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Vitalik's Speech at Wanxiang Blockchain Week: Blockchain is Ending the Era of 'Everyone Repeating Everything'

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Cryptography has matured to the point where blockchain no longer requires "everyone to redundantly execute everything," and scalability and privacy are no longer trade-offs.

Original Title: "Vitalik's Wanxiang Blockchain Week Speech: Blockchain Is Ending the Era of 'Everyone Repeating Everything'"

Original Source: Shenchao TechFlow

Host: Distinguished guests and dear friends, good morning, everyone!

Welcome to the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 12th Blockchain Global Summit, hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs.

Twelve years ago, when the first summit opened here, blockchain was still a little-known technical term. Over the past twelve years, we have witnessed it move from geek communities into the mainstream, from experimental exploration toward industrial implementation, and from a single technology into the underlying infrastructure driving the digital economy. Twelve editions of the summit have not only recorded every leap forward in this industry, but have also become an important stage for global blockchain thought exchange, standards co-building, and ecosystem connection.

Today, we gather once again in Shanghai under the theme "Intelligent Chain Symbiosis" to explore the future landscape of deep integration between blockchain and artificial intelligence. "Intelligence" represents the cognitive revolution brought by AI, while "Chain" represents the foundation of trust built by blockchain. When intelligence meets trust, when algorithms meet consensus, we believe this is not a simple superposition of technologies, but a brand-new paradigm shift that will redefine the boundaries of finance, the value of data, and the ways we collaborate.

On behalf of the summit organizers, I would like to extend the warmest welcome and most sincere gratitude to every guest here today!

At the same time, we also want to specially thank this year's Diamond Sponsor Qtum, Strategic Partner Wanxiang Innovation Energy City, and Gold Sponsors Arkreen, Bianjie AI, Blue Elephant Smart Chain, Frontier Technology Research Institute, and Yuanbi Technology, as well as the exclusive dinner sponsor Sui Foundation for their strong support of this summit. Twelve years of dedication, twelve years of iteration. Today, let us open the next exciting chapter together.

Dear guests, the first heavyweight speaker of today's summit is about to take the stage.

He is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Over the past twelve years, he has grown from a young geek into a spiritual icon of the industry. The Ethereum he created ushered in the era of smart contracts and defined a series of narratives that have led the industry's development.

He will join us remotely to share his latest thoughts on blockchain. Let us welcome Vitalik with the warmest applause!

Full text as follows:

Vitalik Buterin: Good morning everyone, I'm going to talk about a rather complex technical topic today, so I'll speak in English.

Today I want to talk about a macro topic. We've been discussing blockchain and we've been discussing cryptocurrency, and this has been going on for more than 15 years (of time). For example, the entire Shanghai blockchain activities have been going on for more than a decade. Bitcoin was born in 2009. On the surface, the tools and technologies we are building still seem to have similarities, but in reality, over the past 15 years, there have been many differences, and I think these differences are crucial.

One reason is that, as a user, this means the types of assets you get and the types of costs you bear are very different from what we previously expected. 10-15 years ago, even our views on the goals, the goals we were trying to achieve, have changed significantly.

15 years ago, blockchain was our main tool. Bitcoin combined blockchain, signatures, and proof of work. Ethereum also added smart contracts and transitioned to proof of stake in 2022. These were the tools we used at the time. So, this characteristic is what you get from using blockchain.

First, blockchain is open, anyone can freely participate, it is global, reliable, secure, neutral, and no centralized actor can intervene in your application and prevent it from running, which could lead to giving wrong answers.

Zooko, who created Z-Cash, likes to use a phrase, namely: a public blockchain is like Twitter for bank accounts. When the whitepaper was released in 2009, I think the basic answers to these questions, such as personal names not being directly linked to their transactions, were still acceptable if there were strong privacy protections. But now, we have extremely powerful data analysis capabilities and extremely powerful artificial intelligence, and this answer is clearly no longer sufficient. At the same time, people want to do more things with watches. They want watches to have stronger performance. People are not only interested in payment functions, but we also want payment functions to have stronger and superior characteristics. Therefore, both sides want to go further. In many places, we indeed need to go further.

Therefore, the biggest change is in the technical field. The change we have experienced over the past decade is the rise of zero-knowledge proofs, including SNARKs, and then the quantum-secure SNARK version — STARKs. The role of these objects is that they allow you to verify a computation. One person runs the computation, he generates a proof, and everyone else verifies it. The computation process proceeds in this way, and the verification process is more efficient.

At the same time, it doesn't even need to reveal all the information, that is, all the information used for computation. Therefore, the core part of blockchain technology is related to this issue, the issue of verification. We want a system where everyone can participate, and everyone can be assured that what is happening follows the rules.

So, the original technology required everyone to re-execute all operations, so you sacrificed scalability and privacy. SNARKs and STARKs changed these two things. People have been talking about this for a decade, but this is gradually getting closer to becoming a reality every year. I think the biggest change this year is that all plans will shift toward all these technologies. They are no longer part of the future, nor part of future roadmaps. Now there are EIPs, namely EIP-8288, and we hope it can enter I-STARK (ph), happening in two years, perhaps with AI, or earlier. They are "strawman maps," where everything after the fork in the next two years uses STARKs, everywhere. Therefore, this is a major change.

Another major change is that there are now more and more powerful technologies, and I think these technologies are also about to arrive, so fully homomorphic encryption, namely: FHE, many people are using it. In addition, obfuscation technology and IO technology, which for a long time people thought belonged to the distant future, but in fact its versions may become increasingly feasible, on a shorter time horizon, faster than many people imagine, so we have more powerful technologies. These powerful technologies bring us many things, for example, one of them is that you can process blockchains in parallel, and parallel processing begins before transactions are included in blocks.

FOCIL is an EIP that is entering H-START (ph). This is the first instance of multi-party participation in block building, happening on Ethereum, so blocks are not created by only a single participant, but jointly created by 16 participants, and finally completed by one final builder. Its goal is to provide a stronger guarantee, namely: if you send a transaction, that transaction will be included in the next slot. Therefore, no single actor has the ability to delay it.

In addition to fossil fuels, there are also EIP-8288 and EIP-828H (ph), all of which indicate that you have very large proofs. These very large and expensive objects are happening, and we actually do not need to put them directly on the blockchain. Instead, they can be placed in large-scale parallel processing to prove all proofs, and this process happens off-chain, in the mempool, in the gaps in between. When you send a transaction, when that transaction goes on-chain, in that space, it replaces all objects, using only one proof to prove that these all exist. Therefore, many changes have taken place in the media technology field.

But I think the important thing about these changes is that they truly change our mindset. What is the goal for this kind of system? First, an important question is what are we protecting? Bitcoin says we are protecting a data asset, namely "bitcoin currency." If you can issue your own digital asset, we can also protect it, using modern cryptographic assets and information. In Bitcoin and Ethereum, cryptography and code output an answer to a question, and this question is "who can send what." Which asset belongs to whom? Who can send which asset and when? Now we are entering the era of programmable cryptography, where code determines who can see what. So, who can see what, which information, not only who can send, but also who can see? This is becoming programmable. Where does computation happen? Fifteen years ago, blockchain was still just blockchain.

Over the next 5 years, I think to a large extent, this will only accelerate. We are accelerating, accelerating from this aspect, that is, not just having one blockchain, but embracing this entire pipeline, this massive crypto network, which contains a complete pipeline, where users perform a lot of computation locally, completing most of the work before data leaves the user's device, and then transactions go through a mining pool. There are multiple types of mining pools, and they have different privacy properties. Then it gets aggregated, there are multiple different types of participants, and block building, and then it is recorded on-chain. Now, with this mechanism, the same transaction of a major coin is reprocessed, processed by every node, and in the theorem, a proof is verified many times.

In the end, what did we sacrifice? I think this is a very good point. If I sacrifice scalability, I also sacrifice latency. So, centralized systems can provide 100 milliseconds of latency, sometimes even 300 milliseconds, globally. Bitcoin's latency is 600 milliseconds, or about 590 milliseconds, about 10 minutes. And the theorem currently takes 12 seconds to generate a block, and it takes 16 minutes to achieve final confirmation. But in the future, even theoretically, C language is currently expected to be reduced to 4 to 8 seconds per block, and 8 to 32 seconds for final confirmation, as well as scalability. This is a major transformation. That is, blockchain architecture will no longer always require such a large sacrifice. In terms of scalability, it will sacrifice, but not scalability, but scalable generality. It will sacrifice the ability to have extremely scalable computation. If you do not set any limits on this system, do not provide any guarantees to regulate its computational behavior, if you have computational power and can package it, divide it into two parts, they can be executed separately, verified separately, and can run. Before anything happens, even before entering the supply chain, then extremely high scalability actually becomes feasible, right? Therefore,

If you consider blockchain, treat it as a complete system, including L1, including L2, and also including human resource pools. Human resource pools, L2, tools. All these systems have become this very complex middle layer, which you or your agent can solve, possibly because AI Q3.8 helps make them more beautiful. But basically, every workflow link is being accelerated, accelerated by AI, so before AI appeared, we had zero-knowledge proofs, but only very simple cryptographic applications, which were possible only in some cases. One reason is that if the number of lines of code exceeds about 100 lines or 1000 lines, then it is almost certain that vulnerabilities will appear.

We believe we can use it for verification. We can use different types of redundancy, testing, specification, analysis, and we can build larger and more complex things. For example, in the post-AI era, we can put everything, everything we do, into cryptography, as well as algorithms. The algorithms we use have very high overhead. Now, 100x overhead, or even lower, is usually possible. Therefore, for ZK-SNARKs, we have achieved less than 10x overhead applied to AI inference. We have achieved less than 10x overhead applied to certain types of hashing operations. Then we have FLoC, which I think is about 250x overhead, but in reality, this number is falling rapidly. Before verifying all of this, it was all done manually. Now, formal verification is another major operational bottleneck. This is one of the main reasons why I think L2 has failed to achieve the expected results. So far, it is because there is a limit, the degree to which you can protect them is limited, so you need redundancy, you need multiple verification systems, you need security committees.

And the new technology is formal verification, where if needed, you can even use multiple specifications corresponding to one implementation. So, you can express what the work being done is in different ways, by different people, different agents, different teams, and then automatically, mathematically prove that they all express the same meaning? If they end up expressing different meanings, then your foundation will be much smaller, and everyone can refer to it to better understand which side is correct. Therefore, there is a lot of progress happening in the Ethereum world, both at the protocol level and the application level. I encourage everyone to visit our website at drawmap.org to check out the Ethereum protocol. If you look closely, you'll find that every piece of hard work, after about a year, will be involved, with very advanced cryptographic features, putting everything inside the stock, putting everything inside the virtual machine, aggregating, formally verifying everything, deploying quantum-safe signature algorithms, and all these factors combined, they will transform the theory from a mere blockchain into a larger network with different layers. One of the advantages, I think, is that AI not only helps us build all these things faster, but also builds all these things in a more secure way.

Of course, security is something we truly choose to focus on, and we do focus on it in the theorems, but AI, I think, also makes it easier for everyone here to understand all these things. So I think, if someone is a developer or a researcher, it would actually be very encouraging for people to try to understand the different parts being built, to understand the different components, to understand what properties the different components have, and to try to find out if there is any specific part that you want or can contribute to.

I think it is becoming rapidly more feasible and more accessible to anyone, or those who are willing to learn, willing to think, and willing to put in the effort, to help with research, to help build, for a country to contribute to this frontier field, including technology and ecosystem. There are even public competitions ongoing to improve and formally verify improvements to many algorithms.

Moreover, this is also a good time to truly rethink applications, the applications we have been building, and to build new applications. These are all applications built on Ethereum. Five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, many of them were not built with the idea that these new technologies are feasible, that privacy can be programmed, and that even complex code security can be guaranteed. Now these things have become possible, so I encourage people to get involved in development and building, to develop and build applications, to combine them, Ethereum and other decentralized networks, and other things in the real world, just as you hope, you want to influence, you want to improve.

Thank you!