Ethereum: the things I like and some I don't by Mariano Conti - Devconnect

Buades. Good evening everybody. Um I want to start by uh apologizing. I haven't been in the ecosystem much for the last few years. So um when the organizers told me that they wanted me to give a talk, I initially refused because um I've been so far away in certain things that uh I've forgotten really uh sometimes why we're here, why we do the things we do.

I've grown a little bit more cynic in certain ways and optimistic in others. So, um, anyway, I have 15 minutes to talk to you about all this and, uh, let's get started. So, uh, as I always say, as an Argentinian, I love therapy. This is going to be probably my last public therapy session. I hope you endure this with me.

And we're going to go through some of the things I like about Ethereum after what, a 10-y year journey, and a few of the things I don't. So this is me 2015 I started buying ether. um very uh you know humble-looking guy. Uh and now 2025 after 10 years that is uh the broken shell husk of a man that you see today standing in front of you um with a stint u aping tokens during defi summer right and for those of you who don't know I spent a few years at maker I helped u release single and multicolateral die which is uh that was probably the first decentralized stable coin on Ethereum. I created the first decentralized oracles um on Ethereum.

All from uh you know being uh living in an apartment in Almagro of course a part of a much much larger group but um I would say my experiences uh in Ethereum have been quite vast and mostly uh mostly very rewarding. And in 2019, I'm sure you've seen this uh this um picture a few times. And I see some of the people here that were uh upstage with me in Osaka in 2019. This is when we really started the big push to have one of this Devcon events here in Buenosades, right? And probably the person who worked the least to make this happen is me.

I basically only put on the t-shirt and tweeted a couple of times. Everybody in there worked a hundred times as much and the people who came after worked a thousand times as much. So once again, I'm incredibly incredibly honored that we have Dev Connect here in Argentina. and I crossed out too late and put in later. For a while I was very very bitter that we couldn't have it when we said that that it was going to be the most impactful and in a certain way that is true.

uh and in another is not for one if if we were to have uh devcon I know 2020 didn't actually happen because of covid but maybe 2021 it wouldn't have been as big um the technology wouldn't have been as ingrained in our uh in our community in our society as it is now people still when they come to Argentina for the first time they are in awe of the amount of use that we get from stable coins, be it when we had capital controls and when we don't and anywhere in between. Um, Argentinians have a culture of trying new things, always protecting their investments. This is something I've talked about extensively. So, again, so happy that DevCon is finally here. And um I only have really three slides left.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the things I like about Ethereum. And I love that it is still around after more than 10 years. And the uptime is 100%. It's really a technology that you can build on and you can rely that it's going to be trustworthy. uh that uh you know you send a transaction and eventually it's going to make it through you know whatever happens an RPC node uh all the way across the earth then being replicated in thousands of computers all over the world hopefully a lot of them in people's homes and not just the data centers and that whatever it is that you sent or interacted with uh is going to be ingrained in a block hopefully forever right I when I started this journey it just me uh my wife now uh almost a year ago we had a kid.

My kid has an ENS. It's uh it's part of who we are and and and what we are in our family that Ethereum has made so much possible for us that uh I always feel like I never gave back enough. And that is also one of the reasons why I complain so much about certain things. It's because I don't want to go to the things I don't like so early. So uh let me jump through a couple of others that I do like the community especially the Argentinian community and seeing so many friends here uh you know both from Argentina from Latin America as well from all over the world it's crazy that uh they came here for a week or two weeks or for an event that joins us all together in you know our love and respect for I say love and and and it is weird It's uh we at least people back in my day, I don't know if this is true for newcomers, we did not treat this technology as just a another coin or another stock that you would buy and try to see if it went up or went down.

It's uh the price affects us of course but it always affected us more to see that what we were building mattered and that you know that we were doing something meaningful with the technology to enable you know uh entirely new use cases whether it be financing collectibles in in DeFi. Um, and so with that segue, I'm going to move to some of the things I do not like, not necessarily just with Ethereum, but with the ecosystem. Um, going to sound really old, but the rise of memecoins and the rise of, you know, trading everything just like a penny stock. Uh, I swear to you that Ethereum is more than that. And even though I'm really happy that we're finally talking about Ether price, which for years was taboo and it shouldn't be because blockchains uh are secured by cryptoeconomic security and inside that word is economy and that also means price.

So I am happy that we're finally giving the price of the asset that you know secures so many hundreds of billions of dollars if not trillions now uh in the coming years that the price of ether is given the recognition that it should. Um, I disliked for a long time that the Ethereum Foundation looked like it was getting stagnant and that one of the reasons for change had to be people in back channels discussing ways to change it. And even though I don't know if that was the right approach, the good thing that happened with it is that it actually changed at the beginning of the year if not a little bit uh late 2024. There was this movement mainly uh spar sparked by the community to um to gracefully ask some people to exit uh positions of power and uh push others into positions of power that they could steer our beloved uh Ethereum into new grounds, right? And um it became a little bit weird to have something that has always been on the fringes like cryptocurrencies um and blockchains to enter the mainstream the way that they did and that the back channels happened pretty much the way it happens in the movies.

But uh in the end it got the ball rolling and I believe that it ended up being positive change for Ethereum as a whole. Um much like uh couple of years ago Eric Connor and I started this uh little website called pump the gas which stir it uh rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. We only wanted, you know, to uh have the greater community and core devs acknowledge that maybe it was time to uh increase the gas limit of blocks by a little bit and you know it was controversial at the time but in the end it became something uh that was accepted and it started happening with regular cadence and now we even have EIPs that uh Fusaka is going to be a required um increase to 60 million and then uh there's even IPs that want to forcibly increase the the gas limit uh you know with every single iteration. So really happy that that happened and I think I'm overextending myself and running out of time. So, I'm just going to say my calls to action.

I really only have two, maybe a third one that uh uh went past the sensors, but we'll see about that. Is that one of the things I always discuss is that Ethereum should have negative issues. Um don't worry about the the text on the on the slide. Just uh ingrain yourself negative issues. It is uh something truly unique that uh I believe only Ethereum is poised to have a return to L1.

Even though I love L2s and I know a lot of people working on them and they're great solutions, whatever we can keep on the L1, uh I believe is going to make Ethereum uh stand the test of time at least for the next 5 10 years. um you know and whatever people are working on on Lin Ethereum is going to enable us to you know continue this path for the next hundred probably. Uh well I don't know that one maybe shouldn't have been there but um I believe that's all I wanted to say. I want to thank you or I'm sorry depending um how this went down and I do want to apologize that uh I usually have more things to say and maybe uh if we have a small Q&A I'll say them. I been on the fringe like I said for the past couple of years but I've never lost sight of what people are working on on Ethereum and it's always going to be part of my life and again I'm so happy that we have a Devcon in Buenocidis.

Thank you so much. First off, may I meet you?

Yes, you may. You see, it works.

It works. It works as such. Um, okay. So, we got some questions from the audience. I have some questions, too.

I love the slides. I love the story of your kid having an ENS. Uh, that that's awesome. I mean, I think I think more and more uh we're we're at a point where Ethereum's been around for long enough where there are going to be like this next generation of kids who are born with crypto.

And I had to bid on it cuz it was already taken.

What is it, if you don't know me asking? Uh yeah, it's sabino.eth.

Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Um I was actually just talking to someone who I think they had the longest registered ENS address of all time.

I think they registered it for 10,000 years or something.

Really?

Yeah. Um cool. So from the audience, we have a couple crews. What can the world learn from Argentina's crypto adoption? So I I was the right person to answer this five years ago when everything was was still new.

Right now we have such a great uh you know new group of young people who've been working the past few years that they're always going to be better at answering this. But if I were to were to say something, it's Argentinian's ability to adapt to endure risk that almost no other people in the planet uh can risk. So we're always in the search for something new. And in the case of technology, you know, Argentina was one of the first countries to adopt Bitcoin, to adopt Ethereum, to adopt stable coins. Uh, like I always say, I left Argentina when I was little, went to live in Mexico, and then came back.

And all of my Mexican friends, we all studied engineering. They never got into crypto because they didn't need to. And me, I came back to Argentina, few months later, there were capital controls. I had to be compelled to find new ways,

you know, to access money and I found Bitcoin and then Ethereum. So, Argentinians are so good at that that and we're always on the brink of, you know, total collapse, but it never quite gets there. So, it's like the perfect mix. Plus, we have incredibly intelligent people. So,

that's so exciting. I'm a big believer of like you need a given outcome like you to want to use something. Um, and for the longest time, like there's certain populations that needed crypto to survive, like you said, capital controls and other things. And I think we're at a really cool point now because there's apps and other use cases of crypto. Like I can use DeFi, I can lend, borrow, uh, you know, I can use decentralized social media.

I can know what's human or AI. Like this world is getting broader and broader. So hopefully more people begin like using Ethereum because it's like a necessity. Um, almost.

How excited are you now? So you've been around for a while. like things are changing. What are you most excited about in terms of that? Like I guess like in terms of new use cases or even the energy and what you see.

Uh I guess what excites me the most right now is um you know lean Ethereum probably uh you know the next step to make um Ethereum L1 really really uh you know adopting uh zero knowledge um all the things that are coming with uh well even before that uh fossil doing separation of uh you know uh provers with uh with nodes with searchers with builders Um, I don't know if I can put any one thing. I'm excited for the next hard fork. It's crazy that we're going to have two in a year when we had maybe one every three years for the last while. So, I'm excited that for some reason the ball got rolling and we all decided that we can do things faster now.

What do you what are you happy about um that we have gotten rid of from the OG days in crypto as a whole and what do you wish we kept? I wish we kept the cipher punk ethos a little bit more. It's uh it's a catch 22 with the blockchains and crypto. You want adoption, but the more adoption you have, you dilute some of the values that you believed in in the first place. On the other hand, I don't think we should be gatekeeping anything.

Anything we build here eventually becomes a lot bigger than us. And who are we to tell people how to use the things that we built? It's like Yeah.

Awesome. Do you have any advice for someone like you know who's maybe just getting into college today? Um is here is interested in this whole thing but doesn't really know where to start. Um you know do you have any things that you when you were kind of learning about this like that you wish you knew back then that you know now like

Oh yeah for sure. Um I wish we had tutorials back when we started. There wasn't almost anything and we had to build almost everything from scratch. There is so much right now. What I would say and might be controversial, I would advise young people to still go to college or at least take some programming lessons.

I know that uh you know cursor and chat GPT are all the latest rage but uh there's something being lost I believe in the art of programming. So I would say take a few programming courses if you can build something get the word out there. It's never been easier, you know, to build something uh in your uh in your room, in your dorm, whatever, and show it to thousands, if not millions of people. I would say now is the best time. The best time was probably 10 years ago.

Second best time is right now.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Joy. Pleasure meeting you.

Thank you. Thank you everybody.