Making Sense of the Ethereum Foundation by Josh Stark | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] I'm Josh Stark I work for ethereum at the ethereum foundation my talk today is about the EF but it's not just about that it's about where the EF came from ethereum itself and where we're going together so let's get into it prologue so imagine you're trying to understand an organism it can't be understood in a void without any context you need to understand the environment it came from the ecosystem that it's a part of and how they interact and then once you understand the environment and understand how one animal fits into it you've also learned something about the possible ecological niches that can be filled by other organisms so you've learned something not just about how this rabbit relates to its environment but also a bigger picture you've learned something about a whole ecosystem and how they fit together so this is a talk about the ethereum foundation but it's not just to talk about the ethereum foundation because it can't be it's a talk about the environment that's spawned and shaped the EF ethereum and its community and about how the EF has evolved in response to it and once you learn something about the ef's ecological niche you also learned something about other niches to be filled other things that could or should exist so this is a talk not just with the EF but about the design space of organizations in our ecosystem about organizations that you might help found about what the community can grow into years and decades into the future so accordingly this talk has three parts first what is ethereum what perspectives help make sense of it second what is the EF how did it revolve in response to those perspectives and third what else can we build together what is the space of possible organizations that will exist in our ecosystem in our community long into the future part one of the best and one of my favorite ways of explaining ethereum is to refer to this ancient parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant you've probably heard this before like an elephant ethereum is extremely big it's also very novel to most the people that are trying to reason about it and so this leads us to often only focus on a small piece of it the piece that is most relevant to us from our perspective often comparing it to something else that we already know and understand so depending on where you're standing ethereum might look like a lot of different things ethereum is a new kind of financial system it enables new assets trading buying and complex Financial Arrangements ethereum is an open source developer platform it's a toolkit that with many pieces that help developers build new kinds of software ethereum is a Cutting Edge r d project that is pushing the boundaries of civil fields at once and maybe inventing some new ones ethereum is a political movement or even multiple political movements as venkatesh alluded to many of us believe in different ways and for different reasons that ethereum can change the way power is distributed around the world ethereum is maybe a new kind of state or a jurisdiction it's a new kind of place to you know write contracts and build an economy or political community ethereum is also a global project our community this community is spread all over the world and where ethereum is going to serve different needs for different people ethereum is also a decentralized project and protocol our community is inherently skeptical of Institutions and wants to avoid relying on them ethereum is also uncertain and changing we're surrounded by an unknown future a fog of War we should be pretty humble about whether we see the full scope of it whether we really know what ethereum is yet and ethereum is inherently a long-term thing can only change the world if it persists pretty long into the future in some form and continues to influence that future ethereum is an infinite game as many speakers have alluded to already that we want to keep playing if ethereum made everyone in this audience very rich but in 10 years is captured and falls apart would you really consider that success I know that I wouldn't so ethereum is all of these things and more these narratives aren't competing with each other there are sincere attempts to understand something that is large and unwieldy and which has no precedent we don't have a grand theory of blockchains yet that everyone understands so we have to piece our understanding together from these different perspectives to see the bigger picture so what does that mean for the ethereum community and the people teams and organizations that are part of it each of these perspectives uh you know on ethereum helps us build a picture of whether what our ecosystem might be in the future it provides us with historical analogies to to drawn and depending which perspective you align with the most you'll have different intuitions about what our community should be if your model is really about a financial system then you probably imagine you know financial institutions Traders liquidity providers and maybe even Regulators just decentralized if your model is a developer platform you might think of a you know loose Alliance of American VC backed companies a few non-profits and some open source contributors if your model is a political movement you might picture advocacy organizations Mass political movements charismatic leaders even political parties of some type so looking across all of this we can at least you know draw out some few basic implications and questions one who's going to do the maintenance even if and after ethereum is ossified there are Stacks and stacks of software built on top of it that makes it usable to people and individuals and users and developers if ethereum is a developer platform there's a lot of developer facing bits that someone's going to have to maintain for five years ten years maybe hundreds of years into the future that's either great news or terrible news if you work on these projects but your children and their grandchildren will be maintaining them ethereum is a long-term project that means maintenance for a very long period of time who's going to do it who will fund public goods this is something that the ethereum community to our credit talks about a lot you know if your frame of reference is a country then you know similarly we have a lot of public goods that we all benefit from that have to be funded and unlike a state we don't have a tax base to pay for it so how's that going to happen um who will push these political narratives ahead who will advocate for and explain ethereum to different communities of people for their own use cases do you really think we're ever going to be able to stop making the argument the internet has spread to every corner of the planet but we still have to talk about it and defend it and explain why it should be neutral why it should exist if you think about it even democracies that have lasted for hundreds of years we're still needed to make the argument about why voting is important and voting rights and civil rights matter we're not going to ever stop talking about ethereum if ethereum is still an infinite game that we're all playing so who's going to you know push that story forward who's going to explain it who's going to try and understand it who will react to new and unexpected problems remember ethereum is extremely uncertain could you have predicted what it would look like today five years ago I don't know if you could have how will our community retain a live player advantage to solve the problems that you know we don't even know about yet and finally if ethereum is decentralized then how should that influence the organizations who are part of it how should we think about our role in the ecosystem there's this fundamental tension there's a lot of work to be done now and there's probably a lot of work to be done in the future uh and the people and teams and organizations of various kinds will have to do that work but we're skeptical of organizations we're very aware of how other movements other technologies have failed in some ways in part because the organizations that Steward them have been captured or failed in many of the innumerable ways that venkatesh talked about as well so I want you to imagine this huge design space on one axis there's the maybe type of organization corporations Dows non-profits co-ops guilds whatever and on the other axis there's the role in ecosystem what they do build applications fund public goods maintain developer tools and lots of other things now some of you are probably thinking Josh why did you make those logos so small I can't actually see them and it's to make a point we're a small community this is early days there's a big space out here that we've only begun to explore and we've only begun to answer some of the questions I've just posed which brings us to part two what is the EF what I'm going to talk about here is you know first some Basics and then how we answer those questions so very quickly the EF is a non-profit and a good way to understand it is that it's a community of teams we're not like a hierarchical organization we're kind of a lot of distinct organizations that collaborate together on some things it's made up of a lot of teams that work on tons of different stuff from client development to research to building developer tools to developing Regional ecosystems to running events like Devcon and a lot more and most those teams are pretty separate and independent from each other and in addition to the teams that are part of our EF Community we provide a lot of grant funding to external organizations to help them grow the ecosystem if you want to learn more about the EF and the basics I'm talking about we published a report earlier this year you can find on our website at ethereum.foundation so the EF has evolved in response to this ecosystem in response to some of the perspectives we just talked about and over time we've come up with our own answers to some of these questions some of which have been more influential on EF than others and I'm going to talk through three of these questions quickly and how we answer them so this first kind of big tension theorem is a centralized but we're skeptical of organizations we're very aware that they can sometimes grow to be centralizing forces which brings with them risks and downsides that might stop us from playing our infinite game now remember that all of this begins with a certain perspective about centralized power defy applications like Bitcoin and die were a reaction to the failures of financial institutions in many ways web 3 in some ways is a reaction to the failures of web 2 and the institutions that control all the web today we've observed through history of many different industries that they're often a story of centralization and resentualization of power and with that comes all sorts of risks I probably don't have to list now ethereum is different maybe because the protocol does not depend on institutions and it's very resistant to capture but we should also we need to care not just about the protocol but everything around it all the people and organizations that make it useful to people we should care about ecosystem decentralization as well if you want to learn more about the history of this I recommend this great book by Tim Wu called the master switch and if you want to read more about how it applies to crypto saffron Huang and I wrote a great article well I thought it was great an article about this topic which you can find at this link so one key thing to understand is that centralization doesn't happen you know always for bad reasons it can happen for pretty mundane and innocent reasons you know as Aya talked about we're kind of culturally trained often to want to add things and often that means adding to our own power you know people have good intentions they think I've only had more money more power more influence I could do more good in the world and that's good up to a point but there's lots of obvious ways that it can go sideways eventually you start to sound a little bit like this guy our answer in part is to from the beginning adopt this philosophy that pushes back against those intuitions even when they seem rather innocent this is of course subtraction I gave this concept a much more thorough treatment earlier today so I won't talk about it too much but the idea is that the EF wants to become less important over time not more important we want to make space for the ecosystem to grow around us and you can see this in some of the ways that we act you might have noticed that EF is pretty quiet you might not know a lot about it we don't try to attract a lot of attention to ourselves we spend a lot of time trying to help others grow and become independent of us to become better than us at a lot of things and we have this layered approach to allocating where we involve various parts of the community in helping make decisions about where to provide funding to the ecosystem basically we're trying to be the exact opposite of this guy if you want a simple illustration so second question there's a lot that has to get done we talked about tons of things so who's going to do it a conclusion you can reach pretty quickly is that it just cannot be the ethereum foundation alone I think about everything we talked about and then think long into the future for decades and centuries one organization could not possibly do all this it could not possibly do it all well and even if somehow we could it would be a huge centralization risk to our community it wouldn't be the right outcome the answer clearly is that there needs to be an ecosystem around us and Beyond us that is capable of meeting these challenges and adapting to new ones and this is just taking us right back to subtraction the EF needs to become less important over time as the ecosystem grows and becomes more complex and more able to do these things the ef's question is always just how can we help one way we do this is by helping the founders of new organizations that expand and strengthen our ecosystem the Dow research Collective Xerox Park and the known Foundation are just a few of the organizations we've worked with recently and that we work alongside today another way we do this is by choosing not to do things and this is probably an area where we sometimes you know get some criticism but again if the EF tried to do everything we we wouldn't be good at it and it would create a chilling effect that might limit other people's you know intuitions and motivations for contributing to the ecosystem one example of this is that you might know that the EF does not contain a team that's building a consensus or what used to be called an eth2 client back in 2018 this wasn't an obvious choice but today there are five independent consensus layer clients that are live on mainnet today it's an extraordinary success for our ecosystem so third question how do you create an organization that can react to a rapidly changing ecosystem this is definitely a work in progress in just the last five years the ecosystem has trained changed radically and the future is likely to involve even more change growth and evolution this includes the ecosystem growing around us and taking over responsibilities that you know historically the EF might have been responsible for today there are Dows with treasuries larger than the EFS who now contribute on their own to funding those public goods we need to always be reacting to this because we're trying to fit around the ecosystem and not replace it one way we do this is we have this community of teams approach where there's a lot of independent decision makers um you know it simply our org is a bit decentralized the f is this community of teams that can often act quite independently from others which means that when something new happens the EF as a whole doesn't have to like top down pass down a memo the team that knows the most about something just goes and does the thing that they should do another similar idea maybe is that we you know have this layered allocation approach we know that we're not the experts in everything that there's people throughout the ecosystem that know maybe much better than any team inside the EF what to do about something so we involve them in providing grant funding and of course we also involve the community by putting a lot of funding through clrs for example Bitcoin clrs and CLR dot fund to allow individuals in the community to also allocate funding and the EF has a pretty flexible internal structure one example of this is we don't have a lot of titles I don't have a title if somebody asks me what I do I just explain it it takes a bit longer but it's often more accurate to what I'm actually doing at that moment and gives them a lot more information titles are often kind of like Richard feynman's quote about if you name something you think you know it it might not actually give you information you've just you know performed a social ritual of exchanging information and without titles we're a bit more free to adjust organically sometimes people don't want to do something because well it's not in my job description and it's not in my title so I'm not sure that I'm the person to do that at the EF it's a bit easier for someone to say like well someone has to do that so I'm going to do it doesn't matter if it's not in my job description and this also enables people to organically move between teams it's pretty common at the EF for someone to be on a team but really contribute to others as well there are trade-offs here right we're not a perfect Organization for all needs an organization's culture is often defined by what costs we're willing to accept what trade-offs we're willing to accept we're willing to be bad at one thing here is that more flexibility internally also makes the org less legible I can't just call up an org chart that shows me exactly what everyone's doing because people are reacting dynamically to us changes in the ecosystem and giving a ton of Independence to teams also creates operational complexity there's not many standard processes and it's not just a fit for everyone some people want to work in a different kind of environment and that's okay but for those that do want to work here I can be a very good fit so one thing that I talked about the end of her talk is you know in the future probably there are other organizations that can benefit in some ways from what we've learned from our mistakes and our successes there will be ecosystems contained within our ecosystem and organizations in the early moments of those ecosystems might face similar challenges to what the EF has they also might want to pursue a strategy of subtraction of making space for others to grow around you and distributing control to them rather than trying to do everything the simple way the additive way doing it yourself so maybe there's someone in this room today who's starting a new Foundation a project maybe you should think of a subtraction too part three what might else we build together over the years I've spent a lot of time at ethereum hackathons I'm often talking to developers who are new to the space and a really common thing is that it can take a bit of time to figure out like what do you build with this blockchains are a pretty strange things we don't really have precedence for them it can take a while to figure this out you know people think okay it's a secure database I'll put Healthcare data on it or they'll think okay it's just a payments platform I don't understand why the rest of this stuff exists I'll build a payments app it takes a while to build an intuition for it their preconceived notions about you know what a blockchain is what ethereum is limit what they can create it's not that they didn't have the tools or the skills or the time maybe they just hadn't got the ideas right yet I think it's possible that there's a similar dynamic in our community and how we think about building organizations to move ethereum forward a lot of people tend to think well okay this is Tech so the community the ecosystem should look like other Tech ecosystems but ethereum isn't like other Tech and it doesn't want to be and the future it doesn't always look like the recent past it Rhymes but it doesn't repeat so maybe we need to expand our frame of reference to think about what other organizations should exist in that design space maybe we need to explore more of it so today maybe I've expanded your idea of some perspectives that help people you know see what ethereum is every one of these a source of inspiration for what we might build what our community can be or should be each is full of lessons and historical references let's take just one example and look at the lens of ethereum as a political Community or a political organization a state something of that nature if there's truth to that framing then what inspiration can we draw from it well one common way of kind of understanding or conceptualizing conceptualizing a state is divided into three segments the government or the state the private sector companies markets and capital and something called Civil Society Civil Society is this third sector not civil as in nice but civil is in relating to Citizens and their Community it includes organizations and individuals who are neither the government nor private corporations but a third thing a separate thing often they have acted as a check on the power of the state and the market and throughout history organizations that fit Loosely into this category have played a critical role in creating democracies maintaining democracies expanding civil rights and holding people accountable and I think in spirit a lot of the organizations that fit in this bucket have a lot in common with ethereum's values the value of bottom-up organization the dangers of centralized power now ethereum doesn't have and will never have a government analog and it already does have a vibrant private sector so if you frame ethereum as a political project maybe ethereum Civil Society is something we should aspire to maybe we can take inspiration not only from the organizations that built the web but also from organizations that built democracies maybe there's other Role Models out there for us remember this is about inspiration not pattern matching ethereum Civil Society of course couldn't look like that of a nation-state we have different problems we have different opportunities for instance maybe our you know civil society and private sector overlap is a lot larger maybe ethereum gives us the tools for there to be profit-oriented corporations or Dows who can also feed those profits back into public goods we have these new tools built on ethereum like Dows and defy and unsensible software that expand the design space of what might fit in this box there's this great Frontier being explored primarily by Dao's in the Dow Community great credit to them and our civil society also would not be limited to One Nation or one culture but the incredible range of talent and Innovation from a truly Global community we're already seeing the emergence of something like this there's only a few things in this box but I know there are many more uh nomec quadratic funding organizations Xerox Park protocol Guild the East acre community and many many more organizations dedicated to something bigger the organizations that are not just users of ethereum but who are supporting the ecosystem rather than just building on top of it I found this quote somewhere um I think it's a pretty good one and it's true ethereum has a soul but Souls like ideas and values and philosophies they need to inhabit something they need people and teams Dows companies organizations to act on them to make them real protocols need a soul but Souls need a body not just one but many thank you very much