Vitalik: We need to use cryptography to reach the limits of agreement, while optimizing efficiency and enhancing security

At the 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled "Reaching the Limits of Protocol Design" at the "Web3 Scholars Summit 2024" hosted by DRK Lab. He stated that current technologies such as ZK-SNARKs, MPC, FHE have efficiency and security issues. For instance, Ethereum's slot block time is 12 seconds, the verification time for a "regular" block is about 400 milliseconds, and ZK-SNARK proofing takes approximately 20 minutes. The goal of Ethereum is to achieve real-time proofing. To address these inefficiency problems, Vitalik proposed solutions like "Parallelization + aggregation trees", using SNARK algos and hashes to improve efficiency and employing ASIC for ZK hardware acceleration.

Furthermore, Vitalik said that while protocols based on advanced cryptography such as ZK-SNARKs, MPC (Multi-Party Computation), FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) and BLS aggregations are developing rapidly they also face efficiency and security challenges. Efficiency issues can be addressed with parallelization and aggregation trees along with improved performance through SNARK algorithms hashing plus ASIC usage; vulnerabilities in ZK-SNARK circuits could be resolved by safety committees or multi-provers with AI-based validation being a future solution. We need to use cryptography to reach protocol limits while optimizing efficiency enhancing security.

Vitalik pointed out that currently signature aggregation has an efficiency rate of around 30k signatures per slot which requires high node demands; their desired target supports as many validators as possible with low node requirements making it quite simple protocol-wise.