On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his long-term vision for the peer blockchain live at the annual conference of the Ethereum Community, or EthCC, in Paris. As Buterin explained, Ethereum is currently at an inflection point, which means a period of rapid change, before the capabilities of the ecosystem stabilize.
Right now, the top priority for Ethereum is building easy-to-use thin client software for the consensus layer, runtime layer, and default Layer 2 solutions. Then it’s about improving support for home bookmakers or those who want to validate network transactions when Ethereum transitions to a proof-of-stake blockchain, but with less than the 32 ether (ETH) required. Finally, Buterin believes that it is essential that Ethereum can one day be run on a full node with lighter hardware.
As for the long-term roadmap, Buterin plans to upgrade Ethereum with better cryptographic technologies, potentially for quantum resilience, if they emerge, and Ethereum’s zero-knowledge virtual machines, or zk-EVM, be further integrated if they work. “We also need to keep an open mind,” says Buterin. “We don’t know exactly what the needs of 2032 will be.”
But the co-founder of Ethereum shared his doubts about some other possible opportunities. These include supporting multiple and complex virtual machines, being too comfortable with black box technologies like zk-SNARKs, or making the protocol so complex that it becomes unintelligible without the help of specialists. Ethereum is about to transform into Proof of Stake, called Merge. Although this transformation took more than two years, some developers are still skeptical about the safety of the transition.
Vitalik Buterin speaking at EthCC | Source: Maria A., Cointelegraph Events Manager
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