On October 17, the "10th Global Blockchain Summit" organized by the Wanxiang Blockchain Lab was officially opened. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, reviewed the development path of Ethereum and looked to the future in his speech, "In the future, Ethereum can achieve over 100,000 TPS through Layer 2, and any transfer between Ethereum chains and other chains can be realized within 2 seconds, even forming a unified user experience. In addition, the infrastructure of Ethereum is also expanding, and the security of the chain connection is more important than the EVM."
The full text of the speech is as follows:
Good morning everyone!
The Ethereum project started in November 2013, the Ethereum Foundation started in 2014, and the Ethereum mainnet started in July 2015.
In the ten years since the Ethereum project started, the main goal has been to develop Ethereum technology. If you listened to my speeches in 2015, 2016, and 2017, you might find that my views then and now are basically the same. In 2022, we completed the Merge, fully transitioning from POW to POS, and 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?
First, the transaction fees on Ethereum Layer 2. You need to pay a corresponding transaction fee to send a transaction. In 2020 and 2021, you may remember that there was no Layer 2 yet, and Layer 2 was just an idea. At that time, the transaction fees on Layer 1 were not particularly high, sometimes $5, sometimes $10, very high, and the highest transaction fee I paid was $800.
In 2022 and 2023, we started to have some Layer 2s, and Layer 2 is much cheaper than Layer 1, but still not cheap enough.
At that time, there was a big scalability problem. In 2022 and 2023, we started to have Layer 2, which is much cheaper than Layer 1, but still not cheap enough. In March of this year, we came up with 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 fees become very low, 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 this 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, developers can pay these fees for users, this 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 you send to be confirmed on the blockchain. 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. While Ethereum's initial block time was 17 seconds, then it became 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 relatively 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 time users have to wait became very short. In fact, most of the time, after you send a transaction, your transaction is already confirmed in the responsive block, which may be 90% of the time. There is still 10% of the time when you still need to wait for the corresponding block. But the time you need to wait is very, very low. This is Layer 2.
In 2023 and 2024, our goal is to solve the scalability problem, to make some cheaper transactions, that is, to send your transaction to Layer 2 nodes, and the nodes will directly send you a message to confirm, and put your transaction in the next block. If you are willing to trust the Layer 2 nodes, you can know your transaction is confirmed within 1 second or 0.5 seconds. This is also a very important part.
Third, the user experience of different applications.
You can see on the left is the interface of EtherTweet based on Ethereum in 2015. This is a very simple thing, and it is obviously an early thing. If you are not a blockchain user, you don't know what Ethereum 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 find that the user experience 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 you don't need to wait in 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 blockchain, we have really solved the problem of blockchain.
There are also a lot of other progress, such as smart accounts and account abstraction. We have made a lot of progress this year,
Sa e is a famous multi-signature wallet that many people are using now. 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, and was completely impossible on a mobile phone. Now issuing a protocol, it only takes 1 second on a mobile phone, so the progress is huge. For example, Zupass is based on zero-knowledge proofs, such as identity; Rarimo uses zero-knowledge proofs to prove the information in your passport.
Then the user experience of wallets has also been greatly improved.
So in these ten years, there has been a lot of technological progress, and these technological advances have brought a lot of 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 is our main problem now? For Ethereum, there is a very important issue, which is that people feel that the Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum is like a 30-year-old person, 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. That is, a user needs to go to a special website, the whole process is very complicated, and it is also very easy to make mistakes in this process. If you want to send a token, if you don't choose the right network, you will send it wrong. So now our challenges are many, mainly in this area.
Another important topic I have 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 the lightweight client. Now most users access through an RPS and some nodes if they want to see something. This RDC process is based on trust and is centralized. There is a project that uses Helios as a lightweight client with no Layer 2. If you have a Layer 2, you can deploy a contract on the Ethereum chain, and the Layer 2 can anchor its Merkle proof verification function in the bridge contract, which can serve as a generic lightweight client. In fact, we have 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 concept to something that many people can use. So zero-knowledge proofs now have many on-chain applications and some off-chain applications. The biggest circle is very interesting, Crypto is not moving forward. So now Crypto. I think for non-financial applications to succeed, they need to use a part of the blockchain, and they also need a very large off-chain part. Because non-financial applications require much more Gas than financial applications. How many transactions you make per day, how many payments, etc., what kind of non-financial applications you do every day, like you might post something on a social media. So I think the blockchain can't handle everything.
Let's talk about the future of Ethereum.
First, with the help of Layer 2, achieve more than 100,000 TPS. A Google article says that this goal can be achieved through some methods.
Second, transfer from any Ethereum chain to any other chain within 2 seconds.
Third, a unified user experience, which is very important.
Fourth, not just EVM: the security connection is more important than EVM. Ethereum's technology is expanding, Ethereum has EVM, and it also has non-EVM things. For Ethereum, the security connection, that is, whether your chain is protected by Ethereum, is more important than EVM. 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 (possibly) succeed now.
