Title: "Blockchain Tech Predictions for 2024, From Experts at Ripple, Coinbase, a16z, Starknet"

Author: Bradley Keoun

Translation: Luccy, Sharon, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

Bradley Keoun is the technical and protocol editor-in-chief of CoinDesk, responsible for overseeing a team of journalists reporting on blockchain technology and previously managing a global cryptocurrency market team. Bradley has summarized predictions for the development of the blockchain field in 2024 from 10 experts including Ripple, Coinbase, a16z, Starknet, and others. The article is included in CoinDesk's "Crypto 2024" prediction article series and the latest issue of "The Protocol," translated by BlockBeats as follows:

Many blockchain developers may feel that they are at the peak of building the future financial and commercial infrastructure, which is almost a revolution. Based on what we have seen and reported, they are not wrong. Or at least it can be said that the pace of innovation and new developments in the blockchain field rarely slows down, except for those moments that seem very similar.

The downturn in the crypto market this year has not brought much respite, with continuous announcements, product launches, integrations, partnerships, collaborations, fundraising, deployments, migrations, and other news. There are many changes and information, which are quite technical and complex, and the difficulty of catching up may be significant, while staying in sync is equally unimaginable. Imagine playing a game of "focus" with individual asteroids while crossing a dense asteroid belt. Pattern recognition may be your only hope.

Experts widely foresee some key trends in 2023, but there are also many that were not predicted. To be honest, no one really knows where all of this will lead. We have selected 10 predictions from blockchain technology experts for 2024. These predictions are as reliable as any other, and are equally high in technical content.

Interoperability of Blockchain

David Schwartz, Chief Technology Officer of Ripple Labs: "By 2024 and beyond, the progress of blockchain interoperability protocols will cause a major shift, breaking the existing isolation between different blockchains. This shift will enable various blockchain platforms to achieve seamless interaction through shared data and value transfer, creating a unified and more efficient blockchain ecosystem. In this transformation, the role of interoperability protocols will be crucial as they will foster innovation and drive new applications and use cases in the DeFi field."

Bitcoin Transaction Fees

David Duong, Institutional Research Director at Coinbase: "Considering the reduction in miner fixed block rewards, we believe that increasing variable block rewards, i.e., rewards from transaction fees, will become increasingly important. The core Bitcoin protocol has largely been in a stable state, with the only major protocol upgrade in the past five years being the Taproot upgrade in November 2021, at least in terms of changes requiring a soft fork. Therefore, we believe that catalysts for technical innovation will arise within the existing network protocol framework, such as increased use of blob data (such as Ordinals and Atomics) and the emergence of general smart contract environments on the Bitcoin network, like Rootstock, Stacks, RGB, or BitVM."

Modularity

Abdelhamid Bakhta, Chief and Core Ethereum Developer of the Starknet ecosystem: "We have also seen the consolidation of modular theory and the entry of more and more hybrid solutions into the market in this area, such as using Celestia as an Ethereum rollup's data availability layer. At the same time, we see blockchains like Solana continuing to move forward in their single-layer direction and rejecting L2, as they believe L2 is detrimental to liquidity and user experience. Observing the evolution of these two narratives in 2024 will be interesting, especially in cases where some Ethereum rollups explore the use of the Solana virtual machine."

Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Sam Ragsdale, Investment Engineer at a16z: "SNARKs allow the calculation of 'cryptographic receipts' for a certain amount of computational work in an unforgeable manner, provided by untrusted 'provers.' The cost of computing such a receipt was 10^9 times the original computation in the past; recent advances are reducing this number to 10^6. Therefore, SNARKs will become feasible when the initial computation provider can bear a 10^6-fold expense, and the client cannot re-execute or store the initial data. This will lead to many use cases: edge devices in the Internet of Things can verify upgrades. Media editing software can embed the authenticity of content and transform data; and remixed emojis may pay homage to the original source. LLM reasoning can include authenticity information. We can have self-verifying IRS forms, unfalsifiable bank audits, and many more consumer-beneficial applications."

Key Management / User Interface

Friederike Ernst, Co-founder of Gnosis and Gnosis Pay: "The emergence of account abstraction means that we will soon overcome the technical challenges of self-custody. 2024 will be the year when the idea of securing assets with a set of 12 words that can never be lost but can never be accessed by others becomes a historical practice for most people. This idea has become outdated and has largely hindered the actual user adoption. Therefore, blockchain is expected to achieve the inclusive financial promise that has been our core value from the beginning."

Regulatory Framework

Ryan Selkis, Founder and CEO of Messari: "Centralization concerns can basically be attributed to two core issues: whether a certain direction of centralization leads to network performance problems, posing a risk of application interruption; and whether centralization will create regulatory challenges. The separation of block building, relaying, and validation in Ethereum at three different levels has clearly separated regulatory challenges in the Ethereum transaction processing stack, which has become an interesting thing. After the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash addresses last summer, major Ethereum relays began to review transactions. This issue was only mitigated after Flashbots opened its market-leading relays and allowed permissionless relays like Ultra Sound, Agnostic, and bloXroute to become more competitive. Today, block builders are increasingly reviewing transactions. I expect some of the most significant breakthroughs in 2024 to occur in areas such as memory pool encryption, which can protect transactions from potential influences of potential reviewers before they are included in a block."

Security / Privacy

Ramani Ramachandran, CEO of Router Protocol: "In 2023, there were a large number of hacks and frauds in the crypto space, including Euler Finance and Angle Protocol. We will see more security solutions being formulated for blockchain protocols and a greater emphasis on privacy."

Enterprise Encryption

Agoric OpCo Partner Project Director Vanessa Pestritto (Agoric OpCo is a JavaScript-native smart contract platform and proof-of-stake blockchain): "Networks and development platforms should be ready to embrace builders from enterprises, startups, and independent developers. Protocol teams should be prepared to provide user experiences that can be used in the digital experiences of millions of end users. Larger companies are moving beyond treating crypto as an asset class and are seeing it as a product and tool for user engagement. The crypto industry needs to expand its influence and introduce the next wave of on-chain activities."

L2 Liquidity

CCData, a digital asset data and analytics company (formerly known as CryptoCompare), in its Outlook Report: "Mid-year, activity on L2 chains was relatively subdued, with most liquidity still confined to the Ethereum mainnet. As a result, DeFi protocols residing on L2 chains experienced a loss of liquidity for most of the time. However, as gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet rise with increased activity, a portion of new funds will flow to L2 chains next year, making them their new home."

(Simultaneous or Sequential) L2 Integration

Mathew Sigel, Director of Digital Asset Research at VanEck: "Ethereum will implement EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), which will reduce transaction fees on L2 chains (such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc.) and improve scalability. Within a year of the upgrade, Ethereum's L2 will integrate into two to three dominant participants in terms of value and usage."

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