Tim Beiko, core coordinator of Ethereum protocol development, traces how his own need for frameworks to steward Ethereum led to the founding of Summer of Protocols and now the Protocol Institute. He argues Ethereum functions as a 'model organism' for protocol studies—citing the 2017 Parity multisig freeze, Uniswap's constant-product market design and fee-governance debates, prediction markets' oracle problems, and atomic flash loans—to illustrate his concept of protocols as 'engineered arguments' that draw a boundary between formal rules and human judgment.
Shared by the speakers for the symposium. Email addresses have been removed.
Transcript
YouTube’s automatic captions, unedited, so names and technical terms are often misheard. Each timestamp opens the video at that moment.
0:00 Patrick. Yeah, we’re doing a great job staying on time. So thank you everybody again for doing that. Next up we’ve got Tim and this is our last session before the psychohistory sig group has a two-hour block for their special session. So all yours Tim.
0:22 Hey everyone. Um Yeah, if you’ve been here since the start of today, thanks for sticking around. If you’re on the West Coast, thanks for sticking around through the sort of lunchtime. Yeah, pretty excited to close this this block up. Let me share my screen. Make sure uh we all can see the slide.
0:46 Are we good here for the slides? All right, great. So Um yeah, let’s kick this off. Um so yeah. My name is Tim Beiko, obviously. Um I spent the last most of the last like eight coordinating Ethereum core protocol development. And as part of this a few years ago in 2022 I had this problem where I I felt like I didn’t understand how to think about my work quite well. Like there were no frameworks that existed about managing or stewarding protocols.
1:20 This existed for software engineering, for product management, for you know, markets and financial models, but protocols really didn’t have anything. And at the time I really didn’t know how to approach this, so I reached out to the one person I could think of who could help me understand this and I thought knew enough about blockchain to to kind of wrap his head around it, which was Ben Edgington. Uh we spoke for a while and after some time realized that the best way to approach this was not to study Ethereum more closely, but to look at the thing Ethereum was an instance of kind of zoom out and study the broader class, which was protocols. And this is kind of the inception story for summer protocols and now the protocol institute. Um, basically, the first year, we weren’t sure if this was actually a good idea, if there was something to study at the level of protocols abstractly. The image I used to think about this is the one of the parable of the blind men touching the elephant, where everybody touches a different part of the elephant and, um, you know, they got a very different experience, but ultimately they’re touching the same thing. When we started this work, it wasn’t clear if there was actually a protocol elephant. So, what we did on year one was fund a bunch of researchers, uh, working on protocols in a bunch of different domains to try to see if them studying the thing they’re working on through the lens of protocols would would help us come up with some shareable insights or mental models or frameworks.
2:48 And we’re quite happy that it did. After the first year, we’re all super excited. Um, although my work ultimately was still like as a practitioner, I’m not like an Ethereum researcher, uh, I worked on actually getting the protocol, uh, live into production. And so, in the second year of summer protocols, what we wanted to see is whether this theory we’d accumulated in the first year actually translated into practical, uh, techniques that we could use. So, we funded another batch of people, kind of protocol practitioners, if you want, uh, across a whole host of domain, things ranging from adding encryption to messaging protocols, uh, to wildfire prevention in California, or new governance and voting protocols. And again, with the same idea of trying to, uh, come up with things that would generalize or that would at least be useful insights, uh, from one domain to the next. And, yeah, once more, we were happy with with with the outcomes there. It felt like protocols were a useful, uh, applied field along with just, uh, research and theory. And last year, so 2025, uh, it felt like we had enough uh, enough kind of knowledge built that it wasn’t as useful to double down on funding huge new cohorts of researchers, but instead we wanted to bring this work out into the world, make the world more protocol literate.
4:06 So, we funded a bunch of teachers around the world again from many different domains ranging from like technical ones to social and arts with the goal of trying to add protocols as a lens through which to view their subject matter. And what’s more, if we’re obviously because we’re here today, we found this was success as like the protocol dimension really added a useful perspective to all these fields. And after three years of running this, it felt like, okay, what we need is not just a single summer program anymore. We had all these efforts as well as probably the apps that were more long-lived like the SIGs. Um, there needed to be a durable home for protocols, uh, which I’m now pretty stoked that we have through the Protocol Institute.
4:50 And one thing that’s nice about this for me personally is a fear that we had at the start of the program was that it would be seen as this narrow blockchain research thing, and we really wanted to avoid this. So, we explicitly deemphasized crypto and Ethereum early on. Um, you know, pretty much none of the projects were about crypto even though the Ethereum Foundation funded it. And the goal was to have kind of the field grow on its on its own and be multi-disciplinary and not have a single thing, you know, blockchains like suck the air out of everything. And looking at the agenda for this symposium, I I feel like we’ve really succeeded on along that axis. Like, there’s over 50 sessions, I think, and almost none of them are about crypto directly. Um, which means I get to come back to the thing I’m actually an expert at. So, I’m not an expert in protocol, I’m an expert to some extent on Ethereum, and that’s what I I to talk about for the rest of this talk today. Um, I think it’s it’s worth explaining and unpacking why Ethereum is a really interesting protocol for uh enthusiasts of protocol studies to understand, research, experiment with, even if they don’t particularly care about crypto.
6:09 And the way I would frame this is that Ethereum’s effectively a good model organism to study protocols, a bit like fruit flies in biology. Biologists have studied fruit flies for over a century for a few reasons. Uh they have a relatively simple genome, they’re inexpensive to breed and keep, and they will reproduce really quickly, which means you can observe and analyze biological mechanisms across many different many generations in relatively short amounts of time. Um because these fruit flies have this these like neat technical properties, it also means there’s been a huge body of work and tooling and best practice and sort of knowledge built around it as they’re sort of the default for uh a large subset of biological experiments. And my claim is that Ethereum offers something similar for protocol research. It has a short, albeit extremely rich history uh that covers everything from protocol innovations both at the core layer itself as well as what’s being built on top of it, uh a lot of technical uh development, crises, and the entire governance apparatus that’s necessary to bring this to reality.
7:18 Another thing that’s really neat about Ethereum is it’s unusually inspectable. Not only are all of like the transactions, the code, and and and kind of states of the blockchain public, but so are all of the governance discussions and specifications and transcript. So, you’re effectively able to map this like technical history that developed with the social coordination aspect uh uh kind of in real time and go down to any arbitrary point. And if you actually want to use Ethereum and and and experiment on it, uh the entire premise of the system is that it’s open and permissionless. So, anyone can come in and build anything and you don’t need to trust it. You don’t need a third party or a gatekeeper to tell you what you can or can’t do. Um so, it’s become a kind of really fertile ground for experimentation at at like a reasonable scale. One uh one episode from the early years of Ethereum uh I really like as a as a way to kind of illustrate the what’s possible and and the stakes here and bit of the origin of of all of this. So, in 2017, uh there was this popular uh application on Ethereum called a multi-signature wallet. Um it’s pretty simple. The idea is that if you have a wallet on Ethereum that’s controlled by an organization, you want to have some restrictions on who can like send money and and and, you know, uh disburse and manage those funds. So, instead of having a single address, you have a multi-signature wallet that just has uh different thresholds. So, for example, you can imagine the Protocol Institute having its own multi-signature wallet so that if it wants to manage funds on Ethereum, uh it’s not say just me that has the key, but we could say something like Tim Timmer and Venkat uh are all administrators and two out of the three of them need to approve any transaction.
9:01 Then 2017, the most popular uh multi-signature wallet was developed by this company Parity. And at the time, deploying smart contracts to Ethereum was quite expensive. So, they had this clever idea of storing all of the business logic for the application in a single contract and every wallet would effectively just store the configurations. So, in the Protocol Institute example, you know, we might deploy a new wallet that says Tim Timmer and Venkat are the admins. Um but all of the code for what actually, you know, how the funds actually get managed was was was stored somewhere else. Unfortunately, on November 6th, 2019, an anonymous user who went by the name of devops199 on GitHub realized this shared library had not been properly initialized, somehow made themselves the owner, and quote accidentally killed it.
9:53 This meant that over 500,000 ether, which was about $250 million US at the time, spread across 587 wallets became inaccessible. Everything was still on chain except the business logic that’s required to use the funds. One of the people who was not kind of a crypto insider at the time and noticed this, and I think appreciated the scale of it, was Venkat. He had this this line in his newsletter that stuck me that stuck with me ever since, where he said that you used to have to be a central banker to do this kind of damage. You know, Ethereum kind of extended the frontier of what small actions could cause in terms of institutional scale consequences. And this is obviously, you know, not the most positive experiment, but I think it shows that even early on Ethereum just became this playground for things to happen that were, you know, not really seen anywhere else and just could not kind of play out that way.
10:55 That was obviously quite some time ago. Since then, you know, Ethereum has matured, our multi-sig wallets are much safer, and in general things operate at a much bigger scale. To give you a sense of this, Ethereum the blockchain obviously has ether the asset, which is the the the main token on it, but it also hosts a ton of assets, thousands of other assets on top of it, including notably stablecoins, which are quite popular now. Um To put this in perspective, there’s about $160 billion of stablecoins on the Ethereum blockchain, and Canada, which is the country where I’m from, has about $127 billion dollars in official international reserves. Uh the the Ethereum network is also globally distributed. There’s over 8,000 nodes uh more or less around the world and the uh network itself has evolved dramatically. So, there’s been over 20 upgrades to the core Ethereum protocol uh since it’s launched and all of this has effectively happened without the network ever going down. So, we have kind of an uninterrupted slice of history uh going from the start of Ethereum to today where we can observe both kind of the growth in uh the usage and the scale as well as the social coordination side around it.
12:11 But, the reason Ethereum I think is interesting for protocol researchers is not only because of the protocol itself, but also because it’s effectively a platform for other protocols. This is kind of the inspiration for original definition of protocols that we came up with in the first summer of protocols uh which was a stratum of codified behavior that allows for the construction or emergence of complex coordinated behaviors at adjacent loci. And what this means in plainer English is a protocol is a set of rules that you can use to then uh to then be a foundation for other more complex and coordination behavior uh sitting on top of it. And this is effectively what Ethereum is. It provides the shared state and execution uh to build a bunch of protocols uh which we’ve seen kind of happen or or spring up over the years. Uh so, we have things across you know, protocolizing new types of markets through Uniswap, protocolizing lending and borrowing, things like Aave, uh protocols to create effectively stablecoins uh out of out of volatile assets like MakerDAO, and then coordination protocols like DAOs.
13:18 And I wanted to zoom in to one of these because I think it makes it really concrete what you can do by protocolizing things. Uh Uniswap is just in my opinion one of the cleanest examples. Uh If you’re not familiar with it, the idea of Uniswap is to kind of reinvent how a market works uh and and protocolize it as much as possible. So, instead of having kind of a traditional trading venue where buyers and seller puts put uh asks and bids and you match them uh you know at when the price intersects, the way Uniswap works is anyone can create a pool, which is a trading venue for two arbitrary assets. Then, uh you can fund this pool by depositing depositing uh some of these assets in the pool. And the way the price is set is by maintaining the product of the two assets in the pools constant. Uh so, to make this concrete, uh imagine we have an ETH and USDC pool, like on my slide, uh you put uh 100 ETH uh 100 ETH uh 200,000 USDC. Um Using this rule, it implies that the price of ETH is $2,000 you or 2,000 USDC.
14:27 Um So, if you want to trade on Uniswap, you’re not actually trading against a counterparty, you’re trading against the pool itself. So, what this means is say I want to buy one ETH, um my one ETH means the pool afterwards will have 99 ETH instead of 100, and so therefore to keep the product constant, I need to add back 2,020 USDC um rather than 2,000, which was the price before. So, by effectively buying up 1% of the supply of ETH in the pool, I’ve moved up the USDC price by 1% with my trade. And this is kind of how the price equilibrium gets set.
15:04 So, this is kind of wild when you think about it. This kind of reduces markets, which outside of crypto are these like really complicated infrastructure, to this simple protocolized rule. And it it it’s enabled a ton of stuff, right? Like, so the most obvious one is this means you get now get permissionless price discovery. So, before Uniswap, if you wanted to start trading an asset, you had to find some centralized exchange, whether in crypto or elsewhere, that would actually list your asset and allow you to do this. And otherwise, price discovery would happen, you know, without a central venue. Whereas now, anyone can create a pool, anyone can fund this pool for arbitrary assets. The fact that all of this is also open means that these Uniswap pools can be used themselves when building more complex financial products on top of Ethereum because they’re fully transparent and and effectively fully fully composable. And this is not just like some niche thing. Since over the years, the last number I could find was 2025, Uniswap’s done about $4 trillion of volume in in trading. So, quite significant.
16:11 And this example simplifies things a bit and this gets into kind of the the more human side of protocols, but in practice, Uniswap also charges a fee on these transactions. Originally, when the protocol launched, to attract the people providing liquidity in these pools, 0.3% of every trade went to the people to the liquidity providers. But, they knew that this was probably not the the the best long-term design. So, from the start, the protocol launched with a way to allocate this fee differently. It was just set to go 100% to the liquidity providers, but they expected to have the debate about what to do about this as the protocol gained scale, right? You kind of need to balance these competing interests. Like, do you want to keep paying to attract liquidity? Do you want the owners of the protocol to capture some of the value? You want to fund the future development sorry, future development of of Uniswap. And all of these debates again happened in public. Ultimately, we had this proposal in December 2025 that was agreed to where uh, the fee to the liquidity providers was slightly reduced and then 0.5% of each trade now goes uh, to effectively uh, burn the governance token of Uniswap, which captures some value and because the development is mostly fronted through that token, helps sustain the protocol.
17:33 And it’s just this really interesting case study where we’ve had this really successful protocol um, that’s that’s managed to kind of capture some part of finance and then in parallel you get to see all these debates playing out um, at the human coordination side saying like, “Okay, what is the best way to then uh, manage this thing and steward it over the long term?” That’s it. Ethereum is not just useful to make things that exist uh, more efficient. Uh, I think the the thing that that it’s really special for is it’s kind of this super fertile ground for experimentation with things that might not be possible at the same scale outside of blockchains. Uh, prediction markets I think are really good example of this. They obviously predate blockchains and they now run, you know, not only on blockchains, but I think blockchains were kind of the perfect environment for them to come to life because of the program- programmability they offer as well as permissionless aspect of it where anyone could come in and create all these markets. In case you’re not familiar with how they work, it’s it’s quite straightforward. So, the idea is that you have this question uh, that you want to answer, get a prediction for. So, say, “Will it rain tomorrow?” And then uh, every dollar in the market is effectively uh, backing the outcome of this prediction.
18:48 So, say you put a dollar, um, ultimately usually they start 50/50 um, but the the price of the yes token and the no token always has to sum up to $1. This market will move, so you know, based on the forecast for tomorrow and when it resolves uh, say that it does rain, the people who hold the yes token will get a dollar, the people who hold the no token will get nothing and then vice versa. If it doesn’t rain, uh, people who bought the no token get $1. And that’s, you know, like high-level how it works. Um it’s it’s quite an interesting mechanism to get information about things in the world, right? People use them to say get information about elections and whatnot, and it’s kind of a way to price in the information. Um but it also allows you to build like interesting hedges in the real world outside of blockchains. One example I really like about this, uh on the on the weather front, is there was this ice cream shop in Los Angeles that effectively buy uh yes tokens on rainy days as a way to hedge their business because if it rains and, you know, they bought the yes token, they don’t get as much business cuz people don’t buy ice cream when it rains, uh and then, you know, their tokens pay out $1.
19:55 Whereas if it it doesn’t rain, then their tokens go to zero, but uh they get more customers and it’s a way to kind of smooth out their business that’s heavily weather-dependent. So, that’s kind of a a simple example, but I think it shows you what’s possible with prediction markets. And then the interesting part again, I feel is when it comes to the human and coordination side of governing these things. So, the blockchain is quite good at kind of dealing with arbitrary logic and and and verifying things that are provable, but things in the real world tend to be a bit more fuzzy. Uh we effectively call this the oracle problem in blockchain when uh when we need to figure out like what’s a fact about the outside world that the blockchain needs to adjudicate. And prediction markets have given us a lot of good examples of where this breaks down in interesting ways to to uh yeah, interesting problems to think through. Uh one notable market was uh from last year. Uh President Zelenskyy historically did not wear like suits when showing up to uh government meetings uh during the Ukraine war. Uh so, there was a market about when he would wear a suit. Um and then he showed up to the the dinner wearing this sort of blazer sports coat and it became extremely contentious whether discounted as a suit or not. Uh there was over 200 million dollars traded on this market uh which ultimately resolved as a no based on the specific terms and conditions of how a suit was defined for this market.
21:23 Another more recent example of of of the outcomes uh being tricky is uh there was a weather market in France looking at not weather with rain or not but what the temperature would be. And one of the sensors uh for Paris was at the Paris airport and someone was investigated because they’re suspected to have used a hair dryer uh at the airport to raise the temperature of the sensor while making bets on this market um in order to make some money. So, I think this shows that like even if you have something that’s like fairly objective in the real world, uh if you’re designing these protocols, you need to think about what are the failure cases and what are ways to actually kind of resolve them in a in a elegant way.
22:08 And this gets just really complicated as you enter the real world um rather than things like, you know, uh blockchains and and mathematical proofs which are much easier to settle. The last example I want to make is is is kind of doubling down on that. Like if you do restrict yourself to what’s possible only on a blockchain, what can you do? Um one thing that I think it’s quite unique to Ethereum and I haven’t uh really seen anywhere else is um that Ethereum transactions are fully atomic meaning that either a transaction will will happen and you can be sure that it has happened as it said and everybody agrees on it or it will revert and it will be like it never happened. And this is kind of a different type of settlement than you see in traditional finance. Uh the way I like to think about it is a bit like uh space manufacturing where if you go to space, you can manufacture some things in zero gravity that are simply not possible to assemble on Earth because of the constraints. And effectively, Ethereum’s like guarantee of atomicity gives us a similar kind of invariant that allows us to build things that are not possible outside or in traditional financial systems.
23:20 A really simple example here is just large loans that would simply not get approved anywhere else. Um Ethereum, we call these flash loans. And here again, I have an example that shows the kind of most extreme case where in June 2023, there was an arbitrage spot running on Ethereum that held zero capital of its own, but saw a way to close a really small arbitrage. So, they borrowed $200 million in stablecoins, went through a bunch of finance protocols on Ethereum to close some arbitrages, repaid their entire loan only to net a $3 profit on this entire trade. And it’s kind of crazy when you think about this. Like, the only reason this is possible is because the lending protocol knows that either the transaction will finish and the loan will be repaid back, or the loan is not repaid back, the entire transaction is invalid, and it’s like the loan was never originated in the first place. Um And I think this kind of shows you the the sort of expansion of what you can design when you just have different types of trust parameters in a in a protocol.
24:31 And um in a very, I guess, extremely legible way. The The point is not that like Ethereum is like the best place for arbitrage opportunities, but it’s more that you can build these kind of structures that have completely different trust assumptions than other domains see. And the reason this is possible is because Ethereum has these extremely kind of strong and rigid rules that it enforces through the protocol, and everybody knows that this is how the protocol will execute. Therefore, they can allow these actions that they might not be comfortable allowing somewhere else. Which brings us, I guess, to the last part of my examples, which is how do you actually change the system while preserving all these properties people rely on. Um this is the work I was doing when we started summer protocols effectively, right? We need to keep it improving Ethereum, um but people rely on it and have built these things like markets or lending protocols or prediction markets um that they rely and make pretty significant assumptions based on this behavior. So, every time we get a proposed changes um a proposed change, sorry, we need to think through um will this break something people rely on? Will this introduce some new kind of degree of freedom that affects uh kind of the conditions they were relying on for things to work?
25:48 And this is not something, you know, a single team or operator can answer. Um the way we actually structure this process is again completely open and public. So, anyone can go and propose a change to Ethereum. We call those Ethereum Improvement Proposals or EIPs. Um the entire process is then discussed publicly. Uh this is what I used to do, run the calls where these things are debated, implemented, and tested. And we have multiple teams effectively implementing these changes in parallel, testing them in parallel, and ultimately deciding whether something is adopted or not and becomes part of these shared rules again. Um and this is really kind of the crux of the challenge, is how do you keep these systems dependable while still being able to improve them and adapt them over time. And zooming out, I think these three examples kind of bring us to the later definition we arrived at for protocols, which was an engineered argument. Effectively, you can think of a protocol as something that draws a boundary between what formal rules settle and what people still have to decide. Where the formal rules give you full predictability, um but then the more room you leave for judgment and flexibility means the more room you leave for authority to come in and for mechanisms to evolve around resolving these disagreements.
27:03 Right? You look at something like Uniswap, which is quite simple. The code will execute the entire trade and manage the liquidity in the pool, but you still need governance to decide how do you do with these fee what do you do with these fees. And then similarly, you can automate the entire process of a prediction market and who gets paid on on once the claim’s resolved, but the oracle itself is something that requires a human input and judgment. And then, you know, zooming out, I think Ethereum’s kind of the most generalized version of this where we effectively have a protocol that executes arbitrary software rules, but then we need this huge human coordination process around it to determine how these rules changes. And so, I think the crux of this is like good argument engineering means you need to design both sides of that boundary and figure out how they work together in a clean way. And again, I think this is what’s kind of special about Ethereum. It’s like an unusually rich and open an open ecosystem that you can follow where you see all of the public debates, all of the code that’s evolved, as well as the implications on the platform, the users, and whatnot.
28:12 I helped start protocol studies because I wanted to better understand it, and now that the field has a full life of its own, I hope Ethereum can offer something back as a case study. And if you want to go even beyond that with protocols and experiment yourselves, I think Ethereum gives you the perfect environment to do this where you have tools, existing protocols to build on, and the freedom to try something new and engineer your own arguments. Thank you.
28:36 Awesome. Thanks, Tim. Um, does anybody have questions for Tim? We’ve just got, you know, a minute until 12:30, but there are a question or two, I think we can do that. The Psychohistory SIG special session is next, which will run for a couple hours and uh yeah, sign up to join for that if you’re interested. Let’s see the chat. A lot of praise ready in the chat, no questions.
29:08 Right, happy to wrap up. If anyone does want to chat about this, I’m Tim Maco on Twitter. Um so, you can reach me there and happy to chat about this offline.
29:22 Oh, can I ask you a question? This is Patrick. We got one. It’s just on my phone. Uh Tim, so regarding, you know, the one of the pick on the thread we were mentioning, you know, open and permissionless, you know, speaking as someone who’s kind of like uh I don’t know, like I was a pencil and paper math guy and like, you know, the bit of a techie type of thing, but you know, it’s it’s definitely blockchain and dabble a little bit in blockchain stuff, so it’s a bit confusing and opaque sometimes. And you know, there’s a couple of use cases and case studies where we’ve been talking about using like uh protocols for business, we’re looking at using you know, a way to verify like what the authoritative water rate protocol or what the authoritative water rate and like have like a have that like on chain or something like that. And I know some folks had some loose ideas around um or should construction procurement and things like that. I guess my kind of loose question was like, how do you want the rest of the protocol ecosystem to navigate with or [snorts] like collaborate with like the more core Ethereum world because as like a somewhat knowledgeable outsider, it definitely feels like definitely it feels like there’s some like insider kind of dynamics beyond the kind of core technical architecture and like how to
30:38 Right, so yeah, so I guess so there’s a couple things to unpack. I’ll try to do this quick cuz I know we’re already at time, but um maybe the the first answer is like ideally you shouldn’t have to collaborate much if you just want to use Ethereum, right? Like uh and and this is what we talked about permissionless, I think it’s like the main part is like if you want to go and set up something on Ethereum uh in the event of what it is, you know, no one will stop you and for some use cases, you know, for some use cases it it doesn’t really matter much. Um but like for some it really does and maybe prediction markets are a good example where, you know, they frankly weren’t super legal in a lot of jurisdictions in the past and um eventually we did get regulation that makes them, you know, more broadly accepted and I think this is only because blockchains were kind of the thing that popular popularized them. Before blockchains, they were kind of this neat economic thought experiment that people weren’t quite sure whether it would work and then once they were seen to have like, you know, some scale and some value, um you know, regulatory frameworks kind of spun up and and and tried to accommodate I think it would have been impossible to effectively get to that latter step or much longer without blockchains. Um and so I think that’s that’s like definitely one aspect. Like if you’re working on things where um there’s simply not a framework or an institution that will host it for you today, um the blockchain won’t like, you know, ask you for permission.
31:58 I think if you’re looking at like contributing to the protocol itself, um I was speaking a bit about this earlier in the in the opening session. Like my impression is most protocols are like pretty domain-specific things, right? So like uh you know, Tim Murray used to work on workplace safety protocols and he’s on camera, so I’ll I’ll pick on him here, but like he realistically can’t show up tomorrow and contribute to core Ethereum development the same way I can’t show up tomorrow and contribute to like workplace safety standards. I’m just not an expert in that, but my hope with like, you know, this field and venues such as these is like you’re able to learn from people in different domains and how they do things and then go back to where where you’re an expert at then and you know, use kind of those insights or those ways of working. Um But like yeah, I think whenever you’re thinking about like actually working on some protocol directly, like it’s it’s you should expect there’ll be a relatively high bar to entry just because there’s experts in in pretty much every field. Um yeah. TLDR, using Ethereum itself is is permissionless. Um
33:02 Awesome. Um thanks Tim. Thanks for your question Patrick. I’ll hand things over to uh Venkat and Anish and I’ll restart the recording.
Patrick Atwater, innovation program manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, argues that protocols exist simultaneously as documented formalisms and undocumented implicit norms, using case studies from a neighborhood park, bridge/infrastructure permitting, and track-2 diplomacy to illustrate this gap. He proposes practical strategies for navigating illegible terrain—black-boxing unknowns, cultivating domain-expert practitioners as guides, and lightweight fieldwork logging (e.g., a 'protocol watching' Notion database)—and shares a real example of a water utility valve project where jurisdictional coordination revealed pseudo-official knowledge and unwritten norms.
Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.
Timber Stinson-Schroff closes Protocol School 2025 with a capstone talk on 'Applied Protocol Thinking,' arguing that protocol literacy is best built through 'protocol watching'—a low-intensity, habitual practice analogous to an endurance athlete's easy-pace training—before attempting high-stakes protocol design. He introduces frameworks like hazard-oriented protocoling (analogous to object-oriented programming), the Chesterton's Fence vs. Gordian Knot heuristic, and Erik Hollnagel's ETTO (efficiency-thoroughness trade-off) principle reframed as an ongoing tension to manage rather than solve, illustrating concepts with examples from dog-walking, library shelving carts, tree-trimming crews, and GitLab's engineering trade-offs.