Ethereum Ten-Year Development Review and Future Outlook

Recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin reflected on the development of Ethereum and looked to the future at a blockchain summit. He pointed out that the Ethereum project began in November 2013, the foundation was established in 2014, and the mainnet went live in July 2015. Over the past decade, the main goal of the project has been to improve Ethereum technology.

Buterin emphasized that, although the core goals remain unchanged, Ethereum has made significant progress over the past decade. He listed several key areas of improvement:

First, there is a significant reduction in transaction fees. With the introduction of Layer 2 solutions and the implementation of EIP-4844, transaction fees have decreased from several dollars, or even hundreds of dollars in the early days, to around $0.01 now, which greatly expands the possible application scenarios.

Secondly, the speed of transaction confirmation has improved. By optimizing the consensus mechanism and introducing upgrades such as EIP-1559, most transactions can now be confirmed within a few seconds, significantly enhancing the user experience.

The third is the enhancement of the overall user experience. From the early rudimentary interface to the now feature-rich and beautifully designed application, the Ethereum ecosystem has made great strides in usability.

In addition, Buterin also mentioned the development of technologies such as smart accounts, account abstraction, and zero-knowledge proofs, all of which bring new possibilities to Ethereum.

Looking to the future, Buterin has proposed several key objectives:

1. Enhance transaction processing capacity to over 100,000 transactions per second through Layer 2 technology.
2. Achieve transfers between any Ethereum-compatible chains within 2 seconds.
3. Create a unified user experience.
4. Expand the infrastructure of Ethereum, not limited to EVM, but focusing more on the security of interconnections.

Buterin believes that the main challenge facing the current Ethereum ecosystem is achieving true unification. He urges developers to focus on cross-chain interoperability, light client technology, and the application of zero-knowledge proofs to promote further development of the ecosystem.

Finally, Buterin encouraged developers to revisit ideas that may have failed in the past, as many projects that were once unfeasible may now have the conditions for success due to advancements in technology.