ETHTaipei | Exclusive Interview with Vitalik: Possibility of Increased Value and Modular Blockchain with EigenLayer After Cancun Upgrade
ETHTaipei, held in Taipei’s Nangang Bottle Cap Factory on 3/21, featured an interview with Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, conducted by ChainNews. Buterin shared his views on recent hot topics in Ethereum, including the London upgrade, modular blockchains, and the restaking trend in EigenLayer.
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What changes does the London upgrade bring?
Blobs reduce L2 costs, but they may still become expensive
Is modular blockchain valuable for Ethereum?
Thoughts on the restaking protocol EigenLayer? Taking a wait-and-see approach
The purpose of the London upgrade is to significantly increase Ethereum’s scalability, enabling L2 (especially Rollups) to greatly reduce transaction fees paid to L1 Ethereum. To achieve this, a separate data space called “blobs” is created in each block. These data cannot be accessed by the EVM, which is important because it means clients verifying Ethereum blocks do not need to acquire this data simultaneously. However, Ethereum guarantees the accessibility and security of this data, which is highly useful for L2 projects such as Rollups.
In the past few weeks, we have seen a significant decrease in L2 fees, indicating the effectiveness of the London upgrade. However, Buterin emphasized that L2 fees may still become expensive as more people use blobs, and he hopes the number of blobs supported by Ethereum can continue to increase in the coming years. Overall, he believes the London upgrade is quite impactful, but currently, with 3 blobs per block and an average usage of only 1 blob, the fees are still cheap. However, the total usage will eventually increase.
Regarding the attempts of many new projects to provide modular blockchains, Buterin expressed his opinion. He believes this direction is contrary to where Ethereum is heading, which is towards a future of “non-individual blockchains” where different elements of a blockchain are completed by different parts. As for the future of the Ethereum ecosystem, he mentioned the concept of shared sequencing proposed by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake. This design can bring “unity” to Ethereum L2, allowing a better integration of Ethereum L1 and L2.
Buterin hopes that by 2024, there will be 10 L2s reaching Stage 1, which means L1 can handle more valuable tasks while leaving the remaining tasks to L2, which is also valuable.
Restaking is interesting to Buterin because it can indeed free up staked ETH and allow it to be used in other applications, which is something Ethereum does not currently provide. However, this action comes with risks as staked ETH can be taken by centralized actors. Anyone can accept someone else’s ETH, restake it, issue a token, and then ask everyone to restake again. This is not the world we expect to see. Additionally, incorrect restaking behavior may pose systematic risks to verification nodes. While some projects are researching and attempting restaking, Buterin remains in the observation stage for now.
EigenLayer is a decentralized exchange platform that provides a restaking protocol. ETHTaipei is an event held in Taipei. Vitalik Buterin is one of the co-founders of Ethereum. The London upgrade is an upgrade to the Ethereum network. Modular blockchains refer to the concept of dividing a blockchain into different modules. 
Further reading:
EigenLayer Mainnet Preview: Operator Registration and EigenDA Launch
DEX Platform Vega Launches EigenLayer Derivatives Market: More Tokenized Trading Products to be Listed
