Vitalik Buterin introduces Ethereum in 30 minutes (2025 edition)

Author: Zhixiong Pan Source: chainfeeds

it is aLimited scale, but designed for global consensus, extreme robustness, and decentralizationAnd design a computer so that anyone, anywhere in the world, can trust that it will continue to run exactly as programmed.

The following is the full text of Vitalik Buterin’s opening speech at Devconnect ARG 2025, compiled from English.

To sum up Ethereum in one sentence: it is not FTX

I want to… sum up Ethereum in one sentence.Does anyone here remember FTX?(Raise your hands, please) Remember Mt. Gox?(Please raise your hands) Okay, there are quite a few people.

I actually don’t have a lot of negative feelings toward Mt. Gox’s Mark Karpeles.I think he made a huge mistake, but after that, if you look at every action he took after that, I think he was trying to learn from it, adapt, and work on positive-sum safety matters.

But FTX, I think it’s a perfect example of exactly what you get if you take the principles of Ethereum and completely flip them 180 degrees.Moreover, I didn’t put his face (SBF) on it.Each FTX ad featured SBF’s face as the most prominent feature, five times more prominent than other elements.

So, to sum up Ethereum in one sentence:It’s not something like FTX.

Several key points of Ethereum:

From “centralized trust” to “anyone can verify”

FTX is a centralized exchange where people invest huge amounts of money.There is simply no way you can verify whether FTX is actually solvent.Of course, it turned out it didn’t.

From “Don’t do evil” to “Can’t do evil”

“Don’t be evil” was a famously idealistic slogan from Google’s early days, especially when it was a small company.It seems to really pride itself on being a company that creates positive-sum value.Of course, as Google grew, these positive values began to really fade over time, and eventually the motto was officially abandoned over the past decade, and now seems to have become something more banal like “do the right thing.”

The approach of previous generations of technology, and the approach of which we’ve seen many of its consequences, is to stand up and say, “Trust me, because I’m a good person.”

The focus of decentralized technology and blockchain is that youNo needTo trust them.

3. From “I build for you” to “We build each other”

Another important distinction is between “I build for you” and “we build for each other.”There is a very subtle, but I think extremely important, distinction between a company and a community.

Another example that comes to mind is e-Residency in Estonia.I’m actually a little hesitant to criticize it because it’s really innovative and has a lot of positives.

It was very ahead of its time and allowed you to open a bank account digitally, vote digitally, and do a lot of e-government.I remember one of the more idealistic visions of that project was for Estonia to expand into a digital nation.Electronic Estonia (e-Estonia) can be much larger than physical Estonia with 1.3 million inhabitants.

The challenge is that this misunderstands whatreal community.

Electronic Estonia asservice providerVery successful, it is a “hub and spoke” structure.You have a central entity (the Estonian government) providing the service.Their services are very valuable and have helped many people around the world (for example, getting an EU bank account).

But it’s not a community.The difference between a company and a community is:

companyIt’s a hub-and-spoke structure: there’s one thing in the center doing things and collecting money.
communityIt’s everyone (or a lot of people) doing things for each other.

It’s open – not just “open” in the sense of OpenAI (there’s an open API you can use), but not even just “open” in the sense of a lot of open LLM work.

it isOpenness in the full-stack sense is not only open to consumption, but also to creation.open.

4. From “pleasing politicians” to “credible neutrality and freedom”

Also, “pleasing politicians” (under the old model) has become “credible neutrality and freedom” (what Ethereum pursues).

Ethereum is a global network that exists for the world and aims to protect the freedom of people around the world.It is not about currying favor with one particular company or one superpower at the expense of everyone else.

We do believe in this “global” thing.If you feel that the word “global” is too “soy”, you can also use the word “local universe” or “cosmolocal”.There are many different words, but we are here to impact the world.

What is “Ethereum, the World Computer”?

So, let’s talk about Ethereum, the world computer.

Ethereum is a platform for building decentralized applicationsGlobal, open, censorship-resistantplatform.

A new block is generated every 12 seconds, and each block contains a bunch of transactions.The blockchain processes just under 2 million transactions per day.I think as the gas limit increases, it will soon exceed 2 million.

Then there is the consensus mechanism.It used to be Proof of Work, now it’s Proof of Stake.The job of a blockchain is that as a user, anyone can send transactions (basically instructions for “what do I want to do”), and the blockchain ensures that everyone agrees on what happened (like which transactions were sent, and in what order).

Programmability: Ethereum’s core differentiator

The main difference between Ethereum and previous technologies is thatProgrammability.

Blockchains before Ethereum were either single-purpose protocols (only used for one specific application) or what I call “Swiss Army Knife” protocols – where the developers said, “Here are 14 different applications, and we create 14 different transaction types to support them.” If someone found the 15th application, then we had to hard fork the protocol.

Ethereum embraces programmability.No matter what application you want to make, you can upload a computer program.

For some historical reasons (related to Nick Szabo, early cryptography, etc., you can check it out), these programs are called “contracts”.They are smart contracts.

Many people in the legal profession are confused by the word “contract”.So you just need to know that “contract” here is atechnical terms.Just like in JavaScript, “Promise” is a technical term.

You upload computer programs to the chain, and they run automatically when users interact with them by sending transactions.

So, on a technical level, that’s basically it.It’s the “world computer”: not in the sense that it’s a computer big enough to host all the computations in the world (including all the crazy LLM inference and cat video generation).

What is blockchain good at?

1. Finance and DAO (resolving double payments)

Obviously, the first and largest category is payment and financial applications.The first blockchain, “Bitcoin,” was born as peer-to-peer electronic digital cash.Even in Ethereum, if you look at the Ethereum white paper, about half (or even more) of the list of applications that inspired Ethereum are different types of financial applications: issuance of assets, asset exchanges, financial derivatives, and even prediction markets.

AlsoDAO(Decentralized Autonomous Organization).This kind of system encodes the rules of an organization (such as a company) on the chain, and then these rules directly control the assets owned by the organization.

Blockchains tend to be good at these things, and one of the often cited reasons is:Blockchain solves double spending problem.

You may ask, why do we need the concept of “unanimity” or “consensus”?Why do we need proof-of-stake nodes to vote on what transactions happen in what order?

What happens if there is no consensus?What if we just had a decentralized network like BitTorrent?You can upload files on BitTorrent and anyone can download them.You could even (theoretically) have files contain programs and run them automatically.

The simplest problem to understand why that mechanism doesn’t work for money is this “double spend” problem.

The problem is, let’s say I have 1 ETH and I send 0.7 ETH to someone over there.I broadcast the deal.then iAt the same timeSend another transaction giving 0.7 ETH to another person over here.

In total, I turned 1 ETH into 1.4 ETH.If people could do this, ETH would hyperinflation and go to zero value.

If you don’t want this to happen, you need a way toDecide which transaction occurs first.This is what blockchain does.

2. Non-financial applications

Blockchain is also useful outside of finance.

Probably the most successful non-financial application isENS(Ethereum Name Service), I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it in a lot of places this week.You can basically have your own name.You can register an unoccupied .eth domain name (I have Vitalik.eth).

This is a username that is considered your username in all Ethereum applications, and itNot under the control of any single service provider.It’s not like a Google account, or a government-issued name.

3. Censorship resistance and certification

Blockchain provides strong guarantees of participation, also known as censorship resistance.It is a strong guarantee that if you send a valid transaction (i.e. comply with the protocol rules), it will be (and will be) packaged quickly.This is valuable in many areas such as finance (preventing market manipulation).

Blockchain is good at “proof of inexistence”, which is to prove that only a limited number of things have been issued.For example, if you want to issue 1,000 stamps to represent community membership, you can prove that you only issued 1,000 stamps, not 10 million, to prove that you did not keep them privately.

it also works fortimestamp proof: prove somethingNoTo be made before a certain point in time; or conversely, to prove somethinginMade before a certain point in time.This is useful for video authentication and other use cases.

Therefore, blockchain is a diverse tool, with both financial applications and other interesting “long tail” applications.

What is blockchain itself not good at?

1. Privacy

Zcash’s Zooko once famously said that Bitcoin is “Twitter for your bank account.”Does anyone here wish that all their financial transactions automatically turned into tweets?

But you have to realize that if the transaction you send on the blockchain is not private, if someone really wanted to, they could totally make a Twitter bot that automatically waits for you to send the transaction, analyze it with LLM, try to figure out who you sent it to, and then send a tweet.This is closer to “Twitter for bank accounts” than you might think.

2. Extreme scalability

If you wanted to run an LLM program on Ethereum to generate a cat picture, you could spend millions of dollars in transaction fees.

3. Low latency

This is the inherent cost of decentralization.If you want a geographically distributed, neutral system that the world can participate in, it can’t have 50 milliseconds of latency.If it really had (such low latency), then all the activity would end up concentrated in one city.

4. Access real-world information

This is the “oracle problem”.For example, deciding a payment based on whether something happens or not.Ethereum itself cannot solve the biggest trust problem, which is that you still need someone to tell you information: did that actually happen?

Blockchain can be combined with other “gadgets” to achieve these goals, but for blockchainitselfFor the most part, these areas are weaknesses.

The bigger picture: Web3 and cryptography

Ethereum is part of a larger story.This diagram comes from Gavin Wood’s 2015 vision for Web3, an early vision: Ethereum is one member of a suite of technologies that work together to create a freer, more open internet.

Blockchain is an important piece of this puzzle.But in 2015, there were a few sister protocols in development (and still in development today):

Swarm: Used for distributed storage, processing data that is too large for everyone to download to the chain.
Whisper: An off-chain peer-to-peer messaging protocol that doesn’t care about consensus.

These agreements continue: Whisper becameWaku, is used in many privacy protocols and instant messaging; the Swarm team is still there,IPFSIt is also being used extensively.

But I think one of the big things that’s happened is that this “bigger story” has expanded a lot.To me, the bigger story is this: there is a class of technology called cryptography.

Cryptography makes large-scale collaboration possible without centralized trust.

The most basic cryptography is encryption and signatures.

Encryption: Allows you to talk to friends 10,000 kilometers away without anyone in the middle (including infrastructure operators) being able to see the content.
signature: Allows you to verify that the information you receive is actually from the person it claims to be.

Recently, we sawprogrammable cryptography(programmable cryptography), a more advanced form.Not only can you encrypt and sign, you can also:

The entire calculation is performed on encrypted data.
Prove that you own certain data without revealing the data itself (e.g.ZKPs– Zero-knowledge proof).
Calculations that combine data from multiple people (e.g.FHE– fully homomorphic encryption).
(More distant) Obfuscation: Taking a program that contains your data and only doing specific things with it.

It’s a set of tools that allow you to collaborate at scale without a centralized actor.Blockchain is highly complementary to this in many ways.

The future of Ethereum

Our high-level goals are:

We want a secure, robust, streamlined, globally decentralized, censorship-resistant network with all the features people have come to expect from blockchain since the birth of Bitcoin.

Butunder these constraints, we also hope itFast and scalable, so that applications that want to benefit from these features have the space and ability to do so.

2025-2026: Scalability Arc

Gas cap, a measure of how many transactions Ethereum can handle, has been50% improvement.There is also currently a motion to increase the gas cap to 60 million (about a quarter of the nodes are currently voting for it, and I believe this number will continue to increase).

In 2026, we will have a series of EIPs that enable the Ethereum network to securely handle greater scale while maintaining decentralization and the ability to run regular nodes.

EIP-7732 (Native Proposer-Builder Separation, PBS): One of its effects is to allow nodes to spend a larger portion of their slot processing blocks without compromising network decentralization (or severely favoring centralized nodes).
Block level access list: This basically means,ExceptOutside the node where the block was originally created,All other nodes can process the block in parallel.

With “block-level access lists”, this problem is largely solved for every node except the one that creates the block.was solved, which is really amazing.

These two things will allow us to achieve a safer gas cap increase at the end of next year, making Ethereum more performant than it is at the end of this year.

ZK-EVM: The return of full node culture

Next up is what I’m excited about:ZK-EVM, andThe return of full node culture.

Who here ran an Ethereum full node 5 to 8 years ago?

Is anyone here running an Ethereum full node today?

Okay, that’s about the same number, but it’s not nearly enough.

I remember that the last time I synchronized the full node, it tookfour daystime.Four days is too long.It will also occupy your hard driveMore than 1 TBspace.And to keep it running, it requires a lot of calculations, drains your battery, and makes your hard drive die faster.This is an expensive thing to do.

ZK-EVM, based on the zero-knowledge proof techniques I mentioned, they allow youVerify the correctness of a block without performing all the calculations yourself.

This is no longer science fiction.It is now about to become an Alpha reality.

According to ethproofs.org, there are now provers capable of proving Ethereum blocks in real time using dozens of consumer-grade GPUs, and this number is shrinking rapidly every few months.

We can convert the node’sComputational requirements reduced to near zero.

Of course, bandwidth, storage, and I/O costs still exist, but they are also reduced.In theory, if you have a laptop, or even a phone with enough space (like 512GB, as phones are now available), you can start thinking about running a full node.

I think that in the next one to two years, even as Ethereum grows in size over the next two years, the number of people who can actually run a full node will increase significantly.

2026 to 2027: Censorship Resistance and Decentralization Upgrades

FOCIL: Allows a moderately sized set of nodes to propose “mini-blocks” per slot.This provides stronger guarantees that your transactions can be packed quickly.
Account Abstraction: Work is ongoing to ensure you can have more powerful smart wallets, better forms of security (like changing keys), and even support for privacy protocols, and all of thisNot dependent on intermediaries.

Longer term: Lean Ethereum

Justin’s team has been working on “Lean Ethereum,” a long-term effort to make deeper improvements to make Ethereum efficient and secure in the long term.Replace many suboptimal components with components that are known to be closer to optimal.

Highlights include:

Optimized, fast, ZK-friendly VM (virtual machine)
ubiquitousAnti-quantum(Quantum resistance)
ZK-friendly hash functions (the current leader isPoseidon, we are investing a lot of academic research and bounties to ensure its robustness)
Formal verification(Formally verifying) everything
Optimized consensus (Fast finality)

We’re basically taking all the lessons learned over the last five years and really bringing in those technologies that have only become really possible and available in the last five years.

User-level work: Trustless user experience

This includes privacy and security.

Privacy: More than just on-chain ZK proofs.It also includes protecting you from privacy violations by RPC nodes (from which you get data), network layer privacy, voting privacy, DeFi privacy, and even private account abstraction.
safe: Light clients (like Helios) are improving.Software supply chain dependencies (reducing the amount of software we have to rely on that could lead to total collapse due to bugs).On-chain version control (getting rid of the front-end server-dependent environment and preventing the server from being hacked and everything stolen).Multi-signature, social recovery wallet, hardware wallet.
interoperability(Interoperability): There are also related activities this week.

Ethereum can be a standard-bearer for a world powered by permissionless open technology and decentralized trustless security.More freedom, openness and collaborationworld.

It’s a powerful technology, and it’s quickly becoming more powerful.It’s also part of a family of tools that are rapidly growing in power.

I think the Ethereum community, and Ethereum technology, can really help bring this more free, open, and collaborative world into reality.

Let us work together to achieve this goal.

Thank you.

Question and Answer Session (Q&A)

Moderator:Okay, thank you very much Vitalik.I figured everyone knew what the first question was going to be, so I just asked it.Where can we buy glasses like the ones you wear?

Vitalik:I think they’re on Amazon.Unfortunately, we haven’t built a decentralized Amazon yet, so… this might be a good idea for a hackathon.

Moderator:Okay, straight to the point, similar question.What do you think of Ethereum’s relationship with Wall Street?

Vitalik:(…listen to the question…) Wall Street.Well, I think they are a user.In Ethereum, we are “pro-user”.

Moderator:Great.You’ve talked a lot about what Ethereum can become, and where it is today.What are some undervalued things that you think people can focus more on to extend the properties of Ethereum into the real world?

Vitalik:Well, I think there are a few different dimensions to this.

One of them is Ethereum itselfreal world adoption.Dreams start with payment.I remember being very excited in 2013 when there was a “Bitcoin Kiez” in Berlin.(Anyone remember?)… In the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, a man convinced 10 restaurants within a few hundred meters to accept Bitcoin at the same time.It became a Bitcoin cultural community.There was a lot of momentum around Bitcoin payments at the time, but it has since died for several reasons (I think rising transaction fees being one of the main reasons).

We now have the technology to make payments truly viable again.And there is a lot of demand to bring crypto payments back (in Buenos Aires), and there are even many physical stores here that accept ETH and stablecoins on Ethereum.

I think even this real world use would be great.

The other thing is, when you look at the underlying set of technologies, in any area – whether it’s communications, whether it’s governance, whether it’s lower down the stack like operating systems, or even hardware – you can:

Think in terms of the principles we talked about today.Think about how to make things more open, how to minimize the need for trust, how to protect users.In the meantime, consider some of the new technologies, including blockchain and cryptography, that are allowing us to move further in that direction than ever before.

Moderator:What are the most important skills for new and existing members of Ethereum to be better trained on or do better?

Vitalik:It depends on who you are, but I think it’s always healthy for a community like ours to be well-rounded.It’s always beneficial to dabble in a few different aspects of the field.

So I encourage everyone to try paying for coffee with ETH at least once this week; if you don’t have a wallet, install one; if you haven’t used a DApp, use one; if you haven’t written a smart contract, try writing one.

If you want, you can even try to learn how one of the underlying protocols works.

Also look at how all these technologies interact with the wider world, and Argentina has been a good place to be in that regard, with a lot of adoption at all levels of the stack.

Moderator:Another question is,How did you come up with the name Ethereum?

Vitalik:I think I was looking through a list of elements from science fiction and I thought this word sounded good.

Moderator:Great.What about the logo?

Vitalik:This is an interesting story.I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think the reason “Ethereum” was on that sci-fi list was because of a Japanese movie called Castle in the Sky.

In that movie, one of the central objects is the “Ethereum crystal”.The Aether Crystal is what makes the castle float.

I had no idea of its origin at the time.But after I named it Ethereum, I thought our artist might know about the movie and made the logo in the shape of an ether crystal.

I remember it was about five years later when I learned about and watched the movie for the first time, and I thought, “Wow, this crystal really looks like the logo.”

Moderator:Awesome.I think that’s all our problem.Is there anything else you’d like to say to the community?Like lunch recommendations?

Vitalik:Well, eat well, make sure you drink plenty of water, spend some time outside and enjoy the fresh air.You know, air is also one of the four elements, and it is important to keep it clean.

Enjoy this week’s events.

Moderator:Thank you so much Vitalik!