# From pipes to people: 10 years in Ethereum | Friederike Ernst (August 2024) - Channel: [Berlin Ethereum Meetup](https://streameth.org/berlin-ethereum-meetup) - Date: 2024-10-07 - Duration: 25:54 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-uUyHMLn-uio - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUyHMLn-uio ## Description Join us on Meetup to keep track of our events in Berlin: https://www.meetup.com/berlin-ethereu... See you at the next one! --- Apply to speak at our future meetups: https://forms.gle/5y9Y5ywZC7pSEqpV9 --- Twitter: @BerlinMeetup ## Transcript [Applause] hey guys it's it's a total pleasure to be here um and it's really nice to speak just after Fabian because um my take is super different from fabian's take um and I think that usually makes um for um very good uh very good sequence when people actually disagree with one another consensus consensus consensus consensus um yeah first of all I wanted to say that I have learned so much at meetups so kind of I think meetups in the ethereum space um in the entire crypto space really um they have been such a godsent because I think maybe and I think it's been mostly because in the very beginning ethereum was smart hobbyists in some way so people who kind of had a day job and kind of went to these we weird meetups in the even but I've met so many Fascinating People um at ethereum space meetups over the past 10 years or so um that yeah it's it's super nice to be here the 10th anniversary um so I went back through the very early days of ethereum and nosis which I co-founded um nosis not ethereum um and uh I was going to make slides and then I pulled a photo of me and my two co- Founders um and I said ah 10 years ago I'm not going to stand next to that that will make me look really old so um uh I I I'll go uh the very old style meta brout without uh without slides so um I'll give you very quick history of ethereum and nosis so in 2013 the ethereum white paper was uh posted and I think this is maybe the other birth of ethereum uh that is uh is up there for debate um in 2014 the etherum foundation was established and did a crowd sale they at the time they raised 18 $8 million in Bitcoin very luckily um in July of uh 2015 that's July 30th Frontier ethereum Frontier launched and NOS is launched in August of 2015 one week later um and was the first major DB deployed on ethereum at the time we had built a prediction Market platform um believe it or not that was all the age back then um things have shifted and now they've come back with polychain um but uh yeah so that was back then since then we have built a lot of infrastructure so I can run you through what what's been built so M so um the 2016 s saw um the homestead release of ethereum in March then uh we had the Dow hack in June um and uh I maybe we'll hear more about this later I don't know um and uh then we had um uh um the hard fork for etherum classic in July um 2017 saw the no multi sick launch in in March and then uh the nosis token sale in April um in 2018 we opened for not Berlin there so the crypto co-working space here in in in Berlin um we had the first nosis safe release and the first dcon also here in Berlin 2018 was also um the first year um that I remember talking about ZK so up to then uh starting 2017 we had kind of looked to uh plasma as scaling solution um don't really hear a lot about plasma anymore these days so um ZK clearly won out there and then in 2019 we had noas Olympia the prediction Market um which was licensed which was something we went back on later um so we gave back the license um we also launched DX and Dutch X um that was nosis protocol version one in 2019 we started talking about rollups in case you don't remember um uh in 2020 in 2020 we launched cow swap in July and ethereum uh Beacon chain just a little bit later um and then um um we saw pretty early rollups that year as well so Loop ring optimism and zking were the first ones and we saw the launch of circles 1.0 2021 we saw zodiac Dow tooling EIP 1559 um we saw the nosis XI token merger in November fing nosis chain um and in 2022 we launched agnostic relay the me blocker H and then in September we had the merge of ethereum um so that was when ethereum upgraded to proof of stake in 2023 we had the Shanghai upgrade uh for validator uh withdrawals um and uh this year uh metri launch which is a new wallet um out of nosis and we we are having the circus relaunched so kind of if you look over all of these things that kind of have happened in the past 10 years which were the problems that kind of we talked about a lot so um in the very beginning uh we talked about transactions and transaction costs a lot so transactions per second were kind of uh the things um that were relevant um so we had to learn how to write gas light smart contracts um I can tell you this I needed to empty an old nosis multi last year and it cost me an arm and a leg so kind of we have definitely gotten better at writing um uh lightweight smart contracts um you also may not remember this but we also had a lot of congestion on the network so kind of like people who were trying to take part in icos and couldn't um so this was back in 2017 then we had security as a huge topic so kind of like all before audits became common um and we got formal verification fuzzing and good guidelines on kind of like what to avoid we had many mistakes that kind of were made for the first time um and uh actually led to pretty bad vulnerabilities um we also didn't have a lot of Dev tooling um so FR writing testing and deploying smart contracts was very much an adventure um we soon got the likes of truffle remix and metamask obviously we have whole larger tool Suite now 2020 we fought congestion once again so this time it was defi you may remember the eye watering gas fees that many of us paid um at that time um since that time we've also kind of fought for user experience um interoperability that uh Fabian alluded to just a bit ago um we have seen a count obstruction with recovery options gas abstraction transaction batching with Nosa safe and others um we have pass Keys now so kind of we can have a pass key kind of hold a uh a uh private key um to so you can kind of uh sign transactions biometrically so what happens now I mean either you can kind of go back and kind of say okay we have learned all of these things kind of from the technical things that we have built and kind if we were to build them now again we would start completely differently and um and uh kind of build uh kind of the perfect construction out of you know unified standards and everything fitting into each other super well and I would very much posit that this is not the way forward so kind of I would very much say kind of Okay so we've built infrastructure for the past 10 years right kind of we have built so many different standards we have built so many different modules now let's use it to build things that are useful for actual people as Fabian said I very much agree there's very very few users on ethereum you might even say none if you kind of discount like the farcaster crowd um there's there's no one who's genuinely on blockchains except for speculative purposes it's there's zero users so basically let's look at why we started building on blockchains in the first place right kind of so what can blockchains do better than kind of building your app on AWS can't I can tell you it's not simpler right kind of like building on blockchain is uh it's a nightmare so why do we why do we actually bother right so we bother because we can achieve things um in this um in this um decentralized trust this environment that you can't on WS so kind of you can do things like decentralized ownership which is new right so basically if you want to be on an internet where not all the value that is created automatically acres to the same five entities um blockchain is your friend so kind of go on use that right kind of build something that um leverages this decentralized ownership that in principle we can offer right second thing is um is individual agency so so there's plenty of things that regular people cannot do on the internet because they're not allowed or it's too expensive to do it in their jurisdiction and so on so let's let's use that let's give people things they want to use that they currently don't have and the last thing is ironically much better user experience by building on permission systems so I would actually puit that having many people kind of contribute to what is built and kind of building little units on top of what is already built yes it's a mess it's not super neat but in principle it kind of gives you a lot of things to choose between and it kind of it enables a strictly better user experience than um you would have been able to get otherwise so I would kind of say the exact Converse of what you said I said I would say um go forth and build things build things on the messy on the messy uh uh on the me messy groundworks that we have laid um build things that people will actually find useful where they don't have to understand what goes on in the back so kind of if you look at all the tooling we have now it is actually possible to build things for people who don't have to know how a blockchain works just like um most people maybe this crowd accepted cannot explain to you how tcpip works right they still use it every day same and the same should go for blockchains you shouldn't have to understand how uh ethereum works or how any blockchain Works in order to kind of use it you should just be a consumer should be commodified to a certain extent so developers should kind of bother with kind of choosing the right blockchain environment for them in terms of kind of like the cost and security and so on tradeoff but the user should never have to worry about this they should be completely abstracted away from the the user kind of and with all the tooling that we have built over the past 10 years this is very much something that we can achieve today so build something that is actually useful for people that people can use um and uh see to that uh we actually have some real people uh transacting meaningfully uh on blockchains thank you thank you so much I um do we have any questions please raise your hand and I will come running with mic anybody have a good idea what to ah Fabian here you go sorry I mean I just want to be opening up the panel here I mean I just want to mention this I fully agree with you you know I mean we have the first bu things useful we have to make the complexity disappear and we have to actually build things that are useful right now Al for people that are not necessarily joining crypto for decentralization because the TRU is nobody cares I mean normal people do not join blockchain because of decentralization they just rather go for this green frog that now 10x with their friends wallet and they they realize can also um so I agree with that part and I also would say that most of the tools that we have been built are exactly nicely working for the things that we built so there not that it's a complete different thing and it's also not uh so different actually it's just more of how it works together it's more like a cleaned house version of the same with a few more additional things um but it's really meant to be compatible you know it's meant to be compatible to all of these things so sometimes it's good to have that clean clean building this clean Lego totally agree and I think there's I mean you know we have nosis chain so kind of I totally see where you're coming from so I totally understand that ethereum um secures a lot of value so kind of um making changes in ethereum is kind of is is hard as you kind of saw in your standards process and I mean it's for a reason right kind of it's it's um uh it's kind of it's semi aifi um because it secures a lot of value and kind of like you don't want to risk you a few minute few minutes of downtime for kind of um skipping uh all the all the different steps you kind of uh you should take um you want to be sure things work when you deploy them right so kind of I I I see where you're coming from and I also I also think that smaller chains can very much do the leap frogging where kind of they already Implement things that are just talked about in ethereum I do actually see that 100% but um I think kind of building something in new and saying okay look I'm I've built this fantastic house and look it's got other features that kind of the O house didn't have it has an indoor shower and kind of like it it um H it has a fantastic rooftop and so on you but you also want the people who already live there right so kind of like you also you you also kind of want the activity and um and yeah we talk about interoperability but it's not as seamless um as we're making it seem so obviously that's going to be obstructed away at some point but yeah so I think I yeah so I I can I can see both points any more yes there so you talked about I think what you primarily listed was sort of like solving um the infrastructure problems that we've seen um over the years in your view why is it that um with all the money and all the attention that has come into the space there hasn't been anything meaningful for users bu yet and do you have a timeline why and also like do you feel it will be solved if yes like what is the blocker to that yeah absolutely so I think part of the problem is that we're a bunch of Engineers so I think kind of like a lot of the projects that were initially well funded um they they um they were run and are run by Engineers that kind of just really like building beautiful buildings and I totally get that but you kind of you also want to build a building that people actually want to live in so kind of I think you have to come from the other side and this is very much kind of what we've been going through atosis so kind of like we have built all of this infrastructure and now how do we build something that will be an actual value to people and will make them come use this app without having with without having to tell them but this is much better this is you know you own it yourself it's self custodial people don't care right kind of people don't care about decentralization you have to think you have to think about and neither should we to be honest I think kind of um decentralization to a certain extent is fzed in this space so more decentralization is not necessarily better it's a spectrum right kind of like you want to ask yourself what's the price point I'm willing to pay for a transaction and how much security security economic or game theoretic do I actually need for this transaction right kind of um having your identity on chain it should probably be worth much more to you than kind of um having your I don't know Candy Crush school or whatever else you could in principle put on chain right um and this is a very long winded way of coming back to to your question so kind of you we ask ourselves what are the areas in which we can build products that are legitimately better than what people currently have and we landed on the payment space and that's our personal answer so I think other other projects would probably land on different answers for us it's the payment space because of several things most of which aren't particularly sexy um so the first one is that the that payments infrastructure actually today is um it's rip for disruption in the sense that kind of no one would design it the way it is designed if you were to start over today so kind of you you can have huge efficiency gains um by building on a blockchainbased system rather than kind of the very cobal heavy um stack of modules that have been built over the last 50 years right secondly um payments has a very proven business model so kind of we know how to make money in uh in payments and we have for the last you know many thousand years um so we understand how to make uh we understand how to kind of drive a business model on payments and thirdly while payments actually work pretty flawlessly for us in the global North this is not actually the case for most of the population worldwide right all of you have several credit cards in your pockets you can pay at zero cost wherever you want you can do separate insance trans transfers at at zero cost and so on um this is not true for the merchants who are accepting your payments but much much worse than that it's not um it's not true for many people in the global South so kind of like many um many of the things that we take for granted such as kind of being able to H to to hold dollars in your account this is something that is not um god-given to many other jurisdictions right kind of like if you're in Argentina or in Brazil or turkey or wherever having a dollarized account is actually pretty large status symbol because it's that difficult to obtain we we don't even think of this as a product anymore right you you holding usdc that's kind of like yeah any wallet can do this but kind of building a that a regular person can use where you don't actually have to say okay when when was the last time someone here onboarded a friend into the web3 space probably recently right yeah the way you do it is like okay yeah you install this um yeah yeah it's a browser extension yeah it looks dodgy it's not dodgy yeah it's a fox it's cute I know um okay now these these these are your 24 words ah don't show them to me don't ever show them to anyone but write them down but put it put them somewhere where you definitely won't lose them because otherwise everything is me this is this doesn't this is user experience this doesn't work for us this really doesn't work for us this shouldn't work for anyone and kind of like with all the tooling that we've built we can now fully abolish um the the seat phras right kind of like we can have we have a smart account we can have pass Keys hold um the the keys to that smart account you can you can swap them out you can do social recovery with smart accounts as you know you can do things like batching transactions together um you can abstract away gas which which should be at any depth um at any depth disposition so kind of if you have a business model um you can abstract the fees away from someone right kind of if you go to a random website no one would ever say look you've you've visited the guardian.com please pay two cents because that is your portion of our AWS Bill no it's kind of it's Amalgamated into their business model and I expect that many many deps will do this in the future as well so kind of this is why we need smart accounts um and uh this is kind of uh building on this and kind of looking at kind of like what actual people want kind of like um uh reasonably uh reason so so uh uh loans of reasonable interest um uh on uh that are fully collateralized um for instance that that's a very real value proposition sending funds so kind of this is why remittance is maybe the only real application on web 3 right because remittance is super costly so kind of like sending funds in a different currency across borders um paying people kind of using venmo venmo is not available in most countries did you know that um in principle you should be able to kind of just send your friend three bucks wherever you are um and you should be able to do it in your local currency so kind of just enabling these sort of use cases to us that's the answer I can see many different fields that could also benefit from disruption so basically um social media just being one of them but um yeah there's tons and I think kind of just picking one area building things that real people want to use testing them and polishing them to get them to such a point that people want to use them not because they're decentralized but despite the fact that they're decentralized because they don't actually have to know about any of any of things that kind of you made go on in the background okay one more quick question hey uh thanks for theosis and the talk so I'm curious about your brief perspective on like regulatory things in the Europe with the like recent rests and uh I mean like do you still view Europe as like friendly place to build a startup in this space or maybe America is kind of better [Music] whatever that's a very difficult question so I I assume you mean the the the the um telegram founder arrest um yeah so yeah I think kind of worldwide is somewhat challenging in in some respects um so I think um there are certain um there are certain topics that we need to be wary of so kind of um I very strongly believe that you should have right to privacy um you that we we're working on tools for you to kind of prove um that your funds are legitimate and that you've paid taxes on them and so on but you shouldn't have I don't think you should have to disclose where exactly your come funds come from and where exactly they go um and I think to a certain extent this is a cultural battle and I think the same goes for kind of like this content moderation battle so kind of to to what extent should you have to um moderate content if you're building a platform um and yeah I think it's to a large extent it's a cultural cultural battle that kind of we have to fight and we also have to I think it's also um not as clear-cut because there aren't um super easy answers as to what should be allowed and what should not be allowed I would kind of take the stance that Free Speech should actually cover lots of things but should you be allowed to say absolutely everything I don't think so and I think kind of like when when you have these kinds of answers where you can't tell where exactly the line is finding good regulation is super difficult and um I think yeah we do sometimes see overreach but I would still very much say that um we can find reasonable ground that kind of everyone can kind of do you think Europe is still better than United States for this it depends so I think kind of like for for um free speech obviously I think the US is actually better if if you if you are a um a US person if you're not a US person you're but I mean if you're a US person you you for free free speech is probably is pro probably better um for many of the other things I'm not so sure so um yeah it's but then again I'm very much not a lawyer I'm a physicist so I have no idea thank you so much for