Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum ‘fails’ without these 3 critical ‘transitions’

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that Ethereum’s success will come down to three major technological “transitions” that need to happen almost simultaneously — layer-2 scaling, wallet security, and privacy-preserving features.

In a June 9 post via his personal blog, Buterin Explained The Ethereum blockchain outright “fails” without sufficient scaling infrastructure to make transactions cheap.

“Ethereum fails because each transaction costs $3.75 ($82.48 if we have another bull run), and every product aimed at the mass market essentially forgets about on-chain and everything else. adopts a centralized workaround,” he said.

three transitions:https://t.co/rtewRnm2wK

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 9, 2023

Another point of failure, according to Buterin, is related to smart contract wallets.

He explained that the move to smart contract wallets poses some problems due to complications on the user experience side when users control multiple addresses at once.

In addition to wallets that secure crypto assets, Buterin explained that truly transitioning to an on-chain world with zero-knowledge rollup will require wallets to secure data:

“In a ZK world, however, this is no longer true: the wallet is not just protecting authentication credentials, it is also holding your data.”

The last of Buterin’s three changes – privacy – will need to come in the form of better identity, reputation and social recovery systems.

“Without the third, Ethereum fails because the privacy sacrifice is too high for many users due to all transactions (and POAPs, etc.) being publicly available for anyone to see, and everyone Moves to centralized solutions that hide your data, at least to some extent,” he said.

The co-founder of Ethereum suggested that stealth addresses could be implemented to solve this issue.

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Buterin said achieving all three would be “challenging” because of the “intense coordination” between them.

He acknowledged that each of the three changes “undermines” the “one user – one address” model, which in turn could complicate the way transactions are executed.

“If you want to pay someone, how do you find out how to pay?”

“How do they make significant changes and social improvements if users have multiple assets in different places on different chains?” He added.

Buterin concluded by emphasizing the need to build infrastructure that ultimately improves the user experience:

“Despite the challenges, achieving scalability, wallet security and privacy for regular users is critical to the future of Ethereum. It’s not just about technical feasibility but actual accessibility for regular users. We need to rise up to face this challenge.”

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