🎙Tim Beiko | Layer Zero

welcome to layer zero layer zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but it's composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because crypto is people all the way down and always has been today i'm speaking with tim baco timbeco has a similar uh timeline with getting into crypto that as i did got into uh the top

of the 2017 markets and then found his way into what niche fits him best started working as a client project lead at consensus project manager and then eventually he hand-raised and used his uh position working on the bazoo client to really focus on eip-155 and tim raising his hand to take that uh effort on aip1559 led him into the role of being the all-core devs coordinator so this really

this podcast is really a lesson in the dynamics of what it means to make upgrades to ethereum and very very true to what i think layer zero is all about is like who what code and who is proposing this code that ultimately becomes part of ethereum really needs to be considered because people the code dictates how people's lives will look what ethereum is will impact the people that use it and tim baiko's at the heart of what changes make their way into ethereum and what changes do not and so this uh this is a fantastic

podcast to answer the question are there just centralized actors that can upgrade the code uh can vitalik just get whatever he wants in into code and upgrade ethereum as he see fits we've talked about these subjects directly and then also talk about um some overarching just uh you know decisions and and problems that you know will inevitably uh be part of ethereum's uh future and what we can do to solve those problems now uh also this is a lesson in client diversity and client development and so just a very informative podcast so let's go ahead and get right into

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allow for even more collateral types plus a variety of yield strategies to choose from harness the power of alchemix at alchemix.fi that's a-l-c-h-e-m-i-x dot f i follow alchemix on twitter at alcomixfi and join the discord to keep up to date with alchemix v2 and to get involved in governance hey tim how's it going i'm good how are you pretty good my man pretty pretty good uh still in seattle about to head into a plane to get back to san diego from the holidays where are you at

i'm in vancouver and was just in san diego yesterday to celebrate thanksgiving with some friends oh bummer we miss each other i'm up north and you went down south and i was down south and you went up north so you you have one of those uh cool nft things i i can't remember what the name of that nft project is in your background um but i remember looking at those yeah i think they're called crypto trees so i bought it i didn't mint it uh i'm still looking for a good nft background if people have suggestions oh yeah you're gonna get flawless

suggestions yeah this one is like decent but i don't know i i'm not like 100 in love with it either so yeah yeah i feel like that's how nfts go is like you never actually feel completely in love with them so you always have to keep on searching yeah so tim let's go all the way back for those that don't know tim is one of the lead efforts uh coordinating the the eth one so i don't think we call it eth one anymore but also largely the eip1559 efforts but let's go even even further back when was your moment that you first heard about ethereum

right um a friend of mine told me about it and i ignored it the first time um that was a mistake a second time i heard about it was in the context of the dao but when the dao was a fundraising project and not a hack um and uh that seemed interesting and i actually bought my first eath to contribute to the dao i bought the absolute top uh i think like uh my buy went throughout coinbase there's always like a couple days like literally the day before the hack

uh happened um yeah so that was my introduction to ethereum was the dow getting hacked i feel like this is a great exemplar story like your friend tells you about ethereum you ignore it and then you buy the top these are this is how people get into into crypto exactly yeah what kind of uh experience what was your your work life your career trajectory before crypto right um so i i kind of started out more on the business side i always started a bunch of projects um when i was in in

high school i had an online t-shirt company uh shopify i don't think existed back then but you today that would be like a shopify store um then i actually i managed a painting company for like three years uh like actual painting of houses um i realized that doesn't scale really well so there's like really diminishing returns to scale uh with like physically painting things got interested into tech because it seemed like something you could like scale easier um and uh instead of going to college a

friend and i figured out uh why not try and start a tech company so we spent a year trying to start a startup uh didn't work out uh the idea was to try and uh basically airbnb for your luggage space um so if say you're living in bali and you want something from uh france uh we would like match you with somebody coming your way uh and then you could pay them to bring uh whatever you want um and that that was also like a horrible tech idea because that also doesn't scale really well um but learned a lot about you know technology and um also

realized how little i knew i kind of taught myself to code it a little bit while we were doing that and when the startup didn't work out i went back to school to do computer science instead of business um and basically did that um and then yeah after that i worked as a product manager and uh kind of kept doing that it felt like a nice intersection of like being involved in the engineering side but also not like just writing code so you always have had a entrepreneurial spirit inside of you yeah yeah pretty much yeah

did they extend like a even earlier than that or is that kind of like the early stories i think the t-shirt business was the first thing uh and it was interesting because i was like i don't know 16 years old at the time were 15 years old and it was just like so hard to do everything from like getting your paypal account right because you're not 18 uh you know getting like set up on i forget what what i use for a storefront but like the equivalent of shopify like all those things are quite hard if you're not 18 years old um yeah was it was it the pursuit of of capital

or the spirit of building something like what really resonated with you about it yeah so definitely the building more um capital was nice in that it was mostly like unconstrained right like when you work a job it's like you know you can work more hours or find like a you know slightly better paying job especially when you're like 16 years old your options are quite limited um and so uh yeah like i guess working on something that's like self-directed but also like you know if things work out you do get like a higher payoff um yeah i think those two things

were really the the just a bit and then what made you decide computer science when you went back to was it was that that wasn't your undergrad was it yeah undergrad undergrad i guess trying to code i liked it i realized how little i knew and like how flaky everything i was writing was doing so you know there's a lot of like debates about how like useful it is to understand like the theory behind like computer science versus like just doing like say a coding bootcamp um and i think i'm very glad i kind of started with like the boot camp approach and and

actually you know got to building things really quickly um but after that you kind of just realize how little you know uh so then going back and and looking into theory and i spent a lot of time in undergrad also doing ai and that was really interesting to learn um so yeah i you know i i enjoyed kind of getting just a better understanding overall of like how these things work behind the scenes so after you graduated with a degree in computer science and then you had you had some experience you know building being an entrepreneur like where did you

think you were going to take that yeah so one thing i realized when my company didn't work out is i didn't want to start another company unless i knew i was like the best person in the world to do it and it was just something like meeting like as i had my startup i got to meet that you know a bunch of other founders and to me that seemed like one of the really not necessarily like necessary things for companies to work but like it it greatly improves your odd if you feel you're like in the top you know one or 0.1 percent of people that

can actually tackle this problem um so i'm you know i was and still am kind of fine you know not starting a company for its sake but waiting until there's something where i'm like well nobody else can kind of do this better than i can right or you know mo the vast majority of people can't do that um and so yeah i and and i also realized uh while i was kind of running my company you know we were like a startup of three um that i didn't have like a good feel for like what does like a successful 10 percent company look like what does like

a successful 50 200 you know 10 000 percent look like uh so during my my my undergrad i tried to intern up like a bunch of different sized companies to like get a feel for like you know what do they look like um and then after my undergrad i basically went to like a mid-stage startup for a year working on ai um and that was i think late 2017 early 2018 by that point i had been kind of following ethereum again like pretty much um

but there's not a lot of jobs on ethereum if you're not an engineer um so an ai kind of felt like a better kind of career path uh so you know i worked in ai kind of followed the theorem on nights and weekends um and at some point just started searching for a job full time in this space i got just really bored of it after like eight months um and so i was looking at uh any ethereum job i could find yeah what was the uh the process of like work ethereum balance for you before you got into like full time before you got your job in ethereum what was like right yeah

tell me about that so if i had to describe it quickly it's like booking a conference room for yourself and like reading the beige paper you know like you're doing crypto zombies uh so i would try to like if i wasn't too busy at work you know take time there to like you know study or read up on interesting things um spent a bunch of time on the ethereum subreddit um the the quality there was was quite high um and i i didn't actually go to like ethereum meetups like there weren't a lot of them in montreal um but

i managed to get my ai company to pay to send me to a blockchain conference in austin um and then when the first east berlin happened uh my goal was to go there and try i bought a ticket for eastwood and a ticket for defcon uh and i was like i'll just go to those places and like get somebody to give me a job um and i was really lucky that i actually landed my first job right before going to eath berlin but that was kind of my plan is like in person it'll probably be easier to like meet these companies and and yeah find find a good fit

so this was in uh 2017-ish right yeah late 2017 early i guess east berlin the first one was in 2018 so i kind of started looking you know like 2017 again probably like right before the top um and then kept looking throughout like the first half of 2018 and got something a bit later in the year yeah i know our timelines are are about the same uh well so why ethereum because in 2017 like there was there was everything right like there was eos there were a billion billion bitcoin forks like why ethereum

yeah yeah so i you know i i'd known about ethereum since like the dao and and i just the project really resonated with me it did seem like it was trying to build something like genuinely new um i you know i'm just like not that interested but i say like bitcoin forks you know where to like tweak a parameter and like you know kind of derivative projects um so i and i don't know in 2017 aside from ethereum and like bitcoin and maybe a couple smaller ones like monero or stuff

like that and zcash there weren't like a lot of actually legitimate projects um and i also felt uh the risk reward of working on say like an ico project was pretty bad um that's kind of what got me to decide to work on a theorem full-time is when there was this ico boom i was like you know all these projects might fail but clearly it shows there's like demand for ethereum right like there's demand for like using this platform and also the thing that i realized was like how kind of broken a theorem was like i don't know if you remember then but like icos could like

plug the mempool for like two days or something like that and it was like really hard to get a transaction in and i was like clearly there's a lot of work to do at the protocol level there's like some demand for the protocol itself um and all the stuff built on top still feels pretty speculative and i was not i didn't feel like i knew enough to be able to say like you know this is like a project that is actually going to make it um yeah so uh yeah ethereum just felt like i don't like the platform order is like the most actual activity innovation happening on it um and in a spot where

there's still a lot to do to actually improve their protocol while you were going through this 2017-2012 journey of learning how to get into the space were you more of like a lone wolf or did you have like company like a friend to go with you i remember in 2017 like i had like five or six like friends in a group chat right and so like that we all kind of shared knowledge what was your dynamic like that like that no like yeah the exact opposite like completely alone yeah there's like one guy who told me about ethereum and bitcoin and like we're not like close friends so like you know i you know i i

like message him probably 10 times in the span of three years about it but like yeah no i didn't really have anybody i knew and i feel like that was also kind of true when you were building your businesses your early businesses when you were first experimenting with being an entrepreneur we were also also a lone wolf then too uh more or less like a lot of them had co-founders or i had friends involved in that or like made friends through the process um so i think you know a lot of them probably started with me more or less alone and then you know i kind of brought people into it um yeah what was your first job in ethereum

uh so i i got super lucky uh consensus was just starting a protocol team um and they needed product managers so uh actually i tried i think it was like early in the year i applied i interviewed and they're like we're kind of looking for a product lead and not like a single pm um and we'll call you back if like we ever hire single pms and i thought they were just being polite uh and like say no but actually did call me back like four months later they were like well we hired a product lead now we're looking for actual pms are you still interested and i said yes so it

was just like such a perfect fit uh and at that time consensus was building a client from scratch so i basically joined right after they had like the called the v1 but it was really more like a v0 uh like a very basic clients that could like sync the main net uh only had full full sync it was only an archive node so you know aside from like working in theory it really didn't do a lot like on mainnet um and then over the next couple years we basically got to like build that and add kind of all the features you expected like it you know standard ethereum client like fast sync pruning uh all the

json rpc support tracing and all that stuff did this client have a name uh yeah so it was called pantheon it's basu oh yeah yeah yeah i remember it yeah right did you feel like equipped or like qualified uh to be able to do that like was that was that a challenge for you right um so i'm not sure there were a lot of people who would have been like a hundred percent ready i thought i you know i'd say i was

probably 50 there my biggest like surprise or learning when i first started is i assumed i could like read the spec you know like the yellow paper the beige paper and like that would be like 80 of the actual client right like these are like the rules of ethereum but it's more the opposite it's more like 20 and like 80 percent of stuff in clients like for example fasync doesn't have a spec right like the spec there's like a pr on geth that explains how it works but it's like yeah there's so many things that are kind of like that where they're not or they're maybe specified somewhere but

you really have to know where to look for um and it's quite obscure and you kind of have to learn by like either using the other clients uh or you know like trying to understand what they did um so yeah you know that was a lot probably the part where i had to like ramp up the most uh was just you know understanding all these these parts of ethereum that are like specified in the weird corners of the internet and is that is that true just because of like the chaotic nature of ethereum just it was a young ecosystem people weren't really writing stuff down like why why was that

true do you think yeah i think that's that's that's part of it i think the other thing is maybe like you don't know in advance what what will be like the popular feature so for example like uh snap sync or sorry no fast sync uh is what get implemented and parity at the time had warp sync um and and snapsync actually turned out to be sorry fast sync snapsec is what they have now so i keep referring to that but fastsync uh just turned out to be like the better of the two and so everybody kind of converged towards that but like when they were implementing it you know

they we kind of didn't know that in advance and for example for tracing it's the exact opposite parodies tracing apis are actually the ones that everybody uh say like ether scan or exchanges use um and then the get ones are are less used um and so yeah same thing it's just like you know people kind of didn't necessarily know in advance which one would would work yeah or also like how people would use them right like um there's a bunch of like quirks and like tracing apis like you know how you want it like figuring out if a transfer has

actually happened can be quite hard uh if it's like a smart contract let's say sending an erc20 and you actually need to run through everything and make sure it doesn't revert and and only then can you actually like mark say the tokens is transferred um and so over time people like exchanges or block explorers they just gain really deep familiarity with like these apis and they know all the quirks around them and how to handle them and like yeah these things just become kind of cemented as like the the standard even though they didn't set out to be used like that

or use used so extensively basically one of the things that that me and ryan are particularly obsessed with is are like and the broader ethereum ecosystem are like the values of ethereum and when you start to like build out a client is that where you start to become related to those things like how like building out a client and also like making sure that ethereum like retains the values that it was originally purported to have like was that a relevant conversation when you were building out this client yeah i think the biggest one is like you know all core devs it's probably the place

where that like plays the biggest role um and i think the questions we had at basu specifically is like you know given basically was funded by like consensus and consensus is like a big organization in the space like you know should like our views reflect you know consensus is position every time should you have people kind of reflect their own views like how do you um how do you make sure that like you build this in a way that's just aligned with the other teams um and so yeah i think we

we weren't you know super explicit about like okay what are like the values we want to embody as much as just like what the like every interaction we have like how does that reflect you know is this like a net positive for the ecosystem um yeah so i think it's yeah it's kind of all these small decisions of like how you act and like you know the the battles you picked and the things you know kind of when are you when are you willing to just like you know let others win and and this is like the hard part about the theorem like we have you know four clients

and they all have like different trade-offs that they make and sometimes you know some feature can be like harder for you to implement because of you know your architecture stuff like that and just thinking about like okay how do we make sure this all works when we disagree with people like how strongly do we want to express that uh and you know overall like does this make ethereum better or you know does this just benefit us and i think we've tried to be really mindful of that um and the team still is so i'm no longer there but i think they still do like a really good job of that so it's less about like the ethereum

values and more about just like the technical details of like if we build this in this way will that trip up other clients that build it in a different way yeah but but i think yeah i think one of the big values is like decentralization obviously and and like having multiple implementations was always something like that was important to ethereum um and it it was pretty critical like in 2016 when there were the shanghai attacks um and even now like you know if one client has a bug it's it's great that we can have others kind of uh pick it up even more so with the merge uh with the fact that like staking

penalties are like anti-coordinated so i think it's just like the this idea of like decentralization and like resiliency is probably the one that like as a client team you spend most of your time thinking about um and that's like another interesting conversation like you know how much time or how little time i guess client teams spend understanding what's happening on ethereum um especially as it grows in complexity like you literally can't understand everything that's that's uh being built so just trying to figure out like you know where

where do on on what like if they're in value can we have an impact and like you know how do we make sure we do a good job there yeah do you remember like a particular like decision or issue that that had to just like really be unpacked like for a good example for the listeners just so they can wrap their head around like these small choices that had to be made that what what you would have to consider and with that process sure so i can go like very technical and then like much more broad but like the very technical one for example is the eth networking protocol um so so the format

by which nodes communicate with each other so when they send a new transaction how is that how is that formatted right and this is like you can think of it like how nodes talk to each other on the network um the the four you know these formats all have like uh assumptions embedded into them and we improve them and oftentimes if you want to create like a new sync algorithm when you're syncing you're basically asking a bunch of nodes on the network for for data about the network uh so this is where like things change a lot um and i think there's a lot of time where like uh

geth has been like building new syncing algorithms and they've uh and supporting these these these networking formats is something that adds like a lot of technical depth to them and uh they really benefit when other teams kind of drop you know are able to also quickly deprecate that um so that they can just you know refactor their code and make their syncing work better so that's an example where i think we've always tried like with the basic team even though we we might not be implementing the same syncing algorithm as them for like

another year uh to try and see okay how can we prioritize this thing because it helps them uh another thing that's really basic is just like adding testing infrastructure right like the ef maintains a lot of the ethereum testing infrastructure and it's really valuable when other client teams are able to like spare some resources to help improve that um and that's one thing you know we try to be mindful about um a bit more high level and probably relevant to like most of your listeners is like eip 1559 um so when we decided to start working on that it felt like something where we

had kind of the skill set in the team and we also had the bandwidth and like literally nobody else in the client teams had they all had the skill set obviously but they didn't have like the bandwidth to do that um so that just felt like something that was like super valuable for ethereum where there was a lot of work that could be done and we knew that like we could do a lot of the work you know ourselves and then get it to a point where it was like a bit more ready so that when we started involving other client teams like that you know the foundation has been set um and that was stuff like obviously implementing the

eip itself but just like building tools uh to test it better uh and stuff like that so yeah that was probably one of the biggest one in the past couple years where like i think we were able to to really have an impact i've always thought like the position of being a client dev is really really interesting because it there's a little bit of like evolutionary fitness that goes into into clients right like bad bad clients drop off good clients uh you know become downloaded more and the cool thing about crypto is it's it's

all like biomimicry right and so whichever client can get themselves replicated more is a therefore a successful client yet at the same time like clients can't be in too much of a competition with each other because you don't actually want one client to have a monopoly right you don't want one one little organism to dominate the whole entire ecosystem because then the whole ecosystem will die off because you can't have centralization on one client uh so i've always thought it's like there's this tug of war between like you want to make the best client but you can't make it too good because then you then you

smother all the other clients what was the conversation is this a conversation with client teams yeah so we've had this i think every team kind of agrees they're not going to make their client worse right like so you know like whether that's like the get team or you know aragon like they're all you know say very good on certain aspects like i don't think any team is willing to compromise to like make their client worse you know for for like the sake of client diversity just because you know at the end of the day we do want like to offer a good a good product for for the users um i

think what we often compromise on is like making the client better but slower right like it's like we have we all have like these road maps for what we want to do but then if other people kind of have other stuff that's really important to them you know we're we're sometimes fine just like you know not not doing something but just making it in a way that you know gives others time to adapt and stuff like that um and for example you know like this happens a lot uh say with the aragon team today they have like a completely different architecture um and so oftentimes like

if we can do things that like allow them to implement that better then i think we we really should try and do that um and and because you know even though they might not be the most popular client on the network today they're you know potentially like the most popular client in like three years and try you know leaving the room for that is is what allows us to have people who come in and like decide they're gonna build a whole new client and i wouldn't be surprised like after the merge kind of the the assumptions around like what the network should provide and what not

kind of change and there might be a new team that pops up and that's like well you know we're going to build a client who like doesn't care about anything before the merge um you know if you want to validate proof of work sorry we just don't support that but we can be like really optimized for validating everything starting from the merge for example um and i think it's really valuable you want to leave the space for that because this is how you know we we keep having like better core infrastructure for ethereum um now i don't know like i'll shield the clients a bit more like when when you hear about like ethereum

killers or like you know especially evm compatible ethereum killers or even like roll up solutions a lot of them reuse clients from ethereum like a lot of them you know will just forget and like build their whole uh kind of basically network around it uh tron avalanche optimism or all forks of geth um and polygon as well so i think that shows you like how good the software actually is um and we want to make sure that you know

we we keep the software really good and we we give the space for people to come in and build like even better software on the foundation and for example aragon which is used to be called turbo geth is a client that like stores data in a much more efficient way but it also started as a fork of geth and now you know they still can bring some changes in but they've made like major modifications so i'm not sure it's like it's fair to them to call him a fork of geth anymore but they definitely started out as that and um yeah i think it's really valuable that we we we leave the space for new people

to come in and improve on this stuff yeah well i want to keep on going on this conversation but but since we touch on it like why is everything a fork of death like why guess it's it's just so good um and and so i guess a couple things so i get this is extremely good it's also the all the oldest still running client um so there's a lot of you know people who are knowledgeable about it um i think the the license is is quite friendly um and and yeah like also people probably