# ETH Labs Launches to Make Ethereum Root of Global Economy

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-07-23

## Transcript

The more Ethereum is valuable for these chains, the more these chains will be valuable for Ethereum because then Ethereum can capture some of that value.
Right.
So like it is our prompt of like, how can Ethereum be maximally valuable for a Robynet chain, for a, you know, like whatever the chain, that's why we come back to Interop.
Like what offerings, like what do we need to do that?
being on top of Ethereum is something that's like, how could you possibly do anything else?
It needs to be a no brainer.
If a new financial institution comes on chain, of course, they're going to do it on top of Ethereum.
ETH Labs was the first of three new organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem that launched last month.
But what is ETH Labs?
What do they do?
And what does all of this mean for ETH, the asset and for investors?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that ETH Labs are much different than the kind that they had on Breaking Bad.
I'm your host, John Gillan.
Today, is tuesday july 21st and we will be releasing this episode on the 23rd today we are joined by three of the five co-founders of eth labs a non-profit r d lab for ethereum and for eth Anskar Dietrichs, who is the executive director, Barnaby Monat, who is the head of platform, Julian Ma, who serves as the head of growth.
I probably butchered all of their names, but they're going to be very gracious about it.
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Without further ado, welcome to the Milk Road Show, ETH Labs.
How are you, gentlemen?
Hey Joel, super excited to be here.
Thanks for having us.
I can't wait for this.
This is going to be amazing.
I don't think I've had this many guests on one episode of Milk Road ever, but I think this is a good way to start.
And I thought a place to start this conversation, there was a recent interview that I saw Julian did on the mission statement of ETH Labs.
And I wanted to get you guys to comment on this.
He said that the goal is to make Ethereum and ETH the root of the global economy.
which is not a very ambitious goal, but I thought it was a good way to frame this.
Ansgar, let's start with you.
What does that mean?
How does ETH Labs go about doing that?
Yeah.
So I actually think it was really fun.
I heard you just now read your opening sponsors and I think it shows kind of that Ethereum is evolving.
I think four or five years ago, we would have had very different sponsors.
And I think it shows like Like Ethereum obviously like has done phenomenally well in the past, right?
Like I think there's been a lot of success during the stage where crypto was really about figuring out the basics, figuring out the infrastructure, like figuring out even just like the things like smart contracts, you know, like the basic things.
And I think for the last two, three years, more and more, I think it's kind of like becoming clear that, okay, the basics are in place.
And now it's about actually like bringing this to the real world, like actually like...
having blockchains be practically useful, practically used.
And so what are they for?
And how can it, how can it, or should it play out?
And to us, basically, like the root of the global economy is the answer.
We really think Ethereum needs a clear answer, a clear vision that it works towards.
And I think that it really is in a way, like it's very simple.
It just has, it's a few insights, like one just...
The very simple one, like Ethereum is primarily first and foremost for finance, financial applications.
That is where the clear product market fit is for Ethereum, where it's the most useful for.
And then basically in terms of like how, what different worlds could we end up in?
I think, I really think that like when we say the root of the global economy, I think there's like a very...
unusual moment in time right now where there's this like special price up for grabs basically which is the one chain to tie them all together basically is how i would say it and i don't think it's at all guaranteed that it'll play out this way i think what we could see is that we get to see like the entire world all the financial applications institutions they all come on chain and they all come on chain in their own little pockets you know you have like some maybe inter-company chain here some inter-company chain there like some geographic chain here there whatever but it's all kind of like disparate all over the place and you just have these duct tape you know, links in between each other, they occasionally fail, whatever.
And we still get into a better world than we have today, but it's like quite brittle and not that better.
And then I think there's the alternative, the alternative world where you actually, you have the same modularity, the same configurability, like everyone can do their own thing if they want to, but it's all on top of like, I don't know, mixing metaphors, but like around one central hub, where basically like all the activity flows through that one chain, everyone settles back to that one chain.
And in that world, it is incredibly more powerful because like, by their nature, blockchains are state machines.
It's basically like in that world, everyone moves in lockstep.
And so that means that no matter where you are, like point A in the space and point B in the space, you always have a trustless instant link between the two.
You can basically have infinite atomic, clear, fast interoperability between all parts of the global economic system.
And I think...
that would be a just so much better for the world.
And I don't think so many like I really I honestly believe I'm talking about book here, but I honestly believe that only Ethereum has a shot at achieving this.
I think we either end up in a world without such a chain or it's Ethereum.
And I think it is like because really you need a single chain with a credible neutrality that the entire world basically buys in.
And that's just super rare.
And so.
Given that we think that's the incredible vision that we need to get to, that's our goal.
Ethlabs is the place that will help Ethereum make that outcome happen.
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Okay, I assume you all believe this, otherwise you wouldn't still be fighting up this uphill battle here.
So, okay, Ethereum Labs or ETH Labs has been launched.
The Ethereum Foundation already exists.
There are other entities as well, Ethereum Institutional and ETH Systems that have just been launched.
Situate for me this ETH Labs in relationship to these other entities and how you are all collaborating on this objective of making ETH the root of the global financial system.
Whoever wants to run with this, feel free.
Julian, I see you unmuted here.
Let me take that one.
First of all, I think it shows the power of Ethereum that it is possible to launch so many of these new and credible neutral nodes within the Ethereum ecosystem to help Ethereum grow.
And it also speaks towards the vision that Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation had for how Ethereum should be governed moving forward.
Vitalik, others wanted this multi-node future where the Ethereum Foundation wasn't the only place here helping Ethereum grow as the only steward.
Obviously, there are many people in the ecosystem before us as well.
We took that to heart, others took that to heart as well, and that's why we launched ETH Labs.
I think we're all sprinting towards the same goal here.
The ETH, us, Ethereum and ETH Systems.
We want Ethereum to be the root of the global economy.
How we do so is different.
ETH is here to protect the values of Ethereum and will also create A lot of the technical features are still making Ethereum so special, like ZKEVM, like Post-Quantum, very important features.
We're also on the technical side and we're looking to create features that are perhaps more useful for the short term and for the financial use cases that we're very excited about.
That's why we're looking at inter-all, but shorter slots.
Barnabé can tell us more about that perhaps later on.
And then institutional is more on the enterprise outreach, the institutional outreach, and making sure that the product that is built, like the product of Ethereum, is adopted by the people who would most benefit from it.
And so they speak with the institutions and ensure that if Ethereum is a good fit for them, their assets are launched on Ethereum.
eSystems is another group.
I think they're actually slightly different because they are a for-profit entity, which means that they are trying to bring on institutions on privacy-preserving tools on Ethereum that help these institutions launch their assets, for example, as well, or some of their operations.
I see them as forward deployed Ethereans or forward deployed engineers.
I mentioned the for-profits, not because it's bad, but I think the very interesting part is that ETH Labs as well as Ethereum Institutional have been able to raise as non-profits and this is very different from what you see in other ecosystems right and I think that truly speaks to the power of Ethereum like our backers believe in the mission our backers believe in the mission that the Ethereum Institutional has and that's why they're willing to put their money behind a credibly neutral organization.
Okay, so we've established the goal.
We've talked about some of these entities that are all working together to move towards this goal.
I want to hear a little bit more about the collaboration.
Ethlabs is new.
You guys are growing.
You're hiring.
One of your first hires was another Ethereum Foundation, former researcher, who, as I understand it, has been hired to focus on Ethereum improvement proposals for Ethlabs.
And I'm curious how that works now.
Does Ethlabs now own the Ethereum improvement proposal process?
Is this divided between these entities?
going to be fighting with each other over this?
What does that collaboration look like and what does it mean for you all to be focusing on Ethereum improvement proposals at ETH Labs?
Yeah, no, it's a great question.
And yeah, we are incredibly excited to have Francesco join us.
He's absolutely great, brilliant researcher.
And yeah, I think it's interesting.
We get the question a lot with EAPs and collaborative nature, like how will that look going forward?
I think...
because this process of how is Ethereum always coming to agreement on these new features to ship, because it's relatively opaque for most people paying attention, I think there's maybe this impression of like, oh, it's this one group of people at the Ethereum Foundation that decides everything.
But in practice, it's always been a very collaborative effort, even to this point.
Of course, on the research side in particular, so these one, two, three-year-out topics, it's been more concentrated in the past at the EF, and that's now kind of loosening more.
But it's always a very collaborative effort.
I think that will continue to be the case.
And I would say sometimes tensions are actually good and I would expect them to occasionally occur in the sense of like.
So take the example of shorter slots.
That's a feature that we are very actively looking at to propose for the upcoming Higota hard fork.
And we had some conversations with our former colleagues, good friends at the Ethereum Foundation who were like, ah, actually, we are a little bit worried here about some of the implications for our work streams around post-quantum, around ZKVM.
And so basically, that's a tension.
They might be like, oh, maybe let's not do it.
But then, of course, the productive thing is we sit down and we're like, OK, let us understand these concerns.
Let us address them.
Let us basically move forward in a way where we're busy.
Basically, we both think this is a good thing to do.
So I think tensions only ever become a problem if basically one side has a blind spot that they're unwilling to be aware of.
And so I really believe that tensions are good and that we'll always basically productively work together.
Okay, I did an interview with Joe Shalom and Joe Lubin of Sharplink.
And Joe Lubin is obviously one of the co-founders of Ethereum.
And I posed this question to them and they really didn't like it.
So I'm curious what you guys think.
But critics of this new org structure within the governance of Ethereum have said that it's a little bit like reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
You know, a lot of your first hire came from the Ethereum Foundation.
You all came from the Ethereum Foundation.
What in your minds is the benefit of having this like more decentralized, broken out org structure as opposed to keeping all of these entities?
housed within the Ethereum Foundation.
What are the benefits here?
What are the trade-offs?
How do you all think about this?
Yeah, I think it's a fair question, especially given our first hire being Francesco, someone we worked with very closely at the Ethereum Foundation.
But when we launched a month ago, we had on our website five names and then a little mention of join at iflabs.org.
And so we really invited people to reach out to us and not just like our close friends and collaborators of the EF.
Through this, we actually received about, I think, 400 applications.
I've been going through like every single one of them.
I've been running introduction calls with many, many people, like some of them like super talented, some mostly coming from crypto, but some people also just not crypto.
So I think moving forward, people should expect that within ETH Labs, like we're able to bring fresh talent, either fresh talent from crypto who moves closer to core Ethereum development, which I think is good.
or people that are just maybe were not in Ethereum previously and are moving to this.
So it's not like any single profile, just like generally speaking, I really think this would be the case.
So yeah, the trade-off obviously like bringing more people from the Ethereum Foundation would be, well, we want to chart our own path.
We want to create a new culture.
And I think it's really important for us to ensure that our organization like stands under its own principle and culture.
So yeah, I think.
For Francesco, it was obvious to us that he's so aligned with what we want to do, the way we work and everything.
But yeah, I think we had enough inbound from really, really talented people that we will figure more folks in the future.
And just to get our metaphors right here, if we're shuffling DexShares at all, we're doing this on our Starship towards Mars and not on the Titanic.
I think that just doesn't track.
Okay, so I will note down that I should stop using this metaphor because we don't like this metaphor.
But I appreciate the thoughts on this because I do think there's concerns and questions.
So I appreciate understanding the vision there, if nothing else.
Barnaby, I'm glad we got you into the conversation too.
I want to talk about the work that you guys are doing at ETH Labs now that you have this organization up and running.
It's only been a month.
But as I understand it, there is a sprint happening.
But I want to just understand, is there low-hanging fruit that you guys think that you want to start with first?
needle movers, things that will really move the chains that are like the first targets to go after in terms of the work you're actually doing at Ethlabs.
What are those?
How are you approaching that?
What are you guys working on right now?
Yeah, I think some of the topics we are bringing also a little bit from our past at the Ethereum Foundation, that was just a couple months ago, probably the clearest.
low hanging fruit in quotes, because it's actually a very big fruit that we spent a lot of time and a lot of people working on it.
But now it's like ripe for the picking.
It's the fast confirmation rule.
So it's a consensus rule, like a confirmation that essentially allows people to confirm actions that are taking place on Ethereum 98% faster than the finality rule of Ethereum.
So what this means is you can process deposits and withdrawals.
to Ethereum in about seconds instead of previously minutes or maybe tens of minutes.
So when you go on your centralized exchange and you're trying to like send money to Ethereum, usually like that's the slowest is sending to or from Ethereum compared to every other chain.
So with this fast confirmation rule, we can really like reduce the time it takes for liquidity to move around centralized exchange and Ethereum, Ethereum L1 and Ethereum L2s over bridges and interoperability.
So this means like just a huge improvement in speed for capital to move around the network.
And the more, the less friction you have for capital, the lower the cost, the more like you create network effects, the more you invite liquidity to come into the network.
And I think this is like super, super positive.
So now this confirmation rule is essentially very close to production in every main client of Ethereum and the work that we are going to carry.
Julian especially, is to go out into the world and really get people to adopt this.
I think that's something that we've seen sometimes in the past in Ethereum that we create great tech, but we're not that good at bringing it to the market, at making sure that people adopt it and that they really benefit from the features that we create.
And so now I think as EFLAPS that we really want to make sure that It's not just great tech, like it's actually great tech that goes into the world and that delivers like tangible benefits to user in the form of faster deposits, withdrawals, and just like faster moving around of assets on the Ethereum network.
Okay, awesome.
So let's take this a little bit further.
So Barnaby, I understand you're tasked with leading the dev sprint on this.
And for those listening who aren't quite sure, the Hegota, I think is how it's pronounced, or at least spelled, fork is the one that is planned, upgraded for Ethereum that is planned after Glamsterdam, which to my understanding is planned for sometime in Q3 of this year.
So this is kind of like future workouts on the horizon.
Okay, Barnaby, you said you're focusing on getting these faster slot time confirmations in place.
Once that development work is in place, once that upgrade happens to Ethereum, how does that then, like you said, you have to go out and tell people about this and get them informed about it, get that adoption and get them to use that.
Does that fall on ETH Labs?
Does it fall on some of these other organizations?
How is that responsibility shared?
What's the strategy, like go to market, I guess, once these upgrades start to happen?
And not just Hogan, but like Glamsterdam and other things that are unlocked in Ethereum.
What does that look like?
How do you guys participate in that?
Yeah, I guess here there's two things.
So the fast confirmation rule is a new feature that is expected to land in the coming months.
And then the go to market, I think we can carry that ourselves.
So really communicate around the benefits.
actively engage in conversation with centralized exchanges, L2s, bridges for the adoption of this feature.
And you also mentioned slot times, which is a feature that we are planning to propose for Hegota, which is not the next fork, but the one after, so maybe next year.
And that's also like a really important feature in our opinion.
But unlike the fast confirmation rule, which is more of an out-of-protocol thing that other systems need to adopt.
the slot time is kind of almost transparent.
So if you are running on Ethereum and the slot time just decreases, everything is just faster.
So your wallet will confirm faster.
Your transaction will feel like it's landing faster.
All the markets on Ethereum, their Oracle and their prices will become fresh faster too.
So it just like improves the UX, let's say across the board.
So here the audience to really make sure that this happens is less systems outside that need to adopt it, but more.
core developers of the Ethereum protocol that need to be convinced that slot time reduction has a place in Hegota.
There's always a lot of debate and discussion on all core devs, which is like the main governance entity of Ethereum protocol.
And so, yeah, you really have to make a strong case for why should we spend the time shortening the slot when there are so many other features that are competing for attention and development time.
And so, yes, we've been like working on making the argument.
precise, showing the benefits, talking to people who would also benefit from it, like app developers, especially in DeFi, it's really one of the most demanded features at this point because it makes markets just much smoother, like leak a lot less value to the outside.
So yeah, so this is really the work that we have to do to convince people that yes, we need this in the hard fork for the Ethereum protocol.
Yeah.
to add on here is something that's interesting is that this shows how we can collaborate with DTM institutional people.
I was speaking with them this morning trying to validate what you are seeing in the markets is slow times indeed like a thing that really pushes the needle for institutions.
I'd say here with quite high confidence we've been hearing this repeatedly for years now right but again something that they notice is like finality is a big big topic that they have.
in discussions with institutions and finality is basically saying a transaction can't be reordered anymore if it's finalized and we can make that statement after a certain amount of slots have passed in Ethereum.
And so if we cut the slot duration, we also cut the time to finality.
And so that helps them again.
So I think here, both in terms of validation, that this is indeed the thing that Ethereum would benefit from most.
Right now, we can collaborate with the Ethereum institutional people, as well as in the go-to-market to some extent, as in they can spread the word to institutions.
And we can sometimes come in as a solutions architect, ensure that the product that we're building indeed is right for the use case.
But yeah, that just goes to show of the synergies that are to be had there.
Okay.
I want to ask a question about where you guys focus in terms of shorter term or longer term things.
Barnaby raised two things.
One is the shorter term.
quicker confirmations and then slot times is a longer term thing that would be after Glamsterdam, like, you know, next year sort of thing.
Let's take, for example, Glamsterdam, which is coming in Q3.
Is that now what you guys would consider more or less old news?
Are you still doing anything related to work on the rolling out of Glamsterdam?
Or like, where is the focus for ETH Labs in terms of like shorter or longer term goals for the improvement of Ethereum?
Yeah, I can also take that one.
I guess we are all primarily really were researchers at the Ethereum Foundation.
And so as researchers, we tend to be a little bit more upstream or like doing the roadmap, thinking about the design.
And now Glamsterdam is really close to, well, still a couple of months, but getting closer and closer to being released on mainnet.
And so at this point, the work looks more like testing a lot, making sure the clients interoperate with one another.
But that being said, there is one of the headliners of Glamsterdam, which is EPBS.
So I'm actually a co-author of that feature.
This is going to be a big change, like both in terms of scalability, like it allows Ethereum to scale the gas limit maybe between three to five X.
So like a very huge improvement, not just gas limit, but also the blobs that L2 consume.
But it's also changing in subtle but significant ways, the market of blocks.
So the way that proposals or validators on the network receive blocks that are built.
by block builders.
And so there I started paying attention a bit more to the changes that are happening, like especially there's a lot of sometimes protocol intricacies that, oh, you have to change a little bit that feature, but then that feature change might have like pretty big ripple effects on the market because it's kind of an auction.
And so, yeah, I've been...
trying to be more knowledgeable about all of these latest changes so that by the time the market rolls out, we have a really good understanding of how it works.
We can already formulate some hypothesis.
Is it being deconcentrated?
Are builders better compensated?
Are proposals better compensated?
So yeah, we need to understand it so that...
once it rolls out, we can read the tape and understand, okay, are there still like changes we should be doing outside of the protocol or maybe on the fly to correct like some of the issues perhaps that arose as a result of this new market being deployed.
So still a little bit of work, but not super active.
You just said the word roadmap, which begs a question I want to ask.
Ethereum has a straw map, which is sort of like we want to move in this general direction, but it's not as concrete as a roadmap.
Is there a roadmap for ETH Labs?
Is that something you guys are working on that might be announced in the future?
Or are you not working off of that framework at all?
Is there a roadmap for ETH Labs?
I think we have something like a roadmap.
It's not...
So the Stromap is actually, even though it's a play on worlds of like straw man, roadmap, it's actually fairly precise when you go on strawmap.org, like you see all of these boxes.
So it feels much more like a steel man than a straw man at this point.
We don't have such a precise roadmap at Iflabs.
I think we're trying to increase our level of confidence on specific work streams.
So as you heard like throughout the show so far, we've been pretty interested in a lot of...
making Ethereum fast, so like fast confirmation rule, fast finality, fast blocks.
But there's also like other work streams that we're thinking about which are less close to the protocol, a little bit outside.
For instance, interoperability for us is very important.
So making sure that you don't have just like a fast infrastructure, but you also have like the right standards and the right security models for assets to interoperate between Ethereum L1, Ethereum L2 and perhaps other systems outside of Ethereum 2.
So I think...
Interop is probably ranking as a pretty important work stream for us.
And then there's other things where we're trying to build confidence in terms of our engagement.
So scaling is something that we need to be very actively pushing, especially in the short term, in the long term.
ZKEVM is going to be one of the major drivers of scaling.
And this is something that we think EF is doing a very good job at driving.
So do we need to be more active on scaling in the meantime?
user experience.
In Hegota there is another proposal, Frame Transactions, that changes the way the accounts work and that also gives a lot of optionality for wallets to give you better UX.
It is something that we need to pay attention to.
So we're still scoping a little bit.
I think we have different levels of confidence on different work streams, but the ones where we are pretty confident, we're already pushing pretty hard on them.
And I think the work for us now is to...
continuously inform the community about our thinking in terms of we think that's important.
Prop AMMs, everyone's talking about them.
This feels like really relevant to the mission of better execution on mainnet.
So yeah, I think this is for us to build.
I expect we have more confidence after a few months.
Like we really are just getting started, but we already see like some early threads where we can be very active and deliver value quickly.
I think this is something that's maybe important because there's all these, you know, as you said, there's all these new Ethereum institutional and all these different new entities.
And so it's not maybe always so clear yet, like where does everyone start in?
And so basically important for us when we say E-collapse roadmap or basically what do we plan to do?
the core protocol is a important pillar for us.
And it's where like in the short term right now in this conversation, that's where we talk about the most because that's where we come from.
So we have the most detail that we can talk about there.
But for us, it's very, very important that again, like now forwards facing, like it's the future of Ethereum's success is no longer determined by just infrastructure, but really by like this holistic system, like end to end basically, like what does it take, you know, for like more Robinhood chains to come to Ethereum for more like, you know, for more, for more, for more.
assets to come on chain, like all these, all these kinds of like real world considerations.
And so our work will basically like split equally across these different, different, different domains.
And so on the core protocol, it's maybe more.
it's less about having a standalone roadmap, a bit more about like being like, okay, how can we take the lessons we learn by talking to the people that are using Ethereum, that we are convincing to come and use Ethereum in the future?
How can we understand their needs and basically bring some of that back into the core protocol work?
But our roadmap in that sense, as we basically iterate on it, is much more about like all the steps across the different pillars that Ethereum needs to basically to get to that outcome.
Okay, we can leave all the steel and straw maps behind.
I think it's really great we covered that.
But Onskar, that's a great pivot because that's exactly where I wanted to go next.
Growth.
Growing Ethereum's user base has been named as a primary focus of Ethlabs.
Just simple question.
What is the strategy for accomplishing that?
You know, maybe Julian, you want to take this one ahead of growth or whoever wants to.
But what's the strategy for growing Ethereum's user base?
Yeah.
So I'd say on growth, there are two problems that we're interested in.
One is distribution.
So how do you reach more people?
How do we reach more end consumers?
And the other one is more of the solutions architecture, something we call like demand to delivery pipeline.
And I think that's something that Barnabas slightly touched on before as well with, for example, this frame transactions that improves user experience and bring features to markets.
We want to ensure that any technical features that are made at the core protocol are brought to the users who most benefit from them.
And also we're speaking with applications to know what are their blockers and be able to surface these as fast as possible so that that information flows back to core devs, to core researchers so that we can actively do something with it and make sure that those problems are solved.
It's a very basic thing, but it's something that is quite fragile and also hard to do in a decentralized ecosystem.
And we feel that we're well positioned to do that.
So that's one problem.
The other problem is the distribution.
I think here we do, honestly, still have to figure out more exactly what that will mean for us.
But something that we're very interested in is these consumer-facing applications that we're seeing pop up around the ecosystem.
These things like EtherFi, AaveApp, Robinhood Wallet, stuff like this.
that are reaching new people.
And these people might not be like crypto natives.
They probably are not familiar with how all the tech works, but that's exactly like the people you want to reach, the people we want to serve.
So we're excited about that.
We're looking at how we can help distribution here.
Obviously, we're not building the product, so we have a different role as a growth team.
But whatever we can do there as a neutral, independent facilitator, that is very central to Ethereum.
Perhaps there are some things that we're looking at with these teams.
And so, yeah, we're excited to contribute there where possible.
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Julian, you posted the most recent ETH Labs update and you said something I wanted to get you to unpack for us.
You said, in the past weeks, I have spoken with hundreds of builders, devs, growth leads, venture capitalists, and policy advocates from all continents, ramping up on where the ecosystem is headed and where and how new users can be served.
What have these conversations been like?
What have been some of the key takeaways?
Tell us a little bit more about that.
Yeah, I'd say in general, people are extremely excited for Eflabs, which has been really heartwarming.
Both before launching and after launching, the reception has been really, really good.
So that's like a general thing.
I think in...
Interestingly, it's hard sometimes to zoom out and see exactly where an entity like ETH Labs can be useful.
People are quite happy building on Ethereum.
There is also the technical support that exists both in terms of tooling and infrastructure, which makes it quite an easy place to build.
There are some technical features that we could still help with to make sure that they are, for example, delivered better to the markets.
Sometimes when features are shipped.
It's unclear what expectations are of different participants.
So for example, if you're a DeFi protocol and you're expecting a wallet to ship something, but then if the wallet doesn't ship it, it's not useful for your DeFi protocol, you might not actually use that primitive.
And so that might be a feature that doesn't end up working out for you.
So that's something where we would like to step in and make sure that we act as a coordination device and that people do what is maximally beneficial for everyone.
Something else that I think is interesting is many protocols aren't that ideological about which chain they build on, but still they gravitate a lot to Ethereum and its L2s.
Just because I think the transaction volume and TVL that's on Ethereum and the L2s, which I think is a good sign of maturity.
That's people aren't just here for...
the values, but they are also building companies that are worth building.
And yeah, we're looking at how we can help them grow.
There are some threads that we could pull.
I think it's still too early to be too public about that.
But it's, yeah, I think there are some exciting things that we could do.
Yeah, well, I've heard you teasing that there's been a new hire at ETH Labs to help with growth.
Is there anything you want to announce or anything you want to make public today or do we have to keep waiting for announcements on that?
It's awful.
I'm just continuously saying now that there's stuff that we should announce later, I guess.
But yeah, unfortunately here also, I think it's up to this person to announce themselves.
That's expected somewhere in August, mid-August perhaps.
So I think that's exciting.
One of the key reasons why I'm excited for this hire is that this person can really help us make it feel like a really exciting place to be a builder, to be a young builder and contribute to the world.
I think this person is very good at articulating each value proposition, not just as a cypherpunk ideals, but actually as a product value proposition.
Well, it's very flattering to hear you speak so highly of me, Julian, but I already have a job right now.
So I do want to pivot this in a different direction, though, because, you know, we've talked about growth.
We've talked about L2s and a lot of new users coming to Ethereum.
Obviously, a big piece of headlines was Robinhood launching the Robinhood chain.
And this has kind of sparked a lot of debate about value and how much Ethereum should be charging L2s.
So for those who don't know, Robinhood chain is an Ethereum-based Ethereum L2 or sorry.
It is an Arbitrum based Ethereum LTO and it has brought, I think, close to 30 million new potential users into the ETH and EVM ecosystem.
However, critics have noted that most of the value of the fees and the revenue here is going to Robinhood, Robinhood chain and then to Arbitrum.
And then I've seen posts on Twitter basically saying that Ethereum is only getting like a couple thousand dollars of revenue from all this activity.
When I interviewed Joe Lubin, I think two weeks ago now.
I asked him about this and he said this is part of Ethereum's growth strategy to keep the fees low, to continue to bring in L2s and users and continue to grow Ethereum's momentum and inertia.
But then a lot of critics say that Ethereum and ETH the asset particularly are suffering a lot from this.
Where do you all land on this conversation?
What are your thoughts on this?
And just how do you think about this as you continue to try to push for Ethereum to become the root of the global financial ecosystem?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of those topics where I think I see this in Ethereum a lot that people have legitimate questions and criticism and then in the end completely end up overshooting.
I think on Twitter that happens a lot.
And I think this is really one of those like mid curve things.
Like I think if you see Robinhood chain and you're not excited for Ethereum, I don't know.
I think you're like squarely like, you know, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
I think the kind of like the element of truth in there is of course like, okay, but like.
it's not good enough to have indefinite optimism of like, this is abstractly good.
Like you have to have a vision of like, okay, how can this play out in a way that actually ends up benefiting Ethereum?
And that's a reasonable question.
And so I think we are at the very beginning of this kind of this wave of the real world now coming on chain.
That's why we talk about the root of the global economy.
I actually, in the beginning, I always said the root of the on-chain economy and someone was like, oh, on-chain economy, what does that mean?
It's like, no, I mean, this is going to be the economy.
People used to say, the online newspaper.
Now it's just new newspaper.
Of course it's online, you know, like the same thing will happen with the economy.
Like, and, but this is the very like early elements, of course, crypto native that has been much more mature by now, but like the, the kind of the, the, the bridge to the real world, it's, it's, it's only growing now.
And so these, these are coming on, on, on, on Ethereum.
And, and so, so what does it mean?
Well, so Robinhood chain, like, but let's fast forward five years, you have like a hundred Robinhood chains, right?
You have like all kinds of different startups, FinTech.
institutions, whatever, like two main ways in which this, well, three ways, three ways really in which this is great for Ethereum.
I think by and large, the biggest one is all of these chains individually kind of like sit on top of Ethereum.
So, you know, like you have assets in chain one, you have assets in chain two, there's some sort of like economic activity you want to do.
Like, where does that economic activity happen?
Well, of course, on the Ethereum L1, right?
Like that sits in the middle.
That's where you kind of like you meet.
So basically like Ethereum deal one as this like this economic hub for like cross.
platform activity.
Like that's an obvious growth factor where, of course, that doesn't work if you have one chain that dogs into you.
You need the flywheel, you need the network effect.
But that's why it's so exciting.
Like for years and years, there was the vision of this will eventually happen.
Now it's starting to happen.
Now people are like, the vision was wrong.
Like, no, now it's getting real.
But it means you have to actually make that happen, right?
You have to make sure like, what does it need architecturally for the L1 to be the perfect fit for this, right?
Like you don't want to end up in a world where the L1 for some reason, basically like it has so high friction that it shrinks into some sort of thin...
you know, switching board and everything else happens just in the L2.
So like you do have to have that concrete vision so you can actually build the L1 towards that.
Right.
So that's one.
Like the L1 is like the kind of the economic kind of like settlement layer between those chains.
The second one is ETH.
ETH itself kind of like demand for ETH is flowing into these different chains, having increased distribution.
A lot of these fintechs bring their own user bases.
And you already saw this.
I forget the exact numbers, but I saw stats of a lot of ETH flowing into Robinhood chain immediately.
So these are all new surfaces for people to use ETH in productive ways and to create demand for ETH.
So that's the second one.
And then the third one, yeah, of course, fees.
And there, I would say...
um it's it's it's almost like a trivial thing but like of course you need to like build out these synergies of like the more ethereum is valuable for these chains the more these chains will be valuable for ethereum because then ethereum can capture some of that value right so like it is our prompt of like how can ethereum be maximally valuable for a robinhood chain for a you know like whatever the chain for all these different chains like what services like that's what we're coming back to interop like what offerings like what what do we need to do that being on top of Ethereum is something that's like, how could you possibly do anything else?
It needs to be a no brainer.
If a new financial institution comes on chain, of course, they're going to do it on top of Ethereum.
And they're willing to basically make sure that that value goes into all the places.
So I think three simple pillars, again, don't mid curve it.
But you do have to have a vision for how this benefits Ethereum.
You can't just be vaguely optimistic.
Anyone want to build on that or can I go on to the next question?
I know there's a lot in that topic.
All right.
Well, I'll keep prodding on this.
Barnaby, I want to ask you a question about this.
Vitalik recently, or not long ago, tweeted out that the old vision for the L2s on Ethereum no longer makes sense.
And there's been a lot of talk about what does make sense now.
I saw on Twitter, you shared an article titled, How L1s and L2s Can Build the Strongest Possible Ethereum.
And I would really love to hear you try to articulate this for our audience.
And what is the updated understanding of the L2 vision in Ethereum and the strongest version of Ethereum?
Yeah, yeah, this tweet sent quite a lot of ripples in the ecosystem and the post that I shared was written, I think a month after that to explain, you know, this is what it means for this new reality.
And to be clear, I wasn't one of the authors of this post.
It was Josh Rudolph, who is one of our co-founders too, and Josh Stark, who was formerly in the EF management team.
And so what they were trying to articulate is that there's ways that Ethereum can make L2 stronger.
Like usually people on Twitter have highlighted that fact and said, you know, yes, obviously Ethereum is making it stronger, but not to the benefit of Ethereum.
But it goes the other way around.
Like L2 also make Ethereum stronger in many ways.
And so when you look at, well, Robinhood only paid like this trivial amount of fees to Ethereum, like how can this be a beneficial relationship?
I think what the post was trying to say is, looking only at the fees that are being paid to Ethereum is just like you're projecting something very complex on like this one dimension that completely obscures the fact that as Ansgar was saying, so VL2 first brings a ton of new users to Ethereum, like that builds the network effects for the platform as a whole, builds distribution for ETH, the asset, is able to innovate in ways that VL1 is not able to innovate.
And I think that was really the...
what the tweet was getting at to say, we were thinking of L2s for a long time as networks that are meant to extend Ethereum the way Ethereum would extend itself if it was able to scale.
But this is not really what we've seen happen.
What we've seen happen is L2 is actually trying to differentiate from Ethereum.
So when you are a product builder when you want to go on the market, like the first thing you learn is your product needs to be differentiated otherwise you're just not going to make it.
And so the L2s have by and large, like many of them differentiated on many different dimensions can be either go to market or technical features or the types of apps that they were incentivizing for coming on their chains.
And so that really builds in a way.
a complementary relationship where the L2s can do things the L1 can't and the L1 can enjoy the extra liquidity, the extra users, the extra attention and network effects and really like grow as the settlement layer that's rooted at the center with ETH kind of powering all of that and becoming the base pair for many assets that are native to these L2s even.
So this is really what the post was trying to articulate here.
Okay.
I appreciate you all laying out the vision on this.
I think I want to bring this conversation back to Ethereum, the asset, ETH, the asset, because I think one of the consequences for the strategy, the roadmap, what's been built and the relationship with the L2s.
One of the consequences is that my observation is that there seems to be a bit of an overabundance of supply of ETH as an asset.
And it seems like it's outstripping the demand right now.
Do you agree with that assessment?
Is that how you see this?
And how do you think about approaching that as a problem and plan to solve this so that we do see this supply and demand balances for ETH as an asset start to come more in line with, you know, let's say, number go up?
Who wants to start with this one?
Yeah.
No, I mean, I can take that.
I think the way I would frame it is, well, one, I do think, and I always say that because actually I had a podcast when we were launching the very first week, and I actually was like, okay, let me go on CoinMarketCap just so I'm fully back in the loop on all the asset prices and whatnot.
And I was like, wait a second.
This is actually, in a way, more extreme than I remember.
I don't know if this is true today, but it was like two weeks ago or something.
I think only eight.
crypto native assets, excluding the stablecoins, I think above $10 billion valuation and only two above $100 billion, right?
And obviously ETH being one of the two.
So I think it is first pass, of course, like ETH and Ethereum is incredibly successful, right?
Why does it feel so bad?
It feels so bad because like ETH had that incredible success five years ago.
Right.
And ever since it's like sideways.
And I mean, look, my net worth is tied up in this as well.
I feel the pain.
But no, no, it's like.
So it's not that it's failing.
It is that it had the big success.
I think people believe the vision and the vision is coming true, but it's like, okay, but what's next?
Okay, you convinced me you are a $100 billion asset, but can you convince me you're a trillion dollar asset?
There's not that many trillion dollar assets on the planet.
What's your pitch?
What role, what exceptional role can ETH play?
I don't think ETH has given the convincing, quite a fully comprehensive answer to that yet.
So I think that's my reframing.
It's not that we are failing.
It's that like, we need to take the next step.
We need to really have a clear vision of like in five years, if Ethereum goes well, if ETH goes well, like where are we?
What role does ETH play?
What role does Ethereum play to enable that?
And so that's the overall framing.
And then I think also we internally, like obviously like we're coming from the EF, it was always like a side hobby for us to think a lot about ETH, but like it wasn't like part of our day-to-day job so much.
And now we specifically made the choice to make that part of our job.
I think it would in a way be also like a little bit silly if I come on now after like, okay, we've thought about it for a few weeks.
Like now we have all the answers that like the ecosystem has thought about for 10 years, you know, like that's silly.
So like, we're talking a lot with like a lot of the stakeholders, like this is one of those things where I think we can just play a huge role.
It's like, it's not that we're the first to think about this.
It's really just that like in many of these topics, there's like the people building the protocol and the people thinking about ETH.
they're just different groups and they don't talk so much to each other so like really just being this connective tissue just reaching out to the people that like you know that have all these the deep thoughts and just understanding their perspectives going back understanding like basically just i think i see the role of ethelabs as like a lot in tying these things together like helping us create like a shared vision of the future and helping us together get there so i don't have super clear answer right now i have a lot of like individual thoughts on this of course and but i think the important thing is like not we have to get away from indefinite optimism of just leaning back and being like, ah, ETH will be, ETH will go to 10K, go to 100K.
Like it'll just be great.
You know, just, we just have to lean back and wait to definite optimism.
Like Ethereum is in the poor position again, it's the most valuable smart contract chain out there, like by, and by long, by like a long, long margin, we are in the absolute poor position, but we need to have a clear vision of like, what does it mean to succeed?
Otherwise we won't just get there for free.
And so.
again, best we can do for now is state the intention and really start bringing the stakeholders together, have these conversations.
We're having them already.
They're going great.
And then basically we'll in the coming months basically have much more of a clear, okay, this is the concise case for ETH and these are the changes for the protocol as the economy comes on chain that we need to make that a reality.
I appreciate those thoughts.
I think for me, first of all, I think it's...
a little bit terrifying to hear you say like thinking about eat the asset used to just be a side hobby so i'm glad that's not the case anymore because wow um but i think that these new players of sharplink and and bitmine as these large digital asset treasure companies that are focused on eth have become much more aligned around not only eth the asset but telling the story and taking that to market.
Tom Lee has been a great advocate for that.
Joe Shalom has been as well.
And both Bitmine and Sharplink's names appear to the top of the donor list for ETH Labs and for several of these other entities.
Is there dialogue and collaboration with those digital asset treasury companies around telling the story?
What has that been like?
And what are those conversations and that partnership been like with the DATs?
Yeah.
I think also...
Not everybody all at once.
You can go right ahead.
No.
So...
I think it's obviously like a natural fit.
As we got started and we were thinking about who to first approach about like, hey, you know, like we have this new project.
Do you want to help us get off the ground?
And very quickly, like the dads just were like at the top of the list of just like in terms of, I think if we are successful, I think what we are trying to do is really help.
They have two sets of people, first and foremost, which is the ETH holders and the app builders on Ethereum.
And the app builders is, of course, it's a very distributed set of people.
The ETH holders is to some degree as well, but we have the luck that there's these few entities that just individually make up a big portion of the set.
And so that really helped us to just have an initial address, an initial kind of set of people to talk to.
I think for Ethereum, it's been incredibly powerful to have these people come in, to have these, I mean, obviously in the case of Sharplink, kind of through the association with Drillubin, of course, it's not just someone new coming in, but either way, also with Bitmine, it's a completely fresh perspective.
It's people that appreciate.
ETH directly for being ETH, not just people that buy into the broader vision of Ethereum.
And it's like, well, then clearly this will be good for ETH.
It's like, no, ETH specifically is the thing we're excited about.
And so talking with them, I think it's been incredibly powerful to really focus on, okay, what is the lens that centers ETH?
A, what can we do in terms of our work?
What kind of pain points are there in terms of concrete?
how can this protocol evolve to supporting ETH better?
And then also B, how can we help bridge?
How can we help tell that story better and really shape a narrative profile for ETH?
So I think it's a very natural and exciting part of the evolution of Ethereum to have these entities play a larger role.
Yeah, to add on to that.
Sharplink and Bitmine have been incredibly helpful with getting us off the ground.
They really believe in the mission and they've been super helpful just making sure that we can get started basically.
So yeah, very graceful there.
Something that's interesting on the collaboration path is we're looking for a distribution not just for Ethereum block space, but also for ETHI assets.
I think it happens naturally as people consume Ethereum block space that they also consume ETHI assets.
You see this happening with L2s, with Robinhood as well.
But also if we want to distribute specifically if the assets, these digital asset treasuries are obviously good partners for us to help do so because they are the buyers of these assets and they also know what these other buyers are like and then they know the reasons why other people who are potential buyers might not have bought in yet.
So that's something that we could do more in the future of and are looking to do with the partners to make sure that we understand basically what our of the value proposition that are extremely appealing, but perhaps not completely brought to life yet.
And who are the potential buyers of ETH that we could approach and help appreciate the assets?
Okay, so we've talked a lot about the vision making Ethereum and ETH the root of the global economy.
We talked about what ETH Labs is, how you guys are part of the ecosystem trying to do this.
I'm curious what you all need right now, because obviously it's a very young organization.
You're hiring, you're interviewing.
Is it more devs, more donors?
What are some of the roadblocks?
What could people do if they wanted to get involved to contribute to help?
And how could they reach out to you to do that?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Actually, we...
I think today or yesterday, Josh sent a tweet saying that we are closing our round of fundraising at the end of the week.
So we have our anchor funders like Sharpling, Bitmine, others, other big ticket funders.
And you also had like this community round, like a lot of people from the community.
very graciously came and wrote checks for us.
So we have a round two of this community round that we'll announce there.
So I think you can get in touch with us if you're interested.
Otherwise, we are trying to, yeah, address all of the inbound that we received either for hiring or just general interest, want to collaborate, want to...
make your perspective known about as an ETH enthusiast or as an app builder.
So we are able to route things pretty well throughout our organization.
So yeah, I think the more signal we get from the community, the better we will be at scoping our work, messaging around it as well.
And you can really reach us through every channel that we hold on on Twitter or email at join at eflabs.org.
Yeah, we'll see you.
Okay.
Well, I think we got to start wrapping this up.
I've kept you guys for a really long time, but I just want to ask one question.
I was on the fence if I was going to ask this or not, but like, how are you guys doing?
Crypto Twitter is a civil war knife fight.
Everybody is angry, rage quitting.
Like, what's the vibe with ETH Labs?
How are you guys getting through this?
Like, yeah, how are you guys?
Like, I don't know.
Just like, how are you doing?
I think we've been extremely excited.
It's been doing great.
I mean.
Launching ETH Labs has truly been incredibly exciting.
The reception, again, has been insanely good.
So I'm very happy with that.
Obviously, there's been a few bumps in the road before we arrived here.
But I've been enjoying the roller coaster, I'd say.
So yeah, I think it's very exciting.
It's sad to see that so many laels are happening across the ecosystem.
And yeah, I think that's...
probably the most disheartening part.
I think something that I'm personally very excited about is that it is a very good time to be building.
Both bear market vibes are always a good time to be building, right?
And with the power of AI, it's so much easier these days.
So I hope that people are betting on themselves and making stuff happen in the Ethereum ecosystem or elsewhere.
But yeah, in general, I'd say vibes at ETH Labs are sky high in the honeymoon phase, yeah.
And maybe just to say, I think...
to the degree that we can help a little bit with kind of Ethereum kind of find towards, get towards a shared vision of like, where do we all want to go?
So that like, because there is, as Julian was saying, there's like all these incredibly talented builders, some of which just because of the circumstances, like obviously like, and maybe are not able to continue with the current projects.
Like if there is like a clear vision of like, this is where Ethereum is going.
These are the needs, like these, these are where like where additional hands are needed right now.
I think it just helps people also that want to keep stay, that want to like keep contributing to basically find a place where they're like, okay, I understand like here's where I can contribute.
So I think we also, again, not to be like overly like, obviously like we can, we can only, but like to the extent that we can help basically like help the ecosystem kind of.
coalesce around a shared direction.
I think that helps in those times as well.
Awesome.
Barnaby, anything to add to that?
Nothing to add.
Also super excited.
I feel great.
I'm really, really happy we pulled this off.
That seemed quite crazy to me not long ago.
But yeah, we're building this thing.
We're all really enjoying ourselves, really enjoying talking to the community as well.
Many new people that we've met.
through this.
So yeah, I think we only keep increasing our momentum and hopefully be a positive force for Ethereum.
Yeah, well, just speaking for myself, I was feeling a lot of this frustration and the bad vibes on crypto Twitter.
So I wrote this essay called Wartime Ethereum.
And then like two weeks later, you guys launched this and I was ready to run through a wall.
I was so excited.
So I don't know how all this is going to work out, but I am really appreciative of you all for the work you've done, the work you're still doing.
and the work you're going to do.
And I really appreciate all of you coming on Milk Road to share with our audience about this, because I think there's so many people who want to know what's going on, what they believe in your work and what you're doing.
So thanks for coming in here, being so transparent and sharing with us.
You're all welcome back any time.
I'd love to get you guys back on and get a check in down the road and see where things are.
But in the meantime, thank you all so much for being on the Milk Road show.
And thank you for everything you're doing for this industry.
Thank you so much.
Thanks.
Thank you so much.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, stay Ethereum.
And we will see you all on the next episode of the Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.