lessons from the last 5 years or so. Um, and, you know, I see a lot of people that are just pointing towards Cardano and XRP that have crazy valuations almost like, hey, they have crazy valuations, why shouldn't we try to meme and cult our way into crazy valuations? And I have no idea. I guess the way that I feel about that is why would we try to replicate what Cardano has done here? I think the opportunity for Ethereum is to do much more than that. I also think it's the better strategy in the fullness of time. I don't know if— I think, by the way, to maybe get into the REV definition and all that, I think that's one metric that you can look at blockchains through. I think TVL is another metric. There's no one metric that holistically tells you this is how you should value a chain. It gives you a slice of one component that should probably go into the valuation of these chains, but it's definitely not the end-all be-all, right? And it depends what stage of growth the chain is at.

On 3V, I think there is some dimension of like blockchains are meant to literally last forever. Your children's children's children should be able to see your transaction and be like, oh, he cooked with that one, or he was using the chain. And so logically, a lot of the earnings should be very, very far in the future, like hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years. And so I think that's kind of the unique answer as to why a DCF is not the right way to value these things. REV is probably closer, but there's kind of like these negative externalities that you can get when you're trying to optimize for a metric like REV. I do think just on the kind of like long, long-term strategy, I think it's like the cypherpunk ideals are kind of like the foundation. It's like sovereign individual. You can kind of get most of the way there, getting that into the base layer, not being too opinionated. And then there's kind of like the layer on top of that, which is like futurism and what type of futurism is it? Nihilism futurism, where it's like we're all going to gamble, hyper-gamble, nihilism, that type of idea? Is it just like we can take these technologies and merge with other groups of futurists, and that's a very more optimistic vision? I think the problem that most people have had with Ethereum historically, or maybe the past few years, is just the vision of futurism was like NFTs and DAOs, and those things are obviously very valuable, but it's like It's not like world-changing. It's not ambitious enough. And so I think there's going to be a movement to rewire, mostly brought in by external people that are now interfacing with blockchains, what the vision of the future looks like per chain.

Well, and I actually, I don't know if DAOs or NFTs themselves are, as a concept, over. I don't think anything is ever officially over. I think where we fell short, especially in 2021 when all this stuff was kind of hitting its crescendo was there just wasn't anything that it was attached to that was tangible. And it was sort of the circular capital motion of like everything lives on, you know, on-chain and it's moving on-chain. But we didn't connect it to the off-world economy. And like for the first time, I think in the last year or two, we've actually been able to start to connect things to the real-world economy in ways that like literally started with T-bills. And now we're talking about like financing AI data centers on-chain or like, you know, next-gen energy on-chain. And like that's where we're starting to— and I think finance and DeFi is sort of that first way of connecting. And eventually, we're going to start to have enough on-chain that— or enough that's connected between on-chain and off-chain where you can actually start to build some of these primitives. And like, maybe a DAO for coordinating all of that capital actually makes sense. And maybe an NFT to represent the deed for your house, as everybody used to talk about, like, actually makes sense because you can take a loan against it as opposed to getting a mortgage. Like, all those types of things, I think, will, in the fullness of time, become real. But We're just now starting to build the inroads to the on-chain, off-chain.

And you can tell that that's where a lot of the energy comes from because you talk to people that work at these big private credit shops or that are tokenizing whatever asset and they're like, this shit is incredible. This is the future. And you're like, we've had this for a long time. They're like, but this is the first time we've used it.

Right.

That's like the big unlock where you're like, okay, this is going to work, but it's just going to like— you have to really have these ambitious scale projects. And I would say TradFi is meeting us more than halfway because the ETF wave, which is turning into the tokenization wave, like, it's just like we have standard file formats to read. It's like we can take your assets, we can do things with them, we can loop them, we can create shares. It's like that is very futuristic. And I think a very optimistic vision for what Ethereum could be. And, you know, it does have a lot to do with the cypherpunk ideals, but it's not— there's not like a direct line. It's all indirect. And I think that's kind of the point.

Yeah, TradFi has been waiting for many years to be able to move like full speed and just be totally involved. They were blocked by regulation. I think the same way as many real use cases by crypto were just very well defined already in 2015, '16, '17 of how this will look on Ethereum. And then suddenly people had to just do some kind of crazy limited solutions without being able to connect everything just because they didn't know how to operate within the regulatory framework. So this This is a massive unlock from, from last year, and, and hopefully it will all be done well. There's lots of promising signals, and if you can see equities on chain, if we can see this massive stablecoins adoption, uh, this is already happening. I mean, like, the acceleration is huge, and we hear that from institutions that are excited about Ethereum. They're now looking at how to take advantage of this global system, because with the global Ethereum network, which is like very welcome in all the countries around the world. You can have solid on-ramp, off-ramp, solid connectivity to all the financial systems. And you have this borderless aspect of blockchain that was always massive advantage of it. You could escape local regulations and participate in global economy. And this is big. And then fee generation potential is huge. And then NFTs, you know, they appeared and they disappeared and then they came back. Well, they much more force a few years ago and then establishes the fabric for the future design of maybe like the ownership and some super future-looking metaverse ownership. Like now we have all the Gen AI and that'll be next generation of Gen AI. We see probably full feature movies generated soon. It means that you'll be able to generate also life for people. And then there'll be a question of what's the reality in digital space? Maybe there'll be be one space of hallucination that everyone will share and think this is where I prove that I own something. And then suddenly you say, oh, actually there is so much space for innovation on NFTs. And again, this will happen on Ethereum and people haven't even started. This will be like new category probably in a year or two.

So one quick anecdote. We have a friend who works at a very large bank in New York who's been working out of our office here in San Francisco. And he said it on a pitch yesterday where they're actually, it's a, a concept that's going after the data center and specifically GPU market, where they're actually taking GPUs, representing them in NFT form on-chain. So they technically sell the GPUs to the, to the company that then issues a token on-chain that, according under UCC, is actually representative of the ownership of those GPUs. And then they're able to borrow against them. And there's an amortization schedule and but the NFT for the first time actually represents the ownership of a physical asset in the real world, and you're able to borrow against it. And if you default on your loan, they can reclaim ownership. The GPU doesn't ever move and it's still being utilized, but it's something where the NFT actually represents that ownership and can point access to whoever the owner is based off of the loan status, which is the first time that we've seen anything like that at scale. And we were showing this to our friend who works at this bank, and he's like, yep, I got to quit.

It's over. We, we're, we're gonna win. I just like having him in, having this guy in our office this week. We were like, we heard, we heard CoreWeave is doing like a bond auction, this like big public company in the US. Like, can we see that? He's like, I think you can. He sends it to us. We're like, can you tokenize this? He's like, I mean, not right now, but like in the future. So like, it's just like, I think especially like the funds that are I don't know if like Ethereum-aligned or whatever you want to call it. Like, I just think you're going to end up on ETH doing these things kind of no matter what, because like the capital markets are just so deep. But like, it just, it does take some creativity from the actual capitalists, the fund managers as well, to push the vision forward.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains with a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security. SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. That's scale spelled with a K. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Solana holders with the best staking rates on Solana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Solana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance use Marinade to earn rewards on your Solana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Solana staking with Marinade's best-in-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimized delegation via Marinade's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes.

It seems like Ethereum is really running away with the DeFi market and the RWA sort of tokenization market. And, you know, Tomas, I'd be curious to get your perspective on this because, yeah, it seems like— and actually, it seems like the— and this is why I think there's so much debate about REV in general is just because if you're I guess it depends on— obviously, certain chains are set up to do better on certain metrics, right? And so whenever a metric gets created, the chain that looks good based on that metric champions it and the other chains push back and find your own KPIs. Yeah, exactly. Whereas in reality, I think there's a lot— we haven't actually defined what REV is, so I can circle back to that at the end. But I would be curious, Tomas, if you think And I'm curious, why do you guys think it's been so sticky with DeFi on Ethereum? And similarly, it kind of seems like Solana is running away with consumer in general. But I'm curious if you see these use cases being sticky to one chain or another, and why do you think it's DeFi that seems to be taking off on Ethereum versus maybe consumer over on Solana?

Yeah, sure. There's definitely, definitely aspect of the pre-existing liquidity and all the components of DeFi that are there that you can later compose and take advantage of larger finance, larger users to be there and creating liquidity space and federation. Now, yes, as you say, like when you have consumers, when you have the gambling aspects, the meme coins and so on, so definitely you've seen it much, much more on Solana in the last year or so. And And it's not that we don't want to see it on Ethereum. We absolutely do want to see it in Ethereum. And Ethereum was going for that scaling roadmap of saying, let's see L2 scaling massively, that activity. And then towards the end of last year, we felt like, oh, wow. Yeah, we're there. Like it's scaled, it's available. And I think we arrived maybe just like a few months too late for some of those applications and projects to launch on the L2s when they were getting ready. But I think that now we are ready to take it back. And then as we progressing towards the integration of all the layers together, all the L2s, then you should see the network effect and those applications should be very comfortable coming back to launch an L2 and say, yeah, like we can, we can run it at the same, at the same speed. But yeah, it will be challenged to look at, are there some UX on-ramp components? Are there already some users of this? New wave that just stay on Solana and feel very comfortable there and how you attract them to Ethereum space. So this will be for sure an effort, but also we see a lot of signals that many applications are ready to launch on L2s, are launching on L2s on Ethereum. And it's not like suddenly everything escaped. And there'll be many builders feeling like, okay, this was the innovation, how I can evolve on this, how I can experiment with it also on on Ethereum. And many of the, like, old builders or G from Ethereum are coming back and say, oh, actually, this, this is a fresh moment. This is the, the crisis, the battle. I want to come back and I have lots of ideas I want to launch. And what we receive as an ask is, is to build this spaces, communities, super team-like structures where we support, support new builders, new founders on Ethereum to launch applications. So this has to happen and it requires some effort coordination between different institutions, L2s and L1s, Ethereum Foundation, incubators, accelerators. We're welcoming them now a lot to Ethereum to collaborate with Ethereum Foundation on accelerating those pipelines to just say, hey, we are ready and we were asleep for a while and sorry for that. And let's build it. There is lots of excitement. We run the events where lots of new builders, lots of new fresh blood is coming to the ecosystem. And we will be building with hardware, with AI. And we very much, very much welcome all the trading or gambling experiments. It was fun. And so many builders from Ethereum that now are super serious were starting with absolutely, absolutely silly ideas years ago.

Man, that's, uh, yeah, I saw, I think, Jeffrey, Jeff Wilkie or whatever, uh, like, I think he's like an OG Ethereum whale. Like, people were like, he's sending his ETH to Kraken, and then he sent it all out of Kraken into like individual wallets and started like bullposting and, you know, posting about the ETH roadmap. It's, it's definitely like, you know, we're getting the band back together. It's cool to see.

Yeah.

Um, real quick, so I realized we haven't defined, uh REV, and then we can move on from this. And I actually want to get your change of tack and start talking about real-time proving, which is a super cool announcement this week. But REV stands for real economic value. It's a subset of— initially, the first metric here is actually something called total economic value, and it describes the revenue streams of an L1 or an L2 blockchain. So inflation, transaction fees, and then basically fees like priority fees, tips, MEV, that type of thing. And the intuition is inflation is not real revenue, right? That's endogenous shifting value from non-stakers to stakers. So if you were to net that out, what is a measure of an ARR top-line demand and value capture metric? That's what real economic value is. That's what people are willing to pay to use the chain. And this is a related metric to what people call chain GDP. Which might just be the total amount of revenue that apps are generating in aggregate on top of your chain. And so I do think some amount of nuance got lost in this on Twitter. Obviously, I think that the intention was never to say that any one metric defines the valuation of a chain. That would be very silly. Obviously—

You're trying to make rev happen?

Obviously, that's not the case.

Almost like there's a Blockworks dashboard for it or something. There is.

There may be. There may be.

Okay.

Yeah.

But you've seen, I've seen Tina Chen from Flashbots actually looking at it and saying in disbelief because I was with Flashbots at the time when they were publishing paper on REV for the first time. So I think it was like 2021, 2022. So the team was defining those metrics at the time from MEV, I think REV for the first time where it was at appearing was like real extractable value. And then it evolved. And look, those terms, people reinterpret them. And I think that the current conversation is about this real economic activity that is meaningful. Like it tries to show the app activity, everything that happens. It matters. It matters. So definitely all the dashboards are needed and I would love to see it on Ethereum.

Yeah. And I think that the definition has evolved a little bit from— I think that was this maximum extractable value, which is subset within that. Then the realized component of that is like, how much did people actually profit from whatever arbitrage activity or, uh, you know, auctions that were running on MEV? But yeah, I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting debate, uh, for sure. But I don't want to rehash it. Yeah, yeah. Um, okay, uh, I want to talk about, uh, real-time proving here. So this was something that got announced, um, from Uma and the team at Sync. Um, so I'm reading from the tweet here, but this is something that we've talked about on the pod, that ZK is always happening next year, and it's been like that for the last 5 years. But it seems like we're actually getting real-time pruning and real-time being within 9 seconds on Ethereum, which is really, really strong. And the implications of this are quite large. There's been a huge amount of infrastructure and generalized interop infrastructure built on top of L2s to account for the fact that one, we have relatively long block times on Ethereum L1, and the time to finality is quite high. So if you're bridging from one chain to another, you're waiting for— it's like the lowest common denominator of how long the lesser of the two chains is to come to finality. And so, if Ethereum can do that very quickly and prove very fast, then yeah, it makes interoperability across L2s much, much easier and much, much cheaper and more secure, actually, importantly, as well. Yeah, I'm curious what you guys think. There was a little bit of Vitalik did— he basically highlighted the fine print that we're not 100% there yet. But yeah, curious what you guys think about this and also what this means for just like how monumental of a step is this? What did I miss in terms of level setting on what an achievement this is? But then also, what does it mean for the L2 landscape, the infrastructure that supports interop, all that good stuff?

Well, I think also I saw something today from Thomas talking about potentially changing the block time or having a smaller slot time. So curious to get your take on whether or not this applies to that real-time proving or how you think they interrelate.

Yeah. I mean, coming back to that comment on Vitalik, I think it's always good to have Vitalik saying that, oh, look, actually, don't forget that there are some challenges, like we cannot overhype it. But even there, you've seen already UMA's response to Vitalik's comments. We consistently have been talking about ZK and that is coming sometime and it consistently has been exceeding expectations, was coming faster. So Justin Drake has been always like a great optimist on many of the ZK deliveries. And it seems to be that while we were sometimes feeling like, oh, this is like overpromising, it's that Justin was more right than everyone else. And it's heading in the right direction. And I think maybe Justin with this so strong belief, he's accelerating lots of those events happening. So, so with the ETH proofs, we started creating this competition on the dashboards, like show us that you can do the real-time proving. And now it's coming from succinct. We, we see it's very promising on the, on the receiver side. So, uh, yeah, extremely exciting. It unlocks a lot of, lot of other discussions. We, we can talk more about, uh, native rollups. We can think about the, base rollups on the ZK side, the rollups and interoperability gets stronger.

Yeah.

So Vitalik was asking about the decentralization. Could you run a prover? If everything goes wrong, could you run a prover yourself? Could you run a prover at home? How expensive it'll be on the CapEx side? But it all accelerates and it's good to plan Ethereum with this assumption of everything moves faster and faster. You have the Moore law progressing and AI is getting smarter and the machines and the hardware are getting cheaper. And I think we haven't done it for a while. So we stopped in place with the 30 million gas for a very long time. And now it's totally fair to start acting like we expect some things to happen and we can always slow down otherwise, but we should design everything with a bit of excitement about the progress and the success in the space.

Yeah. And just to some of Vitalik's pushback here were— so to be clear, what, what Sysync successfully executed is within a certain period of time, they proved, I think it's like 93% of the blocks for an average time of 10.3 seconds. So the idea here is to get it sub-12 seconds, which is an Ethereum slot. But I would assume some of those blocks that they didn't get to prove were perhaps larger. And those are obviously the more economically valuable blocks as well. So Vitalik's point is that this was an average case. We still need real-time worst case. It's still roughly 10x too expensive to prove at home. So you need to rely on an external prover. And we also want to 10x the gas limit here, as Thomas, you and Don Krat have been banging the table on. So it seems like there's a little bit of pushback in terms of how long until this actually finds its way into production. But still, I mean, it's a massive, massive, massive achievement, I think. And having things feel like it's just around the corner just makes it more real, right? Like getting real timelines, real demonstrated progress. Yeah, it's a fundamental, it's like a sea change in terms of interop on L2s.

Sure. On to the next deal. It's all aspect of the scaling L1 direction, right? So So even if we say 10x the block size, but then we have to understand that it means that we also want to 10x the prover efficiency on the sideline, that the speed of provers. And we have to start looking at the latencies that the scaling L1 means also that it's more as a hub for all the economic activity. They can be at the center of all of this interop space with all the L2s. Which means that very often people will say the block time has to be much shorter. The slot time has to be much shorter. And here Vitalik was again saying that, look, this might be unachievable in the current architecture. What we started doing at the EF now more is asking tougher questions, like which part of the Ethereum architecture could be replaced entirely that first set the goals and then think of what is absolutely top research and engineering that doesn't sacrifice the security and decentralization requirement, uh, or understands exactly where it, it became replaced by some other decentralization aspects of like— so if Fuma says, oh, it's a decentralized prover market, so actually you address some of the concerns. And it can be in many other places like that. There's some new subsystems that got decentralized, uh, so coming back, it's all aspect of this L1 scaling, and we're looking at all of this together, and we start taking more of the challenging questions. So not that choose the IP first and then think after we implement it, what does it mean for the product? And then when we deliver, we start measuring, kind of seems like much too late instead of set the goal and start thinking of is art of the IPs that we're choosing ambitious enough? If not, then we have to keep discarding them until we find something that is substantial enough that leads us. On the engineering side to the desired goals. So I think there's a change of the attitude to try. And that's why also I was asking, like, who should be the engineering leads? Who should be the excellent engineers up for the challenge in Ethereum Foundation? The ones that will actually be seen and like their names will be seen over and over again on Twitter, because people say those guys are delivering, those people are delivering the most exciting changes. To Ethereum that you've seen, like the same kind of excitement that you've seen when the merge was happening. We really needed in Ethereum people to feel like when I go to Ethereum, I'm working on absolutely most challenging network upgrades that the entire world has ever seen, because that was the feeling of the merge. Everyone who participated felt like, oh wow, this is big, like I'll be able to talk about it.

Man, that's very bullish that you guys are embracing debate Nothing is sacred. I saw Solana is like with— I think it's Anza is thinking about swapping out their consensus mechanism. I do feel as you get to the hundreds of billions, then trillions of market cap, you do have to reevaluate all these premises. And it can often be pretty scary to do that, but it's also cathartic once you can just go back to a blank slate and say, like what makes sense.

And we've done it a few times without stopping. So like if we've done it on the merge, we will be very, very hungry to show it that like that we have it, that the teams are like battle-tested and they're ready to deliver the most complex changes.

Earlier in today's episode, I mentioned Ledger's latest products, the Stax and Flex, and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them. These wallets feature the world's first secure touchscreens, which don't just simplify your digital transactions but also keep them extremely safe. These wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip. You can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps. Choose the most trusted name in hardware wallets and take control of your digital security today at Ledger.com or hit the link in the description of today's episode to check out their latest wallets. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy, no-nonsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's Chief Investment Officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topic and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one. The Bitwise Weekly CIO Memo is really worth the 5 minutes of your time. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com/ciomemo/empire or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing.

Good question. Just here is like, what would you say are the top North Star metrics, you know, KPIs? What are you shooting for in terms of scaling the L1? How do you think about what would success look like in whatever period of time you expect it to take?

So you've seen Dankrad talking about 3x each year, which means that it targets 100 million gas for this year. And we don't want it not to be a challenge. So we said something that most of the client teams will say we are pretty comfortable with, but some client teams will say, oh, there are some problems and we'll have to address those, but we want to deliver it. And then 3x next year means like it's $300 million gas and then go 3x and 3x again. And then you have like 100x from now. And this may start invoking some questions about, oh, so what's, what's the massive change here? What's the next generation of VM, next generation of consensus, maybe how it affects the entire ecosystem. So you have to start planning with the thing like, okay, it'll be 100x and there's no, no saying no, it won't be. And then you go back and say, so how the statelessness should look, how the VM should look, what ZKVM can do for us, how much the proving has to accelerate. You know, when you set those goals and some people think that when they set those goals, they have to deliver themselves. But when you set the goals and you say it over and over again, then the entire ecosystem starts adjusting. And like suddenly there are some new crazy ideas and the VCs are more likely to say, okay, let's do it. We found it. We found it because there is potential. Like if people say it's 100x, it means that I can fund this crazy ideas and there'll be space for them because people are open for it. So I think that's the atmosphere that I would like to building in Ethereum to happen in.

Hmm. Uh, Tomas, while we go here, can you give us a quick preview of Fusaka? What is the latest in terms of timeline? Some of the big changes that we've got— PeerDAS, which has been long talked about. I also saw Don Kradt has been calling for and banging the table on 1-second block times, the headline number, not for Fusaka at all, not even for Glamsterdam, which I think he wants down to 4 or 6 seconds. But I'm curious, what is the feasibility on the 1-second headline number? I actually saw Vitalik get in there a replies and say, I'm not sure how I feel about this. So how, what do you think about that? And then could you give us just like the highlights of what we can expect in Osaka?

Like, I think from my perspective, that's one second block time. So just to show direction, because definitely I wanted to start a debate that the slot times, block times, it's all important aspect of scaling L1. And that we are not only asking about the gas limit, but we also show that the entire network is is changing towards better UX through the better performance. So the question is like, what can we do now? And that's where Duncan starts talking about, okay, let's look at the 6, 8 seconds, whatever it will be, and show that there is a direction. We start thinking of, again, what's the next generation of everything that's in Ethereum that would actually answer question. Can we make it 1 second? Can we make it 250 milliseconds? Does it introduce some other aspects geographic sharding or questions about can you really maintain the same number of validators? And we want those questions to be mostly positive that you maintain the same aspects of decentralization, but think of, well, that can you create this like few hundred milliseconds experience for the users? So like when the users feel that the things happen super fast, where exactly does it happen? Is it on the, like, Dankrad talks about these 3 levels, like the time to confirmation, pre-confirmation, the time to censorship resistance, and the time to finality. And when you start looking at any chains that are actually promising those good results on the latency, they also have those multiple levels. And Ethereum usually be very strong on the censorship side, censorship resistance side. And then on the time to finality, That's where significant improvements are needed. But then on pre-confirmation, even more, like how quickly your experience looks like that the transaction is executed. And again, like Dankrad will show you that, well, on L2s, you have the super fast pre-confirmation, so something will happen and then finality will happen on the L1. But the experience is good. It's just hundreds of milliseconds and the things here happen and you can trade and you can you can have this super fun gaming experience as well. So all of that, I went to the level where I forgot where I started from.

No, that's a helpful overview. I actually wanted to get your guys' take on a story because it scratches at this old fear around stablecoins and who controls the network because you have RWAs that move on to the chain because this is like the most rumored IPO/potential acquisition of all time, but Circle is back in headlines here. And the reason being, they, you know, there have been— it's kind of an on-again, off-again attempt to go public. And there have also been acquisition rumors. And earlier this week, it was reported— well, a couple of weeks ago, it was reported that Ripple may have made a bid for Circle valuing it between $4 and $5 billion. Didn't get fully substantiated. Now there are talks that it seems like there's a bidding war in between Coinbase and Ripple, actually. And Coinbase has come to the table here, as was reported in, I think, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal this week. And it seems like Ripple may have raised their bid to about $11 billion, some combination of cash and XRP. And so the question is, one, how do we all think about this as, as a move from the perspective of Ripple? And then two, what would the implications be for Ethereum here if Ripple were to own USDC, which obviously has, you know, it's still the main stable trading pair in basically every DEX. So yeah, I'm just curious about like from the Ripple perspective, do you think something like this makes sense? And then, you know, would this be disruptive for Ethereum if this acquisition were to go through towards Ripple?

Well, so I think first and foremost, when you go through an IPO process, you parallel process an acquisition process. Just to be able to go to the bank or be able to go to the board and say, hey, look, we've turned over every stone. Here's the best value. Our bankers think that the best value for us is to go public. Historically, that is the case. Now, we don't necessarily historically have the business model of Circle, which I'd say probably doesn't warrant a $4 to $5 billion valuation in the public markets just based off of what the financials showed. At the same time, you've got extremely, I would say, token and cash-rich acquirers in our industry, which have the ability to potentially write a check for $11 billion worth of assets. And that's kind of the key point. I think generally, if Ripple was to buy Circle, that is a potential risk in that I don't think that they would kind of kill the golden goose and say, OK, all USDC is now running on Ripple rails. But they could start to favor that, and they could start to put Ripple on kind of the same level of the stablecoin issuance and rails. And maybe they're not as fast to do native integrations onto all the different Ethereum-based chains. Maybe they're not as fast to do new chains that pop up, and they kind of prioritize Ripple over others, which is an interesting kind of vector of what happens to this industry if Ripple kind of puts its thumb on the scale of directing flow and attention and assets in its direction, which is why it's worth potentially $11 billion to them and a massive opportunity for them to really right-size, especially with XRP trading at the FTD that it is. So I think this is a potential risk to Coinbase. I don't know if this is necessarily a potential risk to Ethereum as much, because if Ripple kind of takes USDC and moves it in their direction, I think that there are plenty of other competitive payment stablecoins that could step in and fill that void pretty easily, particularly Tether. All they'd have to do is kind of abide by whatever this genius act will include, and they will be already the most dominant stablecoin that exists in the world. I think they have maybe less of a focus on the US, but if Ripple is going to pull USDC in their direction, I think it leaves kind of a great opportunity for Tether to step in and kind of focus more on the US.

Yeah, I feel that maybe it's worth to think of what really does $11 billion bid represent. What is it applying for? So I guess this might be infrastructure components, the integrations, the know-how, all the partnerships, connections. But very likely any acquirer of the large stablecoin issuer actually will get closer to Ethereum and even And thinking about Ethereum being at the hub of all the economic activity, I would love all the other L1s to like start integrating with Ethereum economy more and more. And this is also a challenge for us, how to deliver that interoperability perfectly. So this is the hope, but also expectation. And also expectation, as you said, that there'll be other stablecoins launching. This becomes much more regulated market. There'll be some delays. For sure you have advantage if you're now in this market where all the banks are integrating with the space, with blockchain, to be ahead and to be able to build those partnerships. But then I think it still places Ethereum in the center. It also creates the— I would like— we'll be hoping for some of the more decentralized representations of stablecoin to appear, include all the off-ramps to the local markets, maybe participation of local banks around the world. Some consortium of banks to launch together stablecoins. So some of those ideas are appearing and seem very promising.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think it's— I guess we'll just have to see. I would also say, you know, to Boston, just in addition to the, you know, the advantages that Circle has, they also have a lot of licenses and they're very well regulated in the US, which is a huge barrier to entry for new stablecoin entrance. So if you look at a lot of like the Levels and the Caps of the world, a lot of the reason why— they're very clever designs, but they're also, you know, lower cost. It'd be very difficult to replicate certainly what Tether has built today. And Circle, for, you know, we talked about their financials a couple of episodes ago, but, you know, they've got, they've got a moat for sure. And you don't see many just payment stablecoins that are launching similar to either Circle or Tether today.

So, and just going on the background in terms of timing, Genius Bill passed cloture in the Senate. It's going to be voted on. The amendment process is beginning, I think, today. The expectation is, you know, depending on how these amendments go, it will pass. It was 66-32, and I think that it's actually extended in some of the other subsequent voting rounds. So our expectation is that we're going to have a stablecoin bill pretty soon here.

Yeah, actually, we had some really great news this week. The stablecoin, the Genius bill advanced. We also had an albeit somewhat brief new all-time high in Bitcoin. So happy all-time high day to those who celebrate. It feels a little bit different than it has in the past. It's a very quiet— this is the most quiet all-time high break for Bitcoin that I've ever What's more, people are busy building.

Easy building. And the more time we have before things get really crazy, I think the better. Um, you know, nothing leaves people less focused than like a serious bull market. So I think it's just like, give us to the end of the year to execute and then run it. That's, that's my plan at least, or hope.

Yeah. Um, all right, maybe just rewind down, um, Tomasz, could you leave us with what is one thing within the Ethereum ecosystem, anything that we've talked about so far, like upcoming changes, change in the energy or the vibe or the culture? Like, what is the one thing that you're most excited about within Ethereum here to leave us?

Yeah, I keep saying that what I'm super excited about, and maybe like is a bit too far in the future, and then I prefer not talk about it. Too much because we have to have this focus over the next 1 or 2 years. For sure, there's massive excitement about the new energy and just like how much support I see from the ecosystem for me and COA to execute everything. So this is exciting because it feels again like being part of everyone feeling that they want to build, they want to show that Ethereum wins. So this is short term and I have a lot of expectation for what Ethereum does as a next big steps. Like we, we solve the crisis and then seeing all the autonomous economy, like autonomous machines, agents, everything landing together on Ethereum and start integrating physical and digital world. Like the simulations, hallucinations together, like us sitting around the fireplaces in there and then generating new realities and creating some kind of crazy economy. This is super futuristic. That's what I'm excited about. I feel like, oh, we need to solve like really big down-to-earth problems now with the network. So we can unlock some massive potential for moving to the next stage, next chapter, next season of this amazing technology curiosity exploration.

All right. Well, Tomas, it's been a lot of fun, man. Thank you for hopping on. Definitely, it's been fun to watch your, you know, early days of your leadership at the EF. And yeah, just keep on chugging. And thanks for coming on.

Yeah, yeah, I feel even more optimistic. Thanks a lot, man.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions. Not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.