Vitalik's View on Ethereum: Technology, Ecology, and Future Vision

Recently, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin participated in a Chinese online interview. This is the first time Vitalik has conducted a Chinese AMA in recent years, aimed at allowing the community to gain an in-depth understanding of the current status of Ethereum from technical, ecological, and future direction perspectives. Below is a summary of Vitalik's core viewpoints on some key issues:

Overall Vision

Vitalik believes that the essence of a "world computer" is "a platform that allows global applications to interoperate," rather than "a single computer that can support all global applications simultaneously." Ethereum is both a digital asset for long-term value storage and an underlying platform that supports the interoperability of global applications. These two positions are not contradictory.

The "World Computer" is realized through a highly decentralized and trustworthy L1 layer working in synergy with an L2 layer that has scalability capabilities. The core task of L1 is to ensure security and network resilience, allowing global developers to maintain the ecosystem based on open protocols even in the absence of the foundation. L2, on the other hand, is responsible for performance expansion and scenario innovation, such as high throughput, privacy, or AI collaboration.

The relationship between the two is like the foundation of a city and its buildings: L1 ensures a solid base, while L2 allows for free design forms. However, the premise is that L1 must maintain sufficient throughput capacity so that any user or application can interact with the mainnet when necessary, while also ensuring interoperability to prevent L2 from becoming an isolated island.

Overall, Ethereum does not need to choose between "digital gold" and "world computer." The compatibility of both is precisely its unique value: Ethereum needs to serve as a decentralized, censorship-resistant, and trustworthy value store like Bitcoin, while also functioning as the infrastructure to support global application interoperability.

Scalability Roadmap

Vitalik proposed a "hybrid L1+L2" scaling solution, where L1 also needs to take on some roles, such as increasing blob space to support L2 and promoting cross-L2 interoperability. Which specific transactions should be conducted on L1 or L2 needs to be clarified through market practice.

The pure L2 route is hard to accept because:

1. may undermine Ether's position as a medium of exchange and a store of value.
2. If you are worried that L2 will "snatch" L1 users and not give back, it is even more serious when L1 is "almost doing nothing."
3. Cross-L2 operations still require L1 support, and when L2 encounters issues, users also need L1 as a fallback.

The pure L1 route is also difficult to achieve because:

1. If L1 supports too many transactions, it is prone to centralization.
2. The demand for on-chain transactions is endless, and there will always be application scenarios that require higher TPS.
3. L2 not only provides scalability but also offers faster speeds through pre-confirmations and avoids MEV through sorters.

Therefore, a mixed L1+L2 solution is needed. Vitalik believes that the role of L2 will continue to evolve, and L2s focused on privacy, application-specific L2s, and others may emerge. In the short term, we should simultaneously enhance L1 capabilities, increase blob space, and promote cross-L2 interoperability, allowing the market to decide which scaling method is suitable for which type of application.

Centralized Sorter

For centralized sorters, Vitalik believes their advantages are:

1. can prevent user funds from being stolen through methods such as front-running.
2. Instant pre-confirmation facilitates the transition of traditional applications to blockchain applications.
3. can prevent censorship through mechanisms such as forced inclusion, and prevent violations through optimistic/zero-knowledge proofs.

However, centralized sequencers still carry risks, so they cannot be fully relied upon. Users should retain the ability to trade directly on the underlying rollup or L1. Both methods should be promoted in the ecosystem to observe which is more suitable for different applications.

It is crucial to maintain the ability for ordinary users to send anti-censorship transactions.

The relationship between L1 and L2

Currently, there is no so-called "ETH 3.0". Justin Drake's 5-year plan only involves the consensus layer, excluding the execution layer.

The balance between L1 and L2 is an execution layer issue. The related roadmap includes: enhancing L1 capabilities ( increasing gas limits, adding stateless validation, etc. ), improving cross-L2 interoperability, expanding blobs, etc.

The dispute over whether L2 pays sufficient fees to L1 should not be shortsighted. Previously, there was concern that L1 would "siphon the blood of L2"; now the blob fee is only 500 ETH over 30 days. If the blob target is increased from 3 to 128, it would burn 21,333 ETH per month, totaling 256,000 ETH per year.

Narratives are changeable, and the top priority is to strengthen L1, ensuring that what should happen on L1 occurs on L1, increasing blobs, and keeping the community adaptable.

Ecological Development Direction

Vitalik believes that the current blockchain community and even the world are in a dangerous state, with many things lacking long-term value or even being malicious receiving too much attention.

The way to respond is not to simply oppose, but to provide better options. The goal should be to demonstrate the possibility of a stable and bright future. This is not only about how blockchain ( can surpass short-term speculation ), but also involves broader social issues ( and how to prove the feasibility of decentralized democratic models ).

Ethereum, as a successful open decentralized ecosystem, can provide a positive example for the world. However, "decentralization" does not equate to "laissez-faire". The "subtraction philosophy" of the Ethereum Foundation aims to maintain ecological balance rather than a complete withdrawal. The foundation should intervene when necessary to balance ( if there is excessive centralization in a certain area or a lack of public goods ), and withdraw after the issues are resolved.

This approach is similar to Taoist thought, requiring the enhancement of wisdom and ability, rather than simply "non-action is success." In the short term, efforts need to be intensified in certain areas to achieve key transformations.

Attracting Developers

Vitalik emphasizes the need to solve three problems at the same time:

1. Attract more developers
2. encourages the development of more open-source, secure, standardized applications with long-term value.
3. avoid forming closed circles when addressing point 2

He advocates that Ethereum alignment should be a technical aspect rather than a social aspect of the game.

Currently, the most pressing centralization issues often lie not in L1, but in L2, wallets, or application layers. The entire ecosystem needs to work together to both attract new developers and make progress in decentralization and trustlessness.

Implementation methods include:

1. Educating Developers on Blockchain Fundamentals
2. The foundation develops some high-difficulty technical components ( such as ZK programming language ) to simplify application development.
3. provides clear standards for developers, such as client testing, L2 grading frameworks, etc., and extends similar standards to ZK applications, wallets, and other fields.

Zero-Knowledge Proof Applications

Vitalik is particularly interested in non-financial use cases of zero-knowledge proofs, such as:

1. Anti-witch verification: Many services that require KYC do not truly need identity information, but rather to prevent bots or duplicate accounts. This can be achieved through zero-knowledge proofs, reputation proofs, or even token proofs.
2. Privacy Protection AI Applications: Here, fully homomorphic encryption may be more suitable than ZK, and if the FHE overhead can be further reduced, there will be great potential.
3. Use ZK-SNARK to wrap any Web2 account for use in Web3, such as ZKEmail, anonymous Aadhaar, ZKPassport, ZKTLS, etc.

He believes that these technologies have the potential to address many issues in society, security, governance, and other areas by protecting personal freedom and privacy.

Decentralized Acceleration

Vitalik corrected a misunderstanding: d/acc is not "deceleration", but "decentralized defensive acceleration".

He believes that simply slowing down is a mistake; during peacetime, it delays important progress, and in times of crisis, it will be devoured by aggressive accelerators. Decentralized and defensive technologies need to compete with other technologies. If offensive technologies advance rapidly while defense lags behind, the world will be more dangerous; if centralized technologies develop rapidly while decentralized technologies stagnate, the world will become more centralized.

Therefore, it is necessary to balance these trends. Blockchain is just one aspect, which also includes decentralized ( outside of blockchain, such as P2P networks ), hardware and software security ( "digital shield" ), and various fields in biology.

Application Development Direction

Vitalik believes that current technological breakthroughs and user adoption have already shown results, but the most attention is often on fleeting speculative projects. He proposed three criteria for evaluating application value:

1. Can you imagine yourself or someone you know willing to use it? Can 2) be profitable?
2. Does the existence of this application make sense for non-users and non-investors?

It is very difficult to meet all three points at the same time; currently, there are only a few applications that meet the standards, such as payment, value storage, and prediction markets. He calls for the creation of 10 more successful cases.

Vitalik is disappointed that some people describe Ethereum as "intolerant" and believes that if the values of the blockchain community were reversed, he would lose interest in participating. However, he finds that the community values are still relatively consistent in offline communication, and therefore feels a responsibility to work with the community to create the ideal world. This requires some changes, such as the foundation needing to more actively support certain directions at the application level, rather than remaining completely neutral.

Communication Tools

Vitalik has been working hard over the past two years to move most conversations from Telegram to Signal. However, Signal is not perfect either; although it is encrypted, it is still centralized, lacks interoperability, requires a phone number to log in, and has server-visible metadata, among other issues.

He tries to use Status every year, recognizing its decentralized efforts, but there are still reliability issues. Currently, there are multiple small teams developing communication tools independently, but the lack of collaboration makes it difficult for any single product to reach an ideal level.

Vitalik recently started using Fileverse to handle documents and is satisfied with its user experience. Several people in the foundation have adopted it. He stated that if there were a decentralized encrypted communication tool that could achieve similar quality, he would definitely work to promote the community's migration.

Ethereum Foundation Positioning

Vitalik emphasizes that Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, not a company. If it becomes a company, it will lose its meaning of existence. Corporatization is the role of enterprises. There are already many large companies in the ecosystem, such as Consensys, various client teams, Coinbase, L2 teams, etc.

The best way is to create more opportunities for these companies to leverage their strengths, while the foundation plays a coordinating role.

Community Divisions and Future Directions

Vitalik observed that there are different opinions in the community:

• Some early participants have deviated from their original intentions, overly pursuing short-term investments.