The Future Direction of Ethereum: Analysis of Vitalik Buterin's Latest Insights

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently shared some of his thoughts on the future development of Ethereum and the cryptocurrency industry on his personal blog and social media. Below is a compilation of his important viewpoints since July 2024:

Cross-Layer2 interoperability issues will be resolved.

Buterin stated that he believes the interoperability issues across Layer 2 will soon no longer be a barrier. The entire Ethereum ecosystem (, including Layer 1, Rollups, Validium, and even sidechains ), will achieve a seamless user experience, which may be surprising. He sees a tremendous drive and determination to achieve this goal.

Political positions should not be chosen solely based on attitudes towards cryptocurrency

Buterin believes that one should not choose to follow someone's political stance simply because they support crypto assets. He calls for attention to deeper goals and policy impacts.

In recent years, "cryptocurrency" has become an increasingly important topic in political policy, with various jurisdictions considering how to regulate blockchain industry participants. Buterin believes that most related bills are reasonable, although there are concerns that the government may take extreme measures.

He pointed out that more and more crypto supporters are beginning to actively participate in politics, but their preferences for parties and candidates depend almost entirely on whether the latter have a friendly attitude towards crypto assets. Buterin opposes this trend, believing that this decision-making approach carries high risks and may go against the original intentions and values of people entering the crypto space.

"Crypto" is not limited to crypto assets and blockchain.

Buterin emphasized that "crypto" is not just about crypto assets and blockchain. He believes that people in the crypto asset space often overly focus on the centrality of "assets," viewing the freedom to hold and consume assets as the most important political issue.

He agrees that in modern society, funds and assets are necessary for undertaking any significant endeavor, and the right to private consumption is equally important. Asset issuance can also greatly enhance people's ability to establish digital organizations. However, focusing almost exclusively on crypto assets and blockchain is not the original idea behind the creation of crypto assets.

Buterin pointed out that crypto assets originated from the "cypherpunk movement", which is a movement of technological libertarianism that understands the importance of decentralization.

Cryptographic assets are just one of the application scenarios of decentralized networks.

Buterin believes that freedom is important, and decentralized networks can protect freedom well, while crypto assets are just one of the important use cases of decentralized networks.

He listed several other technological freedoms that are equally important as the freedom to use crypto assets, such as freedom of communication and privacy, freedom and privacy-friendly digital identity, access to high-quality information, and freedom of thought and privacy. He predicts that freedom of thought and privacy will become increasingly important in the coming decades.

Buterin's core point is that people join the crypto space for deeper goals, not just for crypto assets. He calls for thinking about issues from the perspective of the fundamental goals of crypto and its overall policy impact, rather than merely from the standpoint of crypto assets.

Current crypto friendliness does not equal long-term crypto friendliness

Buterin pointed out that internationalism is a social and political cause that he and many of his crypto peers have always cherished. He believes that the internet and crypto assets have the potential to promote the flattening of the global economy.

He suggested that if you see a politician who is friendly towards crypto assets, you might want to look into their views on crypto assets and related topics from five years ago, especially on the topic where "support for freedom" and "support for corporations" are not aligned.

Buterin emphasized that the key issue is whether the reasons politicians support cryptocurrency assets are correct, whether they share a vision for the technological, political, and economic developments of the 21st century that aligns with yours, and whether they have a long-term positive vision.

Views on Circle STARK

When it comes to Circle STARK, Buterin believes it does not impose much additional complexity on developers compared to regular STARK. He noted that the mathematics behind Circle FRI, while counterintuitive and requiring time to understand, is well encapsulated, so developers do not have to confront it directly.

Buterin believes that, combined with existing technology, the efficiency of the STARK "base layer" is approaching its limits. He hopes that the focus of STARK optimization can shift to higher-level tasks, such as performing the most efficient arithmetic operations on basic computations, conducting recursive constructions to achieve more parallelization, and improving the developer experience.

Simplicity is the foundation of a powerful ecosystem

At the Ethereum community conference (EthCC 7), Buterin emphasized that for a strong ecosystem, it must be simple and should not have complex random hooks and backward compatibility.

He described Ethereum as a "huge and reasonably decentralized staking ecosystem" with a highly internationalized and knowledgeable community. However, he also pointed out that the blockchain still has weaknesses that need to be addressed, such as the high threshold for becoming a validator and the technical complexity of running nodes.

Buterin emphasized that we do need advanced tools, but we also need to make these tools easy to understand and use, ensuring that more people can participate. He hopes to empower people in the future, rather than creating a standardized interface system built by a few.