 So I'm Leen, I'm a core developer on the EOSM team. And as you can imagine, as a core developer, I love technology very much. But you know what, I like people a lot too. And I'm gonna hear, I'm here to talk to you guys about people today. And in particular, sort of the role that Ethereum has to play and that we all in this community have to play in the world at large. Since I sort of got involved in the Ethereum community about a year ago, and I've been kind of exploring this ecosystem, I sort of found that the role that makes the most sense for me is asking the hard questions. So these are questions like, Ethereum's great, the technology's great, but what's your deep why? Why are we all here? What exactly are we building? Who is it serving? What's the purpose? What gets you out of bed in the morning? And as I've kind of searched for a framework that's helped me understand in a broader context what we're trying to do with Ethereum, I've found this thing called social scalability which has been the framework that's helped me understand the big picture of what we're doing, right? Beyond the currency aspect, beyond even the technology aspect, there's a sort of and you know, I wanna start with a confession. As when I first elaborated or kind of described this talk and had a vision for this talk and wrote down the title of it towards a socially scalable Ethereum feature, I initially wanted to talk to you guys about scaling Ethereum, right? Because Ethereum's great and there's a lot of like really smart people working on scaling the technological side of Ethereum. There's all kinds of talks here at DevCon on that topic, but we're hearing less about the social side of it. You know, overcoming challenges like UX and you know, speaking a language the world can understand and of course, governance, which is a big social challenge. But as I went deeper and began preparing this talk, I had a realization, which is that to ask this question, right, what can we all do for Ethereum is actually not the right way to frame it. So let me try to explain. Imagine that this is all the human beings in the world, okay, all seven point whatever billion of us. How many lives do you guys think Ethereum has touched up to now in some capacity? How many people have, you know, coded for Ethereum or have used it or even care about it or know that it exists? Can anyone see up there which one is a little different? Let me help you out. It's, you know, whether it's 10,000 or 100,000 or a million or 10 million, like it actually doesn't matter because there's so many people on the planet. It's like, we're not at 1%, we're not even at one 10th of 1% yet, okay? And this is why I'm saying to ask this question, right, what can we all do for Ethereum is really selfish because no one cares about Ethereum yet, right? The question we should be asking is the opposite question, which is what can we do for the world? So I want to lead here with a quote from President John F. Therian. And so my fellow Ethereans, ask not what the world can do for Ethereum. Ask what Ethereum can do for the world. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what Ethereum will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. So obviously this is a really powerful talk and a really powerful quote and I really didn't understand it until I saw it in this context. So I want to turn the question around and ask what we can do for the world. I have the next 21 minutes to do three things. The first is try to explain social scalability. The second is to try to somehow explain this Ethereum concept, which I think we've all seen this word here and there, but I'm going to make an attempt to go a bit deeper today. And the third is as if those things were not exciting enough, I have a couple of fairly big exciting announcements that I want to share at the end. So let's dive right in. What is social scalability? Well, before we talk about social scalability, let's start with the question, what is scalability, right? In brief, something that is scalable is something that actually gets stronger as it grows bigger. And I think DevCon is a great example of this. You know, they asked me for slides a week ago and I kind of said, yeah, sorry, because I literally added this slide 10 minutes ago. Things move fast in this community, right? And as I was sitting in the main stage downstairs a few minutes ago, I had this realization. DevCon has more than doubled. We went from 1,500 people last year to more than 3,000 this year. And I don't know, what do you guys think? Is DevCon worse or is it better than last year? Better, right? So, okay, so first of all, kudos to the people who organized the event because they're incredible. And we have more than doubled this event in one year and it's scaling. Okay, so again, this is an example of scaling that I think we all have near and dear to our hearts. So let's talk about social scaling. This is a concept that was introduced by a computer scientist named Nick Zabo. And it turns out that primates, including human beings, have cognitive limits. And there's this magic number, which I'm sure many of you've heard before, Dunbar's number, which is something on the order of about 150 for humans. This is the number of people that you can kind of think about as knowing on a first name basis or trusting. It's all kind of boils down to trust. And there's a reason that tribes tend to be smaller than 150 people. Now that's all well and good, right? But there's a limit to how much we can accomplish in a group of 150 people, right? What sort of technologies we can build. And what happened is that throughout human history, humans have developed a series of technologies to scale the size of the society. What is a technology? The definition of a technology is something which allows us to do more with less, simply put, right? We can achieve more wealth, more output. We can do more with the same amount of, let's say, cognitive input. And so a great example, early example of this is language and writing. If every tribe has its own language, then we can't transact or interact with people down the road in the next tribe. But language has allowed us to scale, and there's a reason that there's a power law distribution. And we have languages today that have hundreds of millions of speakers because it's a powerful social scaling tool. Of course, writing and books and the printing press took that even further. And of course, another example is money. If you hand me cash, right? I don't need to trust you. I don't need to know who you are. I don't need to know where you're from. This is a great example of a technology that scales society and scales the number of people we can transact with. It's completely trustless in theory. Adam Smith actually wrote about social scalability almost 300 years ago, right? And what he wrote about was clothing. Something as simple as a single garment, a single simple shirt or jacket. Does anyone in this room think that they could create a piece of clothing from scratch, like truly from the raw materials? Okay, I'm super impressed. You guys have to show me how to do that later. He wrote about, so Adam Smith wrote about the hundreds or thousands of people even in the 18th century who were involved in creating and transporting and creating a market for a simple garment, right? From the shepherd who tends the sheep, to the person who shears the sheep, to the person who cards the wool and dies it and creates the garment, to the enormous supply chain. Again, even hundreds of years ago, the shipbuilders and the sailors and the merchants that were involved in bringing these garments to market. The definition of social scalability is how little we all need to understand about the world, because that's the point of society. I don't need to know how to create a t-shirt because I trust, it's about trust, right? I trust that I can go down the road to a shop and buy a shirt, it'll be there, it'll fit, it'll work. And again, this was the case hundreds of years ago. Now let's bring to the modern era, right? If it's that complex for a shirt 300 years ago, it's just mind-blowing, truly mind-blowing to think about the number of people involved in a technology as complex as a jetliner, which of course brought many or most of us here to Prague. Tens, hundreds of thousands of people involved in the design, the manufacture, the operation of things like airplanes and airlines. And so this is testament to the power of social scalability. Not only is there no one person, there's not even one organization that could do this on their own. Of course, another great example is law, in particular contract law, right? I don't need to know who you are to transact with you in the modern world because I trust that if you do something wrong, I can take you to court and I can fix the problem. I think the ultimate example of a social scaling technology is the nation state. So this image is sort of the piece of Westphalia, right? So we're now in the middle of the 17th century. It's the end of the warring states period. There were 80, 90 years of war of these kingdoms that had been at war over things like religion, and they came together and over a period of years and a series of treaties, they hammered out this thing which has today become the international system, right? The concept of a sovereign state, the idea that states can communicate with each other and treat with each other. And again, this is the epitome today of social scaling. We have countries with over a billion people in them. Just try to imagine that, like a single system that, you know, I mean, okay, they're not perfect, right? But they've actually kind of worked and they've scaled reasonably well up to now. Does anyone recognize this guy? Thank you, this is Alexei de Tocqueville, right? So he is a Frenchman who traveled in the United States in the 18th century, sorry, the 19th century, and he wrote a book called Democracy in America and he commented on the fact that America was unique in the world at that time because of the level of civil engagement and the fact that democracy had deep roots in American society. And, you know, so I wanna apologize for the very kind of America-centric nature of these photos. I'm from the United States. I'm gonna own that right now. But, you know, we have this version of the story which says that we have this civic engagement, right? We have these town hall meetings that happen in every local municipality. We have people who come together and debate the issues on their merits and we have this lively participation, which is what de Tocqueville was describing. But, as an American today, and maybe many of you feel what I feel, right? Democracy doesn't feel like this today. It feels more like this. You know, it's angry, entitled white men who feel that the system, which has benefited them, us, obviously I'm part of this, right? I'm not angry. For a very long time, it's beginning to change and they're beginning to lose some privilege. And, this is a huge topic, right? I could stand up here for the next hour and describe to you the rise of populism and demagoguery and, you know, the wealth gap getting worse and the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and the lack of civil engagement and apathy on the part of voters. The only point I wanna make is that the nation-state is a technology and it's not that old, okay? It's less than 400 years old. And I intended to have my phone in my pocket. I left it over there. But, you know, I have this, whatever. This is a, I don't know, a clicker, right? So I went to the store and I bought this to serve a specific function, right? It's a piece of technology. I can use it to move around and use a laser pointer and stuff. Five years from now, this may be obsolete. Maybe this won't, but my phone will be, right? It'll be too slow. The apps won't work. It won't have enough storage. So what do we do when a technology is outdated? We upgrade, okay? And the point I'm trying to make is that the nation-state is a technology like any other and that that technology is beginning to show its age. And we should be having this dialogue about how we can do better. This is the Galactic Senate from Star Wars. I had to throw a nerd reference in here, right? I used to have a vision that the future of humanity would look something like this. You know, that this is sort of the UN scaled by a couple of orders of magnitude. You know, you have all these groups of whatever humanoids from around the world or around the galaxy who come together in this gigantic centralized forum to like debate their issues. But you know, the nation-state's kind of not working. The UN is definitely not working. And this is no longer how I conceive the future of humanity. To me, it looks more like this, right? We have these like autonomous groups of people who have these divergent interests at the local or municipal or in some cases the national level. And you know, maybe the solution is not a single centralized system. Maybe the solution looks something more like, I don't know, blockchain. Maybe we have a role to play in all of this. So 10 years ago today, right? This thing entered the world. You know, Bitcoin exists. And I guess the question I'm asking is what role does the blockchain, those things like Bitcoin and Ethereum have to play in the future? And what can they do to change the narrative here? There are projects that are actually doing this today, right? So there's many projects that are building governance. Hi, Santi. Governance on the blockchain for blockchain projects, which is great. That's very important. But there's at least one project that is trying to build governance of actual real human institutions, like meat, space, flesh and blood, human institutions using things like Ethereum, using tools like quadratic voting and liquid democracy. So kudos to the Democracy Earth project. If you're not familiar with it, check it out. I think that we all can learn a lot from that project. All right, now let's talk about this Ethereum idea. Over the past week, I've had incredible conversations about the technology behind Ethereum in Berlin and now in Prague here at DevCon. But more than that, I've had a lot of conversations about the non-technical stuff in Ethereum. So this is a gentleman named Harry Halpin, who spoke at the Web3 Summit about the mistakes of Web2 and lessons we can learn about like avoiding corporate capture, for example, of the technologies. This is the Decentral Node, which was literally a conference within a conference at the Web3 Summit that had three full days of non-stop programming, including this talk on decentralized governance. This is an event called the Philosopher's Salon, sorry, the Philosopher's Salon, the Ethereum Philosopher's Salon, that was organized by Andy from Status and several other incredible people. This happened here in Prague a few days ago and it was an extremely moving, personal conversation, right? People really opening their hearts and asking deep, difficult questions, like why are we all here? What are we building? How do we build a system for humans everywhere? This is a town hall that the status team ran also a few days ago here in Prague. And this particular, this was not about technology, that's the point I'm trying to make, right? This was about like vulnerability. This is about embracing our failure and how that can make us better people and lead to better projects. This is a workshop I participated in yesterday here on diversity and inclusion with an incredibly diverse group of people having a very deep, open conversation about recruiting users and builders from diverse walks of life. I had the great fortune last night at dinner to meet this individual, Eduardo. Eduardo, are you here somewhere, maybe? Eduardo is a true revolutionary, okay? This gentleman has been living exclusively on cryptocurrency for years in Venezuela and he just escaped Venezuela a month ago to Argentina and he's here with us today. And it was, let's get a round of applause. That's an incredible accomplishment. And you know, we all opened this morning in the main room, singing kumbaya effectively and coming together as a community and embracing rainbows and unicorns and just goodwill. So the point I'm trying to make is that it's time that we like face the facts, right? Ethereum is about technology, but it's about so much more than technology. If you ask me, this looks, I don't know what it looks like. It's a social movement, it's a political movement. It's like that town hall image that I showed you a little while ago, right? It's the people coming together to have these deep, honest conversations about why we're all here and what we're doing. I had a conversation with my father recently and he kind of asked me, what are you? Are you a Democrat? Are you a Republican? Are you liberal? Are you conservative? And you know, in the world that he grew up in, people fit into these neat boxes. I don't know if this is true for anyone else here. I suspect maybe it is, right? I don't really strongly identify with any of these labels. There's things I appreciate and hate about Democrats and Republicans, about liberals and conservatives. You know, another question, am I an American or a citizen of the world? You know, I'm patriotic, I love my country. I'm standing here before you as an example of the American dream. My father is an immigrant. He arrived in the United States with no money and no education and here I am standing in front of you today. At the same time, I don't believe Americans deserve any special privilege over, you know, there's billions of people in the world, as I said before, right? So again, it's not either of these specifically. You know, I thought further, am I, I'm definitely, I believe in the future, I'm optimistic, I believe in the power of technology. And you know, identity is a very complex, multifaceted thing. When I really paused and reflected and asked myself honestly, like, what do I, what is my identity? I'm American, I'm a technologist, I'm a New Yorker. The thing that I identified with the most strongly is all of you, right? I'm an Ethereum. And I don't know what this means, right? Again, I don't, is this, this is a social movement, it's a technology, it's not really a political party, it's kind of all of these things and sort of none of them at the same time. And all, whatever this is, is just what we as a community create going forward in a collective decentralized fashion. So if you guys feel comfortable using this word, I'm gonna stand up here now proudly and say I'm an Ethereum and I, you know, I share this identity with many of you. All right, I said I was gonna make a couple of announcements, but I'm gonna do that. So the first is in order to kind of kick off this conversation, you know, understanding what is, you know, what does Ethereum mean? I've launched a website called etherean.org. This is live, you can check it out. Right now it's just a discourse forum, okay? So you can go, you can sign up, I posted a couple of topics that we can start talking about, some of the things I've spoken about today like the nation state. And if this is something that's interesting to you, please check it out, join this conversation, right? As I said, I don't, it's not up to me and I'm not standing here, I'm not trying to lead a movement, right? I'm just trying to, what's the word? I'm trying to steward something into existence. I'm trying to recognize the reality on the ground, which is that this is about a lot more than technology. And, you know, very inspired by things like radical markets and the work that democracy or the many other projects are doing. And I'm hoping this can become a forum for that. Maybe a year from now, you know, we can have an etherean breakout session here at DevCon or something like that. And the second thing is I've been extremely inspired by the work that Eric Posner and Glenn Weill did in the radical markets book. Radical markets is, if you haven't read this yet, please go home after DevCon, decompress, read this book. It's very powerful. It's not just radical ideas, as it says, for uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society. It's actually, it paints a picture, right? It actually has these hypothetical narratives, these anecdotes of what a future world might look like. I think the single most important thing that we as a community can do, aside from building the technology itself, is attempting to engage with the real world. Attempting to develop a dialogue that makes sense and growing the impact of ethereum and let's say, etherea, including ethereans, to more than what we are today, which is less than one-tenth of one percent. And I think a great way to do that is by writing a book. So the working title is Move, Slow and Fix Things. And I'm sure many of you could help me come up with a better title, but I'm gonna work this next year on writing a book. And trying to explain to the world what we're doing and what we're all about and the impact that these ideas can have. I'm happy to do this in a very open-source fashion, where we can have that conversation on the ethereum.org website. And I really hope that a year from now I can stand on this stage and I can share maybe a first draft of that book and that many of you can contribute to it. So, you know, sorry, I wanna say one thing first. The move's slow part here, right? This is in recognition of the fact that we're not looking for a revolution. We're looking for evolution, okay? We're looking to incrementally improve things. And that's, I'm calling that the eth volusion here. The last thing I wanna leave you with is that over the next, you know, today, tomorrow and the following day, the next three days, you're going to hear a lot of really incredible talks from a lot of very brilliant people. And what I'd like you to have in the back of your mind, the overarching question is what does this serve, right? How do these technologies make the world a better place and what role do we have to do in getting there? Thank you. I think it's a really fascinating idea. What do you think of sort of this whole idea of blockchain maximalism and things like that? Cause branding it sort of Ethereum, I guess, in a way blocks out other blockchains and other ideas potentially. So I don't, the short answer, so sorry, the question was like, what do you think about blockchain maximalism? And, you know, I guess the implied question is, are you an Ethereum maximalist and does that sort of cancel out other ideas? The short answer is I don't believe in isms. I don't believe in maximalism and no isms, right? It's not about Ethereum at the end of the day. That's the point I was trying to make in the beginning. It doesn't matter whether Ethereum succeeds or fails in the long run, in the grand scheme of things, right? What matters is that we move forward as a society and that the ideas and the values and the principles that we're doing this for, you know, they say you can't un-invent Bitcoin, right? You can't un-invent Ethereum and you can't, the technology may not scale and, you know, you can spam the blockchain, but like we're not going anywhere as a community and some other technology will come along and pick up that same flag and keep the progress moving forward. So I am absolutely not a maximalist. One question I have is, how do you envision underrepresented groups getting more involved? Cause I was at the Ethereum 2.0 workday on Monday and I was one of three women out of like 75 men, which is atrocious. Like as a software engineer, that's like the worst ratio I've ever seen. So yeah, how do you envision more underrepresented groups getting involved in this collective future? Awesome, that's such a big topic and this thing says 29 seconds. So I'm gonna give you a super high level overview and then let's keep the conversation going cause it's important. Number one, diversity inclusion is freaking super important, okay? So Kelvin Fichter gave a talk yesterday at the diversity inclusion breakout session and he made this case much better than I could. So if you weren't there, check out the video. One of the points he made is that even if you sort of on the surface don't care about diversity, you should anyway, even if you only are in it for the economics because diverse systems are more antifragile and better and the economics will be a lot better if we can bring more diversity into the picture. Number two, I don't have the answers. I don't claim to have the answers, right? This is the whole point of what I'm saying here is that this is a platform for us to have more dialogue about this and to learn from each other and we need to engage with the rest of the world, right? We in this room, it's very hubristic of us to think that we can kind of build a system for all of humans. The last thought I want to share is, you know, we have a lot of focus about putting butts in seats, which is important. Like I wish that, you know, 50% of the people in this room were female and that is important, but I think that there's an upstream question here, right? So we need to talk about like, you know, going all the way back, right? How do we raise our kids and how do we instill men and women with different values and how do we, from a very early point going back to, let's say, grade school, get, you know, women more excited about technology and things like that. And it will take a lot of time, I think, to get to the point where we are now with engaged people sitting in chairs and events like this. Again, thank you guys very, very much. Good round of applause for Lane.