Vitalik Buterin Speaks at the ETH Seoul 2022 Conference

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‘ETH Should be Beyond Money,’ Buterin Proposes Cypherpunk Vision
  • ETH Seoul 2022 successfully concluded its summit in South Korea.
  • Several topics were discussed within the blockchain conference.
  • These topics include ZK Proofs and Soulbound tokens, the growing issues with centralized institutions, security and UI experiences, mass web3 adoption, and more.

ETH Seoul 2022, the world’s second-largest blockchain conference, has successfully concluded its summit in Seoul, South Korea. The event, which took place from August 5 until August 7, spread light on privacy solutions, scalability, and enhanced user-friendliness.

Among the topics discussed were ZK Proofs and Soulbound tokens, off-chain microtransactions, the growing issues with centralized institutions, security and UI experiences, mass web3 adoption. and the increase of validator nodes for better decentralization.

The event kickstarted with Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, sharing insights on zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and Soulbound Tokens. He spoke on how the two have emerged as major developments within the Ethereum ecosystem providing greater privacy, security, and real-world use cases for its users.

He expounded:

With ZK proofs, you are able to prove you are a human without actually revealing it. You are also able to have reputation systems where you can prove you have done or did not do something. While with Soulbound tokens, which are non-transferable, you can prevent dumping and unequal allocations, leading to better governance and fairer token distributions.

Representatives from the Ethereum Foundation’s privacy and scaling team Barry Whitehat and Janmajaya Mall echoed Buterin’s sentiments. They said that ZK proofs improved privacy, meanwhile, off-chain microtransaction is a concept that would improve scalability for blockchain users.

On the other hand, a representative from MakerDAO Nik Kunkel, brought up the recent issues with centralized institutions. In detail, Kunkel pointed out the lack of transparency from institutions such as Voyager, BlockFi, and Celsius.

As a result, Kunkel brought up the concept of community consortiums. According to Kunkel, the concept involves onboarding everybody in the community as well as stakeholders to get consensus. “You are essentially betting that the entire community isn’t going to murder itself,” said Kunkel.

The COO of Polygon Studios, Michael Blank, shared his take on the challenges of bringing Web3 to the masses as he mentioned that “We need to ask ourselves what additional value the technology provides to the one before it, how easy it is to enter and engage users, and how many repeat users there are.”

Another speaker at the event, Rahat Chowdhury who is an engineer at Polygon, emphasized the importance of security and user experience for achieving mass adoption. The engineer at Polygon mentioned the need to make apps more inviting to people that aren’t native to Web3 in order to achieve mass adoption.

While concluding the event, Aqeel Mohammad, a part of the Ethereum Foundation, expressed the need for more proof-of-stake (PoS) validator nodes to be established in Korea and Asia to fulfill the aims of decentralization.

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