V God's latest speech: The rise of the second layer protocol ecology of Ethereum
On October 27, the 6th Blockchain Global Summit opened in Shanghai. At the summit, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, said in a speech that Ethereum has gradually become a real ecosystem and a self-sustaining ecosystem. Every time a problem arises a solution can be proposed to solve it. The full text is as follows:
good morning everyone! Nice to see you all, really nice to see you all again.
Today I want to share with you the latest situation. I will share with you the development of the Ethereum ecosystem and the new trends in the past year. Some of the trends have emerged in the past three years, but in the past year Accelerated development in the past year. I will also introduce what the future blockchain ecosystem will look like.
A brief summary of how the Ethereum project started:
I started writing the "Ethereum White Paper" in November 2013. I sent this white paper to a small group of people. The Ethereum project was announced at the Miami Conference in January 2014. At that time, the concepts of smart contracts and blockchain technology were still very new. Many people were excited about it, and many people also wondered what can be done on top of it. interesting thing. In July 2014, the Ethereum Foundation was established and the pre-sale of Ethereum began, mainly to promote the initial development of Ethereum.
Ethereum was "dead" in October 2014. At that time, everyone was talking about why Ethereum was "dead"? Other blockchains also have the capability of smart contracts, so Ethereum is no longer needed, and we need to focus on other blockchains. But for some reason we decided to continue developing Ethereum, launched the Olymplc testnet in March 2015, and launched the Ethereum mainnet in July 2015, which is very exciting because we waited a long time Mainnet launched.
In October 2015, Ethereum was "dead" again, and Wall Street technicians said that it was too late to save Ethereum, so maybe give up. But we still continue to work hard. In March 2016, the first Homestead (hard fork) of Ethereum was carried out. In 2016, the first Ethereum application DAO was released. At that time, DAO was just a decentralized investment fund. The establishment of smart contracts on Ethereum was mainly for the purpose of fundraising, and tens of billions of funds were raised at that time. The bad thing is that DAO was attacked. Almost everyone will remember the DAO attack. Everyone found a loophole in the DAO smart contract. Hackers stole a large part of the funds from Ethereum, so Ethereum "dead". You can see many reports saying that Ethereum is dead, Bitcoin and Litecoin are immortal and so on.
Later, we decided to solve the DAO attack problem and hard fork Ethereum, so that the DAO problem can be clearly resolved and the funds will be returned to users. In the end, we did return the display to everyone.
The months of 2016 were not very lucky for Ethereum, because Ethereum was "dead" again, and the DAO smart contract had a loophole. In September 2016, it was attacked by DoS. At that time, it was the first day of Shanghai DefiCoin (sound). In December, Ethereum was "dead" again.
In 2017, the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance was established, and many companies adopted Ethereum for the first time. It seems that Ethereum cannot die, and it seems that Ethereum seems to be very successful, because Ethereum has attracted the interest of many companies, companies from all over the world, many Institutions and frequent users are also interested in Ethereum. The usage rate of Ethereum was very low, but then the transactions of Ethereum increased rapidly, CryptoKitties were widely used, and many people raised electronic cats. In October, the Byzantine hard fork was carried out to support zero-knowledge proof, so that applications based on zero-knowledge proof can be deployed on Ethereum, laying the foundation for further development
In 2018, Ethereum "died" again, and the price dropped sharply and continued to fall. In 2018, the development of Ethereum 2.0 began. At that time, a lot of work started quietly, including theoretical research, development research, and realization of sharding and proof of rights. In 2018, a seminar was held in Taipei. In November, Uniswap was released, and a decentralized exchange was deployed on the Ethereum platform. In 2019, Tornodo was released, adding privacy tools in the Byzantine hard fork.
In 2019, Ethereum "died" again, and "died" several times.
where are we now Strange that Ethereum is still alive, isn't it great? The first phase of Ethereum 2.0 seems to be only a few weeks away, at most a month before it can be released. The Ethereum 2.0 testnet has been in operation for nearly three months now. There were loopholes at first, but the operation was quite normal afterwards. So we have a lot of good news. People are very excited about staking and know how to run a validator node, so Ethereum 2.0 has made great progress.
For a long time, people thought about the history of Ethereum and thought that Ethereum was mainly about the development of the core. But in fact, many things are missing. Ethereum is not only the core chain, but also involves other things on the blockchain main chain. Let’s talk about Uniswap seriously. Uniswap is a decentralized exchange. Go to the Uniswap website and enter how many tokens you want to sell and what kind of tokens you want to sell, and tell you what tokens you can buy, so that the transaction can be completed. Easier to use than any decentralized exchange, and more convenient to use than most centralized exchanges.
In the beginning, no one had heard of Uniswap for a long time, but in the past 6 months, Uniswap suddenly attracted a lot of attention and interest, and many people traded in Uniswap to provide liquidity for Uniswap. Recently, the second version of Uniswap and tokens were released. Uniswap has become a very important member of the ecosystem because it is a meta-application, and many applications can be built on Uniswap. Today you need special tokens to participate in the application, and you can also go to Uniswap to get tokens. Uniswap is not only a decentralized exchange run by itself, but also a part of our system, making the Ethereum ecosystem more user-friendly .
However, there are still some challenges, such as scaling challenges and a sharp increase in transaction fees. For a period of time, the transaction fee even exceeded the transaction fee of the Bitcoin blockchain. This phenomenon has never happened before.
This means that using the Ethereum blockchain becomes very expensive, if you want to participate in the prediction market on Ethereum, you need to pay 10-20 USD for transaction fees, and you need to pay 30 USD for privacy solutions, if you only need to transfer DAO coins It costs $2. The challenges of scaling have been proven.
However, the Ethereum ecosystem is actively solving the scaling challenge. The scaling solution proposed by ZK Rollups two years ago, I wrote a blog about how to improve the scalability of Ethereum to a throughput of 500 transactions per second. Since then it has now reached a throughput of 3000 transactions per second. This is all theoretical. In addition to decentralized exchanges, payment tools can also be used.
Gitcoin's Grants is a quadratic financing mechanism that is used to fund public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem. I've talked about Grants many times, and I talked about it at last year's conference. Quadratic financing is a decentralized governance mechanism that enables communities to have some way of allocating funds to essential public projects, choosing the ones they deem most valuable. There were seven ballots, all very successful, and people were very happy with the results of the distribution.
This time Zksync is the solution of ZK Rollups, so the financing cost of Gitcoin Grants is 5-10 times lower than before, and the cost of gas is saved by 96%. Rollups are very useful and valuable.
The different layers of infrastructure have begun to interconnect. Gitcoin Grants can fund the expansion of the public product Zksync, which improves the expansion of Gitcoin Grants. Gitcoin Grants supports many extension projects. It is possible to see the synergies between the different layers in the ecosystem.
Optimistic rollups are like ZK Rollups, Optimistic rollups are now more powerful, it is not only capable of processing payments, but also Ethereum smart contracts, many people in the Ethereum ecosystem are very interested in Optimistic rollups migration, because it is short-term Expansion plan.
I gave a speech recently. I think focusing on Rollups is a very realistic short-to-medium-term solution. Optimistic rollups already have a test network, and some applications have been deployed on it. Zero-knowledge proof is the concept behind ZK Rollups, and it gradually supports the execution of general-purpose smart contracts, so there are more ways to expand smart contracts.
Plasma is here! Everyone can use Plasma, and Plasma is a solution for capacity expansion.
The Ethereum ecosystem: not only the expansion of the first layer and the expansion of the second layer, but also adopts a hybrid method to integrate the advantages of the expansion solutions of the first layer and the second layer. The current throughput is 15-45 pens per second, plus ETH1+rollups can be increased to 1000-4000. If there are rollups and fragments, the throughput can reach 100,000 transactions per second.
The expansion and scalability of the Ethereum chain should take advantage of the scalability of the main chain and the advantages of the second-layer protocol. This path can provide Ethereum with sufficient scalability to support the long-term development of applications deployed on Ethereum.
Ethereum has now slowly become a real ecosystem, a self-sustaining ecosystem. Every time a problem arises a solution can be proposed to solve it.
If you want payment scalability, there are now Loopring, ZKsync, OMG website.
If you want a stable value, there are DAI, USDC, etc.
If you want to have extended smart contracts, there are Optimism, Arbitrum.
If you want a username that someone can read, say to send ether to someone else, but you don't want to use addressing, you can use ENS (Ethereum Name System).
If you want privacy, there is Tornado.cash, AZTEC, zkopru.
If you want to exchange and exchange assets, there is Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges.
If you want to fund public goods, there is Gitcoin, Quadratic funding in the Ethereum ecosystem.
The ecosystem contains different parts, and the different parts of the ecosystem support and benefit each other. The privacy layer provides application privacy, the funding layer provides other funding, and the payment extension layer ensures payment, thus forming the ecology of Ethereum. The most valuable part of Ethereum comes from different components, they can cooperate with each other, which is the benefit of the infrastructure.
The ecosystem contains different parts, and the different parts of the ecosystem support and benefit each other. The privacy layer provides application privacy, the funding layer provides other funding, and the payment extension layer ensures payment, thus forming the ecology of Ethereum. The most valuable part of Ethereum comes from different components, they can cooperate with each other, which is the benefit of the infrastructure.
My favorite analogy to Ethereum is a city, and Txstreet.com is a website that describes Ethereum as a city. There are a lot of applications like buildings, people have to come and go between different buildings, if you want to go from one building to another you can take a bus, the bus is like a block in the ethereum block .
Such a metaphor reflects the very important value in the Ethereum ecosystem. Specific applications are not important, the most important thing is the ecosystem, and the most important thing is to build decentralized solutions to replace more and more functions in daily life, infrastructure The more, the more things can be done, which in turn can build more infrastructure.
In 2015, I wrote a controversial blog post "Blockchain has no killer app". I have said this sentence many times, and many people have disputed it. The meaning of my words in 2020 is very clear. I think the blockchain ecosystem is not a killer application, but a killer network. It is not only about stable coins, prediction markets, expansion, but most importantly, interaction. With the interaction between different components such as stable currency, expansion, ENS, DAO, etc., the value of the blockchain mainly comes from the interconnection of different parts and the simultaneous use of these things.
So the blockchain is a neutral base layer that allows us to build an ecosystem. The base layer is decentralized, so that there is enough confidence to deploy applications on it.
Ethereum now occupies a central position, and the encryption ecosystem is also very important, including other blockchains and off-chain components. The more components you have, the more impossible things can be done through the encryption ecosystem, and more and more people will participate in the future, and they may have enough power to support more activities and build more components , thus jointly create a better future.
We are not far from such a future.
