How the New Ethlabs Plans to Make Ethereum More Intentional in Designing ETH

**Ansgar Dietrichs** (0:00)
Just by the way, as a small point there, as an example, it's almost ironic. Today, ETH, in a way, has the worst interop properties of any asset in the Ethereum ecosystem. And the worst meaning, it shares this with many of the other assets. But basically, there's many of these assets that can directly teleport from chain to chain, right? Like if you use USDC and buy a CCTP, you can just instantly hop from one chain to the next with your BTUSDC. With your ETH, you cannot.

**Laura Shin** (0:25)
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Today's guest is Ansgar Dietrichs, co-founder at Ethlabs. Welcome Ansgar.

**Ansgar Dietrichs** (1:24)
Thank you and thank you for having me.

**Laura Shin** (1:26)
The structure around Ethereum has been changing quite a bit the last year and a half or so, partly due to an outcry by the community to take a more competitive stance and to also focus more on ETH asset. The Ethereum Foundation is saying it's going to be taking a smaller role, and obviously it also had some layoffs to put that into effect.
Now we have the introduction of Ethlabs, which sort of seems to be a response to all of that community demand. So tell us what Ethlabs plans to do.

**Ansgar Dietrichs** (1:59)
Yeah, so basically I think the way I would describe it is really that to me, really you could feel over the last two years that Ethereum was changing, crypto overall was changing, right? That like for a very long time, really everything was still pre-adoption, at least pre-mainstream adoption, right? Like it was, we were building out all of this infrastructure stack, building out all the primitives and DeFi everywhere. Then really the shift was happening in multiple places at once. Of course, also in the US, the regulatory shift and all these things were basically coming together. I think it took at least, well, I'm not sure if I would say the Ethereum or the Ethereum Foundation, I think it took a moment to realize, hey, this moment is happening. Then you saw the reaction with Tomash at the Ethereum Foundation for a year. Now, I think the board really set down and decided, hey, the Ethereum Foundation really needs to now assume a new role in this new time period and that is going to be a role that's more focused on, I would say, protecting the things in Ethereum that should not change. That's how I usually explain it.
That made it very clear to me and to a small group of my colleagues that there was a gap forming, specifically, I would say the gap around the things that should change, the things that should evolve in Ethereum, that need to evolve. And so we decided to leave and to start Ethlabs to address exactly this. So basically, very simply, I think Ethlabs is basically trying to help Ethereum evolve into what we think it should become, which we can talk about it. I really think there is a very specific spot as the global economy is coming on chain. There is a very specific spot up for grabs, potentially up for grabs that Ethereum would be the perfect fit for. And we really think that we can help make that happen for Ethereum.

**Laura Shin** (3:55)
And so to find a little bit more what you mean by that, like describe, so if you were to succeed, describe what that vision looks like.

**Ansgar Dietrichs** (4:05)
Yeah, so basically the way I would say it, like you only have these paradigm shifts in technologies like once every so often. And so usually what that means is that once a shift has happened, the kind of the way the architecture of the system often is around for many, many decades. Like you can see if you look at the financial system today, a lot of this basically was built many decades ago over time in the United States and in other places.
And you can really kind of trace back that, like how that all evolved during a very dynamic time. And then it more and more kind of like froze into place in the current configuration. And I really expect that something very similar will happen with crypto now. I think basically we will see similar to how everything came online, right? Like when the internet first appeared, like everything, all the newspapers, everything basically like came online. And then there was a very dynamic time period. And then basically the new equilibrium was forming. And so I think that over the next 10 years, we will basically see the financial system of the future forming and figuring out like what is this new steady state. And once that's all in place, then also always you can see these things like regulations will tighten around the new structure and all these kinds of things. So like once it is in place, it will probably be sticky and in place in that configuration for a very long time. And I really think there's two different ways in which this can play out. And both of them could then stay along for a long time. And like one of them would be, what I would say is like the multi-chain vision, right? Like people have talked about this for many years already, but basically a world where you have many different chains, each one serving different use cases, geographic or app-specific or just user-based-specific, some like somewhat trusted set of institutions, some are permission, some permissionless, and all these kind of different configurations. And then we have seen, of course, this industry evolve around like bridging in between these different chains. And the problem is you can only ever get bridges so good, right? Because you ultimately bridge between two autonomous zones. Blockchains always ultimately are about agreement on shared state. And these systems by definition will never have a shared agreement on state, right? So like there's always going to be friction, always going to be brittleness of links.