Next 10 Years of Ethereum by Fede - Devconnect

Why It Matters

Ethereum’s verifiable, composable infrastructure is becoming the de‑facto layer for global digital assets; its ability to scale and stay secure will determine whether the emerging tokenized economy thrives or fragments across competing blockchains.

Summary

In the Devconnect talk, Fede frames Ethereum not as a generic "world computer" but as the first verifiable computer, emphasizing that its economic incentives and cryptographic guarantees make every computation auditable, unlike centralized clouds such as AWS or Google. He argues that this verifiability underpins a new layer of internet property rights, allowing users to own digital assets—art, land, even AI models—through private keys rather than trusting platform terms, thereby creating a globally neutral playing field.

Fede backs his thesis with data points: Ethereum now supports a $300 billion economy, processes three trillion dollars of stable‑coin volume monthly—three times the throughput of Visa—and benefits from a composable ecosystem where assets can be swapped instantly on‑chain. He credits the post‑2022 bubble for spawning critical infrastructure like zk‑rollups, Polygon’s ZK focus, and the broader roll‑up centric roadmap, while also noting emerging competitors (Solana, Sui, Aptos) that push Ethereum to improve. He highlights technical bottlenecks—performance, gas limits, state growth, validator requirements, and language/compiler security—and calls for accelerated upgrades, higher gas caps, and better tooling (e.g., Solidity alternatives, robust L2 deployment scripts).

Specific anecdotes illustrate his points: a recent hack of Bing’s movie rankings demonstrates the fragility of trust‑based services, whereas Ethereum’s public ledger resists such unilateral tampering. He cites his own team’s progress on a 10 % performance gap to the “wrath” benchmark, the development of the Lean VM and hash‑based post‑quantum signatures with Justin Drake, and the struggle to fund Solidity compiler maintenance. Fede also stresses cultural challenges—complacency, low validator diversity, and the need for clearer privacy regulations—arguing that without addressing these, talent may drift to faster‑moving chains.

The overarching implication is that Ethereum’s continued dominance hinges on solving scalability and usability issues while preserving its core verifiability. If successful, the platform will cement its role as the backbone of a tokenized global economy, enabling seamless, trust‑less transactions across borders and sectors. Conversely, failure to evolve could jeopardize the multi‑billion‑dollar ecosystems built atop it, prompting a migration to rival chains and eroding the nascent property‑rights layer of the internet.

Original Description

Speaker: Fede

Event: Ethereum Day (Devconnect Argentina 2025)

Keywords: Ethereum, zero-knowledge proofs, rollups, stablecoins, decentralization

The Next 10 Years of Ethereum: Verifiable Future

Ethereum started as a world computer. It’s turning into something bigger, a verifiable economy where property rights, finance, and computation run on math instead of trust. This talk looks at what the next decade brings: zero knowledge proofs, RISC V zkVMs, native rollups, post quantum cryptography, and the social issues that keep holding us back: closed debates, conformity, and cultural gatekeeping. We’ll break down how stablecoins became Ethereum’s first real product market fit, why rollup decentralization is the next existential challenge, and why open disagreement might be the only way forward.

About Devconnect

Devconnect is a week-long gathering of the Ethereum community with events for developers, researchers, artists and creators. It’s organized by the Ethereum Foundation and took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Nov 2025, with ~20,000 attendees.

What’s next

The next major Ethereum community event is Devcon 8, happening in 2026.

For updates visit: https://devcon.org

More

Follow us: @efdevcon · @ethereum

Learn more about Ethereum: https://ethereum.org

And the Ethereum Foundation: https://ethereum.foundation/