 Thank you for coming. I'm Franco, co-founder and CEO of the Nome Foundation. And today I'm going to be telling you a bit about the story of how we got here, what we're working on, and a bit of our vision for the organization. So Nome Foundation, Ethereum dedicates a non-profit. We basically build developer infrastructure and developer tooling to improve Ethereum developer experience. That means we're working for Ethereum. We're dedicated to Ethereum and trying to empower developers to decentralize the world. So we're best known for building hardhat. Hardhat is the leading developer tool, Ethereum ecosystem, beyond developers used it to build tasks and debugger software. There's a whole ecosystem of community plugins and nice things going on there. But we didn't always do this. And I'll share a bit of the story of how we got here. We got involved with Ethereum in 2017. We built contracts, tabs, we audited stuff. But by 2018, we started focusing on audits and out of our own need to be more effective when doing technical work. We started working on a developer tool. While at the same time, we were exploring what to do. We were founders trying to find what we actually wanted to work on. And audits were just our way of paying the bills. But we needed to be more effective. So we created a visitor, which then in 2020 became hardhat because that was an awful name. And it was for internal use. We open sourced it. Some of our friends liked it. People started using it. So a need for it. We applied for a grant from the Ethereum Foundation, which they gave to us. And we spent the rest of the year continuing our exploration for what we wanted to do while working on the side on Biblare to deliver on the problem that we set out for the grant. But by 2019, we realized that something needed to change. We needed to focus on something to actually do it well. And we have, or actually my co-founder, Patricia, had this vision for what hardhat could grow into. I know there were big, missing things. And we knew that if we just built out these things that were missing, there was a loss of value that we could add to other people. And we were just thinking about the level of productivity that people were dealing with. And if we managed to improve that very significantly, it was very interesting to think what it could mean for the entire Ethereum ecosystem. So with four months of runway in the bank, we decided to drop all the team and focus on our little open-source project that have maybe 10, 15 users. So yeah. That's where our relationship with the Ethereum Foundation started. As my co-founder focused on building, I went out to get some more money. I asked absolutely everyone that was close to the EVM. This was 2018, the year where the young killers were hot. So I asked everyone for money. Almost no one gave us money. But we had an existing relationship with the Ethereum Foundation. So there was a conversation going there. And through that, we ended up meeting some people at the management team of the Ethereum Foundation who turned out were looking for ways for people in the community that could help them improve Ethereum developer experience. They knew it was an issue, they knew improvements. And what they found in us was a team that had a working product, some users, a diagnosis of the situation, a concrete plan, and we were looking for funding. It was a pretty good match. We started collaborating with them. They gave us another small grant to implement solid distract races. And as part of this same collaboration, we would generally help them improve Ethereum. This was not just working on hard hat, but how do we make Ethereum a whole better? And we ended up putting together a relatively small roadmap of projects that we thought were very high priority, high impact that could be delivered quickly and would make a meaningful difference in a short amount of time. We worked on that. It was great. It went really well. We hit it off. And by 2020, the relationship took another step. And we became what EF calls Delegated Domain Allocators, which is EF terminology for when they empower someone in the community to allocate EF resources to improve specific domain within Ethereum. So basically, it started funding us more aggressively and allowing us to allocate more funding. We started giving out grants. We spent a bit less than the first quarter of the year doing a lot of research, trying to figure out what were the sources of all of these issues. And we worked on many things, but to give you an idea of the kind of Ethereum general projects that we worked on, we did have to have Soliti give Tintas highlighting on by default before you needed to use an obscure .file in your repo for that to work. We entirely replaced the cryptography dependencies that were being used across the stack. That was a preview project today that's called Ethereum Cryptography, where we worked. We put together a new package with all of the cryptography that were needed, and then worked with every single team maintaining all of the different components across the stack to replace them, and that led to the entire thing being a lot more reliable and less friction. So this is some example of 17 different projects that we worked on this year, but just to give you an idea of if it was just pure Ethereum and not really anything related to hardhat. So 2020, hardhat really takes off. It was in the Antioh 2021 that it got really crazy, but by 2020, by the end of 2020, the trend was very, very clear. The professional core ecosystem of Ethereum had mostly all of them adopted hardhat, and this was great, it was a fun, people were very happy with the product, and we learned a ton. By the end of the year, we realized a whole bunch of things. These are, I think, the main takeaways. The main one being, doing this is very hard, building sophisticated tooling. It's for Ethereum specifically in its current state. It's super challenging, and we realized that the next 10x, with all of this work and all the other things that went on that year in the ecosystem, Ethereum DevX improved hugely. But there's still a lot more that can be done, and we realized that the next 10x is not going to come from hardhat, it's not going to come from any single tool out there, because what we realized is that a great, great development platform for Ethereum in, let's say, five years is one that is diverse. Today, the ecosystem is very focused on Node.js and Solidity, but that's unlikely to remain the case for a long time, and in software, for the exact same problem, there are a variety of different solutions that are all valid, depending on personal preference, on circumstance, on different trade-offs that different projects have. So just having a few or one or two solutions for each thing, usually it's not the case in larger platforms, so we know that what we need is not another specific feature. It's not about missing functionality. The next big step up is more about general growth and more availability and diversity within the tool, within the ecosystem, which is the third point. So we knew Uplan, hardhat and everything else that we worked on in 2020 worked out, but that was a very urgent execution of, oh my God, this needs to be better, that's a little better, but then we needed an entire new plan because to do that, we weren't actually that many. In one year, we covered most of it. So for 2021 and forward, we came up with a new plan that we proposed to the foundation and we realized basically that what we had to do was is go one layer below hardhat and rebuild the foundations down there. The things that weren't there that we would have loved to be there when we built hardhat, build those things so that other people will build more things like hardhat, truffle, remix, brownie, and so on. So that's a new plan, build core infrastructure to make it easier, cheaper, and certainly better to build new developer tools like hardhat. So, and I'll get into what that actually means in a bit, but by 2021, the crypto market was in the advanced stage of the bull market and the whole reason why we were doing this in the beginning as entrepreneurs who were trying to build a business was well to build a business, right? Like even the relationship with DEF felt like I wouldn't win because we would get to build our product, build relationships, build a position of leadership, build a brand, and in the process, help them improve Ethereum, which would grow the pie for everyone. It was a win-win, but it was, initially, we saw it as a great strategic stepping stone towards eventually building a business, monetizing something. And given the market context being ideal for fundraising, we thought that if we were actually going to do it, build a business around this, now is the time to fundraise, get the money, and do it. So we felt forced to make a decision and we decided not to. And the reasons why we decided not to build a business and instead turned into a nonprofit are a bunch and I can't cover them all. And so we have to do with what we think is best for Ethereum in the long term and many others have a lot to do with just personal things, motivations, and preferences that we, the founders, have. And the main three ones that I'd like to share today is one, we loved the experience of working for Ethereum. We had spent the past year and a half basically being part of the Ethereum team since our mandate towards the EF was in for Ethereum, the deliver value to Ethereum developers. And even Harhat was just something that at the time needed to happen. It was the right vehicle at the time to deliver value to Ethereum developers, but end to end, the whole thing that we were doing was trying to improve Ethereum and this was an amazing experience, super gratifying, super challenging, simulating and we didn't want to let go of that and simply seal ourselves to just how do we make money out of Harhat? Which would have been a much smaller scope than what we have been working on so far. Another thing is that developer experience we think is absolutely core, crucial, and critical to Ethereum and it's also very hard. There's a lot of attention that goes to the work being done on the protocol layer and makes sense. It's amazing work. The merge has been an insane feat of engineering and without taking any kind of credit away from how critical all of that work is, we shouldn't forget that all of that work is there to support what Ethereum offers. The network supports the value proposition which is a platform to build decentralized software. So if we have the most amazing scalable network and it's decentralized, but when you actually want to use it to build something on top, it's not that great, then that's a significant issue for Ethereum. So we think this is a really valuable contribution that we can make to the project. And then the entire speed of innovation in the ecosystem and its growth are very much directly affected by developer productivity. The faster your developers can write code, iterate, debug, test, launch, and repeat. The faster everything will improve, the more users will be captured. Generally, by improving developer experience, we inject productivity into every single team into the ecosystem, which has a super powerful compounding effect over a long time, right? Like, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. And then the last one, tell me you're from a developed country without saying you're from a developed country, crypto has no use cases. Like, as Arsentein founders, we got involved with crypto in 2015, initially with Bitcoin and having lived our entire lives in Argentina and struggled and experienced the day-to-day limitations that come from living in a place like that. Even in 2015, it was really obvious that this thing had the potential to mean something very meaningful to a lot of people and were just very big believers in what this can change and mean in the long term for people who live in countries like ours. So, we went ahead with it and we raised $22 million in donations from across the ecosystem with the Ethereum Foundation being the largest donor, but we had a bunch of amazing organizations and individuals donating to get this new Ethereum nonprofit off the ground. Units of now, Vitalik Coinbase, the graph, Chainlink, Polygon, and many others. All very long-term thinking organizations that we're very thankful towards. So, how are we going to do all of this? How are we actually going to empower developers to centralize the world? I mentioned before, we came up with a new plan that was all about getting the entire tooling ecosystem to grow more and become more diverse. And for that, we're basically building new infrastructure to make it easy to do that. These two components, SLANG and RathNet, are actually one same project, massive project with two very large components. SLANG is a new Solidity compiler that we're building, which is designed from the ground up to make it easier to build developer tooling for Solidity. So, it turns out that in a development platform, the very core of it is the compiler and many of the tools that we use rely and integrate deeply with the compiler. So, we actually designed the compiler to, for that purpose, it can be a lot easier, more effective than it is today. And this isn't meant to replace Sol-C. Sol-C, it compiles and you deploy it to mainnet, and this compiler is not going to be for that. It's going to be used during the development process because it's main target audience is two developers and what we care about is basically making sure that there are great insights during the development process, not when you need to deploy it. And by not aiming for a mainnet deployment, we're actually able to read ourselves of a lot of very difficult constraints that Sol-C has to deal with and make those constraints make many of the things that we want to do basically impossible to do for the Sol-C team. So, these two compilers are actually going to be complimentary and we're going to be using them together. There are one breathnet. It's going to be a reusable debugging runtime also to build tooling. And it turns out that hardhat is actually a pretty complex piece of software with completely different objectives and constraints. It's basically an Ethereum node. It's got a lot of the very same components, a mempo and AVM and storage, consoles component and an entire layer of debugging features on top where we do runtime observation to figure out what's going on with the bytecode execution to then tell developers. And that's what basically every tool that wants to provide the runtime insights to developers has to do. It's what we've all done, truffle, brownie, remix. We've all built the same thing which requires very in-depth knowledge of the platform because you need to basically build an Ethereum node. When you use mainnet working in hardhat, it pulls data from mainnet and it works as if it's mainnet. It's basically a node with very different objectives. So if someone wants to build a new tool, instead of them spending six months figuring this out, putting the pieces together to only then start working on the very first developer feature, we can just build a thing that is reusable, that is extensible, that is very modular. And if someone wants to build a new developer tool, they can use this as a starting point and it will be a lot easier. These are the things that we would have loved to have when we built hardhat and didn't and we suffered through it and we don't want anyone else to live through that. So, with hardhat in all of this, we haven't forgotten about hardhat. hardhat very much remains a very core priority for NOMIC and these projects are all about the long term. They will take a while to drive meaningful impact as they are dependent on other people building things on top that then end users use but until then, developers still have needs today. You know, have users to service, bugs to fix and hardhat remains our response to those needs that developers have today. So hardhat is growing, so we're expanding and continuing to increase our investment into hardhat and it's expanding into a suite of tools. Hardhat Runner and hardhat network are the main components that everyone's been using, you know, the CLI task runner, which is basically what you run and what contains the config system and the plugin architecture and all of the extensibility and the kind of starting point that connects everything else. That's hardhat runner, then hardhat network is the development node and we recently this year launched our VS Code extension, which makes Solidity editing feel a lot more modern, provides basically advanced Solidity editing assistance. John gave a talk about it yesterday that you should look up. And then Ignition has been in development for a while. We're going to launch it soon. It's going to be this infrastructure as code deployment tool that we're hoping will change the game of deployments. Then what you're going to start seeing is that all of these things start seeing more and more integrations across them. While we're trying to, we're trying to know it's an objective that these things can be used in isolation, including in combination with other tools, but if you use them together, cool things should happen. So that's basically the roadmap. We're 12 people, we're Ethereum dedicated, we're impact-driven, what we do doesn't run after financial metrics, and if you would like to write some rust to build a compiler or help us improve hardhat to continue empowering the ecosystem to keep building cool stuff, we're hiring. That's it, thank you.