Host: Distinguished guests and friends, good morning, everyone!

Welcome to the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 12th Global Blockchain Summit hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Lab.

Twelve years ago, when the first summit was held here, blockchain was still a little-known technical term. Over the past twelve years, we have witnessed its transition from the geek community to mainstream visibility, from experimental exploration to industrial application, and from a single technology to the underlying infrastructure driving the digital economy. The 12th summit not only records every leap of this industry but also serves as an important stage for the collision of global blockchain ideas, co-creation of standards, and ecological connections.

Today, we once again gather in Shanghai with the theme of "Intelligent Chain Symbiosis" to discuss the future scenario of the deep integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence. "Intelligent" represents the cognitive revolution brought by AI, while "Chain" represents the trust foundation built by blockchain. When intelligence encounters trust, when algorithms meet consensus, we believe this is not just a simple overlay of technologies, but a brand-new paradigm shift that will redefine the boundaries of finance, the value of data, and the modes of collaboration.

Here, on behalf of the organizers of the summit, I extend my warmest welcome and sincere gratitude to every guest present!

At the same time, we also want to specially thank the diamond sponsor Qtum, strategic partner Wanxiang Innovation Energy City, and gold sponsors Arkreen, Boundary Intelligence, Blue Elephant Smart Link, Frontier Technology Research Institute, Yuan Coin Technology, and the exclusive dinner sponsor Sui Foundation for their strong support of this summit. Twelve years of persistence, twelve years of iteration. Today, let us together open the next exciting chapter.

Esteemed guests, the first heavyweight keynote speaker of today's summit is about to take the stage.

He is Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. Over the past twelve years, he has grown from a teenage geek into a spiritual totem of the industry. The Ethereum he created has ushered in the era of smart contracts and defined a series of narratives that lead the industry development.

He will join us through a remote connection to share his latest thoughts on blockchain. Let's welcome Vitalik with the warmest applause!

The full content is as follows:

Vitalik Buterin: Good morning, everyone. Today I want to discuss a relatively complex technical topic, so I will speak in English.

Today I want to talk about a macro topic. We have been discussing blockchain and cryptocurrencies for over 15 years. For example, various blockchain activities in Shanghai have been ongoing for over a decade. Bitcoin was born in 2009. On the surface, the tools and technologies we are building still seem similar, but in reality, there are many differences over the past 15 years, which I believe are crucial.

One reason for this is that, as users, the types of assets you acquire and the types of costs you incur differ significantly from our previous expectations. 10-15 years ago, even our views on goals we were trying to achieve have changed dramatically.

Fifteen years ago, blockchain was our main tool. Bitcoin combined blockchain, signatures, and proof of work. Ethereum added smart contracts and shifted to proof of stake in 2022. These were the tools we used at the time. So, this feature is what you get from using blockchain.

Firstly, blockchain is open; anyone can participate freely. It is global, reliable, secure, and neutral, with no centralized entity able to interfere with your application and stop its operation, which could lead to erroneous answers.

A phrase often used by Zooko, the creator of Z-Cash, is that public blockchain is like Twitter for bank accounts. When the white paper was published in 2009, I believed that the basic answers to these questions, like personal names not being directly linked to transactions, were acceptable if strong privacy measures were in place. But now, we have extremely powerful data analysis capabilities and extremely powerful artificial intelligence, making that answer clearly outdated. Meanwhile, people want to do more things with smartwatches; they want their smartwatches to have stronger performance. People are not just interested in payment functions; we want payment functions to have more robust and superior features. Therefore, both of us want to take a step further. In many areas, we indeed need to step further.

Thus, the biggest change is in the technical field. The changes we have experienced over the past decade include the rise of zero-knowledge proofs, including SNARKs, followed by the quantum-safe version of SNARKs - STARKs. The role of these objects is that they allow you to verify a computation. A person performs a computation, generates a proof, and everyone else verifies it. This is how the computational process works, and the verification process becomes more efficient.

Moreover, it does not even need to disclose all information, i.e., all the information used for computation. Therefore, the core part of blockchain technology is related to this issue of verification. We want a system that allows everyone to participate and guarantees that everything happening follows the rules.

Thus, the initial technology required everyone to re-execute all operations, sacrificing scalability and privacy. SNARKs and STARKs changed these two aspects, which have been talked about for a decade, but this matter is gradually becoming a reality every year. I believe the biggest change this year is that all plans will shift toward all these technologies; they are no longer just part of the future or the future roadmap. Now we have EIPs, like EIP-8288. We hope it can enter I-STARK, happening two years later, perhaps with AI, or even earlier. They are “strawman maps,” where everything in the next two years after the fork will use STARK, ubiquitous. Thus, this is a significant change.

Another major change is that there are now more and more powerful technologies, which I believe are about to emerge, such as fully homomorphic encryption, FHE. Many are using it. Additionally, obfuscation technology and IO technology, which have long been considered distant futures, may now be becoming increasingly feasible in a shorter time frame than many imagined. Therefore, we have more powerful technologies. These powerful technologies bring us many possibilities. For example, one of them allows you to process blockchains in parallel, with parallel processing starting before transactions are included in blocks.

FOCIL is an EIP entering H-START - this is the first instance of multi-party participation in block construction occurring on Ethereum, meaning that blocks are not created by a single participant but co-created by 16 participants, ultimately completed by a final builder, aiming to provide stronger guarantees, i.e., if you send a transaction, that transaction will be included in the next time slot. Thus, no single entity has the ability to postpone it.

In addition to fossil fuels, there's EIP-8288 and EIP-828H, which indicate you have a substantial proof that these massive and expensive objects are happening. We don’t actually need to place them directly on the blockchain, but rather can handle them through large-scale parallel processing to prove all proofs, all occurring off-chain, within the memory pool, in the gaps in between. When you send a transaction and that transaction goes on-chain, it will replace all objects in that space with just one proof to prove their existence. Thus, many changes have occurred in the media technology field.

But I think the important aspect of these changes is that they truly change our mindset about what the goal of such systems is. Firstly, an important question is what are we protecting? Bitcoin signifies that we are protecting a type of data asset, namely "Bitcoin currency." If you can issue your own digital assets, we can also protect them using modern cryptography and information. In Bitcoin and Ethereum, cryptography and code output the answer to the question, “Who can send what?” Which assets belong to whom? Who can send which asset at what time? Now we are entering the era of programmable cryptography, where code determines who can see what. So, who can see what information is also becoming programmable. Where does computation take place? Fifteen years ago, blockchain was just blockchain.

In the next five years, I believe this will largely accelerate. We are accelerating in this sense, not just having a blockchain, but embracing this entire channel, this vast cryptographic network containing complete channels. Users perform a lot of computations locally, completing most of the work before the data leaves their devices, after which transactions go through a mining pool. There are various types of mining pools, and they have different privacy attributes. It will then be aggregated, involving multiple different types of participants and block construction, which are recorded on-chain. Now this mechanism allows the same transaction of a large coin to be re-processed by every node. In the theorem, a proof is validated many times.

In the end, what did we sacrifice? I believe it is a good point that if I sacrifice scalability, I also sacrifice latency. Therefore, centralized systems can achieve 100 milliseconds of latency, sometimes even up to 300 milliseconds. Globally, Bitcoin’s latency is 600 milliseconds, or about 590 milliseconds, approximately 10 minutes. Currently, a theorem requires 12 seconds to generate a block and 16 minutes for final confirmation. However, in the future, theoretically, C language is expected to be reduced to 4 to 8 seconds per block, while 8 to 32 seconds for final confirmation. And scalability represents a significant change. That is, blockchain architecture will not always need to sacrifice so much; in terms of scalability, it will sacrifice, but not scalability itself, but rather scalable universality. It will sacrifice the ability to conduct highly scalable computations. If you set no limitations on this system, provide no guarantees to regulate its computational behavior, and if you have computational power and can package it into two parts, they can execute separately and verify separately, and can run. Before anything happens, even before entering the supply chain, then extremely high scalability becomes practically feasible, right? Therefore,

If you consider blockchains, think of them as a complete system, including L1, L2, and even human resource pools. Human resource pools, L2, tools. All these systems become this very complicated intermediate layer, which you or your agents can resolve, potentially because AI Q3.8 is helping to make them more beautiful. But basically, every workflow cycle is being accelerated, being accelerated by artificial intelligence. Before AI emerged, we had zero-knowledge proofs but only very simple cryptographic applications, possible only under certain circumstances. One reason for this is that if the number of code lines exceeds approximately 100 or 1000, there will almost certainly be vulnerabilities.

We believe we can utilize it for verification by employing different types of redundancies, testing, specifications, and analysis, so we can create larger and more complex things. For example, in the post-AI era, we can put everything we do into cryptography and algorithms. The overhead of the algorithms we use is substantial. Now, 100 times the overhead or even lower is usually feasible. Therefore, for ZK-SNARK, we have achieved less than 10 times the overhead applied to AI inference. We have achieved less than 10 times the overhead applied to certain types of hash computations. Then we have FLoC, which I think is about 250 times the overhead, but that number is dropping rapidly. Before verifying all this, everything was manually operated. Now, formal verification represents another major operational bottleneck, which I believe is one of the main reasons L2 has failed to meet expectations. So far, it is constrained by the extent to which you protect them, so you need redundancies and multiple verification systems and safety committees.

And the new technology is formal verification, so if needed, you can even use multiple specifications that correspond to one implementation. So, you can express the work being done in different ways, by different people, different agents, different teams, and then you automatically and mathematically prove that they are all expressing the same meaning? If in the end, the meaning they express differs, then your foundation becomes much smaller, and everyone can refer to it for better understanding of which party is correct. Thus, there are significant advancements, and great progress is happening in the Ethereum world, both at the protocol level and the application level. I encourage everyone to visit our website at drawmap.org to check out the Ethereum protocol. If you look closely, you will find that every piece of hard work will participate after about a year, very advanced cryptographic functions will place everything inside stocks, overlay everything within virtual machines, aggregate, formally verify everything, deploy quantum-safe signature algorithms. All these factors combined will transform theory from a purely blockchain into a larger network containing different hierarchies. One of the advantages, I believe, is that AI not only helps us build all these things faster but also build everything in a more secure manner.

Of course, security is what we truly choose to focus on, which we indeed focus on within the theorem. However, I believe AI also makes it easier for everyone here to understand all these things. Therefore, I think if there are developers or researchers here, I would truly encourage people to try to understand the different parts being built, to understand the different components, and to find out if there are any specific parts that you want to or can contribute to.

I believe a country can contribute to the forefront of fields, including technologies and ecosystems, which is rapidly becoming more feasible and easier for anyone to access, or for those who are willing to learn, think, and invest energy, to help, assist in research, and aid in building. There are even open competitions currently underway, aimed at improving and formally verifying improvements on many algorithms.

Moreover, this is also a good time to really rethink applications, that is, the applications we have always been working on, and build new applications. These are applications, all built on Ethereum. Five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, many of them were not built with this mindset: that these new technologies are feasible, privacy can be programmed, and even complex code security can be ensured. Now these things have become possible, so I encourage people to engage in development and construction, to develop applications, to combine them, namely Ethereum and other decentralized networks, and other things in the real world as you wish, to do the impact you want and the improvements you desire.

Thank you!