Tomasz Stanczak, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation and founder of Nethermind, discusses his journey from building an Ethereum client to guiding external communications at the Foundation. He founded Nethermind in 2017 and self-funded the Ethereum client development, with the Nethermind client now running on a substantial share of Ethereum mainnet nodes worldwide. He explains the challenges of bootstrapping a project without early VC funding and the advantages of maintaining control. In collaboration with Hsiao-Wei Wang, Stanczak emphasizes a collaborative approach to leadership and external outreach, with the Ethereum Foundation’s 2024 goals including scaling L1, scaling L2 via blobs for the Dencun upgrade, and improving interoperability, and user experience identified as the most challenging due to its broad scope.
AI integration and Ethereum form a central theme for Stanczak, who argues that AI needs Web3 for security, censorship resistance, and authentic data verification, particularly in institutional contexts. The Foundation has introduced the ERC-8004 standard for AI agent coordination and the x402 framework for payments, with the dAI team promoting these standards and supporting related hackathons and global collaboration, including cross-border agent payments with the Chinese developer community.
Regarding interoperability and user experience, Stanczak notes two delivery proposals: OIF (Open Intents Framework) and EIL (Ethereum Interoperability Layer). The main challenge lies in a lack of a unified standard, complicating progress measurement across diverse definitions of user experience, security, privacy, and performance. The Foundation aims to foster collaboration rather than impose top-down direction, while continuing work on L1 and L2 scaling alongside interoperability initiatives. L2 interoperability remains a focal point, with challenges such as secure, permissionless asset bridging and maintaining L1 properties during cross-chain interactions.
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