Ethereum Argentina Developer Conference Highlights: Technology, Community, and Future Roadmap

Original Article Title: "Ethereum Argentina Developer Conference: Towards a New Decade of Technology and Applications"

Original Article Author: Sanqing, Foresight News

Opening Ceremony: From the First Web Page to the Ethereum World Expo

From November 17th to 22nd, the Ethereum Developer Conference took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This week featured over 40 official events, 75+ project showcases, and hundreds of city-wide side events, expecting to attract approximately 15,000 participants.

During the opening ceremony, the host started with the release of the first web page by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, reflecting on the Internet's evolution from Web1 to today's Web3. This edition of the conference was positioned as the "Ethereum World Expo," bringing together not only globally significant projects but also showcasing the development achievements of the local Argentine community. Following the opening ceremony, the Ethereum Day's main topics unfolded, covering various directions such as the Ethereum Foundation's governance positioning, protocol progress, privacy, security, institutional adoption, and future roadmap. Core team members and researchers took turns sharing the latest updates.

Ethereum and Foundation Insights (Part 1): Tomasz Stanczak on the Ten-Year Journey and Future Challenges

In a keynote speech, Ethereum Foundation's Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stanczak stated that Ethereum's first ten years laid the foundation for consensus, clients, and privacy tools. However, the future will face greater challenges in privacy protection, decentralization, and user autonomy, requiring more participation in development.

When introducing Ethereum's participant structure, Tomasz outlined the breadth of the ecosystem through specific groups, including local organizers driving Devcon to Argentina, communities focusing on urban experimentation and public goods, core developers responsible for protocol upgrades, privacy-centric engineers, active L2 teams, interdisciplinary roles from academia to finance professionals, and volunteers contributing to the multilingual localization of the Ethereum official website. He emphasized that these long-term contributing builders form the foundation of protocol security and network activity.

Tomasz pointed out that Ethereum has been able to maintain zero downtime during multiple upgrades, and this achievement stems from the contributions of many continuous workers in the ecosystem. He believed that the present is both a milestone to review stage achievements and a moment to reassess the next worthwhile directions for contribution. He encouraged more developers and users to participate in the network more directly, such as by building applications, using ETH for daily interactions, etc., to make Ethereum's usage and governance more closely aligned with real-world needs.

In the Q&A session, he mentioned that if, in ten years, there are still builders attributing their trajectory to this conference, it will be the most important outcome of this event. He shared his observations in Argentina: in an environment of high inflation and capital restrictions, crypto assets can provide real utility for ordinary users, but the decentralized system still needs to address privacy, security, and usability issues to truly succeed. The local community's efforts in these directions are worth paying attention to. His advice to newcomers is to enhance "connectivity," believing that cross-team, cross-community proactive communication often brings about unexpected progress.

Ethereum and Foundation Dynamics (Part 2): Hsiao-Wei Wang on Three Foundation Capacities

Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang summarized the first ten years of Ethereum with a "staircase" metaphor, saying, "This is a staircase constantly raised by a global community, with no preset endpoint, only offering a path that everyone can climb at their own pace. Every new step laid out by a builder becomes the starting point for the next person."

She pointed out that today's Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain but a public infrastructure nurturing new assets, identities, cultures, and forms of collaboration. Ethereum's success comes from "not being owned by any single team," with everyone, including L2, being just a step on the ladder. The Foundation's job is not to climb to the top itself but to "stabilize the ladder" and shape the next decade together.

Reflecting on her work after assuming the role of Co-Executive Director with Tomasz, she summarized the Foundation's new phase into three capacities. The first is reliability: Ethereum has maintained zero downtime in all major upgrades, with this trust coming from long-standing engineering standards that accumulate block by block. The second is flexibility: the Foundation does not claim to have all the answers but continuously adjusts its direction based on community needs and changes in the external environment, ensuring protocol consistency and adaptability as societal usage patterns evolve. The third is genuine governance responsibility: the Foundation's duty is to maintain a stable environment necessary for the ecosystem's operation, rather than deciding where Ethereum should go; the direction should naturally emerge in an open environment.

Hsiao-Wei emphasized that Ethereum's staircase is open to all roles, including researchers, client and application developers, investors, end-users, scientists, scholars, students, and local community organizers. The Foundation's responsibility is to bet on directions early on that are not yet mainstream, such as client diversity and cutting-edge research, allowing these undervalued experiments to become new critical steps years later.

She also pointed out that decentralization, neutrality, and resilience in the face of pressure will not automatically be maintained but must be safeguarded through transparent, honest, and uncompromising design principles. Once these values are compromised, the entire Ethereum staircase may face structural risks.

Layer 1 Scaling, Blob Extension, and Enhanced User Experience: Protocol Update Brief

Members of the Ethereum Protocol Team, Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot, provided a phased update on the protocol development team following the Foundation's early-year reorganization. This report focuses on three directions: Layer 1 scaling, Blob extension, and improved user experience.

In the context of Layer 1 scaling, Ansgar stated that Ethereum has long maintained the block gas limit at 30 million, with engineering efforts focused on key upgrades such as the Merge and account abstraction. As Layer 1 more clearly takes on the role of a "settlement layer," the team is enhancing throughput through client optimizations and protocol improvements, rather than relying on more expensive hardware.

Throughout this year, client optimizations have already raised the gas limit to 45 million and are planning to increase it to 60 million in the next hard fork. The team is also advancing proposals such as opcode repricing, access lists, and others to continuously improve execution efficiency. He also revealed that the ZK-EVM prototype has achieved sub-12-second real-time proofs, laying the foundation for lowering the computational threshold for nodes in the future.

Regarding Blob extension, he highlighted the importance of EIP-4844 in the context of Rollup's data availability requirements. Proto-danksharding introduces data Blobs and commitment schemes, allowing Rollup to submit data at a lower cost. The next hard fork will introduce sample-based data availability proofs to prepare for further increasing Blob capacity in the future.

Barnabé briefly introduced the key focus on enhancing user experience, including cross-chain interoperability Interop, Trillion Dollar Security, and the privacy-friendly wallet project Kohaku. This update primarily focuses on Interop. He stated that the goal is to provide users and institutions with a "seamless, secure, permissionless" multi-chain experience, allowing users to simply declare their transaction intent through an open intent framework and a modular cross-chain stack. The backend system automatically facilitates cross-chain transactions and swaps without the need for manual asset bridging. The team is also exploring ways to improve finality times to make the interaction between off-chain and on-chain systems more efficient.

Laying the Foundation for Trillion Dollar Assets

Ethereum Foundation Protocol Security Lead Fredrik Svantes and Sigma Prime's Co-Founder Mehdi Zerouali highlighted in a session titled "Trillion Dollar Security Initiative" that Ethereum is transitioning from supporting hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of billions of dollars in assets to underpinning trillion-dollar-level public infrastructure. The security capabilities must be upgraded in sync to match the future potential asset scale and application complexity.

The current plan focuses on three main areas. The first is Endpoint Security and Wallet Experience, with the core goal of addressing the blind signing issue, enabling wallets to clearly and legibly display transaction outcomes so that even ordinary users can understand what they are signing. The second is Frontend and Infrastructure Security, with the Fiber Frontend project exploring verifiable, replaceable frontend solutions to reduce the risk of a single website being compromised and funds being stolen through malicious scripts. The third is Communication and Progress Transparency, with the Foundation Digital Studio building a public website to showcase the status and completion stages of each sub-project using progress bars and other tools, making it easier for the community to grasp the overall security roadmap and participate in contributions.

Mehdi emphasized that Trillion Dollar Security is an open topic repository for the entire ecosystem, where all solutions must be open-source, auditable, and collectively owned by the community. He described blind signing as an epidemic, believing that security should not be provided to users as an additional tax but should be a default property. During the Q&A session, both speakers agreed that as AI tools increase code output speed, the demand for security researchers and architecture-level audits will only grow. The Ethereum ecosystem has already funded post-quantum cryptography research and prototyping, potentially being one of the most prepared groups against quantum threats among mainstream public chains.

Regarding ZK-EVM, they likened its current security status to Solidity in 2016, still in its early stages, requiring the systematic cultivation of a new generation of security engineers and gradual maturity through open collaboration. Feedback from traditional institutions indicated that many institutions see Ethereum as the "least worrying about underlying security issues" main chain, a sentiment reflected in their deployment choices.

Institutions and Decentralization: Wall Street and Ethereum through Danny Ryan's Eyes

Ethereum Foundation core researcher Danny Ryan stated in his "Institutions Decentralization" speech that after long-term focus on decentralized protocol design, shifting to daily interactions with banks and large institutions, his biggest realization was that traditional financial infrastructure is far less efficient than commonly perceived. Asset managers often rely on multiple sets of incompatible software, faxes, and manual reconciliations, with securities settlement still operating at a T+1, T+2 pace.

In such a system, institutions are most concerned about various counterparty risks, from trading partners to infrastructure service providers, all of whom are scrutinized repeatedly to identify potential risks. In this framework, Ethereum's trust neutrality and decentralization actually become advantages, with multi-client architectures and thousands of nodes providing high availability layered on top of economic security, positioning Ethereum as having the potential to become the infrastructure for hosting trillions of dollars in assets.

Danny emphasized that for institutions, privacy is a threshold to entry, not a nice-to-have feature. If privacy protection does not meet the level of the existing system, many collaborations may not even start. He believes that building a usable privacy environment for institutions will push Ethereum to continue investing in directions such as zero-knowledge proofs, which will serve both scalability and naturally benefit privacy. At the same time, as various countries' regulatory frameworks gradually clarify, stablecoins and liquidity network effects are expected to undergo a new round of expansion, and Ethereum needs to occupy a key position in this round.

At the architectural level, he pointed out that Ethereum's modular design and Layer 2 ecosystem are highly attractive to institutions because they can build L2s tailored to specific assets with partners while sharing Ethereum's security and liquidity.

He proposed that the true goal is not simply to "tokenize assets" but to make the on-chain system good enough that real-world assets are hard to resist migrating up, and the unit of measure for success should be in the trillions. Currently, on-chain RWAs are still in the billions of dollars, just a start compared to the global investable asset scale.

In the Q&A session, he mentioned that a common misconception among institutions is equating decentralization to being "unregulatable" or "completely public," when in reality, through programmable access control and privacy technologies, intermediary risks can be reduced under compliance premises.

He suggested that builders form a "Translation Alliance" with traditional financial practitioners to align each other in language and mindset. Concerning the fear of being "captured by institutions," he believes that the risk objectively exists, but the key is to maintain Ethereum's core protocol's globally distributed nature, and then take on massive on-chain assets on top of this foundation.

Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min: Vitalik's Principles and Technical Roadmap

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, in the "Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min" speech, starting from the FTX case, compared the fully centralized institutions that rely on individual credit with Ethereum's pursuit of the "Can't be evil" principle. He defined Ethereum as a "globally open anti-censorship application platform," emphasizing its core advantage in programmability, where anyone can deploy smart contracts rather than being limited to predefined transaction types.

At the same time, he categorized the advantages and limitations of blockchain: advantages include payment and financial applications, DAOs, decentralized identity and ENS, voting and anti-censorship publishing, and the ability to prove the existence of something at a specific time or its scarcity; limitations involve insufficient privacy, difficulties in supporting extremely high throughput and low-latency computing, and the inability to directly obtain real-world information.

In terms of technical roadmap, Vitalik has referred to 2025 and 2026 as Ethereum's "scalability arc." This year, the gas limit has been increased by about 50%, and the network is gradually voting to raise it to 60 million. Subsequently, by implementing mechanisms such as separating builders and suggesters, block-level access lists, Ethereum aims to further increase throughput without raising hardware requirements.

Vitalik is particularly optimistic about ZK-EVM, which allows nodes to confirm blocks by validating proofs instead of replaying all executions. This significantly reduces the synchronization and computational costs of full nodes, paving the way for running full nodes on laptops or even smartphones. The longer-term "Lean Ethereum" roadmap focuses on gradually introducing components closer to theoretical optimality, such as a more ZK-friendly virtual machine and hash function, post-quantum cryptography, formal verification, and more efficient data availability solutions. On the user side, Ethereum plans to enhance privacy and security through means such as light clients, account abstraction, hardware and social recovery wallets.

During the Q&A session, Vitalik summarized Ethereum's relationship with Wall Street as "they are users, we support all users," emphasizing the key to maintaining the underlying attribute of trust neutrality. When asked how to bring Ethereum's features into the real world, he mentioned scenarios like enabling everyday payments; for example, entities in Buenos Aires are starting to accept ETH and on-chain stablecoins. He also encouraged adopting open, verifiable technology stacks at multiple levels, such as operating systems, communications, and governance. When asked about the most important skill an individual should have, he recommended community members to strive to be "jacks of many trades," suggesting they personally complete tasks such as wallet installation, making payments with ETH, participating in a DAO, writing a simple contract, and having a basic understanding of the underlying protocols.

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