What are the Takeaways from EthCC?

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On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared some new thoughts about how he sees the blockchain network evolving in the coming years.

The vision emphasized security, stability, and decentralization, as well as the following key points:

"Once we finish the Merge," Ethereum will be "55 percent complete." Buterin contrasted this with the widely held belief in the Bitcoin (BTC) community that Bitcoin is 80 percent complete, while Ethereum is 40 percent complete, according to Buterin.

Ethereum should "settle down" over time. Many innovations have occurred or are in the process of occurring, including the well-known EIP-1559 and the transition to proof-of-stake (PoS), according to the Ethereum co-founder. He stated that "at some point, the protocol's rate of change will have to slow down." According to him, Ethereum will then "appear somewhat more like a system that optimizes for safety and predictability, and less like an ecosystem that optimizes for impressing and dazzling people."

Buterin cautioned against adding support for multiple virtual machines and becoming too comfortable with technologies such as SNARKs (short for succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge), and stated that it is a risk if Ethereum becomes so complex that "no single person can understand the entire protocol."

Buterin believed that the emphasis should be on decentralization rather than escalating complexity. Having an easy-to-use light client for the consensus layer, execution layer, and Layer-2's "as a default," enhanced support for home stakers, and making sure a full node can be run on lighter hardware are all included, according to him.
Buterin suggested that enhancements for quantum resistance are one change that might be worthwhile to make in the future. He predicted the arrival of quantum computers and said that once they do, we will need to switch to new cryptography.

Commenting on the merits of PoS, Buterin admitted that transitioning to it is “a big change” and said there are also “lots of benefits.” He added that the few remaining proof-of-work (PoW) supporters that exist in the Ethereum community can use Ethereum Classic (ETC) instead. They have “a welcoming community,” and it is “a totally fine chain,” he said about the blockchain that split from Ethereum after a major hack in 2016.
“At the end of this roadmap, Ethereum will be a much more scalable system,” Buterin said. “By the end, Ethereum will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second.”

At last year’s EthCC, Buterin gave a talk on “things that matter outside of DeFi” and said that Ethereum had to expand beyond decentralized finance (DeFi).