Executing with Subtraction in the Infinite Garden

foreign [Music] welcome to Devcon again and welcome back to Devcon for many people my name is I am yaguchi from the theme foundation and I'm here to talk about executing with subtraction in the infinite Garden so this Devcon feels very special for everyone first it's been a long time it's been three years since the last step gone and the second the marriage just happened like you saw and merge is very special not only because of the technical advancement made to the protocol but also because of how this giant project was executed by a decentralized ecosystem I share the vision of infinite Garden last year the vision of ethium to stay full of infinite players growing as organically as possible to maintain the soul of ethereum the merge was a great example those who walked on the merch are definitely infinite players they didn't do it for themselves to win the world will let everyone to join at different layers more easily and the work is great a great example to show how our game was played to continue the play not for someone to win so what has been the law of the ethereum foundation in this Garden how have we been making decisions and taking actions to support people to play Infinite games instead of fighting to answer this question for you or to for myself I go back to this word subtraction this is one of the three guiding principles of the ethereum foundation we share this in the EF report earlier this year long-term thinking stewardship of values and subtraction and if you any of you remember I spoke about subtraction at devcom plug four years ago time has passed and I've been frequently asked about subtraction recently and I'm never a fan of talking about ideas before acting on it um where I grew up in Japan we have this word called which literally means shut up and do the work so but today I feel ready to talk about it a little bit more because we have acted on it we have acted on since then since the time that I spoke about it in plug it has become our key principle any in fact it is also our underlying strategy for us to make decisions and take actions and the more I think about how subtraction is important to the ethereum foundation the more I feel that subtraction is best for ethereum and that this can be also applied by others so today I'm here to reintroduce subtraction with the story of how the idea was born and sharing some examples with the hope for this to be your inspiration so how it began when I joined acne Foundation to be honest EF was not really in an organization or okay Hudson is laughing um it was more like a collection of devs and researchers doing different projects there was not even a finance team uh nor our grand team and there was no system to collaborate with Indonesian Foundation very well and so however the decentralized ecosystem was pretty already pretty big already so naturally waves of pleasure were islam.ef when my participation to the ethereum foundation as the executive director was announced during my early time people gave me different ideas and requests one idea that was suggested to hire the best all the best talents in the world to the AF another idea is to hire CTO officem or chief strategy officer of ethereum at the Italian Foundation basically ideas for me to build the EF Empire and that wasn't technically impossible because the place of ether was already decent and it is important to mention these ideas were not seen as crazy ideas if you are a tech startup or an owner boxing it is pretty normal to do this why is it normal tendencies it is because our glands are trained to add let me give you a test when you're asked to fix this bubbly unstable Lego bridge and I say I give you five seconds what would you do did you think of this so there was an actual study about this Lego place and I also tested with some people this week most people think about adding two blocks in the bottom left especially when you see more Lego blocks in front of you so when you are giving more resources it is more natural to add and spend more without thinking about the option to subtract another example our Defcon team has dip process where Community people can suggest improvements for depcon and the team has received about 50 requests so far among all of those requests no one has suggested to subtract something from devcom so going back to my everydays which with this natural human tendency I can argue that the impact almost no one gave me the other options than adding more it looked like there was only one path to take luckily my blank was less Engineers to add because of my background and I was able to see two paths to take one is to road to add to build the EF Empire the other is to subtract standing in front of the fork I intuitively felt following the past two hours long and decided to go to the other way from there subtraction became My Philosophy to build our team and like I said it has also become our underlying strategy to achieve our mission the mission to support the ethereum ecosystem the infinite Garden to support the extreme entire ethereum ecosystem as a whole not just specific projects with subtraction EF shifted its all to support the entire ecosystem which led to the ecosystem Support Program ESP and the other Grant work we prioritize boosting external groups as much as we can it's also led to third-party allocations to empower other organizations to give grants like us Bitcoin CLR fund political political monologue for example and it is always important to go back to why why do we subtract the ultimate reason is like I said because subtraction is best for ethereum subtraction is best for ethereum and in fact I believe it is critical for ethernet decentralization best part of ethereum is that it is decentralized and because of this the ecosystem has unique challenges and I see subtraction as a strategy to achieve two main goals the goals that are important to tackle the unique challenges of this decentralized ecosystem and here are two goals the first goal is to subtract to seek the right balance building an EF Empire and solving all the problems ourselves might have made ourselves look good for the short run but that would have discouraged others to feel that this ecosystem is for everyone to build and the EF could also have become one single point of failure if we kept adding the ecosystem rely on their forever and it is not just about also EF uh gaps and imbalances happen naturally in the decentralized ecosystem and especially when everyone is trying to add second goal is to subtract to focus on what is most important ethereum has become the largest community in the blockchain industry and it is becoming one of the largest open source communities there are just too many things and improvements to make we need to focus on things that only EF can do and the things that others wouldn't do and that are also important and I like keep asking whys and why do we think subtraction is best for ethereum at the end of the day we believe in ethereum We Believe ethereum can change the world we believe ethereum's potential is too great to be predicted we believe ethereum's potential is too great for any single organization to own so there are many examples but I'd like to share a few of how EF executed with subtraction today and keep in mind the whys that I just explained balance and focus um does anyone remember either in the old website in 2018 or are you not that um I got this thanks to internet archive so the website used to be about the project within the year for example it suggested you to download a wallet that A Team India was building and all the guidance and instructions were made by the EF people in the bottom it also showed how EF is the main team so restructuring and redesigning this website ethernet.org started in 2018 it took a while to prepare but the idea is to separate ethereum.org as public good of e3m and it is about ethereum in the community is and not about the ethernet Foundation now you have still support the server and the team who are building it but the content and process is all open source and made by Community people's proposals they are roughly about 950 active contributors for the content I hope they are here today thank you and another example of balance is regional diversity ethereum is still Western oriented unfortunately and the more important information is out there in English English and more communities have developed in English-speaking countries despite the fact that there are a lot of opportunities in places like Latin America or Asia for example this is why we chose bhagra and Latin America for Devcon and have been supporting teams and individuals in the in the region for them to build their own communities through education and events and other activities the next billion initiative is also for the balance seeking two-thirds of the baby is born today are from developing or emerging economies there are the next billion users or the Builders of ethereum we must include them and we have to start now we also invited 50 Scholars to depcon to have potential to be the next change makers they're also here today laughs and going back to ethereum.org the website now has 48 languages that are supported by 5 000 volunteer community members all over the world they are translating the content every day thank you to those people so when we are supporting the project run by a team we're not really looking at the gloss of that single team we are looking at what the glows can do to the entire ecosystem in the long run we want to increase open participation and open competition because that would benefit the entire ecosystem for the long run for example the client Community has not been Diversified enough and even though gas is from the yeah the team gets themselves see that is a problem client incentive program was announced at the end of last year as an effort to incentivize and diversify clients each client received 4608 ether to operate on the mainnet there are many things that have been born from the year um the team in ens was the project Nick Jensen studied at the ethereum foundation we suggested that they graduate from the Year back in 2018 and with the help with Virgil who is not here today but they understood the importance of this project becoming independent for the long long run we supported initial costs and some legal work and now I don't even have to say they are one of the most successful applications as you all know heart yes yes and you may know heart heart from nomik they're from Argentina was one of the major things that you have supported for the focus on the developer experience which back then was something that only F could do and as you know it has become also very successful project from there nomik decided to become a foundation to be able to support things in the develop devx domain and Derek spark who is uh the team that we also support is been doing the research and uh sorry research of general knowledge Booth um and also like support the applications of ZK to also made the decision to become a foundation so these are a great example of how our subtraction is creating more space for others to participate and then they also subtract for others so EF may be in a unique position in a system and an EF could not have been able to start with subtraction if there were there's nothing to subtract from but I do not think subtraction only matters for EF or only for non-profit organizations since I believe infinite Garden is for Everyone by everyone there is always a chance for everyone to use this philosophy for your guidance I will share the myth and about subtraction and key things to remember first subtraction requires high standard and real execution so the biggest myth about subtraction is that you should do less you know it aims to subtract power but not the amount of work or amount of effort in fact it certainly requires more work to do when I subtract my power I can't just make people do do things and I I have to explain and convince others to feel that they should act in one way that requires education communication and more research if you have been any part of the merge you understand better than others how it requires more work to do a project doing in a decentralized way subtracting your power not being a boss then doing it in in in a centralized way using centroids power I also mentioned how human Blazer used to adding that means also the subtraction is harder to be recognized there has been study to prove people tend to fail to recognize when something is subtracted compared to when something is added so if the purpose of your work is to be recognized choosing subtraction makes it harder to achieve that your motivation needs to be something else other than being recognized subtraction also does not fulfill the best interest of just one person or a team for example your team may have investors who's interested in the goals of your team or the profit they can make out of it or even without that people tend to want to please those who are in front of them for the short term so when you subtract you are doing it for the whole ecosystem which would benefit to yourself in the long term subtraction always comes with with long-term thinking so now you might think oh subtraction sounds very hard it is hard I like to take this an opportunity to say thank you to the people at the ethereum foundation working with me with this principle because their work is very hard and often thankless foreign but I also want to share the positive size of this to clarify first you should know that you can add with the subtraction philosophy EF did add things for example we added ESP and when we think about you know how to like who to give guns and how to do that we first think about what problems ethereum has today and after that instead of thinking about how can we solve those problems we asked how can communities solve these problems and how can we help them so yes we can add but the important things is for us to ask this question before adding and subtraction can be actually exciting subtraction makes space for others making an open space for others to join is truly one of the main reasons that ethereum attracts so many people yes it helps to have more people to secure the network but isn't it just fun to work with more people Nami and Derek spark I mentioned decided to when they decided to create a foundation they didn't just um do it to be nice they are nice but that's not the only reason but they both of them told me that you know it is just fun to be able to work with others uh Empower others toward the same goal so there's just this undeniable excitement to be able to empower and to see others grow and we tend to think if we subtract power and Empower others the same amount of power will be split into the number of people you empowered that is not true games in the infinite Garden is not a deal some game EF subtracts so you can add and when you grow and learn the Mastery will let others other new players to add and glow there with this Mastery and growth the energy in total is exponentially glowing this means there is no limit of energy we can have in this growing Garden EF used to be equal to almost equal to the entire ethereum ecosystem but not only EF has become just a small part of it the entire size of the ecosystem has grown so much the ethereum is lucky now that this Garden keeps growing with diverse teams and projects driving and coexisting just like Nature has potential for infinite growth to conclude my talk if you feel a little bit inspired ask those questions do I need better balance do I need better focus and if the answer is yes maybe you can look for things to support in your work or in even in your life you may have to wait for the best timing or also think about other trade-offs but the important thing is to know subtraction is an option for everyone and you might be surprised how that would expand your opportunities thank you for listening if you want to learn more about subtraction or infinite Garden you can go to ethereum.

foundation thank you very much [Applause]