As society evolves, so do its values and principles, but is that desirable for technology that seeks to build the most reliable, trustless and censorship resistant global settlement layer? Ever since the rise in popularity of Solana with its inflow of retail capital in a memecoin gold rush, Ethereum became even more criticized for sticking true to its core values despite the completely divergent demands of market participants. Moreover, the rollup centric scaling roadmap seemed to further silo attention and cause liquidity fragmentation, driving away value from Ethereum mainnet. As institutional demand is expected to grow with the introduction of staking ETFs, a new executive leadership took charge of Ethereum foundation to help steer the protocol’s narrative at the intersection between community demands and Ethereum’s ethos.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Hsiao-Wei’s & Tomasz’ backgrounds
• How they became co-executive directors of Ethereum Foundation
• Ethereum Foundation’s role moving forward
• Decision making in Ethereum Foundation
• Shaping Ethereum’s narrative
• The layer 2 landscape
• Scaling Ethereum as the global settlement layer
• Sharding
• Rollup scalability & their trade-offs
• What values drive adoption
• L2 interoperability
• Future goals

Episode links:

• Hsiao-Wei Wang on X
• Tomasz Stanczak on X
• Ethereum Foundation on X
• Ethereum on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.