Author: Frank, PANews
At the TOKEN2049 conference in 2024, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled What Excites Me About the Next Decade as a guest speaker. Vitalik said that although cryptocurrencies have existed for many years, they have not actually reached the stage of being truly widely available. Nevertheless, technological advances in the past few years are gradually achieving this goal. Vitalik expressed his thoughts on multiple issues such as user experience, handling fees, and privacy protocols. He believes that the crypto industry needs to continue to advance technological progress while maintaining the core value of decentralization to serve the entire society.
The crypto industry has entered a mature stage
Vitalik repeatedly emphasized in his speech that the crypto industry has entered the mature stage from the early stage of infrastructure construction. He pointed out: "Today's crypto field is no longer in the early stage." He took Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples, reviewed their development in the past decade, and pointed out that although the infrastructure construction of blockchain projects is still ongoing, the actual application of cryptocurrencies is gradually being realized. "We are no longer in the early stage of cryptocurrency, but in the early stage of practical application of cryptocurrency."
Vitalik mentioned that "Ethereum as a project has been around for more than 10 years, and in the 15 years since the birth of Bitcoin, we have seen things like ChatGPT go from non-existence to sudden rise, completely changing people's understanding of artificial intelligence. So we have to ask ourselves a question: How should we view all this? Are we really still in the early stages?"
Despite the rapid development of the crypto industry, Vitalik also said that the issue of cryptocurrency transaction fees is still an important limitation. Vitalik recalled that one of the major obstacles to the mass adoption of Bitcoin and Ethereum in the early days was high transaction fees. During his trip to Argentina, he found that many merchants and users, although enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies, still chose to use centralized trading platforms instead of decentralized solutions. This is because the high transaction fees have limited the actual use of decentralized technology.
“Fee chart about Ethereum’s weird phenomenon. Fees have dropped from $10 to 50 cents to less than 1 cent, basically close to zero. At the same time, OP and Arb, two major Ethereum Layer 2s, have reached a major security milestone called Phase 1, and multiple ZK-based Rollups have also told me that they plan to reach Phase 1 soon. Therefore, Rollups will soon become more secure as well,” Vitalik pointed out.
However, Vitalik also believes that with the application of Layer 2 technologies (such as Rollups), especially those based on ZK-Rollups, handling fees have dropped significantly, resulting in a significant reduction in transaction fees in the Ethereum ecosystem. This change makes decentralized technology more affordable for practical applications, paving the way for mass adoption.
Improving user experience is key to cryptographic expansion
Vitalik highlighted improved user experience as one of the key factors driving cryptocurrency mainstreaming. Early encryption products were often complex to operate, and users needed to learn how to switch networks, pay high gas fees, etc. Now, with the introduction of technologies such as EIP-1559, Layer 2, and Account Abstraction, the user experience of Ethereum has been significantly improved. He pointed out that Ethereum’s transaction confirmation time has been shortened from 5-10 minutes to 5-15 seconds, and can even be shortened to less than 1 second when using Layer 2.
In addition, Vitalik also demonstrated the evolution of the interface design of decentralized applications (DApps), pointing out that today's DApps are not only more functionally complete, but the interface quality is also close to the Web 2.0 level. Through these improvements, cryptocurrencies are gradually moving from geek circles to wider mass users. "This year we've also seen progress in account abstraction. We're seeing more and more people using security tools. We're seeing EIP-7702. We're starting to see mainstream adoption of ZK-snarks, in a variety of different applications. As a result, we have new and better privacy protocols.” These technical improvements have significantly shortened transaction confirmation time, and the application of Layer 2 technology allows most transactions to be completed within seconds, greatly improving the user experience.
However, Vitalik called on the industry to continue to maintain the decentralized open source value while advancing technology, and the future crypto world should be able to provide practical and secure services to the public.
Privacy protocols and multi-signature wallets are becoming important underlying tools
With the development of the crypto industry, privacy issues have become more and more the focus of users. In his speech, Vitalik pointed out that privacy protocols have great market potential in the crypto world. He specifically mentioned the application of zero-knowledge proof (ZK-snarks) technology, which allows users to complete transactions without revealing their personal identities, thereby achieving a balance between privacy protection and compliance requirements.
This privacy protocol will play a more important role in the future. Users can not only maintain a high degree of privacy, but also meet the regulatory requirements for transparency. This dual-demand solution will help cryptocurrencies better enter the mainstream financial market.
“We have a new, better privacy protocol. It’s a way for regular users to have a very high degree of privacy while meeting a lot of important compliance requirements, but without actually having a backdoor.”
In addition, Vitalik proposed multi-signature smart wallets as a key tool for future crypto asset management. Multi-signature allows users to disperse keys among multiple devices, friends or third parties, thereby improving the security of funds. Traditional cryptocurrency storage methods are either extreme self-sovereign methods (such as engraving private keys on metal plates and hiding them underground) or rely on centralized trust institutions. Multi-signature wallets can improve user experience while maintaining decentralization.
“That’s what a multi-signature smart wallet does. Multi-signature means you have multiple keys, for example you might have six keys and you need four to send a transaction. You can even set a rule that only one key is needed for small transactions. These keys can be any combination that you control.”
Vitalik believes that this wallet can not only be used for daily management of cryptocurrencies, but also achieve higher security by adding multi-layer trust mechanisms (such as email verification, government ID, etc.), avoiding the risks brought by relying entirely on centralized exchanges.
Decentralization and practicality: both are equally important
Regarding the contradiction between governance and development in the crypto industry, Vitalik emphasized that future cryptocurrency technology needs to strike a balance between decentralization and practicality. Excessive pursuit of decentralization may lead to the sacrifice of user experience and fail to attract mainstream users; while completely sacrificing decentralization will lose the core value of cryptocurrency. He called on the industry to maintain the technical advantages of decentralization while ensuring the availability and ease of use of the system in future development.
This is also Vitalik's vision for the future development of cryptocurrency: through continuous innovation and improvement of technology, it can not only meet users' needs for security, privacy and decentralization, but also attract more mainstream users to participate and promote the large-scale adoption of cryptocurrency. "We need to meet the needs of mainstream adoption while maintaining the values of open source and decentralization. We don't need to make a sacrifice between decentralization and practicality. In the future, we can have both."
In this speech, Vitalik Buterin described his vision for the crypto industry in the next decade. From lower fees and improved user experience to the application of privacy protection protocols and multi-signature smart wallets, he emphasized that the cryptocurrency industry is maturing rapidly. With the continuous development of technology, decentralized applications will become more and more widespread, and users will not only enjoy high privacy and security, but also be able to achieve more convenient daily operations.
Vitalik believes that in the future, cryptocurrency will not only be a technological innovation, but will also have a profound social impact. The core values of encryption technology - decentralization, privacy protection, and distributed management of trust - will become the pillars of the future digital economy. This is not only a technological revolution, but also part of the social structural change. In this process, as Vitalik said, "We need to have both", we must maintain the core value of decentralization, and also pursue the practicality of technology and the optimization of user experience.
