Ben Edgington Interview - Ethereum's Merge to Proof of Stake - ConsenSys & Quorum

Ben Edgington is the Lead Product Owner at ConsenSys which works on the Ethereum and Quorum blockchains. Ben breaks down Ethereum’s move from proof of work to proof of stake, the upcoming merge, staking Eth, institutional adoption of Eth, NFTs on Ethereum, crypto regulations, and much more.

Transcript

Welcome back to the Thinking Crypto podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today, is Ben Edgington, who’s the lead product owner at ConsenSys. Ben, it’s great to have you on the show.

• Real pleasure to be here, Tony. Thanks for the opportunity.
• Ben, I’m super excited to speak with you. As I was mentioning before the recording, this week, we have the Ethereum merge happening, big milestone.
• It’s happening. It’s happening.
• Big. Yeah, you gotta have that meme come up when I do the post production. You know what? I’m so excited. People wanna hear about the building side and how did we get to this point and all the benefits and so forth. But before we get there, I’d love to get to know you better. Tell us about your background, where you from, where’d you grow up.
• Yeah, sure. So, you can probably tell from my accent already, I am British, I grew up in the UK. I spent a few years in academia, ended up in climate science. Decided academic life was not for me long-term. I jumped ship to work for a huge Japanese multinational. I spent 10 years working on supercomputers. We installed Europe’s, then largest, super computer in Germany in 1999, had a mighty two teraflops which I think my desktop, sitting next to me here, can do today. But this was the size of a large room plus. Yeah, all the rest. And then as is the way with large Japanese multinationals, ended up on the manager track when I turned 40 and that was the normal route and ended up in modestly senior management in FinTech, information security area, in a head of engineering role there. And that’s where I came across a blockchain technology, in Ethereum in particular and it really caught my attention became my out-of-work passion, hobby at that point and then a year and a half later. So, that was in early 2016 and about a year and a half later in October 2017, I decided to make my passion my job, which I do not recommend and joined ConsenSys. So, I’ve been with ConsenSys for about five years and absolutely love working at ConsenSys. And my caution is when you make your passion your job, it never ends. It’s just wall to wall, you never get a break, evening or weekend. So, but yeah, that’s my life now and I love it.
• That’s awesome and I could certainly relate to making your passion your job, your career because I made the jump to full-time crypto last year and, of course my wife tells me, “You gotta stop the crypto at some point. You gotta turn it off,” but to your point, when it’s your passion, it almost doesn’t stop.
• Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, my wife was like, when I said, “Well, shall I make this my full-time job?” She was like, “Yeah, maybe I can have you back at weekends and evenings,” but no chance.
• For sure. So, I can certainly make the assumption you have Ethereum in your crypto portfolio. Do you hold anything else?
• Well, for tax reasons, my wife is the big crypto holder in this family. So, yeah, Ethereum is number one. Absolutely. I have a Moon Cat, which I’m particularly fond of. It is early, very early, NFT from 2017, I believe and I was gifted that. But yeah, Ethereum is number one and a bunch of stable points but yeah, that’s it.
• Very cool. So, I wanna talk a bit about ConsenSys, maybe just high-level and we can quickly touch on it for those who don’t know ConsenSys and the work you all are doing on Ethereum. Can you give us a quick overview of ConsenSys and the mission?
• So, ConsenSys, today, is Ethereum’s most significant software company. We are building products to empower the decentralized future and the well known products are MetaMask, Infura, Truffle. So, it’s a range of user-facing and developer-facing products. And also, at the protocol level, we have Teku, which is my client, which is supporting the proof of stake network and Besu, which is our execution client or Ethereum Mainnet client, however you want to call it these days. And yeah, those are the big things. Bunch of other things around that. ConsenSys, of course, started I guess, seven years or so ago, somewhere around 2015. It’s evolved quite significantly since then. So, originally was like a venture studio trying literally, I think, hundreds of different experiments with the hope that some would develop into products, useful products and some have and many have not. It was fascinating being in that environment. We used to have a motto, “Everything is an experiment,” used to be our theme. And it was, yeah, very wild. We tried everything including asteroid mining, famously.
• Wow.
• But over the past two to three years, we have narrowed things down and focused on really what are the products that bring biggest value, deliver the biggest impact and are sustainable for the future. And specifically things that empower others to build products. ConsenSys is not trying to own the whole crypto space. We are building a platforms and enablers like Infura, like Truffle, like MetaMask, so as to allow others to do great things in this space and indeed like our protocol products.
• Yeah, you guys have been working on a lot of great things and I have a question for you. I know ConsenSys had acquired JP Morgan’s Quorum. So, is it just those two primary blockchains that ConsenSys works on, Ethereum and Quorum or are there others as well?
• Yeah, so Quorum is enterprise oriented. So, you can build a private enterprise blockchain using Quorum and also Besu, which is a Mainnet Ethereum client but it also has all of the privacy features and so forth to be able to build private networks as well. ConsenSys has also been involved with Filecoin. We’re working on some layer 2 things like Arbitrum, Optimism, we’re supporting them in various ways. We have our own in-house Zika EVM development going on currently. So, there there’s a lot going on but number one is the Ethereum community and supporting Ethereum. That remains the primary mission for us.
• For sure. Okay, let’s talk about Ethereum 2.0, the merge that’s happening this week and I’m gonna ask maybe some basic questions but I think it’s important because there are a lot of new folks to the asset class and the technology that wanna learn about the history and what led up to this and why is this happening? So, tell us maybe, if you can, the history of Ethereum from proof of work and then why are we moving to proof of stake?
• So, the Ethereum network started in 2015 as a proof of work network but even before that, around 2014, Vitalik published articles about proof of stake and it was always a stated goal to move Ethereum to proof of stake at some point. That’s what really caught my eye in early 2016. When I first got involved, I thought this proof of stake thing sounds incredible and wanted to be part of that. And there are a couple of reasons for it. One is the obvious environmental benefits, we will be using 99.95% less or even less power post when we move to proof of stake. So, yeah, 1/2,000 or better than we’re currently using with proof of work but there are also security benefits to proof of stake. We just believe it’s a better security model than you can achieve under proof of work. That for the similar value invested, you get better security for your money. So, those are the key reasons we’re moving to proof of stake. It’s been a long journey from 2014 to now. There have been many evolutions in the thinking and planning of this. I won’t necessarily call them dead-ends but there have been designs which we have not pursued along the way, partly because new, better technologies have come along. So, they’ve just enabled us to be more ambitious and to build out. An early design required stakers to put down 1,500 ETH to be a validator on the network, just because we had to limit the capacity to a few hundred participants. Now, we do 32 ether and we have 420,000 validators on the network. So, we scaled up our ambition in that sense and made it more practical for smaller stakers to become involved. So, all of that has taken time to feed through. We had a plan. We put down something called the Beacon Chain. So, this is a proof of stake network about a year and a half ago, a bit more, December 2020. So, this has been running alongside Ethereum Mainnet. So, Ethereum Mainnet runs on proof of work, that’s just kept on chugging for the last seven years. Alongside that, a year and a half ago, we put down this proof of stake chain, the Beacon Chain and it currently only sustains itself, it doesn’t run any transactions. It’s just a vehicle for proving that proof of stake works, it’s secure and building the proof of stake foundation there. It’s been running flawlessly. It’s got about, well, it’s about 13 million ETHs. So, I dunno, 20, 21 $billion worth of value staked in it today. And the goal with the merge. So, about a year and a half ago, one of my colleagues at ConsenSys in fact, conceived the idea for the merge. How do we very quickly get Ethereum onto proof of stake? We had a much longer term plan but he came up with this idea of taking the existing execution layer, which is all the smart contracts, all people’s accounts, all of the interfaces that adapts use and shifting them over wholesale onto the proof of stake chain, which already existed at that point. So, that was Mikhail Kalinin and he architected this merge. So, what we’re doing, we’ve got the existing blockchain running the top layer, which is all of the execution, the smart contracts and everything else and we’re just swapping out the proof of work from underneath it and inserting the existing proof of stake chain. And it’s that simple. Just like changing the engines on a plane when you’re flying. Should be straightforward.
• How many developers are working on or with you and for this merge.
• Yeah, so it’s a huge distributed effort and has lots of teams in lots of places, each with their own goals and motivations for being involved. All in all, working on Ethereum core development, there’s about 120 or so developers. You can look at Protocol Guild is basically a curated list of the full or part-time core devs on Ethereum. That’s about 120 and I’d say 70 to 80% of those were somewhat involved in the merge effort itself. So, getting on for 100 or so devs and they’re split amongst research teams, especially the Ethereum Foundation, also some researchers at ConsenSys and client software dev teams, both on what we used to call the ETH1 side, the execution side, the traditional Ethereum clients like ETH and Besu, which is a ConsenSys client and Nevermind and Aragon. And then on the ConsenSys layer side, we’ve got the clients like Maya and Teku and trying to remember all the names, Prism, Lighthouse, Lodestar and Nimbus, which are the five ConsenSys clients. So, amongst all of those teams and a few independent researchers, yeah, maybe around 100.
• Wow. At the time of the merge, do you anticipate any downtime or disruptions in transactions? Will there be an anticipated downtime that everybody will know about?
• So, our goal is for it to be completely transparent. Yeah, if it goes well and we have every expectation of it going well, then users and people transacting on Ethereum, will not even know it’s happened. It will be even if they’re just sending transactions in the moment, the goal is for it to be seamless. I expect exchanges will suspend withdrawals and deposits. This is typical. This is normal for any upgrade. But yeah, anyone working on the main chain should see no difference at all. If things don’t- Yeah, that’s the goal. And yeah, that’s one of the nice features about doing this merge, taking these existing components, we’re taking the existing ETH1 client and just swapping out the ConsenSys layer. So, everything from the user point of view remains exactly the same. They don’t know the engine’s being swapped, it just keeps rolling. What could happen? What if it doesn’t go well? One of the characteristics of these blockchain distributed systems is that they are highly resilient to failures. It’s the goal of building these things is that they just keep going in the face of bad actors or failures or whatever, that is part of the design, part of the whole point of the thing. So, what we may experience is some degraded service. It’s not gonna stop but we may see some missing blocks, for example, slow block times or in the worst case, the proof of stake network might not finalize. Now, finalization is a new feature which comes with proof of stake. It’s one of the security additions or gains that we get with proof of stake. And normally it happens after 13 minutes and you declare a block absolutely final. The network will never revert that block. Which you can never say in proof of work, there’s always a chance that however deeply your block is buried, somebody will appear with a longer fork, a 51% attack they’ve been working on and your block is gone. In proof stake, we have finality and we can say usually after 13 minutes, that that block is secure forever. It’s in the history forever. If network participation drops, if a third of nodes go offline during the merge due to misconfiguration or a bug or something, then finality might be delayed. Now, not the end of the world. The chain will keep on chugging, it’s just we don’t get this nice property until more nodes come back online.
• Exciting. I’m really excited about this ’cause I’ve been staking ETH on the Beacon Chain and earning some rewards that way. And I’m curious, I know there’s probably gonna be miners who are not happy about this change because financially, they’re incentivized to continue doing what they’re doing. How are you guys working with these miners to maybe try to get them to, “Hey, take the ETH you mine and get on from a proof of stake standpoint?”
• Yeah, I think the mining community is made up of two different sorts of miners. And I think there are miners who very much see themselves as part of the community. They’ve been contributors to Ethereum, involved for a long time, believe in the mission, reinvest their ether into staking, for example and generally will come along on the journey and Ethereum’s always been moving towards proof of stake. It is not a surprise. It’s been on the roadmap for a long time. People might have believed it was longer and longer out. It’s taken a while but it’s always been the goal. It’s been part of the DNA of Ethereum. So, I think those miners are reconciled to the change and working accordingly. And then there’s a community of miners who are just hash rate for hire. They’ll just go to whichever chain is offering the biggest rewards. There’s no loyalty. They’re just service providers and they’ll do what they want and we don’t feel a necessity to engage with them. They’ve just been taking rewards when they’re available but not actually feeding back into the ecosystem, so they can do as they wish. Yeah.
• For sure. So, Ethereum has had the first mover advantage. There’s been a lot of building on Ethereum over the years. I just remember ICOs, your CryptoKitties, you got De-Fi, you have NFTs, you gotta decentralized apps and so forth. And one of the challenges I’m sure, I think a lot of people are aware of, there have been the gas fees, which have been very high. Will moving to proof of stake help reduce these gas fees and improve the transaction times and things along those lines?
• Yeah, gas fees are quite low at the moment but they have been much higher, as you rightly say. So, the merge itself will not significantly change throughput or gas prices. So, this, yeah, we need to make this a banner headline ’cause I think a lot of people still have in mind that this is the full delivery of Ethereum 2.0 and this changes everything. No, it doesn’t. This is only, at this stage, about the move to proof of stake and getting Ethereum off proof of work onto proof of stake. Now, it does lay a foundation for the parallel work that we’re doing in improving scalability. So, Ethereum’s scalability is now all about rollups and layer 2 solutions. And we have a bunch of staff at the protocol level, which is pipelined behind the merge to deliver, which will increase the effectiveness of rollups, give them 100 X, 1,000 X better performance but that’s not the merge. The merge is the first step and then over the, six months, year, year and a half after the merge, we will be incorporating those advances into the core protocol and then the rollups will get the benefit of that. So, the layer 2 is where the scaling is and people concerned about gas fees and so forth, that’s the place to go. Seriously investigate the Optimisms, the Abritrums, the zkSyncs, the Starwarez and all of that of this world, that’s the future. Secured by the base chain, the Ethereum base chain secures everything, offers them the maximally decentralized censorship resistance security but the applications in future will sit on the upper layers.
• That’s interesting and I appreciate you clarifying that because I think folks sometimes miss the layer 2s and they think, “Well, could Ethereum lose market share and adoption despite its first mover advantage because of the Solanas of the world or Cardanos?” And I’m not saying that’s gonna happen but those are thoughts and questions that are put out there. So, it’s interesting and to your point, you’re gonna focus more on the scalability and the transaction items in phase two after the merge.
• Yeah, it’s happening now. These L2s exist and they are offering transactions for pennies. It’s available today but they are still slightly limited. If they want to scale by 100 X from where they are today, then they need some more support from the base layer. So, this is what we want to work towards over the next couple of years. And then we’re looking at huge scalability in the system as a whole, it’s not all about the base chain anymore. The base chain, in some, ways fades into the background, which is perfect. It’s infrastructure for the planet and infrastructure should be in the background. You shouldn’t be seeing it and interacting with it every day. That’s the supporting network. And then we’re building layers on top of that, which the users interact with very cheaply, very quickly and because of the base layer, very securely.
• For sure. I wonder if you could walk through, let’s say there’s someone new to crypto and they bought some Ethereum and they’re listening and like, “Oh, okay, move the proof of stake.” Can you walk us through what they could do in order to earn staking rewards and what those staking reward percentages would be as far as APY and things like that.
• So, there’s a range of useful things you can do. So, the gold standard is to run your own node. Now, to do that, you need 32 ether. That’s the minimum stake, which is quite a high bar these days. But if you are blessed to be able to get your hands on that, then running your own node is very feasible. I run a node from home. I’m on a very poor network and I’ve got a little box that costs me a few hundred dollars and it’s been chugging away for the last year and a half and performing perfectly. So, very reasonable to do and there are plenty of staking guides out there. And there are things like Dappnode, just struggling, reaching for the name there, which are basically one click install devices and you can be up and running with your stake pretty quickly. So, that’s the gold standard and that decentralizes the network maximally. Slightly behind that is something pooled staking like Rocket Pool. Rocket Pool is decentralized staking, which you can join, I forget what the lower limit is but something like 0.1 ETH or something like that. And you pool your staking with others to reach the 32 ETH threshold and it’s run by an operator and it’s guaranteed by smart contract infrastructure on the Ethereum Mainnet and they’ve worked very hard to make it maximally decentralized. So, that’s a really good solution if you haven’t got the 32 ETH and basically, you buy RETH, which is the Rocket Pool liquid staking derivative. As part of that, you get RETH and then you can stake that in and De-Fi stuff like that. And then moving along the spectrum a bit, there’s Lido, which is a big staking aggregator, they’ve got about 20 plus operators behind them. They’re a huge operation on Ethereum on the staking network. They actually control about a third of the stake, which is little concerning. There are different views on this. It looks quite centralized because it’s a single DAO that essentially manages that stake but actually is run, the data center’s running the validators are very, very distributed across 22 plus, might be 29 now, in fact, different operators. So, Lido has staked ETH, S-T-ETH is a liquid taking derivative. And when you stake with Lido, you get that and you can put that into De-Fi and stuff as well. And then moving all the way to the far end, the slightly less desirable end of the spectrum is you can go to Coinbase and you can click e-stake my ETH button and just forget all about it. And that’s not, honestly speaking, that’s not really helping the network. That’s not adding to the decentralization of the network or the resilience of the network in any meaningful way but it’s an option. And for the privilege, Coinbase will take, I think, 25% of your staking rewards. Whereas if you sell those stake or you then, everything is yours. And in terms of return, I think you get several different sorts of return. So, currently pre-merge, validators on the Beacon Chain get rewards for their protocol activity. That’s making blocks and that’s voting on blocks and it’s running about 4% per year in ETH terms. Post-merge validators also get the transaction fees from transactions they include in blocks. So, just as miners today, get transaction fees, I think we call them miner tips, I always forget where the current technology is on that one but yeah, what’s left after the base fee is burnt, goes to the miner, validators will receive those. That will be another two or three percentage points above your 4%. And then there is opt-in MEV, miner extractable value or maximal extractable value, which is extra income you can gain from ordering transactions in the block. So, sandwich your tags, arbitrage and so forth. And we have a block builder network has sprung up to provide MEV ready blocks. And so, block builders will bid to validators and say, “I will give you X ETH to include my block.” And another block builder will say, “I’ll give you Y ETH to include my block,” and then you can choose the one which is most profitable for you. And there are some estimates out that’s probably another couple of percentage points on your yield. So, looking at something like a maximum, about 8% per anum.
• Wow. That’s certainly a strong incentive. And what we’re seeing, I’ve been seeing reports at least, just this morning as someone from Bank of America was saying, “Ethereum’s move to proof of stake, the merge happening will bring in more institutional investors and builders on Ethereum.” Are you guys anticipating more adoption? Can you talk a bit about what this opens up as far as adoption and building?
• Yeah, I think the proof of work narrative has become very bad for blockchains and I think our move to proof of stake is very timely. The environmental narrative has been pretty toxic over the last year or so and I’m delighted to be part of making that move. And I think that has been a problem for users, brands, in particular, who want to build on Ethereum, have received a lot of pushback from users because of just the power consumption, the carbon footprint. And we are looking to reduce that by a factor of 2,000 or more with move to proof stake. Essentially, it becomes negligible. We take away all of the proof of work mining burn on that. So, I think that will make it a much more palatable story for brands and institutions who wish to get involved with Ethereum. So, yeah, definitely a better narrative around that. And, yeah, I very much hope it will encourage more adoption. We’re all about openness. We’re all about being a platform which is permissionless. Anyone can come and build anything on Ethereum. We want to remove as many barriers to that as we possibly can. And yeah, look forward to supporting the decentralized future.
• And I’m assuming you guys are anticipating there’s gonna be big institutions looking to stake as well. To your point, that proof of work energy narrative is now off the table, they don’t have to worry about that or that risk and now they have a financial incentive to come stake as well.
• Yeah, it will definitely be interesting to see. The execution risk of the merge being behind us later this week will, I think, definitely help. At some stage we need to put in withdrawals, we need to implement that. So, currently, if you stake, your stake is still locked. Even with the merge, you’re still not able to unstake it meaningfully. So, within some months, we’re still debating, as devs, the exact timing on that, within some months, you’ll be able to unstake. That will be the ultimate de-risking for institutions, I think, who may be nervous about locking up their assets for an indeterminate length of time, at the whim of the core devs. But yeah, absolutely, I can see it becoming mainstream. It’s essentially an internet bond. And it’s basically, essentially, risk free returns for staking into the protocol generated by the protocol.
• Yeah. I’m excited to see who are some of these institutions that are gonna make that big jump. I wanna talk NFTs and NFTs on Ethereum. Certainly the NFT market has boomed and we’ve seen just a lot of different types of artworks and then we see big brands now, starting to build NFTs. We know that we’re still in the early stages, so are you guys anticipating a lot more building of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain and are you prepared to handle the volume and all those things?
• Yeah. Again, I mean, layer 2’s to the rescue, a lot more is happening the non-base chain, which is the right thing to do. NFTs have been fascinating. This, I think, it’s been really interesting to see a world that is mysterious to me, the art world, the collectibles world, coming, intersecting with my techy, blockchain world. And yeah, I get the impression that the blockchain technology’s just not really interesting to them. And this is perfect. This is what success looks like. They don’t care what the technology underlying it is, as long as they benefit from the decentralization, the permission listeners, the robustness of the network. And for me, that’s what success looks like for Ethereum, for a blockchain, is just in the background. Users don’t even know they’re running on it but they gain the benefits of it. And it’s been absolutely fascinating to see this world develop. It’s not my world. I keep an eye on it and sometimes see some of the things going on there. I would never have anticipated it would become so huge but yeah, it’s really, really interesting and I think has a future. Digital scarcity, that’s what blockchains are about. It’s a thing and people are waking up to that.
• So, a question for you and I don’t know if you can speak much to it but right now, let’s say I go to OpenSea and I’m building NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, I’m transaction with the ether currency. To your point of layer 2s, how are you guys, let’s say like PolPolygon Matic, how will this switch over happen? Will it be like, okay, these NFT marketplaces will eventually integrate the layer 2s and highlight that this is a layer 2 on top of the Ethereum blockchain? I’m just trying to put those things together and I don’t know if my question is off base.
• Yeah, if you go to OpenSea today, all of my NFTs, whether on Polygon or on Ethereum are listed and I didn’t do that, they just automatically pick it up. So, it’s happening. This ecosystem where we have multiple L 2s built on an L 1 and you have to choose L 2, this is being abstracted away by the front ends and that’s absolutely the right thing to do. And just in the same way, I can use a website and I have no idea where it’s hosted, what hardware it’s running on, how many machines are serving my webpage and whatever. I don’t know, I don’t care. And in the same way, the front ends and the protocols that are being built on the application level protocols will abstract away all of this complexity. There will be bridges that automatically bridge your ETH from one chain to another, you don’t need to worry about moving it over and so on. Today, it’s not what it will be. Today, it’s clunky. You can see the joins and so on but already with something like OpenSea, we’re getting there and it’s becoming a more seamless user experience. And that’s only gonna improve as we get more familiar with the tech, as more user oriented people come into the system and build more usable systems.
• Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s a great point. People are not gonna care, they just want to work and it’s like the pipeline of the existing internet. You don’t care about the HTT protocol and the headers and all that stuff and what server and this server and that.
• Yeah. I’m old enough that the first web browser I used was an internal text-based web browser and that was clunky. That’s when Mosaic came along with built-in graphics. This was world changing and we haven’t had our Mosaic moment yet, I think, our usability singularity yet but it will happen. We’re still at the clunky, VT, terminal-based development stage of blockchain stuff and users are coming along and expecting that it’s easier to use and it isn’t and that’s our fault but it will be. It’s going to be much smoother and the experience will be as seamless as browsing on your phone one of these days.
• For sure. A question just came to mind and I’ve been talking to other projects and so forth and there’s central banks that are building CBDCs, central bank digital currencies. A lot of people are not fans necessarily but it’s happening. And I’m curious if Ethereum has been piloted or you’ve been approached by central banks where these CBDCs could be tested on the Ethereum blockchain.
• Yeah, it’d be fascinating wouldn’t it? I think more likely is somehow stable coins on Ethereum getting folded into national economies, getting recognized potentially as, I won’t say necessarily legal tender but as a proxy for legal tender. Perhaps in the UK, there have been some murmurings about this. Some interesting moves into perhaps putting some reasonable regulation around stable coins that will make them part of our normal economy. I would like to be able to pay my taxes in DIA. That would be a massive milestone. So, I think that’s more likely than a full CBDC being built on Ethereum. And I say that because the premise of Ethereum is that it is fully permissionless, fully censorship resistance and so forth, where governments actually really want to retain control. So, whilst they could build it, yeah, I’m skeptical that they will.
• And so, it just came to mind, that would probably be the Quorum solution. Privacy and more enterprise, so they would probably wanna try it on there versus Ethereum to your point.
• Right, right. It’d likely, I think to be per country closed systems. Yeah, we’ll have to see how it goes. We’ll see how Brit Coin gets developed. They were talking about Brit Coin a lot a year ago but it’s gone quiet on that front lately. We’ll see how it goes.
• Yeah. It seems like there’s discussions, all these central banks are talking about it. We’ll see where it goes. Certainly a lot of people are concerned about the privacy aspect and that government’s gonna control your money to another level and everything that you buy and sell but that’s a whole other conversation. On the note of regulations, I know you guys just got a new prime minister, who, from what we’ve seen in her tweets, is crypto friendly and we know the United States is still trying to figure out crypto regulations. What are your thoughts on how things have been going, I guess, globally or with at least the superpowers of getting crypto regulations right?
• Yeah, I’m quite encouraged to see some of the noises coming out of the UK government over the last year, some general positivity towards crypto. And interestingly, we had this Brexit thing a while back. I think there’s a desire to differentiate ourselves from the European Union to an extent. And one way, while the European Union seems to be bringing in some quite heavyweight legislation around crypto, there seems to be a desire in the UK to differentiate from that and be more innovative, to enable more innovation on crypto and just generally be more hands off on the regulation. So, that’s looking interesting. I’m intrigued, everyone talks all the time about the US legislation and actually, I think that’s a sign that we’re not yet where we want to be. I think there’s a danger for Ethereum, for blockchains in general, where one economy, one legislature dominates. And what happens in that legislature affects the whole chain, that shows we’re not properly decentralized. We need to be more resilient than that. And I understand, the US is one of the largest or the largest global economy, is always gonna have an outsized influence but we do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about what the SEC is gonna do and I’m sitting here in the UK thinking, “Why do I care?” Is it a security, it its a commodity? Why do I care? And people seem to get very, very vexed about this in the States and it has this outsized, dominator narrative in some ways.
• Yeah, to your point, it’s a big, big conversation happening and we’ll see how things go. There’s some big events and meetings happening here, at least with Gary Gensler, the chair of the SEC and members of Congress. But to your point, you’re on the building side and you just wanna make sure it works. So, I could certainly understand that you guys are heads down building. I want to get your thoughts on big institutions that are entering the market and we touched on this with enterprises and so forth. We just had BlackRock, world’s largest wealth manager, enter the market. Could they be eventually staking on the Ethereum blockchain? What are your thoughts on how the market has grown given that you got in 2016, we’re now in another league compared to what happened years ago?
• Yeah, absolutely. Being part of something, that a platform that supports hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity, I guess it was always the end goal but it surprises you that it’s happening. Looking back, we’ve always pitched Ethereum as the settlement layer for the planet. There’ve been a bunch of ways we’ve looked at it, the world computer and so on but one of the consistent strands has been settlement layer for the planet, the ultimate high court as it were. Underpinning global economists. And so, at the back of the mind has always been the scale of ambition. It has to be, by its very nature, supporting trillions of dollars of economic activity in the end game if that’s going to be true. So, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but it does feel slightly crazy. We’ve got this ragtag band of 100 or so plus core devs, loosely coordinated, our processes are evolving, our roadmap is evolving. We’re just trying to do the best we can. We’re not sitting there thinking, “Right, I want to build a trillion dollar network, how am I gonna do it?”
• Right.
• It is fascinating how it’s been a build it and they will come scenario. And yeah, I think it will go from a strength to strength. We’re cautious in Ethereum world. We evolve and deliver slowly. Some people get very frustrated by that but it’s caution. We desperately do not wish to break anything. But on the other hand, we’re ambitious. We’re not as cautious as Bitcoin, which is basically takes their protocol that it’s frozen as a virtue. We don’t see that as a virtue, we want to evolve and add capacity and add capability to it. But we do it in a way that we believe is sustainable and promotes the values of decentralization, censorship resistance, permissionlessness and reliability, robustness. We don’t actually break anything. So, yeah, it’s a fascinating balance. I absolutely love being part of this community for all those reasons. It feels like you’re doing something important but also there’s this terrific interplay between all the devs working on the same problems or independently and yeah, I’m thrilled that ConsenSys is part of this. And as I was gonna say, put a stake in the ground, but that’s a bit of an awful pun but has invested in supporting the Ethereum protocol in the form of Teku, which is the staking client, which yeah, my team has developed and Besu, which is our execution client which that team has developed and we offer this to the world as public goods. A very freely licensed and free to use and support and anyone can get involved and make PRs and we welcome it.
• For sure. All right, I got some rapid questions here for you. First rapid fire, what’s your favorite food?
• Indian, absolutely. No question.
• Favorite musician or band?
• Dave Brubeck Quartet, do you even know who they are?
• Ah, no.
• 1950’s, 1960’s jazz combo. Did lots of very innovative stuff with polyrhythm and polyphonics. It’s great, absolutely brilliant.
• I will definitely check it out. I love music, I play guitar, so I will definitely check it out. Favorite movie?
• Favorite movie, “Terminator 2.” Yeah, just when I first saw it, mind blowing. First real CGI thing that came out and it was just mind blowing.
• It’s one of my favorites and my wife makes fun of me. If it’s on TV, I just sit and I watch it and she’s like, “Haven’t you seen this movie 10,000 times?” Yeah.
• It’s brilliant.
• Yeah. Favorite book?
• Favorite book. I’ll give you a favorite author. Very British, very English. PG Wodehouse writes very lightweight, very funny novels. Wrote, I should say, in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s about the life of hapless British aristocrats and they’re just very funny and beautifully written. And if I want to just escape from everything and have something which is weightless to read, PG Wodehouse is my go-to.
• Awesome. And when you’re not working at ConsenSys or even anything crypto, what are you doing as a hobby?
• As a hobby? I am a musician. I play saxophone. Yeah, I got outta habit a bit over lockdown and things, so I wasn’t able to meet with the bands, so I need to pick that up again. So, bit outta practice but yeah and then trying to get out into the big wide world a bit more, hiking and walking. Just had a week away, doing some hiking in Wales and yeah, I love that. Just getting out into nature.
• Awesome. And final question for you. If you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
• A themed metaverse? I guess this is probably not a very exciting answer but I think probably, “Star Trek Original,” boldly going where no one has gone before and yeah, I’ll just love that Federation vision. It’s just fantastic.
• Mine would be, “Star Wars.” It’s anything space related, “Star Wars,” I would be in the metaverse all day.
• Oh yeah. Yeah, fabulous.
• Ben, pleasure chatting with you. Exciting week ahead and I’m looking forward to the merge.
• Yeah, thanks Tony. And yeah, absolutely, it’s nervous time. So, we just got two and a half days to go, 60 hours or something and it’s gonna happen. So, yeah, very much looking forward to it. Thanks for the opportunity to join your podcast Thinking Crypto and enjoyed talking to you.