Fadhili Kimawachi

Defi is a central part of the value that Ethereum provides. Financial empowerment is a central part of what it means to have agency and freedom in our current world. Finance is far from the only thing that Ethereum is good for, but it is an important thing. This post discusses how the Ethereum Foundation is approaching defi. Defi today makes the world's best savings, risk management and wealth-building opportunities permissionlessly available worldwide. We need to build on that. Ethereum's early defi era was great because it dared to dream and innovate and come up with totally new paradigms (eg. AMMs). Defi tomorrow will bring back that spirit. Don't just "make a better stablecoin", dig a layer deeper, and think about the underlying problem (risk management, hedging one's future expenses), and come up with an even better solution. But also, as the EF, we are not interested in supporting "onchain finance" or even "defi" indiscriminately. We have a specific vision of what we want to see out of defi: permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that maximizes people's control over their own assets, minimizes centralized chokepoints and trusted third parties, and democratizes risk management and wealth building (the two key goals of finance according to modern portfolio theory) as well as payments. We want protocols that pass the walkaway test: that keep working even if the original team suddenly disappears without warning (or even: becomes hostile / compromised without warning). Bringing this vision to reality will inevitably take a lot of work. Defi is a complex toolchain, including various onchain components, user-side offchain components (ie. wallet, local agent...), other offchain components, etc. The things that we care about include areas like: * Improving security of defi through "traditional" means, eg. audits, standards, wallet-side safeguards * Improving security of defi through "new" means, eg. AI-assisted formal verification, user-side agents as safeguards * Oracle security and decentralization (there's A LOT of skeletons in the closet here, we as an ecosystem really need to point a big eye of sauron at it for a while) * Privacy. Both privacy-preserving payments, and privacy of more complex use cases (eg. what does it mean to have a maximally privacy-preserving CDP? there are clearly benefits in reducing liquidation-sniping risk, but it requires hard tech to get there) * Open source, and improving the licensing / forkability situation in defi Ethereum is a permissionless protocol, and nothing stops people from deploying insecure protocols, protocols that enshrine ultimately unneeded centralized trust in the name of convenience, or dopamine-maximizing gambleslop. However, we *are* interested in working with anyone aligned to make permissionless, open-source, intermediary-minimizing and security and user-agency-maximizing defi ecosystem as strong as possible, so that it can be not just individuals and institutions' first choice in Ethereum, but also a globally compelling way to manage funds for anyone who needs its properties.

Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail. But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already. This includes the following: * Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride. * An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit. * A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment. * An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation) * A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving * A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins) * A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term. Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei.

My first reaction to this was: "And that's why I just got my $2,725 check of fileverse tokens now that fileverse has grown to the point where my dad regularly writes docs in fileverse that he sends to me" My second reaction to this was: "I see how this makes total sense from a crypto perspective, but it makes zero sense from an outside-of-crypto perspective ... hmm, what does this say about crypto?" My more detailed reaction: There are many distinct activities that you can refer to as "incentivizing users". First of all, paying some of your users with coins that your app gets by charging other users is totally fine: that's just a sustainable economic loop, there is nothing wrong with this. The activity that I think people are thinking about more is, paying all your users while the app is early, with the hope of "building network effect" and then making that money back (and much more) later when the app is mature. My general view, if you _really_ have to simplify it and sacrifice some nuances for the sake of brevity, is: * Incentives that compensate for unavoidable temporary costs that come from your thing being immature are good * Incentives that bring in totally new classes of users that would not use even a mature version of your thing without those incentives are bad For example, I have no problem with many types of defi liquidity rewards, because to me they compensate for per-year risk of the project being hacked or the team turning out to be scammers, a risk that is inherently higher for new projects and much lower once a project becomes more mature. Paying people to make tweets that get attention, might be the most "pure" example of the wrong thing to do, because you are going to get people who come to your platform to make tweets, with every incentive to game any mechanisms you have to judge quality and optimize for maximum laziness on their part, and then immediately disappear as soon as the incentives go away. In principle, content incentivization is a valuable and important problem, but it should be done with care, with an eye to quality over quantity, which are not natural goals that designers of "bootstrapping incentives" have by default. If fact, even if users do not disappear after incentives go away, there is a further problem: you succeed from the perspective of growing *quantity of community*, but you fail from the perspective of growing *quality of community*. In the case of defi protocols, you can argue: 1 ETH in an LP pool is 1 ETH doing useful work, regardless of whether it's put there by a cypherpunk or an amoral money maximizer. But, (i) this argument can only be made for defi, not for other areas like social, where esp. in the 2020s, quality matters more than quantity, and (ii) there are always subtle ways in which higher-quality community members help your protocol more in the long term (eg. by writing open-source tools, answering people's questions in online or offline forums, being potential developers on your team). The ideal incentive is an incentive that exactly compensates for temporary downsides of your protocol, those downsides that will disappear once the protocol has more maturity, and attracts zero users who would not be there organically once the protocol is mature. Charging users fees, but paying them back in protocol tokens, I think is also reasonable: it's effectively turning your users into your investors by default, which seems like a good thing to do. A further more cynical take I have is that in the 2021-24 era, the "real product" was creating a speculative bubble, and so the real function of many incentives was to pump up narratives to justify the narrative for the bubble. So any argument that incentives are good for bootstrapping acquisition should be not judged on the question of whether it's plausible, but on the question of whether it's more plausible than the alternative claim that it's all galaxy brain justification ( vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… ) for a "pump and dump wearing a suit". TLDR: the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it's not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary. And we do see that the successful apps now, the apps that we actually most appreciate and respect, do the bulk of their user acquisition work in that way, not by paying users to come in indiscriminately.