In short
- Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin went on stage in London to explore DeFi, sharding and Ethereum 2.0.
- Buterin said the sharding would be ready to begin deployment this year.
- Lubin explored how the company was ready to enter the blockchain.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, and Joe Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, went on stage at ETHLondonUK yesterday to discuss the future of Ethereum in 2020. The main lessons? Ethereum will evolve, become more private and DeFi is the space to watch.
Buterin said new technologies will help evolve the Ethereum network, which has been besieged by network downturns and is about to burst. If the network reaches its maximum capacity, the network will slow down and become more expensive. This would discourage companies from taking inspiration from it.
Buterin believes that a technology, sharding, will make the network evolve from “somewhere between a factor of one hundred and a few hundred. Sharing divides the network into smaller parts, called fragments, which can each process thousands of transactions. It is still in development, but could be implemented as early as this year. He said the number that could increase if people use other scaling technologies, like optimistic rollups, which “consolidates” several transactions into one.
Buterin also said that the Ethereum ecosystem will benefit from “increased confidentiality” next year. “There is certainly an increasing awareness of the need not to have all of your activities publicly linked to all of your other activities,” he told the audience. He highlighted Tornado Cash, which allows users perform private Ethereum transactions.
Given the recent problems regarding so-called flash loans, where people were exploiting oracles price for money, Buterin thinks that more work needs to be done on decentralized oracles, which provide information in a reliable and decentralized way. Additional work on “different types of oracle designs” should be completed to make them “safer and decentralized,” he said.
Lubin, who heads one of the largest development houses for corporate blockchain products, spoke about the future of business on Ethereum.
He considers decentralized finance, or DeFi “amazing”, and said: “Once we have developed and made really functional, it will be a massive magnet that will attract the rest of the world – either through new business models or legacy businesses and will essentially become the ‘decentralized global economy. “Decentralized finance generally refers to products like loans, investments, and insurance, as well as decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, which work on the blockchain. It’s still a small space, but he is growing: last month he crossed the billion dollar mark.
Lubin also believes that large and medium-sized enterprises will start to carry out significant parts of their activities on the public blockchain. A few days earlier, Lubin’s company, ConsenSys (which also finances Decipher) ad with Microsoft and EY, a new protocol that allows organizations to interact with each other, share information, interact with business processes and do all of this confidentially on the Ethereum blockchain.