 Good morning. I'm Tim Beko, and I work with the protocol support team of the Ethereum Foundation I'm here today to talk about the people and the teams who helped transition Ethereum from proof of work to prove a stake I'm but before I get started I just want to take a minute to explain what protocol sport is because it's like the first time we use this and When I told my family I was joining the EF's protocol support team They said it kind of sounded like Ethereum's call center or like people would call if like their transaction is stuck Or like they can't run their node and and that's that's actually not what we do So the main thing your team does is we help coordinate and facilitate network upgrades to Ethereum But beyond that we also spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we can better Align the community across the people working on layer one all of the infrastructure and teams around them and the people building applications on Ethereum Another thing to spend a lot of time on is figuring out how can we onboard and retain people to contribute to Ethereum? There's a few things we do on that front most recently We announced the Ethereum protocol fellowship, which is something where folks who want to come and work on the Ethereum protocol can do so for a couple months and Hopefully then find a job full-time working in the space Another thing we've done is we've helped launch protocol guild Which is an on-chain organization that helps thousand individuals and anyone who wants to contribute to fund protocol contributors directly And lastly, we spent a lot of time doing like weird little mementos and things for the community when there's big milestones that happen Whether these are things like the 1559 NFTs at a merge manual that just went out We try and think about like how can we Like memorialize all these big things both for the community and for all the people who worked on it I'm yeah, so that's what we do a process support, but that's not the main thing. I want to talk about The main topic of today is basically the what I've called like the heroes of the merge all of the people all of the teams who helped get a theorem the proof of stake and Obviously, there's way too many people for me to go over in just a short talk And but at least there's a couple core buckets that are worth highlighting The first is everyone involved on the research side it took many many many years of research and Dead ends and new specs to come up with not only a specification for the entire beacon chain and proof of stake But as well as the transition The EF research team was obviously a big part of that but they weren't alone and there were other teams such as TXRX Quilt who played a major role in this Aside from from these the next kind of logical one is all of the consensus layer teams They're the people who write the software that powers the beacon chain and literally run proofs runs proof of stake So these are teams like lighthouse, Nimbus, Prism, Teiku and Lodestar And obviously they have all their counterparts on the execution layer So all of the people who wrote the software to run a theorem on proof of work and that still manages basically the EVM Transaction Ethereum states and all of that These are teams like Basu, like Geth, like Nethermine and Aragon And last but not least The merge was a massive massive testing effort There's not like a single team or even a single project that we can kind of list and encapsulate all of that So I just want to give a shout out to everyone who's worked on all of the testing efforts Whether this is Hive, whether this is all the infrastructure to set up shadow forks and test client combinations before going live Whether these are the reference tests that Kylian teams kind of implement against folks who works on the specification On the consensus layer side who worked on EIPs and everyone who worked on the security side as well Including the bug grantee program. So I'd ask everyone to please give a massive round of applause to all of these teams All of these individuals who moved Ethereum to proof of stake As we were getting closer to the merge this summer I was trying to think like can we do something that will stay around with all these people After DevCon is over, you know to kind of highlight this contribution Um, and it was a bit weird to find the right thing So I spent a bunch of time talking with different client team leads people in the EF people in the community Asking them like, you know, what could we do for like all the folks who worked on this? Um, and I had a neat conversation with Ben from the Techoo team And so he was telling me like all of the people on his team Often end up not being able to go to ETH conferences because they're kind of so in the weeds working on their stuff That they literally forget about tickets going live They can't find one and then they show up and they can't get in the conference for the protocol They literally rebuild and it's not like they don't want to pay for it or anything It's just like they completely miss it and then they're like stuck at a door for the theorem conference Um, so it seemed like a solvable problem like something we could we could do to make their lives easier Um, and so I spent some time talking to some folks figuring out the best approach for this And I'm really I'm really happy with what he came up with so I'm excited to announce what we've called the merge or pass So this is basically a soulbound token that we're gonna be giving to everyone who's contributed to the merge That'll guarantee them access to all of the top of theorem conferences for the next few years Yeah, thanks Thank and one thing that's neat about this, you know, because this all be on chain It'll be public so anyone in the community can obviously extend it and build on it But I'm really excited today to say, you know, the first partners we have for this are etc in global dev con at con I've all agreed to honor this for the next several years So can I please get a round of applause for all of these partners? Thank you