Vitalik's Latest AMA Technical Insights: Concerned About Technological Stagnation, Exploring Integration With AI, and Willing to Open Up Space for L2 Development
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Vitalik's Latest AMA Technical Insights: Concerned About Technological Stagnation, Exploring Integration With AI, and Willing to Open Up Space for L2 Development
Sometimes it makes sense for different applications to share a wallet, but further improvements to ZK transfers are needed to make the privacy benefits from different activities truly achievable.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: TechFlow
TechFlow has selected some of Vitalik's recent AMA responses on Farcaster—covering personal habits, hot technologies, and industry trend insights—that are well worth reading.
1. What keeps you motivated?
Vitalik: I know our community and the technology we're building are in a uniquely powerful position to create genuinely valuable outcomes in an increasingly complex world. But positive results won't happen automatically—we have a responsibility to thoughtfully design and realize them.
2. In a future with built-in wallets, do you think people will:
(1) Generate a new address for each new application,
(2) Primarily use one address across many applications, or
(3) Something in between?
Vitalik: Right now we’re at (2). I hope we can move closer to (1), because it’s much better for privacy. Sometimes it makes sense for different apps to share a wallet, but that shouldn’t be the default. We also need to keep improving ZK transfers so the privacy benefits from separating activities become practically realizable.
2.1. Follow-up on this question — Do you mean having these distinct wallets within each app, or managed via a single branded wallet like MetaMask? That is, would you log in with MetaMask and generate an address per site, or use email/social login and generate a wallet per site?
Vitalik: I really hope it’s one wallet that generates an address per site. If every app had its own custom wallet, that would be a disaster in my view.
3. As I began understanding the limitations of SNARKs in mechanisms combining private and public data, I wondered: What are your thoughts on FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption)?
Vitalik: FHE still has practical limitations preventing it from being a "magic black box." Specifically, you must somehow protect the final decryption step, and in practice it often faces constraints similar to MPC. So yes, I’m excited about it—but it’s not a panacea. That said, better FHE will almost certainly translate into better witness encryption and/or obfuscation, if we can make it workable in practice.
4. What do you think of Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto?
Vitalik: I agree with much of it—especially that stagnation disguised as prudence or humility is actually a deeply anti-human force. But I also think it misses key points; specifically, the direction and sequence of technological development matter.
For example, brain-computer interfaces are great and will be important in the future, but they carry risks—we're talking about reading from and writing to our thoughts. It’s crucial that such systems remain as open-source and local-compute-friendly as possible. What is a16z doing to ensure that outcome?
Also, I believe crypto is a tech field that doesn’t just focus on consumer utility, but also addresses major techno-political questions—preserving freedom, openness, and the ability for ordinary people around the world to participate, not just consume.
4.1. To achieve this, how should we design systems to guide Web3 toward the public good rather than merely chasing market share and shareholder profits? What incentive structures can Web3 enable to make Regen Meme spread virally in a socially/civilizationally meaningful way?
Vitalik: I think we need more raw funding going into Regen. Optimism’s RPGF is good, but we need even more effort.
5. What is your biggest concern or worry regarding Ethereum’s future?
Vitalik: Risks of cryptographic stagnation, loss of privacy, and erosion of open internet infrastructure—all could lead to failure. The major techno-political issues of the 21st century will be decided by what happens in AI over the next decade.
6. What have you been thinking about lately?
Vitalik: Over the past week or two, I’ve been reflecting on various AI-related issues and how—or whether—the Ethereum community can effectively engage with them.
7. You've said that Ethereum protocol design aims to minimize L1 protocol complexity while maximizing robustness and resilience. Consider sharding vs rollups: clearly, sharding adds far more complexity at L1. Yet for developers and users, it’s simpler—it abstracts away fraud proofs/validity proofs, eliminates exogenous cross-chain bridges, ensures ETH fungibility (no arbETH vs opETH), etc. Why is minimizing L1 complexity better than pushing complexity onto developers and users?
Vitalik: I think if we’d gone with L1 sharding, the powerful ecosystem responsible for developing diverse L2s and scaling infrastructure might not exist to the same extent today. L1 teams have limited resources and were focused on PoS.
That said, the current “L1 core team” is stronger now, and I see a counter-movement among L2s toward greater standardization. This includes:
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Account abstraction (ERC-4337)
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L2 EVM alignment efforts
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Standardized cross-L2 wallet experiences, including recovery
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Potential future adoption of L1-enshrined ZK-EVMs
Of course, all of this runs on DAS—starting with EIP-4844, then expanding to larger and larger data blob sizes. So I believe the Ethereum ecosystem is highly capable of evolving and correcting course, and we’ll eventually arrive at a good balance between standardization and independent innovation.
7.1. Therefore, will ETH cede market cap to various L2 infrastructures? How do you view ETH’s TAM (total addressable market) opportunity?
Vitalik: Definitely giving up some, but not all. I think this is healthy. We need tokens that can use issuance to fund expensive public goods in the ecosystem—ETH itself struggles to play that role, so making space for L2 tokens is a good solution. Being part of Ethereum while having a token directly tied to your project is a huge incentive.
8. Not sure what you think about “ticketing.” Ticketing is often seen as a beneficial use case for crypto overall, and for millions, it may be their first interaction with distributed ledger technology.
Vitalik: Yes, I think it’s valuable—especially if we can (i) integrate it into ZK systems like zupass, and (ii) enable direct on-chain ticket purchases, making the entire process fully independent of any centralized interface.
9. Are you interested in lattice-based alternatives to SNARKs? After all, lattice cryptography dominates most NIST PQC finalists and is compatible with FHE systems. Also, what do you think of recent progress in recursive ZKPs—specifically folding schemes like Nova IVC/PCD?
Vitalik: For FHE, lattice-based approaches seem promising—and possibly the only game in town. For most on-chain use cases, hash-based ZK—like STARKs—might be sufficient?
10. In your view, why haven’t crypto-based prediction markets gained more traction? Do you still believe in their potential? What more needs to happen for them to “take off”?
Vitalik: They’re slowly getting there. Polymarket has recently made significant progress, blending crypto features with commercial viability better than any prior attempt.
11. What’s preventing light clients (e.g., Portal Network clients) from being ready?
Vitalik: Almost there. Next steps are (i) default integration into wallets, and (ii) extending support to L2s, not just L1. However, (ii) only makes sense once L2s mature—or at least remove training wheels—so underlying layers stay decentralized first.
12. What do you see as the greatest threats to traditional finance and late-stage capitalism, respectively?
Vitalik: Militarism and late-stage authoritarianism.
13. Given debates around protocol governance, do you support providing everyone with minimal on-chain tools to express their preferences?
Vitalik: Yes, I definitely think more non-binding sentiment polling tools would be great. Hopefully not just token-based; things like Carbon Vote were cool in the past, but their biggest flaw was clearly whale domination.
14. Scroll recently launched its zkEVM mainnet; however, due to the need to mimic Ethereum’s classic EVM, we’re unlikely to see innovative design concepts or experiments at the execution layer—such as privacy features. What are your thoughts on these constraints?
Vitalik: I don’t think we need privacy at the execution layer—we can build it perfectly well at other layers.
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