Vitalik: Blockchain has evolved from a simple ledger into a cryptography-based secure computing network

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, delivered a keynote speech at the 12th Global Blockchain Summit, stating that the blockchain was initially a primary tool. Although it has characteristics such as openness, neutrality, and security, it is not scalable and is completely transparent, lacking privacy protection mechanisms.

Subsequently, privacy transactions and scalable verification brought by zero-knowledge proofs have changed this situation and have been transformed from planning into actual EIPs, included in the Ethereum roadmap. Technologies such as fully homomorphic encryption are also beginning to be applied, and indistinguishable obfuscation may also be applied on-chain in the future. Beyond privacy, the parallel construction and proof of blocks can make extreme scalability possible, and industry thinking has shifted from digital assets to digital assets plus information, from purely on-chain to user-end, transaction memory pools, a complete pipeline on-chain, and from who can send what to who can see what.

Currently, blockchain has gradually evolved from a simple ledger to a cryptography-based secure computing network. With the development of AI, providing cryptographic rules to AI for automated formal verification can significantly enhance verification efficiency, allowing the chain to carry more possibilities.