Good morning, or afternoon, wherever you are. My name is Jeff Rowe and I'm a community architect within Red Hat's Office of the CTO. I'm here to introduce a great panel to talk about Red Hat's new effort in the automotive space. Today we're discussing automotive computing with a group of program managers who are responsible for various aspects of the initiative within Red Hat. I'll let each of them introduce themselves. So first I want to introduce Whitney Chadwick, who is the Lead Technical Program Manager. Whitney, do you want to say some words about yourself? Hi Jeff, I'm Whitney Chadwick, Lead Technical Program Manager for the N-Vehicle OS program. I'm responsible for building the program ecosystem as it becomes integrated into the Red Hat product portfolio. Great. Rachel Sibley. Hi, I'm the QE technical lead for the automotive program. I'm primarily responsible for coordinating and leading the testing efforts which includes deep collaboration across all feature teams including REL as we continue to scope new requirements for the N-Vehicle OS. Thank you. Allison King. Sure, thanks Jeff Rowe. My name is Allison King. I'm a technical project manager within the automotive program here at Red Hat and I've been working with engineering teams both inside Red Hat as well as externally with partner engagement teams to help identify customer requirements, build upon them in the form of MVPs and POCs and ultimately taking that information to shape the future of the Red Hat N-Vehicle OS. And doing all of that within the agile framework to keep things fluid and keep things moving forward as effectively as possible. Thanks Allison. Can you tell us what exactly is an MVP in a POC in case people aren't familiar? Yeah, sure. So an MVP is when we are working together typically with a partner engagement team in this scenario to create a minimal viable product. So it's not necessarily something that we're going to productize but it's something that's going to showcase the technologies that we have and that we're working toward and really gives a functional increment of software without having to go the whole route of deploying it at a production level. In terms of a POC, that's more of a proof of concept and in the way that we've been handling POCs up until this point they've been more business level engagements and really trying to identify requirements timelines and really proving our concept will work within the timelines and structures set up for us by the OEMs. And finally, Sabine Vogel. Hello. I'm working as an agile practitioner at Red Hat with an automotive. I assume the role as technical project manager with a focus on functional safety and I'm working with the engineering teams as well as external certification partners to support the new requirements for the in-vehicle OS and the required certifications. So diving into questions. First, let's talk with Whitney about the overall program. Sure. The in-vehicle OS program, it's one of the major pillars that supports the Red Hat's open hybrid cloud to the edge by bringing the Linux expertise to the markets that are being transformed to the edge. The program has been in R&D mode and will continue as we move to our more formal product. We have engaged with some potential partners on collaborative efforts. Internally, we have been building a lean adult team to plan and execute on requirements. We have gotten some really good experience. We've engaged with some potential partners on collaborative efforts. And with Red Hat's already well-established presence in the upstream Linux and cloud communities, we are working to have a presence in the automotive community through the automotive sent off SIG as well as other public-facing communities. Great. Thank you. Rachel, do you want to describe the QE approach? Regarding the QE approach for the automotive program that is already well established, that we will leverage well as much as possible, the same holds true for testing. We will run existing test suites where it makes sense by testing the offering with additional coverage to specific to automotive. New test cases will need to be created or existing cases expanded upon as we continue the scoping efforts for functional safety related activities, including both gap analysis and hazard and risk assessment. This also holds true for the customer engagements, which will help shape the offering and how we plan to test. While keeping in mind we don't want to tailor to one customer's needs but instead do it in a scalable way, which will align with all future customer engagements. As we expand our testing processes and automation, this will enable us to dive back to REL to strengthen our testing practices and coverage to make it more safe and stable. For example, vulnerabilities and different attack factors are concerned for functional safety. For device input testing, which can include wireless USB or Bluetooth testing, we would like to expand our existing test suites to include pen testing or fuzzing, which would equally benefit the enterprise model for REL. As a result, we will extend our gating tests used for REL with increased test coverage based on the new knowledge and use cases that are automotive efforts render. In addition to leveraging development and testing practices for REL, we also want to reuse existing CI tooling technologies which are currently running. For example, we plan to reuse TMT and testing farm in addition to leveraging our CI infrastructure. TMT stands for test management tool, which is a standard test framework used to invoke our test drones. While testing farm is an open source testing system as a service, which is currently being used to deploy our CI workloads for both Fedora and REL. Great. So Allison, can you tell me a little bit more about some of these POCs? Yeah, for sure. Our engineering teams have been engaged with partners at various levels, from business level and roadmap POCs to determine timelines, like I mentioned earlier, and really identify customer specific requirements for FUSA or functional safety, which Sabine has touched on a little bit earlier in this conversation. To more technical efforts where teams have been embedded to produce an MVP, which replaced the partners current build system with a REL-based system. And at the same token, we've also had the opportunity to embed with hardware providers to really become or to begin our effort in becoming hardware agnostic. And we've been working very closely with hardware provider engineering teams to start laying that foundation for being able to get Red Hat's in-vehicle OS offering running on different platforms. And it's been really great to embed with these partner engineering teams because we get a lot of different insight that we might not have received otherwise. For example, how a binary-based approach with a vendor-supplied distro can provide value to developers beyond the safety, the stability, and the security that we already knew was associated with an open-source solution. Excuse me. For example, we've brought developers more flexibility through package-level changes and package reuse first having to do a full flash of the system or creating a brand new image each time they want to make a change. And in addition to this, we've been able to improve build times by up to 90%. And I know it's a small scale and it's really early on, but it's really encouraging to our team to see results like this with these various engagements. And I think the POCs have really helped us identify new requirements and learn a lot of different things about the industry, the ecosystem, in a holistic way, which is really crucial in shaping the future of our in-vehicle OS at Red Hat. That's great. Savin, how about the functional safety approach? So one of the important requirements for this offering or a part of the offering is being ISO 26262 certified. Any offering in the automotive industry is expected to comply with the ISO 26262 standard to be accepted by the broader automotive vendor community. So that ISO standard is a multi-dimensional set of guidelines for asserting fitness for purpose, for safety, critical applications. And our foundational assumption is that the core components of REL and the long-standing processes for creating it are already high-quality material that is generally suitable for certification under these frameworks. In case of software, that is used in various parts of the car. So the certification processes include validations on how the software is built and how it is utilized in the car. These arguments will lean heavily on the development heritage of REL and open source more broadly, as well as on our proven track record of fitness based on the widespread use of REL and the derivatives in critical applications over the last 20 years. So these arguments may also involve creating non-trivial new runtime testing frameworks that Rachel already mentioned. So what do you suppose are the challenges for functional safety within automotive? Yeah, so as I already mentioned, any offering in the automotive industry is expected to comply with the ISO 26262 standard to be accepted by the broader automotive vendor community. Such a software certification has not been done before in open source by any other organization. We're going to build a community around this initiative so that anybody will be able to participate in development of the methodology and benefit from this approach. Community members would be able to become specialists in this methodology. Through this public exposure and community, we will be able to jointly build a way to certify complex software stacks against the safety standards targeting different industries. Just to mention, Redhead has newly initiated a special interest group for automotive a few weeks back, and the link is shared in the notes section. It is also worth mentioning that we're working with our consulting and certification partner, Exida, on figuring out a balanced approach to the certification. Redhead is in the unique position where we can pull together the subject matter expertise and review rigor of the upstream communities, combine it with integration and stabilization value of Fedora, and enhance it with development practices of central stream, quality with the extensive review and testing practices of rail development cycle, and provide evidence of the increased confidence with use based on customer adoption and recognition of the stability, reliability, security, and quality of the Redhead Enterprise Linux operating system. The certification narrative is pulling together all those aspects into a coherent story, not relying on a single aspect like testing, but rather on a combination of all these factors in complementing each other in balance. Rachel, how about some of the challenges with QE? As far as the challenges go from a testing perspective, one of the biggest challenges so far is testing on real hardware. For now we're running our CI workloads using a virtualized environment, but eventually we'd like to have access to edge devices, possibly Raspberry Pi or NVIDIA just boards. One, and then later on accessibility to the OEM boards and testbeds. There's work already started to enable edge devices in Beaker, and for those who don't know, Beaker is a framework we use at Red Hat for hardware inventory, OS provisioning, test harness, and visual results that database to name a few. However, it has been quite challenging from what I'm hearing to configuring these devices for remote provisioning where we can tie it back into our Steam CI. There's ongoing work to enable several NVIDIA boards currently, but there's an existing bug which can, which is blocking progress where it requires manual intervention to finish the installs, which is not suitable for automation. It's still unclear whether or not we'll use Beaker or some other external service where we can access remote hardware clusters, edge devices to run our workloads. In addition, depending on the conversations we have with the OEMs and continuing engagements, we need to better understand what are the boundaries that we plan to deliver in the offering versus the OEMs, what the OEMs will provide. Part of that is understanding what we will be responsible for testing versus the tier ones in the OEMs. As we learn more with the proof of concepts and customer engagements, we'll be able to make better decisions regarding hardware accessibility and what's feasible for us to test in-house or whether we can use something similar to distributed CI at our customer sites. Allison, I'm guessing you're also encountering some challenges with proofs of concept. Absolutely. As great and successful as the POCs and the MVPs have been up until this point, it's still difficult to get customers and partners to allocate the resources to really embed and work with our engineering teams early on. On the same token, once we have these resources, aligning them with the life cycles and timelines across OEMs, hardware providers, and internal teams has really made it difficult to determine the feasibility of achieving milestones that align not only with the OEM model years, but also the Red Hat Release cadence. That's more on the business side, but on the technical side, we've also ran into a few challenges. There's definitely a learning curve associated with moving toward a binary-based approach. We've spent an extensive amount of time mapping the sources for software components to bits that are available in a binary distribution ecosystem. This comes as a result of the fact that most OEMs and developers are either starting from scratch, migrating from a real-time operating system, or from other built systems, where they pull these things together in an entirely different way. Along with the mapping, also comes some education and retraining on the new processes. That's a great learning experience for all parties involved. Something else I'd like to piggyback on that Rachel had mentioned is we've experienced some challenges in gaining access to partners' actual automotive hardware and testbeds. In our experience, this embedded hardware hasn't been set up for full remote access the same way servers are, and that makes it difficult to collaborate and troubleshoot in a distributed environment. This challenge has definitely been exacerbated by COVID restrictions. There's been times when our partner engineers could not even get on-site to access the hardware systems in their own offices because of restrictions. But challenge brings out creativity, and the teams have really done a great job setting up creative work-arounds using webcams and Zoom and keeping things moving forward even with these challenges. In the same spirit of creativity and pushing things forward, the last thing I want to outline is not as much a challenge, but an opportunity for us and for the automotive community as a whole. Early on, we didn't have a SIG or a special interest group. So now that we have the CentOS Automotive Special Interest Group, we have the chance for future POCs and MVPs to contribute to development in a public area versus in closed environments. So all of the progress and all the lessons learned can be open-source and shared with the greater ecosystem. And maybe to wrap it up, Whitney, if you want to talk about some of the challenges the overall program has been encountered. So I think this is a new space for Red Hat. So building a new ecosystem means we're hiring a lot of new people, we're taking a look at a lot of our existing processes and we're refining those processes to be more efficient, more agile. And this takes a lot of evaluation and discussion internally. While we have the rest of the externally facing team building that are presence out with customers. And like I've already mentioned in the communities, the other piece that's obviously going to be very anybody who knows anything about automotive knows that the functional safety work to gain certification is going to be extremely it's going to be a lot of work. And so and it's really going to look it looks across the entire company of all business units and all functions to make sure that we are we're practicing what we say we're doing in terms of quality and safety. And so that's going to be a major challenge just making sure that we get all of the T's and I's dotted. Anyway, so that's that's really from an internally looking person like myself. That's those are the challenges thus far. That's really great insight. Thank you. So although we pre-recorded this panel, we did want to make sure to leave some live Q&A time. So please feel free to enter questions in the Q&A box and those of us who are here live will be able to answer. I want to say thank you to all of our panelists. Thank you very much. Be happy to answer any questions. If you want to put them in either the chat or the Q&A box we'll keep an eye out for them. Yeah, hi. I'm not able to see any of the questions in Q&A right now. Okay, so not Q&A. So if you do have questions make sure to add them in the chat box please so that we can see them. Yeah, so please everyone if you have any questions just put in chat box. Because we have all the speakers live so that will be so great to answer any of the queries you have now. Any questions that come up? I also want to make sure to extend an invitation to everybody to the CentOS Automotive SIG we want to get as much participation there as we possibly can. We've only had one meeting so far and we will be doing another one. There is a question in Q&A. Is this initiative focused on traditional automotive traditional cars or electric vehicles? I could take that or any of you probably could too. Go ahead. There you go. So the level that we are addressing the automotive offering at is the operating system so it's not actually determined the drive style or the drive really determine it. It can be either regular automotive regular cars, gas cars electric vehicles or anything else that comes up. So we would of course like to promote electric vehicles so we will be on charging and I know that there are open source options for charging that we will likely be integrating but we're not going to be limited to just EVs available for all cars. Thank you for posting the CentOS SIG so yes I think other questions like how is the compares with some of the existing platform with Apple car, Android car or maker specific platform out there. Would you like to tackle that? Can you repeat? I mean I can kick it off and if anybody has anything to add afterwards feel free. But how we're going to be different in the industry compared to some of the existing solutions is first off being an open source solution that's functionally safe certified. Sabina talked a bit about that during her sessions here and being functionally safe means that we are we're a step above some of the other solutions in the industry that already exist and secondarily will be different because we're striving to be hardware agnostic which will be a game changer really in the industry. I would also throw out that having this from the point of view of a binary distro that can be customized by the customer will be a very different from some of the other solutions. The ones mentioned Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are actually kind of they're at the very top end of the stack so there would have to when you use Android Auto or Apple CarPlay you are going to have a screen from your phone on the screen in the car and so there has to be an operating system running underneath that screen in order to accept the input and that's where the Red Hat Automotive Operating would come in. On top of that as well some of the existing solutions in the industry now require developers to curate their own distros and then manage those so being that we're running it will be a Red Hat product you'll be receiving the scalability the security and the stability that's associated with Red Hat product and an open source product as well so it won't be on each individual OEM's developer team to manage their own curated distro they'll be able to take advantage of all the work of our internal teams as well as the open source community. And just to expand on what Allison said earlier about being doing the certification path Red Hat wants to be one of the very first certified Linux versions of distros running in the car so there's a lot of work that's going on that Sabine had touched on her parts where we're going to make a lot of strides and a lot of changes to make sure that we're doing the right thing and checking all those boxes to make sure that we're functionally safe for the customer. Yeah I think that answers the question that Jagdish might have. So we're not having another question we would be happy to answer any questions further through the breakout room or definitely feel free to join us at this CentOS SIG the next meeting, the next official meeting will be in about three weeks I think two and a half weeks and an interim working session in between there. So bring your questions and bring your hammer and screwdriver and help us with this. Thanks a lot for joining in. Thank you everybody. Thank you everyone. Bye. Bye.


Have two questions for you. Um, is that all right? Number one, you said that because of the Federal Reserve trying to Keep the housing bubble intact. We have these problems today. What exactly is the correlation between the Federal Reserve's actions and the current economic crisis What's the connection? Can you rephrase that? What is the connection between the Federal Reserve trying to keep the housing bubble intact and the current crisis? That we're in? Well, it's sort of a following up What the Federal Reserve has been doing is trying to keep the economy Inflated to you know through the Treasury and through the Federal Reserve actions to what mainstream economists would be say is Maintaining aggregate demand in the economy by spending more money and providing more money For the banking system so that the banks feel like they have plenty of money on their balance sheet You know pretty money and spending money is what basically got the economy into trouble in the first place So the idea that borrowing more money and spending more money can get you out of the crisis Just doesn't make any logical sense What Austrians view is that you have to allow economy to go into a corrective phase Where instead of maintaining prices up you allow prices to fall Now that means wage rates are gonna fall that means housing prices are gonna fall and the prices of most goods and services are gonna fall But what happens in a corrective phase of deflation is that capital prices fall a great deal Stock prices fall land prices fall Real estate prices fall tremendously labor doesn't fall quite as much and Consumer goods don't fall quite as much people are still gonna buy gasoline. They're still gonna buy milk They're still gonna buy food and so forth. So if you look at that situation Capital prices have fallen dramatically labor prices have fallen, but consumer goods are Still up there now. What would you do in that type of economy? anybody Make consumer goods exactly you'd put you buy the capital cheap you buy the labor cheap you'd put them together and make consumer goods so Mises has an example of the business cycle where he talks about a master builder and so this master builder is planning a house and he has a certain amount of materials to build the house and When the Federal Reserve prints a lot of money and lowers the interest rate it essentially makes producers feel like they have a lot more to work with a lot more stuff to produce with and so for the master builder it's sort of like him thinking that He has a lot more Housing materials to build with then he actually does It makes him think he has all the all these bricks that he didn't really have and all all this concrete That he doesn't really have and so what the master builder does is that he starts making plans for a house That he doesn't have the materials to finish So he in you know on his blueprint instead of making a Rectangle of a certain size he makes that size bigger and then he starts committing resources to a house that size Now if if you lay the groundwork for a house that you can't finish and then you start laying bricks for that But you can't even get to the roof of the house because you don't actually have the materials to finish a house like that Eventually you start to realize you you don't have enough materials to build that house So then what you have to do is you have to break down what you already built up You have all these bricks in this huge rectangle, but you can't finish the house at that size So you have to break down what you've already built You've got to break down the partial walls and then start a more modest prod project and so in a boom and a bust of The bust is when you start to realize that you have to break things down you have to liquidate you have to fire people you have to to Start your project on a more realistic level and that that's painful but it's necessary so People often talk about the boom and the bust and they talk about the bust as a bad thing But actually the bust is a good thing because the bust is where things are getting corrected and what to your question what the Federal Reserve is doing is it's Making it so that the market can't correct. It's keeping the house builder the master builder Thinking that he's richer than he is so it's making him continue to build ambitious houses that he doesn't have the materials to build and So right now even though the economy feels it feels to us that the economy is bad We're we still might actually be in a bubble even the conditions as they are now We still might be mal-investing investing in the wrong things Because the Federal Reserve keeps pumping out money that keeps making Producers think that they can create ambitious projects that they can't actually finish question My name is Jason Parker. I'm from Huntsville. My question is for mr. McCaffrey Do property rights copyrights and similar conventions do those count as Socialization in the economy and if so, can they either be privatized or discarded completely? Yeah, the the question is about patents and copyrights and whether or not they sort of qualify as socialization To some extent this is a controversial topic. I am personally of the opinion and I think probably the majority of Austrian economists and deterrents at this point are in agreement that patents and copyrights are really not Justifiable Or at least not in the current form in which they exist. So in a sense you could consider them Not as socialization per se, but it certainly has a part of the the process certainly as a tool of government intervention And particularly as a way of eliminating competition. So in that sense, yes, they are part of the socialist They are part of a socialization process in the sense that they seek to eliminate competition There is some people have suggested various ways in which they might exist on a free market but As I said, there's some controversy here and it's it's not a completely settled issue, but for all intents and purposes Yes, I mean, I think we consider patents and copyrights to be an economic bad as opposed to an economic good This question is sort of for anyone when the housing bubble did burst or even when it was building up He said it hit sort of the entire westernized world That when that happened were there any places that were able to predict or avoid it in a way and what did they do? You know the question is about the worldwide housing bubble because indeed the housing bubble or housing bubbles Have taken place in many many countries around the world and we've seen financial collapses in places is as different as Spain and Iceland and Ireland Greece is not much as much of a housing bubble situation But it's a general financial contagion that continues to this day I've just been researching the economy of Norway, which is going through a massive Housing bubble in terms of their the prices of housing in that country rising and so ours was the first housing bubble and the first to collapse but Housing bubbles have spread throughout the world Based on central bank expansion And they've continued to go beyond our own housing bubble And to affect many places Is diverse as Iceland and China? Given that we exist right now. There's an international division of labor and specialization So we there's a world market So it's very difficult to run and hide from you know the actions of any One central bank or any, you know one economy. We're all integrated now I mean, so probably the only place of the housing bubble really didn't hit was North Korea You know given that it's completely sealed off from the world economy, right? But then North Korea has been giving up the advantages of the international division of labor. So, you know, so Yeah, I mean, it's it's a worldwide more or less worldwide phenomenon questions Can you talk a little bit about? What has been going on in Argentina since the 1980s just I mean, that's I know that's a big story But just in terms of lessons that you guys have been able to take from that that you could share Yeah, the question is about Argentina Fortune our expert on Argentina could not be with He's he's actually given a keynote address at the Austrian Scholars Conference of Canada So I don't know is anybody up on the Expert but there's a What I what you can learn is the you know the problem with high levels of debt And that's the biggest lesson that I think to learn from some of the experiences in Argentina and in fact to prominent economists a Reinhardt and Rokov They've written a book called this time is different and it's basically a historical analysis of all Instances of currency crashes and hyperinflation etc. They find that Every time there is a debt Crisis most governments have historically tended to try to inflate that debt away And that is probably the biggest lesson to learn from some of the experiences in other Latin American countries as well that the perils of building up unsustainable levels of government debt and how that can basically, you know lead to governments choosing to print too much money and then the cycles of hyperinflation and All the social, you know chaos and the breakdown of the division of labor as a result of that One of our online students has a question for everybody here They were asking if they would abolish the Fed if we would abolish the Fed Outright or if we would take a gradual process So yes That was easy Well the Fed is Integrated into the overall financial system a lot of our paper checks for example and electronic checks are cleared through the Federal Reserve system and so it's something that you can't actually Shut down turn off the delights and lock the door because a lot of things have to go through the Fed and And that sort of thing but you can shut down the Federal Reserve's intervention into the financial market simply by Not allowing the Fed to become involved in the federal funds market The buying and selling of government bonds and things of that nature whereby they rig Interest rates in the economy so you can immediately shut down the pernicious effects of the Federal Reserve on day one and then gradually work the mechanical integration of the Fed into the financial markets in the economy and eliminated entirely Another option which has gotten some attention also is the option of allowing competing currencies So for example, there was a congressional hearing on this topic I think a few months ago. So, you know allow Competition and currency with the result that basically the best currency will kind of win And of course that is not going to be one which is constantly being you know inflated Of course, we also like to see a return to the gold standard that Coin-based money Based on commodity money Where would you describe where we are in the existing business cycle with the housing bubble and the and the inflation and also would you Say that there is a safe place to store wealth The question is where are we in the existing? Yeah, well the the thing is so of course we've seen we saw the boom for several years and then we saw the crash as well The difficulty is that because of what the the Fed is doing in terms of trying to Continue to prop prices up and sort of do what it believes is Sort of salvaging the economy, which is actually making it worse But because of what they're doing there hasn't been It's not likely the crash has gone As far as it possibly could have so it's it's not we're not Sort of back to the start where we were before the boom. We're sort of somewhere in between and a part of that because of again because of Current Fed policy in response to the crash is that we may actually be Not just at the end of one bubble, but at the beginning of a new one And so then of course we have the problem of trying to figure out exactly where the bubble is if there's a new one forming exactly what it's in So um, so yeah, I mean my answer would be that we're sort of Sort of at a middle level between the worst possible crash Which as as dandy pointed out would have been the actually the best course of action to take and the Peak of the the boom so we're sort of somewhere in between and we're also sort of somewhere in between the end of one Cycle and probably the beginning of another Probably the best way to think of it is that we've taken a housing bubble and instead of allowing the crash We've as a nation the government has taken on a tremendous amount of debt At all kinds of debt the Fed balance sheet is you know filled with debt And so the one place that we're sure that you probably don't want to store your money is in that kind of bad debt so Couple years back though ballman administration supplies supplements to college students trying to get loans by artificially lowering the interest rates would that mean that there's a college bubble forming Yes, they subsidized the student loans And so students took out more loans and more students went to college By use of loans and so the the ultimate Pile of student loans out there in the economy has grown much larger than it otherwise Would have been I mean you could argue that there's possibilities of the bubble forming there No doubt about that. Yeah Yeah, and I would just say that it's important to Recognize the differences between two different kinds of bad effects that there there are bubble effects where the The government creating money lowers the interest rates and directs investment into channels that are not feasible in the long run and and then there are also effects where the government is is sponsoring a certain kind of Productive activity and so they're funneling resources Towards that and and that direction of resources has nothing to do with consumer demand And you can you can have that even without any kind of a boom bus cycle You can have that even without inflating the money supply just governments directing resources where Where consumers aren't Demanding goods at the end of that production process Would anyone like to comment on the currency crisis? I know we've been kind of stepping around it and saying that there's possibly another bubble forming So in any way if there is a currency crisis, you know How is this going to be in any way different from other crises or bubbles like a bubble in currencies and debt amongst countries How would this be in some ways different from a debt in housing or I mean sorry a bubble in housing or a bubble in Like student loans or something like that. How how is this a different kind of crisis because Instead of being an actual goods. It's now in Government financing means it's a little bit different. I guess per se then The current crisis that we've had recently like the dot-com bubble or stuff like that My exercise in here You could think of the currency crisis if it does happen and hopefully it won't As a result of these other bubbles in the sense that because as dr. Thornton mentioned I mean the fact that in order to stop the housing bubble from playing out You have basically taken on huge amounts of government debt And then what do you do when you have these huge amounts of government debt which are impossible to pay off historically speaking? You know in historical episodes most currency crises have been highly, you know Not only but definitely prominently caused by unsustainable pile ups of government debt and going back to you know question about Argentina and Latin America That's something we can gain from historical experience. So you can think of the currency crisis as in a sense the An unhappy but you know the worst possible culmination of for example the housing bubble So instead of allowing the liquidation to occur instead of allowing, you know The debt to be liquidated most importantly instead of allowing those all those factors of production Which have been kind of sucked into the bubble sector So I mean if you think of the housing sector as a you know a mass pump You know and kind of all the factors of production have been sucked into that you need the labor laborers But also all the other you know goods which are used in producing houses But could be used to produce other things to you know move away from the housing sector and be more rationally Allocated instead of allowing that if you have you know kind of propped up that those affected parts of the economy and done that by Bill you know going into debt Then if you want to pay off the debt by you know basically inflating the currency then the currency crisis in a sense is the culmination of You know you're not allowing the normal course, you know to take place enough to liquidate the bubble I'd like to also go back to one of the older questions talking about patents So there there's an important distinction that Misa straws between Prices and monopoly prices and the difference between the two is that most of the time And people when entrepreneurs make production decisions Let's say that an entrepreneur is Is producing a certain kind of good and then he decides to Pull back on production well most of the time in the market the reason why an entrepreneur would Make production go down of certain along a certain line is because The he thinks that the factors of production that go into that line would be better Served in a different line. So it either he's always following consumer demand. He's always Trying to follow the orders of the consumer Mises characterizes the market economy as Consumer sovereignty that the consumer is king So the entrepreneurs are constantly trying to to follow what the consumers want and so when they restrict production in one Line it's usually because they think the consumers really want those resources to go in a different line But with monopoly prices, which are almost always because of government intervention what happens is that because of Because of a certain shape of the demand curve entrepreneurs Sometimes are able to increase profits by restricting production and they're restricting production Along a certain line not to redirect Think those those factors into another line to better serve consumers but just because they can get higher profits that way and and that is called a monopoly price when when producers are for example able to just Gain profits by just burning some of their crops Because of the effect that that has on their profits that that makes their profits go up And so Mises said that on any price for a patented good Any price for a patent or a copyright is a monopoly price that when you have a patent on something You you have such exclusive government-sponsored control over the thing that you're able to Increase your profits not by redirecting resources towards another line that consumers want more but just by restricting But by restricting your production on the thing you have a patent over just for the sake of profits And and so that that that would be why Pat patents are don't help consumers Yeah, it's sort of a more general lesson that you could draw from Austrian economics and the seminar is that if you look around the economy And you look around at where things are expensive and getting more expensive and Other areas of the economy where things are cheaper and getting even cheaper What you find is that if you look at the high-price stuff that's getting more and more expensive like health care college Education price of oil what you find is pervasive government involvement in those businesses with things like patents and copyrights and Licensing and so on and so forth and then when you go to other areas of the economy like cell phones Computers Things of that nature. Well, those are cheaper. They're good. They're they're cheap and they're getting cheaper and they're getting better My first cell phone I bought in 1989 it cost like $900 And it came in a big bag weighed like 18 pounds and it was 30 cents a minute to make a call and This huge battery like the size of It was about the size of an iPad it would hold a charge for like an hour and a half Things have gotten better The discussion of centralized money in centralized Centralized monetary control can be seen historically as an answer to the problems that were Created by the decentralized system you had before that. How do you? Decentralize again while avoiding those problems. Yeah, so as far as the the origins of centralized control of money and so on I consider it's actually it's really not the case that Before we had institutions like modern central banks that Banking was an entirely free industry and that that a free market in banking created crises and things like that that that's actually a It's an error that a lot of economists make But if we go back and examine the history you find out that prior to the formal institutions like central banks We have today there was very often government manipulation of the supply of money and banking Which actually caused the historical Crises which are sometimes attributed to the free market. There's a options have done a pretty large amount of research on the various different Panics and depressions that occurred historically and have shown pretty convincingly that They were in fact caused by Early forms of government manipulation of the money supply rather than a competitive banking so Did to answer the second part of the question? There the drawbacks of central banking Simply don't exist under competitive banking. So our return to some sort of competitive system would not entail any The invitation of any serious economic problems I mean your question is is very calm. It says has a complicated complex answer But yeah, just to add to what Matt said It for example, just if you take American banking history Before the central banking, you know, you had for just as one example of a certain Restriction on banking banks could not, you know branch, you know have branch banking plus They in some key insight sometimes they had to hold government debt as part of their reserves So, you know, since they were kind of using government debt to kind of you know pyramid off that to kind of print money off that Or could expand their loans based on the amount of government that they held So it's there are there are many, you know details and there's a lot of scholarship out there on these questions Yeah, but I mean it's it's hard to give a short and ready answer to that because it is a very complicated, you know It requires a lot of subtle It's subtle, you know problem Yeah, I'd like to talk about what why competition helps and why competition Makes it harder for banks to inflate and create these problems. We've been talking about this whole time so when With a bank, let's say that there is a guy who Is holding gold for people so people have gold and that's the money and and he's holding it for them and So sometimes when people want to get their gold and they want to spend it on something They'll come to the guy and they'll ask him for their gold and so he gets them the gold But some sometimes they think, you know, that's not really convenient and so Instead the guy the the banker Creates a money ticket For the amount of gold that they gave him And it creates a paper ticket and that ticket is worth a certain amount of gold of the guy's gold And so instead of coming to the guy getting the gold taking it to the store and using the gold to spend it He just takes his ticket that's good for that certain amount of gold and gives the ticket to the store to buy stuff Okay, and so before you know it people aren't even really using their they're using gold directly They're just using tickets to buy things and that's what that's what paper currency Originally was just these tickets But then the banker guy he gets this idea. He thinks wait a minute People are they don't come to collect their their physical gold all the time They're just using these tickets. They don't know how much gold I have in in the vault Why don't I just? Print up a whole bunch of tickets even for more gold than I have and people will accept that as as Real gold and I can make myself richer just by creating all these all these tickets and As long as all the ticket holders don't come asking for gold at the same time I'll be fine. Nobody will find out that I'm kind of defrauding all these people But the thing is is that banking is a competitive industry So now imagine there's another bank in town and and that banker. Yeah mark here. I've been defrauding people and mark Knows that I've been doing that and so then he gets a whole bunch of those tickets and he comes He he wants to put me out of business so that he can get more business for himself So he has an incentive to come to get a whole bunch of tickets and try to Try to get all the gold for me all at once I don't have all the gold and so I say sorry I don't have all the gold and people realize what I've been doing and then they don't have any trust in In me as a banker anymore. And so that's the way banks competing with each other Helped to reduce the amount of extra tickets that are being produced Reduces the amount of extra money that's being created But but what happens with the government is that they they monopolize Banking so that they they eliminate this competition so that the the bankers are free to inflate as much as they want Without competition We're out of time. I'd like to thank you for joining us here today and for joining us online It's been a great pleasure. I'd like you to help me Thank the sponsored donor of this event and the faculty


And these days we also have executable specs, which are specified in Python. So the core developers are working on, first of all, this specification, if you can look further, it's also all there. So first of all, this specification, then the implementations. The implementations of Ethereum are on two layers and the consensus layer handling the brutal stake, actually the validator said the consensus for the network and the execution layer, which includes executing the transaction, having all the state, all the Ethereum data, all the contracts. And of course, we need to be able to test this. There is a heavy testing infrastructure of various domains, which make sure that these implementations not just work and work together, but also follow the specification. And all of this is kind of led by many, many researchers from all the various organizations who are trying to find the best solutions of the cutting edge issues in the blockchain in Ethereum. On the other hand, when you say Ethereum developer, people mostly imagine people writing in solidity, building on Ethereum itself. So there would be some beach by apps, some NFT projects maybe, or even layer tools or the infrastructure, like maybe some blog explorers or stuff like this, which is built on top of the Ethereum. So to give you the idea of what numbers we are working with here, the core developers of Ethereum are in, we would be here in low hundreds, like 100, 200 people in the protocol guild, which is an organization. It's an original magical list, which is including all, like it's up to an list for core contributors to be able to have some sort of funding. There is under 28 people, but again, it's up to 10. So there is not all of them. Most of the people from protocol guild or from the core community is on this picture we met in Austria on January. So you can see that it's a wonderful group of people, yeah. But it's of all of them, of course, the projects in the core ecosystem are very wide. There are many different domains. There are not just the clients, but there's always some library or some piece of tooling, which somebody maintains somewhere. This aggregator is pulling various repositories and identifies over 200, sometimes up to 300 contributors to these various repositories. Again, they don't list specifically which ones, so I would guess that it might be even more. However, if we compare this number to actual web-to-developers, we see a big difference. So the web-to-devs are people building on Ethereum, using the Ethereum technology, but not contributing to the Ethereum itself. And Ethereum is leading in the number of these web-to-devs, the dev-developers. There is, well, let's say, at least 20 times more than the core contributors. So it's a big difference. And yeah, the main difference here is that the app developers are working on the high layer, basically. It's the smart contract layer using something or Viper or Fee or maybe some, these days, whatever compiles to EVM like some Cairo, building the different applications, the things that users actually use. And building these, the developers are responsible for how the app behaves and the security of the user response or the security of the user data is their responsibility, the responsibility of the app they are using. It's also competitive environment. Many Ethereum, many protocols in Ethereum are maybe some public use, but a lot of them are businesses or even DAOS, which have some profit incentives. So they tend to be rather market-driven. And yeah, they're building kind of offensive cars or the standard people use because what the core devs build is the road. It's the actual platform that they are building on, right? So to build the actual platform, to build Ethereum itself, we need lower-level languages. We need the languages which allow us some software architecture, which is mostly Go or REST or C++, Java, even TypeScript, or maybe NIM. So these languages which allow us to build efficient and secure software. And this is how the consensus, the execution clients are implemented. The work done there is still maintaining them, upgrading them, optimizing them, and most importantly, upgrading them for the newest EIPs. And if you think about it this way, the core developers or the people working on the clients themselves are responsible for security of all of the users of Ethereum, not just a single app. So it bears certain commitments that they're responsible, I would say. But this way we have all the robust testing and cooperative community for it. So when I say that it's cooperative, it's very unique because compared to the market-driven economy of companies building something else or the core developers are directly collaborating. So people from different teams, different companies come together to build the things together to make sure that it works and it's all properly specified in Ethereum. Yeah, so it's more ethos-driven. And yeah, so why is it important? Yeah, why is it important? Why maybe some web-tree devs here or other kind of developers or technical people might be interested into the core development? And it was mostly mentioned here. It's the development of the clients themselves or the implementations with Ethereum that actually nodes running the network. If you ask, what is Ethereum? I like, that does the thing with the blockchain, right? You can send a tank to a bank because bank has the building Ethereum will never have that because it's thousands of computers running this very software all over the world and each little computer is running the code that you can contribute to. And yeah, so the contributions by directly contributing or testing upgrades maybe benchmarking and generally improving Ethereum by researching some complex problems. So I would say that without the core devs Ethereum wouldn't be here. I mean, it's kind of obvious. Like if we wanted, we need to build it kind of a democracy approach, but all the work done on launching the Ethereum on the frontier, the homestead, all the upgrades till now, till the merge, Chappelle, it's all was done by these good contributors. And of course there are different people before the now but they come and go, some stay. They're all working towards the same vision. So we say that Ethereum is sort of an infinite garden. It's a game that we don't play for winning but for playing. It's a garden that we will have to improve and trim here and there. And I see it as a, it really comes from the, comes from the free software movement and the central punk culture of the people who are trying to build this distributed and free software, which allows us the coordination and it's the vision that people follow here rather than just some market incentives. That's what makes the core open unique to me. And when I talk about the complex and interesting problems, that's another reason why I see people around me working on the core development because it's not just some shared vision but it's very interesting problems. It's, if you like to solve problems, there is a lot of them to do. So this was around the merge and sure if it was before or after the merge and tell it to say and Ethereum is still only about 55% finished. There is a lot of boxes to fill as you can see in the roadmap. Each in different domains of Ethereum, different parts of the computer science to tackle here and to work on. So it can be also very open and creative like basically whatever problematics you get interested in and you want to get into, it's your opportunity to just come and learn and contribute. Yeah. And yeah, so it's all of this research because of various issues that need to be solved in Ethereum but generally what you know about is the scalability through a lot of blockchain through a lot and all of these people have been putting very hard work to researching potential solutions which can keep the network as decentralized as secure as possible while achieving some scalability. That's these are really the cutting edge solutions to the blockchain technology that we have and like the probably the biggest example of a huge collaboration of people completely open collaboration of people distributed all around the world which was successfully done as this lovely transition to the merge, right? So the merge happened in September 15 last year and it was just incredible to watch how people, each everybody doing their own thing but contribute to the higher goal, right? And yeah, this is what these people are doing and I think this is the last slide before Josh takes over because Josh will actually explain you how can you become one of these contributors and work on all the interesting stuff that I mentioned. Awesome, thank you Mario. Yeah, so the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship as Tim mentioned earlier is a program that's designed to make the process become in a core developer researcher or contributor easier, clearing the path forward so that there are the least amount of roadblocks and you can spend some dedicated time learning and applying any of the things that you learn towards becoming a contributor to the Ethereum Core Protocols. A little brief history of the EPF it was originally a program started by an early core developer Piper Miriam. It was called the Core Developer Apprentice Program and his idea was to find developers that were going to be able to help him work on a project that he started called the Portal Network. He hosted two cohorts originally to do that and then passed the program off to the Foundation Protocol Support Team to host the program in sort of a wider sort of manner. So it is coordinated and funded by the Ethereum Foundation. The design of the program is meant to mimic the core developer experience. So it's a largely self-directed program. You're able to choose what you get to work on. It's the main mode of communication to the greater world is through different technical updates and it's really meant to help you allow you to figure out how to find your way in this ecosystem through your own research but also through accessing in the developer community asking help and gathering guidance from mentors and the Ethereum Core Developer Community. It is coordinated majorly through a GitHub repository and as well as a Discord channel within the ETH R&D Discord. And then we do host a couple of weekly meetings each week to have some face-to-face time. It is a permissionless program which means that anybody is welcome to join the program and will have more or less the same resources that somebody who is officially accepted into the program. So we do encourage people to participate permissionlessly. Our application review processes by no means perfected and we're human and we make mistakes when it comes to applications. So we invite people who maybe don't get selected to be a part of the program to prove us wrong and show us why you should maybe be a part of the official cohort, receive funding, that sort of thing. So some of the benefits of the protocol fellowship, as I mentioned, you get to work closely with the existing core developer community. It is a semi-structured process. So we do have some structure in place to keep people accountable and allow you to have some feeling about what it is that you should be doing through this four month program to help you along in your path there. You get to work on what you're passionate about. So the problems that you're interested in, the areas of the core protocol or of computer science generally that you like to work on and you like to research and that you feel passionate about are the things that you get to work on. There's also the mentorship aspect which allows you to have access to the people who are already working on the core protocols, the people who might have answers to your questions or able to point you in the direction that you need to be going to solve a problem that you're not really sure how to solve. There is a financial stipend that is associated with the people who are officially accepted into the program and we do keep aside a portion of that stipend budget for those people who participate in a permissionless manner that are doing good work throughout the program. And then you also, yeah, you get the experience of what it's like to contribute to an open source software project like Ethereum. We finished up the third cohort in February 2023 and it's a four month program. We had over 600 applications for that program. We conducted 40 interviews. There were 24 official accepted applications. We ended up having about 36 people participate in the program, so 12 people participating permissionlessly. And then I believe five of them ended up becoming sort of official fellows through the permissionless track of that program. They worked on 20 different projects with 27 different mentors. And yeah, the fellows created 300 different development updates. As of, I believe, two months ago, 40% of the fellows that were in cohort three have some sort of placement within a client team, within a research team have been granted in some way to work on a project that they were excited about working on. I'm not gonna go over each of these different projects but these are some of the projects that fellows worked on in cohort three. And I did highlight one that after the cohort was over, one of our fellows that was working on the deter attack defense, the Geth client had that sort of DOS attack happen very shortly after the program was over and the work that that fellow had done on this attack defense came in very handy during that portion of time. So how does the program work? Well, here is a brief timeline of the process. So there are three different phases of the program. The first phase is what we call an onboarding phase and it lasts for a couple of weeks. This will be time for you to meet the different fellows in the cohort, get to know more about the program and the expectations that are set for the program and for you to take some time to get a brief overview of the current landscape of the Ethereum protocol and the current set of problems that are being worked on. We do have a list that is kind of ongoing different projects that our mentors and other people from the developer community are hoping to see worked on or would like somebody to work on potentially if you're maybe struggling to find a project to work on. And then so yeah, once you've done that sort of cursory overview of the problem scape, you will go into phase two, which is the learning and project selection phase. This is where you'll do a deep dive into that particular issue that you're looking into or the project that you'd like to work on, really getting to know the different nuances of that project. Then you'll start to create a project proposal. This would be probably similar to what it's like to create an EIP or some other kind of proposal for upgrading or creating something within the core protocols. And then you'll get feedback on that project proposal and the project in general and iterate on it. And then we do a, I think it's over two weeks, we do project proposal presentations where you will spend five to 10 minutes giving a presentation on your project why you think it's important and how you're going to tackle it. And then the majority of the time in the fellowship is the project execution phase where you're actually working on your project, getting feedback and assistance from your mentors and fellow fellows in the cohort. We'll host these weekly standup meetings where you will give sort of a brief overview of your progress through the week, be able to ask questions of the fellows and maybe have, you know, Mario and I point you in directions of people to talk to if you're struggling with a certain roadblock of some kind.  And then this cohort will end with an in-person meeting at DeafConnect in Istanbul. So this will be a time where fellows will get to meet, face-to-face, have some time to chat about their time in the fellowship and also give some in-person project presentation. So what it might be like to, you know, speak at a conference on what you're working on or, you know, just generally give you some more sort of public speaking opportunity so that you can verbalize your thoughts to others that are working on similar things. So if you are interested in joining the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, the fourth cohort, we encourage you to apply. Successful candidates will have strong written and verbal communication skills. The majority of this program is, you know, done remotely. So it's important that you're able to speak about the project that you're working on and just about the technical aspects in general. You'll also be writing weekly or bi-weekly updates about what you're working on. So being able to write about what you're working on as well is definitely a handy skill to have. It's important that you're self-directed and self-motivated.  It is important to have somewhat of a technical foundation to be able to write some code, be interested in low-level architecture and also having a passion for Ethereum and for decentralized technology in general is also a very important aspect of this program. So when writing your application, it's very good to have well-written answers in your application. We encourage you to put some thought and some effort into the application answers and would discourage you from using chat GPT or other AI tools to write those responses within the application. It's important to have an active hub account of some kind. We definitely understand that not everybody has the opportunity to, you know, work on open-source projects all of the time or maybe, you know, the work that they do is not able to be shared. So it's certainly understandable if you don't have a super active hub account, but when you are submitting your application, it would be important for you to sort of explain what sorts of projects you have worked on in the past and why they aren't necessarily able to be shared. Making open-source contributions to either issues and things within Ethereum ecosystem or generally other open-source software platforms is great. Having some low-level language proficiency, things like Rust and C++ and Java and all of these sorts of things, it's great to mention that in your application. And if you've done any kind of, you know, protocol work, peer-to-peer work, things like that. So the application period is open until June 16th. The program will begin in mid-July and it will run through mid-November. And as I mentioned before, it will culminate in EPF day at DevConnect in Istanbul. Yeah. So these are a couple of QR codes for you to scan if you so desire. One is to the Google group where we do some very high-level communications talking about ways to participate permissionlessly or just announcements about different cohorts. And the other is the GitHub repo for the third cohort. We do have another repo for the fourth cohort which should be open at this point and we'll throw a link to that in the chat if it is still legible. So thank you for listening to this presentation and for joining us on this town hall meeting. We're gonna open it up for questions and we'll see how this process goes with the issues that we were having earlier. Hopefully it will be great. So if you have questions, feel free to post them. Oh my God, there's so many things. Yeah, maybe I can run through what's already been shared in the chat. Cool. Yeah, so first of all, yeah, people are asking for the slides, we can post those there as well. First question was out of the 36 participants last time, how many became core devs? Yeah, so as of I believe a month and a half ago about 40% of them have been placed in some way shape or form. So that could mean that they received a grant through the Ethereum support program that they were hired by a client team, that they were hired by the Ethereum Foundation, the research wing of the EF. So there's a lot of different sorts of ways that you can become a core dev. So, but 40% of them currently are working full-time on core development projects. I guess, yeah, go ahead. I would just to note that like the 20 projects which has been delivered, like all of them were meaningful contributions. So like one thing is being actually employed somewhere, we're getting a grant, but like even the work within the EPF was the actual contribution that people did. And to me, I would say that they already became a core dev or core contributions. And the placement rate, like what we talked about here, about 40% also important to note that some of those people just decided to work on something else or maybe finish the school before joining some teams. So I would say that it's really up to you like it's these projects can easily prove your skill and then it's pretty, it's relatively easy to get hired wherever the help is needed. Awesome. Okay, so the second question is the fellowship only for coders. It is mainly geared towards people who can write code. It doesn't necessarily mean you need to be able to write like production ready code, although that is definitely helpful. We do have a lot of people from the last cohort who were more on the research side of things. And so interested in researching the different things, but it is handy to be able to be able to express your thoughts in code. Or Tim, yeah. I was just gonna say, so like, yeah, it's important. I think to keep the program focused on actual core, protocol development and client development.  So I think for this program, like being comfortable with the Ethereum network and its implementations, like as a live thing is probably the main thing.  That's something that started much more on the research side and then they work with the Get team on like implementing a fix.  But if you're completely outside of those domains, then there's probably other grants rounds from the EF that are better fits than EPF. Mary, I don't know if there's anything else you want to add. I just wanted to mention that I would really recommend to check the past project. So we have the lovely recap blog that was mentioned on the blog of the Ethereum org next to the application so that you can find also there is a link in the blog post to the blog, which is explaining the previous cohort and all of the projects are linked there. Also in the repo from the last cohort, you can see all the work which has been done by the fellows and the projects, you can get an overview that like most of them is some development work. Some of them are also just like, you know, data analytics or building tools which enable some more clear data. Or actually there was also to work on the MEV, some sort of crypto economics implemented in the open games engines. And if you're interested in game theory, there is also some logic to apply in the research there. But this is different from the minority of the program and the most of the projects, yeah. Awesome. Okay, next question was, what's the monthly stipend if you're acceptable? So we do stipends based on needs basically. So we ask you to calculate your monthly burn rate, the amount of money that it takes for you to live basically for a month, things like food rent and basic life necessities. And then that's sort of the number that we would ask for in terms of what you would receive for a stipend. So the program isn't meant to give you like a developer's salary per se, but it is meant to allow you to spend the four months focusing on the project and not have to worry about the things that you would need to survive. Okay, next up, I'll try to run through this because it's more and more. On what basis are the applications accepted and how much are you expected to know about core development? So the second question is sort of touched on a bit, but maybe the first part of the question, like what are the things we look at for good applications and help us make a decision? Yeah, so things that we look at, we definitely look at GitHub profiles a lot. We'll look at the repositories that you've contributed to the different things that you've been working on within the GitHub. We definitely read all of your answers to the different questions. This particular cohort, we've added a new question into the application, which is asking applicants to describe some kind of technical concept, either in a video or in an essay format. So giving some idea to us as to where your technical knowledge is at. Additionally, just describing different projects that you've worked on, giving us some kind of brief resume-like idea of your skills and the languages you work with and the things that you're interested in, as well as just having an interest in Ethereum itself, we definitely highly rate the passion that people have for working on these kinds of projects. But I don't think that there's any hard and fast boxes that we have to check in order to say that somebody is worthy of having an interview or whatever. So, yeah, there's not like a thing that I can say that this will definitely get you into the program. Okay, if you can help me, I'll bring it up a little. Just, yeah, everything that Josh said, like we're looking to see that technical insight, insight into Ethereum, but then we invite people for the interviews. So we will have interview with a subset of people that we decided we will get to know more there. And the thing is that if we have these applications here and you can apply even, but the thing is that the program still stays open and permissionless. So the idea is that even if you don't get accepted or even if you don't apply, you can still just come and contribute. And from the past cohort, we learned that there've been people that we did not accept or maybe didn't apply and just show up to do work. And after a month or two, we see that they're doing a great job and they deserve the stipend. So we offered it also respectively. So like, if you don't get accepted, you can prove us wrong just by coming in and showing the skill, yeah. Yeah, like I just said. Okay. Sorry, I'm going back and forth in the chat here. Okay, so this- There's a question around the, good. I was gonna say, the next one is like, do mentors ever become overwhelmed by having so many people in the program? We didn't necessarily experience that per se. We do ask fellows to really make an effort to try to solve the problems on their own before they reach out to mentors doing a lot of their own research. And if they do have to reach out to mentors for something that they can't figure out to really have a directed question or ask of the mentor so that there isn't a ton of time spent on the back and forth communication around what it is that you're actually trying to figure out. So we didn't, yeah, I wouldn't say that mentors got overwhelmed. And I think that a lot of the mentors are understanding that this is helping to bring in the next crop of developers so that their plates are generally not as full. So yeah, I think the majority of them are happy to help. Awesome. I would just add quickly that there is, you can actually find the list of potentially available mentors. Like they're available just, you know, their things might change, but you can see that there are people covering almost all the core teams. So also what we encourage and protocol is to, and the protocol fellowship is to identify the project that you're trying to work on, but also check with the peers, check with the others. Maybe you can collaborate with somebody on the same project with one team and it helps not to get the mentors overwhelmed like to actually distribute the projects around the various teams. And yeah, so we don't end up with many falls working with one mentor because it won't be possible. Okay. Next up, what's the required time commitment for EPF? We don't have a specific time requirement. You know, in the application, we do ask the amount of time that you would be able to dedicate to the EPF during the four months. We do think that if you're able to, you know, spend only 20 hours or less on the program per week, that it might not be the right fit. You know, that's certainly again, not a rule by any means, more of a guideline to go by. So if you already have a full-time job and, you know, a family and you have a lot of other sorts of obligations that you have to take care of in your life, it may not be the right fit for you, but also, you know, if you're somebody who also likes to stay up all night working on passion projects, then, you know, certainly feel free to apply. It's not something that we, it's sort of much lower on the list of things that we take into consideration. And I would say maybe I'll add something to that. There's like, the reason why time commitments is so hard is because at the end of the day, quality is what matters more than quantity and people have like very different, like outputs based on time. So if we said like, oh, it has to be 20 hours and then, I don't know, somebody who can actually do great things in 10 hours a week feels like they can't join, that's bad. But like, you should expect during the program to make like a meaningful contribution to something like one of the projects that's listed there. So if you like read through the list and you know, you think that's the type of thing you can tackle in like four months, then yeah, that's pretty much the bar we're going for. And related to that next question, is it okay to express an interest in more than one project in the applications? Yeah, certainly that is certainly a possibility. You know, we wanna hear about all of the different things that you're excited about within the protocol development world. And yeah, you can express interest in all those different things. And, you know, in phase one of the program, the idea is that you're, you know, able to do a very high level overview of the different sort of things that are happening in those different spaces. But then, you know, once you kind of hit phase two where you have to choose a project, you know, we will ask that you choose a project to focus your time on. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can't spend time working on other things, but we would want you to focus mainly on one project.  So for free, if you feel like it, I wouldn't recommend it in general, like one thing and perfect, right? But we also saw people think after a month of the researching one topic they decided they have to work on something else. So the actual deep dive in the first weeks of the program should be the real time when you decide on which one to finally work on. Awesome, the question by Amora about, can we say more about participating in the research capacity? What's the example of a topic that a participant might research? Yeah, go ahead, Mario. So there is a lot of research going on in the Curium ecosystem. So I would check out the project ideas. There are also some research, you know, less development things mentioned. One of the things I mentioned before is more of the crypto economics topic, topics handled by the Rick, or was this Google research, which has, it's linked in the project ideas. It's the Rick open problems, open questions. You can find some of the research that are interested in there. It might be like the cutting edge, the current stuff happening. So right now there is the development rate for four, which still might require some maybe some benchmarking, some, you know, more of a applied research, and then more theoretical topics which are still far ahead, but are very interesting and need to be figured out, such as single-slip finality, maybe data available to something. One of the fellows from the previous cohort was working on data available to sampling research. And so the research being also, if you're not aware of the ETH research website, it's a great way where to, for an overview of what's happening in the ecosystem, it's making this a good link, it's ETH research. I'll maybe add to that one type of research that like, I feel we never get enough great people working on is things like simulations and like, basically, yeah, almost more like experiment, like very hands-on research. And like one example I can give, this is not EPS, they were gonna call about this right before, is like for bank sharding, figuring out how many blobs are we gonna have in bank sharding, right? And then running things like network simulations or, and this is a mix of like, you can take a more theoretical approach, you can take a more like sort of simulation and like software approach, but things around that like changing the, some properties of the network or like, changing the topology of the network, things like that. And like understanding that a bit better is something where like, we could have way more like smart researchers who aren't necessarily like engineers in that like they're writing code for core devs, for like core clients, but like are able to use code and like a bit more of like a research and experimental mindset to like, figure out what the right limits for a bunch of parameters on Ethereum are and, you know, are there, are there like things we can improve? That's like a huge, I think area that almost falls like between research and engineering. So like not a lot of people end up there, but I think there's a ton of valuable work to do out there. Okay, so there's another question. Can people who already work on client teams apply? I guess you can apply.  That said, you know, if there's an exception, why like it would make sense for you to get a stipend even though you're already on a client team, we can definitely consider it. Yeah, so there's no, like there's no, there's no kind of rule against it, but I would just, if you're especially looking for the stipend, I would try to explain why, you know, you being on a client team already does not like, isn't like working or what not. If you want to apply as a permissionless participant, you know, imagine you're on NetherMind and you want to spend a couple of months hacking your life house and you don't need a stipend to do it, then I'm sure there is no blocker to do that. Yeah. Okay, next question. Is it expected to work alone or can multiple people work together? Definitely multiple people can work together. We had two different projects that had multiple people that were working on them in the last cohort and it worked out really well. So, you know, they were definitely bigger projects. So it was, you know, it was helpful to have a few different people working on them and collaborating together. Yeah, again, it's totally up to you folks like whether you feel like to clean it alone or working in a team, if you're able to find some peers here who are interested in the same topic, it'll be great. What do we notice is that it actually works pretty well when people are just a two person team, but it still works nice in a way that people, it's easier to brainstorm for them. It's easier to solve some issues in a way that they can just, you know, talk to each other first before going to the mentor and have somebody to discuss directly with. So I would encourage to also chat on these calls more and find people to work with. How many permissionless fellows ended up receiving funding during the program? And maybe there was another question about like when permissionless fellows would like be selected to get funding. So can you maybe just talk a bit more of like how we approach giving money to permissionless participants? Yeah, so generally last cover, I believe, by people ended up receiving funding after the fact as a permissionless participant. What we look for in permissionless participation is, you know, consistency, like really being consistent with your development updates and showing that you are working towards a goal and that you are actively making progress on that particular goal, showing up to the office hours meetings and participating in that way is also a high signal for potentially gaining funding as a permissionless participant. There's no, again, hard and fast kind of rule around what you have to do. It's more about, you know, if you're making meaningful contributions, if it looks like you're actively participating in a way that is going to benefit the protocol at the end of the day, then that's kind of what we're looking for. Awesome. Okay, so there's a question. What if I only know high-level languages like TypeScript and Solidity? Do I need to wait until I understand Go before I apply? I don't, yeah. I don't think you need to wait to necessarily apply. We did have, you know, multiple fellows in the past cohort that were, you know, did need to learn new languages and did learn new languages during their time in the fellowship. I think it's more important that you feel comfortable, you know, with your ability to learn new languages quickly and being able to implement those things pretty quickly. So it's not important that you do need, that you do know those things, but that you're able to learn them quickly. Mario? Yeah, just wanting to mention it again, it's totally up to you in a way that depends on which one to contribute to. So like for kind of front-end web-tree devs, there might be some browser-based tooling or this kind of stuff which is needed. One of the proposed projects, you can see like a DevOps wish list from Pari, you know, certain monitoring nodes or the network is definitely needed and it's also like a front-end work which is important. But I would be excited, there is also a host star which is a whole costus client documentation written in TypeScript. So if you are skilled in TypeScript, maybe Java script and interested more into like evolving your skills towards the architecture, towards the clients, it's a great way to learn. And yeah, what Josh said, it's a great opportunity to maybe learn a new language that you wanted to learn. There was even a guy who was like a non-coder, like light Python skills and he ended up contributing to Rust projects in a few months. If you are educated, I believe anything is possible. And no, there is one client in JavaScript. So there is a Theorem.js. So if it's like actually the programming language and TypeScript is not exactly JavaScript, but like pretty close. Yeah, if that's like the main blocker, you can probably still do some protocol work through a Theorem.js. Okay, so there's a question about the interview. So what's the interview format like for applications that stood out? Yeah, so Mario and I will hop on Jitsi or Google Meet or some other sort of video conferencing and we'll spend a half an hour chatting about what your goals are for participating in the program, what your greater goals are for development in general, get to know your skills a little bit more, get to know some of the projects that you've worked on in the past and just kind of get to know you a little bit better. We can only gather so much information from written applications. So it would just be, yeah, some time to chat and get to know you better and see if it seems like an appropriate fit. Awesome, there's a quick question. Is the application form editable once you send a submission? It is not editable. So if you do feel like you need to send some kind of addendum to your application, you can send me an email or a message through the Discord Protocol Fellowship Channel and the ETH R&D Discord. Also, my email is josh.davis at ethereum.org. We'll add it in the chat here if you do have already submitted an application and would like to make an addendum. Awesome, okay, so there's like three questions that are all related that I think I can take. So just Sirk asked, can we put an existing technical writeup where we ask to write about technical topic? Roy asked me a question between two different things that I answered in the chat. And then Manav just asked whether it's best to speak about like a generic topic like if they're a Miracle Patricia tree or something that you worked on in general. So I'd say that the reason for this question, like why is there any application, is to understand like whether someone can like coherently speak about a technical topic that's like, you know, if not directly related to the Ethereum protocol, like of the same complexity or like, you know, the same types of domains rather than just saying a bunch of buzzwords and like not being able to like actually explain the thing that they do.  Like I'd say that that's great. I would just say if the thing is just very far away from Ethereum, like I don't know, like I'm trying to think of an example of something like say imagine like UX, right? Like which like doing like UX for like a consumer app which is very different than like client work. Then that's probably less good. But if it's like some other like code project that you've done that has like a really high quality writeup then like that's great, you can share that. And I think in general, it's probably better to speak. Yeah, I'd say if it's an application is I would, if it's an application and the writeup focuses on what's like technically novel about it, then that's really good. So like an example would be like, an example of something bad would be like, imagine you just go to like, I don't know, ethereum.org you take the first tutorial. I don't even know what it is, but imagine it's like deploying your own NFT contract and just like copy pasting like the instructions to deploy your own NFT contract. I'd say that's like less valuable than say you actually wrote the contract or wrote the architecture like for a full application and there's something technically novel or interesting there and the writeup focuses on that. I'd say that's super relevant, right? And like one actually one good example. So on ethereum.org there's like a breakdown of like how Uniswap V2 the contract works. And they, that would be the type of thing that like, it doesn't have to be as polished as that. It's obviously like meant for like a super broad audience, but like that sort of goes over the uni V2 contract and explains like what this thing actually does, why it's set up this way, what's like the sort of supply demand care and all of that. I saw that stuff is super relevant. And in general, I think if you can talk about something you've done, like actually done, that's a better signal for us than talking about like something you want to do or just something that you know. So like if you have say, you know, a project you've done that's not quite about ethereum protocol stuff, but it is, you know, technically interesting and novel, I would focus on that. And like as like, I don't know, number one thing, I'd say if you don't have that, then like just talking about either a project that you're interested in or like that, you know, like some topic like Merkel-Patricia trees, like if you want to do a short write up on that, I'd say that's good because it shows like you can understand a list of projects there and a list of like, you know, topics that we discuss. Yeah. And then there's the last question, can you do more than one write up? I'd say if you submit more than one thing, the amount of time people will spend reviewing it probably won't go up.  I don't know, Josh Miro, anything to add on that? Yeah, I think that's definitely accurate. You know, we do get a high number of applications. So the time that we can spend on each one is somewhat limited. So I would suggest choosing the one that you feel like is most appropriate and submitting that one. But again, the form will not stop you from submitting multiple. And just to kind of piggyback on the last things that you were saying, Tim, we have had like a number of people submitting applications that are basically giving like a walkthrough of their, you know, DAP that they've developed in a much more kind of like product pitch kind of manner. And, you know, that's really not what we're looking for. We're really looking for you to like get into the nitty gritty of like how you made the thing and what the novel pieces are of it. And so, yeah, like your elevator pitch for your DAP is not really what we're looking for in the... Yeah, and I guess related to that's a really good point that Lorenzo has a similar question. Do you actually have to go into the code? I don't think you necessarily have to, but I'd say maybe the... If like pitching this to an investor is like the wrong approach, the better approach would be, imagine you have a new coworker or colleague that's coming to work on your thing, right? And you're like explaining them, it's like their first day and like you have like 15 minutes with them to explain to them the thing. So like, you don't necessarily have to go into like, here's what every line of code does, but like, you know, help them make sense of like the technical thing you're describing. That's like the level that we're at. So that, and again, like the use case for this is like, imagine you get on a call with someone, you know, with a client team, like, you know, can you like show them the thing you've been working on their EPF and like explain to them what it does in like a coherent way. So I'd say this is like the audience you should like aim this for. And if the best way for you to do this is to like walk through line by line, here's like a hundred lines of code, you know, first function does this, first second function does this, that's fine. If the way that's best for you to do it is to like actually have like diagrams and like a high level, you know, architecture overview, that's fine as well. If it's really just like writing words and like there's no code in it, that's fine too. But I'd say this is like the framework or like the mindset you should be in is like you're explaining this to like a smart new collaborator on your project. And you're not trying to like sell it to them but you're trying like to get them to understand how it works. Hopefully this answers your question as well Lorenzo. There's a question, is there a specific set of EIPs the application focuses on? There's not necessarily a specific set of EIPs. As Mario mentioned in the repo there is a list of projects that mentors have suggested that people can choose to work on or not. Again, the program is designed to allow you to work on what you feel passionate about and what the areas of the protocol that you're excited about. So we don't necessarily pigeonhole it to any sort of list of EIPs but if you are sort of struggling to come up with a particular area of interest or something to work on this link that Mario just put in the chat is a good place to start in the terms of sort of the immediate things that people are hoping to see done in the near future. Okay, there's another question about permissionless versus permission participants. So do an unaccepted or permissionless participants still get access to mentors and other tools that accepted participants get? Yeah, so permissionless participants do get the same access to all of those resources that somebody who is officially accepted into the program. The main difference between a permissionless participant and an officially accepted participant is that you don't have the stipend right off the bat that you kind of have to prove to us that the work that you're doing is worth funding and that you're dedicated to participating in the program. Just to say a little more about the mentorship, it works in a way that it's not like direct guidance, hand holding kind of thing but more of a asynchronous feedback provided by the mentors. So again, it's up to you to reach out to the mentor. They're available in the communication channels that you use and you can reach out with more of a specific question with a pitch to you should demonstrate it. You have the insight, you did your research and then when you get stuck somewhere there is a mentor to help you. Most importantly, it's the collaborative work when you are opening some poor requests and you get the review to discuss the problems there, right? So it gets, over time it gets more into the PRs into like the review kind of code review kind of work but generally like the mentorship should be approached with again some self-directed responsible to bearing away where you try to find the answer to your question first if you're going to the mentor and if the mentors might get over helmed and in case there are too many permissions participants it's again, it's not our policy or anything but the mentors end up prioritizing the people who stipend. Or at least we saw that before because for some of the mentors it was like too big interest to work with them even though they try to respond to everyone. And one thing I'll emphasize that you both mentioned is like the idea of like reaching out to the specific question. So like in general, like even outside of EPF, right? All of these people who work on Ethereum like tend to be pretty responsive if you actually like have a question that's like not just the highest level like I don't know what's thanksharing or how can I help with thanksharing? But like if you like are reading the spec and you're like, I don't understand why there's this thing online 68 or that type of thing like generally just posting that in the R&D Discord people will respond to it because like there's a lot of like noise at the like what's thanksharing level of the conversation and sometimes people have to like manage the inbound messages they get like however works for them but there's not a ton of like noise or competition at the level of like, I've read this thing and I don't understand like this subset of it and how it works in relation to all of that. So like if you're able to do that and just sort of get past like the first level of like actually trying to read through the thing understand how it works like highlight the parts that are unclear or like count an intuitive to you and then potentially just like I would search the R&D Discord to see if someone has had the same question as you or like search each research. If you've done like that level of diligence and you still have a question then the odds are you've probably hit something that actually is unclear or under specified or like an area of like discussion or research and then people are usually pretty excited to engage because like that's literally what we're looking for is like contributors who can help with all of these things.  Yeah, yeah, people will usually be quite responsive to that. Okay, I think we had most questions. Let me see if there's anything left. Yeah, I think those were all the questions. Any final questions or things that we missed in the chat feel free to repost in the Zoom chat and we can get it for you up up. Okay, well, thanks everyone for coming. Apologies again for the disruption at the start. And yeah, hope to see you all on the R&D Discord.