Here is the English translation of the text, with the specified terms retained and not translated:
On October 17, the "10th Global BlockChain Summit" organized by the Wanxiang BlockChain Lab was officially opened. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, gave a speech reviewing the development path of Ethereum and looking into the future. "In the future, Ethereum can achieve more than 100,000 TPS through Layer 2, and any transfer between chains on Ethereum 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."
Here is the full text of the speech:
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 start of the Ethereum project, 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 merged, moving completely 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 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. In 2020 and 2021, before Layer 2 existed, Layer 1 transaction fees were sometimes as high as $5 or $10, and the highest I personally 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 major 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 the very important concept of EIP-4844, which provides 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's 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 social.
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, 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 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 is in the responsive block, and you will find that your transaction has been confirmed, which may be 90% of the time. There is still 10% of the time, you still need to wait for the corresponding block. But the time you need to wait is very low and very low. This is Layer 2.
Our goal in 2023 and 2024 is to solve the scalability problem, to do some cheaper transactions, that is, to send your transaction to the Layer 2 node, the node will directly give you a confirmation message and put your transaction in the next block. If you are willing to trust the Layer 2 node, you can know your transaction is confirmed within 1 second or 0.5 seconds. This is also a very important part.
The third is the user experience of different applications.
You can see on the left is the interface based on Ethereum in 2015, called EtherTweet. This is a very simple thing, it is obviously very early, 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? Some information you may have seen, in some countries, including Argentina and Turkey, more than 10% of the national population hold digital currencies. I found that in these places, there are really a lot of digital currency users, 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. And the interface is also well done.
If we want these users, not just digital currency users, but also blockchain users, to truly get the trustless characteristics of the blockchain, we have really solved the problem of blockchain.
There are also a lot of other progress, such as smart accounts and account abstraction. This year we have made a lot of progress on this topic. There 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 proof.
There are also some issues with account abstraction.
Then there is the topic of zero-knowledge proof. I've been talking about zero-knowledge proof 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 a protocol can be issued in 1 second on a mobile phone, so the progress is very large. For example, Zupass is based on zero-knowledge proof, such as identity; Rarimo uses zero-knowledge proof 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 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 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 light clients. Most users now access through an RPS and some nodes to see what they want. This RDC process is based on trust and is centralized. There is a project that uses Helios as a lightweight client without Layer 2. If you have a Layer 2, you can put 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 universal 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, as well as some off-chain applications. The largest 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 a 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 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 on Layer 2. A Google article says that some methods can achieve this goal.
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 (perhaps) succeed now.
Original link
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram subscription group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram discussion group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Twitter official account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
