ETH HK will be held as scheduled in Hong Kong on October 23.

Following the crowd through the main lecture venue, hackathon workshops and project presentation venues, you don’t seem to feel the depths of the bear market; on the contrary, developers from different countries and regions maintain extremely high standards for project construction. Enthusiasm and engagement.

Among them, Vitaliks online keynote speech received the most attention.

In a 20-minute speech titled The Future of Ethereum and its Development Roadmap, Vitalik mentioned many topics such as new opportunities and challenges faced by Ethereum, account abstraction, social recovery, expansion and L2, and expressed his thoughts on the current industry development. and express personal reflections on the future.

A reporter from Shenchao TechFlow made shorthand notes of Vitalik’s speech at the scene and compiled it as follows.

Achievements and challenges after Ethereum’s transformation

Vitalik first reviewed some of the key achievements that Ethereum has made since last year’s Merge upgrade and the consensus mechanism shifted from PoW to PoS:

• The first merged hard fork is successful.

• Over 25 million ETH are being staked in Proof of Stake.

• After the consensus mechanism was switched and upgraded, Ethereum has been running stably for more than a year without major accidents.

But at the same time, Vitalik also directly raised the challenges currently faced by the PoS consensus mechanism:

• Centralization of pledges: Since pledges have become a necessary element for the daily operation of Ethereum, pledge service providers can help users pledge, but this inevitably leads to the centralization of pledges.

• Transaction processing efficiency: In order to achieve optimal efficiency, the ETH network may wish to process no more than approximately 10,000 transaction signatures per time window (Slot).

Deep Chao Note: The time window (slot) should be a predetermined period of time, usually a few seconds, for proposing and validating blocks. Each time slot has a pre-selected validator whose task is to propose a new block within that time slot. To ensure efficient operation of the network and prevent potential spam attacks or congestion, there may be a cap on the number of signatures or transactions that can be processed within each time slot.

Account abstraction and social recovery

Vitalik has repeatedly emphasized the importance and necessity of account abstraction. He believes that the promotion of account abstraction is based on two considerations:

• Convenience considerations: Users can use any ERC 20 token to pay gas fees and perform multiple operations (signature, authorization, verification, etc.) in one transaction;

• Security considerations: Vitalik has also talked with multiple multi-signature wallets and MPC wallet projects and believes that solutions based on mnemonic phrases are still not the most perfect choice. The loss of mnemonic phrases and private keys will lead to the loss of assets.

Meanwhile, Vitalik still favors social recovery. The main reason is that Vitalik starts from the usage habits and experience of ordinary users. They may not understand the private key or lose the mnemonic phrase.

In this case, an asset that helps you"protector"Crucial. Considering that you may forget or lose it, your friends and another device of yours can become asset guardians in case of emergencies; at the same time, based on trust, institutions that provide encryption services can also act as this guardian. .

Additionally, account abstraction has its own challenges. This challenge is not just an isolated technical issue, but involves the entire crypto ecosystem.

For existing wallets, applications and development tools, if they choose to use account abstraction to improve user experience or developer experience, it will inevitably involve technical adjustments and adaptations. Account abstraction is a technical concept, but it will definitely encounter problems in actual implementation.

Moreover, with the emergence of more L2s, whether and how different L2s support account abstraction is also a challenge. Users may encounter a situation where one L2 supports it but another does not.

Privacy infrastructure is one of the newly introduced parts and is closely related to account abstraction. This means that in order to achieve account abstraction, transactions and operations need to be kept private so that different authentication methods and account types can work without exposing user privacy.

While advancing broader account abstraction, it is likely that the issue of how to handle MEV will also need to be considered to ensure the fairness, security, and healthy development of the system.

Therefore, Vitalik generally believes that the promotion and popularization of account abstraction requires the joint efforts of all actors in the ecosystem, and the overall goal is to make the on-chain experience consistent with the centralized service experience.

Scaling, L2 and privacy

With the emergence of L2 and the advancement of Ethereums own technology, the expansion problem has been solved to a certain extent, but Vitalik believes that the following challenges still exist:

• When L2 packages and submits transaction validity certificates to L1, how to ensure the security and decentralization of this proof system?

• Among L2s technical components, most of the transaction sequencers are centralized, which may have potential risks.

• L2 has different technology selections and development directions. How to build wallets and addresses across L2 to give users a better experience?

• Data related to transaction records requires space for custody and storage. How to solve the problem of data availability?

Due to time constraints, Vitalik did not give very detailed answers to the above questions, but rather raised all the problems faced by the current expansion.

Interestingly, Vitalik also admitted in his speech that there are too many L2s on the market, but rollup does not necessarily mean that expansion is mentioned.

He also gave some personal suggestions:

• Projects should clearly understand their requirements for security and scalability, and at what level they are, before deciding whether to use Rollup.

• For example, scenarios such as account key storage and high-value financial assets have extremely high requirements for security, while games or non-financial applications may have higher requirements for scalability.

• Clarify the difference between Validium and Rollup, and get it right.

Validium is a Layer 2 scaling solution. It stores data off-chain but verifies it on-chain. This means it can handle a large number of transactions, but may sacrifice some decentralization and security - especially suitable for scenarios such as gaming;

Unlike Validium, Rollup (especially zk-Rollup) keeps data on-chain, which may be detrimental in terms of privacy or efficiency. But if you want reliability or more security, you might choose zk-Rollup.

Judging from the diagrams displayed by Vitalik on-site, for many projects, the current choice to use Validium may be a reasonable choice, because it provides a solution to achieve off-chain data availability while ensuring transaction validity.

But with Blobs (used to compress large amounts of data into smaller"blob", thereby storing data more efficiently in Ethereum) As the data space expands, projects can move to using Rollup, because Rollup provides more security and reliability by maintaining on-chain data availability.

Finally, Vitalik also mentioned three types of privacy issues currently faced in the Ethereum ecosystem:

• coin transfers: Privacy issues in cryptocurrency transfers. For example, while many blockchain transactions are public and transparent, there are still needs and technologies aimed at making these transactions more private to protect users’ financial data.

• guardians: As mentioned above, guardians in social recovery are authorized by users to make certain decisions or perform certain operations. A Guardians privacy may relate to their identity, the assets they control, or the actions they perform.

• dentity/reputation and similar apps: On the blockchain, identity and reputation systems can help verify the authenticity and trustworthiness of a user or entity. However, these systems may also involve personal privacy issues, as they may need to collect and display sensitive personal information.

in conclusion

At the end of the speech, Vitalik summarized the overall ideas for the future development of Ethereum:

• Stay robust and solve problems carefully: Maintaining the robustness of Ethereum’s base layer is a prerequisite. Only on this basis can we carefully expand other capabilities, such as capacity expansion, user experience, privacy and other issues.

• Find a balance between experience and decentralization: It is necessary for Ethereum to become user-friendly for ordinary users, but the benefits of decentralization cannot be lost in the process.

• Technology and ecology are equally important: The development of technology points out the direction, but how to implement it and promote it still requires the joint efforts of the entire ecology.

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