Vitalik's latest speech: Looking back at Ethereum's "dead" revival several times, the blockchain ecology is the most important

Rhythm BlockBeats news, on October 27th, V God delivered a speech at the 6th Blockchain Global Summit, the full text is as follows:

Good morning everyone! Nice to see you all, really nice to see you all again.

Today I would like to share with you the latest situation, and I will share with you the development of the Ethereum ecosystem And new trends from the past year, some of which were already apparent in the past three years but accelerated in the past year. I will also introduce what the future blockchain ecosystem will look like.

A brief summary of how the Ethereum project started:

  ;

I started writing the "Ethereum White Paper" in November 2013, and I sent this white paper to a small group of people. The Ethereum project was announced at the Miami Conference in January 2014. At that time, the concepts of smart contracts and blockchain technology were still very new. Many people were excited about it, and many people also wondered what can be done on top of it. interesting thing. In July 2014, the Ethereum Foundation was established and the pre-sale of Ethereum began, mainly to promote the initial development of Ethereum.

Ethereum was "dead" in October 2014. At that time, everyone was talking about why Ethereum was "dead" up? Other blockchains also have the capability of smart contracts, so Ethereum is no longer needed, and we need to focus on other blockchains. But for some reason we decided to continue developing Ethereum, we launched the Olymplc testnet in March 2015, and launched the Ethereum mainnet in July 2015, which is very exciting time because we waited a long time Mainnet launched.

In October 2015, Ethereum was "dead" again, Wall Street technologists said it was too late to save Ethereum Yes, maybe give up. But we still continue to work hard. In March 2016, the first Homestead (hard fork) of Ethereum was carried out. In 2016, the first Ethereum application DAO was released. At that time, DAO was just a decentralized investment fund. The establishment of smart contracts on Ethereum was mainly for the purpose of fundraising, and tens of billions of funds were raised at that time. Unfortunately, DAO was attacked. Almost everyone will remember the event of DAO attack. Everyone found a loophole in the DAO smart contract. Hackers stole a large part of the funds from Ethereum, so Ethereum "dead". You can see many reports saying that Ethereum is dead, Bitcoin and Litecoin are immortal and so on.

Later we decided to solve the DAO attack problem and hard fork Ethereum, so that the DAO problem can be clearly resolved, Return the funds to the user. In the end, we did return the display to everyone.

The months of 2016 were not very lucky for Ethereum, because Ethereum was "dead" again, DAO Smart contracts have loopholes. In September 2016, it was attacked by DoS. At that time, it was the first day of Shanghai DefiCoin (sound). In December, Ethereum "dead" again.

The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance was established in 2017, and many companies adopted Ethereum for the first time. It seems that Ethereum cannot die. And it seems that Ethereum seems to be very successful, because Ethereum has attracted the interest of many companies from all over the world, and many institutions and regular users are also interested in Ethereum. The usage rate of Ethereum is very low, but then the transaction of Ethereum increased rapidly, CryptoKitties was widely used, and many people raised electronic cats. In October, a Byzantine hard fork was carried out to support zero-knowledge proofs, so that applications based on zero-knowledge proofs can be deployed on Ethereum, laying the foundation for further development.

Ethereum "died" again in 2018, and the price dropped sharply and continued to fall. In 2018, the development of Ethereum 2.0 began. At that time, a lot of work started quietly, including theoretical research, development research, and realization of sharding and proof of rights. A seminar was held in Taipei in 2018, Uniswap was released in November, and a decentralized exchange was deployed on the Ethereum platform. In 2019, Tornodo was released, adding privacy tools in the Byzantine hard fork.

Ethereum "died" again in 2019, and "died" several times.

Where are we now? Strange that Ethereum is still alive, isn't it great? The first phase of Ethereum 2.0 seems to be only a few weeks away, at most a month before it can be released. The Ethereum 2.0 testnet has been in operation for nearly three months now. There were loopholes at first, but later it worked quite normally. So we have a lot of good news. People are very excited about staking and know how to run validator nodes, so Ethereum 2.0 has made great progress.

For a long time, people have thought about the history of Ethereum, thinking that Ethereum is mainly about the development of the core. But in fact, many things are missing. Ethereum is not only the core chain, but also involves other things on the blockchain main chain. Let’s talk about Uniswap seriously. Uniswap is a decentralized exchange. Go to the Uniswap website and enter how many tokens you want to sell and what kind of tokens you want to sell, and tell you what tokens you can buy, so that the transaction can be completed. Easier to use than any decentralized exchange, and more convenient to use than most centralized exchanges.

No one has heard of Uniswap for a long time at the beginning, but in the past 6 months, Suddenly Uniswap attracted a lot of attention and interest, and many people traded in Uniswap to provide liquidity for Uniswap. The second version of Uniswap, the token, was recently released. Uniswap has become a very important member of the ecosystem because it is a meta-application, and many applications can be built on Uniswap. Today you need special tokens to participate in the application, and you can also go to Uniswap to get tokens. Uniswap is not only a decentralized exchange run by itself, but also a part of our system, making the Ethereum ecosystem more user-friendly .

However, there are still some challenges, such as expansion challenges, transaction fees have risen sharply, and for a period of time the transaction fees even exceeded Bitcoin blockchain transaction fees, which has never happened before.

This means that using the Ethereum blockchain becomes very expensive, if you want to participate in the prediction market of Ethereum It costs $10-20 for online transaction fees, $30 for solutions that require privacy, and $2 if you only need to transfer DAO coins. The challenges of scaling have been proven.

Figure Source Site

However, the Ethereum ecosystem is actively solving the scaling challenge, and the expansion proposed by ZK Rollups two or one years ago Solution, I wrote a blog about how to improve the scalability of Ethereum to a throughput of 500 transactions per second, and since then it has reached a throughput of 3000 transactions per second. This is all theoretical. In addition to decentralized exchanges, payment tools can also be used.

Gitcoin’s Grants is a quadratic financing mechanism, which is used to fund public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem . I've talked about Grants many times, and I talked about it at last year's conference. Quadratic financing is a decentralized governance mechanism that enables communities to have some way of allocating funds to essential public projects, choosing the ones they deem most valuable. There were seven ballots, all very successful, and people were very happy with the results of the distribution.

This time Zksync is the solution of ZK Rollups, so the financing cost in Gitcoin Grants is 5-10 times lower than before, With a savings of 96% in terms of gas costs, Rollups are very useful and valuable.

The different layers of infrastructure have started to interconnect. Gitcoin Grants can fund the scaling of the public good Zksync, which enhances the scaling of Gitcoin Grants. Gitcoin Grants supports many extension projects. It is possible to see the synergies between the different layers in the ecosystem.

Optimistic rollups Just like ZK Rollups, Optimistic rollups are now more powerful, it can not only process payments, but also Ethereum smart contracts, many people in the Ethereum ecosystem are very interested in Optimistic rollups migration because it is a short-term expansion solution.

I gave a speech recently, I think focusing on Rollups is a very realistic short-to-medium-term solution, Optimistic rollups have also With the test network, some applications are also deployed on it. Zero-knowledge proof is the concept behind ZK Rollups, and it gradually supports the execution of general-purpose smart contracts, so there are more ways to expand smart contracts.

Plasma is here! Everyone can use Plasma, and Plasma is a solution for capacity expansion.

Ethereum ecosystem: not only the first layer of expansion, the second layer of expansion, it adopts a hybrid approach, the The advantages of the first-tier and second-tier expansion solutions are integrated. The current throughput is 15-45 pens per second, which can be increased to 1000-4000 with ETH1+rollups. If there are rollups and fragments, the throughput can be Up to 100,000 transactions per second.

The expansion and scalability of the Ethereum chain should take advantage of the scalability of the main chain and the advantages of the second-layer protocol. This path can provide Ethereum with sufficient scalability to support the long-term development of applications deployed on Ethereum.

Ethereum has gradually become a real ecosystem, a self-sustaining ecosystem. Every time a problem arises a solution can be proposed to solve it.

If you want payment scalability, now there is Loopring, ZKsync, OMG website.

If you want a stable value, there are DAI, USDC, etc.

If you want to have extended smart contracts, there are Optimism and Arbitrum.

If you want a username that someone can read, say to send ether to other people, but you don't want to use The addressing method can use ENS (Ethereum Domain Name System).

If you want privacy, there is Tornado.cash, AZTEC, zkopru.

If you want to exchange and exchange assets, there is Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges.

If you want to fund public goods, there are Gitcoin, Quadratic funding in the Ethereum ecosystem financing.

If you want identity verification, there is BrightID, not just a machine or a person with 100,000 accounts, BrightID can Solve the problem of authentication.

The ecosystem contains different parts, and different parts of the ecosystem support and benefit each other. The privacy layer provides application privacy, the funding layer provides other funding, and the payment extension layer ensures payment, thus forming the ecology of Ethereum. The most valuable part of Ethereum comes from different components, they can cooperate with each other, which is the benefit of the infrastructure.

I like to compare Ethereum to a city, and Txstreet.com is a website that describes Ethereum as a City. There are a lot of applications like buildings, people have to come and go between different buildings, if you want to go from one building to another you can take a bus, the bus is like a block in the ethereum block .

This metaphor reflects the very important value in the Ethereum ecosystem, the specific application is not important, the most important thing is Ecosystem, the most important thing is to build decentralized solutions to replace more and more functions in daily life. The more infrastructure, the more things can be done, and in turn, more infrastructure can be built.

In 2015, I wrote a controversial blog "Blockchain has no killer app", this sentence I have said it many times, and many people have disputes about it. In 2020, the meaning of my words is very clear. I think the blockchain ecosystem is not a killer application, but a killer network. It is not only about stable coins, prediction markets, expansion, but most importantly, interaction. The value of the blockchain mainly comes from the interconnection of different parts and the simultaneous use of these things.

Image source site

So the blockchain is a neutral base layer that enables us to build an ecosystem. The base layer is decentralized, so that there is enough confidence to deploy applications on it.

Ethereum is now taking center stage, and the crypto ecosystem is also very important, including other blockchains, off-chain components. The more components you have, the more impossible things can be done through the encryption ecosystem, and more and more people will participate in the future, and they may have enough power to support more activities and build more components , thus jointly create a better future.

We are not far from such a future.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia