The 2025 Shanghai Blockchain International Week & the 11th Blockchain Global Summit was held in Shanghai. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a speech via video link, sharing his views, new developments in Ethereum, and future applications. Vitalik stated that blockchain and cryptography technology have made significant progress in the past decade, and the next five to ten years will usher in a phase of being "truly usable, scalable, and low-cost."

Vitalik pointed out that new cryptographic technologies like ZK zero-knowledge proofs and FHE fully homomorphic encryption are rapidly maturing, with their computational efficiency significantly improved and developer experience greatly enhanced. He revealed that the Ethereum mainnet can now generate ZK proofs for L1 blocks in real-time using about 50 GPUs, a feat that two years ago was considered "at least five to ten years away." In the future, ZK will not only be used for scaling and privacy but will also enhance decentralization because verifying blocks will become a matter of "just one millisecond."

Vitalik encouraged developers to actively participate in entrepreneurship, underlying R&D, and practical application of ZK and FHE technologies. This includes engaging with ecosystems like Scroll, Taiko, Lighter, Intmax, Aztec, as well as exploring new scenarios like ZK voting and private identity. He said the development of blockchain mirrors the proliferation of encryption technology back in the day – transitioning from expensive and complex to ubiquitous and almost cost-free. When ZK and FHE reach a similar level of普及, the real blockchain revolution will truly begin.

Golden Finance has compiled Vitalik Buterin's remarks as follows:

Vitalik: Hello everyone, welcome to this event. Within these 10 years, the blockchain and crypto industry has developed immensely. Blockchain technology was initially very nascent, but now its value proposition has advanced significantly compared to a decade ago.

The topic of my speech today is to contemplate blockchain and crypto technology. Blockchain, along with ZK zero-knowledge proofs, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), and all other technologies, should be scalable; secondly, developer-friendly; and third, cheap. If these technologies didn't have many drawbacks, what could we do with them?

Actually, cryptography has many components, like parts the world already has. First is signatures, second is encryption. Encryption is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. You might recall that 20 years ago, HTTPS technology didn't exist. But 20 years later, all websites, all apps, all applications are based on encryption. HTTPS involves, first, encryption, and second, signatures. Why didn't we have this situation 20 years ago? Why do we have it now? It's because the cost of signatures and encryption is now almost zero.

It's not that signature and encryption technologies didn't exist 20 years ago. Important papers existed before 1976 and 1978, followed by RSA, arguably the first modern signature and encryption algorithm. Around 1980, there was the DES algorithm. Around 1989, the BGW algorithm started. Around 1992, there was PGP. By 2015, this technology had become abundant, became ubiquitous, became so cheap and so simple that we no longer need to think about its drawbacks.

In the last decade, I started getting involved in some new encryption technologies in the cryptography field: first, ZK (zero-knowledge proofs), and second, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption). Their computational efficiency has significantly improved, and the developer experience has greatly enhanced.

On L2, this year the Ethereum mainnet Gas limit increased from 30 million to 45 million, but we have plans to increase it further, perhaps by 10 times, 100 times. You might think this technology's cost is very low, and developer UX has become very good. Blockchain is now making similar progress. What is the result? If you are now thinking about ZK technology, you might have this question: Why do we need ZK? Can we avoid ZK? Often, it's the same with blockchain: Why do we need blockchain? Can we avoid blockchain?

In five years, I guess many people's attitude towards ZK will no longer be 'why use ZK?' but rather 'why not add ZK?'. This has a very, very big short-term impact on Ethereum. Right now we have a plan, you can see many ZK EVMs on the Ethereum mainnet, they are now proving Ethereum L1 in real-time. This was completely impossible two years ago; two years ago everyone thought it might take five or ten years to achieve. But now it's possible. Now, using about 50 GPUs, we can prove almost any Ethereum block in real-time, not for 30 million, but for 45 million. So while we are scaling long-term, we can also achieve a more scalable and decentralized network. Why? Because we don't need every node to process all transactions in the blockchain; we can also have most nodes use ZK proofs, and verification takes just one millisecond, extremely fast.

Another advantage of ZK is privacy. So this year we can have a project slogan: we need to think about all aspects of Ethereum privacy, including on-chain transaction privacy, off-chain transaction privacy, including all sorts of applications. All of this can be done now. Two years ago, a little bit was possible, but now we can do much more than before. Another important issue is the relationship between cryptography, blockchain, and hardware. In the blockchain field, we have a saying, "Not your keys, not your coins." If you don't control your wallet's private key yourself, if someone else controls your private key, you cannot verify if your coins are safe. Everything done in blockchain relies on cryptography, cryptography relies on private keys, algorithms need to run in hardware, need to be stored in hardware. If you cannot trust your hardware, you cannot trust anything that happens on that hardware.

Actually, many fields have this problem. Blockchain has digital assets and digital identity, but IT also has this problem. If all devices have a computer inside, how can you trust it? Healthcare also has this problem; privacy in the healthcare field is very important too.

We recently started an interesting project. If you play DeFi Coin or Singapore's DXR, you might see a relatively small device that can show you air quality, show you CO2 levels, show you many, many different metrics. Having such devices lets us know more about what's happening in the air, so it's important for healthcare. But there are also very important privacy issues. In ten or twenty years, the information known about the physical world might be 1000 times more than now. How can we protect privacy? How can we protect security? So what we are doing now is future versions of devices that will incorporate cryptographic technology, allowing us to simultaneously know what we want from the data without exposing everyone's, every place's privacy. ZK is very useful for this.

First, we know cryptography is important, but now we are finding that cryptography is truly usable. Second, open-source and verifiable hardware is also important. Actually, the blockchain field and many other fields share similar problems. There is a lot of development in all the fields I just mentioned. How can you participate?

I think there are three answers:

First, entrepreneurship. Now you can create or support applications that use ZK, FHE, blockchain, like doing some ZKID applications.

Second, underlying cryptography technology R&D and optimization. The Ethereum Foundation has a Lean team, there are many collaboration opportunities; everyone can contact the Lean team.

Third, you can use existing technology-based applications, like Scroll, Taiko, Lighter, Intmax, Aztec, etc., and also ZK voting applications. For instance, zkpassport has existed for about two years; Aragon announced earlier this year they would use ZK voting, and there are some wallets. There are already many ways to participate in these fields now.

I think the question we should ask in five or ten years is: now we have technologies like HTTPS that use simple cryptography like signatures and encryption, but you don't know they have this technology; these technologies are very convenient, you can use them directly without thinking about cost or user issues. If ZK blockchain, like L1, L2, FHE, can also reach that level of efficiency, then everything will be solved. If we can achieve that, what can we do with this technology? The answer requires starting experiments now. Every year we can build more and more applications, and probably every year we will know a little more. I am very happy to participate in this technological R&D process with everyone and hope to continue participating with you all.