Vitalik at EDCON Montenegro: Opportunities and Challenges for Ethereum

Original author: Biteye core contributor Hankester

Original editor: Biteye core contributor Crush

At this year's Montenegro; EDCON; opening ceremony, Vitalik; delivered a keynote speech as always, explaining his thoughts on the blockchain industry and the development of Ethereum to the audience.

Although the content of this time lacks a very novel narrative, we can still capture some subtle changes from "Vitalik"'s point of view.

The editor of this conference also came to the scene in person. Below we will briefly summarize and summarize the keynote speech made by "Vitalik" to help everyone understand the latest progress and direction of Ethereum.

01. Current status of Ethereum

Vitalik; believes that although cryptocurrencies are more popular than a few years ago, users still do not use Ethereum well, but rely more on centralized exchanges.

Although centralized exchanges have the advantages of "0" handling fee, fast speed, and account recovery, the "FTX" incident proves that centralized exchanges are sometimes unreliable.

Before large-scale application of the blockchain, there are still many problems to be solved, including privacy, consensus algorithm security, smart contract security, and scalability.

At present, Ethereum has solved the problem of consensus algorithm security, and privacy, scalability, and smart contract security are still the general direction of future development.

02. Problems and Development Direction

2.1 Scalability

Vitalik; believes that the reason why users are more willing to use centralized exchanges is that the scalability of Ethereum is insufficient, resulting in the poor user experience of "dApp".

However, there are currently many solutions that are already working on solving the scalability problem, especially some "rollup" solutions, which have made substantial progress.

Vitalik; in; 22; year; 11; in an article proposed; milestones for rollups taking off training wheels, from; rollups; to; training wheels (training wheels, can be understood as external forces to; , such as trusted centralized entities for "rollups; providing trust or assistance; rollups; for maintenance, etc.) to measure the degree of maturity of "rollups", and dividing the development stage of "rollups" into "stage 0( full training wheels), stage 1 (limited training wheels), stage 2 (no training wheels).

At present, "Polygon" has entered the "stage 1" state, that is, the state of "limited training wheels", while "Optimism, Arbitrum, Scroll, Taiko, zkSync" are closely behind, very close to "stage 1;".

（milestones for rollups：

In addition to the development of the "rollups" themselves, Ethereum itself is constantly improving. For example; EIP-4844; will continue to bring huge storage space to Ethereum, further improving the scalability of Ethereum.

In the future, after sharding; rollups;, Ethereum's "tps" can be increased from "16" pens to "2; w-10; w; pens. In addition, the "scaling" of "ENS" can allow users to unify their accounts on different "rollups", bringing users a better experience, and so on.

2.2 Privacy

Privacy issues are still one of the biggest challenges facing Ethereum. In addition to ordinary "token" transactions, users' "ENS, POAPs, NFTs; and "SBT" are all publicly available on the blockchain and have no privacy. language, and privacy is one of the fundamental human rights.

While advocating the protection of the privacy of ordinary users, Vitalik; also proposed the "Proof of Innocence" scheme to prevent privacy from being abused by hackers and other bad behaviors, and finally realize the vision of "Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful".

For ordinary users, Vitalik; proposed to use the "stealth address" scheme to protect the privacy of users, that is, both parties to the transaction temporarily generate a temporary address before the transaction to conduct transactions, thereby obtaining privacy.

Compared with the "Tornado Cash" scheme, stealth address; can not only trade "ERC-20" tokens, but can also be used to trade other types of assets to achieve the privacy of "NFT" and other asset transactions.

In order to prevent privacy from being abused by hackers transferring funds and money laundering and other bad behaviors, Vitalik; proposed a "Proof of Innocence" scheme based on "zk-SNARK" to improve "Tornado Cash".

In this scheme, it is first necessary to summarize the risk addresses and generate a "merkle tree" to publish on "IPFS". The list of risk addresses can only be completed after verification; Tornado Cash; to complete the transaction, so as to allow users to prove their innocence without revealing their privacy, so as to realize the reasonable use of privacy.

2.3 Account Security

After the consensus algorithm security issue has been initially resolved, smart contract security issues also have corresponding solutions, such as formal verification, Viper; language, etc. Therefore, Vitalik; believes that the importance of account security has increased above that of smart contract security.

For account security, Vitalik still advocates multi-signature and social recovery solutions. In addition, "Vitalik" also mentioned the use of "zk-SNARK" in social recovery, that is, the relevant data of social recovery will be hidden with "zk-SNARK", and the "proof" based on "zk-SNARK" will be used for identity verification, so that Recover account.

The significance of this solution is that the identity verification link of social recovery no longer depends on a specific third party, but enables smart contracts or any entities that master open source verification algorithms to have the ability to verify the user's account ownership, thereby further improving social recovery. The degree of decentralization brings a more secure account system to Ethereum.

03, zk-SNARK; technical potential

The most well-known application scenario of Zk; is the expansion of ;zk-rollup;, in fact, ;zk; can also be used in a wider range of scenarios.

Compared with; proof size; larger; STARK, SNARK; due to its simplicity and better compatibility with Ethereum, it will be easier to obtain large-scale use in scenarios related to privacy, self-certification, etc., such as the center Responsibility traceability, voting, reputation certification, optimization; MPC; interaction methods, etc.

In Vitalik's view, zk-SNARK, as a technology, will have the same important status as blockchain technology in the next ten years.

04. Summary

According to "Vitalik"'s speech, the roadmap of Ethereum Road has not changed significantly, and most of the content involved has been discussed in corresponding articles before. Vitalik; I also feel that the "ppt" I use is very similar to the "ppt" I used when I gave a speech in Taiwan in 2017;.

But we can also see that among the same content, the attention of Vitalik; has slightly shifted, such as; scroll, Taiko; and other programs have received higher attention, and the importance of account security has surpassed smart contract security, and ;zk-SNARK; status has been raised to be on par with blockchain, etc.

Vitalik; At the end of his speech, he pointed out that with the advancement of blockchain in terms of scalability and privacy, the services provided by completely decentralized technologies can be completely superior to centralized systems in the future.

Therefore, we can expect that as more specific application scenarios are proposed, corresponding projects will also appear in the market one after another, and this is the process of continuous development of Ethereum.

References

[;01;] Proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels

[;02;] An incomplete guide to stealth addresses

[;03;] Why we need wide adoption of social recovery wallets

[;04;] Some ways to use ZK-SNARKs for privacy