Review of Vitalik's New Article: Moving Beyond Pure Degen Culture, ZK Transcends Pure Financial Narratives
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Review of Vitalik's New Article: Moving Beyond Pure Degen Culture, ZK Transcends Pure Financial Narratives
When we enter the true era of practical applications, ZK will become an essential infrastructure like blockchain.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Haotian
Vitalik's latest article may appear to reaffirm Ethereum's Cypherpunk ethos—decentralization, censorship resistance, auditability, modular tooling, and open collaboration—but in reality, it reflects his underlying concern and dissatisfaction with the current ecosystem's excessive financialization (Degen).
How can we move beyond this purely Degen-driven paradigm? @VitalikButerin has proposed five promising directions for development. Here’s my brief commentary on each:
1) Rollups are starting to actually exist.
Commentary: Over the past year, the Layer2 landscape has seen a thriving market of competition and coexistence, with the Layer2 War intensifying. For Ethereum, more Rollup chains mean greater traffic diversion and empowerment. However, Ethereum’s Layer2 ecosystem is gradually being overtaken by various RaaS solutions, DA solutions, and modular VM architectures, causing the Layer2 market to drift away from Ethereum's canonical principles.
This trend is indeed not what Vitalik envisioned. Yet for the broader crypto industry, the ultimate Layer2 market outcome will inevitably split into two camps: pro-Ethereum and anti-Ethereum. Ultimately, the success of any Layer2 will not be determined by political allegiance or canonical legitimacy, but by its ability to drive mass adoption.
2) Following a temporary lull after the regulatory crackdowns on Tornado Cash, second-generation privacy solutions such as Railway and Nocturne are seeing the (moon) light.
Commentary: Privacy-centric transactions are a sector that sounds essential but has been slow to materialize. Due to transparency in DEX environments, MEV exposure, and visible trading intents, most market makers and sophisticated traders still prefer CEX platforms.
The future competitiveness of DEXs against CEXs hinges entirely on the development of privacy infrastructure. First-generation privacy solutions like Tornado Cash, which used contract-layer fund splitting and asset mixing, were widely exploited for illicit money laundering and faced repeated regulatory sanctions. Second-generation privacy solutions introduce an intermediary privacy layer—whether it’s Nocturne’s Teller and handler or Railway’s Relayer—which assumes the role of the sender address, thereby concealing users’ real transaction intents.
Technically, these solutions often rely on ZK-SNARKs, AA (Account Abstraction) Paymasters, or multi-signature management within MPC trusted environments. Users simply wrap their assets into privacy-preserving forms and submit transaction intents to the intermediary layer, which then executes a series of DeFi interactions on their behalf. The larger the pooled assets and user base at the intermediate layer, the stronger the privacy guarantees—and critically, compliant frameworks can coexist alongside them, making them more likely to become mainstream in the future. (More detailed analysis to come.)
3) Account abstraction is starting to take off.
Commentary: The market has become desensitized to account abstraction because it’s so foundational—its true value only becomes apparent when applications built on top experience explosive growth. In essence, account abstraction acts like a patch, giving Ethereum the confidence to retain liquidity instead of losing it to high-performance blockchains like Solana.
That said, the account abstraction space is already quite vibrant, though most projects remain focused on infrastructural layers and haven’t yet been validated by the market, leading many to perceive them as inconsequential. But I believe that if Ethereum’s Layer2 is to truly support high-frequency applications and serve as an entry point for new users, account abstraction is non-negotiable. When exploring Layer2 opportunities, don’t overlook applications rooted in account abstraction infrastructure.
4) Light clients, forgotten for a long time, are starting to actually exist.
Commentary: Light clients have become increasingly important since Ethereum’s transition to PoS, as they extend the verification capabilities of Ethereum validators and allow Ethereum’s consensus to reach across other chains. For example, in building a third-party DA solution, one could use restaking to involve a subset of Ethereum validators in maintaining consensus on a sidechain—offering far greater credibility than a consensus secured solely by independent third-party validators. Similarly, a decentralized sequencer design could also leverage restaking, integrating Ethereum validators into the sequencer set of a sidechain.
All these possibilities depend fundamentally on light client technology. EigenLayer, for instance, is a well-known project that expands the utility of Ethereum validators through light clients. From a strategic standpoint, this approach serves as a powerful defense for Ethereum against encroachment by third-party DA providers, helping preserve its canonical authority.
5) Zero knowledge proofs, a technology which we thought was decades away, are now here, are increasingly developer-friendly, and are on the cusp of being usable for consumer applications.
Commentary: Zero-knowledge proofs were once hailed as revolutionary, but today they evoke more disappointment than excitement. This is because ZK technology doesn't deliver immediate, visible results in solving privacy and scalability issues. For instance, while everyone agrees ZK-Rollups are technically superior to OP-Rollups in the long run, the fact remains that OP-Rollups are currently far more popular.
In my view, ZK technology is better suited for the future and transcends pure financial narratives. Today’s disillusionment with ZK is understandable, but when the real application era arrives, ZK will become as indispensable as blockchain itself. (Vitalik might have said something similar.)
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Haotian | CryptoInsight
