Vitalik's Speech at Wanxiang Blockchain Week: Blockchain is Ending the Era of 'Everyone Repeating Everything'

Host: Distinguished guests and dear friends, good morning to you all!

Welcome to the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 12th Blockchain Global Summit, hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs.

Twelve years ago, when the first summit opened here, blockchain was still a little-known technical term. Over the past twelve years, we have witnessed it move from geek communities into the mainstream spotlight, from experimental exploration toward industrial implementation, and from a single technology into the underlying infrastructure driving the digital economy. Twelve editions of the summit have not only documented every leap forward in this industry, but have also become an important stage for global blockchain thought exchange, standards co-building, and ecosystem connection.

Today, we gather once again in Shanghai under the theme "Intelligent Chain Symbiosis" to explore the future landscape of deep integration between blockchain and artificial intelligence. "Intelligence" represents the cognitive revolution brought by AI, while "Chain" represents the foundation of trust built by blockchain. When intelligence meets trust, when algorithms meet consensus, we believe this is not a simple stacking of technologies, but a brand-new paradigm shift that will redefine the boundaries of finance, the value of data, and the ways we collaborate.

On behalf of the summit organizers, I would like to extend the warmest welcome and most sincere gratitude to every guest here today!

At the same time, we also want to give special thanks to this year's Diamond Sponsor Qtum, Strategic Partner Wanxiang Innovation Energy Fusion City, and Gold Sponsors Arkreen, Bianjie AI, Blue Elephant Smart Chain, Frontier Technology Research Institute, and Yuanbi Technology, as well as the exclusive dinner sponsor Sui Foundation for their strong support of this summit. Twelve years of dedication, twelve years of iteration. Today, let us open the next exciting chapter together.

Dear guests, the first heavyweight speaker of today's summit is about to take the stage.

He is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Over the past twelve years, he has grown from a teenage geek into a spiritual icon of the industry. The Ethereum he created ushered in the era of smart contracts and defined a series of narratives that have led the industry's development.

He will join us remotely to share his latest thoughts on blockchain. Let us welcome Vitalik with the warmest applause!

Full text as follows:

Vitalik Buterin: Good morning, everyone. Today I'm going to talk about a relatively complex technical topic, so I'll speak in English.

Today I want to talk about a macro topic. We've been discussing blockchain and we've been discussing cryptocurrency, and this has been going on for more than 15 years. For example, the entire Shanghai blockchain activity has been going on for more than a decade. Bitcoin was born in 2009. On the surface, the tools and technologies we are building still seem to have similarities, but in fact, over the past 15 years, there have been many differences, and I think these differences are crucial.

One reason is that, as a user, this means the types of assets you get and the types of costs you bear are very different from what we previously expected. Ten to fifteen years ago, even our view of the goals and what we were trying to achieve changed significantly.

Fifteen years ago, blockchain was our main tool. Bitcoin combined blockchain, signatures, and proof of work. Ethereum also added smart contracts and in 2022 shifted to proof of stake. These were the tools we used at the time. So this characteristic is what you get from using blockchain.

First, blockchain is open. Anyone can freely participate. It is global, reliable, secure, and neutral. No centralized actor can interfere with your application and stop it from running, which could lead to giving the wrong answer.

Zooko, who created Z-Cash, likes to use a phrase: a public blockchain is like Twitter for bank accounts. When the whitepaper was released in 2009, I think the basic answers to these questions, such as that personal names would not be directly linked to their transactions, were still acceptable if there were strong privacy protections. But now, we have extremely powerful data analysis capabilities and extremely powerful artificial intelligence, and this answer is clearly no longer sufficient. At the same time, people want to do more with watches. They want watches to have stronger performance. People are not only interested in payment functions, but they also want payment functions to have stronger and superior characteristics. Therefore, both sides want to go further. In many places, we indeed need to go further.

Therefore, the biggest change is in the technical field. The change we have experienced over the past decade is the rise of zero-knowledge proofs, including SNARKs, and then the quantum-secure SNARK version — STARKs. The role of these objects is that they allow you to verify a computation. One person runs the computation and generates a proof, and everyone else verifies it. The computation process proceeds in this way, and the verification process is more efficient.

At the same time, it doesn't even need to reveal all the information, that is, all the information used for computation. Therefore, the core part of blockchain technology is related to this issue, the issue of verification. We want a system where everyone can participate, and everyone can be assured that what is happening follows the rules.

So, the original technology required everyone to re-execute all operations, so you sacrificed scalability and sacrificed privacy. SNARKs and STARKs changed these two things. People have been talking about this for ten years, but this is gradually getting closer to becoming reality every year. I think the biggest change this year is that all plans will shift toward all these technologies. They are no longer part of the future, nor part of future roadmaps. Now there are EIPs, namely EIP-8288, and we hope it can enter I-STARK (phonetic), happening in two years, perhaps with AI, or earlier. They are "strawman maps," in which everything after the fork in the next two years uses STARKs everywhere. Therefore, this is a major change.

Another major change is that there are now more and more powerful technologies, and I think these technologies are also about to arrive. So fully homomorphic encryption, namely: FHE, many people are using it. In addition, obfuscation technology and IO technology, which for a long time people thought belonged to the distant future, but in fact its versions may become increasingly feasible, on a shorter time horizon, faster than many people imagine, so we have more powerful technologies. These powerful technologies bring us many things. For example, one of them is that you can process the blockchain in parallel. Parallel processing begins before transactions are included in blocks.

FOCIL is an EIP that is entering H-START (phonetic). This is the first instance of multi-party participation in block building, happening on Ethereum. Therefore, blocks are not created by only a single participant, but jointly created by 16 participants, and finally completed by one final builder. Its goal is to provide a stronger guarantee, namely: if you send a transaction, that transaction will be included in the next slot. Therefore, no single actor has the ability to delay it.

In addition to fossil fuels, there are also EIP-8288 and EIP-828H (phonetic), all of which indicate that you have very large proofs. These very large and expensive objects are happening, and we actually do not need to put them directly on the blockchain. Instead, they can be placed in large-scale parallel processing to prove all proofs, and this process happens off-chain, in the mempool, in the gaps in between. When you send a transaction, when that transaction goes on-chain, in that space, it replaces all objects, using only one proof to prove that these all exist. Therefore, many changes have taken place in the media technology field.

But I think the important thing about these changes is that they truly change our mindset. What is the goal for this type of system? First, an important question is what are we protecting? Bitcoin says we are protecting a data asset, namely "bitcoin currency." If you can issue your own digital asset, we can also protect it, using modern cryptographic assets and information. In Bitcoin and Ethereum, cryptography and code output an answer to a question, and this question is "who can send what." Which asset belongs to whom? Who can send which asset and when? Now we are entering the era of programmable cryptography, where code determines who can see what. So, who can see what, which information, not only who can send, but also who can see? This is becoming programmable. Where does computation happen? Fifteen years ago, blockchain was still just blockchain.

Over the next 5 years, I think to a large extent, this will only accelerate. We are accelerating, accelerating from this aspect, that is, not just having one blockchain, but embracing this entire pipeline, this massive crypto network, which contains a complete pipeline, where users perform a lot of computation locally, completing most of the work before data leaves the user's device, and then transactions go through a mining pool. There are multiple types of mining pools, and they have different privacy properties. Then it gets aggregated, with multiple different types of participants, and block building, and then it is recorded on-chain. Now, this mechanism, the same transaction of a large coin is reprocessed, handled by each node, and in the theorem, a proof is verified many times.

Finally, what have we sacrificed? I think this is a good point. If I sacrifice scalability, I also sacrifice latency. So, centralized systems can provide 100 milliseconds of latency, sometimes even 300 milliseconds, globally, while Bitcoin's latency is 600 milliseconds, or about 590 milliseconds, about 10 minutes. And the theorem currently takes 12 seconds to generate a block, and 16 minutes to achieve final confirmation. But in the future, even theoretically, C language is currently expected to drop to 4 to 8 seconds per block, and 8 to 32 seconds for final confirmation, as well as scalability, which is a major transformation. That is, blockchain architecture will no longer always require such a large sacrifice. In terms of scalability, it will sacrifice, but not scalability, but scalable generality. It will sacrifice the ability to have extremely scalable computation. If you do not set any limits on this system, do not provide any guarantees to regulate its computational behavior, if you have computational power and can package it, divide it into two parts, they can be executed separately, verified separately, and can run. Before anything happens, even before entering the supply chain, then extremely high scalability actually becomes feasible, right? Therefore,

If you consider blockchain, treat it as a complete system, including L1, also including L2, and also including human resource pools. Human resource pools, L2, tools. All these systems become this very complex intermediate layer, which you or your agent can solve possibly, because artificial intelligence Q3.8, it helps make them more beautiful. But basically, every workflow link is being accelerated, accelerated by artificial intelligence, so before the emergence of artificial intelligence, we had zero-knowledge proofs, but only very simple cryptographic applications, which were only possible under certain conditions. One reason is that if the number of lines of code exceeds about 100 lines or 1000 lines, then it is almost certain that vulnerabilities will appear.

We believe that we can use it for verification, we can use different types of redundancy, testing, specification, analysis, and we can create larger and more complex things, for example, in the post-artificial intelligence era, we can put everything, everything we do, into cryptography, as well as algorithms, the algorithms we use, their overhead is very large. Now, 100 times overhead, or even lower, is usually possible. Therefore, for ZK-SNARK, we have achieved less than 10 times overhead, applied to AI inference. We have achieved less than 10 times overhead, applied to certain types of hash operations. Then we have FLoC, I think it is about 250 times overhead, but in reality, this number is rapidly decreasing. Before verifying all of this, it was all manual operations. Now, formal verification is another major operational bottleneck, which I think is one of the main reasons why L2 has failed to achieve the expected results. So far, it is because there is a limit, the degree to which you can protect them is limited, so you need redundancy, you need multiple verification systems, you need security committees.

And the new technology is formal verification, where if needed, you can even use multiple specifications corresponding to one implementation. So, you can express what the work being done is in different ways, by different people, different agents, different teams, and then automatically, mathematically prove that they all express the same meaning? If they end up expressing different meanings, then your foundation will be much smaller, and everyone can refer to it to better understand which side is correct. Therefore, there is a lot of progress, and the Ethereum world is undergoing tremendous progress, including at the protocol level and the application level. I encourage everyone to visit our website at drawmap.org to check out the Ethereum protocol. If you look closely, you will find that every piece of hard work, after about a year, will be involved, with very advanced cryptographic features, putting everything inside the stock, putting everything inside the virtual machine, aggregating, formally verifying everything, deploying quantum-safe signature algorithms, and all these factors combined, they will transform the theory from a mere blockchain into a larger network, containing different layers. One of its advantages, I think, is that AI not only helps us build all these things faster, but also builds all these things in a more secure way.

Of course, security is something we truly choose to focus on, and in the theorems we do focus on it, but AI, I think, also makes it easier for everyone here to understand all these things. So I think, if someone is a developer or a researcher, they would actually be very encouraged to try to understand the different parts being built, thereby understanding the different components, thereby knowing which properties are possessed by the different components, and trying to find out, to see if there is any specific part that you want or can contribute to.

I think it is becoming rapidly more feasible for a country to contribute to this frontier field, including technology and ecosystem, and it is also more accessible to anyone, or rather, those who are willing to learn, willing to think, and also willing to put in effort, to help, to assist with research, to help build. There are even public competitions ongoing, aimed at improving and formally verifying improvements to many algorithms.

Moreover, this is also a good time to truly rethink applications, that is, the applications we have been doing, and build new applications. These are all applications, and they are all built by Ethereum. Five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, many of them were not built with the idea that these new types of technology are feasible, privacy can be programmed, and even complex code security can be guaranteed. Now these things have become possible, so I encourage people to devote themselves to development and construction, to develop and build applications, to combine them, that is, Ethereum and other decentralized networks, as well as other things in the real world, just as you hope, you want to influence, you want to improve.

Thank you!

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