Apr 14
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In this fireside chat, Kartik Talwar interviews Andrej Bencic, founder of Tenderly, about the evolution of Ethereum developer tools over the past eight years and how AI is reshaping smart contract development. Andrej describes how the multi-chain world has fundamentally changed development — teams now need to test across multiple forked mainnets with bridges, manage indexing across chains, and handle inconsistencies when chains go down. He contrasts today's production-grade stack (Foundry, account abstraction, staging environments) with the 2018 era of Truffle and Ganache. The conversation explores three distinct developer personas Tenderly serves: newcomers focused on smart contract integration and DeFi composability, OG teams like Aave pushing protocol frontiers, and institutional players held back by risk aversion. Andrej details how Tenderly's simulation technology helps manage operational risk post-deployment — from transaction simulation in Gnosis Safe to treasury management. He highlights their MCP integration that gives AI agents a sandboxed fork of mainnet to debug transactions (processing 50MB of data per transaction) and test workflows in a parallel universe before committing to production, calling it a critical safety net against the inevitability of AI-driven development. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 What Is Tenderly and Eight Years of Developer Tooling 01:43 How Multi-Chain Development Has Changed Everything 04:09 Cross-Chain Testing: Forking Multiple Mainnets 05:08 The Modern Developer Stack vs 2018 06:45 Production-Grade Development: CI/CD and Staging 08:17 AI Skills and Delegating Ethereum Context 09:04 Three Developer Personas: Newcomers, OGs, and Institutions 11:36 Institutional Risk Aversion as the Main Bottleneck 12:40 Managing Operational Risk Post-Deployment 14:16 Transaction Simulation and Avoiding Blind Signing 15:12 AI Agents and Smart Contract Development 16:02 Sandboxed Fork Environments for AI Workflows 17:33 Tenderly's MCP: Debugging and Testing for AI 18:40 AI Processes 50MB of Transaction Data Better Than Humans 19:22 Advice for New Smart Contract Developers 21:25 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇫🇷 *Pragma Cannes 2026* Pragma Cannes 2026 was held on April 2nd at the JW Marriott Hotel in Cannes, France and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Cannes 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh5OnsJ95gz7HoI1tLUj3kZr ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Andrej Bencic X: https://x.com/bendzi ✅ Follow Tenderly X: https://x.com/TenderlyApp ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city