 My name is Paul de Marzio. I am the EEA Director of Community and what that means is this kind of stuff All right, I was hired by the EEA back in August to start opening dialogues with all the different Communities that we represent you guys being one of them Yes, and so I started in August. It means I'm a bit of an Ethereum rookie But not a rookie to blockchain. I spent a couple years at digital asset working on their stuff They're demo smart programming language and their platform and then prior to that I was with IBM You know doing IBM stuff And now I decided that it was time to get where the action is right? We're all the good developers the best developers are the Ethereum community So I'm really glad to be joining you guys and I hope to have a lot of dialogue with you So the reason we're having this session today is because you may have heard over the summer You know this this weird thing where the EF and the EEA have joined forces together And and I is on our board and you know, what what the heck does all of that mean? So we're here to talk through that The truth is we don't have all the answers ourselves yet And that's why we're here with you guys because we want to hear what you have to say and how you'd like to See this thing move forward. It's very important to us to get your feedback so that's what we're gonna do today and As my friend John Wolpert here likes to call it we're gonna talk about the magic bus Ethereum mainnet running business. Let's see how that works out So I'm really happy to be joined by all these esteemed folks sitting in the front here I'm co. I'm joined by Ron Resnick. Who's my director executive director. There's me. I just introduced myself You know Hudson from the EF Jamie from the magicians Lane from the cat herders We've all been working together a little bit to figure out what this session is going to be and that's been helping John's been helping Tim doesn't want to sit up front, but Tim's been helping a lot back there as well I appreciate all your efforts Yeah, we we'll just make Tim answer all the questions So what we thought we'd want to do is you know give first give you guys some information So talk through you know, I'm gonna we're gonna have introductions all my friends up here gonna say who they are what they do why they're here I'm gonna come back and talk a little bit about the EA to give you a feel for what we're all about And why we're interested in the mainnet these days and how we're thinking about going about that Then the community is gonna give their views So we're gonna hear again from the EF the magicians and the cat herders to kind of you know Show us you what they're thinking about this stuff and then at least half the session is open mic, right? So that's what we'll you know express your concerns express your input Whatever it is you have to have to say I mean you can shout out a question or comment anytime while any of us are talking But I just want to make sure you hear what we have to say first I think that's important to make sure you got all the information then you can tell it Then you can call you know bullshit or whatever you want to do So let's start with the introductions. I'm gonna pass the mic over first to Ron Have a mic. Okay. Hi everyone. I'm really happy that we're able to do this. I this is my second dev con and the purpose as as Paul indicated is that we have this organization of enterprise Folks and we have the ethereum community and we really want to know what we can do Bilaterally, there is definitely actions that we can take in the a and have them Through our members as we're a member driven organization What can we do to help facilitate the growth in the success of the ethereum mainnet? And that's primary purpose is you know the a started out more in private permissioned Specifications, but you'll see an announcement this week. We're forming a working at group initiative to Collaborate with the ethereum foundation cat herders ethereum magicians So we really need a better direct line of communication and that's why Actually, how this all started is we asked the ethereum foundation. What can we do here? And this is what they recommended. So here we are so hopefully this can give us more of a direct line And the main purpose is if you think about it is that anyone entity and organization whether you decentralized or not it's really hard to be successful if you do it on your own and And so if you take a look what's going on now with hyper ledger and and basu and everyone's still trying to figure it out so this hopefully will be the initial start of a direct line communications and We're an open book. So there's some folks think we're closed. We're not we're an open book Anybody can join us and but we definitely can get inputs. And so this is why we're here. Thank you Hey Hudson, you're up Hey, what's up everyone? I'm Hudson. I am with the ethereum foundation representing them today I think it's really exciting that the ea is getting more involved in main net There's definitely some business applications Things of that nature, you know, whenever like you think about the early internet there were You know just kind of nerds on it mostly, right? I'm actually not old enough to be with the early internet I was in diapers, but from what I've heard The early internet didn't have things like Amazon. It didn't have the Facebook. It didn't have like these really massive You know infrastructure to handle all that stuff and we're in the early days Go copy sir prodigy So basically we're still in that really early day. We're still in that really early days and Because of that we'll need all the support we can get from every single corner of the use cases of the businesses of the volunteers of the crypto anarchist everybody to get together and Work on this stuff so that we can all benefit from it in the end I also think it's exciting that we have our executive director. I am Miyaguchi Helping with the EA now. That's a really cool development. I believe she's on the board right? Yeah, she's on the board now the EA and With that, I think that's also showing that the EF is willing to Partner with the likes of you to Seth Parity with the grants program the EA we're really reaching out to everybody because through this You know level of subtraction that we're kind of pitching here We want to help everyone else and we're not in this to grow and be like a drive like the driving force in the Ecosystem we want to help others be a driving force in the ecosystem That's all of y'all so and on the stream unless you don't like us and then we don't want you But if you like us and you want to support us then that's great. You know what even if you don't like us We're gonna make you like us And that's my intro Thanks Hudson beautiful All right, Jamie Why'd you skip playing? Oh, there's an order. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm an orderly guy isn't stretching. It's a little bit of a Madness over here. Okay, you guys messed up my order My name is Jamie Pitts and I do work at the Ethereum Foundation as DevOps But I also volunteer with the magicians and so I I guess today you could say I'm representing the operations group and the magicians and To give you an introduction to myself. I'm I was involved in the early web So I come from the orientation where like things are really messed up and it's okay If it's like looks really janky and early web was extraordinarily janky And so I look at early Ethereum and and it is extraordinarily janky But actually I think there's there's so much more there than the early web in a way And so the potential is amazing And so yeah, I think I've Ethereum has radicalized me. I'll put it that way I believe in it to a great extent I believe in the philosophies to go into it and all of us have different philosophies But I think there's common there's common philosophies and I'd have to say the technology has affected the way I look at The way I look at politics the way look at how people organize and so yeah It's really interesting how just getting involved with the technology can change change you and in terms of Involving corporations. I'm very skeptical. I think corporations are out to exploit and I think if there's a way that we can show them a different a different path Otherwise, we're gonna destroy them. We have to because they're gonna they're gonna eat us alive So I I think we can show them a different way and Ethereum is an opportunity to create a new kind of corporation And it's up to us to make that happen. So that's the way I look at it Thank you, Jamie. All right, Lane. No, you're up I'll stay sitting down. Hey guys. I'm Lane. I'm here representing the Ethereum cat herders today Let me get one thing out of the way up front like as as Jamie alluded to a moment ago Like all of us have multiple affiliations And in fact when I walked into the room a moment ago Hudson came over to me and said who am I representing again today? Because I think you have you've checked three or four the boxes probably and on the folks up here So I think that actually speaks very powerfully as well to like the degree of collaboration that we have in this community That we all kind of overlap in our in our daily roles It's pretty amazing to be sitting up here representing the cat herders because this Initiative was actually born in a room just like this exactly a year ago in Prague In a in a sort of accidental fashion where myself and a couple of others just made an open call for folks who wanted to contribute to Ethereum in general and kind of to Coordinating the upcoming main net hard fork upgrades network upgrades specifically For anyone who wanted to get involved and contribute to things like project management And it's sort of grown beyond our like wildest dreams since then and it's the big you know big international group of folks who Have I think added a lot of value and will continue to do so So again, it's really it sends shivers down my spine to be sitting up here representing that group now a year later And actually in very similar fashion I think to the way the magicians were born a year prior to that as well So again just speaks very powerfully to the power of what the Ethereum community can do in an organic way when we put our minds together Can I have a show of hands how many people it's the first DevCon? Okay, that's a lot of people so holy crap. Well welcome to DevCon welcome to the community This is a very very very special event This is my third DevCon and I'm sure you guys have probably like fourth or fifth or something by now Yeah, so this is going to be a lot of fun. So yeah, welcome Hey, are you guys John and that give you words? Sorry, I didn't put slides up for you, but go ahead. I have a slide at the end of the presentation Hey everyone, I'm and I'm helping out basically with the operations of Ethereum magicians And I'm getting involved a lot in a community working around Ethereum and I'm trying to be like the cute side of the Ethereum and like meaning out everything what it's possible And that's basically it I would say Thank you John Hi, I'm John Wolpert. I guess I could say I'm on team internet. I'm on team consensus. I'm on team in Ethereum I'm One of the founders of team hyper ledger for my sins and and in general, I'm on team working together And in fact as proof of that I would like to demonstrate This is Vitalik but errands t-shirt from Consensus 2016 or 2015 where we were announcing hyper ledger and I said, you know I would love to announce hyper ledger with an Ethereum shirt on to make a statement that it's about all of us Not just groups of bands of mostly humans and he pulled the t-shirt straight off his body and gave it to me And I went on stage with this and I've had it in a treasured spot in my house ever since and he's never washed it I have definitely washed it and Yeah, so I think this is a tremendous year. This is the year of convergence or this is about to be maybe 2020 Well, I was I had a hand in the years of divergence in 2015 and We've had we've been all on different explorations We needed to do that and now it's time that we we have the bandwidth We have worked out some key problems that we needed to work out on all sides and now it's time to Yeah, to show I mean the corporations and everybody else all groups of mostly humans need to learn how to work together Better and we're gonna show how to do that Thanks, John Tim you want to say anything or no? Yeah, he doesn't want to talk. All right So let me take about ten minutes and and tell you what the EA is all about You know you guys if you want to turn your chairs around for this because I feel really weird talking at your backs You know you can heckle me So what's the EA about yeah heck if I knew when I was given the offer to join I had no idea I knew what Ethereum was obviously and I was looking to get into this space But you know when Ron offered me this position with the EA. I wasn't sure this was the one I wanted to take So I did what I usually do I hit Google and I start looking around for research and exactly what do industry organizations do You know what's their value and is this the way I wanted to spend? You know the next couple years of my career and as I was doing that I came across a really interesting I Can't call it research. You can't even call it a study I think it was just like some some poll that was run by a travel company about two years ago Where they just you know asked a random set of you know, USS smartphone holders What would you give up for a month rather than lose your Wi-Fi access? All right, so First one wine. I don't know how white people are so willing to give up wine. I mean, it's my drink fast food coffee self-explanatory Friends your partner a shower Listen, this is some pretty serious stuff You know, we're talking about some technology here and people are willing to give up the best parts of life for it You know for a while I was doing these full-body cleanses twice a year and and for two weeks I would give up, you know the wine the junk food and the coffee and it was a miserable experience I felt good afterwards, but man to give that stuff up for a month. I don't know how I could do it, right? So what did this mean? You know, how did this all change because I am old enough and I know that this wasn't always the case, right? I built a house in 2000 and I wanted my house to be modern state-of-the-art and future-proofed I wanted to have data voice and video all through the house every room in the house wherever I decided I wanted to be So, you know, I snuck into the house while I was being built with a buddy of mine and we ran Two cat five two RG six cables to 20 locations in the house It was a miserable cold day in the middle of January, but we got the work done You know, this is my wife after she saw what I had done to the house But there was a reason for it right in 2000 Wi-Fi was not reliable. You know, I was doing a fair amount of travel in those days And you know, whatever Wi-Fi was there was really only intended for laptops and and it was awful You know, you'd go somewhere and you'd have to really open up your settings fiddle with it make it work There was no interoperability. It was really quite a mess And the reason is that you know, there was a great standard in place, right? The IEEE the first 802 standard was a great standard and people were building products to that standard But the IEEE is not assigned any resources to do any testing or certification or to make sure anything works with each other Right, so you had basically a lot of vendors coming out with products and saying, you know, where IEEE 802 compliant And of course the stuff wouldn't work, right? So how did we get from this, you know Where I'm wiring my house with a whole bunch of cables to where people are willing to give up the best parts of life For Wi-Fi and it turns out it was the formation of an industry organization it was called the wire a wonderful term wireless ethernet compatibility alliance There's one that rolls off the tongue Weka One of the first things they did was they changed it to the Wi-Fi Alliance probably the smartest move they made But what was it that they did to make the change in this scenario? Well, the first thing they did is they understood that you know a standard is good But you need to have some market driven specifications around that so you need to understand What's the market looking for what functions functions and features do they want in order to start buying product? So they started building market-driven Specifications around the IEEE standard and other standards and we'll explain what that means in a few minutes But then they combine this most importantly with certification testing Right, so if you were a member of the Wi-Fi Alliance you could go you could put a product through a certification suite and then the buyers of that product would be assured that it was interoperable that it was it would be able to work nice and Play nice with any other stuff out on the market. It's this combination of market-driven Specifications and a certification testing program that makes people want to spend their money. All right That's what gets you to web scale adoption That's what gets you from you know a geeky technical standard You know just a few people know it and understand it to something that's really going to drive markets and that's what they did Wi-Fi just works and the way that I term it is Technology stewardship and market stewardship have to work one-on-one Right, so you know the EF and a lot of you guys are really great at focusing the technology making the technology move forward Well, we're trying to do at the EEA is get that market perception in here and start to build out what's needed to make this thing web scalable now What would you give up for a month rather than lose the ethernet? All right I'm not really asking you guys because I know if I ask you I'm going to get all the same answers I got up front maybe some even more startling ones But if you were to like go out of this room go out of this hall You know and start asking people around town here or even your friends and family, you know, they're gonna give you a blank stale and say Ethernet No, I said that on purpose. They're gonna hear a theorem. They're gonna go ethernet. They don't They don't know. All right, you know, I've got the people asked me so you took a new job. What are you doing? I work I work in Ethereum Ethereum it's a blockchain thing Blockchain, did you ever hear of Bitcoin? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know but well it's something kind of like that And that's where we are today. We know people aren't gonna give up anything So how do you get from where we are today where the average consumer is going to start to recognize? Ethereum well, that's why the EA was formed. We were formed by the major industry players at the time But now we're a very very diverse group. That's not just big people. It's little people in fact I'd say most of our membership is under like a handful of handful of folks So we have a really great Selection of folks. We've got people from the private sector. So the big and the small companies. We've got tech producers We've got industry verticals. We've got consumers as well So a lot of a lot of the banks are there consumers a lot of places that are gonna use this stuff Yeah, I know there's not a lot of love for government here But you know, you still they still exist you still got to coexist with them and they're informing us here We've got academics. We've got civil society We work kind of the way that these groups work everybody in this organization has an equal voice So, you know, John's from consensus one of the bigger companies in the group if you're a small 10-person shop, you've got the same voice as consensus in the EA and that's something pretty significant And it really does work that way And our goal is to develop a neutral competitive incredible market view period There's three things we do to make this happen and very much It follows the same lines as the Wi-Fi Alliance and other industry alliances I didn't mean to you know intimate that the Wi-Fi Alliance is the only one doing this Ron here my boss has worked for what four or five others at least There's a lot of them out there and a lot of the technologies that you know and love and accept Have all been pushed that way through some sort of of an industry organization and we're pretty much the same So we do this by publishing open standards based architecture and technical specifications We do not write code. All right, so we're not a code shop. We're a specification shop The next step of the process is to build trust in that in those specific products built to those specifications By producing a certification process our test net is going to be up and running Yeah, a couple of weeks like almost any day now and the certification tests and the certification process should be ready sometime next year So we're ready to start moving to that next step And then we we we do marketing or we're not going to talk about marketing here today But you know, we make sure that what's going on, you know with you guys that are members What's going on in the community is well understood by those folks that we're trying to reach So if we were to look at our architectural stack and and Charles, I did update it. So we got the current one You should take some comfort in that, you know, what we do is we adopt and extend Right. So a lot of what's already out there is the formation and the basis of what we're building in the EA So at the core, you know, we have the core technologies that were defined, you know In the Ethereum yellow paper and everything that's come since and of course as we may move forward to eat 2.0 You know, this is gonna, you know build out and we're going to start to pull all those other technologies in as well So this stuff forms the core What we do then is we kind of fill the gaps. What are enterprises looking for? What is the market asking for in order to run products on Ethereum? A lot of it has to do with the three Ps All right privacy performance and permissioning and the stuff that sits around that so that's where a lot of the focus has been to date Where it's gonna go from here is really depends on the members I'm not, you know, Ron and I don't dictate what goes on the members drive the agenda for this organization And then of course sitting at the top. You've got the application layer I haven't seen that we've done a lot there yet But what we do at the moment in our specs is we pick and choose, you know What what do you have to do? What should you do? What's good for you to do and that sort of thing? All right, so we build out an architectural stack and then we produce specifications based off that stack Currently we have two there is one for the enterprise client and there's one for off-chain trusted compute We released the latest versions of these specs today So they're currently at 4.0 there and 1.1 there. So this is this is what we do We build specifications and then companies build products based on those specifications. So for example Pantheon is an enterprise client that conforms well, what right word here is Built off of this spec. I can't say it's certified because we don't have a certification suite yet But eventually when we do build one then the current Pantheon product I'm sure we'll submit to to this spec All right, and there's going to be some really good off-chain compute demos coming up later this week in fact I Really want to point attention to this session that's happening on Wednesday What what went on is something that really impressed me five of our member organizations banded together And produced a what's called a it's a trusted token specification The demo is something like a rewards token environment and they use the client spec They use the off-trust off-chain trusted compute spec and they also use something that the EA is also responsible for called the token Taxonomy initiative. I'm not really talking much about that today because that is blockchain neutral But of course it does support Ethereum tokens as well So we write specs. We don't write code But what we're starting to see is a fair up uptake of our specifications in hyper ledger So hyper ledger as you know Received the Pantheon code as open source as project Basu right and now Pegasus I believe just last week it was announced that there's a Pantheon product that's coming out based on that and Even just last week the Avalon project was announced by hyper ledger Which is open source code that is based off of our trusted compute spec All right, so you're gonna at some point be able to find that there are products that are going to be built on open source code that are going to certify to the EA specifications and this is this we think is really going to help drive the marketplace and Produce that web scale adoption that we're all looking for right. So this so this is basically what we're all about So just two points of history before I put the mic down Just so you know Where we were and where we are now and why we're having this meeting today And this is you know, even before I joined when the EA was started, you know, there was this You know this vision this perception that the main net was not a safe place to be it was run by a lot of party ears You know you're talking about you know all the stuff that you would hear in the press has to do with people You know doing naughty things and nasty things on the main net and no Enterprise is really going to want to be there because they're focused on privacy and Permissioning and performance and this wasn't really working for them. So the members initially focused primarily on Private blockchains private implementations of based off of ethereum technology and that was a good start And that's where the spec started from But now we think of the main net as the magic bus right This is a good place or it's becoming a good place to run business applications And this is why the EA is starting to branch out and focus on specifications that can run on the main net Of course, we're still going to focus on private permission chains. Those will never go away We still have intranets even though the internet has proven itself But we can't have both and they can both have the same sorts of specifications and they can talk to each other nice So to start to move this process forward we formed the main networking group in the EA The interim chair is going to be Virgil Griffith and I think a lot of you know the interim vice chair is John sitting over there And you know, they don't know what they're going to do yet They just started getting together some of the things that have been thought about are you know to start seeing what can We do to bring Ethereum up and use the EIP process for that, right? That's one option another option is to focus on looking at the Ethereum documentation and kind of raising it to an enterprise grade Specification, you know be the voice of the EA in public is Ethereum discussions like here But really we kind of want you guys to have a say as to how this group operates And I'm about to shut up and we can start to have that discussion But one thing I want to point your attention to is there is a working group planning meet-up happening on Thursday Damn, that's right around lunchtime But well buy your lunch take it to the DevCon park amphitheater and come and talk to Virgil and John And decide how you want this thing to go. All right so that was a really a brief introduction to the EA and I'm really not from the government. I was told that might be funny. Ha ha But what I do have is I have a love for programming I mean like many of you I started programming at a young age Well, you know for me a young age is was my late teens because there wasn't anything when I was growing up But yeah, that is me in front of my Radio Shack TRS 80 Notice notice the cassette tape recorder, which which is where I stored all my programs I only bring this up because I want you to know that I do understand you I am a developer at heart even though I don't write code anymore And I definitely don't have that box anymore. I spent the good part of my career, you know writing enterprise projects for IBM I did that for quite some time. So so I know where you're coming from I want to be your conduit of information back and forth through the EA All right, so I've set up a couple of things, you know You can email me if any of you still use email you can direct message me you can telegram me I've set up an open community on Slack and one on Gitter as well I don't know where else you guys like to hang out if there's some other place Let me know I see a lot of folks taking pictures I actually have put all of these slides on a shared Google Drive and we'll get the We'll start to you know talk about where they're as well. So you don't have to you know, and I guess it's gonna be on video too But yeah, that's it for me So I hope that was helpful What I want to do now is let each of the communities come back up and just say if you know a few parting words show a few slides And then we're gonna go open Mike. So Hudson, you're gonna be up first It's a great presentation There was a lot of points. I really liked about that. There were some that confused me And I think it's gonna confuse the rest of you as we're just starting this process. So I'm gonna go through some of the Interesting stuff first some of the stuff that might kind of confuse you at one point They said the EEA right specs, but they don't write code, right? It was something like that Well, I think when you said that on the call with me a few weeks ago There was kind of like I think I said because I do the core developer meetings every two weeks So I get involved with doing Ethereum 1.0 mainnet updates. The organizer for Ethereum 2.0 is Danny Ryan so basically I said That's that might not work very well because a lot of people who write EIPs. They're expected to build test cases. They're expected to Come together and help with the code on their client or on someone else's client Those are the ways EIPs get in quickest, but that doesn't mean it can't change That means that that's how it is right now And as we grow there is going to be a need for some of this testing and certification and things like that It's gonna take some time. There's definitely distrust with the EEA right now some of their earlier efforts were focused on and still I guess today are focused on private blockchains and A lot of people said those are useless a lot of core devs said those are useless You probably said those are you? Yeah, you built what did he say? It's a useless job. So Basically what I said at first and this might be the case today from some just brief talking is they're gonna fucking hate you That's exactly what I said the core developers are gonna fucking hate you because you're like we want to build these specs And then you all are gonna build it because you said companies build this stuff because that's how it's been traditionally well and Ethereum world companies don't build this except for maybe Basu, which they're doing a great job by the way It's volunteers. It's people who are completely anonymous that aren't gonna sign NDAs that aren't gonna sign These like copyright agreements. It's people who come in Who are working who are donated by people like the Ethereum Foundation consensus? Protocol labs all kinds of people like that. It's such a mix and it's such So many different differing views that coming together for something like this is gonna be a real challenge I think the EA understands that Which is really promising to me Because a lot of people don't get it and I just feel like you guys actually get it So that's that's kind of a short of the point of view to go into more detail How this EIP process works if you were in the last session you got like a deep dive into it I'm sure but EIPs are Protocol it's you know, there's different kinds of EIPs, but the ones we're kind of referring to today are core EIPs So you go in and you say I want to do something with ZK snarks on Ethereum and right now It's really expensive Because there's like these thing called op codes that need to be changed or added or adjusted And so you go in and you write an EIP and you say for the purpose of doing ZK snarks on Ethereum I want this to happen. Here's a sample code snippet and here's some testing cases And then they go to the core devs and they say alright. This is something the community wants There's maybe multiple stakeholders. We think it's important. So we're gonna build it or if you want to build it That'll get it in quicker generally So we've worked with the Zcash foundation and with the Zcash community before to get ZK snarks on Ethereum years ago early on and we worked with them recently to get another opcode in Or a few opcodes that do a similar I say opcode. I meant pre-compile Sorry, someone's gonna get really mad at me for like messing up these terms pre-compiles in the system so that we can Do like more efficient ZK snarks. So they Had some developers develop a spec They had some developers write code and it got in and one of the hard forks They there's an upcoming hard fork Constantinople I hope I get that confused because we've named so many but Constantinople is coming up and Istanbul crap Yes, thank you Constantinople's happened Istanbul. Oh my gosh. I'd need to be better at this Yes, yes Istanbul was once comfortable so basically When that's coming up, we're gonna include more updates Right now. There's a few processes from a core developer perspective that are broken the EIP system needs to be updated It's very confusing if you've ever written an EIP I think that's something that the EA can jump into and has experience in writing these kind of You know perspectives and these kind of repositories of people's Specifications, there's also just the core dev process that and the hard fork process that we're fixing right now Normally we have it actually if you want to attend my talk on the main stage tomorrow at 10 I'm gonna be talking more about this, but I'm actually right after Vitalik. So that's not nerve-wracking at all Anyways Going forward we're gonna change from a hard fork timing model where we go in and We set up a time and we say we're doing a hard fork on this date And then we go in and we try to fit as many in as we can and we're rushed and We're figuring out how to fit these EIPs and we're not coding in time and the test cases aren't built to an EIP centric model Where we do hard forks as EIPs are done. And if they have to happen to be bundled together, that's great If they aren't bundled together, then they go to the next hard fork. So they're gonna happen more frequently The Ethereum cat herders are going to be doing better about reaching out to miners exchanges and major corporations and Infrastructure projects like in Fira to make sure they're ready to upgrade Because it's no one's know it's no one's job to tell these companies and exchanges what to do But that's where the cat herders come in. So I think it's really important that we have groups like that Yep, we got we got a few cat herders in the audience actually like yeah And I'm a co-founder of the cat herders along with Lane and Offery and I'm missing someone Piper Miriam Piper you here? No, it's okay. He's in our hearts. So basically to wrap this up I see a lot of Good things that could happen with this collaboration between the EEA But there are some wounds that are gonna have to heal not that anyone never gotten to a fight But like people are skeptical like why would we help things? We're trying to destroy Jamie kind of Alluded to that. What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do in certain situations where? EEA and the businesses that are related to it are gonna panic when we get big enough that there's a child abuse now Are we gonna whitelist things? Is there gonna be clients that whitelist? I don't know There there's like things that we're not anticipating that are gonna happen that are gonna be really big deals This is supposed to be censorship resistant. This is supposed to be decentralized Are we really gonna stick to our ethos? I don't know so stuff like that or just remains to be seen But I have a lot of hope that we're going to have great collaborations in the future. There's going to be a lot of resources probably Donated and helping out. I know the basu team. I hope I'm saying that right has been excellent partners with these other clients Building on the main net their their client is excellent whenever we have test cases out. Yeah Seriously, Dano has been on like every core dev call every other call He's picking his kids up from school and he's like all right and picking my kids up But like if I don't talk it's because they're getting in the car and I'm just like damn that's dedication. So Yeah, they're a great partner and I have a lot of hope for the future on all this stuff So stay tuned. I think there's gonna be a lot more information as we get our Channels up with the cat herders as we get more stuff out. Maybe we'll do a newsletter People love those right? I don't know anymore so we'll do we'll do something to get the word out for sure and That's all I have to say about that and here's the world-famous Jamie Pitts Right apparently some slides here Yeah, I mean we earlier we introduced the magicians. I think a lot of people in the audience were here for that So I'm not gonna get too deep into it But we're basically an open community of people who want to organize around technology changes And so yes, we focus on EIPs and ERC's a Lot of times we want to facilitate Creativity and people that come together for new initiatives and and so we're really down for that and a key thing that we do key infrastructures communications infrastructure, so we have this this forum at ethereum-magicians.org and You can see if you go there immediately get dumped into all these conversations really specific conversations about EIPs, but sometimes people will try to gather together some people of Birds of a feather kind of thing and say hey, we got a new initiative And so you'll see a lot of those snowball on the forum And the key is open process. We don't we're not exclusive and I think Everyone could call themselves a magician who who is interested in learning ethereum any kind of aspect of ethereum because there's so many aspects to get into An individual representation is a key value for us We don't want people representing their organizations even though in this panel. We're we're Attempting to represent our organizations and institutions When we have conversations, we want you to represent your expertise not the interest of your group Of course your boss is going to be telling you to to represent them. That's fine And the key is rough consensus and running code and Hudson alluded to this is it when when there's any IP we want to see Tests and we want to see prototypes that kind of thing like you'll take Geph and you'll implement What you're proposing and then that's accepted and you can talk about that And the rough consensus part is let's say there's several people coming to consensus That's the conversation and you reach consensus as opposed to some kind of vote The people on in the group come together and and work out how to find achieve Consensus on that and that's a process. It's very hard to define You know we hear about voting and we think that's a very solid way to go but consensus enables you to really in a subtle way find find a common ground and listen to each other and Sometimes you have to make compromises and that's okay And so those two rough consensus and running code once very like it's kind of a hard and soft aspect of it and so I guess the opportunities here like Some of the opportunities with the EA I think the key is with the EA community It sounds like I mean from my impression It's is it hundreds of corporations for members of this and government institutions hundreds and every one of these I mean many of these organizations are vast like very huge organizations And so basically that organization has somebody who is designated to participate in the EA That means we have people in corporations who are interested in Ethereum Who are learning about Ethereum who are working with the EA that is an opportunity for us to influence what's happening at those corporations And we can influence them about the IP process community driven software development And what may net is trying to do how it's permissionless all these different values Decentralization all these different values and things that we're working on We can we can start to bring that and educate them in the corporations about it and then start to change those corporations Hopefully not getting that person fired, but if they're fired they'll come and work with us. It's fine Educate and and we need to learn about these corporations and what their process is the key to the corporations is their efficiency They they have mandates their mandates are often. I think very simple They they need to return have returns for the shareholders. They're very focused on that and you hear some changes like they're oh Yeah, let's let's worry about the environment a little bit, but primarily it's about sharehold boosting shareholder value We can learn about what what's going on with that how that works how corporations work how how they're efficient We can learn from that efficiency. I think in our community work. We're inefficient That's the cat herders are named cat herders for a reason right and it's an extraordinary process to try to herd those cats We can learn to be more efficient And I think the cat herders emerging actually it's an ironic thing because the cat herders is the introduction of much more Efficiency in a process that was previously inefficient. So in a way, we're going corporate, right? We don't have to adopt their culture, but we can steal the way they do things their ideas their efficiencies And so I really commend the cat herders for doing that Magicians can learn to do that too. I think we're actually much more disorganized than the cat herders Okay, we're going to lane now Thank You Jamie Thanks everyone for your awesome presentations before I dive into talking about the cat herders I just want to share a couple quick thoughts on How we call collaborate better. I think if there's kind of one theme I'm taking away from this conversation It's about breaking down walls. I think that our community is a community that we don't believe in building walls We believe that we what what unites us is much greater than the things that separate us and we can learn a lot from each other And I'm really happy as well Hudson that you touched upon things like trust I just want to share that I was very intimately involved in the Cordev calls and the EIP process for about 18 months and throughout this time. I heard EA mentioned many times But had very few touch points and very few chances to kind of meet folks like Paul and Ron And understand what you guys are doing and where it comes from and definitely had and still do to be honest Like a healthy degree of skepticism about You know, I as Hudson mentioned we have this concept of like oh permission blockchain link That's not really a blockchain. Why would we as core developers, you know care about that or want to support it or contribute to it? We see companies like Microsoft launching products based on Ethereum open source permissively licensed software and initially we have naive thoughts like why aren't they contributing more to core development, right? Why aren't they sort of paying for core developers to kind of, you know contribute directly to the project? So the only point I'm trying to make is that it's very essential that we come together in forums such as these to have these conversations And I see a great deal of potential as as wonderful and wonderfully chaotic as like the Ethereum mainnet core development process is Initiatives like the cat herders have arisen for a reason as Jamie mentioned a moment ago We can learn a great deal from folks such as you guys you gentlemen who Have a lot of industry expertise have had quote-unquote real jobs at quote-unquote real companies like IBM before I'm a lot less anti corporate than than maybe Jamie or some people in this room having worked in the financial industry myself in the past And yet I do have that skepticism. So Yeah, so so again what unites us is much greater than the stuff that divides us and I think that we all share Common goals in in our vision for what Ethereum can be and can evolve into and I think we all recognize as well But if we don't come together and work together as a community and collaborate across the aisle so to speak We won't reach those goals So I just want to express my gratitude for for you guys for organizing this and bringing us together This is a very exciting important forum. I will say a couple more words about the cat herders But did you have something you wanted to add? Oh, there are slides you made slides didn't you know someone made slides Tim? Thank you, Tim. I Haven't seen these slides yet, which is my fault. So we're gonna explore these together The cat herders came together in 2019 to help with project management in Ethereum So yeah, so so very very briefly The cat herders as I mentioned in the beginning of this panel were born in a very ad hoc fashion Just before DevCon last year at Prague it was at a hackathon organized by the fantastic status organization and So, okay, so so here's how I like to describe it I've been told that the definition of innovation is when like a need meets a solution and so I like to think of the cat herders as as an innovation in the Ethereum community because There was sort of a supply side issue and a demand side issue, right? So the supply side issue is that there are many incredible people in the Ethereum community who for whatever reason Don't feel super comfortable rolling up their sleeves and jumping into like Like technical governance, right? So that could be the Ethereum magicians It could be the all-cord devs process or something else But really capable fantastic people who have time and a lot of value to add So that's sort of the supply side and the demand side is as we've heard a few times today already There's a lot of wonderful chaos and inefficiency in kind of the Ethereum core development research and development process and In particular the number of stakeholders has grown enormously if you rewind even three four years if you look at all the recordings of the core devs Calls and things like that. You'll see you know They were kind of 10 12 15 people on these calls Nearly everyone was either a part of the Ethereum foundation or consensus or parody That's no longer the case if you look at the calls today, especially like the ETH2 calls There's sometimes as many as 60 or 80 people dissipating in these calls representing dozens of organizations around the world And so as the number of stakeholders has grown and the diversity of projects represented And contributing to these initiatives has grown We've realized that there's just more need for coordination And it's kind of like a Goldilocks thing like we don't want too much because that starts to feel a little corporate And then you know people kind of get turned off But but we don't want too little because that leads to chaos and and we struggle to Efficiently roll out, you know network upgrades and things So that was kind of the supply and the demand that met in the creation of the cat herders It was a very organic thing. There was a initially a group of four people which quickly grew into kind of 10 or 12 people Who came together at DevCon last year in ad hoc conversations? Is this the only slide? There's more Right, so what is the cat herder? What what do the cat herders do as a community? So we're now somewhere in the order of about 20 people So note-taking was the very first thing the cat herders did for so like I personally took notes for the core devs calls For quite some time and just realized it's not sustainable for many reasons Right, I may not be able to make a call Or just didn't have time sometimes so This this this community of folks came together We raised some funding super proud of the fact that it was a hundred percent crowd-sourced community funding for that first year Although recently now we I believe the cat herders have just received some grant funding from both the Ethereum Foundation from Aragon I think those are the sources Malik now as well. So thank you to all of those organizations So right so we have we have cat herders joining all the major community calls the core devs calls the e2 calls, etc Communications is another big piece of the mandate of the cat herders. So there is a medium blog communicating the progress on audits like the prog power audit as well as the upgrade timelines for for Constantinople Istanbul And fundraising activities as well So the cat herders and Hudson led this initiative So thank you Hudson for all the hard work you did on this raising funding for the prog power audit Get Queen grants, etc. And and really it's it's an open platform, right? So as the slide suggests You know and as Jamie said a moment ago There's no such thing as like officially being a member or not being a member of the cat herders It's an open community that everyone is welcome to join and contribute to the things the cat herders work on are exactly those things That the community feels need to be done we have a PM repository a project management repository on github where anyone is free to throw issues into it and sometimes These involve like even like the aetherium.org website has a DNS issue or something that ultimately will be handled by by one of you guys You know it's sort of an aetherium foundation thing But the cat herders are meant to be like the customer service desk for a theory, right? So anything anyone in the community thinks needs to be done like cat herders is a good place to start cool collaboration ideas This is my last slide Promote relevant ea activities in main net community put stakeholders from different parts of aetherium and touch to move projects forward So yeah, I think that's it in a nutshell right with the cat herders is really really good at is Coordination as the name suggests and communication Something that engineers are not always so great at And on the ea side bring non-blockchain enterprises into the theory. Sorry. I'm reading the slides and we'll kind of analyze this together Thank you, Tim. I just wanted to say a note to this It's not this like the reason why Lane is so confused right now about those slides. It's not because We are completely disorganized, but it's because when it was Just ignoring our emails and calls When you put up the slide with with the seven different communication channels and the first one was email And you said it does anyone still use this I shook my head. I'm kind of like I live in a post-email world So I'm sorry So I agree with everything on the slide I think that there's an enormous amount that we can accomplish together I would like to shut up and listen because I think we have open questions coming up But just going back to this one. There's a link I just want to highlight this link if you want to get involved just quick pitch. Please please please everyone in this room There's an enormous amount to be done There's a enormous amount that everyone here can can add to the conversation and contribute to the cat herders So start in the skitter channel. It's open to the community And join the calls and jump in and help Do all the things that need to be done. Thank you So just one quick shout out while you guys turn your chairs back around a Lot of thanks to John and that and Tim for helping me put this together They helped me figure out, you know What the agenda would be what the messaging should be got all these brilliant panelists here for me to you know To ignore my emails and stuff like that But really thanks guys great job So we have half an hour for open forum open mic Make sure that you grab a mic when you talk. I'm gonna sit down. I'm gonna disconnect so I could take some notes I've also got a a members in the audience. Please answer anything if all right while they're all going up So I'm gonna shut up and sit down Can I make a comment on hi, I'm Jeremy. I have some responsibility for the EA being a thing Actually probably the most but I wanted to make a comment on the The concerns of corporates versus Ethereum, right? And so first when we really started the EA the reference document for how the EA should work was the DAO of the ITF Going way back when the second was like there were two There were three concerns. We were the the EA was sort of also came into being at a dev con thing in Shanghai in 2016 and and there were two concerns I saw three one was Whether private permissioned blockings were a good thing or a bad thing they were happening and the dominant way they were happening was Taking in a open source Ethereum code base and changing it and the problem was those code bases were incompatible So you couldn't reach consensus between two different private implementations of Ethereum Which if you believed in a future state where you had an internet a blockchain world was a bad thing, right? So guarding against the bad outcome of incompatible versions of Ethereum, right? particularly if you believe that there are probably some things that are going to sit on a Blockchain network that you are going to want to be private or permissioned or what have you right? the second thing the second element of it was Our three and hyper ledger we're doing we're starting to enter the business of Ethereum bashing and there wasn't really a Entity other, you know, there were some private companies But there wasn't really a trade organization that had a point of view and a permission and a voice To to enter that conversation and have a stake at the table I and we thought that was really important to have right and then the third thing is I'm an ex-bank or two Yeah, yeah, and and and I do I do believe so on that comment I have I have two beliefs one is if you really want to change the world You sort of need to try and change all of it, right? And so if we end up Decentralizing the core financial system 20% the positive Externalities even if we don't achieve full decentralization the positive externalities of even decentralizing the core financial system 20 or 30% are almost enumerate right like the benefits of what you can do for open access To financial services what you can do for greater equality, right? So even if we can't achieve the overall goal, there's a big benefit there, right? So if you want to change the world you have to change all of it then the second part of that being is There are businesses and companies growing up around decentralized technology and and and Ethereum right and so Where is the right community? So for example? The speed of main net increases price volatility, right? I the Cumberland team was here and they left it's because what happens is Liquidity tries to move between the exchanges people try to move their assets You get price dislocations by the time the assets get to the exchange as the price dislocation the dislocations move They all move back and you get greater vol right that's bad for the Ethereum community overall, right? So where is the the right community forum for those type of discussions take place? I would argue it's inside of a trade organization, which is why you know We at consensus working with Ron have been really trying to push the EA in addressing the business issues of running Valuable transactions on the main net. So I just wanted to share those three points of three points of view, right? The the need to have if we are going to have subnets that are private and permission the need for them to be interoperable and compatible right the need to have a voice that to To to be the voice of a more decentralized enterprise the need to try and change all the world at the same time and the need to have a community where businesses that build their businesses running on Ethereum can Explain what the business impact is of some of the technical decisions and architectures Hey guys, so thanks, of course for organizing this, but I'd like to make a few things on EA, correct? So he was launched. Let's yes. Sure. So Sam fall I work on quorum. I lead the quorum engineering team I've been engaged with the community since deaf con one Since deaf con one and I've been working on quorum. Let's say for the last four years for years The engagement through EA may be started recently But we've been working with the core engineering team at the F foundation and the core of theorem G For all of the clients in general over the last four years. So it's not something we started recently EA was meant just for a way for us to organize that effort and bring it together Whether it's with the community or with enterprises in general to get them to adopt Ethereum The way it started maybe as Jeremy was explaining that it was Other companies trying to sell their own version of blockchain and that's where we saw a limitation We didn't want that so what we did we took a public main Ethereum client, which is the go Ethereum client and need we make we build the tools available for it Or we made tools available for it to be able to run in an enterprise environment What does that mean if you do continuous integration? We give you all the tools and all the scripts and all of the code Yeah, that you need to be able to run it there. So Hudson I think worked at ussa for a bit ussa runs quorum and the only way they were able to run it because we customized it with some tools for them To be able to deploy it into their own data centers We made the sold available for them so they can learn how the evm works and how to actually Build smart contracts and how to audit and formally review those smart contracts You cannot do that in enterprise without having all of these tools available for you Same thing for zero knowledge proofs. You cannot run it in an actual private Sorry in a public network, correct? The gas cost is too expensive Maybe now with istanbul is going to decrease But we were able to customize the gas price to be able to run the contracts in an environment Where you can build a permission network and ultimately over time we see a lot of these features feeding into mainnet So now we understand that there is a demand for you to be able to Do privacy better scalability We saw that actual blog gas limit recently increasing and the reason that's been done We've been working on that for a long time correct in a permissioned environment You have more control so you can't decide how many transactions go in a block and based on that those learnings feeding to mainnet I think one question I have it's kind of I'd be interested to know is How is governance how is this community communicating like do they have a core devs they have Sub organizations groups that like how where is this happening like where's the forum? Where's the Where's the phone calls? I just want to second those sentiments like I think having more open active lines of communication would go a long way towards Addressing some of the like skepticism that a lot of folks feel and I'm not the blame is on both sides But I don't want to put the blame specifically like on the ea side or whatever But there are there's a there's a lot that we can learn from each other and yet I don't think we've had very active lines of communication like again from my Naive core dev perspective. It's like why isn't ea joining the core dev calls? I'm sure you guys have your versions of this like why aren't we joining your calls, right? So and and more to the point like whose job is it to coordinate that? I think one of the benefits and hopefully you guys all agree There's no point in reinventing the wheel and if you believe that then we Absolutely need to learn what you guys have spent on the ethereum mainnet the community and also share what we'll share what we know Is that better we'll share what we know based on again our corporate background I've spent 12 years at intel doing telecom So I have some understanding about how you get interoperability. So your phone works wherever you go And and so it's it's really challenging to figure out how we work So I was very happy that we have this session But this is just a launchpad for the session So I think I think some of the ways that you asked about governance. It's real easy for us if we can set some follow-up Sessions to share with you. Okay. What's the best practices? How is it normally done? And then you can figure out what you want to use and that's partly what you brought up I mean, there's best from all the worlds and I think it's not a black and white world So as much as we all like this decentralization the other side of it exists And I think what you're seeing is that a lot of cooperation for us to figure out how we impart the information bilaterally So i'm charles I'm like the flunky behind The technical work who actually puts these things together So some of the answers to your questions are the phone calls happen inside ea member space It's like and that's above my pay grade. So You know But what happens is can you clarify what you just said there? So what that means and help us understand that if you are a member of ea Then it looks the same To a member as All core devs and the magicians looks to anyone who wants to be there Okay, and and it actually works the same. It's like rough consensus and running code is what drives it It's about the people who and and they're not like You know corporate monsters and corporate warriors driving stuff. It's use case driven It's by you know people saying look this is It is enterprises doing it. It's like we have things that we want like permission networks that we don't get off main net Here are our use cases. Here is what we're trying to achieve. Here is how we do the technical Yeah, or here are suggestions for the technical stuff. Let's get to consensus Which as you say is is really valuable and really hard But what do you have a do you have a forum and do you have phone calls that are like among your members? You have like every every week. I turn up to a phone and they get together and you can see So the visibility you get is if you have a look at the the specifications Look for the editor version of the spec that that's you know comes off github. It's updated every week You can see exactly what's there in any given week. So you can watch it Developing what you can't see into is the Discussion of issues the issues that are raised. I think there was a mailing list that got abandoned that bob built, right? Okay, yeah, so that there was that for a little bit Google groups. Okay, you probably should have a mic for the video. Yeah I think I think this is a pointed this is a point of debate at the board level DEA right now Right, which is if you want to have a member driven organization for things like Antitrust confidentiality and some of the things that big companies need How do we get the level of openness required in the technical discussions? I think there is a I think views on this are mixed my personal view is the ea is too closed that we need to change our ip policy A little bit and we need to open up the calls much more broadly. That's my personal opinion That may or may not be the opinion of consensus, but that's my personal opinion But but you're describing constraint that there's a legal There's a legal requirement to protect the ip well, so so here's the here's the thing what we actually do is we protect The ecosystem in in the ea. We protect the ecosystem against patent trolls, right? Which which outside the world of ethereum doesn't do the rest of ethereum is like ah Nobody should come along and be a patent troll whereas ea has actual legal procedures in place to Screw them over and say no you can't do that it won't work We will block that behavior And and so that's some of the motivation behind Why we actually have the setup we have And one quick add on the reason why we do it is so that there's no royalty For everyone and that's so it's not because we want to encourage it We try to do things so the corporate side who may want to try to get a royalty payment Out of this we try to protect it Um, I just wanted to add Something that all members everybody who works for ef has access to ea So hi everyone, my name is jody rich I joined the ea today. Thank you very much I'm And I'd like to introduce Cameron bale. Where are you Cameron? Cameron and I co-founded nft.nyc Which is an event all about nfts every february We also run a company called nft cred which is trying to consumerize nfts the creation and distribution And the reason we joined the ea is because we see we have an opportunity to contribute to the standards the tti And my question for you ron is can you tell us a little bit more about What the ea is doing with nfts? And I just want to say to hudson About 20 years before you were in diapers. I was writing code on punch cards Well, here's we have a winner All right, so I was doing assembly code on a pdp 11 computer so And so I was telling these guys the language the two languages. I learned new back when school is assembly and then the other one was fortran Oh All right, I'll tell you a Sad woodstock story. I had this very cute girl. I was dating at college and no no no no no no. I gotta tell you And she invited me to go to woodstock This is the sad part and it was raining shitty weather And I'm going I nobody knew back then I was in new jersey. What the heck it was going to be I actually didn't go when I could have so that really sucks But you're at dev con which is just this is a lot better I was really bummed. Anyway, so So now I forgot the question is Yeah, nfts, okay, so uh, so bottom line and this is this is important for you guys to know We're just like the ethereum foundation the cat herders We are we're just the all we do is try to formalize like everyone else does the group of members who want to do something So we have a few initiatives and you're going to see an announcement very soon and jerry that was jeremy's idea We about a month or two ago. We have an initiative that actually there's marley for microsoft and he helped And you're talking about what corporate does this could have been a microsoft initiative But microsoft approached us and said look we need to tokenize the whole ecosystem for interoperability And we should make it neutral so everybody wants to jump in so you have a the common language Like the language of music you have notes and you have rules But you can then everybody can share and and and participate We're doing that in the ea. So the ea gets uh, we we're hosting this initiative And so there we invite everybody to participate so for nfts But then we still want to push it on to the ea's Mainnet and and figure out how we tokenize In the right way for nfts tied to the ethereum mainnet So we'll be launching about another month another initiative A token working group that's focused on the ethereum mainnet So the bottom line is ethereum as you mentioned ethereum foundation members can participate We publish all our specs publicly So you don't have to be a member and to do it and and and see everything that we're doing and you can communicate with us And that's why paul joined Okay, so I guess this is more of a comment So i'm tim i work on hyper ledger basu Which is like in the interesting position of we have both a mainnet client and we do all this permission network stuff So we kind of get to be on on both of those calls And and the discussion earlier around like, you know, the ea does work on a lot of initiatives that provide value But to the core ethereum community. It's kind of obscure and hard to see And and I totally get that because I think people complain the same thing about core devs They're like, you know, we just had a session earlier people are like Oh, what's like the meta e per eip one and and people just don't know and and it's it's normal Like people don't have the time to find out those things But one thing I think we do well on core devs that perhaps the ea could consider is the meetings are kind of semi open So the meetings on core devs gets shared in zoom There's no password or anything But if you kind of don't Really belong there or contribute to the meeting hudson will kick you out very politely. I saw it once But any anyone else can just join on youtube and watch the live stream or read the transcript And I can see a kind of model like that working for the ea maybe because of big company policies You want to introduce some delay or something like that, you know, the specifics might be harder But where you have the members, you know on the call being able to speak But everybody else is able to listen or to get a transcript or notes I think that helps it off with transparency And and would help just like trust in the community that like there's not something shady Happening in the meeting that you're not seeing. Yeah, actually a year ago in prog we had a controversy because We had these ad hoc meetings where some of the core devs got together and they Were talking about eth1x and that's where the term was was came from was a year ago eth1x and there was a bunch of people in a room and we were just talking about it and then someone wrote notes and It was and then those notes got leaked and it was like, whoa, there were these secret meetings and so We got nervous and so Coin desk and coin telegraph and the others sometimes they've been doing a really great job lately of getting it right and we have direct connections with them but Back then sometimes it was harder to get like the updates because they'd listened to the core dev calls that immediately put something out And so we felt like pressured to have this we had this live youtube call people are watching us So you can't say things like Yeah, ethereum's not going to be around in two years because of state bloat Like literally state bloat's going to take it so you can't even have it on an ssd Like you can't say that because coin desk is going to be like ethereum's doomed So, uh, what we did was we had for one time we had chatham house rule chat chatham Chatham house rules call the uh, the transcript was completely there No one was attributed and the call was not recorded. We tried that one time and we got enough community backlash We've never done it again So that's something where you can't even go that far You need to be completely open or else you won't get accepted in my opinion So so I wanted to look at some of the other ways that we do have a communication I mean Why are we not on all core devs calls because all core devs is on that as as paul showed We build on top of the stack. We don't want to interfere with the stack We don't want to change the stack and as it develops. We want to make sure we're still Compatible so we'll chop stuff out of our stuff We'll change to fit with the overall ethereum stack because that's critical We also have a policy if we you know, for example, want a new opcode if we want a new pre-compile That we will publish that stuff and make sure that you know and get to see it and review it and we will feed that in as EIPs before we do it So far we haven't actually gone there. We we've set this up and said that is how we will do Anything that might come in touch, you know deeper into main net that might need feedback from core devs We'll take it there and make sure we get that before we go there There are a couple of things happening where we might be doing that over the next, you know six months or so So there are mechanisms Which we have put in place But not used because we haven't had a use case for them yet. There's there's been nothing to say beyond look He's aspect. He's what we're doing Just to re-emphasize a couple of the things Hudson said, you know This question of openness and transparency has been a contentious topic in the core dev community for it Since I joined so a couple years ago and we've landed in a place Which I think is a very good place Which is as Hudson said kind of complete openness and complete transparency If there's one value that I think the the participants and contributors in this process share It is the value of openness and transparency And I think that's a cultural difference between this community and kind of the more corporate side of the world And so like again having worked for a corporation before like I understand that there are sometimes legal reasons or other reasons Why not everything can be totally open and participatory to everyone But I do think that we need to do a much better job of communicating what those reasons are and I would like Just again representing myself and no one else I would like to see like way more openness and transparency on the part of ea and other folks Because I think that would again go a long way towards removing some of the skepticism that we feel All right, so my name is Michael and I I do a lot of consulting and blockchain, but I was president of the blockchain club at UT Dallas and at UT Dallas We've had a lot of blockchain stuff Recently there's like professors are starting to do more research the university starting to recognize that as this is something We want to train students for We were currently on our roll out of pressure to focus on the right things We're like I've tried to make it clear like I think ethereum is where we should be focusing Whether it's permissioned or public ethereum And then the local the local corporations you have in Dallas right now are like IBM and Had their hashgraph so So we're currently in a situation where we're trying to educate university faculty on like this is where you should be focusing your efforts So as well as trying to tell students This is also where you should be trying to like at least first start learning about blockchain Before maybe you pick your stack of choice So my question is what kind of educational resources or what are ways to reach out where we can say hey Here's a here's where you should look and see how you can start maybe contributing to the ethereum community Whether it's in the ea or in the ethereum foundation All I wanted to say was utd is like University of texas dallas. They're one of the leaders in education blockchain stuff I visited it's excellent Secondly as far as educational resources go that is a big gap. We have I feel like the ef needs to do a better job of that We have documentation efforts that are getting spun up a little bit But I do want to hear other perspectives and maybe the ea if there's if there's things that are in the works for that So, yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, I'm reminded that in 1997 I was part of 2,000 people at the company I worked for Uh that we're getting behind java This radical new technology that we were working on that and it was beautiful It was open source well kind of open source and well we all got involved in somebody else's thing Which was kind of openness before open source And part of the thing I was involved with was getting the educational community involved in in java What was interesting was where Those 2,000 people had no organization. There was no organization at my company called the java organization at the time There were 2,000 people that were self-organizing when I think of corporations I've spent half of my career starting stuff and the other half working in large groups of mostly humans That we call corporations and to me from my perspective, they're really not a lot different You've got people that need to work together and they need to work under some kind of operating principle And that gets ossified over time and we call that a corporation You know uber was the radical and now they're the bad guys, right? I guess we're always bad guys So so the point is that it it's it there's lots of educational resources But the most important educational resources the resource is the one that shows the front door To people with initiative to say i'm gonna i see a spot With our 2,000 people with java We knew that we needed to make it work for i'll call it serious business I mean it's not you know enterprise is a terrible word really I almost I'm glad that it's ea and not enterprise ethereum alliance anymore. You know, it's kind of like kfc Because if you're a four-person startup that's working in in That is that's handling grandma's pension You have the same problems as any enterprise does if you're dealing with pii or hippa You have the same problems dealing with those things and now doing it with the main the main net as the center point As the met as the bus that's um That's going to require a lot of serious work By people in Corporations who understand that not because they're part of that corporation But because they're a person that understands how to do that kind of work So we got to find this the front door and show it really clearly and say this is you want to set something up This is how you set it up Just a quick. I'm sorry. I've just been talking about the academic. We have a uh, we we get approached by uh, University schools all the time. So um, we have an academic partnership agreement And that will engage with universities But I can share with you what I usually look at or what we look at is are they're doing true research or they're Really have something to contribute and then we can actually give them and so, you know that already happens rice we have We have university pan usc and we'll even hold events at the schools So if you haven't you're from all over the world if you have a university is why I'm bringing this up That is doing research the professors and then the folks working on stuff They can approach us and join they actually have complete visibility into everything that we do And we'll look at some of the ideas you have I think if we had a way where folks can see what we do we are completely transparent And maybe there's a way. I don't know the best way, but we we're open to talking about how we could do that One one thing I one theme I keep seeing here is that I believe that that the ea like a big component of the ea Has to do with the legalities Because you're it's it's this notion about protecting from patent rolls But also I think in order to engage with corporations in order to engage with the corporate process You have to comply it's sort of conform to the legal frameworks that make the corporation possible We say corporations are people but corporations A corporation is a person it is it is a person in the eyes of the law And it has this incredible huge amount of legal code protecting it And it's incorporated into the government's incorporated it has relationships with other corporations and all of it is legal and The ea is a way to enable them to collectively Work together on on technology And not kill each other because they want to kill Like that's the way I see the corporation. It's out to get profit and we'll do anything for that So they have all this legal framework to control to control and coordinate their behavior. And so When when you like for example, you're working with the ethereum foundation I don't know if most of the people working at the ethereum foundation know this but the members The people who are contractors at the ethereum foundation have an ethereum foundation email address can now Are now covered in this legal framework And so they can have access To to this information to these communications that lead to the The output that is public anyone can get that right What i'm interested in is this nft The nft group that I was talking to you about earlier How many members is your group and how did you become a member can community organizations join And cover their people with this legal Protection I guess you'd call it and then they can get access to this stuff because I call this the secret eip's like to me behind the legal veil of this of The the shielding Is I called secret eip's you guys have access to the secret eip's how did you how did you do it? Like how how is your could you tell us? I think you mean how many people are a member of nft nyc? Yeah, and are they are they able to get like communication? Uh Yeah, you better answer that but I want to ask I want to answer one of the question which is Last year we had 120 speaker applications for nft nyc So a lot of the influences came to us and this year We've only had speaker applications open for two weeks and we've already had 60 So we're getting a lot of the leaders and developers in the space coming to us because they want to be part of the event in febru Yeah, just a quick answer Any any entity whether it's corporate any any anyone can join but If it's like your organization would be the management as long as it's the email address It's just like a theory and foundation because that means they conform like as you mentioned and so So that's how we do it, but if all the 200 member companies they would They would have to look at joining the ea, but his organization Did you have to pay did they pay? Um, if we do it depends You had to pay something but if we so you pay up pay up the money and you it's like face It's like really facebook that you pay for you have the email address And now you're now you can get access to the secret ea piece. Well, yeah, so it's um, can I I don't know what secret ea piece, but maybe they're they're hiding it from me Can I make myself e3 on foundation email and join you guys? Absolutely if you can't because then you're represented by the theorem foundation Just just circling back to the question like I this is also interesting and important I just think like education is something we can do so so so much better It's like arguably the most important thing we should be doing And I want to propose that this is like a low hanging fruit obvious place where we can collaborate because like it's in everyone's interest that like people You know like students who want to like roll up their sleeves and learn about how to contribute to a theme and build on it Can do that and access those resources like I've I personally spend hours writing curriculums and giving lectures At various universities including my alma mater is like in a permissionless fashion. So like let's collaborate on this Just a comment here. Sorry So there's no secret ea piece correct If there is an ea b the evm the current implementation of what the enterprise ethereum clients use They're based on the main net clients and the ethereum evm there is the same vm And if there's any modification to it it would be through the public Implementation it wouldn't be through like a custom ea b or a secret ea b The main thing of ea. I think you explained the earlier very well Which is basically a way for all of these enterprises to work together But as soon as it's going to modify or enhance or update ethereum public That's when it goes through the public ea b um, I had a kind of a comment um So is ibm a member of the ea? Oh, thank god. I was about to go on. Yeah good There were some strongly worded discussions around we had this challenge when we're I mean marley might want to talk about it How to make the token taxonomy initiative? Open across industry but not have but have membership in the ea mean that you're endorsing it Meaning that you're part of the ethereum community. Yeah, and that's the thing because like there's so many There's hundreds of organizations and if one of them's a bad apple or multiple of them's a bad apple then What happens like what what happens with them figuring out? Oh ethereum main net's not for me or what happens with Their influence because there's a lot of fear about corporate takeover amongst the crypto anarchists from the ea f and Absolutely, so like what would be done in that situation or how is that being prevented right now? So we have a corporate structure that like binds them to behave in certain ways as jami said So there's a membership agreement and it's like it would and they have to sign They can't come in and if one company was doing something that was a bad actor There we would it would go to the board But if we could show evidence of it, so for example, we've had some we had one member Who it was an ICO? And they were not there were the shade a shady member So we went ahead we took it to the board and we kicked them out Because we don't want dishonest entities to be in the org So there that's some of the benefits you have with through an association and industry org Sure audience questions, please does the ethereum foundation or the ea have american tax status as a nonprofit organization As far as the ethereum foundation goes we do not have an american entity. We have a swiss entity Okay, it's very complicated, but we basically have a swiss entity a german entity and a singapore entity Ea is a 501c6 or a non-profit right so you you actually As a trade organization you have to have a common purpose And then you can't self-deal No, we can't we get asked by even folks joining. Can we have any affiliates or political? We have to sign off that we cannot and we don't yeah, so no we're we're safe Okay, and do you do you have an educational component as part of that trade organization? I mean usually usually there's one of the things the rs looks at is Are you doing enough from an education standpoint as a trade organization to achieve your common mission? This is important for the crypto anarchists because One of the release valves you have just like you can fork an open source project is you can challenge Under us tax law and go to the IRS and and call them out for bad behavior If you think they're not achieving their intended goals Yeah, we're not in the u.s. I feel like we're safe, but I am not a lawyer Oh, yeah, you And actually so I think we're a little past time so you might be the last question. Is that accurate are we a little? Oh, it's okay to keep it going. All right. I'm not familiar with this format Let's keep the this session till like 12 so we can go on a lunch afterwards together. Okay Now that he knows that I am a lawyer. He only wants to have one question left My question is so since you're having a paid membership, how is the structure looking like is Is it that each member gets a voting right? So it's one member won't vote or do you have a pondering system or how is the governance looking like? Governance is as equal opportunities. You can get whether you pay our least expensive membership is $3,000 We didn't put it on payments because we want the smaller companies to participate or members could be so one Membership one vote regardless of the size of the company. So everyone gets an equal say When we look at the pages of the tech group Uh on ea website Did is the first item did decentralized identity is the first item on it This is also our interest interested in the topic So I have some questions on the id so From ea ea side In enterprise blockchain scenario What is a benefit? Did can provide can I Can I explain my question clearly? Yes, please So my first question is What did he can provide what benefit can the id system provide in enterprise? blockchain scenario And what is the d id? d id standout plan I think I can answer some of that. Do you want me or do you have more or are you? It was that your question So so there are a couple interesting pieces into in your question One is what is what is from the ea or from a business perspective? What is identity all about you know? How is that going to go forward and gosh, you know, I sure wish it would go forward faster. That's all I'd like But the the important thing is that I was sitting next to by chance the the Secretary of State for the state of Delaware A few years ago at a dinner and I leaned over and I asked him. I said how many companies Are registered in Delaware who are controlled by say one person, but you don't know And he said I don't know but it's a lot So there's a you know, there's an individual self sovereign identity question And then there's how do I know that the company I'm dealing with on a blockchain and I'm open especially main net How do I know that that's not that's not only The bona fide company, but it's the only bona fide company and that I'm not accidentally dealing with some other company Or some other entity. This is a deep Problem and it's one that I think the EA is equipped to to to deal with as identity matures Identity has not matured along any lines as fast as I sure would like to see and I see some friends in the audience I would agree But there are a lot of people diligently working on it. I think that corporate identity And individual identity have a relationship that Is it could be radical how we how we approach that if we do it right? And I think we have to we'll have a lot of work to do on that So identity is probably The most complicated challenge because it's subjective as well as objective And if you look at what? Companies want and then for and others who are involved in social impact There are apples and oranges. It's very challenging Our view what I'm seeing is there there's enough organizations out there focused on identity dif. I was at the id 2020 event So I think that the only way any one Organization is going to To drive identity isn't going to happen And so I think our our our objective is to really track what goes on and then come up with a way Hopefully in the future At the same way we're looking at tokens, which we I believe this is where we're focused on we're doing a good job on Unifying the language of tokens. I think the identity side is is going to be Far more challenging. So we don't really know yet. So to answer your question It's up to what our members would like to see us do so so I want to Try and distill john's answer The use of of identifiers in Enterprise blockchains is because you want to know who else is on the chain, right? We need to have ways of saying i've set up a consortium. I want to know What this consortium's members are? It's tied up with permissioning In terms of the what is the standards path for decentralized identifiers dan Burnett who's sitting over there chairs w3c's distributed Decentralized identifiers working group Which is a standards path for building a proper infrastructure to do them. So he's probably a good person to ask Yeah, so i'm happy to talk about that. Um, I I didn't know what Decentralized identity meant for the ea. I would like to understand that actually But the w3c has recently formed a decentralized identifier working group and that is uh, That is a technology piece Which can be used for a variety of Of purposes one of which could be building an identity system, but it was very very very very very very specifically Created as an identifier only Um so that it can be used in systems where you do not have to define identity And i'm happy to talk with anyone who would like to understand What some of those alternatives might be Any other questions from the audience just come over here. Okay, great Okay, hello everybody. Um, my name is jose I feel part of the ethereum community since 2016 um, and I wanted to I wanted to ask you if you are uh, thinking about some kind of credential that maybe people from the community can have in order to to Yeah, you to just feel part of the ethereum community But actually be part of the ethereum community. Maybe an nft or something. I read that in the Defcon they will give an nft of an attendance But maybe for the people that couldn't come that they can also be like a certified ethereum community person that can Maybe represent them directly or somebody nobody can listen to just if you will hold the mic Please hold it tight to your mouth so people can hear you So just for everyone's benefit does someone have the pope sticker the poap sticker I see some people like santa you're here. Can you stand up and model it this the sticker you have right here Po the pope sticker. Yeah, so so this is a sticker that Everyone should have gotten a check-in if you didn't like go there and ask for it And it's actually attached to an nft token This is maybe what you were referring to and there's a couple of folks who developed this pope Protocol pope stands for proof of attendance protocol and have been handing them out At ethereum events around the world for the past couple of years So it's really cool if you have wallet software you can sort of collect these tokens To the second piece of your question My feeling personally is no we don't want credentials because we want this to be an open community that like actually the way you began your question You said if I if I heard you correctly you said I feel that I've been a member of the ethereum community since 2016 Is that that's sort of what you said, right? That's how it should be from my perspective You shouldn't need a credential or or or a badge or something to prove that you're part of this community It should be a community that anybody who feels a strong affiliation with or an affinity with I wants to assert that membership kind of stand up and say i'm an ethereum I'm a member of the community that's that's my feeling I feel like you may have a thought on this um Yeah, it's interesting because I want I want to preserve privacy So there I would say that there should be people who can generate an identity if they want to But I think identity is really important I think it's I think it's a key otherwise. It's going to be monopolized And identity is on its way to being monopolized And I think the ea actually has a big opportunity here to coordinate with all the corporations who have users who have People that can be identified for very good reasons And then to create this open standard d id is a great open standard and what what you're describing d id is actually a really good um way way to go and um I What implementations on ethereum are there for it? I don't know. Um, I believe there is a new joe music head Oh, okay Smart smart contract based accounts eip. I don't remember the number. I think fabian volgasteller was the author of it 7 7 25 7 25 so look into eip 7 25 as well Definitely identity is is is a thing for the age of convergence It was not something that the age of divergence was going to work jim. You got one I say because I come from colombia and we have made several meetups there But we always say that we feel part of the community, but maybe if there were some kind of credential Maybe we could gather more people because they can see some kind of legitimacy behind it And it's just not people that feel community and want to talk Thank you jim zen a co-founder of collido, which is active member of ea the technical working group Like to address the the question about the id's and corporate identities So I think there's there's the id as the technology came out I got three years ago. The first time I heard of that term was when uh, chris Can't remember his last name was working with uh, 2020 the un project Where you can't trust any centralized identity to be the the only source of truth for your personal identity That's not going to work in many of world's situations So that's where the id idea came out of that you the only way to preserve your identity Is to make it not a a thing that a single Organization holds but I think in the corporate world it's quite different because corporate identities As a legal thing does not exist unless it's been What's the right word stamped by government, right? I'm not a lawyer. So but I think It's generally the case that um, you have to be recognized under certain legal system Which means if you want to find out who is responsibility whose responsibility of Certain corporates actions lice you need to go to registry and find out right which means by nature This is a centralized thing so with collida what we're taking is a a A practical approach where what are the problems we can solve today that enterprises that are joining together? To a consortium are facing and they need to solve it today versus the id it's it's a very exciting idea, but it takes it's going to take some time to to actually be useful and and be Be realized right so today There is a very good system very robust that everybody is relying on that's pki Uh, if if you talk to any Uh enterprise in any form or shape right you log on to facebook or you go to bank of america to try to log on to your Banking system you are dealing with that system. You're trusting that and that is what's making The the world work today. So why don't we take? advantage of that system and solve the the the corporate identity Uh problem today and then have a view on the future with the id's So that's the approach we're taking and we're making proposals to the A spec technical spec to make this be part of the the next version Jim and Would you would you guys say that there's a stackability opportunity here a little bit longer term than immediately today But as an individual I should have my own self-sovereign identity But then when I join a company if I do that, but you know, of course, we're going to kill all those pretty soon But but while they're still exist Or you know some group of humans I should be able to stack like like e and s could right I can say now I'm going to attach an identity on top of that and when I get fired which never will happen You know I'm going to I'll snap off the top, but I still have my core identity underneath that I don't lose Um, is that is that sort of where the architecture is going to go so that you have both individual identity and Yeah Yes, there's definitely individual identities and corporate identities So again, uh, the id came out of the idea that individual identity should be protected in the decentralized system Which I think is again quite different from the corporate side Last question last question Um, so actually I was just going to respond to what um to what you said so identity Identity means very different things to different people and that is the problem. I hate the word identity I absolutely despise it Because when you say identity, you know what you mean, but it is I can guarantee you It's not what I mean One of the most influential papers I read was uh from a workshop called rebooting the web of trust On the five mental models of identity Because it was just an attempt to point out there are more models than that but but it was an attempt to point out that um What you mean by identity when you're talking about allowing someone on a plane Is different from what you mean by identity if you're just talking about whether um an individual whether An entity making use of services online Is permitted to do that Okay, they may be completely different in the first case You have a physical security issue and you need to know that that physical person is not getting on the plane in the second case Maybe you don't need any of that and in fact, maybe it's way better for no identifying information to be made available Okay, and the problem with the word identity is that it leads people to think there is one notion of identity And even if you say no, you can have multiple identities Then there's still the question of who defines what that identity is and I think there's a there's a mental mistake in that So you're right that the the decent the verifiable credentials and decentralized identifier based approach Those two can work together will take a while to to get out there and so What people should do in the meantime? There are a variety of identity based approaches today Use whatever works for you. I'm not going to take time right now to go into The reasons why verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers were created It's because of failures that we saw with other approaches That all tried to define identity As a as a unified thing. So obviously it's a big conversation No one knows exactly what it what it means or what it should mean and going forward. We'll just have to see Where things go, but you know, I have my own opinions like others Just a pragmatic point about that for sorry York roads from Microsoft And we were involved in co-founding the decentralized identity foundation Which is a associate member of the enterprise ethereum alliance specifically because we can see the collaborations between those organizations The pragmatic approaches and this is I think where john was going Is that if an enterprise is to do business with another enterprise on the main net It has to somehow be able to verify that that digital Thing at the other end is actually that enterprise and so this methodology around dids and verifiable claims is actually a really good way to do that In a way that doesn't rely on the trust of a single organization And so that is in a pragmatic way Something that in the short term we actually are you know, we need to look at that And it's something that's solvable today with the technology that exists So Great. Thank you. Thank you everybody for attending this session