Founder "V God": What will the "next decade" of Ethereum look like?

On the tenth anniversary of Ethereum's birth, its co-founder Vitalik Buterin accepted an interview with the Bankless podcast on August 11, engaging in a two-hour in-depth conversation with the hosts, analyzing the development of Ethereum over the past decade and its grand blueprint for the next ten years.

"V God" envisions Ethereum transitioning from a grand concept of a "world computer" to a more solid "world ledger," ultimately entering a "maintenance mode" through technological maturity.

The core of this vision is the "barbell strategy": the base layer L1 focuses on security and decentralization as the foundation of trust; while the layer two network L2 meets the extreme performance demands of high-frequency trading. This strategy aims to "isolate" centralized pressure within L2, thereby protecting the core value of L1 from erosion.

Regarding the recently emerging ETH treasury companies, Vitalik expressed a cautiously optimistic view. He acknowledged that these entities provide new capital entry points and coordination mechanisms for the market, but also clearly pointed out their core risk—excessive leverage could trigger chain liquidations, posing a threat to market stability.

However, he stated, "I believe that participants in the Ethereum ecosystem, including those engaged in financial activities, are responsible and will not take risks lightly. Derivatives of ETH are a fundamental way to ensure financial stability, so I support the existence of these treasury companies."

At the same time, Vitalik made it clear that "privacy is the core spirit of cypherpunk," and privacy should be the default feature of all wallets, rather than an exclusive feature for a few.

The following is a summary of the key points from the interview:

• Vision for the Next Ten Years: Ethereum's next decade will focus on transitioning from a "world computer" to a more specific "world ledger," ultimately entering a "maintenance mode" where the technological roadmap is essentially complete. "If the ledger is a book, then ETH is the ink."
• Foundation for the Future—Privacy: Privacy is the core spirit of cypherpunk and a key to Ethereum's future development. He advocates that privacy should be the default feature of all wallets, rather than a separate "privacy wallet," believing this is crucial for addressing regulation and protecting user rights.
• Review of the Past Decade: Ethereum's development has far exceeded Vitalik's initial expectations but has also taken longer. The DAO incident, the rise of NFTs, the explosive growth of DeFi, and the astonishing speed of ZK technology development were the biggest surprises of the past decade.
• ETH Treasury Companies: Vitalik holds a cautiously optimistic attitude towards the emerging ETH treasury companies. He recognizes their role in capital introduction and social coordination, but his core concern lies in the systemic risks that excessive leverage may trigger.
• L1/L2 Barbell Strategy: The Ethereum base layer (main chain L1) will focus on security and decentralization to provide a foundation of trust for the ecosystem; while the layer two network (L2) will meet the extreme pursuit of low latency for high-frequency trading (HFT), thereby isolating centralized pressure and avoiding the erosion of L1's core value. L1 should have moderately low latency to meet the needs of ordinary users; for scenarios requiring extremely low latency, such as high-frequency trading, L2 is the better choice We need to find a way for L1 and L2 to work together to achieve balanced development of the entire ecosystem.
• The Role of Ethereum: It can be divided into two parts. First, it provides a tool that protects people's freedom, autonomy, and organizational capabilities, which does not rely on any individual, company, or country; the second part is the construction of a global community. Ethereum attracts a group of people who care about decentralized finance, innovative organizational forms, privacy protection, and democratic governance, and the community of Ethereum itself still has irreplaceable value.
• Core Values: The advantage of Ethereum lies in its multi-layered and diversified ecosystem, which should serve as an open "sandbox" that encourages various innovations rather than extreme optimization in a single dimension.

The Rise of ETH Treasuries: Opportunities and Leverage Risks Coexist

In an interview, regarding the highly discussed ETH treasury companies in the market, Vitalik admitted that he sometimes feels "confused," but he acknowledged that these tools provide new channels for different types of investors to enter the Ethereum ecosystem and play a coordinating role at the societal level.

"I think the social coordination around ETH as a corporate treasury asset is valuable," Vitalik said, "providing people with more tools to access ETH is a good thing."

However, his biggest concern lies in the potential leverage risks behind these tools. He warned that if these treasuries evolve into an overly leveraged game, the normal market corrections could be amplified into a "death spiral" triggered by forced liquidations, ultimately leading to a dual collapse of credibility and price. Nevertheless, Vitalik expressed confidence in the maturity of the ecosystem: "I believe that the participants in the Ethereum ecosystem, including those engaged in financial activities, are responsible and will not take risks lightly."

A Decade in Review: Development Beyond Expectations and Unexpected Surprises

Vitalik Buterin reflected on the journey of Ethereum from a "side project" he personally envisioned to a global platform, whose scale has "far exceeded expectations," but the development time has also been "much longer than anticipated." He admitted that the initial idea was to complete the project in a few months and then return to university, but the immense attention on the ecosystem made him realize that it required more serious investment, ultimately prompting the team to decide to build a true Ethereum base layer L1.

The past decade has been filled with unexpected events. Vitalik listed several key "surprises":

• The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) Incident and Hard Fork: In 2016, The DAO project attracted up to 11% of the ETH supply in a short period, but then collapsed due to a vulnerability being exploited, ultimately leading to the hard fork between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Buterin referred to it as a "dramatic challenge akin to a TV drama."

• The Explosion of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): The scale of the DeFi ecosystem's explosion after 2019, as well as the emergence of NFTs as a completely new asset class, far exceeded his expectations.

• Non-linear Development of Technology: The realization of Proof of Stake (PoS) took longer than expected, while the development speed of Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZK) technology was "five times faster than anticipated," bringing new possibilities for Ethereum's future scalability.

Ultimate Vision: From "World Computer" to "World Ledger"

In the interview, Vitalik officially revised Ethereum's positioning from the early "World Computer" to "World Ledger." When asked about the role of ETH in the "World Ledger," Vitalik humorously likened it to: "If the ledger is a book, then ETH is the ink."

He explained that the term "computer" is too broad and can easily mislead people into thinking that L1 will handle all computing tasks. In contrast, "ledger" more accurately points to the core function of Ethereum's base layer L1: a globally shared layer with extremely high economic value, responsible for recording and settlement.

This positioning also clearly defines the relationship between L1 and L2: L1 is the authoritative, trustworthy ledger, while L2 is the environment for various efficient computations and executions built on top of it.

Therefore, he proposed a "barbell strategy": L1 provides "good enough" low latency from the user's perspective and focuses on security and decentralization; while L2 can freely explore various high-performance application scenarios, including high-frequency trading (HFT). The independent ordering mechanism of L2 allows it to absorb extreme demands for speed while isolating centralized pressure from L1. Vitalik believes that this layered structure is key to maintaining the long-term health of the ecosystem.

The Return of Privacy: From Marginal Feature to Default Function in Wallets

Privacy is another core theme that Vitalik repeatedly emphasized in the interview. He believes that privacy is the cornerstone of the cypherpunk spirit and a core value that the Ethereum ecosystem must promote. He pointed out that one mistake in the current ecosystem is the creation of the concept of "privacy wallets," which makes privacy a niche choice.

The future direction should be to make privacy a "default feature" in all mainstream wallets. Users should be able to easily have private balances and private sending options in their regular wallets. He revealed that the Ethereum Foundation has already initiated related work to promote the realization of this vision.

In terms of technical pathways, the concept of Privacy Pools, such as the practices of protocols like Railgun, has proven that it is feasible to strike a balance between protecting user privacy and preventing illegal fund flows. Vitalik believes that through technological means, the encrypted ecosystem is fully capable of providing privacy protection that far exceeds that of traditional financial systems while achieving or even surpassing its effectiveness in anti-money laundering

Relationship with Bitcoin: A Dual Perspective

When discussing the relationship between Ethereum and Bitcoin, Vitalik provided a dual perspective. He believes that the relationship between the two communities should not be viewed in a generalized manner, but rather by distinguishing "different types of new groups."

On one hand, he sees mutual respect among the technical builders. Vitalik pointed out that those in the Bitcoin community who are dedicated to technological exploration (such as BitVM, Taproot, OP_CAT) "have a lot of respect" for the achievements Ethereum has made in technological advancement and privacy protection. On the other hand, he clearly distinguishes between the technocrats and the ideologues, noting that the core ideological differences between the two ecosystems still exist.

Ethereum has developed for 10 years, while Bitcoin has been around for about 16 years. "So, we have all grown up together. Ethereum is entering its teenage years, while Bitcoin has just learned to drive."

The following is the full transcript of the interview (translated by AI tools):

Guest: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin

Host: Ryan Sean Adams; David Hoffman

Podcast Name: Bankless

Original Title: Vitalik Buterin: How Ethereum Becomes The World Ledger?

Broadcast Date: August 11, 2025

Some professional terms:

L1 (Layer 1 blockchain, mainnet)

L2 (Second layer network outside the mainnet)

DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)

High-Frequency Trading (HFT)

EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)

Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZK-SNARKs)

Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines (ZKVMs)

Proof of Stake

Ethereum Name Service (ENS)

Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Transactions Per Second (TPS)

Ethereum Foundation (EF)

Research Virtual Machine (VM), Taproot (a privacy and efficiency upgrade technology for Bitcoin), OP_CAT (script opcode that extends Bitcoin's functionality)

Block Access Operating System (Block Access OS)

PIR (Private Information Retrieval)

David (00:42)

Ethereum has just turned 10 years old, and we once again invite Vitalik Buterin to the podcast. Welcome back to Bankless.

Vitalik (00:48)

Thank you very much, David and Ryan. I'm glad to be back.

David (00:52)

First of all, happy birthday to Ethereum. The Ethereum white paper was published back in 2013, and then the Ethereum mainnet launched in July 2015. So, ten years later, Vitalik, how does Ethereum's development compare to your initial vision?

Vitalik (01:07)

Its scale far exceeds my expectations. I think that's the most important point. It has indeed taken longer than expected. Its achievements have also surpassed my expectations.

Vitalik (01:19)

When I wrote that November version of the white paper, my plan was for it to be a side project. I would finish it quickly in a few months and then return to university. That ultimately did not happen. Then, at some point, we thought there would be four phases. When we reached the proof-of-stake phase, it just so happened that the foundation's funding ran out, and then the project would start to develop on its own from there. That also did not happen.

Vitalik (01:47)

Then, all the DeFi started to emerge, and different groups began to initiate various types of token waves. A lot of that content was already written in the white paper. We wrote derivatives as a use case into the white paper. That has indeed materialized, although the terms people ultimately used often differed. In some cases, ENS and stablecoins also emerged. But at the same time, many very interesting surprises also appeared.

David (02:25)

Now, looking back at these 10 years of Ethereum, many things have gone more or less according to plan. If you read the white paper and then look at today's Ethereum, you will find that it has indeed followed some of Ethereum's original visions to some extent. Reflecting on the past, what unique contributions do you think Ethereum has made to the world that you might be most proud of or happiest about?

Vitalik (02:52)

I think one of Ethereum's biggest contributions is its important role in promoting openness and decentralization, and making these ideas gradually become a habitual way of thinking for many people. These values need to be passed down and updated by each generation. Traditional freedom and open-source software played such a role in the 1980s and 90s. To a large extent, the blockchain world is meant to play the same role in the 2010s and 2020s, and I think it has indeed done so for many people. It has enabled the possibility of many things. Prediction markets are one example. In the early 2010s, they were mainly just an idea, and Ethereum provided a huge experimental ground to truly turn them from ideas into reality. The whole concept of DAOs, although the field has experienced many ups and downs, has overall transformed the governance of controlling resources and organizations into something more programmable. I am very proud of this, and I believe we will continue to see the dividends it brings in the coming decades So, there are many different things.

Adams (04:18)

Vitalik, you mentioned some unexpected events that occurred during this process. I can imagine there were many surprises, one interesting anecdote being that you initially expected this to be just a side project, but it turned into a massive endeavor that has lasted for about 10 years, more or less full-time. So, what were some of the unexpected events in the development of Ethereum that you didn't foresee?

Vitalik (04:40)

The DAO received such a huge amount of ETH and was almost immediately attacked. In hindsight, the former was more surprising than the latter, but it was still unexpected.

Adams (04:53)

It's like an out-of-control use case and can also be seen as an early instance of decentralized finance (DeFi), as it was closely related to capital formation. I remember at that time, about 5% of the Ethereum supply was attracted into the DAO, which was a huge number.

Vitalik (05:11)

It actually reached 11%. The total supply of Ethereum at that time was 11 million. If it were a lighter version, it might have reached 17%. But in any case, that proportion was indeed very high, marking the first time in Ethereum's history.

David (05:22)

An instance where animal spirits truly took off on Ethereum.

Adams (05:28)

Okay, are there any others?

Vitalik (05:32)

The birth of Ethereum Classic (ETC). Then, I like to think of it like a TV series; just as the chapter of ETC was about to end, the chapter of the Shanghai DDoS attack began. The timing was perfectly scripted. Maybe it was the same screenwriter, I don't know. But that was a series of very engaging technical challenges.

NFTs were a big surprise. I completely did not anticipate the emergence of something like NFTs. Also, the scale of DeFi growth, from Uniswap being almost nonexistent in 2019 to the huge prosperity we saw just a year and a half later. And other things, like the time it took for proof of stake to be implemented was much longer than I expected.

Vitalik (06:36)

The development of zero-knowledge proof (ZK-SNARKs) technology progressed about five times faster than I expected. This is great. The level of interest from institutions and even governments was almost there from the very beginning. Even in the 2010s, many large companies were very interested in this field. Many governments were also interested. I think a lot of the early interest was very abstract. It was just people trying to innovate or show that they could innovate.

Vitalik (07:20)

But even so, this is not what I expected. Now, we see institutional interest has returned, but this time in a more specific form. There are other things.

Adams (07:37)

Vitalik, one macro issue you mentioned is that all of this has taken longer than you imagined, at least since you released the white paper. Why has it taken longer? When you say "it took longer," do you mean that achieving proof of stake took longer, or that implementing the rollup roadmap took longer? Which specific parts took longer than you initially imagined, and why?

Vitalik (08:04)

One reason is the difficulty of software development, and I didn't have enough experience at the time to appreciate that. Another reason is that we kept setting higher standards for ourselves. The version of Ethereum we originally wanted to launch in a few months is actually what we now refer to as Layer 2 built on Primecoin. But what happened later was that we gained a lot of attention and interest in January, and we realized that many people were pinning their hopes on this. It deserved our more serious consideration. So we decided we wanted to create a real L1. Of course, at that time, there wasn't really an L1 that was suitable for building L2 on. So, it might be a combination of two factors: the technical development was slower than expected, and we kept raising our standards.

David (09:05)

In Ethereum's history, you've mentioned some, there have indeed been some completely unpredictable huge challenges, with The DAO fork being the first and the Shanghai attack being another. But even during the successful periods of Ethereum, such as the NFT boom in 2021, Ethereum projects faced challenges. Ethereum projects have continuously faced a series of challenges. I would like to ask you to comment on how Ethereum specifically responded to these, how this strategy evolved into a culture, a community, including the personnel within the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum core developers, and the Ethereum community, we developed coping strategies. We have a unique strategy for overcoming challenges that is specific to Ethereum. Now that we have about 10 years of data, how would you articulate Ethereum's unique strategy for overcoming those inherently unpredictable challenges?

Vitalik (10:03)

I think we, as an ecosystem, have done very well in problem-solving. There are always many different approaches being tried simultaneously. Usually, there is an L1-based approach, as well as some application-layer approaches. Typically, there are multiple competing methods within each category. We are able to advance many tracks in parallel. We can even gain a lot of synergies between different tracks, especially during the maturation of ZK-snarks, where many different efforts in the field contributed simultaneously and promoted each other.

Vitalik (10:45)

I think this collaborative style developed by the ecosystem has proven to be quite fascinating. It is not perfect, but overall, it works quite well.

David (11:03)

If you could go back in time to meet a younger version of yourself or an earlier Ethereum Foundation, and teach them something that could help Ethereum develop, when would you go back? What would you teach?

Vitalik (11:17)

One answer that comes to mind is to go back to the very beginning and tell them everything we know now about ZK-snarks. This technology is powerful and a game changer in many ways.

David (11:33)

Just to enable a leap in Ethereum's ZK technology.

Vitalik (11:37)

A leap of 10 years. That's right. I think we have taken many technical detours or forks that we actually didn't need to take. If we had known what the final state would look like, in some cases, we could have saved a lot of resources and achieved our goals faster. The inability to predict the future is one of the frustrating drawbacks of Ethereum. Interestingly, people have indeed asked me what time capsule message I would send to my past self. Many times, the answer is to give myself the correct technical answers. But then I think, besides warning myself to have more realistic expectations about timelines, what other answers could there be?

Vitalik (12:47)

I sometimes wonder if there were some ideas at the so-called social or cultural level that, looking back, could have made things better. One example might be whether Ethereum should have a...

Vitalik (13:13)

A time-limited supply portion to fund public goods, even based on some clunky mechanism we knew in 2014. The argument here is that we could have done this. Instead of a clear pre-mine, miners could vote on who receives developer rewards based on markers from the past 1024 blocks. This could have led to very similar results and might have provided more funding for the foundation and other organizations. But it could have given us more credibility in the early days.

Vitalik (14:01)

Another thing I think about is whether things could have been done better in the early relationship with Bitcoin. Ethereum's failure to capture more of Bitcoin's momentum is always a bit regrettable.

Vitalik (14:20)

This is a rather crazy hypothesis. For example, if Ethereum (1) was issued according to the formula I mentioned, and then (2) assumed it was actually a fork of Bitcoin. Then based on that, say, hey, we are going to switch to proof of stake. We would start with a relatively rudimentary proof of stake on day one, and then we would issue the remaining 4 million ETH based on some developer formula So, Ethereum might become the big block camp compared to Bitcoin.

Vitalik (15:00)

I think you may have read my comments on the big block and small block sides in the block size war. I was thinking that if Ethereum had been Bitcoin's block size solution from the beginning, there might still have been a fork, but the whole process could have been more productive. This is something I sometimes ponder. But everything has unexpected consequences and surprises. If you bring in an existing community, you will have many stakeholders from day one, and then you might end up with many things that cannot be executed well. So I'm not sure.

Adams (15:53)

The philosophy of Bitcoin has somewhat evolved into monotheism. So I was thinking, is any kind of split coin destined to split that community apart? But we have now developed for 10 years, and Bitcoin has been around for over 16 years.

Vitalik (16:16)

16 years.

Adams (16:18)

So, we have all grown up together. Ethereum is entering its teenage years, while Bitcoin has just learned to drive. Do you think the relationship between Bitcoin and Ethereum has improved? Or is it just a matter of price ratio? I feel that when the ETH/BTC ratio is unfavorable to Bitcoin, Bitcoin holders are always friendlier to Ethereum people. So they are quieter now. But when the price direction changes, things might change too. But I feel that the hostility between the new generation of Bitcoin and Ethereum holders may have decreased. How would you describe this relationship?

Vitalik (16:56)

It depends on what you mean by the new generation. Because I think there are different types of new generations, those who are trying to make a technical impact, researching BitVM, Taproot, CAT, op_cat, and so on. Then there are the Saylorists, and I don't expect Saylorists to be particularly friendly or have any particularly aligned values with Ethereum. Technically, the smart ones, I think they have a lot of respect for what Ethereum is doing, whether it's the technological advancements made or the increasingly open and effective way the ecosystem defends privacy; we are not just talking the talk, we are delivering real results. At the same time, I think many people also respect the efforts of the Bitcoin community on op_cat and some new Bitcoin Layer 2 ideas. There is indeed some very interesting technical work going on there. So from that perspective, the relationship is definitely more positive.

David (18:26)

When you see people building technically on Bitcoin, like building on BitVM, trying to make Bitcoin more expressive, do you think, guys, you are just wasting your time? Just come build on Ethereum; that's what we are here for. Or do you actually look at what they are doing there with curiosity and optimism?

Vitalik (18:45)

Both can coexist.

David (18:49)

I want to ask about the current moment for Ethereum. Recently, with the election of Donald Trump, we have seen a shift in social trends both within and outside of cryptocurrency. Perhaps to name this shift in social trends, I would describe it as a transition from a feminine "WEF soy boy" mentality to a "Bronze Age mentality." To quote someone on Twitter, "Woke is dead, Base must rise." This is the cultural trend of our current era. We have also seen this in cryptocurrency, with many projects vying to position themselves as US market-based projects. We also saw that infamous Solana marketing video, which claimed to invent technology rather than gender. We still see this in cultural debates today, such as the discussions sparked by Sydney Sweeney's jeans.

Adams (19:40)

Oh my, has this infected the cryptocurrency space, David?

David (19:43)

I've seen it on my timeline.

Vitalik (19:45)

Now it has. Congratulations. This episode is the super spreader of this meme.

David (19:51)

Exactly. It's worth noting that Ethereum has not participated in this shift.

Vitalik (19:58)

By the way, I want to publicly thank Sydney Sweeney for not doing any NFTs, hopefully.

Adams (20:05)

You gave her an idea, Vitalik, be careful.

David (20:08)

What I want to ask is, regardless of what Ethereum looked like before this cultural shift, it remains the same today. I want to ask, is this by design? Should Ethereum be a fortress against the tides of the times and fleeting trends?

Vitalik (20:25)

Ethereum should be a diverse ecosystem that includes many different people and many different viewpoints. At the same time, in a world with many different cryptocurrencies and ecosystems, you will indeed see varying degrees of drift and organic self-selection occurring. Even if Ethereum were the only cryptocurrency, you would expect to see cultural differences between Ethereum and artificial intelligence. I believe every project has a responsibility to strive to create the best and most honest version of the philosophy that its members are most passionate about and best suited for. Hopefully, the result of all this is that we can achieve productive and world-improving outcomes in many different directions, rather than projects fighting against each other or falling into a state of doing nothing but shouting slogans. Then you see a group of people shouting one slogan, another group shouting another slogan, both feeling very righteous. But three months later, you come back and find they have actually made no progress So, I personally have a lot of concerns about the various cultural shifts we see in the world. But if you’re just worried, then in the end, you’re just one of those people shouting slogans. So the real question is, how do we actually move forward and respond, and create the next better competitive alternative?

Vitalik (22:34)

In this regard, one of the new themes this year is that I’m trying to reset the conversation about public goods funding and DAOs through some actions and words. Because I do believe these are important topics, and I really think that if you abandon funding public goods, if you abandon any form of governance other than founder dictatorship, it will still bring a lot of quite negative consequences, and the end result is that you revert to essentially a “trust me” model.

Vitalik (23:18)

But at the same time, there are practical issues with quadratic funding, and token voting and delegated DAOs also have significant problems. So I have been advocating for prediction market-based funding and prediction market-based DAOs. I have been collaborating with Divan. He has been working on Deep Funding, which is a public goods funding project. There’s also a version 2, which is very directly based on prediction markets, essentially combining prediction markets with a jury mechanism. The basic idea is that if you have a small tool that can give high-quality opinions on the value of something, but it requires a lot of effort, then you can use prediction markets as a way to scale it. My basic philosophy is to try to replicate the best aspects of free markets, but applied to the field of public goods funding. Create an open game, what political scientists call an “open access order,” where anyone can come in, and if they do well, they can succeed, and they feel they have a fair chance. Something that doesn’t degrade into a social game, that doesn’t degrade into a game of persuading a few central figures, and then tries to put it into some practical experiments.

Vitalik (25:00)

The Aquarius team has done some work in this area. Then, another big thing I’ve been pushing for is to focus more on privacy. I think the reason for this is that privacy has always been a core part of the cypherpunk ethos. If you remember the Chaumian e-cash from 1982, Chaumian e-cash was actually not decentralized. It had a centralized operator, and all transactions went through it, but it was private, and it was also private to the centralized operator. Because that was the feature we could technically achieve at that time. It was due to technical limitations that we turned to Bitcoin, which is decentralized but not private. But now, we have ZK-snarks. Those technical limitations have disappeared, and we can actually achieve both decentralization and privacy. So we should actually do this. There has already been some very interesting work started in standardizing privacy pools similar to Railway, making it easier to integrate privacy protocols, and researching privacy issues related to on-chain reading. Basically, if you are an ordinary user, you have a browser wallet, and you don’t have 2TB of free space, what are the ways you can access Ethereum without leaking all your behavioral data to Infura? There has already been some very interesting cryptographic and academic work in this area. I think, in terms of cultural positioning, my role model is Milai. Because if you look at what Milai has done, I think it's really clever; he basically has a Bronze Age vibe, but his substantive content is actually the same as what the three of us would support at any time over the past 15 years.

Vitalik (27:17)

He made the market freer. He made the government more efficient. He did reduce inflation. He simplified a lot of things in the housing market. He did a lot. And he also lowered tariffs. He made the country more open. His government team worked with us to make it easier for people to obtain visas for Devconnect. So in many ways, substantively, he is very not material, but at the same time, he has the vibe of the other side. So he successfully attracted a lot of people.

Vitalik (28:15)

For me, privacy actually has many of the same attributes. Because privacy is freedom. Privacy is a very important right that we all need to protect here. Privacy is something that must be built through technology. If you make privacy the focus, then the game you are playing is one about action rather than empty talk. But at the same time, privacy is not a multi-billion dollar scam; privacy is not people tearing off T-shirts and pounding their chests; privacy is not collusion with all politicians. So it is something that I think everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem should be able to support. Therefore, I think this is something we must continue to work to advance.

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Adams (32:12)

Let's talk more about this because I think it's an interesting cultural component of how we balance the values of Ethereum with the mainstreaming moment of traditional finance. So you mentioned Milei, who has a "mullet" from the Bronze Age, with the front being Bronze Age style but the back representing wise policies and a pragmatic spirit of getting things done. It really works. So how do we achieve privacy on Ethereum in a "Bronze Age mullet" way?

Adams (32:37)

In certain areas, we seem to have made tremendous progress in cryptography. We have incredible ZK technology. But when we try to implement privacy, like with Tornado Cash, we are in a court case, and as of the recording, we still don't know the outcome of Roman Storm's case. So whenever you get into financial privacy, you face resistance from nation-states. I've always thought there is a point that is somewhat valid, which is that if Ethereum or Bitcoin had provided privacy on Layer 1 from the very beginning, and all transactions were private, we would never have reached the level of widespread acceptance we have today because some forces would have stifled this technology in the cradle. So how do we balance this? I think this is a realistic way to evolve privacy. We now have these very niche applications, like Tornado Cash, and even things like Railgun that can do some things. But they are not user-friendly, not widespread, and certainly not default privacy. There are also projects like Aztec that are emerging, which will go live on the mainnet, but that will be their own independent rollup. How do we balance all these things to reach a state that we are satisfied with, rich in content, while also allowing those nation-states that are trying to maintain some degree of freedom to feel comfortable letting it develop? What does a realistic privacy roadmap look like here?

Vitalik (33:57)

Okay. I think there are two parts to this. The first part is how we move from privacy being very niche to privacy being a default part of the experience. The second question is how we get enough key groups, as well as governments and regulatory bodies, to accept this. For the first question, the reason I don't support something like literal on-chain Layer 1 privacy, like the wormhole-type stuff in EIP-7503, is not because I think it's fundamentally wrong, but because I think it's technically too early to make such a commitment. I mean, we still don't know which technology will be the best. If we lock in a certain technology as Layer 1, we might be locking ourselves into something very undesirable. This is obviously a concern we have whenever we formulate any EIP. But for privacy, because the data itself is private, you can't just mess around with it, like replacing tree structures when you really need to search and replace one thing with another. So it's harder to upgrade

David (35:18)

But Vitalik, does this mean you fundamentally believe that privacy on Ethereum Layer 1 is correct?

Vitalik (35:23)

Yes, I am very open to this in the long run. One argument is that I mentioned future compatibility. Another argument is security. Because you have to remember that if the privacy tools on L1 are compromised, the consequences will be extremely severe, as someone could stealthily steal an unlimited amount of tokens. I believe the technology will eventually be good enough for us to make that leap. I have seriously stated in my recent blog post that the number of bugs in code is on a downward trend and will eventually approach zero. So we will reach a point where we can have a very high level of trust in the code, to the extent that security researchers trained over the past 20 years will find it hard to imagine. I believe AI will accelerate this process. But before that, Zcash deserves praise; they were brave enough to go for it directly. But even so, the threshold is still very high. So the question is, can we make privacy as default as possible without making it Layer 1? For me, the medium-term goal is to make privacy a default feature of wallets. The way we achieve this is basically that I think the biggest mistake we as an ecosystem are currently making is that we have proposed the concept of a "privacy wallet." We should not have privacy wallets. Privacy should be a feature of wallets. The privacy feature should be something that can be integrated into existing wallets.

Adams (37:10)

What are you saying? So if I have my existing crypto wallet browser extension, like on my phone, there will be an option where I can send a transaction normally, or I can send a private transaction, is that the default setting?

Vitalik (37:20)

Exactly, you have a private balance and a private send button, and it's all part of wallets like Metamask, Rabbi, or Empire.

Adams (37:27)

Can we do this now? Why can't we do it now?

Vitalik (37:30)

In fact, the Ethereum Foundation has already started some work internally trying to move in this direction. So hopefully we will see some results in the coming months.

Adams (37:43)

What about the other part of the question, which is how do we get nation-states to accept it? Projects like Ethereum clearly want to push the Overton window towards more privacy, more open source, and more decentralization. To some extent, this will contradict some governments and cultures that do not accept these. But we want to push cultural development and hope that this can be accepted by the mainstream. We cannot let it be illegal in all countries of the world. Can we find some balance that addresses some nation-states' concerns about crime and money laundering while balancing the values of cypherpunks? Are these two fundamentally incompatible?

Vitalik (38:22)

I think, first of all, all the progress we've made on the concept of privacy pools over the past few years is very good. Now that Railgun exists, you can use it. And there are successful cases that prove it has indeed prevented those who attacked large DeFi contracts from putting funds into them.

Vitalik (38:47)

Privacy pools also use very similar technology. So the whole concept is starting to withstand practical tests more and more. What I've realized so far is that the vast majority of illegal funds through privacy protocols are stolen from DeFi protocols or, in some cases, stolen from individuals. In both cases, they are very suitable for this level of blacklist mechanism of privacy protocols.

Vitalik (39:23)

Because if your money is stolen, there will probably be an API through which you can basically mark your own coins as suspicious. If a DeFi project is hacked, it will do the same thing. So I think this alone can largely push things forward. As for how much more we can or need to do, I think one point to remember is that the fiat currency ecosystem is absolutely not a model for resisting bad actors. Various bad actors have various ways to move funds and anonymize themselves to evade detection. They have ways and know how to use them. Given that funds are transparent on public blockchains, at least in the sense that you can point out the transactions that are happening, and if something happens to your money, you know when it was transferred, I actually think achieving a level of resistance to bad actors or unfriendly behavior that is comparable to the fiat currency ecosystem, while giving people more actual privacy, could be quite feasible. So for me, that's one aspect. I think the second aspect is that we do need to make a positive case for why a higher degree of privacy is important, including its importance from the perspective of law enforcement objectives. For me, an incentivizing example is that there have been several such cases, and this is actually happening all the time. In fact, I don't know, all these things are probabilistic. This is just one example. And this situation has been happening frequently among all countries recently. So a world of rampant centralized data collection is a fragile world because if those databases are hacked, then the data you think might help national security could actually fuel national insecurity. I think it needs to be articulated more strongly to legislators and the public that actively minimizing data collection is actually a safe practice. We should work towards this direction, and privacy-protecting finance is part of it.

Adams (43:04)

I think you are implying that you at least want to remain firm on the privacy issues of cryptocurrency and Ethereum. This goes back to a broader cultural issue, and I want to ask a question about Ethereum. My observation over the past 10 years is that some of the cypherpunk things we've tried have worked, but not in their idealized versions Does this make sense? Right now, we are at an important moment in Ethereum's history, and we are actually bringing the world in. The mainstream is coming, Robinhood is working on a Layer 2, JP Morgan is talking about doing things on-chain, and Coinbase is getting bigger. They have all come to Ethereum. So here’s the question: when you bring in traditional finance and mainstream participants who don’t have the crypto-punk values, you’re talking about the pluralism of Ethereum. Okay, we’re letting more people into Ethereum with this diverse mindset, but they are less crypto-punk. They don’t care as much about the values that we might care about. So the question is, where is our bottom line? Because I think of things like stablecoins. My ideal stablecoin might be something like Rai. Do you remember that project Rai? Okay, so if it’s completely decentralized, completely crypto-native, guess what? It’s useless. Nobody wants it. In Silicon Valley terms, there’s no product-market fit. And what has succeeded? Circle, Tether, these other less idealized crypto-punk stablecoins, but they are helping people. Go look at emerging countries, and that’s exactly what they are using. I think the question is broad. When should we hold on to the crypto-punk values of Ethereum, and when should we adapt to the world around us, truly prioritizing product-market fit and practical use?

Vitalik (44:47)

I think there are several places where prioritizing privacy and crypto-punk values is crucial. I think one is the underlying protocol. Because you can build a centralized or decentralized application on a decentralized backend, but you can only build a centralized application on a centralized backend. I think similarly, in some places, if the blockchain is fundamentally unfriendly to privacy and unfriendly to this non-intermediated access model, then it cannot create space for privacy-friendly things to happen on top of it.

Vitalik (45:37)

One example is the reason I have been working on account abstraction and continuously improving EIP-7701. Because I believe that if we don’t do this, then smart wallet use cases or any multi-signature, quantum-resistant things, and privacy protocols will only be able to operate through an intermediary ecosystem. And the problem with intermediary ecosystems is that they work when they can work for you, and they don’t when they can’t. So, there really needs to be some group that genuinely cares about these things and ensures that at least it is possible to interact with Ethereum in a privacy-preserving way, for example, not relying on a centralized intermediary when you are doing basic operations. If any server you are talking to disappears, it shouldn’t cause any of your funds to get stuck. So especially at the foundational level, these are things that need to be genuinely focused on. Then I think the second aspect is that that powerful, privacy-focused, and minimal-intermediary way of using Ethereum needs to at least be possible. This part is the work of the protocol layer, and part of it is doing some work in this area at the wallet layer and application layer. For me, it doesn’t matter if most people don’t choose that option But what we don't want to see is a world without the infrastructure to achieve this. We also don't want to see a world where a top-level protocol, like ERC and standards, is structurally hostile to it.

Vitalik (47:42)

An analogy is email, I think email is a very good analogy. Because theoretically, email is an open protocol. Anyone can set up an email server. You can get a VPS, you can get a DNS account, and then you can set up david.ryan@davidandryanemail.com, and give yourself ryan@davidandryanemail.com, david@davidandryanemail.com. If you want, you can even write all the software yourself, and large language models make this much more practical than you might think. But at the same time, the problem you run into is that, okay, you have your little email server, but by default, all the big providers will blacklist it, and the reason they blacklist it is basically spam. So in fact, email ends up being more centralized and permissioned than it could have been. So the question is, what could email have done to better maintain its openness? We want to ask similar questions.

Vitalik (48:58)

But for any specific standard that emerges, such as a standard for moving tokens from one Layer 2 to another, or an intent-based standard.

Vitalik (49:09)

One thing I've been ensuring is that for certain intent-based approaches, like trading tokens on Optimism in exchange for tokens on Arbitrum, there should be a way to do this without talking to a server. This is completely feasible. The challenge is that if you don't consider this, then all the standards at the base level will assume there is a server you are talking to, and then you will leak privacy. So I think it's important that there are people focused on these kinds of things in the right places, ensuring that those privacy-friendly, minimal-intermediary, more self-sovereign ways actually exist, and at least without any unnecessary performance loss. If not everyone chooses that option, that's fine.

Vitalik (50:07)

If a group of people continues to keep their coins on Coinbase, that's fine. If a group of people continues to use Metamask directly, completely trusting Infura without any protection, and they decide not to add any protections based on Helios or some private RPCs we started doing, that's fine too. But the starting point is that this option must exist, and there must be a social norm that the products, protocols, and standards built must take into account the need to at least accommodate those who choose that option

Adams (50:54)

Good news for David and me, the domain name ryananddavid.com is now available. So we can go ahead and set up a VPS or something like that.

Vitalik (51:04)

I wonder if there are already bot agents registered for David and Ryan.

David (51:12)

I want to talk about some more specific topics regarding Ethereum recently, but to achieve that, I want to first ask a macro question to set the framework for some upcoming questions. So I want to paint a picture of the future. There are some future versions that we know are coming towards us. We know that artificial intelligence will define the future. We can discuss the different ways it might look. There also seems to be geopolitical tensions on the horizon. The world seems to be increasingly Balkanized. There are some potentially scary future versions. Of course, there are also other cool things to talk about, like gene editing, etc. The future is coming. Vitalik, what role do you think Ethereum will play in that future we know is coming towards us?

Vitalik (52:08)

By the way, I’m glad we agree that gene editing is an exciting thing and artificial intelligence is a scary thing. I think many people are the opposite. I think the version you described is correct. What role will Ethereum play? I think the answer has always been divided into two parts. First, I think the basic product that Ethereum provides is the protection of people's freedom, self-sovereignty, and organizational capability, which does not rely on any individual, company, or nation-state. In a world that is more physically Balkanized, this is a very valuable thing. And it is becoming an increasingly rare thing. If you turn the clock back to the Facebook era 15 years ago, I think many people were willing to give that kind of trust to Facebook, and today we almost all agree that such a level of trust should only be given to something like blockchain. So 15 years ago, I think in that sense, the market was not ready. Because the idea that trust issues were something to worry about did not exist at that time. It was well known that it was an era where privacy was dead.

Vitalik (53:48)

I remember many people, like Mark Zuckerberg's famous real-name policy. I personally remember hearing people say at cloud computing conferences that privacy was over. Then fast forward 10 years, and even those people started talking about things like TEE.

Vitalik (54:17)

So in that sense, the market for trust technology is ready. The "market" I'm talking about here is a very broad and metaphorical term. There are people willing to pay for these things. There are also people who have social issues they care about, and they are willing to accept this type of technology as part of the solution. I think this situation is much greater than it was 10 years ago. So I think that’s part of it, which is building technology that can truly do those things

Vitalik (55:00)

The second part is that I think there is an inevitable aspect here, which is global community building. Ethereum is a powerful attractor of knowledge, drawing in those who care about decentralized finance, those who care about new forms of organization, those who care about things like prediction markets, and an increasing number of people who care about privacy and making democratic organizational models truly work in technologically advanced societies.

Vitalik (55:38)

Ethereum will ultimately involve many different topics, and I believe the community itself is a valuable commodity, even in a hypothetical world where, for example, we discover P=NP tomorrow and we all have to pack our bags and go home because cryptography no longer exists. So, I think continuing to build this community is also very valuable.

Adams (56:05)

In the early days, there was a saying about Ethereum as a "world computer." This saying has fluctuated as a meme (cultural gene). In your article from May this year, you referred to Ethereum as a "world ledger," which resonated with me and felt less abstract, more concrete. It may not be so for some, but for me, it implies that this is a world ledger I can use to register things like property. Another thing I constantly think about regarding "what Ethereum is" is that it is a decentralized property system. I know this still feels a bit abstract for many ordinary people, but to what extent do you think this encapsulates what we are trying to do here, namely Ethereum as a world ledger?

Vitalik (56:50)

I believe that the real value of Ethereum as a world ledger lies in the fact that the concept of "world computer" itself is an extremely broad concept. A computer does everything for you. A computer generates pictures of cats for you. Now they are used to view your cat pictures, they can convert the text on a sign held by a cat into German, and then make a corresponding video.

Vitalik (57:27)

Obviously, I have many examples about cats and AI. But the point is, they can do a lot of things for you. They can organize your life. Many of the things they do are clearly not suitable, especially for Ethereum Layer 1. And the benefit of the term "ledger" is that it seems to encompass a subset of things that have real high economic value in computers. I think the term "ledger" clearly has a strong financial connotation. So it is also easy to see its meaning in the context of DeFi. But at the same time, I think it is also easy to see its analogous significance for things like ENS. The benefit of this term is that it begins... I specifically mean that Ethereum L1 is the world ledger. So I think it also tries to clarify the relationship between L1 and L2, which I believe is one of my explicit goals. And in terms of people's acceptance of this statement, it has undoubtedly succeeded in these aspects

David (58:49)

If Ethereum is the world ledger, then what is ETH?

Vitalik (58:54)

Okay, now we need to figure out what corresponds to gas in the ledger. I think it's ink. Well, ink is Layer 2, but if there's a TM symbol next to the ink, it's that Layer 2 without the TM symbol. Does that work? Sure.

David (59:09)

I think that works. I want to focus on some conversations happening in the Ethereum community in 2024. I define 2024 as Ethereum's "difficult period," mainly due to the decline in the relative price of ETH, which has sparked a series of internal conflicts within the Ethereum community about how to cope. Do you think Ethereum will have a tough time in 2024? Do you feel that way?

Vitalik (59:34)

I absolutely think so.

David (59:36)

How do you explain that? How would you tell the story of Ethereum in 2024?

Vitalik (59:42)

The low price of ETH is undoubtedly a very significant factor leading to many things happening. I think for many people, a big part of the reason is that some storylines are coming to an end, but there are no other clear storylines to replace them. In a sense, there are indeed people who are quietly disappointed with DAOs, but if you are someone who likes DAOs and suddenly they are not working, what can you do? Then NFTs are also gradually cooling down in 2024. Meme coins are indeed rising in 2024. But at the same time, I think people in Ethereum inherently want to make a real contribution to making the world more free and open. How meme coins contribute to that is harder to see. Of course, all the biggest meme coins are happening on Solana. Also, I think another big reason is the issue of Layer 1 versus Layer 2, and how people sometimes blame it on EIP-4844. I'm not sure to what extent that's true. It's not 4844, or actually it is, 4844, and the establishment of a separate fee market for blobs, and the question of whether L1 and L2 really cooperate. Once people realize that there are these more inconsistent incentive mechanisms, that naturally leads to more internal conflicts. So I think it's a combination of all these factors. It was a moment of price decline, and it felt like many storylines had reached their natural conclusion, while what new things would come to replace them was still unclear. I think that new thing must be able to make money and also gain the ideological support of the Ethereum community. I actually think that in 2025, we will start to see some answers to these questions. So I think that's one of the reasons we are seeing positive sentiment now

David (01:02:25)

How much of the story for 2024 is just narrative psychological warfare, and how much are actual problems that need to be solved? This is still being debated in Ethereum today. One important story is that Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap has not turned out as we imagined. The fragmentation between chains is severe. Each Layer 2 feels like a brand new chain. In contrast, Layer 1 hasn't really attempted to scale, making Ethereum's roadmap seem incoherent with its ultimate goal of becoming a globally unified world computer. Then, downstream, the Ethereum Foundation has also made some changes, or perhaps not downstream. Maybe that is part of the signal too. Could you reveal to us some aspects that many people in the Ethereum Foundation do not see? Why is the Foundation making changes? What needs to change? And where does the Foundation stand today?

Vitalik (01:03:28)

I think this is a case where a lot of things have been brewing for a long time, just needing any kind of trigger to make them actually happen. Leadership changes are one example of that. I think Aya feels happier in her current role as chair of the board, and she continues to be active in some projects, like the adoption project in Bhutan, which has always been one of her interests, along with some other financial inclusion efforts where she is spending more time. The position of executive director is definitely not something that anyone should hold forever.

Vitalik (01:04:25)

Moreover, her tenure is longer than everyone else in the Foundation combined. Then, there are also some new voices bringing new focus. I think Tom and Shelley are both very strong technically in their own different ways. At the same time, there are many newcomers leading different departments and initiatives within the Foundation. The organization around scaling and user experience work is part of that. I think one thing I am currently focused on is better organizing efforts around anti-censorship and privacy. Basically, a lot of things are happening aimed at making PSC (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) a more focused team, shifting from privacy and scaling exploration to putting privacy concepts into production. So, there are many interesting new initiatives that have already started. I think these things will happen sooner or later, but sometimes, these extreme moments can serve as triggers and often accelerate and bring forward those upcoming things, making them happen at the same time. That’s part of it.

Vitalik (01:06:12)

Regarding the L1 and L2 issue, I think it's interesting that this is a relatively disconnected topic from the Ethereum Foundation. Clearly, the work to increase the L1 gas limit is a very important topic for the Foundation, but there is also another main thread we have been working on, which is improving interoperability between L2s.

Vitalik (01:06:39)

This is actually an initiative that started in mid-2024, but it just... I think it's a good example that a lot of what is happening is not all caused by everything that will happen in early 2025. They have already started happening, but were then greatly accelerated. Work on L2 interoperability is still ongoing. More L2s have reached the first phase. I think after the first phase, the next priority will be... I actually think that achieving a one-hour withdrawal time is more of a priority than the second phase, or even not needing an hour at all. It could be a minute or 12 seconds. The fundamental limitation is just how much gas you are willing to pay. The reason is basically that if the withdrawal time takes an hour, or if the withdrawal time takes a week, then for many applications, using native deposits and withdrawals is too inefficient in terms of capital. So, that trustless, L1-based asset issuance method will not win in the long run. What will win is basically various custom minting and burning bridges that ultimately concentrate power in a multi-signature control. So what we need is, in order for the L1-based approach to be truly viable, to achieve this, you basically have to shorten that hour or shorten that week. Because for that week, if you want to transfer assets from one chain to another, you don't want people to lock your coins for a week, or even pay others to lock their coins for a week. Even that kind of capital cost is too high. But if you turn a week into an hour, then suddenly, the liquidity of intent-based bridging becomes very cheap, and in many cases even free. Of course, if it keeps dropping to 12 seconds, then you might see a world where withdrawing and depositing through L1 becomes the natural way for many people to transfer assets between L2s.

Vitalik (01:09:06)

These things require the joint efforts of many different participants in the ecosystem. They benefit from the work within the Ethereum Foundation, benefit from the work of the L2s themselves, benefit from the work done by teams like Succinct, the entire ZKEVM effort, like Risk Zero, and all the other different SDK providers. So this is a grand thing, with many of these moving parts in the ecosystem that must come together to really become a concrete solution. I am very optimistic right now that we are on the right path to solving all these issues. Having a strong L1 while also making L2s have a clearer relationship with L1. Of course, completing all the different technical steps will still take time. But overall, I think we are in a good position.

Adams (01:10:10)

This is a perspective. Vitalik, Dave, and I discussed Ethereum in 2024. The concepts about L2 being parasitic, and what should be done, are somewhat correct. Indeed, I think that Dave and I, along with most people in Ethereum, feel much better about the current state of the Ethereum roadmap, thanks to some new leadership within the Ethereum Foundation and the emphasis on scaling L1, especially a strong L1

Adams (01:10:35)

But I have some questions about the rollup roadmap. Of course, there are many aspects that are successful, especially regarding the deployment of a rollup, such as the recent Robinhood, and the adoption rate among more traditional financial institutions coming up is quite impressive.

Adams (01:10:48)

But sometimes I think, and have always been concerned about the fact that we emphasize the different stages of user property rights on Ethereum Layer 2. We have made some progress in entering the first stage, and I believe we will reach the second stage.

Adams (01:11:06)

That progress is going well. We place less emphasis on cultural coordination, or coordination between these Layer 2s. There are some tactical issues that I think can be solved quite easily through user experience and standards, you can transfer assets from one chain to another, I'm not too worried about that. What I am concerned about is the lack of cultural coordination among these participants. So if you enter a state, I remember your "Endgame" article from 2021 conceptually discussed a state where you have a decentralized Ethereum and a decentralized Ethereum Layer 1. Then there might be a world where you have a large rollup that contains all the execution states, right? You still think, hey, that's fine because you can have centralized large block production. We still verify and validate things coming from the chain, and that might be an acceptable state, maybe not ideal. What I worry about in that case is what happens if our Layer 2 becomes so much more powerful than Ethereum Layer 1 that they can basically decide the rules. They might detach from Ethereum at some point. That doesn't seem like a good cultural balance. And that's the feeling given by different chains and their own brands. They don't feel like Ethereum Layer 1 did back in the day. So how do you view this cultural coordination part? Do you think we can get it right? Or are there still issues?

Vitalik (01:12:29)

I agree with that. I think you can look at the cultural coordination issue from two different angles. One angle is, hey, the fees paid by L2 are not high enough. I think we should have a higher minimum base fee. If we set the minimum block fee to 1 Gwei, I think that would make a lot of things better, and I think that's good. But many times, I'm also not sure if fees are the main variable we should focus on. I think the correct primary variable is more about network effects. Then, I should better explain the logic behind my concern about one-hour withdrawal times. Because for me, that's exactly what you mentioned, which incentivized me to make this a key goal. Basically, if L2 is ultimately going to decentralize and detach, then the most likely cause of that would be if all the assets are issued on L2, and then people move them through minting and burning bridges, then L1 is basically completely out of the picture What keeps L1 relevant is that even if most activities happen on L2, assets are issued on L1. I think this is important because, from a trustless perspective, it is much better since all these L2s still have governance, still have upgrade issues, and so on. So if you issue assets on L2, then basically no matter where you move it, you have to trust that L2.

Vitalik (01:14:30)

On the other hand, if assets are issued on L1, then you can actually use the withdrawal function natively. Then L1 becomes the ultimate decision-maker. So it makes the security model clearer and allows for many things to be more permissionless. Because activities can migrate more freely from one L2 to another. Having applications that can natively operate across different L2s becomes more feasible. So basically, if, of course, any technology developed for synchronizing DeFi operations between L1 and L2 will naturally be more capable of working in synergy with all these assets. So I think we should encourage assets to be truly issued on L1 and make it economically viable, and then use standard deposit and withdrawal channels to do this.

Vitalik (01:15:38)

For me, this is actually one of the very important parts of keeping L1 central. So I think we should do this. And I personally also think that raising the minimum base fee to a level like 1 Gwei is good. We should do both things at the same time, continue to explore some synchronizable composable blocks, like whether you can have L2s that can synchronize operations between L2 and L1. No, I also think that’s good. We really need to continue pushing these things forward. And I think we really need to continue to promote that vision, which is that the significance of L2 lies in gaining value by interacting with L1 and being able to offload many things to L1, rather than L2 just being a chain that happens to have a bridge somewhere.

Adams (01:16:39)

Dave and I operate a lot at Layer 0, which is the social layer. One conclusion we’ve come to is that in order to “speak softly but carry a big stick” and increase the soft power of Ethereum Layer 1, you must have an expanded L1 that can scale from a transactions-per-second perspective, but it is also the home of DeFi, the home of liquidity, and the home of asset minting (as a subset of that). The stronger L1 is, the more you can constrain those Layer 2s. Essentially, you give them the carrot, which is the liquidity of Ethereum. That’s why you are attached to this, and also our view on... I don’t know if you would use the word P, pivot.

Adams (01:17:23)

There is some debate about the semantics of this word, but we are excited about the initiative to scale L1. By the way, we are also very excited, and we think a higher value ETH is crucial in that conversation because ETH is a value storage asset. The higher the price of ETH, the more liquidity and control over L2 you have if they decide to get a bit unruly

Adams (01:17:46)

Regardless, can you comment on the path to scaling L1? It has been somewhere on the roadmap. Perhaps when ZK technology develops to the point where it can scale L1. So from that perspective, it's not a pivot, but there seem to be some signs of reprioritization recently. And under the new leadership of the Ethereum Foundation, this seems to be the top priority, which is scaling L1, and you can also scale the block space of L2. But scaling L1 is what needs to be done right now. From your perspective, what is the rationale for scaling L1?

Vitalik (01:18:15)

I think the biggest question is always, how to securely scale L1? Security means not compromising the network, security means not completely centralizing node operations. Security means not undermining the staking ecosystem. I think we actually have technologies now that did not exist a few years ago to achieve this. The most important of these is certainly ZKVM. ZKVM is almost ready for production this year, whereas that was not the case a year ago. So this is something that many of us are clearly relying on. I think there is a clear willingness to indicate that we will increase the block gas limit by 3 to 5 times. If this ultimately eliminates the bottom 10% of independent stakers, we are not telling those 10% to get lost. Rather, what we are saying is that the bottom 10% of independent stakers can use the ZKVM approach to validate the chain instead of manually re-executing everything. This is actually secure. Because when the technology is at a medium level of maturity, having 10% of the network relying on ZKVM is perfectly fine as long as that proportion is below one-third. So ZK technology has reached a level of maturity where we can actually start to strategically and partially rely on it in various ways. You can think of it as L1 itself entering a kind of first phase. Then as security improves further and technology develops, L1 enters a state equivalent to a second phase, and then you can start to rely on most of the network using this kind of technology.

Vitalik (01:20:08)

That's one part, but ZK is definitely not the only technology to achieve this goal. Two other technological examples are, one is historical data storage. A big issue is that nodes take up a lot of space. Now we have finally achieved the most basic form of historical data expiration, which is to expire and merge previous historical data. So the storage requirements for each API Ethereum node have been reduced by hundreds of GB. Then the plan is to continue to delve deeper, ultimately reaching expiration after a fork. I think the long-term goal should be to expire after 36 days. For this to work well, you need some kind of peer-to-peer, distributed storage like a BitTorrent network, so that we can ensure the chain truly becomes fully accessible and fully verifiable. This way the chain won't disappear. We absolutely do not want to become like Ripple, where the first 35,000 blocks have disappeared and can no longer be found, leading to some strange occurrences. So, the distributed historical data concept from Portal is actually entering the production phase This is another example. Gas repricing is another example.

Vitalik (01:21:37)

I think block-level access lists are another very powerful example because with block-level access lists, you can allow all nodes except the one that created the original block to execute that block with maximum parallelism. It doesn't matter whether it's EVM, UTXO, or Solana. What happens is that the node that creates the block must execute in order, but it can generate hints. Hints are essentially the intermediate states after each transaction. If you have these hints, then you can validate and re-execute that block by running each transaction completely in parallel. You can even parallelize between execution and IO. So you can make the IO itself more efficient in a massively parallelized context. Then this part is done in some threads, and in other threads, you basically break the block down into different transactions for parallelization. Then you essentially have massive parallelism that is completely independent of the underlying virtual machine model. So this also makes running Ethereum at higher gas throughput levels safer. So basically, there are many of these technologies that didn't exist before, and now they do, and they have been really improved and optimized a lot. Therefore, we have more options than ever to truly have the best of both worlds.

Adams (01:23:13)

Do you think that with this combination of technologies, we can maintain Ethereum's existing level of decentralization while achieving the threefold scalability social commitment proposed by Dankrad each year? I don't know, Ethereum is currently around 20 transactions per second after the recent block size increase. Dankrad says threefold each year. Then Justin Drake thinks a more long-term stable point, maybe in three to five years, is that Ethereum Layer 1 reaches Giga gas, which is 10,000 transactions per second. Do you think those goals are realistic?

Vitalik (01:23:53)

I have indeed become less certain about some of those high-end goals. Although I actually think my skepticism is more directed at ultra-short block times rather than ultra-high TPS. In fact, if I had to choose between a 1-second block time and 10,000 TPS, I think in terms of what is safer for Ethereum, a 10,000 TPS at a 12-second block time is far safer than a 1-second block time at the current TPS level. Because at that level, we would encounter very fundamental decentralization-type issues. So I personally believe we should be cautious about high-end goals, but I absolutely think there is a lot of room for optimization.

Vitalik (01:24:48)

I absolutely believe we will far exceed the current level of 45 million. As for maintaining decentralization, I think we will be in an interesting and difficult-to-judge position, and in fact, I hope that in many important aspects, decentralization will actually increase. I can give an example to illustrate what I mean I think one thing that everyone is privately complaining about is that basically no one is really running nodes, and everyone is trusting RPC. I feel confident now, for the first time in a while, that we have a very solid roadmap to get out of this dependency. Part of that, of course, is Helios.

Vitalik (01:25:37)

And being able to have a light client inside the wallet, whose efficiency is constantly improving. But another reason why the cypherpunk type values the importance of running personal nodes is something I only realized after spending more time talking to some of them in person, which is running personal nodes for privacy. Because imagine if you are using these Ethereum privacy protocols, you are using many accounts to do many different things, and you are very concerned about your privacy not being leaked. But you are still pinging Infura with every address you call get_balance on.

Vitalik (01:26:34)

So if Infura still knows everything about your links, then running your own node is a very powerful way to solve this problem. Because if you run your own node, then you are actually just downloading the chain, and no one knows what your reads are because your reads are completely local. So the question is, how can we have the best of both worlds? The answer is that we will actually be able to, and we will be able to do it very soon.

Speaker - 2 (01:27:03)

There are two different paths to achieve this goal. The first path is whether we can start from the current concept of Ethereum nodes and greatly improve its efficiency?

Vitalik (01:27:16)

This is how you can significantly improve efficiency. You say 1, you actively clean historical data. You actively clean and do not store everything. In fact, you don’t even need to store branches of the state tree.

Vitalik (01:27:32)

You only need to store the table that is the state. That table is 80GB. If you have a block-level access list and you have zero-knowledge proofs, like ZKVMs, to verify that the block-level access is correct. Then you can keep the current Ethereum state updated with almost no local computation and only maintain an 80GB database locally. 80GB is small. 80GB is like the size of 3 or 4 different large language models.

Vitalik (01:28:06)

Large language models running locally, everyone has 80GB. Even my phone has 80GB. So 80GB of storage, very low computational load, still medium bandwidth, but that’s okay. That’s one scenario. Then if we decide to scale L1, let’s say, we are a bit conservative and say we scale L1 by 30 times. Then obviously 80GB will turn into 2.4TB

Vitalik (01:28:32)

The 2.4TB has increased again. In fact, it has returned to the amount needed to run a full node today, or basically the amount before historical data cleanup. So effectively, we have secured a 30-fold growth space for ourselves. But if you want to go further, there is the concept of partial state nodes. Partial state nodes basically say that you only store all states except for garbage data. There is a lot of garbage data, and there is a lot of complexity in defining what garbage data is. But if you only say to store the states related to the top 100 applications and store all EOAs and all smart contracts.

Vitalik (01:29:18)

That would already be a huge reduction. So that's one direction. Another direction is to start with browser wallets and then add security to it. The first part is Helios. So light clients can verify the chain. The second part is that you can use a technology, in the short term, with Oram's TEE.

Vitalik (01:29:44)

In the long term, it is PIR with cryptographic level trust attributes, where you can make requests to the server without the server knowing what you requested. The server gives you a response, but the server has no idea what it just responded to. So if you make this kind of thing a standard, then you can actually have this strong privacy guarantee. You can basically have a light client that not only gives you the security properties of a full node but also gives you the privacy properties of a full node without actually having to own a full node. So basically, we have several different paths through which we can actually provide people with decentralized properties that were not possible even in 2017.

Vitalik (01:30:32)

Even before the era when L1 began to scale significantly. So I think in many dimensions, we are gaining greater scale, more decentralization, more privacy, and more censorship resistance at the same time. But there are some areas where I still have concerns, such as I think continuing to ensure that proof of stake remains decentralized and block building remains decentralized is one of the key focuses we need to pay attention to. I think having high-quality research teams with many different focuses and approaches there will be very valuable. But overall, I think we are on a very good track to increase both decentralization and scale at the same time. We must seize it.

David (01:31:21)

Vitalik, I recently listened to an Epicenter podcast, and there was a statement that left a deep impression on me, and I want you to emphasize it again. That statement is: "If Ethereum as Layer 1 gets involved in directly playing the high-frequency trading (HFT) game, then for me, that would fundamentally destroy the soul of Ethereum, because entering the HFT game really destroys your soul."

David (01:31:44)

I don't quite understand this conclusion. I want to know, why would playing the HFT game on Layer 1 destroy your soul? What do you mean by that? And how is Ethereum Layer 1's scaling strategy different from this?

Vitalik (01:31:57)

I think the core principle here is that if you optimize very aggressively for one thing, the end result is that you will be doing anti-optimization for everything else, potentially to an infinite degree. This is actually the same argument you hear about AI safety from people like Eliezer Yudkowsky. It's just a universal optimization principle.

Vitalik (01:32:27)

And for low-latency HFT-type finance, there is always lower latency to pursue. The more you want it, and the deeper you go in pursuing lower latency, the more you increase the incentives for ecosystem participants to develop in that direction.

Vitalik (01:32:48)

And there isn't a real natural stopping point. It's a path that can easily lead to gradually abandoning more and more global decentralization. So at some point, you will reach a situation that I can illustrate with numbers, for example, let's take a one-second block time. If you try to analyze what that means, first, to have a one-second block time, you have to break it into two parts. There is block propagation, and then there is witnessing. Each of these two parts needs to occupy 0.5 times the network latency, which is 500 milliseconds. And the average ping time from one place in the world to another is just over a few hundred milliseconds.

Vitalik (01:33:43)

So basically, achieving this is itself a challenge that requires quite aggressive peer-to-peer optimization. You can't have any redundancy. You must have very direct broadcasting. And what this ultimately leads to is that the standard we must achieve is not the threshold for participation capability, but rather the threshold for not having strong incentives to engage in collocation. So the focus is not on whether non-collocation is possible, but rather that non-collocation is only slightly worse than collocation. Then if you engage in collocation, basically if you collocate with the proposer, your latency is not 200 milliseconds, but 0 milliseconds. This is a huge improvement. So if we move in that direction, then the incentives for collocation will be everywhere. Because if you are a DeFi participant, you will want to send your transactions as quickly as possible while being aware of all the latest information. If you are a builder, then every 5 milliseconds you reduce latency allows you to broadcast your block 1% more within the block time, which could earn you nearly 1% more revenue. So we see what HFT systems look like in reality; they are basically a bunch of collocated servers. Everyone is trying very hard to get closer. So there is this type of activity, and I actually think this is Ethereum's barbell strategy The barbell strategy of Ethereum's L1 and L2 is that L2 handles those tasks that require centralization, and they indeed gain the benefits of centralization, including the ability to perform high-frequency trading (HFT). At the same time, they benefit from the security and censorship resistance provided by L1. The benefit they bring to L1 is contributing to this shared activity pool, while also isolating L1 to ensure that some incentives for co-location do not directly impact L1. This is because L2 is independently ordered.

Vitalik (01:36:16)

So this is actually one of the reasons why I have recently somewhat shifted away from being enthusiastic about rollup-based solutions and am more enthusiastic about L2 directly saying, "Hey, we are the orderers, and we will gain these benefits." In this configuration, you can do a lot of things. You can even say that you can have decentralized governance to replace the orderers, which could often be a very good approach. So I think L2 is doing well; L2 is the right structure to absorb part of the demand.

Vitalik (01:36:51)

In fact, if you fast forward a bit, we can talk about the AI economy. The thinking speed of AI is 1,000 times faster than ours. If an AI thinks 1,000 times faster than humans, then from the AI's perspective, the subjective speed of light is only 300 kilometers per second. So subjectively, light takes only one second to travel from one city to a neighboring city. Therefore, from the AI's perspective, once you have a complete AI economy, which we will definitely have soon, the concept of a global financial ledger doing everything actually makes no sense. By then, what you actually need is a city ledger, and what is the right structure for the city ledger to become part of the Ethereum economy?

Vitalik (01:37:46)

I think L2 is a very natural answer. So I think if L1 starts moving in this direction, then many centralization incentives will accumulate. Moreover, if we commit to being competitive, then we commit to being competitive in the HFT game, where everyone else is actively optimizing while caring far less about decentralization than we do.

Vitalik (01:38:18)

So I think that’s why the barbell strategy is the right approach. Essentially, L1 does need improvement. I think L1 does need to have relatively low latency from a human perspective. I believe Bitcoin's 10-minute block time is absolutely wrong. If Bitcoin's block time were 20 seconds instead of 10 minutes, I can see that it would significantly... reduce the trend of "self-custody doesn't matter" that people like Michael Saylor promote. This is just one of ten factors, but it is still important. So having a lower block time for L1 is good.

Vitalik (01:39:07)

But I do believe that this market separation, that if you want relatively low latency, you use L1, but if you want extremely low latency, then L2 is your destination, and we are actually researching how to make these two work together, which could be better for us.

David (01:39:30)

I hear some things in your answer that I often hear, which may stem from you being quoted the most by me and Ryan in this podcast from that famous blog post of yours, "Concavity and Convexity Bias." What I hear is, for example, Bitcoin is a convex ecosystem, and they are a minimalist ecosystem. They focus on the hard cap of 21 million, and the Bitcoin ecosystem and culture revolve around that hard cap of 21 million. Looking at Solana, you can make the same comparison. Solana focuses on low latency and high-frequency trading. That's what Solana is about. Ethereum, on the other hand, leans more towards concavity. It tries to keep all possible doors open. It tries to be more balanced, trying to take the middle path. But Vitalik, there's another saying I really like, which is "Everything in moderation, including moderation itself." If we follow this logic, it means that Ethereum should be balanced in many things, but not in some things. In some areas, it should exhibit convexity. For example, my partner Ryan is actually trying to stand tall as an Ethereum person, becoming an Ethereum nationalist, promoting Ethereum nationalism and pride in what Ethereum represents. If you were to define Ethereum nationalism, what would it be? In what aspects should Ethereum culture and values exhibit convexity?

Vitalik (01:41:09)

This is interesting because I started thinking of an answer, but then you turned to the discussion of Ethereum as a nation, which is interesting in itself. But I think, perhaps we should start from the answer I originally intended. I think another very important point is that the world is actually much more complex than just picking a point on a slider. Ethereum benefits greatly from having a multi-layer structure. Because if you have a multi-layer structure, you can usually have the best of both worlds.

Vitalik (01:41:47)

I can actually give an analogy of a nation-state. Recently, many people have argued in a famous way that countries ruled by dictators might be better. For example, you would see Curtis Yarvin saying that America should have a king. This is a common view held by many people. They would say that dictators do not need to negotiate with people. They have no political costs. They can do various things very efficiently, and they can guide large-scale projects, thereby improving society on a large scale.

Vitalik (01:42:23)

There are many reasons why I am obviously not in favor of dictators. Dictators have significant downsides, and I believe these downsides far outweigh their benefits. But interestingly, the benefits of dictators do exist. However, I think democratic capitalism can be seen as a way to "box in" dictators, enjoying their benefits while not bearing their costs What is the dictator in the box? It is the entrepreneur. You have giants like Jensen Huang and various AI figures, etc. They command a large amount of resources, and at that level, their goal is to mobilize these vast resources and large entities to produce results. They do need to negotiate with people, but certainly much less than if you were trying to distribute the same amount of resources democratically. But at the same time, you have another social layer that should be more democratic, which should decide the rules and incentive systems. If Jensen Huang makes the world a better place, then he can earn more money and use more resources for the next round of the game. Or if Jensen Huang makes the world worse, then at worst, he goes to prison. Essentially, this is something that certainly needs to be carefully maintained. If you enter a world where entrepreneurs essentially escape from the box and start to actually set the incentives themselves, then the whole model collapses. Then you actually risk bearing the downsides of Curtis Yarvin's world without its benefits.

Vitalik (01:44:32)

I think there is an analogy here, L1 and L2 are one example of this. There are also many examples at the application layer. The analogy here is that many times these things are much more centralized than Ethereum. Many times these things make trade-offs in user experience, you might say, leaning more towards the average user rather than Ethereum L1. Many times they do not care much about the various values of cypherpunks. But at the same time, if built properly, you can establish structures on L1 whose job is to hold them accountable. The most basic example is proof systems. Because proof systems prevent L2 from claiming falsehoods as truths and prevent L2 from stealing people's money.

Vitalik (01:45:34)

Another example is bypass channels. This is a mechanism where if L2 starts to censor you, then as a user, you can send your transaction, and your transaction is forcibly included in a block, allowing you to withdraw your assets. We have actually seen interesting examples of these bypass channels being used in real life. Another example is the idea I briefly mentioned, if you have a centralized sorter, you can have a small tool on-chain to switch the sorter. If people vote that we have off-chain evidence showing that this sorter is abusing in some way, such as through extractive MEV for front-running, or it is not responding quickly enough, etc., then people can vote, and that vote obviously needs to be censorship-resistant. So it happens on L1. Then you replace that sorter. So this leads to a discussion about what I think are the advantages of Ethereum, which is that we are this ecosystem with different participants. So I think we as Ethereum must figure out what the right incentive mechanisms are. I believe, as you said, a powerful L1 that can truly run all these mechanisms is a very important part of these incentive mechanisms. Because if you do not have a powerful L1, then you are essentially letting the entrepreneurs out of the box. For example, you have a theoretically feasible proof system, but when you dig into the details, you find that there is actually not enough space on L1 for everyone to exit simultaneously So the whole thing feels a bit like a joke. So, a powerful L1 is part of it. Basically, one of the roles of L1 is to create these boxes and make various different types of things available to users across the entire spectrum, such as centralized trade-offs, low-latency user experience trade-offs, etc. So that's what I think Ethereum's answer is to the question of "where should the sliders be." To me, Ethereum is a sandbox that should allow people to build simultaneously at as many positions on the sliders as possible. I think that's one of its most valuable traits. I feel like I've taken the national analogy in a direction you might not have thought of at all.

Adams (01:48:28)

Not at all. We can continue to expand on it. We love to talk about the national analogy of Ethereum. But one area we can expand on is through assets. Every country has its own currency, and some have world reserve assets. So, in Ethereum, the social layer, or what we call part of Ethereum nationalism, and the way I use it, is to use ETH assets as a Schelling point. So let's talk about a few concepts.

Adams (01:48:56)

I first have a question, how do you view these emerging ETH treasury companies? You mentioned on the podcast that someone said he wanted to acquire 5% of the total ETH supply. It's hard to do that without driving the price up. What do you think of these tools? Do you think they are good? Do you think they are bad? Or do you feel indifferent about them?

Vitalik (01:49:19)

Regarding the first question, about the value of ETH, I think ETH is the greatest common divisor that everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem culturally identifies with. Therefore, I think it is important to maintain the strong role of ETH for this reason alone. If we lived in a world where the incentives of Base, Bankless, and the Ethereum Foundation were all heading in three completely different directions with no overlap, then Ethereum as a community would collapse. So I think the cultural core that ETH creates is crucial. I also have many different theories about the sources of ETH's value. Many days I realize that it is actually hard to surpass a theory like the price of ETH being set by a conspiracy of 14 demons living on Jupiter's moons. Everything we do is just a race to see who can put on the best performance for the demons on Jupiter's moons. But even from that perspective, making Ethereum a more relevant and core ecosystem to global applications and finance is still the right thing to do. So I think there are transaction fees, there are arguments for network effects, and the best things we do are those that support ETH from all these angles.

Vitalik (01:51:12)

ETH treasury companies sometimes confuse me. Because to me, I think they are not operating with their own money first. Their focus is mainly on people buying into the treasury companies, and then the treasury companies use that money to buy ETH So they are actually creating an interesting leveraged financial product on top of ETH, which is between options and derivatives. Clearly, many people are buying and valuing this kind of thing.

David (01:51:58)

Which one do you like the most?

Vitalik (01:52:03)

Which treasury company do I like the most? I guess the U.S. government, which continuously confiscates assets from hackers, is pretty cool.

Adams (01:52:18)

Let me defend the ETH treasury company; it's a matter of moderation. Clearly, there is a world where the ETH treasury company goes too far, too much, being held in non-bank institutions, etc. The argument for supporting them is that they serve as a coordination mechanism for the Sheldonian point of ETH assets themselves and, to some extent, spread this story to the mainstream. In some ways, this is similar to how Bitcoin has successfully done it now. Of course, it is always possible to go too far, over-leveraging, holding more ETH than you would like. But for me, it feels like entering 2025, ETH is in a healthier position compared to now, and a strong ETH makes Ethereum healthier. When you have some activities like that, and it has some representation in traditional finance, you get some capital inflow. What do we get from this? More cultural security and more cultural bandwidth to create the crypto-punk things we really want. So, to some extent, in a certain moderation, we have gone from 0% supply to now 1%, which seems to have produced good effects. That's why I support the ETH treasury.

Vitalik (01:53:24)

I agree. I think the social aspect of coordinating around ETH as an asset that companies can hold is good and valuable. Providing people with different channels to access ETH is also good, and I think that's one of the reasons people buy treasury companies instead of holding directly.**Giving people more choices is good. There are always various financial situations, and they have all sorts of requirements, incentives, or attributes regarding the form of participation. So, I think there is indeed valuable service provided there. If you wake me up three years from now and tell me that the treasury led to the decline of ETH, then I would certainly speculate that the reason is basically that they somehow turned into an over-leveraged game. Then at some point, a 30% drop turns into a forced liquidation, which then becomes a 50% drop, then 70% and 90% drops. Then this combines with the loss of credibility. But I think the people in Ethereum, overall, including those doing finance in Ethereum, are responsible people. We are not talking about followers of Do Kwon. So I think,as long as the leverage is not too high and these things do not start entering that mechanism, then the existence of ETH derivatives is completely normal. So, cheers for them.

David (01:55:20)

Looking ahead, among these ETH treasury companies, one or two will definitely still exist in 10 years. I think this is also why people are excited, because if these treasury companies do it right, they can withstand the test of time. But I want to look further and talk about the next 10 years for Ethereum. When Ethereum turns 20, we hope to invite you back on the podcast to discuss it again.

Adams (01:55:42)

We will be getting older, David.

David (01:55:44)

That's okay, but Ethereum will be very young; it will only be 20. Vitalik, because Ethereum is an ongoing project. The work will never really be finished. I think the work can get closer to completion, but I don't think it will be 100% complete.

David (01:55:59)

So, what hopes, dreams, and goals do you have for what Ethereum should accomplish in the next 10 years? If the work is not finished, what do you hope to achieve for Ethereum in the next 10 years?

Vitalik (01:56:09)

I think one is the technical roadmap, basically reaching a state that you could call a finish line or maintenance mode. For me, this includes: 1. Handling everything with ZK-snark technology; 2. Replacing any unoptimized components with optimized ones, such as replacing Keccak with Poseidon or something better, and replacing EVM with RISC-V or something better, at least as an option; 3. Ensuring all validations are done through ZK-snark (or should be STARKs).

Vitalik (01:56:52)

Making every node super lightweight, and through validation, making privacy a default part of the experience, starting with payments and gradually expanding to more complex DeFi forms. At the same time, achieving some form of self-custody that is friendly to self-sovereignty and also user-friendly for the average user. I think this is actually achievable, and I hope we can reach that goal.

Vitalik (01:57:21)

Formal verification for everything. If we could have a formally verified secure open-source chain, from the top layer like DApps, to Ethereum clients, down to the lower-level operating systems, and ultimately to hardware, that would be very cool.

Vitalik (01:57:47)

Then in terms of the world's impact, I think it would be amazing if finance defaults to being conducted on Ethereum. If we could really reach a world where the financial infrastructure is such that if users want, they can actually open developer mode, take their assets out of one application, and then start using other applications, being able to connect different things without permission. Ensuring that people have strong choices to protect their privacy, being able to take their funds out of one wallet and then transfer them to another wallet, all of these things

Vitalik (01:58:35)

I think this is all very important. Overall, a trustless security vision based on cryptography and code verification has become the societal default. We are entering an era where everything we use has strong security guarantees, and the era that relied on "trust me" for security is starting to feel as outdated as how we view unsafe drinking water today.

Vitalik (01:59:17)

I think that would be amazing. We have already achieved this through HTTPS. I think we need to reach this level in all other areas as well. And I believe Ethereum can play an important role in achieving this goal.

Adams (01:59:35)

Vitalik, you wrote the white paper in 2013 when you were still a teenager. Now, as we wrap up this conversation, perhaps I can ask a personal question. Since then, over the past 10 years, it has grown into a network with nearly a trillion dollars in assets. And it seems like the whole world is building on this global ledger. But in the next 10 years, what do you see your role in Ethereum being? Will you stay? Will you fulfill this vision? What does that look like for you?

Vitalik (02:00:12)

I think continuing to do everything related to Ethereum is definitely a big part of it. Over the past few years, I have been and expect to continue to be involved in some broader decentralized technology work. We talked about bio-defense. We talked about some security issues at the stack level that we discussed, and I think that will also be important. So basically, making this fully open, secure, and trustworthy world a reality, in ways that include Ethereum but also many other things, is something I expect to be an important part of my focus in the next 10 years. I think this is essentially the same goal I have had since I joined Bitcoin in 2011, and I am excited to realize it.

David (02:01:25)

Vitalik, Bankless has existed for about half of Ethereum's lifecycle, which is 5 years out of the 10 years. Ryan and I might continue to do so, right, Ryan? Of course, David. Do you have any requests, guidance, or advice on how Bankless should coexist with Ethereum in the next five to ten years?

Vitalik (02:01:52)

I think you have been doing a great job consistently covering all these different and valuable parts of the Ethereum ecosystem. I think it’s important to continue doing that. I think, especially with some newer things, they definitely need to be reported on and supported, whether it’s developments in privacy or the upcoming new wave of DAOs. Or, even possibly all these various ideas that will make Ethereum more like a real nation. This is a vast field, and thank you for all the work you’ve done to report on it

Adams (02:02:52)

Vitalik, thank you for joining us today. Happy 10th birthday to Ethereum. Although it's a bit late, we're still around this time point. I'm glad you could come. Thank you very much.

Vitalik (02:03:03)

I'm also very happy to be here. Thank you all.

Adams (02:03:06)

I need to tell everyone that the above content is not financial advice. You know that cryptocurrencies carry risks. You may lose the funds you invest, but we are heading west. This is still the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you could join us on the Bankless journey. Thank you very much