## From Verification Philosophy to Practice: Vitalik's Vision of Ethereum's Future at Devconnect Argentina Forum

What is the direction of Ethereum's evolution? At the recent Devconnect Argentina conference, Vitalik proposed a fundamental philosophical shift—from "trust intermediaries" to "cryptographic verification." This is not just a technical upgrade but a redefinition of the core values of blockchain.

### Trust vs Verification: The Fundamental Difference in Blockchain

Traditional financial systems are built on "trust"; you must believe that banks will not commit malfeasance. Ethereum achieves "impossibility of wrongdoing" through mathematical constraints at the protocol layer—users do not need to trust any intermediaries, only to verify the state itself. This shift fundamentally changes the trust model of the entire system from a philosophical perspective.

Unlike dedicated protocols, Ethereum pursues general programmability. It is not aimed at infinite scalability (like LLM reasoning), but at maintaining global consensus. This means preserving a singleton state unaffected by geopolitical interference—that is the true meaning of the world computer.

### Beyond DeFi: The Hidden Capabilities of Blockchain

Transaction ordering rights remain an underestimated feature. In peer-to-peer networks without consensus, double-spending attacks become commonplace. A deeper application is "proof of non-existence"—cryptographically proving the scarcity of an asset or that a certain event never occurred. This expands blockchain's boundaries far beyond payments.

Isolated blockchains face three major vulnerabilities: transaction transparency leading to privacy issues, decentralization limiting speed (latencies below 50 milliseconds inevitably lead to centralization), and reliance on oracles to access real-world data.

### Cryptography's Answer: From Zero-Knowledge to Collaborative Computation

Programmable cryptography offers a solution. Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) verify data without revealing it; Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) perform computations on encrypted data. This shifts the paradigm toward decentralized collaborative computing, fundamentally changing existing architectures.

### EIP-7732 and Innovations in Block Construction

Ongoing upgrades directly address execution layer bottlenecks. EIP-7732 (Proposer-Builder Separation PBS) allows validators to spend more time processing blocks without risking centralization. Block-level access lists break the constraints of serial execution, enabling transaction parallelism. These improvements collectively push Ethereum's throughput and security forward.

### zkVMs: Synchronization Is No Longer a Burden

Synchronizing Ethereum's history once required terabytes of data and days. zkVMs change all that—by verifying execution via SNARKs instead of recomputation, computational load is reduced to nearly zero. Native mobile nodes thus become feasible, further decentralizing validation power.

The FOCIL mechanism allows a broader set of validators to propose "mini-blocks," strengthening guarantees of inclusion and reducing censorship risks.

### Smart Wallets and Key Management

Account abstraction enables features like key rotation and social recovery in smart wallets without relying on centralized services. This is another breakthrough in decentralization.

### Future Outlook: Lean Ethereum Tech Stack

The ultimate goal is a streamlined and optimal Ethereum. This involves adopting zk-friendly hash algorithms (like Poseidon), formal verification, single-slot finality, and quantum resistance. The focus is not on infinite scalability but on security, simplicity, and mathematical perfection.

From a philosophical perspective, Ethereum evolves from a conceptual "world computer" into a robust, privacy-preserving technology stack—verification over trust, cryptography over intermediaries.