What Will the Next 10 Years of Ethereum Bring?

Transcript

yeah everyone's got their own little style when they slide into the ramen Bowl I guess hi but yeah uh after this we have another guest speaker and then after that we got a little K-Pop group coming out to perform hi right right and then after that we could all come back down to the web 3 Garden to party H while a little dj does a sting up here all right all right what

[Music] yo hold on Yo um I think one of the mascots got lost um I think that thing is a little too big for the staircase yo uh one of the edcon mascots has made it onto the stage here hold on hold on hey over here over here where you going where you going oh Jesus hey you edcon unicorn over here I feel I feel like I feel like I'm catching this thing um who

who uh who are you who who's in there oh yeah over here Japanese you think you got to test Japanese oh okay not Japanese okay um um oh oh your center right there okay um yo this thing is huge wh what's going on um hello are we is

this is this what's going on yeah oh Jesus okay oh my God who who whoa whoa whoa he's he's on his tippy toes here hold on all right I think it's hot in there yeah I'm pretty sure who who are you I I it do you hear that yeah I think I'm sure I heard something um um I don't know what is happening right

now but uh the the edcon unicorn has snuck up on the stage and I thought it that that is oh my God what why does the quality of the horse go up inside of the unicorn um hey no hello hey no no pun intended hey um can

we who who who are you I I am a do coin holder one more time please I am a do coin holder I hold sorry one more one more one more time right for the ladies and gentlemen mhm what one more who are you hold on ballic boter in in the house hey a round of [Music] applause you thank

you great so happy birthday of ethereum everyone yeah the the ethereum chain um launched on July 30th back in 2015 I still remember when I was uh at the Berlin office uh on on that day and uh a lot of developers uh came together and uh we were all watching the blocks on the ethereum test net count up to number 102 8201 because that was the number at which the mainnet ethereum main net

would automatically launch and uh I still remember like us all sitting around and then waiting and then it hit the number and then I think it took like about half a minute for ethereum blocks to actually start coming but then they did and uh they and they started coming very quickly and uh at the time ethereum was uh just uh me less than 100 uh deel developers Al together not even just in the ethereum foundation you know probably uh at least working on the protocol including those outside of the foundation as well and since then the ethereum ecosystem has just become so much bigger than uh it than it was then

right since then we've grown into this uh ecosystem that holds these I like multi- thousand person conferences that has applications with millions of users where all of the ideas that were in the ethereum white paper at the time have actually become ethereum's reality and I think one of the big questions that everyone in the ecosystem should have is what will the next 10 years of ethereum bring or to put it in another way what will in the next 10 years you bring to ethereum so so this um over here um so the picture on the left is uh the very first

decentralized Twitter on top of ethereum it was called ether tweet it's uh a very simple application it's uh it ex this was launched back in 2015 and uh all uh it had it was was just a very simple interface um so you could write what you wants the tweet and then you click Send and then it just immediately becomes a transaction that gets sent to the ethereum blockchain on the right uh we have this client called firly um so done by uh you know the mask Network and uh this is a uh multic client actually of both regular ethereum TW or regular Twitter and probably the two largest um ethereum based kind of

Twitter like uh social media platforms so one is forecaster and the other is lens so if you ever see me um when I write an article and then I publish it and I send out a tweet on Twitter and a tweet on foraster and the tweet on lens at the time like this is um actually what I'm using now if you look at the quality of the UI it's just vastly better than what's in 2015 right 2015 is uh like amazing work amazing developers but I me know this was like the right Brothers airplane um of decentralized software right and today what we have is more like a modern commercial jet so what do we have here right so first of

all the quality of the ux what they're doing there's even a mobile version right um there's uh multiple uh forecaster clients they're all desktop versions all glob all mobile versions if you look at the under l in network on the left everything was going on ethereum L1 and everything was a blockchain message you had to pay for every single time that you tweet on the right um it actually is a hybrid architecture it uses a combination of uh the ethereum blockchain to store information about accounts uh together

with an offchain data structure called a crdt which has some of the properties of a blockchain but not quite all of the properties and it gets much more efficiency and much lower cost that way um to store the actual tweets that people make um so this is uh what decentralized Twitter looks like in 2024 right it's something that is easy to use it's something that is actually affordable to use it's something that is uh much more scalable and it's something that people already are starting to use more and more um just because of its use value right not even because they wants to use a crypto product but because well it's actually like really

fun so ethereum is uh progressively solving all of the problems that it had back in 2019 if anyone here heard me uh present uh back in 2015 2016 2017 I would talk about the importance of security scalability privacy um you know switching to proof of stake a um account abstraction all of these different concerns and then if you look at what we have today right so if you look at transaction fees back in 2019 you would often have to pay1 to5 to send a transaction um on chain if you're not lucky maybe it's over $50 if you're not lucky and you're using some complicated

application that involves a ZK snark maybe $500 I actually paid a transaction fee of like over $500 once just uh uh put a c snark on chain if you look at today transaction fees on layer 2 uh are usually less than one cent right so if you remember you know like back five years ago I made this comment that you know the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction and then at the time of course ethereum cost more than 5 cents a transaction and at the time Bitcoin maximalists were all laughing and they were saying like look you know haaha you know he says that uh

this is what we need to do to scale and ethereum has that scaled now in uh 2024 um you know we did this major upgrade um and which introduced this feature called blobs right so this was a hard Fork on March 14th or 13th and it introduced this feature called blobs that increased the amount of data scaling that's available to l2s and as a result of it basically every major L2 is now almost always seeing fees that are either less than one cent or definitely less than 5 cents so using the chain is actually affordable now transaction inclusion time back in 2019

you would often have to wait like 1 to 5 minutes for a transaction to get included if you were unlucky you had to wait an hour today because of EIP 1559 making the action fee Market much more efficient you generally wait 5 to 20 seconds and then if you're using L2 many of them offer pre-confirmation so you have to wait less than one second wallet security so back in 2019 Mo almost everyone was using externally owned accounts accounts that are controlled by a single private key so you hold all your money all your life savings in one private key and if the private key gets lost all your money is lost if the private key gets stolen all of your money belongs to someone else now today

we have a very wide array of options for smart contract wallets so who here uses a safe many people use safe um and uh I expect within five years like almost everyone will use either a safe or some kind of smart contract wallet so this gives you much more options in how your account is secured how you access your account how you use your account for different applications so security has improved a lot as well right basic and then also in 2019 ethereum was a proof of work and it was consuming about as much electricity as a small country today ethereum is proof of

stake and it's consuming less electricity than a small than a building so lots of big improvements everywhere now this is all layer one right and layer one is continuing to evolve it's continuing to become more scalable continuing to become more secure introducing ZK snarks introducing statelessness introducing many things but uh the question is what like what are we doing this for right and ultimately we need a a better layer one in order to enable better applications so what would better applications look like I think think uh if we could ask

the question what can ethereum do over the next 10 years I think from most people's point of view the thing that people will see are going to be the applications so basically I think we have the tools or we soon will have the tools to build the best possible applications in every space where using ethereum Mak sense now one thing that I think is interesting is that over over the last 10 years the ideas of where blockchains might be used have actually not changed that much right so if you go through the ethereum white paper from 2014 so this was more than 10 years ago and you look at the

list of applications one of them was stable coins another one I basically called it Financial derivatives but basically defi decentralized exchanges also defi then another one was uh centralized domain names um then another one uh was uh uh Dows and another one was like was uh insurance and you keep going down the list and if you look at the things that exist today we have defi we have great decentralized exchanges we uh are starting to have prediction markets that we talked about that one quite a bit in 2014 as well we uh actually have quite a lot of dows we

have nfts I did not predict nfds okay I did not predict that people would be trading digital monkeys for $2 million that's all you okay uh but uh you know many other things are I think uh it's interesting right how much a lot of things have actually changed the same so what how are all what is going to happen in the next 10 years right one way to think about this is uh we can look at some specific types of applications and we can see how far have they gone and we could see how far they could go so on the left back in 2019 um this is called this was augur this was uh a prediction Market that was popular back then on the right um You have poly

market and um you know poly Market is uh much more scalable much lower fees much easier to use um again um you know when I used a augur to trade back in 2020 I paid over $1,000 of transaction fees today poly Market is on on L2 it's know on polygon and the cost is like almost nothing right and so the question is in 2034 how is uh something like this going to improve let's look at wallets wallets are most people's window into the crypto world right and wallets have two functions right so people can use

wallets to make payments and payments I think always has been one of the mo i it was the first use case of crypto and I think it always has been and it always will be one one of uh the most important and wallets are also the way that you interact with applications more generally back in 2015 uh we had this uh idea to build to build a an ethereum browser that was called mist and the thing that we started with was a simple ethereum wallet that would do payments now if you look at the UI if you were around 15 years ago you would recognize that this was actually this looks very similar to a Bitcoin clients from back then and at

the beginning ethereum was really heavily inspired by Bitcoin right and know ethereum wallet looks like a Bitcoin wallet it was a desktop software um and know this is what it looked like now over here in the middle a 2024 Doo this was an ethereum wallet that is explicitly TR to be as friendly and asy to use for people for people who are not yet of the crypto and if you look at it it just looks like venmo right so we've gone from having applications that are like these things in these very early stages to things that uh actually look like they're ready for normal users now Doo

is for payments the thing that we don't have yet I think is something that is as friendly as D and uh that that is actually secure enough for people to use that actually like is a general purpose right that handles people's access to the entire ethereum world um so one question is what are wallets going to look like in 2034 I don't think they will look like the ethereum wallet from 2015 I also don't think that they going to look like d let's look at voting voting was uh one of these use cases uh that I think a lot of people who are interested in ethereum were interested in from the beginning right that one of the big differences

between ethereum and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin was about money ethereum was more generally about creating new kinds of social institutions one new type of social institution is finance another type is voting and there's a lot about voting that could improve right you could try to make votes be more transparent be more guaranteed to like actually be resistance to manipulation you could do a lot of things back in 2015 knowledge uh proof based voting so

this combines blockchains and zero knowledge proofs to make voting that is simultaneous very trustable and at the same time privacy preserving um so big Improvement in the quality of the underlying technology and if you just look at the application it's very easy to use this is basically W to Quality and so one of the questions to ask is well what will voting and especially voting enabled by a combination of blockchain and cryptographic Technology ends up looking like in 203 a lot of people think about voting as being government elections right a vote is something that you do once every

years and it decides the fate of a whole country I think if we can make voting more efficient and at the same time more secure we can really expand the set of conditions in which in which we use voting in our entire online lives so if you think about likes and retweets on social media those are also a kind of voting they're a kind of much more high bandwidth voting but at the same time they're also a kind of uh voting that today is very insecure can we use blockchains and DK technology to make those kinds of votes more secure as well so I think uh

there's going to be a lot of things that either look like voting or that combine some aspects of voting and some aspects of finance and we're going to see a lot of really cool things developed in 2034 and uh you could be one of the people that builds uh builds it let's look at uh ethereum scalability in 2034 right so on the left is uh a chart of the amount of data space in ethereum blocks that we're expecting to have over time this directly connects to the number of transactions that users can make on on layer the theoretical Optimum is that one transaction takes at least 25es on chain

if he wants to have a roll up now Leona for mint Max is going to come and say well actually you only need five um and I'll let him make that presentation plasmon is happening tomorrow it's great but let's say 25 for now um so divide 384,000 by 12 seconds 32,000 bytes per second divide by 25 and uh you know you have about 1,280 uh transactions per second that could happen on on layer 2os now the next step is Fe us this is an upgrade to ethereum's data space that we want to do next year go up from 384 kilobytes to 1 to 4 megabytes maybe go up by a factor

of let's say eight so now we go up from 1280 transactions per second that could happen on layer twos to about 10,000 now then we go further and we have full D and that might go all the way up to 16 megabytes every 12 seconds so we're looking at tens of thousands of transactions a second happening on layer 2os and if you include plasmic instructions it can go up to hundreds of thousands even Millions so we're basically looking at in the medium term Unlimited scalability on top of ethereum and secured by ethereum and uh in the ethereum ecosystem now we can also look at the data that's required per rollup

transaction right so today we data is mostly uncompressed and it's between 150 and 180 bytes and if we actually do compression then we actually go down to the 25 bytes that we're talking about and then if you go further and then use plasma like that can go even less so more and more transaction volume which also means that ethereum users will be able to benefit from lower and lower fees user experience and Security in 2024 one of the challenges that we have in adoption is basically that if you have coins there's two ways to hold your

coins one way to hold your coins is uh you know the very paranoid way right basically you have a key and you have this you know you have this number that might be stored on your computer it might be written down on a piece of paper maybe it's on a computer that never goes online you try to be as secure as possible but then it's difficult to use and at the same time maybe you still make a mistake maybe you try so hard to be secure to protect against a theft that uh you end up losing access to your coins yourself or maybe you try so hard to make sure you can access your coins even if many different things happen that one of those things gets attacked and someone

steals your coins at On The Other Extreme we have people who just give up on that approach entirely and they say I'm going to trust coinbase with my coins or I'm going to trust uh binance with my coins or they might decide there's this guy named Sam and he looks like a trustworthy guy he goes on panels together with Bill Clinton he donate he donates to nice Charities he has um you know his face up on big advertisements in San Francisco maybe you should trust him maybe I should let himle all my coins and then one day in the fall of 2022 it turns out that this guy named Sam is not so trustworthy and then you

wake up and then you realize you don't have your money anymore so this is also something that happens many times in um our ecosystem right and so I think uh the challenge is that we have to deal with these two extremes right this like extreme of like total know self sovereignty trust anyone versus this other extreme where you just trust centralization and I've always thought that the most interesting thing that we could do is we could find something in the middle and that that benefits from the both of both both sides of this and so the thing that we can do is uh we can what's called multi- wallets right wallets where instead of being

controlled by one key they get controlled by multiple keys for example controlled by six keys and you need need four of those keys to approve a transaction if it's big but only one of those keys to approve a transaction if it's small so this uh a lot of people use this right this is know what you could use in for safe this works for individuals it works for organizations but then there's a problem if you have those six Keys what are you actually going to set those six different keys to be like what is an option that we can set that actually works for people who are not existing crypto experts so the way that I see this is that there's three different options one of them is

your own devices right your desktop your phone we can make your phone more secure by putting the wallet inside of a trusted Hardware chap you can have a hardware wallet something like a ledger um so this is one option or even just a a seed phrase stored on a piece of paper another option is friends and family right if you have people that you trust they could be some of your key holders too and then a third option is institutional key Guardians right so you can trust institutions with some of your keys so they can help you secure your money but you don't give them all of your keys so they do not have enough Authority that they can just go and

steal your money unilaterally for institutional Guardians there's two different versions one of them is specialized Guardians so you create a company that intentionally does the job of being a guardian or and another option is you can take existing services including existing Web Two services including centralized ID including email government ID uh Twitter accounts and you can use ZK snark rappers to turn them into um Guardians that can help uh protect your wallet without giving them full authority to like actually Seize Your all of your funds so I think one of the things that I'm excited to see is

just a lot more work in these kinds of designs you basically try to get the best of both worlds right try to get op an open and decentralized system where you don't have one single centralized actor that controls your accounts that controls your assets and all your data and at the same time have something that is secure both for uh like people that are full-time in the crypto space and for people that are just joining crypto for the first time standardization using ethereum ler 2s should feel like using ethereum it should not feel like using 34 different blockchains so today depositing to poly market for example this very complicated

process I you know you have to uh copy an address and then you have to make sure switch over your network to polygon you have to like use some custom I know application that's like a specialized bridging application and then if you do the wrong thing maybe you send your coins to the wrong place what this all can be simplified a lot right and I've talked in other places about how this can be simplified and if we just adopt the right standards for Crossway or 2 exchange and for um cross layer 2 addresses then moving funds from one layer two to another layer two from from L1 to another layer two from a layer two to L1 could be just as easy as moving

funds within the same uh Network so another thing is I think the Ean Builders should not just replicate web 2 I think we should Speed Ahead of web 2 right I think uh if we wants to be something that the world takes uh much more seriously and that everyone uses in 2034 we cannot be at the state where in 2034 we build excellent clones of everything that the ized world has in 2024 we have to go where the tget is moving so a few different ideas one is other form factors right so the big thing that we did between 2014 and now

is we moved from just supporting desktop to also supporting desktop and Mobile in 2034 it's not going to be just desktop and mobile right so what other form factors wearable devices could be a watch could be glasses talking to a locally running AI augmented reality brain computer interfaces all of these things are coming and maybe we like we should actually build applications directly with the idea in mind that this could be how people interact with them epistemic technology so technologies that can help people understand what's true what's fake what is a good application what is a scam um on the internet so Community notes is uh one of

my favorites pred markets is one of my favorites there's a lot of different things that I think could be should not even just be separate applications and they should not just be part of Twitter I think these things should be built directly into the browser right directly into the interface that you use to access the web 3 world and uh I think this is something that we can think about for um web 3 browsers I think this is also something that we can think about even for other kinds of applications think about encrypted Messengers for example right many people building encrypted Messengers you know we like being Cypher Punk we like helping individuals protect their

privacy but at the same time this is like Messengers are something that already exists what if we don't just do encrypted messaging we go a step further right and we say well let's think about what kinds of other things that are being developed in the 2020s could help make messaging even better what if you have locally integrated AIS and you know you could actually uh like have AIS that people choose based on you know their own uh their own values and based on which communities that they're part of that run locally and that help them understand what and make sense of uh things that other people are saying to them another idea is to lead the way on

security right one of the challenges with the crypto space is that uh we do have these ongoing security challenges the reality is that the centralized world is even more insecure right the the the thing with the centralized world is the way that the centralized world does security is by chasing the Wolves right if there is a wolf the wolf is attacking people you send police you send centralized administrators you send other people to try to go after them and if this is the only thing you can do then this is what you have to do I think what's interesting about the crypto world is that there's another strategy which is

we can put armor on the sheep right we can protect the Sheep by building in Def defenses that just directly protect them from any kinds of threats that appear regardless of which country they're in regardless of of What kinds of threats they are and so we do not even need to rely so much on going after people who are attackers and instead we can protect people at the source I think this is uh the only approach that makes sense for crypto because crypto just is a very chaotic space it's inherently very globalized it's inherently open inherently permissionless and so you really can't go after attackers to the

same extent right and so one of my hopes is that if we can figure out how to protect regular users in a way where we like actually protect them at the source then that is something that we could export to The Wider world and we could help The Wider World become much more a much more secure place and in doing so also a much more open place at the same time and uh I think there is uh like an info defense part of security so things like Community notes things like uh are are one example and then there's also just like a cryptographic security side of things right so making sure that that at least the base blockchain software

does not have bugs in it with formal verification technology it might be possible to actually get there onchain content versioning so if someone basically instead of accessing daps through websites you access daps through hashes that go onto ipfs and so a you if a Dap gets updated then every user will immediately be able to see and uh if an attacker comes in and they take over a website they will not be able to like feed fake versions of adap to users immediately right it'll be much harder for them to do those kinds of attacks there's a lot of different things that we could do to really weed on security

within the within the etherum ecosystem and I think there's a lot of value in US really trying hard to do this so summary right I think uh the recent the last 10 years of ethereum have been a decade where we focus on the and we focused on making that things work well making that the technology just exists to the point where we can build things the applications that we built were basically small demos anything that people built in 2016 they knew that it could not scale with that uh with the technology that existed today in 2024 we do have that technology we actually can scale we actually can reach the quality

of ux that we need to appeal to regular users very powerful and very consequential applications are already happening on ethereum and I think in the next 10 years we really have to like really switch Focus right we really have to not just think about layer one but also like really think about what are the impacts on the world that we're actually going to have what are all of these different applications that we're going to build and how do we build them in a way that actually preserves the values that we all have and at the same time actually works well enough to to reach people who are not yet part of the crypto space and build things that people want to use and

I do not know the answers right and I think all of you all the developers here all of the builders and not even just Builders also every single person in the ethereum community who expresses their voice has a chance to be part of this process of actually building out this uh future of ethereum together thank you thank you everybody give it up for ballic [Music] buin oh he's already [Applause] going you got to be careful cuz he's

wearing the Japanese yucata right yeah that thing really Rises up he could have got a really bad wedgie yeah