# Ethereum in 30 minutes by Vitalik Buterin | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Vitalik Buterin](https://streameth.org/speakers/vitalik-buterin)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 30:20
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-ei3tDRMjw6k
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei3tDRMjw6k

## Description

Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum, opens Devcon with a comprehensive overview of Ethereum’s evolution as a decentralized “world computer,” explaining its layer 1 trust machine and layer 2 scaling solutions for security and scalability, emphasizing improvements in decentralization and client diversity, and encouraging developers to build innovative applications that leverage Ethereum’s robust and evolving ecosystem.

Speaker(s): Vitalik Buterin
Track: Opening Ceremonies

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Music] great so ethereum in uh 30 minutes so this is a a presentation that I've given at I think basically every single Devcon since launch though I think what's interesting is how as uh ethereum the ecosystem uh changes and as ethereum the protocol changes as the times change uh the contents also end up changing quite a bit right so if you go back to the equivalent of this from 2015 you'll hear a lot about Uncle blocks of course Uncle blocks are a feature of proof of work that we have proof of stake and so we don't have Uncle blocks anymore now ethereum also uh of course uh now has a layer twos and back in this would not contain layer 2s at all and now of course as we know layer 2s are half the story right so ethereum is above all an evolving ecosystem and uh the contents of this are going to keep changing as the technology changes and also as the emphasis of the uh ecosystem changes from building basic infrastructure uh to now also really putting a huge amount of focus on the applications so what is ethereum so first ethereum is the world computer so who here remembers etherium being the world computer this is the place where I'm supposed to like put that Meme the where like there's the guy with the gun in space saying always has been but I don't know I never understood why you're why like like giving someone such an amazing and beautiful Revelation is supposed to come at the same time as uh shooting them in space 20,000 km away from home and so you I'm not going to do that today so ethereum is the world computer it always has been always will be uh so in addition to this ethereum is an incredibly large and diverse onchain economy um and uh fortunately know Josh uh right before uh well one one skipped before me made an incredibly good presentation talking about all of the different aspects of the economy and also so ethereum is an incredibly large and diverse Global community and I and Josh and the uh automated like intro thing before that I think did a a really good job of showing that too so ethereum is many things right I think uh they're like also Pro probably you're supposed to like put up a flashing sign saying e is money as well but you know ethereum is a lot of things right and if ethereum is all of these different things at the same time so how does the world computer work right so the way that I think about this is uh you layer one is the Shust machine and Layer Two is uh the GPU right so the layer one of ethereum that is the core ethereum blockchain this is the anchor that keeps the rest of the ecosystem safe and holds the rest of the ecosystem together layer one is the reason why layer twos are able to trustly talk to each other and at least once everything upgrades to stage two you will be able to take an asset issue it on optimism and then move it and hold it inside of a smart contract on arbitrum and do so with zero counterparty risk layer one is not there to be ultra fast it is not there to do a million transactions per second layer one is first and foremost there to be decentralized to be robust and to be something that is Dependable Layer Two is the GBU so Layer Two is uh all of you uh in the in the room who are part of any single layer two um who here is part of a layer two yay who here has used the layer two who here has used layer one good it's uh we're all users here so actually know there's lots of these different gpus right and ethereum of the world computer is able to hold together because each and every one of these gpus is connected to the trest machine through optimistic uh proof systems zero knowledge proofs snarks Starks Bas jolts plun plunk you know whatever the buzz words are right uh and uh that all of these systems actually ensure that ler one is able to trustly verify what is going on inside of the layer tws and layer twos also are able to trustly uh read what is happening on layer one so there's an important interplay between these two components and together they make up the ethereum that is here today so what is the L1 it's a chain it runs proof of stake it doesn't Afra so it's so what does this me right so ethere one is uh a chain that has uh existed alt together for um more than n years now and it's existed in its current proof of stake form for um a little bit over two years and I think one of the really important things for a Bas layer to have is you want to have clear evidence that that you're building on a base layer that is decentralized that is open that is robust and that is likely to keep those traits going forward into the future right and one one part of that of course is so like something that is slow to change right one part of that is being something that is not suddenly going to wake up on a Tuesday have new management and then suddenly decide that it's just like totally going to like start deleting a whole bunch of applications change its entire model and do other push the fees up by a factor of 10 and do other things without warning another part of decentralization and resilience is actually recovery right so whenever problem actually starts to arise actually be able to recover from it and have some way of actually improving the qualities of the layer one over time so over here um this is uh on the left a chart of Bitcoin proof of work um mining pools and on the chart if uh on the right if they in proof of stake mining pools actually um I'm deliberately being generous here because uh putting Bitcoin proof of work mining pools because before the merge actually ethereum proof of work decentral uh was even more concentrated than this right and so what we see here on the right is you see actually a pretty diverse different set of staking pools and if you zoom into either of the top items on the uh chart on the top left so Lio and it has somewhere somewhere a little bit under 30% but then actually Lio is like it's not one actor right it's a dow technically the deposits are split between 40 different node operators approximately and there's some more complicated structure that keeps updating uh but it's so I think it's reasonable to think of it as being like somewhere between one actor and 40 actors exactly where like this is like a problem for you social science people to figure out right how do you actually quantify the decentralization thing there are there there's even grant opportunities for this stuff so that's uh like so that's number one right and then number two unidentified now unidentified is not an actor just like there's no the any key on your keyboard is not actually a key so unidentified like we actually don't know what it is there's probably lots of solo stakers lots of small business stakers lots of uh various tiny staking pools also not one actor right so ethereum L1 today actually has a surprisingly High degree of decentralization in its proof of stake design and this is a property that I think has only gotten better over time here is one thing one property that actually has gotten a lot better so ethereum uh about uh 5 years ago was basically just gu right and when you have an ecosystem that is dominated by one client that itself becomes a central point of failure right so who here remembers the 2016 dos attacks yay so you know remember wake up 5:17 a.m. get a military style wakeup call um you know say Hey you have to go down to you know like the thing that we suddenly turned into a war room now go down and then oh someone discovered a bug in the clients now the entire chain is stopped and then we fix it and then two 3 days later the the some guy somewhere finds another bug and then 3 Days Later another bug and then that keeps going on for a whole month until eventually uh we have to hard Fork but during that period actually the ability for ethereum to have two different clients at the time they were gu and parody basically saved the chain there were like there were times when there was a bug that would hit gu but not parody there were times when there was a bug that would hit parody but not gu um and uh so ethereum actually gained a lot from having multiple software implementations and this is something that as of 2024 is probably at the best that it's ever been in ethereum's history so so on the left you have consensus clients consensus clients handle the proof of stake part of ethereum on the right you have execution clients execution clients handle the evm part of ethereum so as we we can see the single client with the highest market share is gu which is like somewhere around 50% and actually this is uh from a source that's basically assuming that most unidentified clients are gu and so it could easily be below 50% right so let's say it's about 50 so what happens if there is a bug in any ethereum client like literally today right now okay anyone here has like a bug okay uh Josh can you check as ethereum still running I'm going to guess it is um you know bet like 99.99% Plus on poly Market okay so what so case one what happens if the client is gu that's the worst case if the client is gu and there's a bug what realistically happens basically chain splits in half one half follows gu one half follows the other clients but on both sides the chain stops finalizing to finalize you need 23 if you have less than 23 the chain keeps blocks keep getting created but the chain stop finalizing and so if you are a user an application a business and you're waiting for confirmation on some transaction you're you're probably actually going to be waiting for a finality and so if the chain splits in half because of a client bug well actually your neither chain is going to finalize and so you're going to detect that and you're going to be on standby what's realistically going to happen cord davs get on high alert figure out which client actually has the bug and the bug gets fixed the one time this happened in ethereum actually yeah fun fact I actually set the transaction that did it myself this was back in 2016 uh basically everything was fixed within 12 hours so that's the worst case every other case basically if prism and Lighthouse have a bug all that happens is that ethereum stops finalizing for like about a day at most and then it B it just goes back to normal any other client you're you're not going to notice anything at all so in terms of practical decentralization having multiple clients is extremely helpful and also having multiple clients is extremely helpful because it diversifies the power and the control over the uh eorum ecosystem especially in any kind of contentious situation right if some kind of Dow Fork type incident happened again and one particular development team made a choice is unpopular then even if that one uh that one development team just insists on pushing it through users are going to be very easily able to just switch to the other clients and just completely route around them this is not something that is anywhere close to that practical in a single client ecosystem having a diverse multi client ecosystem is actually very difficult to achieve I think aside from ethereum no other chain has really gotten to achieved anything close to this and even outside of ethereum like even web browsers web browsers supposed to be an open standard reality is like something like 80% of the pl plus of the ecosystem probably even more runs on some Fork of webkit and the rest runs on Firefox which is kind of valant trying to hold its own as an alternative and uh is uh doing pretty well it's one of the browsers that I use but like you can see right like there there there are natural pressures toward um you know homogenization and toward one implementation winning and ethereum actually has managed to Buck this trend so in ethereum um two years ago this chart was worse and so ethereum's uh decentralization is not only able to not get worse but it's also able to actively respond to problems that exist and over time push to make them better if you building an application that you needed to exist 5 years from now 10 years from now and that you want to be robust and continue working five or 10 years from now the what properties do you want the chain you're building on to have I think properties like these are exactly what you would be looking for with 32 eth or with less than 32 eth if you join a pool there's more and more really interesting pool options that are appearing um there's even you know things like oall Squad staking like the there's options around okay um there's options around like basically creating smaller pools with your friends there's different pools that follow all kinds of different rules and so there's lots of different ways for you to become a Staker and if you're a Staker then you become part of this network of nodes that is securing the ethereum blockchain so earn rewards while securing ethereum so know I guess uh this is know how the foundation propaganda describes that it has a cute elephant uh so good cheers for the elephant uh so you know you two can join the network and you two can help secure it so also even if you're not a Staker you can also run an ethereum node and you could verify the chain so this is uh a computer I mean I guess these days nobody even has desktops that look like this right it's like you either have laptops or you have like some crazy like GPU construction that's like basically like looks almost like a server right but like I don't know I mean I just like shoved like a desktop computer into stable diffusion 3.5 and it like put this out so that's the computer you get uh but uh you know you can run an ethereum node on your computer and you can verify the ethereum chain right so this is really important because if you have users that are verifying the chain then even a majority of the stakers acting together even two3 of the stakers acting together are not able to change the rules on people without everything breaking right there's the ethereum rules they can only change through a hardk that is agreed upon through wide Community consensus they cannot be pushed through by a majority or super majority of the stakers and this is something that is really key and really important and makes blockchains very different from almost any other kind of protocol and I think this is one of those things that's really valuable and really important to preserve I think even among blockchain ecosystems it's basically Bitcoin and eum that really have a strong um culture of like really at least among the large ones right of of of actually trying to make it possible and keep improving people's ability to verify the chain and there's a lot of protocol upgrades that are coming that precisely have the goal of making it even easier to verify the chain so today um you have this uh tomorrow uh you will uh be able be able to one run node without requiring more than a small amount of storage using stateless clients so this is uh in my big like series of six posts this is going to be the one on the verge right so stateless clients is a very important section light clients uh so there's a project called Helios which is doing a form of light verification of the chain so light verification is not perfect it still follows the consensus and so if 51% of nodes change the rules you are going to follow them but but it does mean that if you're using a light client that you do not have to trust an RPC node to tell you any kind of information about the chain and so Helios is uh building a light client for ethereum that does verification of the proof of stake part of uh ethereum and uh also actually starting to build light clients for l2s um as well the longer term future of course is we want to snark the whole chain and once we snark the whole chain you will be able to verify the ethereum rules on extremely large or extremely tiny Hardware so node writing requirements and pushing those down is a key part of the ethereum road map going forward also uh staking with with less eth this is one of those very active research requirements right so 32 eth it's still high and uh you know it's even higher than it was two weeks ago but my my okay [Applause] but you know my think like I would like for people to be stakers with one e and so I think there's a different ways to do this there is orbit there is uh just making a large number of aggregation improvements but there's a lot of protocol improvements that are coming specifically in order to make staking easier and more accessible and to make running a node that verifies the chain easier and more accessible so what runs on the ethereum L1 so some high value application use cases so a lot of high value defi runs on L1 um ens is uh currently on L1 though it's uh increasingly doing doing more and more with uh layer twos then uh a lot of uh diff various applications um all kind just all kinds of things in every category uh people just hold assets on layer one so lots of high value application use cases on layer one also managing block rots and and state roots and proof systems for layer twos layer one is the thing that secures layer 2os cross layer two operations um and layer one needs to still be powerful enough to handle cross um a lot of things happening especially in the case where a layer two fails the difference between a layer two and an independent chain is that even if your warer 2 gets 51% attacked or 91% attacked or the team shots down layer one is still stands there to protect the users users are able to prove their whole their assets and their ownership and their state inside of the layer two and migrated down back down to layer one in order for this to actually be possible layer one needs to actually be powerful enough to handle the load if a layer two actually does fail recently there was a live experiment of this uh so dyd DX V3 I believe shut down recently and the uh L2 beat people actually wrote their own implementation of escape hatch software and so without any involvement from the dydx team uh users are able to take any assets that they have ins um inside of D ydx V3 and bring it back down to the ethereum L1 so layer twos are not just multi the ability to Mo move your assets out of the layer two and back to layer one if the layer 2 fails without the layer two teams involvement is not just Theory it is reality so okay L1 runs some applications and L1 protects the l2s what do the l2s do l2s provide speed and scale so on the left here you have a chart of like basically the same as the chart that Josh showed earlier basically Layer Two fees and this is just what they've done this year so this year Layer Two fees have gone down from about 50 cents to less than 1 cent so this is a massive change right this basically means that for an incredibly wide class of applications ethereum has overnight gone from being basically unaffordable to being completely affordable so that's fees [Applause] now transaction inclusion times right so who here remembers the experience of sending a transaction and then having to wait some arbitrary number of minutes could be 10 could be 40 could be 90 for the transaction to get included who here remembers having this experience in ethereum who here remembers having this experience in ethereum in the past 6 months so ethereum has improved massively now this is actually a pretty linear progression that we've had all the way since the beginning right so Bitcoin 10minute block times and uh Bitcoin has uh this uh thing called A Plus un distribution that of course ethereum also had um had during the proof of work era but then we decided we don't like fish and so we switched to proof of steak so Bitcoin average walk time 10 minutes often you have to wait up to 1 hour now in in ethereum uh the average block time is 12 seconds but then there's still this like annoying phenomenon where if you send a transaction and you get unlucky with the gas price that you set maybe you would have to wait like 10 minutes or 20 minutes accidentally EIP 1559 which came in 2021 basically solved that and created a situation where you're able to reliably send a transaction and expect to see it included usually within one block and then the merge because of this interesting Quirk of mathematics even though the average time between blocks reduced only from 13 seconds to 12 seconds the average time between you sending a transaction and your and your transaction getting included in a block reduced from a little bit more than 13 seconds to a little bit more than six seconds um so math problem figure out why this is true it's actually a really fun fact so post merge basically goes down to like about 6 to 30 seconds and then finally with layer twos you have preon and you have layer twos that are fast enough to just confirm your transaction within a couple hundred milliseconds so layer twos provide speed layer twos provide scale and the way that you as a user see scale is you get to be part of an application where lots and lots of things are happening and at the same time your transaction fees get to continue to be cheap so history of ethereum right so November 2013 the white paper July 2015 the launch around 2018 that was the time when ethereum settled on it's approximate design for proof of stake and data availability sampling so the original papers and like documents for data availability sampling and aaser coding um I wrote those back in 2017 and then we settled on uh the Casper the Friendly finality Gadget also at the end of 2017 actually if you really want and you can dig I think it's like either GitHub ethereum research or like GitHub ethereum simple Casper you just like search for the directory called Simple Casper and you can find like contracts written in serpent like who here remember serpent okay who here uses serpent good I mean I mean I think like I think python is uh like is really beautiful but I think if you uh like if you want that then you should code in Viper Viper is actually like great it's actually kept improving quite a bit for the last couple of years so we had basically yeah okay yay glad for Viper um okay and so in 2017 actually we attempted to like basically do this like full like abstraction thing and even write the proof of stake logic directly as a smart contract and so there's this like really fun demo that we launched at I think it was actually like 2320 Bangkok time on December 31st 2017 and like you know we wanted to get something out before New Year's but then like the demo it ended up like breaking up pretty quickly you know it was early days but since then of course it's not early days anymore and at the start of 2018 a really massive effort started to actually build out the ethereum proof of St system and to build out the ethereum scaling system which has since then turned into the blobs that we have today 2022 the merge switching from proof of work to proof of steak 2024 The Surge part one right so if you look into the road map diagram and you look into the search section you see that there's two Milestones there's one that I call Basic rollup scaling and there's one that I call full rollup scaling and basic rollup scaling basically says you need major ler 2os to hit stage one and you need blobs to exist and so 2024 we actually hit that the next step is having actual like fully running data availability sampling and major ear 2 is hitting stage two so I think that will happen and I think that will happen sooner than people and it's up to the ler 2 teams to build this future of ethereum there are still a lot of problems that are left to solve so we want upgrades to decentralization who here wantsum to be decentralized who here wants ethereum to be centralized okay okay so one person wants ethereum to be centralized okay um censorship resistance wants to censor ethereum okay a couple more hands um Quantum resistance who here wants ethereum to break the first time a Quant of computer comes out okay one hand that's good you know maybe it's like you know you know sometimes like you need collapse in order for Renewal to happen right so further upgrades to make sure that decentralization sensorship resistance and Quantum resistance continue happening Progressive upgrades to efficiency and scale um so so Layer Two I think is going to scale extremely quickly and its safety is going to improve quickly over the next few years and also I expect Progressive upgrades cautious upgrades but still Progressive and definitely ongoing upgrades to layer one capacity in different forms as well over the over the next years and I think one of the big reasons why we need to do this one is to support the activity that continues to happen on layer one itself and two because ultimately if something breaks on a layer two layer one still needs to be there to be as a back stop and so the maximum theoretical safe capacity of l2s is proportional to to the capacity of L1 we're going to have upgrades to data availability sampling to increase the number of blobs that ethereum can support as of about a week ago ethereum is actually hit price discovery mode meaning the uh in terms of blobs meaning that the number of blobs that is actually being us being used on ethereum exactly equals the protocol that long-term Target now we need to scale this number upgrades are happening to actually do this so upgrades to data availability sampling we've now we have also scaled enough that a wide variety of applications are possible ens consumer payments social one category that I think is going to be extremely important over the next decade is mixed financial and non-financial applications applications that make use of the power of Finance But ultimately to serve ends that go be that go beyond financial goals and I think there's lots of very powerful applications here and I think it's uh we've spent a long time making the technology better and we will continue doing this but it is at the level where now is the time to build thank you [Applause]