At the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin provided insight into the future of Ethereum, detailing ongoing developments and the long-term vision for the protocol.

His speech covered a wide range of topics, including the transition to proof of participation (PoS), sharding, Verkle trees, state expiration, and Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

Buterin emphasized Ethereum’s goal to become a more powerful, robust, secure, and decentralized system. The transition to PoS, a significant development for Ethereum, will reduce the annual issuance of Ether and introduce a new security model known as weak subjectivity. This change is expected to make Ethereum’s monetary policy more predictable and safe.

buterin he also discussed the implementation of sharding, a solution intended to significantly increase the scalability of Ethereum. With the full implementation of sharding and roll-ups, Ethereum is expected to process up to 100,000 transactions per second, marking a huge leap in platform capabilities.

In terms of improving decentralization, Buterin introduced the concept of Verkle trees. This development will allow Ethereum nodes to verify blocks without having to store hundreds of gigabytes of data, thus improving the decentralization of the protocol.

Buterin also touched on the concept of account abstraction, which will allow any algorithm to verify transactions, not just elliptic curve signatures. This could lead to better multisigs, smart contract wallets, social recovery wallets, and other improvements.

The co-founder further discussed the vision of separation of layers, where Layer 1 (L1) is for security and reliability, and Layer 2 (L2) is for fast iteration and high scalability. He expressed his wish that Ethereum would eventually “settle down” and become a system that optimizes security and predictability.

Lastly, Buterin highlighted the need to reduce the complexity of Ethereum while increasing its capabilities. He mentioned several proposals to achieve this, such as banning the self-destruct op code, reforming how gas costs work, and switching to Verkle trees.

As Ethereum continues on its journey towards its long-term vision, these developments point to a promising future for the platform, offering greater scalability, security, and decentralization.

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