• Ethereum architect shares his thoughts on smart contracts, EVM and other features.
• Buterin says Ethereum developers should have shipped proof of stake sooner.
• Ethereum is becoming more widespread with the advent of ETFs.

When 620 tired developers emerged after three days of non-stop coding at this year’s ETHBerlin event last week, few expected Vitalik Buterin to take the stage.

The co-founder and principal architect of Ethereum was a surprise guest.

What was even more surprising were some of his thoughts on building the second largest blockchain in the industry. Buterin detailed some of the regrets he had regarding Ethereum’s initial design.

For many listeners, his speech not only recalled the halcyon days of the network’s birth in 2014, but it also helped lay out the roadmap for the future of a cryptocurrency now worth $448 billion.

The United States has just approved an Ethereum spot exchange-traded fund, and BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, launched its own tokenized fund on the blockchain.

The Ethereum network has given rise to a vast ecosystem of developers and financial applications worth over 63 billion dollarsand it has become synonymous with decentralized finance.

List of things

Still, Buterin, a 30-year-old Canadian-Russian programmer, said he has a list of things he would have done differently. They range from the development of the Ethereum virtual machine to smart contracts and the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.

And he noted that even as Ethereum becomes more widespread, it remains poorly understood.

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“Bitcoin has a simple narrative which is digital gold,” Buterin said. “But like with Ethereum, it’s like ‘Whoa, what is Ethereum?'”

ETHBerlin04 in numbers 🧮

– 802 super humans in total
– 627 hackers
– 83 project submissions
– 56 volunteers
– 40 experienced hosts
– 33 judges
– 18 mentors
– 15 main teams
– 13 speakers
– around twenty dogs

– ETHBerlin04 (@ETHBerlin) May 26, 2024

Sitting on comfortable sofas on stage with ETHBerlin organizers Afri Schoedon and Franziska Heintel, Buterin opened his conversation by sharing his fondest memories of the German capital over the years: hacking in the old office with the co-founders of ‘Ethereum Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke, launching Devcon. Zero, and celebrating Merge upgrade in 2022.

Then Schoedon asked the question.

“With everything you know and everything you have learned over the last 10 years, how would you build Ethereum differently today if you could start from scratch? asked Schoeden.

Vitalik Buterin (center) discussed the vision for Ethereum then and now during a panel at ETHBerlin. Photo credit: Liam Kelly/DL News.

Too many songs, too soon

Buterin’s first qualm concerns Ethereum’s virtual machine, which is essential to operating the network as a kind of decentralized crypto megacomputer.

He explained that Ethereum’s original EVM design used 256-bit processing instead of 64 or 32 bits.

In computer architecture, computing size is measured in bits, with larger bits providing better efficiency and processing more data. But 256 bits are very inefficient for most operations and can create a lot of overhead on a blockchain, even for simple tasks.

For a network in its infancy, Ethereum did not need to be optimized for this.

“The original design was way too over-equipped for 256-bit,” Buterin told the audience.

Optimizing smart contracts

Second, Buterin said that early Ethereum developers should have focused on making it easier to write smart contracts with fewer lines of code.

The reason? Added transparency.

With fewer lines of code, he says, “people can properly see and verify what’s going on inside them.”

Volunteers and developers play music during a hackathon in Berlin. Photo credit: ETHBerlin.

Switch to a “shittier” version of staking

Instead of custom computers – called miners – running non-stop to secure a blockchain network, Ethereum has moved to a different model.

Ethereum’s move from one Proof of work consensus mechanism – the way nodes in a blockchain like Bitcoin agree on the state of transaction data – to Proof of Stake in 2022 should have happened much earlier, Buterin said.

“When we moved to Proof of Stake, we should have been prepared to move to a slightly crappier version of Proof of Stake sooner,” he said. “We ended up wasting a lot of cycles really trying to make the proof of stake perfect.”

Instead of miners, Ethereum is now secured by validators who have staked 32 Ethereum, worth approximately $124,000, to do the same thing – and to be rewarded for it. If they behave badly by validating fraudulent transactions for example, they are punished.

In short, the shift replaced raw, energy-intensive computing power with economic incentives.

“We could have saved a huge amount of trees if we had a much simpler proof of stake in 2018,” Buterin said.

Issue logs from day one

From large token transfers to backdoor honeypots, users can track money in crypto quite easily. This is partly thanks to automatic logging.

But as the industry advances, including moving from external accounts like MetaMask to smart wallets like Safe, some aspects of this crucial logging are lost.

In particular, automatic logs for Ether transfers.

“It should have been there from the beginning,” Buterin said. “This could have taken about 30 minutes of coding for me, Gav and Jeff. Instead, it’s an EIP.

Ethereum Improvement Proposals are formal proposals made by developers to change certain aspects of the Ethereum network.

EIP-7708which Buterin submitted on May 17, would bring precisely this change.

Ameen Soleimani, strategic advisor at 0xbow and co-founder of MolochDAO and Reflexer Finance, discussing the Tornado Cash case. Photo credit: Liam Kelly/DL News.

Ditch Keccak

Buterin also said he would have used SHA-2 for Ethereum’s hash function rather than the current function called Keccak.

To understand the difference, you need to delve a little into the history of cryptography, particularly how SHA-3 became a standard. Remember, before crypto became synonymous with celebrity memecoins and nine-digit initial coin offerings, it was complicated math.

When Ethereum was built, the hash used was in a format “hash function competition” – yes, that’s a thing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology held the competition to create a new hashing standard alongside SHA-2.

Previous standards had been attacked and debunked. But SHA-2 was unscathed and NIST was simply looking for a safe alternative. After all, variety is the spice of life (and apparently crypto).

Keccak was just one of many contestants who entered the competition. During the competition, the team made some minor changes to their algorithms, resulting in them being crowned the winner. In other words: SHA-3.

The first Ethereum team, however, had already implemented a non-standardized version of Keccak. Essentially, Ethereum uses a pre-SHA-3 iteration.

Co-founder and CPO of ChainSafe Gregory Markou and founder and CEO of Phylax Systems Odysseas Lamtzidis speaking on stage at ETHBerlin. Photo credit: ETHBerlin

Big oops, right?

Well, that meant that Ethereum developers needed a custom library – collections of reusable code that didn’t need to be rewritten from scratch – to support both SHA-3 and Keccak.

“We are not compatible with other systems using SHA-3,” said Marius van der Wijden, one of Ethereum’s main developers. DL News. “We need to support both algorithms in the EVM.”

It’s basically resolved. Today, major libraries support both encryption mechanisms.

So yes, big whoop indeed.

“It does not matter in the grand scheme of things and the current development is certainly not affected by it,” van der Wijden said.

The Ethereum Crack Team

Despite the list of minor design errors, Buterin said it’s inevitable that any project will have a few.

“I am really very happy to feel that our core developers and their ability to execute continue to increase year after year,” he said.

“We are able to correct some of these errors efficiently and safely.”

Liam Kelly is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Do you have any advice? Email to liam@dlnews.com.

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