Growing The Infinite Garden for Humanity

Hello, everyone. I am Miyaguchi from the Ethereum Foundation. You know, this is the last before getting tired. Before I start my talk, I'd like to mention last year there was an ETH Global Hackathon here in Tokyo. And then this one was the first Ethereum hackathon run by, fully run by the Ethereum community members in Japan.

So I'd like to congratulate Japan and also the team and a group of people who supported this hackathon and this event. Wherever you are, really great job. Those are group of people, volunteers. They all have full-time job somewhere else. So it's really nice job done.

As much as big global events are exciting, I also think it's very important for local communities to be able to run their own events, such as like this, because one of the most exciting things about Ethereum, I think, is it's the autonomy of local communities. It's everywhere now. A few days ago, a girl in Mexico tagged me on Twitter, on Next. She participated in a hackathon in Mexico for the first time in 2022, two years ago. And I just happened to be there.

this girl's team was building a tool to preserve indigenous local languages that there seemed to be like hundreds of them in Mexico. And she said that the experience was, you know, she was very nervous, intimidated to work together with strangers, but the life, the experience was, you know, changed her life. So I hope if hackers, I don't know if it's a mix of hackers and also some visitors today, but if you were a newcomer or new hacker for the first time joining the hackathon, I hope that was life-changing for you too and if anyone is from a company who is looking for Web3 talents, hackathons are the best place because you not only can see what they can build, but also you can see how they can work in a team. That's actually also important talent. Today, I'd like to talk about progress.

I think Vitalik also talked about the past and future, and we don't really record it. Ethereum is almost 10 years old next year. The first Genesis block was mined in 2015 in July, how much of a progress has been made, and many of you already know this, but let's look at some numbers. Just looking at these, you can see a lot of increased numbers, and sometimes numbers do matter, and for me, personally, the most number is that increase actually 10 times now compared to 2017 was already like a first I see whole bubble. So it was already pretty big.

But active contributors on the platform. This is very important because Ethereum is an open source project and participation is permissionless. Anyone can participate if you have talent and if you have guts. How about qualitative plugless? Blockchain's trademark is a trade-off you have to make when you're building blockchain between decentralization, scaling, and security.

Plugless on scaling has been slower to make when you're building blockchain between decentralization scaling and security progress on scaling has been slower relatively slower with ethem because it puts strong emphasis on decentralization and security but as you all know um it's the scaling has improved a lot uh layer two's efforts have been uh prominent and it's reducing the cost of improved a lot. Layer 2's efforts have been prominent and it's reducing the cost of transaction a lot. And UX, user experience, I have to say human experience as Audrey advised today, is also hard because it's Web3. And again, like Vitalik mentioned, it's an app, but account abstraction is reducing the barriers to onboard more users because you need more to do anything. Thanks to account abstraction, multi-sig is more of a standard feature now and making it easy for corporate staff and families to create joint accounts.

Social recovery is natively built in without relying on separate contract for it now. And because of that social recovery, it's more flexible and more secure. And it allows users to pay gas fees in tokens other than ether, that was actually a big blocker before. It also delegates gas payments entirely to a layer service. And I got this data this morning.

As you can see on the top right, the gas abstraction is pretty popular. And the total gas covered by Paymasters is exceeded 3 million USD amount. And you can see also that category of user ops. If you're interested, you can check out this bundlebearer.com.

Privacy is also a challenge because Ethereum is a public blockchain. And new way of cryptography, which we call programmable cryptography, such as Zuckey Snack, is enabling privacy by allowing verifiable claim without revealing the underlying data, which is contributing also to scalability because it reduces the computational burden at the verification. And the merge happened in 2022. And then that was a major milestone is still an understatement. Mainly it's a shift from proof of work to proof of stake.

And the decentralization improved because of this shift. It's not just the number of nodes, but that geographical diversity is important because if we have a bunch of nodes in one location, that defeats the purpose of this decentralized network. So that has improved a lot because barrier to entry to be a validator node is a lot easier now. a validator node is a lot easier now. And needless to say, it is a lot better for our planet now.

It reduces the energy consumption to 99%. How about, I talked about the progress on the platform. How about the progress on application layers and solutions and also social impact? news this week is that the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina is adding Ethereum to the high school curriculum, starting tomorrow, actually. And this is organized by a local team, East Kipu.

She is, you know, she has a crypto chica they provided a workshop for high schoolers that extended to this curriculum idea and they also provide this hybrid course for teachers so that this can stay sustainable and as a former educator i couldn't be happier to hear this. Finally, Ethereum is empowering the next generation of builders or next billion builders. And when we onboard or when we empower next billion, next generation builders, the first question we want to ask them is, what problems are you going to solve with the technology you learned? And another question I want them to think about to answer this is, what kind of world do you want to see in the future? And to me, the answer was this, Infinite Garden.

This is the phrase that came up in 2020, actually. And then the meaning of Infinite Games, Audrey also used this, and Tom also mentioned this previously. So it's a game we play to continue the game together, and the goal is not for one player to win it all. While competitions and some business models or even making profit is necessary for the ecosystem to be sustainable, for the ecosystem to be sustainable, I do hope the builders look beyond and think about the long-term impact the solution you're building is creating. With that, I asked this question on Twitter, like I have to say X, a couple months ago.

Help us identify projects that are solving real-world problems and impacting communities all around the world. We actually did a small survey, the similar one, five years ago, and that time we couldn't really find many application solutions that were using Ethereum to really solve weird world issues, which was understandable because the infrastructure wasn't really ready or advanced. But now, as you saw previously, the infrastructure is ready. So it is time to build what matters. I like to share some use cases, because now I can share some use cases, and also stories of people, the teams that are building solutions for reward board issues.

Decentralized ID, it's being explored by many teams and at many places now, but Quark ID is the one that is already being implemented in the city of, again, Buenos Aires, Argentinians are killing it. And what's great about this is it's a collaborated effort by teams in Latin America. So this is also being implemented in Mexico too, and then other places are considering too. And also it's built on Ethereum's Layer 2 and with general knowledge function. Voting freedom tool is a decentralized, transparent and privacy preserving voting tool.

It's anonymous voting is important for places where democracy is compromised. So one great example was Russian opposition party used this tool to launch surveillance-free voting app last year, 2024. In Russia, tweeting something negative about Putin means you go to jail for seven years. So it's very hard for a citizen to voice their opinion. And then this is one effort that is giving citizens to be able to sign a petition or vote anonymously to make sure their safety and security.

OpenSearch, I ran into this in Singapore randomly, but now almost all the educational records in Singapore is on Ethereum. And basically, if you finish any diploma, or it seems like it starts at the age of 12, the first national exam, and then you receive an email, here's your age of 12, the first national exam. And then you receive an email. Here's your record of certificate. And it's a great example that Ethereum is not owned by the Ethereum Foundation or anyone because we didn't even know this was happening.

And then they picked Ethereum. They tried other private chains, but they picked Ethereum because they really want the records to be, you know, like available without even the team who built this. So that's a great example. And then on the bigger scale, now India is hosting 8 million government documents on blockchain, specifically Hyperledger and Ethereum. government documents on blockchain, specifically Hyperledger and ATM.

And covering areas such as education, property, judiciary and drug logistics and more. So this is a little bit bigger scale documentation on blockchain. Fact check, this is built by a major Italian media company with actually a blockchain team. It's basically around the time of, this was built around the time of COVID pandemic, when people started to recognize fake news online. It's not just started at the COVID, but we started to recognize more of them online.

So, and then you can, the readers can verify the presence of the digital sticker that is assigned by verifying the parameters matched on Ethereum. that is assigned by verifying the parameters matched on Ethereum. It's a simple IDN system that is starting to be more prevalent. And this is actually a project by... The Ethereum Foundation has this team, Nexperion, and they're running NeBillion fellowship program.

And this is a current cohort of fellow is working on this on-chain credit scores from smallholder farmers and co-ops in Kenya. In Africa, we hear this more often in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa, we hear this more often in sub-Saharan Africa than in Africa. Supporting small farmers is very important because they're far in the middle of nowhere and then they don't have access to many different things. And then this is very interesting and impactful because it's for cooperatives and then it's record keeping for a cooperative and then they monitor or actually put the record of like how the produce, the state of produce on chain and then so the farmers can receive loans.

And another one from the current cohort of the fellows is this actually was quadratic folding and funding was also mentioned by Audrey. The mechanism itself is not really nothing to do with blockchain, but the idea was it's more popular in the Ethereum because we share the shared values. And that's something interesting about this Ethereum community that we try out and then actually great fit with the blockchain technology too. This is experimented in a city in Croatia. And again, like quadratic voting and funding is a great system to reflect what each citizen cares.

It's not just about the size of big donations someone makes. Oh, yes. I want to share some Japanese things because in Japan and also hackathon. Last year's hackathon winner, minor award. Actually, Vitalik also mentioned this, which was good.

I saw the team the other day. They came to me to show me the progress. So if you're not Japanese, my number card is actually newer ID system. That's the physical card actually issued by the government. And the user can use the card to log into a wallet.

And they received grants after the hackathon last year, they received grants from EF, and working with both account abstraction team and PSC privacy team. And the progress they show me, the new feature they are building is you can actually use, I don't know if you can maybe see that, you can use a wallet, sorry, card as a wallet, physical, my number card as a wallet. that, anyway, that's the reason why I like what they're thinking is Japan is a big aging country, a bunch of ojichan and obachans, and then, so they have to imagine, like, how can we onboard those seniors, you know, they can't even use smartphone. So I like that kind of like a local ideas, creative ideas and the UX is was impressive. So I was really happy to see that.

And then yesterday, these are the finalists from yesterday's hackathon, yay. One project that I would like to mention is Toban, is a simple solution to record contribution and distribute rewards. I thought this was kind of unique. It's showing like a unique part of Japanese culture because, you know, like people coordinating and collaborating together is, it's very, you know, Japanese are good at it. So I, ideally, I hope this will inspire some discussion in the DAO space and also probably funding space too.

So why I share these use cases or even I ask the question about the existing real-world use cases, my motivation is, and also my motivation to join this industry or decided to help the Ethereum Foundation was our world is full of issues, unfortunately still. There are wars and conflicts, poverty and inequity, social injustice, environmental damage, and those are made by humans unfortunately and we call Ethereum a protocol for human coordination. Well this was a quote from the Ethereum Foundation's report a while back. And it's exciting that infrastructure is more advanced and now ready for things to be built. And when builders build a solution, I genuinely hope that solution is for a better humanity, and that will lead to our flourishing infinite garden.

And that is end of my talk, but I do have to mention this in the end. DevCon 7 is happening in Thailand, Bangkok, this year. And for the first time, we call it DEVCON Southeast Asia instead of calling it with the name of the city because last time when we did DEVCON in Bogota, the best amazing part was a lot of local Latin America communities. They owned the week as their event, and that added a lot of energy and passion, and also others who came to the region learned a lot about new creativity by talking to local communities. So I hope to see that in the region of Southeast Asia.

But also, the Bogota was a little bit too far from Japan or Asia. But you don't have that excuse this time. So I will see you in Bangkok. Thank you. So I will see you in Bangkok.

Thank you.