EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan explains the significance of Ethereum — it is scaling the world's coordination bandwidth

The segment, in Kannan's interview with Bankless, starts at:

https://youtu.be/ms94dx9HvL0?t=3644

"You know, when I first did the numbers and tried to calculate, I realized that Ethereum's data bandwidth is something like 80 kilobytes per second. At first, I was like, 'Oh, why is it so slow? Why is it so small?' But then I started thinking about it in the broader arc of human evolution. These bytes, as we say within the team, represent our goal in building EigenDA is to maximize coordination bandwidth.

These are complex coordination systems. In Ethereum, for instance, we have multiple parties certifying and maintaining a ledger which facilitates a lot of coordination, like the movement of money and other things. If we neglect the last 5 to 20 years of history, as a species we were only able to coordinate on very few things. For example, electing a president who can specify a very simple immigration policy—'immigration good' or 'immigration bad.' That's essentially one bit of information. Our coordination bandwidth was incredibly limited, maybe five bits every five years.

Now, we are scaling that to kilobytes per second, to megabytes, and even gigabytes per second. This means the rate at which we can coordinate as a species and maintain common information, to enact powerful coordination conditions, has drastically increased. This is a huge leap. It's like the internet unleashed this information superhighway, enabling us to communicate with each other. But communication is not the same as coordination, because without a globally verifiable state, I may be telling one thing to you and something else to someone else.

With systems that offer common data availability or more block space, we're essentially increasing the bandwidth of coordination as a species. Let's set aside all the blockchain wars—L1, L2, L3—for a moment and just let this sink in. It's amazing and unusual. We're becoming much more coordinated as a species.

Our evolutionary advantage is that we're able to cooperate on a scale that's not possible for other species, and in a flexible way. Like Yuval Noah Harari says in his thesis, humans are special because we cooperate flexibly in large numbers. And when we talk about EigenDA bandwidth, it's about cooperation that is flexible because we can program all kinds of new VMs, contracts, and arrangements on top of it, and it's in large numbers because everyone can agree on this common state.

This is an incredible development. As a community, what we're setting out to accomplish is just astounding. It's good to put it in that perspective, rather than focusing on the day-to-day competition of 'I'm doing X better than Y or Z.' We have two mechanisms right now for ensuring this..."