Vitalik gave a keynote speech at the Shanghai Blockchain Week today, discussing the key directions for Ethereum over the next few years—there was a lot of information.
The core idea is: the next phase of blockchain is “blockchain + cryptography.” In the past, chains solved the question of “who can send what assets.” In the future, we’ll be able to programmatically decide “who can see what information”—fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a technology once thought far from practical use, is rapidly approaching viability.
On performance, he laid out a roadmap with specific numbers: block production time will be shortened from the current 12 seconds to 4–8 seconds, and finality will be compressed dramatically from about 16 minutes to 8–32 seconds, over a timescale of the next 5 years. The approach is to move more computation forward to the user’s device, the mempool, and parallelize it across the block-building process.
There are also moves toward censorship resistance: FOCIL (EIP-7805) plans to have a group of 16 validators collaboratively provide the transaction inclusion list, reducing a single block builder’s ability to censor or delay transactions.
One-sentence summary: Ethereum is evolving from the cumbersome ledger of “every node re-executing everything across the entire network” into an efficient computing network powered by cryptography.
The core idea is: the next phase of blockchain is “blockchain + cryptography.” In the past, chains solved the question of “who can send what assets.” In the future, we’ll be able to programmatically decide “who can see what information”—fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a technology once thought far from practical use, is rapidly approaching viability.
On performance, he laid out a roadmap with specific numbers: block production time will be shortened from the current 12 seconds to 4–8 seconds, and finality will be compressed dramatically from about 16 minutes to 8–32 seconds, over a timescale of the next 5 years. The approach is to move more computation forward to the user’s device, the mempool, and parallelize it across the block-building process.
There are also moves toward censorship resistance: FOCIL (EIP-7805) plans to have a group of 16 validators collaboratively provide the transaction inclusion list, reducing a single block builder’s ability to censor or delay transactions.
One-sentence summary: Ethereum is evolving from the cumbersome ledger of “every node re-executing everything across the entire network” into an efficient computing network powered by cryptography.
