At the Hyatt on the Bund in Shanghai, an industry event spanning eleven years is quietly documenting the transformation of blockchain technology from a geek ideal to industrial application.
The 11th Global Blockchain Summit grandly opened at the Hyatt on the Bund in Shanghai. This year’s summit, themed “Web3, Without Boundaries,” brought together representatives from global regulatory agencies, industry leaders, and innovative forces.
In his opening speech, Wanxiang Blockchain Chairman Xiao Feng pointed out that the main thread of blockchain technology development has shifted from early technical exploration and grassroots innovation to large-scale application implementation and standardized development.
I. Return and Inheritance: Eleven Years of Blockchain Journey
The venue of this summit, the Hyatt on the Bund in Shanghai, was also the starting point of the first Global Blockchain Summit eleven years ago. This arrangement not only symbolizes the return and inheritance of industry development, but also witnesses the journey of blockchain technology from conceptual sprout to ecological prosperity.
Since its first event in 2015, Wanxiang Blockchain Lab has met with the global industry in Shanghai every autumn, continuously promoting innovative breakthroughs and industrial implementation of blockchain technology.
After eleven years of trials and tribulations, the Global Blockchain Summit has become a top event in the global blockchain field, gathering top thought leaders from technology, finance, academia, and other sectors.
II. Technological Breakthroughs: ZK and FHE Lead a Cost Revolution
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech at the summit, systematically reviewing the development of blockchain and cryptographic technologies over the past decade.
● He focused on explaining how key technologies such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) have matured from theory to practice, driving the industry into a new stage of scalability, low cost, and developer-friendliness.
● Vitalik revealed a key technological breakthrough in his speech: using only about 50 GPUs, it is now possible to prove almost all Ethereum blocks in real time, whereas two years ago, this was thought to require five or ten years to achieve.
● He stated that with the development of ZK technology, the ability to use ZK to verify all Ethereum mainnet blocks in a short time, which was thought to require 5-10 more years two years ago, has already been achieved with dozens of GPUs.
● Looking ahead, Vitalik put forward a thought-provoking viewpoint: in five years, many people’s attitude toward blockchain ZK technology will shift from “Why do we need ZK?” to “Why not add ZK?”.
III. Application Prospects: Infinite Possibilities from Finance to IoT
● Xiao Feng emphasized that blockchain will gradually grow into a new type of global financial system infrastructure. He pointed out that as blockchain deeply integrates with real-world scenarios, users, and needs, it will inevitably be constrained by social rules, which is an important sign of its maturity.
● Vitalik looked forward to the application prospects of ZK technology in privacy protection. He mentioned that this year we can have a project slogan, to consider all aspects of Ethereum privacy, including on-chain transaction privacy, off-chain transaction privacy, and various applications.
● He also particularly emphasized the importance of hardware security, proposing a new security concept: “Not your silicon, not your private key.”
He believes that everything done in blockchain relies on cryptography, cryptography relies on private keys, algorithms need to run in hardware, and need to be stored in hardware. If you cannot trust your hardware, you cannot trust anything that happens on the hardware.
IV. Shanghai: A Hotbed for Blockchain Development
As a highland of China’s blockchain industry, Shanghai has continuously promoted blockchain technology innovation and industrial implementation in recent years.
● Jing’an District, as the core area of Shanghai’s blockchain industry, currently gathers nearly 190 blockchain enterprises, ranking first in the city.
● Among them, “Shutong Chain Valley” has nearly 170 blockchain enterprises, with the number of enterprises increasing by more than 300% within a year.
● In 2024, enterprises with blockchain as their core business achieved revenue of nearly 3 billions, driving the scale of upstream and downstream industries to over 21 billions, and tax revenue exceeding 240 millions.
These figures fully demonstrate Shanghai’s remarkable achievements in building a blockchain industry ecosystem.
V. Web3: A New Ecosystem of Boundless Integration
The theme of this summit, “Web3, Without Boundaries,” deeply echoes the core trend of current industry development—decentralized technology is dissolving the boundaries of the traditional world, building a more open, interconnected, and free new digital world.
● Technological boundlessness is reflected in breaking technological silos and achieving composability and interoperability;
● Financial boundlessness means capital flows are not restricted by geography or time zones, reconstructing the logic of value distribution;
● Collaboration without boundaries is achieved through DAOs and smart contracts, enabling large-scale permissionless collaboration.
Vitalik encouraged developers to actively participate in this wave of change, proposing three paths for involvement: entrepreneurship, to create or support applications using ZK, FHE, blockchain-based ZKID, etc.; underlying cryptographic technology research and optimization; and using existing technology-based applications.
