Austin Griffith on the $1 AI Audit and the Case for Founders Over DAOs: Uneasy Money

**Kain Warwick** (0:00)
If Vitalik wasn't there, I do not think this thing gets built. I think Vitalik disappears, and it turns into like pitched, internizing warfare within 20 seconds. People tear each other apart. There's like multiple forks of the chain. Like it would just be an absolute disaster. I'm Kain Warwick, and welcome to Uneasy Money, because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain.
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**Kain Warwick** (0:46)
All right. I'm here with my co-host Taylor Monahan, security expert and a very special returning guest today, Austin Griffith, Ethereum developer, creator of Scaffold, ETH or EF, depending on where you come from and SpeedRun Ethereum, and founder of the, I won't even say this, the BuidlGuidl thing, a Majigger. He's done a lot of stuff. He's done a lot of stuff, this guy.
He has just launched a new project called the $1 audit.
We will talk about that in our second segment. But yeah, very happy to have you, Austin. Thanks for joining us again. We have lots of cool AI stuff to talk about. But first, Vitalik's Lean Ethereum. What is it? Vitalik published a Lean Ethereum three- to four-year protocol overhaul. He calls Ethereum's biggest rebuild since the merge framed as its third iteration after the genesis and merge processes, which also happened like totally on time, by the way. So don't even worry about it. It's going to be fine. We're going to land this in three years. So I think the interesting thing about this, outside of the technical stuff, we can dig into the technical stuff. Because I've been very bullish on Ethereum's ability to accelerate its technical frontier, given AI agents and just how much easier it is to do research, and how much easier it is to consolidate information, and also to build stuff. Not that we want Ethereum to turn into a slop factory, I don't think, at least at the core protocol. But the ability to accelerate engineering efforts in all areas should allow Ethereum, I think, that is probably the best position to take advantage of this, to really accelerate away. That's been my thesis for the last year. So I think we've shaved off a year from the 2030 roadmap that everyone was raging about last year when it was published in 2025
Yeah, what's your take? What's the most exciting technical stuff to come out of this? Before we talk about the whole timeline thing.

**Austin Griffith** (3:10)
Is that a question for me? I don't know if I have it.

**Kain Warwick** (3:12)
For anyone.

**Austin Griffith** (3:13)
Yeah.

**Kain Warwick** (3:13)
I don't know if I have it.

**Austin Griffith** (3:14)
For anyone.

**Kain Warwick** (3:15)
Go over.

**Austin Griffith** (3:15)
Yeah. I have a builder on top of it. Once the thing ships, I like to create the apps on top. I feel like the protocol layer stuff is cool. But when we're talking about, okay, it's going to be post quantum and we're going to have a new EVM, I'm like, it'll probably all work the same way for me and I'll be building the same apps. It'll just continue working. The thing has been up for 10 years and it will be up for another 10 years or more or 100 or something.
These changes are to enable that kind of stuff and then UX stuff quicker, faster, cheaper.

**Kain Warwick** (3:52)
This is the thing that I think, again, I've been saying for the last year, I don't think people are priced in the fact that we've lived with this 12-second block time environment for such a long time. And even though the block limit has gone up a bunch, we still have constraints. Obviously, Gui is like 0.0000, I can keep going with zeros for a while, one at the moment. And so it's almost free to use Ethereum.
But we do still get spikes in high volatility environments. We do still get those gas spikes and it does still get kind of expensive to use the chain.
So I think that the UX side of all of these different technologies kind of coming together is very exciting. That said, maybe as a builder on top of the protocol, it's less of an issue. That said, let's not forget that we spent four years building layer 2s to get more gas and faster settlement. And if Ethereum lands that, then that whole kind of process, whilst necessary at the time, is kind of invalidated, right? Like, you know, you look back on that and go, I think they're playing a different game.