Compiled by: BlockBeats
During the ongoing ETHTAIPEI, Ethereum founder Vitalik participated in a media group interview. Overall, compared to the market’s discourse that “Ethereum is not doing well,” Vitalik remains hopeful about Ethereum. He discussed the current issues facing Ethereum, but also talked about potential solutions, such as the issue of POS, where he once again mentioned “Rainbow Stake,” a concept aimed at addressing the current high proportion of LIDO, although it is still in the conceptual stage and the market needs to give Ethereum some more time.
Due to recent challenges posed by projects like Solana and modularization, the market is starting to doubt whether Ethereum can maintain its position as the world’s leading public chain. While Vitalik did not give a direct answer, from his words, it is clear that the market needs to give Ethereum time, as time will tell.
The following is the content related to Ethereum from the group interview compiled by BlockBeats.
What is the significance of the Denunc upgrade to the Ethereum ecosystem?
Vitalik:
The purpose of the upgrade is to significantly increase scalability and greatly reduce Layer2 (especially Rollups) transaction fees. This is achieved by creating a blob in each block that cannot be accessed by the EVM. We have seen a significant decrease in Layer2 fees in the past week or two, with costs decreasing by about 50% in some cases. It is important to note that these fees may rise again as the number of blobs increases, and we expect the number of blobs supported by the Ethereum chain to continue to increase significantly in the coming years.
Is this better than you expected?
Vitalik:
I think it depends on what you mean by “better.” From a technical perspective, the upgrade went very smoothly, with the number of validators dropping from 99% to 95%, better than any fork we have done before. Currently, the usage is surprisingly low, with the goal of about three blobs per block, but the average usage is only one blob per block, which means that blobs are currently very cheap. If you want to publish a blob, you basically only need to pay the Ethereum transaction fee. High fees may be a reason for low usage, and if blob prices trend towards zero, you can use them to back up encrypted copies of your hard drive or similar things. This is very cheap for current Rollups. I look forward to an increase in usage in the coming months.
What do you foresee as the most transformative things in the next five years?
Vitalik:
Yes, I think the next five years will be critical for Ethereum, as many previously theoretical and small-scale applications are now beginning to move into real-world usage. One significant impact of the blockchain field on the real world is that ideas generated in this field have permeated in many unrecognized ways into the broader world. For example, Reddit is about to go public, and one thing they are doing is giving very active contributors in the community the same participation conditions as institutional investors and moderators.
Additionally, the biggest practical impact is stablecoins, as people are using stablecoins for savings and transactions. There needs to be very low fees, which historically Ethereum did not have, but in the next five years, Ethereum can. You have already seen Layer2, and projects like Base getting closer and continuing to improve. In the future, Ethereum can help stablecoins become more accessible, open, decentralized, and do not require trust in fragile third parties.
Furthermore, I expect non-financial applications to begin having a greater impact. We have seen the success of Farcaster in the past year, and to some extent, we have seen success in creating alternative social media platforms like Lens and others. I believe that the decentralization brought by these projects has a special benefit, as basically anyone can write a new client, and if you have a new client, you can access and write the same content without starting from scratch to build your network effect. I expect the identity space built on Ethereum to grow rapidly, with technology improving rapidly, and I really hope to see some mainstream usage soon. A major challenge that many people are facing now is how to prove that an account on a platform is actually a person and not a bot, or a million bot accounts controlled by the same person. When people need to solve this problem, they tend to turn to centralized solutions, which is very bad. I hope that the Ethereum space can truly propose some decentralized alternatives and make them truly accessible.
How do you view the current challenges in Ethereum POS, and how do SSF (single slot finality) and other upgrades address this issue?
Vitalik:
I think the main challenges in POS currently are related to various centralization risks. One of the concerns is in the MEV aspect, and another is related to the risks associated with staking and being a validator itself. The challenge in the MEV aspect is that the scrutiny risks are growing, and relayers are emerging as another form of centralization role. Execution tickets and inclusion lists can mitigate these risks, with the inclusion list approach essentially going back to Ethereum in 2016, where decentralized validators are responsible for creating blocks, except here, what we call a “block” just means a list of transactions, as from the perspective of fairness and resistance to scrutiny, this is the most important thing.
Another part is related to staking itself. I recently did a series of polls on Farcaster, and when I asked why they don’t stake, the most common answer was that they don’t have 32 ETH, and the second was that running a node is too difficult. For the issue of running a node being too difficult, we already have a pre-existing technical roadmap in place to address this problem. Basically, to solve this problem, as a node in the future, you won’t need to store state locally or store most of the history locally, so the amount of data required for you to become a node will decrease from multiple TB to a node that can theoretically run in RAM. Once we have this, for example, resynchronization and synchronization will become faster, possibly taking only a few minutes. With the arrival of ZK-snarks, the requirements will be further reduced. I think in the long run, running a node will feel like downloading some data, which can be done on any computer. There are also some new POS methods that involve sacrificing the requirement for every staker to participate in every round of consensus. If you sacrifice this requirement, then you can benefit from SSF. Rainbow Staking is one of these proposals.
There are now many modular blockchain solutions, and we also see some ideas, such as Ethereum being responsible for shared sorting, so what problems should Layer1 handle, and what should be left to others to handle?
Vitalik:
Modularization means that single chains are becoming less and different components are completed by different parts. Researcher Justin Drake is a strong supporter of Ethereum for shared sorting, which is a vision. You can see the work of Layer1 today, where Layer1 is responsible for shared security, it is a shared settlement layer. With Ethereum, every Layer2 has the ability to read any other Layer2 without relying on any centralized role. Ethereum provides data availability for Rollup, but it does not provide data availability for validium. Then sorting, choosing the order of transactions is currently determined by each Rollup. I am neutral on the issue of shared sorting, I know some people support it, and some think shared sorting is completely overrated, they feel that the benefits of shared liquidity are not as great as imagined. For an average user, whether the market depth is $500,000 or $1 million is not important, you just need enough market depth to handle your own transactions. They will also think that cross-Layer2 MEV is not that important, and any MEV between Optimism and Arbitrum can be decomposed.
For other types of functionality, I do hope that we can truly expand the amount of data that Layer2 or Ethereum can directly support. In an ideal world, everything will be a Rollup, and Ethereum will not handle data availability for everything, I hope to see very high-security things pass through Rollup on the chain.
Another big issue is related to account abstraction. If your account has states that may need to change, especially if you have a key and want to revoke the key and add a new key, where does this state live? If you have accounts in 100 places, do you have to send the same data 100 times to upgrade your accounts? One way is to have a minimal critical storage Rollup method, where this state lives in a specific place, possibly on a very neutral Rollup, and then all other Layer2 can call it to prove what the current state is for each transaction they are accessing. But these are all early-stage ideas.
How does ZK solve the trust issue for non-technical individuals, how do they know that ZK has actually achieved identification? If you have a system that theoretically provides you with a certain level of ZK privacy, how do you as a user know that you are actually getting that level of privacy?
Vitalik:
I see this question as an extension of a problem that already exists in Ethereum, which is, if you put your assets into a smart contract instead of just giving your assets to someone, how do you actually know that your smart contract doesn’t have a backdoor, that someone can take it away at any time or take away your funds? Currently, we can publish source code through tools like Etherscan, where people can verify the source code. This is a good tool for developers and savvy users. For the average user, they cannot read a thousand lines of code themselves.
We see wallets becoming more complex, giving more warnings, telling you whether you are interacting with an application or if you are interacting with an application that you have not interacted with before. Ultimately, I would like to see DApp user interfaces become versioned. So just like you know, you’re just uploading the interface to IPFS instead of the website, so every update must be a blockchain transaction. You can make the authorization for that transaction controlled only by the team, so no server can be hacked to force an update. Additionally, the opinions of high-quality researchers and audits need to be aggregated, and wallets play a very important role here, acting as a significant active assistant to help users aggregate all this information. The tools used on Ethereum should be used on ZK, such as publishing Cairo code on a platform similar to Etherscan and verifying it, which can be completely done.
What are the benefits of integrating AI with cryptocurrencies, and how will this reshape the industry?
Vitalik:
Many people are very curious about the intersection of AI and cryptocurrencies, and this question has been asked for the past 10 years. I think it makes sense to ask this question because at a very high level, AI and cryptocurrencies are two very important technological trends of our time, and there is a feeling that AI tends towards centralization while cryptocurrencies tend towards decentralization, and there should be some complementary aspects between the two. But the question is, can you get actual useful application examples? In an article I wrote about two months ago, I tried to analyze this issue and tried to identify some specific applications that are meaningful. So I talked about, first, AI involved in prediction markets or other types of markets, second is AI as part of a wallet to help users understand the online and on-chain environments they are interacting with. The third is the use of cryptography, including things like ZK SNARKS and ZKML, MPC. The fourth is the AI for secure privacy, if successful, can be used in other areas. Among these, I think the first two are short-term visible, and the latter two are actually more speculative.
Another is the role of AI in debugging code. One of the biggest challenges in this field is bugs in code. If we can achieve this, then we may eventually have a bug-free ZK-EVM. The more bugs we can reduce, the safer this space will be.
Are you more active on Farcaster than Twitter?
Vitalik:
Farcaster is interesting, and the quality of participation there is higher. I am also looking forward to seeing alternative clients for Farcaster, it is not a server, it is a chain, you can create your own client, and then your client can read or write the same content, so people using Warpcast can see. Another thing I am happy about is that Farcaster is easy enough to use and is being used by people outside the circle, which many other applications have not achieved.
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