During the 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech Reaching the Limits of Protocol Design at the Web3 Scholar Summit 2024 hosted by DRK Lab.
He introduced that in the 2010s, protocols based on basic cryptography were hashing and signatures. Subsequently, the agreement developed rapidly. In the 2020s, protocols based on advanced cryptography include ZK-SNARKS, 2 PC, MPC, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), aggregation (including through IVC, ICD, etc.), and advanced P2P networks.
Vitalik said that current ZK-SNARKs, MPC, FHE and other technologies have efficiency and security issues. Among them, the Ethereum Slot block time is 12 seconds, the ordinary block verification time is about 400 milliseconds, and the ZK-SNARK proof time is about 20 minutes, Ethereum aims to achieve real-time proofs. There are several solutions to the efficiency problem, including parallelization (Parallelization), aggregation trees (aggregation trees), improving efficiency (using SNARK algorithm and hashing), and ASIC accelerated hardware solutions.
The ZK-SNARKs circuit vulnerability problem can be solved by the security committee and multi-provers. In the future, AI can help with debugging and further solving problems.
I think an interesting future direction is to use artificial intelligence tools, potentially using new tools for formal verification. For example, proving that there are no bugs in zkEVM, he said. Maybe we may actually be able to achieve a bug-free world in the future. This It’s a little crazy.”
Furthermore, when talking about signature aggregation efficiency, Vitalik Buterin pointed out that the current situation is about 30,000 signatures per slot, which requires high node demand. The desired goal is to support as many validators as possible while reducing node requirements and adopting a relatively simple protocol. According to the theoretical limit, each participant requires 1 bit of data per time slot, and there is no lower limit in calculation.
So the takeaway is, basically, what we need to think about is we need protocols to reach the limits of what you can do with cryptography, and weve gotten to the point where our cryptography is much stronger than it was a few decades ago, but it can Stronger, at this point I think we really need to start thinking about what the ceiling is and how we can actually get there, Vitalik said in closing.
