Odaily Planet Daily reported that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said at the 2025 Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 11th Blockchain Global Summit that blockchain and cryptography technologies have made tremendous progress in the past decade, and will usher in a stage of "truly usable, scalable and low-cost" in the next five to ten years.

Vitalik pointed out that new cryptographic technologies like zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and homomorphic encryption (FHE) are rapidly maturing, significantly improving computational efficiency and the developer experience. He revealed that the Ethereum mainnet can now generate ZK proofs for L1 blocks in real time using approximately 50 GPUs, something that two years ago was considered "at least five to ten years away." In the future, ZK will not only be used for scalability and privacy, but also for greater decentralization, as block verification will take "just one millisecond."

He further emphasized: "Five years from now, people will no longer ask why we use ZK, but why not add ZK." At the same time, he proposed a new security concept - "not your silicon, not your private key", which means that blockchain security is truly established only when the hardware, algorithms and keys can be verified and controlled by the user.

Vitalik encouraged developers to actively participate in the entrepreneurship, underlying R&D, and application of ZK and FHE technologies, such as participating in ecosystems like Scroll, Taiko, Lighter, Intmax, and Aztec, as well as new use cases like ZK voting and private identity. He said that the development of blockchain is similar to the popularization of encryption technology in the past—from expensive and complex to ubiquitous and almost cost-free. "When ZK and FHE reach the same level of popularity, the true blockchain revolution will begin."