E THPanda Talk is a show focused on how to build a better digital future based on Ethereum. We will invite outstanding Ethereum builders to share their motivations for building Ethereum and the projects they are working on, as well as related experiences and gains, including their outlook for the future. We hope that by exploring the stories and ideas behind these, we can bring more diverse perspectives or inspirations to everyone and inspire everyone to participate in the construction of Ethereum.
The guest of this issue of ETHPanda Talk, Wang Xiaowei, joined the Ethereum Foundation as a researcher in 2017 and has been working within the Ethereum Foundation for nearly 8 years. He has participated in multiple important Ethereum upgrades including The Merge, Shapella, and Dencun. In April 2025, she had just taken over as co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, and this was her first interview since taking office.
In this issue, we discussed with Wang Xiaowei her growth experience, the details of the Ethereum technical roadmap, the highlights and difficulties of community building, and her work at the Ethereum Foundation. I hope to bring new ideas and thoughts to everyone.
01
Wang Xiaowei's personal growth experience
Bruce:
You initially joined as a researcher and grew step by step, so I believe many viewers are interested in your personal growth experience. You just mentioned that you entered this industry in 2017. Are there any important people or moments that brought you here? What was your reason for joining Ethereum? What are your mental journeys that you can share with us?
Wang Xiaowei:
My background is in computer science, and after graduate school I moved into telecommunications. Base in Taiwan. During this period, one day the theme of an internal training in the company happened to be blockchain, and it mainly talked about Bitcoin.
In 2016, there were few blockchain startups in Taiwan, and most of them were exchanges, which allowed ordinary people to buy Bitcoin in Taiwan. When I was wondering whether I should change my career path, my college classmate told me that their company was going to set up a blockchain research department, so I submitted my resume. Later, I was fortunate to meet a former colleague of mine in my previous job, who was also my former colleague at the Ethereum Foundation, Mr. Chen Chang-wu (now at ImToken). He first went to the Ethereum Foundation as a researcher. Around 2017, the foundation was recruiting researchers in Asia, so I invested as well. The Foundation is a very special opportunity for me because when I was in my previous company, I learned about Ethereum and felt its community culture. I feel that in addition to Bitcoin, there are many blockchain innovations in the world. Ethereum is particularly attractive, so I joined the Ethereum Foundation.
Bruce:
In your career as a researcher over the years, what have you done or learned that made you feel like you were suddenly upgraded, achieved a huge breakthrough or a sense of accomplishment?
Wang Xiaowei:
As Ethereum researchers, half of our research will be adopted, and the other half may not be adopted. Beacon Chain has had many roadmap changes. I think it wasn’t until Beacon Chain went online that we finally felt we had found a definite route. Whether it is PoS or Sharding, we need to find an integrated route. It’s not that all the other research I did before was in vain, as some of it was put into practice. But I felt like there was a sense of sweet reward after all the hard work.
Bruce:
We also know that it was in 2022 that Ethereum completed The Merge and officially switched from PoW to PoS. The difficulty of this process is often likened to changing the engine of an airplane while it is in flight. After participating in the entire process, what do you think was the biggest challenge at that time? Are there any little-known stories?
Wang Xiaowei:
Because we already have a lot of things on the chain, and a lot of people are involved in this project. There are so many clients, and I think coordinating manpower is the biggest challenge.
There is a little easter egg. There are many zeros in front of the Deposit Contract because everyone will be using it for several years to come. You must remember this address. So the person in charge of Deploy at the time spent some time calculating and generating this unique address to reduce the risk of phishing scams. We also take many measures to prevent other scammers from using Deposit to defraud money. So we spent some time to generate this contract address, so that there are many zeros in front of this contract address.
(Deposit Contract: 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa)
Bruce:
I remember The Merge had a panda meme, how did you come up with that?
Wang Xiaowei:
This is a Dragon Ball meme. At that time, I was about to give a speech to introduce The Merge, and I was thinking about how to make everyone understand that we are not going to destroy the original chain, but to merge the Beacon Chain containing the Consensus Layer, and how to materialize this merger. I just happened to find a meme picture of a panda merged together, which is a black bear and a white bear. This is a work by a Thai artist. We used this metaphor, and it became very popular.
The Merge Panda meme
So ethPandaOps was established at that time. They were a very powerful DevOps team behind The Merge, responsible for the operation and maintenance of the Ethereum network. Later they named it ethPandaOps.
Bruce:
In fact, in the past few years, we have also seen some relatively large fluctuations in the entire industry, and there are often some so-called Ethereum killers. Have you ever been emo in this process, or have you questioned whether what we are doing is valuable? When you feel down, how do you hold on?
Wang Xiaowei:
Some people use blockchain technology to do bad things, which may give the general public a very negative impression, causing the general public to think that Crypto has a bit of speculative meaning when talking about it. We in this industry want technology to advance, and this phenomenon is a sad thing for those of us who have better visions.
Fortunately, the atmosphere among my colleagues is very similar. Of course, education is also important, but we may not be able to change some of the negative impressions of the chain in an instant. But there are some good things about blockchain or Ethereum. We hope to carry it forward, and this is what we can do.
Bruce:
I actually feel that when choosing to work with the builders, the environment is still very important. However, if you are feeling low, you can gather together for warmth, and then do some research and try things together, and things may get better slowly.
Wang Xiaowei:
But another part I want to emphasize is that sometimes you need to leave the ivory tower and listen to some negative opinions. Because I’ve been working hard recently.
02
Ethereum technical route and future development
Bruce:
We often see Vitalik update a very complex roadmap full of various terms every year. Can you introduce how the roadmap is designed, how it is determined, and how it is promoted? What is the general process?
Vitalik's Ethereum Roadmap in 2023
Wang Xiaowei:
Vitalik has been posting this chart for more than three years. We also urged him to post it last year. In the end, he chose to write 6 articles: "Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol".
His technology roadmap is a high-level guide. He pointed out that we want to go in this direction, and there are actually three plans A, B, and C internally. Which one is more likely to succeed is what developers and researchers need to think about this year. He gave a high-level idea, and it also served as a channel for community communication. However, the actual direction of development progress is still decided by the Core Devs of our community. It was actually very simple when he drew this picture, and then he used the researcher's ideas to get in. Different options were then proposed on how to implement this roadmap.
There are many EIPs that may have existed for 3 or 5 years before being put on the chain. First there was a proposal, and it took a very long time for the proposal to be adopted. Maybe it was put in a few weeks ago, something like EIP-7702 might have been adopted relatively late.
There is an EIP Repository on Ethereum's GitHub. Anyone can post an EIP proposal here and use a template to write the proposal. The content should be how you would like to change the protocol specifically. Then, when the proposal receives more attention and more reviews, there will be an opportunity to discuss it at the ACD (All Core Devs Weekly Meeting) for all client developers and researchers to discuss.
Usually, someone who particularly supports this EIP will attend the meeting to make a presentation, and other people will give some feedback and signals. If this EIP has a strong voice, it is more likely to be adopted. From being proposed to being discussed at the ACD, to the final EIP Inclusion meeting. Last month, because Pectra was about to hard fork in early May, everyone had already started planning the content of the next hard fork.
When this EIP is very likely to be adopted, we will give it a tag called CFI (Consider for Inclusion) to send a bigger signal and let people in the industry pay attention.
To sum it up briefly, Vitalik will roughly determine the route, but will not involve any particularly specific content. It will be up to the researchers to make some progress in these directions. At the same time, anyone can submit an EIP to tell the community that they want to make changes, and then hold an ACD meeting, improve it through community feedback, and finally release the final EIP. After that, each client team will start developing changes and then go online at a set time.
Wang Xiaowei:
The main organizers of ACD over the years have all been from EF, and EF is also thinking about the extent to which we need to lead. Every hard fork is different. For example, the Core Dev upgraded by Pectra each has things that users hope to be adopted, so the final scope is actually quite large. But for Fusaka, everyone’s consensus is to give us what we need PeerDAS. Everyone has a more cohesive consensus, which simplifies the process a lot, and each coordination is different.
Bruce:
This process is very interesting. It is not run like a company, but rather the entire community participates in promoting an upgrade with a very wide impact. You expect the Pectra upgrade to be launched in May. What practical changes will it bring? Which of these EIPs do you think is the best?
Wang Xiaowei:
Each EIP has its own use, but the one that has the greatest impact on developers and applications is EIP-7702, which allows you to set a code for your original EOA address. If the original code unit is empty, you can change its value. It just provides functionality, but if it's code, it has a very broad design. We hope this change will unlock some design changes in account abstraction and pave a broad path. There are many options for how to design the AA contract on Layer 1 and how to design Layer 2.
The Ethereum Foundation is also very actively negotiating a standard that can be used across the industry. Of course this is also very interesting, and we hope to have more designs and more innovations. But at the same time, we hope that everyone uses safe contracts.
Bruce:
I have also been looking at EIP-7702 recently, and I think the room for imagination is indeed very large. In the past, we had to click on various pop-up windows, but now they can be merged into one. Including Gas Fee and Sponsorship payment, but at the same time, I also think that if it is too flexible, it will also bring some security risks. What do you think, how can we better protect security?
Wang Xiaowei:
The first is the AA contract, which must be fully audited. The foundation also provides implementation cases to enhance everyone’s trust in contracts through the foundation. In terms of wallet standards, many of our teams are working on integrating this function into their wallets.
Bruce:
In fact, Ethereum expansion is a very long-standing topic. We can often see some words or concepts including sharding and ZK. From your perspective, can you give us a brief introduction to the concepts of ZK rollup and sharding, what other important tasks are there, and what are the main challenges?
Wang Xiaowei:
The concept of sharding actually comes from the design of the database. Our earlier design had an open main chain, and then some Shard Chains underneath. But now we also have a Rollup-centric roadmap, not going downwards, but upwards. There is Layer 2 on the upper layer, so we can see Sharding + ZK rollup expanding the development of Layer 1 at the same time. In the near future, the main thing is how do we increase the number of Blobs? Blob is the data layer of Ethereum. Once it is enhanced, Layer 2 can regularly pass the hash value to the Layer 1 space, and the overall frequency is also expected to increase.
So if we expand Layer 1, it actually helps Layer 2 at the same time, and the two multiplied together are the output of the entire Ethereum.
Bruce:
What are the main challenges? Is there any way to speed up this development?
Wang Xiaowei:
In the near term, our main goal is testing, and we have many clients. In terms of research, designing cryptographic algorithms is almost done, but at the network layer, it is an engineering problem. More testing and parameter tuning is needed. Or maybe a client is OK during internal testing, but there may be some problems when it comes to interoperability. So the main goal of regular testing is testing. So it’s a good idea to go to the test network and brush it up a little bit when you have time.
03
The development of Ethereum ecosystem, applications and communities
Bruce:
The Ethereum ecosystem not only includes the protocol layer, but also applications, communities, etc. Which applications do you think have the potential for explosive growth? Do you have any observations or thoughts?
Wang Xiaowei:
I personally think the interesting aspect might be Identity or the design of SocialFi. What I find interesting recently is the applets on Farcaster. Because you can see what your friends are using and what games they are playing, and share them on social platforms immediately. This type of small program can actually easily penetrate into the lives of ordinary users, but it will take some time for it to explode. If you innovate here, you may immediately find a user group to use it.
As for larger projects, I wonder if there will be some interesting designs in the financial sector in the next one or two years. One part is DeFi, and I hope to see more innovative application cases. The other part is RWA, which has been very popular recently, and it should also be classified as one of the application categories.
Bruce:
Many Ethereum communities are spontaneously established by local Ethereum enthusiasts and volunteers. But human resources or funds are sometimes not particularly stable. From your perspective, do you think communities have more robust ways to achieve sustainable development? Have you seen any cases where the community has done well?
Wang Xiaowei:
I am actually the co-founder of Taipei Seminar and ETHTaipei. Many communities in Taiwan have members who are open source. Some of them may be members of Python PyCon, or they may have had an open source software spirit in other communities. So many people want to use the open source spirit to develop Ethereum.
Ethereum Sharding Workshop in Taipei, March 19-21, 2018
What’s interesting about Taiwan is that everyone has no problem doing things that are in the public interest. We work during the day, and at night we work together to dig holes, fill them up, and do things.
But this behavior model really requires bringing in new people. How do you pass on this spirit? I think it is very important to continuously onboard new people.
Because it is an open source community, individuals do not have much ownership in this community, and everyone does something. If there isn't one, then that's your job. Without the open source background, it may not be easy to implement this model in other places.
There are many interesting designs in the Chinese area, each with a different style. Maybe because Taiwan is relatively small, it seems that the people doing the work are all the same group of people. The diversity is a little lower than other places. As for other big places, they are popping up like mushrooms after a rain, which I think is also good.
Bruce:
Talking about this diverse community. Since 2018, you have been promoting some related Ethereum communities, including the development of ETHTaipei. What are the advantages or challenges of the developer community in Asia? What role do we play in the global Ethereum system?
Wang Xiaowei:
I think there are actually a lot of really great developers in Asia. Asia’s strength lies in product development and user experience. I feel that Europe and the United States may have a longer history of studying Ethereum. So sometimes there are some cultural differences between the two sides. I think it is quite important to maintain our unique characteristics, and it would be even better if we can communicate better. If Ethereum wants to be the world’s computer, it must face global users and developers. So there is a cultural gap, and I hope to understand each other through communication.
Bruce:
I feel the same way, because there are so many people in the Asia-Pacific region, and our cultures have certain similarities. Therefore, we are more experienced in user experience and application level. Let's look at it from an overall perspective. What community-related work do you think is lacking in promotion or support? In other words, what are the undeveloped or relatively blank parts that everyone should promote to make the entire Ethereum ecosystem better?
Wang Xiaowei:
In recent years, because AI has become so convenient, reading English information does not seem to be a big problem. Thanks to ETHPanda for providing the Chinese translation of the key points on Twitter right away. The response speed is very fast. However, I think the demand for translation may decrease in the next few years, as everyone enjoys the benefit of AI. We need to be able to promote and bring in more new blood. I have been a member of the community for 7 years and I am really an old hand. So how do we onboard more new people? As for newcomers, we mainly hope to promote our products in the student community.
04
What the Ethereum Foundation does
Bruce:
You are now the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. Has there been any change in your daily work since your position changed from a researcher to executive director? What new challenges have you encountered?
Wang Xiaowei:
The speed of change must be accepted. My previous main work and main activities were mainly at the Consensus Specs (consensus layer standards) level. I thought at the time that I could come back and review the PR when I have nothing to do in the future. But the focus in the last month has shifted to management. At the same time, it is necessary to closely discover the latest developments in research. Challenges really come from all directions.
I feel very honored and grateful to have my work partner Tomasz as co-executive director. He is very active in collecting feedback from the community and converting the feedback into a broader route for EF. I feel not alone on this difficult road.
Bruce:
I can relate to this as well. Tomasz would post some appeals on Twitter so that everyone can contact him. I actually sent one too, and the next day he immediately created a group to connect with colleagues at EF. I think this is a very good and positive change.
In the past quarter, or in the past few months, EF has made frequent adjustments in its organizational structure and personnel, including the establishment of non-EF organizations such as Etherealize or new external organizations, making it more diverse. Can you introduce the background and goals of these changes?
Wang Xiaowei:
I can first introduce the general architecture of EF. First we have the Board of Directors, then the Management Team, under which there are three business clusters, which are not strictly defined departments. The first is the Operations department, which includes Finance, HR, and Legal, which are necessary for the daily operations of a company or a foundation. The second is the Development department. After some recent large spin-offs, it is now mainly focused on Protocol R&D, and the Research Team is also in this development department. The third one is the Eco Dev department, which is related to ecological development. This part may include departments that issue grants such as ESP and Next Billion Fellowship.
Bruce:
Could you please give us a brief introduction to some organizations outside EF, such as Etherealize?
Wang Xiaowei:
If I remember correctly, Etherealize was actually established last year. The foundation and Vitalik supported them slightly in their early days, and their activities in the United States were mainly on Wall Street. It also reflects the change in the world's political direction towards Crypto. Their establishment enables them to operate on Wall Street and do some things that I think are very helpful to us, some things that EF may not directly execute. Their BD part can better directly face American users, as well as the current traditional financial or traditional large companies in the United States. I think it is very good for them to promote this area.
Bruce:
From what I just heard, EF doesn’t have a marketing team, right?
Wang Xiaowei:
Yes, we only do Communication. Because as Josh Stark said, Ethereum doesn't have a BD team, Ethereum has one hundred BD teams. For other applications, whether it is Layer 2 or some Dapps, their BD team is also like our BD team.
We do not view Ethereum as our own brand. For example, on Twitter, we have had some account conversions recently. As of the beginning of this year, there is now an Ethereum account and an Ethereum Foundation account.
I think the separation is quite good, because in the past, every time we wanted to use the Ethereum account to issue something, it seemed that everyone would think that this was the intention of the foundation, which was very restrictive. Now I use this account to do BD-related things and some publicity work to help the community understand what major events are happening now. Anyway, I think this separation is very good, and both accounts can be used effectively.
Bruce:
This also brings a lot of convenience to our work. Because Ethereum's official account is a good source for us to translate and import content, and we can get the latest changes. It can provide better publicity to the community.
I just mentioned ESP. As a very important part of EF, it has always played a boosting role in the development of the entire ecosystem. After this new architecture, will there be any changes in EF's budget allocation design and the areas that ESP will focus more on?
Wang Xiaowei:
I just mentioned that we have different departments such as Eco Dev and Development. The team leads of developers and researchers in these departments are already capable of managing larger grants. ESP and other Eco Dev Team are the other parts. If we talk about the major areas, one of them might be AGR. This is not within ESP, but it is somehow connected to ESP. It is part of academic research and there is a grant every year. The application for this year should be completed and is currently under audit.
In other areas, I think ESP is actually our front office for receiving inbound requests, so I think their choices are quite broad. They don’t require a certain budget to be set for an activity, and may not have such a strict definition.
Sometimes what the Ethereum Foundation wants to support may not necessarily be Grants support, or money, but rather the foundation’s Shout Out (publicity and diffusion).
When deciding whether to give Grants to an activity, the foundation sometimes does not necessarily consider how many direct users the activity can bring to us, but rather what kind of Grants allocation can have a greater impact, which activities or projects can only be supported by the foundation, and which are useful and can bring some public goods that are helpful to everyone.
Bruce:
To sum up, for this kind of activity or project, the foundation may be the only organization willing to support it, and the thing itself is necessary.
I actually see that EF has introduced more external organizations to participate in influencing decision-making, such as the EF Silviculture Society recently?
Wang Xiaowei:
They are a bit like a board of directors. We have selected some advisers who are very concerned about public interests in different fields. We are very grateful to them, so I think they mainly represent the spirit of Cypherpunk, and then security and privacy.
If we regard Ethereum as a business and have a business adviser, we can easily hear a lot of opinions. How can we better listen to the voice of the community? That is the significance of the composition of this council.
In other aspects, we have also been listening to the opinions of some DeFi experts recently. Recently, EF has also been doing a lot of Twitter Space to actively communicate with Layer 2 Interop and some successful projects on Dapps. At the same time, external project team leaders will also come to EF to give seminars. This is how we listen to expert opinions and community feedback.
Bruce:
In fact, some people have been suggesting that the Ethereum Foundation should obtain profits through DeFi instead of continuing to sell coins publicly. What do you think of EF’s funding operation model? What are the potential input channels to ensure the long-term sustainability of this foundation?
Wang Xiaowei:
This year, the foundation began to actively participate in DeFi. There was a wave of deployment in early February, and we released some to start trying ETH DeFi Lending, and the second phase is also in the plan. We are evaluating whether to increase investment in Lending or explore more creative ways to utilize ETH assets; the second larger area is Staking. We are also exploring different Staking Options, and considering whether EF’s participation in Staking can bring positive benefits; the third point is still in the exploration stage, which is Tokenization, such as participating in some RWA. Our participation is mainly in some more conservative funds, or funds that are better for L1.
Bruce:
It seems that there are still many new ideas and attempts in this direction. In fact, there are some feedbacks from the community, including selling 100 ETH from time to time. Although it will not cause much selling pressure, it may have some impact on everyone's emotions. What is the opinion within the foundation?
Wang Xiaowei:
Well, we have no choice but to sell it, because our foundation now has two to three hundred people, and about 75% of the expenditure is in fiat currency, and 25% is in Crypto. So the first point is that if the foundation needs to operate, it needs to rebalance its assets.
The second is that our community may not be aware that we have this need, so we may need to strengthen communication. There is one more thing I want to say first. When we sell coins, we don’t mean to sell them at the high point. People often say that we sell them at the high point, but in fact, many times we sell them at the low point. When the price was low, no one tried to magnify it, so we didn’t have any big designs here.
Bruce:
In fact, we have also heard voices from the community saying that it can be done through OTC or some more covert methods. What do you think about this?
Wang Xiaowei:
Our main treasury is actually very open and transparent, so maybe this is okay in the short term, but everyone can see the changes in the main treasury.
Bruce:
Regarding the work of the Ethereum Foundation, some people speculate that EF may gradually fade out or disband after completing a certain mission or stage, allowing the community to drive the execution of Ethereum. What do you think of this direction? If that day really comes, how do you imagine the Ethereum community will execute it?
Wang Xiaowei:
First of all, this year is a particularly important year for the foundation. We have invested a lot of budget in the transformation of the entire organization. Perhaps next year, if the foundation finds that there are more entities in the community that can replace the role of the foundation, we can operate in a conservative and contracted state. What’s interesting is that we need to change our strategy every year, and the topics that the foundation focuses on may be different each year. Perhaps when the Foundation focuses on Protocol, its presence will be stronger.
So maybe when we focus on the application layer or Wallet in the future, we may not need such a strong presence, so this presence changes every year. Personally, I hope that the foundation will always think about how we can increase the number of people who can do what we do today. In the future, there are things that only we can do, and maybe we will keep doing them. For example, the coordination part is very dependent on changes in various factors in the future, as well as some support from the community. If the community does well, the foundation can move on to more complex things, or things that are less lacking in attention.
Bruce:
We are almost coming to the end of this interview. We have talked about a lot before, including personal experiences, technology roadmap community, and the work of the foundation. We can end with some lighter topics. Because our audience includes students and relatively young developers, as an "old man" in Ethereum, what advice do you have for those who are just entering or want to enter the industry?
Wang Xiaowei:
I think many people say that choice is more important than hard work. I think we can add one more thing: you should choose a place where you have more choices. Ethereum has a very large community and very dynamic developers who have paved the way ahead. I hope that all the new members can develop in this field. Whether you are a developer, educator, product maker, or user, you can find some mentors in the community, giving you more choices.
Bruce:
Recommend some books or materials that are helpful for building Web3 thinking or personal growth.
Wang Xiaowei:
The blog post I read most often is probably Vitalik’s. Because if the level of thinking is two, then you may need to see what a person with a level four thinking level thinks, that is, a person with a square level of thinking.
I have also been reading books on business management recently. There is a book called "Principles", which contains some general directions and principles. I think the important takeaway from this book is that you have to establish your own principles. His principles may not apply to me so much, but the important thing is that you have to establish principles. If the principles are established and if you can follow them, then things that happen afterwards may become much simpler.
Bruce:
Do you have any favorite sports or other leisure activities besides work?
Wang Xiaowei:
I am a very homebody, mainly watching TV series and playing chess, which are all static activities. But now that leisure time has been greatly reduced recently, there is a lot of work to be done.
Bruce:
Thank you Wang Xiaowei for sharing today. Thank you very much for bringing us some interesting and profound thoughts. Thank you for watching or listening to this episode of ETHPanda Talk. Special thanks to Hashkey for providing us with a free venue. If you like our content, please follow and share to support us. See you next time!
