Vitalik Buterin Calls for 'CROPS' Shift, Unveils EIP-8288 to Solve Ethereum's Post-Quantum Privacy Scalability at ETHTaipei

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered two talks at ETHTaipei that framed the event's core narrative: a philosophical pivot away from blockchain as an end in itself and a technical proposal to solve the looming scalability and privacy crisis. In his keynote, Buterin urged the community to make "crops is the objective" — censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and safety — and treat blockchain as just one tool, noting that "one of the mistakes that we made... is that I think we saw blockchains a little bit too much as an end and not enough as a means" 2. He argued that while blockchains are no longer the shiniest technology, the need for secure, open finance is greater than ever as AI amplifies surveillance and censorship risks 2.

Buterin then detailed EIP-8288, a proposal for what he described as "inme recursive stark aggregation" that aggregates all signatures, zero-knowledge proofs and post-quantum proofs in a block into a single proof. He identified four problems the EIP solves: quantum-safe signatures are expensive (gas cost ~150,000 vs 21,000 for a basic ETH send); privacy protocol withdrawals can cost 1 million gas; quantum-safe privacy proofs would be prohibitively large (6.4 million gas); and protocol bloat from supporting many signature schemes 7. The EIP replaces all on-chain verification objects with one aggregated proof, creating a new dependency frame type 7.

Privacy emerged as the dominant blocker for institutional adoption across multiple sessions. Jatin from the Canton Foundation described a "privacy trilemma" where traditional DeFi's global state and transparency expose institutional positions and counterparty details, making front-running possible 15. Oscar from ETHSystem noted that after years of regulatory progress (MiCA, the Genius Act), "privacy is really the main blocker now" for institutions moving to public blockchains 10. A panel on public vs. private chains featured Tegan from Canton Network, which processes over $9 trillion monthly in repo, and Kaye from IOTA, which focuses on trade finance with government collaborations 1. The message was consistent: confidentiality, not regulation, is the top hurdle.

The event also revealed that nearly $180 million in unclaimed funds from the 2016 DAO hack — originally earmarked for Ethereum security — have been rediscovered and redirected. Pol from Dappnode explained that a blog post had promised that unclaimed edge-case funds (about 3% of the original 12 million ETH) would be sent to security after a cut-off date, but the plan was forgotten for nine years until Fade from Wintermute spotted it 13. After the Balancer hack triggered urgency, the funds were finally moved to the newly formed Ethereum Initiatives Funding Round managed by PC and Griff 13.

On the security front, Alex Murashkin demonstrated how AI-powered impersonation scams have evolved, with impersonation attacks increasing 14 times in 2025 and losses over $2 billion from operational security failures — four times more than DeFi exploits 6. Hao Chen from CertiK argued that formal verification, not just bug hunting, is the answer to the asymmetric battle where AI agents find vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them. He described a new prover that allows proofs to be written "as easy as just talking with AI agent" 11.

Prediction markets and intents also featured prominently. Alan Wu from Uniswap explained how market makers fill trades on UniswapX using intents and blind first-price RFQ auctions, offering fresh off-chain price discovery settled on-chain 8. Aditya from Polymarket detailed the protocol's V2 modular architecture, which separates markets modules, oracle aggregation and a position manager to handle over $50B in volume 14. Devansh Mehta introduced conditional prediction markets for participatory budgeting, using "multi-scalar" and conditional markets to distribute funding based on crowdsourced forecasts of project value 9.

• 'The Weird Nature of Cryptography Products' 3 — A hands-on look at why cryptography feels boring even when it works, with a live test of a zero-knowledge digital wallet at a Taiwan convenience store.
• 'Assets First, Proofs Later: Building Verifiable Cross-Chain Intents with OIF' 5 — Alfred from I'm Token Labs explains how the Open Intents Framework separates lock, oracle and settlement layers for cross-chain asset transfers.
• 'Less Is More: Underestimated Contract Features for Institutional Adoption' 12 — Anton from Morpho shares how splitting roles like curator and allocator in lending vaults meets the needs of traditional finance partners.