# The Shape of Protocols to Come

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 23:23
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-t_2ZIfF9gMc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_2ZIfF9gMc

## Description

Ethereum defies easy categorization—it blends aspects of money, nations, and more, yet doesn't fit neatly into any single category. To build better mental models for understanding Ethereum, we've spent the past two years stepping back and exploring the broader class it belongs to: Protocols. This talk explores the fundamental properties of protocols, strategies for navigating them, and how Ethereum can uniquely contribute to this emerging research field.

## Transcript

Okay. Oh, nice. Um thank you for making it to the real Ethereum 3.0 talk. Um Hi, I'm Tim Beiko. I work at the Ethereum Foundation on core protocol coordination. And as part of this, um I spend a lot of time thinking about how we should steward Ethereum. Like, what are the things we need to do or understand to make sure that the protocol evolves in the right direction. And a few years ago, I was quite frustrated because I felt like we didn't even have the right mental models or the right frameworks to think about Ethereum. And the reason for this is like Ethereum is quite hard to describe, right? Like, uh it's this complex thing and so it leads us to use analogies to describe it. So, to use one myself, um oh. Nice. App flies. Sweet. To use an analogy myself, um I really like the parable of blind men and the elephant to think about this. So, when different people look at Ethereum, they'll see something different, right? Some people will look at it, they'll see that there's this asset in the middle, ether, and think of it as money. Um other people will see that, oh, there's like this EVM that runs computations. It's like this world computer. Um you can think of it as a settlement layer for everything to use as sort of this global ledger. Um and even extending that something like Ethereum's a digital nation-state. And all of these things are partially true, but there's there's ways in which they sort of fall apart if you look at them a bit more closely. Um obviously, ether is valuable. It's like an asset, you can buy and sell it, but it functions very different than say fiat currencies. Similarly, computation runs on Ethereum. It's distributed, but the intuitions we have about scaling Ethereum are very different than how you'd approach scaling like a normal computer system. Um and then when people start talking about Ethereum being a country or anything like that, you know, Ethereum doesn't have a border, doesn't have citizens, doesn't have like natural resources to protect. And so, if you don't have actually good mental models to think about Ethereum, we risk sort of misunderstanding what this thing is and sort of doing a poor job of shaping it in the future. So, couple of years ago I set out to find better ways to go about describing this Ethereum elephant. And one intuition we had around this is that maybe we should zoom out a little bit, and instead of looking into like every part of Ethereum and try to understand how it works, could we find something a bit broader and effectively find like a higher level class which in Ethereum would be just a single instance. One inspiration we had for this was the idea of like chaos theory. If you look at chaos theory, you have these abstract formulas that allow you to describe systems ranging from like biological organisms to financial markets. Or another example could be something like economics. People obviously bought and sold things before we had a formal field of economics, but once we had the concepts like say supply and demand demand and how markets work, it allowed us to reason about what was happening in a much clearer way. And so in this case the framework we landed on was protocols. After some initial discussions, a few of us within the EF and outside had confidence that like protocols might be a rich enough topic that if we study this as like a first class thing, we could derive some general insights that we could then apply back to Ethereum, helping us to guide its stewardship. And so over the past 2 years, we effectively were inspired by this idea of the blind men and the elephant and decided to fund the over 50 researchers to study protocols from many different angles and try to give us a reports around what they were seeing so that we could see is there actually a common thing there. We funded people from with backgrounds in architecture, law, engineering, environmental management, arts, and way more. And they each had to spend time collecting these findings. And you can think of this as like field notes from touching the elephant in different places, and now I'd like to share some of their findings. You can think of this as like a sketch of the shape of protocols. So first off, let's look at how protocols get adopted. Protocols tend to have like a pretty slow adoption curve, especially early on. And the reason for this is that they tend to require consensus across many different people in different institutions. So, this means that at first you can feel like it's it's it's almost like stagnant. Like there's not a lot of energy, there's not a lot of process. But then, if the conditions are right, you can have very rapid adoptions of protocols. Everyone has like this common knowledge about things, and so it can evolve very much like a phase shift. And because you have this common knowledge, once you've actually adopted the protocols, it feels like it it it can get very entrenched, actually. So, it it's like a new status quo, in a way. So, one way to sort of visualize this is think of it as like a reverse dead curve, where early on you have like this initial wiggle of adoptions, and then um this sort of phase shift happens, where the protocol gets adopted, and then it's a new equilibrium. And the reason for this is just, again, because there's like all this common knowledge that's built up across people around why uh you know, this protocol should be adopted, and they've coordinated on it. So, one concrete example here is um how time zones got adopted. For decades, there were conversations around time zones as uh as uh there were more and more trains in in rail worlds across uh the US, specifically in Europe. But it didn't really go anywhere. Until one year, there was actually a conference which was sort of the tipping point, where at that point in time, people decided, "Okay, we're going to do time zones." Within a year after that, 85% of the US had time zones adopted. So, it sort of went through this phase shift within the span of a year. And now, if you think of time zones, it's effectively this protocol we take for granted. And even doing major changes, like trying to change daylight saving time, is this very complicated thing. It's super hard to move from the equilibrium. And one implication of this is that once these protocols get adopted, they'll tend to fade into the background. As researchers were studying protocols, there was this one quote that came up over and over uh different domains um that everyone would sort of use as like an anchor for how to think about protocols. There's a quote by A.N. Whitehead that reads that civilization advances by extending the number of important operation they can perform uh without thinking of them. And so we start thinking of protocols as effectively these tools to generate these Whitehead advances to allow civilization to perform more complex operations by abstracting them in the background. One example of this is like GPS. It's this very complex technological protocol um that we've deployed across the world and now we sort of take for granted that you can just, you know, position yourself between two points in space and not really have to think about it. And to use an example a bit closer to us, you can think of Uniswap as another uh as another one. Where prior to Uniswap, you know, deploying markets between assets was this long complicated process, whereas now we have like a simple formula that we've protocolized and you sort of take it for granted that when a new coin appears, there's like a liquidity pool that's that's powered by the Uniswap protocol. Um and one implication of this is that almost like the better a protocol is, the less visible it becomes over time. Think of something like HTTP. You can argue HTTP is like the greatest digital protocol that's ever been invented. It powers effectively the entire internet. But when I talk about it, I don't get like a strong emotional reaction. Similar to how like when you use a great product, you know, you notice it. Or if you see like a beautiful work of art or you walk into like a nice space, like the conference venue. Um HTTP sort of falls flat and you're like, "Yeah, it's a good protocol." But on the other hand, think of bad protocols. Uh one obvious example is like air travel protocols. If you're traveling, you know, internationally and I put these pictures here, you immediately have like a gut reaction of what it feels like, right? The take off your shoes, you're scared to be pulled aside. Um and maybe, you know, this goes well, you fly, but then you're trying to get a taxi to go back to your airport after your jet lag. And if the protocol there is bad, you know, you immediately feel it, right? You're standing there outside, uh it's warm, and there's 100 people waiting for their grabs. Um And so, this was a really valuable insight because um it allowed us to sort of or it it sort of illustrated a different lens through which we could start viewing protocols. One of the researchers formalized this and called this the Kafka index. The idea being that it's much easier to reason about a protocol by imagining its worst version across many different dimensions than to try and imagine the best possible version. And again, this is very different than our intuition when, say, building products. If you're building your product, you're trying to think like, "Okay, how do I build the best version on across all these dimensions?" You know, I go from like zero to 10. Protocols are a bit like the opposite. It's more like you have all these dimensions and you're trying to get from minus 10 to zero. And when I was thinking about this this week, um it hit me that this is kind of what the Bitcoin protocol, I think, is is so elegant. If you look at the Bitcoin white paper, um the second line or so, uh focuses on what is like the core theme it's trying to address. Um Satoshi's claim is, you know, trusted third party are like the worst things about online payment system, and the entire protocol is focused on just trying to get around that one thing. If you look at the bottom of the abstract, it sort of says, like, there's all these other parts of the protocol, and they sort of kind of work, um but it's sort of less important than the idea that on this one bad dimension, we're trying to optimize to uh go from minus 10 to zero. And flowing from this, like, if we're trying to like protect these protocols or get them to avoid these bad states, another way that's useful to think about them is to to treat them as commons in a way. Commons are these shared resources that have a risk of like being captured or overused. Um in in sort of outside of crypto, people will use this when talking about things like fisheries or or pastures, basically natural resources. Um and obviously, in our context, uh these protocols tend to not have these like physical boundaries. Um there's things that have clear digital boundaries. You can think of Ethereum itself as having like clear digital artifacts or even if you consider Linux to be a protocol, you know, there's like a clear thing to point to. But, there's also some more diffuse things. For example, think about like the evolution of workplace safety protocols. It's clear that there's like a common good here, you know, there's like this sense of safety and injury and whatnot, but it's distributed across a whole range of institutions um without necessarily having like a single artifact. But, still I think it it points at an important intuition that like if you want to avoid the bad cases, just like for physical commons, we need to have strong stewardship because we want them, you know, we want to protect against capture, overuse, and other risks. And the sort of risky capture that has to one of the sort of final insights around what's unique about protocols. At the very start of this, we spent a lot of time trying to define what even was a protocol and especially how it was different than other things. You know, like what's the difference between a protocol and an API or a standard or a grammar. And one thing that became clear through this work is that protocols have a notion of conflict embedded sort of at their core. Um Um you know, you can see this very quickly in something like Ethereum, right? Ethereum is effectively this digital protocol. We have nodes on the network which have to come to consensus about the state of things. So, they have all these ways to resolve conflict, you know, by peering or or unpeering from each other. There's some more um explicit parameters they get to negotiate over like the block gas limit. Um but, beyond that, we also have these like meta protocols around Ethereum that exist immediate like how we plan upgrades. And again, outside of crypto, you could think of something like traffic rules, right? The way that traffic is organized and we're trying to mediate different people going to different places but going through the same roads um is another way to like we have these protocols that manage conflict. And this was like such a central point that it allowed us to sort of simplify our working definition of protocols by about an order of magnitude. So, in 2022 when we started this, Danny Ryan had had a following definition for protocol, which I'll have to read, um which is a stratum of qualified behavior that allows for the construction of emergent or emergence of complex coordinated behaviors at adjacent loci. And so, this was broadly right, but it was quite verbose. And then through all of this work, uh at the end of this summer, Venkat, who runs the summer protocols program, was able to summarize it in two words, which is protocols are engineered arguments. And this is like a really helpful working definition of a protocol, especially when contrasting it with things like standards, APIs, and so on. And so, to recap what we had so far, you effectively have like these five initial properties of what the shape of protocols starts to look like. We have the slow adoption and intransigence that we first covered, sort of reverse dead curve. Then the idea that protocols create these white headed advances, that they provide sort of this invisible infrastructure that civilization can then build on top of. Um we have this idea of a Kafka index where you can analyze a protocol by looking through all of the worst versions of it across different dimensions. Then thinking of protocols as commons which have uh risk of being captured and therefore require strong stewardship. And lastly, treating protocols as engineered arguments, so realizing that they embed conflict in many different ways. And this sort of validated the initial thesis, that there was a common thing around protocol that applied across different domains that we could use to discuss um to discuss our problems with the Ethereum and hopefully learn from others as well. And so now, I'd like to talk a bit about how protocols may evolve in the future and specifically how Ethereum may help shape that. And to do this, it's useful to like zoom into Ethereum's distinguishing property as a protocol, uh which which I think is hardness. This is a term that Josh Stark coined a couple years ago, um and defined it as the capability to make the future more certain. Ethereum isn't the only source of hardness in the and in this piece uh Josh puts out three categories. So, atoms, institutions, and blockchains. And but Ethereum's hardness is special in three different ways. First is that it's globally homogeneous, meaning that no matter where you are in the world, you have like the same degree of hardness when you use Ethereum. And this is very much not true of atoms and institutions. The second is that it's independently auditable. So, anyone that uses Ethereum for hardness is able to verify whether or not a certain thing happened. And then lastly, it's permissionlessly accessible, so you don't need sort of a high barrier to entry to use Ethereum. And so, if we use this and understand like Ethereum has hardness as its core, um we we can start to see how it can shape the future of protocols. The first is as an hardened foundation for other things. Um this is kind of obvious for anyone who's at Devcon here, but it's striking how special and unique this is. There's not many other things in the world that exist to provide sort of the strong source of persistence and reliability to financial assets, cultural artifacts, or even a whole set of protocols built on top of it. So, um again, this it's it's kind of hard to overstate this, but like looking from all these different domains, it feels like something truly unique that we should not take for granted. But stemming from that, there's like a more subtle way in which uh we we we have sort of hardness at our core, and it's as a hardened culture. And here you can look at hardness both in the way I just defined it as like uh giving you better certainty about the future, but also in its like more traditional sense as battle-tested. Ethereum operates in a pretty adversarial environment, and over time we've developed like norms and practices that mitigate and respond to attacks at both the protocol, application, and infrastructure layer. But in parallel to this, we also have a culture of looking really far into the future, of trying to like plant seeds for the ecosystem to grow to become resilient and not dependent on a single institution or set of people, and also have a technical roadmap that's sound in the long term. And so, by combining both like these hard foundation as a protocol and the software like cultural hardness, um Ethereum effectively can impact the future protocols beyond just crypto. And one way one way I thought about this is like Ethereum is effectively this tool that we can use to harden commons um outside of this space as well. And this is because we have this open platform that's very large and and and sort of very versatile, but that's also fairly sandboxed from the rest of the world. This means we can run experiments that would be probably too risky to have in any but where else, but it can still happen at sufficient scale on Ethereum and provide value to the rest of the world. Two examples here on this slide are quadratic quadratic voting and prediction markets. Both of these started off as these theoretical ideas that didn't quite have a place to sort of be prototyped in the world. Eventually Ethereum became that place. We were able to run small experiments and learn from those, improving our understanding, and then, you know, leading to much more significant outcomes. Most notably, you know, prediction markets playing a a major role in the recent US presidential election. Um And so, I think going through all this and coming back to the original question, I feel like we have like a start of an answer to how we can best steward Ethereum. So, by understanding um the the notes are wrong on this slide, but we'll run with it. But okay, by understanding anyways the shape of protocols, um we can better calibrate effectively how we approach developing Ethereum in the future. Um you know, we should expect that things will take time, especially early on, but we shouldn't be too surprised if things gradually happen as a sort of phase shift all at once. We should expect conflict and capture and and systems that gracefully handle them, and instead of building for hypothetical utopias, we should be honest about everything and try to solve for failure modes in the protocol. And by having this shared language, this shared framework of of protocols, we're able to learn from other communities who otherwise wouldn't be interested in our problems. And at our best, we can also export our best practices out to them. So, in other words, the understanding the shape of protocols is the way Ethereum community can leverage its impact beyond crypto. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tim. Fantastic. You win the record for the first speaker that has finished before time. Wow. Every other speaker pushed me to come on stage a bit earlier than expected, but nevertheless, that gives us a little bit more time for some great session of Q&A. I was going through the questions. Some questions are not exactly linked to the topic. So, if possible, we want to keep the topic and as our focus. So, please ask questions regarding what Tim has shared about protocols, Ethereum. Um and feel free to upvote as well, right? If you see a question that looks really good, please upvote it so that our speaker can address it. Let's go with the first one on top. How do we converge on a conception of protocols which will be sufficiently specific to lead to useful actionable in Oh. Okay, second one. They keep Okay, hold on. I can't scroll down. Can I scroll down? I don't know if the team can scroll down cuz I Yeah, yeah. That third one. Okay. Actionable insights while keeping it Oh. While keeping it Okay, I think I got the question. I'm happy to answer it. Okay, let's go to number six. Do you think EF ecosystem operation is a bad protocol because we don't see any feedback channel? That's a good question. Tim, how do you think you'd like to address it? Yeah, I I guess I'd dispute the premise. I don't think that like there's no feedback channel. I don't know. I work at the EF and I read all the tweets, and I listen to everything. So, I think um a lot of it is not necessarily visible. You know, the EF doesn't have a suggestion box, but we get a lot of unsolicited feedback, so we don't necessarily need to. Um And and then I think back to what I said earlier, like um and you know, back to IS talk this morning, um getting the feedback doesn't necessarily mean you have to act on it, right? Like, I think one thing the EF wants to optimize for is um leaving the space for others to grow. And and sort of take ownership about ownership about solutions in the space. And so, if we just reacted proactively and solved every single thing, um others would sort of feel like they don't have the space to do that. Um But yeah, to the extent to which we have or we don't have good feedback channels, then yeah, that would make it a bad protocol. That's a good answer. Now, I want to pick up on that because our previous session with Justin, a very big crowd came in, and he was saying that if you want to accelerate growth, come and email us and join the team. Don't just watch from the sidelines. You know, giving feedback is good, but participating, I think, even better. Great question, great answer. Let's look at the next one. Um okay. What are the takeaways for Ethereum here? Rules of thumb for healthy protocol evolution, past mistakes we should avoid repeating. Yeah. Um One thing that felt good about doing this research is honestly, a lot of the instincts of the Ethereum community are are pretty good. Like, so um it's it's it's it's made me a bit less concerned about this, but um you know, like, probably the biggest one is like say you're like solving for the negative versions. And um this is maybe not as visible to to like people who don't work on the protocol every day, um but the main thing that we talk about when we discuss uh protocol changes for Ethereum is security, right? Like, everyone comes in with a new idea for a new feature for Ethereum, um it's always great, it provides a ton of value to user, but there's a security issue with it. And effectively not compromising on Ethereum security is more important in the protocol development process than trying to deliver as much feature as much value as possible through features. Um so that's one of the takeaways where like it's kind of nice that we were already sort of doing it. Um I do think the adoption bit is something we should think a bit more about where a lot of the intuitions we have around how Ethereum will get adopted, we probably borrow from like the technology sector and product development. Um and we should probably be looking more things like yeah, how time zones got adopted or how GPS got adopted than uh products. Yeah. Excellent answer. All right, uh number four votes on the top. How does engineered argument differ from logic defined by Wiki as the study of correct reasoning? Um yeah, I'd say it's like correct is uh correct is subjective, right? Like you know, uh and and one of the big things is just this idea that protocols exist effectively mediate conflict. Um so everyone thinks their version of the protocol or their view in the protocol is correct, but a good protocol will be able to to deal with cases where yeah, it's incorrect. All right, thank you. Okay, we're back to our earlier question which I couldn't finish in time. Hopefully now you'll stay on the board. Don't vote for anything else. Wait, hold on. How do we converge on a conception of protocols which will be sufficiently specific to lead to useful or actionable insights while keeping it open enough to facilitate input of off-chain perspectives? Wow. Um How do we converge on a You got 30 seconds. But so I I Yeah. This is like a low confidence answer, but I think at this point it feels less like there's a single core formula that we can use that will be like perfectly actionable rather than like these many different lenses. So I think um one thing that's been useful in this summer protocols research is having people from different domains to be able to validate like is this an Ethereum thing or is this like a broader phenomena? And yeah, I I I think just like gut checking against other domains and yeah. And I think maybe just one more question, the second one on the list in case anyone's interested, where was the research published in one place and where was the research published? summerprotocols.com, all of the research is there. Um yeah, if there's one place to go, that would be it. Fantastic. Now,