 The title of my speech is, what are we doing, right? I really like puns, most people don't know that about me. I really like puns, the changing tithes of the Thinner Foundation Grants Program. So my name is Ken, like Barbie and Ken, like the doll, that's how you remember me. I send a lot of emails out. But I'm really happy to be on stage today because a lot of what I've heard throughout the weekend is the Thinner Foundation Grants Program is a black box, right? Like no one knows who you guys are, you guys are so mysterious, and what else? You guys, you have some money, right? The Thinner Foundation Grants Program has a lot of money, sort of, but what we like to do is talk through what are we actually doing here, right? Like what is the mission of the Grants Program and is this actually sustainable, right? So thus far this year, we've given out $11 million to 75 projects, which is not insubstantial. Yeah, yeah, there we go. It's awesome because we were able to bring a lot of people from all around the blockchain industries, right? So it's not just Ethereum, it's not just the community, but it's also bringing people over from Secure Scuttle, but it's also bringing people from university academia, bringing Kestrel Institute, bringing everyone from around the world, and really talking about what it is that the Grants Program really is trying to do, right? And it's kind of nebulous thus far. This is, I guess, like a face that you see now for the Grants Program, but there's not just me, right? It's a lot more on the team. And I don't like saying I, it's more of we, and I'll get back to this and I'll do some more puns. This is gonna be good. It's like stand-up comedy where you wrap it around at the end, maybe, I don't know, I'm not that funny. But what I think I really want to kind of bring out here is that it's this idea that the Ethereum Foundation Grants Program is really just funding Vitalik's friends and you guys are just doing whatever you want with all this money, and that would be really cool because that would make my job a lot easier, but it's not easy. We're actually talking about, for the Grants Program, it's fundamentally changing and empowering the community. And that's very, very broad, right? What does it actually mean to empower the community? It's talking about funding and empowering open source development, right? It's actually talking about creating upon the core infrastructure of Ethereum. And what that means is really talking through public goods, right, public utility, public tooling. What does Ethereum actually need, right? It's actually facing the hard facts of what's broken, right? What, where is our roadmap currently and how do we build upon that? How do we address the issues head on? And so one of the things that I've really realized in this space is we don't like to talk about what's broken. We don't like to admit our flaws, but that's okay, right? A lot of things are going really well with Ethereum and that's amazing. The foundation is going and it's not just the foundation, it's everyone else in the community. I kind of liken this to, you know, not, we're not really looking for a return on investment, which is what a lot of people ask us, right? It's like, how are grants actually sustainable if you're not getting ROI, but that's the point of rents? You actually don't need an ROI. What we're looking for here is actually impact, right? Compounding impact. The Ethereum foundation doesn't have that much money. So if you look at the grants program, we actually have less than 1% of all Ether in circulation, right? It's not insubstantial. We still do have money that we're, you know, pumping out into the ecosystem. I'm going to continue to keep pumping it out. The idea behind this is, you know, what this can really fundamentally do is bring more people to the table, right? It's not just us sitting here saying, oh, well, these guys, like, you guys should get some money, and you guys should get some money. It's really like, how do we bring all of us? Yeah, Oprah style, right? I wish it was Oprah style, but it's, you know, we want to bring more people and come to the table and sit with us, right? Don't be afraid to come to me and ask me, can I apply for a grant, right? We actually saw a decline in applications because people were kind of scared and saying, like, you know, like, we're not even worth it. Like, yes, you are. Absolutely, you're worth it. This is the Ethereum community. Everyone here can apply for a grant, and I will talk to every single one of you, not just me, but everyone else on this team, on the grants team, we'll talk to you and we'll make sure that you hear back from us, right? So fundamentally, what we want to do is have everyone here come to the table because the Ethereum Foundation wants to use this to diffuse our power, diffuse what we have here, all of our resources, and make sure it's disseminated across everyone here, right? For the decentralized futures to actually exist, it can't just be us at the table. It's every one of us. It's everyone building with client diversity. It's everyone building on security because the experts are out there. The experts are all around the world and it's not just people who say we're a Ethereum Foundation, right? It's every one of you guys sitting out here saying we want to build. Yeah, so let us help you build. Let us give you funds. Let us give you resources. Let us bring you to the table. Let us have you talking to everyone else around here. Don't be afraid to do it, right? Just come off. And so now we're gonna go back to funds because I only have three minutes left. So what I like to talk about is how, what we're doing here is like a sale. It's like a ship, right? And so what we're doing is really like making sure everyone's sales are up and we're just pushing wind out at everyone, right? Little by little, we're just gonna keep pushing more boats at sea so that we have a full navy out here, right? It's not just one ship. The most powerful navy is with the most amount of ships flanking around, right? It's not just one guy at the top. No Christopher Columbus here. And it's still debated when Christopher Columbus, that's actually an American reference. Sorry, I apologize. I'm a very ignorant American. But it's really cool to see teams like Prismatic Labs, right? Yeah, woohoo, Prismatic Labs. Where you just kind of meet online, right? You just meet online and just say like, this is what we wanna build. This is our passion project. Let us get a grant and let's build a full team. And they've been able to do that. And then they come back and say, hey, we wanna build a client. Absolutely. Yeah, just let's keep doing it. Let's have more people do the same thing. Let's build our passion projects. Let's see where it goes. Let's stop worrying about building, let's stop worrying about how do we build a business. Let's stop worrying about all these other things. Let's actually build what we wanna build. Let's make Ethereum better, right? Let's actually do it. And let us give you the wind so that your sales can keep going, right? What are we doing? That's it, man. This is what we're doing. But I truly do believe that jokes aside, through the grants program, the decentralized future is really in our hands. It really is. And we have to understand that using resources, using funds, tap and rely on the Ethereum Foundation and rely on the grants program to let you do that because the other question we get asked is, who are you to be giving these grants out? Great question. Because the grants team is actually not just us. What we do is just facilitate. We facilitate conversations, right? So all of us go out and reach other people to get on these calls and get on these conversations of who deserves to get a grant, right? We are not technically the experts of everything, right? We don't know everything, right? We get people from outside of the foundation, internal, external, anyone we can get to make sure that what we're doing is fundamentally going to better the ecosystem, right? And that's having these hard conversations of, will this essentially be my competitor? Absolutely. So that's okay, right? It's okay. We have to be able to say like, you know what? I love it. Let's all build together. We can build the same thing and we can build it better or we can work together, right? That's even better. This is the Navy right here. We can keep going, right? So yeah, I'm just gonna end it with that. Let the grants program allow you to put the decentralized future in all of our hands. Thank you guys. Thank you.