Vitalik’s latest speech: Current applications are “not imaginative enough” and an independent and open technology stack is the dream of Ethereum

Author: Macauley Peterson, Blockworks

Compiled by: Felix, PANews


Vitalik Buterin does not want Ethereum to rest on its past achievements, but to continue to solve old problems with new ideas and methods.

Vitalik said at the Permissionless Conference in Austin, Texas, that even the latest applications are “not imaginative enough” when looking at today’s application fields.

DeFi is “cool”, NFTs are a new primitive but have historical extensions, and using cryptocurrencies for payments is great but feels familiar. These are individual pieces designed to fit into the same ecosystem as before.

Vitalik is excited about the decentralized social network Farcaster, a Twitter-like protocol built on the OP mainnet, with a companion Warpcast mobile app (Farcaster client) that is currently invitation-only alpha version.

Like Lens Protocol, the social protocol developed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov and running on the Polygon proof-of-stake chain, Farcaster is using cryptographic tools to compete with centralized platforms.

“We’ll see how far we can go in this direction,” Vitalik said. “But I think in the long run it does feed into everything else we do.”

For example, create a witch boycott organization so that “894 likes correspond to 894 people, rather than 894 accounts all controlled by a single organization.”

Vitalik said cryptography-based solutions have the potential to be more decentralized, privacy-preserving and secure than the current Web2 environment. Vitalik cited building blocks such as ENS, various human proof ideas and POAP (or a next-generation version using zero-knowledge technology, which would be better) and Gitcoin Passport.

“The dream of Ethereum is to truly create an independent open technology stack.” One that can compete with the likes of Google and Twitter without the need to be closed like China’s WeChat, Alipay and a growing number of CBDCs , centralized system.

Vitalik envisions a step-by-step process for new Web3 users to create an Ethereum address, initially controlled by a familiar service like Gmail, but using account abstraction to allow users to take ownership when they are ready for more crypto-native methods.

“Overall, giving users the opportunity to gradually transition to decentralization and finally, really properly get into this completely independent stack. But actually, all the different parts of the stack are working together.”

Related reading: Transcript of Vitalik’s lecture at Nanyang Technological University: “The Past and Present of Ethereum”