On the evening of February 19, at the invitation of FSL Chief Revenue Officer Mable Jiang, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin conducted a special flash text AMA in the Flash Interview Circle in the Tako App. Anonymous questions were collected from the community in advance for this interview, aiming to respond to the communitys concerns and confusion about the future development of Ethereum.
The content of this interview covers the future adoption and ultimate narrative of ETH, how to view the relationship between L2 and the Ethereum main chain, and the centralized sequencer solution of MegaETH. Vitalik even answered the question from community users about whether he is a communist. It is worth noting that this is also the first time that Vitalik has conducted an AMA in Chinese in recent years.
The following is a summary of the content of this AMA:
Q1: In your mind, should Ethereum today be closer to Bitcoin or the world computer? You mentioned in the previous X post that many people who have a negative view of ETH are just short-term speculators, and their frustration can hardly bring any constructive help to the ETH community. However, many people in the OG ETH-Maxi camp also loudly promote the concept of ETH is money (such as Bankless, the largest ETH Maxi media), and compare ETH with BTC, believing that it is another competitive form of digital currency (maybe even a better form of currency). What is the ultimate narrative you envision for the future adoption of ETH?
Vitalik: Is Ethereum a world computer or a currency? I think these two ways of thinking are compatible with each other.
If you need to tell which blockchains are truly decentralized, you can use a relatively simple test: if its foundation disappears, can the chain survive? I feel that only Bitcoin and Ethereum can clearly answer: of course. Most of Ethereums development is outside the foundation, and the client team has an independent business model. Now many researchers are not in the foundation, and almost all activities except Devcon are independent. It is difficult to reach this stage. Ethereum was not like this 5 years ago.
Giving up these advantages in pursuit of TPS is a big mistake, because there will always be new chains that suddenly have higher TPS than you. But decentralization and resilience are precious, and few blockchains have them.
These characteristics are conducive to creating a digital currency with long-term value, and also conducive to having a good world computer. However, the world computer also needs to solve the problem of expansion. World computer does not mean a computer that can support every application in the world at the same time, but a place where applications in the world can interoperate with each other. High-performance computing can be placed in L2, which is fine. However, this beauty still requires L1 to have enough scale. For specific details, please refer to an article I wrote recently: Vitaliks new article: Substantially expanding L1 still has value and will make application development simpler and safer
ETH is a digital asset suitable for use by the worlds applications (including finance and other things, such as ENS, etc.). ETH does not need every transaction to be placed on L1, but it needs to have enough throughput to allow anyone who wants to use L1 to use L1 at least occasionally. So these two directions are also compatible here: the characteristics that help Ethereum become a better world computer are also the characteristics that make ETH a better digital currency.
Q2: Today, many L2s have emerged, mainly OP stacks, and some zkrollup attempts. I would like to hear your evaluation of the rollups route in the past few years, and I hope it is as objective as possible: what do you think is done better, and what is different from what was expected at the time; is rollups generally good for Ethereum or a bloodsucking (I saw you calling on these L2s to give back to Ethereum a few days ago)? Does ETH really need these L2s?
Vitalik: Ethereum needs hybrid L1 + L2. So far, our expansion method can be roughly understood as hybrid L1 + L2, but I think no one has clearly defined which transactions should be in L1 and which transactions should be in L2.
The answer put everything in L2 is harder to accept because:
* This will easily lead to the loss of ETHs position as a medium of exchange, store of value, etc. If you are worried that L2 will steal L1s users and not give L1 anything in return, this problem will be more serious in a situation where L1 does almost nothing
* Cross-L2 operations still require L1. If an L2 fails, users still need a way to move to another L2. So there are some use cases that are difficult to avoid L1. I wrote an article on this topic here: Vitaliks new article: Significant expansion of L1 is still valuable and will make application development simpler and safer
The answer put everything in L1 is also difficult to accept because:
* If L1 supports many transactions, it is easy to become centralized, even if ZK-EVM and other technologies are used
* The world’s demand for on-chain transactions is infinite. No matter how high the TPS of L1 is, you can always find an application that requires 10 times more TPS (for example, artificial intelligence, micropayments, micro-prediction markets, etc.)
* L2 not only provides capacity expansion, but also provides faster confirmation speed through preconfirmations and avoids MEV problems through sequencers
So we need hybrid L1 + L2. I think the role of L2 will continue to change. For example, it seems that evm-equivalent L2 is enough now. It is possible that we will see more privacy-focused L2 (aztec, intmax, etc.), and there may be more application-specific L2 (if an application wants to control its own MEV situation, there are benefits here, etc.) So in the short term, I think we should continue to improve the capabilities of L1 at the same time, increase blobs to give L2 more space, promote interoperability across L2, and then the market will decide which expansion method is suitable for which application.
Q3: The rollup route has been proposed for quite some time. Do you think the current centralized sequencer of Arbitrum/Base/OP is a big challenge for future regulation because it cannot be truly censorship-resistant? Do you think they will move towards a decentralized sequencer solution? If your answer to the previous question is yes, what do you think of MegaETHs centralized sequencer solution?
Vitalik: Regarding centralized sequencers, centralized sequencers actually have many advantages:
* A centralized sequencer can ensure that it will not steal users’ money by frontrunning, etc.
* instant preconfirmations
* It is easy to turn a traditional application into a blockchain application because the server directly becomes a sequencer
The decentralized nature of blockchain can be used to avoid the risks of centralized sequencers: forced inclusion mechanisms prevent sequencers from censoring users, and optimistic or zk proof mechanisms prevent sequencers from changing or violating application rules (for example, suddenly inflating a token or NFT collection).
However, centralized sequencers still have risks, so we cannot rely solely on centralized sequencers to solve the problem. The ability to trade based on rollup or directly on L1 is also important. So I support having two parts of the ecosystem to promote these two methods at the same time, and then we can see which method is more suitable for which application. Of course, it is critical to maintain the ability of ordinary users to issue censorship resistant transactions.
Vitalik responded to the comment Actually, my starting point is that the US regulators may go after them, but the probability is not very high: Possible solutions and attempts for single sequencer anti-censorship. If this happens, there are two possibilities:
1. DAO will select the sequencer and backup sequencer and will always move to the new sequencer
2. We use based rollups
I think the first one is worth studying, and I know some L2 teams have thought about this direction. The second one is a backup, and there may be other reasons why we think based rollups are better and start using more based rollups. The advantage of Ethereum is that we can try several directions at the same time.
Q4: What is the difference between the technical route of ETH 3.0 and the goals it hopes to achieve in the rollup era? In the 3.0 design plan announced at Devcon last November, did it take into account that rollups do not really provide actual value to the Ethereum mainnet at this stage?
Vitalik: The relationship between value capture between L2 and L1. There is no such thing as ETH 3.0 now. Some people will say that Justin Drake’s 5-year plan is it, but that plan is only the consensus layer, not the execution layer, so it is only part of the future of the Ethereum blockchain.
The relationship and balance between L1 and L2 is an execution layer issue. Here is another roadmap: strengthen L1 capabilities (increase gaslimit, add stateless verification (such as Verkle) and other functions, etc.), improve cross-L2 interoperability, improve blobs, etc. I also think that the question of whether L2 pays enough transaction fees to L1 should not be viewed too much from a short-term perspective. For example:
* Before 4844, everyones complaints were the opposite: Is L1 sucking the blood of L2?
* Currently, the blob fee for the last 30 days is 500 ETH
* If the blob target is increased from 3 to 128, according to our plan, if the blob gasprice remains the same, 21333 ETH will be burned per month, 256000 ETH per year.
So the narrative here is prone to changing quickly, and now we need to strengthen L1 so that things that should happen in L1 can happen in L1, increase blobs, and then maintain the adaptability of our community.
Q5: You decided to step up and lead EF again. I believe you have considered a lot. This is not an easy decision. It is a courage to take a leap and look into the abyss. I admire it very much. Do you mind sharing your whole thinking process with us today? At the same time, I am curious whether you recognize socialism with Chinese characteristics? The starting point of my question is the proper board mentioned in your discussion with Ameen: Before embarking on the right development path, do you think the organization needs a strong leader to guide and correct the direction?
Vitalik: Decentralization does not mean doing nothing.
I think the blockchain community, and the world as a whole, is in a dangerous state. There are many things happening that have no long-term value or are even malicious. These things and the people behind them have received a lot of attention. But we cant just shout against these things without proposing better alternatives. So our goal should be to do this alternative well and demonstrate that a stable and brighter future is possible.
Here I am talking about both the blockchain community (if memecoin, which dropped 97% in one day, is not our future, then what is?) and a macro-social aspect: many people now think that democracy is impossible and that things can only be done under the leadership of a strong man. But at DevCon, a political scientist told me that one of the reasons he respected Ethereum so much was that we are a truly open and decentralized ecosystem, and we have succeeded at this scale, which gives him hope. So if we can succeed in this way, the positive impact on the world may be huge, and it will give many people a bright example of success that they can follow.
But decentralization does not mean doing nothing. The Ethereum Foundations philosophy of subtraction does not mean reducing the foundation to 0, but a way to maintain ecological balance. If there is an imbalance in the ecology in one place (for example, one part of the ecology is too centralized, or there is an important public good that others do not do), we can help counterbalance. After solving this problem, the foundation can withdraw from that area. If an imbalance occurs in a new place, we can move resources there, and so on.
In Chinese culture, the way we pursue may be most similar to the ideas of the Tao Te Ching, but this path requires wisdom and the foundations ability to improve in some areas. It is not a matter of success by doing nothing. Therefore, in the short term, we need to put more effort into some important pivots.
Q6: I don’t belong to the core Ethereum circle, so I am not too clear about some of the more detailed political issues. From your own perspective, what do you think is the main reason why some ETH Maxis OGs left the Ethereum community? When Shuyao and I were recording a podcast, she mentioned a very interesting point: Ethereum needs to be reset to zero before it can be rebuilt (half-joking). At this stage of Ethereum, do you think it is indeed facing a major reshuffle of existing holders and community members before it can find its own way?
Vitalik: Ethereum needs new stories and new users.
There are many different people with different stories. For example, many people in the blockchain circle would say 10 years ago that the goal of blockchain is to be a global neutral system, protect personal freedom, and counterbalance the hegemony of the government. Now, if a president issues a memecoin, they will say, wow, this is real world adoption, so good, but why is it happening on other chains? If we can be more friendly to those politicians, it will happen on our chain next time! I personally think that such people have gone astray. Of course, they will say that I am too purely idealistic, unrealistic, etc. Each side has its own story.
Some people would also say that the Ethereum ecosystem is too controlled by OGs and there is not enough space for newcomers to come in. But this criticism is in another direction, and there are different groups making these arguments.
I think there is only one suitable way for us to get out of these predicaments: we need to have some updated stories to explain why Ethereum exists, what ETH does, what L1 and L2 do, etc.? This is no longer the era of infra, but the era of applications, so these stories cannot be abstract freedom, openness, anti-censorship, solar punk public goods, etc., and some clear application layer answers are needed. In the near future, I plan to support more: info finance (this is also the direction of AI + crypto), privacy protection, high-quality public goods financing methods, and continue to do a good job in the worlds open financial platform, which of course must include real world assets. There are many things here that are valuable to many users at the same time and are in line with the values we have always had. We need to support this direction again, and this can also give new people more opportunities to come in.
Q7: Do you think Ethereum needs more commercial company-type management? Do you think that the current difference between ETH and SOL is essentially a difference in efficiency between different organizational forms and a difference in achieving different goals? What goals are they achieving?
Vitalik: If Ethereum becomes a company, it will lose most of its meaning
I think Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, not a company. If Ethereum becomes a company, we will lose most of the meaning of Ethereum. Being a company is the role of a company. In fact, there are many large companies in the Ethereum ecosystem: Consensys, various client teams (Nethermind, Nimbus, etc.), Coinbase, L2 teams (including Aztec and Intmax, their privacy technology is very interesting and underestimated by many people).
The best approach is to find ways to give these companies more opportunities to realize their strengths, with the foundation acting as a coordinator.
Q8: You have always been concerned about the application of ZK technology in the web3 field. In addition to the application of ZK in asset trading scenarios, in social media networks, in which scenarios do you think ZK can be introduced to achieve privacy protection?
Vitalik: I am very interested in many non-financial zk use cases, such as:
* Anti-sybil verification. Many services require you to log in with kyc not because they really want to know who you are, they just want to know that you are not a robot, or if you are banned, you cant reopen your account 100,000 times. To implement this use case, you only need zk proof of personhood, or proof of reputation. In fact, sometimes proof of tokens is also enough, such as anonworld
* Use cryptography to protect privacy in AI applications. ZK may not be the most suitable technology here, but FHE may be. FHE has made a lot of progress recently. If we can further reduce the overhead of FHE, we may have a chance.
* Wrap any web2 account with zk-snark and use it in web3. zkemail, anon aadhaar, zkpassport, zktls etc are good examples.
I think this technology has a lot of opportunities to solve many security, governance and other issues in social and other fields by protecting personal freedom and privacy.
Q9: Do you think encouraging more developers to join Ethereum, motivating and retaining existing developers (compared to some new L1 or even L2 with more generous developer incentives, Ethereum is definitely in a more complicated situation) is the current priority? Accelerating network decentralization, improving scalability, and exploring more application scenarios Apps, among these three aspects, which one do you think is the highest priority for Ethereum at present?
Vitalik: The alignment of the Ethereum community is not a social game but a technical game. Here we actually need to find a way to solve three problems at the same time:
1. Attract more developers
2. Encourage developers to develop applications that are open source, secure, compliant with public standards, have long-term value, etc.
3. In the process of solving (2), avoid the situation where the ecosystem becomes a closed circle (the phenomenon of we are aligned because we are good friends of developers)
So I recently said that ethereum alignment should be a technical game, not a social game. I want to emphasize this issue because I think that in terms of decentralization, the most pressing centralization problem is often not an L1 problem, but an L2 or wallet or application problem. Therefore, the entire ecosystem needs to work together to expand and attract new developers and make progress in these decentralized and trustless aspects.
There are several ways we can help with this:
1. Education, making it easier for developers to understand why blockchain exists, what should be on the chain, what should not be on the chain, what they need to care about in the field of blockchain, etc.
2. If some blockchain-specific technologies are too difficult for application developers, the foundation can do it itself, making it easier for developers to integrate. For example, zk programming language, a16zs helios, etc.
3. Provide developers with clear standards. For example, if you are developing an Ethereum client, there are many tests, and you can run the tests yourself to see if your client can pass. If you are developing L2, there are frameworks such as l2beat stage 1, stage 2, etc. This should also be provided for zk applications, wallets, etc.
Q10: Today, AI is accelerating the evolution of technology. You mentioned the concept of d/acc (de-accelerationism/or defensiveism against accelerationism) before. Now, does the effective acceleration process of decentralization of technological power meet your expectations? Do you have any hidden dangers in this regard? I actually feel a little powerless. I know that Folding Beijing may be a future. From a humanistic perspective, I dont want it to happen, but I think it is getting closer and closer to us.
Vitalik: I need to make an important correction here: d/acc is not de-acceleration, but decentralized defensive acceleration. This is important because there are people in this world who support deceleration, degrowth, etc., but I think this direction is wrong. In a peaceful world, it will delay the improvement of important medical care and infrastructure and cause more people to get hurt. In the more dangerous world now, if you don’t accelerate, you will be eaten by those who are willing to accelerate.
Decentralized and defensive technology need to compete with other technologies. If the sword advances rapidly but the shield does not, the world will become more and more dangerous. If centralized technology advances rapidly but decentralized technology does not, the world will become more and more centralized. So we need to counterbalance these trends. Blockchain is part of this story, but only part of it. There is also decentralization outside of blockchain (for example, p2p networks), software and hardware security (the shield of the digital world), and many things in the biological field, and so on.
Q1 1: Do all employees of Ethereum Foundation, including the leadership team, have an assessment mechanism such as KPI/OKR? Non-profit organizations generally have problems with inefficiency. Do you think EF has such a problem? If so, how to solve it? Can you systematically explain in detail how to accelerate the development of Ethereum from all aspects? Eth has been around for ten years and is updated once a year. It feels that the development progress is a bit slow and needs to be greatly accelerated.
Vitalik: The Ethereum Foundation has started a lot of internal reforms in recent months, so any answer I can give now will soon be outdated. This question may be better asked in 6 months.
Q1 2: How do you understand the role of Crypto as an anti-establishment infrastructure in realizing Democracy and Commieism? Do you think that the current Memecoin (I am referring to the rapid launch on Solana) is a kind of beneficial chaos for realizing Democracy and Commieism? (This term comes from your blog) I didnt find the anonymous function, so I just released it directly. At the same time, I strongly recommend you to play Disco Elysium, I believe you will like it.
Vitalik: The core of Degencom is to make better rules of the game. Chaos is not necessarily beneficial, nor is it necessarily bad. It depends on the situation. The interesting question is, how can we make rules of the game so that the chaos naturally produced by the community has a good effect?
For example, civil wars in countries have bad effects, unless they are to get rid of malicious tyranny. However, market chaos often has good effects, eliminating old and inefficient companies and giving new companies opportunities. However, sometimes the market can also lead to the problems we see in the blockchain community. So this is actually very complicated.
So how can we make better rules? I think the current memecoin is far from ideal. I wrote this article last year to see if there is a better direction : Vitalik talks about meme again: What is the imagination space for memecoin?
Q1 3: You should know Simon de la Rouvieres This Art is Always on Sale Harberger tax experiment (patronage as an asset class). Do you think this kind of experiment can make new progress in the future of decentralized social networks? Are there any mechanisms you expect to see used in decentralized social experiments?
Vitalik: Yes, I think decentralized social media is a great opportunity to try out many new mechanisms. Harberger tax is one example, and some other examples are:
* A mechanism similar to community notes https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html
* Creator payouts, similar to Twitter and YouTube but more fair and transparent. You can try retro funding, deep funding, quadratic funding, etc.
* Combining social media and DAO governance
Q1 4: What do you think about the fact that we, as a group of people in the crypto world, are still highly dependent on centralized social applications such as Telegram and Twitter for communication and collaboration? Building decentralized social media and real encrypted communication tools does not seem to be so popular and recognized. So far, do their developments meet your expectations? What suggestions do you have for teams exploring and building in this field?
Vitalik: This is also a question that I am very concerned about. I have been working hard to move most of my conversations from Telegram to Signal in the past two years. But Signal is not perfect either. Although it is confidential, it is still centralized and has no interoperability. You need a mobile phone number to log in, and the server can see a lot of your metadata, etc.
But it is difficult to make a higher quality messenger. I try Status every year. They try to be completely decentralized. They do a good job, but they still have some reliability issues. In fact, there are various small teams making their own messengers, but they are not united, so it is easy for each one to be not good enough.
I recently started using fileverse to do my various documents. I found that the user experience is good enough, and now many people in the foundation use it. If there is a decentralized, encrypted messenger that can achieve this quality, I will definitely work hard to help the community move to this messenger.
Q1 5: I have heard from people in the Milady community that you might have chosen Milady for some reason, but I am still curious about how you would explain your identification with Milady?
Vitalik: I think milady can attract a lot of people because this Internet community does two things at the same time:
1. Not boring
2. Not malicious
If you look at the circles in the mainstream world today, you will find that it is difficult to achieve both conditions at the same time. Milady is one of the most successful examples.
Q16: Are you a communist?
Vitalik: No, and Im not a capitalist. Both are 20th century ideologies. (These words have been stretched and abused to the point of meaninglessness: remember, in the 1990s, Microsoft called Linux communism: https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/)
I stand for liberty, global equality of opportunity, benevolence and cooperation, human well-being and progress. These are timeless principles. The question is how to use the tools we have now to realize these values in a 21st century context. I have written at length about the various mechanisms I personally support, but I definitely do not claim to be the sole source of good ideas, and I think figuring out the best approach is a shared project that requires both thought and increasingly real-world experimentation.
Q1 7: Can you systematically explain in detail how to accelerate the development of Ethereum? Eth has been around for ten years and is updated once a year. I feel that the development progress is very slow and needs to be greatly accelerated. eth/acc
Vitalik: Ethereum development is currently focused on increasing the number of blobs. The main goal now is to increase the number of blobs, here are:
* pectra, increase blob target from 3 to 6
* fusaka, add peerdas, and increase blob target
* Continue to optimize peerdas in 2026 and 2027
* Add 2D data availability sampling, and increase blob target
There is also a roadmap to increase the L1 gas limit, but this is more complicated, such as delayed execution, statelessness, etc.
Q1 8: Today, Vitalik has grown golden claws and silver scales, and has transformed from a dragon slayer into a dragon. During the Ethereum mining period, it was still a democratic consensus, but now Vs management system is a dictatorial and authoritarian management model. After switching to POS, it has changed from a democratic system to a peoples congress system. Is it suspected that he secretly joined the party without telling anyone?
Vitalik: POS is not a governance method in Ethereum. PoW can only be democratic in the short term. Because there are always economies of scale, larger miners are more efficient, so it will become more and more centralized over time.
I think the reason why we didn’t have ASIC before PoS is probably because everyone knew we planned to move to PoS, so no one made ASIC. If we declared from the first day that we would always use PoW, ASIC would probably come out between 2016 and 2019, unless we kept changing the algorithm every year, but this would also be centralized.
So I think our approach, spending 7 years using PoW for distribution and then moving to PoS, is the best. PoS has its own fairness: if you have 10 times more money, you can produce 10 times more blocks. In ASIC PoW, there are economies of scale, maybe 10 times more money = 11 times more blocks. Another point is: PoS is not a governance method in Ethereum. Ether holders do not have the right to choose which EIPs to put in the next fork, etc. If we used PoS to make such decisions, it would indeed be too plutocratic.
