# Ethereum Institutional Launches Unified Enterprise Adoption Strategy

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-08-06

## Transcript

We want to go out and be open, honest and objective about Ethereum versus some of the other ecosystems.
We want to be very loud about ecosystem win and then also looking at developing case studies, developing use cases over the course of time, and then assembling all of these different parts into one unified, coherent Ethereum story.
Ethereum is going whale hunting.
Ethereum Institutional launched in July of 2026 to be the institutional front door for the Ethereum ecosystem.
But what does that mean?
What is the plan?
Who is on the team?
And what do investors need to know about all of this?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast.
That knows that the words Ethereum and institutional are quickly becoming synonyms.
I'm your host, John Gill, and today is Thursday, August 6th.
And today we are joined by three of the co-founders of Ethereum Institutional.
David Walsh, Matthew Dawson, Maria Smith.
These gentlemen's resumes are too long for me to cover in this introduction.
So I'm going to let them all tell you about themselves.
When we get into the episode here, we're going to break down everything you need to know about Ethereum Institutional.
There's going to be a ton of alpha in this one.
So if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
As a reminder, our podcast...
today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful sponsors at securitize the regulated rails for tokenization so keep an ear out for more information about them and the great work they're doing later in the episode but for now welcome to the milk road show ethereum institutional all of you at once uh gentlemen welcome to the milk road show how are you all today doing well thank you for having us great thanks for having us I'm used to doing one-on-one interviews, so I always get stressed out when I have more than one guest.
This is just going to be a lot of fun.
All right.
I wanted to start this conversation.
Before we get to Ethereum Institutional and the work you guys are doing there, I think a lot of people in crypto, in digital assets, are familiar with Ethereum.
but may not be familiar with you, gentlemen, or your work.
So I would like to just go around the circle and quickly give me a couple sentences on who you guys are, what work you were doing at the Ethereum Foundation prior to Ethereum Institutional, and the work you're going to be doing now.
Just to introduce you all a little bit to our audience, let's start with David.
Do you want to lead us off on this one?
Yeah, I can do.
Thanks for having us on, John.
So I'm David, Irish originally, started my career in consulting, spent three years at EY in financial services consulting.
and primarily in banks throughout the UK and Ireland.
I spent three years there, annoying partners around blockchain technology and had enough.
So decided I wanted to work full time in the space.
After EY, I spent five years in the staking space as the head of business at a data company and then head of ecosystem at a liquid staking protocol that we're all institutionally focused.
And then last year around June, I joined the EF as the head of enterprise when Tomáš was the executive director.
And the aim and the goal of the team was basically to go out and speak to as many different financial institutions as possible, understand who's building what and where, and see how the foundation can support them in their mission.
Okay, great.
Marius, you want to go next?
Yes, you're happy to.
I'll be the nun.
native English speaker on this call.
I'm originally from Denmark, hence the accent that I can't seem to get rid of.
I started my career at Google, working with large enterprises and financial institutions on adopting Google's tech stack.
Then went and joined a new bank, Revolut competitor called N26, out of Berlin, Germany, focused on product payment partnerships.
And I think that's really where I got into the the crypto rabbit hole as well and decided that it was time to go and invest all my effort into this industry professionally.
So I joined a very small company at the time called Finora in around the beginning of 2020, which became one of the first regulated custodians in Europe.
Had a lot of fun growing the team from five to, I think, 150 people at the tops.
A lot of early exploration with tokenization in 2020, 2021.
Fortunately or unfortunately, it was very exciting, but also a bit too early.
So it's fun to be here now again and see things really pick up.
But yeah, I spent five years there.
I did a bunch of different things.
We launched a staking product.
launched a brokerage offering.
We had a lot of fun dealing with the regulators that were trying to wrap their head around the exciting innovations that came out of crypto.
Yeah, I spent five years there.
Ultimately, then decided that I wanted to go even closer to the infrastructure side of things.
So I joined Eichen Labs, the team behind the Eichen Layer Protocol.
Spent time there working on capital markets and also the rollout of them.
of a confidential compute offering.
And yeah, I had gotten to know David over the years and we started chatting a little bit more.
Always been intrigued by Ethereum and he persuaded me to come over and join the team that was being set up there.
So I've been working with with David in a good part as part of the enterprise team that was set up.
Yeah, now excited to go out and do this in a full but different capacity.
Okay, well, it's nice to meet you.
Matthew, you want to back clean up on this?
Yeah, so my background is a bit similar to David's.
I started off in financial services consulting as well.
So I was working on various projects in banks, but learning about Ethereum at the same time.
Spent probably about a year nonstop just scrolling X or Twitter at the time.
And then eventually decided I probably need to go and work in that space because it will eventually supersede a lot of the traditional banking rails.
So then worked in a variety of roles across crypto before fortunately joining the EF.
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Okay, so I want to talk about this decision.
We talked about how you guys got to the Ethereum Foundation.
Talk to me about the decision to leave and to start Ethereum Institutional.
Was this something you guys have been thinking about for a long time?
Was this sort of like a spur of the moment type of thing?
What caused this decision to come about?
How did this happen?
Yeah, I don't think it was spur of the moment.
So I think it was a series of events, right, that ultimately led to Ethereum Institutional.
So I think one initially on the sprint that we did when we went out and met with all of these different financial institutions and also with the ecosystem teams, the reception to our team, our work and our existence was extremely positive.
And honestly, at that time, I was like, OK, we could grow this team two to three X in terms of size and still be like a capital arc.
capacity constrained generally.
So that was an initial early signal and then I guess as the months progressed Tomás left the foundation, the EF put out the EF mandate, it became pretty clear that the foundation was going to revert back to focusing primarily on research and development, working on focusing on crops values both at the protocol layer but also at the application layer.
And Jeff, from our perspective, I guess it was necessary to continue fully in agreement at crops at the protocol layer, but given the entities and the types of participants we're working with, it's not always possible or it doesn't make necessarily too much sense at the application layer, whether it's compliance, regulatory, whatever restrictions that they might have.
So I think that coupled with the pivot, back from adoption more to research and development kind of triggered a series of conversations both with EF leadership but also with Tom Lee and Joe Lubin around what a dedicated entity could look like if we were to get one stood up.
So yeah a lot of a lot of back and forth and negotiations around what that could potentially look like but unfortunately enough Joe Lubin and Tom Lee had both seen the work that we had been doing.
thought it was extremely valuable and decided to back the mission.
So yeah, definitely not an overnight decision, something that we had been working on for months.
But I think it worked out best for all parties.
We have a dedicated institutional focused team that can go out and cater for a specific segment in the market, while all of these other ecosystem participants like the EF, ETH Labs can do what those guys do best too.
Okay, well, we'll take all this one piece at a time.
I do want to talk about this launch.
You started Ethereum Institutional with funding from Bitmine, Sharplink, Joe Lubin, and another Ethereum co-founder, as you said.
But then you also closed a ecosystem funding round, I think it was last week or the week before, that had over 100 different participants in it.
And I wanted to get your thoughts on this.
Why did you guys choose to do an ecosystem funding round?
And what is the signal that we should take from the market to see over 100 different people participating here?
Why is there so much enthusiastic support and what brought together that ecosystem funding round?
It's a combination of things.
But to David's point, we started exploring this idea of having a dedicated institutional front door for Ethereum and its ecosystem.
And in so doing, obviously went around and spoke to a lot of different teams that we have been working closely with at the EF.
And I think a lot of consensus there generally on on the path.
But I guess also the missing piece of the puzzle, i.e.
there wasn't really one entity or interface for institutions to engage with.
And there wasn't really one that did this in a neutral way, in a way that benefited the ecosystem at large and not just one individual vendor or service provider or application builder.
In, I think, those conversations and when we went out with the news, what is that, four weeks ago now, I think the reception was overwhelmingly positive.
And I think we had a lot of conversations with teams that were very eager and excited to support the mission and the vision.
So I think the ecosystem round is like a great...
I guess, reaffirmation of our aspirations and, you know, something we wanted to do to show that there is, you know, a broad backing from the ecosystem in, you know, having a dedicated institutional front door that can, one, you know, be the face for institutions that want to explore the Ethereum block space, but also it's a wider ecosystem.
And so I think everything kind of came together in this funding round where a lot of teams came.
basically showed that this was something they were very supportive of.
Okay, so you're getting a lot of support from the ecosystem because people feel like there needs to be an institutional front door.
What does that mean, having an institutional front door?
What does that look like?
And then I want to get some thoughts on this, but you guys have said that you're trying to drive institutional adoption, but...
I think it's not really clear to some people what institutional adoption means.
What are you trying to get institutions to adopt?
Is it just to get them to buy Ethereum?
What does that look like?
What are those conversations?
Talk to me about that.
Largely, our focus is on institutional adoption of Ethereum as infrastructure.
And of course, buying Ethereum is part of that.
But overall, the adoption is much bigger.
And I would say for institutions, institutional roadmaps are.
at least years long.
And so this is quite a long journey.
And so we're already seeing the beginning of that adoption and that's deployments across stable coins, tokenized funds and other activities.
And so...
Along that journey, we want to support on kind of the education for teams that are looking to adopt.
And for those teams that are already actively adopting, we want to work more collaboratively with them to support those launches, but also learn from their feedback.
These are quite sophisticated teams as well that understand some of the challenges and concerns of public chain launches.
And so we, together with the ecosystem teams, can work to meet some of those challenges and requirements.
So it's quite broad.
And in specific areas, we go quite deep as well.
Okay.
Well, let's take a specific example then to kind of illustrate this.
Just earlier this week, BlackRock announced that they are tokenizing two new funds on Ethereum.
Obviously, they have tokenized funds on other chains as well, but the majority of their capital is on Ethereum.
Can you talk to me about what role you see for Ethereum institutional in something like this that BlackRock is doing with tokenizing their funds?
What role do you guys play?
Where do you fit into that conversation?
How should people think about it?
Ethereum Institutional in that kind of a context.
Yeah, I mean the BlackRock launches are a great signal.
And yeah, two big launches this week coming from one existing fund and also one net new fund.
But actually an additional 12 products as well was announced just a few days after the initial two, which is two share classes per fund.
So another 12 as well, which is traditional money market funds that will be launched on Ethereum as well.
BlackRock is a very sophisticated team who obviously like with their with their bid or launch initially have kind of led the way with a lot of these tokenized money market fund launches as have others so i think that there's a lot of learnings that can come from that and for the teams that don't have the the size scale and capacity of a blackrock to understand or or push forward these kinds of deployments there's a lot of learnings that we can take from our conversations with the likes of blackrock jp morgan and others that are involved in these big um these big launches.
And like I said before, understand where there may be challenges, but take best practices, go to market strategies and learnings to all of the thousands of other banks and institutions that will follow in their footsteps.
I think that kind of begs the question here.
There's been a lot of reference to Ethereum institutional as a front door.
And then there's also this idea of like go to market.
In other words, like going out and maybe evangelizing or like bringing Ethereum to clients or institutions.
A front door is somewhere that people come to knock and go to market is somewhere you're going out to advertise.
Which one of these is it?
Is it like people, institutions looking for a front door to knock on and not having one?
Or is it a situation where you need to go out and make them aware of things that they don't know of right now?
And how do you guys think about balancing between the two of those?
both right a lot of it goes back to the time at the ef when we did that initial sprint we went out and had conversations usually in the first five minutes it was like okay this team exists we've been waiting for this team like where has it been the whole time there's like three other ecosystems or four others that are knocking on our door and trying to talk to us at all times and for an fi if you're evaluating a chain where you want to potentially deploy for the medium to long term you need to have some answers question or some questions answered you need to understand the technology that you're implementing, you need to understand the ecosystem, you need to have someone to call if there's any problems.
So I think that's where the front door element comes into it.
And a little bit to Marius's point, prior to our team, there was several different vendors going out and pitching Ethereum, whether it was L2s or DeFi protocol solutions providers that all have their own vested interests.
some are agnostic to which chain is deployed on.
So that was really the idea with the front door to have one team whose only bias or key focus is Ethereum winning and the ecosystem winning.
I think in terms of go to market, that's something that we've also done historically and we will tend to do.
So we've done an exercise recently where we've evaluated 200 of the largest FIs.
globally and a lot of them are already building on Ethereum.
So supporting those, building on Ethereum in one way or another.
So supporting those and advancing some of those products and initiatives, but those who are not building on Ethereum already are potentially working with other networks going out and having those conversations where they need to be had.
Okay, I want to ask a question around what going out and having this conversation looks like.
In a lot of the announcements I've seen about Ethereum Institutional, the language that's been used is that there's a need to be more aggressive about the institutional adoption.
You're all smiling.
What does being more aggressive about this actually look like?
What does that mean?
And just talk me through what that means.
Yeah, I did a control F on a few of our docs to look for aggressive.
I think it might just come from me.
And I'm a sports guy, John, I'm not sure about you.
But I think about sport, like if you think about the sports analogy, like your team goes onto a field, you don't necessarily just want them to be passive, you want them to be front footed, do their best and do ultimately whatever is possible in some senses to make sure that they win.
So I think in terms of being aggressive, it's making sure that We're pushing as hard as we can, not being rude and obnoxious, but that comes across in a couple of different ways.
So in terms of marketing, it's, yeah, I think my own opinion anyway is like Ethereum has been relatively passive in terms of talking about its wins, talking about its benefits historically.
We want to go out and be open, honest and objective about Ethereum versus some of the other ecosystems.
We want to be very loud about ecosystem wins, and you can probably see that in some of our...
comes already on LinkedIn and on Twitter, where we're pointing out Ethereum wins, we're pointing to data, we're pointing to scoreboards, seeing where Ethereum is winning, and then also looking at developing case studies, developing new use cases over the course of time, and then assembling all of these different parts into one unified coherent Ethereum story.
And it's the same thing on the BD side, right?
So like going out, reaching out to people who are signaling interest in a digital asset strategy, going talking to them about the roadmap plans, making sure Ethereum is very much front and center of their thinking, and then pushing people a little bit further who have already developed on Ethereum to go one or two steps deeper.
So maybe what does native issuance look like?
What does DeFi deployments look like?
That's something that's been missing historically and something that we weren't actually necessarily able to do at the foundation too.
So I think that's what we mean by when we say, aggressive, as front-footed as possible is probably a nice way to put it.
I interviewed Joe Shalom, who's the CEO of Sharplink, one of the largest Ethereum digital asset treasury companies, and he said that Ethereum is playing to win.
And I think that kind of gets to the same point you're making there.
I want to ask you about something else that Joe said in the interview I had with him.
He said that he views one of Ethereum's major competitions in these institutional arenas, not as a Canton network or a Solana or some other digital asset native ecosystem, but rather the legacy infrastructure that these institutions have spent many billions of dollars and years building up inertia on.
And I'm curious if that resonates with the experience that you've had and the conversations you've had with institutions in terms of the struggle to get them to adopt Ethereum or to.
switch to anything else other than the legacy infrastructure they already have.
What has that been like?
And do you agree with that assessment?
Yeah, I think we very much agree to a large extent.
I think integrating with existing infrastructure is a big challenge, not just for Ethereum, but for the industry as a whole.
We've seen decades of investment into proprietary batch-based systems that I think...
work well enough for most institutions today but those systems i mean as we all know here they can be expensive they can be opaque they can be flexible um but they are deeply embedded in in the processes the compliance frameworks and i guess also the the mental model of the people that we kind of engage with today i think on top of that if you factor in you know that financial institutions are very used to markets that that sleep at night that have these batch-based reconciliations that have layered intermediaries.
And so they're now faced with an always-on global settlement with programmable assets.
It's a very different paradigm, right?
And so that kind of rewiring of operating models, risk, governance, I would agree with Joseph that that is like a journey that we're on and something that will take a lot of time.
I've spent a lot of time on the infrastructure side of...
in the industry.
And I think one of the core properties of Ethereum and what makes it so great is that it's been around for a very, very long time.
And so it is what most institutions are very comfortable with today.
the best documentation, the widest support from any service provider in the industry.
It's most widely understood.
It also has the largest developer ecosystem.
And I think that's why you see a lot of major banks as managers already using Ethereum and its L2s today.
And that's also why it has become the default platform for tokenized assets, stablecoins, etc.
Having said that, and I think...
I also wanted to acknowledge competition.
I think David alluded to it as well.
So yes, we are on a transformative journey, right, for the financial services industry as a whole.
But competition is also increasing.
And it is a reality of where we are in terms of maturity.
I think 2020, when I got involved with the first tokenization pilots, like the timing wasn't really right.
But what we're seeing now is that...
all the world's major financial institutions are moving on chain.
And there's a window of opportunity here that I think everyone sees the next 6, 12, 18, 24 months will be extremely crucial in terms of how these different ecosystems positions themselves.
So I think we also want to acknowledge that competition is increasing.
Other ecosystems are investing heavily in.
Business development efforts, marketing, a lot of incentives to support different types of deployments as well.
So that is obviously also something that we're faced with.
And that's also why, by the way, and I won't say aggressive, David, but I think proactive is the right term.
Like we want to go out there and we want to meet institutions where they are.
They need someone that they can speak to and they need someone that can help them accelerate.
their digital asset journey, but they're also doing hopefully also choosing Ethereum as the main settlement rail.
Real world assets like funds, treasuries and private credit are still running on rails built decades ago.
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Yeah, well, proactive or aggressive as long as somebody's out there playing to win.
I think that's what we all want.
I'd love to hear.
So we've talked a little bit about this list of over 200 different financial institutions.
We've talked a little bit about the growing competition in the space.
And I think maybe it was Matthew, but one of you mentioned that prior to the introduction of Ethereum Institutional, there were some players pitching Ethereum, but they were all pitching it from a different angle and it wasn't so coherent and focused.
What is the sort of coherent?
differentiating value prop pitch that you all make to these institutions when you're approaching them about Ethereum, about ETH.
How do you go about doing that and standing out from all this competition?
What does that sound like?
And what do you think is actually moving the needle on this?
I think the key reason that institutions adopting Ethereum and what we talk to most is some of the kind of technical aspects.
Really, institutions care about just a few things.
Risk.
uh liquidity and distribution i think are some of the key things and from the risk perspective uh sort of been mentioned but you know ethereum is is the oldest smart contract to maple blockchain and in now over 11 years hasn't gone down like that is a really really compelling kind of data point and then when institutions as we see increasingly are deploying tokenized assets on chain then it needs to be somewhere where there's the majority of liquidity and most stable coins most rwas are also on ethereum mainnet and so instead of we we'd like to point to the data because a lot of that does the talking for us really and so the other thing is if we look at kind of what is already happening it's a move from kind of private chains where institutions felt comfortable they knew that they could kind of experiment and a lot of those struggled But even if we look at some of the ones that did really well or are continuing to do well, we could take like JP Morgan's Connexus, which was a fork of Ethereum about 10 years ago in the form of Onix rebranded to Connexus as doing, I think, $5 billion a day in volumes.
But then we see a pretty clear story as well.
Because then JPMD, the deposit token, was launched on base and Ethereum layer two.
And then subsequently JLTXX, which is one of the genius compliant collateral money market funds, is now in public Ethereum and approaching a billion dollars in TVL.
And we also see, as we mentioned a little bit, BlackRock with Biddle and now a series of new funds all coming in in quick order in the past week, coming to public chains.
And that's because they're starting to, become more comfortable having done their initial tests.
A little bit more clarity is coming in.
Also the ecosystem, who we obviously work closely with because that is what enables all of this, is now really maturing for institutional onboarding.
And so a lot of it is pointing to what is already happening.
providing clarity on that kind of journey and roadmap and making sure that they have the support there when it's needed.
I think that resonates a lot.
I did an interview with Austin Arnold from Altcoin Daily.
He's one of the biggest crypto YouTubers there is.
And I asked him about Ethereum.
He said the same thing, this security decentralization, the liquidity and the network effects.
It seems like there's consensus on that message that resonates with a lot of people.
I want to ask you all about collaboration because.
breaking out a lot of these entities from the Ethereum Foundation.
Now there's ETH Labs, Ethereum Institutional, ETH Systems, Etherealize, right?
How do you all think about the collaboration there?
Where are the jurisdictional boundaries between other ETH entities in the organization and you all?
And what does the collaboration look like?
Is it ad hoc?
Is there some sort of formal coordination?
What does that look like right now?
Yeah, I think clearly this is...
been a transition not a cold start for us from the EF and also for some of these other spin outs and then for others like Ethereumize we've been working with and friends with them for over a year since we joined the EF so these are some of them seemingly new relationships but also old relationships as well and I think it's kind of a testament to the decentralization of Ethereum just not at the you know the protocol layer but also at the the social layer and so we work collaboratively with all of those teams that have been mentioned just as we do with the ecosystem broadly so in very regular communication with all of them so that we can you know share information and support each other on where all of our strengths are but then also to make sure that we can pull them in when people need support and so just like all ecosystem teams we work closely with them from a jurisdiction perspective most of those teams are global so they cover all regions but i would say each are specialized in their own areas and we and so yeah the the short answer really is that we're close to them and work closely with them all i think maybe just to add on that i think like I've seen a couple of comments when I'm scrolling on X or Twitter as well and said why does there need to be these two institutional BD teams or I don't know all of these different spin outs.
I think it's a sign of maturity, right?
And passion and energy in the space as well.
And Ethereum, like Matthew mentioned, is by a significant distance the largest public blockchain.
Yeah, having all of these different teams with different areas that are all rowing in the same direction with their own expertise, I think can only be a positive thing for Ethereum.
And it's something that we've already, to Matthew's point, we've already been working with all of these teams over the past year of really good working relationships.
And for all of us to go out and focus on specific areas can only be beneficial for all of our goals.
I think that this is a thing I'd like to understand more just how you guys think about this, because I did an interview with Mark Van Le Berg, who is the chief market officer of the Algorand ecosystem.
And he said that Algorand is combining Algorand Labs and the Algorand Foundation.
In other words, seeing some consolidation in leadership.
And it seems like Ethereum is deliberately going in the opposite direction, right, of like breaking out a lot of this talent and teams.
from the Ethereum Foundation.
What is the benefit in your minds of that strategy versus consolidating all of this back into the EF?
Yeah, the EF is a very principled organization.
There's no doubt about that.
And they've often talked about a principle of subtraction where typically institutions amass more power, more influence, more control, and then you have centralization risk.
So I think this is a good example of that principle in action, which if, as we are doing, building infrastructure, for hundreds of years to come, then this is the safest way to decentralize, influence, support, power, however you want to position it, and to build in redundancy and give the ecosystem the best chance of success, I would say.
So it certainly comes from a principle of long-term thinking.
And I would say that that is the core difference probably.
Okay.
So you guys have put together this organization.
You've closed the funding round.
You're up and running.
I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about what actual work you guys are doing.
Is it mostly just information, education, like going up a learning curve with people?
Are you actually doing development work and building things with people?
Does that live with another organization, not Ethereum Institutional?
Tell me a little bit about that and what goes on actually within the organization now that you guys are off and running.
Maybe an example is what do institutions need that historically wasn't necessarily available?
And so we just spoke about how decentralized the ecosystem is.
But institutions are used to having a counterparty.
So who represents Ethereum when Ethereum is so decentralized?
institutions need someone to talk to and work with on specific things.
So if we just take like an RFP process, for instance, we can help that institution go through due diligence on Ethereum and help to coordinate across the ecosystem and the teams that are needed for whatever that product launch may be and to try and help that be successful.
That's one aspect.
Then the other aspect is that broad engagement with institutions globally to ensure that they know that they have a point of contact and a team that will support them and help them navigate the ecosystem and then where there are those key engagements going deeper so we won't ourselves be doing you know large amounts of development work there's other teams in the ecosystem that are very well positioned to do that and that's exactly who we would work with but what we can do is help to help to essentially do the requirements gathering and discovery with institutions because bringing that information together from a massive number of institutions can be a big coordination challenge but that's the information you need to as the ecosystem and as individual service providers push things forward understand concerns challenges and blockers and make sure that where solutions are already available as they often are that is well communicated so that's part of the education and where it isn't there's structured work to uh to come and try and counter that and that could take the form of collaboration across many teams with specific institutions or groups of institutions in verticals.
And then the team is also growing.
So a big part of the current journey is expanding so that we have capacity to do that at ever greater scale.
But also, I would say, operationalizing that so that it can become more efficient and distributed to even more teams as they kind of come on their digital asset adoption journey.
How does this kind of work with ETH Labs?
So I did an interview with three of the five co-founders of ETH Labs.
They are a nonprofit that's focused on research and development.
And I guess maybe my question here is more generally, like you guys are going out actually talking to market participants about what their needs are, what their concerns are.
In terms of like taking that information and bringing that back internally into Ethereum so that changes can be made, adaptations can happen, improvements can come about.
What is that pipeline like?
Do you just like CC?
them on an email or like is there something more formal and and who do you direct that information to once you get that feedback from institutions yeah it depends if we look at what eth labs are doing they're very close to the core protocol so if something that um that we identify as an institutional need is associated with core protocol work then both the ef the client teams, ETH Labs are all appropriate teams to inform of that.
And so, for instance, just today, ETH Labs have proposed shorter slot times for upcoming hard fork.
That is exactly the kind of thing that is very interesting to institutions, but also beneficial to the ecosystem and applications generally.
But institutional requirements set at multiple layers.
I'd say they set at the...
core protocol layer, they sit at the application layer, they sit at token standard layers, and they also touch outside of the ecosystem to regulators and like government bodies.
So we can try to ensure that the communication is flowing to the right entities and trying to make sure that the work and outcomes are there to meet what is required.
So ETH Labs are are somewhat specialized and there's lots of other teams that will be appropriate for other requirements as well.
Okay, cool.
I want to talk about Ethereum and rather ETH.
I want to talk about ETH, the asset, and where that fits into these conversations, right?
Because we've been talking a lot about the adoption of Ethereum as financial infrastructure by institutions.
And I think a big, let's say, point of contention or piece of feedback that the broader community has had is that ETH, the asset, kind of gets left out in these conversations.
Where does the asset of ETH come into these conversations for you guys?
And how do you think about talking about institutions or talking about ETH to institutions?
We only touched on security being so key for institutions.
And obviously that is underpinned by ETHI Asset.
So at any point that we're discussing ETH as infrastructure, ETHI Asset is obviously linked there and so important to it all.
I think institutions, there's two sides, right?
There's asset allocators who are interested in investing in Ethereum and there's users of Ethereum, the infrastructure.
The majority of our work sits on the side of the infrastructure adoption and I think that ETHI asset benefits downstream of that.
So I would say historically we've talked less about ETHI asset to institutions because that's been our focus, but it's increasingly something that institutions are looking at as well.
Okay, I want to use Robinhood and the Robinhood chain as sort of a case study here.
I asked the ETH Labs guys about this as well, because I think this is fascinating.
Obviously, Robinhood is a major financial institution.
They launched the Robinhood chain, which for those who don't know, is an Arbitrum-based Ethereum L2.
And so they're now part of the Ethereum ecosystem.
And they brought in, I think, like 30 million users, technically, somewhere like that, or potential users to ETH.
But a lot of people have been critical of this because a lot of the fees, the revenue generated from all this activity is going to Robinhood or to Arbitrum.
But very little, and by very little, I mean like a couple of thousand dollars right now, is...
And I asked Joe Lubin about this, and he said this is part of Ethereum's strategy to continue to grow the ecosystem and bring in more users rather than extracting rent.
And then some other people on the other side say that if there's no value being extracted by Ethereum to ETH, then it hurts the investment case for ETH the asset.
How do you all think of this as a case study around this tension between wanting to bring in more institutions, wanting to drive value to ETH, and balancing between those concerns?
And just what are your thoughts on all of this?
First and foremost, Robinhood Chain has been a fantastic launch and I think is a great example of institutions leveraging L2s, which we're happy to talk about, but also leveraging Ethereum more broadly.
You know, ETH is central to the DeFi ecosystem across all chains.
also on Robinhood's chain and it's the gas token.
So that in itself is key.
On the scaling side, I agree with Joe Lumen.
Ethereum is still very much in a scaling phase.
And we see that also on the straw map, the protocol roadmap.
And in order to scale, we have to make it attractive to institutions.
And you want to make sure that as...
we are seeing institutional demand is exponentially growing and accelerating that the scale is there to meet it.
I think I don't think it should get caught up like a public company that is trying to kind of optimize for the next quarterly earnings call too soon when there's such a long and kind of aggressive roadmap of institutional adoption that's coming.
So I would say it's definitely part of a scaling and growth strategy.
David, I want to ask you a question directly here.
You talked about playing to win.
And I think that there are a lot of ways to measure or define success for something like this.
But some of those metrics are different.
And I'm curious how you think about defining success, what metric is the most important one to focus on, and how you think you're doing on the scoreboard right now.
Yes, so I think in terms of engagement from our side, or at least initially, we'll be making sure that we go out and we're prioritizing initially asset managers, commercial banks and market infrastructures.
So going out and speaking to the largest 200 in each region.
So primarily we'll focus on the US, MENA, EMEA and then APAC.
And we're hiring appropriately to scale up on the BD efforts to go out and make sure that we're in all of the conversations with those leading institutions.
So I think that's one metric for us to make sure that we're in those conversations, having them and Ethereum as well represented and ideally winning business.
And I think that naturally converts to on-chain activity and TBL generally.
And then I think Ethereum over the past year or two, while it's still top of the scoreboard, there are, like we mentioned previously, competing chains in the ecosystem as a whole that are coming and taking pieces of Ethereum's market share bit by bit.
And I think making sure that we're going out and speaking to the entities that Yeah, that are maybe migrating to other chains or evaluating other chains and making sure that they know the latest Ethereum pitch, they know the possibilities, they know the roadmap, and they know that Ethereum is building for the long term.
So I think those are the major two pieces that we're looking at and focusing on, at least initially, as we scale up.
I'm not sure, Marius, Matthew, if there's anything else that you'd add to that.
It's a coverage exercise in the end, right?
And I think to some of the points that were made here, a lot of institutions are taking pretty important decisions right now on which infrastructure to go with.
Naturally, Ethereum has benefited from a lot of organic interest over the years because it has been around for the longest and because it has the properties that it has.
But institutions also take decisions based on relationships as well and need someone that can handle them and guide them through these different deployment processes.
And that's why it's super important for us to also accelerate the not just being the institutional front door to your point, John, but actually going out and knocking on these doors, making sure that Ethereum is heard and making sure that we also proactively help them onboard to Ethereum.
I think.
You can have them figure it all out themselves, but if you can help them, help push them in the right direction, that is one very helpful from an adoption perspective and in terms of accelerating those deployments.
But two, and to Matt's point, when you start to distill some of all those inputs, the current blockers, into more scalable patterns, blueprints, business cases, case studies that allow adoption at a much larger scale, I think is where you have the real unlock.
And unfortunately today, I think it's fair to say that a lot of institutions, they're reinventing the wheel every time they go and do institutional deployments on Ethereum, Solana and other chains.
And I think there's a lot we can do.
as an industry to come together and you know effectively align on both standards implementation patterns and ways in which we can you know drive this adoption work at a much larger scale i'll just say as well like institutional uh roadmaps are long like they have a lot of approval processes uh due diligence to go through and deployment itself goes through significant testing etc like i think that in the in the tech industry and the crypto industry we're used to people building in the open building quick shipping quick institutions have a little bit of a different pattern not only does it take a bit of time it's also most of these conversations are obviously behind closed doors and under mda so we hear a lot of things publicly there's a lot of announcements or or marketing that we might see out there but it does take a little bit of time for some of the the work that is happening to show itself kind of out in the open and that's one thing as well that is a little bit different to DeFi for instance or other things where we can see quick integrations and quick partnerships but it just takes a little bit more time for things to to really reveal themselves We've spoken a little bit about roadmaps.
Obviously, Ethereum is still rapidly under development and improvement.
The Glamsterdam upgrade is scheduled for sometime in Q3.
The Hegoda upgrade that will come after Glamsterdam is kind of being put together right now.
Are there any things that you're particularly excited about that Glamsterdam is going to unlock that you think are really going to move the needle or remove some blockers or like quell some objections from institutions who are evaluating whether or not to build on Ethereum?
I think scale continues to be a big thing.
Showing institutions that Ethereum is dedicated to scale and therefore able to meet their requirements is a really big thing.
Because Ethereum still has a little bit of an association or people associate it with being slow and having high gas fees.
and whilst we all remember paying hundreds of dollars to mint an nft back in the day that's no longer the case and so for institutions seeing scale and and continued reliability is is a very important thing i think that is one of the big things and then when you look further down the line i think something else that we are looking to do or do is to communicate what ethereum will look like in a few years time as i said institutional roadmaps are slow and looking at both scale at the L1 and of course scaling of blobs for L2s because I think Robinhood is a great example but L2s are an incredibly attractive value proposition for institutions and happy to talk about that and then privacy is top of mind for all institutions and now the EF or the ecosystem has a dedicated privacy effort.
In fact, it's had a dedicated privacy effort for over five years, but now it's a little bit more publicly communicated how central it is to the vision.
And last but not least, like quantum resistance.
So many institutions are very interested in this because, as we said earlier, institutions care deeply about risk and are...
are very aware of quantum risks because they have sophisticated technical teams internally that do due diligence on all of these things.
So having a well-communicated roadmap as we do, where we can point to the quantum roadmap or we can point to how Ethereum will scale, we can point to the kind of roadmap and potential of L2s is all really important for institutions because it gives them confidence as well.
Interest on the post-quantum.
piece too.
I think that's one of the most exciting topics in a lot of our conversations.
And Ethereum has been thinking about this, or the Foundation have been thinking about it for a very long time.
So I think Justin Drake initially started working on it in 2019 or something along those lines.
There's been tens of millions of dollars invested in it, and Ethereum will be post-quantum resilient before the end of the decade, I believe 2028, 2029.
I think there's a lot of different protocols out there and blockchains that cannot say the same thing.
And that's been an exercise that we've been running workshops and doing educational sessions on with a number of different banks throughout the world.
And it's something that they've been quite impressed by generally.
Okay, so all this R&D and investment and improvements to Ethereum, it is moving the needle and it's going to pay off.
I want to end this conversation with a couple of questions about what Ethereum institutional needs.
Do you guys need more developers?
Do you need more, like, what are you hiring for?
What could people do if they wanted to help the efforts you're making?
How could they do that?
What could they contribute?
And what do you all need right now?
All of the above, John, is the short answer.
But no, we're obviously looking to scale.
out the efforts and the team pretty significantly.
We have been very blessed to receive funding to go out and build a full organization.
So to David's point, we're now looking to strategically place people in all the major financial hubs in the world.
And so now they're quite aggressively hiring to make sure that we have someone that can represent Ethereum.
in all the right rooms in all the right places in the world.
We will be hiring across like a range of other supporting roles, both marketing events, comms, but also looking to set up solutions architect for the engineering team as well.
So that will also have some some resources internally.
So all these all these JDS are on our website and we'll update those on an ongoing basis, I would say.
hiring and staffing of the team is very key for us at the moment.
So yeah, if any of the listeners here are interested, we're very happy to hear from them.
Outside of that, I think there's a lot of work that we carry over from the Ethereum Foundation and the work with it.
There are a lot of existing relationships with all these financial institutions.
that we're not only looking to nurture, but I think also more proactively engage with.
And as we begin ramping up the team as well, ramping up those external efforts as well.
So I think you'll see that we'll be much more present online and out in the real world as well.
We'll do more events.
We'll do more convenings.
create more opportunities for the industry to come together and to tackle some of these larger challenges, barriers to adoption that we see or work towards kind of more productive paths to deployments generally.
So I would say that's top of mind for us right now.
And obviously, as we grow and scale up the team, I'm sure more priorities will emerge that are not just hiring and acceleration related, but I think that's where we...
That's where we focus efforts right now.
David, I don't know if you noticed this, but Marius said the words aggressively hiring in his answer.
So you're starting to have a corrupting influence.
Not proactively, no.
We said that too, but aggressively hiring is a good way to do it.
If I am an institution and I am not on your top 200 list, but I want to get in touch with you all, where would I go to do that?
How would I start a conversation with Ethereum Institutional to learn more about Ethereum?
Yeah, I think you can go to the website.
So ethereuminstitutional.org.
You can reach out to us by email.
Hello at ethereuminstitutional.org.
I think you have all of our Twitter handles here.
We all have LinkedIn profiles that we're very responsive on.
So feel free to reach out there.
There's quite a few ways to get in touch with us if you're keen to.
And we're very much excited to talk to anyone, regardless of whether they're on that list or whether they're not.
Because there's ways that we'll be.
taking this feedback and building it into systems that will be scalable over the course of time.
And those might be an option for those teams in the future.
So the website, the email, LinkedIn, Twitter, we're on all.
Well, I think that's a great place to end the conversation.
Gentlemen, I want to thank you all so much for coming on the Milk Road Show.
I think you all have been working for a very long time in this industry and for Ethereum and for digital assets overall.
But this is maybe the first time a lot of people in the community have gotten a chance to hear from you all directly and learn more about your work.
So thank you for coming on the show and sharing with all of us.
I hope we can catch up again another time soon.
I'm not going to go around the room and say goodbyes, but I'll just say to the audience, thank you all so much for joining us.
Until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode.
of the Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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