# Ethereum Real World Economy | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 55:17
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-3A0b9y7OmUI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A0b9y7OmUI

## Description

Ethereum’s role as universal settlement layer is growing fast. Tradfi companies like Stripe are building on-chain, while native projects like Polymarket are increasingly impactful in the real world.

This panel will debate the future of “Real-World Ethereum”. What does that mean? How do we maximize growth opportunities while avoiding capture? What can we learn from history? How do we best compete, and how do we ensure Ethereum values as we power more and more of the world outside crypto?

Speaker(s): Tim Beiko, DC Posch, Liam Horne
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Ethereum Roadmap, Use Cases, e/acc, case, use

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Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

thank [Music] you nice welcome wow really great seeing everyone um so we're going to do this panel about real world ethereum and I think this is a topic that's close to all of our hearts here um and we're at really interesting time for it you know like there's like big things that are happening we're going to talk about there's sort of accelerating adoption of ethereum as the world's settlement layer there's you know big like actors from outside of ethereum coming in and like using it launching staple coins launch all kinds of things and so we're going to talk about those things and like what it means for us and and how we can like you know what needs to happen to like bend that towards the the the best sort of end of the space of outcomes um let's kick it off with introductions so we'll go around and say who we are and we're going to say what sort of real world ethereum means to us uh yeah Tim do do you want to kick us off sure um hi everyone my name is Tim boo I work at the ethereum foundation the main thing I do there is run what are called the aord devs calls where we discuss potential changes to the ethereum protocol and so as part of that um I have a good view into like what can we actually do on ethereum how the road map is going to evolve and also sort of the softer cultural norms around like how we want to develop the protocols things that have been important and how that shifted over time sweet uh my name is Liam horn I'm one of the co-founders of eth global and optimism and longtime kind of ethereum developer um I'm really excited about kind of the topic of ethereum real world because having now worked on this stuff for nearly a decade uh it's become very important to kind of see how it's going to get into the hands of real world people you know it's still not the case that I can tell my mom what I work on and she understands it it's still very esoteric and I'd love to get to the point in time where uh everyone in the world can see like viscerally how all the work we've done here has kind of changed uh their everyday lives so that's uh that's where I'm coming at it from and ideally espousing the ethereum values that we've been working on and not just you know uh a relic of history of all this cool stuff we're doing yeah so my name is DC Posh and I'm building Dao so um you know we sort of started with something that is like looks and feels like like a global venmo on usdc now we're working on you know something that's a universal crypto checkout it's like take any action by by paying with whatever crypto you have to like do a deposit do anything on ethereum um but I've been interested I've cared about like blockchain for a really long time about ethereum and and really like what what motivates me about it and what I think some of the things we're going to talk about today like there there's this shape that happens to cyberpunk or Cipher Punk Technologies where um a lot of a lot of times you have sort of this recurring pattern uh of you know people invent something and it's new and exciting and it has some liberatory properties it lets people do things that they couldn't do before and then there's this sort of period of conflict um where the technology grows sort of fit fly and and it has it butt heads with with you know incumbents and with governments and with regulatory um and a lot of the time when it turns into something that has you know big adoption something that really wins the the the final product ends up looking very different um or significantly different from the original vision and it embodies some kind of compromise and you know I I think this idea of like like liberatory software is something that been know motivating for like many of us for a really long time and and so I think we're going to dive into like uh you know how we can basically be like you know like pragmatic and optimistic about what's coming and and and still like bend it towards those goals if that makes sense um let me do briefly sort of the shape of what we're about to do so we're going to talk about we're have the first section where we're going to talk about what's happening uh right now um I think there's actually more of it than is widely appreciated because this is sort of stuff from outside the tech this is in from you know uh fintech trafi Black Rock all of these kinds of things big like you know forces of adoption that are happening and what what's about to happen then in the second section we're going to talk about sort of what can we learn from history and uh you know what sort of the space of possible outcomes and then the last part we're going to talk about uh what needs to happen today and what's our calls to action um yeah let's let's Dive Right In so Liam do you want to kick us off with you know sort of the first part of you know you you actually for people who don't know so like a big part of what uh you know even inspired this panel was uh an article that uh Liam wrote a year ago about like making sense of tether on Tron and you know like mapping out what's happening with stable coins right now yeah do you want to tell us about that yeah and by the way uh we have this uh list of questions in front of us also so I encourage you guys to like throughout the kind of panel if you have questions throw them on upvote them uh I think it'd be great to get to the point where like we're we're really kind of touching on a lot of the subjects you guys are most interested in um um but yeah okay so I guess uh a little bit of a recap who was here for the talk that I gave yesterday just so I can have some context of like roughly who knows what okay so I'll share a little bit about what I shared yesterday um so like uh DC alluded to I wrote an article um earlier this year called making sense of tether on Tron the um the reason why was that I was asking myself you know where do people use ethereum in the real world who has a wallet who's sending payments around um you know DC built this app called Doo which which he mentioned to let folks like us that are at ethereum conferences like very easily move money around um and we asking this question who else around the world is going to do that and when you look at the data like there kind of crazy fact is that the vast majority of that kind of activity where it's happening is like using tether on Tron um often times even like through a binance account or like literally through binance you're moving tether and Tron around uh in places that are not not you know with with westers basically and the crazy thing is it's kind of you can almost look at like a failure of our space that um we built all this incredible decentralization technology decentralize stable coins decentralized block space like censorship resistant and like the biggest use case is like people move moving like a completely centrally controlled sort of opaque Shadow banking um Empires token around on a chain run by like one guy basically uh and that's just like like ludicrous and so uh we was trying to understand how did how did we get to this point in history uh and where are we going to go from here and when when looking that up there there's a lot of history you can you I can talk about and I'm not going to go into all of it as to how we got here but when you look at when you look into it um you notice that the state this this adoption how we've gotten to this point where so many folks are using stable coins um it hasn't been at all sort of related to the the booms and the the busts of the crypto market we've gotten to a point now where consistently for five straight years uh there have been just more and more people um uh more and more volume more and more transactions all just up into the right consistently using stable coins um and this has been really interesting because it's like one of the few Trends in our industry that's not completely sort of like speculative and bubble driven um and that was really exciting and it led me to ask a question like where where is this going to go um and my observation was that there's uh an enormous sort of Industry that's being built around the use cases that stable coins enable and uh one really uh important element of it is that it's not just that people use stable coins to say go into a blockchain hold it self custodial or put it into a pool on defi it's actually become like a payment rails where you can sort of load up money into crypto uh Transit it into a stable coin move it from one account to another and then load it out of crypto and that doesn't always get reflected in the supply metrics but it becomes a way for you to like move money across the world uh and that is going that is growing extremely fast um I mentioned the on the presentation yesterday that this company Bridge which is effectively wrapping that with an API it's a a tiny like I think one and a half year old company was acquired by stripe for $1.1 billion like 3 weeks ago and the reason why is they've found that trend of how people are using tether and all these countries to move move money around they've realized how important that's going to be for the future of money they've apied it and you know the biggest payments processor on the internet stripe realized this is a threat uh and something they really need to get on top of and bought it for like you know I think a 500x multiplier um so anyway I don't want I don't want to go on too long of a rant here but the point is stable coins seem to be really damn important um and if we're as an industry trying to build for this use case we should be hyper aware of it and make sure that the technology doesn't get to um Left Behind history to what might be the sort of these centralized players not adhering to the decentralized value so so that's kind of like my my stable coin angle basically nice yeah um yeah if any of you are curious Liam's done some really great writing on this topic with all of the the charts and the data and the the information behind it uh yeah Tim do you want to tell us about uh like what um let's see what we have here uh yeah do you want to tell us about about big things that you see happening so like Beyond just stable coins around you know like Innovation prediction markets and things like that sure um so I think another way to think about like the real world value of ethereum is are there things that we can do on ethereum that are just not possible anywhere else in the world um it's almost like a depth versus bread thing so on one hand ethereum's like this amazing distribution platform allows you to get uh Financial assets and financial products and a bunch of other things like identity um to a wide range of users that like trfi can't get um but there's also a sense in which ethereum is a sorry there's also a sense in which ethereum is able to like enable new things that just yeah did not exist so two examples I really like here are prediction Market quadratic Bing um both of these things were effectively theorized decade or so ago and never quite had like a place to be instantiated in the world before ethereum and the fact that we you know were able to ship uh quadratic funding first on gitcoin um and prediction markets first on like Veil or auger means that like the the world now has these things I did not have before right and I think prediction markets is probably the clearest example where the First iterations on ethereum were like not super popular they were quite Niche products never quite reach product Market fit um but then uh um prediction markets in this last uh the last year or so have become like this huge cultural thing um and so ethereum was really like a Neer there does anyone here remember augur or Veil yeah um and and yeah it's kind of wild that like you know without ethereum we wouldn't have had augur and ostensibly without auger I don't know that you could have had something like poly Market exist um and similarly I think if you look at something like gitcoin and the quadratic funding rounds it's like on one hand it's it's very nice that we get to allocate all this money to public goods in crypto but I think the broader impact there is we get to see okay does like QV actually work in practice and can we tweak it can we improve it so I think that's another huge part of like how you can get Real World Adoption is are there just ideas where they're not possible anywhere else in ethereum yeah nice yeah 100% um I think poly markets really woken a lot of people up to this about okay you know there are things where we're having permissionless rail a global rail is actually pretty incredible advantage and it lets you move faster and bigger than than anything else um and there's this like question I think is like really worth for everyone to think about about like like okay like what is the like next one two and three things that that feel like that um you know one other thing when we're talking about so this first section is about like what's happening right now right what's like you know what's happening right now and what's what's like coming in the immediate future I think one of those relates to this like spicy first question up here about like oh it's the next uh billion people are are exit liquidity some kind of mean um could we uh can we get the the slides actually there's there's a chart that I was going to put up here a funny one I figure out which way it goes next oh yeah um you know and it relates to this kind of thing that I think is also really worth people like internalizing at least this possibility around you know there's this like funny chart that people have been pointing at for a long time that's kind of like the zoomed out log chart of price and a lot of it so far there's this second chart here that's much less flattering that I'm about to show and this is you know about like actual this is about you know roughly usage right this is this is people searching for how to install relevant apps you know metamask binance coinbase and you can see for like you know there's been these past waves of adoption that have each been centered around like a new speculative asset class there was an altcoin wave around 2011 that was sort of inspired by Bitcoin a lot of clones of Bitcoin there was one uh that was sort of the Ico wave around 2017 that was inspired by ethereum um and then there was the latest one that that had Defi and then then nfts and um I I think the the thing the thing I would would would leave you guys with I think there like that there's an excellent chance that the next big wave of crypto adoption will feel very different from those so if it if it does turn out that the next big wave of crypto adoption is centered around you know stable coins and you know uh like a lot of these these more sort of real world organizations we about to talk about like you know like adopting the chain as a settlement layer um that doesn't necessarily have this kind of like spiky shape and it's something that could look and feel a lot more like a regular technology adoption S curve so instead of having something that goes up and back down in terms of actual usage you have something that has you know early adopters and late adopters and and and works that way um which on the one hand is super exciting like that's like what um we've been looking for and on the other hand I think it it comes with interesting new risks yeah I have I have one also to kind of take on this which is um if one way of looking at like the the the booms and the busts uh on on this uh that prior graph is that we have sort of gotten like progressively less sophisticated in our ability to create assets for people to speculate on uh like in the beginning this was like future of Finance like sort of utility tokens uring value um in really like you know interesting economic ways there was white papers with economic analysis and you know you could come up with a theory of how the thing might be valued and then the second wave we had sort of like these um art like digital art nfts in it's like you know art subjective there some value there's an art Market it kind of makes sense and now we're kind of in a phase where it's like these are memes it doesn't have value that's the whole point it's just like we like them and they go up and I don't know how much progressively more D gen we can get and so in in terms of like is like the the billion our exit liquidity um my take on that is that we've sort of like exhausted the ability to create these sort of speculative assets and uh we kind of need to like actually build build real now and that that people can actually use in their everyday lives and so uh it's actually more of like a turning point for the industry where um if we don't do that people are going to lose interest because there's not going to be that much more to speculate on so you know I know there's some people that are like super pro meme coin it's like a really new way to think about value in society but personally I'm I'm more like Pro substance and real value um you know helping people in their lives and I think that that as an industry we need to kind of focus on [Applause] that yeah totally you know one other really fun thing about this sort of chart which I think is like a loose proxy for like installs um is you see this interesting Divergence over on uh you know after the the most recent wave where you know after that the the for example after the Ico wave it's quite sad you see all of these things go back you know they round trip to zero and after the most recent one there's you know the the binance app has a much like higher sort of like new Baseline than than the other two and you know this I think relates exactly to the thing that that Liam was talking about earlier with binance tether and Tron with it it's of the three this you know it's the only one that's of these at least of these three it's the only one that is widely used for stable coin transactions um and you know we saw this we we did trips to places that have poor banking systems poor currencies um to Turkey to Argentina uh talk to a lot of people and there's a surprising amount of people there that are basically using the binance app as their Bank um which I think is like both it's it's another case of this it's it's promising and it's also a challenge for ethereum because you know there's there's work to do to upgrade can I ask question actually have any was anyone here at Dev connect I think in eastanbul somewhat recently yeah did anyone see the tether stores one guy like there in eastanbul there were literally shops you could go to in like the Grand Bazaar and big a big tether logo and you could walk in and give them cash and they they would send you tether on like on Tron uh and you could go in also and you can give them tether on Tron or you could actually they also supported ethereum which was nice but um most people we we pulled them uh we we walked into these stores pulled them and asked them like why are you here and like it was you know all kinds of use cases you wrote a blog post about that actually do you want to like share like some of those learnings yeah yeah um yeah so my my my co-founder Nan wrote a post called Cash to chain Istanbul that is uh you know about some of this it's it's it's very fascinating um you know and maybe this touches a little bit on the second question that was up on the questions board earlier um which by the way I think we can go back to the the questions leaderboard uh where the second one was was about like when when can we buy coffee right uh I think both in terms of what we're seeing right now you know like sort of like the the uh early pirate prototype of this with binance tether and Tron and in these countries with with uh you know where where the the need for it is bigger and then also the big wave of it that that's that's currently Brewing where you know like PayPal is launching their own stable coin and revolute and like Robin Hood just announced on all those kinds of things both of those things I think are going to be focused on use cases like like you know dollar global settlement for things that are that are sort of higher value use cases than things like buying coffee if you're standing in you know in front of a like a physical location uh you can just use the local cach it's more things like you know like global USD savings uh like International checkout um you know things like like uh like poly Market that have an international component to them um it's it's things like that where you kind of need you know like these like new greas rails um uh more so I think than than like uh you know personal P2P payments curious curious what what your guys's take is on that have a strong opinion um yeah so I was actually looking at the question at the top um around what like real world functions are there that uh are not on ethereum that should be um and one thing I've been thinking about with uh you know you mentioned the the tether versus Tron versus ethereum thing is um how like should we think about ethereum being different than those things right like is there is there something about ethereum that's like more useful to people than Tron or or tether or you know like a binance chain and um ostensibly one of the things we care about in the ethere community is like longevity or as in like the change should stay around for a long period of time um and so one thing I think that like would be nice to to see the space move towards in terms of like non-speculative use cases is are there things with like longer time Horizons that we can start putting on ethereum um to sort of build sort of a collective culture that like okay there's stuff on this that's really valuable that we cannot break and sort of forces us to build for like a more sustainable like future um one trivial example um is I don't know if people know the website like long bets.com it's like people can bet on something that will resolve in like 10 20 years and it's usually quite small amounts like hundreds maybe low thousands of dollars um but this is like a perfect use case for a smart contract right like you could say 10 years from now if x happens you know person a gets the money if y happens person b gets the money and I think this is like one thing I would I would encourage people to think about when you're thinking of what parts of like an economy or like of a company or something you want to put on chain is are things we can put that need to have like a really high uh level of durability far into the future um and there kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect there and then if people can like trust that ethereum is around 10 years in the future 20 years 100 years um I think it starts to answer a lot of these questions around just like okay why would you use like ethereum over these other things it's you know this thing will still be there and there's a sense which so far this has been the case you know we talk about whatever chains today and there's a bunch of chains we talked about 5 years ago that just don't exist anymore or effectively like totally um irrelevant so yeah like I don't have a great example Beyond long bits now but um this is really the big question for me is like yeah something that has like a 10 plus year time Horizon can we put that on chain and use that uh obviously to fulfill that use case but also to like signal that there's this like deep reliability in this commment to actually having things stick around long term yeah totally that actually segs nicely you know this is like Josh Stark's idea of hardness and and you know like ethereum is something that provides you know like a global settlement layer that that has sort of Maximum possible hardness um uh know if we're talking about things that are happening today just to like close out this first section you know we have stable coin adoption um the tech is kind of ready right now we have like one cent 1 second transactions on rollups and I think that combined with sort of like the physics of stable coins where they're produce yield for the issuer they give international access has made them sort of irresistible for like a lot of these like um you know existing organizations where we talked about like PayPal and revolute and all those but it's also exactly what you were just saying where it's like hardness there's probably a reason why there's like an ethereum ETF but not like a Tron ETF like there's like an element of this thing is going to be around forever that doesn't always apply to everywhere else um I can one thing on that which is that um uh to to some extent like ethereum's value being hardness like in other words is like ethereum is reliable like you know it's going to be around for a long time and you know that you're not going to get your money taken away it's kind of because the the collective kind of like um process of how blogs are generated is so robust that it's just like it's it's it's hard it's reliable you know you're not going to lose your money I think that's one of the things that in terms of like risks of how we could end up in kind of a more centralized World um we can s of think about is if we end up in a world where let's say PayPal here it's a stable coin um that everyone uses to the PayPal app uh if that's a thing that can be kind of like rugged and like taken away from you that would be like not good for for an end user and so there there's a lot of questions around how exactly will that will the world look like when more and more companies kind of issue stable coins and more people are holding stable coins as a form of money um I think actually Tim you gave a good example earlier day when you were saying that like your bank in Canada um uh you told told you to deposit money in but then it said if you want to withdraw it out you can only do 5,000 per day and so it's kind of like similar to like an optimistic roll up that's doesn't disclose the fact that you know you can't withdraw all your money you got to wait like several days um and I think that's an example of a thing where we as an industry can set what are the what are the things that we must know to be true in our money um and we can make sure that those principles those values are adhere to by the new people coming into this space so a PayPal USD you know instead of it being issued on some random chain that you don't have any trust guarantees around at any moment it could go away it's issued on ethereum it's auditable it's traceable you know there's kind of certain social principles around how you keep it I think that you know this this element of how does ethereum keep its values to be maintained as the technology gets adopted is a very important sort of topic totally and I think on that point um when we think about like uh Within the ethereum community we've done a decent job of trying to segment like what are the things we want to see like with rollups most notably we say okay like stage zero stage one stage two and using this like terminology we can create like a shelling Point saying like we're going to direct the rollups energy to build these types of thing and I think we we sort of Miss something like that in terms of like real world applications um because even before this panel I was trying to think like what does it mean to like use ethereum you know like there's a very narrow sense in which it's like okay you just hold the asset and then when you're like standing a stand a stable coin on ethereum like okay it uses the gas on ethereum and then the some question here is about like non-financial use cases so if you just have something that you know You' registered an identity once on ethereum for like a hundred years um and you sort of never touched a chain again are you like using ethereum and so I think this is something that uh I'd love to see sort of the community come up with but it's almost like a tax taxonomy of like what are the ways people use ethereum and then of those ways what are like the different trust assumptions and the different like affordances that people should think about um I think once we have those labels um and again like rups is probably the best example but um yeah it sort of helps people then frame their work um and my sense is when you think of like the value stuff around like okay the people in the future won't have like the same values as the people of today and that's that that'll be somehow bad um if it feels like it's rarely malicious like most people I speak to like come and they want to try to build the right thing for ethereum based on their understanding of it and they obviously like may have different values and there's like conflict around that but if we can have like the shelling points where like someone is saying like oh I want to build like an identity app on ethereum and we can just be like hey here's like you know a stage two for like an identity app it should do X Y and Z it you know the issuer should have like these rights but like these guard rails um then you can like guide people who come in with good intentions to sort of respect the values or stick to the values in a way that doesn't feel super adversarial which is like oh you know you believe something different than us and we're going to try to like shift your product road map um so yeah it would be amazing to see like more of that on like the social and use cases side yeah so we talked a bit about like you know like what's happening now um let's do the section on like what we can learn from history what we can learn from history and like what are the you know to your point just now about like we should have high standards like what are the like you know uh like given that this big thing is happening and and all of these big organizations are sort of piling into ethereum as a settlement layer like what are the better and worse outcomes within that space and how can we we and then in the last section we can talk about like you know our calls to action like how we can bend things towards towards the better end of that um yeah let's start with the risks I guess yeah I mean one one example um earlier today I spoke to someone that was interested in basically trying to stable coinify Japan was actually a very really interesting project um and the default approach they were thinking about doing it with was by kind of launching um a brand new L1 you know a brand new sort of system completely Sovereign independent from ethereum um and just using ethereum purely for its um software layer um because it's you know it's a very useful way of kind of getting a blockchain up and running and you know the idea was using a small number of validators to set it up and I was really strongly advocating for like no dude like this is why we built l2s you can make it as a rollup because if you do that um you get to benefit from the ethereum consensus the kind of the incredibly neutral block space uh while still being able to go to Japan and stable coinify the country and you know it it it seemed to me that in response to that his reaction was a lot more you know actually that kind of makes sense it's a techn technology uh technologically it's a good solution we might as well do that it saves us a lot of the headache of having to set up our own validate our set but we can still do decentralized sequencing and like the the point of this was that through making ethereum easy to interact with and interoperate with we can get more of these sort of use cases that people want to use blockchains and stable coins for broad into the ethereum fold um and in terms of like how that relates to the risks if ethereum is not at all thinking about how do we integrate with these use cases we're going to end up with a big kind of Frank Ste machine that doesn't actually work for people that want to leverage stable coins and so on um but if we are really receptive to the use cases and we build it you know through things like scalability interoperability we'll make it a very attractive kind of central point for people to inter inter integrate with um so yeah I just with regards to risks the biggest risk I think is that we're just like not focusing on the use cases um you know I often meet folks in this in the space that are like the types of things in their heads of what people are going to use ethereum for are just like so far gone from the reality um when the reality is staring Us in the face you can look at the gas metrics every day and you can see what people use this thing for and we have to like not not forget that um for example it's been a great thing that the ethereum foundation is really into defi recently because you know 95% plus of the gas fee revenue is from defi yeah I think one risk that's really worth drilling on is a lot of this new wave of like Financial adoption of ethereum is centered around real world asset act stable coins so uh like how many people have here have heard of D most perfect how many people have here have heard of Ry right perfect and we love these things and they have you know a few percent of the the market cap of like usdc and usdt and uh I think there's a really interesting like sort of space of possible outcomes there some of which are are really nice and some of which are really quite bad around uh you know we're going to have like more and more of the world's activity happening on these these tokens currently the way they're built is kind of um you know right in the middle like they're they're permissionless by default which is fantastic it's what lets people build things like poly Market on top of usdc but they have a centrally operated Blacklist and there's tail risks that come with that um so yeah I I think it'd be interesting to talk about like like you know like what are assets that are at the center of this and you know like how what are like the better and worse outcomes there yeah I think kind of what we were talking about earlier like the sort of labeling around different stages um there's a sense in which you you know usdc being uh effectively uh controlled by singer issuer is bad because they can Blacklist your coins um but it's net better than a bank because it's like transparent on chain you can use it and whatnot and it's probably you know somewhat worse than die because you know there's like more of of a control there um and so I think this is something as well that like within the ethereum community we need to I don't know agree on is are we fine with like facilit facilitating a lot of things that are like net improvements for the status quo in the worlds even though they're you know not fully um not fully permissionless or not fully transparent to the same extent that something like that's purely built on chain is um I think you see this over and over like you know we talk about assets but um I was talking with the founder of Eve uh who announced that uh the sort of physics for their next versions is going to be on ethereum and we were talking about you know how they should go about upgrading the contracts for the game and one thing you said is like paraphrasing is it's actually not the most important thing how you upgrades because most video games are just a complete Black Box and going from like the code for the game to complete Black Box that there's something public is already like most of the value and then you know whether you have a multisig a delay or whatever it's like it's kind of like an incremental gain from there so my sense is like there's a lot of real world use cases that almost look like bad if you take like a blockchain first perspective because they have all these trusted uh failure points um but they are like a significant Improvement to the status quo because just the rest of the world doesn't operate this way um so yeah we we should I think we should welcome those and it's like a very valuable way to leverage ethereum's impact in the world and to the extent that we can then like giving them a terminology of like okay this is like a stage zero game on ethereum or this is like a stage zero asset um that's extremely valuable because if they then want to go further down the rabbit hole they have like a clear road map to do so that's been informed by sort of the ethereum values rather than their perception of what that is yeah yeah I would strongly agree with that and with with regards to stable coins in particular there's this really good website I think it's is it blue.org yeah how many people here have been to Blue chip. org oh only a handful yeah go to Blue chip. org um you know I think we're going to get to this in very soon when we talk about our like call the action like what needs to happen next section um but I think those kinds of things that are providing like you know active sort of drill down transparency um are are going to be really important yeah it plays into the question of like how does that technology get adopted we were saying earlier like if we as a community can articulate clearly what are the things we need to be true and in the case of a disabled coin it's like you know that the the reserves are fully backed that it's visible where they are it's traceable like we want this thing to not be ruggable like with regards to a blacklist you know we want to understand you know to what extent that thing is being abused or maybe we don't want that at all like we have to articulate these things and then it makes sure that within the protocols we espouse and make popular we kind of make sure those things are used I think it's very important you had a really like thought-provoking take um you know this morning around the idea of like a whit list as opposed to a blacklist stable coin do you want to talk about that a bit yeah like I I think that it's pretty it seems very likely to me that they're going to be stable coins um that are issued from consumer finex so for example a PayPal coin that I've said a couple times um in some sense you can think of circle kind of like a coinbase coin because you know Circle owns a a big uh coinbase owns a big chunk of circle um and I think there's going to be a lot of these examples of these coins issued by kind of consumer fintex and the thing for them is it's really important that they adhere to regulations otherwise they're not going to do it so it might be the case and this is just you know I'm just kind of theorizing that they actually have more of like a whit list uh where the only way you can access this coin is if you're kind of already an existing customer if they've kyed you and so on that's like maximally compliant but obviously it's not very you know Cipher Punk um but maybe it's actually possible that you know these sorts of coins might still exist but instead of them being black listable they're wh listable but you can always exit um and that gives you this interesting property where it's very much more like a regulated Financial product that these companies are already familiar with offering but you're adding this new feature to it which is the ability to exit into crypto um and to some extent that's one of the major value props of stable coins already just the ability to have it be portable so this is like it's a product in the direction of make it regulated make it familiar and make it something people already want but add in a bit of crypto flare so that it's ejectable into the ethereum kind of uh block space so what are the kinds of products we can build like that I guess totally yeah I think that's a perfect Segway too you know uh we have like 15 minutes left so I think it's a perfect Segway to the our last section is going to be about like our calls to action I mean um I I think what one thing that that sort of like thought experiment really sort of illustrates too is how much the devil is in the details like it's the the outcome is not going to be like total Cipher Punk Victory it's probably also not going to be like total trafi Victory and like ethereum just gets subsumed somehow right it's going to be something that you know uh like a lot of interesting things are happening at the market margins and you know uh like I I think ethereum is adding a lot of freedom to the world no matter what but there are outcomes that that result in a lot more of that versus others um like one really interesting version of what you're talking about where it's like you know on the surface for example like a whit list stable coin is actually like much worse and more dystopian than like a blacklist stable coin but on the flip side if you had one that has like okay you need a kyc to like receive pyu USD um or to to do something along those lines but like to to to send it um uh you can you have like this permissionless exit like even if you get removed from the white list in some ways that is more like permissionless than something like usdc where if you land on The Black List then you can't do anything with it anymore the balance is just gone um so yeah let's dive into like the the uh the what needs to happen next col future or call the action part um yeah yeah Tim like in in in in your viiew like what what what should we be doing I think we should be more ambitious than stable coins um so I think uh stable coins are great but you can think of them as effectively like a distribution channel for like Fiat right like and um there's a lot of good stuff you can build with that um and there's a way in which stable coins are like thinking of okay how can like we get it ethereum out into the world and sort of push it around to different users um one thing I'd like to see more of is like are there things we can do to pull the world into ethereum and sort of make ethereum sort of a more of a dependency in some important way and that's like providing value that nothing else in the world can um one example I like to think about for this is you know SpaceX is the only company in the world that has reusable Rockets um this means their rocket launching costs are like much much cheaper than others and the entire sort of Industry will then reorient around that and be like okay like they are able to do this thing that no one else can and that unlocks a whole new set of Industries and there's a lot of people working on ethereum a lot of very smart people and my sense is there's probably some like SpaceX reusable Rockets level of thing we can build that then means that like people will use ethereum because it's the only thing in the world that provides that and my sense is to to the to date what we've seen with things like poly poly market and gitcoin uh quadratic funding is um we have these like economic constructs that are maybe a bit too risky for like traditional allocators like if you're a government you're not just going to swap everything over at the quadratic Ving overnight and ethereum's been like an interesting playground or almost like a test net for those people um I think the poly Market case is almost more some sort of like legal Arbitrage where like it was just impossible to do outside of crypto and and that created like a way to do it um but those feel kind of like weak modes in a way where you know you can fix this and you can you know make prediction markets legal and just have them on like whatever Robin Hood um I think uh I think the quadratic funding example is a bit stronger because it's actually like you have to want to do this and you have to test it um but this is really the thing I I I would try to think about in terms of like real world applications not as much can we just like export a bunch of things into the world using ethereum as distribution but can we build something on ethereum that's so valuable that makes people sort of come to use the chain um and and and you know actually provide significant value in a differentiated way to uh the rest of the world yeah that's really you know it's really interesting like when at the beginning we were talking about what tends to happen to you know Cipher Punk Technologies at scale and you if you look at what happened for example to um you know pgp versus what happened to bit Tor versus what happened to bitcoin um you know the the thing you're talking about which is like how can like ethereum be uniquely valuable so that like all of these sort of you know institutions that are coming in and like oh we want to do you know like global settlement like basically e is like the only responsible option right um there's an interesting element to this so like pgp for example um initially like there was a big fight with the government about whether encryption was even allowed at all then they won that fight then there was signal there's mostly much bigger audience but still like sort of centered on enthusiasts and now we have like Mass adoption of end to end encryption via like WhatsApp via iMessage there's an asterisk on these things but one interesting way that this came to be is that you know apple and Facebook some these big organizations decided that actually end encryption is in their Interest being able to go to a regulator and say actually like we don't have these messages was in their interest and like that's actually really to the extent that ethereum becomes that it's very powerful and then you know conversely you look at how many people here have heard of um Daniel e actually oh like a a few a handful So Daniel e is the founder CEO of Spotify he was previously the CEO of uTorrent which is one of the big torrent clients and I think that's sort of an example of like this going this story going less well you have a cipher Punk technology it's liberatory it's interesting it's you know um something that that is in the user's control um but it ended up not finding a way to be valuable to like you know any of the like bigger organizations in that space and so they ended up just sort of like routing around it entirely and building this thing that's a w Garden um so yeah I I think the thing you're saying about like like find more ways for ethereum to be like uniquely valuable like you know to individuals also to institutions makes a ton of sense yeah and I want to like amplify a little bit what you're talking about the Boran example is I think it's like really illustrative of how this technology adapts um if you if you look in the early 2000s when torrenting first became popular like we figured out as a society how to like share files with each other you know getting around um sort of like you know any sort of barriers to do that and we figured out how to launch a Dap one of the first daps was bit torrent basically um and that meant that all of a sudden now like you know me as like a kid I could download this thing and I could start you know basically downloading movies illegally and I was one of many many people that did that and it kind of totally shook up the way that the music industry worked which is how we ended up with Napster um because someone realized holy crap the whole world is now downloading all these movies on bitorrent let's like just Blitz scale this this new thing that's happening in society um but they did it in a way which was very sort of um not very friendly to the existing kind of media landscape uh which is why Napster kind of eventually got shut down but it didn't change the fact that bit torrent existed like since bit torrent existed you can't you know go back in time it now it exists you can always get the movies on Pirate Bay or whatever uh and that's what I think ultimately was the thing that put societal pressure to enable things like Spotify and Netflix and streaming models I think this is like really similar mental model for what's going on in crypto like the fact of the matter is now you can move money around the world uh using an internet connection that that that that Pandora's Box has been opened we've seen like the tethers the binance the trons go and Blitz scale it out every everywhere in the world like without thinking about the regulation or the consequences like CZ literally went to jail because of this um but then on the other hand the cat's out of the bag we're not going to go back like it doesn't matter what Gary gendler any all says like we're not going to go back and so you know we need now as a society to adapt and so I think in terms of the call to action is that we need more companies like like a coinbase that's willing to say hey look this is going to happen no matter what you can't stop it let's actually come up with Frameworks for regulating it and embracing it in society and doing it doing it properly because you can't go back in time but but we need less of the the bances um but maybe at least more people that are heavily scrutinizing them to the point of like the L2 beats and the Blue Chips stuff like that yeah totally yeah you know on that last note actually I think we we have we have two very specific you know like uh prompts for for for the audience if anyone wants to to work on something like this um you know L2 be is amazing we love L2 beat Blue Chip is great I think there are a few more instances of this that are just missing currently like we currently don't have anything that is like L2 beat but for non-custodial wallets and we don't have anything that's like L2 beat for custodial apps right I think the kinds of things you're grading them on are different like for for non-custodial there's this big um aspect of like uh fake self- custody there are companies out there that are like I won't like name or roast any of them but there's several you probably know that are like oh we're non-custodial also you can recover your account with sms off and you know there's so physics of that doesn't quite work H so I think having some like nice transparency there would be very like sort of a useful guardrail and then conversely on the like custodial side the big question is like to what extent is there like permissionless exit in practice you know um and it it really varies so you know there's there's like PayPal P USD we'll see how that shapes up but hopefully you can just like send your PUSD to any address if that happens then you can do anything else in the extended ethereum Cinematic Universe from there um and on the the the bad side you know if you look at for example the venmo crypto tab right now it will let you buy and it will let you sell that's about it and then if you it does technically have a transfer button but it requires like a additional kyc that is so onerous that I'm pretty sure they don't actually intend anyone to use that I think they I'm not sure why they put it there but yeah I think think something that that is like L2 beat for wallets both custodial non-custodial that would be extremely useful yeah I know plus one that there there's a lot of stuff you could dive into with regards to how these wallets secure um their assets and even even like one password and like iCloud you know these are these are crypto asset custodians effectively and like you got to ask yourself how secure is it really um and I think as we're entering into a world where um embedded wallets is becoming a concept which means you know you are sort of in this weird gray area where like you kind of custody your assets but like not really like we really got to make sure like we don't screw that up and so an L2 beat for self- custodial or quote unquote self custodial wallets would be like very very valuable if anyone wants to build that please like you know reach out like that would be extremely valuable uh business and product yeah do you do you have feel like I already said mine but like something that's so valuable the world like has to use it like the equivalent I know maybe it's like a bank in space or something like that that runs on ethereum like having things that just do not exist anywhere else um yeah yeah totally and long-term things as well you should ask questions yeah we do quick questions totally yeah we we have you can buy coffee with crypto already the fees are 1 cent your coffee is like $4 easy one wait who who has bought coffee with crypto like ever I bought you coffee with crypto like okay like five 10% maybe yeah okay okay we should keep checking on that um I think okay next one as well uh fi is only a playground for a few million people most people like the amount of people who've like bought and sold options in trafi is also like Millions I think that like we having the rails of defi is extremely valuable because it provides a bunch of financial infrastructure to the average users stable coins like die is probably the most simple version of this it's like a CDP is like a complicated Financial product but like a stable coin is very simple so so even even if TR or defi is just used by like a few million users um if it produces you know financial services for like hundreds of millions or billions of people uh that's quite valuable and I don't think that's that different than how Finance works I think that makes sense like um one one moniker I had for defi last year was it's kind of like Switzerland in the sky like it used to be the case that a lot of like the world's Rich that wanted to kind of Park their money somewhere they would go to Switzerland and put it in like a bank that you know you knew that the the guy was never going to like reveal any relationship to the US government or anything like that I think defi is kind of that but on a global scale and via the Internet where it's maybe not going to be like the thing that every single person everywhere uses all the time but it's going to be like this really high quality place you could always exit into if you needed to um for anyone anywhere in the world um and I think that's a fantastic thing is that that again it it creates this place that's better than any other alternative and it is better than any other alternative for most people in the world um that I think is going to lift lift everyone else up in terms of quality of their financial access I can do to game five one either have a good game already and don't think about crypto while you're building it then at some point some crypto I think Eve do as well or do something from scratch that's crypto native like I think uh Dark Forest is probably the best example we've seen the worst is that like in between like you're trying to do a game and you're trying to do crypto and they don't quite work well one one other take on game fight that I heard from the founder of third we I thought that was pretty apt is that um we kind of took blockchain gaming and like just Mega Juiced it with like extra money incentives and his take was kind of like you know games you you you shouldn't need to like just juice up the amount of money you can earn from playing a game like the whole point of a game is it's supposed to be addictive in the first place and it could be the case that we just got so hyped up about games on blockchains that we just like threw all this money and tokens at it but maybe we kind of lost track of just making like interesting games in the first place and I don't know I think person like we've kind of overly linked the concept of blockchains with the concept of gaming um and it it maybe confused us a bunch I don't know what eth the next five year means not going to predict the price non- crypto da if people manag in self- custody I think this is back to what Liam was saying like we should have different standards that we apply to different types of wallets um and ideally each of them are like relatively sound so that as a on crypto person I can be like okay anything that's like a stage two wallet is secure and I don't have to like think about oh the mechanics of how they do recovery or whether they do recovery or stuff like that yeah I mean I have a bit of a like Riff on that maybe like not the thing that most people would want to hear but I I I think that empirically and realistically a lot of the people that are going to gain access to ethereum are going going to be on custodial apps um and you know like traveling to places like Argentina and and turkey really reinforced that this is even people who like have direct experience getting rugged by their own Banks and they're still like yeah we binance we love lemon right uh and this is I mean I to tell you like the personal side of this this is this is what drove like you know us at at Doo shifting our Focus from like Dio the app to Diop pay which is like okay you know ethereum has these magical properties how do you let people do anything on ethereum in like one transfer even a transfer from a custodial app like someone wants to place a poly Market bet like how do you do that directly from binance like send money to an address um and so yeah I I I think at the same time like it's like a critical like back stop like like the fact that you can like exit to self- custody is like the boundary condition that like ensures freedom for everyone else and so I think like fighting for like good regulatory around like self custody and like that is still like extremely important what do you think I think we're getting kicked off I see what was that I think they're kicking us off I see I see I see or they're about to they're about to kick us out well thanks so much for joining us this was fantastic thanks thanks everyone yeah thank you think both of you thank you DC Liam Tim awesome