Vitalik Buterin joins Kartik Talwar for a wide-ranging fireside chat at Pragma Taipei 2025, covering Ethereum's technical roadmap, developer ecosystem challenges, and governance evolution. They discuss VM improvements, rollup strategies, blob pricing economics, and the Ethereum Foundation's shifting role in the growing ecosystem.
The conversation explores practical solutions for protocol upgrades, developer tooling gaps, and balancing innovation with decentralization principles in Ethereum's next phase.
00:04 - Introduction and Pragma Taipei reflections 01:19 - Evolution of Ethereum developer tooling 03:34 - Potential for Solidity-focused LLMs 04:10 - Emerging application trends in web3 06:25 - Discussion on platform lock-in and walled gardens 08:40 - Incentivizing open development practices 10:12 - Wallet standards and recovery mechanisms 12:24 - Ethereum Foundation's role in wallet development 15:24 - Emerging layers in Ethereum's tech stack 20:28 - Modernizing Solidity and smart contract patterns 23:22 - ZK integration and VM improvements 24:22 - Oracle functionality and external data access 26:45 - Developer experience with REST APIs 28:01 - Missing developer tools in Ethereum ecosystem 29:46 - Multi-VM support on L2s 31:35 - Reflections on EWASM and RISC-V potential 34:14 - Speeding up Ethereum upgrades 36:19 - Fork frequency and coordination challenges 37:25 - Prioritizing protocol improvements 39:36 - Native vs based rollups explained 43:03 - Blob pricing economics 46:14 - Improving governance signaling 49:22 - Protocol change reversibility 50:57 - Ethereum Foundation's evolving role
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
🇹🇼 *Pragma Taipei* Pragma Taipei 2025 was held on April 3rd at POPOP in Taipei, Taiwan and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Taipei YouTube Playlist here:
ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past.
Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city
