Hey, Carter.
Welcome. This is a very special version of our chat. We usually have one of these at least a year. And one thing that's different from my perspective is that there's a lot less t-shirts and a lot more suits in the room. I know I'm having trouble collecting t-shirts at different conferences. I'm running low.
And one of the things that both of us have seen Ethereum from the perspective of is developers and a lot of that has been just let's build the infrastructure. Let's make sure we can support what we think is needed in the space or how we can replace anywhere from existing systems or just add more efficiencies. And the thing I'm kind of curious about at first is we're nearing 12 years in this space, 10 years of just Ethereum fully being on mainnet. And I wonder from your perspective, do you feel like this is the regular pace of things or did you expect things to get here much sooner and was 2026 was the year that we needed these things or certain things had to have happen for us to get here? How do you think about are we on time or on track or off track?
So I think when in the early days when we were thinking about how long this might take to really kick in, some optimistic of us felt, hey, this stuff is so cool. Of course people are going to eat it up right away. And that was true and that was a small subset of the population. But it does take a long time for technologies to diffuse into the world. AI is remarkable. It's just so powerful that it's the fastest adoption curve to a billion users I think in history. There are some social media things that took a few years before that. But I guess the question to ask is why should people care about this technology for it to actually gain traction? So it's easy to see why crypto nerds would care. We like consensus algorithms and tokenization and things like that. It was easy to see why certain DeFi nerds would care. So you've got finance people joining up with the crypto people and building really interesting things. It was easy to see why artists would care in control of their intellectual property and do fun things, trade fun things, buy fun things. But in terms of the rest of society, why should people care? So we've had wave after wave of innovation of these subsets, small subsets of the population who are really just building stuff and then kicking the tires on the stuff that they built. So we've been spending 12 years roughly building enabling technology for Ethereum and decentralized protocols to break into the mainstream. And so why should the world care? Why should governments care? Why should financial institutions care? Why should the general population care? It's essentially because the world is composed of platforms. There's Facebook, Instagram, I've been deplatformed from at least one or both. And you know, Twitter, etc. It's easy to get deplatformed from these platforms. AWS is a platform. You sort of need permission to run your stuff on that platform. The United States of America is a platform. Other nation states are platforms. You can get deplatformed from those institutions. And essentially the world has been top down command and control and platforms for thousands of years. And that works really well for building civilization. But it tends to not work out most of the time for 99% of the people in the civilization. So what we need are platforms from which we can't be deplatformed. We need a new form of trust rather than top-down command and control trust. And so Satoshi came along a bunch of years ago and invented decentralized trust. And Vitalik showed how we could use decentralized trust in a more expressive version of what Satoshi brought into the world. And so we're now at this point where we are scalable enough and we're going to get massively scalable very soon. We're usable enough. It's getting legal enough so that and there's a forcing function in the United States for financial institutions to be online 24/7/365 if they adapt or die.
If they can handle that. If the president is tweeting something mean at 2:30 in the morning on a Sunday and it might result in you needing to hedge or move your assets around. The retail brokerages and other actors in the space. So Hyperliquid is a forcing function for the whole financial world to get online. And so the people will now have to care because the world is getting increasingly complex and everything has moved online for quite a long time and now tokenization is going to move everything onchain as well.
There's a whole set of categories here that you kind of unlock that we get to talk about. I want to get to some of that, but it feels like one of the kind of themes here is that we kind of now have an alternate choice that wasn't necessarily there before and it's getting bigger and bigger that people actually are choosing the second option. And there you kind of have to force both sides to think about what does it mean to play anywhere from fairly to unfairly and just actually see if you can offer the same value prop really efficiently. And that's kind of where the Ethereum as a platform sort of argument comes in. I want to get to that especially kind of from the perspective of like how Ethereum the protocol is developing and just are we happy with the pace or things we would like to see. But to kind of zoom out a little bit, the thing I'm curious about is from your perspective, how do you think the Ethereum Foundation is evolving right now? There's been a lot of announcements around what their focus should be. We've seen some people talk about their departures to exploring new things. When you kind of read that as somebody who not only was part of that project at the beginning but also runs Consensys, what are your reactions and thoughts?
So rumors of the demise of the Ethereum Foundation are greatly exaggerated. They're understandable because there have been announcements that people are taking time off, that people are leaving the Ethereum Foundation and some people are taking time off. It's been a long slog and they want to clear their head. I don't think these people that are taking time off are leaving the Ethereum ecosystem, but a very small number are actually taking time off. So the Ethereum Foundation has a mandate to focus on cypherpunk ideals, and I think that's great. I think that's totally appropriate. So they're going to focus on the core components, and that's going to be a whole bunch of the core devs, researchers, etc. There is I think great respect and appreciation for the initiatives that Tomasz Stanczak brought in and there's been a lot of work to try to figure out how to preserve that great work but also set up the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum ecosystem properly. And so what I mean by that is that if you look at a lot of these sort of challenger decentralized protocols, they look more like slightly decentralized companies than a credibly neutral decentralized platform for the world to build on. So you often have a labs company and a foundation and the foundation's supposed to be slightly pure but they're under the same roof as the crypto bros who are doing the biz dev and they're paying people to land their application on their network and so there's not a lot of credible neutrality in those projects and in my opinion that's why our ecosystem was developed for Bitcoin and Ethereum to bring credible neutrality into the world.
Do you feel like that's at odds or creates a conflict when you have to maintain that but you also have to think about how do you satisfy customer demand and institutions here are saying hey we are used to XYZ or we would like to see these features but you're not even engaging with us or you're not talking or we don't know when this is going to be prioritized. How does that actually affect being neutral while still losing the customer to someone else?
So, there have been a bunch of things going on over the last few years at the Ethereum Foundation. And what's happening now is it's getting explicit about where certain things should be focused on. So, Ethereum Foundation focus on the core components. There's another group of Ethereum core developers that are organizing themselves in discussions with the Ethereum Foundation to focus more on platform like the coherent platform scalability usability. They might have discussions with DeFi developers to understand the forcing functions potentially. There's a second group and this group has been talking to somewhere around 200 different financial institutions and governments around the world. So they're going to be the legitimate, the authoritative sort of user interface to the platform or institutional education product manager for the platform.
So they're going to take any sort of queries, interest in getting something developed and this will be a nonprofit organization also but they'll be able to route information of educational seminars, certifications, they'll throw conferences probably so that group will announce itself at some point soon. Now there's another group that's been working with institutions, the institutional privacy task force. So they're also in the process of finding their right focus place. And so what we're looking at is instead of having conflicts of interest under one roof as other ecosystems do, we're going to really cleanly separate a couple of nonprofits from for-profits and we will think of all these organizations and I would include Consensys as one of these steward organizations and Sharplink and BMR, Ethereum Foundation, these other organizations. So, they're going to be a sort of decentralized stewards of Ethereum group.
Does that make coordination messier? Like, would you rather have everybody under the same mission and KPI versus...
I think maintaining credible neutrality. You can't build a platform that's supposed to be the credibly neutral application platform for the world if you don't have a credibly neutral foundation that's beyond reproach. And so it's not going to be that different in terms of how the protocol gets built because many other organizations already build the protocol. So the process will be exactly the same having a few core devs move into another group and with slightly different focuses. A, it gives them the ability to save money for the EF. They'll get funded in other ways. But also it'll have a different vibe. It'll bring in a different group of developers potentially who might not have been attracted to building the core components. So I think it's the right architecture.
That's awesome. And I guess we get to see that very soon in public on just kind of what the initiatives are and how they're working. I hope one other kind of question I'm curious about is in this world where you have specialized institutions coming in and primarily they're looking at it from the point of view of stable coins and just kind of how they can think about transfer of funds between anyone from different parties to entities. How do you think about the value accrual of Ethereum and just in this space like is it going to be the app layer again? Is it going to be the chain at the base layer? Are we still thinking about L2s coming into play or will be something else and it's just fee kind of base models of any inflow? What changes in that version of kind of how you think about ETH accrual?
Okay, so here's one take on it. This is my take. It may be shared by some people that I work with but value will accrue to all three of those layers, applications, layer twos, layer threes, not so much at layer three, and layer one definitely. So the ether token, in order for so Ethereum has always been focused on some future where it would become necessary, where the world would where it gets scalable enough and just ready for the world to make use of it. And I think we're there now. With an agentic human hybrid human machine economy coming online pretty quickly and with traditional finance starting to use our technology quite significantly or build on it and launch soon. And so building for the future meant that we pursued the rollup-centric roadmap that we seeded pricing power to the layer 2 so they could just establish themselves and flourish so that we could build enabling technology, so zero knowledge proof technology was built or accelerated simply because the layer 2 rollup-centric roadmap offered an opportunity for it to become the obvious dominant technology at layer 2. And so it's easy to see app chains doing well. Some layer 2, some general layer twos will do really well. And layer 1 is going to get very very busy. It's very cheap right now. But I anticipate that not just a lot of layer 2s but also private permissioned blockchain systems. So Daniela and John just spoke about the Besu client. So the Besu client, Consensys built that. It's our execution layer client. Teku is our consensus layer client. And we contributed it a long time ago to the Linux Foundation or Hyperledger Foundation back then. So that it could be the enterprise friendly version of Ethereum. And that's been remarkably successful. So most major financial institutions run Ethereum internally. Huge business. At Citibank Token Services that's on Besu. Janna talked about their collateralization app chain and you know BNY and many others make use of the technology. So our Linea team has built and also zkSync, Jordi Baylina and the Gnosis people have been building synchronous composability technology. So what you can do is you can have a bunch of layer 2 Linea networks for instance and even some private permissioned Besu networks that are enhanced by zero knowledge proof gadgets. And you can do zero knowledge proofs on each of these networks. And then you can aggregate those proofs in a block on say Linea mainnet or Ethereum mainnet. And you can create this atomic execution context.
A singular interface to everything.
You can unify in real time all these fragmented liquidity pools. And so to answer your question more directly there will be a lot of new networks, a lot of corpo chains that will be L2s or private permissioned networks. And if you're so Linea chains already burn ether and to the extent that we can cause that to proliferate we will and whether a Linea chain coordinates all that activity or is coordinated on mainnet, there will be a lot of ether required to coordinate a whole lot of transactions across a lot of different chains.
That's exciting. And I think I'm actually happy to hear that you don't think it's one particular place and you kind of do feel like it's a lot of places, but it still behaves like a funnel.
Yeah. So if layer 1 is sucking up too much value, you're going to get a whole bunch of app chains, right?
Exactly. This is kind of the efficient hypothesis of people kind of wanting to make sure that they're managing this whole infra. You kind of said something super interesting and actually we're going to talk about a lot of the general Ethereum feature, but one interesting thing that came out today was a new product launch MetaMask. I'd love for you to tell us about what just launched today and what made you bring that out as a product.
