 Hi everyone, thank you again for being here with us. And it's really my pleasure to introduce you all, Vitalik Buterin. Thank you, Vitalik, for joining us here for this fireside chat. Thank you, Brian, it's great to be here. So we first met in 2015 in San Francisco on your original road show for the Ethereum ICO. And I was really impressed by the vision for the Ethereum ecosystem. And it's one of my greatest regrets in life, not having jumped in with a small bit of investment that day. I admit, I was completely daunted by the prospect of what you were building, and I didn't think it was possible. So when we met a year later in Shanghai, it was clear that I was mostly wrong. And in my new role at Hyperledger, I was intent on making sure that we didn't second guess this community being built, even while Hyperledger was set to really explore the more permissioned side of the blockchain space. These days, I like to think that, well, we're more full spectrum at Hyperledger with Hyperledger Bezu and other efforts that bridge these two worlds. You know, so what we're here to do is talk about the future of Ethereum and how it relates to this thing called the enterprise. But I wanna start on these early days. So let me ask, even before Ethereum kicked off, you participated in the early days, in the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem and the Bitcoin code base. What was it about those early days of that open source community around Bitcoin that made it so accessible to a young Vitalik? And I think one of the fascinating things about the Bitcoin community early on is just how it managed to extract and bring together many very different kinds of people, right? Because crypto as a whole is itself a very multidisciplinary thing, right? You have the cryptography, you have the math, you have the economics, you have the monetary theory, you have the social and political implications, you have businesses trying to do things with it. And there are definitely many different people, like even back in the community in 2011 that just came at it from all of these different perspectives, right? And sometimes the perspectives were very different and there was even some healthy and vigorous debate on the Bitcoin forums back in 2011. This was back before they were even called Bitcoin talk. And I was interested in a lot of things at the time, like I've always been interested in math. I've been interested in cryptography, I was interested in economics as well. So I'm interested in, I guess, the bigger questions of life and the human civilization. So the Bitcoin community definitely had some of all of that and it was just a great forum to just talk with other people that had all of these different and interesting ideas. And then also there was this just vibrant community of people that was just willing to come in and help and build whatever needed to be built, right? Like, you know, we needed to build a Bitcoin client and there was this community of course developers that was working on and improving the client. We needed to build Bitcoin wallets. People came in and just made wallets and you know, you needed a way for people to see what's going on in the blockchain, people just came in and built block explorers. So there was this great kind of community collaborative feeling there at the time, which I definitely really like. And that's definitely one of the things that I definitely really value and care about really trying to support in Ethereum as well. Yeah, well, sometimes when we in the open source community talk about the community and about how things work, we can sometimes, sometimes I'm guilty of making it sound like spontaneous combustion, you know, like these things just happened and we didn't know why or how. But when you think about the Ethereum ecosystem now and like the role that the foundation is playing and others, are there specific things like you think about or that they think about in terms of helping foster the right kind of community around, especially the development, the open source community around the development of Ethereum? Hmm, I think having a good open source community, definitely, like there's a lot of different ingredients that I think you need to get right. Like one of them is just that, like the ecosystem needs to be one that's kind of open and welcoming and like if someone wants to come in and contribute, they actually can go and do that. Like it's definitely easy to just even accidentally fail at that and like accidentally just gonna end up either driving away contributors when you don't need to or just like not making it clear that there's things where people just can go in and participate. Also, I think Ethereum has been kind of successful just because of what it is, right? Like it's not a kind of finite bounded system in the sense of just here's one thing that you can do with it and like this is money or this is a domain name system or like this is one thing. It's an open platform and people can just go into and like build their own interesting and amazing things. And just like having that space is also, I think, important for having an ecosystem that developers are excited about. Also, I think there's just like, you do have to get the economics, right? And this is one of the challenges of this community, right? Like especially with crypto that like on the one hand, well, like I think like the biggest difference I think between crypto projects and the ecosystem and say the open source ecosystem of the early 2000s is that like there's money involved and there is like a significant amount of money that I've got of floating around. You know, you got the coins and the coins go up and then the coins go down and then there's new coins and there's new coins going up and down. And on the one hand, like this needs that you actually have an opportunity to like try to even compensate people who are doing really important work, which I think is important, right? Like you can rely on volunteers for some things. You can rely on volunteers for smaller projects, but the challenge with kind of just relying on volunteers and if going forever is that like first of all, you're not going to necessarily attract enough people. And also like if you have this ecosystem where like some people are contributing for free but then other people are making millions off of it, like that just feels very unfair to people, right? And like that is a legitimate challenge of the crypto space as well, right? That like sometimes you do have this imbalance and like you make this one valuable tool and like, okay, maybe you can get a grant but then you make this other thing where like you've come up with a way to stick a coin in the middle of it and you know, you get like $25 million of VC investment flying at you. And like that's an imbalance and we've definitely tried to do our best to address that imbalance and like at the same time as trying to prevent like the Ethereum Foundation itself from sort of being an overly dominant pull in the ecosystem. So that's also a challenge. And other important challenge is just like appealing to the kind of diverse community. Like, you know, not everyone that might want to contribute speech-singlish that's probably the most obvious example. And like just making, you know, our content documentation, everything's like accessible and a different language is trying to actually engage with all the local communities as something that we've valued and we've tried to do for a long time as well. Cool. Like so many different pressures at play and compared to like the idyllic early days of Apache or Linux or something like that it sometimes feels like these pressures can really create such an intense kind of pressure cooker environment. Well, some of those pressures increasingly feel like they might be coming from people trying to adopt these technologies for enterprise uses. You know, I think of the enterprise I think of Star Trek or whatever is kind of this almost, you know, impossibly big or menacing thing. But really some of these are for very prosaic use cases, right, for settlement systems, for regulatory reporting or auditing, that sort of thing. How much are those pressures on the backs of the core Ethereum developers? How much are you thinking about this? You know, especially with the design for Ethereum too were these kinds of use cases and needing to support those use cases on your minds as you're designing the F2 design. Yeah, and I think like enterprise users of blockchain are definitely really important. And I think like the biggest way in which ETH2 in particular can help enterprises is just having more scalability, right? That's because, you know, right now transaction fees are high. And one of the challenges with the transaction fees being high is that like first of all, it just prices out users but like it prices out different kinds of users differently, right? Like it, I think the people who get priced out first often are just like, you know, the people that wants to use the blockchain for like doing based on non-financial things like whether it's, you know, supply chain tracking or even things like ENS or like just about everything that's not moving high value crypto tokens around. And so when the fees go up to $10, like, you know, all that's left is like, well, there's some high value domains and then there's like a lot of moving crypto tokens around and our vision in Ethereum has always been to be this platform that's open to all of these different applications where, you know, the limit is just your creativity but if in practice, just the economics make it so it's only viable to do a few things then in some ways that's like a big limitation on how much of our mission we can actually accomplish. So, you know, the dream of scalability, right? As you know, we have rollups and rollups already exist for some applications and now general purpose rollups are coming very soon, right? Like Arbitrum recently released their thing on mainnet and then Optimism has a kind of limited rollout on mainnet that they've been totally expanding over time. ZK sync has been making great progress, right? And at the same time, we've been working on charting which kind of improves the base layer itself so that at the base layer, you have something like a hundred times more scalability, right? So charting times 100, rollup times 100, the two multiply times 10,000 and like the hope is that you can simultaneously like make the platform able to handle more users and like reduce transaction fees, right? And so, you know, it's like supply and demand, right? You have like more supply and so, you know, you don't have like all of these users kind of bidding against each other so hard. So if transaction fees can go down then, you know, we're hoping by a factor of a hundred but we'll see, then that like opens the door for all of these other applications again. And like, there are a lot of people, you know, even in enterprise that even wants to use the public chain, right? Like there's, you know, like EY and like the nightfall, I think it was there's like the baseline protocol. There's all of these amazing groups trying to like do a public chain based enterprise things. And again, I get like, I definitely believe in kind of the public chain, I guess, because like I don't even know what wants to see a future where, you know, like enterprise and kind of, you know, the people have to be these kind of two different polls that are either different universes or kind of you as opposing each other. Like, you know, we should have an ecosystem where, you know, the enterprises and everyone, they can just all live together. And the ecosystems can kind of plug into each other and benefit each other much more. And the, but the challenge is that, you know, if you want anyone to be building on the public chain, then, you know, the transaction fees have to go down and then also privacy issues have to be solved. And that's like the other benefit, right? Like you have all of these like very diverse, different groups, like just building and working on this technology and like everyone can just use each other stuff ideally, right? So I'm optimistic about that future. Good. And you mean it isn't as easy as just increasing the block size by 10x? No, no, Elon said it was. So I thought that was that, that was the case. And obviously one of the big changes coming up in Ethereum 2 is the move from proof of work to proof of stake, which a lot of people are concerned about the energy consumption of main net of cryptocurrencies in general, you know, how much was the environmental concerns on your mind as you were designing 2.0 is the move largely driven by that or were there other motivations? And I think it's definitely a major reason why people wants to move over. I think like the consequences of, you know, the amount of like energy and even just stuff that proof of work says those consume are pretty significant, right? Like, and people often talk about, you know, the energy waste aspect, but then there's also like, first of all, you know, even if you're using amazing solar power, you know, you're still, which, you know, there's not everyone else. Like you're still taking away energy that could be used by other people and like, you know, we've seen like in Iran, they're the government's been angry because of like electricity being displaced for political villages and so forth. And then there's hardware and hardware hasn't sold environmental costs. So going from that to a consensus bottle where the economics are fully virtualized, which is, you know, proof of stake is, right? Like we've even talked about like proof of stake validators just being kind of like virtual miners, right? I know they're like miners, except, you know, it's all kind of digital and just simulated by the system and that just like, completely solves all of these problems. So, you know, we don't even have to argue about them and we don't have to just like, get into these lengthy debates of like, you know, who's using coal and who's using solar and like, is the solar actually solar and all of this stuff. Like, no, just like, make a system where, you know, the resource requirements as a whole are just more than a thousand times lower. Like that's definitely, I think it's definitely a big motivation for us. And obviously, of course, at the same time, there is kind of the more selfish factor, which is that if you reduce, like the fact that you need so much electricity and like hardware, like you also need to pay for that stuff and to pay for that stuff, you just have to like print a huge number of coins and that you got like, you know, it does risk the economic sustainability of the system. That's kind of the, you have to choose between, you know, either the supply of coins, just kind of continuing to go up nonstop or potentially risking security going down to very low levels. And like, once again, you know, it's a proof thing we don't have that trade off. So I think, you know, it's good for the Ethereum community, good for the users, good for the world. It's always great when things wind up that way. Yeah, that's great. And just as a wrap up question, what is the one technology you think in the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole that you're most excited about when it, when you think about the needs of enterprises or the needs of getting this kind of infrastructure adopted by the mainstream of society? What kind of infrastructure? I think like some of the higher level stuff that I'm most concerned about. So I think like we've talked about privacy and I've talked about it a lot previously as well. And it's definitely important, right? Like, you know, you don't want Twitter for your bank account, right? And the nice thing about like combining blockchains and cryptography is that you have a lot of room to just like make all of these like different compromises between them, you know, privacy and what your other goals are. And you can kind of much more freely define like what it is you're actually getting. And at the same time, you know, the blockchain has this verifiability and auditability. So, you know, if you like need like, if you want need like whether for an audit or investigation or something like proof that, you know, here's things that happened before and like, look, I did everything the way I was supposed to be doing like you can and you can just kind of selectively reveal whatever information you want, right? Like, so there's a great future for like improving privacy. Security I think is also important, right? Like, I still remember and frequently link back to the Bitcoin magazine article I wrote in 2013. This was like a Bitcoin wallet security. And there are these kind of nightmare stories of, you know, a guy has a half a million dollars of Bitcoin and then he wakes up and then he doesn't have half a million dollars of Bitcoin. What happens? I don't think we know yet. But, you know, you can have someone's computer, someone's computer can get lost. If you write the words down on a piece of paper, someone can steal the piece of paper, the piece of paper can get lost. You know, there's just all of these things that can happen. And like, I've talked about ideas, like I've talked about things like multi-sake, wallets and social recovery wallets and all of these things to try to like reduce the risk that things like that happen and like actually make like cryptographic keys or at least kind of blockchain wallets a more viable way of like authenticating a person. But, you know, it's, this is, you know, like I feel like we've seen a fairly big improvements over the last three years as well, right? And I feel like, you know, we're gonna continue to see improvements in the future. So, you know, once again, like it's both, like for me a big concern and a worry, but it's also something that I'm very excited about seeing fixed because I know it is gonna be fixed. Yeah. Thank you so much, Vitalik. I mean, I'm reminded of the quote from Mahavagandhi, which is, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win. And I see this pattern repeated, whether it's the early days of the internet, people were concerned, we can't use it for commercial purposes because it's this research thing and it's unreliable. Then they said that about open source software. I, you know, there's that transition point in like the late 90s where it's like, okay, maybe we can use this for enterprises. And I think that's a similar transition point we're at when it comes to thinking about the full spectrum of blockchain technologies. And I think the Ethereum ecosystem is playing a key role in that transition. So thank you so much for your time and looking forward to talking with you again soon. No, thank you, Brian. And thank you for just all the great work you've been doing with our Prologer. Very sweet. Thanks.