Ethereum Update by Tomasz Stanczak - Devconnect

Hi everyone. All right, great. Let's talk about the the future. We're starting the future now. Uh so many people.

It's great. And it's I believe we'll be around 20,000 of us over the next week here together building the future. Um so the future is possibly a bit grim and I think that many many people here uh kind of celebrate the success of the last 10 years but also probably are very very worried about the next years that are coming [snorts] especially when you think about privacy when you think about decentralization when you think about owning your future building something very green and happy uh because these are the colors of defcon connect when you think it's all about bride and clouds and white colors, but there's lots of fears. And I think this is about bringing 20,000 people together here. So you all can look around and find people that actually 10 years ago were facing the same kind of possible results, the same kind of fears that everything is centralizing in the world is harder and I think next difficulty level is coming.

it will be much much harder and then why we need much more people and we have already tools and the same tools that will be challenges will be the ones that will use to fight all of this and who are those 20,000 people here so thank you so much for all the volunteers they'll be around you helping you with everything and making sure that you feel safe secure and they can ask questions uh coming from all around the world um there will be people with us who actually fought so much for this event to happen in Argentina for many ers uh those who talked about it for years who attended other devcons and said we have to do it here in Buenosiris. Uh there will be founders, successful founders, future founders, founders and their babies. Founders their babies and when you ask them for sure they will tell you what they think about now is the future of their children. they are probably as well worried about it and that's why they're building and that's why many of us will be building building for the future. Uh there'll be artists and creators artists that maybe create just for the local communities or artists that create to win the global awards and get recognition.

There'll be core developers core developers and there are hundreds of them or thousands of them. And this is a picture from Berlin this year. Core developers this year uh put a lot of effort delivering two hard forks for the network, two network upgrades. Many of them hiding behind others. Uh but very often this is the role of core developers operating in the stealth mode from behind building the backends and infrastructure of Ethereum.

Uh there'll be D5 builders and the general feeling of defi and payments and many more apps. the ones that you see here. But this is DeFi that brought to Ethereum billions of dollars, but also enabled billions of people, well, not yet. I think it's still in millions, uh, to to be able to use something that we started talking about as low-risk DeFi. The most simple, the most basic requirements for payments for being enabled in the financial world.

Something that 10 years ago was a dream. Now it's becoming reality. There's still much work. At the same way, we'll have dreams about the very safe future with AI, with financial systems, but also a lot of challenges, a lot of work ahead of us. Uh various various communities and meetups and pop-up cities that brought you here uh that keep you engaged throughout the year.

uh things like invisible gardens, edge cities, zuzales, all of those brought a lot of thought leaders to start asking big questions on telling what are we fearing now and how to become fearless, how to become hopeful for the future. Uh all the people who fight for privacy and continuously anchor us with the values and tell us that's what we're fighting for. We want privacy for everyone. Privacy by default privacy on Ethereum mainet. Uh these are people that bring the tooling and say every now every every week we have to be braver and braver.

On one side you always have the opening the opportunities to bring more privacy tools. On the other side there's always always someone chasing you for delivering privacy for others. uh people who never ask for permission uh people who don't need any institutions around them who don't need any foundations who don't need even communities those hackers that just connect and feel that they need to build a future together I think that's in the end what makes the world good we have ideas we talk about the ideas and are millions of people that very quietly listen to us and judge by themselves what is good what is bad and follow the right paths and that's why it's so important to keep talking, keep educating, keep building tools for people and you not always will hear who the real heroes are. I think that many of you here are silent heroes that maybe built more more on Ethereum uh that many of those that are in the pictures are being mentioned by me ever in the talks. Um there will be people from academia, researchers, uh builders of communities, educators of students from around the world.

Here are some pictures from academia in Asia, in Latin America, from our tours from the Ethereum Foundation. There are obviously thousands of universities that educated cryptographers, privacy fighters, uh people who bring the the legal definitions for blockchain and for Ethereum. Uh people that define businesses uh create mechanism design. All of those people coming from academia and with the foundation will be more and more active in supporting the top universities but also here up and cominging universities around the world. uh builders builders on the hackathons those who prefer sleepless nights over parties and sometimes guess parties over sleepless nights uh the the builders that uh build on the trains that build on huge hackathons the builders that will build at the global bonosirus here after defcon connect uh all of them around you and among this 20,000 people I guess there'll be 10,000 or more builders ers, those that uh maybe just learned to build on Solidity or are building soon.

Uh people who build community hubs around the world. um the Frontier Tower in San Francisco, the Hong Kong community hub around the financial center, uh the labs that are available for those who built on blockchain on Ethereum but want to also experiment with with AI with uh biotech uh with longevity technologies with culture with art. It's the connection on all the different industries and ideas that bring the best of the projects to Ethereum. uh the Wall Street people, those who talk about prices, who talk about speculation, uh many many times even as many of us started here building with ideas of bringing the Wall Street down, replacing it, uh removing the need for any of the financial systems, you go to financial institutions, to banks, and you find the silent hearers that have been there for over 10 years, and they say, "We've been supporting Ethereum, and now they climbing up in the hierarchies, and they changing the world as well, and they moving the all global finance to Ethereum and allow us to actually make the difference without revolutions but through the evolution and they understand and they tell us we think that we'll disappear or we think that we'll change we think that the digital assets and blockchain will shape our future uh all the L2 builders and there are so many obviously we have the long tale of L2 builders we have the leading L2s many of them will be here around you we tried to bring as many of the L2 builders together to Devcon connect venues and it's extremely important to appreciate their innovation, their contributions to Ethereum, uh the times when they leave and come back, the times when they arrive, the times when they announce how much Ethereum matters, the times when they get irritated, all of that is understandable and it's great to have altus around Ethereum ecosystem. um all the builders from the local communities in Latin America and I'm pretty sure I missed so many so sorry for that.

Why are you putting so much effort and very often it's so difficult and it feels so much not supported at the other times you realize that it's everything that matters that you're building that together. That's how you start and then you contribute years later to build new communities and to come back with experience with the stories uh with the stories of building that together in small groups at the beginning and the new stories begin again today. Uh all the people who want to display data and look at data all the time, they are around you. They bring the dashboards. They talk about numbers.

They explain Ethereum. They explain global economy. They explain security. They tell you what's going on. Um, I love those dashboards.

They help me all the time. We keep sharing them. That's what uh tells the story to many of the people in finance. Uh, it does tell people also story of how many users are really impacted by the changes that we bring to the world. Uh, wallets and payments builders.

And this is the first steps. This is the first step for many of you. uh finding the wallet and experimenting with Ethereum and I think many of us also start to build around Ethereum but take a while before downloading the first wallet. So this is the place to go ethereum.org Orac website.

You go, you find a wallet, you start and those first steps, experimenting with things, experimenting with layer 2, experimenting with Ethereum mainet, experimenting with DeFi, deploying NFTTS, exploring the art of Ethereum, reading the stories of Ethereum that are forever embedded in the chain on mainet. All of this is the story to start. and so many so many more people. Uh the teams behind the public goods building, the teams that uh support local communities, global communities, they support infrastructure, they support building Ethereum, uh the Dows that were created to govern, experiment with governance, uh the ideators of the new models of the governance. And I think that one more challenge, the challenge of the very uh very dark future of the of the AI agents not giving us the space for governance as one more that they'll be addressing.

Uh the refi people, people that look at the impact, the positive impact and how to really define the values beyond the basic values of Ethereum. uh policy and legal teams who are so much sought after now when the governance uh governments around the world are asking for help. They say oh something is opening more and more adoption is happening. Help us to understand how to set the policies best. Help us to define standards.

help us to understand how not to h how not to harm people that build over the last that I've been building over the last many years uh Ethereum solutions on top wallets all this policy and legal people helping us to defend those that were brave enough to build and it's so important uh marketing teams marketing teams that continuously tell us we have to do it better we have to work on branding of the foundation on Ethereum and we will be listening think more and you are so important to deliver this vision that is actually compelling looks good sounds good feels good marketing teams so important uh beev teams all those people that will be creating the stories around you that will be talking when everybody is quiet that will be listening when you're talking they'll be thinking of how to help you connect how to make sure that you have the best parties here that you feel natural or sometimes cringe all of those business people create connection actions create a network of people around us and help our teams to actually deliver visibly what we all building in the stealth mode. um educators, those that go and deliver the simplest message of how to start, how to build the first smart contract, uh how to join the network if you're somewhere there in a far away country uh countryside area, not connected well, but you still want to use Ethereum to build whatever is important for you locally. uh translators who continuously convert like who deliver the content in all the languages uh and now allow us to to speak through the ethereum.org park websites uh to hundreds of languages uh around the world. All of these people who helped us build communities and bring the content from the English speaking language uh to to the world in Asia to the world in Latin uh Latin America.

All of this we need and all of them are around you and help all of those teams. Everybody who is here wants to build a future wants to build with you and has a place in building the next 10 years of Ethereum. And now it's bright but I think all of us will remember that there is something dark in the world and there is really big challenge really high difficulty level for fighting all of this and it's worth again it's not only the time to celebrate but to listen uh what the new ideas are and what's worth building. Thank you so much and use Eve for all your stories. Start using Eve.

If you're worried about the world of the future, use Ethereum. Use Eve. Thank you so much. Thank you. Q&A.

Q&A.

Is there a Q&A?

Yeah.

Hi. So, reminder, there are questions um that you could ask. Then we have a couple questions that have been asked for the Q&A. We're going to spend some time with Tomas. We have got about a couple minutes to just finish this off on the Q&A slide.

So we have a couple questions. Um the first one is what would make you consider Devconnect Argentina as a success five 10 years from now?

10 years from now the Devcon connect Okay. What will make Dev Connect a success for me 10 years from now if everybody will tell the stories of what they started at Devcon Argentina and they will feel that's the big impact. So they will be celebrating 10 years from now they'll be celebrating the next 10 years of Ethereum and probably that's the beginning of the stories that they'll say if they're inspiring if they tell and if people feel we won again and there is yet another challenge because I guess the difficulty level will go up again in 10 years like the world is scary is accelerating it's more challenging we have to always adapt and be faster and more efficient with all the tooling that is there

what can we learn from Argentina's web 3 adoption.

What did we learn from Argentina? That's uh well, we learned some challenges and some promises. So, first of all, crypto matters. It does help a lot of people, but also it's not easy even in challenging situations to deliver the centralization properly. Uh we do talk about Argentina using crypto but sometimes using in a centralized way.

Uh what we learned we learned a lot of huh they the like research hard research hardcore research thing we learned that there are fantastic engineers and researchers on cryptography side zik engineers in Argentina that can help us and uh that's a big learning more from the adoption in Argentina. I hope that we'll learn over the next week much more than we ever thought we would.

It's awesome. I I've seen crypto everywhere. The amount that it's normalized here it's amazing. It's like definitely number one in adoption that I've in any country I've been to. Um the second third question is what are builders doing today that makes you the most excited about Ethereum's future?

Is there something that stands out? Is it a whole bunch of things?

What are builders doing today that makes me most excited? I change my excitement every week when people build something new and send me the details of what they're building now. So I think that uh anything AI related I think it begins the big story the big challenge of the next 10 years. uh if they continue building something that's already successful and not giving up, not giving up even if they are successful but they say oh I'll keep pushing I want it even bigger that's super exciting to see people that uh never stop uh because they prove you that it was always for values um when they build in privacy and suddenly they get so much attention that's super exciting uh look the everyone talks about privacy now encouraging everyone to build privacy And still it's very very risky like we see it's very risky. So this is super exciting to see people that uh risk it all to build privacy solutions.

Um you're very like you've spoken to a bunch of people from across the Ethereum ecosystem from the institutions to developers to the artists to every basically everybody. Uh you might actually be the most open person in all of Ethereum. I saw the last slide on your uh thing is all your contact information. Um what's something that you wish everyone knew? Like you know someone new to Ethereum.

Is there something that um newcomers you wish they just like immediately knew or a misconception that you wish you could immediately eradicate? Um yeah,

not a misconception, but I would love everyone to just very quickly learn how to help other people to get connected. Uh the most basic networking skill helps networking skills help everyone so much. And we building the networks, it's important to create connections between people, between continents. uh the more unusual connections you create that make sense uh the better because probably nobody else was thinking about it. Uh and sometimes it's super surprising how easy it is to make a connection that actually makes a difference.

Uh you build a single telegram connection uh you connect a builder with a capital provider. you connect uh someone in academia who's looking for founder that wants to launch a project on research and it works and they come back after years and they say this is exactly the moment that helped and you think oh really it was just a simple introduction on telegram uh so that matters sometimes more than building yourself activating everyone around you that's a bit of this the the smallest possible delegation that you can do uh delegate being in the center of the network to other people connecting directly Awesome. Yeah, I I think so much of this is like community based and a lot of it is largely like the people that it's right next to you and who how you can level each other up. Um so another question we have is what for the younger developers in the room or someone starting from scratch uh what would you say is the most exciting place to begin or what would you recommend where they start like let's say they're coming into the ecosystem and they don't have a network uh what would you recommend? H I myself think now like this is so easy to build the networks but when I was starting I was super disconnected for one or two years from the from the network of people building.

So I I didn't follow people on Twitter. I very slowly integrated with the local community and I was just building a lot and I'm not sure which path is better. Um so some people may may be much better in immediately jumping into the social uh social space uh coding with others hacking. Some other people will benefit from this one or two or three years of very very deep study uh reading experimenting probably VIP coding and building something that was my journey a bit more on the blockchain side. Uh so I think everyone has their own story, their own way of doing something and maybe the worst thing is just to try to find the answers of how to do the things.

So whatever feels right, that's what people should do.

Uh so some of the audience want to know about you and your journey as well. Uh is there a specific moment for you when you were getting into Ethereum that really unlocked everything for you or uh something that you like remember and cherish?

Something that unlocked it for me for sure. help of the London local community. So Antonio Sabado helped me a lot by telling me get on Twitter, apply for a grant, uh start talking about what you're building. So if that story helped me, then probably it would help others as well. So on one side I was very not distracted and building, but also at the right moment people who just noticed what I'm building started telling me, now is the time to show to the world what you're building.

Awesome. Um, I think that's all the time we have for Q&A. Thank you again. Please give a round of applause to Tamas, executive director of the country. Thank you.