The 2025 Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 11th Blockchain Global Summit were held today. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a speech entitled "New Developments in Ethereum and Future Applications". Vitalik said that blockchain and cryptography technologies have made tremendous progress in the past decade, and the next five to ten years will usher in a stage of "truly usable, scalable and low-cost".

The following is the full text of the speech:

Hello everyone, welcome to this blockchain event. In the past 10 years, the blockchain and cryptography industries have developed a lot. Blockchain technology was very early in its development, and its value proposition is much greater now than it was 10 years ago.

The topic of my speech today is to think about blockchain and cryptography. If blockchain and ZK, FHE, and all these other technologies are scalable, developer-friendly, and inexpensive, and if these technologies don't have many shortcomings, what can we do with them? (Katon)

Cryptography actually has many parts. The two on the left are already established in the world: signatures and encryption. Encryption is the difference between APGB and ACBS. You should remember that 20 years ago, there was no ACBS, but the technology existed. But 20 years later, all websites, apps, and applications are based on encryption.

The first part of ACBS is encryption, and the second part is signatures. Why didn't we have this 20 years ago? Why do we have it now? It's because the cost of signing and encryption is now almost zero. Actually, these signing and encryption technologies didn't exist 20 years ago. (Carton) There were some important papers before 1976 and 1978, and then there was RSA, (Carton), which can be said to be the first modern signature and encryption algorithm.

Around the 1980s, (Katon) the digital signature function began to be developed in 1989. PCP (PCP) was introduced around 1992. By 2015, this technology had become so ubiquitous, so cheap, and so simple that we no longer needed to worry about its shortcomings.

In the past ten years, I have started to work on some new cryptographic technologies in the field of cryptography, one is zero-knowledge proof (ZK), and the other is homomorphic encryption (HE).

You can prove about 2 million hashes within one second. The technology is highly efficient, increasingly secure, and provides a particularly good developer experience.

Homomorphic encryption technology may improve 10 times between 2023 and 2025 (stuttering). Now we also have Blocks, which help expand L2 security. We already have 6 Blocks, and we may plan to have 50 Blocks within two to three years.

On L2, the cost of blockchain has increased from 30 million to 45 million this year, but we plan to increase it further, potentially by 10x or 100x. Do you think this technology is very cost-effective and provides a great developer experience? Blockchain is experiencing similar progress. What are the consequences? If you're currently considering ZK technology, some might ask, "Why do we need ZK? Can we avoid it?" This is often the case with blockchain: "Why do we need blockchain? Can we avoid it?" A technology is very new.

Five years from now, I suspect many people will be asking why ZK technology isn't added to blockchains, and why not add blockchains? Ethereum will have a huge impact in the short term. We have a plan. You can find numerous ZK EVMs on the Ethereum website. They're now proving Ethereum L1 in real time. Two years ago, this was completely impossible. Two years ago, everyone thought it might take five or ten years. But now it's possible. With around 50 GPUs, we can now prove almost all Ethereum blocks in real time—not 30 million, but 45 million. So, as we scale in the long term, we can simultaneously create a more scalable and decentralized network. Why? Because we don't need every node to process every transaction in the blockchain. We can use ZK proofs on most nodes, and verification takes just a millisecond—extremely fast.

Another advantage of ZK is privacy. So, this year we can have a project slogan: We need to consider all aspects of Ethereum privacy, including on-chain transaction privacy, off-chain transaction privacy, and a wide range of applications. We can now do this. Two years ago, we could do a little bit, but now we can do much more. Another important issue is the relationship between cryptography, blockchain, and hardware. In the blockchain field, we have a saying: "Not your private key, not your coin." If you don't control your wallet's private key, someone else controls it. If someone else controls it, you can't verify the security of your coins. In 2023, we will add another slogan: "Not your silicon, not your private key." This is because everything in the blockchain relies on cryptography, and cryptography relies on private keys. Algorithms need to run and be stored in hardware. If you can't trust your hardware, you can't trust anything that happens on it.

In fact, this problem exists in many fields. Blockchain has digital assets and digital identities, but the Internet of Things also has this problem. If every device has a computer inside, how can you trust it? Healthcare also has this problem, and privacy is also very important in the medical field.

We recently started an interesting project. If you've played around with DeFi Coin or Singapore's DXR, you might have seen a small device that can show you air quality, CO2 levels, and many other indicators. This kind of device allows us to better understand what's happening in the air, which is crucial for healthcare. However, it also raises serious privacy concerns. In ten or twenty years, the amount of information available in the physical world may be 1,000 times greater than it is today. How can we protect privacy? How can we ensure security? So, what we're developing is a future version of this device, incorporating cryptographic technology. This allows us to simultaneously determine what we need to know about the data without exposing the privacy of everyone, everywhere. ZK is very useful.

First, we knew cryptography was important, but now we're discovering that it's truly practical. Second, open source and verified hardware are also crucial. The blockchain sector shares similarities with many other fields. There's so much development happening in all the areas I just mentioned, so how can you participate?

I think there are three answers:

First, for entrepreneurship, you can now create or support some ZKID applications using ZK, FHE, and blockchain.

Second, for the research and development and optimization of underlying cryptographic technology, there is a Lean team in the Ethereum Foundation, and there are many opportunities for cooperation. You can contact the Lean team.

Third, you can use existing technology-based applications, such as Scroll, Taiko, Lighter, Intmax, and Aztec. There are also ZK voting applications, such as ZkPassport, which has been around for about two years. Aragon announced earlier this year that it would use ZK voting, as well as other wallets. There are already many ways to participate in these areas.

I think the question we should be thinking about five or ten years from now is that many current technologies, like HTTPS, use simple cryptography like signatures and encryption, but you're not aware of their existence. These technologies are incredibly convenient and can be used directly without having to consider costs or user issues. If ZK fast blockchains, like L1, L2, and FHE, can achieve this level of efficiency, then everything will be solved. If this is achievable, what can be done with this technology? The answer is not simple. The answer requires experimentation now. We can develop more and more applications every year, and we'll probably learn a little more each year. I'm very happy to be participating in this technological development process with everyone, and I hope to do so again.