Hardhat & Nomic Foundation: the creation of an Ethereum non-profit by Franco Zeoli

foreign [Music] thank you for coming I'm Franco co-founder and CEO at the number foundation and today I'm going to be telling you a bit about the story of how we got here what we're working on uh and the Beautiful vision for the organization Foundation ethereum dedicates a non-profit we [Music] basically build developer infrastructure and developer tooling to improve ethereum developer experience that means we're working for ethereum we're dedicated to ethereum um and I'm trying to empower developers to decentralize the world so we're best known for building hard hat um hard hat is the living developer tool ethereum ecosystem Beyond developers use it to build tasks on debugger software um there's a whole ecosystem of communities blinds and nice things going on there but within always do this and I'll share a bit of the story of how we go here you know we got involved with ethereum in 2017 um we built contracts tabs we audited stuff but by 2018 we started focusing on Audits and out of our own Neve to be more effective when doing technical work I was also working on a developer tool um while at the same time we were uh you know exploring what to do we were Founders trying to find what we actually wanted to to work on and all these were just our way of paying the bills uh but we needed to be more effective um so we create a Visa which then in 2020 became high hat because that was an awful name um and you know it was for internal use we open sourced it some of our friends likes it uh people started using it uh we uh so a need for it and we applied for a grant from the ethereum foundation uh which they gave to us and you know we spent the rest of the year uh continuing our exploration for what we wanted to do uh while you know working on this side on on beadler to deliver on the roadmap that we set out for the grant um but uh you know by 2019 we realized that uh something you needed to change uh we needed to to focus on something to to actually do it well um and you know we we have or actually my co-founder Patricio I had this vision for what uh haha could grow into I know there were big missing things um and we knew that if we just built out these things that were missing uh there was a lot of value that we could add to a lot of people and you know we were just thinking about the level of productivity that people were dealing with and you know if we managed to improve that very significantly it was very interesting to think what it could mean for the entire theorem ecosystem um so with four months of runway in the bank we decided to drop all of the all the team and focus on our little open source project that have maybe 10 15 users um so um yeah that's where our relationship with the ethereum foundation started and you know as he focused microphone are focused on building I went out to get some more money I asked absolutely everyone that was close to the evm this was 2018 the year where Theon killers were hot so I asked everyone for money almost no one gave us money but we had existing relationship with ethereum foundation so to do a second position on going there and through that we end up meeting some people at the management team of ethereum foundation um who turn out we're looking for ways for people in the community that could help them improve their experience right they knew it was an issue uh the new Improvement and what they found in US was you know a team that had a working product some users a diagnosis of the situation a concrete plan and we were looking for funding so it was a pretty good match we started collaborating with them they give us another small Grant to implement solid these tax races um and as part of the this same collaboration as um we will generally help them improve ethereum right this was not just working on hard hat but how do we make ethereum as a whole better and when they are putting together a very small or relatively small roadmap of projects that we thought were very high priority high impact that could be delivered quickly and would make a meaningful difference in a short amount of time we worked on that it was great uh went really well we hit it off and by 2020 you know the relationship took another step and we became what EF calls delegated domain allocators which is uh EF terminology for when they Empower someone in the community to allocate EF resources to improve specific domain within ethereum so um basically it's also finding us more aggressively and allowing us to allocate more funding we started giving out grants um you know we spent a bit less than the first quarter of the Year doing a lot of research trying to figure out what where the sources of all of these issues um and we worked on things like we worked on many things but to give you an idea of the kind of ethereum Channel generally ethereum projects that we work on uh we got GitHub to have uh solidity if uh things that's highlighting on by default before you needed to use an obscure dot file in your wrap up for that to work we entirely replaced uh the cryptography dependencies that were being used across the stack uh that was a preview project and today that's called ethereum cryptography where you know we worked we put together a new package with all of the cryptography different uh Primitives our new network with every single team maintaining all of the different components across the stack to replace them and uh that was that led to the entire thing being a lot more reliable and have less friction there's some example of like 17 different projects that we worked on this year but just to give an idea if it was just pure ethereum and not really anything related to to our hat um so 2020 hard hat really takes off um it was an NGO 2021 that it got really crazy uh but by 2020 by the end of 2020 the trend was very very clear you know the the the the professional core ecosystem of ethereum had uh mostly all of them adopted hi-hat and this was great of the fun um people were very happy with the product and you know we learned a ton um no but by the end of the year we we realized a whole bunch of things these are I think the main takeaways uh the main one being doing this is very hard you know building sophisticated tooling it's for ethereum specifically uh in its current state it's super chunishing and we realize that the next 10x uh so you know doing with all of this work and a lot of other things that went uh on that year in the ecosystem ethereum devx improves hugely um and we but there's still a lot more uh that can be done and we realize that you know the next 10x is not going to come from our hat it's not going to come from any single tool out there um because what we realize is that you know a great great development platform for ethereum in let's say five years is one that is diverse you know today the ecosystem is very focused on node.js and solidity but that's unlikely to remain negates for for a long time and in software and you know for the exact same problem there are a variety of different solutions that are all valid depending on personal preference on circumstance and different trade-offs that different projects have um so she's having a few or you know one or two solutions for each thing uh usually it's not the case in larger platforms so we know that what we need is not you know another specific feature it's not about missing functionality the next big step up it's more about General growth and more availability and diversity within the tool within the ecosystem which is you know the third point um so we knew uh you plan you know hard hat and everything else that we worked on and 2020 uh worked out but that was a very you know urgent execution of oh my God this needs to be better let's do better um but then we we needed an entirely new plan because you need to to do that when actually that many in one year we we covered most of it so but for you know 2021 and forward we came up with a new plan that we proposed at ethereum foundation and we realized basically that what we had to do was is uh go one layer below hard hat and rebuild the foundations down there you know the things that weren't there that we would have loved to be there when we built our hat build those things so that other people will build more things like hard hat truffle remix brownie um and so on so that's a new plan you know build core infrastructure to make it easier cheaper and certainly better to build new developer tools like Harahan uh so and I'll get into what that actually means in a bit but you know by 2021 um the crypto Market I was you know in in the advanced stage of the the bull market and the whole reason why we were doing this in the beginning as entrepreneurs were trying to build a business was well to build a business right like the whole even the relationship with the AF felt like I wouldn't win because we would get to build our product build relationships build a position of leadership build a brand and in the process help them improve ethereum which would grow the pipe for everyone it was a win-win but it was uh initially we saw it as a great strategic stepping stone towards eventually building a business monetizing something and given the the market context um being ideal for fundraising we thought that if we were actually going to do it build a business around this now is the time to fundraise get the money and do it so we felt forced to make a decision um and we decided not to um and the reasons why we decided not to build a business and instead turned into a non-profit um or a bunch and I can't cover them all and some have to do with what we think is best for ethereum in the long term and many others have a lot to do with just personal uh things motivations and preferences that we the founders have and you know the main three ones that I'd like to show today is one uh we loved the experience of working for ethereum you know we had spent in the past year and a half basically being part of ethereum Team since our Monday towards the AF was improve ethereum you know they deliver value to ethereum developers and even hard hat which is something that at the time needed to happen you know it was the right vehicle at the time to deliver value to ethereum developers but end-to-end the whole thing that we were doing was trying to um improve ethereum and this was an amazing experience super gratifying super challenging um simulating and we didn't want to let go of that and simply seal ourselves to just how do we make money out of our head which would have been a much smaller scope than what we have been working on so far another thing is that developer experience we think is absolutely core crucial and critical uh to ethereum and it's also very hard you know there's a lot of attention that goes to uh the work being done on the protocol layer and make sense it's amazing uh work the the the merge has been an insane feat of engineering and without taking any kind of credit away from how critical all of that work is uh we shouldn't forget that all of that work is there to support what YTM offers you know the network supports the value proposition which is a platform to build decentralized software um so if we have the most amazing scalable Network and it's decentralized but when you actually want to use it to build something on top it's not that great then that's a significant issue for ethereum um so we think this is uh she's a really valuable contribution that we can make uh to to the brush act and then you know the the entire speed of innovation in the ecosystem and its growth are very much directly affected by developer productivity you know the faster your developers can write curve iterate debug test launch and repeat uh you know the faster everything will improve the more users will be captured uh generally by improving developer experience we inject productivity into every single team into the ecosystem which has a super powerful compounding effect over the long term right like faster faster faster faster faster and then the last one um you know tell me you're from a developed country without saying you're from a developed country crypto has no use cases you know like as Arsen design Founders um I got involved with crypto in 2015 usually with Bitcoin and having lived our entire alarms in Argentina and struggle and experience the day-to-day limitations that come from living in a place like that even in 2015 it was really obvious that this thing was had the potential to meet mean something very meaningful to a lot of people um and which is very big Believers in what these can change and mean in the long term for people who live in countries like ours um so we went ahead with it and we raised 22 million dollars in donations from across the ecosystem with the ethereum foundation being the largest donor but we have a bunch of amazing organizations and individuals uh donating to get these new ethereum non-profit off the ground you know units of now vitality coinbase the graph chain link polygon and many others all very long-term thinking organizations that were very thankful towards um so how are we going to do all of this how are we actually going to empower uh developers to centralize the world um you know I mentioned before we came up with a new plan that was all about getting the entire tooling ecosystem to grow more and because become more diverse and for that we're basically building new infrastructure and to make it easy to do that these two components slang and refnet are actually one same project massive project with two very large components slang is a new Solitary compiler that we're building and which is designed from the ground app to make it easier to build available tooling for solidity right so it turns out that in a development platform the very core of it is the compiler and many of the tools that we use rely and integrate deeply with the compiler so um you know we actually designed the compiler to for that purpose it's going it's it can be a lot easier more effective than it is today and you know this isn't meant to replace salty and Soul C uh it's you know compiles and you deploy to mainnet and this compiler is not going to be for that it's going to be used during the development process um because it's main you know the target audience is two developers and what we care about is basically making sure that there are great insights during the development process not when you need to deploy it and by not aiming for a Mana deployment we're actually able to read ourselves with a lot of very difficult constraints that salsi has to deal with and make those constraints make many of the things that we want to do basically impossible to do for this whole city team so these two compilers are actually going to be complementary and and we're going to be using them together um they're one wrathnet it's going to be a reusable dividing runtime also to build tooling and it turns out that high hand is actually a pretty complex piece of software and with completely different objectives and constraints it's basically an ethereum node you know it's got a lot of the very same components some ample and evm and storage um consensus component and an entire layer of debugging features on top where we do runtime observation to figure out what's going on with the bytecode execution to then tell Developers and you know that's one basically every tool that wants to provide the uh runtime insights to developers has to do right what we've all done truffle brownie remix we've all built the same thing which requires very in-depth knowledge of the platform because you need to basically build an ethereum node right like when you use mainnet forking in hard hat it pulls data from maina and it works as if it's maintenance it's basically I know with very different objectives um so um if someone wants to build a new tool instead of them spending six months figuring this out putting the pieces together to only then start working on the very first developer feature we can just build a thing that is reusable that is extensible that it's very modular and that if someone wants to build a new developer tool they can use as a starting point and it will be a lot easier you know these are the things that we would have loved to have when we built our hat and didn't and we suffered through it and we don't want anyone else to live to that um so um where's hi-hat in all of this we haven't forgotten about her hat very much remains a very core uh priority for nomec and you know the the SE projects are all about the long term you know like they will take a while to Drive meaningful impact as they are dependent on other people building things on top that then end users use but until then developers still have needs today you know have users to service bugs to fix um and hard hat remains our um response to those needs that developers have today so Hornet is growing so we're expanding and continuing to increase our investment into our head and it's expanding into a suite of tools uh heart health Runner and network are the main components that everyone's been using you know the sea lights has Runner which is basically what you run and what contains the the config system and the plugin architecture and all of the extensibility and the kind of starting point that connects everything else that's harder Runner then Hardware network is the development node and we recently this year launched our vehicle extension which makes um solidity editing feel a lot more modern provides basically Advanced solidity editing assistance John gave a talk about it yesterday that you should look up and then ignition has been in development for a while we're going to to launch it soon um it's going to be this infrastructure as code deployments tool that we're hoping will change the game of deployments and then where you're going to uh sort of seeing is that all of these things started seeing more and more Integrations across them and while we're trying to we're trying now it's an objective uh that these things can be used in isolation including in combination with other tools but if you use them together uh cool things uh should happen um so that's basically the roll map um where 12 people were ethereum dedicated were impact driven and what we do doesn't run after Financial metrics um and you know if you would like to write some Rust to build a compiler or help us improve hard hat to you know continue empowering the ecosystem to keep building cool stuff we're hiring that's it thank you [Applause]