Overview
- In posts on X on Jan. 26–27, Buterin retracted his 2017 “mountain man” critique of full user verification.
- He reframed self-verification as a rarely used but essential BATNA, likening it to a “mountain man’s cabin” for outages or censorship.
- Buterin cited real-world risks—including p2p network failures, latency spikes, validator concentration, and Tornado Cash restrictions—as drivers for stronger user guarantees.
- He highlighted zk-rollups such as zkSync, Scroll, and StarkNet as live examples of ZK systems that compress computation while preserving verifiability.
- Developers are aligning the roadmap to ZK tooling, with reported proposals to remove legacy features like the modular exponentiation precompile to improve proof efficiency.