Ethereum Argentina Developer Conference: Stepping into a New Decade of Technology and Applications

Written by: Sanqing, Foresight News

Opening Ceremony: From the First Webpage to the Ethereum World Expo

From November 17 to 22, the Ethereum Developer Conference will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This week will feature over 40 official events, 75+ project showcases, and hundreds of side events throughout the city, with an estimated attendance of about 15,000 participants.

At the opening ceremony, the host began by recalling the release of the first webpage by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, reflecting on the development of the internet from Web1 to today's Web3. This conference is positioned as the “Ethereum World Expo,” which not only brings together important global projects but also showcases the achievements of the local community in Argentina. After the opening ceremony, the main topics of Ethereum Day were immediately discussed, ranging from the governance positioning of the Ethereum Foundation, protocol progress, to privacy, security, institutional adoption, and future directions, with core team members and researchers taking turns to share the latest updates.

Ethereum and Foundation Dynamics (Part One): Tomasz Stanczak Talks About a Decade of Journey and Future Challenges

Tomasz Stanczak, the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, stated in his keynote speech that the first ten years of Ethereum laid the foundation for consensus, clients, and privacy tools; however, in the future, it will face greater challenges in the areas of privacy protection, decentralization, and user autonomy, requiring more people to participate in its development.

When introducing the participant structure of Ethereum, Tomasz outlines the breadth of the ecosystem with specific groups, including local organizers who drove Devcon to Argentina, communities focused on urban experimentation and public goods, core developers responsible for protocol upgrades, engineers concerned with privacy by default, active L2 teams, interdisciplinary roles from academia to finance practitioners, and volunteers contributing multilingual localization to the Ethereum official website. He emphasizes that these long-term builders form the foundation of protocol security and network vitality.

Tomasz pointed out that Ethereum has managed to maintain zero downtime through multiple upgrades, a feat attributed to the contributions of many continuous workers in the ecosystem. He believes that the current moment is both a time to reflect on past achievements and a moment to reassess the next direction worth investing in. He encourages more developers and users to participate in the network in a more direct way, such as building applications and using ETH for daily interactions, making Ethereum's usage and governance more aligned with real-world needs.

During the Q&A session, he mentioned that if, ten years from now, there are still builders attributing their trajectories to this conference, it will be the most important achievement of this event. He shared his observations in Argentina: in an environment of high inflation and capital restrictions, crypto assets can provide real utility to ordinary users, but for a decentralized system to be truly implemented, issues of privacy, security, and usability must be addressed. The local community's attempts in these areas are worth paying attention to. His advice to newcomers is to enhance their “connectivity skills,” believing that proactive communication across teams and communities often leads to unexpectedly positive outcomes.

Ethereum and Foundation Dynamics (II): Hsiao-Wei Wang Discusses the Three Capabilities of the Foundation

The Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, Hsiao-Wei Wang, summarized the first ten years of Ethereum with the metaphor of a “staircase”: “This is a staircase that is continuously being raised by a global community, with no predetermined endpoint, only a path that everyone can climb at their own pace. Each new step laid by a builder will become the starting point for those who come after.”

She pointed out that today's Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain, but a public infrastructure that nurtures new types of assets, identities, cultures, and forms of collaboration. The success of Ethereum comes from “no single team owning it”; any participant, including L2, is just a step on the ladder. The foundation's work is not to climb to the top by itself but to “steady the ladder” and collectively shape the next decade.

In reviewing the work after Tomasz took over as co-executive director, she summarized the new phase of the foundation into three capabilities. The first is reliability, as Ethereum has maintained zero downtime during significant upgrades, a trust built on long-standing engineering standards that need to be accumulated block by block. The second is flexibility, as the foundation does not consider itself to have all the answers, but continuously adjusts its direction based on community needs and changes in the external environment, ensuring that the protocol remains consistent and adaptable as social usage changes. The third is true governance responsibility; the foundation's duty is to maintain a stable environment necessary for the ecosystem's operation, rather than to decide where Ethereum should go, as the direction should naturally form in an open environment.

Hsiao-Wei emphasized that the ladder of Ethereum is open to all roles, including researchers, client and application developers, investors, end users, scientists, scholars, students, and local community organizers. The foundation's responsibility is to invest early in directions that are not yet valued by the mainstream, such as multi-client diversity and cutting-edge research, allowing these attempts, which seem to have no value, to become new key steps many years later.

She also pointed out that decentralization, neutrality, and resilience in the face of pressure will not be maintained automatically; they must be safeguarded through transparent, honest, and uncompromising design principles. Once these values are compromised, the entire ladder of Ethereum could face structural risks.

Expanded L1, Expanded Blobs, Improved User Experience: Protocol Update Briefing

Ethereum protocol team members Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot provided a progress update on the protocol development team following the foundation's restructuring at the beginning of the year. This report focuses on three areas: scaling L1, expanding data Blobs, and improving user experience.

In terms of L1 expansion, Ansgar stated that Ethereum will maintain the block gas limit at 30 million in the long term, focusing on key upgrades such as the merge and account abstraction. As L1 more clearly assumes the role of a “settlement layer,” the team is improving throughput through client optimizations and protocol enhancements rather than relying on more expensive hardware.

Since the beginning of this year, client optimizations have pushed the gas limit up to 45 million, with plans to increase it to 60 million in the next hard fork. The team is also advancing proposals such as opcode repricing and access lists to continuously improve execution efficiency. He also revealed that the ZK-EVM prototype has achieved real-time proofs in less than 12 seconds, laying the foundation for lowering the computing threshold for nodes in the future.

In terms of expanding Blobs, he illustrated the importance of EIP-4844 by discussing the data availability requirements of Rollup. Proto-danksharding introduces data Blobs and a commitment mechanism, allowing Rollup to submit data at a lower cost. The next hard fork will launch sampling-based data availability proofs to prepare for further increases in Blob capacity in the future.

Barnabé briefly introduced key work to improve user experience, including cross-chain interoperability Interop, Trillion Dollar Security, and the privacy-friendly wallet project Kohaku. This time, he mainly introduced Interop. He stated that the goal is to provide users and institutions with a “seamless, secure, permissionless” multi-chain experience, allowing users to simply declare their operational intentions, while the backend system automatically completes cross-chain transfers and exchanges without the need for manual bridging of assets. The team is also exploring ways to improve finality times, making interactions between off-chain and on-chain systems more efficient.

Laying the foundation for trillion-dollar assets

Fredrik Svantes, the security lead of the Ethereum Foundation, and Mehdi Zerouali, co-founder of the security company Sigma Prime, pointed out during the agenda titled “Trillion Dollar Security initiative” that Ethereum is transitioning from supporting millions of users and hundreds of billions of dollars in assets to a stage that supports trillion-dollar public infrastructure. The security capabilities must be upgraded in sync to match the potential asset scale and application complexity of the future.

The plan currently focuses on three aspects. The first is terminal security and wallet experience, with the core goal of solving the blind signing problem, allowing wallets to display transaction consequences in a clear and readable manner so that ordinary users can understand what they are signing. The second is front-end and infrastructure security, with the Fiber Frontend project exploring verifiable and replaceable front-end solutions to reduce the risk of funds being stolen through malicious scripts after a single website is compromised. The third is communication and progress transparency, with the foundation's digital studio building a public website to show the status of various sub-projects and aspects to be completed using progress bars, making it easier for the community to understand the overall security blueprint and participate in contributions.

Mehdi emphasized that Trillion Dollar Security is an open topic repository for the entire ecosystem, and all solutions must be open-source, auditable, and community-owned. He described blind signatures as a plague, insisting that security should not be provided by imposing additional taxes on users but should be a default attribute. In the Q&A session, both agreed that as AI tools increase the speed of code production, the demand for security researchers and architectural audits will only grow; the Ethereum ecosystem is already funding post-quantum cryptography research and developing prototypes, making it one of the most prepared for quantum threats among mainstream public chains.

When it comes to ZK-EVM, they compare its current security status to that of Solidity in 2016, still in the early stages, requiring systematic cultivation of a new generation of security engineers, and gradually maturing through open collaboration. Feedback from traditional institutions indicates that many have regarded Ethereum as the “main chain with the least concern about underlying security issues,” which is reflected in their deployment choices.

Institutions and Decentralization: Wall Street and Ethereum through the Eyes of Danny Ryan

Danny Ryan, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, stated in his speech “Institutions Decentralization” that after long focusing on the design of decentralized protocols and now communicating almost daily with banks and large institutions, his biggest realization is that traditional financial infrastructure is far less efficient than the outside world imagines. Asset managers often rely on multiple incompatible software systems, faxes, and manual reconciliations, while securities settlement still lingers at the T+1 and T+2 pace.

In such a system, institutions are most concerned about various counterparty risks, with repeated scrutiny on “who might let me down” from trading partners to infrastructure service providers. Within this framework, Ethereum's trusted neutrality and decentralization become advantages, as its high availability brought by multiple clients and thousands of nodes, combined with the security of the cryptoeconomy, gives Ethereum the potential to become an infrastructure capable of supporting trillions of dollars in assets.

Danny emphasized that for institutions, privacy is a threshold rather than an added benefit. If privacy protection does not meet the current system's standards, many collaborations cannot even begin. He believes that creating a usable privacy environment for institutions will compel Ethereum to continue investing in areas such as zero-knowledge proofs, which will not only serve scalability but also naturally reinforce privacy. At the same time, as regulatory frameworks in various countries gradually become clearer, stablecoins and liquidity network effects are expected to usher in a new round of expansion, and Ethereum needs to occupy a key position in this round.

At the architectural level, he pointed out that Ethereum's modular design and L2 ecosystem are very attractive to institutions, as they can build L2 solutions targeting specific assets in collaboration with partners while sharing Ethereum's security and liquidity.

He suggested that the real goal is not simply to “tokenize assets,” but to make the on-chain system good enough that real-world assets find it difficult to refuse to migrate onto it, and the measure of success should be in the “trillion-dollar level.” Currently, on-chain RWA is still in the tens of billions of dollars range, which is just the beginning compared to the scale of global investable assets.

During the Q&A session, he mentioned that a common misunderstanding among institutions is equating decentralization with “unregulatable” or “completely open”. In fact, through programmable access control and privacy technologies, intermediary risks can be reduced under compliance.

He suggested that builders form a “translation alliance” with traditional financial practitioners to help align each other in terms of language and ways of thinking. Regarding the concern of being “captured by institutions,” he believes the risk objectively exists, but the key is to maintain the globally distributed characteristics of the Ethereum core protocol, and on that basis, to then carry large-scale asset on-chain.

Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min: Vitalik's Principles and Technical Roadmap

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, in his speech “Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min,” started with the FTX case to compare centralized institutions that completely rely on personal credit under the principle of “Don't be evil” with the principle that Ethereum pursues, which is “Can't be evil.” He defined Ethereum as “a global open anti-censorship application platform,” emphasizing that its core advantage lies in programmability, where anyone can deploy smart contracts rather than being limited to preset transaction types.

At the same time, he categorized the advantages and limitations of blockchain: advantages include payment and financial applications, DAOs, decentralized identity and ENS, voting and censorship-resistant publishing, as well as the ability to prove the existence or scarcity of something at a specific time; limitations involve insufficient privacy, difficulty in handling extremely high throughput and low-latency computation, and the inability to directly access real-world information.

In terms of the technical roadmap, Vitalik referred to 2025 and 2026 as the “scalability arc” for Ethereum. This year, the gas limit has been raised by about 50%, and the network is gradually voting to increase it to 60 million. In the future, throughput will continue to be improved through mechanisms such as separating builders and proposers and block-level access lists, without raising the hardware threshold.

Vitalik is particularly optimistic about ZK-EVM, which allows nodes to confirm blocks through validation proofs rather than replaying all executions, significantly reducing the synchronization and computational costs for full nodes, thus making it possible to run full nodes on laptops and even mobile phones. The longer-term “Lean Ethereum” approach focuses on gradually introducing components that are closer to the theoretical optimum, such as more suitable zero-knowledge virtual machines and hash functions, post-quantum cryptography, formal verification, and more efficient data availability solutions; on the user side, it simultaneously enhances privacy and security through means such as light clients, account abstraction, hardware, and social recovery wallets.

In the Q&A session, Vitalik summarized the relationship between Ethereum and Wall Street by saying, “They are users, and we support all users,” emphasizing that the key is to maintain the trustworthy and neutral underlying attributes. When discussing how to bring Ethereum's features into the real world, he mentioned restoring everyday payment scenarios, such as the emergence of physical merchants in Buenos Aires that accept ETH and on-chain stablecoins. On the other hand, he encouraged the adoption of open and verifiable technology stacks in more areas like operating systems, communication, and governance. When asked about the most important skills individuals should possess, he suggested that community members try to become “multi-talented,” at least personally completing tasks like installing a wallet, making payments with ETH, participating in a DAO, writing a simple contract, and having a basic understanding of the underlying protocols.