ETHHK was held in Hong Kong on October 23rd as scheduled.Following the crowd through different venues such as the main speech venue, Hacksong workshop, and project introduction, you don't seem to feel the deep bear market; On the contrary, developers from different countries and regions maintain a high level of enthusiasm and participation in project construction

ETHHK was held in Hong Kong on October 23rd as scheduled.

Following the crowd through different venues such as the main speech venue, Hacksong workshop, and project introduction, you don't seem to feel the deep bear market; On the contrary, developers from different countries and regions maintain a high level of enthusiasm and participation in project construction.

Among them, the most popular one is naturally Vitalik's online keynote speech.

In the theme ofThe Future of Etheremandits Development RoadmapIn his 20 minute speech, Vitalik mentioned many topics such as new opportunities and challenges faced by Ethereum, account abstraction, social recovery, expansion, and L2, and expressed personal thoughts on the current industry development and future.

Shenchao TechFlow reporter took shorthand of Vitalik's speech on site and organized it as follows.

The Achievements and Challenges of Ethereum Transformation

Vitalik first reviewed some key achievements of Ethereum since last year's Merge upgrade and the shift of consensus mechanism from PoW to PoS:

• The first merged hard fork was successful.
• More than 25 million ETHs are being pledged in equity certificates.
• After the switch and upgrade of the consensus mechanism, Ethereum has been operating steadily for over a year without major accidents.

But at the same time, Vitalik also directly addressed the current challenges faced by the PoS consensus mechanism:

• Centralization of pledge:Due to the fact that pledge has become an essential element in the daily operation of Ethereum, pledge service providers can assist users in pledging, but this inevitably leads to the centralization of pledge.
• Transaction processing efficiency:In order to achieve optimal efficiency, the ETH network may wish to process no more than approximately 10000 transaction signatures per time window (Slot).

Deep tidal note: The time window (slot) should be a predetermined time period, usually a few seconds, used for proposing and verifying blocks. Each time slot has a pre-selected validator whose task is to propose a new block within that time slot. In order to ensure the efficient operation of the network and prevent potential spam attacks or congestion, a limit may be set on the number of signatures or transactions that can be processed within each time slot.

Account Abstraction and Social Recovery

Vitalik has repeatedly emphasized the importance and necessity of account abstraction. He believes that the abstraction of push accounts is driven by two considerations:

• Convenience considerations:Users can use any ERC20 token to pay gas fees and perform multiple operations (signature, authorization, verification, etc.) in a single transaction;
• Safety considerations:Vitalik has also discussed with multiple multi signature wallet and MPC wallet projects and believes that the solution based on mnemonics is still not the most perfect choice. The loss of mnemonics and private keys can lead to asset loss.

Meanwhile, Vitalik still has a strong preference for social recovery. The main reason is that Vitalik starts from the usage habits and experiences of ordinary users, who may not understand the private key or may have lost mnemonics.

In this situation, a 'guardian' of assets that helps you is crucial. Considering that you may forget or lose, both your friend and your other device can become asset guardians in case of emergency; On the basis of trust, institutions conducting encryption services can also play the role of guardians.

In addition, account abstraction itself also faces challenges. This challenge is not just an isolated technical issue, but involves the entire encryption ecosystem.

For existing wallets, applications, and development tools, choosing to use account abstraction to enhance user or developer experience inevitably involves technological adjustments and adaptations. Account abstraction is a technical concept, but it will inevitably encounter problems during actual adaptation execution.

And with the emergence of more L2, whether and how different L2 supports account abstraction is also a challenge, as users may encounter situations where one L2 supports but another does not.

Privacy infrastructure is one of the newly introduced components closely related to account abstraction. This means that in order to achieve account abstraction, it is necessary to ensure the privacy of transactions and operations, so that different authentication methods and account types can work without exposing user privacy.

While promoting broader account abstraction, it is likely that consideration will also need to be given to how to handle MEV issues to ensure the fairness, security, and healthy development of the system.

Therefore, Vitalik generally believes that the promotion and popularization of account abstraction require the joint efforts of roles in the entire ecosystem,The overall goal is to align the on chain experience with the centralized service experience.

Expansion, L2, and Privacy

With the emergence of L2 and the advancement of Ethereum's own technology, the expansion problem has been solved to a certain extent, but Vitalik believes that there are still the following challenges:

• How to ensure the security and decentralization of the proof system when L2 packages and submits valid proof of transactions to L1?
• In the technical components of L2, most of the transaction sequencers are centralized and may have potential risks
• L2 has different technology options and development directions. How can we build wallets and addresses across L2 to provide users with a better experience?
• Transaction record related data requires space for safekeeping and storage. How can data availability issues be resolved?

Due to time constraints, Vitalik did not provide very detailed answers to the above questions, but rather addressed all the issues currently facing expansion.

Interestingly, Vitalik also admitted in his speech that there are currently too many L2 platforms in the market, but it is not necessarily necessary to roll up when it comes to capacity expansion.

He also gave some personal suggestions:

1. The project should clarify its own requirements for security and scalability, and at what level, decide whether to roll up or not.

For example, scenarios such as account key storage and high-value financial assets require extremely high security requirements, while games or non-financial applications may have higher scalability requirements.

2. Clarify the difference between Validium and Rollup, and take the appropriate seat accordingly.

Validium is a Layer2 expansion solution. It stores data offline, but validates it on the chain. This means that it can handle a large number of transactions, but may sacrifice some decentralization and security - especially suitable for gaming and other scenarios;

Unlike Validium, Rollup (especially zk Rollup) preserves data on the chain, which may be detrimental in terms of privacy or efficiency. But if you want reliability or more security, you may choose zk Rollup.

From the images displayed on site by Vitalik, it can be seen that for many projects, currently choosing to use Validium may be a reasonable choice as it provides a solution to achieve offline data availability while ensuring transaction effectiveness.

But with the expansion of blobs (used to compress large amounts of data into smaller "blobs" for more efficient storage of data in Ethereum), projects can shift to using Rollup, as Rollup provides more security and reliability by maintaining on-chain data availability.

Finally, Vitalik also mentioned three types of privacy issues currently facing the Ethereum ecosystem:

• Cointransfers:Privacy issues during the transfer process of cryptocurrency. For example, although many blockchain transactions are open and transparent, there is still a need and technology aimed at making these transactions more private to protect users' financial data.
• Guardians:As mentioned earlier, the guardian in social recovery is authorized by the user to make certain decisions or perform certain operations. The privacy of guardians may be related to their identity, the assets they control, or the operations they perform.
• Identity/Reputation and Similarapps:On blockchain, identity and reputation systems can help verify the authenticity and credibility of users or entities. However, these systems may also involve personal privacy issues, as they may require the collection and display of sensitive personal information.

conclusion

At the end of the speech, Vitalik summarized the overall ideas for the future development of Ethereum:

• Maintain robustness and solve with caution:Maintaining the robustness of the Ethereum foundation layer is a prerequisite, and on this basis, we can cautiously expand other capabilities, such as scalability, user experience, and privacy issues.
• Finding a balance between experience and decentralization:It is necessary for Ethereum to become "user friendly" to ordinary users, but the benefits of decentralization cannot be lost in this process.
• Technology and ecology are equally important:The development of technology has pointed the way, but how to implement and promote it still requires the joint efforts of the entire ecosystem.