Vitalik Buterin Calls for Change at London's ETH Global Event, What Did He Say?

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is urging a paradigm shift towards building layer-2 (L2) decentralized applications and solutions following the successful implementation of the Dencun hard fork.

Speaking at the ETH Global’s Pragma London event on March 14, Buterin celebrated the completion of the network upgrade, which facilitates L2 rollups to achieve scalability by reducing the costs associated with submitting cryptographic proofs to Ethereum’s base layer.

“We have officially achieved basic rollup scaling, but we need to bear in mind that progress will be incremental from here,” Buterin addressed a crowded audience at the Christ Church Spitalfields venue. The event, drawing over 500 attendees ahead of a weekend-long hackathon, was capped off by Buterin's appearance, making him a key attraction towards the end of the day’s speaker lineup.

Reflecting on Ethereum's roadmap post its transition to proof-of-stake consensus after The Merge in 2022, Buterin emphasized that many of the milestones he had outlined were primarily engineering tasks, some of which came to fruition with the finalization of Dencun, according to Cointelegraph.

The Dencun hard fork introduced Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-4844, altering how Ethereum rollups store data on the mainnet. This proposal, coined Proto-danksharding, enables rollups to attach data blobs to blocks, offering a more cost-effective alternative to using call data for storage. These data blobs, inaccessible to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, are automatically deleted after 18 days.

Ethereum's trajectory has been one of constant evolution, and Buterin stressed the need for a change in approach to have a substantial impact on both the internet and conventional financial systems. He envisioned Ethereum's second decade as a period of outward expansion, emphasizing the importance of breaking out and making a significant global impact.

He said, “The tech geeks were trying to satisfy tech geeks and create beautiful technology. The second decade needs to see Ethereum breaking out and having a big impact on the world.”

With the Dencun hard fork playing a pivotal role in this narrative by shifting Ethereum's focus away from layer 1-centricity, Buterin anticipates a transition towards a period of maintenance, emphasizing the importance of embracing an L2-centric mindset for application developers.

He highlighted the array of tools available for building decentralized applications (DApps), notably zero-knowledge proofs, which empower developers to create more scalable applications while enhancing user privacy.

Buterin also encouraged builders to adopt an “Ethereum 2.0” approach to development, leveraging contemporary tools and protocols like L2 rollups to harness improved privacy, security, and performance benefits.