Ethereum Argentina Developer Conference: Towards a New Decade of Technology and Applications
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Ethereum Argentina Developer Conference: Towards a New Decade of Technology and Applications
Ethereum clearly outlined its key focus areas for the next decade at the developer conference: scalability, security, privacy, and institutional adoption.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Sanqing, Foresight News
Opening Ceremony: From the First Webpage to the Ethereum World Expo
From November 17 to 22, the Ethereum Developer Conference took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This week featured over 40 official events, 75+ project showcases, and hundreds of side events spread across the city, expected to attract around 15,000 participants.
At the opening ceremony, the host began with Tim Berners-Lee's release of the first webpage in 1991, reflecting on the evolution of the internet from Web1 to today's Web3. This year’s event was positioned as the "Ethereum World Expo," bringing together major global projects while also showcasing achievements by the local Argentine community. Following the opening, Ethereum Day commenced with key discussions ranging from the Ethereum Foundation’s governance role and protocol progress to privacy, security, institutional adoption, and future roadmaps—core team members and researchers shared updates in turn.
Ethereum & Foundation Update (I): Tomasz Stanczak on a Decade of Progress and Future Challenges
Tomasz Stanczak, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, stated in his keynote that Ethereum’s first decade laid the foundation for consensus, clients, and privacy tools. However, he emphasized that future challenges in privacy protection, decentralization, and user sovereignty will be more difficult and require broader participation.
When describing Ethereum’s participant structure, Tomasz illustrated the ecosystem’s breadth through specific groups: local organizers who brought Devcon to Argentina, communities focused on urban experiments and public goods, core developers managing protocol upgrades, engineers prioritizing default privacy, active L2 teams, interdisciplinary contributors from academia and finance, and volunteers contributing multilingual localization to Ethereum’s website. He stressed that these long-term builders form the basis of protocol security and network vitality.
Tomasz noted that Ethereum has maintained zero downtime through multiple upgrades—an achievement made possible by countless sustained contributions across the ecosystem. He believes this moment calls not only for reflection on past milestones but also for re-evaluating where efforts should be directed next. He encouraged developers and users to engage more directly with the network—by building applications or using ETH in daily interactions—to align Ethereum’s usage and governance more closely with real-world needs.
In the Q&A session, he said that if, ten years from now, builders trace their journey back to this conference, it would mark the most important outcome of the event. He shared observations from Argentina: in environments marked by high inflation and capital restrictions, crypto assets offer tangible utility to ordinary users. Yet, for decentralized systems to truly take root, issues around privacy, security, and usability must still be solved. Local community experiments in these areas are worth watching. His advice to newcomers is to strengthen “connective capacity,” noting that proactive communication across teams and communities often leads to unexpectedly strong progress.
Ethereum & Foundation Update (II): Hsiao-Wei Wang on the Foundation’s Three Capabilities
Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, used the metaphor of a “ladder” to summarize Ethereum’s first decade: “It’s a ladder continuously raised by a global community—without a predefined endpoint, offering a path anyone can climb at their own pace. Every new step laid by a builder becomes the starting point for those who follow.”
She pointed out that today, Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain but a public infrastructure fostering new forms of assets, identity, culture, and collaboration. Ethereum’s success stems from the fact that “no single team owns it”—any participant, including L2s, is merely one rung on the ladder. The Foundation’s role isn’t to climb to the top, but to “hold the ladder steady” and co-create the next decade.
Reflecting on her work since stepping into the Co-Executive Director role alongside Tomasz, she summarized the Foundation’s new phase through three capabilities. First is reliability: Ethereum’s record of zero downtime during major upgrades reflects trust built through consistent engineering standards, accumulated block by block. Second is flexibility: the Foundation does not assume it holds all answers, instead adapting direction based on community needs and external changes, ensuring consistency and adaptability as social use cases evolve. Third is genuine governance responsibility: the Foundation’s duty is to maintain a stable environment for the ecosystem to function—not to dictate where Ethereum should go, as direction must emerge organically within an open environment.
Hsiao-Wei emphasized that Ethereum’s ladder is open to all roles: researchers, client and application developers, investors, end users, scientists, scholars, students, and local community organizers. The Foundation’s responsibility is to place early bets on directions not yet mainstream—such as multi-client diversity and frontier research—so that efforts whose value may not be immediately visible can become critical steps years later.
She also warned that decentralization, neutrality, and resilience under pressure do not sustain themselves automatically—they must be protected through transparent, honest, and uncompromising design principles. Once these values are compromised, the entire ladder faces structural risk.
Scaling L1, Scaling Blobs, Improving UX: Protocol Update Briefing
Ethereum protocol team members Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot delivered a progress update on the Foundation’s restructured protocol R&D team since the beginning of the year. The report focused on three areas: scaling L1, scaling data blobs, and improving user experience.
On L1 scaling, Ansgar explained that Ethereum has long maintained a block gas limit of 30 million, with engineering focus centered on key upgrades like the Merge and account abstraction. As L1 increasingly assumes the role of a “settlement layer,” the team is enhancing throughput through client optimizations and protocol improvements rather than relying on more expensive hardware.
This year, client optimizations have already increased the gas limit to 45 million, with plans to raise it to 60 million in the next hard fork. The team is also advancing proposals like opcode repricing and access lists to continuously improve execution efficiency. He revealed that ZK-EVM prototypes have achieved real-time proofs under 12 seconds, laying the groundwork for lowering node computational barriers in the future.
Regarding blob scaling, he highlighted the importance of EIP-4844 in meeting Rollup data availability demands. Proto-danksharding introduces data blobs and commitment mechanisms, enabling Rollups to submit data at lower cost. The next hard fork will introduce sampling-based data availability proofs, preparing for future increases in blob capacity.
Barnabé briefly outlined key initiatives to improve user experience, including Interop (cross-chain interoperability), Trillion Dollar Security, and Kohaku—a privacy-friendly wallet project. This session primarily covered Interop. He described its goal as delivering a “seamless, secure, permissionless” multi-chain experience for users and institutions. Through an open intent framework and modular cross-chain stack, users need only declare their intent—the backend system handles cross-chain routing and exchange automatically, eliminating manual asset bridging. The team is also exploring ways to reduce finality time, enabling more efficient interaction between off-chain and on-chain systems.
Laying the Foundation for Trillion-Dollar Assets
Fredrik Svantes, Protocol Security Lead at the Ethereum Foundation, and Mehdi Zerouali, Co-Founder of security firm Sigma Prime, spoke at a session titled “Trillion Dollar Security Initiative,” stating that Ethereum is transitioning from supporting millions of users and tens of billions in assets toward becoming a trillion-dollar-scale public infrastructure. To match future asset scale and application complexity, security capabilities must scale accordingly.
The initiative currently focuses on three levels. First, end-user security and wallet experience: the primary goal is solving blind signing by enabling wallets to clearly and legibly display transaction outcomes, allowing even average users to understand what they’re signing. Second, frontend and infrastructure security: the Fiber Frontend project is exploring verifiable and replaceable frontend solutions to reduce risks of funds being stolen via malicious scripts after a single website compromise. Third, communication and transparency: the Foundation’s digital studio is building a public website to display subproject statuses and pending tasks using progress bars and similar tools, helping the community understand the overall security roadmap and contribute effectively.
Mehdi emphasized that Trillion Dollar Security is an open issue repository for the entire ecosystem—all solutions must be open-source, auditable, and collectively owned. He likened blind signing to a plague, arguing that security should not come as an extra tax on users but as a default feature. In the Q&A, both agreed that as AI tools accelerate code generation, demand for security researchers and architectural-level audits will only grow. The Ethereum ecosystem is already funding post-quantum cryptography research and developing prototypes, positioning itself among the best-prepared public chains against quantum threats.
Discussing ZK-EVM, they compared its current security maturity to Solidity in 2016—still in early stages. Systematic training of a new generation of security engineers and open collaboration are needed for gradual maturation. Feedback from traditional institutions indicates many already view Ethereum as the mainnet “least concerning in terms of base-layer security,” reflected in their deployment choices.
Institutions and Decentralization: Danny Ryan on Wall Street and Ethereum
Danny Ryan, Core Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, shared in his “Institutions Decentralization” talk that after shifting from long-term focus on decentralized protocol design to nearly daily conversations with banks and large institutions, his biggest insight is that traditional financial infrastructure is far less efficient than outsiders assume. Asset managers often rely on multiple incompatible software systems, faxes, and manual reconciliation, with securities settlement still operating on T+1 or T+2 timelines.
Within such systems, institutions are primarily concerned with counterparty risk—constantly asking, “Who could screw me?” Under this framework, Ethereum’s trusted neutrality and decentralization become advantages. High availability from multiple clients and thousands of nodes, combined with cryptoeconomic security, positions Ethereum as a potential backbone for trillion-dollar asset infrastructure.
Danny stressed that for institutions, privacy is a prerequisite, not a bonus. If privacy protections don’t meet existing system standards, many collaborations won’t even begin. He believes creating usable privacy environments for institutions will drive continued investment in zero-knowledge proofs and related fields—investments that simultaneously advance scalability and naturally enhance privacy. As regulatory frameworks clarify globally, stablecoins and liquidity networks could see renewed expansion, and Ethereum must secure a pivotal position in this wave.
Architecturally, he noted that Ethereum’s modularity and L2 ecosystem strongly appeal to institutions, allowing them to build asset-specific L2s with partners while sharing Ethereum’s security and liquidity.
He argued the real goal isn’t simply “tokenizing assets,” but making on-chain systems so compelling that real-world assets find it hard to resist migrating. Success should be measured in “trillions.” Currently, on-chain RWAs remain in the tens of billions—just the beginning relative to global investable assets.
In the Q&A, he addressed a common misconception: equating decentralization with “unregulatable” or “fully public.” In reality, programmable access control and privacy technologies can reduce intermediary risk while maintaining compliance.
He advised builders to form “translation alliances” with traditional finance professionals to bridge language and mindset gaps. Regarding concerns about “institutional capture,” he acknowledged the risk but stressed the importance of preserving Ethereum’s core protocol as globally distributed—building large-scale asset integration atop that foundation.
Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min: Vitalik’s Principles and Technical Vision
In his “Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min” talk, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin opened with the FTX case, contrasting centralized institutions relying solely on personal trust (“Don’t be evil”) with Ethereum’s pursuit of “Can’t be evil.” He defined Ethereum as a “globally open, censorship-resistant platform for applications,” emphasizing its core strength in programmability—anyone can deploy smart contracts rather than being limited to predefined transaction types.
He categorized blockchain strengths and limitations: strengths include payments and financial apps, DAOs, decentralized identity and ENS, voting and censorship-resistant publishing, and proving something existed or was scarce at a given time; limitations involve insufficient privacy, difficulty supporting extremely high-throughput and low-latency computation, and inability to directly access real-world data.
On the technical roadmap, Vitalik labeled 2025 and 2026 as Ethereum’s “scaling arc.” This year’s gas limit increase of about 50% marks the start, with the network gradually voting to raise it to 60 million. Further improvements—including proposer-builder separation and block-level access lists—will boost throughput without raising hardware requirements.
Vitalik expressed strong optimism for ZK-EVM, which allows nodes to verify blocks by checking proofs instead of replaying all executions, drastically reducing sync and compute costs for full nodes—potentially enabling full nodes on laptops or even smartphones. The longer-term “Lean Ethereum” vision focuses on incrementally adopting theoretically optimal components: zero-knowledge-friendly VMs and hash functions, quantum-resistant cryptography, formal verification, and more efficient data availability schemes. On the user side, lightweight clients, account abstraction, and hardware/social recovery wallets aim to jointly strengthen privacy and security.
In the Q&A, Vitalik summed up Ethereum’s relationship with Wall Street as “They are users—we support all users,” stressing the need to preserve the underlying property of trusted neutrality. When asked how to bring Ethereum’s features into the real world, he cited examples like reviving everyday payments—pointing to physical merchants in Buenos Aires already accepting ETH and on-chain stablecoins—and encouraged broader adoption of open, verifiable tech stacks in operating systems, communications, and governance. Asked about the most important skill individuals should develop, he suggested community members strive to be “generalists”: installing a wallet, paying with ETH, joining a DAO, writing a simple contract, and gaining basic understanding of the underlying protocols—at minimum.
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