Joined actually Ethereum because of a governance in Dallas, so that is still what keeps me interested in this space. Ethereum is an institutional technology on a scale of centuries.

I've been thinking recently about the minimum viable Ethereum foundation in the sense of minimum viable products and founders speak. Like, what is the essence of the Ethanolong run? People on the streets often associate blockchain with scams. And if you have that image in your mind, you are reluctant to engage with that technology. That's reasonable. There's less money in democracy than there is in capital, obviously. Yeah. Governance can be profitable. And I think if it's profitable, I'm not sure if that is

In fact, we're just two people. So that as a disclaimer. Another disclaimer, I don't speak on behalf of the Freedom Foundation, but I'm glad to be talking about

That's exactly it. So that out of the fray. Yeah. I joined actually Ethereum because of a governance in Dallas. So that is still what keeps me interested in the space, space, which is also my research subject at the University of Zurich where we just published a paper of on a digital democracy in Dallas, together with, Uwe Sedol, Clarissa Sone, and, Paminda. So, so that is sort of a side project of mine. My main job, at the Ethereum Foundation is with the academic secretariat. And the academic secretariat was really born out of, this ongoing activity of the academic grants around EF giving, small to medium grants to researchers to go about research topics offered around the layer one, very technical work, very core to the weekly, monthly priorities of, colleagues at Ethereum Foundation. And then, earlier this year, I think, the idea was to do more as an Ethereum Foundation to realize that the technology has matured and, there is more need for guiding the ecosystem to priorities. And, that's taking many shapes and forms across the Ethereum Foundation and its ecosystem development cluster, but the academic circuit in particular is, of course, looking at academic audiences. And we are actually looking at Ethereum as a socio technical system and looking beyond this very core layer one technical work, which is, of course, very important, and there will be continue there there are continue grants and, collaboration with technical research. But our secretariat looks at the socio technical system as a whole Right. Trying to identify the gaps, research that is not yet happening, connecting researchers, and just spreading the message to academic audiences outside our bubble that there are interesting research problems for them to pick up in the hope that we can have academia as a steward of Ethereum.

Well, a little bit. Yes. And, when I say there's funding, I really want to rephrase that into a call for co funding. I think Yeah. Ethereum is a powerful ecosystem of many aligned entities, and, academic research is often an afterthought. So here it goes. Please, everybody in the ecosystem, join us to co fund these dependencies in academic research because we all benefit from that. And the Ethereum Foundation, can do, coordination, can consolidate efforts, can do, you know, avoid free riding problems. When each of every one of us faces the same problem, let's say, all of layer two is face the same problem, No one individually has a strong incentive to to fund it. But, together, we should be concerned with these cross project, domains. And technical research is often quite specific to a certain product. But when it comes to governance topics, to social science related topics, even policy, legal theory, the culture of Ethereum, organizational theory, there are so many social science related topics that cons that where everybody benefits, and I think this is where the foundation and our team can co coordinate a co funding round with maybe a tiny bit of c funding of ours. But, ultimately, it is a collaborative effort of Ethereum aligned organizations, and we need your support. So Right. So you guys tend to look and plant the seeds for

Sure. I I can share my perspective Sure. On things as as a member of the ecosystem development cluster. VF has, now the protocol cluster, which is, most of the technical teams. We have the privacy cluster that includes, PSE, and other projects. And we have the ecosystem development cluster, which, has been there for a longer while, but more recently, James Smith and, the management team reoriented the cluster to to do more. And, I think this is, a much needed effort of EF showing more presence in the ecosystem. Everyone listening probably, has their experience of EF, and there was, I think, a need for more presence, more listening. I think more listening is something we can all agree on, that that EF should be out there and, sense what is going on in the ecosystem. Now when it comes to next steps of listening, I think there are different approaches and strategies what EF should do. There's a balance to strike between the subtraction, philosophy, the long term risk avoidance, and shepherding, shepherding, stewarding the Ethereum brand through, a bias to nonaction through the Ethereum Foundation. That is these are my words. That is one subjective interpretation of mine's of mine where I do see, value because, there's, Ethereum is an institutional technology on a scale of centuries. This is a long term effort, and the Ethereum Foundation exists only once. The brands, the rotation is incredibly valuable. So, one way of seeing the EF's role is this extremely risk risk averse entity that is doing everything it can to preserve this long term success of the protocol, while external entities that are not called Ethereum Foundation would be out there and trying different things, taking more risk, and they may fail. Now I think more recently, people came to the conclusion that it is time to dare more. Ethereum is mature. It is increasingly mature. It is more mature than many years ago. And it is a time where the Ethereum Foundation is able to dare more without jeopardizing the security, the decentralization, the independence, the neutrality of the the the technology. The credible neutrality ethos that is continues to be, the Infiniti nation's motto, I think, allows for more interaction, more bias to action. Although we continue to be concerned about what the EF's role is, and the Infiniti EcoDive plus has different teams with different priorities and different sort of audiences. And there is the academic secretariat. There is the institutional secretariat interfacing with larger NGOs, international organizations like UN organizations and governments. That's a very different stakeholder group than our enterprise team, our founder success team, who help small and medium businesses or corporations, just guide them to L2B or to all these other resources in this ecosystem and help them build their products while government and academic relations, require a very different level of assessing risks and neutrality. So there's no one size fits all strategy for Ethereum's ecosystem, and it's it's a big cluster of many individuals. But, yeah, I hope this helps to clarify some of the new directions we started

Yeah. I think that that observation is is correct. I share that. I think, there was a need to signal and actually be more available. And I think listening is a continuous exercise, which we have to do. We have yet to find the right balance between being out there and listening and then finding the right internal stakeholder to to pick up on that conversation and and do something about it. Yeah. As an ecosystem, as a decentralized ecosystem, it is a challenge when there is this, like, in a language term centralizing factor of the Ethereum Foundation, people outside the ecosystem assume it is the center of the ecosystem. Right. There needs to be the explanation of it's in fact not, and it just happens to be called like foundations in other ecosystems. Yeah. But, yeah, being there, listening is a necessary prerequisite to then abstracting away the most critical thing the f should do. I think, I've been thinking recently about the minimum viable Ethereum foundation Mhmm. In the sense of minimum viable products, in in founder speak. Like, what is the essence of the ETH in the long run? And its runway is of concern. Its strategic role is of concern. Being capture resistant as Ethereum enjoys adoption across DeFi and other industries is of concern. So, yeah, it continues to evolve.

Happy to. Yes. And, yeah, I think so my work with the University of Zurich, and its Center for Democracy Studies, started, shortly before I joined the Ethereum Foundation one year ago. We've presented the paper at Ethereum Zurich earlier this year and then at Davao, the European DAO workshop, which will happen again later this year, and we'll also have a second day with Metagoff for practitioners. So, would love to have you all there in winter tour later this year. DHWO twenty six DOROG is the name of the conference. And, the paper is really it's titled Digital Democracy in DOWUS. And, well, the conclusion, unsurprisingly, DAOs today. Darn. Shame. And but this is, I think, quite plausible. I think, DAOs are still very immature. We have a rudimentary technology. We have rudimentary understanding of decision making processes, and we have early stage communities using these three, sort of a triangle of technology, the logic implemented through technology, and and the user groups. And on the other hand, beyond crypto, we have had centuries, thousands of years of human coordination. Democracy is a bit younger, still long, long track record of decision making. Cooperatives have insights into decision making processes, deliberation techniques, and public governance is very relevant. Also, private companies and their different governance mechanisms could be resembled by DAO governance and DAO infrastructure. It's just not there yet. I think what we see today, when we have academics looking at DAOs, they some of them look at empirical data. Right? What is on chain? What is getting traction? That is heavily biased towards DeFi DAOs and layer two DAOs. These DAOs serve the very specific purpose of stewarding layer two protocols and DeFi protocols. Mhmm. They do, you know, an okay job at that. DAOs are, you know, very not much not mature, but this immaturity is also constrained to this very specific industry vertical. And all these other use cases of Ethereum that have yet to be, you know, reached mainstream, their DAOs have also not yet reached mainstream because the use cases are not there. So if people say DAOs have failed, they talk about these extremely specific industry verticals, DeFi and layer two's, and also very early stage image for implementations of DAOs. And it's an extremely hard job. Kudos out there to all the governance leads. I've been one myself at, Nososafe and Vita DAO, and it's an ungrateful job to insist on, you know, governance when there are so many competing interests that's taken. Actually, in DeFi, there's so much money to be made. Mhmm. I would expect the default is that governance becomes increasingly corrupted just because there is so much money at at stakes. Actually, designing better governance, good governance is maybe easier beyond DeFi when there's not that much money at stake. Anyways, our paper finds that the status quo is very biased towards certain implementations, which have, you know, the right to exist. They are interesting, often useful. But there's this room of possibilities coming back when you said DAOs could be the socialist vehicle. They could be. And we have yet to, build coalitions of the willing, including stakeholder groups beyond crypto who just use Ethereum as rails for their decision making processes in cooperatives, in publicly listed companies, maybe in, you know, municipalities where their democratic federation process could be, complemented with on chain transparency, immutability of of records, avoiding corruption. And there are certain features we identify in our papers that are often conceptual, and have yet to be built. But it is important to insist on that potential because the global narrative of blockchain is, of course, heavily centered around DeFi. Mhmm. Even beyond DeFi, people on the streets often associate blockchain with scams. And if you have that image in your mind, you are reluctant to engage with that technology. That's reasonable. So I think we need these coalitions of the willing just, inform people who, yeah, take the technology into their communities with local knowledge, tacit knowledge of of communities of theirs, build products that work for them, governance processes that work for them, and, enrich this space of DAOs that is, just very simplistic these days. Yeah. I mean, my guess

Yeah. Governance can be profitable. And I think if it's profitable, I'm not sure if that is designed the right way. I mean, governance is, I think, friction necessary friction for diverse stakeholder groups to have a process, and that process should have been designed intentionally to balance certain priorities that each community can define for themselves. And if governance is profitable, I'm not sure if that even serves its point because the point of governance should be to safeguard priorities that a community defines, perhaps through a constitution, perhaps through a law, whichever document or, you know, vision it is. Governance is a way of asserting that. And if it's being used for short term metrics, that seems like a counter indicator towards the long term success of of any single product.

DAOs today are token half token rated voting, which leads to protocracy and often Yeah. Which leads to delegation, which leads to professional delegates, orphan intertwined with service provision, which leads to a whole range of conflicts of interest and various suboptimal DAO designs that we see today. I think it's very plausible overall because on the blockchain, you have accounts and wallets. And token rated voting is, I think, to date, the most robust mechanism to avoid civil attacks. Mhmm. You just have so and so much money, and, you can spread that across accounts. You still have the same amount of voting power if it's token rated. If you want democratic voting, one person run vote, that continues to be extremely hard to implement on chain. Now if you fall back to mechanisms like Worldcoin Yeah. Or other mechanisms, they have their own ethical issues, and people debate whether their designs are something we would want to adopt upscale. Very cautious as well. I think identity on the blockchain is a necessary, prerequisite for democratic voting, of course. Mhmm. But do we want, Worldcoin to be used at scale worldwide? I'm not sure. We can discuss discuss these concerns afterwards, but I think having a pluralistic identity is probably, useful. We have a couple of early stage implementations there. But, yeah, going back to the point here, democratic governance requires you to identify a person on chain, which comes with a whole range of challenges. Right. And token rated voting has been easiest to implement. I think the point is most many protocols did not see the point of investing into democratic, processes. They reverted back to token weighted voting. And, yeah, we have yet to identify these applied research groups and products who we who feel strongly about democratic voting in through DAOs and then optimize the product stack. There are lots of modules out there, but you're right. It needs to be much easier for for the end user Mhmm. User groups to just, you know, fork their smart contracts, including greater UI and use it. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Credits to my colleagues at the PSE cluster and the privacy cluster there. Yeah. Also, doing a lot of work on private voting recently, released a report in collaboration with Shutter. So, yeah, there's process progress there and also the the primitives that, led to zk passport and and other technologies where you can identify, yourself through passports. And and but in a zero knowledge preserving way that is is also a step towards a decentralized identity. Mhmm. Cool.

I think when it comes to DAOs and democracy, I would just encourage anyone out there to to experiment with, with the tech we have and bring it to new audiences and identify user groups who you think, if you're inside the community, where you think they could benefit from this and be a bridge builder, be a translator to create this narrative that crypto can be more than it is today. And, yeah, bring these modules, open source repositories to people outside our bubble and have them understand it and make use of it as it suits their needs because there are so many user groups out there with distinct preferences. And yeah. So that is one call to action. And yeah. Cool. Well, thanks, Theo, for coming on.