Vitalik’s Research and Ecosystem Update
Research and Ecosystem Update: A Glimpse into the Future of Ethereum
Over the past five days, I, along with our executive director Ming Chan and several others from the Ethereum team and Ethereum-based projects and businesses, have been visiting China and Hong Kong. We've been attending a series of back-to-back conferences and events, including the Blockchain Workshop in Hong Kong and the "First Global Blockchain Summit" in Shanghai. These events have been highly positive signs of the growth in the Ethereum ecosystem.
A Growing Ecosystem in China
The Hong Kong event was a semi-closed session on issues such as decentralized governance, identity and reputation, and regulatory compliance. Robin Hanson brought up the topic of prediction markets as a form of "low-cost micro-governance." He suggested using prediction markets to provide the result instead of a legal or arbitration process, which can be costly and time-consuming. This idea has the potential to revolutionize the way we resolve disputes and make decisions.
The next two days consisted of panel discussions on technical and philosophical topics, where people discussed their own projects and the future of blockchains in areas like reputation and internet of things. Ethereum was mentioned many times, not through marketing, but by individuals who see Ethereum as a worthwhile technology on which to build their applications.
Mainstream Adoption in China
The Shanghai conference was equally impressive, with a large audience of representatives from major banks, government officials, Intel, Huawei, and other traditional industry players. People seem excited to see how they could adopt blockchain technology for their own use, and there was plenty of interest in Ethereum specifically. While there are legal restrictions limiting the potential for adoption of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in China, there are no issues with blockchain technology.
Research and Protocol Development
We've identified four key areas of research regarding the underlying protocol that we feel represent the key milestones standing in the way between Ethereum as it currently exists and crypto-utopia:
1. zk-SNARK Integration
We're working on integrating succinct zero-knowledge proofs into the Ethereum protocol. This will enable ultra-private coin mixing, privacy-preserving reputation, and two-party financial contracts. We've had productive chats with the developers of these technologies on how to move forward on accomplishing this.
2. Casper
Ethereum's proof of stake algorithm is now under development by Vlad Zamfir with help from Lucius Greg Meredith, myself, and several others. The key components include by-block instead of by-chain consensus and the concept of "economic consensus by bet" as a way of approaching de-facto finality with exponential speed rather than linear speed as is the case with proof of work.
3. Scalability
We're using a combination of sharding schemes, random sampling, heavy use of Merkle proofs, and asynchronous calling to increase the potential transaction throughput from ~10-20 transactions per second to over 100,000. The basic concepts behind scaling have been set in stone for over six months, and our research team is highly confident that the general approach is valid.
4. EVM Upgrades
Martin Becze has taken the lead on exploring WebAssembly as a candidate for an upgraded Ethereum virtual machine. WebAssembly shares many properties with the EVM, but it lacks gas counting. We can use WebAssembly to create a just-in-time compiler for the EVM, drastically speeding up the ethereum js implementation.
Homestead and Beyond
Our internal target has been to launch Homestead when the Frontier network has successfully run without serious problems for 4 weeks. We plan on announcing a more detailed strategy for Homestead soon, but suffice it to say that we are already mostly there. We're also releasing the 1.0 versions of cpp-ethereum and Mix.
DEVcon and the Future
DEVcon is still slated for November 9-13 in London, and we're looking forward to seeing everyone there! We're excited to share our progress and hear from the community about their ideas and projects. The future of Ethereum is bright, and we're committed to making it a reality.
Conclusion
The past five days have been a whirlwind of conferences, events, and research. We've seen the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem in China, and we're excited about the potential for adoption and innovation. Our research and development efforts are focused on making Ethereum a more secure, scalable, and user-friendly platform. We're committed to making crypto-utopia a reality, and we invite you to join us on this journey.
Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2015/10/18/vitaliks-research-and-ecosystem-update
