Vitalik at EDCON Montenegro: Opportunities and Challenges for Ethereum

Original editor: Biteye core contributor Crush

Original editor: Biteye core contributor Crush

At the opening ceremony of EDCON in Montenegro this year, Vitalik delivered a keynote speech as always, explaining his thoughts on the blockchain industry and the development of Ethereum to the audience.

Although the content this time lacks a very novel narrative, we were still able to capture some subtle changes from Vitalik's point of view.

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01. Current status of Ethereum

Vitalik believes that although cryptocurrencies are more popular than a few years ago, users still do not use Ethereum well, but rely more on centralized exchanges.

Although centralized exchanges have the advantages of 0 handling fees, fast speed, and account recovery, the FTX incident proves that centralized exchanges are sometimes unreliable.

Before large-scale application of the blockchain, there are still many problems to be solved, including privacy, consensus algorithm security, smart contract security, and scalability.

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2.1 Scalability

Vitalik believes that the reason why users are more willing to use centralized exchanges is that the lack of scalability of Ethereum leads to poor user experience of dApps.

However, there are currently many solutions that are already working on solving the scalability problem, especially some rollup solutions, which have made substantial progress.

Vitalik proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels in an article in November 22, from rollups to training wheels (auxiliary wheels, which can be understood as the help of external forces to rollups, such as trusted centralized entities providing rollups trust or help rollups to maintain, etc.) to measure the maturity of rollups, and divide the development stages of rollups into stage 0 (full training wheels), stage 1 (limited training wheels), stage 2 (no training wheels) three.

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（milestones for rollups：https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/proposed-milestones-for-rollups-taking-off-training-wheels/11571 ）

In addition to the development of rollups themselves, Ethereum itself is constantly improving. For example, EIP-4844 will continue to bring huge storage space to Ethereum and further improve the scalability of Ethereum.

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2.2 Privacy

Privacy issues are still one of the biggest challenges facing Ethereum. In addition to ordinary token transactions, users' ENS, POAPs, NFTs, and SBT are all publicly available on the blockchain, and there is no privacy at all, and privacy is a basic one of the human rights.

While advocating the protection of the privacy of ordinary users, Vitalik also proposed the Proof of Innocence scheme to prevent privacy from being abused by hackers and other bad behaviors, and finally realize the vision of "Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful".

For ordinary users, Vitalik proposes to use the stealth address scheme to protect the privacy of users, that is, both parties to the transaction temporarily generate a temporary address before the transaction to conduct transactions, thereby obtaining privacy.

Compared with Tornado Cash's solution, stealth address can not only trade ERC-20 tokens, but also can be used to trade other types of assets, realizing the privacy of asset transactions such as NFT.

In order to prevent privacy from being abused by bad behaviors such as hackers transferring funds and money laundering, Vitalik proposed a zk-SNARK-based Proof of Innocence scheme to improve Tornado Cash.

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2.3 Account Security

After the consensus algorithm security issue has been initially resolved, smart contract security issues also have corresponding solutions, such as formal verification, Viper language, etc. Therefore, Vitalik believes that the importance of account security has increased above that of smart contract security.

For account security, Vitalik still advocates multi-signature and social recovery solutions. In addition, Vitalik also mentioned the use of zk-SNARK in social recovery, that is, the relevant data of social recovery is hidden with zk-SNARK, and the proof based on zk-SNARK is used for authentication to restore the account.

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03. zk-SNARK technical potential

The most well-known application scenario of Zk is the expansion of zk-rollup. In fact, zk can also be used in a wider range of scenarios.

Compared with STARK with a larger proof size, SNARK will be easier to obtain large-scale use in scenarios related to privacy and self-certification due to its simplicity and better compatibility with Ethereum, such as centralized entity responsibility tracing , voting, reputation certification, optimizing MPC interaction methods, etc.

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04. Summary

According to the content of Vitalik's speech, the roadmap of Ethereum Road has not changed significantly, and most of the content involved has been discussed in corresponding articles before. Vitalik himself feels that the ppt he uses is very similar to the ppt he used when he gave a speech in Taiwan in 2017.

But we can also see that among the same content, Vitalik's attention has slightly shifted, such as scroll, Taiko and other programs have received higher attention, and the importance of account security has surpassed smart contract security, and zk-SNARK The status of the blockchain has been raised to be on par with the blockchain, and so on.

At the end of his speech, Vitalik pointed out that with the advancement of blockchain in terms of scalability and privacy, the services provided by completely decentralized technologies can be completely superior to centralized systems in the future.

References

References

[ 01 ] Proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/proposed-milestones-for-rollups-taking-off-training-wheels/11571 

[ 02 ] An incomplete guide to stealth addresses
https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/01/20/stealth.html

[ 03 ] Why we need wide adoption of social recovery wallets
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

[ 04 ] Some ways to use ZK-SNARKs for privacy
https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/06/15/using_snarks.html