As a "legendary" figure in the encryption world, besides Satoshi Nakamoto, V God, the co-founder of Ethereum, has always had a vicious vision and has achieved many "outstanding" achievements in the encryption field and the blockchain industry.
At the recent EDCON 2023 event, V God revealed the latest progress and future plans of Ethereum 2.0, as well as his vision and expectations for the Ethereum ecosystem.
V God believes that after two stages of development, Ethereum has moved from theory to application, and can solve real-world problems, but the current use cases are mainly focused on trading cryptocurrencies and NFT, and most users are concentrated in the center Centralized exchanges, because centralized exchanges are cheaper, more efficient, and easier to use.
However, centralized exchanges have tail risks, thus requiring the existence of decentralized exchanges. But why there is no real decentralization at present, or the transaction volume of dapp is still very small, the biggest reason is that Ethereum still faces many technical problems.
At present, the biggest challenges of Ethereum come from four aspects: privacy, security of consensus algorithm, security and scalability of smart contracts. This is the problem that Ethereum needs to solve in the future to make the use of decentralized programs smoother. In the future, Ethereum will pay more attention to the security of user accounts and ensure the traceability of assets.
In terms of scalability, since every transaction needs to be verified, this is the bottleneck of the current development of Ethereum and the bottleneck of scalability development. Layer 2, which has become popular in recent years, is also to solve these problems, such as Optimism, Arbitrum, Scroll, Taiko, Zksync, etc.
At the same time, Vitalik explained from the perspective of users that as the Ethereum L2 solution becomes more and more mature, ENS () is compatible with L2, can provide analysis services for the entire ecosystem, and improve the efficiency of ENS users.
Regarding the issue of wallet security, V God shared his two perfect solutions by telling two examples of bitcoin theft: multi-signature and social recovery to ensure wallet security, multi-signature is suitable for cold wallets, and social recovery is more suitable for hot wallets. wallet.
V God once wrote that self-hosting is very important, and social recovery and multi-signature are good ways to achieve this goal. He also said that it would be more convenient to use the ERC-4337 account abstract wallet in encrypted payment. In the roadmap of Ethereum 2.0, the official puts account abstraction, merging, and sharding at a directory level. It is not difficult to see the important position of account abstraction in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Regarding the privacy issues of Ethereum, if you do not want others to know the wallet address and assets, then you need the stealth address technology, which can generate temporary addresses to accept assets. But if it is completely private, it will cause hacking and theft problems, which requires a new solution: Proof of Innocence, that is, use the correct identity to do anonymous things.
Finally, V God said that zk-SNARKs will be as important as the blockchain in the next 10 years. zk-SNARKs is an encryption technology that successfully interprets "coexistence of privacy and authenticity", which can solve the current development paradoxes of the Ethereum network such as scalability and centralization, privacy and evil, security and anti-censorship.
Over the past year, zk-SNARKs have progressed beyond expectations. Although the general consensus is that these innovations are years away, applications, such as ZK-EVM, are emerging. Enhancements to zk-SNARKs have made it possible to explore new use cases for blockchains.
Summarize
At the Ethereum conference, the topics such as account abstraction, stealth address and ZK-SNARK mentioned by V God revealed the development plan of Ethereum. In the future, Ethereum needs more support from communities and projects to create a more A blockchain ecosystem of privacy, scalability and security.
With the higher scalability and lower costs brought about by the upgrade of Ethereum, we have reason to believe that on this increasingly mature Web3 infrastructure, a more complete new world full of infinite possibilities will gradually unfold.