Fireside Chat with Bogdan Habic & Kartik Talwar at Pragma Prague 2025

Thu, Oct 2, 2025, 12:00 AM

In this fireside chat at Pragma Prague 2025, Kartik Talwar sits down with Bogdan Habic, co-founder of Tenderly, to explore the evolution of Ethereum developer tooling. They discuss Tenderly's origins from a Serbian hackathon to becoming essential infrastructure, challenges in building dev tools for blockchain, and the delicate balance between open-source ideals and sustainable business models. Habic shares insights on EVM compatibility issues, contract verification challenges, and why most computation should happen off-chain while using blockchain for verification. 00:00 Introduction to Bogdan Habic and Tenderly 00:49 Origin story: From public procurement hackathon to Tenderly 01:17 Transition from Hyperledger to Ethereum tooling 01:42 Tenderly's open-source roots and pivot 02:11 Early days of EVM tooling (2017) 02:35 Challenges of building dev tools as open-source 03:04 Debugging smart contracts in 2017 03:31 Inventing missing Web2 tools for Web3 03:56 Tenderly's current product suite 04:26 Security scanning for wallet transactions 04:54 Cost challenges in Web3 developer tooling 05:22 Why dev tools are infrastructure in Web3 05:50 Collaborative nature of blockchain development 06:22 Foundry's limitations in collaborative debugging 06:50 Unique challenges of shared database paradigm 07:18 Developer tooling as infrastructure 07:47 Biggest problems in Ethereum developer ecosystem 08:18 Solidity's limitations vs ecosystem needs 08:52 Debugging symbols and ecosystem growth 09:23 Overpromised timelines vs long-term value 09:51 Generational adoption of blockchain technology 10:22 Simplifying crypto for mainstream adoption 10:58 Evolution from Truffle to Hardhat to Foundry 11:26 Importance of learning from past tools 11:53 Open-source vs closed-source tensions 12:22 Business challenges of open-source dev tools 12:47 Monetizing public goods in Web3 13:16 Tenderly's path to open-sourcing 13:45 Foundry's success factors 14:12 Founder perspectives on open-source 14:39 Sustainability in dev tool businesses 15:10 Experimentation with alternative VMs 15:40 Ethereum's stability vs innovation tradeoffs 16:06 EVM compatibility nuances 16:35 Risks of VM incompatibility 17:06 EVM equivalent vs compatible confusion 17:36 Stylus and WASM experimentation 18:06 Contract verification challenges 18:39 Importance of source code visibility 19:06 Two benefits of contract verification 19:34 Debugging across smart contracts 20:04 Web2 vs Web3 debugging comparison 20:33 Advice for building complex on-chain systems 21:03 Verification over execution principle 21:38 Balancing on-chain vs off-chain logic 22:09 Scaling TPS vs developer growth 22:38 Future of off-chain compute 23:05 Closing remarks _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇨🇿 *Pragma Prague* Pragma Prague 2025 was held on May 29th at Holešovice Market in Prague, Czech Republic and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. This event was in collaboration with ETH Prague. Watch the full Pragma Prague YouTube Playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7vLS72NelQ2dOx2VgPNxJZ&si=UsHtX5roJ4R2R4_K ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Bogdan Habic X: https://x.com/BogdanHabic ✅ Follow Tenderly X: https://x.com/TenderlyApp ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _