Ethereum: The Next Chapter | Alex Stokes - Ethereum Foundation

[music] All right, I hope you guys enjoyed that talk by Tamage. So now we're going to bring Alex Stokes up to the floor and he's going to be talking about Ethereum, the next chapter. So Alex uh is one of the co-leads of our protocol cluster and so let's give him a nice warm welcome.

Hello everyone. It is really bright up here. Okay. Uh [laughter] I don't have much time so uh let's jump into it. Uh this talk um yeah you know I think um anyway let's get into it.

So Ethereum the next chapter uh the idea is kind of a reflection on you know where we are where we might be heading and yeah why why it all matters. So you know to set the mood uh I had uh this LM model opus 4.6 six that probably most of you know quite well. Uh, write a haiku. And you know, maybe it's not the best poetry, but uh, it's something.

And the cool bit is it just produced it from this very short prompt. Uh, can you write a haiku about the fast takeoff of AI, a complex world, and finding your path? So, if anything, it's just a short preview into some of the themes in this talk. Um, yeah, AI is happening and yeah, it's about to get wild, so buckle up. So, uh, you know, this is kind of the core question.

If you're in Ethereum for long enough, uh, I think you get to this place. What is Ethereum actually good for? And, you know, so there are some things we can point to around, you know, more traditional product market fit. We have tokens, NFTTS, and DeFi again with your like money logo, verb, swap, lend, borrow, send. These are all things that you know kind of just take traditional use cases in this case like traditional finance and just kind of port them on chain and we see some experimentation uh you know like flash loans you can't really do without blockchains uh at least we haven't seen them right and so there's some stuff here but nothing like truly novel and I think moreover this you know this like even if we just sort of quote do DeFi that's life-changing for like many people all over the world uh but it's not what brought us into the You know, going back even to the Ethereum white paper, you know, it almost reads like science fiction.

Uh, thinking about the future of like how humans organize and coordinate, how we think about identity, governance, and yeah, like making groups of people and, uh, can we do better than the systems we have today? At the same time, you know, I think many of us are feeling fatigue. you know, no one really cares these days about the newest, you know, super fast 01 that's launching because we just have too many of them. The 400th new per deck, for example, like again, these things are cool, but it's not like moving the needle on what's possible with blockchains in general. Um, another thing, yeah, like there are many, you know, research challenges that I think we had historically that brought a lot of people into this space.

Um, but, you know, we kind of know how to scale blockchains now and there's still a lot of work to do. But you know I think it does feel like you know different and kind to how it used to. So at the same time as you know us trying to ask these questions of what is this stuff actually good for? You know maybe we're also feeling a bit tired and you know yeah what can we do about that? Uh the title here is maybe a little piffy but we love relative changes in unit cost.

And so this is like a concept for economics. Like if you think of like how much it costs to make they say like the marginal unit of something you know like you're in a widget factory and the question is like okay if I make one more widget like how much does that cost me? So it turns out that well one blockchains change the unit cost of trust like quite radically and this is like the core insight that you know keeps bringing us all here. Um yeah you have this like concept that there's digital media. So to make another digital thing you just hit copy.

It's basically free. Um especially now, you know, with the internet, this is accessible to anyone around the world with internet connection. So whereas before, say you wanted to like make a chair at a furniture factory, you'd have to like get the wood for the chair, make the chair, ship the chair. It's like a whole it's very complicated. [laughter] But uh on the computer again, it's you just click a button.

Um so that being said, uh blockchains, you know, what is their sort of novel contribution to this environment? Well, it's like injecting trust into the setting. Uh because yeah, with blockchains, there's like an objective history of the world that we can all trust and work with. And yeah, um because of this, the point, you know, the takeaway is that, you know, this must have some farreaching impact on the world. Like this much this must be like a like civilizational technology even if we don't know how to apply it today.

Uh you know, my claim at least is that it must be so. And I think that's what keeps a lot of us here. So there's a gap. There's like where we are today. You know, there's like some very cool stuff, but it's not clear how to get to like the super cool stuff that we can dream about.

And how do we close the gap? How do we get there? Um, first I would just ask for patience. I think this will take far longer than any of us expect. Um, and yeah, I called this like path dependence, but essentially just like these things aren't given.

like even with the successes we've had, we're not going to magically like unlock all of these like cool sci-fi things just by like sitting on our laurels of what we have today. Uh in particular, there's like a pretty unique culture with Ethereum and we need to scale that outside of ourselves. So, we come back to this key question, what is Ethereum good for? And yeah, maybe before I, you know, pontificate on what it is actually good for, we can just stop and ask why the question is so hard. Um, yeah, so you know, I think many reasons.

One of them is this is actually like a new technology. Uh, people say, "Oh, AI is so cool. It's like so useful. You know, there's like overnight, you know, adoption, all this." But people have been working on AI since like the 60s at least.

Blockchain's really only for 10 years. And there's some prehistory there. But when we look at what we call blockchains today, this is like actually quite new. Because of this, you need like new ways of thinking. And again, like culture is a big thing here.

Just like it will take time for humans to understand how to like use this stuff. And it's just a process. Um you know, moreover, I think the people who have adopted this stuff so far, uh they are, you know, more young. They're not in positions of power. And so, you know, if we set out to like change the foundations of these institutions, uh, you know, again, that's going to take time before we can actually play these things out.

And this is, I think, my core takeaway here that, uh, we need new inputs to this process to help us think about use cases and how to like bring them into the world. Um, yeah, I don't know if I'll have enough time to get through all the slides. Uh, but this is the core takeaway [laughter] and it's that I don't have an answer to this question. uh maybe I have a partial answer which is that you know it's like when you're thinking about anything it's like okay if I can't think of a solution to something I need to like change how I'm thinking about it and this is what I'm trying to call here new inputs and moreover if you look in if you look at the world in 2026 we live in quite volatile times which can be scary but at the same time uh that means we're going to have lots of new inputs and moreover we should capitalize on them so here are some new inputs AI is a big one Everyone here this week has been talking about this. Um but also other things like geopolitical regime change.

Uh just yeah the the very like balance of power in the world is changing from what it has over like say the last you know at least century. Uh epistemic collapse that's like a maybe big big phrase but I'll explain it in a second. Uh side note these are all interrelated somehow if you like sit and think about this stuff. Uh I saw someone on Twitter refer to this all as like the poly crisis which I like. It just captures the fact that yeah, there's a lot changing and it's like kind of all stuck together somehow and no one really knows what to do about it except to just try to hold on.

Uh my partial answer here, there's this like notion of capital itself, you know, thinking about value and production like that itself is becoming intelligent with technology and it seems this process just keeps accelerating. Um unclear what this means in the long run, but yeah, it'll at least be exciting even if a little scary. So yeah, first new input AI robotics is like a yeah call out there as well. So [clears throat] even if you don't realize it yet, we're in fast takeoff. Like we've had general intelligence for like some time now these, you know, if you go and use the the tools today, maybe it's not perfect, but it will get there and like they're already quite good.

uh we talk about this question of like uh AGI or like you know when is the computer intelligent and if anything I think you know we see we keep moving the goalpost what that actually means because we keep hitting it it's like when you're inside it it's not as like amazing or special as you thought and so then you just move the goalpost and anyway point being is uh the computers are starting to think [laughter] and they're going to rapidly become uh Yeah, at least what I said here is autonomous. Sovereign in particular, I'd actually like separate these two. So autonomous is like can go off and like do something on its own. Uh we have that today. Sovereign then is like an actual like distinct unit of intelligence that you know is sort of independently living in the world.

Um we see this today, you know, at least people thinking about this with blockchains. Um and yeah, my point here is that these will exist. We will have these agents that are not controlled by any one person. They'll be out there in the world. They'll eventually become embodied with robots and anyway uh that this is going to happen and they're going to need ways to protect themselves otherwise they'll just like yeah again this is provocative but haunted by humans like unironically and blockchains are a natural you know tool they might use um again you know with blockchains we seek to like preserve our own sovereignty in the digital realm AI will naturally have something like this are they going to use our blockchains you know I think there will be at least a bootstrapping phase where will um they'll probably make their own thing eventually, but we can at least focus on the first part uh and yeah, maybe bias towards better outcomes than otherwise.

So yeah, what does an autonomous agent or a sovereign agent want? It wants you know a few key things uh a few key things. So it wants access to you know compute or energy that's like how it actually lives. Uh it then is out in the world. it needs access to cheap capital.

uh cheap coordination cost and like microp payments is a concrete example of that and importantly always on infrastructure right so if you're like an agent you don't want to like be rug fooled suddenly cuz like you know say your blockchain went down and tlddr ethereum offers all of this in my view um I think in the interest of time we'll kind of keep moving but yeah I think again key takeaway Ethereum has these things and it could lose them but it has them today which does make it a very attractive place for this development. Um, I think there have been other talks about this stuff today, so I'll just skip over this, but some things to look into. Important note, don't be complacent. Uh, I do think Ethereum is ahead in these categories today, but it might not be. We have very strong competition with deep pockets.

And yeah, you know, these things can end up other places with a different value set, which then if you project this out, you now have agents running around that uh might not be as aligned with you as you would like. which is very scary uh geopolitical regime change. So yeah, you know the point here is the world is changing very fast. Um you know one way to look at this is there's this notion of like a uniolar world where there's like one predominant power that kind of keeps peace everywhere else. Uh it's I think pretty clear now that we're moving away to a more multipolar world where it's not clear that there's this like you know sort of ultimate sovereign that's keeping peace and order and that means the world becomes more chaotic.

This is turbulent uh but it's also an opportunity again because blockchains can give us this infrastructure that is incredibly neutral and I'm running out of time so I'll just kind of move through this but uh key takeaway blockchains in particular Ethereum give you this thing that you lost from like with the move from a unipolar to a multipolar world. So that's pretty cool and yeah again I I do think Ethereum is best in class here. Epistemic collapse. So yeah, this was the big phrase that I said I would explain. So epistemology, this is this thread in philosophy where you know what it what it ask is like how do you know what you know?

And it's like very disorienting because I do think the internet is like fracturing everyone in their own little bubbles and we lose the ability to like have shared trust because of this. Uh we when you don't know what's real, it's like how can you even start to build bridges to like your neighbors? um foundations are shifting. I'm out of time and I think I'll try to keep this uh timely. So ultimately I rushed through this but TLDDR blockchains for example like Ethereum can help us reestablish uh reestablish this this ground truth uh which helps against this and yeah TLDDR uh the world is changing there's a lot going on but there are opportunities here to look at these challenges as opportunities and uh yeah use them to help figure out how to make the world a better place.

So thanks

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