In-depth analysis of Ethereum V God: The ten-year journey and future blueprint of the technical idealist

1. The growth trajectory of technological idealists

1. 
   The cross-border enlightenment of a talented boy Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia in 1994. He immigrated to Canada with his family when he was 6 years old. He showed talent for mathematics and programming when he was a teenager. He taught himself Python to develop games at the age of 12. After being exposed to Bitcoin at the age of 17, he was deeply attracted by the concept of decentralization. In 2011, he emerged as the chief writer of Bitcoin Weekly. An article analyzing the scalability flaws of Bitcoin caused a shock in the industry and paved the way for the subsequent birth of Ethereum.
   
2. 
   The road to disruption after dropping out of school to start a business In 2013, Buterin, who had only been studying in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo for 8 months, decided to drop out of school and devote himself to blockchain research. He proposed the concept of "smart contracts" based on the Bitcoin protocol and believed that blockchain should not be limited to currency, but should become a general computing platform. In 2014, he teamed up with Gavin Wood and other developers to release the "Ethereum White Paper" and raised 3,153 Bitcoins (approximately $18.4 million) through ICO, starting the legendary journey of Ethereum.
   
   
   
   

2. Technological breakthrough: from concept to global infrastructure

1. 
   The three revolutions of Ethereum
   
• Technical architecture revolution: After the mainnet was launched in 2015, Ethereum pioneered the Turing-complete smart contract language Solidity, allowing developers to deploy any application on the chain. The "merger" was completed in 2022, switching from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), reducing energy consumption by 99.95%, becoming the world's first carbon-neutral blockchain Ethereum.
• Revolution in expansion solutions: In 2025, Layer 2 expansion technology will achieve a qualitative leap. Rollup solutions such as Arbitrum and Optimism have reduced the cost of a single transaction from US$20-50 to less than US$1, the throughput has exceeded 2000+ TPS, and the average daily transaction volume has exceeded 12 million. ZK-Rollups such as zkSync have performed well in the field of real-world assets (RWA), with a TVL of US$2.25 billion.
• Privacy technology revolution: Buterin published a long article "A GKR Tutorial" in October 2025, explaining in detail how the GKR protocol reduces the cost of zero-knowledge proof from 100 times to less than 15 times that of traditional STARK, and promotes the implementation of ZK-EVM verification, AI model verification (ZK-ML) and other scenarios.
2. 
   2025 Technology Roadmap
   
• The Surge stage: The goal is to achieve a total L1+L2 throughput of 100,000 TPS, and improve cross-L2 interoperability through data availability sampling (DAS) and Plasma architecture optimization. Buterin particularly emphasized the need to maintain the decentralization and censorship resistance of L1 and ensure that at least part of L2 fully inherits the core attributes of Ethereum.
• Prague-Electra upgrade: activated in May 2025, introducing functions such as composite verification accounts and executing account-triggered validator operations to improve the efficiency of pledged capital and user experience. EIP-7702 allows ordinary accounts to execute smart contract code and unlock new Ethereum functions such as transaction batching and account recovery.
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3. Ecological empire: from technological island to global collaboration network

1. 
   The prosperity of the developer ecosystem. As of 2025, the Ethereum developer community covers more than 200 countries around the world, and there are more than 50,000 GitHub contributors. The Layer2 ecosystem has attracted blue-chip projects such as Curve and Aave to settle in. Communities such as Nantang DAO and LXDAO, led by Chinese developers, play an important role in technology research and development and financial support.
   
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   Breakthroughs in application scenarios
   
• Decentralized Finance (DeFi): The locked-up volume (TVL) exceeded US$200 billion, covering all categories such as lending, trading, and derivatives. MakerDAO's DAI stablecoin has a market value of over US$50 billion and has become a core asset for on-chain settlement.
• Non-fungible assets (NFT): Annual transaction volume exceeds US$30 billion, expanding from digital art to games, social networking and other fields. IPs such as Pudgy Penguins reach mainstream users through the mobile game "Pudgy Party", achieving a seamless connection between on-chain assets and offline scenarios.
• Real World Assets (RWA): Ondo Finance has launched more than 100 tokenized US stocks, and traditional asset management institutions such as China Asset Management have issued on-chain assets through open standards, promoting the integration of trillion-dollar traditional finance and blockchain.
3. 
   Global layout and challenges Buterin has frequently visited marginal areas such as Argentina and Türkiye in recent years to promote the practical application of blockchain in countries with high inflation. He emphasized that the core value of blockchain is to solve the trust problem, especially in scenarios where centralized institutions fail. But at the same time, he also warned the industry to be wary of the misunderstanding of “decentralization for the sake of decentralization” and advocated balancing efficiency and decentralization in technical design.
   
   
   
   

4. Depth of Thought: From Technology Geek to Social Philosopher

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   Decentralized philosophical speculation V God proposed the "Cultural and Political Growth Ring Model" in 2025, believing that society's acceptance of new technologies is like tree rings, and change needs to be achieved by creating new behavior patterns rather than directly confronting the old system. He advocated that blockchain should become the "constitution of digital society" and reshape the foundation of social collaboration through transparent rules and community co-governance.
   
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   The game and symbiosis between AI and blockchain In a dialogue with Sina Finance in 2024, Buterin pointed out that AI and blockchain represent two opposing philosophies: AI pursues centralized power concentration, and blockchain advocates decentralized equality. He believes that Web3 should build a hybrid architecture of "AI Agent+ZK Proof" to allow AI to perform specific tasks and the blockchain to ensure data sovereignty and trust boundaries. For example, in the prediction market, AI can analyze event probabilities in real time, automatically adjudicate disputes through ZK proof, and only introduce manual arbitration in extreme cases.
   
3. 
   Open Source Funding and Public Goods Innovation In response to the low efficiency of traditional public goods funding, Buterin proposed the concept of "open source funding" and advocated motivating developers to contribute through on-chain voting, quadratic financing and other mechanisms. He personally donated 50 trillion SHIB (approximately US$940 million) to support India's COVID-19 relief, and established a Deep Funding project to explore innovative scenarios such as decentralized vaccine research and development.
   

5. Latest developments and future prospects in 2025

1. 
   Exploring technology frontiers
   
• Popularization of ZK technology: The GKR protocol promotes ZK proof from theory to practice. Buterin expects to achieve real-time verification of on-chain AI models in 2026, significantly reducing the cost of DeFi strategy execution.
• Improved Layer 2 interoperability: Through standardized address formats and cross-chain communication protocols, asset transfer time between L2 will be shortened from hours to minutes, forming a "super-connected Ethereum ecosystem."
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   Social influence expansion
   
• Digital identity revolution: Worldcoin platform users exceeded 16 million, achieving global identity authentication through biometric technology and providing infrastructure for cross-border payments and inclusive finance.
• Decentralized governance practice: Aragon Project launches BORGs (on-chain entities), allowing communities to create autonomous organizations through smart contracts and achieve seamless connection between code and law.
3. 
   Personal updates and works In 2025, Buterin continued to publish in-depth technical articles on his personal blog, including "The importance of full-stack openness and verifiability" and "Low-risk DeFi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google", etc., systematically explaining the development strategy of Ethereum in the next ten years. He also participated in the BNB Chain MVB Season 9 Accelerator Program to help incubate early Web3 projects.
   

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