Breaking down Day 2 of Permissionless IV
IPO’ing onchain, Ethereum scaling, and using AI for ZK
BlockDaemon founder and CEO Konstantin Richter | Permissionless IV by Ben Solomon for Blockworks
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If you’ve been to crypto conferences, you know you’re not “supposed” to actually be at the panels. They’re recorded anyway — networking is priority. Opportunity costs abound!
To cope with my FOMO from Permissionless, I listened to every panel (almost) on Day 2. So ironically, I probably got more out of Permissionless from halfway around the world than most attendees.
Here are several choice quotes from Day 2 panels.
Konstantin Richter, founder of BlockDaemon, was asked how his investors would feel if he IPO’d onchain rather than on the NYSE. He responded:
“If my investors feel like the return they would get is a lot better, then I think it’s a fairly easy conversation in this regulatory landscape, (assuming) we could get the right legal structures to avoid ending up in an orange jumpsuit.”
Wen World Liberty Financial token?
Zak Folkman, co-founder of World Liberty Financial, said: “I don’t want to give away too much, but if you pay attention over the next couple weeks, everyone who wants to know ‘wen World Liberty?’ is going to be very, very happy. We’ll leave it at that.”
Cryptic.
Brendan Eich, co-founder of Brave, on what he thinks of his Javascript creation: “Javascript’s over 30 now, so it should get out of my basement. It’s doing fine.”
How should crypto purists feel about DeFi today integrating with centralized finance?
Here’s Kain Warwick’s excellent answer, paraphrased from the DeFi Renaissance panel:
“If you look at the history of fintechs over the last two decades, it’s kind of disastrous, because they’re dealing with a ton of regulation and legacy systems that aren’t interoperable. That’s the big difference between DeFi and fintech: in fintech, if you want to do something, you got to go to a bank, beg for access to an API which you probably won’t get. Whereas in DeFi, anyone can turn up and use it.
“A hybrid CeFi-DeFi system at least means that the rails are still interoperable in an environment where any new entrant can come in. The barriers to entry are lower. And that, to me, is the win. Even if we didn’t get ‘pure’ DeFi replacing the world, I think we’ve still won.”
A masterclass in marginal thinking if you ever find yourself reminiscing about the good ol’ cypherpunk days…
What are the biggest impediments to adoption today?
Privy co-founder Henri Stern: “Onramping and moving from fiat to crypto remains the single biggest hurdle for adoption today.”
What’s the most important scaling decision Ethereum has to make in the next year?
Dan Robinson of Paradigm: “Increase the gas limits on L1. I’d love to see some progress on latency by then, but I’m doubtful that we will.”
Unfortunately, the percentage of Ethereum validators signaling for a higher gas limit has slowed in recent weeks. The last time gas limits were raised from 30m to 36m was in February 2025.
Source: gaslimit.pics
Why would apps not just go off and build on their own chain?
Max Resnick of Anza: “If you want users, you should stay on Solana — that’s where they are. If you want to bring your own users and have them use a product, frankly, I don’t really know why you’re building on the blockchain.”
Here’s another spicy one from DBA fund’s Jon Charbonneau: “If I had to take a bet, I would bet Base would not continue paying 10-15% (to Optimism), because I don’t think they’re getting sufficient value in return. My gut is the same for most rollups with their relationship to Ethereum. There just isn’t pricing power there.”
How is AI being used for ZK?
Uma Roy from Succinct: “There was a fun example of a big Hyperliquid whale with zero formal programming background that vibe-coded an SP1 application over the weekend. The app proved he owned addresses with ~25m of HYPE across accounts and bootstrapped an anonymous X account without revealing his addresses.”
Finally, some dunk tank action from the folks over at Blockworks Research.
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