Ethereum Co-Founder: Why Crypto Has Failed | Gavin Wood

This episode is brought to you by zkSync. Join the Elastic Network today at zkSync.io/empire. Thanks to zkSync for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Focal by FalconX, the AI-powered insights engine built for institutional crypto. By leveraging AI, Focal empowers institutional investors to streamline research, anticipate market shifts, and make sharper investment decisions. You'll hear more about Focal later in the show. All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. I'm Kikim Sov. Santi's joining in a few minutes, but we're very lucky to be joined by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum as well as co-founder of Polkadot. So, Gav, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Is this the— have we entered the Gav era or is it still Gavin?

I mean, I'm easy with either, but yeah, Gav is fine.

Nice, nice. How's life, man? What's been going on?

I got back a few weeks ago from a tour of India and China doing some university lecturing on jams. That was fun. Met a lot of people, saw a bunch of cities, but at the moment I'm just at home sort of resting after the travel.

Nice. All right, well, let's see if we can deliver some stuff on the podcast here. I've got a million things I want to ask you. One of them I mean, maybe just on a very macro scale, like you helped found Ethereum starting in 2014. You're kind of in the Ethereum world, I guess, left for like an EF, like an Ethereum Foundation-like entity late, I think it was 2015. And then I think left the Ethereum ecosystem full-time in 2017 for Polkadot. I think I'm getting those dates right. I would love— I mean, TL;DR, you've been in the industry for a very long time, longer than most who are listening to the show. I'd love to just get your macro view on like just crypto as an industry. Like, are you happy with where we're at so far? Are you like overwhelmed with, oh my God, pro-crypto president right now, stablecoins are booming? Are you like underwhelmed and like, damn, like I really thought we'd be much farther along than we are today?

The latter.

Say more.

I think it was Gandhi that said there's two types of people in the world, those who do the work and those who take the credit. And I think we see a certain bifurcation of crypto in this regard as well. There's a lot of hype-driven projects out there in the crypto world, in the crypto industry, and not that many that are doing legit work. I mean, there's certainly some that are doing some proper software engineering, but actually pushing the original Web3 crypto Bitcoin ideals forward, really not that many. Whereas there are an awful lot of people trying to, so to speak, take the credit, which is to say, try to find that buzz and that hype, that capital inflow to make their token go up. And I mean, it's not surprising really, but it's not where I would've hoped to be.

So you put this underwhelmed feeling in the hands of— you think the industry has misallocated attention?

Dramatically. Dramatically. And I mean, there was an old cartoon in this very ironic newspaper, The Viz, back in the '90s. And it had an advert in, an ironic advert, a comedy advert. No technological nonsense, just marketing breakthrough. That was the advertising line. And this, I fear, is really where crypto, an awful lot of crypto industry is at. It's not about, it's not about delivering a new utility. It's not about improving the technology to the degree that it becomes actually a viable social operating system. Right. This is really just about trying to attract more money into their specific economies.

So maybe if I had to take the other side of it, just to make this a fun conversation here, the other side of the argument is that all, all technology industries have these boom and bust periods of like crazy attention. But really, like when the tide goes out, you know, maybe when the tide goes in, everything feels like it has attention and hype. When the tide goes out, maybe one of the 10 things is left standing, or, you know, 3 of the 100 things are left standing. And actually, hype is what ends up building all the companies. And then, you know, most of them fail. But the ones that stick around I mean, the hype is actually warranted. And that's just part of the— there's two sides of building a company. There's the engineering and product. And I know you're an engineer's engineer, but the other side is long, sustained periods of hype. And that would be bucketed as like marketing and sales, I guess I'd say. So is there— I don't know, I'm curious to just hear how you think about that.

So promotion is certainly an element. Of marketing. It is not all of marketing by a long shot. And I would say hype is really just a form of promotion that tends to chronically disregard the fundamentals. Now, you're right. Can have a collateral benefit. It can benefit broad numbers of projects. It can be the tide that lifts all boats to some extent, sure. But the problem is that if only one or two boats are deserving to be lifted, hype represents an incredibly inefficient capital allocation. Not one that Adam Smith would be particularly impressed with. Right.

And that's the main problem here. Who's deserving of it? Like, is, is Hyperliquid deserving? Is Solana deserving? Is Worldcoin? I'm thinking of like very hyped projects who also have talented founders. You know, I think you and I would be in the same bucket that, you know, something like meme coins like a lot of hype, maybe not a ton of talent behind a lot of these things. But there are things that get a lot of hype but have, you know, actually very talented founders and, you know, real users and stuff like that. So how do you— who's warranted of the hype?

Real users, I would, I would argue maybe not. And of course, there are some founders that are talented. The question is, are those talents for the good? In whose interests are those talents working? And I do not— I believe there are certain meme coin founders that are incredibly talented. I mean, you might argue they're quite lucky as well. I would say part of being talented is making your own luck.

So let's talk Solana, right? Solana, Hyperliquid, or Worldcoin. Like, I'm using three very hyped up projects who I think they also have talented teams. How do you think about those kind of folks?

I think they're very talented in making themselves money.

Who's to say, though, that So, okay, well, I don't, I don't know. It's got— who's to say though that the users on Solana are not doing things that are productive? It's, it's, they're just choosing what to trade, what basically what to do. Right. And it's, and it's kind of the free market that lets them do that. Yeah.

So I'm, I would question the utility that is being provided. Now, if the utility is unlicensed gambling, if you consider that a utility, that is actually not fair gambling either. That's mostly insider trading and just the appearance of gambling. If we start thinking of utility as basically the ability for an elite group of insiders to make themselves a lot of money, then— and I don't see this as a sensible form of utility, but if you're going to argue that that is, then sure, then Solana is giving utility. If we're talking about creating a social operating system, the thing that sort of the original Web3 hype cycle started with, then no, I do not see Solana as doing particularly substantial utility. And I've written quite extensively about this, and this is why the JAMM is a thing, right? It's because I see the direction that Solana is going, and I see that it's wrong. And I, I've made clear arguments as to why it's wrong.

This episode is brought to you by zkSync. In 2024, zkSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever-expanding network of zkChains, the Elastic Network. To onboard the whole world into crypto, many specialized chains must be able to coexist, work together, and share liquidity. Institutions and global financial leaders choose zkSync for unmatched security, scalable infrastructure, better onboarding, gasless transactions, and privacy-first design. Join over 20 chains including Abstract, Sofon, and Cronos in the Elastic Network today. Behind zkSync is the zkStack. It is a one-stop platform for building private blockchains on Ethereum. The stack solves all the typical privacy, regulatory, user experience, and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security. Join the Elastic Network today at zkSync.io/empire. Thanks to zkSync for making today's episode possible.

I want to double-click on— obviously we talk about utility a lot in crypto and the common criticism that not just Solana has, but like from the outside in, it's like it's all a casino. And they— I am curious to get your perspective on like, where do you see the most amount of utility? Because you could argue someone from the outside said, wait a minute, like everything, not just in Solana, has been pure speculation. Like recursive leveraging, buying meme coins is not just a phenomenon that happens in Solana. So, so I'm curious to get your perspective, like what is the most utility driving feature that you see in crypto? Because I think every network has this problem.

So Polkadot has a number of parachain projects that use Polkadot's incredibly large amount of correctness finality, basically the Polkadot world computer, to run their projects. I can point at a few of these, but I think probably the most interesting one is Mythos, Mythical Games. Yeah, I'm an investor. And they're using this essentially to ensure that users can have direct ownership of their in-game assets. And this is something that I would argue is on a level of utility that's categorically higher than meme coin trading, um, because it brings in— there's a very easy way of sort of understanding this. It's like, if Polkadot weren't available, would Mythical do this functionality anyway? Do they consider the functionality itself useful enough for them to implement? The answer is yes. They would be running this functionality as part of their game servers. Now, the thing is, why are they running on Polkadot? Well, because their game servers are ultimately run by Mythical Games. And that doesn't give the user sovereignty over those assets. There are some— the ability to give users sovereignty over assets is an additional feature that they want to provide. And that comes with an amount of interoperability. Those assets can, in principle, be moved around the Polkadot ecosystem, potentially into the Ethereum ecosystem, moved around exchanges, third-party integrations, can be licensed to other game developers for other games. And we start to see how Web3 can actually benefit Mythical Games via Mythos. Now, the key point is, though, what they're doing at the moment with blockchain, disregarding all of this Web3 value-add, is actually useful because it would be done under Web2-style technologies if it were not using Web3. Would we see meme coins under Web2-style technologies? We don't, indicating that it's probably something that is quite specific to Web3, a very specific utility. And if we dig deeper, we can realize, yes, it's still an unlicensed casino with a very, very opaque means of determining whether the gambling is fair. Hmm.

Gavin, I would actually love to maybe taking us out of this Solana conversation and markets conversation. I've heard you talk about this post- Snowden internet and post-Snowden world. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you view the internet today and what is broken with it and how crypto can maybe be a solution to some of this.

I don't think crypto is much of a solution. So, I am in the crypto industry, I suppose, but I consider myself really a sort of Web3 practitioner. Sure. I don't consider myself a crypto guy, basically because so much of crypto is about sort of this Mickey Mouse finance, you know, and it's really not my thing.

The context for the question, by the way, is like, I do sense like a bit of— disgust is probably too strong of a word, but maybe a little cynicism on what's happened in the last decade in this industry that you've worked in. So I think I'm trying to answer the question of like, man, you are a phenomenal coder. You could go build some great companies in AI or something else. You probably don't have to work again for the rest of your life. Like, why are you still working in the industry if there's still disgust? I would say I think that's at the heart of the question.

I think it's a very good question. I think the industry is— while, while yes, I don't think that everyone's hearts are really in this industry, are sort of in the right place necessarily. I do think that some are. I think there is still a sort of core. That is really trying to do something that's good for the world, that's not getting caught up too much in the self-enrichment. And I think this is what keeps me here. If I thought it was just a lot of people scrambling to try and make their next, whatever, $1,000 or whatever, it would really turn me off and I'd probably I would not be here. But I sense and I see and I talk to people in the industry that see that this Web3 isn't this industry. It's a part of it, but it's not all of it. The industry as a character isn't the same sort of character as Web3. And it's not the character that I wrote the Web3 Manifesto about. And I do believe that this technology, although it is facilitating, Solana to run meme coins, run a market meme coins, which is essentially unlicensed gambling. I think it can do so much more than that. And I think this is actually one of the warts. Now, it may be a wart that delivers an amount of hype, and some of that hype maybe lifts Polkadot's boat a bit. Great. But I think it's still, at the end of the day, a wart. I think we will be a lot better off, probably, without any of the hype, because then the money that would otherwise have gone into the hype, some of it at least, the more sensible portion of it might actually do a bit more digging and find the projects that actually have real basis for social change behind them. What sort of social change am I thinking about? Well, self-sovereignty, transparency, the ability to build, for example, voting systems and agile governance systems. Without the need for a huge civil service and an awful lot of trust that that civil service, in principle, sort of bring or requires a population to take. We already see, in the US in particular, an immense reduction in the trust of the civil service over the last 50 or 60 years, right? There's a feeling, there's deep state, there's a feeling that there's 'These government taxes are not being used to pay for the public good.' And that's unfortunate. And it may very well— in part, may very well be true. What we need are systems that can allocate common resources in a transparent and effective manner for the benefit of those that are paying into them. And that is in part what this technology can facilitate. It's not being used to facilitate it that much at the moment. And there's certainly more development that needs to be done, both in terms of scaling it out and in terms of the sophistication of the mechanisms. But in principle, it is my belief that social systems can be incredibly improved with this technology.

Why do you think that hasn't happened? Because I think you're not the first person to believe this, right? I remember Blockworks hosted an event sometime in mid-2018. It was like Supply Chain on the Blockchain. And you probably remember these ads. It was like Walmart was moving their supply chain onto the blockchain. Hernando de Soto wrote a piece about, you know, property rights and, you know, how moving on to emerging markets real estate would move, you know, move on to blockchains and that would make the world a better place. None of that has really happened. Instead, we got, you know, 100 perp DEXs, NFT marketplaces, massive exchanges. I would probably take the other side than you. I actually think that has been decently productive to build a new industry. But yet none of the like good for society in the classical definition of it has happened. Why is that? Why do we have a lack of major successful apps? In short, product.

The product, which is to say the platforms that constitute Web3 have not been sufficiently good or they have not being a good enough product to allow these use cases to be built on them effectively. Now, I think there's some exceptions here, right? Don't get me wrong. I think that there are very particular sort of supply chain provenance style exceptions. I've seen a few in the real world. I think there are some exceptions to, you know, Some of these— I mean, there are a lot of them on Polkadot. So the idea that the social graph should be managed transparently, it should be held by the user, not by the platform. This is something that Frequency is pioneering, Frank McCourt's sort of social Web3 social media project. And I think this is— and there's a few others. There's Peak sort of trying to track information, also very interesting. And we are starting to see truly scalable, like useful, because a lot of these use cases, they need scale or they're not going to be useful. And I think this is something that has been difficult and that Polkadot is pushing forward. And I think the other one that's very important is economic sovereignty. A lot of A lot of applications, a lot of platforms, Web3 platforms or Web3-ish platforms, they require the projects that are launched on them to not have economic sovereignty. They require, for example, transaction fees to be paid in the platform economy. If you launch something on Ethereum, your users are going to be paying Ether almost certainly. And that can be a problem. That's a turnoff. It's a turnoff both for the the team that is deploying, but it's also a turnoff for the users of that use case. They don't want to be buying some random crypto that they've never heard of before. They want to have to hold particular special wallets. They want to have to go to DEXs or centralized exchanges. This is the product that's the issue. And I think we are starting to see as real utility, real use cases that are not just parasitic crypto, crypto projects, real use cases move into Web3, we're seeing that they are choosing platforms like Polkadot that provide economic independence for the project. So they don't need an underlying token in order— their users don't need an underlying token to use their product. And scale, the ability to actually scale to hundreds of thousands of interactions. On a, on a second-by-second basis.

This episode is brought to you by zkSync. In 2024, zkSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever-expanding network of zkChains, the Elastic Network. To onboard the whole world into crypto, many specialized chains must be able to coexist, work together, and share liquidity. Institutions and global financial leaders choose zkSync for unmatched security, scalable infrastructure, better onboarding, gasless transactions, and privacy-first design. Join over 20 chains including Abstract, Sofon, and Chronos in the Elastic Network today. Behind zkSync is the zkStack. It is a one-stop platform for building private blockchains on Ethereum. The stack solves all the typical privacy, regulatory, user experience, and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security. Join the Elastic Network today at zkSync.io/empire. Thanks to zkSync for making today's episode possible.

So, I mean, I agree with you on that point. Like, you know, today crypto has been mostly speculative activity. Now, every technological revolution has relied on speculation. But we can do better, much, much better. I mean, there are core products that exist today in crypto, they just have not gotten the same level of attention or traction. I find interesting what you guys built with Polkadot through the vantage point of talking to the Mythos team and why they decided to migrate over. The question is, why haven't we seen more adoption? The tech, if the tech is truly superior, truly better, not just within crypto, but just Web2 versus Web3. Why don't we have a billion users on-chain today?

Well, we don't have a billion users on-chain in part because it takes time to get a billion users to move over. Users are quite sticky. User acquisition can be quite sticky. User acquisition can be quite sticky, especially when we're talking about economies. There's a reason for this. And it's manifested essentially in money. It costs money to move users over to one platform as opposed to another platform. Now, we see some very obvious examples of this, like for example, Polygon or Solana, or these projects with fairly deep pockets just paying projects, paying like newbies who want to move their utility onto a blockchain, just pay them to put it on their blockchain. And if they don't really technologically— if they don't have really great, strong technological leadership, they will choose a solution They will lose the argument to their CFO. And they will take the money and then deploy it on this technology that could never deliver what they need. It can never deliver the scale or the economic independence that they need. So the reality is that it's sticky. It takes time. It takes time for projects to realize. There's a bit of trial and error. They might try one thing. I mean, Mythos tried Ethereum. They tried Ethereum in order to do this. They realized it just wasn't going to work for them. Once it became clear, ah, okay, this platform does not support what we need, not in terms of scale, not in terms of economic independence, okay, what platforms are there? Is this just a lost thing? Is Web3 not going to happen for us? No, actually, it turns out Polkadot can do this. Now, it takes time for people to understand this. Humans don't move at the speed of light. And there are all sorts of things that are slowing them down, pulling at them. In existing investments, fear of loss. It takes time for these to wash away. Now, it will happen eventually. You always have to believe. As a technologist, I have to believe that building the best platform will ultimately garner the attention that it deserves. But at the end of the day, I also have to accept that money is a thing, that conservatism is a thing, that caution is a thing, that There are cynics all over there who are willing to spend money in order to slow things down, slow the progress down. And it's like, okay, but then it will take time. And if it takes time, I've got time. I've been here 11 years. I can be here 11 years more.

Gavin, what do you think you nailed with the early Polkadot vision? And what do you think you got wrong?

So, the thing that we nailed And it wasn't a one-man effort. Now, the vision was— the paper was pretty much written by me, but the overall protocol, a lot of other people working on it. But the thing that I think we got right was delivering scale beyond generality and resilience. So, Bitcoin pioneered resilience, still around, still doing its thing. Ethereum took a huge step from Bitcoin into a general— generalizing this technology, allowing you to write using a Turing-complete language. And Polkadot took it one step further with scale, kept the generality, kept the resilience, delivered scale. And I think this is really a really impressive feat. It's not a feat that other other projects have been able to do. And I think one of the other interesting things that we delivered was economic independence, something that I talked about just now, which is essentially the ability for projects to purchase in bulk Web3, purchase block space in bulk, and then use whatever means that they will to dole it out to their users without going the Ethereum route of their users actually having to pay their way, pay as they go, pay per transaction. I think this was also something that we got right. So, I think the product actually wasn't bad. But what really held us back was the fact that there wasn't a central crucible, a mixing pot where people could try it out before actually having to get there, really dive in. Polkadot was definitely— Polkadot 1 was definitely a dive in. Kind of a proposition. It's like, you know, we had crowd loans, we had slot auctions. You know, if you were going to deploy anything on Polkadot, it was going to take you— it was going to take a team and you were going to have to do some marketing. You're going to get some people aware of it. You have to actually do some tokenomics. And this, this I think was the, was the thing that held us back the most. And this is something that we are hastening to correct. Over the last year and this year. And there's some very interesting, very, very important alterations that we have been making over the last 2 or 3 years, over the last year, 1 or 2 years, and that we will continue to make over the next year or 2 that will fix this, that will keep— allow us to keep all of that lovely scalability and economic independence as our product, but also bring this much lower barrier data, to just fucking around on it. That's what made Ethereum really great, because people could just mess around on this platform without really having to invest very much. It gave all of these large amount of use cases. In the end, actually, there's not that many use cases that have been that successful on Ethereum.

No, but it just made it really easy to get started and get going and deploy some code. Exactly. Okay. What are your thoughts then when you see— if I had to describe Polkadot from an— I've never built on Polkadot, but from an outsider's point of view, you had this this idea for a native rollup host chain, basically. And this thing that would basically allow you to deploy your own chain and build an interoperable world. And I think it was probably you guys and Cosmos saw this vision and you guys maybe had this idea that, look, we can help you secure— we're going to build this platform really that lets you secure 100 chains for the price of securing one. Great, great vision. What do you think now? That there are basically all the L2s, you're kind of just watching them turn into the exact same pitch, native rollup host chain, right? If you're Arbitrum or Optimism or Polygon, it's less about building on Optimism now. It's like now the OP stack. And what do you, what are you offering? What's the service you offer? Interoperability and the ability to go build your own chain using our stack. What do you think And actually, they're gaining a lot of traction, right? Like Base and Zora and all these people are now building on their stack. They didn't choose Polkadot, they didn't choose Cosmos, they chose them. What do you make of this?

It's very vindicating. So this makes me feel very much as though the work that we've been doing and the product that we made, this early, relatively high barrier to entry, your own blockchain product was not wholly wrong, that it has its value. Now, personally, as I just said, I think that we can do a lot better than this as a product. And it's very interesting to see that other ecosystems and the other projects are viewing this as some sort of panacea, something to actually aim for, some North Star. Well, we already got there. And we can tell you point blank, it's not a North Star. This is where JAM comes from. So this is the basis of JAM. JAM came from the realization that this roll-up, deploy your own chain and we'll secure it, and make it relatively easy to deploy your chain. Sure, it's a reasonable product. And sure, we'd be able to find, particularly if interoperability is fairly decent. And I think this is actually where probably the Base and the Arbitrum and the OP Stack guys, where a lot of their value came from was this at least appearance of Ethereum interoperability. I think it's oftentimes overstated, but yeah, an appearance. I think Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation are increasingly realizing that this is overstated. And that is leading them to wanting to have their own native rollups. They're like, actually, we don't want to scale using OP Stack or Polygon. We want our own. To some extent, these guys are cowboys. Have you seen how many validators are running on the average OP Stack chain? What the hell? And therefore, we want our own quality scaling solution. And it turns out that Ethereum's idea of a quality scaling solution looks quite a lot like Polkadot 1. Maybe if we're being nice to them, Polkadot 2. But it doesn't look like Jamf. And Jamf is where my thoughts and my considerations of what it is that we've built and deployed, looking at the market, looking at how people are using products, looking at other ecosystems, and trying to understand how all of this fits into a potential vision for where we could go. And JAMM is the outcome of that. And essentially, it boils down to coherence and in some sense interoperability. And I fear that the solution that Ethereum Foundation are having with native rollups that we already have with parachains, and obviously all of the L2s that are trying to become their own L1s are having, They're all suboptimal in the same way. They are trying to split apart the different avenues of use cases into their own chain. By splitting them apart, they're keeping them apart indefinitely. It's like what I call a partitioning, but a persistent partitioning, one that is permanent. And this persistent partitioning is something that I've identified is not a good way of scaling. I mean, it's one thing that you can do in order to scale, and it's something, as I said, that Polkadot did, but it's a suboptimal way of scaling. And Jam is here to fix that.

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It is. And I mean, this isn't— this is a good, a good understanding of our intention. And I think it actually boils— it's both Jamf and it's with Polkadot 2.0's intention as well. So the idea of this like Polkadot Cloud, Polkadot Hub, concept that we're sort of rolling out Polkadot Hub over the course of this year, in the next few months, and it will be Ethereum compatible and you'll have smart contracts on Polkadot and you'll be able to deploy smart contracts directly to Polkadot for basically very little money, right? High performance smart contract, fully synchronous, fully coherent environment, the same sort of environment you're going to get from Solana, you get from Ethereum L1. And it's like this is We really want to take the scale of Polkadot, the decentralization, the resilience of Polkadot, and combine it with this very low barrier to entry, easy to use, highly compatible, interoperable smart contract system. Now with Jam, we're taking it to the next level. And Jam is really a— it's the same intention. So you're absolutely right with what it is that we're intending to do with Jam. The means that we're going about it is a shift in the platform, an alteration to the underlying technology, a relatively small alteration. It's not research-level alteration. It's more of a product alteration, but it's an important one. With this alteration, I believe that we're able to deliver something that not only gives you this very low barrier to entry, easy to get into smart contracts, very compatible interoperable environment, but also one that can scale like more or less indefinitely, without breaking it up, right? Without sort of having to say slice it and say, well, that's, that's the, the base chain, right? And then this is the Arbitrum chain and then this is the first OP stack chain and that's the second OP stack chain, right? This, I don't, this isn't good. This is, we're just back to parachains if we do this. And it's fine when you have a really, really singular use case on a parachain, you don't need too much interoperability. Right. That's fine. You can use chains for this. They may even be the optimal solution for this. But when we're talking about delivering this like low barrier to entry, let's all mess around in the same sandpit, Ethereum-style product, then you need something a bit different.

Okay, Gavin, how do you— let's bring all this together. Let's say you can really build what you're talking about building, which I trust you can. Good engineer. There is another angle to this, right? Which is actually, I think, the part that I can tell, just I don't know you very well, but like in this conversation that you maybe don't like as much, which is marketing and growth and ecosystem and candidly playing the kind of crypto games, the backroom games, like there are the games that people play. How do you, how do you think about this? Like, how do you think about marketing and growth and Jam goes live, the tech works? Like, how do you think about just the soft side of all of this?

No, you're right. It's not something that I'm I'm desperate to get— it's not a swamp I'm desperate to start swimming in. I think that there's a part of this which I would loosely call sort of technical promotions or technical advocacy, which is sort of what I try to do. And it's this Call is a good example. But there are others, the touring around Asia, writing blog posts, this sort of thing. And this, I think, this can be helpful. And this is something that I'm willing to sort of do my fair share, more than my fair share at, in order to try to bring about visibility for what it is that Polkadot is doing and why it's trying to do it. Why we're bothering putting all this effort in to build all this technology. To what ends? Why is it sensible? Why is it good? Why is it going to be valuable in the future? But I think on a more day-to-day basis of like, well, trying to sort of build Hike, right? I think there are people that are good at this. I think they deserve to be— I think the Polkadot treasury is capable of, at least eventually, finding them and incentivizing them and getting them on Polkadot's side. But it's not something that I personally feel is my— is a great value add for me. Like, a great value that I can add, you know, I think, I think the value that I can add can be so much better if it's focused around work, basically around technology. I'm a technologist. I'm pretty good at it. But like, and I can explain myself. I'm a teacher as well. Like, I've been— I've been paid for teaching in a past life. And I enjoy it. So it's like, and this can form an element of advocacy, right? This can form an element of marketing. But I think, I think in terms of like reaching large crowds with messages of, you know, simple messages that are easily understood and may not be very nuanced, it's not really, it's not really my, my gig.

Will you hire? Will you hire for that or will you Someone— because you got to, you got to do it even if you don't like doing it. So do you, do you outsource that? Do you hire? Do you— what do you do there?

I mean, I'm, I'm not in an operational role for, you know, in a managerial operational role. So there is a, there is a sort of executive director of the Web3 Foundation, not me. There is a CEO of Parity, not me. Of course, there are lots of people that have loud opinions on how Polkadot treasury funds should be spent. I'm not generally one of them. Only once or twice in the past have I chimed in. Yeah, I think it is a not unreasonable spend. The issue is not that I think that it's wrong or evil, the issue is that I just lack the ability to understand what spends make what value. It's just not my expertise. And so that's something that I would indeed hire for. But I mean, as I said, it's not my hiring decision. It's the guys that are running these organizations' hiring decisions. And I trust them to do it. Now, in terms of the treasury, of course, it's a decentralized leadership. And so there isn't really any particular person who's going to make any particular hiring decision. But I think to some extent, we are seeing people come forward in the ecosystem saying, really kind of bringing the goods and saying, well, look, I am going to do this anyway. I'm going to get out there. I'm going to sort of really pedal Polkadot and really try to get people on board for this. and maybe in the future, I get some recognition of that, I get some incentive or whatever. I think that's good. I think that's nice. I think we already see this in certain other ecosystems, particularly Bitcoin. If you look to Bitcoin, there was no one really that held— I mean, Satoshi Nakamoto notionally that held a lot of Bitcoin. But in principle, we saw people in the Bitcoin community stepping forward promoting to whatever extent, advocating, marketing Bitcoin because they believed in it, not because they were being paid, not because someone had hired them, but because they believed in it. It was grassroots. I think if you can make a strong enough mission statement and get people really on board for what it is that you want to achieve with this, then it's actually possible. To kind of get people to do this advocacy, this promotions marketing sort of work. This talent to do it without having to make these difficult hiring decisions or difficult value judgments.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of what you talk about here is organic community building and the power of crypto is running coordination at scale. And I think if you introduce the right incentives, I think you can achieve some things that are pretty powerful that you saw in the Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin is pretty impressive what it's pulled off. Ethereum transitioning from proof of work to proof of stake, I think was one of the more like fascinating things to pull off. But I guess more of a debate here is like, I think it's not an either or. It's not that speculation is dirty or that activity of that nature is dirty. I mean, you have capital markets like Wall Street, and it's an important piece of how you coordinate. If you're not transacting value, you can't coordinate, is my point. Now, of course, we would all hope that we would have more tangible, real utility beyond just pure speculation and recursive leveraging by 10 people on-chain, but we'll get there. So from your position, What is it that excites you the most? And what is it that you're focused on if you think about the next chapter? You've contributed so much to the space. What do you want to do next? How do you think that someone in your position wants to really continue to make a dent in the space?

I believe at the end of the day that speculation although in part could be considered sort of utility, this sort of casino, is grounded in the idea that these systems provide substantial value to society. Not to specific individuals, to society. And although I think that the industry has taken, over the last few years, taken a distinct turn away from this. I think it still lurks there in the heart of it. I think that as you said a while back, there will be storms that are going to wash away a lot of the projects that are not producing value, that are the zombie projects that are just have— people speculated on them, and now the money is sticky. And so they're just retaining this value, but they're not able to to improve because they don't have a significant value proposition. I think we will see— I would hope we kind of see a sort of flushing of these zombie projects. And I think— I kind of hope that we will— not get too far down this road of kind of, um, centralization. And I see centralization happening, like, especially over the last couple of months, um, you know, people clamoring for recognition by, you know, certain powerful people, um, and I, I fear that this is not really what it's I don't see this as being really in the best interests of crypto, assuming crypto is about delivering social value, broad social value, not to one specific country, but to the world. I think overall, with enough time, the product which is the best And the project that proves the most resilient, most capable of evolving, of being agile, of meeting and pivoting to meet market needs, of changing as market needs change. And market in this case is actually more than a market, really. It's the world. It's the sociopolitical environment, or the technological sociopolitical environment that blockchain finds itself. Blockchain is an interesting technology. It's not just another app on a phone. It's a technology that is a sociopolitical technology. And therefore, its market is really its environment. And its environment is one that is multifaceted. It will change. And projects will need to change as it changes. It will— and at the moment, we're seeing the world changing substantially. Well, that's going to weed out some projects, but it's also going to make others alter and pivot. Yeah.

Maybe just on the note of the world changing a lot right now, we can start to think about wrapping this with a conversation around AI and just how the world is changing so quickly right now. AI, I've heard you say, is diametrically opposed to crypto. I'd love to just get your views on crypto and AI. Are they two peas in the same pod? Is AI going to run on crypto? Is it— these agents are going to all have tokens, or are they working together? Are they fighting? Like, tell me your views on AI and crypto.

Again, I'm not— I don't know. You know, crypto is a relatively It's not the term I'd use. I mean, for example, central bank digital currencies could be considered cryptos. They're heavily— they're obviously central. USDT is a crypto. It's totally centralized. So crypto as a whole isn't necessarily going to be— isn't going to have a particular relationship to AI. Web3, Web3 technologies, like technologies broadly governed by the concept of less trust, more truth. Yes, these are philosophically diametrically opposed to AI. Why? Well, AI as a technology really is less truth, more trust, which is to say they're heavily centralized. And what they— the way that they work is they pull in data from the world and they provide opinion, opaque opinion generally. This means that we have to trust— if we use AI, we have to trust the organization behind the AI. We trust them in a couple of ways. We trust them that their data that they pulled was comprehensive, that it wasn't a clip, that they didn't run any kind of eclipse on it, or they didn't withhold some types of data. And push others, that they didn't put just fake data in, but also that they haven't tampered with the model. There's no way to check that they've tampered with the model, not really. What we end up with is a totally, totally trusted data source, a data source that is broader and more trusted than one that humanity has ever known before. This is the opposite of Web3. Web3 is about gathering your own data, and evaluating on a basis of first principles yourself. This is why we hate RPCs, the true Web3 people. We hate this idea that Ethereum is served to us via servers that other people run, even though most of the time, it's basically fine and basically transparent. We don't like it because at the end of the day, it's a trust basis. Well, AI is a supercharged trust information system. It gives us the appearance or the feeling of getting information, but on the basis that we have to trust the information, the single solitary Sam Altman information giver. This is madness to me. It's dangerous. A world that trusts one individual for all of its information gathering is, is a fucked world, right? And that's, that's the world that these AI CEOs want to build. Make no mistake, they want to be the dictator of truth, and that's why they build these trust-based systems. So yes, Web3 is diametrically opposed. Crypto, not so much. Web3 is diametrically opposed to AI. And it is my belief that we need Web3 systems if we are to survive humanity as the survival world.

That has such predominant use of AI in it. Gavin, maybe we can wrap actually with proof of personhood. I saw you tweet back in December saying this is precisely the reason we need a solid Web3 proof of personhood and we need it now. I'd be curious, A, why proof of personhood is so important to you, and B, what you think of the Worldcoin approach.

The Worldcoin approach is flawed. It's trust-based. It's, again, it's the same thing as before using an RPC. It's like, who issues? Who issues this? Who is the signer here? Who is the organization that determines whether I am an individual, whether it has seen my retina or not, whether this device has seen my retina or not? Well, that is a single— there is a single keyholder for that. And actually, that information is controlled by a single authority as well. So not only do we have an arbitrary keyholder, like an arbitrary authority that can determine who is an individual, but we also have an arbitrary authority that sort of knows everyone's retinas. This is, again, fucked. This is just as fucked as the AI system. And it's not that surprising that it's the same person behind them. Proof of personhood in a Web3 system needs to be made from first principles, and it cannot have an arbitrary authority that controls who is and is not a person. I believe it's necessary because I believe the basis of most human interactions are on notionally interactions where we care about the interaction being with another human. Now, there are some interactions where that's not so important. Markets, for example, it's not so important to know whether you're interacting, whether you're buying or selling something from a human or from a bot. And I think that's why crypto kind of works with this initial use case. But there are lots of instances where we do care if it's a human that we're interacting with or not. Say, I don't know, personal ads. Well, I want to know that it's a human that's put up the ad, not a bot. Right. Communication systems. I want to know that if I'm in a chat room, that all the other 200 people in the chat room are actually humans, not bots. Because I use chat in order to get opinions about the world, get trust about the world, get truth about the world. I believe I have a much greater chance of getting truth about the world if I'm interacting with other humans, not a single human that comes across as 200 bots. There are numerous ways how AI, because we haven't had proof of personhood, There are numerous ways how AI has subverted the course of human consciousness, of global consciousness. I think we're starting to measure this stuff. We had the Cambridge Analytica thing several years ago. On a more recent basis, we've got things like this Romania thing where the elections, 60,000 or 70,000 Twitter accounts that were big political tweeters were actually, it turns out, controlled by one Russia-aligned entity. Yeah. And it's like, because they come across— we, we as humans are quite like, we're driven by not entirely rational factors. We seem to see that if there's different avatars on a screen saying, using kind of different types of language, but all saying the same rough opinion, we might think that that opinion is a very popular opinion and we might change our own opinion according to it because we don't want to, you know, go against the flow too much or because we believe other people might be just better informed than us. There's all sorts of reasons why, how our psychology causes us to do not terribly rational things. And there are people out there, not great actors, people who act against our interests or against our broad interests, that would use this against us. And AI is really facilitating it. It's giving them huge new tools in their arsenal, tools that we haven't yet found a way to work— to use AI to work against. There might be some possible usage of AI to work against, but at the end of the day, if AI is controlled by a single entity and that entity is someone that can be influenced themselves, then we're still a problem. Um, that's why proof of personhood, um, if we believe in Enlightenment liberalism, if we believe in democracy, if we believe in self-sovereignty, if we believe in our core freedoms, then we kind of need proof of personhood in order to ensure that these are respected, ensure that we actually live in a digital world where, you know, we, we— that, that, that reflects these principles. And if we do not, then we risk— well, we already are really living in a digital world that is essentially a dystopian dictatorship.

Hmm. Okay. I was going to end the podcast there. Can't end it on a dystopian world comment. Gavin, what are you most optimistic about as we look forward to the next couple of years?

I think what was in the past was far from perfect. If we look at the social systems that we had in the past, they were not perfect. As someone that grew up— I've been alive 44 years. I grew up in the West. I grew up in the UK, a place with pretty strong civil service, pretty strong social fabric— I mean, weakened, but still reasonably strong social fabric. The systems that were helping us live our lives, these sort of what I call social operating systems, took us to that point, but they were fast growing weary, and they were fast becoming outpaced by technology, and particularly by IT, by the internet. And this becomes problematic. This has become problematic, dramatically problematic. And I think that we are starting to see a shift, not just from technologists with Bitcoin and BitTorrent and all the rest of these Web3 technologies, but also from the view of leaders. of whether they're politicians, civil servants, but of leaders. I think there is some tumult happening in the world. I think there's a lot of not so great things coming about from that. But I think there is an opportunity here for there to be some really important changes where technology can replace these crusty, old, oftentimes unjust, highly suboptimal systems, with much better, much more transparent, much more agile social operating systems. That's my hope. That's what I'm optimistic about. I think in order to do that, we need the right technologies. That's why I'm dedicating so much of my time to building this. Good.

Gavin, congrats on everything. Hell of a journey. We're rooting for you. Cheers. Thank you. Thanks, Gavin.