Organizer: Deep TideTechFlow**

ETH HK was held as scheduled in Hong Kong on October 23.

As you weave through the main conference hall, hackathon workshops, and project presentations, you seem to feel no signs of being deep in a bear market; on the contrary, developers from different countries maintain a high level of enthusiasm and participation in project development.

Among them, the most attention naturally goes to Vitalik's online keynote speech.

In a 20-minute speech titled "The Future of Ethereum and its Development Roadmap," Vitalik discussed the new opportunities and challenges facing Ethereum, account abstraction, social recovery, scalability, and L2, among many other topics, and shared his personal thoughts on the current industry development and future.

Deep Tide TechFlow reporters took notes on Vitalik's speech on-site and organized them as follows.

Achievements and Challenges After Ethereum's Transformation

Vitalik first reviewed some key achievements of Ethereum since last year's Merge upgrade, which transitioned the consensus mechanism from PoW to PoS:

• The first successful hard fork after the Merge.

• Over 25 million ETH are staked in proof of stake.

• Since the consensus mechanism switch, Ethereum has been running stably for over a year without major incidents.

At the same time, Vitalik also directly pointed out the challenges currently faced by the PoS consensus mechanism:

• Staking Centralization: As staking becomes an essential element of Ethereum's daily operation, staking service providers can help users stake, but this inevitably leads to centralization of staking.

• Transaction Processing Efficiency: To achieve optimal efficiency, the ETH network may want to limit the number of transaction signatures processed in each time window (Slot) to about 10,000.

Note from Deep Tide: A time window (slot) is typically a scheduled period, usually a few seconds, for proposing and validating blocks. Each slot has a pre-selected validator whose task is to propose a new block within that slot. To ensure the efficient operation of the network and prevent potential spam attacks or congestion, there may be a limit on the number of signatures or transactions that can be processed in each slot.

Account Abstraction and Social Recovery

Vitalik emphasized the importance and necessity of account abstraction multiple times. He believes that promoting account abstraction is based on two considerations:

• Convenience: Users can pay gas fees with any ERC20 token and execute multiple operations (signing, authorizing, verifying, etc.) in a single transaction;

• Security: Vitalik has also discussed with several multi-signature wallet and MPC wallet projects, believing that mnemonic-based solutions are still not the best choice, as the loss of mnemonics and private keys can lead to asset loss.

At the same time, Vitalik still favors social recovery. The main reason is that Vitalik considers the usage habits and experiences of ordinary users, who may not understand private keys or may lose their mnemonics.

In such cases, a "guardian" for your assets is crucial. Considering that you might forget or lose access, your friends or another device can serve as asset guardians for emergencies; at the same time, trusted institutions providing cryptographic services can also act as this guardian.

Moreover, account abstraction itself also faces challenges. These challenges are not just isolated technical issues but involve the entire crypto ecosystem.

For existing wallets, applications, and development tools, choosing to use account abstraction to enhance user experience or developer experience inevitably involves technical adjustments and adaptations. Account abstraction is a technical concept, but it will certainly encounter practical adaptation issues during implementation.

Additionally, with the emergence of more L2s, whether and how different L2s support account abstraction is also a challenge, as users may encounter situations where one L2 supports it while another does not.

Privacy infrastructure is one of the newly introduced components closely related to account abstraction. This means that to achieve account abstraction, it is necessary to ensure the privacy of transactions and operations, allowing different authentication methods and account types to function without exposing user privacy.

While promoting broader account abstraction, it may also be necessary to consider how to address the MEV issue to ensure the fairness, security, and healthy development of the system.

Therefore, Vitalik generally believes that the promotion and popularization of account abstraction require the joint efforts of all roles in the ecosystem, with the overall goal of aligning on-chain experiences with centralized service experiences.

Scalability, L2, and Privacy

With the emergence of L2s and the advancement of Ethereum's own technology, the scalability issue has been somewhat addressed, but Vitalik believes that the following challenges still exist:

• When L2 packages and submits transaction proofs to L1, how can the security and decentralization of this proof system be ensured?

• In L2's technical components, most transaction orderers are centralized, which may pose potential risks.

• L2s have different technical choices and development directions; how can wallets and addresses be constructed across L2s to provide users with a better experience?

• Transaction record-related data needs space for storage; how can data availability issues be resolved?

Due to time constraints, Vitalik did not provide very detailed answers to the above questions, but rather raised all the current issues facing scalability.

Interestingly, Vitalik also admitted during the speech that there are currently too many L2s in the market, but not every mention of scalability necessitates the implementation of rollups.

He also offered some personal suggestions:

1. Projects should clarify their security and scalability needs, determining what level they are at before deciding whether to adopt Rollup.

For example, scenarios involving account key storage, high-value financial assets, etc., have extremely high security requirements, while games or non-financial applications may have higher scalability demands.

2. Clarify the differences between Validium and Rollup and identify accordingly.

Validium is a Layer 2 scaling solution that stores data off-chain but verifies it on-chain. This means it can handle a large number of transactions but may sacrifice some decentralization and security—especially suitable for gaming scenarios;

In contrast to Validium, Rollup (especially zk-Rollup) retains data on-chain, which may be less favorable in terms of privacy or efficiency. However, if you seek reliability or greater security, you might choose zk-Rollup.

From the diagram presented by Vitalik on-site, for many projects, currently opting for Validium may be a reasonable choice as it provides a solution for off-chain data availability while ensuring transaction validity.

However, with the expansion of Blob (used to compress large amounts of data into smaller "blobs" for more efficient storage on Ethereum), projects can shift towards using Rollup, as Rollup offers more security and reliability by maintaining on-chain data availability.

Finally, Vitalik also mentioned three types of privacy issues currently faced in the Ethereum ecosystem:

• Coin Transfers: Privacy issues during cryptocurrency transfer processes. For instance, although many blockchain transactions are public and transparent, there is still demand and technology aimed at making these transactions more private to protect users' financial data.

• Guardians: As previously mentioned in social recovery, guardians are authorized by users to make certain decisions or perform certain actions. The privacy of guardians may relate to their identity, the assets they control, or the actions they perform.

• Identity/Reputation and Similar Apps: On the blockchain, identity and reputation systems can help verify the authenticity and credibility of users or entities. However, these systems may also involve personal privacy issues, as they may require collecting and displaying sensitive personal information.

Conclusion

At the end of the speech, Vitalik summarized his overall thoughts on the future development of Ethereum:

• Maintain robustness and seek cautious solutions: Ensuring the robustness of Ethereum's base layer is a prerequisite, upon which other capabilities, such as scalability, user experience, and privacy, can be cautiously expanded.

• Find a balance between experience and decentralization: Making Ethereum "user-friendly" for ordinary users is essential, but the benefits brought by decentralization must not be lost in the process.

• Technology and ecosystem are equally important: The development of technology points the way, but how to implement and promote it still requires the joint efforts of the entire ecosystem.