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Balaji Srinivasan
Former CTO of Coinbase, Independent

13 - Network State Conference 2026 - Vitalik and Balaji on AI, Cryptography and Network School

📅 Oct 10, 2026 Network State Podcast 35 MIN 8184 VIEWS 91 SEGMENTS · 1 SPEAKERS
Vitalik Buterin is cofounder of Ethereum and creator of Zuzalu, the pop-up city experiment. He joins Balaji Srinivasan for a fireside chat. Website: https://vitalik.eth.limo OUTLINE 0:15 - Do you think public key cryptography continues? 4:57 - Open-weight models bundled with the rest of a blockchain node 7:12 - The whole Lean roadmap would basically not be possible without AI 9:01 - The future of formal verification is end-to-end 9:52 - Pure mathematicians are going to see their salaries go up 10x 14:55 - Proof of human social networks where no AI writing is allowed 18:21 - Switching topics:...

What Balaji Srinivasan said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Balaji Srinivasan discussed the future of public key cryptography, arguing it will continue but face degradation, comparing it to how RSA key sizes increased from 256 to 372 bits due to improved factoring algorithms. He advocated for using AI models for learning through iterative questioning and self-explanation, noting that even open models like Qwen 3.8 Flash running on his laptop are sufficient for most tasks. He proposed a 'proof of excellence' mechanism for blockchains, where tokens reward optimization of algorithms rather than enshrining a single model. He believes formal verification will extend end-to-end, with formally verified Ethereum clients covering the entire operating system and hardware. He predicted pure mathematicians' salaries will rise 10x due to their ability to prompt and verify AI. He introduced 'man-months' as a metric for measuring community size, and discussed Network School's expansion, including a fusion with Kazakhstan and plans for a hundred startup society leaders.

Key takeaways

  1. Public key cryptography will continue but require one or two more rounds of parameter increases, like 'extra Y2Ks'.
  2. Pure mathematicians' salaries will go up 10x because they are the best at prompting and verifying AI.
  3. Network School has fused with the state of Kazakhstan, with 10 other countries bidding to host it.
  4. He plans to build a hub in Kazakhstan scaling to 10,000-100,000 people, then add Ethereum City, Coinbase City, Stripe City, and Shopify City.
  5. He wants a hundred Network School equivalents worldwide, each with its own leaders, calling this 'decentralized democracy'.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
256 bits to 372 bits Increase in safe RSA key size due to improved factoring algorithms metric 0:19
10x Predicted salary increase for pure mathematicians commitment 9:43
2,000 man-months Example community size metric for 1,000 people at Zuzalu for 2 months metric 19:57
10,000 to 100,000 people Target population for Kazakhstan hub commitment 24:18
100 Number of Network School equivalents he wants worldwide commitment 24:18
30 to 40 years His expected remaining working years timeline 29:38

Chapters

  1. 0:00Future of public key cryptography
  2. 1:51Learning with AI models
  3. 4:44Open models and blockchain audits
  4. 6:53Formal verification and Lean roadmap
  5. 11:26AI writing and structured formats
  6. 14:54Proof of human social networks
  7. 18:20Zuzalu and community metrics
  8. 21:18Network School in Kazakhstan
  9. 29:05Governance and succession plans
Balaji Srinivasan 0:01 ↗
Mr. V. Mr. V. [clears throat]
Yeah. Good. Um, all right. So, we've had we might do part two of the Justin Drake tweet and your response. Um, but what I mean that got three four million views. What what I mean you posted about it. Do you think public key cryptography continues?
I think it continues. Um I I do think it will probably take some hits to concrete security and I think uh one of the ways that I that I think it's like realistic to think about this is to think about what's happens to existing hard problems that cryptography depends on right so things like like factoring for example right like for a long time people thought that you know like fac the fastest way to factor is basically yeah like effectively brute force but you sort of make it quadratically easier you kind of do it from the bottom to the top and the top at the same time you get a square root and it's like pretty easy and then people invented the quadratic people invented GNFS and like that's basically why the size of a safe RSA key has gone up from you know 256 bits to 372 bits right so not broken but degraded by quite a bit. And I think like there is a uh a very reasonable kind of points to make that basically what if elliptic curves and lattices have about the same level of like extra skeletons in the closet in them like they have their equivalent of you know quadratic sieve and GNFS and all of these but it's just well we haven't been smart enough to discover them yet right because they just require holding more things in your head at the same time than we're used to. Right. But the bots can.
So, you know, one thing for a lot of people in the audience who aren't as technical. Um, you know, when starting out with linear algebra, I like Gilbert Strang's linear algebra, for example. Where should, you know, given that everybody's going to have to go back to basics on cryptography, number theory, discrete log, all this kind of stuff. What do you like, what what references did you learn from or do you find useful?
So the latest experience um I've had learning things that are like crazy difficult for me uh was probably the series of blog posts on obfuscation that I uh published over the summer.
But what canonical references? So this is okay this is the thing that I discovered right I discovered that just talking to the bot is just like a very effective way to learn and I think there's like a specific way you want to talk to the bot right because it's very easy to ask a question get the answer think that you know like you always learn better by writing than by reading right and so the thing that works for me is you know you keep asking questions and then eventually you re-explain everything in your own words and then you tell ask it. Am I right or wrong? And then usually, you know, the AIs are all sycophants so they tell you, "Oh, yay. You're mostly right, but here are some things that I'll improve." Right? And just keep going back and forth until it stops saying, "But here are some things that I'll improve."
Yeah. So, it's interesting. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, when you're doing when you're learning math, it's like active reading if you're doing it right where you're trying to anticipate what's on the next page and the page after that. And um similarly here you know the way that I I use these models is I will ask it to ask me a multiple choice or um integer valued answer or something like that and you can compute it and type it in and then you know that you're not you know fooling yourself into thinking that you got it right.
Yeah it's a great technique.
Yeah. So what have you what have you used it for like you know which models have you used for this kind of thing? Just everything you know Claude Anthropic.
Just everything. I mean, so my experience with the models right now is I've realized that uh like even the open ones, like even like Qwen 3.8 Flash, which runs on my freaking laptop, yeah, it's like good enough for like a majority of day-to-day tasks. The only downside of literally running it on my laptop is that it's slow. The places where the like frontier ones like uh basically, you know, like Fable and Opus 5.5 and uh Astra like really stand out and you need them. Basically is the frontier stuff, right? Like the stuff where you're literally understanding or even contributing to like actually advancing the very frontier of some like complicated field for anything below that level like basically yeah anything that works like even the open ones even though even the local ones are getting very good.
It's interesting. You know, one thing that Haseeb and I have been talking about for a couple of days is um, you know, let's take these open models now. They're pretty good. Uh, there's a scenario I'd like to hear your thoughts where open weight models are bundled with the rest of a blockchain node. Why? Because um, a blockchain will need to devote some fraction of its tokens to paying for constant audits of its codebase and its mathematical assumptions and so on. And it's like a defense department where you have a certain percentage of whether it's ETH that's mined or what have you that is actually spent on you know tokens served up by OpenRouter or something like that that are constantly going and probing the assumptions underneath that blockchain. As soon as a new model comes out you're trying to attack yourself with it before somebody else. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think uh the version of that that I like I think is super interesting is uh don't enshrine like one single model in the chain. Instead uh like there's an idea from uh way back like more than 10 years ago in the very early blockchain space called proof of excellence. And uh the idea is basically it's like an issuance mechanism that pays for results, right? So if you remember do you remember Primecoin?
Oh, long time ago. Yeah. But that was the one he was trying to make a useful proof of work to find the next largest prime. Right.
Exactly. Yeah. And so what I think actually might make sense is to make a useful proof of work where the task is to optimize the blockchain's own algorithms because uh the thing that you can do is you can like in many cases you can formally define the goals, right?
So so this is interesting because you know how it feels like a lot of these mathematical results are very discontinuous. How would you have incremental progress in the same way you'd have a hash? Like what are you thinking there?
Yeah. So you don't literally use it for a consensus, right? Like you like you use it as issuance like and if it's issuance then like it's fine if you know during one year one person provides 75% of the value, right? Because that's sometimes what happens.
I see. Interesting. So um are you are we going to do actually you did put out something else recently which is Ethereum roadmap like about a like a few weeks ago you had done make Ethereum cyberpunk again and then you put out the roadmap. Does the math singularity does that influence how you think about the roadmap?
It definitely does. Like I think the whole Lean roadmap it would basically not be possible without AI. Like I think without AI the roadmap as we now conceive it with the level of ambition that we conceive it like possibly would have taken until like literally 2040 or 2050. Um, basically we've been getting massive speedups from the fact that AI is doing a lot of research. AI is starting to do a lot of coding and we've especially a lot of the Lean um Ethereum stuff like you know Lean Ethereum is sort of intentionally a pun, right? Because it's uh you know making Ethereum leaner and faster and then also everything is written in Lean for um but [snorts]
Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Okay.
Yeah. And uh basically like what we already have is uh like very advanced versions of EVM, recursive proving, consensus, all of these different components with formal proofs of uh their security, right? Because the statement that like basically expresses the idea this is secure is like often 100 times smaller than the actual algorithm. And so instead of there being like 10,000 lines that humans have to audit and be sure that there's no bugs, there's like 100 lines. And then even for 100 lines, those 100 lines, the bots help you.
Well, it's interesting. There's well, there's two versions of that. One is that it's true in theory and there's a Lean proof. And then there's the specific machine implementation which right, you know, it's sometimes useful on some machine it'll do rounding or floating point or weird things. You might still want to audit the code, but you also look at the Lean proof. Do you agree with that? I mean or do you think you think the Lean proof would just be enough in in I I guess it depends if that formal verification is in an abstract context or if it's machine dependent.
Yeah, I mean like I personally like I I believe in that the future of formal verification is end-to-end. Like to me the real singularity of all that is I believe that we will have formal proofs [snorts] of the security of our Ethereum clients that that stretch all the way to including the in the thing that's being proven over the entire operating system and even the hardware like we'll literally have a Lean a formally verified of a formally verified computer where the only assumptions are the laws of physics.
You know what's funny is that AI has made that possible to contemplate.
Yes.
And actually necessary to do.
Exactly.
You know, it it's funny because uh so here's one of your thoughts on one more thing and then let's talk to startup societies. Um you know, Haseeb disagreed with me on this? But I do think that pure mathematicians are going to see their salaries they're they're despondent right now, but I think their salaries are going to go up 10x in the years to come because they're the only ones who can prompt and verify. And maybe not the only ones, but let's say the best ones who can do this. And the value of that is now like you know the the nuclear codes equivalent for for at least for crypto and maybe for a lot of things.
Yeah. I mean especially in the short term I really agree like I think one um interesting observation I also had again from uh writing those three posts on obfuscation that I did is like two years ago I would not have been able to do it right. Basically two years ago I would not have been able to understand that kind of subject matter without like weeks of talking to the people who invented those protocols and we're a very scarce resource and their time is very scarce dumb questions. It felt to me like writing those posts was at the same time four times less useful because well if I never wrote them like someone else could have uh in many cases figured out the same thing but at the same time it was also four times faster right and so yeah but like basically I feel like it's uh a lot of people are kind of moving one level up the stack right and so you're doing work that's like really still taking advantage of your experience your acquired intuitions your domain expertise, but often [snorts] you're actually able to take advantage of those things in a more pure form like you have to do sort of less boring housekeeping,
you know, and so is your view do you think um do you think AI is going to well it depends on the domain? I think in a verifiable domain AI does not asymptote it just kind of keeps going because it can keep generating things but in other domains um it do what do you what is your view on that like for example writing I don't actually feel AI writing has gotten better in a while you agree with that
yeah I agree it partly I think it's because with code the formulaic if then you know else constructions it's fine to be repetitive but in prose that's clunky, you know, and so it's it's it's okay when it's sound machine-like when it's uh when it's code, but not when it's prose, you know. Um or or do you think it's just because actually I don't know the answer to this. Uh do you think it's just because Anthropic and OpenAI have not optimized writing that it's still so detectably robotic?
My guess would be that especially yeah Anthropic does care about writing quality like it it feels you know very core to their brand that sort of we are the human ones right um OpenAI actually one thing I've noticed about OpenAI is uh you know how with ChatGPT if you ask it to write give you explanations of things like it inserts emojis everywhere it inserts random bold everywhere and like from [snorts] a traditional you know like stodgy New Yorker register perspective like this is like oh my god what are they doing like I actually think like they've like invented the future in that right basically the reason is that if you look at forms of writing that evolved independently from you know like long form prose like the top two that we have are basically math and code right and if you think about math like if you think about the quadratic equation right like you've seen it before you know like minus b plus minus square root of b minus 4ac all over 2a. Like if you imagine like transcribing like what I just said just now and like sticking in like that like you're not going to be able to understand what it is, right? But you know you've seen the quadratic formula before like looks really beautiful. You have like a square root over here, a fraction over here and like that makes it three or four times easier for you to understand it, right?
And like syntax highlighting and like basically saying like okay, we're going to actually have indenting over here. We're going to have different things be different colors.
So you think AI writing and the structuring and the emojis will actually become sort of like a structured form of writing and
yeah like basically yeah like I think all of that could have happened uh with just humans but it does feel like you know like we're actually sort of like speedrunning to being able to essentially separate writing effort from reading effort.
You know, it's funny because um I So, here's what I think. I think, you know, it used to be pre-ChatGPT and so on. Whenever you saw a post that had emojis and so on, people had put more work into it. But whenever I see that today, I assume they put less work into it and it's some bot spam. And so it's it's weird that um I think there's an aspect of is it actually communication to someone on their side? It's saving time for the writer but not the reader which is the opposite of what writing is supposed to be. So will it get adopted by will the will the prestige kind of people break?
I actually think instead we're going to see proof of human social networks where no AI writing is allowed at all and those are going to actually be in a sense upstream of the models because they're generating new information and the models aren't. I don't know your thoughts on that.
I I agree we'll have a lot of that. I think uh at the same time we are going to learn a lot from these uh you know like new styles that are rapidly getting created and like I think uh the thing that we're going to get will just always be a synthesis right like if you think about like right now even you know like when you make slides for example right like the slides you make are probably both not the slides you made 5 years ago and like in terms of even style and they're also not like the type of slides that Claude would make for someone by default right
so you know here's how I use AI at least right now is summarization but not creation and uh you know one of the things now I hate is if I even say a not b it sounds AI but it's contrastive negation is a useful thing in English so you have to you have to rearchitect your sentences to never include that but anyway so I think they agree but but yeah so summarization you know you take a 60-minute voice memo you know right Go ahead.
Yeah. No, I I think I agree with that. Like I think uh you know there there really is an art in uh writing [snorts] in a way that like really does make things maximally friendly for people to read. Um but where at the same time you're not just kind of like letting the bot do things and glossing over it. Because if you do that, like I don't even think it's just about people's aversion to the fact that they've seen that exact style 100,000 times before. I think it's also, you know, if you don't like actually walk over the content yourself, it's like very good at uh making things that pretends to be content but like actually don't pass any kind of scrutiny, right?
Well, you know, here's the thought. you know those uh those like true randomness sources like entropy sources you know like like people have weird things like lava clocks and and stuff like that right
I do think that there's going to be like offline airgapped libraries where there's computers that have not only no AI but the auditing of them is something where there's no AI on the computer and you have to type everything like this and the data generated by those things is sort of like pure pure and uncontaminated way. It's like pre-2022 like a mountain spring of purely human data, you know, that's upstream like because otherwise the thing gets so circular in a non-verifiable domain.
Mhm.
You don't you don't think so? No.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I I I think that's definitely true.
So, okay. All right. One more thing. So, public key cryptography you do before we move on. Public key cryptography you think continues? I think yeah I think continues but I think uh everyone will have to do like one or two more rounds of like refreshing things one or two rounds of letting their parameters get bigger like it's uh you like we like we basically get extra Y2Ks and I mean I think you know like cyber security is the same like I am optimistic about where we come out the other end but you know I think uh you know we are kind of going through you know like a tunnel that has obstacles in it that we have to like you know like play the a game where you sort of like bounce and dodge them.
Great. Okay, cool. All right, switching topics. Um, Zuzalu.
So, you know, we're at Network State. I actually, one of the things I was just saying to you on text beforehand is I think Network State has now moved out of theory into practice. Um, here's a few things that we've discussed that maybe you have some thoughts on. One, um, like you you did Zuzalu, maybe you can describe to them what Zuzalu is and what you learned from doing that.
Yeah. So, Zuzalu was this uh basically of pop-up city experiments that uh I did. I mean, the original one back in 2023, basically like grab get 200 people, invite them all into one place, this one place in Montenegro. And I was intentionally mixing different communities like some Ethereum, some like rationalist communities, some longevity, some other things, and [snorts] basically just stay for 2 months and be a pop-up city. And uh I I feel like that was still kind of very successful at uh just showing that that whole pattern is possible. And then uh I think you know the big question ended up opening is that okay you know you're it's possible to bring 200 people together. It's possible to make a pop-up and uh like where do you go from there? What is the next thing after that? And uh I feel like trying to answer that question is a big part of like what I imagine you're doing like this conference and your kind of whole meta community for.
That's right. And I think actually um I've got a metric on the space now um which is uh the equivalent of CoinMarketCap for coins is man-months for communities. Mhm.
So because like a traditional census counts the number of sedentary human beings who are German or you know Russian Japanese whatever but if in you've got a digital nomadic world people aren't in the same place. So number of man-months let's say for example a thousand people spent two months at Zuzalu or whatever the number is then that's a 2,000 man-month community and now you can and that's very quantifiable because you have proof of human and you have proof of location. So you can say these humans at least attest that they were in this location with their location beacon and you can have a cumulative signal which is the cumulative number of man-months for that community or tons of communities. Now you can start ranking these things and now you've got a growth metric you can start going up on because it took a a couple of years as you know into Bitcoin before the Bitcoin price even existed.
And so I think the introduction of that metric is going to be an important thing. We're going to be rolling that out soon.
Yeah. No, I think it's uh definitely a good way of uh just measuring like how far along we are from basically having a a big house party to having like something like like actually the next stage of startup societies. So I wanted to ask you just a less quantifiable metric. So you've been running Network School for more than two years now I think
just almost exactly two years.
Exactly two years. It's um an actual thing. You've put your heart and soul in it. You've had your your highs and your lows that the entire internet knows about it. How do you feel?
Awesome.
I actually do feel awesome. And you you'll [clears throat] see some of that towards the end where uh you know like I guess I'll scoop myself. So we're going to be able to Yeah. So we have fused with the state of Kazakhstan like you know Voltron or something like that and uh there's like 10 other countries that put in bids for Network School and so to me the thesis I mean see the thing is um most things in the world have a score of zero-zero with governments. What I mean by that is um whether I don't know you're wearing a a purple shirt today, nobody nobody no government cares about that for the most part. Um so it's not something they're going to take a position on and so on. Then there are some things that governments oppose and you can be zero and one with a government. But then there's things that other governments support and anything where some governments oppose it and other governments support it where it's like one and one or three and one or five and three is a critical binary switch on the whole world. It's like, you know, in old school C, you know, if you you ever pound defines at the top of a file and those switches influence all subsequent behavior, you know, a consumer example, dark mode versus light mode. You know, the entire app is influenced by that. In the same way, what countries are now coming to terms with is do they want like global nomadic populations on their soil or not?
Yeah. And you know the reason I think this is non-obvious people countries are being used to having tourists and a tourist is there for implicitly a few days. It's like an individual and they're only recreating. But a digital nomad community it could be thousands of people. They could be there for years and they're also working. So one it looks like a foreign enclave.
Yeah.
But one man's foreign enclave is another man's global city in embryo. Right. So the countries that actually want the next New York, the next Dubai, the next Singapore on their soil, those are going to do very well. And the crucial thing, at least the thing that this whole thing surfaced for me is that there's a lot that do enough that do that this is going to win.
That that's what I think at least.
Yeah. No, I uh agree. How of uh how have you been finding the new node in Kazakhstan so far?
You should come and visit. I mean, you speak Russian.
That's true.
That's right. And they'll roll out the red carpet. Um we have Olaf there. We have Shervin there. We have I mean Mike Maples is going to come up there. A lot of Zcash people coming up there. Um you know it's funny because like there are countries that I like uh but I really love Kazakhstan because it at least right now and it looks good.
It is uh is a place you can actually build startup cities because it's only three times the population of Singapore but it's 3,000 times the space of Singapore, right? So, you know, we can have I So, here's what I plan to do. We're going to build, you know, our hub. We could get talent from around the world. We could bring in the visas or the visas bring in people. We get that to 10,000 100,000 people. And once we've got that, then you have Ethereum City, you have Coinbase City, you have Stripe City, maybe Tempo City, whatever, you know, uh, and you could have Shopify City in Kazakhstan. And then once you've got a few of those um that's also by the way a place that they can base talent from around the world and then you can scale that model everywhere right because the startup city incubator and I think the key thing that was missing was a country that had digital innovation and the space to build.
Yeah.
Because Singapore I love it. It doesn't have that right.
San Francisco doesn't have that. Right.
Digital plus physical is new. I think that's interesting. So in terms of like maturity of these things, the other kind of questions I uh had in mind was how much do you think does uh the Kazakhstan node just like day-to-day it running and also like people's interest in continuing to be there how much do you think that depends on you right now? So great question is so this is something which we call minimum necessary okay and minimum biology is right right now I have to do this okay and I love all you guys don't get me wrong but basically the goal is to decentralize myself and have a hundred startup society leaders so at some point I can just chill and go back to just doing math and you know like biology and genetics right and just sip coffee but right now I do feel that I need to kind of bootstrap this whole thing to give us options because the old world is melting down so actually just on this concretely you know the very very first version of Network School there were a fair number of people there who were there for let's call it celebrity okay which is fine whatever but then by V2 it was very much about community and maybe I would give a talk like once a month if that you know and but it really wasn't people weren't there for in the same way when you come to Singapore are you there for Liang not really right not anymore you know he set up a system and it's also enlightened self-interest in a few ways a you scale yourself so you don't have to right b it's uh it's something which others can copy and do right so that's how I think about that
I guess do you see yeah like the institution that is um you know like Balaji's Network School in Kazakhstan as having something that uh with a longevity that exceeds like your level of very active involvement or is your vision that like after any years the whole thing like splits? Yeah.
Oh, no. Yeah. Well, so here's how I think about this. Um Harvard started as a one-room schoolhouse, right? And what was its role? Its role was to build the Massachusetts Bay Colony which then built Massachusetts which then basically was influential in building the United States of America in winning the Civil War and then winning you know the World War I, World War II, the Cold War. And so you know basically Harvard's um export of its ideas the or the wetware right that's I think the most underappreciated layer. We talk about hardware, we talk about software, but the wetware, the software in our heads, that's, you know, the the underappreciated layer. So Harvard's wetware basically over 400 years was the most dominant until the last 30 years where Stanford started becoming more successful. Why? Because that was the network taking over from the 20th century state and Stanford was an internet, you know, based thing.
And now I think we need a version 3.0. So, just like you had taxis, this is just a long answer to your point. You had taxis, then you had Ubers, which are digital hail, and now you have full self-driving where there's no human, or you had physical cash, and then you had fiat in a bank account, and then you have pure digital cash, pure internet. We had Harvard, which is pure offline, pure fiat. Stanford, which is like a fiat internet hybrid, and now we need a Network School that is for the post-internet order, right? And I do think the internet is going to be around for a long time. And so if that's true, then I think the kind of concepts that we have will will be around for a long time and they'll lead to people building these societies that will themselves build other things. At least that's the idea.
Yeah. I guess I'm curious like once uh Network School kind of becomes self-sustaining to the point where you can afford to chill, like what do you envision the the governance structure of the thing looking like?
That's a great question. I want to have a hundred Network School equivalents around the world which each have their own leaders.
Right. That's the short version. So that this what I'm actually starting to call this a good term decentralized democracy.
Right. Right.
Yeah. Go ahead.
That makes sense. But I guess the one that is like the one that is in Kazakhstan the physical that you started. Yeah. Like what will happen to that?
Um TBD I I I actually don't know. Um because you know I have to build it into something that's you know right but um you know Hopefully, I've got 30 40 years in the tank myself, right? And then, you know, at that point, the next step will be obvious. Maybe um you have maybe smart contracts and AI will advance to the point that you can have it be a true DAO. I don't know. Um you know, this is by this is an important point because like what do you do with something after you've passed on? How do you handle the succession problem? um you know one of the someone in Singapore said something funny which is uh it's random have more kids right because you don't know you know who's going to another possibility that's another way of decentralization so I don't know the answer to that yet but I I do think part of the answer is basically reduce the dependence on Network School succeeding after I go such that there's another hundred alternatives.
Yeah, I I agree that's an important part of the answer. Um I think uh like going full on kind of uh you know like pop-up and disappear sort of like fork maximalist governance like I think for something like universities it could actually work very well cuz um especially with uh you know like modern tools and AI like you don't need single things to have century long reputations if uh you wants to do other things that I think a lot of people here care about like say make a new rocket company that goes to Mars like that requires you know like a 10 year physical lands hardware commitments like more than 10 years.
Yeah, we're definitely doing that. We're doing a big campus and so on, but um more on that soon. Go ahead.
Missing. Yeah, like no I like one of the things that I've just noticed from uh I mean like both uh running in like running the original Zuzalu in uh in Montenegro and uh doing like lots of all kinds of things after that is like being at the center of attention like it really gets traumatizing after a while.
Yeah, you don't like that. I know. Yeah, I I don't like it either, but I have a slightly higher tolerance maybe. Um like like basically everybody wanted you can actually can I make an observation? Sure. Yeah. So with Ethereum you could just put out a system of pure law and then people could just argue with the code and so forth right in the physical world you being at Zuzalu people took you to be the president of Zuzalu even if you didn't want to be the president of Zuzalu. And so even if you were not officially the leader, you were implicit the leader and then everybody would hang on one statement you said. And so so so in the physical world, I don't think we can do away with leadership yet. We can't automate away yet, right? Do you agree with that?
Yeah. And so because of that um you know the the only thing worse than having a leader is having no leaders and you know like which is what America's going to American anarchy and so it's like very reluctantly that I lace up the cleats and I do this stuff mainly because it's kind of like you know if if one doesn't have some positive vision of the post-internet future it's not going to get built by people hearkening to fascism or communism or all these 20th century things. So that's that's why I do what I'm doing.
I think yeah, you you you have to get good at uh like building up and supporting like many new leaders, right? Like decentralization, it's not about going from one leader, zero leaders. It's about going from one leader to many.
Yeah, exactly. That's right.
Yeah. I mean, like I feel like for like Ethereum is starting to get there, you know, like Justin has uh acquired the important skill of making cryptos what are angry as effectively as I can. Um so that's important. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So the question is um like when uh any of these can get to like that kind of level.
It's it's hard because you know one of the things is you know Ben Horowitz has talked about this also the kind of person who is a founder CEO. It's relatively rare that they have a key lieutenant who's as similar. You know, once in a while you have Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and then Satya Nadella who's actually kind of like that, but it's rare, right? Usually it's some like, you know, like Steve Jobs did not have another Steve Jobs at Apple. Maybe you could argue um gosh, the guy who was going to become well, I don't want to name names. There was a guy who might have become CEO instead of Tim Cook. Um but because of that it kind of turns out in the internet that that person goes and does something else rather than necessarily working within the existing institution. So, so that is maybe the succession plan is decentralization. But, but Ethereum is doing I should it's the thing is you can't actually leave Ethereum. Everybody no matter what you would do or what you'd say as long as you're alive, people will basically say unless you had some which you shouldn't do. Do not do this for anybody who just has some public breakup with Ethereum, right? So, you you're not going to be able to go away from your influence over it in that sense.
Yeah. I think like for me the positive signs that I always look for is basically are other people you know in the foundation and in the community able to kind of both push it forward and kind of defend the right values um even without my involvement and uh I feel like recently that's been happening more and more and it's been happening uh very effectively like uh a lot of people are you know insisting that uh you know like hey we actually have to care about security like hey you know we are supposed to value privacy here I mean like and you're saying yeah like basically you know like the again it's like sort of like focusing on decentralization not as going from one to zero but it's going from one to many and I think like seeing the presence of uh that uh like that kind of layer able to just appear and do its thing like even without kind of waiting for me to say something I think is like really been the key thing.
Awesome. All right. Great. Let's get some lunch. Good. Thanks for Thank you. Yeah.

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Srinivasan, B. (2026, October 10). 13 - Network State Conference 2026 - Vitalik and Balaji on AI, Cryptography and Network School [Interview transcript]. Network State Podcast. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3033007/

MLA

Balaji Srinivasan. "13 - Network State Conference 2026 - Vitalik and Balaji on AI, Cryptography and Network School." Network State Podcast, 10 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3033007/.

BibTeX
@misc{srinivasan2026_3033007,
  author       = {Balaji Srinivasan},
  title        = {13 - Network State Conference 2026 - Vitalik and Balaji on AI, Cryptography and Network School},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, Network State Podcast. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3033007/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}