Highlights from the Ethereum Argentina Developers Conference: Technology, Community, and Future Roadmap

Original Title: "Ethereum Argentina Developers Conference: Towards a New Decade of Technology and Applications"
Original Author: Sanqing, Foresight News

 

Opening Ceremony: From the First Webpage to the Ethereum World Expo

From November 17 to 22, the Ethereum Developers Conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This week featured over 40 official events, 75+ project showcases, and hundreds of side events throughout the city, expected to attract around 15,000 participants.

At the opening ceremony, the host began with Tim Berners-Lee’s release of the first webpage in 1991, reviewing the evolution of the internet from Web1 to today’s Web3. This conference is positioned as the "Ethereum World Expo," not only bringing together major global projects but also showcasing the achievements of the local Argentine community. After the opening, the main topics of Ethereum Day unfolded, covering Ethereum Foundation governance, protocol progress, privacy, security, institutional adoption, and future roadmaps, with core team members and researchers sharing the latest updates in turn.

Ethereum and Foundation Updates (I): Tomasz Stanczak on Ten Years of Progress and Future Challenges

Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stanczak stated in his keynote speech that the past decade of Ethereum has laid the foundation for consensus, clients, and privacy tools, but the future will face greater challenges in privacy protection, decentralization, and user autonomy, requiring more people to participate in building.

When introducing the structure of Ethereum participants, Tomasz outlined the ecosystem’s breadth with specific groups, including local organizers who brought Devcon to Argentina, communities focused on urban experiments and public goods, core developers responsible for protocol upgrades, engineers focused on privacy by default, active L2 teams, interdisciplinary roles from academia to finance, and volunteers contributing to multi-language localization of the Ethereum website. He emphasized that these long-term contributors form the foundation of protocol security and network vitality.

Tomasz pointed out that Ethereum’s ability to maintain zero downtime through multiple upgrades is due to the ongoing contributions of many in the ecosystem. He believes now is both a time to review phased achievements and to reassess the next direction worth investing in. He encouraged more developers and users to participate in the network more directly, such as building applications or using ETH for daily interactions, making Ethereum’s usage and governance more closely aligned with real-world needs.

In the Q&A session, he mentioned that if, ten years from now, builders attribute their journey to this conference, that would be its most important achievement. He shared his observations in Argentina: in an environment of high inflation and capital controls, crypto assets can provide real utility to ordinary users, but for decentralization to truly take root, privacy, security, and usability issues must still be solved. Local community efforts in these areas are worth watching. His advice to newcomers is to enhance their "connection ability," believing that proactive communication across teams and communities often leads to unexpectedly effective progress.

Ethereum and Foundation Updates (II): Hsiao-Wei Wang on the Foundation’s Three Capabilities

Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang used the metaphor of a "staircase" to summarize Ethereum’s first decade: "This is a staircase continuously built higher by the global community, with no predetermined endpoint, only a path that everyone can climb at their own pace. Every new step laid by a builder becomes the starting point for those who follow."

She pointed out that today’s Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain, but a public infrastructure nurturing new types of assets, identities, cultures, and forms of collaboration. Ethereum’s success comes from "no single team owning it," and every participant, including L2s, is just one step on the ladder. The Foundation’s job is not to climb the highest itself, but to "steady the ladder," shaping the next decade together.

Reviewing the work since she and Tomasz became Co-Executive Directors, she summarized the Foundation’s new phase as three capabilities. The first is reliability: Ethereum has maintained zero downtime through major upgrades, a trust built on long-term engineering standards and accumulated block by block. The second is flexibility: the Foundation does not claim to have all the answers, but adjusts direction based on community needs and external changes, keeping the protocol consistent and adaptable as social usage evolves. The third is true governance responsibility: the Foundation’s duty is to maintain a stable environment for the ecosystem to operate, not to decide where Ethereum should go—the direction should naturally form 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 early on directions not yet valued by the mainstream, such as client diversity and cutting-edge research, so that these attempts, whose value is not yet clear, can become new key steps years later.

She also pointed out that decentralization, neutrality, and resilience under pressure do not maintain themselves automatically, but must be safeguarded through transparent, honest, and uncompromising design principles. Once these values are undermined, the entire Ethereum staircase could face structural risks.

Scaling L1, Scaling Blobs, Improving User Experience: Protocol Update Brief

Ethereum protocol team members Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot provided a progress update on the protocol R&D team after the Foundation’s reorganization earlier this year. This report focused on three directions: scaling L1, scaling data blobs, and improving user experience.

On L1 scaling, Ansgar said Ethereum has long maintained a block gas limit of 30 million, with engineering focused on key upgrades like the Merge and account abstraction. As L1 more clearly takes on the "settlement layer" role, the team is improving throughput through client optimization and protocol improvements, rather than relying on more expensive hardware.

This year, client optimization has already pushed the gas limit up to 45 million, with plans to raise it to 60 million in the next hard fork. The team is also advancing proposals like opcode repricing and access lists to continuously improve execution efficiency. He also revealed that the ZK-EVM prototype has achieved real-time proofs under 12 seconds, laying the foundation for lowering node computation thresholds in the future.

On scaling blobs, he explained the importance of EIP-4844 for Rollup data availability needs. Proto-danksharding introduces data blobs and commitment mechanisms, allowing Rollups to submit data at lower cost. The next hard fork will introduce sampling-based data availability proofs, preparing for further increases in blob capacity.

Barnabé briefly introduced key work on improving user experience, including cross-chain interoperability with Interop, Trillion Dollar Security, and the privacy-friendly wallet project Kohaku. This time, he mainly introduced Interop. He said the goal is to provide users and institutions with a "seamless, secure, permissionless" multi-chain experience, where users only need to declare their intent and the backend system automatically completes cross-chain and swaps, without manual asset bridging. The team is also exploring improvements to finality time, making interactions 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 co-founder Mehdi Zerouali, in the "Trillion Dollar Security initiative" session, pointed out that Ethereum is moving from supporting millions of users and tens of billions of dollars in assets to becoming public infrastructure supporting trillions of dollars, and its security capabilities must be upgraded accordingly to match the potential future scale and application complexity.

The initiative currently focuses on three levels. The first is end-user security and wallet experience, with the core goal of solving the blind signing problem, enabling wallets to clearly and readably display the consequences of transactions so ordinary users can understand what they are signing. The second is frontend and infrastructure security: the Fiber Frontend project is exploring verifiable, replaceable frontend solutions to reduce the risk of funds being stolen by malicious scripts if a single website is compromised. The third is communication and progress transparency: the Foundation’s digital studio is building a public website to display the status and missing links of each subproject with progress bars, making it easier for the community to understand the overall security blueprint and contribute.

Mehdi emphasized that Trillion Dollar Security is an open issue library for the entire ecosystem, and all solutions must be open-source, auditable, and community-owned. He described blind signing as a plague, believing that security should not be provided by charging users extra, but should be a default attribute. In the Q&A, both believed that as AI tools increase code output speed, the demand for security researchers and architectural audits will only increase; the Ethereum ecosystem is already funding post-quantum cryptography research and developing prototypes, and may be among the best prepared for quantum threats among mainstream public chains.

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

Institutions and Decentralization: Danny Ryan’s View of Wall Street and Ethereum

Ethereum Foundation core researcher Danny Ryan, in his "Institutions Decentralization" talk, said that after years focusing on decentralized protocol design and now almost daily communicating with banks and large institutions, his biggest impression is that traditional financial infrastructure is far less efficient than outsiders imagine. Asset managers often rely on multiple incompatible software systems, fax machines, and manual reconciliation, and securities settlement is still at T+1 or T+2 pace.

In such a system, institutions are most concerned about various counterparty risks, scrutinizing everyone from trading partners to infrastructure providers for "who might hurt me." In this context, Ethereum’s credible neutrality and decentralization become advantages: multi-client and thousands of nodes provide high availability, and crypto-economic security gives Ethereum the potential to become the infrastructure for trillions of dollars in assets.

Danny emphasized that for institutions, privacy is a threshold, not a bonus. If privacy protection does not reach the level of existing systems, many collaborations cannot even begin. He believes that building usable privacy environments for institutions will force Ethereum to continue investing in areas like zero-knowledge proofs, which serve both scaling and privacy. Meanwhile, as regulatory frameworks become clearer globally, stablecoins and liquidity network effects are expected to usher in a new wave 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 L2 ecosystem are very attractive to institutions, as they can build L2s for specific assets with partners while sharing Ethereum’s security and liquidity.

He proposed that the real goal is not simply to "tokenize assets," but to make on-chain systems good enough that real-world assets cannot resist migrating on-chain, with the unit of success being "trillions." Currently, on-chain RWA is still at the tens of billions of dollars level, just the beginning compared to the global investable asset scale.

In the Q&A, he mentioned that a common institutional misunderstanding is equating decentralization with "unregulatable" or "completely public," but in fact, programmable access control and privacy technologies can reduce intermediary risk under compliance.

He suggested that builders form "translation alliances" with traditional finance practitioners to align language and thinking. Regarding concerns about being "captured by institutions," he acknowledged the risk but said the key is to maintain Ethereum’s globally distributed core protocol features, and only then undertake large-scale asset on-chaining.

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

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, in his "Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min" talk, started with the FTX case, contrasting centralized institutions that rely on personal credit and the "Don’t be evil" principle with Ethereum’s pursuit of the "Can’t be evil" principle. He defined Ethereum as a "global open censorship-resistant application platform," emphasizing its core advantage of programmability—anyone can deploy smart contracts, not just use preset transaction types.

He also categorized the advantages and limitations of blockchains: advantages include payments and financial applications, DAOs, decentralized identity and ENS, voting and censorship-resistant publishing, and the ability to prove something existed or was scarce at a specific time; limitations include insufficient privacy, difficulty handling extremely high throughput and low-latency computation, and inability to directly access real-world information.

On the technical roadmap, Vitalik called 2025 and 2026 Ethereum’s "scaling arc." This year, the gas limit has increased by about 50%, and the network is gradually voting to raise it to 60 million. Further improvements will come through proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists, and other mechanisms to continue increasing throughput without raising hardware requirements.

Vitalik is particularly optimistic about ZK-EVM, which allows nodes to confirm blocks by verifying proofs rather than replaying all execution, significantly reducing the sync and computation costs of full nodes and making it possible to run full nodes on laptops or even phones. The longer-term "Lean Ethereum" roadmap focuses on gradually introducing components closer to theoretical optimality, such as more zero-knowledge-friendly virtual machines and hash functions, post-quantum cryptography, formal verification, and more efficient data availability solutions; on the user side, privacy and security are strengthened through light clients, account abstraction, hardware and social recovery wallets, and other means.

In the Q&A, Vitalik summarized Ethereum’s relationship with Wall Street as "they are users, we support all users," stressing that the key is to maintain the credible neutrality of the underlying protocol. On bringing Ethereum features into the real world, he mentioned restoring everyday payment scenarios—such as merchants in Buenos Aires already accepting ETH and on-chain stablecoins—and encouraged the adoption of open, verifiable tech stacks in more areas like operating systems, communications, and governance. When asked about the most important personal skill, he advised community members to become "generalists" as much as possible: at least install a wallet, pay with ETH, participate in a DAO, write a simple contract, and have a basic understanding of the underlying protocol.

 

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