At the "10th Global Blockchain Summit", Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, delivered a speech, discussing the development path and future prospects of Ethereum. Vitalik's speech is as follows.
The Ethereum project was launched in November 2013, and the Ethereum Foundation was launched in 2014. The first version of Ethereum was released in July 2015.
The main goal of the Ethereum project in the first ten years is to develop Ethereum technology. If you listened to my speeches in 2015, 2016, and 2017, you would find that my views then and now are basically the same. In 2022, we will merge and move completely from POW to POS. I will also talk about scalability, privacy, and zero-knowledge proof technology, as well as some security issues. In fact, what we are doing now is not much different from what we were doing five or ten years ago. But there has been a lot of progress in these ten years.
How can we see the progress?
In 2020 and 2021, there was no Layer 2. At that time, Layer 2 was just an idea, and the transaction fees on Layer 1 were particularly high, sometimes $5, sometimes $10, very high. The highest transaction fee I paid was $800.
In 2022 and 2023, we started to have some Layer 2s, which are much cheaper than Layer 1, but still not cheap enough.
At that time, there was a problem. In 2022 and 2023, Layer 2 started to emerge, which was much cheaper than Layer 1, but still not cheap enough. In March of this year, we proposed a very important concept of EIP-4844, which is to provide more data space on Layer 2 to do some Layer 2 transactions, so that the transaction fee can be reduced from $0.2 to $0.01, which is a huge difference. There are many applications, if you tell users that they only need to pay $0.4 for any on-chain action, developers will think it is completely unacceptable. If the transaction fee can be reduced to $0.01, it will be a completely different story.
In fact, there are many AGI applications that can be done now. Because when applications have a large number of transactions, people are unwilling to pay $0.2, but for non-TURBO applications, users are used to free, $0.01 can be said to be very small, and developers can pay these fees for users, which is the success of Ethereum in the social aspect. By solving the relevant problems, we have reduced the transaction fee problem.
The second is the transaction confirmation speed.
That is, how long it takes for a transaction to be confirmed on the blockchain after you send it. Everyone knows that the average block time of Bitcoin is 10 minutes, sometimes 65 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes 70 minutes, and the confirmation time is very unstable. Ethereum's initial block time was 17 seconds, then 4 seconds, then 12 seconds. But we had a problem, the efficiency of the Gas fee design. When you send a transaction, the transaction fee is very high. If the transaction fee is too low, you suddenly find that it takes a very long time, maybe 5 minutes, 30 minutes, for your transaction to be included in a block. But in 2021, we did the 1559 protocol, and after 1559, the user's waiting time became very short. In fact, most of the time, after you send a transaction, your transaction will be confirmed in the responsive block, which may be 90% of the time. There is still 10% of the time when you need to wait for the corresponding block. But the time you need to wait is very short. This is Layer 2.
In 2023 and 2024, our starting goal is to solve the scalability problem and do some cheaper transactions. This is also a very important part.
The third is the user experience of various applications.
You can see on the left is the interface of EtherTweet based on Ethereum in 2015. This is a very simple thing, obviously a very early thing, if you are not a blockchain user, you don't know what it means. On the right, you can see Firefly (Farcaster+twitter+Lens Client), which is a client they have made, and everyone knows that Farcaster is the largest social application based on Ethereum.
In this Firefly interface, you will know that the client quality is very good. Why did I write three? You may have seen some information that in some countries, including Argentina and Turkey, more than 10% of the national population hold digital currencies. I found that there are really a lot of digital currency users in these places, but there is a problem, they are not blockchain users. They use their digital currencies through some centralized services. Why? Because the transactions in some centralized services, from one account to another, are free and do not require waiting time. And the interface is also well-designed.
If we want these users, not just digital currency users, but also blockchain users, to truly enjoy the trustless nature of the blockchain, we have really solved the problem of the blockchain.
There are also many other advancements, such as smart accounts and account abstraction. We have made a lot of progress this year: for example, ZKEmail, if you have an email account, you can use Ethereum smart contracts, which are done through zero-knowledge proofs.
There are also some account abstraction issues.
Then there is the topic of zero-knowledge proofs. I've been talking about zero-knowledge proofs since 2015. The zero-knowledge proof technology has developed a lot. In 2016, a Zcash transaction was issued, which took 90 seconds or 2 minutes on a computer. On a mobile phone, it was completely impossible. Now, a protocol can be issued in 1 second on a mobile phone, so the progress is huge. Zupass is a zero-knowledge proof-based, such as identity. Rarimo uses zero-knowledge proofs to prove the information in your passport.
Then the wallet user experience has also improved a lot.
So in these ten years, there has been a lot of technological progress, and these technological advances have brought many benefits to users. So five years ago, we could do some early things. But it was impossible for blockchain applications to become mainstream, but now it is possible.
So what are our main problems now? For Ethereum, there is an important issue, which is that people feel that the Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum is like a 30-year-old person, and what we should do is to unify the Ethereum ecosystem.
If you have tokens, your tokens are on other chains, and you want to send your tokens to other chains, the process is very complicated. A user needs to go to a specific website, and the whole process is very complicated, and it is also very easy to make mistakes during this process. If you want to send a token, if you don't choose the right network, you will send it wrong. So now we have many challenges, mainly in this area.
Chain-specific addresses. I have an important topic, which is chain-specific addresses.
There is also the ERC-7683 protocol, which is a protocol that can trade tokens. You can use this protocol to trade your tokens and exchange them for tokens on another chain. If we combine these two, the process of sending tokens will be very simple.
Another topic is light clients. Most users now access through an RPC and some nodes to see what they want. This RDC process is based on trust and is centralized. If you have an L2, you can put a contract on the Ethereum chain, and the L2 can put its own Merkle proof verification function in the bridge contract, which can serve as a general light client. In fact, we have a lot of things. There are many solutions to solve many problems.
Another very important topic is the development of zero-knowledge proofs. In the past five years, zero-knowledge proofs have evolved from a theoretical thing to something that many people can use. For the current crypto industry, for non-financial applications to succeed, they not only need on-chain, but also off-chain applications. Because non-financial applications require much more gas than financial applications. How many transactions you make per day, how many payments you make, etc., what kind of non-financial applications you do every day, like posting something on a social media. So I think the blockchain can't handle everything.
Let's talk about the future of Ethereum.
First, achieve over 100,000 TPS from L2. A Google article says that through some methods, this goal can be achieved.
Second, achieve cross-chain transfers between any Ethereum chain to any other chain within 2 seconds.
Third, a unified user experience, which is very important.
Fourth, not just VEM: the security linkage is more important than VEM. Ethereum's technology is expanding, Ethereum has VEM, and it also has non-VEM things. For Ethereum, the security linkage, whether your chain is protected by Ethereum, is more important than VEM. This is the technical direction we still need to work on.
There are many things we can start doing now. So if you have some ideas, but they failed before, I think you can try them now. Because with the current technology, things that didn't succeed before may now succeed.
