Author：Cold Wind Meta

The 2025 Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 11th Blockchain Global Summit were held in Shanghai. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a speech via video link, sharing his views, Ethereum's new developments, and future applications. Vitalik said,Blockchain and cryptography technologies have made tremendous progress in the past decade, and will enter a stage of "truly usable, scalable and low-cost" in the next five to ten years..

Vitalik pointed out,New cryptographic technologies such as ZK zero-knowledge proof and FHE fully homomorphic encryption are rapidly maturing, its computing efficiency has been significantly improved and the developer experience has been greatly improved. He revealed that the Ethereum mainnet can currently generate ZK proofs for L1 blocks in real time using about 50 GPUs, which was considered "at least five to ten years away" two years ago. In the future,ZK will not only be used for scalability and privacy, but also to improve decentralization, because verifying a block will become "just a millisecond."

Vitalik encourages developers to actively participate in the entrepreneurship, underlying research and development, and application practice of ZK and FHE technologies., for example, participating in ecosystems such as Scroll, Taiko, Lighter, Intmax, and Aztec, as well as new scenarios such as ZK voting and private identity. He said that the development of blockchain is similar to the popularization of encryption technology in the past - from expensive and complex to ubiquitous and almost cost-free.When ZK and FHE reach the same level of popularity, the real blockchain revolution will begin..

Golden Finance compiled Vitalik Buterin's speech as follows.

Vitalik: Hello everyone, welcome to this event. In the past 10 years, the blockchain and encryption industries have developed a lot. Blockchain technology was very early at the beginning, and now its value proposition has made great progress compared to 10 years ago.

Today's speech will focus on blockchain and encryption technologies. Blockchain, along with ZK zero-knowledge proofs, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), and other technologies, are all scalable, developer-friendly, and affordable. If these technologies didn't have their many drawbacks, what could we do with them?

In fact, encryption technology has many parts, such asThe world already has two things: signatures and encryption. Encryption is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Everyone should remember that 20 years ago, HTTPS technology didn't exist. But 20 years later, every website, every app, and every application is built on encryption.The first part of HTTPS is encryption, and the second part is signatures. Why didn't we have this 20 years ago? Why do we have it now? It's because the cost of signing and encryption is now almost zero.

In fact, it’s not that signature and encryption technologies didn’t exist 20 years ago. There were some important papers before 1976 and 1978, and then there was RSA, which can be said to be the first modern signature and encryption algorithm.The DES algorithm was introduced around 1980, the BGW algorithm around 1989, and PGP around 1992. By 2015, the technology had become so ubiquitous, cheap, and simple that there was no need to worry about its shortcomings.

In the past decade, I have started to get involved in some new encryption technologies in the field of cryptography, one is ZK (zero-knowledge proof) and the other is FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), whose computing efficiency has been significantly improved and the developer experience has been greatly improved.

On Layer 2, the Ethereum mainnet's gas limit increased from 30 million to 45 million this year, but we plan to increase it further, potentially by 10x or 100x. Do you think this technology is very cost-effective and provides a great developer experience? Blockchain is experiencing similar progress. What are the results? If you're considering ZK technology, you might be wondering: Why is ZK necessary? Can we avoid it? Many blockchains are similarly questioned: Why is it necessary? Can we avoid it?

Five years from now, I suspect many people will no longer be asking why ZK is used, but rather why it's not added. It will have a significant short-term impact on Ethereum. We have a plan in place, and you can see numerous ZK EVMs on the Ethereum mainnet. They're now proving Ethereum L1 in real time. Two years ago, this was completely impossible. Two years ago, everyone thought it might take five or ten years. But now it's possible. With around 50 GPUs, we can now prove nearly all Ethereum blocks in real time—not 30 million, but 45 million. This allows us to achieve long-term expansion while also creating a more scalable and decentralized network. Why? Because we don't need every node to connect to every transaction in the blockchain. We can leverage the majority of nodes to use ZK proofs, and verification takes just a millisecond—extremely fast.

Another advantage of ZK is privacy. So, we can have a project slogan this year: we need to consider all aspects of Ethereum privacy, including on-chain transaction privacy, off-chain transaction privacy, and a wide range of applications. We can now do this. Two years ago, we could do a little bit, but now we can do much more. Another important issue is the relationship between cryptography, blockchain, and hardware. In the blockchain field, there's a saying: "Not your private key, not your coins." If you don't control your wallet's private key, someone else controls it. If someone else controls it, you can't verify the security of your coins. Everything in the blockchain relies on cryptography, and cryptography relies on private keys. Algorithms need to run and be stored in hardware. If you can't trust your hardware, you can't trust anything that happens on it.

In fact, this problem exists in many fields. Blockchain has digital assets and digital identities, but IT also has this problem. If every device has a computer inside, how can you trust it? Healthcare also has this problem, and privacy is also very important in the medical field.

We recently started an interesting project. If you've played around with DeFi Coin or Singapore's DXR, you might have seen a small device that can show you air quality, CO2 levels, and many other indicators. This kind of device allows us to better understand what's happening in the air, which is crucial for healthcare. However, it also raises serious privacy concerns. In ten or twenty years, the amount of information available in the physical world could be 1,000 times or more than it is today. How can we protect privacy? How can we ensure security? So, what we're developing is a future version of this device, incorporating cryptographic technology to simultaneously reveal everything we need to know about the data without exposing the privacy of everyone, everywhere. ZK is very useful.

First, we knew cryptography was important, but now we're discovering that it can actually be used. Second, open source and verified hardware are also crucial. The blockchain sector faces the same challenges as many other fields. There's a lot of development happening in all the areas I just mentioned. How can you participate?

I think there are three answers:

First, for entrepreneurship, you can now create or support some ZKID applications using ZK, FHE, and blockchain.

Second, for the research and development and optimization of underlying cryptographic technology, there is a Lean team in the Ethereum Foundation, and there are many opportunities for cooperation. You can contact the Lean team.

Third, you can use existing technology-based applications like Scroll, Taiko, Lighter, Intmax, and Aztec. There are also ZK voting applications like zkpassport, which has been around for about two years. Aragon announced earlier this year that it would use ZK voting, as well as other wallets. There are already many ways to participate in these areas.

I think the question we should be thinking about five or ten years from now is that many technologies, like HTTPS, use simple cryptography like signatures and encryption, but you're not aware of their existence. These technologies are incredibly convenient and can be used directly, without having to consider costs or user issues. If ZK blockchains, like L1, L2, and FHE, can achieve this level of efficiency, then everything will be solved. If that's possible, what can be done with this technology? The answer requires experimentation now. We can develop more and more applications each year, and we'll probably learn a little more each year. I'm very happy to be participating in this technological development process with everyone, and I hope to continue doing so with you.