Upgrading the MEV Supply Chain /w Drew Van Der Werff (Commit-Boost & Fabric)

Rex (00:00.576) So even if you just like want to re-say something, just... Drew Van Der Werff (00:05.76) Sounds good. Rex (00:08.055) Drew, welcome to the Signaling Theory Podcast. Drew Van Der Werff (00:11.146) Thanks for having me, Rex, and happy Friday. Hopefully I'm not on the day of the week that we recorded this, but good to be here and having a fantastic conversation with you. Rex (00:20.27) Of course, man. So before we get started, just for those that aren't familiar with you, can you just give like two sentences about who you are and what you're working on? Drew Van Der Werff (00:30.11) Yeah, absolutely. And just a little bit of background too. I started my career in data analytics at Deloitte and then moved over to Goldman Sachs where did something random, but then ended up being the second hire on their crypto team. And I had fallen in love with Ethereum a little bit before that from a roommate of mine who, if you listen to this, thanks again, Skyler. But yeah, worked on the crypto team at Goldman for a few years and went to a hedge fund called Brevin Howard Digital where I was on the investing team. then about a year and a half ago now. left that and wanted to do something a little more deeper in Ethereum and a little bit of twists and turns, but now running nonprofits that focuses on supporting outer protocol infrastructure for Ethereum. We've received grants from about a dozen organizations across Ethereum and have a couple of developers working on a few things. One of them is called Fabric, which is a more of a researchy but standard setting experimentation around based rollups to try to use Ethereum. as a sequencer and we should have some exciting items coming up later this year. We've been working a lot with a couple of teams and roll ups to get based roll ups with precomps going. And then the other product we have is called CommitBoost, which is a new validator sidecar. It's a drop and replace for MevBoost. Comes with additional tools and features, but also is future proof for a few things I think we're going to touch on today. Right now, CommitBoost is around 30 % market share. So over the last few months, we've really grown and have a huge posturing towards security. So we've done a lot around audits and then working with the SEAL team on a few things. So it's been an absolute blast and I appreciate you having me on. Rex (02:12.558) Of course, I think we'll try, in the past we've had a very good conversation on the basics of what commit boost is. And so we'll try to stay out of just the 101, but I will link that episode in our show notes. But I guess what I think would be cool to start is, a year and a half ago, and I just can't wrap my head around if that. feels like a long time or a short time at this point, but welcome to 2025. A year and a half ago when you were, you know, commit boost and eventually fabric, when these things were kind of in the primordial state and in your mind and you knew something needed to be done, but, like you weren't really sure what it was going to be. Well, what were the problems that you were seeing and like, what kind of, what were you addressing in like standing up this nonprofit and like making sure that. what eventually became commit boost and fabric, why did they need to exist? Drew Van Der Werff (03:13.556) Yeah, they each have their own individual story and our goal is to have sustainment. do have like, we do have some larger token grants and so our goal is to have a few million dollars depending on the markets to continue to hire developers to focus on these different niches that come up and really there was this. key theme I saw starting to emerge when I was investing, it came up actually in the context of this app that really has not much to do with crypto, but it's more secure than Signal. And they were looking, it's a peer-to-peer network for messaging, and most of their adoption is in periods of high volatility in the Middle East. And in particular, one usage was women were using it to warn women in other villages, hey, people are coming. you know, and let others think about what that, what that means. And so the founder was asking me, he's like, do you, we're having problems with people, people hosting this software. Do you know anyone who's good at uptime knows how to run computer programs, has some software. And I was like, have you heard of Ethereum validators? And so this started me down there. It's rabbit hole. today, Ethereum validators do very simple tasks. They outsource the majority of this too. They just run this program. They're equipped with good liveliness. What else could they do outside of block construction to earn revenue? And at the same time, like my expectation was issuance is going to go down. It's a commoditized business. You have to think of other ways and become innovative. And I started asking node operators what they thought about this. I think running other softwares outside of blockchain. It's a little bit of a leap, but I started to then ask them about, what if you change the way a block is constructed? What if you can offer other services? And so did this huge deep dive to a published piece on frontier research about gas futures or changing the way a block is constructed to offer other services to the end users of Ethereum. And then immediately I started to think about like right now, Drew Van Der Werff (05:18.464) Flashbots and others have really pushed this negative viewpoint of the Ethereum construction pipeline around maximal extractive value. And it's this thing that everyone in society is trying to extract value. And it's really shaped the philosophy and the things we've done. And Ethereum, my view is, ok how do we use this pipeline to provide a benefit to end users of Ethereum? How can we use to provide end services to make Ethereum block space Rex (05:28.814) Mmm. Drew Van Der Werff (05:46.048) better to be consumed, better to be produced, and in the end, more robust. And this encompasses both censorship resistance, but also just pure business incentives around how people consume block space. And so today, I guess a year and a half ago, the standard sidecar was MEV Boost, and this physically wasn't possible. And so it came up with a different design that does allow that, and that's how Commit Boost came about. So kind of a long-winded answer to get there. Fabric was slightly different. Basically, base rollups needed to keep being driven forward. Justin was taking not a step back, but refocusing towards Beamchain. And so we discussed how we could bring on a developer to kind of focus on these things and still guide. And base rollups, they're a little less popular these days, but the concept of synchronous composability is still alive and free. And people are focused on it. I still expect base rollups to happen. It just has taken a bit longer than what we had probably originally wanted. Rex (06:43.766) Yeah, awesome. So let's just separate the conversation and we'll talk about bass rollups and fabric in a little bit. you know, think, let me like kind of spit back what you said and tell me if this resonates at all. But essentially the paradigm that was created by Flashbots and the focus around maximal extracted value, MEV, right, was essentially It put the guardrails around what we thought the Ethereum validator set was capable of, which is like, okay, we're here to build blocks and you want to build the best blocks. That means really what you're doing is extracting the most value and know, Flashbots built this whole system around who gets that value and who's doing the work and blah, blah, blah. And I think what you're saying is by framing what Ethereum is in that context, The idea of using the Ethereum validator set to host a decentralized, truly resilient chat app that is causing real good in the world, allowing people to protect themselves or protest or whatever, right? It wasn't possible for that to be part of the conversation under the MEV flashbots paradigm. so I think your first aha moment was, hey, we have this decentralized network of let's say, I don't know, between six and 10,000 computers. Like what more can we use that for than just doing like smart contract transactions? Drew Van Der Werff (08:20.755) Yeah, I think that's right. And I don't know if it was Flashbots. I think it was more a byproduct. So there was a certain thing we were trying to solve, which is MEV, which is the public mempool of Ethereum and users getting ripped off. But a byproduct of that was the development of Metboost, which was just very limiting around the validators. And over time, we've obviously discovered like there's better ways to do things at the time. Maybe it wasn't obvious, but... But yeah, and secondary to that is, not only chat apps, but the less of a leap has just changed the way we construct blocks. So offering services around what you do today as a validator. My end goal or view and Vitalik has now wrote on this is could validators help with LLMs? There's a whole host of other things they can focus on. I hope commit boost helps enable that. Absolutely. Rex (09:04.344) So can you talk a little bit about what, you know, I don't know how much we need to like set the stage for what MEV Boost and like the paradigm before was, but I really want to talk about what are the new types of things that are enabled by Commit Boost that like kind of weren't possible before. So can you just walk us through a little bit about the things that you find exciting that are happening on Commit Boost that weren't possible? Drew Van Der Werff (09:28.883) Yeah, absolutely. And some of the framing here is critical. My background is more tradfied. think there's a lot of techie type people that might not have studied or been in seats or have the knowledge around traditional markets. And there's a lot of auctions, people in this space that have focused on all this optimizing how things are auctioned, how it's all starts, that thing. I still think they miss the practical implications of how a real market works. And if you really look across any commodity market, and oil is a great example, but when you had oil being produced in the eighties and nineties, there was highly concentrated and there were idiosyncratic events that would decimate businesses. And there was like a lack of stability. were periods of time where everyone wanted it. would spike. And then what ended up happening over time is there was a diversification of producers. That's one function, but a lot of that was actually enabled through the development of the derivatives markets and the ability to splice and dice how the cost and the amount paid for, and then the production of oil changed. And what I mean by this is that majority of studies says when you have derivatives, as part of a spot product or like box based spot today, how it's like consumed, it becomes more stable. And the price it provides, you can do building services around this, the consumers or the producers become more robust. There's just like a lot of things you can do when you increase the amount of people taking a view on the current price of gas through different derivatives, whatever it may be. And so I think that's critically important and one of those products that's being created today that aligns lot with this is pre-confirmations. I'm not going to call that a derivative, but essentially what it means is you can pre-purchase gas or block space ahead of actually getting delivery of that. There is a plethora of use cases, notwithstanding just based rollups. This is why we kind of started down this pathway, but other things that improves the user experience around interacting with Ethereum. it creates a better, Ethereum becomes a better product before. Drew Van Der Werff (11:52.349) because of it, but it also creates robustness for those producing it. They can have more stabilized yield. They can take views on if gas price is high today, they'll sell some pre-confirmations that they think it's low. Maybe they don't. There's a whole host of things they can do. And then it provides more stability for the actual gas price that's paid in real time. And so again, improving the user experience of Ethereum. So that's item that's getting created. Another is full slot auctions. So there's a team working on this where the full block is auctions and there's a lot of pushback by people in the community around this and the things it can do to Ethereum and how it's going to ruin a whole host. These arguments happen throughout time. I'm sure people argued this with... Farmers probably argued this back in the day when Futures got created too. I think a lot of these arguments are being made by people who maybe have incentives and certain protocols that do not benefit from this type of activity. It's an open source system. I tend to think this creates a more robustness around Ethereum. And so they're working on that. There's a lot of demand for that product. The yields for validators is increasingly high. Those servicing, block space and consumers have new products they can now offer. They have better pricing they can offer. And so it's overall better. And then the last item that no one's working on but is built is what we call ILBoost. And this is an out of protocol implementation of Fossil. And so we haven't pushed on this because, I mean, it's still TBD on where Fossil is or isn't going to be included. If it doesn't get included in the next hard fork, we're absolutely going to be pushing for it. We've already been speaking with validators to get it going. And I do think there will be a subset of a couple percent, least of Ethereum, running Fossil on commit boost. The best mental model, probably should have started this, of how to think about Kinect Boost is it's just a standard and it's an interface for developers to create applications that change block construction. So something like IL Boost, you can think about as an application and for validators to opt into that application. So same thing when you open your app store, you choose the apps you want to run, but you don't have to run a new app store for every app. Drew Van Der Werff (14:06.546) So for validators, it's the same thing. They just open App Store, which is they run commit boost and they can launch these different apps. And then the developers themselves don't have to talk the validators into running a whole new set of software. They just say, hey, run my app, which spins it up. then, yeah, and a technical layer just standardizes how validators provide a signature and how an app requests the signature. So it's not too complex. Rex (14:28.78) Yeah, so I think just to put a period on this model, what you're saying is that if commit boost is the app store and I'm a validator, I can say, OK, I want to opt in to commit boost. And then one of these apps in the analogy would be, for those who are not in the lingo, like Fossil or IL, these are just inclusion lists. So the idea that you can force your transaction to be included even if into the Ethereum blockchain, even if you have some issues around like the OFAC censorship list or these other things. But the idea is that I'm a validator. I am running commit boost. I can opt into this inclusion list protocol. And then instead of like having to figure out like how to engineer this or run a whole separate piece of software for each one of these apps, it all flows through the commit boost framework and enables that kind of app store like experience for just different ways that we can manipulate and use this block space as opposed to how it was before, which is essentially like you send a transaction or maybe a few transactions in a bundle and then kind of let the system work and hope that it gets folded into a block. Drew Van Der Werff (15:46.205) Yeah, that's exactly right. And even just the current construct of today's market, or at least the, the MedBoost paradigm was validators lost all autonomy. and again, I don't know if this was by design or byproduct, but essentially when you run MedBoost, you give all autonomy over the block, which you have a monopoly over. So you have this commodity you've produced and you're essentially giving the right to sell it and I don't know, chop it up however you want, send it to sanctioned countries, you know, whatever, to another party. And so you've lost all your autonomy around that. And that has created other dynamics where certain actors take that and do things you may not agree with. so, yeah, Medboost, you just give up all autonomy and you say, other actor who's sophisticated, do whatever you want with this, just pay me the most money. That's kind of like what you get. With commit boost, you're able to say, still build this for me. Sell my piece of corn, but you can't sell it here. Or I want you to pre-sell some of it now. You can put all these constraints on downstream constructors of the block, which there's a million plus validators in Ethereum guaranteed. A couple of them are going to act with the ethos of which we all got into Ethereum 4 versus the few builders or relays that are out there. Rex (17:13.846) Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense and I hope everyone's following and we're not too in the weeds here. Tough to tell when this is something that you're passionate about, but just kind of pushing forward a little bit. think to me, one of course what's compelling about what you're talking about is the idea, I'm a home validator and... I got into that because I believe I want to be part of this decentralized network to keep it decentralized. But by opting into MEV Boost, which as a responsible financial party, that will earn me a lot more money than doing it myself. I essentially give up my autonomy, as you say, and therefore, you really need to ask yourself, am I truly contributing to the decentralization and the credible neutrality of this network or you know, I guess going back to the conversations of four years ago when MEV Boost started like have we just kind of like compromised the entire system by like kind of dressing it up in this MEV conversation. Drew Van Der Werff (18:30.683) Yeah, that's right. And you as a user running that boost today, you couldn't run up, you couldn't support inclusion list. Like your best thing you do is just not run a boost, but you're giving up that financially with commit boost, you can run inclusion list as the app plus still get the benefits of the yield. It's not a, it's not a binary outcome. It's there's a portion of my block I once saved for those things that are getting filtered. Rex (18:46.616) Yeah. Rex (18:53.506) Yeah, you can say like, okay, 50 % of the block, please, like MEV people, just do whatever dark force stuff you want. I want the most money for half the block. For a third of the block, I want it to be inclusion-less because I believe the point of Ethereum is that even if you're North Korea or Russia or Iran, you are supposed to be able to use the world computer. And then like the last third, I don't know, I guess the last two, six, whatever I'm at, right? What I think is very interesting is we can start to move the conversation about the compute offered by nodes and really what block space or gas or whatever you want to think of it. What that represents is computation that you can do. We can start thinking about how to use that computation for things outside of financial transactions on the blockchains, i.e. this chat app that you kind of opened us with. Drew Van Der Werff (19:51.55) Absolutely. And it was asinine to me that we designed the system, I don't know how many years ago the merge was, can't do math quickly, a couple of years ago, and we really haven't improved anything. This is the thing. It's, when you type something in the chat GPT and you're asking it to define some term, it doesn't use the same compute location as me giving it some complex research question where it's spelling out things out. Like the amount of energy it takes to define a term, send it. to the high energy area, it doesn't take cost money. But if I ask you something complex, you can guarantee it's going to West Texas with the wind farms and stranded wind. I'm just using that as an example. But with block space, you submit a transaction, there's no separation of the type of compute you're using. It doesn't matter if you're simple or complex, it's the same rate, paying the same thing. And it really is time we change that. And so I see commit boost is one piece of that. I think across the PBS pipeline, there's a million other things we could do. And I think we should really lean into the actors we have today. It's a robust pipeline. I could see decentralization and robustness of Ethereum improving, still using relays and builders and still becoming robust. I mean, there's all these incentive dis-alignments that exist today. We're still relying on relays as a public good for some crazy reason. Let's reward those who provide value in the value chain and get them paid. This is crazy to me. And today I call it collaborative, combative collaborative relationships between the builder, the relay and the validator. Everyone is trying to scrape a fee. Absolutely everyone has, and no one works together. I mean, this is a huge inefficiency. And yeah, there's just a lot we could do if people just... you know, sat down and maybe rethought some of the things that we've learned over time. And I'm not blaming anyone for where we're at today. Just that's the best we knew at that point in time. And we should really think, rethink it. And this doesn't require going out and shoving the builder into TEEs and, you know, calling this thing decentralized. mean, fun fact, the U S government owns 10 % of Intel, right? you know, who built SGX? I just don't understand why we're pushing down all these rabbit holes there. Drew Van Der Werff (22:06.91) I think we should have a diversification approach. It'd be fantastic if a block was constructed that had a portion of it built by TEs, had a portion of it built with some pre-conf, had a portion built with IL inclusion, have a portion built by the centralized builders that we have today that hopefully become more robust with time. And I think that would be fantastic for Ethereum. Rex (22:26.198) Yeah, no, man, I think that's super kind of like exciting and refreshing in this conversation in our industry that seems to have like kind of moved past our core values. And so, you know, we'll impact that more in a second. I want to definitely hear your thoughts on the entire PBS pipeline and like where opportunities are. I want to talk about TEEs, but before I like let us skate too far away from the things that you've brought up, I just- Can we go back to the idea behind full block auctions and you don't have to name any names if you don't want to, like, why is that controversial? That seems like, look, if people want to opt into that, why not? Drew Van Der Werff (23:11.185) Yeah, there's the continuous point to portion of this is that there is research that shows that. People who will buy multiple slots in a row can artificially, for instance, keep the price in an Oracle low or high, which can trigger certain things in DeFi protocols. And so let's kind of have like four or five blocks where you're keeping the price low or not letting it through. And then all of a sudden at the end of the four, there's this huge opportunity that's collected across the four blocks. And so there's a big value to that. And that isn't really the most efficient system. Yeah, I tend to think that maybe the systems were designed incorrectly. guaranteed down the line no matter what people are going to be doing multi-block MEV. There's no doubt in my mind whether it's now or later, you know, it's just going to happen. So. Rex (24:04.834) Yeah, but I guess, I guess, you know, at the end of the day, right? Like, I feel like these are problems that we've solved, right? It just, from a mechanism standpoint, which is like, look, like people should be able to like buy the space that they need and, or that they want. And then if they want, like, what I'm trying to get to is essentially like exponential fee increases, where it's like buying one block is. X, two blocks is two X, three blocks is four X, right? And so we just make it prohibitively expensive for actors to do bad things. Isn't that kind of the concept of crypto economic security? Drew Van Der Werff (24:48.496) This is it. There's this fantastic story of Lloyd Blankfein, the old CEO of Goldman. Not everyone crypto likes Goldman, when he was a commodity trader, he traded aluminum. And this is back in the heyday of Wall Street, but Lloyd bought up literally all the physical aluminum you could physically purchase. And it was supposedly so bright that the US government called Goldman Sachs and asked them to put tarps over their aluminum because it was ruining the satellites. I this was insane. And the markets function fine. I mean, I'm sure Goldman made a killing off this and they were doing something, but you know, the aluminum market's still going. It's still working. I'm sure there was regulatory change maybe from this, but I think of regulation and Ethereum different than the US government and putting rule sets in place. Let's design a system that encompasses the rules to limit this type of behavior. not sit here and say, you, bad person, you, this is open innovation, but you can't do that. Um, you know, things, things like that. And so there's a ton of history in traditional markets where people have been able to do this. And here we are sitting here. I don't know what, you know, my Yeti is probably made of aluminum sitting next to me and everything is fine. Rex (25:52.962) Yeah. Rex (26:07.286) Yeah, no, I feel you. I struggle a lot. Drew Van Der Werff (26:11.228) How do you feel about that? I mean, yeah, what's the balance for you of like the Ethereum alignment, the, you you're good or bad and using the social layer. Rex (26:23.682) You know, I think, I think the social layer at the end of the day is the foundation that all of this is built on. And what that means is, for me, what that means is like, we, the, the system that we build is going to be a manifestation of the values that are held at the social layer and. Like innovation should be embraced. if innovation introduces something that is in conflict with those values. If we truly hold those values, what is going to happen is that more innovation will come to keep the good parts, but to smooth out the things that don't align with what we're trying to build. If you're trying to build the world's tallest building and you build the 30th floor, not structurally sound, you don't... stop or whatever, right? Like you fix it and you move on and to get towards your goal. I, so like, I think the idea of like, let's try to put social blocks around innovation because like it could bring bad things is not the right way to approach things. You know, there's always an exception that, like makes you rethink everything. And, and I'm sure you're familiar with it, but there was a Guy who was early in flashbots who did a podcast with Anna Rose on the ZK, the Zero Knowledge podcast, like three or four years ago now. And he essentially talked about, much too like technical to get into, essentially like you could build into flashbots, the, like multi-block reorgs. And, essentially what that would let like rich enough people do is say, Oh, I just saw what happened three blocks later. Let me reorg the whole chain so that I can get in three blocks earlier and then like make a killing because I essentially control the chain. And that was deemed so dangerous that he was essentially like tart and feathered out of flashbots and maybe, I don't know where he ended up, but again, I'll drop it in the show notes for those that are interested in the story, very good story. And so, you know, I think that I don't look at that story and think, Rex (28:43.916) That was a mistake. I think that probably, at least for the time, was what needed to happen. So I don't know. I think there's always a balance. I think the most important part is, and maybe this is somewhat of a pivot to the next conversation or not or whatever, the most important part is we need to make sure that the social layer values are concrete and don't... don't drift, right? Like at the end of the day, if we start to care less about decentralization and credible neutrality and these things that brought us to this space in the first place and start to chase after Solana to say the most important thing is execution speed or fees or whatever, right? We're gonna start to build systems that value that and those systems will start to forget the things that we've started to forget. Drew Van Der Werff (29:37.648) Yeah, I completely agree. I do think Ethereum in its infancy social layer was so critical. It always is in society, markets, all those two things. But as you grow mature, and I think this is a fairly great representation of what's kind of taking place across Ethereum with people focusing other places, it becomes to this mature state where you just can't rely on that. And even if you look at markets today like TradFi, day one of banking, there's this social layer, which is don't trust a prop shop. You're like, not saying any names, but HFT firms, you just, when you talk with them, you don't, you don't trust them. know, they're going to rip your face off. And so that's just something that they grill into you. And it's a social layer thing and you accept it and that's fine. Again, it doesn't drive the whole system today. There's not rules in place to say. HFT firms don't rip the face off of agency or broker dealers. Like it just, it does happen. And there's a social layer of known thing that that can take place. And so I think Ethereum is going through this growth phase where they've relied a lot on social layer throughout its history. Now it's becoming much, much bigger. And a lot of the people involved don't really care about the social layer to some extent. And so we need to create more robust mechanisms to still have Ethereum become a great product of what it is, which is the most decentralized supercomputer on the face of the earth or up in the cloud. And we should continue to lean into the things that continue that legacy and keep it a valuable product. Rex (31:11.8) So, you know, I think the, what do we do about it question is outside of the scope of our possibility, but our expertise. But my question for you is, are you concerned about the state of the Ethereum social layer today? And I'm not trying to lead you at all. A genuine question. You know, there's a billion different things we could talk about specific people or developments or whatever, but just overall. When you look around, especially now that it's been really four years since the last time where it really felt like Ethereum was positive, like the sentiment was positive and we were all focused around this one direction of the merge and the roll up centric roadmap. When you look around today, are you nervous? Are you bullish? Do you think we just need to stay off Twitter? Like what's your thought? Drew Van Der Werff (32:13.849) Yeah, this is good question. thinking about ways to frame my response. I mean, I'll just play it raw, I guess. Rex (32:27.704) It's the best content. Drew Van Der Werff (32:27.835) What's the price of TIA right now? I mean, where have the concerners gone? I don't know. Like John, he's probably still chasing the latest, whatever it is for his VC firm. I appreciate their feedback and thinking and just their insight into potentially what was not happening well in Ethereum. And I don't think the EF defines everything. I think client teams, think... Rex (32:30.958) Under a dollar. Drew Van Der Werff (32:57.499) A lot of what was coming out on Twitter was shared across a lot of people, so I blame any individuals, but Ethereum's gotta grow up. BlackRock is making the most money on these crypto ETFs. They are coming, they are here. They are going to start interacting with Ethereum. Fidelity is in the same boat. Look, this stuff is happening, it's coming, these parties. are going to build on Ethereum. I'm not too concerned. It just needs time. you know, some of things I am a bit concerned with is that, Sometimes self-fulfilling prophecies. The more you talk about being concerned, the more others get concerned, the more concern you have, the more concern, the more or less stable people feel, and maybe the less brightest minds in the world stop focusing on this because they're concerned too. So that's like one thing I still wonder about. I think this whole dank-rad thing guy is a genius. I, you. I think he's leaving because of the whole sentiment. He wants to move fast, break things. He's tired of the ETH alignment. He's tired of the social layer, these types of things. There was this post too about pay of people at the EF. Look in society today, there's a million places that don't pay what the industry pays. And that's just the reality of things. You work there because it's a good place to work. You believe in the mission and it isn't about the money. Now, does that attract the best talent? I don't know. You tell me. Drew Van Der Werff (34:28.827) We still have some of top researchers in the world working at NASA. They don't make what they could make at SpaceX. The trade-off is they get home at night and hang out with their kids. They get to say they work at NASA. They get these unique projects that they wouldn't get otherwise. And so there's these huge advantages. And so just focusing on the salary and the treasury that EF has and what they pay people, I think it just, know, a bunch of teenagers debating things on crypto Twitter, it just doesn't resonate well with me. Uh, it's, it's the same with consulting firms. mean, some consulting firms pay more than others. Okay. That's the reality. If you don't, you want to get paid more leave and go somewhere else. Like that's kind of my attitude towards all that. So, uh, it isn't a fortunate dinker. I'd left a brilliant mind and he contributed a lot. I, you know, I think he was tired of a lot of the alignment and all the debates we're having Justin still at the EF, man, that guy is just a very unique combination of having an EQ that's off the charts plus. an IQ that is even higher. And we are super fortunate to have him still driving the beam chain. The guy gets beat up all the time. He just puts his head down and continues to keep pushing Ethereum forward. So I wish instead of bagging on him, we would give him a little more support. I know there's people out there doing that, but you know, we should probably embrace a bit more on that side of things. So I don't know how you feel about things. I'm not too concerned about Ethereum. I think we just got to continue to evolve and mature as an ecosystem. as it grows and keep trying to provide the best product we can around the Ethereum block space. Rex (36:00.089) For sure. I probably entirely agree with you. I think the thing with Dankrad is like, look man, at the end of the day, like we're people. And if you want a different environment, you want a different challenge, you want to get paid more, like I support that like 100%. The thing that I really have trouble wrapping my mind around is that he's framing this as I'm going to temp, I'm going to stripe to build something with the same technology. Sure. and values. To me, really makes me, that a little bit rattles my foundation because Tempo to me is the actual opposite of the values of Ethereum. Is there any doubt that if North Korea does a hack on Tempo, that Stripe is not just going to freeze those funds? And that's the easy example to say like, isn't that a good thing? But the harder one is like, if something is happening in Venezuela and like, I'm actually not really sure who the good guys and the bad guys are these days, but assuming that Maduro is the bad guy and he like asked a company to freeze the funds, like shouldn't, shouldn't that not even be possible? And so to me, like the whole Dan Croud thing is like, I don't understand how you can say this is the same values and that makes me question if I really even understood the values of Ethereum in the first place or maybe I was kind of making up this story in my head or maybe he understood the values different. I don't know. mean, that's the thing that I struggle with the most. like in terms of walking into a new challenge, like dude, go for it, man. Like do it. I don't care if it's to get your bag or just try a new challenge or whatever. Like that's great, but the same values. Drew Van Der Werff (37:55.963) Fun fact tempo is the largest tissue maker in Germany. So if you're listening tempo People, know, you should look at your trademark and who's trying to take it. So Yeah, I I do know and I have heard payment chains like the amount of effort that goes into managing chargebacks There is a whole host of things that come with running a payments chain It is ironic to me that the supposedly Rex (38:08.014) Yeah. Drew Van Der Werff (38:23.98) Most Ethereum line fund is the one doubling, tripling down on this. this should tell you enough. need to know, about, you know, they operate to make money. That's fantastic. I'm glad, you're the guy that runs that place who proliferates himself in magazines, you know, all these things. I'm, I'm glad he's successful. yeah, I'm glad people around them have investments from Citadel very close to these high free C trading firms. I'm glad they're tied into all these places. Great for them from a financial standpoint, I understand. But yeah, I don't know about the ethos overall of where we're headed versus the control and money to be made for some of this stuff. Rex (39:03.404) Yeah. And look, like, I mean, I think at the end of the day, part of the way we talk is a little bit like, we're coming for the banks, like JP Morgan, like in 10 years, there'll be nothing. But you know, anyone with any who's actually participated in any of these systems knows that that's not what we're here for. We're here to augment those systems. so like, again, I welcome Stripe. I welcome payment chains. I welcome Tempo. I just don't think it's what we're doing. And so, you know, I think that that's enough about DankRide. And I don't know if you have more to say about Tempo, but that's probably enough. The other thing that concerns me a little bit is, and feel free to just like punt on this conversation, because I know you still need to manage a lot of like relationships, but I'm a little bit confused about what's going on with the Ethereum Foundation. Look, like Tomash, I've met him before. He seems like a great guy, but like... He seems like a little bit of a conflicted party to be running the foundation that's supposed to be in charge of credible neutrality. Like whether it's like the whole Nethermind piece where like Nethermind is not just a Ethereum client, which like directly competes with one of, with Geth, right? But like has all these things to, wasn't he named like the managing director or some like? high level executive position of a new VC fund or something. I very much agree with you that the Ethereum Foundation isn't really the key player in what we're building here. And that's a good thing, right? Like we're supposed to be decentralized and incredibly neutral, but I do wonder like just what the hell is going on over there? And... What would happen if we can't really rely on the Ethereum Foundation to be like a bastion of credibly neutral research and instead becomes like another political party like everyone else? Drew Van Der Werff (41:17.018) Yeah. And I just have one lens of this, is coming, yeah, at Wall Street and just the amount of disclosures, compliance rules, restrictions. It's, it's all about managing conflicts of interest and without knowing all the details, it's very hard to say like, there are people conflicted and they can't make the right decisions. And even if they're good humans, it's just a great pulse. mean, again, it's getting to the social layer versus the practicality of things. Does it is it perceived? Well, all this stuff that that just gets wrapped into it. And so I don't know all the details. I've known Tomas a very long time. He's a great person and I still trust his judgment, but yeah, at the end of the day, it appears to be some interesting things that have happened and agreements that are in place. I don't know if that's good or bad. I do think like us as an Ethereum community needs to not rely on the Ethereum Foundation as the core function of what drives the protocol forward. People should, yeah, I respect Ponce put us a lot. And EPBS, I think people for years shit on it and continue to. And man, this guy pounded the table and look where we are now. And he doesn't work at the EF, right? And he's just a guy that cares lot about Ethereum that's been doing this a long time, has lot, built a lot of respect. And I would even say he probably has his own conflicts, but you know, he's gotten people on board and driven things forward and I don't still fully agree with EPBS, but I respect what he's done and I respect his opinion because the amount of effort and time he's put into these things. I think there's plenty of examples across the theorem outside of the EF where people are pushing things forward. Rex (43:14.604) Yeah, you know, and I kind of went into this like rant a little bit about a little bit thinking at the end of the day, these client teams are the ones that decide what is the Ethereum protocol at the technical, like at the real protocol layer. And, you know, is there some risk that building a client doesn't really make you money and so is that going to cause some atrophy and what does that mean for the long-term future of the protocol? But I also just think about the internet and how that works and is no one's really making a profit contributing to the internet and making it a better, more robust place. they contribute to the internet so that they can build their businesses on top of it, right? Like Google doesn't. Anyway, mean point is is that like you can build these businesses that are incredibly Profitable and extract a lot of value in other ways, but still contribute in positive some ways to Open source and to like the core protocol that like needs them to They need to operate and so I don't know I mean I think all things like this just like Kind of land back and I don't know it's complicated, but we'll see Drew Van Der Werff (44:41.849) Agreed. Rex (44:42.968) Cool. All right. So we're, we're a little bit of drift here, but let's bring us back to like the, you know, that was our, our social layer conversation. Moving back to like the protocol, I think it would be interesting to return the conversation about what, what other parts of the PBS pipeline are you interested in and think could like really transform. And then just to signpost a little bit, like what I'd love to end on is like, because of all these transformations, because of commit boost, because of fabric and the concept of base rollups, which maybe we'll touch on, maybe we won't, what are you starting to get really excited for for the next phase of Ethereum and for kind of the path forward in front of us? So PBS pipeline, what are you excited about? Drew Van Der Werff (45:31.769) Yeah. And I've written about this for years now. Uh, I talked about the block space future posts I had, uh, obviously been working on commit boost and, I forget the name, uh, the super coordinator, I think I called it, but, uh, this picture of Spider-Man where the relays in the middle and you've got this actor who currently is a public good for still some crazy reason. I don't know what these relays that are doing out there, but yeah, I mean, there's just, there hasn't been much change in the PBS pipeline. in years and there's things like exclusive order flow. There's huge inefficiencies. We're still thinking about this concept of validator as a sort of like static box. And there is a ton of opportunity for that box to move around the world and be following the sun. Like we see in the traditional very robust infrastructure that has components of decentralization to it, or at least censorship resistance. Uh, and so yeah, for me, it's just sitting down thinking about how these actors interplay. What are, you know, it's still incredibly robust. I don't think we should just yank it out the window by all means. I don't think we should do that. And, but how do we calculate create efficiencies and where I would like ground myself is how can we make Ethereum more robust? How can we increase? the offering increase. Let me scratch that. Think about how we can make Ethereum more robust, how we can make Ethereum a better product to not only the producer supporting it, but the consumers. And how can we decentralize it in a way that's, it's still permissionless. And I think these three core pillars, we still have a ton of improvement we can, we can go down paths on. And I mentioned this earlier, but decentralized block builders, it's one way to think about things. It's not the wrong way. probably a little hard on it. But for me, we still have the ability to use Ethereum's 1 million plus validators to dictate how a block is produced. And that creates decentralization itself. There's just all these things we can look at. And so yeah, for the next few months, that's what I'm thinking about. think we talked earlier before the show, I still got my machine shop and I'm still running commit boost. Drew Van Der Werff (47:49.914) the nonprofits, but had started to think a lot about my previous research. And the thing probably that excites me the most is just knowing and grounding myself in traditional markets where if we can create derivatives, forwards, futures, other ways to consume block space and offer it to the end user, it will make Ethereum better and it will make gas markets more stable and a better product for people to consume. And that to me is a huge part. And we were just talking about Dan Grad, he had this great episode where he talked about us mental model shifting, this paradigm shift of stop thinking about Ethereum as this eat the line thing, this esoteric, it's a product that we needed to strengthen, we need to offer, and we need to think about hard forks this way. We need to think about a lot of protocol infrastructure this way. And it's just, you know, music to my ears. Rex (48:38.648) For sure, yeah. And I know that you've got a lot of interesting stuff cooking and hopefully we can get you back on the pod when you're ready to talk about it. So I don't wanna get in front of anything that you're not ready to talk about yet. But I wanna just push you a little bit more into understanding, you're talking really high level about like. things that sound exciting, like, just for example, like when you look at the relay of today, like where do you think the opportunities to evolve that, that not only make Ethereum more robust, incredibly neutral and decentralized and all the values that we say, but start to add some new capabilities in that transform what even a blockchain is for. Drew Van Der Werff (49:25.389) Yeah, we still don't reward relays for their value. And so what's in the happening is relays are playing timing games themselves. And so they receive bids from builders and they offer a bid to the validator. They take a spread and again, great. They're in the position. This is the way they're monetizing. Not great for Ethereum. When you have these isolated parties, it's kind of like when you buy a house, you have all these people that want their piece of the transaction and if they kind of all work together in some way or you formalized how these fees should be structured and it's very transparent then you don't have someone trying to scrape as much from the other person as possible and so for me that's a key point is relays or Ethereum community more formally needs to think about okay if the E-PBS happens I still am in the camp, but there's going to be out of protocol infrastructure outside of EPBS, even if certain clients don't support it. And so how do we formalize how we treat relays in this ecosystem? Or do we need to push forward on APS? Do we need to have out of protocol block proposal? Do we need to accelerate this? Because we're creating a ton of inefficiencies in the pipeline of today that we can just improve on. And this is about faster transactions, which are possible, cheaper transactions. more optimized blocks, all these things we have to think about in the context of scaling. You can still have incredible robustness and maybe the ability for lower varied entries so that if you wanted a relay that doesn't filter, it can still quote unquote compete. You know, just these concepts I still think and we can link to my old post in the show notes that I had from years ago, but yeah. Rex (51:17.326) Yeah, sorry, I'll edit this out, send me that post so I remember to it in the show notes. totally, it makes so much sense. guess all the things you're talking about are kind of like table stakes that we all know we need, but really do transform whether this is kind of like a toy for us, like speculative nerds or something that can actually be used, like faster confirmation times, lower fees, these kinds of things. so, you know, so much opportunity for improvement just on like getting better. and I'm looking forward to really like taking that next step to understand what else is possible. and like how to evolve this past, like essentially an engine for payments, transfers and building perp decks is, so very, very interesting, but something that has been kind of like in the back of my head since you mentioned it, since you mentioned this whole like, okay, the government owns 10 % of Intel is the role of TE is like whether that's in relays or at other parts of the MEV supply chain or, you know, really at any point of Ethereum, I'll kind of like hold my thoughts in reserve and let you answer first, but I guess. How do you think about TEs to the extent that you do think about them? And do you think that they are something that provide a valuable role and like do have a place in Ethereum? is this a little bit of a, well, what are your thoughts? Drew Van Der Werff (53:00.856) It's on Pocock. He started Aztec built a PC called geometry. I asked him once about TES. He said, was nice British accents. He kind of looked at me. He's very smart guy. It says math. yeah. And he said, TES are just the poor man's ZK. And then just walked off. And I think that's still crystal clear, pretty accurate description. I think back when he said that versus now the amount of acceleration we've had. with real time proving, with cryptography, with the hardware that supports this cryptography. I think if you fully bet everything on TEs, you're potentially jumping down a train with less secure, more centralized tech with less benefit over time in particular. so I don't have a strong view either way. I think it does enable things today that we can't do in the future. Certainly wouldn't be betting my house on it. yeah, certainly concerned that the U S government now owns a large chunk of a company that produces most T E's, but outside of our world today, I mean, these are using our iPhone. There's a, there's a lot of places that these are used. And so certainly a great tech, but yeah, I would support much more about a diversified construction of the Ethereum pipeline. Things in T E's, things not in T E's different systems. Rex (54:26.722) Yeah, you know, I think you even have a kind of like softer, more conciliatory thought than I do. Like, I'll just be honest, like I think TEEs are destructive to what we're trying to build. I mean, it's in the name, right? Trusted Execution Environment. In a world where we're trying to create like a credibly neutral system where you're not trusting people. TEs kind of fly in the face of that. And you know, you can make an argument, it's like, no, you're not actually trusting anyone. You're trusting this proof that comes out of the, and it's just, I don't know, man. Like to me, Ethereum is pretty simple, which is at the end of the day, where does credible neutrality come from? It comes from the fact that non-technical people can go buy a computer for like $1,000 or less and participate in the system, bringing their own. understanding of the values and I think TEs are kind of saying, yeah, but like what if we essentially created a new set of banks that were running this for us? And you know, that's aside from the fact that like every other day I see something on Twitter about how there's a major exploit in TEs and so, you know, I, ETH Denver, maybe two years ago, I forget, but I was walking around and I saw Uma Roy, the co-founder of Sysynx, doing a presentation. And so I waited around and talked to her afterwards. And then Sriram from Eigenlayer was there as well. And so we were having this conversation where he was telling me about, like there's this really interesting opportunity to do, I forget what it was for, something to do with AI and TEs. And I kind of looked at him and I was like, Like Uma's standing right here. I kind of thought the point of what she was building was that we would just use cryptography to like the ZKVM, like run your AI in that and then we can just prove it. And he looks at me and he goes, yeah, like that would be great, but that's like 10, 20 years from now. And then like fast forward two years later and we're proving, like multiple teams are proving Ethereum blocks in less than 12 seconds. So within slot times and the... Rex (56:47.296) Acceleration is is growing. It's not shrinking and so You know, I I very much agree with that quote that you just throw out the tees or like the poor man's zk and and maybe there's like some sort of like cute little argument about like well, we're going to use tees until zk is ready, but like Drew Van Der Werff (57:07.415) Maybe the only change we could make to that is TEs are the rich man's ZK. I don't know. Rex (57:08.374) I don't know man. Rex (57:12.366) Yeah, exactly. And I think the thing that I scratch my head a little bit about is that at so many points in this industry, in fact, maybe all of them, we hand wave our way past these concepts around. We talk about how Ethereum is secured by hundreds of billions of dollars of staked ETH, but You know, that's never really been tested and like we don't really know what that means. And, and we're just kind of like comfortable with it. We hand wave our way through it. Why in TE's do we like suddenly need to implement some like kind of like training wheels and then we'll get to the good ones. It's like, dude, like for everything else, we'll just understand that we're early on the innovation curve and then we'll get there. But like, why do we need to implement something that favors highly capitalized, highly sophisticated people in the meantime. To me, that is a huge risk of compromising Ethereum. Drew Van Der Werff (58:17.685) little more direct than me. Rex (58:19.278) No, man, fair enough. with last few minutes here, I'd just love to hear what are your eyes on these days? Whether that's within your realm of expertise in the PBS pipeline or Ethereum infrastructure, or that's crypto in general, or as you mentioned, your machine shop. I know you're spending a lot of time with CNC work up in real factories. You know, in October 2025, what are you excited about? Drew Van Der Werff (58:52.887) Yeah. On the fabric side of things, Jason is cracking away. We revisited our roots and we're hyper-focused on synchronous composability right now. So the ability to move L1, L2 liquidity within a transaction or a smart contract call. And we've continued to ship things. Our focus is setting up pre-confirmation infrastructure. So this has been a while coming, but having on Hoody, a set of open source software that anyone really can spin up to start testing pre-confirmations. is the core focus of ours. And then we hope to go to main nets later this year with one of the base rollups, another team working on that. We're kind of both building for both sides. So that will be huge. It's a huge focus of ours. The other thing is commit boost. We've got Fusaka. Whenever these hard forks happen, weird shit happens on these interactions. so just bug squashing, but also shipping new features. I mean, we had this stuff that validators have loved, the mucks. I'm not going to get all this reporting. And they keep coming back with more features and so we've spent time just helping them scale not only for the current PBS pipeline, but for the future of these other services they can offer around block construction. And so that's what I'm excited about. It of talked a bit about my thinking and research around just the whole pipeline, where we can get efficiencies and for the next year. Similar to last year, I took on Fabric at beginning of the year. Next year, I want to take on another effort to think about how can we make block production better for Ethereum. And so we'll definitely be investing time around that and working towards some solutions that we can get teams to triangulate around. then, yeah, the machine shop, boy, what what a joy that is to make bolts and screws for American companies in America. This is a huge pride of mine. And yeah, it's been a lot of ups and downs, a lot of humility this last week. Our machinist walked out. Our water pump broke, the lights stopped working. Our other machinist had such bad arthritis, he was limping around. Something called a tumbler broke. We just had gotten our huge machine back up and running earlier this week. So it's just like all of these things that are constantly going right, right and wrong, I guess, at that thing. So it's a great balance between that and focusing on the future of the internet. Rex (01:01:11.522) Well, man, I know just from our conversations, but even seeing like how you light up when you talk about it, that the machine shop is something that you're passionate about. But dude, I'm not going to lie. I'm getting a little nervous that we're going to see the Drew post following soon, the Dan Krab post saying, I'm leaving Ethereum and taking my talents to nuts and bolts full time. Drew Van Der Werff (01:01:34.999) What's the US tissue issuer? Is it actually tissue? Rex (01:01:38.317) What, Kleenex? Drew Van Der Werff (01:01:39.511) Kleenex, yeah, I'm going to the Kleenex factory. Just Lake Teffa. No, Rex, not gonna be leaving anytime soon. So those who are sick of me, I'm sorry, those who love me, you're gonna get more doses. So I may just be trying to sell you some parts if you know anyone that works at an assembly or manufacturing shop in the US. Rex (01:01:41.516) Yeah. Rex (01:01:57.774) Awesome man, much appreciated. Before I let you go, can you just share with the audience where they can find you, if they're interested in learning more about Fabric or Commit Boost, like what are the best resources and just yeah, like what's the best way to follow up? Drew Van Der Werff (01:02:11.703) Twitter, follow the updates, we're okay at it. If you look in our docs, there's also links to community chats, we're a little more active. So yeah, if you're a node operator and we haven't spoke, we'd love to talk to you. And if you're focused on base roles, we haven't spoke, we'd love to talk. And if you want to think about the PBS pipeline, particularly later this year, I'll be at conferences and trying to organize a few things. So we'd hope to have you if you want to join. Rex (01:02:35.818) Awesome, man. Well, Drew, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure as always and looking forward to getting you back on when you're ready to start talking about those things you got cooking. Drew Van Der Werff (01:02:47.307) Awesome. Thanks, Rex. Appreciate it. Rex (01:02:49.581) Have a good one.