Vitalik Buterin's keynote speech in Hong Kong: The protocol has developed rapidly in the past 10 years, but there are two major problems: efficiency and security

During the 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech entitled "Reaching the Limits of Protocol Design" at the "Web3 Scholar Summit 2024" hosted by DRK Lab.

He introduced that in the 2010s, the protocols based on basic cryptography were hashing and signatures. Subsequently, the protocols developed rapidly. In the 2020s, the protocols based on advanced cryptography include ZK-SNARKS, 2PC, MPC, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), aggregation (including through IVC, ICD, etc.), and advanced P2P networks.

Vitalik said that the current ZK-SNARKs, MPC, FHE and other technologies have efficiency and security issues. Among them, the Ethereum Slot block time is 12 seconds, the "normal" block verification time is about 400 milliseconds, and the ZK-SNARK proof time is about 20 minutes. The goal of Ethereum is to achieve real-time proof. There are several solutions to the efficiency problem, including parallelization, aggregation trees, improving efficiency (using SNARK algorithms and hashing), and ASIC accelerated hardware solutions.

The circuit vulnerability problem of ZK-SNARKs can be solved by the security committee and multi-provers. In the future, AI can help debug and further solve it.

“I think an interesting future direction is to use AI tools, potentially new tools for formal verification. Like proving that there are no vulnerabilities in the zkEVM,” he said. “Maybe we might actually be able to achieve a world without bugs in the future. It’s kind of crazy.”

In addition, when talking about signature aggregation efficiency, Vitalik Buterin pointed out that the current situation is about 30,000 signatures per time slot, which requires high node requirements. The desired goal is to support as many validators as possible while reducing node requirements and adopting a relatively simple protocol. According to theoretical limitations, each participant needs 1 bit of data per time slot, and there is no lower limit on calculations.

“So the conclusion is, basically, what we need to think about is we need protocols to get to the limits of what you can do with cryptography, and we’ve gotten to the point where our cryptography is much stronger than it was decades ago, but it can be much stronger, and at that point I think we really need to start thinking about what the upper limit is and how we can actually get to that upper limit,” Vitalik said in closing.