On September 22, ETHShanghai 2026, co-hosted by ETHPanda, PANews, and The Excited Few, officially kicked off in Shanghai. The event received special support from GCC, Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, LXDAO, ETH HK Hub, Web3Buidler.Tech, SigMarket, and Nantang DAO.
This year's conference, themed "The Renaissance of Ethereum," brought together developers, builders, and thinkers to revisit the direction of technological evolution through the lens of crypto's history and original ideals, extending discussions into AI, open-source collaboration, public goods, cryptography, and the future of networks.
In an online speech centered on EIP-8288, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that Ethereum is exploring the introduction of a recursive STARK mempool mechanism to ease the tension between quantum security, privacy protection, and network scalability. Currently, quantum-resistant signature verification could cost 100,000 to 300,000 gas; transactions involving privacy proofs could consume hundreds of thousands or even millions of gas. As quantum-resistant signatures and privacy technologies see broader adoption, the on-chain verification burden may grow further.
The core idea of the proposal is to separate signature and proof verification from on-chain execution. Mempool nodes would collect and aggregate relevant cryptographic objects before transactions are packaged into blocks, ultimately generating a unified proof to be verified by the Ethereum main chain. Users would still need to submit transactions along with their signatures and proofs, but the main chain would no longer need to process every complex object individually, thereby reducing on-chain data and verification overhead. Vitalik views this as a specialized computation scaling solution for signature and proof verification, offloading part of the computation to network nodes for parallel processing to ease the burden on the main chain.
This mechanism is expected to bring cost optimizations for quantum-resistant transactions, privacy transactions, and Layer 2 state proof submissions. Vitalik said that as proof verification costs decline, Layer 2 solutions may submit proofs to Ethereum more frequently, potentially shortening intervals from minutes to every minute or even less. Additionally, developers could offload some high-cost computations to clients and submit the resulting proofs on-chain for verification, expanding Ethereum's support for different computing architectures and external applications.
Vitalik believes this direction reflects Ethereum's architectural evolution from general-purpose computing toward specialized, modular computing, and mentioned that new instruction sets like RISC-V could gain more application space. Currently, the relevant mechanisms are still in the proposal, simulation, and testing stages.
Dr. Xiao Feng, Vice Chairman of Wanxiang Holdings and Chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain, said that supporting Ethereum back then was not purely an investment judgment, but an endorsement of its vision of using blockchain as a new type of accounting system to enable third parties to build all kinds of applications. He believes Ethereum's original intent was to build application-oriented infrastructure, and while there are aspects worth reflecting on in its development, its long-term value still deserves attention. Ethereum doesn't need a renaissance, he argued—as a blockchain infrastructure with a high market share, it still has an important application foundation. The ultimate fate of all infrastructure is to be forgotten. The deeper infrastructure goes, the less users and application developers need to be directly aware of its existence.
Regarding the development of the Ethereum Foundation, Xiao Feng said the Foundation's idealistic character is commendable, but its ultimate goal should be to gradually decentralize its own role until the Foundation is no longer needed. He noted that this year, more organizations independent of the Foundation have emerged in the Ethereum ecosystem, which is an important sign of Ethereum's maturation. One of Ethereum's key growth areas in the future lies in further expanding into important markets such as the United States and China.
Speaking on Hong Kong's role in this crypto cycle, Xiao Feng said Hong Kong has the advantages of a common law system and its status as an international financial center, giving it a certain "testing ground" role for the Chinese mainland to explore practices in digital assets, stablecoins, and blockchain, accumulating experience for future policy research. But for Hong Kong itself, developing related industries is not merely an experiment—it is an important part of maintaining and enhancing its status as an international financial center. He also emphasized that Hong Kong's level of regulatory prudence is related to the size of its financial market and risk tolerance. Compared to the United States, markets like Hong Kong, Singapore, and the EU tend to be more cautious with financial innovation, because risks in a single project could have a more pronounced impact on a smaller local financial system.
On the convergence of crypto and AI, Xiao Feng said the two are two sides of the same coin and will further integrate. He noted that payment tools for AI applications will involve digital currencies such as stablecoins, especially "digital twin" currencies tokenized from real-world money. As AI applications and intelligent agents develop, tokenized currencies are expected to become important tools for their transactions and payments. Meanwhile, the AI industry chain faces risks such as fluctuations in chip, electricity, and computing power prices, requiring corresponding financial instruments for management. CME Group plans to launch computing power index futures in October this year, and as the AI industry grows, price risk management for foundational resources like computing power will become an important application direction for financial derivatives markets, including tokenized perpetual contracts.
Xiao Feng concluded by noting that AI infrastructure development requires massive financing, potentially involving trillions of dollars or more in the future. Existing capital market structures alone may not fully meet this demand. Therefore, the United States is exploring ways to further connect global capital, investors, and liquidity through financial asset tokenization and round-the-clock trading. He believes that building a more globally integrated capital market supporting 24/7 trading would help meet the massive financing needs of AI infrastructure development.
In a panel discussion titled "What Are We Losing?", several crypto OGs explored topics ranging from looking inward at changes in original ideals to looking outward at the impact of AI.
Cancer, a partner at Waterdrop Capital, said that among the founders of early blockchain projects, there was no shortage of excellent software architects, but technical ability doesn't necessarily mean adherence to decentralization principles. Citing EOS founder BM as an example, she said BM made too many compromises in practice, causing some designs to deviate from the original vision of decentralization. However, many ideas eventually came to fruition thanks to the continued participation and efforts of community developers. On industry development, she noted that it's not easy for Ethereum to replicate the rapid growth of early projects today. It's crucial for young people to choose fast-growing industries, and the crypto industry has already passed its early high-growth phase. She believes Ethereum's exploration of bringing democratic mechanisms on-chain still embodies the industry's unique significance, but Ethereum's tight coupling with finance also makes it easy for outsiders to view it as a "big casino."
Zhang Yuanjie, co-founder of Conflux, said the appeal of blockchain lies in providing open financial infrastructure that gives people of different backgrounds, education levels, and abilities a chance to participate. The early crypto industry was highly inclusive—while still following market competition mechanisms, it also incubated important innovations like stablecoins and DeFi, offering new options for people underserved by traditional financial services.
Zhang Yuanjie recalled that around 2018, the barrier to entry for crypto startups was relatively low—a small team could attempt innovation and quickly ship products. Compared to many traditional industries, crypto entrepreneurship once offered small teams greater room for trial and error. But as the industry gradually integrated with traditional finance, costs for technology R&D, capital investment, team management, and compliance kept rising, and the barrier to entry rose accordingly. The startup environment has changed significantly, and the early model of launching projects quickly with a small team is hard to replicate. At the same time, emerging technologies like AI have brought new directional choices for entrepreneurs. Facing industry changes, entrepreneurs need to re-examine their own capabilities, interests, and market demand. Still, in Zhang Yuanjie's view, compared to many fields, the crypto industry retains a certain openness, offering entrepreneurs opportunities to explore and participate.
Sun Ming, General Counsel at Fenbushi Capital, discussed the compliance process of the crypto industry from the perspective of law and financial systems. He believes the crypto industry is exploring a new generation of financial development models, and as the industry evolves, the regulatory environment is also changing—from an early relatively ambiguous state toward clearer administrative norms and institutional exploration.
Sun Ming noted that the U.S. SEC's approval of crypto-related financial products reflects regulators beginning to respond to emerging assets and trading models through existing financial frameworks. However, regulatory recognition does not mean all crypto businesses receive the same level of acceptance—specific projects still need to be assessed based on their asset attributes, issuance methods, and business models. In his view, compliance is an unavoidable issue in the crypto industry's development.
In an AI-themed panel, Heyang Zhou, co-founder of AFK AI, Lauging, Asia-Pacific business lead at Kite AI, and Ian Xu, co-founder of OpenBui, discussed measuring and incentivizing open-source contributions, collaboration models between commercial companies and open-source communities, and the convergence of AI and blockchain. In their view, quantifying and incentivizing open-source contributions still lacks an effective solution—simply calculating points based on code commits or article publications is hard to sustain. By contrast, shared values and common goals within a community are important factors for retaining long-term contributors.
Regarding AI open source, they believe it's difficult for ordinary developers to directly participate in core areas like model training, but toolchains, documentation, and ecosystem applications offer more room for involvement. Although they attempted to use blockchain to record different contributors' contributions to specific tasks, in practice it was difficult to accurately determine which contribution led to the final outcome, so they ultimately adjusted their exploration direction.
On developer migration trends, the three guests noted that some developers have been shifting from Web3 to AI in recent years. Ye said there is still room for combining AI and blockchain, especially for privacy protection needs of institutions like hospitals, and for application ecosystems built around open-source models.
On the integration of AI and blockchain payments, they pointed out that in the future, intelligent agents may generate high-frequency, small-amount API calls and service payment needs. Blockchain and smart contracts can provide fine-grained constraints on agents' fund usage by setting call permissions, per-transaction spending limits, and total budgets, offering an exploratory direction for related payment scenarios.
In a panel titled "Cryptography Sanctuary," Guo Yu, founder of Amber Labs, said that cypherpunk is a way of life for the future digital world—its core is not easily surrendering personal information and rights while retaining the freedom to choose. Cypherpunks not only emphasize self-protection but also empower more people to protect themselves by inventing and promoting cryptographic protocols and tools. He noted that the cryptography wars are not truly over, and as software becomes increasingly open-source, security and privacy issues arising from hardware centralization and on-chain transactions still deserve attention.
Xavier, co-founder of Primus Labs, said privacy protection is a capability that many Web2 systems have yet to fully achieve and is an important safeguard for individuals' rights in the digital world. He believes cryptography is a relatively pure technology, but security is a complex systemic issue that cannot rely solely on cryptographic algorithms—it requires combining with specific application environments like blockchain to clarify the scope and boundaries of the technology. Once cryptographic algorithms have security vulnerabilities, they also need timely upgrades and iterations. Additionally, challenges remain between cypherpunk ideals and commercialization, with projects like Zcash continuing to explore application scenarios for privacy technology.
Petri, a fully homomorphic encryption enthusiast, discussed the boundaries of technology and power, emphasizing that in technological development, the balance between individual rights and public authority should be valued, and cryptographic protection mechanisms should not be weakened through backdoors or similar means.
In a panel discussion on future applications, Gus, Chairman of Starlink AI, pointed out that the main application scenarios of the space economy are still concentrated in communications and computing power, while satellite remote sensing can provide real-world data support for financial institutions and prediction markets. In the future, as satellites and related infrastructure develop, how to integrate distributed satellite resources and build open collaborative networks will also be a direction worth exploring. Among these, communications is an important application direction for the space economy. Satellite communications are expected to provide connectivity for areas with insufficient ground base station coverage and weak network infrastructure, further supporting internet services, AI applications, and digital payments. He believes the future development of the space economy should not be limited to replicating the satellite deployment models of large corporations, but can also explore connecting distributed resources through multi-party collaboration to form a more open and autonomous space infrastructure network.
On stablecoin applications, Shawn Pang, CEO of All Scale, shared his experience serving overseas creator economy companies. These companies have hired large numbers of content creators in Southeast Asia, Brazil, and other regions for content production and marketing, but cross-border payments involve declaration processes, fund arrival timelines, and local payment infrastructure issues, and opening and using USD accounts in some regions also has high barriers. Stablecoins can provide dollar-denominated and cross-border payment channels for some overseas users. Especially in regions with significant local currency exchange rate fluctuations and limited access to USD, demand for stablecoins comes not only from crypto asset trading but also from business operations and daily payments. In the future, with the development of programmable payments, stablecoins may also be applied to machine payments and new digital economy scenarios.
Miles, founder of Sigmarket, pointed out that prediction markets have strong hedging functions. An important difference between prediction markets and traditional gambling lies in whether the trading subject has a direct connection to the real world and real-world spillover effects. At the same time, prediction markets also have derivative attributes—predictions formed around real-world events such as politics, war, and economics may connect with risk management and financial markets. Additionally, the project is using AI to uncover potential causal relationships between different events, which could bring new differentiation directions for prediction markets.
In the final digital nomad community panel, builders from Nantang DAO, The Mu, GCC, Xiangjian DAO, and 706 Youth Community discussed the long-term development of public goods, charitable donations, and social innovation projects. They noted that community development requires not only technical and commercial resources but also humanistic values and trust-based connections among members. At the same time, promoting the long-term development of related projects requires attention to resource allocation, project selection, execution efficiency, and long-term value—short-term returns or phased metrics alone cannot serve as the sole measuring stick.