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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Ethereum Foundation dropped a mandate document describing its values, describing its approach. This caused a reaction, let's say.
Chapter 2: What is the Ethereum Foundation's new mandate about?
Some people loved it. Some people hated it. We're going to discuss it today and give our takes because it is time for another Bankless Takes episode. David, we do these things whenever we're feeling, what, like motivated that there's something to discuss? What's the cadence of Bankless Takes episodes?
Yeah, when there is a conversation happening that you and I are a part of or can contribute to or otherwise have takes about. Ethereum is a very frequent topic of this. We've done other ones in the past as well.
Chapter 3: What are the bullish perspectives on the EF mandate?
I think maybe the most common reason or way that these episodes come about is somebody in the EF, usually Vitalik, releases a blog post and... And everyone's talking about it. And therefore, so do we, which is exactly what happened this week. Galaxy operates where digital assets and next generation infrastructure come together, serving institutions end to end.
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Chapter 4: What are the bearish critiques of the EF mandate?
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Chapter 5: How does the community react to the EF's focus on CROPS?
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Chapter 6: What are David's insights on the EF's direction?
Yeah, a lot of these are Ethereum related, let's say. I'm actually very curious in this conversation what your opinion is and how that contrasts with my opinion to see like whether there's a delta on that or not or whether we have somewhat similar opinion. But tell us what happened. We usually don't have that much of a delta. That's true, but let's tease it.
This could be a big clash, Bankless Nation, all right? Gloves are coming on. Yeah, gloves are coming off, all right? David and Ryan are going to brawl on this one. What happened was the foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, released what they call an EF mandate. What was the EF mandate? It was first a tweet, then a blog that linked to a 38-page document.
Chapter 7: What does Ryan think about the EF's approach?
It's not 38 pages of writing. It's probably a third of that. A lot of art, a lot of just like, you know, blank pages, just title pages. Very aesthetic. Aesthetically really like turned up the dials on this one. Yes.
The idea, it was stated that the EF mandate is a document by the EF for the EF, but they are publishing it, you know, publicly so that anyone who is interested in following along, you know, the broader Ethereum community can follow along. So it was for the organization itself. It was for the... Yes, an internal guiding document.
Chapter 8: Can Ethereum balance cypherpunk values with market needs?
But then also it said also for fellow self-sovereign individuals on the journey. So people in the Ethereum community as well was the secondary audience for this, you'd say. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And like the core of the document are two pillars. There's a technical pillar, which outlined this idea of crops. I don't think crops had been a thing. I think this document introduced crops.
Is that correct? I think so. I've never heard of crops. It's not been popularized. It has not been popularized until now. Now everyone in Ethereum knows what crops are. It's an acronym, we should say. C-R-O-P-S. David will give us the definition in a minute. Yes. And then the second pillar of the two is the social pillar. So the technical pillar and the social pillar.
The social pillar is really just how the foundation conducts itself and like guides its own decision making. Just like if you want to learn about what the ethos of the EF thinks it should have. Yeah. That's what it's for. I think crops, crops I will say was the star of the document. Yeah, I think so. That was the big emphasis. Crops, censorship resistance, open source, private, and secure.
And so this is a guiding principle boiled down into an acronym about what the EF, its mandate for itself about how to guide the Ethereum protocol. Yeah, those are the letters if you didn't catch it. So the CR is the CR in crops and the O is for open source and the P is for private privacy and S is for security, secure. Yes.
And in this document, the document stated that the EF puts crops above everything else. So that's not only are the crops important, but it is the most important thing. Yeah, I guess if you're asking what the North Star for the EF is, and they're saying this is part of the North Star for Ethereum too, it's why it exists, is probably crops. Those are the features that it wants to bake in.
So censorship resistance means, they define it, no actor can selectively exclude valid use or break functionality, including by gaining durable, non-competitive control of any critical mechanisms. Open source means open source code, no privileged code, nothing hidden, it's all transparent. Privacy means user data is not exposed beyond necessity or against their interest.
And secure to them means things must do what they claim they do, no more and no less. I mean, pretty standard definitions of all of these things. No big surprises here. Yeah, it is interesting, Ryan. Actually, if you go into the document and you go command F north star, it shows up once. Okay. It says the north star is disintermediation. Oh, yes. I actually had a take on that. We'll get to that.
What this document was not, though, this document was not a roadmap for Ethereum. It wasn't the straw map that Justin Drake came out with. It was not an org chart. It wasn't financials. It was not any like Ethereum marketing or product information. It wasn't anything you could, you know, send to your friend who's bullish on ETH to get them. To make them further bullish on ETH, yeah. Right.
It very much was a internal type of document, almost like a mission statement type of document, I'd say, for the ETH, for Ethereum. It would be in a 300 level course about what Ethereum is for. This document would be in that curriculum. One of the words that was used repeatedly, I don't know if you've done a search for this, but was the word, the term self-sovereignty.
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