This year in Ethereum by Josh Stark | Devcon SEA

[Music] thanks Skyler love everybody uh I want to say thank you for that incredible opening uh both the dances the opening video Nobody Does it Like Dev con thank you to everyone that put that together hi everybody and thank you for being here I'm so thrilled to be in Bangkok in Southeast Asia for Devcon 7 the biggest Devcon in ethereum's history I'm Josh Stark and I work for ethereum at the ethereum foundation where I'm honored to serve as part of the leadership team in the next hour and a bit more you're going to hear three talks from me from a from balic and we think they form a complimentary ho I'm going to talk about ethereum as it is today in simple terms that I hope anyone can understand the present vitalic will go deeper into the technology and also talk about ethereum's road map the future and I will talk about the philosophy the ideas that unite the ethereum ecosystem across time and space and the ideas that the EF Works to nurture around the world in the nine years since ethereum first launched our ecosystem has been through a lot it hasn't always felt like a straight line because it hasn't been one there have been some ups and downs some hard struggles and some challenges we've overcome this talk is about this moment in time in 2024 what is the story of ethereum where are we and to tell that story I want to break this down into three big themes first applications the ecosystem of products and companies and decentralized protocols that millions of people around the world used today secondly I want to talk about infrastructure the technology under the hood that makes it all possible and thirdly the community The Human Side of ethereum our social layer so first applications ethereum is changing the world because it solves problems for people because applications built on ethereum offer something that users want whether that user is a small business an internet Community or an ordinary person ethereum is for users and in 2024 that application ecosystem has never been stronger but ethereum doesn't do just one thing ethereum is a platform a credibly neutral platform a canvas for exploration where developers can build things that are often unexpected and one of those things is stable coins stable coins are tokens that are designed to hold a stable value for instance by keeping close in value to a fiat currency like USD or Euros stable coins on ethereum give every human being the freedom to transact to send money home to their families to preserve their savings to access the financial stability that until ethereum came along was not accessible to billions stable coins are a fundamental increase in global human Freedom it's no wonder then that stable coins have become such a huge success since first emerging in the early 2010s stable coins have gained wide adoption across the ecosystem not just on ethereum but behind these big statistics are individual stories use cases applications like in Latin America where bitso uses stable coins on ethereum to offer people low fee remittances across Borders or in Indonesia where pinu uses stable coins to offer their users Financial tools to manage their savings stable coins are available on many blockchains but the ethereum ecosystem has a unique role as the home to the majority of all stable coins that exist the ethereum ecosystem meaning ethereum L1 and ethereum l2s is home to 55% of all stable coins and stable coins in the ethereum ecosystem are now comparable to traditional global payment systems like visa and Master Card so far in this year 2024 stable coin volume is 86% of MasterCard total volume and 53% of Visa that is incredible when you think about where this all started so what else have you built on ethereum ethereum is defi defi is financial services and tools built on ethereum applications that use ethereum's unique properties to build Financial products that can't discriminate or be turned off and which give people greater control over their money it includes lending and borrowing insurance payments trading and complex things like derivatives the beginnings of the internet's Global Financial system and defi matters because it gives everyone on Earth access to the same Financial tools defi levels the playing field and in 2024 ethereum is the home of defi the majority of all value locked in defi protocols across the entire crypto ecosystem is in the ethereum ecosystem but Behind These charts again are small cases and specific use cases like eup that uses def on ethereum to connect small business owners like coffee producers in Mexico with the lenders who can give them the capital that they need to grow their business there's so much more to the defi ecoystem which I couldn't hope to cover today thank you to the hundreds of defi teams companies organizations Dows and individual developers who have innovated and expanded ethereum's user base defi began on ethereum and you are the the reason that it is still its home Defi and stable coins were some of the earliest use cases on ethereum and they continue to mature and grow and expand but ethereum is also used for so much more many new things that are being built new categories of application some of which we didn't even expect when ethereum was first invented ethereum is still the blockchain where new things are invented and deployed and scaled like the emerging sector of decentralized social network like farcaster lens or Zora social networks where users can own their identities and share in the growth of the platform and which are interoperable with all the other C applications in the ethereum ecosystem or games that use ethereum to offer players new experiences like e Frontier a new MMO where the physics of the game are expressed as smart contracts and players can write code to build autonomous worlds without constraints in that game world if ethereum is also emerging as the default foundation for digital cryptographic identities the ethereum name service has served the ecosystem for years with human readable names that let users sign in with ethereum or new projects like a non addar which gives developers the tools to build privacy preserving applications on top of the existing Indian ID system ethereum is also being used to support real world physical infrastructure by offering a trustworthy digital platform glow solar Powers hundreds of active solar farms around the world incentivized through ethereum based rewards and the ethereum ecosystem is home to incredible breakout applications like poly Market poly Market is a prediction Market where you can wager on the outcome of future events and by viewing the markets for those Wagers anyone can get gain a better insight into the future huge kudos to the poly Market team for showing so many people around the world the power of open systems built on blockchains and to the polygon team for building the infrastructure that made it possible yeah Round of Applause they deserve [Music] it and I know I speak for so many in the ethereum ecosystem when I say that we're so excited for polygon proof of stake to complete its transition to becoming an ethereum validium we're really looking forward to it [Applause] so what I see when I look at this is that ethereum is where ideas enter production prediction markets began as an idea debated and discussed and formalized and academic over 30 20 years largely by Robin Hansen who might be in the room somewhere right now because I know he's speaking this week and it was on ethereum where a series of experiments led to uh this breakup moment for poly Market or quadratic funding which also began as an idea discussed and formalized by people like Glenn wow ballic and many others and it was on ethereum where multiple teams have turned those ideas into products that serve users around the world but there's one group of users that we haven't talked about yet and of course that is developers developers [Applause] developers ethereum is for developers ethereum is a plat form where your code has superpowers where your software gains this durable performance this hardness that lets you build things that last things that millions of people can depend on and in 2024 the ethereum ecosystem Remains the developer platform of choice for the entire crypto industry when we look at the total open source developers working in crypto nearly half are working in the ethereum ecosystem and when we look at data about what blockchains Founders are or want to build in the ethereum ecosystems lead becomes even more apparent and one huge reason for this is the Deep developer ecosystem developer tooling ecosystem rather people and companies and projects who have worked heads down for years to build the compilers the tools the developer environments and much more that lets developers build safely on ethereum thank you [Applause] so when we zoom out on applications what do we see ethereum is home to the most mature use cases like Defi and stable coins which continue to scale ethereum is the place where new things happen social prediction markets programmable crypto identity gaming and so much more and ethereum is home to the best developer ecosystem with the most web 3 devs and the best-in-class platform this is ethereum's application ecosystem this year and it is I think our ecosystem's goal to continue growth in every one of these Dimensions into the future okay that's applications but in order to understand where we are today the second big theme we have to talk about is infrastructure and what I mean by that is that underneath all these applications that we just talked about our layers and layers of Technology over the last few years the ethereum ecosystem has made huge investments in improving the infrastructure of ethereum ethereum is the only blockchain really that's had enough demand and use to test the limits of what we have today and force us to improve the infrastructure in response we've taken the hard but necessary step of actually scaling ethereum and the growth we're seeing now is enabled by that investment these updates include updates to the L1 but also the launch and development of ethereum's network of l2s now there's a lot to know about l2s and this week is a great chance to go deep on them but I'm going to keep it simple for this talk because the big idea behind L2 is relatively simple here's ethereum L1 layer 1 aka mainnet the original smart contract platform and the most secure blockchain in the world but L1 only has so much space so much surface area that can be used and it can be relatively expensive because of that you're paying for these very high security and decentralization properties here are ethereum's l2s they are networks built on top of ethereum L1 they expand its surface area outwards they make more space available for developers and users which means that costs can come down but because they can be attached to L1 in a specific way they can also be extremely secure and interoperable now we shouldn't be complacent I think many of us know there's a lot of work to be done here but there's some today in 2024 that this scaling strategy that the ethereum ecosystem has invested in is working for one people are using them the adoption of L2 is happening when we look at daily average average transactions per second this year that metric has exploded as more l2s have launched and as more use is migrating onto them when we look at total value locked inside ethereum's l2s it also exploded earlier this year and it's been growing steadily since and at the same time we have low low fees unlocked by upgrades shipped earlier this year right now on ethereum L2 you can send a dollar $100 a million dollars to anyone on Earth for less than a cent again that's [Applause] [Music] incredible and low fees are important not just for the obvious reason but also because they enable a wider diversity of use cases they make it possible for the average person to use ethereum and they make it easier for developers to experiment with new things the second piece of evidence is that developers are starting to build customized l2s that take advantage of the flexibility they can offer each L2 in this ring around ethereum expands its surface area but each of them can be designed a little bit differently it is its own blockchain that can have its own rules conform to certain standards but there can be a lot of customization and deviation and this matters because it lets ethereum offer a wider variety of features to developers and users and also incorporate the best new ideas from any ecosystem for example Mega eth is pushing the limits of evm performance World chain is designing their chain to prioritize block space and offer a subsidy to users that can verify as human uni chain will try to mitigate and address uh meev using a technology called trusted execution environments and eclipse is bringing alternate virtual machines into the ethereum ecosystem the third piece of evidence is that we're seeing institutions and businesses launching their own l2s to bring their communities into ethereum this includes centralized exchanges like coinbase Kraken okx and also organizations from outside crypto like Sony and their sonan project and it's easy to understate how incredible that is but with ethereum we're not only building a new decentralized onchain world but we are converting centralized traditional institutions to become more decentralized themselves to offer their users something new something that wasn't possible before and over the last few years we've also seen projects that were l1s choose to migrate into the ethereum ecosystem by becoming l2s welcome to the infinite Garden we're very proud to call you part of our ecosystem [Applause] W all of this it's positive it's worth applauding uh but it's not done and we can't lose sight of the fact that there's so much more work to do right now I think there's two big quests at least two big Quests for the ecosystem when it comes to the rollup Centric road map and l2s on ethereum the first Quest is just to remove the training wheels the majority of L2 2os in the ethereum ecosystem have not yet reached their final form where they get as much security and decentralization as possible from L1 the picture I showed earlier is really more like this right now many of these l2s are not yet firmly attached to ethereum L1 they're in the process of testing designing and securing and finalizing their designs and preparing to make that that that step each week l2s around the ecosystem get closer to that goal we usually talk about this in terms of stages stage zero is the starting point where there are still many training wheels set at stage one we remove some of those protections and on stage two that's the end goal where the rollup becomes firmly attached to ethereum and secured by it as much as possible you can learn a lot more about the details of that on L2 be.com but we're making progress and we have lots to be proud of here so far two full evm l2s optimism and arbitrum have made it to stage one and they are sure to be followed by many more in the near future maybe even in the very near future and also a huge kudos to L2 beat you've seen me put their graphs up on here already a couple times they do a lot of work to understand and evaluate and educate our ecosystem about the status of the L2 networks [Music] yeah you help the ethereum ecosystem understand itself better and you hold us accountable to our ambitious goals it's an essential function thank you the second big Quest is interoperability and what I mean by that is that today using all of these L2 networks on ethereum it's not as good as it could be it could be kind of frustrating and confusing sometimes to move from one L2 onto Main net onto another L2 to interact with someone who's across the ecosystem from you and using the ethereum ecosystem should just feel like you're using ethereum it needs to look more like this yes an easy interoperable Network that feels like one ecosystem because it is one ecosystem and we'll get there there's a ton of work being done in the past year to last week this week on all these problems soon we will have addresses that work just work everywhere you'll be able to send from one L2 to another very easily and we'll be able to verify l2s using like clients there's so much to learn here if you want to learn more about these challenges and if you want to help solve them uh there's several talks and workshops going on this week as well as in a forum later as well now all of these l2s are or will be secured by ethereum L1 the heart of the world computer there's a lot to be said about L1 how far it has come and where it's going too much to say in this talk but I do just want to say that in 2024 I think part of our story is that we can kind of take L1 for granted because it's so reliable we become AUST C to it being boring in a good way durable hardened secure thousands of validators around the world reliably coming to consensus every 12 seconds a new block for us to write the future on the heartbeat of the onchain world it's an incredible accomplishment ethereum doesn't go down it has been challenged and tested sometimes we go through Stormy Weather and strong winds but ethereum has never broken the third big theme to understand where we are today in 2024 is community we've got to talk about us everyone in this room everyone elsewhere in the venue everyone streaming from home and all the many thousands of others who are heads down building on ethereum right now the ethereum community has gotten so big that it's hard to wrap our head around it we definitely can't all fit in the same room uh and even it's hard to have visibility into other parts of it when you're in your own Niche the ethereum community is users of e theum applications holders of eth app developers protocol researchers client developers L2 developers and debaters stakers and rakers degens and Regens activists radicals artists musicians and authors Educators translators students complete noobs and relatively ancient graveyards there are so many different ways of being part of the ethereum ecosystem today the other truly striking thing about the ethereum community is is how Global it is Skyler already talked about this but this year alone at least 73 big events around the world in over 44 countries every one of those events represents a local community often who have worked for years to bring and welcome the ethereum ecosystem into their home we're not just a little bit International we are truly International and every region like southeast Asia has a claim to being the home of ethereum I want to talk about one other thing a change that I've observed I don't have a metric or a fancy graph to show it to you but maybe you've noticed it too in the last few years uh the ethereum ecosystem has not just grown bigger it has deepened it has matured in 2024 many of us understand this is not a Sprint this is a marathon we are putting down Roots we are in this for the Long Haul we are building the teams and organizations and companies and working to make them last and we are making sure there will be people to continue the work that needs to be done we are training the next generation Our ecosystem has gained the confidence to plan for Success that is a very significant Milestone so at the beginning we asked a question what is the story of ethereum in 2024 I see the early stages of a virtuous cycle we are growing in applications in use cases in users and that early growth is testing and pushing it forcing us to expand and forcing us to improve and so we build bigger and better infrastructure and by doing so we unlock a new phase of growth and this interplay between adoption and growth and infrastructure it attracts a community people who are drawn to its opportunities people who want to plant their own seeds people who want to Steward the whole into the Next Generation we can't get complacent the challenges are real there are many hard problems to solve and they won't stop coming but remember ethereum hits hard problems first because we have gone the furthest that is a strength and not a weakness thank you have a great depth on w