Taiwan’s annual Ethereum event, ETHTaipei 2025, was officially held today (1) at the Taipei Nangang Bottle Cap Factory (POPOP Taipei) . The first panel was hosted by Hsiao-Wei Wang, the new co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, together with Vitalik Buterin and spokesperson Joseph Schweitzer, focusing on EF ecosystem management and industry trends.
The following dynamic area organizes the full text for you to share the event
Host (Joseph Alby): Hi, everyone. I am Joseph Alby, the moderator of this discussion. I work in PR at the Ethereum Foundation and I had the pleasure of speaking today with Vitalik Buterin and Shawai Wang, the new Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF).
But today is a very special day. As you may have heard this morning, this marks one of the most significant transactions in the history of our industry. Blockstream announced that Bitcoin 2.0, which will be launched soon, will address its security and quantum risk issues by becoming the settlement layer of future Rollups. Now is the era of Ethereum L3 and native L2 technology stacking.
Vitalik, a few minutes ago you announced on your blog that you will be joining Blockstream for the next four years, along with Tim Beiko, who will be responsible for running the Bitcoin Core developer meetings. What aspect of working at Blockstream are you most looking forward to? What can the Ethereum ecosystem expect from Adam Back and the incoming leadership in this deal?
BUTERIN: Yeah, I think it’s going to be very exciting. We will merge Ethereum and Bitcoin together. This was certainly Satoshi’s original vision, as claimed by Craig Wright. It will be interesting to see Ethereum return to Proof of Work and Bitcoin move to Proof of Stake. And we have to make both of these transitions at the same time.
I think this field should do more interesting things for the world, it should scale, and it should do technical things. It's a bit like if you were always following Starships. Sometimes people say, you just keep looking at Starship, you know, and sometimes people are more like… you just make interesting technical stuff, and then you, you know, you give the world something to watch and be excited about. So yes, I’m excited about this collaboration with Blockstream, it’s going to be fun.
Moderator: Okay, on a panel like this, we usually jump right into technical questions like the one just now, but... Happy April Fools' Day everyone!
Note: Yes, the above is Vitalik’s April Fool’s joke to everyone. Let’s get back to the topic.
Let’s start with the Ethereum Foundation. Shawai, does your role mean a new chapter for EF management? Can you share more about your priorities and what you plan to do?
Shawai Wang: OK, hello everyone…Before taking on this role, I was a researcher at EF and also a community builder, participating in cybersecurity and other Taiwanese communities. So I think the change in this role for me is that, first of all, I will be exposed to a lot of new areas that I need to be more familiar with, not just (pure) technical research.
So I think the priority for me is, first of all we have to review, what we didn't do well enough and what we did well and should continue. So I think the first week or two we were just kind of going through this process.
After that, I think the most important thing is to improve the capabilities of the management team. Like, I think this new chapter this year, like now we have two co-executive directors, it doesn't mean that we're going to drastically change, I mean, we're going to drastically shift our focus somewhere.
I think we'll make some slight adjustments to reflect that 2025 is probably going to be a more critical year. Then we need to inject some new inspiration into EF, and hope that these atmospheres can spread to EF, and hope that these atmospheres can spread to the entire ecosystem.
I would also say that the key thing going forward is that the way we work is not a reboot, but at least for myself and Tomás, we should and will strengthen our communication and connection with the community.
We’ve been in this industry for many years, but me taking on these roles means we need to have a broader view of the ecosystem. So I think these are two of our recent capability enhancements. After that, we'll have more realistic plans about what exactly we think needs to be done to achieve the results.
Host: I understand. Thank you. Also regarding Moo Deng’s adoptive father (referring to Vitalik), can you share some insights on how EF works, such as the interaction between management and research? During the stressful period of the last few months, there were a lot of people who thought they could bring in someone like Danny and then have the executive director define the roadmap.
Vitalik: Yeah, the way we think about the role of the Ethereum Foundation is basically that it does really valuable and important things for the ecosystem that allow the ecosystem as a whole to thrive and continue to support the core values of Ethereum. But especially those things that don't happen automatically in the absence of EF, right?
So if you think about, for example, building DeFi applications, DeFi is great, right? But there are also many other people willing to create DeFi applications. So EF itself doesn't need to have a team to do this.
But on the other hand, if you think about things like paying security people to continually audit clients of different parts of the protocol, that kind of thing is something that the ecosystem itself could easily underinvest in. So your job is to get involved.
Or another example of this might be that certain layers of infrastructure, if handed off to independent actors, might be designed to be more proprietary than they should be, or more dependent on additional tokens or centralized actors.
So for something like this, EF needs to be built on open standards… So in terms of how EF works, it's a very loose collection of many different teams. The research team has actually been quite autonomous for a long time.
So I think the job of leadership is to make sure all of these different parts, they have the resources they need when they need them, that they're actually able to get the job done, but also to keep an eye on and make sure all of the other things that need to scale, all of the things that were necessary before but are no longer necessary, or that the ecosystem can handle on its own, are there new areas where the foundation needs to step in, be more invested, and create more teams, and basically we play this coordination function.
So to me, that’s what leadership is all about. Beyond that, we generally try to take a hands-off approach, and we try to focus on nurturing, on supporting early, diverse teams within and outside of the foundation. Do everything we can to maximize exposure to teams that can collaborate effectively.
Host: Understood. As an extension question, this question can be asked to one or both of you. While EF is not the government of Ethereum, some argue that holding Genesis Ethereum gives the organization some public accountability. How do you guys see this dynamic and how this character might change over time?
VB: Which role are you referring to?
Host: Yeah, the role and some level of responsibility there, whether it's responding to the public will or whether it's done its role of launching the network and now it exists to do... you know, do what it thinks is good for the network.
BUTERIN: Yeah. I mean, I think in general we should avoid getting too hung up on the past, right? I think we should always re-examine Ethereum from the perspective of the current situation. And then there are societal concerns, whether it’s about incentive mismatches, centralization risks, or other issues.
I think overall we need to go in with an open mind and not be overly influenced by how we thought about EF in 2014 or 2019, but keep in mind… If you’re a young foundation, keep in mind the philosophy of the position and basically ask: what is the right thing for the web at this point in time.
Shawai Wang: I would also like to add that these two can be true at the same time: EF is supported by the Genesis Block, and EF is established by the public. And like everyone else. Just like at the beginning, they set firm goals, philosophy and core values about what EF should be like and what EF should do.
So I think we have to strike a balance between the two. I don't think EF is the center of the ecosystem, nor a major player. All of these dynamic changes have to happen at the same time. It happens because EF is doing its job, right? To decentralize power and empower others.
Host: It's a difficult balance. There are two failure modes. One is a foundation that looks like a corporation, and the other is a foundation that wants to be like a retirement fund. We see a lot of examples of this in both areas, so I don't think we should be either of those.
Do you see other players trying to execute the same long game as EF? Whether it is the application layer, Layer 2…
BUTA: I think there are a lot of different projects and teams that aspire to this ideal and try to think about having a long-term vision, but at the same time, you know, the question is, like, which approach is actually going to work? But to me, EF exists to be integrated with all the other applications, Layer 2, zero-knowledge proof-type entities, etc., so that others can make up the Ethereum ecosystem.
Moderator: Okay, regarding the Internet, Vitalik recently mentioned that we are at a turning point. Ethereum is moving from a more experimental technology and its early stages to a global, radically neutral world settlement layer.
I would like to ask you two, can we start with Shawai. Whether it’s securities markets, identity, real-world assets, or anything else that might look like a broader form of success in the future, can you give a specific example? What would it look like in practice? For example, can you paint a dream scenario of how real people will use this network in ten, twenty, or fifty years?
Shawai Wang: Yes, good question. I think the technology will eventually be there, and hopefully there will be a healthier ecosystem where applications will be built on top of it. If we think about the long-term vision, the applications there will be more prominent, important, and closer to people's lives in the long run.
I think this should be used for basic payments, it should be seamless and should be embedded into our current payment use cases. Then it should be possible for users to not feel the existence of blockchain. It's just a regular payment solution. Then there's authentication, which will also be combined with privacy solutions, and you should be able to choose what kind of data you want to share across all the old use cases.
Host: Yes, if I can embed it into all of our lives, users don’t need to understand what zero-knowledge proof or cryptography is, you can just use it directly. So to a large extent, the idea of owning your own private keys and managing your own security is there for those who need it, but for a lot of people, when they use payments, they're going to use digital versions of, say, state-issued tokenized currencies, things like that.
Shawai Wang: Yes, I think it really depends on your experience, like making users feel that cryptocurrency, any blockchain, does not exist. Behind this, you need to have a very good wallet experience. And maybe in the future you won’t need a cold wallet, just like WeChat or LINE now, so in the future, you won’t feel that this is a blockchain application. It is an integrated application, you may have many small learning thresholds
Host: This is a call to app developers. There is still a lot of work to be done on account abstraction. Vitalik, you can also answer this question a little bit, but if not, I have a controversial question for you about Layer 1.
There is a lot of debate about the value capture mechanism of L1. Some researchers talk about blockchain capturing value and see it as a major feature of future L1 revenue. The other side argues that the Data Availability Layer (DA) will become trivial and we need to find other L1 scalability paths and other L1 fee capture mechanisms. Where do you stand on this today? I don’t want you to express too strong an opinion and thus steer the research in a particular direction.
VB: I think there's a lot of uncertainty about where the value of cryptocurrencies comes from, right? One school of thought believes that it comes from transaction fees, while another school of thought believes that transaction fees are not important. What is important is the currency nature of ETH, such as ETH's central position as a large payment and mortgage asset in the Ethereum ecosystem.
I think overall I'd prefer that we be open to these different options and that the strategies we try out should help the ETH asset thrive in all of these different scenarios.
I think the common point is that I think for the ETH asset to thrive, Ethereum L1 really needs to do something. For example, I think if L1 becomes this hyper-minimal thing where you only submit a few hash values to it, then the problem is that all the other participants in the ecosystem are not interested in succumbing to the existence of ETH, their interest is to focus on the existence of their own assets.
So we see, the USDC-based economy on all the Layer 2s, we see Layer 2s encouraging the issuance of assets directly on their own chains, and all these different things, right?
The challenge is that if Layer 1 has very little power, then the ecosystem has no choice but to do all of those things. The result will be that Layer 1 will not be able to charge significant fees. You get all these different actors who tend to continue to route the erosion of ETH's monetaryness and deploy other assets, right?
So I think that's a big reason why I do think a good Ethereum roadmap has to include a strong L1 role, including more block space, including more L1 Gas, and also including more of these L1/L2 interoperability features. Because if you have that, then that creates more opportunities for L1 and ETH to play a more important role in all of these dimensions.
Moderator: A quick follow-up question on L2 and interoperability. Do you see any progress? We talked last year about things like address formatting work. There are some calls going on right now, but I think how extensive this work is remains to be seen. Any initial thoughts on this?
BUTA: Yeah, it does feel like there is broad consensus on a lot of things. I mean, there’s definitely a wall of Open Intent Framework that’s integrating… and is integrating addresses of specific chains. There’s definitely been a lot of quiet progress behind the scenes to unite everyone around a common framework, so I’m optimistic about how a lot of things will develop in the future.
Host: Okay. Shawai, in what ways do you think the Ethereum ecosystem is healthiest or most self-sustaining today? In what areas are we still overly dependent? What do you think about our ability to influence these things?
Shawai Wang: I think… So the ecosystem is much bigger, we have more leaders in the ecosystem, but I hope we can have more decentralized leadership within the ecosystem. We did a good job, but that’s from my perspective. At the same time, I am also inspired by this endless possibility.
This comes not just from within the current ecosystem, but also from outside. Like, how can we bring in new leaders into the ecosystem? So I think we should do more in terms of functionality.
Moderator: I got a three-minute reminder, and I'll see if we can do a quick Q&A session with the remaining questions. In an area where stablecoins are gaining popularity, how do you see Ethereum or decentralized technologies catching up to those centralized chains that gained early adoption?
Shawai Wang: Honestly, I think the first thing is to have a better and competitive user experience (UX). And then secondly, I think, is just like moving forward on new types of use cases. So I think this also adds value to existing USDC and things like USDC and provides a better opportunity for people to use (the asset) to preserve and grow their wealth.
Moderator: Please keep your answers to the two questions as brief as possible. If someone builds DeFi or stablecoin payments on a blockchain that is, say, 99% owned by a single company and 1% is allocated to their preferred validators, is that DeFi? Even though it supports EVM.
Vitalik Buterin: I think that’s like CDFi, right?
Moderator: Phase 0 of DeFi.
Vitalik Buterin: Phase 0 DeFi, yes.
Host: Okay. If you have any app types or specific apps in mind that have regional or global impact and deserve more attention. This is an opportunity to single out a project for praise.
Vitalik Buterin: Regional or global focus?
Host: Yes.
BUTERIN: So that means any focus is fine?
Host: Yes. Or just one type of application.
BUTERIN: Okay, so there’s this whole area of things like ZK email and directories related to TLS, which are basically… things that allow us to read Web2 stuff inside of Web3, like importing Web2 trust anchors into Web3. I think that gives us more options about how to create more security for the average user, but at the same time, actually yes, still have more autonomy because you're going to be able to put together different combinations of these things that are not controlled by a single actor.
Shawai Wang: I think it is decentralized social media. I mean, right now I think the community is pretty centralized in some areas. At the same time, like the Asian community, you know, there are some barriers between communities. Then I think it would be better to have a decentralized platform first, so that people in the Eastern community can be more connected with the world and empowered at the same time. I think Asia, the West and Europe, these three regions should interact and integrate more creatively.
Ok, thank you very much. I think that's all our time, but thank you Vitalik, thank you Shawai. Keep building.
BUTERIN: Okay, thank you everyone.
Shawai Wang: Thank you everyone.
About ETHTaipei
ETHTaipei is a community-driven event born out of the vision of connecting the Taiwanese/Asian blockchain community with the world’s top teams for in-depth technical exchanges. Over the past two years, ETHTaipei has attracted more than 2,000 participants, demonstrating its rapidly growing influence and determination to advance the Ethereum ecosystem.
Event time: 2025/4/1 (Tuesday) ~ 2025/4/2 (Wednesday)
Location: Nangang Bottle Cap Factory
Purchase tickets and complete event information: https://ethtaipei.org/
Community information: https://x.com/ethtaipei
