Vitalik Buterin: The Next Five Years Are Crucial for Ethereum

The next five years are of “crucial importance” for the widespread adoption of Ethereum and its acceptance in the “real world,” according to Vitalik Buterin.

He noted that in recent years, stablecoins have become the primary use case for cryptocurrencies, as they facilitate seamless cross-border payments and offer protection against inflation for users in countries with unstable fiat currencies.

Therefore, low fees and well-designed interfaces are crucial for attracting new users to “stablecoins,” Buterin believes.

“Historically, blockchain lacked such features, but they will emerge in the coming years. We already have L2, and we continue to move forward. I expect Ethereum to be a leading player in making stablecoins accessible to people, ensuring they are truly open, decentralized, and without intermediaries,” he added.

The Ethereum co-founder suggested that non-financial applications will significantly impact mass adoption. Buterin highlighted the success of decentralized social platforms like Farcaster and Lens as alternatives to X and Facebook.

He also emphasized the growing interest in identity and verification protocols within Ethereum amidst rising concerns about the threat of AI and deepfakes.

Looking ahead, Buterin is enthusiastic about the Verkle trees feature, which will be implemented in the upcoming Ethereum hard fork, Pectra.

“With Verkle trees, nodes won’t need to store the state locally. And thanks to EIP-4444, most of the history won’t need to be stored. The data volume required to run a node will decrease from several terabytes to being able to run on RAM,” the developer explained.

The future implementation of zk-SNARK will further reduce the data transmission burden on nodes, he clarified.

Buterin believes that in the long term, running a node will resemble “a few very simple computations that can easily be performed in the background on any computer, possibly even on a phone or in a browser.”

Earlier, the Ethereum co-founder drew attention to the issue of network centralization in the staking sector. He noted that Lido, Coinbase, and Binance have gained an “excessive market share.”

Previously, Buterin also proposed a method to protect Ethereum from quantum computers through a simple “recovery fork.”