Thoughts after Vitalik’s speech at the Hong Kong Summit: Ethereum is pursuing the limits of cryptography

Today, Vitalik made a low-key appearance at the Wanxiang Hasheky Hong Kong Summit. V God’s speech was really clear and without red tape. He started with $ETH dry goods and talked straightforwardly. Combining this speech, let me talk about my understanding.

All blockchains are rooted in cryptography, which can be said to be the real underlying technology. In recent years, the theoretical frontier of cryptography has been developing. The current goal of Ethereum $ETH is to transform the theory of cryptography into engineering practice.

Friends who have done development know that the more cutting-edge something is in academia, the more challenging it is to use it directly in industry, and cryptography is no exception.

The cryptographic frontiers that Ethereum is most concerned about now are:

• ZK-SNARKs
• 2PC、MPC、FHE
• Aggregate signature
• Improve P2P network

For example, Bitcoin has already done a similar upgrade in Schnorr. Ethereum’s BLS aggregate signature upgrade and Schnorr have their own advantages, and can also make it very smooth to aggregate multiple signatures into one signature.

A cryptographic achievement can actually be transformed into:

• Make blockchain more private (multiple signatures are conducive to protecting privacy)
• Save gas fees (co-signature takes up less space)
• Further reduce the requirements for equipment (easy to verify)

At the same time, Vitalik also mentioned the two elements of “academic theory → technical practice”.

First of all, efficiency

For example, a very practical problem is that the blocks of the Ethereum main network are at an interval of 12 seconds, but it takes at least 20 minutes to do ZK-SNARKs Proof.

If there is a lightweight ZK Proof solution and every block can be fully ZK-ized, then Ethereum will be very private, secure, and censorship-resistant, and even faster.

Secondly, safety

As long as we are human, we will make mistakes.

No one can guarantee that there are no bugs in their code.

Currently, debugging relies on the naked eye, such as the “Safety Committee”

But in the future, maybe we can rely on multi-provers, through some

In the more distant future, we may even rely on AI

While ensuring both security and efficiency, Ethereum aims to absorb more cryptographic achievements and push the upper limit of cryptography.

I was very excited after listening to it. It is the truly cutting-edge technology that drives the development of ETH and all other blockchains.

Now, all the public chains ranked behind ETH are desperately comparing themselves with Ethereum, and are trying to find answers from this competitor, Ethereum.

Ethereum, however, found the answer in cryptography. This is the real difference between first-rate public chains and second-rate public chains.