Okay. Okay. Thank you and good morning everyone. So what I wanted to talk about today is what I think is an important transition in how I have been thinking about blockchains, and I think really how a lot of people have been recently thinking about Ethereum, its place in the world, and how to use it, and also how not to use it. So the title is: blockchain is one tool and CROPS is the objective, right? So who here is familiar with CROPS?
Censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and safety. Those are the goals. Blockchains are a technology that can help us achieve CROPS. There are also other technologies that can help us achieve CROPS, and sometimes there are also ways to use blockchains that do not help anyone achieve CROPS at all. And so these are two different things. And I think it's important for us to really start with the goal in mind, right? And not kind of take too much of a perspective of focusing from the point of view of one particular technology, right? So I think one of the mistakes that we made in the era around five or six years ago, you know, who here remembers that era? Who here remembers, you know, selling digital monkeys for $10 million?
You know, all of the extremely big and flashy conferences, the Lambos, Justin Sun. You know, it's now one of the weaknesses of that era, right, is that I think we saw blockchains a little bit too much as an end and not enough as a means, right? So your personal profile, put it on the blockchain. Your identity, put it on the blockchain. Your social graph, put it on the blockchain.
NFTs. NFTs are good because they're on the blockchain. If NFTs had the exact same thing had been launched by Twitter or by Google as a product, everyone here would have hated them. DeFi, it's good because it's on the blockchain. Regardless of whether or not the oracle is completely centralized, whether or not the bridge is a backdoor multisig and so on, right? And why did we think this way? I think two reasons, right? I think one because number go up, and two because we didn't really have any other tools, right? Like the blockchain was the one hammer, and so everything looked like a nail.
So I think especially this year that style of crypto has basically hit the end of the road, right? And I think it's good to be honest about one of the reasons why, right? Basically because blockchains are not the shiniest technology. You know, if you go to someone in a university or in Asia or in a big company or anywhere else and you ask them like what is the shiniest technology, they're going to say that it's AI. But at the same time, the underlying goals of blockchains, CROPS, is something that people need as strongly as they ever have. The need for secure finance even stronger than before. Over the next couple of years, probably huge amounts of traditional finance are going to get hacked. What is the infrastructure that can make finance both open and secure at the same time? It basically is the infrastructure that has been perfecting exactly that for the last 15 years, which is blockchains.
Proprietary LLMs as centralized choke points. If you have a workflow today that depends on OpenAI, that depends on Anthropic, that is a choke point. It can get taken away from you at any moment. Surveillance of your AI use. If you're using any of these models, then there is someone on the other end or some bot on the other end that is looking at how you use it, that is quite possibly training on it. We have no idea if they are or if they're not. We have no idea whether or not the training process of the next model accidentally memorizes your password and so on. Metadata-based deanonymization. So protecting your privacy on the internet is becoming harder and harder very quickly. So 30 years ago this was something that we were very optimistic about. I think many people remember the slogan on the internet: nobody knows you're a dog. The problem is now on the internet you can get deanonymized from even one document. And you can even get deanonymized from a document if you try to keep it anonymous. Right? This is a few months ago I published that challenge where basically I had written an anonymous document related to Ethereum and I published it and within two weeks someone else discovered which one it was even though I wrote that document in Chinese and I asked Qwen 3.5 to translate it. So even if you try hard, deanonymizing is very easy.
Now the problem is metadata, right? So if you look, if you think of decentralized messengers, something like Signal, Signal can protect the content of your data. It does not protect the graph of who is communicating with whom, what is the frequency at which you're sending messages. And with modern AI, from all of those things you can learn a lot. The need for secure and trustable information sources. The internet has over the last 10 years basically turned into a full-on info war zone. AI-enhanced censorship. Censorship is getting more powerful. Also universal physical surveillance. This year there has been a large backlash. A lot of people are getting very worried about both the much larger number of cameras that's going up and also the much more powerful algorithms that are able to interpret all of this data in real time. And also it's not just cameras. It's drones. It's Wi-Fi hotspots. It's all kinds of devices that can be turned into cameras. These are topics that many people around the world are extremely concerned about. Even if you ask someone who is 20 years old who thinks that blockchains are the last generation's technology and blockchains are stupid, they will be concerned about at least some of these things. And so the goals are not just still alive. The goals are even more important than they were 10 years ago. And this is something that I think is really worth remembering.
Now in the mainstream technical public view today, I think it's also worth acknowledging: the leading freedom tech is not even blockchains. The leading freedom tech is open-weight LLMs, right? But at the same time, blockchains are here to stay. Blockchains are powerful. And I think many people are greatly underestimating blockchains. Cryptography is here to stay. Five years ago, we were just blockchain people. Today we are blockchain people. We are also zero-knowledge proof people. We are also FHE people. And I think maybe in another few years we will also be indistinguishability obfuscation people. Blockchains and cryptography make each other better. They massively expand each other's capabilities, and what you can do with a blockchain is much greater once you have zero-knowledge proofs and other technologies that you can add on top. And so Ethereum is important. Ethereum is extremely important, and the cryptography that the Ethereum community has been central in developing and accelerating is also just objectives.
So let's go through a couple of examples, right? Don't think about this in the Ethereum community. Think about this from the point of view of someone in the world who cares about the goals. So one goal that many people have is they want to use frontier LLMs with maximum privacy, right? So the LLM provider sees your queries. They might not even be willing to offer TEE inference, so you don't have confidentiality. But what you can get is you can get anonymity. So here is one kind of pipeline that can meaningfully protect as much privacy as possible while you're using an LLM.
So these days local models are powerful enough that local models for orchestration. Even if you're using remote models to do very smart things, you can actually use local models to figure out what the queries are. You don't actually need to use remote models directly for everything. I have Qwen 3.8 Flash running on my laptop. It's actually extremely powerful. Who here has used Qwen 3.8 Flash? Okay, a few people. No, it's like actually very smart. So, step one, you can use local weight models to orchestrate, to make them rewrite your request in a way that removes all of your private information, even in a way that removes your writing style. So, the honest punchline: it's not your writing style. It's the same AI slop English that everyone else is using. That's what the model sees.
Now, step two, anonymizing networks. So, anonymizing networks can provide network-layer privacy. Step three is ZK API. This is an ongoing project and they will actually be releasing very soon. And with ZK API, it combines together zk-SNARKs and Ethereum-based payment channels, and they allow you to make payments to a provider or to a proxy where each query is not linked to every other query. So this is basically combining most of the anonymity properties of something like Zcash or Tornado or Railgun, but without requiring a blockchain transaction every time you make a payment and then finally send it to the provider. So this is a pipeline that solves a problem, and what we can see is, well, blockchains appear in one place as a solution.
Let's try example two. So let's imagine you care about public safety. You also care about in-person physical privacy. And so you say, well, I want a camera that detects violence. And it records and forwards video only if it detects violence. Otherwise, it immediately, instantly deletes everything that it sees. And we want this to be something that people can verify. So how would you actually build something like this to the best that's possible today? So first of all, you want an open-weight LLM that can be verified, and you want it running on trusted hardware. You want the whole camera to be trusted hardware. Then the open-weight LLM detects, it has a classifier: is this something that needs to be detected and forwarded, or if it's just normal people doing regular things, then instantly delete. And then if you want to add another layer of protection, then you can add one more feature. You can say, well, anytime the video is forwarded, the software that's running on it, which is verified by the trusted hardware, is going to publish an on-chain transaction, and it's not going to continue recording until it gets a proof that the on-chain transaction was included. So what does this do? It gives you a public counter. It gives you a public verifiable counter where you can actually see how many times has this particular camera actually forwarded video. And so you get these kind of much guarantees, right? You can have cameras that are verifiably not a total panopticon. Now this is not something that you can construct from the perspective: I have a blockchain, I want to put a blockchain into everything. This is from the perspective: I care about CROPS. I care about the underlying goals. I want to try to solve these problems. And it turns out that in one place out of all of the many places, blockchains appear as part of the solution.
So blockchains are sometimes a small part of the solution, but they're a nonzero part and they are an important part. Blockchains are very useful for finance. Blockchains are useful for making credible commitments. Blockchains are also useful for verifying that something has not happened. So you can use them, for example, to verify what is the latest hash of some particular file. You can use them for version control to verify that you're actually getting the same version of software that the developers have signed off on. You can also use them as a counter to verify that something happened some number of times and not more times. So if you see blockchains as a tool, they will come up surprisingly often even if your goals do not include blockchains at all.
Cryptography makes blockchains better. So this is something I'll be talking about later today. The proof singularity. Basically one of the biggest problems with blockchains is scalability. How do you solve scalability with zero-knowledge proofs? So EIP-828, the recursive STARK command pool. And so individual users publish transactions with proofs. Those proofs get aggregated into other proofs. And then the entire block only contains one proof at the end that verifies everyone's activity. Consensus-layer signature aggregation. The Ethereum lean chain will have tens of thousands of validators. Those validator signatures will get aggregated, and the aggregation will be done with recursive zero-knowledge proofs that also get included on-chain. Data availability routes, the same thing. This is all being heavily accelerated by AI and formal verification, and AI-assisted formal verification is making all of this acceleration safe, right? So the Ethereum roadmap has actually massively increased in ambition in terms of what we want to do over the next three years. The roadmap, I think for about the last decade, we've had things that we wanted to do until about 2030. The difference now is that the list of things has gotten about five or ten times wider. How are we able to do it? Well, because bots are doing a lot of the coding. How is it possibly safe to have bots do any of the coding? Because we have formal verification that is verifying it.
So, how can you help? How can people in Taiwan help? How can the Ethereum community everywhere help? So, I think one thing that's important is you want to start by going back to the roots. So, CROPS: censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security. This is crypto as it was before 2013. Does anyone remember there was this article in 2017? And it said everyone is getting hilariously rich and you're not, right? And you know, I think you might have remembered on Twitter in 2025 people making fun by basically reposting that exact same article except it's like the AI people getting rich.
So the thing that we need to remember is what matters for the long term, going beyond all of these cycles of who is getting rich in one year, who is not getting rich in one year, is the underlying goals. The underlying goals are the same as they have been the whole time. If you ask someone who was in Bitcoin, Bitcoin was the only crypto in 2010, what their goals are, their list would look very similar to this list. So find a problem that you care about that involves these properties. Our current age is the age of corporatist and statist warfare, all against all. There are many problems that are like this. There are many problems that people care about. Pick one. I would also say someone who shares our underlying goals without using our chain is more of an ally than someone who uses our chain for goals that are completely incompatible. So find a problem you care about, figure out what technologies you need. If blockchains are not one of them, then you can build things without a blockchain. If blockchains are part of the answer, then absolutely. And Ethereum is there for you, and it's getting stronger with every passing six months.
Now, mandatory Ethereum roadmap update. I think, you know, people like somehow Ethereum roadmap updates always appear in what I talk about, and so we'll make this quick. So scaling: Glamsterdam, the next hard fork, will make higher gas limits safe. It enables parallel verification. It includes fixes to gas prices that solve denial-of-service issues. EIP-8288, I'll talk about it later. I'm hoping we can include it in AR, will make privacy protocols and quantum-safe signatures cheap. ZK-EVMs being rolled out slowly over the next three years will make even higher gas limits safe. So massively scaling computation and using proofs in order to do it without bloating the chain. Privacy: Fossil coming in HAR will give much stronger transaction inclusion guarantees to all transactions, including privacy protocol transactions. Frames: EIP-8141, which looks like it's going into HAR, will allow private transactions to be intermediary-free, and so you will not need to go through public broadcasters that are sometimes online, sometimes offline, add extra dependencies, take a huge extra fee. EIP-8288 will also make privacy both cheaper and quantum-resistant at the same time. And so we will have a full stack where we're using the same ZK-STARK technology to bring privacy and security both to Ethereum's consensus layer and to the applications on top of it, and then also companion technologies on the access layer.
So the Kohaku project is continuing. So a few weeks ago I've used it. You can basically use the demo version right now. You can use it as an interface to send transactions through a Tornado or privacy pools or Railgun. It works. The next step is including private reads, which can be done either with TEEs and OAM or with PI, also anonymizing networks, so you can send privately. And then security: so formally verify all the things, making it easier to run nodes, making it easier to have light clients. Every single Ethereum user should have at least a light client by default. Quantum-resistify all the things. This is obvious. And companion technologies on the access layer: so decentralized UIs, on-chain UIs, social recovery, a lot of progress being made there, making much, much better forms of recovery that do not depend on having one single key that controls your entire wallet. Multisig wallets, CROPS-friendly AI tools, local AI tools, all of it's happening now.
You can also help by participating. One of the benefits of what AI has done to protocol research and protocol development is it's made it much easier for any smart person anywhere to quickly get up to speed with the existing latest frontier and quickly start contributing. So there's already running AI competitions. So better.codes is one, and snark.fast is another, basically for improving the proof systems that Ethereum will be using, and we will probably have more competitions coming soon. AI-assisted research on extreme frontier cryptography. This is also something that is, I think, really open for any researcher, any cryptographer, mathematician anywhere to help. This includes AI that's both verifiable and with FHE making that extremely fast. So now you can do AI inference that's verifiable. So inside of STARK with less than 10x overhead, and my dream is that we can do the same for FHE and even for STARKs on top of FHE. Diamond IO and local mixing. So both families of obfuscation algorithms, different new, you can try to invent a totally new style of ultrafast SNARKs, and you can use things like Arib to actually mathematically prove it secure. Arib, MASM, LeanVM, a lot of ongoing projects that you can contribute to, or you can take on any corner of the Ethereum world that we're not paying enough attention to yet. So even on the core research, there is a very wide surface area for people to come in and for people to contribute.
So I think this next year, this next era of Ethereum, these next few years, as the blockchain fully merges with the most advanced cryptography, becomes extremely secure, becomes scalable, and becomes a useful tool in all of the places where it makes sense to help bring better censorship and capture resistance, openness, privacy and security to the world into a reality. And so I hope that all of us here can be a part of making this future happen. Thank you.
Q&A session. All right. And we have some Q&A session. If you have any questions, please raise your hand, and then we'll give the mic to you. And I'll put on my sheriff hat because if there's, you know, we should use our common sense and then figure out what is a nice question. Unfortunately, I cannot do a Western cowboy accent. Sorry guys, but you know, use common sense and just ask things that are relevant, technical, or like really about improving CROPS or all these things. And since I have the sheriff hat, if I sense that it may not be the best one, then I'll ask the asset to skip. Okay. So yeah, the first, there's one there.
