Onboarding the Next Generation of Ethereum Builders w/ BuidlGuidl feat. Austin Griffith

GM GM. 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 build. And today I am really ecstatic to welcome Austin Griffith, who you may know as the founder of BuidlGuidl. So BuidlGuidl is a curated group of Ethereum builders creating products, prototypes, and tutorials to enrich the Web3 ecosystem. So stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Austin, get a chance to ask him some questions live, and learn about BuidlGuidl, Scaffold-ETH 2, Ethereum Speedrun, and more. All right, let's do this thing.

GM GM. Welcome to the show, Austin. I am really ecstatic to have you on, man. Oh yeah, there's that Austin energy.

Yo, yo, yo. What's up? What's up? Yeah, bring it. How are you?

Doing well, man. And thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come chat with us today. I'm really looking forward to it. I know BuidlGuidl, Scaffold-ETH, Speedrun, they've all gone through a lot of iterations since at least the last time I took a look and took a spin. So really looking forward to kind of hearing and seeing what's kind of evolved since then. There you go. Now we got the t-shirts here. Look at that, matches the color. I got the color scheme going. Oh yeah, right on. Got the BuidlGuidl node running here. Got the green, a lot of green. Got the nerdy streamer vibes. Yeah, man. This is the way. Yeah. So I guess, if some folks are new to the crypto Web3 space and aren't familiar with yourself, would you like to just give a brief introduction?

Yeah, I'm Austin Griffith. I run developer growth at the Ethereum Foundation. I am focused on catching developers as they orbit by Ethereum and teaching them the way, W-E-I, how to build on Ethereum, why to build on Ethereum, what to build on Ethereum. We do that through Speedrun Ethereum, which is a curriculum that has taken me years to build through lots of sessions one-on-one, figuring out what resonates with developers. But it kind of teaches you how to build on Ethereum while showing you many different projects. Kind of like the TL;DR we found is like people need to just ship things over and over. There's kind of a tour of duty you have to do, and you have to just like learn all these weird things about Ethereum like Wei, ETH first Wei, the fact that like nothing is automatic, you always have to poke it. To get someone to poke it, you can't just have one server checking in to poke it, you've got to have like an incentivization system and millions of computers all like interacting and you're building things that are massive multiplayer for an adversarial group of people to coordinate. So figuring out all those aha moments and then delivering those to people through Speedrun Ethereum. And then we have Scaffold-ETH, which is our app building tool. And then just recently we launched the Ethereum on Tour. It's tour.ethereum.org. We're going to college campuses and giving them the good word of Ethereum and building decentralized apps and why to build a decentralized app. And you know, we need more younger folks in this space. There's too many old dogs like me in Ethereum and it's time for some young blood to start innovating. And so we're pushing that a lot.

Amazing to hear. Yeah, I definitely agree, need a bit more of the younger folk kind of in the space and yeah, getting taught with the right types of foundations like what you're providing for folks. So yeah, man, keep doing what you're doing. I really love to see it. Heck yeah, heck yeah. And I guess, just curious, before all of this with BuidlGuidl and the Ethereum Foundation, how did you get into the technology space in general? Like did you start in like the Web2 side of the world and kind of move in here or yeah, what's the story there?

I mean, get into the technology space. I was, you know, born, you know, I don't know, it's like technology's all all around us these days. But you know, I was born into we had a computer at our house and I figured out how to, you know, mess around with spreadsheets and we had a modem and I could dial up and get internet. So I feel like I've been into programming since I, you know, probably like Basic way back in the day. I think my dad showed me Basic. But I had a great teacher in high school that took me through tons of different languages. We wrote a lot of C and C++ and I had like a custom-built Linux machine back then. So it's like since I can remember I've been into technology. But I think before Ethereum I was deep in the like dev-ops world. I was building like a scalable infrastructure system for teams that allowed them to have microservices that could scale to the cloud where you would have them locally and they would all run locally and then you just boop, hit a button and it would deploy to your AWS cloud and my boss wouldn't let me open source it and it kind of weaponized me toward open source and then I found Ethereum and it was like programming money and decentralized ethos and all of those things all together. The first time I saw a smart contract I was like, oh wow, I'm building apps that will last forever and no one can censor them and the code does exactly what it's supposed to do and there's, you know, billions of dollars as a bounty to break it and no one can. So that was really exciting to me. So I think I was really I was really Ethereum-pilled around 2016 and then I got in in 2017 and built a bunch of things. Did like meta-transaction dev-rel and did the Burner wallet at ETHDenver in 2019, did eth.build which was like a nice teaching platform you can kind of like drag things around and wire them up, and then that led to Scaffold-ETH, which led to Speedrun Ethereum, which led to the Ethereum Tour. Everything's kind of connected in a weird linear timeline I think.

Yeah, I mean, thing things end up working out for a reason so it's it's awesome to see kind of where you've landed and you spoke on Ethereum and I believe you have a Ethereum node running behind you, is that correct?

Oh yes. Yes. This is a this is a this is a BuidlGuidl client. It has the little castle and everything, right? Castle up here. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, yeah, so that is running Reth and Lighthouse. But it's a BuidlGuidl client. We have a piece of software that runs both the the EL and the CL and makes it easy for you to it's like a one-line command. You go to client.buidlguidl.com, you copy-paste it right into the terminal, and you get this super nerdy node. And if you dig deep enough you'll find that this is also powering our apps. When you build something with Scaffold-ETH and you deploy it to mainnet, it's using mainnet.rpc.buidlguidl.com and that is basically a DRPC and anybody who's running a BuidlGuidl client can opt in to being part of that RPC network and that powers all of our apps. So we make it really easy to run a node and the node looks cool and nerdy and you can be part of this like cool peer-to-peer system. But also you can opt in by saying --owner atg.eth, whatever your ENS is, and then you're like opting into our DRPC system and and that's a whole thing too. But very nerdy. Doesn't it look super nerdy, right? Love it.

Yeah, I yeah, I dig super nerdy so that's that's freaking awesome.

And yeah, just before we kind of get into the meat and bones of BuidlGuidl and Speedrun, just curious to kind of hear your thoughts on I know you said kind of how you got started with Ethereum, but I think Ethereum's kind of grown up since like four years ago or since its inception really and it's kind of evolved and is still evolving. Just wanted to get your thoughts on what you think of the Ethereum ecosystem today and kind of what you think or how you think it's kind of going to evolve going forward.

Yeah, it's there's a really interesting tension I think between like the cypherpunk ideals and banks adopting Ethereum, right? We have stablecoins and we have enterprise coming in and we have a lot of interesting new developments that I think are good and I don't think that maybe ETH has been great at like BD, you know, we're not BD bros, we're not very good at that. We're we're cypherpunks with our hoods on and we're trying to to hack things. So I think that we're trying to build the future for humanity in one way but some of that means going to people where they are and I think doing more enterprise engagements and helping banks come on-chain and I think previously they all thought like, you know, when your boss tells you like blockchain was hot and so your boss would say we need to be on blockchain but also it needs to be private and so they would like get a private blockchain and then like years into it they would realize that that's dumb and doesn't make sense and you need a credibly neutral set of rails that everybody can use so you need a public blockchain. So I think that like all roads will lead back to Ethereum and and hopefully the EVM and I think that like Ethereum is growing up. Yeah, I think that we are kind of we're still kind of playing that dance of the tension between you know keeping our cypherpunk ideals and also onboarding the world and I think that's it's a tough it's a tough thing to figure out and I think we need we need both sides. We need the cypherpunk privacy, everyone owns their own data, everyone is in control of their own stuff but also we you know the world starts through a lot of these like enterprise and government interactions so we have to figure those out.

Yeah, well said and and yeah, I noticed that kind of more I don't know if it was a lack of BD or or maybe it was just like there weren't enough BD folks in in the space. But yeah, I'm definitely seeing more more engagement from the Ethereum folks like whether it's IRL or doing things like like you're doing going to campuses and kind of just like getting getting into the into the trenches so to speak. But yeah, it's it's really great to see and yeah, I hope it keeps continuing.

Yeah, the Eco-Dev department of the Ethereum Foundation is growing and they're doing a lot more interaction. I think that that's that's really exciting to see.

Yeah, 100%, 100%.

And I yeah, I think this is a good segue to kind of get into all the nitty-gritty of everything kind of that you do at the Ethereum Foundation here. So I want to give you an opportunity to kind of share your screen and take us through. I think this is the best way to kind of see and experience BuidlGuidl and all the great stuff. So I will bring your screen up.

There we go. Ethereum on Tour. Thank you. Yeah, this is so this is kind of like one of our recent things is just like going to campuses, doing lots of virtual engagements. If you or your university are looking for Ethereum to come visit, you can sign up at tour.ethereum.org and our email is university@ethereum.foundation. So hit us up there. Shom will catch your email and and schedule some stuff and we'll figure it out. Also just like I just tweeted a session. If you want to see what a session is like or you want to just have your students watch the video, like I I do a very similar talk for a lot of universities where it's like most of it could just be a video but people don't want to like bring their whole class together and watch a YouTube. It's like gotta be this interactive thing. So I try to make it as interactive as possible and have people ask questions, but sometimes it's just me mansplaining the same concepts over and over, but that's maybe what you got to do to get the word out. And and that's what we're doing. So yeah, it's tour.ethereum.org. Hit us up. We'd love to come talk to as many campuses as possible all around the world. So so that's available.

And then yeah, BuidlGuidl, we talked about BuidlGuidl a little bit. So kind of gosh, we were talking about the burner wallet, meta-transactions. Kind of like around that time I got an airdrop oh man, the burner wallet's probably not even up anymore. You can still do like Punk Wallet, which is like a burner wallet like wallet, but the the burner wallet at ETHDenver was kind of like this private key and local storage, magic UX but totally insecure. Like good way to lose your money. You don't want to put a lot of money on a Punk Wallet, like ten bucks or something. But it's fast and cheap and really easy. And what happened there is in the burner wallet there was this swap where you could go from ETH to Dai to XDai right natively in the app and it was really smooth. But what that did is it qualified you for the Uniswap airdrop. And so I got a bunch of airdrops on a bunch of burner wallets basically. And I wanted to give back to the community. I had kind of grown up in Ethereum and Vitalik called me the first quadratic freelancer and early rounds of Gitcoin with quadratic funding kind of you know propped me up and gave me enough money to live and I kind of lived off of that quadratic funding for a while. So after that airdrop, after some of my success, I wanted to give back. I deployed this custom smart contract to Ethereum. I went and looked at it the other day and there are 193 deployments of this exact same contract. Kind of embarrassing I didn't do a cleaner version of that but that contract allows a builder so basically I deploy it and a builder can withdraw from it. And and it's and when the builder withdraws, they type in what they are working on. So it's a very like low-effort way for me to YOLO to lots of builders that I have identified as high leverage and give them the freedom to build what they think is the most important and then withdraw from that stream and you know, thrive hopefully. And that's kind of where the BuidlGuidl was born was out of those contracts and me finding good builders.

And you know, those good builders I kind of picked you know the best small a small amount of them and kind of brought them in tighter to now what the BuidlGuidl is is now a very tight organization. It's like a very small DAO, 10 or 15 people that are building educational content, traveling, you know, I've I've created 15 Austins basically. You know, recreated myself over over 15 times and now they're traveling and giving workshops, they're building educational content, they're building tools and different things like this node here too. And you'll see us all at Devconnect by the way. We will there's a BuidlGuidl at Devconnect. Basically if you go look at the schedule at Devconnect there's like a big chunk that says BuidlGuidl right at the top. Come find us. We will have a room, we'll have a workshop room at the main venue. Looks like it's going to be called the Yellow Pavilion. I don't know what that means but look for the Yellow Pavilion. We're going to have a ton of great programming at the at the event. But probably the most hardcore and for all you like hardcore devs out there, come come win a thousand bucks at the Capture the Flag. We're going to have Last year we did a Capture the Flag. Carlos built it with with a team within the BuidlGuidl and they're highly technical challenges and we didn't think anybody was going to finish and like a team finished the first six in like the first minute. We thought something was broken or hacked or something like that but the Capture the Flag is going to be even harder this year. But come come check out the Capture the Flag and all the other programming, introductions to building your first apps all the way to how to build a stablecoin or a prediction market or zero-knowledge proof voting system, Farcaster mini-apps. We're going to have like a student and company fair and founder speed dating. If you're a founder or an idea guy looking for a developer, come find us at founder speed dating.

But yeah, the BuidlGuidl is building lots of cool things. With Speedrun Ethereum, with our Batch program, our small grants program. We have like a whole pipeline of developer enrichment and nourishment, sending them hopefully to to get a job in Ethereum or even better, you know, found a product and build something that that gets actual users. Yeah, lots of stuff here. I don't know, yeah, the BuidlGuidl client, lots of stuff at buidlguidl.com.

I think our main key offering, sorry if I just keep mansplain rambling here, but our our key offering is Speedrun Ethereum. I think this is the curriculum, it's fully open source. You can just go to GitHub and get it. We don't even collect email addresses or anything like that. You connect your wallet and you sign when you finish a challenge. And you don't even have to do that. But when you do, we run it against our autograder and we give you a little credential and you earn XP. Let me see if I can go to my my portfolio here.

You can earn XP and you can submit new builds and you can track your your progress. And there's lots of side quests that kind of get you into, you know, using a mainnet, using L2, swap on a DEX, lots of fun Ethereum first steps that you need to do with your account. And and it's all just geared toward that idea that like you just have to build a bunch of things. And you have to go through that tour of duty. And sure, you understand the syntax, you know, you went to Solidity by Example and you found how to do, you know, how to build Ethereum on Ethereum and you can write a smart contract. But like what do you do and what kind of things do you build and what kind of things have product-market fit? Speedrun Ethereum is going to teach you that. You go to speedrunethereum.com and you crush through all of these challenges and then you'll you almost basically have the the right to start building, right? Once you have all of this, then my advice to developers is just to take Scaffold-ETH or their stack of choice and build a whole bunch of things and deploy things to mainnet, deploy things to L2, deploy things that actually move money around. And of course you have to be careful and audit all of that, right? But build things and ship things. And I think Scaffold-ETH will help with that. So go through Speedrun Ethereum and then take Scaffold-ETH off the shelf and ship a whole bunch of things.

Well said. Yeah, and on this topic, David actually says he loved he loved the prediction market challenge and broke a lot of things while tinkering with it. And yeah, prediction markets are pretty hot these days so it's awesome to see you guys have a a a demo there or a project there.

Yeah, it's fun to go through these challenges and even like learn how to teach them. You like a prediction market was sort of like, man, how does that work? And then when you get in and learn that it's basically just like deploying two meme coins with the promise to rug one for the other one, then you realize like, oh, these are pretty simple. Even even the stablecoin, I think when you look at, you know, Maker and Dai back in the day, the coin was like obfuscated and it was it was meant to be hard to understand. And that's hard for a builder to learn, right? And as we have new organizations and banks and companies coming in trying to build their own stablecoins, it should be easy to figure out how to build a stablecoin, right? So we we made it super easy to understand the mechanics and the mechanisms and the Oracle and everything that that make that coin stable and and keep people incentivized to either hold it or LP it or all of those things. So yeah, definitely check out those challenges on Speedrun Ethereum.

And you mentioned a grant program. Are are these quests on Speedrun Ethereum kind of tied to those grants or are grants more like free-range? People can build whatever and potentially get funded for that?

So I think, you know, as Austin at Ethereum, I'm looking to give grants to high-leverage builders. Those are kind of rare. Like it's it's about finding the right people and, you know, my budget is is extremely limited so I have to be very, you know, smart about how I allocate funds. But as Austin at BuidlGuidl, the grants program is basically for people who are running through that pipeline of the BuidlGuidl curriculum. I think it's grants. Let's go to grants I spelled it wrong. grants.buidlguidl.com. These are basically for people who have finished the speedrun and are at that stage where they need to build a bunch of things. And a lot of times their first like grant idea is not very good and you have to be like, okay, good start, put it on the shelf, let's do another thing. Okay, put that on the shelf, let's do another thing. Kind of when you first come into Ethereum you think you have the idea that's going to make you rich and you think you just can kind of half-ass build it and you're going to make a whole bunch of money. Or even like whole-ass build it and you spend six months like in the trench with no one around in a silo building the thing and then when you come up for air you realize that no one cares or they can't use it or you know a myriad of other things could could be the problem there. You kind of have to build in public and you kind of have to go through this tour of duty of learning what kinds of things work and how things work and gain connections, right? Like as much as crypto Twitter is gross, you need to be on crypto Twitter and you need to be tweeting about your projects and you need to be building a following so then when I go to give a grant I can see like how many mutuals do we have? How, you know, how many times have you tweeted something? What does your GitHub look like? How many things have you built? I can't just like give a grant to this, you know, if you're yeah, I don't know, it's hard to explain. But you kind of know it when you see it when you see a good builder and it takes a lot of work to get to that point. So these grants are kind of like pushing good builders to keep going and and make something cool and like keep shipping and and you know often you build the first few things and you have to put those on the shelf and then you, you know, keep trying and go for new things. So these are kind of for builders that have gone through Speedrun Ethereum and it's part of our pipeline and it's just kind of an incentivization layer after you finished everything else until you get to that. We call it like there's definitely a chasm there of I can build a smart contract really well but I still I haven't built a mainnet protocol yet. And to get to there you just need to ship a bunch of things so this is meant to just incentivize that and give folks a push. But sometimes you don't even need that. You just need to grab the tools off the shelf and build a bunch of things and show them off on Twitter and get your first 10 to 100 on-chain users.

Yeah, and I think you touched on a great point and hit the nail on the head. Your this this advice and and kind of sentiment is I've seen it like many people who have come on this show kind of give the same same advice just like start building things, share it with with your circle and like it will eventually hit the right amount of of eyes to kind of gain interest. I mean, the entirety of this podcast was basically built on this like for people who are building cool things but might not necessarily have a big following on on on Twitter back then or X now. Just build things, share it with your friends and you never know what will happen, right? Just like the right if it's meant to be the right eyes will kind of land on it and yeah, I think yeah it's a really really powerful message to kind of ingrain especially if you're a builder just starting or somebody just starting in any in any field really.

And it's it takes more than you think. Like that that guy, I remember myself going to ETHDenver 2018 with this really cool mobile game that worked on Ethereum like it was on-chain, there was movement, there was massive multiplayer, it was like a cool game and no one cared. And it's not that they didn't care but like our space is full of trash and our space is full of people trying to grift. So you have to understand that anybody who's giving grants, anybody who can help you with that next step is getting hit with 10 terrible pitches every day or more, right? And so you as the builder can't just like kind of wave your little thing around and hope that they see it and they're just going to get it and fall in love with it. You have to kind of I don't know, you I don't know exactly what it is, but you have to push harder. You have to say like, you got to see this thing, here's what I've built. And you have to understand that maybe it isn't the thing, right? Also you may not have something that's that cool and you may need to put it on the shelf and build the next thing. And it's a tricky dance to figure that out. The best way to do it is to get it in front of 100 people and if five of them use it and they're still using it the next day and they're still using it the next day, you might have something. But if you put it in front of 100 people and no one's using it in a week, you probably don't have the thing. And you probably need to iterate or try something new or try a different angle and you have to be honest with yourself. So it's it's harder than you think and I you know you want to just like put that out there. Go ahead, sorry.

Yeah, no worries. Yeah, I think you're spot on and and the fact that maybe you're not getting any feedback, that's like data in itself, right? It's like I think Brian Armstrong from Coinbase said it best. It's like um like actions yield data or or I might be paraphrasing there, but basically you do things and then you kind of assess what the results of those things are and you kind of iterate on that. And um to your earlier point of like the crypto Twitter kind of being full of grifters, like it's got for me personally, it's gotten to the point where I just assume most things are like fake or scam. Like for example, um Cloudflare, I think last week or the week before they're like oh we're coming out with this stablecoin. and you're like hacked! yeah, it's like yeah, oh yeah, these guys got hacked, like no way. Like what what the heck? and then it's like no, this is actually legitimate. I'm like oh, okay. pretty sweet, yeah. Yeah, right? um but um yeah, I I guess like coming coming back, um what would you say um it would be um the best kind of quest or or maybe like a starting place for people who want to just pick up Speedrun Ethereum today or or just mess around with Scaffold-ETH?

Yeah, no, I think it is Speedrun Ethereum. I think you just go to speedrunethereum.com. Go I mean, there's this first challenge that's basically like just minting a token and sending it around, so it's going to teach you about uh just wallets and the framework and here's the frontend, here's the smart contract, here's how you deploy the smart contract. Uh but but really like getting in and building this this staking app, which is really like more of a crowdfunding app. Building this crowdfunding app really helps you realize that you're you're creating a simple set of rules for an adversarial group of players. Going back to what we were talking about, there's just like these aha moments you have. The the automatic like the Web3 cron job, like everything has to be poked like nothing is automatic. You just kind of have to get these like aha moments that come to you as you build these things and we've kind of baked them into the the challenges here. So you really kind of get these aha moments as you go through and learn these things. The DEX is one of the really big ones, right? Like the fact that when you're deploying a DEX you're just deploying kind of like the hardware of a vending machine with all the rules written correctly. And for the swaps to work, like the swaps are kind of like the the business in the front is everyone wants to be able to swap from token A to token B, but to make that work you need a bunch of reserves. And to make a bunch of reserves work you basically have to incentivize LPs to provide those reserves, right? And so you have to write all these rules where LPs are incentivized to have those reserves locked up and and you create that incentive by making a fee system between the swaps. And that's it. You just write the rules correctly that say you can get token A for, you know, at some price for token B or token B for token A and every time you do that you're going to pay some fee and that fee is going to go to whoever provides the liquidity and anyone can get in and provide that liquidity. But this is a really neat thing cuz like usually when you think of a vending machine at the school it's like it's a vending machine that one dude with a comb-over and a sweet like set of keys keyrings he's the one running that thing, right? And uh this is not how a DEX works. A DEX is basically anyone can provide the chocolate and the money for the vending machine and they're going to earn a fee on that. So it's like a massive multiplayer system both on the swapping side but also on the LPing side. You're creating like the world's largest co-op of of a company that is LPing these swaps and all of you collectively are earning these fees. And that's a really neat system.

And you know, then it gets into lending and all the other stuff you you can go through here but this this DEX is really this big aha moment of the kind of thing you're building.

Awesome. And yeah, folks, I mean the weekend is coming up, so no better way to to kind of spend a little bit of time uh just getting into the weeds. Speedrun Ethereum. Poop poop poop. Oh yeah. Go ahead.

No, no, man. Yeah, uh I love your vibe, man. Uh yeah, uh I guess um kind of uh as we're approaching the end here, um what if any um anything can you share around perhaps the roadmap around BuidlGuidl and some things that might be um coming up um I know you got the big big event at Devconnect. um but anything you can share perhaps going into 2026?

Yeah, I think AI is huge, right? I think that now if you if you pull down uh Scaffold-ETH and you clone something, demooooooo, you uh are maybe going to use AI for the whole thing soon. Which is a little scary and everyone's like you should not use AI to write smart contracts. And they're probably right. But eventually they're going to be wrong. I think eventually uh these models are going to be able to write smart contracts better than humans can. But uh with Scaffold-ETH it comes with a cursor rules. It has the the Hardhat or Foundry uh contract orchestration all already wired up to the Next.js frontend with uh buttons that run functions on smart contracts. So you have the frontend, you have all the wallet handling stuff, we even have like extensions for like if you're using, you know, Ponder like if you're using indexers or you want to uh get into like using Porto, I think is my new favorite extension uh from uh yeah if you yeah go here. I think the new Porto extension let's see if I can find it. I'm really excited about uh passkeys and mainstream audiences don't want to mess around with 12-word seed phrases but they can easily, you know, fingerprint in to make a transaction. So Scaffold-ETH is is going to have all these extensions that allow you to quickly spin up these apps. Uh let's see. But but I think the key here is like the AI is going to be so critical and such a big part of this. It's so much easier to yolo an app now. I basically have let's see I have my Foundry up here, I have my Next.js here, and then I'm, you know, already deploying a contract locally and if I want I can open up that with Cursor and Claude and I can basically prompt Claude and Cursor to build, you know, whatever I want them to build. Now I can't just say like build me a protocol that's going to make me money. You kind of need to go through and iterate and it takes time. But uh yeah, you can kind of prompt it to build some kind of app even if like we want to build a simple counter that counts up plus plus and a button and display in the frontend. Like this is really oh whoops the front edge, I don't know if that's going to work. This is really simple and stupid, but this thing's going to go to work. It's it's got a cursor rules. It's it's going to tell it like what contract to go edit, it's going to give it all the hints about what kind of hooks to use. We have Viem and Wagmi under the sheets here. Uh but you basically prompt it and it's going to one-shot this app for you. It's going to give you the smart contract, it's going to give you the frontend, uh and then you can go tinker with that. The cool thing about Scaffold-ETH is it has this let's let's open it up.

If we go to localhost 3000 we'll be able to see the the app here, which is fired up here. I think I think I clicked it, we're just waiting for it to load here. um But you can tinker with your smart contract. It kind of comes with this nice debugging page out of the box so whatever smart contract you deploy, it's going to hot reload and be uh adapting to your contract. As you add new functions and variables to your contract, that debug frontend, uh if we go to it here, is going to uh allow you to see that contract and see all the read functions, see the address, see how much money's in it, and then and then actually poke at it. In in this one it comes with the greeter contract. So let me actually disconnect my wallet. Uh it also uses burner wallets out of the box so you don't have to have a wallet connected and have it on the right chain or any of that. Let me zoom in a little bit. You basically get a wallet out of the box and you click one button and that wallet has money. And then if you say hello world over here if you're setting, you know, your first uh greeting, right? We want to update that greeting. You hit send and the greeting updates. Notice I'm not getting any wallet pop-ups. It's not telling me I'm on the wrong chain or the wrong network. I'm just incrementing that counter and it's working. Click click click. And if you like have some only owner function and you want to test that, you can open up an incognito window and go to localhost and you'll get a different wallet. You'll notice this is kind of purple-pink guy, this is kind of pink and green guy. So then you try it as that guy and it says not the owner, you know, so this is a good way to kind of test your assumptions, make sure the contract works how you think it does. Play around with with everything. But then also one-shot, right? How's our how's our counter app looking? Is it working on something? I don't know uh what happened over here. uh Did you build the frontend? uh I feel like it did not build the frontend for us. Bad demo. Bad demo, Claude and Cursor. uh I'm so zoomed in I can't even see what's going on. uh Let's see. Did it make did it make our smart contract? uh counter increment. It looks like it just uh made a increment function. uh Please please make the frontend too, bro.

Maybe oh maybe it made oh it did. Oh it's right here. Here it is. It's right here. And if we click increment, our counter increments. That's weird that it put it down there in a thing. Uh Of course you would make a more interesting application, but this thing was able to one-shot a silly counter. Uh Of course like that's a stupid simple example and something much more advanced would take a little bit more time and and prompting. But yeah, we we were able to one-shot that app. And then you just yarn deploy --network arbitrum and you push that thing out to some network. You yarn verify your smart contract on arbitrum. Then you yarn ipfs and that puts your frontend out uh on uh a live network or yarn vercel. So all of these commands let you tinker and play around, but also you're dangerously close to shipping it to production when you're ready.

That's awesome. That's awesome. And we did all this in like five minutes, so. Yeah, yes, exactly. That's pretty that's pretty amazing. Yep.

And uh like on that earlier like the your first point around like whether or not like AI uh should be used to make smart contracts, I don't know, I I think it's going to be way more way more used just because like the big AI labs, they they train on like public data, right? And most of the big-time verified audited smart contracts are open source, so technically those models should be trained on that. So um I mean it you're still going to want to still going to want to have a human pair of eyes on it before you deploy anything moving big chunks of money. But um I think it can yeah, I think it'll be all right.

And even the big platforms who get $10 million audits are still getting hacked from time to time. And getting something small out there with sane guidelines or guide rails on it, you can only put $500 in this thing at first, something like that helps it get Lindy and helps other people play with it and helps you get, you know, your first users and traction. So yeah, there's a scary gray line there in how AI can help and how, you know, what the best way is to get your app finally deployed. uh I can't give great advice on that cuz I'm not running a million-dollar protocol. I'm just doing education and yoloing simple counter apps. But uh keep building and keep shipping and don't be afraid to put that thing out there.

Awesome. And uh yeah, I think that's uh that's a great way to kind of end things off here. uh Thank you, Austin, so much uh for taking the time out of your day again to come chat with us. um Yeah, and all the resources and and whatnot that Austin has shared, um they'll all be shared in the description below. um If it's not there, it will be added shortly. um And and yeah, we'll definitely want to at least uh I know I'll be taking a little bit of look uh around Speedrun Ethereum uh maybe build a prediction market uh maybe build a new stablecoin, who knows over the weekend.

Do it. Do it. Yeah, make a launch make a launchpad for something. Make a I don't know. Make a privacy-based prediction market launchpad. Something cool. Go build it. People like even even given Scaffold-ETH and AI and everything, people still have a hard time of like shipping the app. What people really want is like a website they can go to where other people have already shipped a few of them and they're making money and they want to hit a button and they want to do something creative and they want to ship that thing. Like make a launchpad for something and get it out there. I think that's like super uh hot right now.

Yeah, yeah. You're 100% correct. And yeah, maybe someone watching here today will build that over the weekend, who knows. There you go. Go get rich. Go get rich. You can do it. Go get rich. You can do it. Send me 32 ETH. Just kidding, don't really do that. Heart heart heart. Yeah, yeah. All good, all good.

uh Yeah, and with that, uh just want to wish everybody a uh very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be. FYI for those who are still keen on uh entering our Devconnect giveaway, you only have about three three-ish hours left uh to be able to sign up for that. um The link for that is also in the description of of this video. um And uh why not? uh Have a chance for winning up to 2 2k USDC uh to go to Devconnect and why not go hang out with Austin? Yeah, why not go hang out with Austin? Yeah, look for the BuidlGuidl, we'll be there. There you go. um Alrighty, uh hope you have a nice Friday, nice weekend, and we'll catch you back here next week. All right. Cheers. Thank you. Cheers.