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The Three Transitions

vitalik.ca/general/2023/06/09/three_transitions.html

What Jamie wrote

I continue to see a wide range of powerful use cases for Ethereum. With that said, there are a number of technical challenges still in front of Ethereum even with "The Merge" accomplished and complete.

As Ethereum transitions from a young experimental technology into a mature tech stack that is capable of actually bringing an open, global and permissionless experience to average users, there are three major technical transitions that the stack needs to undergo, roughly simultaneously:

  • The L2 scaling transition - everyone moving to rollups
  • The wallet security transition - everyone moving to smart contract wallets
  • The privacy transition - making sure privacy-preserving funds transfers are available, and making sure all of the other gadgets that are being developed (social recovery, identity, reputation) are privacy-preserving

These are all great topics to understand directly how Buterin is thinking about it. The wallet section is particularly interesting to me since I think that wallet improvements is one of the most important unlocks that we need. Wallet development has to prioritize user experience and ease-of-use at some point, even when there is still a tremendous amount of technical work to be done. I also applaud that Buterin repeatedly places privacy as a high priority. Blockchains are necessarily public endeavors, and making sure that we don't abandon privacy with their adoption is very important.