Julien is the cofounder and Chief Science Officer at Argent, a crypto wallet that's used and loved by many people in the crypto ecosystem.

In this conversation, we talk about how Argent has evolved to get to where it is today. How Julien sees user experience evolving broadly in the ecosystem, and what the flow of a new person interacting with a crypto application for the first time might look like in the future.

Another topic we get into deeply is L2s, how Julien and Argent have thought about the topic of EVM equivalence and compatibility, and why they ultimately chose to build on ZK Rollups like ZkSync and StarkNet.

And lastly, we dive into what has been like to build on StarkNet, what the early community feels like today, what it's been like to write code in Cairo, and as a bit of a snapshot into this experience we do a deep dive into what account abstraction looks like on StarkNet.

Timestamps: 0:00 intro 1:56 leaning into zk rollups and account abstraction 7:29 scaling the self-custody experience 13:20 what onboarding users to crypto will look like in 3 years 20:24 some of the friction points that still need to be abstracted 33:52 L2s and the trade-offs between different rollups 39:45 is breaking EVM-equivalency worth it? 48:01 Julien’s experience in the StarkNet ecosystem 58:24 a primer on account abstraction 1:15:38 session keys 1:28:17 starting a sensible wallet set up from scratch

Relevant links: Julien Niset: https://twitter.com/jniset Argent - https://www.argent.xyz/ StarkNet - https://starkware.co/starknet/ zkSync - https://zksync.io/ Topology - https://www.topology.gg/

WalletConnect is a communications protocol that enables wallets and apps to securely connect and interact.

In this conversation, We talked about WalletConnect v2 and its architecture, account abstraction, potential downstream effects of a crypto-native chat protocol, and other topics.

Timestamps: 0:00 intro 8:00 developing the user experience before creating the product 10:23 account abstraction and the spectrum of security and convenience 20:39 WalletConnect APIs and “Log in with Ethereum” 28:55 how WalletConnect works 37:45 light clients and generalized messaging protocols 45:36 the politics of making big changes to the Ethereum protocol 50:14 connecting wallets with WalletConnect Chat

Mentioned in the show: EIP2938 (account abstraction) - https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2938 WalletConnect APIs - https://docs.walletconnect.com/2.0

I hope you enjoy!

Josh has a long history in the Ethereum ecosystem going back to the early days of the community. He cofounded one of the first L2 scaling protocols with Counterfactual. He also cofounded ETHGlobal which is a much-loved series of hackathons/events that brings the community together and which acts as an entry point into the ecosystem for many people. And nowadays and most relevant to our conversation, he works in a leadership capacity at the Ethereum Foundations.

In this conversation, we talked about two topics: one being the Ethereum Foundation, and two being the question of why blockchain is matter — this being something that Josh has spent a lot of time thinking about and which he's written about in a long form piece titled Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains.

Timestamps:

3:50 subtraction 7:22 creating a self-sufficient crypto ecosystem 12:33 the property of ‘hardness’ for blockchains 17:47 understanding decentralization 23:11 Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains 26:00 blind men and an elephant 33:06 our civilization’s infrastructure 43:33 digitally-native hardness 59:38 how the EF operates 1:06:21 challenges with decentralized coordination 1:12:08 infinite players have nothing but their names

0age is the Head of Protocol Development at OpenSea, and this was a conversation about Seaport, the new marketplace protocol for buying and selling NFTs.

0age takes us through a tour of the Seaport protocol, talking about how it's architected; how conduits and zones work; and we even get into the low level gas optimization work they've done on the contracts. I hope this can be a helpful resource for anyone looking to understand the Seaport protocol or anyone who's building with NFTs more broadly. I also consider 0age to be a true veteran of the space, and hearing him talk through the design of the protocol can be an educational experience in its own rights. I definitely personally found that to be the case.

I hope you enjoy!

Timestamps:

1:42 why build Seaport 10:20 the Seaport architecture 12:44 EIP712 signatures 14:17 the global concept of a nonce 16:02 EIP1271 and bulk listings 17:18 the Executor and conduits 25:08 zones, additional rules that can be applied on top of an order 29:47 implementing English auctions via zones 32:17 layers of the stack 36:05 fulfillment 40:42 gas optimizations and understanding the low-level behavior of the EVM 58:40 the interaction between OpenSea the product and Seaport the protocol 01:07:06 criteria based items, and partial fills 01:17:50 ideas to build on top of Seaport

Charles St.Louis is the COO at Element Finance, a protocol for fixed and variable rate yield markets and previously the governance architect at MakerDAO.

In this conversation, we talked about Element’s governance system - with a particular focus on voting vaults, a powerful new primitive that decouple the relationship between capital and voting power and allow much more expressiveness in how users are given a governance voice in the ecosystem.

Timestamps:

• 2:54 - MakerDAO’s arc of decentralization

• 7:51 - how Maker influenced Element’s design

• 10:22 - the Governance Steering Council

• 21:25 - voting vaults

• 29:10 - L1 and L2 for governance

• 33:23 - qualitative evaluation for contributions

• 37:50 - the ElFiverse and NFTs in the Element community

• 42:24 - on being a protocol delegate

Henri was previously a research scientist at Protocol Labs and worked on Filecoin’s consensus protocol. And after many years of thinking through problems related to data privacy and security, he recently co-founded a new company called Privy where they provide a suite of API tools to store and manage user data off chain.

In this conversation, we talked through a set of topics that Henri has a unique point of view on — starting with the question around the seeming trade-off between privacy/security on the one hand and UX/convenience on the other. We talked about principles he has in mind in designing an off-chain data system; how privy does encryption and key management; how they do permissioning; and how they think about data storage.

Timestamps:

• 2:30 - designing the product/protocol roadmap

• 10:30 - privacy/security vs. convenience

• 19:27 - building an web3 application

• 23:20 - decentralizing Privy

• 32:09 - key management architecture

• 46:11 - verifiability, transparency as a disinfectant

• 59:02 - building a product with private data

• 1:07:08 - cofounder relationship

I hope you enjoy!

Matthew is building a laboratory experimenting at the edges of music and web3.

It's called Songcamp, and right now they're running their third immersive experience. They're coming together with a group of musicians, visual designers, developers, and at the end of this process, will be releasing new music under the moniker of a single headless artist called Chaos.

I've been personally completely nerdsniped by Songcamp and think it’s one of the most beautiful corners of our web3 ecosystem.

I hope you enjoy!

Timestamps:

• 1:08 - Songcamp a web3 laboratory

• 3:27 - songwriting camps

• 6:30 - imaginative language and lore

• 11:12 - incentive alignment

• 20:55 - selection and curation

• 30:31 - immersive digital theatre

• 36:18 - having fun

• 38:03 - the power of IRL

• 43:01 - what’s next

• 51:37 - economic models for internet-native collectives

Simon’s exploration of creative mechanism design through the years is documented on his blog. His contributions to the space range from seeding the idea of bonding curves and curation markets, to building one of the first creator platforms with Ujo, to writing a full length novel experimenting with different publishing models, to now working on bottom-up storytelling with Untitled Frontier.

In this conversation, we talked about cc0, designing NFT economies to welcome derivative works, bottom-up storytelling, and much more.

I hope you enjoy!

Timestamps:

• 1:29 - How Simon got into the craft of storytelling

• 6:25 - The lonely process of long-form content creation

• 9:53 - Kishōtenketsu

• 14:26 - Top-down vs. bottom-up storytelling

• 21:52 - “The medium is the message.”

• 27:17 - CC0, derivatives, Jenkins the Valet

• 34:43 - Harberger Taxes and mechanism design

• 39:51 - NFTs vs ERC20s for ownership and governance

• 44:06 - New power structures

You can subscribe to the newsletter to hear about new episodes: bytecode.substack.com

Sound is a platform that helps musicians host listening parties and engage with their fans. It's a suite of tools that will grow over time to help musicians make a living using NFTs and other web3-native primitives.

I was particularly looking forward to this conversation since David, Matt, and Vignesh participated in Zeitgeist Season One and we got to work pretty closely together. They’re moving fast and are working towards a beautiful vision of the world.

Timestamps:

• 3:42 - Redefining engagement between artists and fans

• 7:23 - MySpace, HypeMachine, Optimism, and Friends With Benefits

• 12:50 - Using Discord DMs for recruiting

• 16:53 - NFTs as the perfect medium for music patronage

• 20:34 - Fair-play incentive structures for music

• 26:25 - Differentiating the first fan and the millionth fan

• 32:03 - The technical architecture underpinning Sound

• 34:33 - Getting to market and building in public

• 39:45 - Oshi breaks the website

• 41:37 - The Daniel Allan EP

• 42:14 - RAC and deploying to mainnet

• 44:12 - Zeitgeist’s impact

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Thousands of people in countries like Uganda, India, and Brazil have been financed by Goldfinch loans through local lenders.

These lenders are largely innovative fintechs in the global south, and have historically fallen into an uncanny valley — they need too much capital for what is available in their local financial markets, and too little capital to navigate foreign institutional markets.

Goldfinch has built a product/protocol that’s being used in the real world -- and this has involved solving some difficult problems..

Borrowers receive funds in USDC and convert into their local currency before paying out to end users. They therefore need to hedge against exchange rate risk. With stablecoins not being available most currencies, this requires interfacing with the legacy system.

Borrowers — like Tugende, the motorcycle taxi lender — are incorporated as local entities and have local compliance requirements around borrowing/lending. The Goldfinch protocol therefore needs to work within the regulatory regimes of these countries.

Goldfinch has built an offchain/onchain KYC system for sybil-resistance and compliance. They’ve thread the needle in building a system that’s pragmatic today, while future-proofing so that it can be upgraded as other models emerge.

Sybil-resistant identity is the holy grail, but is a difficult problem. I’m hopeful continued experimentation with models like web of trust will uncover new possibilities here.

This in turn allows them to design their incentive/security model within the protocol. Things like:

The leverage ratio — how much capital is put to work from the senior pool — scales in part with the number of unique backers who have diligenced a borrower.

Auditors have their work checked with an analogue of a Keynesian beauty contest.

Lastly, Goldfinch uses quadratic voting for governance.

In short, Goldfinch is building a debt marketplace - one that is global, liquid (ie borrowers/lenders can trade out of their positions), and programmable (ie can eventually be the basis of various structured products)

What I’ll be watching for from here:

• How the community navigates the transition to open governance.

• How the protocol incorporates more borrowers, backers, auditors - to operate at growing scale.

• How Goldinfch evolves to include other types of uncollateralized lending.

That’s all. Hope you enjoy!

The conversation on publishing today is the very first one I recorded for the podcast about six months ago.

It's a conversation with Justin Glibert about patterns he's uncovered while building Ember (an onchain game) and Lattice (the engine behind the game) — patterns related to inflation and zero sum resources, spacial constraints, and user impersonation.

I hope you enjoy.

This is a conversation with Phillip Wang and Nate Foss two of the co-founders of Gather.

Gather is a video chat platform that puts you and the people you're communicating with in a virtual space - and gives you the ability to move around and interact with them based on your locations in that space, just like in real life. It's had a ton of traction over the last year and is being used by millions of people around the world. It's one of the coolest products I've personally used in recent memory.

As you will hear in this conversation, Phillip and Nate are two incredibly thoughtful and mission-oriented people — and they plan to build Gather into a progressively open and decentralized system. So in this conversation, we went deep on what this could actually look like. We talked about how Gather is architected under the hood and how they think about decentralizing the game engine and the tech stack. We talked about identity, login, and social graphs. We talked about business models. And lastly, we talked about the metaverse and the path dependence of how the future unfolds from here.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

This is a conversation with Tracheopteryx about the evolution of Yearn, Coordinape, and pseudonymity.

Tracheopteryx has been a key leader in the Yearn Finance community since its legendary genesis event. In this conversation, we talk about key moments in Yearn's evolution with an eye towards takeaways that might be useful for other projects. We talk about the introduction of the multisig; the mint — a complex governance proposal where the community eventually chose to dilute themselves in order to reward core contributors; and constrained delegation - the governance framework that Trach helped design and which is operating in Yearn today.

The other big area we get into is Coordinape. Coordinape is a protocol for decentralizing compensation. It was designed and incubated inside of Yearn, and is now being built as an independent project.

Towards the end of the conversation, Trach tells the story behind his name and shares a perspective on becoming pseudonymous that has stayed with me since.

I wholeheartedly recommend this episode. It is packed with ideas, and was a blast to record. I hope you enjoy :)

This is a conversation with John Palmer and Danny Aranda about PartyDAO - the DAO building PartyBid - the product that lets people pool their funds and participate in NFT auctions as a team.

We dive deep into John and Danny’s experience building this project. We talk about what they see as the role of product vision in the DAO, how they think about hiring, the organizational design, the stack of tools they use to operate, and the legal structures they're considering. We also touch on the role of community in NFTs, social investing, and what John and Danny see as particularly interesting things to work on today.

I think this conversation is worth listening to for anyone building in crypto today. There’s a lot to learn from PartyDAO as a case study.

I hope you enjoy!

This is a conversation with Austin Griffith about his continued journey as a builder/educator, and learnings from onboarding thousands of developers onto Ethereum.

Austin is a friend and someone I've had the good fortune of working with extensively in our shared time at the Ethereum foundation. In this conversation, we take a tour through the different projects he's worked on over the last two years — starting with ETH.build (the graphical interface for working with smart contracts), moving to scaffold-eth (his development starter kit that has really taken off and been used by thousands of developers), and then moving onto the BUIDL GUIDL and the Moonshot Collective (DAO-like collections of developers who work on prototyping interesting new ideas). We also go down a few fun tangents around Loot, the Doge NFT, DAO tooling, and we get to hear a walkthrough of Austin's curriculum for bringing a new developer into the space.

I consider Austin to be a gem of the ecosystem, and feel lucky that we have him here. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

We're entering the golden age of crypto-native products and protocols. The possibilities are increasingly clear and only beginning to be explored. Growing numbers of talented builders are pushing forward on every front. And thanks to a lot of hard work, the infrastructure is finally ready to support this phase of growth - Layer 2s are here, the developer tooling has improved, and the Ethereum protocol itself continues to evolve with upgrades like EIP 1559 and the transition to PoS on the horizon.

But taking a new project from 0 to 1 is not easy. It requires that one navigates a terrain of non-trivial trade-offs and questions that are unique to crypto. Questions like those related to architecting a smart contract system and writing secure code that doesn't get exploited; structuring entities and taking legal into account in order to avoid difficulties further down the line; raising funds by working with grants programs, onchain mechanisms, and a meaningful community of operator/angels; and maybe most importantly, navigating the idea maze and building in a way that leans into what's uniquely enabled by crypto.

To answer these questions, we're coming together with a small group of talented teams building new projects on Ethereum, and doing a collective sprint until the end of the year. Codenamed Zeitgeist, we'll be running from Oct 18 to Dec 17, and will have a group Discord, weekly calls/demos, and support from some of the most effective builders/operators in the space.

The Ethereum ecosystem is young and evolving at a rapid pace. Consequently, we believe that the best way to navigate the early stages of a project is to learn from those who have gone through the journey themselves. These are the people who have built the current set of breakthrough products/protocols, and have learned what works and what doesn't work through direct experience. We're grateful to be relying on their input here.

We have a strong group participating in the sprint (shoutout to Wei Jie, Abram, Will, Tarun, Faraaz, Jonny, Jason, Nikita) and are looking to welcome more teams into the process. So if you're working on an early stage project on Ethereum, and would like to participate - please consider getting in touch.

Entrepreneurs and the projects they build are an archimedes lever for moving the space forward. They create value by getting to product/market fit; they recruit talented people into the space; and over time, they grow to contribute back to the public goods they depend on. We're inspired by those who've built the space into what it is today, and hope to play a small part in continuing this tradition. Join us for what promises to be a fun journey!

Subscribe to the newsletter to follow along: zeitgeist.xyz

This is a conversation with Gubsheep about Dark Forest and building crypto-native games.

Dark Forest is a uniquely crypto-native game, and embodies patterns that we can all learn from. It's a game that takes place in a procedurally-generated universe that's shared by all players, where the smart contracts enforce the rules of the game, but where they don't leak information about what each player is up to by using ZK SNARKs.

In this conversation, we talk about how Dark Forest uses ZK SNARKs to enable this core game mechanic, how it has organically built a community of players and developers, how early DAOs are participating in the games, how the game might interoperate with other games in the near future, and we also have a good discussion on Layer 2s and the trade-offs involved in choosing a scaling solution.

https://share.transistor.fm/s/5071af0e

This is a conversation with Tim Beiko and Danny Ryan - the lead coordinators for the Eth1 and Eth2 development efforts.

In this conversation, we go deep on the future of the Ethereum protocol together. We talk about the Merge (the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake via the Beacon Chain - which is the most substantial Ethereum network upgrade to date, and happening sooner than many people realize), the cryptoeconomics of PoS, MEV, staking derivatives, and how protocol development works in practice.

Check out our newsletter for other episodes and writing: bytecode.substack.com

This is a conversation with Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) and Karl Floersch (a long-time Ethereum researcher who is working on Optimism - the Layer 2 optimistic rollup).

We begin the conversation with a focus on retroactive public goods funding - a compelling idea that Vitalik and Karl shared earlier this year. We then move onto topics like decoupling value creation and value capture, the sustainability of public goods, Ether's Phoenix (a play on Roko's Basilisk, the thought experiment which originated in the LessWrong community), and governance models as lying somewhere on the continuum from being exclusionary to being conformist. Towards the end of the conversation, we talk about personal tokens and new social network designs.