 Everyone welcome to DevCon again and welcome back to DevCon for many people. My name is Aya Miyaguchi from the Ethereum Foundation and I'm here to talk about executing with subtraction in the infinite garden. So this DevCon feels very special for everyone. First it's been a long time, it's been three years since the last DevCon and second the merge just happened like you saw and merge is very special not only because of the technical advancement made to the protocol but also because of how this giant project was executed by a decentralized ecosystem. I share the vision of infinite garden last year, the vision of Ethereum to stay full of infinite players growing as organically as possible to maintain the soul of Ethereum. The merge was a great example. Those who worked on the merge are definitely infinite players. They didn't do it for themselves to win. The work will let everyone to join at different layers more easily and the work is the great example to show how a game was played to continue the play not for someone to win. So what has been the role of the Ethereum Foundation in this garden? How have we been making decisions and taking actions to support people to play infinite games instead of finite? To answer this question for you or for myself, I go back to this word subtraction. This is one of the three guiding principles of the Ethereum Foundation. We shared this in the EF report earlier this year, long-term thinking, stewardship of values and subtraction. And if any of you remember, I spoke about subtraction at DevCon plug four years ago. Time has passed and I've been frequently asked about subtraction recently and I'm never a fan of talking about ideas before acting on it. Where I grew up in Japan, we have this word called hugen jikko, which literally means shut up and do the work. But today I feel ready to talk about it a little bit more because we have acted on it. We have acted on it since then, since the time that I spoke about it in plug. It has become our key principle and in fact, it is also our underlying strategy for us to make decisions and take actions. And the more I think about how subtraction is important to the Ethereum Foundation, the more I feel that subtraction is best for Ethereum and that this can be also applied by others. So today I'm here to reintroduce subtraction with the story of how the idea was born and sharing some examples with the hope for this to be your inspiration. So how it began. When I joined the Ethereum Foundation, to be honest, EF was not really an organization or, okay, Hudson is laughing. It was more like a collection of Dev and researchers doing different projects. There was not even a finance team, nor a grant team. And there was no system to collaborate within the Ethereum Foundation very well. And so, however, the decentralized ecosystem was pretty already, pretty big already. So naturally, waves of pleasure were slown at EF when my participation to the Ethereum Foundation as executive director was announced. During my early time, people gave me different ideas and requests. One idea that was suggested to hire all the best talents in the world to the EF. Another idea is to hire CTO of Ethereum or Chief Strategy Officer of Ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation. Three ideas for me to build the EF empire. And that wasn't technically impossible because the price of Ether was already decent. And it is important to mention these ideas were not seen as crazy ideas. If you are a tech startup or an online blockchain, it is pretty normal to do this. Why is it normal? Tendency. It is because our brains are trained to add. Let me give you a test. When you're asked to fix this bubbly unstable Lego glitch, and I say I give you five seconds, what would you do? Did you think of this? So there was an actual study about this Lego glitch. And I also tested with some people this week. Most people think about adding two blocks in the bottom left. Especially when you see more Lego blocks in front of you. So when you are given more resources, it is more natural to add and spend more without thinking about the option to subtract. Another example, our DEF CON team has the IP process where community people can suggest improvements for DEF CON and that the team has received about 50 requests so far. Among all of those requests, no one has suggested to subtract something from DEF CON. So going back to my ideas, with this natural human tendency, I can argue that in fact almost no one gave me the other options than adding more. It looks like there was only one path to take. Luckily my brain was less ingenious to add because of my backland. And I was able to see two paths to take. One is to road to add to build the empire. The other is to subtract. Standing in front of the fork, I intuitively thought following the path to add was long and decided to go to the other way. From there, subtraction became my philosophy to build our team. And like I said, it has also become our underlying strategy to achieve our mission. The mission to support the Ethereum ecosystem, the infinite garden. To support the entire Ethereum ecosystem as a whole, not just specific projects. With subtraction, EF shifted its law to support the entire ecosystem which led to the ecosystem support program ESP and the other grant work. We prioritized boosting external groups as much as we can. It's also led to third party allocations to empower other organizations to give grants like us. Bitcoin, CLR fund, protocol, give up malloc for example. And it is always important to go back to why. Why do we subtract? The ultimate reason is like I said, because subtraction is best for Ethereum. Subtraction is best for Ethereum and in fact I believe it is critical for Ethereum's decentralization. Best part of Ethereum is that it is decentralized. And because of this, the ecosystem has unique challenges. And I see subtraction as a strategy to achieve two main goals. The goals that are important to tackle the unique challenges of this decentralized ecosystem. And here are two goals. The first goal is to subtract to seek the right balance. Building an EF empire and solving all the problems ourselves might have made ourselves look good for the short term. But that would have discouraged others to feel that this ecosystem is for everyone to build. And the EF could also have become one single point of failure. If we kept adding, the ecosystem would rely on the EF forever. And it is not just about also EF, gaps and imbalances happen naturally in the decentralized ecosystem. And especially when everyone is trying to add. Second goal is to subtract to focus on what is most important. Ethereum has become the largest community in the blockchain industry. And it is becoming one of the largest open source communities. There are just too many things and improvements to make. We need to focus on things that only EF can do and the things that others wouldn't do. And that are also important. And I like keep asking why do we think subtraction is best for Ethereum? At the end of the day, we believe in Ethereum. We believe Ethereum can change the world. We believe Ethereum's potential is too great to be predicted. We believe Ethereum's potential is too great for any single organization to own. So there are many examples, but I'd like to share a few of how EF executed with subtraction today. And keep in mind the why's that I just explained balance and focus. Does anyone remember Ethereum.org website in 2018 or earlier than that? I got this thanks to Internet Archive. So the website used to be about the project within the EF. For example, it suggested you to download a wallet that the team in EF was building. And all the guidance and instructions were made by the EF people. In the bottom, it also showed how EF is the main team. So restructuring and redesigning this website, Ethereum.org, started in 2018. It took a while to prepare, but the idea is to separate Ethereum.org as public good of Ethereum. And it is about Ethereum in the community, not about the Ethereum Foundation. Now EF still supports the server and the team who are building it, but the content and process is all open source and made by community people's proposal. There are roughly about 950 active contributors for the content. I hope they are here today. And another example of balance is regional diversity. Ethereum is still Western oriented, unfortunately, and the more information is out there in English and more communities have developed in English-speaking countries, despite the fact that there are a lot of opportunities in places like Latin America or Asia, for example. This is why we chose Bogota and Latin America for DevCon and have been supporting teams and individuals in the region for them to build their own communities through education and events and other activities. The next billion initiative is also for the balance-seeking. Two shares of the babies born today are from developing or emerging economies. There are the next billion users or the builders of Ethereum. We must include them and we have to start now. We also invited 50 scholars to DevCon who have potential to be the next changemakers. They're also here today. And going back to Ethereum.org, the website now has 48 languages that are supported by 5,000 volunteer community members all over the world. They are translating the content every day. Thank you to those people. So when we are supporting the project run by a team, we're not really looking at the gloss of that single team. We are looking at what the gloss can do to the entire ecosystem in the long run. We want to encourage open participation and open competition because that would benefit the entire ecosystem for the long run. For example, the client community has not been diversified enough. And even though GAS is from the EF, the team GAS themselves see that as a problem. Client incentive program was announced at the end of last year as an effort to incentivize and diversify clients. Each client received 4,608 ether to operate on the mainnet. There are many things that have been born from the EF. The team in the ANS was a project Nick Johnson started at the Ethereum Foundation. We suggested that they graduate from the EF back in 2018 and with the help of Virgil, who is not here today. But they understood the importance of this project becoming independent for the long run. We supported initial costs and some legal work. And now, I don't even have to say they are one of the most successful applications, as you all know. You may know HardHart from NOMIC, they are from Argentina. It was one of the major things that EF supported for the focus on the developer experience. Which back then was something that only EF could do. And as you know, it has become also a very successful project. From there, NOMIC decided to become a foundation to be able to support things in the DEVEX domain. And XeroxPark, who is the team that we also support, has been doing the research of Xeronar's Bluf and also support the applications of ZK, who also made the decision to become a foundation. So these are great examples of how our sub-flexion is creating more space for others to participate and then they also subtract for others. So, EF may be in a unique position in the system and EF could not have been able to start with subtraction if there was nothing to subtract from. But I do not think subtraction only matters for EF or only for non-profit organizations. Since I believe Infinite Garden is for everyone, by everyone, there is always a chance for everyone to use this philosophy. For your guidance, I will share the myth and about subtraction and key things to remember. First, subtraction requires high standard and real execution. So the biggest myth about subtraction is that you should do less. You know, it aims to subtract power but not the amount of work or amount of effort. In fact, it certainly requires more work to do. When I subtract my power, I can just make people do things and I have to explain and convince others to feel that they should act in one way. That requires education, communication and more research. If you have been any part of the merge, you understand better than others how it requires more work to do a project doing it in a decentralized way, subtracting your power, not being a boss than doing it in a centralized way using centralized power. I also mentioned how human brains are used to adding. That means also the subtraction is harder to recognize. There has been studies to prove people tend to fail to recognize when something is subtracted compared to when something is added. So if the purpose of your work is to be recognized, choosing subtraction makes it harder to achieve that. Your motivation needs to be something else other than being recognized. Subtraction also does not fall for the best interest of just one person or a team. For example, your team may have investors who are interested in the gloss of your team or the profit they can make out of it. Even without that, people tend to want to please those who are in front of them for the short term. So when you subtract, you are doing it for the whole ecosystem, which would benefit yourself in the long term. Subtraction always comes with long term thinking. So now you might think, oh, subtraction sounds very hard. It is hard. I'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you to the people at the Ethereum Foundation working with me with this principle because their work is very hard and often thank us. But I also want to share the positive sides of this to clarify. First, you should know that you can add with the subtraction philosophy. EF did add things. For example, we added ESB. And when we think about who to give grants and how to do that, we first think about what problems Ethereum has today. And after that, instead of thinking about how can we solve those problems, we ask how can communities solve these problems and how can we help them? So yes, we can add, but the important thing is for us to ask this question before adding. And subtraction can be actually exciting. Subtraction makes space for others. Making an open space for others to join is truly one of the main reasons that Ethereum attracts so many people. Yes, it helps to have more people to secure the network, but isn't it just fun to work with more people? NAMIC and Derek Spark, I mentioned, when they decided to create a foundation, they didn't just do it to be nice. They're nice, but that's not the only reason. But both of them told me that it is just fun to be able to work with others, empower others toward the same goal. So there's just this undeniable excitement to be able to empower and see others grow. And we tend to think if we subtract power and empower others, the same amount of power will be split into the number of people you empower. That is not true. Games in the infinite garden is not a zelosome game. EF subtracts so you can add, and when you grow and learn, the mastery will let other new players to add and grow there. With this mastery and growth, the energy in total is exponentially growing. This means there's no limit of energy we can have in this growing garden. EF used to be almost equal to the entire Ethereum ecosystem, but not only EF has become just a small part of it, the entire size of the ecosystem has grown so much. And Ethereum is lucky now that this garden keeps growing with diverse teams and projects thriving and coexisting just like nature has potential for infinite growth. To conclude my talk, if you feel a little bit inspired, ask those questions. Do I need better balance? Do I need better focus? And if the answer is yes, maybe you can look for things to supply in your work or even in your life. You may have to wait for the best timing or also think about other trade-offs, but the important thing is to know subtraction is an option for everyone. And you might be surprised how that would expand your opportunities. Thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about subtraction or infinite garden, you can go to ethereum.foundation. Thank you very much.