Okay. Well, thank you so much for the lovely introduction, Star. So today, what I thought I would talk about is just a reminder that the technology has not stopped, right? And the technology has not matured. And there's actually some very important trends that are happening, especially in these particular five years, a lot of which are being really accelerated by AI, where AI is becoming at the same time the biggest opportunity and also the biggest risk. And it's worth understanding this, and I think it's also worth understanding some of the new properties that become possible once we start moving beyond just talking about blockchains and just talking about putting programmable value on top of blockchains, and also think about things like zero-knowledge proofs. Think about what if we can not just have programmable assets, but we can also have programmable data. So this is something that probably started with zero-knowledge proofs about 10 years ago. Who here has used Zcash? Okay, a few people. Who here has used any privacy protocol on Ethereum? Who here has used a ZK rollup? So still a few people right now. These technologies are, I am going to expect, rapidly going to become mature to the point where within two years, quite possibly, the majority of people will have used one of those things without even knowing it. So these are very, very modern forms of cryptography, and the thing that they let you do is they let you prove something about a piece of information that you have without revealing what that information is. So you can prove something about yourself, some asset that you have, some objects that you have is trustworthy, that it satisfies some property that you care about without revealing everything. So revealing information is not something that just happens automatically where you just have to just dump everything for the whole public to see just to participate.
Every bit of information that you reveal can be an intentional choice. And this is a topic that I think is going to become more and more important, especially in the age of AI, right? I think, you know, there's a lot that we gain from technology moving forward rapidly. One of the things that we often lose, for example, is privacy, right? So we have amazing AI agents that can help us think. If you use your AI agent, if you use Claude to think, Claude now has access to your thoughts. This is, for certain types of information, this is not something that you want. For some other types of information, it's not even something that you're legally allowed to give away, right? If you have anything involving attorney-client privilege, anything involving a non-disclosure agreement, it's not actually clear that it's even legal to use many mainstream AI products in that case, right? And this is just one of these examples, right? Like these technologies that are very quickly kind of intruding into every single corner of our lives in many different ways very quickly, right? The number of cameras inside of this room. If this was 10 years ago, it would probably be much less, right? But today, how many cameras might there be inside this room? Right? So, first of all, probably the number of cameras per person. I mean, I see each individual phone has gone up from having one to having three for some reason, like possibly other computers, possibly like 50 or 100 up there, like possibly more, like probably over a thousand right now, also like recording voice, also recording all kinds of aspects of the physical environment. So, and this is all from the data collection side, right? We could also think about things from the cybersecurity side, right? From the perspective of protecting your access to both your information and your assets, right? And I think we've seen already this year, you know, like we've seen AI start to actually become powerful at hacking into everything, right? You know, we've seen AI break out of sandboxes. We have seen AIs take down all kinds of websites. We've seen AIs discover bugs and exploits in all kinds of software. At the same time, the Ethereum blockchain has not gone down. I mean, Bitcoin also has not gone down. Lots of... And what's going to happen is that much better forms of security are going to become possible, right? And a big part of the reason why they're going to become possible is because AI will help each and every one of us do it, right? AI is already helping the Ethereum protocol discover bugs, implement very complicated forms of cryptography in a way that mathematically proves that it has the properties that it's supposed to have. AI is at this helping do the same kind of formal verification at the protocol layer, at the application layer, checking for safety of your coins, checking for privacy of your data, checking for all kinds of things. So these much higher levels of security that were not possible before will become possible, but at the same time they will become mandatory because anything that has any exploit in it, AI is going to find it. You know, GPT-7 is going to find it, Claude 7 is going to find it, DeepSeek 7 is going to find it. They're all going to find it, right? And what this basically means is that, you know, we're going through this very, very fascinating, a very challenging transition period, right? We're going through this period where we're already starting to see the way that it's possible to interact both with a blockchain and with other services on the internet and with AI and with the internet is changing very rapidly. So about a month ago, for the first time, I updated my ENS without going through an interface, and I did that basically by just asking an agent, by asking Qwen 3.8 locally to just come up with a script and write a script that updates my ENS hash. I did it. It took the agent about 5 minutes. Right? This is going to become normal. It is going to become normal to do complicated things with a blockchain without ever using a UI. Basically, I think AI is going to become the new UI in more and more cases. When AI is the new UI, this brings both benefits and risks. If you remember the Safe hack, this is one of the largest wallets. It was hacked last year. About $1.4 billion lost. What happened there was not an attack on the contract. It was not an attack on the code that's on the chain. What happened was an attack on the layer in between the chain and the user. Now, if AI is going to do more of our transactions, that entire layer disappears. You can basically... all of the problems that have to do with user interfaces, all of the concerns of are they secure enough? Is the server that you're re-downloading the interface from freshly every single time you download a page actually secure? If North Korea hacks the website at the exact time that you're accessing it, are they going to be able to take all your money? Like a lot of these things reduce, but at the same time AI brings in its own issues, right? AI brings in its own issues of making sure is the AI itself safe? Is the AI itself something that, you know, can get prompt injected by someone? Is the AI really properly understanding what it's doing with the chain? And so a lot of problems get fixed and a lot of new challenges also appear here at the same time, right? And I think for all of us, both for people working on this technology, for people building applications, and for people building things, there's both a lot of opportunity and a lot of need to really rethink every layer of how we're interacting with these systems, right? And the problems that I think we're seeing and that we're going to see more and more of in the blockchain world, they're not... the rest of the internet. The blockchain world gets them first. The reason why the blockchain world gets them first, I think, is pretty easy to see. The blockchain world has a lot of money, but whatever anything that is difficult today is going to become easy tomorrow. And so these are challenges that the whole internet is going to have to go through, and everything that you see happening in the blockchain world, like this is the front line. This is a very rapid and a very challenging transition that humanity just has to go through in terms of all of our capabilities, everything that we can do with digital technology improving at probably 10 times the rate that it has done in most of history. Now, so far this is only in the digital world, right? So far the physical world is moving more slowly, except the physical world is also becoming digital. 10 cameras now, cameras. In probably 10 years from now, there's going to be like five or 10 drones flying around just because... So the physical world is becoming more digital. At some point, other parts of the world are also going to start changing, and so this is one of those areas where we need to keep the protocols secure. We need to keep all of the infrastructure stable, but at the same time we cannot stay in one place. We all have to keep our vigilance. We all have to take into account all of these different, all of these new things that are happening. We have to take into account how that impacts the security of the network, how that impacts the security of each individual user's account, how that impacts a lot of things, right? And both the problems and the tools that we have to solve the problems, they get bigger basically every month, sometimes even faster. So Ethereum in two years, what might it give you? It will give you the ability to make a large number of transactions. Those transactions will be much cheaper than they are today. They will have more privacy than they have today. Applications will exist that are not just about payments for the sake of payments. There will be, there already are applications that interact with AI. Already applications that make it easier to pay for AI inference, to improve privacy when you're paying for AI inference. There will be applications where AIs participate in those applications. The average counterparty that you trade against probably has already been a bot. And this is something that will only continue to grow more and more. Probably today the average counterparty you trade against will be a bot. But the application was written by a human. Possibly in two years the application will also be written by a bot. Possibly in two years there will be no applications. There will just be bots making on-chain offers, and then your bots interpreting everyone's offers and telling you what they mean and trying to figure out for you which offers actually make sense for you to accept. So there's going to be, you know, there's going to be a lot of changes for everyone here, and there's going to be changes that stretch far beyond the financial layer. So think about what's keeping your personal data safe, for example. And that's a question for the operating system. It's a question for any AI you have that is processing the data. It's also a question for the hardware. You know, as the physical world is becoming digital, we also need to take care to make the physical world safe. So, Si is another Si that matters just as much. This is element 14 on the periodic table. It's silicon. So the silicon that all of our... nots... for a system to be secure, the hardware that it is written on and the hardware that links any consequence of the system to the real world must also be safe. We have to think about everything that we build as a full stack, from at every layer going all the way up to the user, all the way to the left to the chain, all the way to the right to the internet, and all the way down to the hardware. So there are many, and this is again something that the blockchain world has been on the front lines of. What is a hardware wallet today is going to become the universal secure device of tomorrow. So this is going to continue to be a very challenging and also, I think, a very meaningful and fascinating journey for all of us. And we need to remember that, you know, the blockchain space will continue to be at the front line of all of these issues. And these are big problems that the world will have to deal with, and probably many of these problems the blockchain world will have to deal with first. And so, you know, I encourage everyone here to continue thinking about both the challenges that all of these new technologies are going to bring, and also the opportunities, both to protect you from the threats and to make all of your use of the chain more efficient. And I think my hope is that we can not only continue to improve the blockchain world itself, but also really show the rest of the world what safe, private, efficient, and fair — not just finance, but also computing as a whole — can look like. Thank you.
is another Si that matters just as much. This is element 14 on the periodic table. It's silicon. So the silicon that all of our... nots... for a system to be secure, the hardware that it is written on and the hardware that links any consequence of the system to the real world must also be safe. We have to think about everything that we build as a full stack, from at every layer going all the way up to the user, all the way to the left to the chain, all the way to the right to the internet, and all the way down to the hardware. So there are many, and this is again something that the blockchain world has been on the front lines of. What is a hardware wallet today is going to become the universal secure device of tomorrow. So this is going to continue to be a very challenging and also, I think, a very meaningful and fascinating journey for all of us. And we need to remember that, you know, the blockchain space will continue to be at the front line of all of these issues. And these are big problems that the world will have to deal with, and probably many of these problems the blockchain world will have to deal with first. And so, you know, I encourage everyone here to continue thinking about both the challenges that all of these new technologies are going to bring, and also the opportunities, both to protect you from the threats and to make all of your use of the chain more efficient. And I think my hope is that we can not only continue to improve the blockchain world itself, but also really show the rest of the world what safe, private, efficient, and fair — not just finance, but also computing as a whole — can look like. Thank you.
