The long-awaited @VitalikButerin speech “The Next 5 Years of Ethereum Core Tech” at #EDCON2025 is finally out ! Big thanks to @francescoswiss for the quick summary The talk has already sparked great discussions ! Watch the full recording and check out our detailed recap below 👇

Short-medium term focus: interoperability - Trustless cross-L2 asset transfers - Fast settlement for L2s (via ZK proofs) - Stage 2 rollups - Proof aggregation (longer term) - L1SLOAD

Privacy has been probably the big new topic for Ethereum this year. Short term focus: Privacy (writes) - Improve privacy for actions that users take onchain - Payments - Voting - Defi - Account operations (eg. key changes, social recovery)

Privacy of writes: key technologies - ZK-SNARKs Client-side ZK-EVMYou should be able to prove things that are happening on the Ethereum blockchain, and prove things about EVM computation locally on your machine. And the reason is that we want the privacy Ethereum world and the rest of the Ethereum world to speak the same language. - Privacy pools / association sets These technologies lets you essentially preserve your privacy, while proving that you're not a known bad actor. - MACI for zk-voting - FHE, obfuscation... to further add security - Sending transactions through mixnets

Short-medium term focus: Privacy (reads) - How much data are you leaking when you read the chain? - Intermediary minimization: ideally leak to no one except the RPC provider - Hide contents of the read - Hide timing of the read?

Privacy of reads: key technologies - TEE + ORAM - PIR ( Private Information Retrieval) - Partial state nodes - Padding and dummy request techniques (eg. similar to Tor)

Medium term focus: faster slots and finality - Main challenge: how to do this safely - 3SF and similar fast finality ideas - Network optimizations (eg. erasure coding)

Medium term focus: stronger guarantees for transactions - FOCIL - In-protocol full account abstraction

What this means for users - Scalability and usability will steadily increase over the next few years - It will become possible to build L2s that have very strong scaling and UX properties, that integrate deeply into and benefit from Ethereum L1 - Trust assumptions will steadily decrease. A trust- minimized user experience will become viable for more and more users - Prioritize trustworthiness and security of the Ethereum L1 - Ethereum will stabilize more and more over time