At the opening ceremony of this year's EDCON in Montenegro, 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 this time lacks a very novel narrative, we were still able to 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 given by Vitalik to help you 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 zero handling fees, 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 a poor user experience for dApps.
However, there are currently many solutions that are already working on solving the scalability problem, especially some rollup solutions, which have made substantial progress.
In an article in November 22, Vitalik proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels, from rollups to training wheels (training wheels, which can be understood as the help of external forces to rollups, such as trusted centralized entities providing rollups trust or help rollups to maintain, etc.) to measure the maturity of rollups, and divide the development stages of rollups into stage 0 (full training wheels), stage 1 (limited training wheels), stage 2 (no training wheels) three.
At present, Polygon has entered stage 1, that is, the state of limited training wheels, while Optimism, Arbitrum, Scroll, Taiko, and zkSync are closely behind, very close to stage 1.
（milestones for rollups：
In addition to the development of rollups themselves, Ethereum itself is constantly improving. For example, EIP-4844 will continue to bring huge storage space to Ethereum and further improve the scalability of Ethereum.
In the future, the tps of Ethereum can be increased from 16 pens to 2w-10w pens after sharding and rollups are superimposed. In addition, the scaling of ENS can unify the accounts of users on different rollups, bring better experience to users, and so on.
2.2 Privacy
Privacy is 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 there is no privacy at all, and privacy is a basic one of the 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 proposes 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 Tornado Cash's solution, stealth address can not only trade ERC-20 tokens, but also can be used to trade other types of assets, realizing the privacy of asset transactions such as NFT.
In order to prevent privacy from being abused by bad behaviors such as hackers transferring funds and money laundering, Vitalik proposed a zk-SNARK-based Proof of Innocence scheme to improve Tornado Cash.
In this scheme, it is first necessary to summarize the risk addresses, generate a merkle tree and publish it on IPFS, and each user needs to generate a Proof of Innocence before Tornado Cash transaction to prove that he is not in the list of risk addresses, after verification That is, Tornado Cash can complete the transaction, so that users can 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 is hidden with zk-SNARK, and the proof based on zk-SNARK is used for authentication to restore the 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 STARK with larger proof size, due to its simplicity and better compatibility with Ethereum, SNARK will be easier to obtain large-scale use in scenarios related to privacy and self-certification, such as centralized entity responsibility tracing , voting, reputation certification, optimizing 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 the content of 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 himself also felt that the ppt he used was very similar to the ppt he used when he gave a speech in Taiwan in 2017.
But we can also see that among the same content, Vitalik’s attention has slightly shifted. Solutions such as scroll and Taiko have received higher attention. The importance of account security has surpassed smart contract security, and zk-SNARK The status of the blockchain has been raised to be on par with the blockchain, and so on.
At the end of his speech, Vitalik 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 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
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The content is for reference only, not a solicitation or offer. No investment, tax, or legal advice provided. See Disclaimer for more risks disclosure.
Vitalik at EDCON Montenegro: Opportunities and Challenges for Ethereum
At the opening ceremony of this year's EDCON in Montenegro, 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 this time lacks a very novel narrative, we were still able to 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 given by Vitalik to help you 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 zero handling fees, 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 a poor user experience for dApps.
However, there are currently many solutions that are already working on solving the scalability problem, especially some rollup solutions, which have made substantial progress.
In an article in November 22, Vitalik proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels, from rollups to training wheels (training wheels, which can be understood as the help of external forces to rollups, such as trusted centralized entities providing rollups trust or help rollups to maintain, etc.) to measure the maturity of rollups, and divide the development stages of rollups into stage 0 (full training wheels), stage 1 (limited training wheels), stage 2 (no training wheels) three.
At present, Polygon has entered stage 1, that is, the state of limited training wheels, while Optimism, Arbitrum, Scroll, Taiko, and zkSync are closely behind, very close to stage 1.
（milestones for rollups：
In addition to the development of rollups themselves, Ethereum itself is constantly improving. For example, EIP-4844 will continue to bring huge storage space to Ethereum and further improve the scalability of Ethereum.
In the future, the tps of Ethereum can be increased from 16 pens to 2w-10w pens after sharding and rollups are superimposed. In addition, the scaling of ENS can unify the accounts of users on different rollups, bring better experience to users, and so on.
2.2 Privacy
Privacy is 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 there is no privacy at all, and privacy is a basic one of the 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 proposes 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 Tornado Cash's solution, stealth address can not only trade ERC-20 tokens, but also can be used to trade other types of assets, realizing the privacy of asset transactions such as NFT.
In order to prevent privacy from being abused by bad behaviors such as hackers transferring funds and money laundering, Vitalik proposed a zk-SNARK-based Proof of Innocence scheme to improve Tornado Cash.
In this scheme, it is first necessary to summarize the risk addresses, generate a merkle tree and publish it on IPFS, and each user needs to generate a Proof of Innocence before Tornado Cash transaction to prove that he is not in the list of risk addresses, after verification That is, Tornado Cash can complete the transaction, so that users can 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 is hidden with zk-SNARK, and the proof based on zk-SNARK is used for authentication to restore the 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 STARK with larger proof size, due to its simplicity and better compatibility with Ethereum, SNARK will be easier to obtain large-scale use in scenarios related to privacy and self-certification, such as centralized entity responsibility tracing , voting, reputation certification, optimizing 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 the content of 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 himself also felt that the ppt he used was very similar to the ppt he used when he gave a speech in Taiwan in 2017.
But we can also see that among the same content, Vitalik’s attention has slightly shifted. Solutions such as scroll and Taiko have received higher attention. The importance of account security has surpassed smart contract security, and zk-SNARK The status of the blockchain has been raised to be on par with the blockchain, and so on.
At the end of his speech, Vitalik 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 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