Making Ethereum 100x Faster with ETHGas feat. Founder Kevin Lepsoe

GM, GM, or GN, wherever you may be. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Kevin Lepsoe, who is the founder of ETHGas. So, if you're not familiar, ETHGas is a pioneering real-time Ethereum infrastructure protocol that accelerates Ethereum transaction speeds by 100x through blockspace commoditization. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Kevin, get an introduction to ETHGas, we'll even touch on the day's events in the world of crypto, and you guys will also learn how to start building with ETHGas today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM! Welcome to the show, Kevin. I'm excited to have you on today, man.

Good morning. Thank you for having me. It's indeed a very exciting day in multiple ways, so very much looking forward to this. Perfect timing.

Yeah. Perfect timing, absolutely. I want to say we timed it that way, but nope, can't say that we did.

Yeah.

Yeah, man. I'm really keen on our audience learning more about ETHGas. It's a very interesting project, as I'm sure you can attest to. But yeah, would you like to just start with an introduction about yourself?

Sure. So, I'm Kevin, founder of ETHGas. I'm originally from Vancouver, but currently in Hong Kong. So literally good morning from Hong Kong here. Born and raised in Vancouver, I started my professional career in TradFi. So I was an FX option or vol trader for a number of years, transitioned to more complex interest rate options and credit, correlation, kind of the whole gamut of stuff over 10-12 years. Had the pleasure maybe of working through the Lehman crisis back in '08, or displeasure, depending how you look at it. And then fast forward, following that crisis, coming from Vancouver, my concept of banking is like retail banking and do you want to deposit that in checking or savings? I had always thought there was something more to life perhaps than traditional finance. Wife and I, we built a tech company, ran that for a number of years. But just being in Hong Kong 10-15 years ago, where there was a lot of the early OGs in the Bitcoin space, a lot of the big exchanges were here, it's hard to not think about crypto, which was at the time fintech, right? But lo and behold, it was calling me back to get into the space. So the intersection of tech and finance just totally made sense. Well, here I am now with ETHGas, so we can dive a little bit more into that.

Of course. And yeah, I think you certainly picked the right field. This field, this intersection of finance and tech, and now even AI is in the picture as well. It's just so fascinating and there's something new every week, every day. Unfortunately, yeah, go for it.

I was going to say, the cool part about both of those fields is that in the tech world, if you create a product, instantly you have global distribution, right? And you have product stickiness and you can sell it everywhere and look at your user acquisition funnel. But finance is the same thing. If you have some trading strategy or some innovation in finance, you could almost deploy that globally at the same time, right? AI is adjacent to this, right? But when you combine the finance and the tech part together, it just kind of amplifies one another. And so, I think that's a cool kind of intersection of these things, and I think we have an interesting future ahead of us at the intersection of these worlds. But yeah, I didn't really realize that at the time. But both of those spaces are incredibly scalable for entrepreneurs. So I was like, let's do it. Let's go for it.

This is the way. This is the entrepreneurial way. And yeah, I believe this is going to be tech that's going to be used in the future as well. There's going to be bumps along the way, of course, just as any developing, frontier-level piece of technology. And yeah, I mean, we saw kind of the lows today with, well, I mean, we started with a high. We started with a high where we saw the Hyperliquid and New York Stock Exchange news, even Stanley Druckenmiller got on X today and was like, 'Oh yeah, we're doing this partnership.' And then like three to four hours later, we got news around Polymarket getting hacked, and then now the ongoing Binance situation. Yeah, I just wanted to, yeah, let's chat.

It's scary out there. You know, of course, coming back to a few weeks ago, we had a little bit of a high and it's come off since then. And then to your point, like a little bit of optimism. But then yeah, the hackers just unleashed. And so you have again, like Binance and multiple exchanges are down. I think Binance has just said they're halting deposits and withdrawals just so they can close the system off, figure themselves out presumably. But you know, again, not that I want to see hacks, but there's a bit of a message here. I'm a bit of an ETH maxi, but you think about like, what if, as AI accelerates, and it is obviously very quickly, and it's able to hack these systems, you tell me, what's an easier target? Is it these centralized institutions with like hundreds or thousands of people and like multiple entry points perhaps? Or Ethereum? And so it's like if I'm a hacker and I have money, it's like I can go after the banking system, I can go after the Ethereum network itself, I can go after the centralized institutions that are on Ethereum. But like the network itself, Ethereum, that's far more resilient. The whole story is that it's supposed to challenge the traditional financial network, like all the rails and transactions will slowly shift to Ethereum. But I'm not going to say it's not hackable, but it's far stronger than many of these institutions, many of which built systems, you know, 5, 10, 20 years ago. And here's AI using the latest common exploits and just like spamming them across everywhere. So I think there's a silver lining in this where people are going to realize that wow, Ethereum is really strong in terms of financial infrastructure. And so, I'm interested to see how that will evolve. But of course, I hope as a community we can just kind of stop these exploits, or at least kind of get a hold on it, because nobody likes this instability. Maybe traders, but you know, I generally don't like this instability. Moving forward, you know, a little up, down, up, down. But it's...

Absolutely. Like, if we can avoid these deep valleys, I think that would be great for everyone. I mean, last week was a doozy of a time for a lot of engineering teams across the board, just like hour after hour, day after day, with one new zero-day exploit coming out. I think there was still some trickling in today or earlier this week, rather. So yeah, I think it's going to be very painful for everybody across the board for the next little while. It's just like, AI is really good at figuring out exploits. Most of all software up to this point has been written by humans, and humans are, to no fault of their own, prone to making errors and overseeing security mistakes, right? So it's just like the software is going to get hardened. It's a great time to be in security if you're thinking about a field to go into, security is the way.

That's for sure. Those guys are not sleeping. Guys and gals, they're not sleeping right now. But yeah. It's a great, if you're like in the insurance business, that's going to be tough. Unless you, depends what you're doing. But I guess we had the Bitget hack, what, maybe a month ago now, I'm trying to think. But that should have been like a warning sign really to all the other exchanges that we need to harden our system everywhere. And you know, as a hacker, you're going to go after the largest pools of money first probably, right? So you're going to go after the Binances of the world. But that's going to trickle down to everyone, right? To all the protocols, builders, and maybe even you one day. You just never know. It's so easy to run these bots, unfortunately. But at the same rate, at least we, for those people who have the tools to scan, harden their own systems, like everyone should be kind of all hands on deck at this moment, at least see how the next month or two might pan out. But in the meantime, we're going to keep building, keep pushing the markets forward on the finance and tech side and crypto side. So yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. The only way forward is to build, so I'm with you. And yeah, I guess kind of segueing us back into all things ETHGas. Just before we dive into all the intricacies around ETHGas and what it is, for our viewers that might be just learning about DeFi for the first time this year, maybe they got interested with stablecoins or something piqued their interest. On Ethereum in particular, could you kind of walk us through at a very high level kind of how blocks are formed and how different transactions make their way onto the chain?

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, Ethereum is this network and it has, let's just call it like a million different computers around the world. Whatever the number is, it's maybe, yeah, like a million different computers. Really, it's probably like tens of thousands of people who are running these. And those are validators. And so the validators effectively authorize the next blocks that will be created on-chain. So what happens is that Ethereum's block times are 12 seconds. So every 12 seconds, there's a new block. How that block lands on-chain basically starts with people looking to trade or do transactions or do whatever it is on the network. And so you and I would look to trade or transfer, or buy an ENS domain name if that's how you phrase it. You know, we're going to do something on the network that requires resources. We're going to pay fees, gas fees we call them, to block builders. And so there's a handful of block builders who will basically build prospective blocks. So there might be three or four people, or there's probably a half dozen, who build blocks. And they compete against one another to build the best block, the best as defined as the most valuable. And so they say, 'We propose that we should have these blocks.' And then the validator then says, 'Well, I want to pick the most valuable block.' And so the validator says, 'I like block number two because it pays me the most. I'm now officially going to propose that block as the next official block on the network.' So yeah, you have what we call order flow or traders, that goes to block builders who assemble prospective blocks. The validator then says, 'I'm going to take this block,' every 12 seconds, and then they propose that to the network. The network confirms it, and then boom, now it's part of the network. And so that is the pipeline that we work in. And a similar analogy perhaps is that how do we look at energy in the real world? So you have oil and gas, and that is across the world in Middle East, or off the coast of Norway, or in Calgary in Canada, or Texas. You have oil all around the world. But like, how does that eventually get to the end consumer who needs energy? And so we're part of that energy distribution pipeline, or that pipeline on Ethereum. And I can dive more into how exactly we fit into it, but that's how blocks are built.

I love that analogy. I haven't heard that one before. Definitely going to keep that in my back pocket. And the way blocks are formed, because Ethereum is a public network, basically everybody kind of has a chance to bid on getting to the front of the line, paying gas. But that usually doesn't stick well with larger institutions who are driving lots and lots of liquidity wherever they're operating. In your eyes, have you seen institutions balk at coming on-chain because of some of these limitations or inherent features of a chain like Ethereum?

Yeah. So what you're touching on is a very deep, dark corner of the web called MEV, right? That refers to maximum extractable value. That's an area where it's unfortunate, it's just part of the network today, and people just kind of take it for what it is. And so every chain, you basically have a certain amount of MEV. And if you're a traditional player from TradFi, when you want to land a trade on-chain, you think, 'Well, okay, I'm BlackRock, for example. I'm going to buy like a billion dollars of these bonds or tokenize something, or maybe not tokenize, maybe natively issue it, whatever. I'm going to buy something on-chain.' But then someone else, this searcher in the dark corner of the network says, 'I see BlackRock's putting in a billion-dollar order. I'm going to front-run them.' And then, so that's the first thing. No major player, as far as I know, likes to be front-run. And so it creates this barrier where immediately as you access the network, like I'm being picked off. And that's not a good market mechanic that you want for the traditional players. And the playing field arguably is more fair within a traditional context. It's more, people trade based on low latency and you get your infrastructure closer and closer to the exchange, you use lasers or microwave towers, and that's kind of like fair play. But in this case here, the gap between the BlackRock and the searchers is too broad, is too wide. And so that's one of the mechanics that prevents TradFi from coming on-chain. The other thing is, well, they're paying gas fees. So BlackRock is going to pay, I mean, it's so cheap to land trades, like 5 cents, 10 cents, whatever it is to land a trade on-chain. Where is that money going? Is it going to Narb, this upstanding citizen here, or is it going to this dodgy person in some sanctioned country? In which case, like, I just can't do that, right? And so you have a couple elements. One is the market mechanic overall, like will I be front-run or sandwiched? Nope, can't do that. And then the other part is like, who am I paying fees to? So we've created this solution we call institutional blockspace that effectively insulates and enables these participants to come on-chain, but satisfying the compliance controls that they have within the traditional environment. And so we can eliminate front-running and the sandwiching by augmenting how blocks are built. And then separately, we can ensure that the payments will only touch perhaps American validators, or even in Japan, we have another initiative there where, hey, Japan only wants to pay maybe Japanese validators and American validators. It's kind of like within the G7 or G20, I guess maybe, you only trade with a certain set of partners and you kind of all adopt those principles. And I expect that over time we can formalize this framework around how do we enable institutionals to come on-chain. And so traditionally, you would start your own blockchain if you're a bank. You start your own blockchain, but hey, there's no liquidity, there's no one trading there, so that may as well be a database, like a centralized system. Or they start like an L2, but what this does is it gets all the capital and the money to squarely come right on Ethereum itself. And so it is the squeaky cleanest path to come on the network and intersect with the broader world. And they don't need to trade with the sanctioned entities, they can still trade on the network with the appropriate counterparties. But we just create that clean lane for them to at least kind of like on-ramp onto the highway, if you know what I mean. But if you'd like, I can kind of unpack this a little bit more, talk about like how we access the blockspace. Should I go through some of that?

Absolutely, yeah. I think that would be great. Yeah, go for it.

Yeah, so cool. So to our earlier discussion in terms of how blocks are created, the interesting dynamic there is that validators, they just run some infrastructure, some software. So you kind of set it up, you hit the button and you just like, go get a coffee perpetually, do PowerPoints and just let the infrastructure run. Now what our approach is, is that well, you guys are effectively maybe like the landlords, or you know, the crude oil producers. You own Ethereum's most valuable instrument, and it's like Ethereum has one product, that's blockspace. It doesn't sell anything else. And so they are agents of Ethereum's blockspace. And so you fast forward 10, 20 years into the future, and if the global rails are run on Ethereum, people are going to fight over this blockspace. There's going to be wars over it. And so the aha moment we had was that we should enable people to trade and access this blockspace just like you would crude oil, right? You trade gold, you trade oil. How come I can't access some Ethereum blockspace, trade it, secure it, hedge it, and manage my exposure? So that was the first way we came into the space. And then the second thought was that, okay, now we can access this blockspace, how do we refine it into like jet fuel? How do we do something better for the network? And so, you know, we were discussing a little bit offline earlier about like how we make Ethereum faster. And so what happens there is that, again coming back to the validators in 12-second block times, and them running kind of dumb infrastructure, we said, 'Well, why don't in advance of proposing your block, why don't you give it to us? We will take your block, cut it into maybe 100 pieces, and we will sell off or execute trades every 100 milliseconds or 200 milliseconds.' Basically like synthetically making the network feel like 100 times faster. So that's part of our core business where instead of just waiting 12 seconds for that trade to go through and then doing something, we are actively saying, 'Hey, there's a basket of trades that come in, a bundle of trades that come in, like you're done. And then you're done, here's the price.' And then 100 milliseconds later, 'Oh, here's the new price, you're done.' And so every 100 milliseconds we synthetically pretend we are powering the network, and we give people what are called pre-confirmations, which is just an early confirmation, right? So that's what we do. We effectively take that block, we cut it into hundreds of pieces. And now, you know, if you're on MetaMask or if you're trading, you can hit the button and as soon as you lift your finger, it's done. So that's the technology. And you know, Ethereum of course, it has the largest pools of assets, it has been very slow, but when you make it hundreds of times faster, how is anyone else going to compete? You have the deepest pools of capital. For the last many years, everyone is like, 'We're a cool blockchain, we have some cool tech, and we're faster.' So we've eliminated the faster component now. We're just in this ramping-up phase where we're getting validators to onboard with us. But I think that brings the discussion back to where is the future of finance going? And there is no question now, it will have to land on Ethereum. So I'll pause there for a moment, but yeah, I just wanted to touch on one of the core aspects, which is making the network real-time and as a result of that, we eliminate MEV, and there's a whole bunch of other cool things around that.

Fascinating, fascinating. And what's the process to become a validator? I'm sure there's some thorough vetting, probably people have to do a KYB, KYC to kind of know who you're getting involved with when you are a validator. But yeah, I'll let you speak to it.

Yeah, so no. You have 32 ETH, well actually, sorry, it's not 32 ETH anymore. You have some staked ETH, so you're already a validator on the network, and you basically just connect to our relay. It's very simple. You connect to our relay, and then you tell us your validator keys. So you say, 'Hey, I'm Narb, I run validator keys like 0xABC123.' And we say, 'Okay, cool.' So whenever you are about to propose a block, we would then ensure that you get a real-time block, and then anyone who's trading in your prospective block would get that much faster experience. And so the network, it broadcasts who are the next 64 validators, and that's about 12-13 minutes. And so we can say, within this window of the next 64 blocks, Narb's validator is at slot number 56, right? So you know, in about 10 minutes time, at that specific slot, it's going to be a really high-frequency, low-latency block, and then that's how we do it. So it's fairly easy. Basically connect to our relay. And if you had more than millions of dollars, and you had billions of dollars, then there's some other custom implementations we can do as well. But yeah, it's fairly straightforward. The base case is that it's permissionless to set up. But as we go down some of this institutional path, then we'll see how that evolves in terms of KYC and KYB. But that's not up for us really to decide. It's really the US regulatory environment, or the US players perhaps, or the Japan players, or Middle East, or EU. So we're just the technology layer.

Fair enough, fair enough. And I'm sure you guys had a slew of different technical hurdles and challenges you overcame while you're making it so seamless. Just curious if there's anything that comes to mind that you want to share around some of the challenges you kind of faced and overcame?

Yeah, that's a good question. I'd say it was less about technical challenges and more a coordination effort. You know, the reason why L2s, for example, are fast or new L1s are so fast is because they're highly centralized teams. And it's not a knock on those guys, right? But like a new L1, you're highly centralized. You're like, 'Well, I'm going to create a semi-decentralized network and you can think in new ways from the ground up.' And if you're doing an L2, well, there's just one sequencer, right? So like on Base, maybe they have a few sequencers, but they're all controlled by Base. So it's basically just like a single sequencer, and so it's very easy to figure out how you want to sequence blocks and build blocks. But Ethereum of course, it has these, like I said, millions of computers around the world. And so how do you reach out to everyone and say, 'Hey, this is like a good user experience. Making the network 100 times faster is fundamentally a good user experience.' And I think everyone for the most part agrees with that. But the second question is like, so what does it mean for me economically? And so, you know, I'm a validator and I get paid based on the fees, and if I typically get paid $50 per block, am I going to get paid $51, like at least a little bit more? And so a year ago at Devconnect or Devcon in Buenos Aires in Argentina, we kind of launched that, 'Hey, we can make Ethereum faster. Instead of 12 seconds, we can bring it down to 50 or 60 milliseconds, so like 200 times faster.' And so people were very excited about that. But it's taken us a year to convince people that, well, to me it's obvious, right? You take any exchange or any platform that processes transactions, that takes fees for processing transactions, and if you can make it 100 times faster, you will get more transactions, you will get more fees. And so it's taken us a year to really get to this point where people are like, 'Oh, now I really get it.' And so that's been it, you know, this coordination effort. Going from this counterparty who is a validator for 3% of the network, and this other validator who is maybe like 8% of the network, you know, we've had to go through and speak to 80% of the network potentially to say like, 'This is how it works, this is why it's good for you as a validator, this is why it's good for the network.' And by the way, there's all these assets and capital that are going to other chains. They're going to like L2s, you know, whatever, Robinhood, or it's going to like Canton Network. Like, do you want Ethereum to lose this battle to capital going elsewhere? And people on Ethereum, they don't. They want all the capital to come to Ethereum. And so, the biggest issue is it's so darn slow. So I see this as a real unlock for the network where, you know, once it is meaningfully faster, once it's meaningfully adopted across a large number of validators, you know, a lot of the assets, a lot of the capital will just come to ETH, to Ethereum mainnet and not anywhere else. Because, you know, for anyone in TradFi looking to come on-chain, the first question is like, do I do Ethereum, and maybe I do something else. So you don't get fired for choosing Ethereum, really, right? But you get questioned over, well, it is very slow, we should also try something else. And so, you know, we hope that we can close the gap on that so they invariably will just choose Ethereum because nothing else is any stronger or any better.

Pushing the boundaries there, yeah.

As an ecosystem, we've gone through this cycle where, you know, the whole NFT boom, right? Now that put a lot of stress on the network, and as a result, you know, everyone was like, 'Oh, Ethereum's too slow. I'm trying to buy this NFT, it costs me like 100 bucks just to buy this $20 JPEG,' which today no longer exists. And so you have this explosion of L2s, which is great, right? It kind of alleviates capacity and it keeps some of the transaction flow tangential or very close to the network, as opposed to a completely separate L1. Now, all this throughput, activity, it's on the L2s for so many years, but people don't, people didn't really realize that, well, Ethereum actually had, the engineers had their heads down working hard on scaling the network. And so it doesn't cost a lot of money to land trades on Ethereum. You know, like I said, it costs you cents. I don't know what gas prices are specifically at this moment, but it costs cents to land trades on Ethereum now. It doesn't cost hundreds of bucks. And Ethereum is now able to scale massively, right? So from last year to this year, we've doubled the capacity. In the next month or two, we'll see whether this Glamsterdam update comes, we're going to triple capacity again. So again, last year to this year, double. This year to next few months, we're going to triple the capacity. Next year, we might 10x the capacity. So we're going from what costs cents today to what's going to cost fractions of a cent, you know, in the future. And so, you know, there is a ton of capacity now on the network itself. And so all that activity that went to the L2s and other L1s, like it has to come back to mainnet, it has to come back to Ethereum itself. And so I think this is a beautiful story for the founders of Ethereum to see this proliferation of ideas and friends helping to scale the network via L2s. But I think it'll all come back to the L1, and the future will be much more clear, and we will have a lot more security on the network. And so, yeah, this is a, it's a great time to be in Ethereum, and many people don't realize that, but at the ground level, it's, yeah, it's only up. I can't say where the price is going from one day to the next, but from an adoption standpoint, from a fundamental standpoint, it's super clear.

Yeah, there's no better time to be in this field, in tech in general. And I guess on this topic, for the developers who are watching and listening to the show today, how can they start utilizing these validators on ETHGas? Is there anything they have to do for their existing dapps?

So not much. So there's a little bit of technical onboarding, but yeah, effectively the validators are running some software called MEV-Boost. We have this sidecar attached to this other, we have this module attached to the sidecar, terminology. But basically a new set of software they can use in the software called Commit-Boost. And so you could use that, but there's some other ways to access it. I'd say just visit our website, docs.ethgas.com. And as a validator, you know, you can learn how to onboard into this network. Reach out to us, our contact is there, or on Telegram or Twitter, X, sorry. Just reach out to us if you have some special situation. But come on board and support like a faster, real-time network. On the other side of the equation, it's, well, as a trader, how do I access the faster network? And so on that side of the equation, if you're running an RPC, you can connect to us to get the real-time state of Ethereum. And so instead of that RPC updating every 12 seconds, you can get the synthetic real-time state every 100-200 milliseconds. So on that side, and then you can basically submit trades to us to access these real-time blocks. And then so that's the other side where if you're a trader, a searcher, a wallet, an RPC, you know, whoever that wants to land trades on-chain, we have documentation there as well in terms of how do I access these faster blocks. Because invariably anyone who's trading on Ethereum will probably trade 5 to 10 times more. And I don't know if that means you'll make 5 to 10 times more, but you can trade 5 to 10 times more. So someone's going to make money.

Indeed. And for viewers and listeners tuning in today, all those resources that Kevin mentioned will be in the description of the podcast. So if that's something that interests you, definitely check that out. And a couple more questions before we let you go, Kevin. We talked about it earlier around AI. We know agents are all the rage now, and as far as I understand, you guys also support the x402 protocol in being able to purchase some of these pre-configurations. I was just curious what kind of spurred you guys diving into there, and what are some interesting use cases around that?

Sure. So the first process for us was just to support the standard and to enable people to access Ethereum's blockspace and transaction inclusion. And so the angle there is that, or the story or the narrative is that everyone's going to have their own agent, or multiple agents doing things for them. And these agents are going to run around the world and do things at machine-level speed. Now, when those agents touch Ethereum, they're going to try to do stuff, but it's going to take them 12 seconds. And so if those agents are doing financial-related things like transactions or trading, you don't want the agent to be constrained to that 12-second block time. You want the agent to move as fast as it can. And so how do we enable the agents to basically access that blockspace or reserve some of the blockspace? Sometimes it might just reserve it, but not use it. But at least you have the optionality to use it. And so how do you create that pathway for the agents to get immediate access to the network? Because again, with AI moving rapidly, AI is going to go to the path of least resistance. And is it going to go to some other chain, even though the other chains might have less capital, it might be far faster? And so it might go there, but the hope for us on the L1 is that, well, we have the capital. Let's address the speed, let's make it agent-compatible, and then the agents can do all the wonderful things they want to do in the deepest pools of liquidity. So instead of trading your token out in the suburbs where you might get a bad pricing, you can trade it right downtown at the major exchange. And so that was our approach behind supporting x402, where it applies not just to financial matters, but maybe I want to buy something in the real world, but pay for it on-chain as well.

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm big into the agentic commerce space, so when I saw you guys had support for x402, I was like, 'Oh, giddy up!'

Yeah, I don't know any person or agent that wants a slow experience, right? So it's a small hook or a small feature that we built, but again, all of this is infrastructure. And so it's people like you and I who see this at the ground level. And yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. And just to kind of cap things off for our founders and builders watching today, I know you've kind of been through your own trials, founding multiple companies and kind of seeing your way through those. Is there any words of advice you'd be willing to offer our viewers today, maybe some advice you'd be willing to give to your younger self?

Ooh, I mean, we're in a fascinating world now, aren't we? I would say there's probably two parts. I'd say do something ballsy. Like, do something that's really out there, because there's a lot of information overload in this space. And you might create something that's like good and logical and a little bit better than something else. But there's this old saying: you need to create something that's like 10 times better, and like you really, you need to up that. It needs to be like 50 times better, or whatever, to make it really stand out. And I think people are looking for really exciting ideas. We've gotten used to this accelerationism that we're in right now, right? Go back to two years and yes, the world is still moving kind of linearly in some respect. But in the last year, it's exponential. So I think if you have a crazy idea out there, and you think you can get just that first prototype or something of that sort, I think people would really rally behind you because they're really scared of missing some of these crazy opportunities. So I'd say work on a crazy opportunity, put it out there, don't be afraid of someone kind of picking it off, taking the idea. Obviously you probably want to get one or two key partners aligned, so at least you're saying, 'Hey, I was first to put this idea forth,' and people give you that respect. But yeah, I'd say work on something that's really out there and then try to bring in your ambassadors for that idea. But at the same rate, that's also things that VCs are looking for as well. So I think there's two parts: there's one, the adoption side, people are looking for new products because everyone's behaviors are changing in this environment, but VCs as well are looking for the 50x type of ideas as well. So yeah, work on something that's really crazy and then get the word out there and get on your podcast, Narb.

Exactly. Beautifully said, I love it. Yeah, build it, ship it, and then showcase it on DevNTell.

And then DevNTell.

This is the way.

Indeed.

Awesome, awesome. And last point, what's the best way for folks who are watching today to follow along with all the latest and greatest from ETHGas and yourself?

Well, there's our website, ethgas.com, super simple, or on X, @ethgasofficial, and or Telegram. There's a whole bunch of places. But yeah, come say hi. If you have something fun and interesting in this space, you know, we work with people who want to tinker around a little bit, work on some dashboards, or just hear about our story, be an ambassador, whatever it is. You know, our mission is to make Ethereum super fast, and if you're aligned with that, let's chat.

There you go, folks. There you have it. With that, Kevin, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to come chat with us. It was awesome learning about ETHGas and yeah, wish you guys nothing but the best continuing to scale Ethereum forward here.

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Narb.

My pleasure, my pleasure. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a happy upcoming weekend, happy Friday, happy Halloween. I hope you guys all have some Halloween plans on Saturday. And we will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Till then, have a good one, folks. Cheers.