 Good evening, everybody. I'm Piper Merriam. I'm here to tell you a story. Those that know me best know this about me. I have a deep love of storytelling. You see, stories are everything. They're the glue that hold together this thing that we call reality. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, about what it all means. At this very moment there are hundreds and hundreds of stories colliding and competing and passing clean through one another. Without either protagonist being the slightest bit aware of their insignificance. But I digress. I promised you a story, didn't I? The characters in this story are messy. They live in places where the water isn't safe to drink. Their dreams of children are met with miscarriages and disappointment. Their fathers drink themselves to death. Their partners toss them aside with indifference. Their daughters become sons. Their governments charge them with treason. Their brains betray them with depression and panic attacks and crippling social anxiety. The character that I play spends more time and pieces these days than he's comfortable with. His marriage failed this year. His windfall turned into tax liens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. He has self-destructive coping mechanisms. He turned 40 this year. He goes to a lot of therapy. Struggles to keep showing up to work and lead when the truth is that he feels lost most of the time. Struggling to keep things compartmentalized and walled off and separate. This is fine, he says, as the pieces of his life fall to pieces in the ground around him. I'm fine, he says, when all he can hear is the rattling of the bars as the feelings fight to be let free. It's fine, he says, as the community that loves him props him up day after day. But fine or not, there's a story to be told here. And the story of cryptocurrency is not mine. It doesn't belong to any of us. But it's one that I've had the honor to help write. It's a story written in math and human experience, straddling the predictable and reliable world of numbers. And the messy reality that I've been over-sharing with you today. And in this story, at least the part that I'm telling, I am a superhero. I feel uncomfortable and self-conscious saying those words, how arrogant. But for real, the things I get to do and the stuff that I get to work on, the things that we get to work on, it's truly astounding when you step back and look at it. And then step back again, trillions of dollars sloshing around, 14-something million ether staked, blah, blah, blah, I think I have to say, NFTs. I lied, I'm not really here to tell you a story, I am here to tell you about stories. When I said that stories are everything, I meant it. Stories propel us through our day-to-day. They're the chalk marks on the floor telling us where we came from in this labyrinth that we call life, and my job requires excellent storytelling. It's a craft I take with the utmost responsibility. The stories I tell have to be compelling and true and entertaining. There are a myriad of people who deserve an enormous amount of credit for coaxing Ethereum into existence. I hesitate to draw such focused attention to a single individual, but we do love our heroes. We might not be here today without the story that Vitalik told us. So many people out there deal in these things called ideas, and idea merchants need not apply. Ideas are thin things, electricity surpassing some minimum threshold across a path of neurons in your mind. Affemeral things, but stories, stories have staying power. They are sticky things, infectious things. Ideas are nothing without a story to carry them, and stories are the incantations that we magicians use to summon ideas into existence out of thin air. A few years ago I decided to tell a story. I called it the Core Developer Apprenticeship Program, and I told a story about what some people call a job, a career. I don't think those are exactly the right words. Identity, mission, purpose. Okay, it's a job, but it's a really cool job. I told them a story about getting paid to build what has the potential to be the most important tool humanity has ever imagined, and they believed me. They showed up in droves, hundreds and hundreds of them, hundreds and hundreds of messy people with messy lives. They showed up eager and ready to learn, what do you have to teach us, Piper? Absolutely nothing. This is not how it works. Go figure it out for yourself. No, there is not a roadmap. No, there is not any curriculum. No, we have not called it serenity for a long time. No, I do not know how zero knowledge proofs actually work. But they did it. Not all of them, but enough. Danny and I like to say that the doors are all unlocked and hilariously wide open, and I think a lot of people have trouble believing us. But all you have to do is look. These people walked through those doors one after another. Out of the rat race, away from OKRs and conversion funnels, away from larger salaries and stabler jobs, and away from the bullshit that I never ever want to go back to. Stories are power, and power that I have learned how to wield. Unwieldy things that can slip through your fingers, things that can burn you when held too tightly or too close. I almost drowned a few years back. I told everybody a story about a new Ethereum client that would be lightweight, line after line of code, months turned into years. The thing grew and metastasized. Wasn't this thing supposed to be lightweight? I watched as it pulls me deeper, water filling my lungs, I can't let go. My precious story that wasn't a lie, but would never become true. Of all of the things I was saved by a story about a monkey and a pedestal and dreams of the moon, so much time wasted and money to learn that I was telling the wrong story, why do we have such a hard time letting go of the things that no longer serve us? A few years ago I told another story that's called Stateless Ethereum. An epic journey fraught with peril, a story filled with swaths of blank pages yet to be written, a story with a chaotic beginning and a fairytale ending and nothing but empty space between. A story that some of you seem to have believed was worth telling and that you continue to tell and that is still being written. It tells us stories about infinities and games. Danny told us a story about a bright beacon on the path towards a yet to be realized dream. Alexi told us stories about how we're doing it all wrong and he's not entirely wrong. Parity told us stories of make-believe and fantasy that all turned out to be too good to be true. Nick tells us stories about the names of things and Vitalik tells us story after story after story. And today you've listened to me say the word story 30 times or so without necessarily having a clear point to be made. What story are you going to tell? I did a talk like this a few dev cons back on the subject of depression. My hope was to help normalize some of the stigma around mental health issues that are prevalent in our industry and often invisible and that I have personally struggled with. My goal this year was to do something similar for the more broad topic of the messy parts of our lives. There is immense social pressure to present a very well manicured version of yourself. Fairy tales make for good bedtime stories, but when we tell them about our own lives we deprive other people of the opportunity to really get to know us. I'm done with telling fairy tales. It's easy to feel like we are alone when everyone around us looks so well put together. My life is messy. I suspect some of you have your own messes. You at least don't have to hide them from me.