Ethereum in the Next Decade

Transcript

so the um thing that Ikea wanted to talk about today is basically just to give the big picture of where from at least a technology perspective ethereum is going to go over the going to go over the next 10 years right um so over the last 10 years the um I think if there's obviously been a lot that has happened in ethereum development right oh there we go okay ethereum in the next decade yay thank you so much so the what ethereum's last decade the 2010s they were focused a lot on solving problems in theory right so first let's just create a blockchain any blockchain at

all that people can actually use let's create a blockchain that has some kind of general purpose programming language so you can you create smart contracts you can build applications you can make Dows trying to figure out in theory what all of the different applications are understanding that the scalability problem exists and like thinking through you know the lightning Network State channels plasma Roll-Ups sharding um just all of the different possible ways of actually of trying to solve that problem and we did a lot of work in the 2010s but at the same time like in the 2010 snow the crypto space has still

been remains fairly small right so I think if we look at even the even today right if we just look at the status quo use of ethereum usage in many places very few people have found uses for ethereum aside from Trading digital monkeys who here has a digital monkey interesting no no words this time um so in a lot of places right people's existing Financial systems work reasonably while people's existing identity systems work reasonably well why do they need a dow when they could make LLCs and all of these things right and so the number of use cases that

people can see in a lot of contexts is just not very large but also in many other voices many people have found uses for ethereum Bitcoin cryptocurrencies blockchains already right in a lot of countries is around the world there's like more than 10 percent of people have not just heard of cryptocurrency but are like actually using it and holding it for their own personal savings right there are many countries around the world where the existing fiat currency is either hyperinflating or it's just not at all connected to Global Financial systems or you know there's other there's various political problems and for a lot of people even today

cryptocurrency is a Lifeline whether for making payments or for doing or for savings or sometimes even for like very basic and primitive doubts for doing things uh things like this community organizations together in groups so in many places many people have found useless for ethereum but they're largely using centralized exchanges um so about at the end of uh 2021 I visited Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires is a fascinating City because the when I walk around on the streets the rate at which someone on the street recognizes me is higher than in San Francisco

you know there's no other technology or if you think of or Buenos Aires so you know beat San Francisco in that way right but you know crypto is it right crypto is uh you know not the yeah the technology for uh for one wealthy city in the world crypto is you know the technology for the right for for the world um and uh I was walking around uh on Christmas Day when a lot of shops were closed and eventually we found one coffee shop that was open and my friends and I went to get some tea and uh the owner recognized me and we paid and I paid him in eth but what kind of wallet did he use he had a binance wallet right so and this is like actually a pretty

common scenario if you look through countries whether in Latin America or in Africa or in Southeast Asia where people are using cryptocurrency and if you're ethereum today not because of some ideological reason or because they're part of a community but to fill this like very deep need that they personally have right now adjust to economically survive a lot of the time they're using centralized exchanges right and that's the status quo today and I think it's easy to understand why people use centralized exchanges centralized exchanges are cheap they have zero transaction fees sending a payment on the ethereum mainnet at the time that I was in Argentina at the end of 2021 the

transaction fee was I think somewhere around five dollars but Finance Divine insurance first instant so the choice exchanges are convenient you don't have to wait for 12 confirmations your payments are instant it's you know you don't have to worry about oh did this transaction get accepted by the network how long is it going to be is it in a block it's just uh you know it's just the instant and they protect the user for mistakes right if you lose your account you can recover it you can talk to customer service they might ask you to submit a passport they might annoy you but you can recover it you're not going to just lose your money if your house burns down or if you lose your device so they're convenient but um centralized exchanges sometimes fail

right so who here knows this guy okay once again no cheering um you know sometimes you have guys and you know they're they act very professional and they go on panels with important people like Bill Clinton and you know you can trust them you know this guy is not going to have double spending relations with your assets and you know then six months later it turns out that he does right so you know the choice exchanges they work very very well until until one day you wake up and you realize it's not working anymore and crypto in a lot of ways is really about like protecting people from systemic risks and like these relief

kind of tail risks that people people generally do not anticipate right like people most generally don't anticipate you know their currency hyperinflating people generally don't anticipate being censored and being um you know taken off of every major social and financial platform people you know generally don't anticipate all of their credit cards simultaneously yeah not work not working and them still having to buy a plane ticket which is something that actually happened to me right um and so the problem with using crypto in a centralized way is that well actually all of those exact same tail risks they're coming right back right and so if we want a really robust uh

crypto ecosystem that actually fulfills its promises we need to have actual decentralization but why don't we have actual decentralization yet because the decentralized technology is not good enough and this is basically what I'm really hoping and a lot of people are really trying hard to make sure that we solve over the next 10 years so what are the problems well the problems are kind of the same as what the problems were five years ago this is a slide that I gave at a Meetup in Taipei back at the end of 2016. and well let's uh look at what were the problems of 2017 what were the problems that I

identified back in uh in late 2017 when I was visiting Taipei privacy who here cares about privacy um consensus safety hook here cares about blockchain defenses not breaking um smart contract safety who here cares about their smart contracts not breaking scalability over here does not want to pay 40 transaction fees okay so yeah it's uh a lot of alignment on some basic things right and like today the problems that I'm going to talk about basically are these um well we did solve one right so ethereum has moved from proof of work to proof of stake now you're still ongoing

challenges in consensus like there is the challenge of making sure that the whole Mev situation for example does not lead to consensus the the consensus breaking or becoming centralized in some way there is upgrading the consensus adding things like single SWOT finality making it easier to be a validator all of these little things right but the really big thing the switch from uh proof of work to proof of stake that's done and I think we as a community really have something uh very big to celebrate there but that's still one right um another thing that you might notice is that five years ago I was focusing a lot on a smart contract safety and here I'm focusing more on user account safety

and I think I mean both of these are important I think the reason why my my emphasis here is changing a bit is basically that like back then it was still this like it was still much less clear what kinds of applications people would want to use and I think today it's like still somewhat unclear but I think a lot more of the categories have become pretty well defined and right now it's a lot easier to do things that you want to do just by reusing code right and there's a lot of code bases that have stood the test of time that have survived for four or five years and there's definitely this kind of crazy Frontier d-gen space where people still get hacked for 181

million dollars once in a while but there's like a growing body of uh you know obligations that people have used safely for a long time you know uniswap good news is safe um I've been told I'm supposed to call it safe now um it's you know gotta respect the rebranding um I've uh you know be a lot of just basic infrastructure here you know erc20 contracts um you know wrapped to eat a lot of things have kind of stood the test of time they've had even more Audits and the need to write completely new things is like in my view a bit lower than before and but at the same time like user account safety is I think as important and I think is continuing to

become even more important right if you even just think about the simplest use case using crypto as a store assets like those assets have to be safe you can't have mass adoption of a system where if you lose a piece of paper and you lose your phone you're screwed right you can't have you know Mass adoption of a system where if someone hacks into your phone they can steal all of your money you can't have method option of a system where if a burglar comes into your house and they happen to open the right drawer and they see the 12 word seed phrase they can photo it have an AI app in like half a second immediately open the wallet and like drain all of your life savings right so

I think user account safety is like still even today not nearly good enough and like even Hardware wallets in my view are like far from Asia a perfect solution right and so I think the more complex your crypto usage goes the more smart contract safety is the emphasis the simpler your crypto usage goes the more just basic user account safety is the emphasis um and I think uh one of the things that we've realized over the years is like the really basic use cases of ethereum are actually really important right and like that's the thing that most people do you know hold coins um who here has like any eth or any erc20 token

um who's here has a view is uniswav who here has used uh some yield farmings to all see you know a number of hands goes down right um so it's still important but like the most basic thing and especially once you go to like people who you know are really depending on this for their lives right it just is you know keeping your assets being able to make payments you know you know holding on to your identity in the future and just all of this really simple stuff right and like without user account safety nothing else really uh really works so let's talk about the three remaining problems right so fees and uh scalability using ethereum or Bitcoin or any other

public blockchain with a serious amount of usage is expensive um the ethereum the the amount of demand for using ethereum has gone up massively over the last 10 years the amount of people using the ethereum L1 or the amount of space that the ethereum L1 has to use has not gone up the transactions per day has been somewhere between 1 million and 1.5 million for the last three years now the gas limit has gone up but basically instead of there being more transactions we just have more complex transactions now some of this I think actually is activity that's moved to the layer 2 which is good right but generally the ethereum layer one has not increased in

scalability by that much and the problem is fundamental when you have a system that every single person needs to verify that system cannot be more powerful than what you can verify on a single computer right and this is a big problem and it's causing transactions to be expensive for people but we're making progress so about three years ago I wrote this post where I talked about the idea of a roll-up Centric roadmap basically using a particular type of layer 2 scaling solution called a roll-up as a way of scaling ethereum and robots are systems that are not inside the blockchain they but they use the blockchain for security

but they only put a little bit of data into the blockchain the rest of the data and all of the computation happens off chain and by doing this you have systems that have the same level of scalability or even actually much higher scalability than ethereum itself but that don't you but that still have the same level of security right so this was a post and um at that time you know there were a few of these Roll-Ups since then there are more Roll-Ups um and about half a year ago I basically published this post that basically tries to kind of formally classify how mature different like different Roll-Ups are

um stage zero is like basically you know still a training stage and then stage one and stage two are basically when you do what I call like taking off the training wheels and like actually making the roll up closer to being fully decentralized and where the security actually does only depend on the technology right so it becomes fully trustless and as of about two months ago polygon is uh our stage one on mainnet and all of the others so optimism arbitrom scroll Taiko ZK sync um I've been told that if I don't mention Linea someone's going to get angry um so I'm supposed to mention Linea as well um you know they're very close behind

right so um a lot so actually a lot of progress happening and I think uh like we can actually see right how you know with uh well not after the merge was finished all of the work really switched over to getting scalability working and we're making huge amounts of progress right five years ago proof of stake was something that like you know the the trolls on Twitter would say hahaha ethereum promises proof of stake but it'll but it keeps never happening it'll never happen now we're fully proof of stake you know two years ago people would say scalability is something ethereum promise but haha it'll never happen now you know we're basically on we have we actually have you know one

working uh you know like roll up with actual cryptography running things and over the next year we're going to have much more um eap4844 is a feature of the ethereum protocol whose goal it is to create more space on on chain so that Roll-Ups can have higher scalability not important to understand the details of this but what is important is that with eap4844 Roll-Ups will be able to have much more space to store their data and with future versions of uh game sharding Roll-Ups will have even more space right and so with all these Technologies stacked together the amount of transactions per second that the ethereum blockchain can store well is expected to increase from about 16 to

somewhere between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand right so actually really huge improvements so that in theory the numbers are really good right in theory Roll-Ups give a huge amount of scalability and that's amazing but let's look at roll up scaling from the user's perspective we have multiple Roll-Ups so who here has an account on optimism who here has an account on arbitrary who here has an account on the polygon ZK AVM who here has an account on any starknet system who here has an account on Isaac async Linnea amazing um Bitcoin um Aptos

uh Bitcoin satoshi's vision okay um the US the US dollar s started Cairo yes okay uh so a lot of people are on a lot of different systems right and uh the pro like the roll-up that you are on might not be the same as the role of what if I have coins on our own Optimus and I'm trying to pay someone and they're only on arbitrum um what applications that I want to use right so let's say I'm on optimism and I wants to pay you and you might even have an address on optimism but your ens name

is on polyglon ZK VM right um what you know what if I'm on um you know Kakarot and I want to put trade some coin uh some coins into a different coin using some you know decentralized exchange and that decentralized exchange is on one air right so there's like a lot of these very concrete user experience challenges um addresses exist need to exist on multiple Roll-Ups and then there's a lot of these challenges at the level of individual applications so if you look at ens for example right ens currently exists only on ethereum mainnet ethereum mainnet is expensive

um if you want to register a new ens name right now you're going to have to pay on top of the registration fee a transaction fee of like something like five dollars and you know if ethereum becomes much more widely used then then that transaction fee might easily become like 200 right so um there was this proposal um called a ccip that ens is uh in you know actual you know has and people are rapidly integrating there's actually something called Opti names that is already based on this and I have one and I've been told that other layer 2 projects have very similar things basically you can what you can do is you can put a domain

an ens name into one of these systems and then users can register subdomains on a layer two and you can use custom code to verify proofs that you own the thing on the inside of the layer 2 system right and so you basically it's this very permissionless design that allows it's basically every layer too to be used to register and use ens names now that's really powerful right like it's not just ens moving to optimism right it's ens moving to every Layer Two at the same time so I think this is great and like I'm happy that in this you know these frequency in us are happening but like there's challenges involved in you know actually result

like making sure all of the different infrastructure that we have actually resolves this sort of thing so that's problem one scaling a lot of work is happening and a lot of good technical work is happening but there's also like this very practical user experience work on right of making lawyer twos as natural and as easy to use as the layer one is today as of today this is not true right like I have a wallet I have a wallet on this phone and uh I you know have some amount of eth on it but then it's all on mainnet this wallet does not support any of the any of the layer twos at the moment right so things like this need to improve and they need to improve in a way that does not compromise on the

trustlessness and decentralization censorship resistance openness and all of these things that you know we value of the ethereum layer one problem two user account security so warrant security is a big problem um this is uh from an article that I wrote a year ago that quotes a Bitcoin magazine article that I wrote I believe back in 2013. so this is like literally more than 10 year old content and it's pretty scary content um last night around 9pm PDT I clicked a link to go to coinchat.freetsy.com and I was prompted to run Java I did thinking this was a legitimate chat room and nothing happened I closed the window and thought

nothing of it I opened my Bitcoin QT wallet approximately 14 minutes later and I saw a transaction that I did not approve go to wallet one year um S3 qevk and one qap p67 E7 jlcvms ipqx VX dot pntc for almost my entire wallet dot uh dot dot so this is the sort of stuff that happens to people right um this person unfortunately only lost 2.07 Bitcoins um so at the time it wasn't that much but today it's worth a huge amount right um another but other people lost even more all in vain lost 25 000 BTC

right imagine you know who here wants 25 000 BTC imagine having 25 000 BTC and then suddenly you don't know what happens but your balance just drops to zero this is stuff that's actually happened right so wallet security is like pretty scary and people as well it's getting stolen is scary and people losing their wallets is also scary Stefan Thomas lost his wallet despite having multiple backups my preferred solution to this stuff is multi-sig and social recovery right wallets that instead of having one key have multiple keys so this is I mean this is actually like how

I store most of uh most of my money this is also how the ethereum foundation stores most of its money you have a wallet and you have multiple keys and most of those keys are all controlled by different people and let's say you need in the case of the ethereum foundation you need four out of those seven people to approve a transaction right so it does make things less efficient but for huge amounts of money and for amounts of money that our people's life savings you know the cost is actually worth it right and so you know these are seven people that are in different places around the world if you want you can actually go one level of security higher and say you don't even need the seven Guardians to know about to know

each other right you don't even need any of one of these key holders to know who the other key holders are and that's like even more protection protection against I'm trying to collude with each other um so basically wallets that have multiple signatures where each individual key some of the keys could be controlled by different devices that you have some of the keys could be controlled by other people some of the keys could be controlled by Institute by institutions right any as a one basically any combination as long as it gets us away from this really horrible approach where you have one key and if you do something wrong with that one key you're completely screwed so multisig basically says you have seven keys or you have some number of keys and you

need like for example four of them to do anything social recovery is like a milder version that says you have one wallet and with that wallet you have one main key that one main key can do things but then if you lose that one key then four out of seven could recover that key so I'm a big fan of both like I think multisig is good for cold wallets and uh social recovery is good for hot wallets um but and there's some actually so social recovery wallets and the there's been a lot of very good progress in making multisig and social recovery happen right so who here has heard of erc4337 good account abstraction right basically yeah it's a set of ethereum standards

that makes it much easier to have a an account an account where the rules for verifying transactions are smart contract code and so your account does not have to be protected by one key your accounts can be protected by three key executive protection by seven keys you can even have rules for changing the keys you can have rules for revoking Keys you can even have rules that say you need one key to spend up to about up to a thousand dollars and four keys to spend more than a thousand dollars you can do all kinds of things now from the user's perspective right social recovery like in my opinion it's great and in my opinion like this category of solutions is by far the best

way to like actually have security for people's wallets but there are user experience challenges users have many accounts um and one reason why users are going to have many accounts is because there's many ltos right A lot of people are going to have accounts on optimism and on arbitrum and on Kakarot and you know everywhere right and if you what happens if you lose your key well because you have to go and recover every single account on every single out layer two at the same time you know do you have to pay all of those transaction fees what about counter factual accounts right like you can ethereum has this feature and Bitcoin like basically most blockchains have

this feature that we don't really think about but it's super important which is like you can send people coins before those people have sent a transaction right like I can generate in Azure s locally and you can send me coins to that address before I actually send a transaction and like the system has to work this way right because if that feature did not exist then like how would I even send a transaction like how would I even pay a fee to send that to send that transaction but what happens there so what about accounts that you generated locally and that you have not used right like imagine you generate a counter factual account like you generate your private public key pair and this account is a social recovery account and there is a

copy of it on three different Altos but you actually use it on one you use it on another but you don't use it on a third and you don't use it on five more and then someone sends you coins on one of those five more and then well like which key actually is needed to send the transaction right like there's a lot of these really weird and confusing user experience trade-offs and these are things that a lot of the smart contract wallet people are really trying to deal with right now and finally what about privacy right so like I've done some person some surveying myself and it basically asks people why don't you use grenosis safe or something similar to store all of your money today the biggest answer is

privacy like they did not even if they trusted their family and friends to not literally steal their money they still did not want their family and friends to see every single transaction that they make in every single asset that they have right so can you have a social recovery system or a multi-sig without needing to or in a way that makes sure that the Guardians don't actually see what they're guarding well and in a way that the Guardians don't see each other as identities you actually can but it involves some pretty hard math so problem three privacy so cash payments have been a basic feature

of human civilization for thousands of years right Canada you know cash has basically been the way that most in-person Commerce has happened and privacy is a human right and um privacy you know in payments we haven't even needed to talk about it as a right because it's just been a default right for 3000 years of human history there hasn't been a way to have anything other than a form of cash that actually has privacy now um digitization is uh you know rapidly eroding our privacy in pretty much every sphere right and I know that like normally I'm not really a fan of bashing

the world economic forum and like I think people sometimes go too hard on them and they're like you know if they're a forum they're not like the secret guys that control everything but you know in that Forum sometimes they say things that are pretty scary and like this is uh you know this line welcome to 2030. I owe nothing I have no privacy and wife has never been better like I think it's up there and I think it's kind of Representative of uh you know this kind of mentality that I think is too common and kind of worrying and it's uh basically it's like the default direction that unfortunately I expect digitization to take unless we try really hard to actually make sure that digitization takes a better direction

right digitized systems by default don't have privacy you have to like add cryptography on top and you have to like actually try to make the digitized system private the Central Bank digital currency proposals that I've seen most generally they don't really have like real privacy right like they sometimes pay lip service to it but like in reality the Central Bank could see everything that each person is transacting right and even outside of privacy like if you use identities right like Google can see everything that you're logging into you know it's uh like basically every single app that is being created it's like by default it's being created in a way that has no

privacy and like this many different forms of privacy all across the Spectrum though that have just been an unthought and kind of unconsidered default that everyone has assumed exists as part of our civilization or just rapidly falling off a cliff and I think the crypto space is possibly one of the very few spaces possibly the only space that is in any kind of position to actually offer the world a realistic alternative to this um now there's problems on the other side too right so if we think about the privacy of cash it's easy to anonymously move a thousand dollars but moving a billion dollars is harder right now with digital cash well it turns out that you know

digital stuff is celebrity and it's like very it's as easy to move a billion dollars as it is to move a thousand dollars right and like this is actually a challenge right like it's uh like digital privacy at the like or privacy of cash transactions at the very top end of the scale you know it does also end up uh causing a whole bunch of problems and so there was this this is a slogan by him you know from Julian Assange right and uh he basically said uh you know that the ideal World from the cypherpunk point of view is a world that has privacy for the week and transparency for the powerful so can we have a world where privacy for you know small amounts of money and privacy for just regular

transactions is in actual reality and like really a reality like not some like stupid fake privacy where there's actually a back door real privacy no back doors like only you see the things that you're supposed to see but at the same time you know especially for the largest of the edge of the transactions have like some have some kind of uh of transparency and traceability especially yeah you know in cases where something that like everyone agrees is a hacker or theft happens for example so we actually there's actually a lot of interesting research in making something like this possible right I think one of the things that people keep chronically underestimating about zero knowledge

proofs is just how powerful the technology is right like people think about sometimes people think about cryptography as being this technology that does complete anonymity and sometimes people think about cryptography as this technology that like enables total verification and tracing but the reality is like zero knowledge proofs are both at the same so the proof of an innocence protocol this is a a really fascinating example basically the way that this works is uh we imagine a mixer right so something that works like tornado cash people put their coins in and coins come out now

let's imagine that you as an individual depositor wants to prove that that your coins are just let's say you just want to prove that your coins did not come from from a scam or you approve your or or from a hack or from you know something that's clearly associated with North Korea right and that's all and you want to prove that without actually publicly revealing um you know the link between the coins they're taking out and the coins that you're putting in it turns out that you can right you make a zero knowledge proof that says I'm one of these three and I'm not one of these two and this is something that can be automated right and you can make a system where by default everyone that participates in one of these privacy

systems they make a proof that proves that you know they are not one of the Azure one the payment that they're taking out is not one of the payments that came in from you know crypto scam DB or like one of the official lists of uh transactions that get flagged as suspicious and you know they get a very high degree of privacy and then the people that actually are associated with these staffs well they're not going to be able to make this kind of proof because while they are one of the hacks deposits and so they're going to get a much smaller set of people that they're mixing their coins with right and so this is like one example of something where people have privacy by default but like if the community if the ecosystem

coordinates around kind of boycotting the coins that come out of opportunity of that are associated with a particular set of events they are able to do that and the amounts of other coins that those uh that those coins are able to mix themselves with suddenly becomes much smaller right and so suddenly if you steal a billion dollars well there's a lot more friction associated with trying to move that bill that billion dollars anywhere further right and this is something that a bunch of different development teams are working on right so there's the chain way team there's uh I mean I mean solomoni who you know helped instigate the original tornado cash um and always got privacy polls continuing to do some great work on this there's a actually a bunch of projects

that are started that are starting to go in this direction and like I think this is one a really just like a really interesting educational story of like how zero knowledge proofs can like actually give us you know privacy for the people and at the same time like these like more complicated security and uh verification guarantee is at the same time right like you can prove that you're not one of the bad guys without revealing everything about yourself and that's something that's really powerful that's something that was uh not really available to us before other kinds of privacy right so I think just the ability to like move coins around without creating a link between every single action that you do is like

the simplest kind of privacy that people have come up with there's other kinds of privacy too so let's say we have Bob and Bob is receiving assets and the the way that this happens if we're doing an in-person conversation is Alice asks hey what's your address and Bob gives this ens name bob.eath or maybe it's uh you know bob.optynames.ether or Bob dot you know whatever other Layer Two names.eth right but the problem is that if Bob does this then he's doxing his own name and he's docking the connection between his own name and all all of the actors that he's interacting with if Alice has a DOT eth name then he's even creating a public

on-chain link between Bob and Alice and so the question is how do we hide the link between Alice and Bob and how do we even hide the total assets that Bob received stealth addresses so this is something that I think Tony uh varshader will be talking about a bit later today but it's um you know this powerful technology uh for basically letting Bob receive money in such a way that like what it basically does is it lets each every other person generate an address where that address is controllable by Bob but without a public link on chain between Bob and that address right so I instead of give

instead of bob.eith linking to Bob's address bob.eath will link to something that's called Bob's meta address in a meta address is like this this cryptographic key that you can go and you can take that cryptographic key combine it with data that you control and then create an an address which is controllable by Bob and which is totally unlinkable to any of the addresses that Bob has right so another example of privacy and like this is something that totally can uh you know can be done is being done there's uh already teams that are working on it and like this is another really important thing right like if you imagine you know a charity like or you know political activist

group you know wants to collect funds like that's it you don't necessarily want their like docs each and every person who is uh who is Santa who sent money to that organization right and um you know with stealth addresses you actually can improve some privacy there um can we make social recovery privacy preserving this is a fun one right so imagine you have notes that are coins that are inside of a privacy system and you want to at the same time have a recovery system so if you lose your key you can switch the key to something else well this seems unsolvable right it's like you want to give other your Guardians the ability to change the key but then at the same time like you want

to you wants to not create a link between all of your different assets well it turns out that we can right so ZK social recovery the basic trick is we separate the concept of an address where that holds assets with the concept of a key store right so a key store is going to have logic for the pop what is the spending key and what it what are the rules for changing the key if you want to recover you do things with the key store and then your assets are going to be in separate addresses right and if you want to spend from one of your addresses you provide a zero knowledge proof that's your knowledge proof it contains a pointer to the key store but that pointer is a

private input so the computation of verifying that you're authorized to spend your assets according to the current conditions in your current key store today all of that logic is done privately inside of a zero knowledge proof right so it doesn't actually get revealed to the outside world so you know conclusion right so stream zika Stark's rule everything around me um zika Starks are like the super important technology that is enabling pretty much basically everything that I talked about right so scalability ZK Roll-Ups um so you know Kakarot when a uh um you know ZK sync polygon all of this stuff depend on ZK snarks privacy

um depends on Seagate snarks social recovery at the same time as privacy enables even more collaborative darks right um you know the people who were who were in zuzulu before this um you know zoo pass the yeah and uh you know Zoo poll the zero knowledge voting system depending on snarks right so we are identity systems that preserve privacy depend on snarks right so University Starks are basically this technology that's like as I like I think it's going going forward in the next 10 years right so that's kind of an overview of the yeah of the main technological paths that I'm seeing happen over the next 10

years and I think the interesting thing about this is that the problems that we're solving are basically the same as the problems that I talked about in that slide that I gave in Taiwan at the end of 2017. right privacy scalability security same sort you know okay fine we solve proof of stake we still have the other three right the problems are very similar but the solutions are I think they've Advanced a lot and I think the biggest advancement is just how they've moved from Theory to practice right like are any of those are any of these things possible someone in 2017 could have said yes but in 2017 like we did not know when like ZK attack that's you powerful

enough for people to actually use is going to come right like in 2017 I mean I personally thought that you know Ezekiel VMS were like at least 10 years away then you know probably probably like 15 years away six years later we have running ZK avms on mainnet right it's like you know Ezekiel snarks are probably like aside from uh Transformers they're like the one technology that's like actually shooting way ahead of people's expectations right and I think it's uh kind of important and healthy to you know reevaluate any like in a uh in an optimistic Direction just how much we can do if we like actually use all these uh all of these Technologies properly and it turns out

that like we could do quite a lot right like we can actually make blockchains that are much cheaper so transaction fees would be able to you know be back below five cents again we can have applications that preserve people's privacy and not just like Financial privacy but also privacy for identity systems reputations um you know all of this social recovery stuff like everything we're going to you know we can actually have like account systems that are much safer and we can basically get to the point where fully decentralized technology like actually is comparable on a pure user experience basis to what centralized systems offer today and I think decentralized technology we could actually make it Superior to what centralized systems

offer today and so once we have that then like people will actually be like even the kinds of people don't really depend on blockchains today are going to actually be able to use blockchains without needing to use centralized intermediaries right and at the I think that's powerful and I think that's really important and I think like it's amazing that we out that there's like actually so much more clarity now around the paths in all in each of these individual directions than there was even two or five years ago right but the challenge is like there's just a whole bunch of technical work that needs to be done and there's like a

whole bunch of people that needs to actually keep working together right like um you know who here is um actively developed part developing an ethereum wallet um who here is uh talking to everyone else that just raised their hand sure the question is who here is currently actively part of a team that is building an ethereum wallet oh who here okay so second question who here is already talking to all of the other people that have raised their hand okay basically yeah okay see you so a couple which is good right but I think we need more right like if we if we're

talking about like getting ethereum across through the layer 2 transition and through the Privacy transition like this is something that requires standardization right this is something that requires wallet Builders to be working together on this is something that requires ens in applications to be working together on existing stuff that exists like applications like lots of applications don't support smart contract wallets lots of applications don't support ERC 1271 which is how you do off-chain signatures for everything that is not a basic basic eoa right um lots of applications they don't even like they're not even standards

compatible like they only support metamask and they don't support other wallets because of like just one tiny thing and like their testers did not even think of testing it in Brave right like there's still a lot of these little things that have to be solved and like even more of those things are going to have to be solved in the future um so there's like a really important need for I think people in the ethereum ecosystem to keep collaborating and working together even more as we get through all of these technical transitions that are needed to actually like take all of these theoretical technical benefits and turn them into you know properties of ethereum that regular users coming into the ecosystem for the first time

actually get to benefit from a use right it's easy to make an alpha it's much more difficult to actually standardize something across the entire ecosystem right and I think that's probably one of the still one of the big Social Challenges that the ecosystem has left right like we we talk a lot about coordination and we talk a lot about funding public goods and funding public goods is super important but then there's also just coordinating on making sure that we're on the same page in terms of upgrading protocols layer one is pretty good at doing this the application layer you know it's uh Sometimes good sometimes what's good but and I think it can be can be much better right and so you know

that's my like the dream that I have for the ethereum ecosystem is as we continue building all this amazing Tech and uh you know as we continue turning privacy and scaling and security and all these other things into solve problems that we can you know actually work together and like actually make sure that you know we preserve ethereum's core values of decentralization openness censorship resistance permissionlessness and actually create a you know any ecosystem where we do all these things collaboratively and you know we worked and we worked together and uh you know we actually you know create Asia you know a beautiful ethereum stack where

all of these problems are actually solved for uh for people five years from now um you know no matter which also you're on and no matter which wallet you're using so thank you foreign