With an uninhibited tone and far from appearing formal, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, went up to the main stage of Devconnect in Buenos Aires with a strong message: the network today processes 50% more transactions than at the beginning of the year.
This was stated before a room full of developers, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. CriptoNoticias is present at the event and was able to witness first-hand how Buterin broke down the technical advances that are redefining the future of the protocol.
From the beginning of his talk, the thinker sought to put the evolution of the network into perspective and contrast it with past mistakes in the ecosystem. He recalled the collapses of FTX and Mt. Gox to illustrate why transparency and verifiability are essential.
“FTX I think is a perfect example of what you do if you take the principles of Ethereum and then literally rotate them 180 degrees,” stated before the audience, underscoring the value of decentralization as an antidote to abuses of trust.
For the co-founder of Ethereum, while the project’s network is designed to maximize trust through verifiable and open systems, FTX operated as a structure that was impossible to audit and sustained by the blind faith of its users. “People deposited huge amounts of money and there was no way to verify if FTX was solvent or not,” the developer said.
In this way, the cryptocurrency specialist suggested that this total absence of transparency was precisely what opened the doors to a fraud that, as CriptoNoticias reported, ended up becoming one of the biggest collapses in ecosystem history.
This reminder, according to the technologist, works to put into perspective why cryptography and transparency are not technical details, but essential guarantees to prevent errors from being repeated.
The technical pillars that drive Ethereum
Buterin took advantage of Devconnect to review the fundamentals of Ethereum as a “world computer, an open global ecosystem resistant to censorship,” recalling that the network processes around 2 million transactions daily.
“The gas limit, which is a measure of how many transactions Ethereum can process, has already gone up 50% this year, so the network can process 50% more transactions today than it did at the beginning of the year,” he explained.
He also pointed out that a quarter of nodes are voting to expand the gas limit to 60 millionwhich would free up even more capacity.
We can call it global, cosmopolitan or use any other similar word, but the idea is the same: Ethereum was born to have a real impact on the world. Let’s then think of Ethereum as the ‘world computer’. An open, accessible, and censorship-resistant platform designed so anyone can build truly decentralized applications.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
The gas limit is, in simple terms, the ceiling that defines how many operations Ethereum can process in each block. Each transaction consumes a certain amount of “gas”, which is the unit that measures the computational work required to execute it.
In addition to the current state of the network, Buterin dedicated part of his speech to the advances planned for 2025 and 2026, especially in terms of scalability and cost reduction to operate a full node.
He explained that zero-knowledge proofs will allow more and more users to verify blocks without the need for expensive hardware, bringing the possibility of running lightweight nodes from common devices closer. “We could reduce the computing needs of a node to close to zero,” he said.
Ethereum leader too highlighted key advances such as block tiered access lists. Essentially, instead of each node reviewing every transaction in an entire block—which is time-consuming and resource-intensive—it will include an organized list of accesses and state changes divided into sections or “tiers” based on the accounts or contracts affected.
In turn, he mentioned the Lean Ethereum project, aimed at simplifying, securing and deeply optimizing the protocol for the next decade. Its objectives include quantum resistance and greater efficiency in the consensus mechanism.
Argentina’s role in the global ecosystem
The developer also dedicated a portion of his presentation to celebrating the growth of the local community and the role that Argentina is playing in technological adoption and experimentation in the region. He pointed out that Buenos Aires consolidated itself as one of the most active centers of programmers, entrepreneurs and Web3 projectsdriven by a culture that embraces innovation even in challenging economic contexts.
According to the co-founder of Ethereum, the country brings together a rare combination of technical talent, creativity and resilience that makes it “a unique opportunity” for Latin America to project itself as a global benchmark in decentralized infrastructure.
In his final message, the specialist called for teams, companies and developers to prioritize interoperability and collaboration over commercial competition. “The value of Ethereum does not depend on a single project, but on thousands building in the same direction,” he remarked, making it clear that the future of the network is sustained by open cooperation and collective effort.