Ethereum, the things I like and some I don't by Mariano Conti

A personal talk by OG Ethereum developer Mariano Conti at Devconnect Buenos Aires about what he loves about Ethereum, from his son's ENS name to the community's cypherpunk roots, Argentina's unique relationship with crypto, and his call for a return to L1.

This transcript is an accessible copy of the original video transcript (opens in a new tab) published by Ethereum Foundation. It has been lightly edited for readability.

Introduction (0:08)

Mariano Conti: Buenos Aires. Good evening everybody. I want to start by apologizing. I haven't been in the ecosystem much for the last few years. So when the organizers told me that they wanted me to give a talk, I initially refused because I've been so far away in certain things that I've forgotten really sometimes why we're here, why we do the things we do. I've grown a little bit more cynical in certain ways and optimistic in others. So, anyway, I have 15 minutes to talk to you about all this, and let's get started.

As I always say, as an Argentinian, I love therapy. This is going to be probably my last public therapy session. I hope you endure this with me. And we're going to go through some of the things I like about Ethereum after what, a 10-year journey, and a few of the things I don't.

So this is me, 2015 — I started buying Ether. Very humble-looking guy. And now 2025, after 10 years, that is the broken shell husk of a man that you see today standing in front of you, with a stint aping tokens during DeFi Summer, right? And for those of you who don't know, I spent a few years at Maker. I helped release single and multicollateral Dai, which was probably the first decentralized stablecoin on Ethereum. I created the first decentralized oracles on Ethereum. All from living in an apartment in Almagro — of course, a part of a much, much larger group — but I would say my experiences in Ethereum have been quite vast and mostly very rewarding.

Devcon in Buenos Aires (2:20)

Mariano Conti: And in 2019, I'm sure you've seen this picture a few times. And I see some of the people here that were onstage with me in Osaka in 2019. This is when we really started the big push to have one of these Devcon events here in Buenos Aires, right? And probably the person who worked the least to make this happen is me. I basically only put on the t-shirt and tweeted a couple of times. Everybody in there worked a hundred times as much, and the people who came after worked a thousand times as much. So once again, I'm incredibly, incredibly honored that we have Devconnect here in Argentina.

And I crossed out "too late" and put in "later." For a while I was very, very bitter that we couldn't have it when we said — that it was going to be the most impactful. And in a certain way that is true, and in another it's not. For one, if we were to have had Devcon — I know 2020 didn't actually happen because of COVID — but maybe 2021, it wouldn't have been as big. The technology wouldn't have been as ingrained in our community, in our society, as it is now. People still, when they come to Argentina for the first time, they are in awe of the amount of use that we get from stablecoins — be it when we had capital controls and when we don't and anywhere in between. Argentinians have a culture of trying new things, always protecting their investments. This is something I've talked about extensively. So, again, so happy that Devcon is finally here.

Things I Like About Ethereum (4:28)

Mariano Conti: And I only have really three slides left. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the things I like about Ethereum. And I love that it is still around after more than 10 years. And the uptime is 100%. It's really a technology that you can build on and you can rely that it's going to be trustworthy — that you send a transaction and eventually it's going to make it through, whatever happens, an RPC node all the way across the earth, then being replicated in thousands of computers all over the world — hopefully a lot of them in people's homes and not just the data centers — and that whatever it is that you sent or interacted with is going to be ingrained in a block, hopefully forever.

When I started this journey, it was just me. My wife — now, almost a year ago — we had a kid. My kid has an ENS. It's part of who we are and what we are in our family, that Ethereum has made so much possible for us that I always feel like I never gave back enough. And that is also one of the reasons why I complain so much about certain things.

The Community (5:25)

Mariano Conti: It's because I don't want to go to the things I don't like so early. So let me jump through a couple of others that I do like — the community, especially the Argentinian community, and seeing so many friends here, both from Argentina, from Latin America, as well from all over the world. It's crazy that they came here for a week or two weeks or for an event that joins us all together in our love and respect for — I say love, and it is weird. We, at least people back in my day — I don't know if this is true for newcomers — we did not treat this technology as just another coin or another stock that you would buy and try to see if it went up or went down. The price affects us, of course, but it always affected us more to see that what we were building mattered, and that we were doing something meaningful with the technology to enable entirely new use cases, whether it be financing, collectibles, or DeFi.

Things I Don't Like (7:00)

Mariano Conti: And so, with that segue, I'm going to move to some of the things I do not like — not necessarily just with Ethereum, but with the ecosystem.

Going to sound really old, but the rise of memecoins and the rise of, you know, trading everything just like a penny stock. I swear to you that Ethereum is more than that. And even though I'm really happy that we're finally talking about Ether price — which for years was taboo and it shouldn't be, because blockchains are secured by cryptoeconomic security, and inside that word is "economy," and that also means price — so I am happy that we're finally giving the price of the asset that secures so many hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions now in the coming years, the recognition that it should.

I disliked for a long time that the Ethereum Foundation looked like it was getting stagnant and that one of the reasons for change had to be people in back channels discussing ways to change it. And even though I don't know if that was the right approach, the good thing that happened with it is that it actually changed. At the beginning of the year — if not a little bit late 2024 — there was this movement, mainly sparked by the community, to gracefully ask some people to exit positions of power and push others into positions of power that they could steer our beloved Ethereum into new grounds. And it became a little bit weird to have something that has always been on the fringes — like cryptocurrencies and blockchains — enter the mainstream the way that they did, and the back channels happened pretty much the way it happens in the movies. But in the end, it got the ball rolling and I believe that it ended up being positive change for Ethereum as a whole.

Much like a couple of years ago, Eric Connor and I started this little website called "Pump the Gas," which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. We only wanted the greater community and core devs to acknowledge that maybe it was time to increase the gas limit of blocks by a little bit. And it was controversial at the time, but in the end it became something that was accepted and started happening with regular cadence. And now we even have EIPs — Fusaka is going to be a required increase to 60 million — and then there's even EIPs that want to forcibly increase the gas limit with every single iteration. So really happy that that happened.

Calls to Action (10:24)

Mariano Conti: And I think I'm overextending myself and running out of time. So, I'm just going to say my calls to action. I really only have two, maybe a third one that went past the censors, but we'll see about that.

One of the things I always discuss is that Ethereum should have negative issuance. Don't worry about the text on the slide — just ingrain yourself: negative issuance. It is something truly unique that I believe only Ethereum is poised to have.

A return to L1. Even though I love L2s and I know a lot of people working on them and they're great solutions, whatever we can keep on the L1, I believe is going to make Ethereum stand the test of time, at least for the next 5 to 10 years. And whatever people are working on on lean Ethereum is going to enable us to continue this path for the next hundred years, probably.

Well, I don't know — that one maybe shouldn't have been there, but I believe that's all I wanted to say. I want to thank you — or I'm sorry, depending how this went down — and I do want to apologize that I usually have more things to say. And maybe if we have a small Q&A, I'll say them. I've been on the fringe, like I said, for the past couple of years, but I've never lost sight of what people are working on on Ethereum, and it's always going to be part of my life. And again, I'm so happy that we have a Devcon in Buenos Aires.

Q&A Session (12:10)

Host: Thank you so much. First off, may I meet you?

Mariano Conti: Yes, you may. You see, it works.

Host: It works! Okay, so we got some questions from the audience. I have some questions too. I love the slides. I love the story of your kid having an ENS — that's awesome. I think more and more, we're at a point where Ethereum's been around for long enough where there are going to be this next generation of kids who are born with crypto.

Mariano Conti: And I had to bid on it because it was already taken.

Host: What is it, if you don't mind me asking?

Mariano Conti: Yeah, it's sabino.eth.

Host: Oh, nice. Awesome. I was actually just talking to someone who had the longest registered ENS address of all time. I think they registered it for 10,000 years or something.

Mariano Conti: Really?

Host: Yeah. Cool. So from the audience we have a couple of questions. What can the world learn from Argentina's crypto adoption?

Mariano Conti: So I was the right person to answer this five years ago when everything was still new. Right now we have such a great new group of young people who've been working the past few years that they're always going to be better at answering this. But if I were to say something, it's Argentinians' ability to adapt, to endure risk that almost no other people on the planet can. So we're always in the search for something new. And in the case of technology, Argentina was one of the first countries to adopt Bitcoin, to adopt Ethereum, to adopt stablecoins. Like I always say, I left Argentina when I was little, went to live in Mexico, and then came back. And all of my Mexican friends, we all studied engineering. They never got into crypto because they didn't need to. And me, I came back to Argentina, a few months later there were capital controls. I had to be compelled to find new ways to access money, and I found Bitcoin and then Ethereum. So, Argentinians are so good at that — and we're always on the brink of total collapse, but it never quite gets there. So it's like the perfect mix. Plus, we have incredibly intelligent people.

Host: That's so exciting. I'm a big believer that you need a given outcome — you need to want to use something. And for the longest time, certain populations needed crypto to survive, like you said — capital controls and other things. And I think we're at a really cool point now because there's apps and other use cases of crypto. Like, I can use DeFi, I can lend, borrow, I can use decentralized social media, I can know what's human or AI. This world is getting broader and broader. So hopefully more people begin using Ethereum because it's almost a necessity.

How excited are you now? You've been around for a while, things are changing. What are you most excited about?

Mariano Conti: I guess what excites me the most right now is lean Ethereum — probably the next step to make Ethereum L1 really, really adopting zero knowledge, all the things that are coming with — well, even before that — Fusaka doing separation of provers with nodes, with searchers, with builders. I don't know if I can put any one thing. I'm excited for the next hard fork. It's crazy that we're going to have two in a year when we had maybe one every three years for the last while. So I'm excited that for some reason the ball got rolling and we all decided that we can do things faster now.

Cypherpunk Ethos and Advice (15:45)

Host: What are you happy about that we have gotten rid of from the OG days in crypto as a whole, and what do you wish we kept?

Mariano Conti: I wish we kept the cypherpunk ethos a little bit more. It's a catch-22 with blockchains and crypto. You want adoption, but the more adoption you have, you dilute some of the values that you believed in in the first place. On the other hand, I don't think we should be gatekeeping anything. Anything we build here eventually becomes a lot bigger than us. And who are we to tell people how to use the things that we built?

Host: Yeah. Awesome. Do you have any advice for someone who's maybe just getting into college today, is here, is interested in this whole thing, but doesn't really know where to start?

Mariano Conti: Oh yeah, for sure. I wish we had tutorials back when we started. There wasn't almost anything and we had to build almost everything from scratch. There is so much right now. What I would say — and might be controversial — I would advise young people to still go to college, or at least take some programming lessons. I know that Cursor and ChatGPT are all the latest rage, but there's something being lost, I believe, in the art of programming. So I would say take a few programming courses if you can, build something, get the word out there. It's never been easier to build something in your room, in your dorm, whatever, and show it to thousands if not millions of people. I would say now is the best time. The best time was probably 10 years ago. Second best time is right now.

Host: Awesome. Thank you so much, Mariano. Pleasure meeting you.

Mariano Conti: Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you.