Vitalik and Asia & Ethereum's Future | Fireside Chat between Dr. Xiao and Vitalik

Photo Credit: Wanxiang Blockchain

On the afternoon of April 9, 2025, Dr. Feng Xiao, Chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain and Chairman & CEO of HashKey Group, had a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, at the main stage of the 2025 Web3 Festival.

The conversation marks the 10th anniversary of the two’s first encounter in China. Some of this information may be shared with the public for the first time. What will Ethereum be like in 10 more years?

The chat was conducted in Chinese, and the translation is provided by ChatGPT with some edits. The original Chinese transcript is compiled by Wanxiang Blockchain.

Conversation can be broken down into six sections:

I. First time to China and learning to speak Chinese

II. Vitalik’s expectation of the Chinese developer community

III. When will we see blockchain’s app moment?

IV. The way for Ethereum L1 to capture the value created by L2s

V. Centralized vs. Decentralized

VI. Will Vitalik consider setting up the Foundation’s Hong Kong Office?

Part I – First time to China and learning to speak Chinese

Xiao Feng: Thank you, everyone! I want to start by sharing a little secret: 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of when I first met Vitalik. We first met in Shanghai in 2015. Sitting here now, having a conversation with him, I feel very emotional. Of course, some of these feelings involve personal matters, so I won’t go into them in this public setting.

I did a quick calculation — Vitalik lived in Shanghai for about three months. I’m especially curious: what impressions do you have of China, of Shanghai, of the Ethereum community in China, and of Chinese Ethereum developers? This is something many Chinese developers are also very eager to hear.

Vitalik Buterin: I remember the first time I came to China was in 2014. I first visited Beijing, then came to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen — I had experiences in all of these places.

Right from the beginning, I could feel that there were already many companies, teams, and developers in China working on various blockchain-related projects. I remember visiting exchanges like OKcoin and seeing that they had even more employees than the largest exchanges in the United States.

Then there were the Bitcoin miners. Between 2013 and 2014, it was the period of transition from FPGA to ASIC mining. I recall going to the outskirts of Shenzhen and seeing some very large factories — they had their own mining rigs. Even back then, I could already sense the tremendous computing power of Chinese miners and how many teams were pushing forward the development of Bitcoin and blockchain communities.

I found that Chinese teams were large, there were many projects, and the companies were very strong — but almost nobody outside of China knew about them. At that time, most of the activity was led by exchanges and miners. I remember that by 2015, you and some other companies had already started doing more meaningful things.

After 2015, I’m very grateful that you had so much confidence in Ethereum from such an early stage. I still remember you invested in the Ethereum Foundation — at that time, we really needed the money, and I could say you saved the foundation.

Since then, I’ve felt that the Chinese community has become more and more complex, with a growing number of different groups emerging, covering areas like protocol research, cryptography research, consensus algorithm research, and more.

Back in 2015, there wasn’t much interesting exchange between Israel and San Francisco, but now, there’s a lot of ongoing research and work in areas like ZK (zero-knowledge proofs) and AI. The quality of the community has truly become very high.

Visit worldledger.substack.com for the rest of the interview.