Ethereum Argentina Developers Conference: Towards a New Decade of Technology and Applications

Original author: Sanqing, Foresight News

Opening Ceremony: From the First Webpage to the Ethereum World Expo

From November 17th to 22nd, the Ethereum Developers Conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This week featured more than 40 official events, 75+ project showcases, and hundreds of side events throughout the city, and was expected to attract approximately 15,000 participants.

At the opening ceremony, the host began by recounting Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the first webpage in 1991, tracing the development of the internet from Web 1 to today's Web 3. This year's conference was positioned as the "Ethereum World Expo," bringing together not only major global projects but also showcasing the achievements of the Argentine community. Following the opening ceremony, the main topics of Ethereum Day unfolded, ranging from the Ethereum Foundation's governance role and protocol progress to privacy, security, institutional adoption, and future roadmaps, with core team members and researchers sharing the latest developments.

Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation Updates (Part 1): Tomasz Stanczak Discusses Ten Years of Development and Future Challenges

In his keynote address, Tomasz Stanczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, stated that Ethereum's first decade laid the foundation for consensus, clients, and privacy tools, but the future will present greater challenges in areas such as privacy protection, decentralization, and user autonomy, requiring greater participation from all stakeholders.

When introducing Ethereum's participant structure, Tomasz outlined the breadth of the ecosystem using specific groups, including local organizers who drove Devcon to Argentina, communities focused on urban experiments and public goods, core developers responsible for protocol upgrades, engineers concerned with privacy defaults, active L2 teams, interdisciplinary roles from academia to finance, and volunteers contributing multilingual localization to the Ethereum website. He emphasized that these long-term committed builders form the foundation of the protocol's security and network activity.

Tomasz pointed out that Ethereum's ability to maintain zero downtime across multiple upgrades is thanks to the continuous contributions of numerous ecosystem members. He believes that now is both a time to review past achievements and a time to reassess the next worthwhile area of investment. He encourages more developers and users to participate in the network in more direct ways, such as building applications and using ETH for daily interactions, making Ethereum's use and governance more aligned with real-world needs.

During the Q&A session, he mentioned that if, ten years from now, builders can still attribute their journey to this conference, it will be the most important achievement of the event. He shared his observations in Argentina: in an environment of high inflation and capital restrictions, crypto assets can provide practical utility for ordinary users, but for decentralized systems to truly take off, privacy, security, and usability issues still need to be addressed. The attempts by local communities in these areas are worth noting. His advice to newcomers is to enhance their "connectivity," believing that proactive communication across teams and communities often yields results beyond expectations.

Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation Updates (Part 2): Hsiao-Wei Wang Discusses the Foundation's Three Capabilities

Hsiao-Wei Wang, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, used the metaphor of a "ladder" to summarize Ethereum's first ten years: "It is a ladder that is constantly being raised by the global community. There is no predetermined end, but only a path that everyone can climb at their own pace. Every new step laid by a builder will become the starting point for those who come after."

She pointed out that Ethereum today is no longer just a blockchain, but a public infrastructure that fosters new assets, identities, cultures, and forms of collaboration. Ethereum's success stems from the fact that "no single team owns it," and every participant, including L2, is merely a rung on the ladder. The foundation's job is not to climb to the top themselves, but to "hold the ladder steady" and collectively shape the next decade.

In reflecting on her work since taking over as co-executive director with Tomasz, she summarized the foundation's new phase into three key capabilities. First, reliability: Ethereum has maintained zero downtime during major upgrades, a trust built on long-standing engineering standards accumulated block by block. Second, flexibility: the foundation doesn't believe it has all the answers, but rather continuously adjusts its direction based on community needs and changes in the external environment, ensuring consistency and adaptability as societal usage evolves. Third, genuine governance responsibility: the foundation's role is to maintain the stable environment necessary for the ecosystem's operation, rather than deciding where Ethereum should go; the direction should naturally emerge within an open environment.

Hsiao-Wei emphasized that Ethereum's ladder is open to all stakeholders, including researchers, client and application developers, investors, end users, scientists, academics, students, and local community organizers. The foundation's role is to invest early in areas not yet prioritized by the mainstream, such as multi-client diversity and cutting-edge research, so that these attempts, whose value is not yet apparent, can become new key steps years later.

She also pointed out that decentralization, neutrality, and resilience under pressure do not last automatically; they must be protected through transparent, honest, and uncompromising design principles. If these values are undermined, the entire Ethereum ladder could face structural risks.

Extending L1, Extending Blobs, Improving User Experience: Protocol Update Briefing

Ethereum protocol team members Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot provided an update on the protocol development team following the foundation's restructuring earlier this year. This report focused on three areas: expanding L1, expanding data blobs, and improving user experience.

Regarding L1 scaling, Ansgar stated that Ethereum has long maintained a block gas cap of 30 million, focusing its engineering efforts on key upgrades such as merging and account abstraction. As L1 more explicitly assumes the role of the "settlement layer," the team is improving throughput through client optimizations and protocol improvements, rather than relying on more expensive hardware.

This year, client optimizations have driven the gas cap up to 45 million, with plans to increase it to 60 million in the next hard fork. The team is also working on proposals such as opcode repricing and access lists to continuously improve execution efficiency. He also revealed that the ZK-EVM prototype has achieved real-time proofs in under 12 seconds, laying the foundation for lowering the computational barrier for nodes in the future.

Regarding expanding Blobs, he illustrated the importance of EIP-4844 using the data availability requirements of Rollups. Proto-danksharding introduces data blobs and a commitment mechanism, enabling Rollups to commit data at a lower cost. The next hard fork will implement sample-based proof-of-availability, preparing for further increases in Blob capacity in the future.

Barnabé briefly introduced key efforts to improve user experience, including Interop for cross-chain interoperability, Trillion Dollar Security, and the privacy-friendly wallet project Kohaku. He primarily focused on Interop, stating that the goal is to provide users and institutions with a "seamless, secure, and permissionless" multi-chain experience. Through an open intent framework and modular cross-chain stack, users simply declare their intent, and the backend system automatically completes the cross-chain transactions and exchanges without requiring manual asset bridging. The team is also exploring ways to improve finality time, making interactions between off-chain and on-chain systems more efficient.

Laying the foundation for trillions of dollars in assets

During the "Trillion Dollar Security initiative" agenda, Fredrik Svantes, head of protocol security at the Ethereum Foundation, and Mehdi Zerouali, co-founder of security firm Sigma Prime, pointed out that Ethereum is moving from supporting millions of users and hundreds of billions of dollars in assets to supporting trillions of dollars in public infrastructure. Security capabilities must be upgraded in tandem to match the potential scale of assets and the complexity of applications in the future.

The plan currently focuses on three key areas. First is endpoint security and wallet experience, with the core objective of resolving the blind signature problem by displaying transaction consequences in a clear and readable manner, enabling ordinary users to understand what they are signing. Second is front-end and infrastructure security; the Fiber Frontend project is exploring verifiable and alternative front-end solutions to reduce the risk of funds being stolen via malicious scripts after a single website is compromised. Third is communication and progress transparency; the foundation's digital studio is building a public website using progress bars and other methods to showcase the status of each sub-project and the steps yet to be completed, facilitating community understanding of the overall security blueprint and encouraging contributions.

Mehdi emphasized that Trillion Dollar Security is an open repository of issues for the entire ecosystem, and all solutions must be open-source, auditable, and owned by the community. He described blind signatures as a plague, arguing that security should not be provided by charging users extra, but should be a default attribute. During the Q&A session, both agreed that as AI tools increase code output speed, the demand for security researchers and architecture-level audits will only increase; the Ethereum ecosystem is already funding post-quantum cryptography research and developing prototypes, and is likely among the most prepared for quantum threats among mainstream public chains.

When discussing ZK-EVM, they likened its current security situation to Solidity in 2016, noting that it is still in its early stages and requires the systematic training of a new generation of security engineers, maturing gradually through open collaboration. Feedback from traditional institutions indicates that many now consider Ethereum the main chain "least concerned about underlying security issues," a point reflected in their deployment choices.

Institutional vs. Decentralized: Wall Street and Ethereum Through the Eyes of Danny Ryan

In his "Institutions Decentralization" presentation, Ethereum Foundation core researcher Danny Ryan stated that after shifting his focus from long-term decentralized protocol design to almost daily communication with banks and large institutions, his biggest takeaway is that traditional financial infrastructure is far less efficient than many people imagine. Asset managers often rely on multiple incompatible software programs, fax machines, and manual reconciliation, and securities settlement remains stuck in a T+1 or T+2 cycle.

In such a system, institutions are most concerned about various counterparty risks. From trading partners to infrastructure service providers, everyone is scrutinized for "who might cheat me." Under this framework, Ethereum's trust neutrality and decentralization become advantages. The high availability brought by multiple clients and thousands of nodes, combined with cryptoeconomic security, makes Ethereum the potential infrastructure to support trillions of dollars in assets.

Danny emphasized that for institutions, privacy is an entry barrier, not a bonus. If privacy protection doesn't reach the level of the existing system, many collaborations simply cannot begin. He believes that creating a usable privacy environment for institutions will force Ethereum to continue investing in areas such as zero-knowledge proofs. These investments will both serve scaling and naturally contribute to privacy. Simultaneously, as regulatory frameworks in various countries become clearer, stablecoins and liquidity network effects are expected to experience a new round of expansion, and Ethereum needs to occupy a key position in this wave.

At the architectural level, he pointed out that Ethereum's modular design and L2 ecosystem are very attractive to institutions because they can work with partners to build L2 for specific assets while sharing Ethereum's security and liquidity.

He proposed that the real goal is not simply "tokenizing assets," but rather making the on-chain system good enough that real-world assets would find it hard to resist migrating to it. The unit of measurement for success should be "trillions." Currently, on-chain RWA is still in the billions of dollars, which is just the beginning compared to the scale of global investable assets.

During the Q&A session, he mentioned that a common misconception among institutions is that decentralization is equivalent to "unregulated" or "completely open." In reality, through programmable access control and privacy technology, the risk of intermediaries can be reduced while adhering to compliance.

He suggested that developers form "translation alliances" with traditional financial professionals to help them align their language and ways of thinking. Regarding concerns about being "captured by institutions," he believes that the risks objectively exist, but the key is to maintain the globally distributed nature of the Ethereum core protocol and then take on large-scale asset on-chain operations on that basis.

Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30 minutes: Vitalik's principles and technical roadmap

In his "Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min" talk, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin used the FTX case to contrast centralized institutions that rely entirely on personal credit and adhere to the "Don't be evil" principle with Ethereum's "Can't be evil" principle. He defined Ethereum as a "globally open, censorship-resistant application platform," emphasizing its core advantage in programmability, allowing anyone to deploy smart contracts instead of being limited to pre-defined transaction types.

At the same time, he outlined the advantages and limitations of blockchain by category: advantages include payment and financial applications, DAO, decentralized identity and ENS, voting and censorship-resistant publication, and the ability to prove the existence or scarcity of something at a specific time; limitations involve insufficient privacy, difficulty in handling extremely high throughput and low latency computing, and inability to directly access real-world information.

In terms of the technology roadmap, Vitalik refers to 2025 and 2026 as Ethereum's "scaling arc." This year, the gas limit has already increased by about 50%, and the network is gradually voting to raise it to 60 million. In the future, through mechanisms such as separating builders and proposers and block-level access lists, throughput will continue to be increased without raising the hardware threshold.

Vitalik is particularly optimistic about ZK-EVM, which allows nodes to confirm blocks by verifying proofs rather than replaying the entire execution, thus significantly reducing the synchronization and computational costs of full nodes and making it possible to run full nodes on laptops and even mobile phones. The longer-term "Lean Ethereum" roadmap focuses on gradually introducing components closer to theoretical optimality, such as virtual machines and hash functions better suited for zero-knowledge cryptography, quantum-resistant cryptography, formal verification, and more efficient data availability solutions. On the user side, it strengthens privacy and security simultaneously through lightweight clients, account abstraction, hardware, and social recovery wallets.

During the Q&A session, Vitalik summarized Ethereum's relationship with Wall Street as "They are the users, and we support all users," emphasizing the key lies in maintaining its underlying attributes of trust and neutrality. When discussing how to bring Ethereum's features into the real world, he mentioned two points: firstly, restoring everyday payment scenarios, such as the emergence of physical merchants in Buenos Aires accepting ETH and on-chain stablecoins; and secondly, encouraging the adoption of open and verifiable technology stacks in more areas such as operating systems, communication, and governance. When asked about the most important capabilities an individual should possess, he advised community members to strive to be "versatile," at least personally installing a wallet, making payments with ETH, participating in a DAO, writing a simple contract, and having a basic understanding of the underlying protocol.