Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum, takes the stage at #EDCON2023 and gives the big picture of where Ethereum is going over the next 10 years! Vitalik says over the last 10 years, there’s been a lot that has happened in Ethereum development, and in the 2010s the focus was on solving problems in theory: first creating a blockchain that people can actually use, a blockchain that has some general-purpose programming language so you can create smart contracts, build applications, make DAOs, trying to figure out in theory what all of these different applications are, understanding that the scalability problem exists, and thinking through the lightning networks, state channels, Plasma, rollups, sharding and all of the different possible ways of trying to solve the problem.
Vitalik says a lot of work was done in the 2010s, but at the same time, the crypto space remained fairly small, and if we look at even today, the status quo of Ethereum usage, in many places, very few people have found uses for Ethereum aside from trading digital monkeys. So the number of use cases that people can see in a lot of contexts is not very large, but in many other places, many people have found uses for Ethereum, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains already, and in a lot of countries in the world, more than 10 percent of people are using it and holding it for their own personal savings, and for a lot of people, even today, cryptocurrency is a lifeline. So in many places, many people have found uses for Ethereum, but they’re largely using centralized exchanges since CEXs are cheap, convenient, and they protect users from mistakes. That’s the status quo today. But sometimes centralized exchanges fail. So if we want a really robust crypto ecosystem that actually fulfills its promises, Vitalik says we need to have actual decentralization. But why don’t we have actual decentralization yet? He says that’s because decentralized technology is not good enough, and this is basically what Vitalik is really hoping and a lot of people are really trying so hard to make sure to solve over the next 10 years.
Vitalik goes on to point out the big problems in Ethereum, saying that the problems are kind of the same as what the problems were 5 years ago in 2017: privacy, consensus safety, smart contract safety, and scalability, but we did solve one (the consensus safety), since Ethereum has moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. He says another thing people might notice is that 5 years ago he was focusing a lot on smart contract safety, and here he is focusing more on user account safety, since back then it was still much less clear what kinds of applications people want to use and today it’s still somewhat unclear but a lot more of the categories have become pretty well defined, and right now it’s a lot easier to do things we want to do just by reusing code, user account safety is continuing to become even important. He thinks user account safety is still not nearly good enough today and even hardware wallets in his view are far from a perfect solution, and one of the things he realized over the years is that the real basic use cases of Ethereum are actually really important. So without user account safety, nothing else really works.
Vitalik continues to talk about the 3 remaining problems. The first one is fees and scalability. He says the amount of demand for using Ethereum has gone up massively over the last 10 years, but generally, the Ethereum L1 has not increased scalability by that much, and the problem is fundamental. But we’re making progress: about 3 years ago, Vitalik wrote a post talking about the idea of a rollup-centric Ethereum roadmap, and rollups are systems that are not inside the blockchain but they use the blockchain for security and only put a lit bit of data into the blockchain, and the rest of the data and all the computation happens off-chain. And after The Merge was finished, all of the work released to get scalability working has made huge progress. EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) is a feature of the Ethereum protocol whose goal is to create more space on-chain so that rollups will have much more space to store their data, and with full danksharding, rollups will have even more space. Vitalik also explains the other two problems, which are user account security and privacy, and the progress made and solutions proposed to solve them. You can learn more about Vitalik’s insights into these 3 problems via his presentation at EDCON 2023!
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