Partnered With:

Vitalik Buterin: Talk about the challenges Ethereum is currently facing

Read this article in 7 Minutes

Vitalik shared his views on the current state of Ethereum and blockchain, including the latest trends and related technical challenges.

Original title: 《 Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was invited by Professor Wen Yonggang to visit NTU to imagine the future of blockchain 》

Original author: Song Chengru, CAP Group of Nanyang Technological University

With the development of blockchain technology, decentralized applications have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. For example, decentralized finance (DeFi) is a general term for financial products and services based on Ethereum. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are data units stored in Ethereum smart contracts that are used to prove that digital assets are unique and non-interchangeable. In addition, using blockchain as an infrastructure to support transactions of different commodities such as electricity and carbon neutrality are also very popular academic research directions.

However, there are still many unresolved issues with blockchain, including scalability, privacy, security, latency, and transaction efficiency. Applications that use blockchain technology as a foundation, such as payments in daily life, are still in their infancy and face several key technical challenges.

The interview started with a warm introduction and welcome from Professor Wen Yonggang to Vitalik.

In this speech, Vitalik mainly shared his views on the current state of blockchain, including many applications such as DeFi, NFTs, ENS, etc. In addition, Vitalik broke down the current blockchain challenges and briefly introduced the efforts currently made by their team to solve these problems.

For many applications on Ethereum today, especially DeFi (distributed finance), NFT (non-fungible tokens), ENS (Ethereum naming service) and DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), Vitalik reviewed the great success of Ethereum and the potential of Ethereum in the future. However, the current Ethereum blockchain still cannot meet the requirements for more efficient and powerful distributed systems. One challenge is to improve security and energy efficiency, because Ethereum is still using the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm, which wastes a lot of electricity for calculations to confirm transactions. To address this problem, Vitalik and his team are working on a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm to replace the original mechanism. By separating the data layer and the consensus layer, the Ethereum team is preparing for a seamless switch that is completely transparent to users, but requires users to download a new client.

For another challenge, scalability, it is also a bottleneck for Ethereum because it introduces a high gas limit (which can be seen as a transaction fee). To solve this problem, Vitalik and his team suggested using a layer 2 protocol and some sharding methods to achieve scalability.

Finally, Vitalik mentioned a common problem encountered by Ethereum. Users of Ethereum sometimes experience a degradation in experience because transaction confirmation time usually takes 1-5 minutes. He suggested that after the introduction of EIP 1559, most transactions are within 20 seconds and will continue to decrease in the future.

In addition to these topics related to the Ethereum blockchain, Professor Wen is also very concerned about the career development of students at Nanyang Technological University. He asked Vitalik for some advice on career planning and research directions for undergraduates and graduate students. Vitalik suggested that for undergraduates, starting an Ethereum project right away would help them understand Ethereum better. For graduate students, zero-knowledge proof algorithms would be a good research direction.

In a nutshell, Vitalik shared his views on the current state of Ethereum and blockchain, including the latest trends (DeFi, NFT, ENS, etc.) and related technical challenges, especially around scalability, PoS, user experience, and security. Vatalik said that these issues need to be solved to make more mainstream blockchain use a reality.