Vitalik's latest speech: The past ten years and the next ten years of Ethereum

Author: Pzai, Foresight News

Yesterday, at the EDCON 2024 developer conference in Tokyo, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin presented a speech on “The Next Decade of Ethereum”, not only briefly reviewing the changes in Ethereum over the past 10 years, but also envisioning a future of unlimited possibilities for Ethereum in the next 10 years with his forward-looking perspective.

Changes in the Past Decade

First, Vitalik reviewed the changes in the social interface, from EtherTweet, which simply put information on the chain in 2015, to the current multi-client Firefly transition, which includes changes in user experience and underlying architecture. The latter can generate higher efficiency and lower costs, and usability has been improved to some extent. Vitalik sees Firefly as a combination of ‘Farcaster+Twitter+Lens client’, and posts published using Firefly can be simultaneously published on Farcaster and Lens.

Vitalik then compared the improvement of on-chain interactions. In 2019, the cost of using the Mainnet was relatively high, and the cost of ZK-SNARK was even higher. The current Transaction Cost is usually less than one cent. Over the past decade, Ethereum has significantly reduced related costs and improved transaction processing speed through expansion. In terms of confirmation time (Tx inclusion time), in 2019, it usually took 1 to 5 minutes, and if unlucky, it might take up to 60 minutes to include the transaction. Now, after the implementation of EIP-1559, this process has been improved to 5-20 seconds and has achieved instant confirmation on Layer2.

Additionally, proposals such as EIP-4337 have increased the applicability and security of Smart Contract Wallets. Vitalik expects that almost everyone will adopt Smart Contract Wallets such as Safe in the next five years.

Vitalik said that the blockchain use cases have not changed much in the past 10 years, focusing on stablecoins, financial derivatives, decentralized exchanges, and prediction markets, so it is necessary to discuss future use cases. In 2014, he talked about decentralized exchanges and prediction markets (now the popular prediction market Polymarket has dropped a lot in cost compared to before), but did not predict the popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“I didn’t expect people to be trading a digital monkey for as much as 2 million dollars,” said Vitalik. “In 2020, I paid a transaction fee of 1,000 dollars on Augur, and today the Transaction Cost on Polymarket is almost zero. A lot of interesting things have happened in the past 10 years, what will happen in the next ten?”

Outlook for the Next 10 Years of Ethereum

On the Wallet front, taking Wallet UI as an example, the 2015 ETH interface was highly homogenized with BTC, while the 2024 Wallet leans more towards the traditional application user experience. Vitalik believes that neither of these are the paradigm for the future Wallet, because ETH is committed to creating a new type of on-chain-based social system.

In 2024, an application developed by a Ukrainian company is building a voting system based on Zero-Knowledge Proof. The voting itself can also be a government election, which would be more credible when combined with Zero-Knowledge Proof and privacy protection. Looking ahead to 2034, if we can make the voting process more transparent, efficient, and secure, we can expand the use cases of ‘voting governance’ in life, and even combine it with certain financial elements.

In terms of scalability, Vitalik said that the blob will expand to 1~4 MB in the future, and will eventually reach 16 MB/Mainnet block. This will achieve benefits for users in the expanding environment by utilizing transaction compression technology while being protected by Ethereum and its ecosystem.

In terms of user experience, Vitalik hopes that future Wallet constructions can integrate more long self-sovereignty and security on the basis of traditional user experience. For example, in the encryption Wallet hosting, a combination of on-chain and off-chain mode can enhance protection for the Wallet in the ‘guardian’ mode. In terms of user experience and security dimensions, the value of Web3 user sovereignty will be combined with the user experience of Web2 in 2034, making it more secure compared to traditional Web2 services. In addition, using ETH L2 will become as smooth and unobstructed as using ETH Mainnet directly.

In addition, Vitalik also proposed standardizing the interactive front-end experience: by integrating the long chain experience within the EVM architecture through relevant displays (such as ERC-3770 and ERC-7683), Vitalik uses the prediction market Polymarket as an example. Previously, users were prompted to pay attention to the risk of misconversion due to different chains, but in the future, they can directly interact seamlessly through a single front-end.

In addition, Vitalik believes that builders should not just copy Web2, but should take a step ahead and explore. In 2034, there will not only be desktop and mobile devices, but also wearable devices, locally run AI, AR, and ultimately BCI. There will also be some practical technologies that directly integrate Community Notes, prediction markets, and similar technologies into Wallets or browsers, and security can verify everything or provide on-chain content version proof. These constructions also give meaning to Crypto, which is to protect people from the source in the face of ongoing security challenges.

Finally, Vitalik made a corresponding conclusion, stating that the development of ETH in the past decade has been focused on theory. Now, as developers can achieve the user experience quality needed, powerful and important applications have been built on the ETH network. It is time to shift the focus to building applications that have an impact on the world, while preserving the value accessible to everyone.

“What kind of application do we want to build? How do we build it while preserving everyone’s values? I don’t know the answer, but I think that all of us, all developers, all Buidlers, and everyone indispensable in the community have the opportunity to be part of shaping the future.” Vitalik said.