# KEYNOTE | Blockchain is one tool, CROPS is the objective | Vitalik Buterin | ETHTaipei 2026

- Speakers: [Vitalik Buterin](https://streameth.org/speakers/vitalik-buterin)
- Channel: [ETHTaipei](https://streameth.org/ethtaipei)
- Date: 2026-10-03
- Duration: 38:41
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-UllNPhkn6hg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UllNPhkn6hg

## Description

KEYNOTE | Blockchain is one tool, CROPS is the objective | Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation | ETHTaipei 2026

## Transcript

Okay. Okay. Thank you and uh good morning everyone. Um so thing that so what I wanted to uh talk about today is uh what I think is an important transition in how I have been thinking about blockchains and I think really how a lot of people have been uh recently like thinking about Ethereum its place in the world um and uh and how to use it and also how not to use it. So the title is uh blockchain is one tool and crops is the objective right. So who here is familiar with crops? Censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and safety. Those are the goals. U blockchains are a technology that can help us achieve crops. blockchain. There are also other technologies that can help us achieve crops and uh sometimes there are also ways to use blockchains that uh do not help anyone achieve crops at all. And so these are two different things. And uh I think it's important for us to really uh start with uh the goal in mind, right? And uh not kind of take too much of a perspective of focusing from the point of view of one particular technology, right? So I think uh one of the mistakes that we made in uh the era around five or six years ago, you know, who here remembers that era? Who here remembers, you know, selling digital monkeys for $10 million? um you know all of the like extremely big and flashy conferences [clears throat] the lambos Justin Sun you know it's uh now one of the we one of the weaknesses of that era right is that I think we saw blockchains a little bit too much as an end and not enough as a means right so person your personal profile put it on the blockchain your identity put it on the blockchain your social graph put it on the blockchain NFTs. NFTs are good because they're on the blockchain. If NFTs had the exact same thing had been launched by uh Twitter or by Google as a product, everyone here would have hated them. Um, DeFi, it's good because it's on the blockchain. Regardless of uh whether or not the oracle is completely centralized, whether or not uh the uh whether or not the bridge is a backdoor multisig and so on, right? And why did we think this way? I think two reasons, right? I think one because number go up and two because we didn't really have any other tools, right? Like the blockchain was the one hammer and so everything looked like a nail. [snorts] So I think uh especially this year that style of crypto has basically hit the end of the road, right? And I think it's good to be honest about one of the reasons why, right? basically because blockchains are not the shiniest technology. you know, if you go to someone in a university or in Asia or in a big company or um anywhere else and you ask them like what is the shiniest technology, they're going to say that it's AI and uh the but at the same time the underlying goals of blockchains crops is something that people need as strongly as they ever have. The need for secure finance even stronger than before. Over the next couple of years, probably huge amounts of traditional finance are going to get hacked. What is the infrastructure that can make finance both open and secure at the same time? It basically is the infrastructure that has been perfecting exactly that for the last 15 years, which is blockchains, proprietary LLMs as centralized choke points. If you have a workflow today that depends on open AI, that depends on anthropic, that is a choke point. It can get taken away from you at any moment. Um [snorts] surveillance of your um AI use. If you're using any of these models, then uh there is someone on the other end or some bot on the other end that is looking at how you use it that is quite possibly training on it. We have no idea if they are or if they're not. um we have no idea whether or not the training process of the next model accidentally memorizes your password and so on. Um metadata based deanonymization uh so protecting your privacy on the internet is uh becoming harder and harder very quickly. So 30 years ago this was something that we were very optimistic about. I think uh many people remember the slogan on the internet nobody knows if you're a dog. The problem is now on the internet you can get deanonymized from even one document. Um and uh you can even get deanonymized from a document if you try to keep it anonymous. Right? This is uh a few months ago I uh I published that challenge where basically I had uh written a some an anonymous document related to Ethereum and I published it and within two weeks someone else discovered which one it was even though I wrote that document in Chinese and I asked Q13.5 to translate it. So even if you try hard deanonymizing is very easy. Now the problem is metadata right so if you look if you think of decentralized messengers something like signal signal it can protect the content of your data it does not protect the graph of who is communicating with whom what is the frequency at which you're sending messages and with modern AI from all of those things you can learn a lot the need for secure and trustable information sources the internet has uh over the last 10 years basically turned into a full fullon um info war zone. Um AI enhanced censorship. Censorship is getting more powerful. Also universal physical surveillance. Uh this year there has been a large backlash. A lot of people are getting very worried about both the the much larger number of cameras that's going up and also the much more powerful algorithms that are able to interpret all of this data in real time. And also it's not just cameras. It's drones. It's Wi-Fi hotspots. It's uh all kinds of devices that can be turned into cameras. These are topics that many people around the world are extremely concerned about. Even if you ask someone who is 20 years old who thinks that blockchains are the last generations technology and blockchains are stupid, they will be concerned about at least some of these things. And so the goals are not just still alive. The goals are even more important than they were 10 years ago. And this is something that I think is uh really worth remembering. Now in the mainstream technical public view today, I think it's also worth acknowledging. The leading freedom tech is not even blockchains. The leading freedom tech is openweight LLMs. Right? But at the same time, blockchains are here to stay. Blockchains are powerful. And I think many people are greatly underestimating blockchains. Cryptography is here to stay. 5 years ago, we were just blockchain people. Today we are blockchain people. We are also zero knowledge proof people. We are also FA people. And I think maybe in another few years we will also be indistinguishable offiscation people. Blockchains and cryptography make each other better. They massively expand each other's capabilities and what you can do with a blockchain is much greater once you have zero knowledge proofs and other technologies that you can add on top. And so Ethereum is important. Ethereum is extremely important and the cryptography that the Ethereum community has been central in developing and accelerating is als is just objectives. So let's go through a couple of examples, right? Don't think about this in the Ethereum community. Think about this from the point of view of someone in the world who cares about the goals. So one goal that many people have is uh they want to use frontier LLMs with maximum privacy right so the LLM provider sees your queries they might not even be willing to offer TE inference so you don't have confidentiality but what you can get is you can get anonymity so here is one kind of pipeline that can meaningfully protect as much privacy as possible while you're using LLM. So, these days local models are powerful enough that local models for orchestration. Even if you're using remote models to do very smart things, you can actually use local models to figure out what the queries are. You don't actually need to use remote models directly for everything. I have Q1 3.8 flash running on my laptop. It's actually extremely powerful. Who here has used Q1 3.8 flash? Okay, a few people. No, it's uh it's like actually very smart. So, step one, you can use local weight models to orchestrate to make them rewrite your request in a way that removes all of your private information, even in a way that removes your writing style. So, the honest punch line, it's not your writing style. It's the same AI slop English that everyone else is using. That's what the model sees. Now, step two, anonymizing networks. So, anonymizing networks can provide network layer privacy. Step three is ZK API. This is uh an ongoing project and uh they will actually be releasing very soon. And uh with Ziki API combines together ZK sonarks and Ethereum based payment channels and they allow you to make payments to a provider or to a proxy where each query is not linked to every other query. So this is basically combining most of the anonymity properties of something like Zcash or Tornado or Rail Gun but without requiring a blockchain transaction every time you make a payment and then finally send it to the provider. So this is a pipeline that solves a problem and what we can see is well blockchains appear in one place as a uh solution. Let's try example two. So let's imagine you care about public safety. You also care about inperson physical privacy. And so you say, well, I want a camera that detects violence. And it records and forwards video only if it detects violence. Otherwise, it immediately instantly deletes everything that it sees. And we want this to be something that people can verify. So how would you actually build something like this to the best that's possible today? So first of all you want an openweight LLM that uh and you that that can be verified and you want it running on trusted trusted hardware. You want the whole camera to be trusted hardware then the open weight LLM detects it has a classifier. Is this something that needs to be detected and forwarded or if it's just normal people doing nor people doing regular things then instantly delete and then if you want to add another layer of protection then you can add one more feature you can say well anytime the video is forwarded the software that's running on it which is verified by the tr by the trusted hardware is going to publish an onchain transaction and it's not going to continue recording until it gets a proof that the onchain transaction was included. So what does this do? It gives you a public counter. It gives you a public verifiable counter where you can actually see how many times has this particular camera actually forwarded video. And so you get these kind of much guarantees, right? You can have like you can have cameras that are verifiably not a total panopticon. Now this is not something that you can construct from the perspective I have a blockchain. I want to put a blockchain into everything. This is from the perspective I care about crops. I care about the underlying goals. I want to try to solve these problems. And it turns out that in one place out of all of the many places blockchains appear as part of the solution. So blockchains are sometimes a small part of the solution, but they're a nonzero part and they are an important part. Blockchains are very useful for finance. Blockchains are useful for making credible commitments. Blockchains are also useful for verifying that something has not happened. Um so you can use them for example to verify what is the latest hash of some particular file. You can use them for version control to verify that you're actually getting the same version of software that the developers have signed off on. Um, you can also use them for as a counter to verify that something happened some number of times and not more times. So if you see blockchains as a tool, they will come up surprisingly often even if your goals do not include blockchains at all. Cryptography makes blockchains better. Um so this is something I'll be talking about later today. Um the proof singularity. Basically one of the biggest problems with blockchains is scalability. How do you solve scalability with zero knowledge proofs? So EIP828 the recursive stark command pool. And so individual users publish transactions with proofs. Those proofs get aggregated into other proofs. And then the entire block only contains one proof at the end that verifies everyone's activity. Consensus layer signature aggregation. The the Ethereum lean chain will have tens of thousands of validators. Those validator signatures will get aggregated and the aggregation will be done with recursive zero knowledge proofs that also get included on chain. Data availability routes the same thing. This is all being heavily accelerated by uh AI and formal verification and AI assisted formal verification is making all of this acceleration safe. Right? So the the uh Ethereum road map it uh has actually massively increased in ambition in terms of what we want to do over the next three years. the road map. I think for about the last decade, we've had things that we wanted to do until about 2030. The difference now is that the list of things has gotten about five or 10 times wider. How are we able to do it? Well, because bots are doing a lot of the coding. How is it possibly safe to have bots do any of the coding? Because we have formal verification that is uh that that is verifying it. So, how can you help? How can um people in Taiwan help? How can the Ethereum community everywhere help? So, I think one thing that's important is uh you want to start by going back to the roots. So, crops, censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and uh security. This is crypto as it was before 2013. Does anyone remember the uh there was this article in 2017? and it said uh everyone is getting hilariously rich and you're not right. And uh you know I think you might have remembered on Twitter in 2025 uh people making fun by basically like like reposting that exact same article except it's like the AI people getting rich. So the thing that we need to remember is uh the thing what matters for the long term out going beyond all of these cycles of who is getting rich in one year who is not getting rich in one year is the underlying goals. The underlying goals are the same as they have been the whole time. If you ask someone who was in Bitcoin, Bitcoin was the only crypto in 2010, what their goals are, their list would look very similar to this list. So find a problem that you care about that involves these properties. Our current age is the age of corporatist and statistfare by all against all. There are many problems that that are like this. There are many problems that people care about. Pick one. Um, I would also say uh someone who shares our underlying goals without using our chain is more of an ally than someone who uses our chain for goals that are completely incompatible. Um, so find a problem you care about, figure out what technologies you need. If blockchains are not one of them, then you can build things without a blockchain. If blockchains are part of the answer, then absolutely. And Ethereum is there for you and it's getting stronger with uh every passing uh 6 months. Now mandatory Ethereum road map update I think uh you know people like somehow Ethereum road map updates always appear in what I talk about and so we'll make this quick. Uh so scaling uh Glamsterdam the next hard fork will make higher gas limits safe. It enables parallel verification. It includes fixes to gas prices that solve denial or service issues. Um, EIP8288, I'll talk about it later. I'm hoping we can include it in AR, will make privacy protocols and quantum safe signatures cheap. ZKevms being rolled out slowly over the next 3 years will make even higher gas limits safe. So, massively scaling computation and using proofs in order to do it without bloating the chain. Privacy uh Fossil coming in HAR will give uh much stronger transaction inclusion guarantees to all transactions including privacy protocol transactions. um frames um EIP8141 which looks like it's going into HAR will allow private transactions to be in intermediary free and so you will not need to go through public broadcasters that uh like are sometimes online sometimes offline add extra dependencies take a huge extra fee um EIB28288 will also make privacy both cheaper and quantum resistant at the same time and So we will have a full stack where we're using the same ZK stark technology to bring privacy and security both to Ethereum's consensus layer and to the applications on top of it and then also tech companion technologies on the access layer. So the uh Kohaku project is continuing so a few weeks ago I've used it. You can basically use the demo version right now. You can use it as an interface to send uh like to to send transactions through a tornado or privacy pools or rail gun. It works. The next step is including private reads which includes which can be done either with tees and OAM or with PI also anonymizing networks so you can send privately and then security. So formally verify all the things making it easier to run nodes making it easier to have light clients. Every single Ethereum user should have at least a light client by default. Quantum resistify all the things. This uh is obvious and companion technologies on the access layer. So decentralized UIs, onchain UIs, social recovery, a lot of progress being made there. making uh much much better forms of recovery that do not depend on having one single key that can that controls your entire wallet. um multisig wallets uh crops friendly AI tools local um local AI tools all it's happening now you can also help by participating one of the benefits of uh what AI has done to uh like protocol research and protocol development is it's made it much easier for any smart person anywhere to quickly get up to speed with the existing latest frontier and quickly start contributing So there's already running AI competitions. So better.codes is one and snark.fast is another basically for improving the proof systems that Ethereum will be using and we will probably have more competitions uh coming soon. AI assisted research on extreme frontier cryptography. This is also something that is I think really open for any any researcher any cryptographer um mathematician anywhere to help at this includes um AI that's both verifiable and with FHE making that extremely fast. So now you can do AI inference that's verifiable. So inside of SARC with less than 10x overhead and my dream is that we can do the same for FHE and even for SARS on top of FHE um diamond IO and local mixing. So both families of offiscation algorithms different new you can in try to invent a totally new style of ultraast snarks and you can use things like arib to actually mathematically prove it secure aribmasm leanvm a lot of ongoing projects that you can contribute to or you can take on any corner of the ethereum world that we're not paying enough attention to yet. So even on the core research there is a very wide surface area for people to come in and uh for and for people to contribute. So I think this uh this next year these this next era of Ethereum, these next few years as the blockchain fully merges with the most advanced cryptography becomes extremely secure, becomes scalable and becomes a useful tool in all of the places that where it makes sense to help bring better censorship and capture resistance, openness, privacy and security to the world. um into a reality. And so I hope that all of us here can be a part of making this future happen. Thank you. [applause] Q&A session. All right. Um and we have some Q&A session. Uh if you have any questions uh please raise your hand and then we'll give the mic uh to you and I'll put on my sheriff hat because if there's you know you we we should use our common sense and then figure out what is a nice question. Unfortunately I cannot do western cowboy accent. Sorry guys, but you know um use common sense and uh just ask things are relevant uh technical or like really about like improving crops or all these things. Um and if uh since I have the sheriff hat, if I sense that it may not be the best one, then I'll ask the uh asset to skip. Okay. Uh so yeah, the first uh there's one there. >> I see a couple here. Yeah, >> thank you. Uh very nice to see you here and welcome to Taiwan again. U my name is Ivy and um my question is so uh one of the top application on Ethereum right now uh it's lighter and I want to ask what's your general thoughts on perpetual future do you see it as a uh net positive value for the society and did you envision this to be one of the best example of Ethereum uh 10 years after launch thank you >> yeah I mean I think perpetual futures are a tool they are a powerful tool. They can be used to do lots of things. There's definitely a lot of people that are just using them for gambling and losing their money. There's also people that are that are using them to hedge uh their risk. And uh I think the uh idea of creating a uh a financial system that makes it like very easy for people to hedge all kind um all kinds of uh of risks on chain and like basically coming closer to having this uh kind of complete market is uh very powerful. Um, so I mean I also appreciate that they've been like lighter has been doing a lot of research on and like and implementation on using zero knowledge proofs and uh like making making it more scalable in a a more proper way. So that's been good. Um I mean I know there's also like I published a few months ago this uh post where I suggested that we should be using options more uh to implement uh you know like things like stable coins and and hedging. And uh I know there's been projects that have been trying to to build off on top of that idea too. So I think uh all of these things you know can be quite valuable. >> I see a hand right there. Thank you. >> Hey, nice to have you here. M um you talked about cameras and hardware cameras and basically like a shout out to to Flock and how can we make Flock um basically >> crops and reduce violence in the world which we agree it's a net positive but without the panopticon style >> there is no incentives currently for anybody to implement something like this >> there is there apart from the social layer >> um people pushing for privacy which we know it doesn't work. People are not so excited. We are kind of like a a minority that that push for privacy. Um what are some lines of thought that maybe we could explore in order to bring those to a reality not on the technical side which we know it's possible but on the on the real push for for implementation. >> Yeah, it's a good question. Um I think there's two parts to the answer, right? I think one part is that kind of these more privacyfriendly and more verifiable ways of doing things have to be much more mature. They have to be something that you can like just go and go and uh deploy with a similar standard of quality to some of the existing more main more mainstream solutions. Like it has to be at the point where for either a politician or like someone managing maintaining an environment like a university or something else like the choice is literally just you know like signing off on a different provider and it's not like [snorts] there isn't a large difference in uh like difficulty. I think the other part of my answer is I would like if you focus on the underlying goals I would also not underestimate how many allies we have right I think uh if you like privacy is a very mainstream concern and uh a lot of people definitely don't think about privacy in the same way there's definitely a lot of people for example who you know like nod at privacy as a slogan but at the same time they would be extremely willing to you know like if you ask them about anonymous finance they would say that it's bad and scary which I think is a mistake uh but uh there ultimately if you like think back to these goals like there's a lot of people who are concerned about you know like who can see them through the through cameras who is able to reconstruct all of their movements and their entire personal life it's even stronger at the institutional level laws like GD GDPR have been uh a big part of uh you know like the European tech environment for over a decade. There's a huge number of governments who are concerned about tech sovereignty and who do not want their um like all of their citizens uh private lives to be immediately v vis visible by companies in the US or in other large countries um that are building these technologies. So even at the institutional level, I think there's uh also a lot of interest in uh like the in these kinds of things, right? And they you know like they sometimes use words that make it sound more like compliance and risk management than being about like individual freedom and empowerment, but often it's like ultimately the same goals, right? And so I think like actually understanding and creating these bigger coalitions also just uh has to be part of the answer. Yeah. >> Hi. >> Uh, amazing talk. My question is like after 10 years >> the blockchain goes through a few like iteration and we don't really have dozens of primitive with smart contract. Do you think we should uh or ser should learn more like the UTXO from uh Bitcoin and then get the whole protocol more lean and minimize because at the end if that's about verification about ZK about like proof >> why we need a turning complete VM on chain because a lot of thing can be done offchain and if the thing can still be like implement and execute offchain then why the blockchain itself need to handle all the uh VM layer itself. Yeah, I mean I think in principle I agree like I don't think that saying like like I think saying touring completeness is bad is kind of going a little bit too far. And one of the reasons why is because for example like [snorts] we have uh already had a need within the Ethereum protocol to have a language within which to describe things like for example recursive proof aggregation consensus layer logic and we've discovered that uh like the most practical way to like express these concepts is by just having like a a simple VM but still like a fully functional VM. I actually hope that in the long term like Ethereum will have a VM, but it'll be a simpler VM. Risk 5 is currently the leading contender. So my hope is that we basically use Risk 5 everywhere kind of both as the uh ISA for like proofs that users make and for the ISA to describe the protocol and even um like basically make the EVM into an IR and so the EVM stops being part of the consensus layer. instead like the like you just have uh another compilation step from the EVM into risk 5 and that's uh like basically where a big a big bulk of the code can move to. So I like this is also one of my goals like I actually really hope that the uh Ethereum protocol can kind of start shrinking and uh become much more minimized over the next five years. >> Can I ask second question? >> Okay, my second question is about like stable coin. So now we know crops and AI are important but stable coin is maybe the greatest like innovation or adoption crypto past 10 years but >> it's mostly USDT and USDC so it's not the way we really like it's not trustless east like it's no now it look like we don't say east is money anymore like compared to 2020 so do you think like uh to really get crops should we not not to push too much about all the centralized stable coin we should push more about the decentralized or even the ETH the token itself. >> Yeah. I [clears throat] mean I think uh like first of all about the ETH token itself I think yes more people should use ETH right. Um I think uh there's a lot of different situations in which uh you know like even 10 or 20% volatility on the order of a few months is like actually completely survivable. Like I think most things should just be paid like that most things that we do should just be paid in ETH, right? Um I think uh [snorts] the big reason why you know like people would want stable coins. I think there's like two categories of reasons, right? One of them is people need dollars for accounting, right? And uh like often tax issues are simpler, accounting issues are simpler, a lot of things are simpler if you just uh charge everything in dollars. And the problem is that it's actually hard to compete if you make if you try to make a decentralized dollar-based stable coin, right? I mean, one of the reasons why is that if it's dollar-based, it's not fully decentralized anyway because, you know, the US government can always choose to devalue it if they want to, right? Um, you know, like [snorts] these days, you know, like they rename lakes, maybe they start changing dollar values too. Um the uh other problem of course is uh that uh the uh [snorts] you is that uh like with a decentralized stable coin the problem is that you have like you you can't really avoid the possibility of having a negative interest rate right because if there's too many people who wants to hold it and not enough people who wants to kind of be on the other side and provide the 2x leverage then like you can't really avoid having a possib ility that like in equilibrium the interest rate is below zero, right? And so then the problem is well then like the the value has to be floating and that makes accounting too difficult, right? And so I actually think we should kind of go to go and figure out well instead of a decentralized stable coin like what is the thing that people want and can we provide it in a way that's even better, right? And [snorts] I think the thing that people want is decentralized stable value. And the thing that I think that we can provide that's even better is decentralized stable value that's personalized to each person, right? like the value that's stable for you and the value that's stable for someone who lives in New York and the sub and the stable value for some for a farmer um who lives like somewhere in the countryside and what is stable value for someone running a business that that uh whose main expense is like compute and electricity those are different right and so like I think there is an opportunity to try to continue working on DeFi, continue to like expand it into this kind of more complete market, right? Where essentially stable coins and like perpetuals and predict and prediction markets and like all of these things kind of merge into one, right? And then each person will be able to like essentially prepay for their own expected future expenses, right? And if we create that then we've created something which is probably like it might be too difficult for a lot of people to use but there will be some people for whom it's a superior product to the dollar right and uh I think if we can create that then we like we will have created something that's both [snorts] actually new and actually interesting and like we might even be the best ones to provide it if especially if we become better at making like properly secure and properly decentraliz ized oracles, you know, >> have one last question. Uh, >> go ahead. Oh, >> um like today we talk about privacy and security but then uh I see a big problem is uh um the hardware like right now like we do not um able to control the hardware and know what he doing >> and even like some component It look like the like the back door >> like the TME of Intel. >> Mhm. >> And it's quite scare when we build the software and everything around >> and even the infrastructure on top of that. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, I I fully agree and we're actually uh already start starting to do a lot of things to really uh improve kind of open hard hardware open source and hardware verifiability. So uh I mean expect a lot more things happening on that uh on that side that that we'll be contributing to. >> Thank you and thank you Vitalik. Thank you sir. Um [applause]