Vitalik's speech revealed two important Ethereum plans

On May 20, at the online ETHshanghai conference, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin conducted a live broadcast, during which he expressed two viewpoints and two important arrangements related to Ethereum.

Viewpoint

1. Vitalik said that the Ethereum ecosystem is now too focused on financial applications such as DeFi. The risks of financial applications are too high and there is little room for improvement. More applications in other fields need to be developed.

Author's note: More than 95% of Ethereum ecosystem projects are financial applications, and the DeFi Lego culture evolved based on the composition of smart contracts has allowed many DeFi application tokens to be used together, resulting in extremely high leverage. That is, an asset provides liquidity and mints multiple assets in multiple protocols and derivative protocols. In the case of continuous price declines, it is very easy to trigger liquidation and systemic risks.

2. Vitalik talked about the "Soul bound tokens" recently proposed in the paper "Searching for the Soul of Web3: Planning a Future Built on Trust", saying that more application layer instances will benefit from this new type of identity token, and once again emphasized the importance of DAO, privacy and decentralized governance to the Ethereum ecosystem.

Note from the author: Soul bound tokens are a new type of asset that describes the definition of assets on Ethereum in more detail, that is, it marks a non-transferable asset that conforms to the social attributes of human beings, and this type of asset will have a correlation with other assets such as erc20, erc721, etc.

Important Arrangements

1. Vitalik said that Ethereum 2.0 is currently undergoing final network testing. If all problems are resolved, the merger may take place as early as August. If other conditions arise, it may also occur in September or October.

Author's note: The merger was scheduled for June in January this year, but after Vitalik's announcement, the merger time has been postponed accordingly. The main difficulty of the merger still lies in the unknown handling difficulty of the pow chain. Currently, all applications run on the pow chain. In order to ensure that the merger does not affect the normal operation of the Ethereum network, it is necessary to prepare enough execution layer nodes to ensure the processing efficiency of Ethereum. It also requires multiple execution clients and node clients to cooperate with each other to work smoothly.

2. Vitalik Buterin said that the Ethereum team has proposed an expansion plan called Dank sharding, which will expand the block capacity of Ethereum to 80,000 TPS in the long term. First, Proto-danksharding will be completed to support 1MB block capacity and (Rollup) 5,000 TPS.

Author's note: The difficulty of processing efficiency on the blockchain is that all calculations are constantly scrambling to be stored in a block space. Therefore, the idea of ​​expansion must also include expanding the block size. The first step in the future will be a protocol upgrade. Proto-dank sharding will be carried out before the launch of the shard chain. The shard chain plus rollup, the data availability size of the future block can be increased to 16M, but this needs to wait for the progress of the shard chain to be completed.