Ethereum Ecosystem Overview by Jason Chaskin - Devconnect

Hello everyone. Thank you for that introduction, Benji. Today I'm going to give you an Ethereum ecosystem overview. We have a lot to cover, so let's not waste any time. Now, before I talk about Ethereum, let's actually go back to the '90s.

Let's pretend the year is 1991 and the internet is just getting started. Everyone is extremely excited about the internet. It's going to revolutionize the world. Well, everybody except for a small group of 2,000 people. This group of people, they were mathematicians.

They were cryptographers. They were software engineers. And they saw that if the internet kept progressing in the same way that it's currently progressing, well, people would have no freedom on the internet. And that the technology would actually be something that authoritarian regimes like the Nazis would have dreamed to have. But they didn't just stop and let this happen.

They were proactive and they wanted to fight back and they built software to do that and they built code that was free to use and they knew that if the software was uh was distributed worldwide nobody would be able to shut it down and they did just that and we have privacy because of them and they didn't do this for personal kind of wealth. They didn't do this to start a company. They just wanted the world to be more free. The US government even tried to make encryption illegal and they fought the US government and they won and these cippher punks are heroes. Um, but after the 1990s the movement kind of died down.

However, in 2008 it was reborn. The cipher punk considered digital cash to be this holy grail in constructing a new borderless world. All the freedoms that we know and love are kind of downstream of the freedom to transact. And enter Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a new decentralized monetary system.

It was neutral. Everyone on the network is treated the same. It's global. Anyone in the world with an internet connection can access it. And you have censorship resistance.

If you send a transaction, your transaction will be included. And you also can run a computer yourself and know that the rules are being verified. There was one curious 17-year-old in Canada, and he was particularly interested in Bitcoin's values to the point where he actually started a magazine called Bitcoin Magazine to cover the movement. Now, that 17-year-old was named Vitalic Buterine, and he was so inspired by Bitcoin's values, but he thought that Bitcoin could be more. He thought that the values that made Bitcoin special could be extended to more things.

He played around with something called Namecoin, that was the an early kind of decentralized identity system, but Bitcoin wasn't really built for that. He played around with color coins, which was an early stage um technology that allowed you to issue different digital assets other than Bitcoin, but you kind of had to hack it together. um the Bitcoin community was not open to experimenting on Bitcoin, but he had a question. He was wondering if you could actually build a blockchain where you can decentralized compute and not just one asset. And that question led to the creation of Ethereum.

Now, at Devcon 1, Gavin Wood was quoted saying, "Ethereum commoditizes trust. It's the bridge between people and systems that don't yet trust each other. That is the world computer. instead of uploading an application to one company's server and then when you do that maybe they can erase your application, maybe they could change it. You kind of have no idea what's going to happen.

You're giving them your application. Instead, you upload it to thousands of computers around the world and these computers will run your application at the same time, making it the world's computer. But we needed some way to fund this world computer. there needed to be um kind of a a crowdfund in order to have the money to build this world computer. And that crowdfund was actually um conducted in the same way of Ethereum's values, open, global, and permissionless.

It was built in a way where people could send Bitcoin to an address and then later they would receive ETH when the network went live. And that crowdfund raised $18 million in 2014 and was the third largest crowdfund um at the time. Then once Ethereum went live, it was the perfect platform for having similar crowdfunds around the world. It was open. It was global.

It was permissionless. You didn't need to ask Kickstarter for permission. You didn't need to ask VCs. You didn't need to be located in some country. And it was put to immediate use.

20 of the top 30 crowds in the world have been run on Ethereum, raising 5.6 billion. Your dreams don't need gatekeepers. Some highlights of crowdfunds that have happened on Ethereum include raising $52 million for Julian Assange's legal defense. And some things are just fun, like a group of Ethereum community got together and they attempted to buy the US Constitution, raising $49 million.

And some things are not fun but necessary. Like when the Ukraine war started, uh $7 million was raised in just a week to support their war relief efforts. Ethereum also allows you to get around the gatekeep. Um, here you can see the group that actually got together and crowdfunded on Ethereum to produce an animated show called White Rabbit. And earlier this year they actually won an enemy and an an Emmy.

And here you can see one of the producers, People Pleaser, thanked Ethereum on stage. Now, our legacy system when it comes to finance was not designed for a global digital world. It's not that banks are evil. They're just the system isn't set up to support the global world that we have today. Traditional finance feels broken.

And that's because crossber payments take days and cost 10x more. And not everyone has access to the same financial tools. Americans don't have the same access as Argentinians and rich people don't have the same access as lowincome people. Um, I think this is part of the reason we're seeing the wealth gap, uh, inequality gap just increase around the world and billions are left out. 1.

4 billion people don't even have access to a bank account and 2.5 billion don't have access to a basic savings account. Now, when the internet, before the internet came around, um, you had to kind of live near a library if you wanted to have access for information. Um, you had to be lucky or maybe you just didn't have the same access as someone that lived near a top university. But then the internet came around and it made the information open.

Anyone could take a college course today. That's actually how I got into Ethereum. I started to I took um Patrick Collins has a 36-hour course and I learned about Ethereum and the internet made information open and finance and Ethereum is doing the same for finance. Finance on Ethereum is open, global and permissionless. Um glo international transactions are fast and low cost.

You don't have to create a separate account in the same way you do in the traditional finance world where you have to KYC hopefully they let you in. Maybe it takes a couple days and if you want to close your account they have to let you um they have to get you the right to close your own account and then you have to make a new account. This whole process takes days on Ethereum. One account across all apps for finance. No borders, no gatekeepers, no permission needed.

And maybe if you're from um a devel a developed nation, you're like,"Well, why do I even need this? My financial institutions work great." Well, you might not need it until you do. Venezuelan saw their currency hyperinflate and go to zero compared to the US dollar overnight. Here in Argentina over the last decade, their peso is down 99% to the US dollar.

And in Turkey, their currency is down 93%. And for many, the system fails when you need it the most. In 2008, people thought, well, I trust my financial institution. My money is safe. And overnight, they saw their money evaporate overnight.

And what happened? The big kind of financial institutions were bailed out. And the people were left in the dust. Ethereum is always there for you. And you don't need to trust what happens behind a boardroom.

You trust code. Now, like in places like here in Argentina, people just want access to save their wealth. They want to be able to work and know that their hard work, the the value that they get from that is not going to go away overnight. And in some places, you there are actually currency controls where you don't have the ability to take your um local currency and swap it to a currency that is more stable in value because the government had makes you go through their registered exchange where you get a bad rate and you can only swap a certain amount. But on Ethereum, anybody can swap to global dollars.

These are called stable coins that anyone in the world has access to. You don't need to see the hard work that you made, the wealth you gained from that go away overnight. And 55% of all stable coins live in the Ethereum ecosystem. Now we have open, permissionless, borderless money. What can you do with it?

Well, pretty much everything you can do in the traditional finance world, but it's open and it's permissionless. You can spend, you can borrow, you can trade, you can invest, you can hedge all on Ethereum. And this is only going to keep growing. We now have global financial services and compared to financial services that are siloed by region. And the decentralized finance ecosystem on Ethereum is actually 7.

8 times larger than the next blockchain ecosystem. But maturity in financial infrastructure is earned through time and trust. You don't see a new um it's like when bridges were first kind of invented, people are not like, "Okay, I'm good. Let's go go over this bridge and hope for the best." No, you have to earn that trust through time.

And Ethereum has done that so far. Ethereum since it the day it went live has never gone down. There's never been a reboot. There's never been it doesn't go down for business hours. Ethereum has a 100% uptime.

Now, traditional finance is very unique in the sense of a lot of it actually runs on code that was written half a century ago. This code is written in a language that probably no one here and we're a group of like software engineers um knows how to read Cobalt and yet it powers trillions of dollars in transactions worldwide today. Well, why is this? Because it simply works. And DeFi needs to be safer than Trafi.

It needs to simply work if we want the world to adopt it. All those beautiful beautiful properties I previously talked about only matter if it's safe. And early there was experiments, there were bugs and bugs still happen today. But one thing beautiful is the percentage of hacks as a result of um as a compared to total DeFi is going down over time. And we need to keep this trend going.

DeFi will only win if it's safer than trapi. And institutions are choosing Ethereum because they trust Ethereum. Ethereum has earned that trust over the past decade of being live and never going down and being secure. Already live today are financial products from Black Rockck and E Toro and coming soon are products from Robin Hood and Swift. And the world's assets are moving onchain.

We're seeing assets like private credit, US Treasury, and commodities like gold moving onchain. And 71% of all tradable assets live on Ethereum compared to other blockchain ecosystems. But Ethereum is more than just that. It's a place where experiments can actually have a chance to thrive. It's a place where academic papers that were previously just sitting there and getting dusty can actually be tested out.

A great example of this is zero knowledge snarks which is an advanced form of cryptography that was actually first written about in 1989 but people thought it was too slow and too complex but not the Ethereum community. We saw how powerful it was and we took this technology and we accelerated its research and now it's live today powering Ethereum's scaling roadmap with over billions being secured by zero knowledge um proof scaling systems and it's also powering Ethereum's privacy applications applications like rail gun have over4 billion dollars in shielded value using these zk snarks in 1945 Hayek had this idea that you could actually use markets to aggregate information better than just a central planner and we can take advantage of these markets in order to get better information for the world. But they weren't really used. We didn't see any progress there until Ethereum came along. And Ethereum was immediately like we need to put these information markets to use.

And they were one of the first applications built on Ethereum. And today we now see some of the top applications that people look at. There's actually tens of millions of people that look at prediction markets or information markets every day in order to get their information. And there's been analysis that's seen polymarket is up to 94% accurate in predicting outcomes. We no longer need to trust a news that might be biased or someone that's like not even trying to be like uh wrong or anything.

They just don't have access to all information. But you can look at information markets. We're even experimenting with future forms of governance using information markets called food turkey. Now Dows are this very unique type of organization where you could actually let people coordinate decisions and rules directly. um encoded into smart contracts and every move that um organizations make are actually transparent and you don't need to rely on institutions.

There's already billions of dollars worth of organizations that are powered from these Dows. And I could see a future one day where you won't even trust a charity or a government unless they're run as a DAO. You see how corrupt these organizations are and unless they're kind of transparent and run via a DAO, well, I don't know how you're going to trust them. And one thing I think is so unique about Ethereum's governance itself is Ethereum builds in public. If anyone here wants to start contributing to Ethereum, you can go join the um the Discord and go talk to all EF researchers.

You could go join the Zoom call to talk about EF strategy. You can go contribute to the open source core code. Imagine if Apple live stream their strategy meetings and Apple open source their code. This is like almost unimaginable. And yet this is how Ethereum operates.

Ethereum is also the internet's permanent art gallery. We see over um $3.6 billion worth of digital collectibles and 89% of them live on Ethereum. Now, why would you um deploy your art to Ethereum? You could deploy your art maybe to Google art.

We trust Google, right? Google's great. But they could just decide one day that Google art isn't profitable and shut it down overnight and you lose art that could be very valuable to you. And if you upload your art to Ethereum, it'll be there as long as Ethereum lives. Now, identity is an interesting thing.

Like, what even is identity? Is my name Jason Chaskin that's in a government database? Is that my identity? Is your identity controlled by Google when you click log into Google because it's convenient? Is your identity on um on Twitter?

I know some people consider their Twitter identity more important to them than anything else in the world. And like a weird thing when you think about it like that is like your identity today actually lives on government databases and big tech servers. And you can lose that overnight. We saw when Elon actually bought Twitter and renamed it to X, he took someone's X handle and offered them a free t-shirt and that was actually their identity. I'm sure that was horrible to find out too.

But on Ethereum, you actually own your identity. Um, here you can see like Vitalic. That's his ENS address. And you know when you see Vitalic.eth do something and that's his identity, it's him.

He owns that. It's controlled by his private key and no one can take that from him. They're also a more internet native form of identity. Like think about my name Jason Chaskin. If you go and Google it, you can like maybe find me potentially or it could be the middle school teacher that's also named Jason Chaskin or it could be somebody in Nebraska.

I don't know. But if you look on chasin, you can pay me. You can look at my website. You can see the u um the the avatar I have set. You could even message me.

Um ENS names are more internet native form of identity. This is identity built for the internet, not just what's whatever's in some government database and it's being used today. 1.6 billion ENS names have been issued on Ethereum. And this identity is also portable.

I can log into one application and it knows I'm chasing right away and I go to another one, it also knows I'm chasing. You don't have to create new accounts every time and like maybe forget your password or um maybe Google locks you out. Ethereum is also powering national identity systems. Recently, the nation of Bhutan actually switched their identity system over to an identity system that lives on Ethereum. This is so powerful.

Instead of choosing to have their identity system controlled in their government servers, they actually chose an open verifiable identity system for their people. And here in Buenos Ares, they actually issued ZK, the technology I was talking about earlier, ZKbased digital identity for the 3.6 billion people that live in Buenosares. And Ethereum also solves real problems. Earlier this month, there was actually a cleanup that happened in Africa where there was 22k metric tons worth of waste removed in Nigeria and 300 workers.

They were all coordinated on Ethereum. This cleanup was actually deemed impossible by local authorities, but Ethereum powered the global coordination and they cleaned up 22k metric tons worth of waste. Now, let's take a step back and let's go back in time again. Now the year is 2006 and time just named you the person of the year. Now why is that?

Because back then it felt like you own the internet age. There was it was a beautiful time. The web was you can upload a website. You can go to forums. You actually the be the internet was this like chaotic magical place that we felt like we were shaping to the point where time named you the person of the year.

Well, fast forward to today and it feels like there's just a couple people that own the internet. We're just living in their world and hopefully the feed that they show us is what we like and hopefully they don't boot us tomorrow. All right, I guess we're stuck staring at them for a minute. Nope. Um, social media promised connection, but it delivered us addiction and anxiety.

We're seeing depression rise among teens alongside social media adoption. And developers can see their business if they built it on like um another company's API just shut down if it becomes successful. And this is like their livelihood just shut down overnight. On the internet today, we are the product. But what if the internet worked for you again?

On protocols like Barcaster, they're built using Ethereum as the identity layer. And using that, you actually own your audience. You own the identity and as a developer, you don't actually have to ask permission. You can just build knowing if you build a success successful app, you won't be shut down. Here you can see there's the Farcaster app and then there's the base app.

The Coinbase team built this base app and they didn't ask anyone's permission. And when I logged into the base app, I kept all my followers and the feed is the same. You can build without permission. And people are using Farcaster today. This really flips everything about social media because instead of us being the product, we are now the customer.

And we need to tear down all the wallet gardens. The primitives are there. Ethereum's here. Decentralized technology is here. We have to build the internet in a way that we are now in control of it again.

And it's up to us to do it. I'm sure everyone in here has used an LLM and AI is going nowhere. AI keeps accelerating. One thing that's in a bit of the early days is AI agents. McKenzie did a study in which 62% of companies are actually already experimenting or scaling agentic AI.

Now, what do we think? Do we think AI is going to go to the government and register an identity there? Or is is AI going to be able to KYC at a bank? I don't think so. I think AI needs Ethereum.

AI needs permissionless payments. AI needs permissionless identity. And we're in the early stages of an emerging AI stack on Ethereum. There's the payments layer which is X42 and it's already processing um millions of transactions daily or sorry total and there's also an identity layer being built um ERC X8004 is being built so agents can actually register identity and there's over a thousand active devs that are building towards this standard. Now let's go back to kind of what I was talking about with the cipher punks earlier.

I think if they were to look at the technology or kind of the payments world today, they would have a similar conclusion of when they looked at the internet back in the 90s, they would see that less people are using cash and more people are using cards. And what that means is we're actually losing our um our privacy when it comes to spending money. Um you have privacy if you exchange with cash. You don't have privacy if you use cards. And do I think that governments are going to implement privacy?

Do I think institutions are going to implement privacy? I don't. I think crypto is the only realistic path to private digital money and Ethereum is building the privacy layer of the internet. There's over 750 projects building privacy related apps on Ethereum. Um like I mentioned earlier, they've already processed billions of dollars worth of transactions and hopefully one day we'll have privacy even built into the Ethereum protocol.

But Ethereum is nothing without its developers. Ethereum is a developer platform and so we need developers building applications and developers are choosing Ethereum today. Um there's 30,000 active Ethereum devs which is nearly double the amount of the next biggest blockchain ecosystem. However, this is not enough. If you look at total devs, it's just.

1% of the world's engineers. We need to keep onboarding developers and ETH global does an amazing job of that. Um just in the past year, Eve Global is a hackathon in which um 195 countries have been represented at EF Global Hackathons and they've introduced 65 new members um into the Ethereum ecosystem. I personally was introduced um into the Ethereum ecosystem by an EF global hackathon and I can't recommend attending it it enough. It's such an amazing environment and you'll realize that people are like giving up their weekends just to build on Ethereum because they're passionate about it.

It really changed the way I look at Ethereum and people aren't just building toys. There's been over $600 million raised by EH Global alumni. Some of the biggest um decentralized applications that I'm sure you use every day have come out of an EH global hackathon. And last but not least, when it comes to Ethereum applications, I have to talk about the most used application on Ethereum, ETH, the asset. When you look at the value of E the asset compared to all assets in the world, it's actually the 31st most valuable asset just behind Palunteer and just after Costco.

We got you $1 hot dogs. And Ethereum, sorry, ETH asset is a unique asset. It's what I kind of call the everything asset. Um, when Bitcoin came out, it was this weird digital gold where it was scarce like gold and it was neutral like gold, but now it's digital and it's portable and gold is not either of those. Ethereum is all of those and more.

Ethereum is programmable. You can move Ethereum based on certain conditions. You can actually transact with Ethereum at scale. Ethereum scaling roadmap is working and you can move ETH for less than a penny today and ETH also offers yield similar to bonds. ETH is the everything asset.

But Ethereum is more than just a technology. Ethereum is a global community. Every week around the world there's Ethereum events. And in the Ethereum community we live a global life. We don't live a local one.

I know one day if I go pop into Nairobi or if I go to here in Buenos Ares, you can immediately find your community because we choose to live with people that um have our same values no matter where in the world you live. I think that's so powerful. I'm so grateful for Ethereum. I have friends around the world and I get to travel around the world and that wouldn't be possible if it if it wasn't like this global industry and I think that we're at the early stages and the rest of the world is eventually going to live global as well. We're seeing there's these living labs for the network age.

There's Edge City that is um a new pop-up city where over 11,000 people have attended their events. There's a network school. There's Switzerland. There's Georgia. It's this early stage of these pop-up cities where you can go anywhere in the world and choose to like let's let's gather here with people that have similar interests and let's build a community here.

And I think it's so inspiring and I'm really excited to see how these continue to develop. But I think Ethereum is just one technology in a broader movement. I think Ethereum is freedom technology and we should it's one group of freedom technology. We should also be pushing towards it. Freedom technology in health apps in apps that keep us physically safe and apps that keep us safe on the internet.

Ethereum is freedom technology and we need to be pushing for more freedom technology and not permission tech open protocols over closed protocols. Ethereum is more than just the blockchain itself. It's part of a broader freedom technology movement. And I want to leave you with this. Ethereum isn't just code.

It's a culture. It's how people all over the world are building a freer, more humane internet, and honestly, a more humane way to live. It's a bottom-up movement. Nobody's waiting for permission. Nobody's asking for approval.

Everything you saw today, all the progress, all the values, all the energy. It only exists because people like you decided to show up and build. Ethereum needs you. Not in some abstract way, but in a very real one. because this whole thing only works if we push it forward together.

Thank you and my lady.

Wow. Wow. That was incredible. Can we get another round of applause for Jason, please?

It's amazing, man. Um, it's very hard to describe every single thing that happens in this ecosystem. And Jason just did that in 25 minutes.

I tried my best. If I left anything out, it's because I just ran out of time. But

yeah, I'm curious how many things you must have had to leave out as well. Like, wow. Um, thank you so much. Incredible. I We have a bunch of questions to get through, so we can just go immediately off the bat here.

Which protocols or organizations or type of people? Let's actually remain type of people push us forward the most.

Oh man.

Instead of naming

um

I don't think it's fair to single out everyone. Like I I truly believe everyone has a role in this. Um I know for me I like kind of struggled to find my role at first. I was new to like tech in general and I thought the only thing that you kind of can contribute at first if you want to get involved in tech is to learn how to code. And then after years in this industry, I realized no, like we need storytellers, we need marketers, we need community members, we need just people that are passionate, um we need accountants, we need finance, we we truly need everyone.

So I don't think it's fair to single out one group.

Awesome. Yeah, I think uh it's a misconception sometimes in our industry where like you have to be technical and things, but like that's just simply not true, right?

Yeah, there's there's a lot uh of skill sets that make this space great. Uh and second question, someone wanted to learn more about ETH apps day. could you go more into detail about like where what's happening there and where to find you after this as well? Yeah. So, I'm very excited tomorrow to be hosting the first Ethereum app town hall and it's going to be a new experimental format where we're bringing the app community together at the Amphitheater here um at the main venue.

And the idea is we can get together and we can discuss our problems and we can be honest and we can be open and there's 10 of the biggest apps presenting including myself too and I would love feedback from you guys um about kind of how I can better support Ethereum maps and the goal is um the first 15 minutes will be them talking about something they want feedback on or maybe their product roadmap or just anything they want to share with app community and then the next 50 minutes of their presentation will be an open dialogue where the Ethereum app community together can discuss how we can grow as an ecosystem. So if you want to register, if you want to go to that, please register online. And uh yeah, I'm super excited to bring the app community together.

Um people come for the technology, they stay for the other people that they meet through it, the experiences they have through it, the friendships they make through it as well. Um what is like do you have a specific example for that in your own life that made you want to you discovered Ethereum through hackathons? Like I guess what made you want to stay and what made you want to do what you're do today?

Oh man. Um great question. I do think that kind of what I mentioned in my talk earlier and and that that actually wasn't planned. I practiced this talk a million times and then when I saw that slide come up I'm like wow like I just remembered my kind of uh moment where I'm like this is my community and I have to stay here was at ETH global New York in 2022 and at that hackathon I had never seen an environment like that. I actually used to work in investment banking and there you go to work and everyone hates their job and everyone's sad and you work long hours and I did a lot of self-reflection.

I'm like, how is this a life that like I kind of want to live? And then you go to ETH global hackathon and people are spending their weekends not sleeping just to try to make an Ethereum app. And everyone's so welcoming. Um this was like I was still learning how to code. I tried to make a basic NFT ticketing app.

It it didn't work. And yet everyone was so nice. I even got a small bounty. So I think like that moment of seeing like so many passionate people spend their weekend working towards something was the moment for me.

That's incredible. And I I think like the apps that you build that you hack on, you said like $600 million raised by you global alumni for example, it could lead to real outcomes for real people in the real world. And I think imagine being able to do that while having fun doing it and making friends and connections while doing it. Um you know as especially at the end there was like you spoke a lot about like the belief of like what keeps us going, what keeps us uh you know propelling further ahead. Uh do you have a fear when it comes to like we're scaling so fast which is great in so many ways right all the different examples.

Um, do you think there's potential to lose the message of why we're here and how do we fight against that if do you think that's an issue?

Yeah. Um, yeah, I I am scared. Um, cuz I do think there's a possible outcome where Ethereum gets adopted in the world, but we've actually given up on what makes Ethereum special. And if Ethereum doesn't remain this like neutral decentralized technology, well then it's just more of the same. And even if people are using Ethereum, well then it's kind of just another fintech.

And if that's the world kind of that um ends up a reality like I personally consider Ethereum a failed project.

Yeah, I I think it's u it's really interesting all the different use cases that you highlighted they're all very different from each other and it seems the one unifier is Ethereum. It is this need for a decentralized system to ensure that that doesn't eat itself like AI doesn't eat itself etc and identity becomes like fairer. Um it feels like almost Ethereum waited so long to meet the world and it's like the world is meeting Ethereum now. Um what do you you know for all the young builders on stage that are like learning more about this maybe it's the first time they discovered some of these intersections uh what do you recommend like how how do you recommend they pursue you know building on Ethereum and pushing Ethereum forward?

Um well one thing that's beautiful about Ethereum now compared to what it was when I first got started three years ago is every year there's more and more resources to learn about Ethereum. Um, when I first learned, I there was a 30-hour video where you could learn how to code smart contracts and now there's like entire courses that exist to learn how to build smart contracts. Um, so I'd recommend checking out those. Um, attend an ETH global hackathon people or any hackathon. There's more than just ETH global.

I I single them out because I think they do such an amazing job. But any crypto hackathon, um, come to events like this, come to DevCon or you don't even need to go to DevCon. I'm I'm sure wherever you live there's a local Ethereum meetup. go and talk to people and you'll probably learn something new.

Awesome. Well, I think that's all the time we have, but Jason, thank you so much. What an incredible speech. You covered literally everything. Round of applause, please.