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Original author: Pzai, Foresight News
Today, at the Ethereum developer conference EDCON 2024 in Tokyo, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin presented us with a speech on “The Next Decade of Ethereum”, which not only happened in the past 10 years.The changes are briefly reviewed, and from its forward-looking perspective, it depicts a picture of Ethereum full of infinite possibilities in the next 10 years.
Changes over the past decade
First, Vitalik reviewed the changes in social interfaces. From EtherTweet, which simply put information on the link in 2015 to the current multi-client Firefly, the changes in user experience and underlying architecture are included, which can produce higher efficiency andLower cost, availability has been improved.Vitalik regards Firefly as a “Farcaster+Twitter+Lens client”. Using posts posted by Firefly, you can post them to Farcaster and Lens at the same time.
Then Vitalik compared the improvements to on-chain interaction-related problems. In 2019, the cost of using the main network was relatively high, and ZK-SNARK was more expensive, and the current transaction cost was usually less than one cent.Ethereum has significantly reduced related fees and increased transaction processing speed through capacity expansion in the past decade.In terms of confirmation time (Tx inclusion time), it usually takes 1 to 5 minutes in 2019. If you are not lucky, you may have to wait up to 60 minutes before you can be included in the transaction.Now, after the implementation of EIP-1559, this process has been increased to 5 ~20 seconds, and a second-level confirmation has been implemented on Layer 2.
In addition, proposals such as EIP-4337 have improved the applicability and security of smart contract wallets.Vitalik expects nearly everyone to adopt smart contract wallets like Safe over the next five years.
Vitalik said that the relevant use cases of blockchain have not changed much in the past 10 years, focusing on stablecoins, financial derivatives, decentralized exchanges and forecast markets, so future use cases need to be discussed.He talked about decentralized exchanges and forecasting markets in 2014 (the cost on Polymarket, the popular forecasting market, is now much lower than before), but he did not predict the popularity of NFTs.
“I didn’t expect people to trade a digital monkey for up to $2 million. In 2020, I paid $1,000 in transaction fees on Augur, and today the transaction costs on Polymarket were almost zero.There have also been very interesting things in 10 years, so what will happen in the next ten years?”
Ethereum’s next 10-year outlook
In terms of wallets, taking the wallet UI as an example, Ethereum’s wallet interface in 2015 is highly homogeneous with Bitcoin, while in 2024, wallets are more inclined to the use experience of traditional applications.Vitalik believes that neither is the paradigm of future wallets, because Ethereum is committed to creating a new on-chain-based social system.
In 2024, an application developed by a Ukrainian company is building a voting system with zero knowledge proof.Voting itself can also be a government election, and if it is combined with zero-knowledge proof and privacy protection, it will be more credible.Looking ahead to 2034, if we can make voting itself more transparent, efficient and safe, we can expand the use cases of “voting governance” in our lives and combine it with certain financial elements.
In terms of capacity expansion, Vitalik said that the blob will first expand to 1 ~ 4 MB in the future, and will reach 16 MB/ main network block in the later stage. While achieving protection from Ethereum and its ecosystem, it will use transaction compression and other technologies to enable users to expand capacity.Benefit in the environment.
In terms of user experience, Vitalik hopes to integrate more self-sovereignty and security in future wallet construction based on the combination of traditional user experience.For example, in crypto wallet hosting, a combination of on-chain and off-chain mode is adopted, and the “Guardian” mode can enhance the protection of the wallet.In terms of the dual dimensions of user experience and security, the 2034 Web2 user experience and Web3 user sovereignty value will be combined, which is safer than traditional Web2 services.In addition, using Ethereum L2 will become smooth and unimpeded as using the Ethereum mainnet directly.
In addition, Vitalik also proposed a standardized experience on the interactive front-end: through the relevant display of the front-end (ERC-3770 and ERC-7683, etc.), the multi-chain experience within the EVM architecture is integrated. Here, Vitalik uses the prediction market Polymarket as an example, and the original user wasIt is recommended to pay attention to the risk of mistransfer caused by different chains. In the future, you can directly interact seamlessly through a single front-end.
In addition, Vitalik believes that builders should not just copy Web2, but should take the lead and be brave enough to explore.In 2034, there will be no desktop and mobile devices, but also wearables, AI and AR that can run locally, and it may eventually be BCI. There will also be some Community Notes, forecasting markets and similar technologies built directly into the wallet or browserThe practical technology and security aspects can also verify everything or provide on-chain content version proof, etc.These constructions also produce the meaning of cryptocurrency to protect people from the source in an ongoing security challenge.
Finally, Vitalik made a corresponding summary. He said that the development of Ethereum in the past decade has focused on theoretically. Now, when developers can achieve the quality of experience required by users, applications that are powerful and important enough are already on Ethereum.Build, then you can turn your attention to how to build applications that have an impact on the world while retaining the value that everyone has.
“What kind of application do we want to build? How do we build on the basis of retaining everyone’s values? I don’t know the answer, but I think that all of us, all of the developers, all of the Buidlers, and everyone who is indispensable in the community,There are opportunities to be part of shaping the future,” said Vitalik.
