Danny Ryan: leading crypto's biggest upgrade

An interview with Danny Ryan, co-founder of Etherealize and former lead coordinator of the Ethereum Merge. Danny discusses discovering Ethereum through the DAO hack, his path to leading the most complex upgrade in crypto history, his encounter with the SEC, and why he believes institutional adoption is the key to Ethereum's future, all while playing a record-breaking game of Jenga.

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.

Discovering the internet and early curiosity (0:36)

Host: How's it going? When was the last time you played Jenga?

Danny Ryan: The kids are not quite there yet. But some friends of ours have a bunch of games and I've played a couple times recently.

Host: Do you remember the first time you discovered the internet?

Danny Ryan: I got a book from a book fair — or maybe a book order thing at school — in second grade about the internet. And it was about the internet, but really it was about chat rooms. So I read this book and I was like, "Okay, great, now I chat on the internet." And from there it just went. I probably had done things on the internet before second grade, but that was definitely the moment. It's hilarious now — how do you learn about the internet? You get a book.

Host: Was your family into tech?

Danny Ryan: We had a computer, and my dad was really proud of having a computer. That didn't mean we did anything other than word processing. And we had a printer with the dots on the side, all connected — the perforated paper. The cool thing was you could print long things. So it would just make banners. The Hale–Bopp comet came — that'll date this. We were all very excited about the comet and would make these long banners with baseballs and flames behind them.

Host: Is there foreshadowing in your childhood to what you're doing now?

Danny Ryan: I was always the one that could fix things. My grandparents always quoted me — I was probably about seven — I would help them with their computer, and one time I said, "Sometimes you just have to turn it off and turn it back on." They quoted me on that forever.

From mechanical engineering to software (5:02)

Host: Was there an "aha" moment or a mentor that made you follow a certain path?

Danny Ryan: My uncle certainly set the stage. He always talked to me like I was a human being and not a kid. It was the first relationship with an adult that way, and through that I learned about the world and developed a lot of confidence. If you treat an eight-year-old as a capable person, turns out they are pretty capable.

I was always kind of into computers because they were around, but I wasn't like a deep computer science expert. I went to school and was like, "I'll study mechanical engineering because making stuff's cool." But I had to take a computer science class sophomore year of college. I never programmed before. I was like, "Oh, this is fun. I changed my major."

I'm not one of those "programming since the age of six" types. I'm not a crazy programmer, not a crazy mathematician. I'm just good at kind of seeing the problems and stitching them together.

The freelance life in Louisiana (7:17)

Host: What do you do after college?

Danny Ryan: I'm from Louisiana, and I moved back — moved to New Orleans, and my goal was to not get a job.

Host: Like you just refused to work?

Danny Ryan: No, I did freelance work, but I was like, "I'm not getting a job where I have hours and someone tells me what to do." I ended up working with a bunch of small businesses in Louisiana just helping them think through how to solve problems — automation and that kind of stuff. Some of the more fun stuff was literally random small businesses that didn't realize automation existed. They were manually doing reports, and I'd be like, "Yo, bro, write thirty lines of code and never ask that again."

I also started a screen printing business in high school. It's been going 20 years now. My best friend and partner runs it — it's called Girraphic. We started doing it for our band, then started doing all the shirts for our high school.

The DAO hack and falling into Ethereum (11:13)

Danny Ryan: In 2016, a friend of mine sent me a New York Times article about the DAO. It had raised, I don't know, 120 million dollars — largest crowdfunding in history. I had known of Bitcoin. I'd transacted Bitcoin. I probably lost money on Bitcoin. It hadn't really clicked.

I read this article and dug into it and was like, "Oh, this is crazy." It was kind of all I could think about. My first mainnet transaction — I sat on the couch next to a friend, sent it, and I said, "This is not going to end well." I funded the DAO, and it didn't end well.

I was deeply skeptical as a software engineer — you can't write code without bugs, and this code you can never change. That's maybe a failed premise, but YOLO. And that was a crash course in blockchain. All of a sudden it went from "oh, I understand this blockchain thing" to "wait, they're trying to fork it — what does that even mean?" I was probably pro-fork, mostly because I lost money and didn't actually understand what the hell was going on.

I just got deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, and the first day of 2017, I said, "This is all I can think about. I will get rid of all my clients and give myself a year to figure out how to make this my work."

On day one, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to go to the New Orleans Ethereum meetup." There is no New Orleans Ethereum meetup. So I had to make the New Orleans Ethereum meetup. I downloaded the white paper, printed it out, read the yellow paper, the technical specification, over and over again. Made notes, started contributing to open source repos.

I learned about proof of stake and I was like, "That doesn't make any sense." Then I kept learning, and was like, "Maybe this does make sense. Maybe I could make a staking pool or something." I heard Casper was coming — that's what proof of stake was called — so I started reading the code. I was like, "Oh, they could do some more tests." I wrote some tests. At the end of 2017, the research team was like, "Hey, do you want a job?" Said, "Okay."

Finding community in open source (14:35)

Host: How'd you find your community and your people? How'd you build the confidence?

Danny Ryan: I didn't talk at first. But I would try to make things better. They'd be talking about some blog post on the research call, and I'd be the quiet guy that found the link and dropped it in the chat so everyone had it. Some of my initial open source contributions — I would just be reading docs and fix typos and try to make things better. All of a sudden you're making things better and you have a dialogue with a member from Geth or something. You submit some PRs, then you show up to an event in person, and they're like, "Oh, you're that guy. Hey, what's up?"

The doors were comically wide open. I haven't had to walk through the doors in a long time, but I imagine for many sections of Ethereum, doors are pretty wide open given the nature of the work being in the open.

Leading the merge (16:58)

Host: A guy who wasn't into gaming because he was talking to girls, was in a band, started a screen printing business, funded the DAO hack — ended up joining this foundation by being helpful initially, and ended up essentially architecting possibly one of the most insane engineering feats of all time. How did you do the merge?

Danny Ryan: I show up, I'm on the research team. I was mainly working on tests and trying to make things better. Then I don't know, six months in, I'm functionally running the team. Hudson Jameson — and this might be actually what happened — we met, became friends, and he's like, "You're the only one that responds to their emails."

Which was representative of how valuable people like Vitalik's time and attention are — he's focused on other stuff. And I realized I could do the work but I could also do the things that other people weren't doing. I could figure out what needs to happen to move this all forward. People's heads are in the clouds, they're working on incredibly complex and difficult stuff. My frame was always, "What can I do to make this a reality?" Sometimes I was doing research, sometimes I was writing specifications, and increasingly it became communicating and coordinating across a very complex project.

Work-life balance and managing stress (18:07)

Host: How did you manage the stress?

Danny Ryan: I have a really good work-life balance. I chose to work remote most of my adult life because I like to be judged by my output, not by how much I'm sitting at a computer or whether I showed up to the office. I prioritize my health and my family over everything, and actually in doing so, I do my work better.

I'm pretty consumed by my work — I think about it a lot. But I also know that for the type of work I'm good at, it doesn't mean sitting on my computer. Taking a walk is just as if not more valuable for me to think through a problem.

The technical problems are never the stressful problems. It's the complex technopolitical sphere. The people are the hard part.

Co-founding Etherealize (20:02)

Host: You recently co-founded Etherealize. Where did your interest for that come in? What keeps you excited about it, and why do you think that work is important?

Danny Ryan: It was time to leave. It was time to get some air. I had done the thing with the merge and then spent another couple years at the EF. Loved the work, but felt like I needed to get space, see what was up.

Last year was a whirlwind. I got served by the SEC in April of 2024 — that was day two of my three-month sabbatical. So I spent my entire sabbatical dealing with that.

Host: You got served individually?

Danny Ryan: I think I was the highest person at the EF in the US — or the most visible person. They didn't have a case against me. They didn't have a case against the EF. But they were trying to make crypto disappear. It was the last effort before the ETFs were approved to try to build a case.

They served me — handed me a stack of papers — and scared the hell out of me. I was at my house, it's Easter Sunday. My parents are there, a bunch of friends are there, we're literally setting the table. They knock on the door. The most adrenaline ever.

You learn it's a civil organization, so the worst thing they can do is fine you and you can lose all your money, but you can't go to jail. But the DOJ might be lurking — you never know. Then it disappears because it was all politics. They threw out the case because they were worried about losing the election.

Then I went back to the EF, then left. Then Trump launched a memecoin — literally whiplash. Then I consider going back to the EF, and we close that door. The first interesting thing that landed in front of me was getting an intro to Vivek. I was like, "Oh — during this window, we might actually be able to get Ethereum adopted." Vivek has a really complementary energy, a complementary background from TradFi. I just said, "Okay, let's do it. Let's onboard the world."

Why the world needs Ethereum (24:10)

Host: Why does the world need Ethereum?

Danny Ryan: We need to onboard the world for Ethereum to succeed. Thomas says we need to onboard the global economy — I think that's a piece of the mission. But I think we can just build fundamentally better systems and fundamentally better markets. I spend a lot of my time looking at terribly inefficient, archaic, fragmented markets riddled with middlemen and risk and costs. When I think about rewriting those markets from first principles on Ethereum, so much of the garbage just goes away. It's just a better environment.

Vivek had the "aha" moment in 2020, leaving Wall Street, learning about Ethereum — "Oh, all capital markets should be upgraded with Ethereum." And he's right. And it's time.

The case for decentralization (25:47)

Host: Ethereum is heavily focused on decentralization, on being credibly neutral. There's this criticism that you could forego decentralization for efficiency, onboard more people today. What's your rebuttal?

Danny Ryan: I've been thinking about this a lot. If you don't have decentralization, then the infrastructure has counterparty risk. Banks care a ton about counterparty risk — who can screw them over. Ethereum is the only answer in the programmable blockchain space where the answer is "no one."

That's going to mean a ton to banks and financial institutions. And it's going to mean a ton to the real world as we move past these finance solutions — when you're thinking about putting your life savings onchain, managing the deed to your house in crypto. Who can make it go offline? Who could take it from you? The answer should be "no one." And Ethereum is the answer to that.

We have a little bit of work to do in terms of scale — although Pectra is launching and it's going to set the stage for massive amounts of scale, along with layer twos. We also have work to do evolving so these things are not just excellent decentralized protocols, but excellent products — safe products, easy-to-use products. As we make this transition, Ethereum actually is the best answer to onboard the world.

Wishing people were nicer (27:38)

Host: What do you wish more people were aware of — doesn't even have to be a crypto thing — in the world today?

Danny Ryan: I wish people were a little nicer to each other. And also realize that this whole crazy thing of modern society — be careful and treat it with care. It's complex. It's been in a moderately stable equilibrium. I think we can continue to improve it and should, but we shouldn't just throw it all away.

The EF leadership transition and taking a stand (29:00)

Host: Earlier in the year, when the EF was about to undergo changes, you were thrust into this spotlight. What was your reaction?

Danny Ryan: I thought about leaving crypto forever — between the SEC and the massive swing of the pendulum. Then I realized there was potentially some good to be done. Simultaneously, it felt good by some standard because people believed in me. But it also got quite nasty quite quick.

I have a massive amount of respect for Aya. We're close friends, and we worked closely together for a long time. A lot of the decisions that she made, I helped make and support and execute. So it's funny to be pitted against her in a public arena when I'm not deeply philosophically divergent from her. I like to be kind. I like to treat people with respect, especially in public forums. She was very hurt, and that's absolutely not what I wanted. Honestly, that happening was probably the nail in the coffin for me not going back — which is the opposite of what the mob intended.

Future cities and being human in the age of AI (32:06)

Danny Ryan: I just remembered — in eighth grade, I worked on this Future Cities project. My English teacher would pick one winner from the class and work with them all the way to nationals. We made a big model, planned a whole city, read a bunch of research, made up a future society. We went to nationals. Maybe that was a bit of foreshadowing.

Host: I guess that's what we're doing — making up the future. How do you feel about AI as a complicating factor?

Danny Ryan: I used to have unbridled optimism for the tech. I thought Ethereum was going to change the world, decentralized technology was going to change the world. I'm a bit more in the "it's a tool" camp now. It's a very powerful tool. It will change the world, but it depends on how it's wielded and on the people.

That's why I'm optimistic about the things I'm working on — onboarding institutional capital into Ethereum, making these markets better. But I don't have the unbridled optimism of "if you just build decentralized awesome tech, the world's just going to be better."

Kids and the future (39:00)

Host: You have kids. Let's say fast-forward twenty years — the things you believe in have worked out. How does that change the lives of your kids?

Danny Ryan: Take AI out of it and if we succeed, I think we have a fairer, less top-down controlled, freer world. Which is great. Add AI and I don't know at all. When you have a kid, they're about to go through the gauntlet — potentially with the thing in their pocket being better at art than they'll ever be, maybe better at math, maybe a better writer. What is it to grow up in that?

Hopefully at least we have a fair and open and free society, partially because we can architect good systems on top of crypto. But AI is a complicating factor into "what is it to be human?"

Values and speaking to institutions (42:34)

Host: What's one value you'd never compromise on?

Danny Ryan: Honesty.

Host: How's it been speaking to an entirely different set of people now for your work?

Danny Ryan: Really fun. I kind of just like talking to people as Danny. I'm not much of a chameleon. It's fun — I get to learn a ton, I get to leverage my expertise. I love explaining things. I teach a computer science grad class at a local university, and I get to do that to people running eighty-billion-dollar funds.

Host: What's your go-to explainer?

Danny Ryan: I don't have a go-to. I'm very dynamic. I read their language, understand what their needs are, understand what they're curious about, and figure out the right entry points and metaphors. I'm not a big planner.

Life outside crypto (45:12)

Host: What do you look up to outside of tech and crypto?

Danny Ryan: I'm not one to have heroes. I barely follow the news. I don't watch movies. I don't watch TV.

Host: How do you spend your time?

Danny Ryan: I hang out with my family. I work out and play outside. I play the piano. And I do my work.

The host's origin story — leaving Optimism for the EF (56:50)

Host: Why'd you leave Optimism?

Host (explaining): My whole origin story in crypto — I was forced into it. I'm from Nepal but I went to Costa Rica for high school. There were capital controls, money transfer issues. In 2017, I found Bittrex and I was like, "Let's see how trading works." Bought a bunch of ETH, lost it all by buying the top of Tron. I was like, "I'm not a trader."

I did behavioral economics in school. From there, I got into this idea that if you program society, you have to program incentives. Money is the biggest incentive. If you can program money, you can do very interesting things. That took me down the Ethereum rabbit hole.

I joined Coinbase as a product manager after college. Left eight or nine months in because I wanted to go deeper into crypto. Optimism took a chance on me and literally gave me a platform to be this energetic kid who was able to talk to everyone and tell them what L2 was — and just had to learn what L2 was in the process.

I think the reason I left was I felt like I did everything I could have done there. The EF is very unique in that it's done a lot — it's gotten a lot of flack for it, but it's done a lot to protect its neutrality, to protect its values. When I go speak to somebody, they don't think I want anything from them because the EF is not a startup. And I needed a new challenge.

Securing Ethereum's future (59:26)

Host: How do we make sure that Ethereum doesn't lose? What's the most controversial take you have to secure Ethereum's future?

Danny Ryan: I don't know if this is controversial, but 120 trillion dollars of the world's investable capital is held by institutions. We're going to have to figure out how to get that on Ethereum. If we're going to change the world, otherwise we're not playing the game.

I've been working on decentralized systems for a decade. It's very strange. Someone asked me to speak about institutional DeFi, and I was like, "I don't know if what I'm working on is DeFi." I'm working on rearchitecting capital markets on top of Ethereum in ways that make them better. Maybe it reduces the middleman. Maybe it makes it more efficient. Maybe it makes better products.

I think that's okay. I think we can make the world better with Ethereum without being purists. But at the same time, we need to make sure that Ethereum remains Ethereum.

Host: I think we have to strengthen the core so the edges can experiment. We need to meet people where they're at. We can learn a lot from the early internet — the TCP/IP wars. The one constant is human behavior. After you forgo every single technical challenge, the one ultimate challenge will always be just coordinating.

Cool. Danny, this is an honor, man.

Danny Ryan: I honestly think we broke our Jenga record there. That was great.

Host: We both won.

Danny Ryan: Yeah, we both lost. Thanks for making it out.