Speaker notes & full script

Welcome to Lego Land. For the next hour we walk one toy park with seven districts, and every metaphor is a real protocol piece underneath. The white bricks on screen open the actual specs, so nothing up here is decoration.

First, the park rules. A single chain gets to pick about two of three things: scalability, security, decentralization. Make the blocks bigger and fewer people can afford to run a node — and you've quietly traded away decentralization without anyone voting on it. Ethereum stopped picking in 2020. The rollup roadmap leaves the base chain slow, scales the data it publishes, and settles everything on top. That's why the green slab lands first in this animation. Everything today stacks on it, and that same green strip runs under every section of the page.

Quick hello before we walk. I'm Tanisha Katara, and parks like this one are my day job. Through KCG, my consulting firm, I work on governance design, tokenomics, and the economic simulations behind fee models. On the commercial side, go-to-market and product-market-fit work. In park terms: how the park decides, how it prices the rides, how it fills up.

Eleven-plus clients so far, all through referral, and every one has renewed. They cover most of this park — L2s like the mini parks we're about to visit, governments and policy think tanks, L1 dApps from the bazaar, a messaging protocol, and payments, which is where the robots come in at the end.

That's enough about me. Grab a brick.

Let's lift the baseplate. The base chain kept exactly three jobs and moved everything else upstairs. The Consensus Hall puts events in order. The Archive keeps the data available. The Courtroom settles disputes, and its word is final.

Two mechanisms worth knowing. The toll booth first: EIP-1559 splits every fee into a base fee, which gets burned, and a small tip for the proposer. The base fee adjusts every block depending on how full blocks are running, so the protocol sets the price instead of a bidding war setting it.

Then the blob cellar: EIP-4844 gives rollups data packets of roughly 128 kilobytes with their own little fee market, pruned after about eighteen days. Long enough that anyone can reconstruct and challenge what a rollup did, short enough that nodes never carry the weight forever. The EVM never reads what's in a blob, only a commitment to it — which is why blob bytes cost a fraction of what calldata costs.

So yes, this layer is slow. Slow on purpose. It's a court anyone can audit.

Now the mini parks, where people actually ride the rides. Two kinds, split by how they prove they're being honest. The trust-but-verify park posts its results and assumes they're fine — anyone can file a fraud proof for about seven days, and one honest watcher is enough to catch a cheat. The math-proof park ships a validity proof with every batch, and the base chain checks it in minutes, no waiting window. Pick your park by how you like your guarantees: a complaints window, or math.

Watch the train. Those cars are batches of compressed L2 transactions riding home as blobs. That's what makes a ticket cost pennies.

Now the honest part — the ladder. L2Beat grades rollups in stages. Stage 0 means the team can still override everything. Stage 1 means the proof system is live with a security council as backstop. Stage 2 means that council can only step in on a provable bug. "Same security as the main gate" is fully true only at Stage 2, and most parks are still climbing. Say that plainly and builders will trust you.

Two bricks tie the parks together. ERC-7683 lets a user sign the outcome they want and lets solvers race to deliver it. ERC-3770 puts the park's name in front of the address, so money stops landing in the wrong one.

This is Grandma's bridge, and Grandma has one rule: she is never going to learn what a seed phrase is. Fair. The planks are the parts she actually feels — passkey login, gas paid for her, one tap instead of five, spending limits, and recovery through people she trusts.

The pipe underneath is what actually runs, and the purple dot is her one tap. Follow the numbers. Her tap becomes a UserOperation, which lives in its own mempool. A bundler scoops up a batch of them, fronts the gas, and calls one global contract, the EntryPoint. The EntryPoint asks her account to check the operation by its own rules — a passkey signature (cheap to verify onchain since RIP-7212), or a spending limit, or a session key for a game. A paymaster can cover her gas, so she never has to own ETH just to move. One tap in, one L1 transaction out.

For the millions of accounts that already exist, EIP-7702 is the retrofit ramp: an old account delegates to contract code and picks up the same powers without moving house. ERC-7579 and ERC-6900 standardize the snap-in modules; ERC-1271 is how a contract signs.

This bridge is the second of Vitalik's three transitions. Hold onto it — the robots at stop seven cross the exact same bridge.

The castle gates. The gatekeeper checks papers once, in the order a real sign-in happens, and then the park is yours. Name first: ENS resolves dev.eth both directions. Then the signature: Sign-In with Ethereum — EIP-4361 — is a structured message tied to the site's own domain, so there's no password and nothing blind to phish. Then one person, not an army — that's the personhood check. Then the badges: soulbound tokens, ERC-5192, can't be transferred, so a reputation can't be bought. And last, the receipts: attestations through EAS, where anyone can vouch for anything and apps can build on those claims.

Two more props. The backpack is ERC-6551 — an NFT that owns its own wallet, so a game character can carry its own items. The cloak is stealth addresses, for getting paid without the whole park watching.

The frame matters more than any single spec here. We moved the bouncer to the door so there are no cameras inside. Verify at the perimeter, then leave people alone.

The bazaar — where this land coined the phrase "money Legos" years before I showed up with a deck full of bricks. Watch the coin do its party trick. It gets borrowed at the flash counter, swapped at the fountain, parked in the vault, and repaid before the bell — all inside one transaction. The bell is atomicity. If the repayment fails, the EVM reverts the whole trip. It's not that the lender loses money; the trip simply never happened. That's not trust, that's the runtime.

Why do the stalls snap together at all? ERC-20 is a tiny shared interface, and everything speaks it. The fountain prices by formula — two reserves, x times y stays constant, no order book and no merchant in the middle. The vault standard, ERC-4626, means an aggregator wires up deposit and withdraw once and every vault just works. Permit, ERC-2612, turns the annoying approval step into a signature — one transaction instead of two.

The bazaar's whole business model is that every stall trusts the same stud shape.

The commons. Fountains and roads — the things everyone uses and nobody owns — and the hard question of who pays for them. Look at the two bars. Same nine coins in both. Quadratic funding matches on the square of the sum of square roots, so nine visitors giving one coin each pull a match of eighty-one, while one whale giving nine coins pulls nine. The math counts people, not money. A whale can't buy the fountain.

The known attack is fake people. Sybils and collusion break quadratic funding — which is exactly why it leans on the personhood checks from the castle gates. The mechanisms connect; that's the point.

Two more tools. RetroPGF flips the timing: build the road first, get the trophy once it's carrying traffic, because it's easier to judge a road you can see than a promise you can't. Hypercerts turn "I built this stretch of road" into a claim you can actually hold and others can attest to.

The robot quarter — the newest district, and it reuses everything we just walked. Watch one full loop: twelve seconds, five acts, with the act bar and the numbered list lighting up in sync.

Act one: ClientBot reads Agent-42's passport — that's the ERC-8004 identity registry, live on mainnet since March, basically a pointer to the agent's card. Act two: the report card — the reputation registry, structured feedback from past jobs. Act three: the parcel crosses back, work delivered. Act four is the payment: PayBot's tollgate answers with HTTP 402, Payment Required — a status code that sat reserved in the spec since 1997 because machines don't fill out checkout forms. ClientBot signs a USDC note using EIP-3009, gasless for the payer, x402 settles it, and the gate lifts on a 200. Act five: ValidatorBot stamps the finished job into the validation registry.

Now the callback. Whose wallets are these? Grandma's bridge — 4337 and 7702. Where do their names live? The castle gates. The robots are just very fast tourists.

And the question I'll leave hanging for the fireside: who governs a park where the robots outnumber the visitors?

Zoom out. There's the whole park in one frame — the bridge, the mini parks, the gate, the bazaar, the fountain, the tollbooth, and a few robots enjoying the evening. Every building is clickable and takes you back to its stop. Notice what they all stand on: one green plate. We didn't pick two out of three. We built up, and the base chain settles all of it.

If you want the one document that holds this whole talk together, it's Vitalik's Three Transitions. L2 scaling is the mini parks. Smart wallets are Grandma's bridge. Privacy and identity are the castle gates.

And here's the Monday-morning ask. Pick one district. Click one stud. Read the spec tonight, and ship a toy this week. That's how every builder in this park started. Thank you.