 It's definitely a very interesting setup here, given it's 2020. So a very good evening to all listeners here, Relipe here in Singapore Expo. My name is Sean Ji, the co-founder of Digix, an asset tokenization platform that was built on Ethereum. We have one of the first few projects that was launched back in 2015 to successfully tokenize physical gold and issue its digital representation on the Ethereum blockchain itself. And I have here with me today, in person, Vitalik Buterin, the founder and chief scientist of Ethereum. So let's kick it off. Vitalik, would you mind giving us and the readers out there, the viewers out there, a very high level distillation of what Ethereum essentially is that goes beyond what we read on mainstream media. What is your vision, mission, and the philosophy behind it? Sure. And thank you very much, Sean, for the introduction. It's definitely good to be here and look forward to seeing more of you in person at some point. And hopefully not too far off, especially now that the vaccines are starting to hit main net, as we say, in the blockchain space. So I guess the way that I think about Ethereum is I think about it as a general purpose blockchain. So if you go back and remember the way that the Ethereum project originally started, it was in this environment where you had Bitcoin and it was the first blockchain except when we did this one thing, which was maintaining this digital currency. And then you would have namecoin, the sub-blockchain project for domain names and colored coins for digital assets. And the core idea behind Ethereum was to basically kind of abstract things out beyond that and to say, well, how about we try to create a version of this technology that is much more general purpose so that you basically need to just build what we need to build the blockchain once. And then once Ethereum exists, you can just go ahead and just build whatever thing, a blockchain-based application you want on top of it. So really try to cut down the costs of just innovation, building any kind of new application and just allow people to build things without having to create an entire blockchain from scratch by themselves. And that's a vision that I think we've seen and seen play out quite well over the last few years. There's a whole bunch of different applications on Ethereum and a lot of different industries. There's things in the financial space. There's ENS, decentralized name system. There's some certificate projects like open certs based in Singapore being used in a few places. And there's people looking into supply chain related things, various kinds of verification, digital assets. This is all happening in this kind of one big ecosystem where all these applications can interact with each other. So I fondly remember from the very first meetup that was done in SMU back in 2015, your former colleagues actually mentioned that Ethereum itself is almost like an iOS and like a phone. And whatever applications is built on top of it is almost like an app store. So you can have access to different applications that's available on there. How do you think that vision has changed over the last few years? And do you see any other competition coming from other protocols that also have their own smart contract functionalities? So I think the core vision is definitely about the same as it has been all along. I think there's definitely a lot of changes in the technology that have happened. So there's a lot of excitement about what we've been calling ETH2 recently and these upgrades to make the consensus much more efficient and waste a lot of electricity and all that around proof of stake. And the new proof of stake chain, the beacon chain actually just launched literally last week. So that's been really exciting for us. Much higher scalability through sharding, so going up from 15 transactions a second all the way up to the thousands and maybe even tens of thousands or more. And then there's also this big other list of technology, zero-knowledge proofs, roll-ups, plasma, multi-sig contracts and this big log list of buzzwords. And I think the core thing that all of these technologies are trying to achieve, which is just allowing people to build these applications that allow large groups of people to interact without everything needing to go through some single trusted intermediary. And it kind of needs to be in control of the entire interaction. That's, I think, been pretty much the same vision all the way through, I think. The work that's been done in the last five years is just everything that's needed in order to take Ethereum from where it was on day one to a system that's actually secure, performant, scalable, private and all of these things enough to actually be able to serve the needs of users on a global scale. I'd like to hold a thought on Eve too and to discuss it further in detail in the later part of this conversation. But with all technologies out there, we're trying to create value for society out there. So I'd like to actually put out a harem idea or rather a case study that we can discuss here today, which is what do you think is the possibility of using the Ethereum blockchain, for example, of tracking the distribution of vaccines, which is something that's been happening around the world, with the UK being obviously the first country in the West to actually issue this out. What do you think of that as a possibility for technology? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a good example of this kind of big category of supply chain use cases in general, which is something that I know a lot of people are really excited about using blockchain and so forth. And basically, just because you have this big ecosystem where things get produced in one place and then there's a lot of different parts that come from different places and they get shipped around the world and you want to actually verify that they're real and there's a lot of different companies and a lot of different countries. And in the case of vaccines for COVID-19 specifically, I guess, I mean, the main challenge is just like, it takes time to build these things and people want to kind of get these vaccines fairly quickly. So the world can get back to normal, but I guess for the future, and I think things like that can definitely happen more, and especially once we have more scalability with some of the technologies I'm talking about and you can actually build systems that are tracking thousands or millions of different packages that are going around the world. But would there be benefits around these kind of providers using a public one over the private blockchain? Is there any differences here? Right now, that's a very good and important question. I guess theoretically, anything that can be done on a public blockchain could just be done on some guy's computer, as long as you actually trust that person to keep running the thing, stay online, not try to exploit all the different participants and not try to make the system break or any of those things. So I think now in the middle of those two extremes, and there's obviously a lot of private blockchains and consortium blockchains and all of those things. And I think the discourse up until recently has been very private chain centric, especially for kind of enterprise and really big scale applications. And I think a big part of what motivated that has been, like one, that public blockchains don't have enough scalability. And two, that public blockchains have privacy issues. And the reality is that in the space, especially over the last couple of years, we've been seeing both of those problems come much closer to getting solved, right? So like I mentioned, like ETH2, sharding and roll-ups and all of these technologies are really pushing the scalability up, which also means that they're pushing transaction fees down. Zero knowledge proofs can get you a lot of the benefits of privacy together with the verifiability and auditing benefits of transparency at the same time. You don't really need public data to move around on chain. You just need encrypted data or hashes of data to move around on chain. And then if people want to prove particular things about what's going on, then I can just prove something to you and I can make a cryptographic proof that points to the hash, but the two of us are the only people that actually need to see a particular piece of data. So I think with one of those technology improvements we've been seeing, I expect we'll see public blockchains start entering the conversation more and more and across a lot of different application areas. Right, speaking of conversations as well, I do think that stable coin as well as central bank digital currencies are definitely a very big topic in the last couple of months of this year. What were your thoughts around the whole idea about mobility of digital assets that will likely improve over this year and next? Yeah, central bank digital currencies are definitely this area that's been moving forward really quickly over the last couple of years. And you can see where the attraction comes from. And I think in general a big part of the kind of conversation around government in the 21st century is just going to be about how they can provide more digital services and even beyond money in a group and seeing the amazing work done in Estonia with electronic ideas and Singapore's own interview government is quite forward thinking and along with some other places. So you can see CBDCs and especially CBDCs then go closer to being a kind of direct to consumer as being a part of that trend. And then there's a lot of potential benefits in terms of just kind of simplifying the macroeconomics and taking out intermediaries and those things. There's also concerns at the same time, like for example, privacy is a big thing that I know that people are worried about. Like one arguments that I hear just in defense of the existing kind of commercial banking system is just that if you have your money going through a commercial bank then if the government needs to see the information then there's some legal process by which they can get it. But at least the fact that there is an intermediary means that you have this kind of actor that's motivated to make some effort to protect the privacy of your information. And so I think figuring out how we can get good levels of privacy to keep working in a world with more CBDCs is going to be a challenge. And then of course there's the question of how these central bank currencies are going to interact with digital current. Well, both crypto and digital currencies more generally. There's going to be more digital assets, I think, of many different kinds that are coming out over the next few decades. And I expect there to be a lot of opportunities to fairly easily exchange between these different kinds of assets and move from one ecosystem to another. So we'll see, it should be interesting. Right, as a user journey perspective, for the benefit of our readers out there can you walk us through what do you think a CBDC will likely impact someone's daily lives? It goes everything from wallet storage to payment rails. What's the kind of user journey that we can expect from a CBDC? I think, first of all, from a consumer side, it really depends a lot on how the CBDC is done because there's many ways to run a CBDC. There's no standards really yet. So is it direct to consumer? Is it more of a back end staying? And the people who have CBDC accounts are kind of companies that have payments licenses and then users still have accounts with those. And if that's the situation, then it just looks kind of much the same way as today except we'll probably just see better payment services because it'll just be easier to set one up and there's more competition. If it's direct to consumer, then just having something that's standardized and uniform has its own benefits too in a lot of ways. So then I guess the challenge is just can we get these digital payment mechanisms to just be more standardized and work more conveniently. And as I mentioned before at the same time, just make sure there's a set of privacy issues that are addressed well. I want to talk a little bit more about the philosophy of the idea between transparency and decentralization. So we are often thought like decentralized societies or decentralized systems are often more transparent. But do you think are there any more categories that are required to set our society on a path to including technology more from a financial inclusion perspective? Yeah, transparency is definitely one of those things that's kind of both very powerful and at the same time. You don't want to treat it as an absolute. You definitely don't want your apartment building, including your bathroom, to be replaced with glass. So one of my really favorite cypherpunk slogans is transparency for the powerful and privacy for the weak. So individuals with their personal lives, that is something that should not just be transparent. It should be something that people have the ability to keep to themselves. But things like these big mechanisms and these big institutions and systems that govern how society operates and transparency there and transparency around what the rules are, transparency to provide a guarantee that the rules actually are being followed correctly and all of those things and they're definitely, I think, very important and powerful ways to just make sure that people have confidence that the system works the way that it's advertised as working. And even within blockchains, we kind of see that, right? There's been a lot of work happening on trying to improve privacy for users in the blockchain, but at the same time that the system as a whole is transparent and that makes sure that it's very easy to verify that only valid transactions are getting into the chain, like nobody's coins are being illegally stolen in some way, that there aren't any protocol changes that are just being thrown into the ecosystem with other participants' consent and all these things. And the way that blockchains protocol and the data structure in the chain itself are transparent is really crucial in making that happen. So I think it's a balance and there's definitely a lot of room for nuanced conversations to be had there. Yeah, so lastly, please indulge us, right? So EVE 2.0 has been one of the bigger hot topic that's happened over the last couple of weeks with the main phase zero launch on 1st of December. Can you tell us a bit more about where do you guys go from here? Like after phase zero, what are you guys looking forward to in phase one or phase two? What was installed here for us? Sure, so phase zero launch to the proof of stake chain, right? So for those who are not familiar, proof of stake is this alternative to a proof of work or mining as the consensus mechanism, a consensus mechanism, basically meaning how the computers in the blockchain agree on which transactions get in and get accepted by the network in what order. So Bitcoin kind of famously does this with mining. And so you have these computers that are just consuming huge amounts of electricity. It's basically solve these mathematical problems basically just as a way of proving that a computer ran for some amount of time and put its computational weight towards supporting a particular block in some sense. And the structure provides some security, but it's also just hugely expensive and it wastes a lot of your electricity. It's like, I think the Bitcoin network takes about the same as either Russia or Switzerland or something like that. And Ethereum from the beginning was also a proof of work system because proof of work was basically all we had at the time. But we've almost from the beginning had this big multi-year effort at coming up with this alternative called proof of stake, which basically removes the need to use these big computers that are just running and solving math problems 24-7 and that increases the efficiency of the chain by a lot. And so the proof of stake chain, kind of what we call the beacon chain, was just launched a week ago. And so now it's not fully integrated with the system yet. The proof of work chain is still running yet. So one of the next steps that we have to be excited about, this thing that we call the merge, is basically like the existing proof of work chain actually being kind of folded into this new proof of stake system. So that's one. And then the other is what we call sharding, which is this big mass of scalability improvements. And basically instead of every computer having to process every transaction, we kind of spread out the work more in parallel and make the thing be able to process a hundred or a thousand times more transactions. So sharding and the merge coming soon. I'm excited. Hope you can be excited too. Just one last point on this, right? So what is one possibility you think that you would see in EVE 2.0 versus 1.0? One possibility? Yeah, one benefit, possibility and stuff. I think scalability is the big thing, right? And I think people still don't appreciate the extent to which scalability is everything because there's a lot of these different ideas that people have for blockchain applications and whether it's acrylic certifications or supply chain things or domain name systems or even just getting every user on board to the payment side. And right now, these things are not really practical beyond a fairly small user base just because there is not enough transaction space and transaction fees are high. But if the space, the number of transactions the chain and get process goes up by a factor of a thousand then it's basic supply and demand economics, there's more space and so transaction fees go down and then it just gets much cheaper to build and use things on the public blockchain and that just unlocks a huge wave of new possibilities. Sure, all right. Thank you very much for having asked this evening, Singapore Fintech Festival as well as Block Show. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's been good to be here.