Building, Upgrading and Documenting Ethereum w/ Ben Edgington (Consensys)

**Speaker A:** Hello and welcome back to the Strange Water podcast. Thank you for joining us for what I'm excited to say is our tenth episode, and we definitely have something special to celebrate. Double digits. I've been a huge fan of Ben Edgington for a long time now. In fact, he's one of my secret weapons. Every time I need to understand how Ethereum actually works, whether it be for a Twitter thread research project or for a consulting job, I navigate over to Ben's website book, Upgrading Ethereum. Ben describes upgrading Ethereum as a passion project, but for so many in this community, it is so much more. It is basically the only way for people who are not writing the code to understand how Ethereum works. Have you ever wondered what does Ethereum's proof of stake actually entail? Good luck getting an answer without referencing upgrading Ethereum or some work derived from it. But Ben is not just a writer or an educator. Ben has all this knowledge because he has dedicated his career to actually building Ethereum. He leads the teams at Consensys that build the software that run Ethereum. This conversation covers a lot of ground. Ben's background and transition to Ethereum, listening to your heart and advocating for your career, how to understand Ethereum and the Ethereum roadmap, and so much more. I know you'll enjoy it. One more thing before we begin. Please do not take financial advice from this or any other podcast. Ethereum will change the world someday, but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then. All right, onto the episode. All right, Ben Edgington, thank you so much for joining us on the Strange Water podcast. **Speaker B:** Hey, Rex, it's nice to meet you. It's nice to be here. Thank you for the invitation. **Speaker A:** No, well, I very much just appreciate the opportunity and the time. And, you know, as I mentioned before we started recording like you're a celebrity and an inspiration and I really, you know, accredit my career so far and my, like, brand to just like basically taking what you've written in the E2 book and making into diagrams and Twitter digestible. **Speaker B:** So that's very kind. I do enjoy your Twitter threads. They are epic. So well done. It's good stuff. **Speaker A:** Thank you. Thank you. So, Ben, I would love if you could kind of just give the audience and myself a little bit about your background and especially your background pre crypto and now with the superpower of hindsight, just give a little bit of context to what kind of jolted you out of the system and into our crazy little world. And how'd you get Here, Yeah. **Speaker B:** Well we should probably start with where I am, where is here? So I work at Consensus, which most people will know, but it's one of the largest software companies in the Ethereum space, responsible for Metamask, Infura and other things. Specifically I work with Techu, which is our Formerly known as Eth2 Client is our Ethereum staking client and we also have Besu, which is the execution client. So I sort of founded Teku, I don't know, four and a half years years ago, something like that and we started building it in late 2018 and I am now product owner I guess for that. That's my sort of organizational position going a bit before that. I became fascinated with Ethereum in 2016. Early on that's when I got sucked down the rabbit hole as it were and at the time I was working for huge Japanese multinational, one of the immense household name companies and was a very small cog in a very large machine and I'd been doing that for 20 years or so and I left there in 2017 and joined ConsenSys at that point. Yeah. What was the journey to that point? I mean initially I thought I was going to be an academic, I studied mathematics, I did some post grad degrees. I sort of thought I might be a lecturer, researcher. Ended up in climate modeling, climate forecasting stuff. But yeah, I just realized that yes, science wasn't for me. I was far more fascinated by the computers. We were using some of the world's largest supercomputers. I was far more fascinated by that than I was by the science. And that led me to me to leave academia and move to the, the Japanese company Hitachi. I mean you can look it up, it's on my LinkedIn who were big in supercomputers in those days. I spent 10 years or so as a supercomputer engineer involved in lots of pre sales which involved just making people's code run fast pre sales and support. And so I got. This is the thing about supercomputing and this is the link to Ethereum, right? It's a resource constrained environment and it seems weird to say that when you've got a room full of computing kit, you're thinking hey, unlimited resources is fantastic but, but it's not like that. The point is we're trying to solve the biggest problems in the world and you never have enough iron. And so let's say it costs $50 million pounds, euros, whatever it is, if, if I can save, if I can make your code 10% faster through optimizations, compiler optimizations, whatever, algorithmic optimizations, then you can run 10% more code on that 50 million hardware or we can just supply you with $45 million worth of hardware and faster code. And it's a good deal all round. And so we were always looking at micro optimizations and memory optimizations and so on because of this resource constraint on there. And yeah, cutting a long story short, after a sort of 10 year detour in management and technical management and product and all of that good stuff, just coming across Ethereum was this computing in this resource constrained environment. I thought, I can do that, I know how to do that. And I was surrounded by software engineers who had only ever worked with managed code, who had effectively a modern PC is effectively unlimited resources and had never seen hexadecimal and any of this stuff. And I was looking at EVM OPCOs and thinking, I know this, I can do this. And it just seemed very familiar and attractive. So that was the kind of initial hook that grabbed me and made me think, yeah, this is really fascinating. **Speaker A:** Yeah. You know, sometimes it's hard for me to have these kinds of conversations about the entry into Ethereum with people like you who entered at a time when things were still so young and still so unknown. And you know, I have, you know, either the privilege or the curse, depending on your timescale of entering in the 2021 cycle. And, you know, just something I so vividly remember at the time and believe until now is just feeling like, oh, we, once we reach the merge, like the important parts of Ethereum have been de risk and like a lot of that is about, well, we can talk about Etherium when we get there. But I just, for me there was always this sense of like, oh my God, like look at what we can already build and look at what's coming. And that's why, you know, the Ethereum roadmap has always really excited me and you know, I think some of the ways that our brain works together, like I'm a huge believer in enterprise and big business and so what, Ethereum has to work for those kinds of groups too. But anyway, I'm rambling so well, it. **Speaker B:** Is a little bit pertinent. I mean, you know, when, when I joined in 2016, I reckon you could learn what was going on not only in Ethereum, basically in all of Crypto by spending an hour to two hours on Reddit every day. And you know that you'd be across everything at that point. It really was so much smaller than it is now. And I Found that very attractive. I am a bottom up kind of person. If you kind of look at what I've written, you can see I'm only really interested in the nuts and bol. So I'm not really interested in the sort of end product so much and getting to that bottom layer. There aren't that many industries you can do that. You come to AI today or something like that and it's already, the foundation is already built and it's all massively complex, it's huge. And getting into that base level is hard. And I felt, you know, this blockchain thing was something when I saw it and I thought this is so early and I can start from the foundation and work upwards, which is rare in industries these days. So that just chimed with me as well. **Speaker A:** No, I mean, I think for me like Ethereum is two things, has always meant two things and one of it is we haven't talked about yet, right, but it is like distributed computing and like how do we create systems that are like truly decentralized and like there's a lot of interesting stuff down that. But the other thing is like to me Ethereum is like almost very simply the logical conclusion of Open Source and the Open source movement. And it is this like manifestation of not only is this like backbone of the Internet, something that we have all built together, but it is something that anyone in the future can deploy on and we will all benefit from it. And so, you know, I think that my background real quick is I studied computer science at Stanford from 2009 to 2013 and then never did computer science professionally. But, but so like I, I learned like just what Open Source means even for the professional community. And to see like first Red hat was, was what Open source could produce and like Ethereum is like no, no, no, this is really like the end game of Open Source. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, that's yet another attractive aspect of the whole thing. I mean I spent so much time at Hitachi arguing about intellectual property and all of that and as a company policy they were very reluctant to use open source software because it's always like who do I yell at when it goes wrong? I mean you always had to have, if you were supporting a product, you had to have an accountable entity who was going to fix it for you. And that just doesn't exist in Open sour. And so it was all proprietary, all in house. Whereas I constitutionally am very much drawn to this open community and you know, again, a bit of a contrarian. For years I was the only person in the European Headquarters who ran Linux as a daily driver. I had to find obscure plugins so that I could use the exchange server. And you know, all of this and everyone was exchanged, exchanging Office documents, Microsoft Office documents and the solutions available on Linux in those days were very, very poor. But you know, just bloody mindedness kind of made me wrestle with this and just make it work and eventually it just got too exhausting, but I capitulated and I run Windows today. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But yeah, absolutely. And I love that, you know, Teku, that we, we do and, and the book. Right. I mean technically consensus owns the copyright on, on, on all my writing. That's in my contract. It's unavoidable in a modern employment contract. You know, they, they own all my ip. But yeah, I spoke to lawyers and said look, I'm writing this thing and I spoke to Joe Lubin and I, I want to put a liberal license on it so people can take it, they can translate it, they can do, you know, lift the diagrams, use them, whatever. And I just want to make it open and transparent and freely available. And they were totally cool with that. And that was for me was, yeah, a joy, A real joy. **Speaker A:** Yeah. I think there's a lot of things that are really special about Ethereum and I think in its very nature the blockchain is that it's about composability, right. And, and that's what it enables and that's what makes it magical and cool and like by its very nature things have to be open source or else none of this can work. And so I think that, that you know, puts us in a very specific fundamental mindset. And so anyway, let's try to keep some structure. So you're at Hitachi, like what is the moment that how did you get over a consensus? And you know, for context, if 2017 where, correct me if I'm wrong, but we're at a point where consensus is like a pretty like real substantial company and you know, like while it's still small and still scrappy and they're still very much a risk, it's not running out of a garage. Is that correct? **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, yeah, Funny story really. So I mean when I was at Hitachi in my final in 2016, I was running sort of technical operations for our information security division. And so I had teams of people, you know, teams of pre sales people, teams of developers and so on and so on. And there came a point in early 16 where all the sales guys were coming back from client meetings saying look, Ben, our clients only want to talk about one thing. It's something called blockchain. Do you know what it is? I have no idea what this thing is. I did some research. I had previously read the bitcoin white paper and thought, yeah, it's kind of interesting, but I don't know what to do with this information. **Speaker A:** Did you have the same reaction that I did when I first read it? Which was okay, Internet money. Cool. **Speaker B:** Yes, very cool. **Speaker A:** Moving on. **Speaker B:** I downloaded a wallet, I made an address, I looked at getting hold of some bitcoin. **Speaker A:** You went way further than me. **Speaker B:** But yeah, at that time the only application was like Silk Road. And it just seemed, knowing what I know now, I mean bitcoin was like $300 at the time. But this was pre, this is about 2014 or something. But anyway, it just seemed to me, yeah, didn't, didn't really get it. But coming to 2016 and coming across Ethereum, all the use cases our clients were wanting to discuss and all of that, it just was exciting at that point. So I just got sucked further and further down this rabbit hole. So Consensys had just established the London office in summer 2017. I was more and more spending all evenings, all weekends doing Ethereum stuff. I'd really lost interest completely in the day job at that stage and was just exploring what was going on. The ecosyste and I'd done, I'd written some things about Ethereum and Consensys was hiring busily at the time. So it was about 350 people when I joined and grew to about 1200 over the next nine months. We were hiring like two people a day. I mean it was absolutely mad. I spent my first like four months there just interviewing people. It was mad. **Speaker A:** They're like, tell me about the culture. And you're like, I cannot. **Speaker B:** It was, yeah, changing. Changing so much. Yeah, yeah, but so funny, funny story. My last business trip for Hitachi, I was, I got the offer from consensus and I was, you know, this, leaving beside a 20 year career, leaving that behind, you know, very comfortable trajectory to retirement. And yeah, all I had to do was wear a suit and sit behind a desk doing Excel spreadsheets for 10 years and you know, I'd do well and going to this scrappy startup, at least in my mind, was very difficult decision and I agonized about it. So my last business trip for it actually I took a flight to Denmark and coming back on the plane, there's a British Airways business magazine. I pulled it out and there was vitalik on the front cover. And I thought, I read about that and flicked through it and there was, Joe Lubin appeared as well. I thought it's a sign. I took this thing and I came home and showed it to my wife and said right, we're doing this. So that was that something. **Speaker A:** So again my background, very quickly after Stanford I, my day of graduation I got in the car and drove to St. Louis which is, was the headquarters of Anheuser Busch in Bev, which is you know one of the, it is the largest beer company in the world. It's you know, in the US it's Budweiser, Bud Light and the, in Europe it's Beck's, it's Stella, it's, it's between 40 and 50% of all beer worldwide. And so you know I'm, I was in first like technology innovation and then in treasury cash management and then in like financial planning and analysis and like, you know, so before I came to crypto and the blockchain like I like really came from you know, these, these huge scale backgrounds of like how do you organize people, how do you organize systems? Like how do you think in like scales that you know, like for example my responsibility at Anheuser Busch at the cash desk was $20 billion a year for U.S. and Canada. And like these scales just make like our entire industry like seem as small as it is, you know. And so I think people definitely like you, who had a real career, I only had five years of it, just have a different perspective on what it takes to build resilient companies and teams and institutions. And we care about that not because we're evil centralizers, because that's how you create good strong technology or at least that's what I believe. And so one I was. Do you have any reflections from your career at like a big company and then coming into this like pretty chaotic industry? And two. Yeah. Can you share those with us if you have any? **Speaker B:** Yeah, it's a very open ended question. I mean so leaving Hitachi and landing at Consensus was, was a shock in every way. It felt like sort of therapy. I went from a 350,000 person company to a 350 person company. I went from a highly structured hierarchical organization to what was self consciously at that point trying to become a flat leaderless organization. Consensus has moved away from that since. But at that time that was very much the ethos. I came from fairly rigid expectations on what I would do with my time to an environment whereas a lot of autonomy where we had basically freedom to Carve our own path through, through the, the mess. And honestly I thrived. I mean it was, it was a joy. Absolutely loved it. I, I think it was hard for people who had less experience, who weren't so self confident in, in navigating their way through things. I think, you know, college graduate, you know, people at the start of their careers, very little career development, very little handholding, very little mentoring. You basically had to have the confidence and the knowledge and the skills, you know, the soft skills to navigate your way. But, but this was fine. Yeah. Coming from an environment in Hitachi Europe which was sort of sales led, I was one of the least connected people in, in that environment. I was a technical person, not expected to be sort of front of house and you know my linked, you know, just a few hundred and all of that. But you know, coming into Blockchain world I was like a connectivity superstar. I mean I was building links with everybody all over the place just from this kind of skills I'd learned. And it was sort of effortless, which was nice, you know. Yeah, I think, you know, dev world of devs that perhaps doesn't come so naturally. So that was great. So yeah, I think. **Speaker A:** No, no, I mean I think that's very well put to a very open ended question which is, you know, the later you come into blockchain, which is an extremely unstructured space with just like more you know, career reps under your belt, like the easier it is to navigate the career portion. And so you know, I think, I think that's, that is what it is. So anyway, moving on. So you're at consensus and I think based on the literature or my understanding is that Techu is the Ethereum consensus client for enterprise. And even going a little further back in your career, you worked on the technology that is now known as Quorum, which is the JP Morgan private blockchain. So I am like very curious to kind of hear your thoughts and your experience on what it's like to work with like really anything that you would call an enterprise. And like how I would define that acutely is like anyone with a legal or compliance department that would be pushing back against the fundamental idea of even working with you. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I'm going to subvert the question. So story time again. Because of my background at Hitachi, so my day to day job have been dealing with enterprise. That's all we did all day, every day. And I've worked with every bank in the city of London and plenty of institutional players over the years, you know, peer companies and all of that. So coming into consensus, the expectation is that that would effectively be my role. And we were building Enterprise Ethereum. The Enterprise Ethereum alliance has started. Consensys was a big player in that. We had just started building the Enterprise Ethereum client which was called Pantheon at the time. It's now called Besu. Lots of private network support. And you're right, I mean, after a couple of years we acquired the quorum from J.P. morgan. And so that was my expectation, that was kind of the company's expectation. And so I joined in October and I spent the first three months working on Quorum and you know, visiting. I spent time with Hewlett Packard and you know, big banks and all of this stuff, just doing the rounds, wearing a suit, shaking hands, handing out business cards and all of that. And I hated it. I just hated it. I loved being at consensus and I hated the work. And over that New Year period I did a lot of self reflection and I, I remember going out for a long walk with my wife and saying, look, I, I'm not sure I haven't made a mistake here. Everything here is enterprise focused. And that's, that's not what brought me into the space. What brought me into space was passion for the decentralized community, the open source. All the things we spoke about earlier. And I, I need to tell consensus this, I need to tell my colleagues that that's what I need. I must work on. And, and, and if, if they're not up for that, then, then I'm gonna have to leave and we'll find something else. And so I went with some trepidation back to business. It was Pegasus in those days, that was the protocol engineering group in, in consensus and said to my, I mean, what passed for a lead at Pegasus, Dan Heyman, at that time, we were non hierarchical, remember? And, and I said to him, you know, I can't work on this enterprise stuff. It's not what drives me. I'm not excited by it. I understand that's a direction of travel. That's a business imperative. Will you allow me to set up a mainnet practice? And they were super great about it. So this is fantastic. Yeah, we didn't know how to do this and now you mentioned it, you're ideal. Get on with it. And so that, and so that was the beginning of January 18th and ever since I've been fully focused on Mainnet and have got this massive blind spot where enterprises so might deflect some of your kind of questions around this and you want to talk about how to sell Ethereum to enterprise, I have no idea whatsoever. So that's not my world. **Speaker A:** I think that's like incredibly interesting. And you know, as you were telling your story, I definitely thought kind of the resolution with consensus was going to be along the lines of like, Ben, totally understand that like we want you to be able to build what you want to build here. Like right now we have a business need in this enterprise stuff and so like, you know, help us like over the next year and we'll transition you over to the projects you want. But you know, welcome to like Ethereum or crypto or whatever consensus where like things just happen like a lot quicker and a lot more frankly than even that. **Speaker B:** Yeah, absolutely. And you know what gives me real joy now, Rex, is that five years later the whole company has now pivoted, be fully mainnet open. We basically don't do enterprise anymore at all. So this for me has been a huge win. But I just followed that wasn't strategic on my part, I was just following my heart. But I'm super glad to see it. **Speaker A:** No, well, yeah, again I think that's very cool and a lesson for a lot of people out there, like myself included. But I also think that you can look at the questions that I sent you earlier back when we're done. But how I was going to move this conversation was essentially to my belief, which is the end game for like blockchain enterprise. Like is Etherium right The at the end of the day like it and there's not really a purpose of using blockchain technology unless like you're settling down to Ethereum and like that's a provocative big statement, like we can have debates about that, that's fine. But like I just truly believe that like whatever J.P. morgan's doing, like whatever any of the banks or the hedge funds or whatever, like you're either going to be just like some like centralized app which like you might as well use aws. It's like a lot easier and cheaper or like you're going to like care about these properties and like you're going to be like an app chain or a roll up and be associated with Ethereum. And so I guess like I need to know more about consensus. I didn't realize that like consensus had done like a pivot off of kind of enterprise entirely. But you know that that is like why I'm here and like the future that I believe in. And like I think if you believe that Ethereum is inevitable, like I do like that that is how this all works. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, absolutely. **Speaker A:** Yeah. **Speaker B:** I think Enterprise Ethereum just never made sense to me. But also Enterprise working on Mainnet Ethereum was difficult for all sorts of reasons. So I think we've got a huge opportunity with rollups and they can offer the features like privacy and so forth and permissioned networks, but built on the secure base layer of Ethereum, which, which actually makes sense finally. So I hope that will become a fruitful area. I think I'm sure it will over years to come. It will. It is inevitable, as you rightly say. But yeah, yeah, that's for others to, to, to work on, not I. **Speaker A:** And one of like the things that I, you know, one of the analogies that I use to try to express at least like where we are in this technology is like, look like, imagine it's 2004 or whatever and we're at Harvard, right? And I say, I'm going to give you a billion dollars and you can go hire Mark Zuckerberg and like, here's the business plan for Facebook and like you guys are going to go build it. Here's the one catch. HTTP has not been invented yet. Like, we're really just at like the primary stages where all you can do is send like one character or one emoji at a time. Like, I don't really care how much of a head start I give you. Like, what you build, like, is just not going to work in the same way that it will work like when the protocol analogy is done. Right. And so I like really believe that like we're, we're at a, we're at a very unfortunate place where like regulation and like a lot of like political nonsense is keeping enterprise out. But, but like as a technologist and like as people that are working on the protocol, it's kind of a little bit like, all right, well, we're not done anyway. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I keep reminding people that this is a decades long development effort. This is not months or years crypto or you know, crypto economics. The whole system will not achieve its potential, full potential, for decades. And you know, I've been around long enough. I, I was reflecting on sending my first email sometime in 1987, I think, sitting in front of a green screen monitor at college. And it was ex. Unbelievably clunky and primitive. And yet in, you know, less than 40 years, 35 years, I now carry basically the world's knowledge around on, on a device in my pocket and can instantly access any of it in full color and sound. I mean the, it's just extraordinary how things move. And we are in the early 90s stage of Internet in terms of blockchain. You know, we are at the using Gopher to find things out. You know, we haven't even reached HTTP yet. You know, I remember using Mosaic web browser and seeing my first picture on the Internet and whoa, you know, and we're not even there with blockchain yet. I mean it's the, the trajectory from here is, is up only in terms of technological capability and we just as I could not possibly imagine in 1987 having a device that's always connected, that I could, you know, message people around the world instantly on. I can't imagine how, how this will be in, in 20, 30 years time, but it will be fundamental to the way we live our lives. Just as, you know, our, the Internet our phones are today. **Speaker A:** Well, I mean normally I would like kind of wait to get this like Galaxy Brain to the end of the podcast, but since we're here, might as well hover over it a little bit, I guess. You know, for me like part, you know, there's like very specific things in the Ethereum roadmap that are ahead of us that are like, we can go on YouTube and watch lectures about like, we know that they're coming. And like the things that I'm referring to, not to be coy, right, are like dank sharding and light clients and you know, basically ZK access into like this state so that, you know, and we, I won't bore the audience with explaining what all those things mean, but point is is that like, if you understand like those things and like a few more upgrades that are coming, like you can start to really see like what Ethereum is, right? And like for me it is like very, very simple, right? Like when we've been inventing these communication technology, like going back to Gutenberg, but like, let's just say radio, video, Internet, right? Where we're transferring like text and then photos and then video. And like what Ethereum is, is we're figuring out how to transfer value, right? And so and, and like have identity and like in this world that is falling apart, whether it's you, your country in the UK or mine in the US like absolutely just like falling apart. Like I, we're watching our systems of coordinating like not working anymore. And so like as the Internet is to your point, like I don't have quite as, as many years as you do, but like I remember like getting in fights with my mom over like the Internet connection because like I wanted to play Warcraft 3 and she wanted to like use the phone. But like I just for me like the more you understand about Ethereum, the more you understand like this is just like how the world works with like computers and the Internet of things and digital identity and like this is just like how. I don't know, to me it's just, it's pretty clear. And so anyway, I'm rambling for sure, but my question back to you is like what, when you think about like this 10 plus year journey of what like Crypto and Ethereum is and what the world looks like because of what that enables, like what are some of the outlines of the world that you can conceive? **Speaker B:** Interesting question. So you're asking kind of how do I see things in 10 years from now in terms of how Ethereum will have changed things? **Speaker A:** Yeah, but like in a much more long winded and pretentious way. **Speaker B:** Got it. Yeah. It's hard to predict, right? I mean we get this wrong all the time and you know, predicting Defi Summer and all of these things, I mean it shows how incredibly prescient Vitalik was in the white paper. Most of the stuff he outlined there has come to be in one shape or form or another. What would I like to see? I would like to see financial autonomy being much more accessible across the world. This is a dimension we haven't talked about, but it's the kind of what is the social or the impact dimension of blockchain technology? Technology. I mean I love the tech, it's cool and so forth, but it has a purpose. And what's the purpose? And for me one of the big things has always been about financial inclusion and we're not there yet. Partly because the bandwidth, the cost of transacting on Ethereum is just not at a level that the people who need to use the technology can use the technology, but that I'm convinced with our scaling roadmap that will, will change. And depending on how effectively we manage to bring that about then, then I would like to see a much, I'd like to see it reaching the, the excluded. That for me is a big deal if, if we remain a gambling game for whales and wealthy people for the next 10 years, you know, I, I'm, I'm out, I'm, you know, it's fun while it lasts, but it's not, it's not why I'm here. You know, I, I actually would, would like to do something which is world changing, which actually liberates the, the oppressed in in some meaningful way. **Speaker A:** Yeah. And honest, I'm not sure which specific oppressed you're referring to, and I'm not even sure it matters, but I feel the exact same way. And like, for me, like, you know, behind this, behind the curtain. Right. My fiance is Russian. Like, moved here when she was 15, but her whole. Or moved to the US when she was 15, but her whole family is still in Moscow. Like, I'm understanding the consequences of, like, geopolitics that you have no ability or influence or, like, even, like, desire to be a part of. And, like, how it can, like, tragically transform your life. And, you know, it doesn't have to be something like this, like, topical and new. Right. Like, we've been doing this to Iran and for generations. And it's just, you know, I think for me, I would totally, totally agree with everything you said, except for actually it was on some bankless episode. But Vitalik blew my mind when he. He dropped, like, the fun fact that the, like, he was in South America or maybe Argentina, and he was like, so everybody there is using crypto to store their wealth. Can you guess how they're doing it? And, like, the bankless guys were like, oh, I don't know, uniswap the ledgers. And they're like, no, they just used. Yeah. And so, like, part of me is a little bit like, you know, what? For the people that really do need this, it's there in the powerful, impactful ways. And, like, whether we're talking about, like, being able to, like, flee or, like, send money back to, like, like, devastated regions, or we're just talking about, like, you know, reserve protocol is like, a great example where in Latin America, people, like, hundreds of thousands of people are using an app that is backed by, like, E.U. s or whatever their stablecoin is to protect their wealth from inflation. Like, that's a real use for real people in South America that they're not really touching the chain, but they are, like, for the ways that matter, you know? And so I do agree with you that there's so much more to come, but, like, I am. The more I travel and the more I, like, learn about the people that are, like, doing God's work and not just creating more, like, proof of liquidity chains of, like, ponzonomics. Like, the more encouraged I am about this space. **Speaker B:** Yeah, you're absolutely right, Rex. There is a quiet revolution, and we're much more interested in the. The no crazy stuff and the scandalous stuff. But actually, it would be good to surface more of this stuff about the, the reality of how crypto is, is reaching parts of the world which, which are not mainstream. I gather that the, the biggest user of crypto in the world is, is Vietnam in terms of its population, proportion of the population using crypto. I don't know what they're using it for but I, that's fascinating. I'd like to hear more about that. **Speaker A:** Yeah, no, and I, I, what I, I say to all my American people and I'm pretty sure that this is relevant to basically anyone in the developed or like over developed economy which is, you know, crypto's like real use cases are just not like applicable to us. And so like we can only really understand this through the lens of like technology and through like speculation. But like you know, the like Satoshi's true revolution is like already underway to be, you know, romantic about it. **Speaker B:** Yeah, that's encouraging to know and it's good to remind oneself of this from time to time. That's motivational for sure. **Speaker A:** For sure. So let's talk about actually working on Ethereum and like what it's like to be developing like at such a core piece of the protocol. And so I guess first for the audience, can you just in like two or three sentences explain what a client, what a consensus client is, what an execution client is? And then I guess like my follow my next question for that is going to be what is it like developing these pieces of technology in conjunction with independent teams that are developing the exact same technology but different? **Speaker B:** Yeah, sure. So the network is sustained by individuals or organizations who run nodes, we call them. So I run software. Node is just software. So I'm running nodes here at home. I've got a consensus node and an execution node. And these nodes, they talk to other nodes on the network. So this is why we have this, this network. And the idea is it, it's as global as possible, it's distributed as possible and it runs across as many different types of hardware and in as many different types of network as possible to be as diverse as possible. So that's the goal. The consensus node, which is like Teku and there are four others that are currently sort of production. So there's Teku, there's Prism, there's Lighthouse, there's Lodestar and Nimbus. They, they are responsible for coming to agreement on the state of the network. So they talk to each other, they exchange messages constantly, they build blocks and they decide what is the, the, what are the blocks that, that remain in, in the blockchain. Now those Blocks contain transactions. So if people are sending coins or exchanging on userswap or whatever, those are user transactions, they're handled by the execution client. For historical reasons, these are separate currently. So you have the execution client which is maintaining the record, the ledger of everybody's balance and the state of every contract and all of that on the blockchain. And so now we've done the merge, we've got Ethereum onto proof of stake. These two clients, the consensus client and the execution client, work in lockstep with each other. They're connected together and collaborate to build this chain, which is consensus blocks and execution blocks together. **Speaker A:** So just to like, kind of recap on that, is it fair to say that the, if you think of like Ethereum as. I don't know, this term is very polarizing. But if you think of Ethereum as the world computer or, you know, if a shared computing platform, that the execution client is that like computing space, whereas the consensus client is the like system that like kind of protects it with this crypto economic security that is derived from proof of stake. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, that's a reasonable distinction. And we used to talk in terms of Eth1 nodes. So they were, they're effectively exactly the same as they used to be. They have been for the last seven, eight years with proof of work turned off. And what we've done is we've taken this proof of stake layer, which is these kind of eth2 clients, and we bolted them together so it no longer runs this proof of work algorithm to secure the chain, but now plugs into the proof of stake layer to do so. And there are, I should say, the number of execution clients. There's Geth is the big one, but there's Besu and nethermind and Aragon as well. So we have like nine clients, as. **Speaker A:** You said, for historical reasons, and we're not going to get into it. It's not even historical reasons, it's two clients. And now to be an Ethereum node, like I run a rocket pool node, which is just a regular Ethereum node, and what that means is I run both of these clients together at the same time and they communicate and together they constitute a node. And were you kind of hinting that maybe in the future a, like a node would have a single client or do you pursue, do you think that we'll always have these like two kind of independent distinctions and then like two sets of options that, that you'll be able to like pick and choose from? **Speaker B:** Yeah, a bit of product management alpha, I suppose I Mean, I see a direction of travel where, where the two become unified. I mean it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to maintain this distinction between the execution client and the consensus client. And we maintain it in the specs and there's a logical distinction but effectively they are tightly coupled today and at consensus we have a Java execution client Basu, we have a Java consensus client, Teku and we talk about converging them over a period of time so that they become less and less separate and eventually might just run as a single instance on the jvm. For me that makes a lot of sense. Great user experience and so on the. And terrific for the sort of individual home staker, right, because it's one piece of software and you just, you're just running one thing and it just does everything for the more sophisticated user or the large staking enterprise stakers, institutional stakers, they prefer the modularity so they can do failover and you know, have separation of concerns and so on. And so they might run actually a stack with, with execution clients, consensus clients, validator clients and remote signing software. And then there's all the MEV stuff as well and all of that. So we try and keep it modular. Techu, you can kind of. **Speaker A:** Well, speaking on behalf of Ben and not on behalf of consensus or on behalf of like any specific product roadmap like what do you think the appropriate thing for Ethereum is, is to build towards. **Speaker B:** It's an interesting question. I haven't thought about that at all. And one of the things which I really fascinates me about this space is that we are prepared to explore all these different directions. Right. So. And there are some really interesting experiments going on with, you know, Geth implementing a minimal consensus client so that I can't remember exactly what the rationale is for it now, but these lines are getting blurred all the time. Aragon is working on something similar as well, putting consensus client into Aragon. But people are exploring all sorts of different options and there's multiplicity of stuff like your rocket pool node or the DAPP node or different ways where you can just get a bundled, you know, press a button with a GUI and. And it will spin up a staking environment for you. All of this stuff is, is terrific and I didn't really envisage it when we started out on this journey like four or five years ago. And I just love the inventiveness of this space. So I don't want to constrain it by saying, oh, this is. There is one way to do this, and this is. This is the vision. And we're not going to deviate from it because people are endlessly inventive. There's one thing I've learned in this space is that people are extraordinarily creative and, yeah, let's embrace it. **Speaker A:** And I think, like, again, the more you understand about the Ethereum roadmap, the more you realize that there are really important changes that we need to make that are going to require some, like, major, major redesigns. And like, the one off the top of my head is like, single slot finality, but, like, there's a ton of them. Like, Vertical Trees is another one. And so, you know, I think that at any of these, like, turning points, you know, the merge was the big one, but we still have these, like, major turning points to make. Some, like, really, like, like, thoughtful design changes. And like, maybe we decide that this is too much complexity. It's a historical reason that we have two clients. Let's try to unify them all. Or maybe we decide, like, yes, it's complexity, but, like, because we know that all five of the each clients, like, all these permutations work, that means that we do have, like, a more resilient system. And so, like, yeah, you touched on some good points. **Speaker B:** I mean, it's blessing and curse, right? I mean, we've ended up with this, a lot of legacy stuff. I mean, this whole thing going through the merge, you know, so this is what I'm trying to document as I write and I just continually, just like, great segue. **Speaker A:** So, yeah, so let's talk about the eth2 book. And as I said when we started, like, that is like, how I originally know you and how I have, like, gained so much, like, respect for what you're doing. Because for, for, you know, I'll let you explain it in your own words. Can you please describe to us, like, what is the ETH2 book? **Speaker B:** Yeah, we shouldn't call it that, really. I call it Upgrade. I host it@eth2book.info which was a bit of a dig at the Ethereum foundation when they told us all we're not allowed to say eth2 anymore. That was my petty revenge. But I call it upgrading Ethereum because it's about fundamentally, initially about Ethereum's transition to proof of stake. So you're somebody who writes about Ethereum and you've tried to gather information and put it together in your inevitable Ethereum site, which is awesome. I mean, what incredible resource. It's a gold mine there. And I'M trying to do much the same. I mean, my observation over the years was that information is scattered, it's fragmented all over the place, the quality is very inconsistent and it's very poorly maintained and stuff goes out of date within three to six months in this ecosystem. So if you're reading a document that's over three months old, you're like, well, is it still true? Is it not true? You've got no idea. And I tried to maintain for a while a sort of curated list of good resources to go to, but it just, you know, the bit rot on that was high and my passion really was to write the comprehensive work on this, which would be consistent in terms of quality, but also comprehensive and also well maintained, which is a massive rod for my own back. But what I wanted to do was not only to explain what we do, you know, how does the protocol work today, but how did we get here and why? And for me the why question is really important. So many design decisions are informed by sort of nebulous Ethereum related goals which are almost sort of, they're sort of folklore, right? They're sort of collective agreement, they're in the air, but they're very rarely stated, sort of written, you know, documented anywhere. But we sort of implicitly understand them as core devs. But, but in two, three, four years time, when the next generation comes along, will they share that law? So I'm trying to sort of document the reason that we made this trade off. Why are we using a hashing routine that's half the speed, less than half the speed that a good hash would be? Merkalization. I mean it's terrifically inefficient. Well, we're doing it because that makes light clients really, really efficient and you know, there's stuff like that and so yeah, just trying to bring it all together with rationale and I, I almost feel like I'm too late. I mean I, I started in earnest about a year, just over a year ago and already stuff is fading from my memory and documents are sort of like dropping out of sight and you know, people are not around who, who were involved and I'm feeling like already losing some of the early insights and things. But try trying to capture them in any case. So yeah, this is, this is my quest. It's been on the, it's been going on the back burner for, for a year and a half or so. Year, yeah, just under. But consensus has been super supportive of me writing this. It's a passion project for me, is no value to consensus as an organization to speak of. **Speaker A:** But that's not, that's just objectively not true. And I think so. Like, I think just to again, give the audience just like a little more context from how so when you go to, as Ben said, eth2.info like the way you experience this book or why you would be looking at this book is because you are trying to understand like how Ethereum actually works without digging into code. And before this resource, I promise you, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out a lot of these questions that are super basic. But also, for example, everybody knows that maybe, I'd say probably 50% of the people know that an epoch is 32 slots and once every epoch, every validator votes once and a vote is called an attestation. That's pretty basic. I'd say a good decent chunk of people know that. But if you want to know why or how or how does Ethereum decide which validators are going to test to which slots? And there's really not a way for you to understand that. And like, look, I think like what you're doing has like huge like applications to, you know, developers that like want to come work for or build on top of or like contribute to consensus in some sort of way. But like, for me it's like why this book is so cool. It's like ideological, right? Which is. It is so cheap and easy to say like, oh, it's all open source, it's all out there, anyone can read the code. Like, like, like that. Then you can trust it. That makes it trustless. **Speaker B:** Yeah. **Speaker A:** And like, come on, like, I went to whatever, maybe the best computer science school in the world and I studied computer science and I took Intro to Number Theory from Professor Dan Bone. I could not audit any of this at all, you know, and just like it's so important for this to have any value that like, like we have like in ramps into people understanding what's going on and like to, to show people that like this is a system that makes sense and like that they can like create we you then like what you're doing is creating trustlessness and like the way that like actually matters. And so, you know, again, I. That's not a question, that's just, I guess that's like a pushback to you that like, how dare you say that what you're doing has no value to consider? **Speaker B:** Yeah, well, yeah, we have to distinguish consensus the company, which is what I meant. But the. I, yeah, I essentially I'm writing it for myself, right? This is a niche I've got to scratch. And you know, I find myself, you know, maybe 30 years ago I could have contributed to the cutting edge of blockchain research. But you know, cognitive decline is a thing. And these days I, you know, I do what I can and for me, you know, I want to leave something substantial behind. And this is, this is it for me. So that's the main reason. But you know, if other people derive value from it, that is super cool. I'm hoping that people who, for some people it will be that entry. You know, when I first got into, when I first discovered blockchain stuff, I picked up a pre print. It was on the online a PDF of. I can't even remember who the authors were, but it was about digital currency and it talked about blockchain stuff. It had a brief chapter on Ethereum and a mention of proof of stake and that just, it led me through by the hand and it captivated me. This mentioned a little mention of proof of stake that had all been about mining equipment and all of that. And then it said, there is an idea. We can cut out the hardware, just remove that and virtualize the hardware as a stake in the system. That captured me at that point and stayed with me and drove me to begin the TECU project and help get Ethereum to the merge and all of that. And maybe it will have some useful effect. My writing will in turn have some useful effect on capturing somebody else's imagination down the line. That would be super. **Speaker A:** I mean again, you and I are at very different points in our career and what we're trying to do. But, but you know, like a very concrete motivating factor into like when I was like creating Twitter content and like, you know, between you and me and the audience, like, I stopped creating Twitter content because like I'm not willing to continue invest like my brand and my career in like such an unstable platform as it's become. And so like another selling point for Ethereum, right? But Soapbox for another time, like, like, like why I was creating that content and decided to move it over to its own website was because like I really, really believe that every single one of my friends who like work for Facebook or you know, used to work for Google and went to like business school and now like are doing like that, that kind of routes who like really can't even talk to me about crypto because it becomes like too heated and emotional and how they think that this is all like, like voodoo in a scam. Like I very much believe that, you know, whether it's like two or five or 10 years, like they'll realize that this is inevitable and like I just want to have the resources like ready for them to get up to speed so like we can go out there and like we ready to start companies or like whatever needs to happen. Like, I just am creating resources to get like, like my guys up to speed when it's time, you know, and that's like always been my driving motivation. And you know, I, I don't know how much that like resonates with you, but I do think that in order to be crazy enough to like build these kinds of, this kind of content for no financial purpose, like you do need to be driven by something. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It is driven us. I, I think I, I don't think too much about who is going to read this. I mean I'm bad, bad, bad product manager. You know, I have no user Persona that I'm, I'm thinking of as I sit there writing. I'm writing for me and I write what I think I would like to read and if people find that useful, then you know that that's great and I, that is definitely propels me in that there's something I had in mind. But it's gone now. But it's a big project. It is. I'm doing so much. I mean I was trying to find out today historical, right? So the initial version of the consensus protocol was called Immediate Message Driven Ghost and now we use LMD Latest Message Driven Ghost. The Internet cannot remember what Immediate Message Driven Ghost was, but I feel it's an important part of the narrative. Why, why did we take it up? Why did we abandon it? You know, it briefly was going to be Ethereum's consensus protocol. I spent most of today trying to track down resources on IMD and for a while it was called Reversive Proximity to justification, which. And just trying to spending a whole day winkling out this kind stuff without resorting to have to having to DM Vitalik is, you know, you have to be somewhat mentally unbalanced. **Speaker A:** No, and I think like you are just reinforcing your point even more because like again like I consider myself like incredibly well researched in this stuff and I didn't know that that even like I thought it started with LMD ghost, you know. And so I just, I think that you know there's so much value and like for historical purposes. But again like also what I just wax poetic on, on like the like fundamental like properties of like what open source, like, need not only like means, but has to actually like be in practice in order for it to have any value. And like, you know, if you've followed me online at all over the last six months, you know that like I'm a huge believer in like Sriram Kanan and what he's doing with Eigen Layer. And like I really think that like, why, why that's amazing is because it's really like predicated on the fact that like the point of Ethereum is to create like trustless trust and we should make eth the asset of trustless trust and then build from there. But like, it's people like you that give like Ethereum that big base case like, like, like that base property and like give that bedrock to the value that like people like Sriram and then the next generation of builders can build on top of. And so, you know, with that, with these last couple minutes here, again, I just feel so honored and so, so thankful for the opportunity to like, let you know how much your work means to me and how much it's like meant to me and just to say you. Thank. Thank you. **Speaker B:** Thank you, Rex. I appreciate it. Be sure to buy a copy when it comes out in print, which is never going to happen, I think. **Speaker A:** But that's the problem. It's like I'll buy it and print like the second that Ethereum stops coming out with like new like hard forks. But I, by that time, like, I don't know, I don't know if that's like a time to hope for or time to be afraid of. **Speaker B:** Exactly. It's. Yeah, Revi, every, every fork that we do. It took me like three weeks to revise the thing for capella and the more it grows, I. There is a PDF version. It's like 320 pages so far and I reckon I'm maybe half done. I mean it's, it's going to be enormous. **Speaker A:** No, and I think, yeah, it, I think it's an incredible project already and like, it is like ambitious because it will only grow in scope as again we have talked about over and over again, like Ethereum is not done and continuing to grow and that's something we celebrate. But, but Ben, just so you know, like, it's going to only get worse from here. **Speaker B:** Yep, I understood. **Speaker A:** Well again, Ben, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. And for the folks out there listening, any, any like social media or anything. **Speaker B:** You want to shout out, Twitter is my happy place. Crypto Twitter. People complaining about it. But for me, that's where you'll find me. You can DM me. DMs are open, Benjaminian, underscore XY Z or Z, depending on your preference. And yeah, happy to hear from folk. And yeah, see you there, Ben. **Speaker A:** Thank you so much and talk to you soon. **Speaker B:** Thank you, Rick. It's been a pleasure to speak to you, it really has.