Panel | What it's like to build Public Goods in Crypto | ETHDam III - 2025

Welcome to Ethan to Ethan. To Ethan, to Ethan, to Ethan. We have a panel panel about the funding side of uh I would say crypto as it says here. And um so I'm just going to go ahead and uh introduce Constanza. So please give it a round of applause for the moderator.

Hi, thank you. Is it working? Yeah. Okay. Uh, hi.

Thank you so much. So, for the panel on public goods, we are going to have um Vivian from PSC. So, applause please. Nico Gallardo coming here. Julian mom daddy is [Applause] welcome and shy gorilla.

So round of applause here. So thank you so much. Let's start. Um do you want to start by introducing yourself first and what you do so that then we can take it off? Sure.

Does that work? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So, I'm Julian. Uh, I'm a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation working on some topics like ME that was discussed in the previous panel.

Uh, and now we're more I'm working on uh scaling. So, scaling the L1 and scaling blobs for the L2s. Uh, I guess it's related to public goods because we're building public goods. Um, and it's been very interesting to to work uh in an atmosphere where like new people come in. Uh, you build everything in the open.

Uh, and you can see your results, I guess, in the open. Thank you. Hey everyone, I'm a Cheeky Gorilla. You can call me Cheeky. I'm a core contributor to Protocol Guild.

Uh we're focused on uh rebalancing incentives um for working on Ethereum's core protocol to make sure that Ethereum can uh on board and retain its talented core protocol developers to keep on shipping the upgrades they've been shipping. Um in my spare time, I'm an absolute privacy freak. Uh so happy to nerd out with anyone about that. Uh, hi everyone. I'm uh Nico Gallardo from um Octant.

Um well, what we're doing at Octant is basically been funding public goods um well digital public goods for um two years and uh now we're shifting focus towards uh helping other ecosystems uh fund themselves as well uh while at the same time finding Ethereum alignment and funding Ethereum as well. Hello everyone. My name is Vivian Placencia and I'm a software engineer in the privacy and scaling explorations team at the the foundation and we also build public goods. So yeah, it's related to this panel. So thank you so much.

Um I guess the first question to start and set the tone the first question I have is what is a public good? Um, what's the definition of public good that you would like to have? Um, like Vitalik pointed out, it's not clear whether there is public good um, in crypto. Is a project with a token but without a business model a public good or only like projects that have that don't have a token. So, and what about an open source project that has a define business model?

So, what is public good and what is not public good? I guess I'm going to ask this question to all of you so that we can get the different definitions. I'll I'll I'll kick things off. Sure. Um I think if you ask Ethereum what is a public good, they will tell you everything is a public good.

Um which basically means that nothing is a public good anymore, which is a shame. That's not technically correct. There are a wide variety of definitions for what a public good is. I unfortunately in the pressure of the moment cannot remember a single one. Um but nevertheless something that is providing benefits to people all over the world at scale in a way that's not monetizing those users, right?

Um and I think there are a variety of public goods funding programs in Ethereum. Um which is truly an incredible thing and is truly one of the reasons why it's so fun to be in the Ethereum ecosystem. Um, but you can see that all of those different funding programs kind of target different different types of projects that they think are public goods. And so there really is a disconnect uh between what is it actually that we're trying to fund. And again, I don't think that's necessarily a terrible thing because trying to provide uh trying to build funding for worthwhile projects is always worthwhile.

Um, however, I do think we can sidestep a lot of the complexity that we have with trying to figure out what are public goods by just reframing it around maybe dependency funding because at the end of the day, what we really want to do is provide funding for projects that we depend on. And those are much much easier to identify. Those are much easier to quantify like what is the impact that they're having, what is the scale of the dependency and basically make sure that we uh we pass funding along to those accordingly. Thank you. Yeah, sure.

So, uh my view on what's a public good is starting with the economic definition of public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalous goods. So, the non-excludable part means that you can't randomly pick people that can't use these goods. Any permissionless system is that by definition basically non-rival means that if I use it, uh it doesn't degrade someone else's user experience. Uh this I think is a more interesting one in in crypto because if you use for example Ethereum um you're using some block space that someone else can't use at that point. So in that sense Ethereum the blockchain itself isn't necessarily a public good but a common good as in it's non-excludable but it's still rivalous.

Uh but that maybe um that that doesn't really cover the message because for example then Ethereum client code uh is a public good because like anyone can review the code, anyone can run the code uh and it doesn't degrade someone else's user experience. So I think it's very very nuanced what you actually call the public good. Uh and it's important to have discussion about that. Thank you. Yeah.

So I think public goods are these projects that benefits everyone and everyone can use and it can have a business model or not but I have seen it mainly in projects that don't have a business model. So, but it's mainly projects that benefits everyone and everyone can use and in the Ethereum ecosystem that are also decentralized and h they that have the values of of the ecosystem. Thank you, Nico. Yeah. Um well I think we see already like how wide the variety of definitions of public goods are and um I'd like to focus a little bit on the kind of like digital public goods and like what we call public goods in the um Ethereum space and I think I've seen a shift in the definition of uh from public goods to uh network goods or even ethereum goods you know that relate more specifically to to Ethereum because what's good for let's say Ethereum maybe doesn't necessarily mean that it's good for Solana let's say and does that exclude it from being a public good well I would argue not really as long as it's um like open source and available for anyone I think the open source part is like really key here because if anyone can just fork the code and and reuse it in in different places then as a digital public good I think that's like maybe like the most um important uh part of Thank you.

So, yes, go ahead. There was a part of your question that we we haven't touched on that I wanted to touch on uh was basically a hill that I will die on about um if you are a so-called public goods project uh are you allowed to have a token? Um and perhaps more importantly, are you allowed to raise VC funding? Um and I think this is a really really interesting questions. Um there is no right or wrong answer but I will give you my perspective of this.

Um, and my perspective of this is predicated on my vision for optimism's retroactive public goods funding program. How many people here are familiar with uh, optimism RPGF? Okay, a good amount of hands. U, basically optimism is a layer 2 and they are dedicating a portion of the transaction fees generated on that layer 2 towards funding public goods. Um, and the way that this works is they have these so-called badge holders who are basically trying to figure out, okay, in the last couple quarters, what are the projects that basically created the most good or the had the highest impact uh for the optimisms or Ethereum ecosystem broadly.

Um, and basically channel that those transaction fees, channel that uh that funding towards those projects. And um when this was initially conceived by of course Vitalic Buterine um when he this this idea of ret retroactive funding um there was this notion that basically if something like optimism can achieve sufficient scale right so they have enough transaction fees so that projects can truly depend on this funding over the long term then you might see this beautiful situation where you can have public goods projects who are valued based based on the amount of RPGF, the amount of retrofunding that they are going to receive on a quarterly basis from this program and that would kickstart this flywheel effect where you can basically have VCs who are looking to invest into projects based on how much good they can create and that's mindblowing that idea. We are still very far from that being a reality. But like the potential is there. But of course for that potential to actually become a reality.

Uh two things are required. Number one, these projects they need to be able to have tokens or do ICOs because otherwise what are they going to give to to VCs and number two obviously they need to be able to accept VC funding. And I mean in some ways you can think of VC funding as like a bank loan that needs to be repaid anyways. Um, and so from my perspective, yes, public goods projects, uh, they can absolutely have a token. They can absolutely raise VC funding, but of course, you have to have a token that's used in the right way and you have to have VCs that won't corrupt the project.

So, you know, nothing's black and white. You have to consider the ramifications of what you're doing, but generally speaking, I do not think that those two things should disclude uh disclude a project from being considered a public goods project. Interesting. Thank you. So we have one yes for public goods can have a token.

So now at this point I want to know the other opinions. Can public goods have a token and what's the role of VC in public goods? So I'd say for me it's about the outcome basically. So do you actually produce a public good and whether you have VC funding is about the process. I mean there could be a million reasons why a VC would want to fund something that's a public good that they don't directly get some benefit from.

And you can see this happening a lot. For example, Paradigm builds like a lot of tooling and it makes a lot of sense for them to build this tooling, right? I mean, that's how their their portfolio companies, they can create other products, they can onboard more um developers that that work either in paradigm or for their portfolio companies. Uh but like the specific tooling that they make is essentially a public good. Uh so the exact reason why a VC funds something I think is not so important.

uh how a public good funds itself beforehand is also not not like the defining characteristic of whether something is a public good. The it's just like the the outcome is the thing that matters and and the process is um malible at some points I guess. So is that a yes? It's yes. Okay.

Um yeah, I would also agree with that. I think Ethereum is maybe like the prime example of like a public good that has a token and has raised money from investors um that is making like a lot of impact. I think a lot of people confuse the word public goods with nonprofit which is you know causing a lot of confusion all around. Um but I don't think it's necessarily the case. like you can be a public good and offer a lot of uh the value to people um while at the same time having a a revenue model that makes it sustainable.

In fact, I think a lot of public goods would benefit from thinking a little bit outside of the okay what I can provide for free, what can I offer with extra value to uh make myself sustainable. So yeah, that's interesting. So you're even taking it one step further and say yes it can have a token yes it can be a business. That's very interesting. Yeah I agree.

I think yes because if they find a way to fund themselves I I think that's better as long as it's still public everyone can use it. And I think yes because if they find a way to to fund themselves, I think it's is it's fine too. Yeah. Both. So if I may, so what you just both said about like they should find like revenue models like in principle, I agree.

Like if you're starting a business, you should be able to make sure that you can uh you know pay to put food on the table and support yourself and your family. Um that's absolutely rational. Um it is also a a tough nut for the ecosystem to crack. Like we have not cracked public goods funding yet. Um there are many different projects that are that are trying to crack it.

Um like Octant, Lotto PGF, Protocol Guild, we have Paddle Battle, uh Gitcoin, Optimism, like everyone's trying their own unique flavor. Um and yet still despite all that initi all those initiatives um projects would still be very rational to to not depend on that and try to find their own revenue sources. Um and I am hopeful that one day um that won't be the case anymore. Um very ambitious plan um but uh you know I think we've seen that the Ethereum ecosystem is dedicated to solving this problem. Um because what we really want is for these talented entrepreneurs to truly dedicate themselves to just providing uh the most good in the world as opposed to uh figuring out how to monetize.

But again, this is the wideeyed Ethereum uh purist view I suppose. Thank you. Um continuing on this line, if we look at the well non-digital definition of public goods, then it is everything that we might need from the fans to transport. So what's the relationship between public goods and the funding models? What are the the best models, the best projects working on capital formation, capital allocation for public goods and how can we create self-sustaining public goods?

Yeah. Um I'm going to be a little bit uh shilly here, but this is actually what we're trying to achieve at Octant. Um indeed, what you mentioned is exactly right, like how can we marry uh capital formation with capital allocation? And I think especially in the public goods funding space, this is what we've been kind of like um falling behind a little bit cuz I mean we we have found a lot of really cool capital allocation mechanisms like uh you know quadratic funding, conviction voting, uh auctions, lotteryies, like a bunch of different stuff. Um but we haven't really uh kind of discovered that much the capital formation side of things.

Um, and I think it's been always in front of our eyes. At least that's uh what we believe at Octant. Um, to give you a bit of context, at Octant, we use staking rewards to fund public goods. And what we want to do now is like create a protocol to, uh, fund to to generate yield through DeFi strategies or staking and use that yield to fund ecosystems and and Ethereum. So, um I think that's like a very kind of web 3 native way of funding public goods even without uh risking your your own treasury.

Um but I'm in general I'm I'm really looking forward to other types of um kind of capital formation like revenue generation for for these public goods can be quite interesting if we find a way and some other dynamics like the ones I mentioned like auctions or lotteryies that we were experimenting uh before. Thank you. Um following on those lines we have um a very interesting question. Can we really map all our public goods dependencies especially those that don't have adequate funding? I mean there are people who are trying right uh deep funding proposes to do this uh basically take uh to take take the network of all the GitHub repos that people are using in the ecosystem and then leverage some experts who provide a snapshot view of uh the impact that those repos are having broadly speaking on the ecosystem and then leveraging AI because why not uh to basically model out kind of uh an aggregate view of all experts to make sure that all the repos that have been identified can achieve funding proportional to their impact.

Um that is a super ambitious goal. Um I there have like deep funding themselves as far as I'm aware they have not done a pilot yet. Um as far as I'm aware there's only one project that has done a pilot with uh with AI allocation um for this kind of thing. and their conclusion was we are no longer going to use AIS for allocating funds. Um but that's not to say that like this is not a worthwhile experiment.

Um it absolutely is. All projects who are trying to solve this problem are worthwhile experiments as long as we're all innovating and not just copyping from each other which is the case currently. Um so yes, if we can map out like all the like a dependency graph that would be fantastic. um protocol guild doesn't do that because you know not all uh not all public goods not all dependencies have a github repo for example like think about ethereum research um this is a foundational public good obviously and is what uh what pushes the clients uh the GU Aragon Teu etc to like to implement these upgrades uh into into Ethereum but you know those are harder to quantify in like a dependency graph um unless you're somehow I uh crawling the entire web for including ETH research and uh whatever else. So it is a it is a huge task.

Um there is no clear way to do that correctly right now. Um but I applaud the people who are trying to do that. Um and and rest assured if they find success with that then that will benefit the entire ecosystem because it'll be another unlock for us to know that this is potentially the right path to go down or not. But we'll see. Thank you.

Um, now going from the broader public goods to the reason why we're here, privacy. Um, what are some examples of public goods in the to advance privacy and what do those mean in the context of today in the context of the surveillance for example? Yeah. So there are some protocols that want to advance the privacy in the ecosystem. Some examples are a lot of these protocols are part of privacy and SC explorations team and I can mention some like semaphore is it was used at devcon last year and is a ser knowledge protocol for anonymous membership proof and there also it's also used in world the world project and paywise also is using this project for voting and another project I will say Macy which is for private voting and also CKit which is a project with libraries algorithms for privacy preserving applications and protocols and yeah there are a few so just to mention this but but there are some projects being used in real life that I want to advance the privacy preserving ecosystem I'd say more generally zero knowledge proofs are a great example right the Ethereum has pushed zero knowledge proofs libraries and implementations quite far and a lot of these are very open source um and apart from just the code there's of course a lot of academic research in this which is open source and areas of public good um so I think that's a really good example of of a privacy focus public good thank you I think that Niko wants to answer or no no I was going to ask cheeky actually because as a privacy freak like I'm sure he has something to say.

Yeah. Um, you did not clarify crypto unless I didn't understand. Um, I will shill probably my favorite uh privacy project, Graphine OS. Um, if you have not heard about it, um, it is basically a way to reclaim privacy on your phone in the most userfriendly way possible. For anyone who has tried to go down the privacy path, you will find out very quickly it is inconvenient, right?

Like the amount of times you have to inconvenience yourself for in inconvenience yourself for privacy is mental. It's why most people don't bother with it. Graphine OS makes it easy, especially if you are already an Android user. So basically, graphine OS takes Android and scoops out all of the Google in it and makes that portion of the phone per um opt-in. So basically, you can have a vanilla Android experience that very much looks and feels like what you would have with the Google experience, but completely free from any surveillance and tracking from Google.

And that's a phenomenal thing. That does mean that there are some compromises by taking out Google. It means like no Gmail, no maps. And some people they live by those things. But what's amazing about Graphin OS or another thing that's amazing about it is that you can basically opt in to reintroducing those those services, those features back into the operating system, but in a sandboxed way.

So if you still want to use uh Google Maps, you can you can kind of enable it, but you're enabling it again in a sandbox way, which means that the amount of data that Google can collect from your usage of that is extremely limited compared to what they were ordinarily able to collect on a normal Google Android phone. So honestly, if you are at all curious about uh privacy, if you are uh curious in safeguarding your uh security and you are an Android user, your switching cost to move to graphine OS is very very small. Um if you are if you want to know more about that, come talk to me afterwards. I can I can show you on my phone what it looks like, but it looks exactly like Google Android, right? Um and the only complexity or the only kind of hurdle let's call it is that it only works on Google Pixel phones.

Um this is because graphine OS is built by a small team and they cannot optimize the the operating system for all the phones on the planet. And ironically, as it turns out, the the Google Pixel line of phones, they actually have the strongest uh security guarantees when it comes to the hardware inside the actual device. And so that's why you need to have a Pixel phone to use Graphine OS. But it should not stop you from trying Graphine OS. Thank you for letting me shield that.

Well, I know that I'm supposed to be taking the questions later, but this brings like a very good question we're receiving. Um, you already answer, but shield one public good project, not your own. Uh, can you repeat that? You need to shield one public good project, but not your own. Not the one you're working for.

Oh, so many. Um, where do I start? protocol guild. Um, you know, Ethereum, um, I think, uh, people a lot of, uh, DeFi protocols I would consider public goods, um, as well. Um, to mention a few, a, morpho, um, I think, as I said, like anything that's open source, I'm I'm really happy to, um, push forward.

Uh if we're talking about public goods funding, uh I think um Paddle Battle is is doing an excellent some excellent experiments that I'm really looking forward to to see. So yeah, could could go on forever. That's the key takeaway. I didn't expect a public good. So we can tweet it and let Danny know.

Um Vivian, what do you what's the public good project you want to shield that is not PSC? Yeah. So I think the libraries we use let's say ethers libraries we use to create applications in the web3 space I think most of them probably all of them are public goods because they are open source everyone can use them and and contribute to them and yeah so these kind of things libraries I want to shout out some of the the OG public goods like the nonpay libraries and some of the like very low level libraries that everyone uses and no one thinks about and there are people behind there maintaining it and some people are kind of stuck in their maintainer role because they can't find who is going to do it after them. Um, so yeah, shout out to them. I would love to chat with you about it because at TTON we're trying to find out exactly those things.

So let's chat. Amazing. So one of the thing is that it's not just about funding with money but also with resources and people that can contribute and one of the problem with building in public is that there is a constant influx of newcomers that needs to be on boarded and that takes times and take resources. So how can you ensure high quality outputs given limited funding and limited time and so many new people coming and wanting to contribute? Yeah, I think it documentation is very important so that people can understand the project and I will also say that mentorship is very important.

It's true that it can be difficult because there are a lot of people and with different backgrounds but mentorship is very important too and the path to contribute let's say contributing guidelines so that people can know how to do it how they can contribute and maybe also have a governance or a way to filter high quality contributions that's that can help too so that you know wish people will contribute more on specific sites but yeah that's very difficult and in this case I I think that documentation mentorship and a path to contribute are the three main things thank you yeah if I can add on to that um I'd like to compare public goods funding to some extent to like the housing crisis that we have in Amsterdam today you can't just solve it by giving more money to the people that need a house you need to actually build the houses right and In public goods funding, we have a similar sort of problem. We can't just give grants to people who do like one-off work to do yeah short-term focused work. You need to actually create teams where people can thrive. And so like Vivian mentions the the mentorship and I think Proto is an interesting example of that because it's it's a more longer term uh vision. So you know uh what you can expect for for the coming time and you know that if you onboard more people they can also potentially be editable for uh protocol deals.

So that's that really allows you to like build more houses uh but then get more people to work on open source stuff. Thank you. And in the context of building the house um today with um a very fragmented regulatory landscape um in the context of building permissionless um applications or permissionless public goods. what is the role and the risk for public goods like writing open source for example apparently can land in rail. So how do you balance that?

Yeah. Um, so not sure if I'm answering the question, but this might be related to what we were talking about earlier of like um, you know, how to make it sustainable. You know, like if you're open sourcing, how much are you differentiating and how much, you know, like you can use the technology as a defensibility for against let's say other competitors. Um I'm personally a big proponent that um if we open source everything then like technology just advances faster because then um you know there's more openness to collaboration and then just like the the teams that um actually um shine more are the ones that are like moving the technology forward faster. Um, so yeah, not sure if that answered your question, but I think it might go in that direction um of defensibility.

Yeah. Any other answer? I mean, trying to follow the regulations that may or may not exist like they're always changing. So I like I think it's really difficult to give advice to public goods projects on like how to build in a compliant way because at the same time a lot of what uh us in the Ethereum land are trying to do is build like a better version of what we have today. Um even if some people today may consider that what we're trying to build not super compliant, right?

Because we're for example leaning too much into privacy. Um, so I have no wise uh suggestions on on what to do there. Uh, I guess the most important thing that you can do is just for yourself uh be comfortable with the risk that you're taking. Uh, and please acknowledge the fact that you are taking a risk whether you're a public goods project or not working in crypto today unfortunately in some places more than others. Um, and so just be mindful of that uh and don't do anything that uh you would ultimately regret.

Do you think that the role of public goods will change in the context of network states or do you think it will stay the same like building for the society you want that that's something we should do? So advancing privacy and advancing public goods is that going to change in the future? Ethereum is going to change the world. Yes. So yes.

Yeah. Okay. Um, another question I have is that um, especially in the debate, there has been um, a resurgence on whether public goods can be defined as cryptocommunism. So, how do you respond to that framing? Is it a float?

Is that unhelpful? Is that something that we need? or it's just I you know I think we're a little bit stuck in like old political definitions of things. I think we should move a little bit forward and start thinking start defining our own things and like what they mean and not trying to derive things from the past. I think um I don't know like what I personally dislike the most about communism is that it's enforced right like it's very top down and I think in crypto like by nature we're doing pretty much the opposite so it's a little bit hard for me to relate it although I understand that some people might see it as okay like if you're doing something for a commune like a group of people And that's communism.

I think it's like extremely reductionistic and like again like being too much stuck in the past. I like to think, you know, like maybe the opposite like capitalism and like liberalism has a lot more of an abundant mind mindset and like if we can afford like having public goods and like open sourcing everything and advancing technology faster that way, then I believe that's like very far from like what communism would be. Thank you. Chiki, do you have anything to add? I think you do.

Did you want to say something? Yeah, I was I was going to say that I think it's better not to talk anything and it's because ideology usually divide divides people and I think it's better to focus on just the outcome and the results. So if it's for everyone and it's good for everyone and everyone can use it, I think it's better to focus on that part and not ideology or tax something. I think it's for everyone. So just focus on that.

That will unite more people than if we t this to an ideology or to politics. Very well said. Yeah, Ethereum is about collective empowerment. And so not to like maybe I'm putting my foot in my mouth, but like Ethereum is for communists as much as it as it is for capitalists, right? And this is it mean here?

No. Um, this debate has been um, some people have made a joke of it. Some people have taken it very seriously. It's gotten a little bit emotional. Um, I don't think it's necessarily productive to wade into that argument.

Um, again, I think there's space for all mindsets in Ethereum. That's the whole point of credible neutrality. Um I will say that protocol guilds as a funding mechanism has been accused of being communist repeatedly not just by a mean. In fact the the optimism crew uh that uh uh uh I think they accused us of being that like within 3 months of launching uh protocol guild and the reason why is because we basically uh collect funding and then we distribute it to Ethereum's core devs vested over four years based on how long you've been contributing. Right?

So our impact metric is is time, right? Like uh it doesn't matter if you're like a shitty programmer or a great programmer. If you have kind of served the same amount of time, you will get the same amount of funding from protocol guild. Um and that kind of um equality and distribution is what is a reason why people have called protocol guild communist. From our perspective, um we did not set out to design something communist.

We set out to design something that was simple, right? like we did not want to have a lot of governance overhead with this mechanism because we are going around to all the projects in Ethereum's ecosystem and saying like hey could you please help to fund your dependencies right you have this dependency on Ethereum's core protocol um we would suggest you donate 1% of your token supply to vest over four years directly to Ethereum's core devs so they can keep on shipping the scaling upgrades that you need to succeed and that's a lofty request and the only way that we're going to convince the ecosystem to actually do that and shout out to the projects that we have been able to convince to do that. I can layer, tao, uh, puffer, etherfy, and some others that I'm unfortunately missing. Um, they are doing so because they trust the mechanism and also because they trust the mechanism is simple enough so that it can't be distorted or corrupted. Now, all that being said, we are constantly trying to figure out what is the best way for us to make sure that Protocol Guild is truly serving Ethereum and the ecosystem.

And so there are things that we can improve by, for example, trying to take into consideration other impact metrics to make sure that the people who are uh truly truly making a difference in Ethereum's core protocol um are in some way recognized for that. But at the same time, Protocol Guild is not built for Ethereum's core dev superstars. It's built for the median core dev. Because the reason why Protocol Guild exists is because the financial incentives associated with this work are far lower than elsewhere in the ecosystem. And so these core devs are constantly getting ludicrous job offers from other ecosystems or from other projects in Ethereum.

And it's not financially rational for them to say no to those job offers. But it's not the superstars. the superstar core devs who leave us. It's the median core dev and they have so much ingrained knowledge that losing one of them really hurts. There's not more than a couple hundred of these individuals.

And so we are optimized for the median core dev. Um and to that extent we are like I said constantly looking into how can we improve this mechanism but we need to be as thoughtful as Ethereum's core protocol development is. We cannot introduce an attack vector. We cannot introduce something that goes against our own credible neutrality because these are the people who are building the future of Ethereum and that's a really really important job. Thank you.

That was actually super super interesting. I didn't know you were optimizing for the medium core dev. Um which brings to another question. So this is how protocol guild is rationalizing and directing investment. What about Octant?

Um, so in the past we've been kind of like experimenting a bunch with uh how to fund public goods. We have like a very community uh based approach like um yeah well our community of uh GLM token holders and lockers can decide uh where the funding of the staking rewards go to. And um now we yeah after two years of of experimenting we've had a lot of uh lessons of how effective that is you know like of course uh the there's always the problem of civil attacks and people trying to game the system. Um and uh so with those learnings we uh are trying to uh create this kind of protocol that allows other ecosystems to fund their own um kind of network goods or whatever is their dependencies whatever is beneficial for them uh and allowing their own communities to to decide for that. So kind of like distributing this um kind of decision making towards to different communities and the communities that are relevant for themselves um while at the same time trying to find a layer of alignment between all these communities that fund like the Ethereum public goods.

So it's um yeah it's still like very well I guess like opposite to u protocol guild is a lot more like community uh driven uh in a way um and yeah I would say we're we're yet to see how that experime that next experiment plays out. Thank you. Thank you. I saw you wanted to say something. Yeah.

Uh I wanted to ask you a question actually. So you say uh protocol guild has this like simple uh funding mechanism basically and and it's easier to just tell that to people and and spread the message. Deep funding is the exact opposite, right? It's very complicated and and so do you see that even if deep funding is like a great success, would it be a lot harder to raise funds for that? Deep funding is fundamentally trying to solve a different problem than protocol guilt.

Um, deep funding. Uh, I don't want to speak for Vitalik, but uh, obviously he's a huge proponent proponent of deep funding. Uh, and deep funding appears to be his answer to the question, how can I donate like x amount of money into one smart contract to distribute funding in a way that's impactbased to the entire ecosystem. And like, damn, that's that's an ambitious thing to be able to do, right? Like it's it's not specialized.

it's literally fund the entire ecosystem. Um, and I applaud uh the pursuit of such things, right? Like there's definitely going to be very useful data that comes out of that versus protocol guild which is laser focused on fund the core devs who are building Ethereum, right? Um, and so given that we obviously approach the way that we treat our funding mechanisms completely different, right? like it is easy to identify who these core devs are because there's relatively few of them, right?

Um whereas in with deep funding, you need an AI to reason about it, right? And so um it's it's too early to say like how will protocol guild pivot to like accommodate deep funding. um we're waiting to see on results of the pilot and the results of the pilot will either be like a we told you so moment or it will be a egg on our face moment and we have to rethink like how can we incorporate some of those learnings. Um and like either way it's it's a good thing for Ethereum's ecosystem because we have like one more door open or one more door closed in terms of like what is the right next step. Thank you.

Um looking at the questions we got, there is one that is very interesting. Um should Ethereum only fund it own public goods or should it fund public goods in the wider world? So that means both in the digital crypto space but also I guess in the nondigital IRL space. So do you mean should the Ethereum protocol or the Ethereum foundation fund everything or um the question I say is Ethereum but I would say the Ethereum both. Okay, let's see both.

Yeah. Um so I think Ethereum protocol is interesting because Optimism is doing like somewhat like that, right? They they take their transaction fees and they uh spend them on public goods. Um I believe they spent them mostly on public goods that are directly relevant to them. Um but yeah, maybe that's something that they consider.

I think Ethereum has considered this like spending our transaction fees on on public goods on funding either Ethereum public goods or others and um people have decided against um so I think that's that's not happening uh at least for now. Um I think the Ethereum Foundation is is funding like a variety of things and Vivian maybe better suited to talk about that. But you can think of like deep funding for example as as not being directly relevant to Ethereum protocol yet it's funded by the Ethereum Foundation. So I guess some of it is happening. So what is the question like to talk about should Ethereum both Ethereum foundation and the protocol fund only public goods or also like the wider world public goods?

So if it should fund public goods in the ecosystem or also yeah I think for example semaphore one of the projects I work on it's not for ethereum it's for it can be used on offchain on in a web two application so it can be used not on web three web three so I think yes yeah and semaphur is still a public good and it's funded by the ethereum foundation And there are a lot of others because PSC is focused on advancing cryptography and privacy preserving applications. So this can be for web two, for web 3, for Ethereum, for other layers too. So So yeah, it's mainly focus on cryptography and privacy. It doesn't matter if it's on Ethereum or others. It's for everyone, for all the layers and for the world.

Yeah, I personally think that Ethereum should at least at this super early stage, I mean, it's been 10 years, but I feel still quite early, we should really focus on funding ourselves more, you know, like funding Ethereum and like growing Ethereum because I mean I think we all here agree that Ethereum is a force of good that is already making a lot of huge impact in the world. like I come from Bolivia where now there's like a huge economic and banking crisis and a lot of people are finding um refuge in um you know ethere in the ethereum network basically like by transacting stable coins. Uh so I think if we keep growing that like reducing uh the costs and like trying to just make this uh system a lot bigger even growing it you know I believe is an important part of of how to make Ethereum succeed and growing Ethereum as a public good should be considered as well. I I think we still should focus on that before looking outside a little bit. What's the deadline or like the milestone you would like to reach before going further?

That's that's a good question. I I don't really have a a straight answer like maybe uh my co-panelists here have have some more ideas but um yeah I I would say once Ethereum like has reached like I don't know like a big percentage of the world world is using Ethereum then we can start thinking of like funding other things outside of it. Yeah, I would agree. I think if you look at companies whether they decide to pay out dividends or invest it in themselves, it's kind of a similar question, right? And I think you you pay out dividends when you think that's your internal investments aren't going to be that lucrative anymore.

I think for Ethereum currently the internal investments are are huge. I mean there's a lot of scaling room that we can do and there's a lot of improvements that we can make and so when those improvements have dried up when when the protocol is basically osified then we can think about like other stuff. So, from my perspective, if we're talking about the EF, they should keep on doing more or less what they're doing. Um, but I'll take the opportunity to get on my soap box. Like, why does Ethereum have all this focus on public goods funding?

Well, because social norms don't exist around funding your dependency, at least not at the scale at which we need. And so, like to answer the question like holistically, um, I I don't care who you are, what you are. I don't care if it's like a crypto project or a non-crypto project. Fund your dependencies, right? If you're using open- source software and they're and and they're not monetizing you and and you're not paying them, consider paying them something.

Yeah. Buy buy them a coffee every month um so that they can survive, right? If we can instill that mindset to a majority of people, then maybe protocol guild and octant and paddle battle and whoever else wouldn't need to exist, right? Um it takes a village. And so to the extent that we can establish social norms around funding your dependency, that is a net positive for the world.

That's really what we want. So, um, don't when you're doing your donations, hopefully you are, um, don't think about if these are crypto projects or not, just fund what matters to you. The stuff that you know that if it's gone tomorrow would hurt you because these are projects that probably need your funding. That's super interesting because I mean we grew up in the free internet. Free as in we don't pay with our money, we pay with our data.

So I go on Google and I don't pay to use Google. I go on Instagram and I don't pay like to use Instagram then I pay with my own data. But yeah, there is no um immediate cost that I'm facing. It's all something that is in the back. So I don't think about it.

So doing what you say requires a shift in the mindset. Requires me knowing that if I use a software then that software needs to be maintained. That software needs to pay its contributors. So I need to contribute and if it's not with my data then it is with with my money. So, how do I achieve how do we achieve this shift in mindset that by the way is going to be so helpful to create a better privacy preserving internet?

Can I get back on my soap box? Um, oh, okay. Sorry. Um, you can give one word answer to that question. Yeah, the the companies who are destroying our privacy are monopolies.

Um, Ethereum is enabling the destruction of monopolies and so hopefully this is a way that we can bypass this issue that we have today. Thank you. Cool.