Highlights of Vitalik's Speech at EDCON 2023: Scalability, Privacy, and User Security

Web3CN
2023-05-23 17:37:30
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Vitalik believes that Ethereum has developed through two stages, moving from theory to application, and can solve real-world problems, but the current use cases are still mainly focused on trading cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Author: Web3CN

Since the establishment of Ethereum, it has been using PoW to verify transactions, until last year when it transitioned from PoW to PoS. With the increase in Ethereum's usage, many performance issues have emerged, and solutions regarding scalability, transaction costs, efficiency, and privacy protection have become the focus of Ethereum's future.

On May 20th, Montenegro time, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled "Three Technical Challenges of Ethereum: Scalability, Privacy, and User Security" at the EDCON 2023 conference.

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Vitalik believes that Ethereum has developed through two stages, moving from theory to application, and can solve real-world problems. However, current use cases are still mainly focused on trading cryptocurrencies and NFTs, with most users concentrated on centralized exchanges. This is because centralized exchanges are cheaper, more efficient, and easier to use, but they face the issue of tail risk, which necessitates their existence. But why is there still no real decentralization, or why is the trading volume of dapps still very low? The biggest reason is the technical issues currently faced.

Currently, Ethereum's biggest challenges come from four aspects: privacy, the security of consensus algorithms, the security of smart contracts, and scalability. These are the problems that Ethereum needs to solve in the future to make the use of decentralized applications smoother, and in the future, Ethereum will pay more attention to the security of user accounts to ensure asset traceability.

Regarding scalability, since every transaction needs to be verified, this is currently a bottleneck in Ethereum's development, as well as a bottleneck in scalability development. The recently popular Layer 2 solutions are also aimed at solving these problems, such as Optimism, Arbitrum, Scroll, Taiko, Zksync, etc.

At the same time, Vitalik explained from the user's perspective that as Ethereum's L2 solutions become more mature, ENS is compatible with L2, which can provide resolution services for the entire ecosystem and improve the efficiency of ENS users.

For wallet security issues, Vitalik shared two examples of stolen bitcoins and presented what he considers to be two perfect solutions: multisig and social recovery to ensure wallet security. Multisig is suitable for cold wallets, while social recovery is more suitable for hot wallets.

Regarding Ethereum's privacy issues, if you do not want others to know your wallet address or what assets you have, then the technology of stealth addresses is needed, which can generate temporary addresses to receive assets. However, complete privacy can lead to hacking and theft issues, which requires a new solution: Proof of Innocence, which allows for anonymous actions with the correct identity.

Finally, Vitalik mentioned ZK social recovery, believing that ZK is currently the most important technology on Ethereum. Many projects now require support from ZK technology, which can balance social recovery and privacy, providing a secure asset management solution.

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The topics mentioned in this conference's speech, such as account abstraction, stealth addresses, and ZK-SNARK, reveal Ethereum's development plans. In the future, Ethereum will need more support from the community and projects to create a blockchain ecosystem that is more private, scalable, and secure.

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