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

Original Author: Bradley Keoun

Translated by: Luccy, Sharon, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

Bradley Keoun is the Technical and Protocol Editor at CoinDesk, responsible for overseeing a team of reporters covering blockchain technology and managing the global cryptocurrency market team. Bradley summarized the predictions for the development of the blockchain industry in 2024 from 10 experts, including Ripple, Coinbase, a16z, and Starknet. The article is included in the CoinDesk "Crypto 2024" prediction article series and the latest issue of "The Protocol". BlockBeats has translated the original article as follows:

Many blockchain developers may feel that they are at the forefront 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 innovation speed and new development speed in the blockchain field rarely stops, except for those moments that look very similar.

This year's cryptocurrency market downturn has not brought much relief to people. There are constantly announcements, product launches, integrations, partnerships, collaborations, fundraising, deployments, migrations, transitions, and other news. Many of these changes and information are quite technical and complex, and the difficulty of catching up may be great, while keeping in sync is equally unimaginable. Imagine going through a dense asteroid belt while playing a game of "focus" with individual asteroids. Pattern recognition may be your only hope.

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

Interoperability of Blockchain

Ripple CTO David Schwartz: "By 2024 and beyond, the progress of blockchain interoperability protocols will cause a major shift, breaking down existing silos between different blockchains. This shift will enable various blockchain platforms to seamlessly interact 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 facilitate innovation while driving new applications and use cases in the DeFi space."

Bitcoin Transaction Fees

Coinbase Institutional Research Director David Duong: "Considering the reduction of fixed block rewards for miners, we believe that increasing variable block rewards, namely rewards from transaction fees, will become increasingly important. The core Bitcoin protocol is largely stable, 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 using catalysts to generate technological innovation, primarily within the framework of existing network protocols, such as increasing the use of blob data (such as Ordinals and Atomics) and building L2 on the Bitcoin network (such as the Lightning Network), or generating technological innovation in general smart contract environments such as future implementations of Rootstock, Stacks, RGB, or BitVM, will be important."

Modularization

Abdelhamid Bakhta, the chief and core Ethereum developer of the Starknet ecosystem: "We also see the consolidation of modular theory and more and more hybrid solutions entering the market in this field, such as Ethereum rollups with Celestia as the data availability layer. At the same time, we see blockchains like Solana continuing to move forward in their single-layer direction and refusing to adopt L2 because they believe L2 is harmful 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 Proof

a16z Investment Engineer Sam Ragsdale: "SNARKs allow for the calculation of an 'encrypted receipt' for a certain amount of computational work in an unforgeable way, provided by an untrusted 'prover'. In the past, the cost of computing such a receipt was 10^9 times the original computation; recent advances are reducing this number to 10^6. Therefore, SNARKs become feasible in situations where the initial computation provider can afford a 10^6-fold expense, and the client cannot re-execute or store the initial data. There are many use cases for this: edge devices in the Internet of Things can verify upgrades. Media editing software can embed authenticity and conversion data; and remixed emoticons may pay tribute to the original source. LLM reasoning can include authenticity information. We can have self-verified IRS forms, unforgeable bank audits, and many more consumer-friendly applications."

Key Management/User Interface

Gnosis and Gnosis Pay co-founder Friederike Ernst: "The emergence of account abstraction means that we will soon be able to overcome the technical challenges of self-custody. 2024 will be the year when the use of mnemonics becomes a historical practice for most people. The idea of defining asset security as having a set of 12 words that will never be lost but will never be accessible to others is outdated and has largely hindered the progress of actual user adoption. Therefore, blockchain is expected to fulfill the inclusive financial promise that has been our core value from the beginning."

Review System

Messari Founder and CEO Ryan Selkis: "Centralization concerns can basically be attributed to two core issues: whether a certain direction of centralization leads to network performance issues, putting applications at risk of interruption; and whether centralization will create censorship challenges. The separation of block construction, relay, and verification in Ethereum makes it interestingly clear in three different levels of Ethereum transaction processing stacks to separate censorship challenges. After the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash addresses last summer, major Ethereum relays began to review transactions. This problem can only be alleviated when Flashbots open sources its market-leading relays and allows unlicensed 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 areas such as memory pool encryption to occur in 2024, which can protect transactions from potential censorship by including them in a block before they are affected by potential censorship parties."

Security/Privacy

Router Protocol CEO Ramani Ramachandran: "In 2023, there were a lot of hacking and fraud incidents in the encryption industry, including Euler Finance and Angle Protocol. We will see more secure solutions being developed 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): "Network and development platforms should be ready to embrace builders from both enterprises and startups, as well as independent developers. Network protocol teams should be prepared to provide user experiences that can be used in local digital experiences for millions of end users. Larger companies are surpassing the use of cryptocurrency as an asset class and are seeing it as a product and tool for user engagement. The cryptocurrency industry needs to expand its influence and introduce the next wave of on-chain activities."

L2 Liquidity

CCData Outlook Report: "During the mid-year, activity on L2 chains was relatively quiet, with most liquidity still limited to the Ethereum mainnet. As a result, DeFi protocols residing on L2 chains saw a loss of liquidity for most of the time. However, as gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet continue to rise with increased activity, some new funds will flow to L2 chains next year and become their new home."

(Alternating or Simultaneous) L2 Integration

VanEck's Director of Digital Asset Research, Mathew Sigel: "Ethereum will implement EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), which will reduce transaction fees for 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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