# The Heroes of The Merge

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-09
- Duration: 05:44
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-ql082HLTndA
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql082HLTndA

## Description

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## Transcript

foreign [Music] good morning I'm Tim Bako and I work with the protocol support team of the ethereum foundation I'm here today to talk about the people and the teams who helped transition ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake um but before I get started I just want to take a minute to explain what protocol sport is because it's like the first time we use this and um when I told my family I was joining the ef's protocol support team they said it kind of sounded like ethereum's call center or like people would call it like their transaction is stuck or like they can't run their node um and that's that's actually not what we do so the main thing our team does is we help coordinate and facilitate Network upgrades to ethereum um but beyond that we also spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we can better uh align the community across the people working on layer one all of the infrastructure and teams around them and the people building applications on ethereum another thing to spend a lot of time on is figuring out how can we onboard and retain people to contribute to ethereum um there's a few things we do on that front most recently we announced the ethereum protocol Fellowship which is something where folks who want to come and work on the ethereum protocol can do so for a couple months and uh hopefully then find a job full time working in the space another thing we've done is we've helped launch protocol Guild which is an on-chain organization that helps balance individuals and anyone who wants to contribute to fund protocol contributors directly um and lastly we spent a lot of time doing like weird little mementos and things for the community when there's big Milestones that happen um whether these are things like the 1559 nfts uh the merge manual that just went out um we try and think about like how can we uh like memorialize all these big things both for the community and for all the people who worked on it um yeah so that's what we do at products support uh but that's not the main thing I want to talk about um the main topic of the day is basically the what I've called like the heroes of the merge all of the people all of the teams who helped get ethereum the proof of stake and obviously there's way too many people for me to go over in just a short talk um but at least there's a couple core buckets that are worth highlighting the first is everyone involved on the research side it took many many many years of research and dead ends and new specs to come up with not only a specification for the entire Beacon chain and proof of stage but as well as the transition um the EF research team was obviously a big part of that but they weren't alone um there were other teams such as txrx quilt who played a major role in this aside from from these the next kind of logical one is all of the consensus layer teams they're the people who write this software that powers the beacon chain and literally run proofs runs proof of stake um so these are teams like Lighthouse Nimbus prism taku and lodestar and obviously they have all their counterparts on the execution layer so all of the people who wrote the software to run ethereum on proof of work and that still manages basically the evm transaction ethereum State and all of that these are teams like base 2 like Geth uh like nethermine and Aragon and last but not least um the merge was a massive massive testing effort uh there's not like a single team or even a single project that we can kind of list encapsulate all of that so I just want to give a shout out to everyone who's worked uh on all of the testing efforts whether this is Hive whether this is all the infrastructure to set up Shadow forks and test line combinations before going live um whether these other reference tests that client teams kind of implement against folks who works on this specification uh on the consensus layer side who worked on eips and everyone who worked on the security side as well including the bug Ramsey program um so I'd ask everyone to please give a massive Round of Applause that all of these teams all these individuals who moved it there into proof of stake as we were getting closer to the merge this summer I was trying to think like can we do something that'll stay around with all these people um after Defcon is over you know to kind of highlight this contribution um and it was a bit weird to find the right thing so I spent a bunch of time talking with different client team leads people in the EF people in the community asking them like you know what could we do for like all the folks who worked on this um and I had a neat conversation with Ben from the techu team and so he was telling me like all of the people on his team often end up not being able to go to East conferences because they're kind of so into weeds working under stuff that they literally forget about tickets going live they can't find one and then they show up and they can't get in the conference for the protocol they need to rebuild and it's not like they don't want to pay for it or anything it's just like they completely miss it and then they're like stuck at the door for the ethereum conference um so it seemed like a solvable problem like something we could we could do to make their lives easier um and so I spent some time talking to some folks figuring out the best approach for this um and I'm really I'm really happy with what he came up with so I'm excited to announce what we've called the merge or pass so this is basically a soul-bound token that we're going to be giving to everyone who's contributed to the merge that'll guarantee them access to all of the top ethereum conferences for the next few years um yeah thanks [Applause] thanks and one thing that's neat about this you know because this will all be on chain it all be public so anyone in the community can obviously extend it and build on it but I'm really excited today to say you know the first Partners we have for this are Etc Global Devcon edcon I've all agreed to honor this for the next several years uh so can I please get a round of applause for all of these Partners thank you