[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