Vitalik ETHTaipei Interview

Vitalik Buterin did an hour long interview with the media at ETHTaipei 2024, speaking on topics from breakfast to Farcaster to quantum resistance and much more. Below is the transcript we've created from audio of the interview:

"What's a quick meal you like to prepare?"

Vitalik: I like to put almond butter, fruit, and chocolate into a bowl and that's my breakfast. And when I say chocolate, I always mean like dark chocolate. I don't mean like sugar with a little bit of chocolate. It's bitter.

"About travel: What experimental community event inspired you the most?

Vitalik: It depends on what you mean by an experimental community event. Zuzalu was probably the biggest thing in that category. And there were definitely a lot of interesting groups and events and activities inside of there that I found really fascinating, both in terms of actually using Ethereum, using zero-knowledge proofs and those things, but also experimenting on the health side, experimenting on the community side.

The other big thing is the different Ethereum events that I go to. I definitely respect ETH Denver for being interesting and cool in a bunch of ways, like they had me wear a buffalo suit. I do know it's gotten a lot bigger in the last couple of years and I haven't been to the last couple of years. But the ones that I've been to were definitely fun.

The one in Vietnam that I was just at was fun. I think this was the first one where the entire venue was outdoors, and they made it really fun. And they found a venue that's similar to the Westlake in Hangzhou. It was last week and it was definitely by far the most COVID safe conference I've ever been to.

That was cool, but yeah, I definitely want to see more experimentation and different event styles, not just bouncing around between Hilton's and various spin-offs that are actually owned by Hilton every other week.

"What are you most excited to work on these days? It doesn't have to be this year."

Vitalik: Since I'll answer about Ethereum in all the other questions, I guess I'll focus on the non-Ethereum stuff that I've been doing.

Zuzalu is continuing this year and it's like Ethereum connected, but the community obviously goes beyond that and there's a bunch of independent groups that are making their own various villages this year. So I'm following along, helping them when I can, excited to actually get a chance to visit some of them soon.

I've been playing around with some of the recent AI tools and running some of the models locally and using them to draw and do other things. So that's a really important space to just get more understanding in.

What other things? Again, just learning. And yeah, I think there's a lot in learning about some of everything. So those are the big ones.

"How does the Dencun upgrade contribute to the Ethereum ecosystem? Does it meet your expectations?"

Vitalik: The purpose of the Dencun upgrade is to massively increase the scalability and reduce the transaction fees that are paid by layer 2s, and particularly roll-ups. And the way that it does this is by creating an independent section of data space inside of each block. This is what are called blobs. And this data cannot be accessed by the EVM, which is important because what that also means is that when a client is verifying an Ethereum block, they don't have to have access to that data at exactly the same time. But the data is data that the Ethereum blockchain guarantees is available.

So this is very useful for rollups and in principle any layer two project that depends on data being available for its security so that, for example, to ensure that other nodes can sync if the current nodes disappear or to ensure that if someone sees a wrong answer they can challenge and things like this.

We have already seen over the past week or two fees decrease massively, in some cases by a factor of like 50. Now I think it is important to warn that there is a possibility that these fees will increase again as there come to be more users of blobs because as there come to be more users eventually the fees will go up but it's still a pretty significant scalability gain and we expect the number of blobs that the Ethereum chain supports to continue to increase greatly over the next few years.

"Is it better than you expected?"

Vitalik: It depends what you mean by better. From a technological perspective, the upgrade went by flawlessly. I think the percent of attesters only went down from 99 to 95%, which is better than any other fork that we've had. The amount of usage is interestingly low though. Right now, the target is about three blobs per block. But the average amount used is only one blob per block, which means that right now, blobs are incredibly cheap.

If you want to publish a blob, you basically only have to pay Ethereum transaction fees. And it's possible that Ethereum transaction fees being high is one of the reasons for this. But if the price of blobs tends to zero, then you can just go use them to like... backup and encrypted copy of your hard drive or whatever. There's like an infinite number of uses for a guaranteed data space. So I do think it will increase eventually. It is definitely good for present-day roll-ups that it's very cheap, but I'm definitely looking forward to usage going up over the next few months.

"What do you envision as the single most transformative impact Ethereum will have on society in the next five years?"

Vitalik: I think we're already seeing the blockchain space really affecting the real world. One big impact that it already has had is just ideas generated by the space have really filtered into the broader world in a lot of ways that have not been appreciated.

For example, Reddit is doing their IPO soon and one of the things that they've done is they've given people who have been active in the community, like very active contributors, moderators, the ability to participate on the same terms as institutional investors. And I think that kind of approach is definitely something where crypto applications have really helped blaze the trail and legitimize and set the standard.

Aside from that, it's biggest actual use has been stable coins. People just using stable coins to save money, to trade, to conduct transactions. I think what will happen over the next five years, is that first of all, in order to succeed in that space, you need to have very good UX and you need to have very low fees. And historically Ethereum has not had those things, but over the next five years, Ethereum will start to have those things.

We're already seeing layer 2s and things like Base already starting to get there. But I think that will continue improving and once that gets there, then I expect Ethereum to be a very leading player in just helping to make stablecoins accessible to people in a way that is actually open, actually decentralized and that actually doesn't require trusting fragile third parties. But going beyond that, I expect non-financial applications to really start to make a much larger impact

We've been seeing for the past year the success of Farcaster especially, and also to some degree Lens and a few others in creating alternative social media platforms. There's a big desire to have alternatives to things like Twitter and Facebook at the moment. These projects I think are doing a very good job of leading.

I expect for that to continue and I expect the particular benefit that decentralization gives to these projects, which is basically that anyone can write a new client and if you have a new client you can access and you can write to the same content and you don't have to like build your network effect from scratch. I expect that benefit to become much more very clearly visible to a lot of people and to actually see a very vibrant ecosystem of people creating different clients, of people creating different ways to see the same content. So I think that space is going to be interesting.

The Ethereum-based identity space, is growing quickly. The technology is improving quickly. I'm really hoping it will see some mainstream usage. This includes different proof of personhood protocols, whether that's Proof of Humanity or the WorldCoin system or IDENA or any of those. And it includes social graph-based things like Pope and like ZooStamps. And it includes things like Gitcoin Passport.

One of the big challenges that a lot of people are worrying about right now is how to prove that an account on some platform actually is a person, as opposed to being a bot or being one of a million bots controlled or accounts controlled by the same person.

The big risk I see is that when people need to solve that problem, people will jump to centralized solutions. Centralized solutions, I think, are going to have very bad risks in terms of excluding all kinds of people. And I hope that the Ethereum space can actually lead in coming up with some of those decentralized alternatives and making them really accessible.

"Can you explain how you see the current challenges in Ethereum’s proof of stake, and how single-slot finality (SSF) and other upgrades could address those issues?"

Vitalik: I think the big challenges in proof of staking right now largely have to do with various centralization risks, right?

The big ones that people are concerned about, 1 is on the MEV side – risks relating to staking and being a validator and attesting by itself. The challenge on the MEV side is we're seeing growing builder centralization and builder censorship and relays are emerging as this other kind of centralized actor. There's a set of techniques, one of them is execution tickets, which is basically the latest form of what we call PBS, Proposal Builder Separation, except it's probably more accurate to call it attester builder separation.

And then the other one is inclusion lists. The way to think about inclusion lists is to try to get back as close as possible to the kind of world that Ethereum was in 2016 when you would have decentralized validators be responsible for creating blocks, except here, what we mean by a block is we just mean a list of transactions. Because that's the most important thing from a fairness and censorship resistance perspective.

And then actors like builders would be responsible for some very specific functions that are important, but that do have centralization risks to them. One is block prefix and block ordering, like the part of creating a block that could involve capturing MEV. Another is computing the state route, so like running the EVM computation, eventually doing a ZK-snark of that computation. Then doing aggregation tasks. Signature aggregation, you know, EIP 4337 aggregation, potentially aggregating signatures and proofs from layer twos.

Basically all of that centralized stuff would be done by builders that would be selected through an auction with execution tickets and the parts of block pre-creation that are just more relevant to the protocol's permissionlessness, which is just choosing transactions would be done by validators in a way that's less vulnerable to censorship.

So that's one part. Another part has to do with staking itself, right? I did a series of polls recently both on Farcaster and on this ETHTaipei presentation where I asked "If you are not staking – Why? "

By far the biggest answer that people gave is that they have less than 32 ETH. And probably the second biggest answer is that people have not, like running a node is too difficult.

For running a node being too difficult, we already have a pre-existing technical roadmap that is basically intended to solve this. The next big step has been Verkle trees. And Verkle trees have actually made a lot of progress. There are active testnets that have working implementations of it.

With Verkle trees, as a node, you would not have to store the state locally. And with EIP-4444, history expiry, you would also not have to store most of the history locally. So, the amount of data that you would need to be a node would decrease from multiple terabytes to basically being able to, in principle, run a node in RAM. And once we have that, re-syncing and syncing will become much faster. Potentially it could be a few minutes. And it'll just become a much simpler task that's much easier for people to do.

And then with zk-SNARKs, requirements are going to decrease further. I think in the long term, running a node will feel like downloading some data, like hashing it and verifying a SNARK, right? Just a few very simple computations that will be very easy to do as just like a background process on any computer, maybe even a phone, even inside the browser. And there is a pre-existing technology roadmap to get to that point.

The less than 32 ETH part is more challenging, because originally 32 ETH was this compromise between not requiring too much ETH to be a staker and not having too many stakers because that would make blocks too hard to process.

There's some new approaches to proof of stake that basically involve sacrificing the requirement that every staker participates in every round of consensus. If you sacrifice that requirement, then you're able to get the benefits of single slot finality, and the benefits of being able to stake with less than 32 ETH and having simpler and lighter nodes all at the same time.

There's a lot of challenges in the details of how you actually make that kind of algorithm work. And rainbow staking is one of those proposals. My writing is around 8192 signatures per slot, one of those proposals. This is a very active research area.

"How about modularized blockchain solutions? Many projects are proposing this solution, and we are also seeing ideas that the Ethereum L1 could be responsible for shared sequencing.

What are the functions that an L1 should handle centrally and what should be left to individual L2s?"

Vitalik: Yeah, I think we're seeing some movements in opposite directions. So modularizing blockchains is a future where each individual chain does less and different components are done by different parts. Whereas shared sequencing, especially as described by Justin Drake, one of our researchers who is a big proponent of the Ethereum L1 doing shared sequencing, that's a vision where the L1 does more.

If you look at what the L1 is responsible for today, the L1 is responsible for shared security, and it's a shared settlement layer. With Ethereum, it ensures that every L2 has an ability to read any other L2 in a way that does not depend on any kind of centralized actors or even any validator sets. Because even if Ethereum gets 51% attacked, all of the L2s get reverted at the same time. So you still have consistency. And then Ethereum provides data availability for rollups, but then it doesn't provide data availability for Validiums. Then sequencing--choosing the order of transactions --is currently left on a rollup by rollup basis. So the question is, what is an ideal approach in the future?

On the shared sequencing question, I personally am agnostic. I know that some people are in favor of it and some people think that shared sequencing is completely overrated. A lot of people would argue that, One - the benefits of shared liquidity are actually not that large beyond a certain size.

For a regular user, it doesn't matter if market depth is like $5 million or $10 million. You just need market depth to be big enough to handle your own transactions.

Others argue that cross L2 MEV is not actually that large. Basically any MEV that is arbitrage between Optimism and Arbitrum could be decomposed into MEV between Optimism and Binance and then separately MEV between arbitrum and Binance, right? That's the basic way to think about this.

To the extent that that's true, there aren't actually large gains from some central, all-seeing market actor having a global view into all the L2s and choosing transactions on that basis. And it could be fine for all of the L2s to be sequencing separately. But, you know, this is an open debate, and I'm content to just keep watching the debate and see how it goes.

For other kinds of functions, I think we definitely want to really expand the amount of data that Ethereum can support directly. In an ideal world, everything would be a roll-up and Ethereum would not handle data availability for everything. But we know in practice that's probably not enough. Even the long-term vision of 16 megabytes per slot is probably not enough.

The thing that I want to see is I want to see very high security stuff being on-chain roll-ups, but then other things using various kinds of optimistic data constructions that basically do data off-chain by default, but data on-chain in specific cases where there might be some kind of problem. Plasma is a good example of these constructions, but there's a whole spectrum of constructions that are like that.

Another big one has to do with account abstraction. If your account has a state that might have to be changed – if you have a key and you want to revoke the key and add a new key, if you want to change algorithms, then where does that state live? If you have an account in 100 places, then to update your account, do you have to send that same data 100 times?

One of the ideas here is this minimal key store roll-up approach where that state lives in one particular place, possibly on a very neutral based roll-up on top of Ethereum. And then all of the other L2s would be able to call into it to prove with every transaction what the current state is that they're accessing.

But these are still early stage ideas and they're being still discussed in the wallet space. So I think like my view on this is very pragmatic. If there is a function that is important enough to handle at L1, then it absolutely should be. Otherwise, I think leaving room for different L2s to do different things is also very valuable.

"How does ZK address the trust issue for non-technical individuals? How can they know if ZK truly achieves identification?"

Vitalik: The question is basically, if you have a system that gives you some ZK level of privacy in theory, then as a user, how do you know that you actually get that level of privacy in practice? And I think I see this as basically a continuation of a problem that Ethereum already has, which is that if you're putting your assets into smart contracts, instead of just, I mean, giving your assets to some guy, then like, how do you actually know that the smart contract doesn't like have a back door so the guy can just take it or take your funds whenever he wants.

The solutions that we have so far for that are etherscan contract reading ability. Then so you can read a contract, people can publish source code, etherscan checks the source code. And that's great as a developer tool for sophisticated users.

For regular users that are not able to go and read a thousand lines of code themselves, we've been seeing wallets start to become more sophisticated. We've been seeing wallets start to give more warnings, like are you interacting with a popular application or are you interacting with some application, other people have not interacted with before.

One thing I eventually want to see is I want to see like Dapp user interfaces become versioned. Even just uploading the interface onto IPFS instead of onto a website. If you do that, then every single update would have to be a blockchain transaction. And you can make the authorization for that transaction just be a multi-sig controlled by the team, so there would be no server that you can hack into to force an update. From a wallet perspective, then the wallet would be able to show you, like basically, like how recently has the site been updated or contents approved. So, we want to see more of those.

Basically, I think we need to see more ways of aggregating these opinions of high quality researchers and auditors. And we've been starting to see that.

I think that the wallet is going to play a very important role. I think it's going to be an important, active assistance to the user in aggregating all of this kind of information. And I think all of these kinds of tools that we are using and that we are going to use for regular Ethereum are going to need to be applied basically in the same way for ZK technologies.

In the same way as we have Etherscan for solidity "Publish Your Source Code"we need to have Etherscan, "Publish Your Circom Code", or even "Publish Your Stark", "Cairo Precode", or whatever the original source language is. And then it would compile and it would actually verify that the on-chain verification key matches. These are things that totally can be done. And I hope someone does them in the hackathon tomorrow.

But basically take exactly the same types of tools that we've been using for Ethereum contracts and just apply them to both the ZK on-chain and to a sort of off-chain personal ZK and things like ZooPass in basically the same way.

"How do you propose Ethereum address the present concern of quantum enabled attacks? What implications does this have for the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem?

Vitalik: One thing that is important to realize and I think a lot of people still don't realize is that from a technology perspective, we have quantum resistant algorithms for every single thing that is vulnerable to quantum computers.

So quantum computers break existing elliptic curve signatures – We have like five different types of hash and lattice and isogeny-based signatures that are quantum resistant. Quantum computers break elliptic curve-based encryption and the stealth addresses. We have lattice-based and isogeny-based solutions for that. Quantum computers break KZG and IPA-based zero knowledge proofs, but we have Starks and recently, there has been actually a new paper that basically showed how you can really reduce the number of rounds in the FRI protocol, which makes Starks about two times smaller than before. Starks are hash-based proofs, hashes are quantum resistant, so Starks are quantum resistant.

Fully homomorphic encryption, actually we're very lucky that the fully homomorphic encryption constructions that we have and have had from day one were just quantum resistant out the door. Quantum computers do not help with lattices.

So in theory, it's a solved problem, but there is an important logistical challenge in going from theory to practice. One nice thing is that I think we do have the ability to do an emergency recovery that preserves most people's funds. I wrote about this on ETHResearch recently.

But we want to get from most to all, and we want to get to the point where there's something that can be done where ideally users are just quantum resistant out the door and even the protocol itself is. For that to happen, we need account abstraction because account abstraction has lots of benefits, and one of those benefits is that you can provide whatever signature algorithm you want for as a way of verifying your account. So if you want to make it quantum resistant, it can be quantum resistant.

Another is we need the Ethereum consensus layer to become quantum resistant. This is a bit harder engineering wise because our current approach relies heavily on the fact that we use BLS signatures, which are incredibly efficient and anything quantum based is going to be less efficient and that's a fact. That's one of the reasons why like I've been pushing for 8192 signatures per slot. I think we need to give ourselves more wiggle room so that we can adjust to a less efficient algorithm if needed. And at the same time, researchers are going full speed ahead on optimizing and measuring and benchmarking post-quantum alternatives as much as possible.

"What are the key benefits of integrating AI with cryptocurrency and how might this reshape the industry?"

Vitalik: I think a lot of people have been very curious and asking about what is the AI crypto intersection for basically the last 10 years.

At a very high level and a very thematic level, it feels like there should beRight. Like AI and crypto are two very important technology trends of our time. And there is this line that AI tends towards centralization and crypto tends toward decentralization. And those are supposed to be some kind of yin-yang complements between the two, but the question always has been, can you go from having this kind of thematic convergence to actual examples of applications that use both in ways that make sense for both in a productive way.

And in my recent post from about two months ago, I tried to analyze that question and try to identify some concrete applications that make sense. So one of them that I talked about is AIs participating in prediction markets or in other kinds of markets on top of Ethereum – you could create markets much more micro scale, then create AIs that can play in them.

Then another is AIs as a part of wallets to help users make sense of the online and on-chain environment that they're interacting with.

A third is using cryptography, including things like ZKSnarks and ZKML, MPC, AI inside of FHE and things like this to try to create AI models that are secure and robust and privacy-preserving enough that it becomes safe to actually use them as a central participant in on-chain applications, whether DAOs or oracles or something else. And then the fourth is basically if that succeeds, then that could be used for AIs in other areas.

So out of those, I think the first two are the most obvious short-term. And then the last two realistically are more speculative. So I definitely don't want to give the impression that AI crypto applications are going to be the next great narrative that will carry the industry forward or whatever else. But I do absolutely think that these intersections are worth people looking into.

And another one is AI's role in debugging code. Basically, one of the biggest challenges of this space is bugs in our code. And one of the nice possibilities that maybe we can look forward to is the possibility that AI will make it much, much easier.

So you basically use formal verification tools to prove that much larger sets of code satisfy certain properties. And if we do that, then we could potentially have guaranteed bug-free ZK EVMs, for example.

The more that we can reduce the number of bugs, the more secure the space can become. There's a chance that AI could be super valuable in that too.

"What is your opinion on 'restaking fever?'"

Vitalik: On the one hand it is potentially a very valuable way to unlock ETH that's being used in staking and make it accessible to other applications. And this is one of those things where if there's a demand and if we don't provide for that demand somehow, there's a risk that basically the demand will get taken over by centralized actors. Because anyone can just accept people's ETH and stake on people's behalf and then issue a token and then just let people restake that token – but that's not a world that we want to see.

But on the other hand, there definitely are risks from doing restaking wrong – various kinds of systemic risks could end up also affecting the Ethereum validator set. There's some different approaches to that. Different projects have been looking into it. So far, I'm just watching this space and looking forward to seeing what comes up.

"You are more active on Farcaster than on Twitter."

Vitalik: Yes. Who else here is more active on Farcaster than on Twitter? Who here is going to Farcast whatever article comes out of this before they tweet it?

[nobody raises their hand]

Vitalik: "You should. Come on, we're the decentralized space. We need to use our own stuff."

"Do you think that the social applications like Farcaster are going to need to compete with Web2 like Facebook, Twitter, social apps?"

Vitalik: I think one of the interesting things with the social space is it has network effects but it also has anti-network effecs. Twitter is the place where all the people are but it's also the place where all the really annoying people are.

I have found that like Farcaster has already gotten to the point where there's enough people there that it's interesting, but the engagement that I get on there is like actually higher quality. The other thing that decentralized social can really bring to the table is that Twitter has a bunch of features that are about trying to differentiate high-quality content and people from low-quality content and people like moderation and blue checks. And a lot of people had critiques that these mechanisms were very centralized and privileged a particular group with a particular set of opinions and biases.

The crypto space, a lot of these non-financial Ethereum applications are fundamentally about solving that problem in a way that is more decentralized and basically trying to solve the trust problem without entrenching some centralized actor that decides who and what is good and who and what is bad. And I think things like that could end up combining with Farcaster and Lens and these other protocols and we could actually get to see a very live example of seeing those kinds of techniques work.

Farcaster is starting to have an actual spam problem. So it is something that they are going to need to work on, but I'm excited to see that.

I'm also excited to see Farcaster alternate clients. The big thing about Farcaster is that, you know, it's not a server, it's a chain. In principle, you can make your own clients and, your clients can read or write to the same content so that people using Warpcast can see. That's something that I think can absolutely be a wonderful place for people to start trying to create their own clients and trying to add interesting new features.

You could imagine people putting their own community notes on Farcaster or people putting various AI-based fact checking or even prediction market-based fact checking or whatever into Farcaster. You could imagine people creating their own mechanisms for identifying which participants are high reputation and which participants are not for doing content prioritization. And different groups of people can have different approaches, and so all of those things can be done by different clients until people get to choose for themselves which ones they want to look at the Farcaster content through. I'm very excited to see those kinds of trends play out.

The other thing I'm excited about is that I feel like Farcaster does a good job of being pragmatic and of actually making sure that it's easy to use enough. And it's managed to be used by non-crypto people in a way that a lot of other previous applications have not. That's also an important success to build on and for other applications to try to replicate.

"In the face of greater institutional adoption and greater concentration of power, how can the industry stay true to its original ethos of decentralization and freedom"

Vitalik: There's several important things that the space needs to do at the same time. One is basically solve the public goods problem.

There's a lot of these projects that do a better job of staying true to these values but often doing that involves sacrificing on business models.(Editor's note: DeFi Developer news is actively seeking grants) In those cases, the community needs to come up with and execute on alternative ways of funding and supporting those projects. And that's something that we need to get better at. That's something that the various grants giving entities, including Optimism RPGF, including Gitcoin grants, including also things like Protocol Guild, are doing a better and better job of providing, which I think is valuable. But it's an area where I think we need to continue to do more.

I think we also need more active community-wide efforts at standardization. One risk I see is the risk that there are going to be large actors in the ecosystem that try to pull away from standards into essentially their own walled garden, closed ecosystems. And if that happens, then the value of the entire ecosystem as a whole decreases, right? That really ends up sacrificing on the benefits of the space.

Also, I think people need to keep actually executing on the basics: making real implementations of the theoretical benefits that crypto provides. For example, every one of these major protocols should have an alternate user and graphical user implementation made by an alternate team. If you can't do that, then that's a problem. And the team should be called out on it until they can.

There should be alternative GUIs for every one of these layer 2s and all of the function in those layer 2s for Farcaster. So Flink exists, but we need more. There should be alternative GUIs for even Gnosis Safe, for example. Before I was willing to switch my own cold wallet to Gnosis Safe, I actually like poked in and I made my own GUI for it just to make sure that I could withdraw. And actually, that even ended up saving me at the beginning because it turns out that at the beginning, the Safe UI was not compatible with the status wallet, but my UI was.

We need to make sure that we actually support open standards for things like accessing logs. Basically making sure that we actually have decentralized alternatives for infrastructure that's not blockchains.

Another important thing I think is like, you know, this balance between preserving the ethos as much as possible and regulatory issues and mainstream acceptance. And back in September I co-wrote that paper on privacy pools, which basically provides an approach for how privacy protocols like Tornado Cash can be adapted to still provide privacy for the vast majority of users, but lock out bad users, bad actors from the system. And there are implementations of this that are already pretty successful. So I think we want to see more of those. And not just for the financial use case, but also for identity and reputation type of use cases.

And coming up with those pragmatic solutions and at the same time helping users to understand what is the level of privacy are they actually getting when they participate in something like that?

Another one is we just continue to need to find ways to encourage more and like different groups of people around the world to really participate in the Ethereum ecosystem as not just as users, not even just as application developers, but even as layer two developers, wallet developers and protocol developers. The stronger an ecosystem we have, the more global an ecosystem we have, I think the more we can preserve and increase Ethereum's decentralization over time.

"Do you have any specific advice to how non-English writers can participate in the public goods ecosystem? It's normally only for English writers."

Vitalik: If you have some level of English language skills, then creating more translations is something that's always valuable. And creating localized versions and expressions, presentations, articles about similar ideas, making an effort to actively participate in these protocols, because I think a lot of them actively are trying to welcome more participants from around the world, you just need to show up and actually be a participant, voter, badge holder, participate and help aggregate information for other people.

If you actively reach out, then I think a lot of people are happy to receive you and then sort of like pass it on and help make the content for more people.

How can the upcoming Ethereum upgrade facilitate greater adoption and developoment in unbanked regions like Indonesia, where 66% of population lacks access to banking services?

Vitalik: Stable coins and other like various kinds of DeFi protocols and even things like Play-to-Earn have already been super popular and helpful to people in those regions.

The challenge with Ethereum itself and even with a lot of Ethereum alturs is that fees are too high and the main thing is just reducing the fees. The Dencun upgrade helps to reduce those fees and future upgrades will reduce the fees further.

"Why are you so interested in longevity? What would you do if you were immortal?"

Vitalik: I just like living! . Life is fun.

What would I do if I'm immortal? Probably the same kind of stuff that I do today, just like longer.

"What has surprised you the most in terms of how crypto has evolved and played out? If you want to tell yourself five years ago how are things now, what would surprise you the most? "

The re-rise of meme coins is definitely surprising.

On the positive side, I think the rapid progress in ZK technology has definitely surprised me. That's like one of the things that's really happened faster than we expected which is very rare in software

The increasing speed of rollout of layer one protocol changes. We did the Merge and we did blobs only one and a half years after the merge, right? And it looks like we're on track to do Verkle trees not that far in the future. I'm impressed by that too.

"C0uld you share one piece of advice you would like to give to Taiwanese developers who are new to blockchain?"

Vitalik: I think the most important thing is to find some way through which you feel motivated to participate and keep participating, and ways in which you actually start to join and become part of the community instead of just being off on your own in a corner and abandoning the whole thing after two weeks.

In-person events are great for that. I think identifying just like some particular basic project and then doing and then actually building something is great for that. You could also try joining in the space in the same way that I joined, which is to start off by being a writer. That's a great way to also push yourself to learn.

This article is a transcription of the Media Interview Vitalik Buterin did at ETHTaipei.

Today in DeFi/DeFi Dev News is a proud media partner of ETHTaipei.