The Summer of Protocols Episode

Welcome, Bankless Nation, to the Summer of Protocols. Summer of Protocols is an ongoing research and evangelism effort that aims to catalyze broad interest in the study of protocols as a first class concept for thinking about the world. Today on the show, you're going to experience something a little different here, something a little bit more close to storytelling, a little different kind of frontier,

but all around the idea of protocols. To explain a little bit more about what we're up to, Tim Bako from the Ethereum Foundation and Venkat Rao will open up the show today. Tim, Venkat, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having us.

So this is going to be your guys' show today. Tim, maybe you can kinda lay down a little bit of context as to again a little bit more about what Summer Protocols is and uh how it relates to Ethereum and what the Ethereum Foundation's role is here. Like what are your listeners gonna experience here today?

Yeah, of course. So the idea with summer protocols is to better understand exactly what protocols are and um do this across a whole range of domains so that we can hopefully uh on the Ethereum side just have a better way of thinking about what Ethereum is. This sort of started a few years ago now, where I reached out to Venket, who uh is a blogger and consultant across the tech industry and

If maybe in like 2017-2018 started mentioning Ethereum from time to time in his newsletter, uh, I think the first mention I recall was like the parody hack.

And um, so I reached out in like yeah, a few years ago, just familiar with his work, because I work on Ethereum, and Ethereum is kind of a weird thing to work on. Like a lot of the frameworks that you have when you're saying working on a tech startup or something else just don't quite apply, right? Like Ethereum is not like a product, it's not like something where you like, yes, there is a high level roadmap, but it's it's very different in that there's not like a specific team that's working on with a CEO pushing it forward.

So I

I reached out to Venkat to just like help me better think about this thing. I think when we when we try to describe Ethereum, we always use these analogies where we're like it's it's just like a nation state or it's just like a tech platform or it's like a currency. And none of those are quite right. They all they all sort of hint at you know parts of Ethereum and have similar properties, but they they sort of fall apart when you when you start looking a bit closer.

And so at the end of Vencaps, like, okay, can we like understand this thing better and try to figure out how we should approach it?

After doing that for a while, we realized it was a bit too narrow to just have like me and him talking about that. So he he spent some time uh consulting with the EF and a couple of us there to think through these things. And in fall of last year, um we like me, Venkat, Josh Shark, Danny Ryan, um, and Trent, and a couple others published this piece called uh The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols, which we were basically trying to define okay, what's like special about protocols?

And that piece was more a lot of questions than actually answers that we had. And sort of led us to think like, okay, Ethereum is a bit too narrow of an example to properly understand protocols in like their full breadth. So, what would it look like if instead we we try to get researchers focused on protocols directly across a whole bunch of domains? And that's where summer protocols started. So last summer we we, the EF, funded 30.

Five people, I think, to spend the summer researching protocols across a whole bunch of domains and in a bunch of contexts. So we had people looking at like traditional web protocols, but we also had people looking at, you know, say how the protocols die or how do memory protocols evolve over time.

And that gave us like a really good snapshot of okay, is there

Like a common theme, a common element across protocols. And

I think it sort of provides a good uh a good sort of starting ground to explore this domain. Um and yeah, Venkat, you effectively ran the entire research part of this program. Uh, do you want to share a few thoughts on like

yeah, what your expectations were maybe before the program and then how it morphed over the summer after uh after we actually had the research?

Yeah. So this was um like when we thought of this idea after doing the um like just me thinking about it, it was like

um

suddenly felt like I've spent my whole career so far in various sorts of RD environments of the traditional sort.

And suddenly I realized I had a lot of strong opinions on

everything wrong with like every other research context, like you know, university labs, corporate RD labs, uh uh big company product development, uh government RD labs. Um so there's that was one piece of my thinking coming into this, which is.

Is there a modern way to do a research RD program on an emerging topic that leverages ideas from open source, decentralized networks, the way Ethereum community does its technical development? So that part of it felt a little bit like, you know, there was that old Seinfeld

joke where Kramer creates a coffee table book about coffee tables that's in the form of a coffee table. Maybe this is a dated reference, it's a 90s show. But that's what it felt like. This was.

A program for researching

protocols that was in the form of protocol that turns into a protocol? It's like, you know, not like a traditional RD lab, not like, you know, a university research department, all contexts are spent time in. So that's how I approached it. It was like

can we create something that's um

a bunch of independent thinkers and scholars and uh doers just working on aspects of protocols that interest them?

And doing so in a protocolish manner. So we had these 30-odd people working on various topics. Like Tim said, like you know, safety in coal mines, how protocols die, uh, how does memory work as a protocol? Um even small examples, like uh we spent a lot of the summer talking a lot about handshakes, like handshakes are a very basic introduction protocol.

What can we learn from just thinking about handshakes? But we did so in this sort of decentralized way rather than like, you know, academic or industrial way.

So that turned out to be a really interesting experience, and we published the research in the form of

what we call a protocol kit.

I have mine somewhere here. So it's a big three ring binder with uh

all the research published in print. It's all available online as well at uh

summerprotocols.com.

Um and I think I approached um this uh running this program

kind of like

Thinking back in history, at what small groups have had a really big outsize influence in creating entire, like, you know, intellectual or cultural or technical movements. So we spend a lot of our sort of meta-discussion time thinking about, you know,

um

things like um park, the original Xerox uh park that created a lot of computer research, things like you know, Stuart Brand's whole earth catalog, or way back in the 1920s, the Bloomsbury set of writers and artists who created a lot of uh modernist culture. So we took a cues from a lot of these loose collectives of um highly influential research groups uh from which a lot of like important things have started. Tim's um uh pointed out the one that

kicked off AI. So there was a small conference at Dartmouth in the 1970s, I think, that can be seen as almost the genesis event of all of modern AI. So we wanted to do something like that for protocol. So that's kind of the backstory here. And I think it

basically worked out the way we were hoping it would.

So, listeners, as you listen to this episode, you are going to listen to three of the 35 researchers that have gone out and investigated uh protocols. So, you are getting a small snapshot of this much larger movement uh about understanding and researching and storytelling about protocols. I think this is gonna be a really cool episode. I have not heard of any of these things. Uh, so I'm gonna be in the audience with you, Bankless Nation, as some of these stories get told. Uh, I'm I'm I think this is gonna be really, really fun. Tim, just kind of give us a preview of what listeners are about to um are about to hear. Uh, we're bringing on you, you two, Venkat and Tim, are the co hosts for this episode. So I am disappearing. Uh, and you guys are going to be asking questions to three selected uh protocol investigators. Uh, what should listeners expect? What should listeners like, what kind of frame of mind should they be in as they uh navigate these three different conversations? Overall, what do you want to say before we get into these episodes?

Um, yeah, I guess I'll start by saying what they are. So the three the three researchers uh we thought would would be interesting to bring on are uh Sarah, Timber, and Nahi. Um so the way we structured the program, actually, we had 12 core researchers who spent the whole summer looking into a topic. And then midway through the summer, we brought in 20 ish extra people to come and build on their work. So the first two people we'll hear from, uh Sarah and Timber, they're two of the core researchers who spent the whole summer working on this. And then Nahi was one of the people who came and like built something on top of their work. Um

And so I wanted to get like a pretty like broad sample of the domains we looked at last summer. So the first one, uh, which is uh Sarah's work, is around how protocols die and like the death of of these these digital uh so one, the death of protocols, and two, the death of like digital structures, um, you know, things like video games, online worlds, and whatnot. Um, I think this this is pretty relevant in terms of like a lot of the fundamental questions we have around Ethereum, around, you know, what should the future of Ethereum be? Should it ossify? Should it stick around forever? And uh how how should we think about that? Um, so yeah, that was one of the topics, just like protocol def that was on my wish list. And um, Sarah was like the perfect person to spend a summer looking into that.

Then we have Timber, who came knowing nothing about like crypto or not a lot of tech either. He his background was in workplace safety, and he studied the evolution of safety protocols in workplace from basically people being in mines in the 1800s and blowing up and sort of derived a generalized theory of protocol life cycles out of that. And I think.

To me, this is one of the really good examples of why something like Summer of Protocols can be useful, where we have this like case study for something that has nothing at all to do around technology or Ethereum. And I just remember reading his article and being like, wow, like this is exactly sort of how like smart contract development or protocol development works. Um, even though like there's there's not even a tangential mention to it. Um, and to me, that was one of the ones that validated that, okay, like.

There's probably value in studying protocols at a higher level than just looking at Ethereum or looking at workplace safety or looking at something else.

And then Naki's work is completely different. So it's like a visual piece that

really brings in a bunch of the different um a bunch of the different themes and topics that were explored throughout the summer. Um and

Like, yeah, as opposed to the first two, which are mostly text, it's like uh a graphic uh a graphic comic. Um, so I think getting her perspective as well as someone who comes in, looks at everything that's being done, and and builds something on it uh is really valuable.

So that'll be most of the most of the show. After that, we want to wrap up uh with our plans for 2024. So we do have another cohort of summer protocols planned for this summer. The applications are closing for it April 12th. So uh

Soon. And uh so we'll we'll close off saying, like, you know, what are we expecting to do this summer? And then uh some ideas I had for how to tie all of this back to Ethereum.

Beautiful. Well Tim Venkat, I am looking forward to stepping into the audience, which I think I will go ahead and do right now. So Tim the Venkat, the floor is yours and I'm looking forward to hearing all of these stories.

Okay, well, Sarah, thanks for coming on and talking to us about your work on death this summer.

Um, I guess just to start,

maybe do you want to take a couple minutes to explain like

why you are interested in researching this? Um, and then we can go dive deeper into like the your research throughout the summer. But yeah, just give us some context like why was this interesting to you?

Yeah, yeah. What an intro to follow. Why were you interested in death of all things?

Um