Onchain is the next online by Jesse Pollak | Devcon SEA

[Music] come on hey everybody I'm Jesse if you don't know me uh I've been building in crypto for a decade ethereum since it started and the last two years base uh and I'm really excited to be here to talk about how we're thinking about onboarding the next billion people to ethereum and like Miss purple said we've been on a little bit of a journey oh we've been on a little bit of a journey for the last two weeks uh we started in New York City uh then we took a overnight flight to Kenya where there was no Wi-fi it was very painful um and then we were in Kenya for three days we met incredible Builders there then we flew to India now we're here in Singapore I mean now we're here in Bangkok then we fly to Singapore and then we go to Manila and the whole point of this tour is to tell the story of the world coming on chain and to listen and to learn and to figure out how we can support builders make that transformation happen faster and we've been in a ton of places so I just want to quickly shout them out we started out in Kenya and we had spent the last 3 weeks uh running a buildon and we saw an incredible number of pro projects Building on Base building this global onchain economy fun fact Kenya uh uh Africa was double the next buildon in terms of the number of participants there were more than a thousand Builders from across the continent Kenya Nigeria Ghana South Africa and it was also so inspiring to see that at Devcon this year uh there were more than 150 Builders from African continent and that was compared to around 10 at the last Devcon 2 years go and my full expectation is that when we are hopefully in Africa for Devcon 2026 there are going to be thousands of African Builders at Devcon and they're going to be a core contingent of building the future of ethereum so that was where we started first next up we went to India uh the builders in India are so cracked is unbelievable the the level of talent the the level of um energy and hard work uh and I think the thing that was most striking is is the builders in India they're all thinking about how do we build for the global economy and getting to be there in Bangalore and feel that energy we played some football uh we won um so that was a little that was good um uh but G to feel that energy was so inspiring um and it put us uh in a great mood as we headed to Southeast Asia um where we are here today we're we're here in Bangkok where the Builder energy has been incredible uh and then tomorrow we fly to Singapore we're there for 3 Days uh and then um we fly to Manila directly after that and we're going to be listening we're going to be learning we're going to continue to do the thing one place we weren't able to go to on this trip because going to Argentina and then Kenya was a little bit too far was Latin America builders in Latin America Inc Latin America in [Music] and I think the thing that like really struck us as we were going on this world tour and as we were meeting with Builders is crypto is not a thing that's going to happen in the future it's a thing that's happening right now in every single country in every single region we felt energy and we saw real solutions we saw people building stable coins local stable coins that would make their economy stronger we saw people talking about Global Payments and how by cutting down on fees you could actually have better outcomes for families that were separated and across different parts of the world we saw people using onchain fin to make it easier to save to spend to store to grow your wealth and build better businesses and I think we saw an emerging Trend around creators who we believe are going to be at the Forefront of bringing the world on chain and how this new onchain economy is actually enabling them to do 10x better because instead of having a centralized intermediary that sits in between them and their fans they go direct and they make more money and so all of was incredible but the thing that was most incredible was the people like the experience of flying to now three different countries and touching down and not knowing what to expect and then being greeted with people who are so passionate so energetic so hardworking so smart and all have the same mission of building a Global onchain economy that's going to make the world a better place there is nothing like that it is the most inspiring thing I could ever imagine and getting to be here now in the ultimate Melting Pot of ethereum where we have people from 140 countries this is what it's all about it's what it's all about and so I want to talk a little bit about why why are we doing this why are we flying around the world why are we here at Devcon why have tens of thousands of people come together and it's because the systems that we have today are not working raise your hand if you are a developer and uh you've had to deal with a frustrating App Store review process where people have blocked you or you've had to give away 30% of your Revenue to a centralized Corporation raise your hand that's a lot of developers raise your hand if you're a Creator and you've spent years putting your creativity online and you feel undervalued and like you haven't actually earned for that and raise your hand if you are just an everyday person who's been frustrated because an app isn't available to you because you have a different phone or because you're in a different country or because you were born in a different place this is the world we live in today and this is the world that is not working it's a world that's controlled by a small number of Corporations it's a world that's siloed where depending on where you're born depending on where you live you get different access and people around the world are fed up they're sick of it and they want to build something new and that's what onchain is onchain is a new economy it's a new internet it's a world where if you're a developer you can build on open platforms and no one can stop you and no one can deplatform you and you don't have to pay any fees to anyone if you're a Creator you can put your creativity on chain and you can earn literally 10x more while getting access to asymmetric upside where if you go viral you make money and if you want to use an app it doesn't matter where you're born it doesn't matter where you live it doesn't matter what phone you have you can participate because you're an important person and you deserve to have a global economy that works for you and that's the onchain part but let's talk about the bass part why Bas why am I up here why am at ethereum Devcon it's because we think about base as ethereum Bas is ethereum and base is bringing the world onchain to ethereum right now all around the world millions of people are starting to on board to ethereum through base and in doing that they're coming together to say we believe in a better world we believe in building a global onchain economy that's going to massively increase Innovation creativity and freedom and we believe that when we do that it's going to change the world and it's going to bring millions of developers billions of people trillions of dollars of assets onto a secure decentralized fast platform that anyone anywhere can participate in an internet by the people for the people that actually works for us and it's not just uh you know figment of our imagination it's not just something that's going to happen in the future it's something that's happening right now Bas launched a year ago on top of ethereum and in the last year I mean I didn't know what to expect but I can tell you I did not expect this we've seen we've seen tens of thousands of developers show up we've seen Mill ions and millions of people show up we've seen billions of dollars of assets come into the economy we've seen 6 million daily transactions we've seen tens of millions of dollars earned by developers and millions of dollars earned by creators this is the future when we talk about a new onchain economy that works for us this is what we are talking about we're talking about real money in the pockets of real people who otherwise didn't have access who otherwise didn't have the opportunity to create or to build build or to participate in the way that they do now because they're now participating in a global economy that works for them and it's not just numbers alongside all those numbers we've also seen incredible cultural momentum people have Bas names they literally Rock them on shirts that they make they show up at base camp they you know build with tools like onchain kit they're celebrating and following us on based around the world there's a movement that's happening raise your hand if you participate in onchain summer yeah we're we're here and we're announcing ourselves to everyone and saying the time is now the future is now but it's still day one and I think we've been we started here and we've been on this slow and steady March of building infrastructure but the March is coming to an end and the acceleration is starting to begin because we finally have the tools we have fast cheap block space we have easy wallets we have fast and easy to access identity and when we put that together into consumer products that work we're going to go from here to there and it's going to happen faster than any of us can imagine because the power and the benefits of the onchain economy are going to blow people's minds and once you go onchain you will never go back because being a part of an economy that works for you is the future and so let's talk about what are we doing to make that happen there's a lot of work that has to be done and the base team and the ethereum team is working together as a massive super team to figure out how do we get there faster and there's five things that are top of mind for me the first thing we have to keep scaling this year base went from uh 2.5 megas a second to 17 megas a second next year we'll push to 100 we need to scale 10 to 20x next year if we want to keep up with things like Petra a where we're hopefully going to do a Target increase for blobs and P Das where we're going to be more sustainable path forward for more data availability that's the work that the base team is contributing to and that ethereum core developers around the world are working to make happen so that when the world comes on chain it remains fast cheap and accessible to everyone the second thing that we need to do is we need to continue decentralizing three weeks ago Bas shipped fault proofs it was a huge milestone and what that means for maybe those who are less in the weeds is that we went from a world where there were a few parties validating Bas and making sure that it was safe and working for people to a world where anyone anywhere can participate in securing the network and where there's no single actor or no even handful of actors that could prevent you from moving into base or moving out of base and from a decentralization perspective that's incredibly important because unless we have those protections unless we have that freedom we're not going to be able to build a global economy and we have more work to do in the months ahead we'll be working to get to stage one we have work to do on Security Council and then after that we're going to be pushing to stage two and this work remains at the top of mind for us because the only way we build a global economy is by building a decentralized platform that powers it [Applause] all and as we have that scalable platform and that decentralized platform we're also going to keep making sure that that economy it's not just a technology platform it's also an econ ecomic platform and it's an economic platform that works for everyone everywhere and the thing that I'm most excited about here is supporting countries around the world to bring their economies on chain starting with local stable coins that work for every country around the world and I'm excited to say and proud that in Thailand right now in Bangkok right now we are supporting a tibot stable coin tbx which is is in a regulatory sandbox where all around Devcon you can pay for merchant Goods using a tibot stable coin on base that is the Innovation that we need and we need it in every country around the world because the best version of ethereum the best version of this global economy is one that lifts up every country and gives them sovereignity and empowers them to take these new tools and use them to make their economies better and then if they want to use ethereum if they want to use dollars that's okay too but we can't lose sight of the fact that we all need our own countries we all need our own communities and we need the tools to make those communities stronger and so we're going to keep doing the work to make it so everyone everywhere can come on chain and feel like they're coming into their community on chain because that's a fundamental human right the next thing we're going to do is we're going to make it oh we're going to make it incredibly easy for anyone to build on chain because if we have a secure platform that's decentralized where the economic infrastructure is there the next thing you need are developers and Builders who are going to create that next generation of applications that drive overall adoption we're doing this thing with things like Basse names where you can have an outof the-box identity that just works and it gives you your social information it gives you your personal information it connects to things like your Builder score where you can actually see how good of a builder are you and you can use that to actually get things like under collateralized lending so you can get credit for building and you can use that to make your life better and shout out to I and talent protocol who's been doing incredible work to make that happen we're going to do it with things like the smart wallet which makes it so any user can go from never having interacted with crypto to being in your app in less than 10 seconds and takes all of the complexity of on- ramping and cross chain execution and abstracts it so all you have to worry about is is building incredible products and open-source infrastructure handles the rest of it and then we're going to do it with things like onchain kit where literally right now and in the months ahead even if you've never written code before using AI tools and onchain kit you're going to be able to go from nothing to a full functioning app with a feed with messaging with payments with swap with identity in less than an hour from nothing to a full functioning app in less than an hour hour 5 years ago people would have said that's crazy that's impossible but now because we have the world's computer that can power these applications that we have open source that's letting anyone build on top of them it's not only possible it's easy and anyone in this room and anyone who's on the stream and anyone around the world is going to be able to build this next generation of applications on chain and then the last thing is that we're going to do it for creators because when we think about the next 5 years and we think about what's going to be required to bring the entire world on chain it's going to be driven by creators because they're the ones who can tell the story they're the ones who can share their experience they're the ones who can Inspire their Millions there's tens of millions there hundreds of millions of fans to believe in a new economy economy that works by the that's built by the people that works for the people and that's going to put money back in the hands of creators of Builders of small businesses of the people who need it most so that they can build better so that they can create better and so that they can accelerate the rate at which we build this new global economy that's going to work better for all of us and so I guess the last thing I have to say is let's get building this is not something this is not something that I can do alone this is not something that base can do alone this is not something that ethereum can do alone this is something that we need to do together and when we do it together we will change the world and I don't know all the details but I want to leave you all with three things that we've been thinking a lot about as we're entering the new year that we hope can help you build better the first is that we need to make something people want for too long I think we've been distracted by tokens and prices and noise and we've lost the plot and unless we are building products that solve real problems for real people for real businesses we are not on track and every day I'm meeting Builders who are doing that and we need more we need to keep making something people want the second thing is that we need to build incredibly simple experiences we can no longer say oh this is good for crypto that's not good enough we need to build experiences that are 10x better than the experiences that web 2 companies have been building for the last decade that these massive corporations have invested hundreds of million of billions of dollars in optimizing and we need to beat them and so we need to build worldclass experiences that just work for everyday people for everyday businesses and then the last thing is that we all need to bring new people on chain take your app show it to your friends show it to your family hell show it to the random person walking on the street because you're going to learn something and if each one of us does that we're going to bring the world on chain much fter F and so let's build the time is now we are at day one of building a new global economy on ethereum on base that will fundamentally change the world and when we look back in 10 years or 20 years or 50 years we will think about this moment we will think about the friends we met at Devcon we will think about the ideas that were created at Devcon and we'll say oh my God can you believe that we were there can you believe that we were the people that changed the world that built a new economy a new global economy a new global onchain economy that was built by the people for the people and massively increased Innovation creativity and freedom around the world so with that thank you than you all for being here we got a few minutes for questions then we'll wrap it up keep on building who's got the questions there we go of course thank you so much Jesse that was great I think that was very inspiring and as an African I'm very proud to have you traveling across all over the world I think everybody here understands that the value of base is within the people so yeah People for People yeah Round of Applause okay we're going to start off with the questions the one at the top is will Bas ever want decentralized sequencers great question um yes absolutely we have basically thought about our decentralization road map in a few phases the first and most important phase was moving from stage zero to stage one uh we just launched fault proofs a few weeks ago that was a huge milestone we're working on our security Council changes that will get us fully to stage one then we're going to continue pushing on that side of decentralization towards stage two in the year ahead at the same time on the op stack R&D has started around what does decentralized sequencing look like we're really excited about that we're having conversations uh first about kind of proposer Builder Separation on base which we think is probably where we'll start where we'll actually decentralize the Builder side so that more folks can build blocks within like certain constraints and then over time we'll also decentralize the proposer side now the one thing I will say about this is we have explicitly designed l2s as a construct on ethereum so that they can still be decentralized even if the sequencer isn't decentralized that's the whole conceit that's what forced includ inclusion enables and that's what makes it so that the sequencer is just a fast lane and anyone can go through ethereum to add transactions to base or to withdraw from base and that property is super super important so we're absolutely going to keep pushing on sequencer deenal isation but we're also just going to keep making base decentralized with other languages uh other components all right who will be on chain first my mom who's 70 years old or my kid who's 2 years old look I want both of those people on chain but I honestly think it will probably be your kid when we think about where technology happens adoption happens it happens with young people we saw this with the internet we saw this with social media we saw this with mobile technology and I think the the the value prop to young people of the onchain economy is even more compelling because around the world today if you are a young person you are functionally unbanked like in the United States if you're less than 18 you cannot get a bank account without your parents approving it without your parents functionally having that bank account but in the onchain economy you can just download a wallet and you can be plugged into a new global economy that's going to work for you and that access is important and so I think young people are going to see the power of that they're going to get on chain and they're going to be at the Forefront of driving Global adoption all right what happens to base if coinbase seases to exist well the first thing I'll say is coinbase isn't going anywhere you know coinbase has been building in the onchain economy for the last 12 years uh we deeply believe that this is a like a multi-decade effort and we're so freaking blessed to have a leader and founder and CEO and Brian Armstrong who believes in decentralization who believes in fighting for freedom and fighting for the onchain economy more than anyone and when I look at the history of Bas over the last two years I can honestly say that without Brian pounding the table for Bas to be open to be permissionless to be decentralized we would not be where we are today now at the same time we need to reduce risk that coinbase could be one of those people who controls we need to reduce risk that if something did happen to coinbase something could happen to base and that's what our decentralization road map is and so the really powerful thing that we just did with fault proofs going live is we removed the final kind of check that coinbase had uh which was there was a permission component of being able to withdraw from base that required coinbase validation because that's how the prefault proof system worked and now with fault proofs live that's gone so even if coinbase were to disappear tomorrow you could still keep submitting transactions to base through L1 you could still keep submitting transactions from base that would let you withdraw from L1 and you could continue operating across the global onchain economy on ethereum as if maybe not nothing had happened but as if you still had your freedom because freedom is at the core of this global onchain economy optionality is at the core of this global onchain economy and we're excited to build that global onchain economy with all of you so thank you so much for being here have a great day everybody keep building and stay based thank you Jesse and