Benzinga - Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler continued to hint that ether, among other crypto tokens, may face increased scrutiny as an unregistered security. And with securities laws time-tested, the industry better get in line.

"If the public is anticipating profits based upon the efforts of others in a common enterprise, those are the indicia of a security," Gensler said when asked by The Block why he declined to directly weigh in on whether the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is a security or a commodity.

"Overall, these token operators generally have websites, they generally have a group of individuals that are updating software, they often have Twitter accounts, they often hire lawyers, they often lobbyists who come and meet with members of the SEC and members of congressional staff," Gensler said. "It kind of belies logic that there's not some common group of promoters that are in the middle of this."

The Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Patrick McHenry, earlier pressed the SEC chair to provide more clarity on the topic, a seeming friction point between Gensler and fellow markets regulator Rostin Behnam, the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In a recent enforcement action against crypto firm KuCoin, New York Attorney General Letitia James asserted that ether is an unregistered security, possibly opening Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin and other early developers up to legal liability.

"Give me a break, come on," said McHenry during repeated attempts to get Gensler to provide further detail on ether. "There's a lack of clarity here, can you at least agree with that?"

'Clarity' in cryptoGensler spoke to reporters following Tuesday's hearing before that committee, during which he received a lengthy grilling from Republicans on digital assets, among other issues, as well as the occasional critical question from committee Democrats.

Asked by The Block whether more direct guidance on ether might make sense given conflicting views from policymakers on the cryptocurrency, including from a former SEC divisional head, Gensler responded that "this is a field that has clarity and mistakenly attempts to ignore it."

"The time-tested securities laws really are time-tested," added Gensler. "And that's why we need to ensure that a number of your readers, maybe even your owners, come into compliance with the securities laws."

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2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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Gensler Says Securities Law Is Time-Tested, Crypto Just Needs To ... - Investing.com UK

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that ZK-EVMs will become crucial to Ethereums layer-1 security and verification process in the future.

In his latest blog post, Vitalik shares how he thinks the way in which Ethereum maintains its security and decentralization is its multi-client philosophy.

Buterin noted that the privacy-enforcing characteristics of ZK technology could disrupt the broader EVM ecosystem. By combining several transactions into one proof, Layer 2 protocols in ZK rollups have scaled Ethereum and successfully utilized ZK proofs.

ZK-EVMs, however, de facto become a third sort of Ethereum client, just as crucial to the networks security as execution clients and consensus clients are now, as they develop to verify execution on Mainnet.

Vitalik aims to preserve the advantages of the multi-client philosophy while simultaneously making use of ZK-EVMs to increase the Ethereum networks scalability, security, and decentralization as the ecosystem grows.

The Ethereum co-founder stated that if users use ZK-EVMs to verify layer 1, they could use a Single ZK-EVM, Closed multi ZK-EVM, or Open multi ZK-EVM.

According to Buterin, the main technical issues of deploying ZK technology with many clients are related to latency and data inefficiency.

Additionally, because different ZK-EVM implementations or protocol rules are interpreted differently by different Ethereum clients, zero-knowledge proofs are handled differently by each client, says Buterin.

The Ethereum co-founder says that the latency challenge could be addressed by being careful when designing the single-slot finality protocol and the data efficiency issue would have to be addressed by having a separate protocol for aggregating verification-related data.

Clients will likely start experimenting with ZK-EVMs to prove Ethereum block execution on their own, especially once we have stateless clients and theres no technical need to directly re-execute every block to maintain the state, Buterin added.

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Vitalik Buterin says ZK-EVMs Will be Crucial to Ethereum - Crypto Times

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, addressed technical challenges involving security and scalability on the altcoins blockchain in a recent blog post. Buterin explained how Zero Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) protocols could help enhance Layer 1 security in the long term.

Buterins comments indicate ZK projects and their native tokens could witness a boost in utility in the short-term and likely fuel a bullish sentiment among holders.

Also read: Arbitrum Foundation plans to steal $750 million via AIP-1?

Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum co-founder, explained how Ethereums multi-client philosophy interacts with ZK EVMs. Buterin explains the technical challenges, trade-offs and potential solutions in creating a multi-client ecosystem.

The Ethereum co-founder believes that ZK-EVMs will become an essential part of Ethereums Layer 1 security and verification process in the future. ZK technology allows developers to prove the authenticity of a transaction or message without revealing any additional information. Thus making ZK protocols key to Ethereums ecosystem.

Leading ZK coins like Polygon (MATIC), ImmutableX (IMX), Loopring (LRC) and Zcash (ZEC) have yielded gains to holders over the past week. With the ZK coins narrative heating up, tokens of key projects in the ecosystem are rallying.

ZK coins

Buterins comments on ZK coins could fuel the narrative and likely a bullish sentiment among holders of ZK tokens like MATIC, IMX, LRC, ZEC and AZERO.

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Why Vitalik Buterin is bullish on ZK coins - FXStreet

Ethereum smart contract is a groundbreaking technology that has revolutionized our interaction with decentralized applications. They have opened up a new world of possibilities for developers and businesses alike.

The creation of the Solidity programming language further fueled the success of Ethereum and increased its adoption by allowing developers to build highly sophisticated smart contracts. But what is Solidity? And why did the founders of Ethereum decide to create Solidity? In this article, we will answer these questions and discuss the importance of Solidity in the blockchain ecosystem.

Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by the computer programmer Vitalik Buterin. Recognizing the limitations of Bitcoins scripting language, Buterin envisioned a more robust and versatile blockchain platform that could support a wide range of decentralized applications beyond simple transactions.

Vitalik Buterin launched Ethereum in 2015, along with the co-founders Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin. This marked the beginning of a new era in the blockchain industry.

Ethereum smart contracts are self-executing digital agreements that run on the Ethereum blockchain. They are written in Solidity or other Ethereum-compatible programming languages like Vyper and they get deployed on the blockchain. Smart contracts get automatically executed and eliminate the need for intermediaries. They also reduce the risk of human error, fraud, or bias.

Smart contracts are a crucial aspect of Ethereums value proposition, as they enable the creation of a wide variety of decentralized applications (dApps) that leverage blockchain technology for various use cases. Some key benefits of smart contracts include:

As the Ethereum platform started to get traction, developers quickly realized the need for a new programming language specifically tailored to smart contract development. Ethereum Smart contracts require a Turing-complete programming language. The existing languages were not well-suited for these unique requirements.

There was also a need for the code of smart contracts to be very deterministic, meaning that it always produces the same output against an input. This would ensure predictable and consistent behavior on the blockchain.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which executes smart contracts, also had its quirks and limitations that needed to be addressed by a purpose-built language. One of its biggest quirks was its limited resources. A new programming language was required to manage resources efficiently and prevent issues like infinite loops.

Solidity was developed as the first high-level programming language for Ethereum smart contracts. It was created by a team of developers led by Dr. Gavin Wood, one of Ethereums co-founders. Inspired by popular languages like JavaScript, Python, and C++, Solidity was designed to be easy to learn and write while offering robust security features and seamless integration with the EVM.

The primary goals behind Soliditys creation were to provide a language that:

Soliditys development began in 2014, and the first official release, version 0.1.0, was made available in 2015. Since then, the language has undergone numerous updates and improvements, reflecting the growing needs of the Ethereum developer community and the evolution of the blockchain ecosystem.

Solidity was designed specifically for the development of smart contracts on the Ethereum platform, offering several key advantages over traditional programming languages:

The creation of Solidity as a dedicated programming language for smart contract development addressed several critical challenges that developers faced before.

Lets take a look at some specific problems that Solidity helped to solve and how it paved the way for a more robust and accessible ecosystem for smart contract development.

Several other smart contract languages have similar characteristics to Solidity, such as Vyper, Rust, and Go. While these languages offer their unique advantages, Solidity remains the most popular and widely-used language for Ethereum smart contract development.

Some key differences between Solidity and other smart contract languages include

Solidity language comes with its own set of advantages and drawbacks, like any programming language. Let us take a look at some pros and cons of using Solidity for smart contract development.

Embarking on the journey to learn Solidity can be a rewarding and potentially lucrative endeavor. With a wealth of resources available, its essential to know where to begin and how to make the most of the learning process.

In this section, we will guide you through the best resources, platforms, and communities to help you become a proficient Solidity developer. Eventually, you will be able to unlock the full potential of Ethereums smart contract capabilities.

Here is a list of some of the most helpful resources.

With the growing demand for blockchain technology and smart contracts, a career in Solidity development can be both rewarding and lucrative. Some tips for building a successful career in Solidity development include:

Solidity has played a crucial role in the growth and success of Ethereum. It has enabled developers to create secure, efficient, and sophisticated smart contracts that power many decentralized applications.

It addressed the unique challenges of smart contract development and provided a robust and easy-to-learn language. Hence, there is no doubt that Solidity has now become an essential tool for the blockchain industry.

As the adoption of blockchain technology and smart contracts increases, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Solidity as a programming language. It is quite an in-demand skill nowadays and has a huge potential impact on the future of decentralized applications.

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How Ethereum Reaped Success with Solidity and Smart Contracts ... - Cryptopolitan

Welcome to Future of Finance, where Fortune asks prominent people at major companies about their jobs, how their firm fits into the crypto ecosystem, and what this all means for how we use money.

The following is from a recent conversation with Paul Brody, the global blockchain leader at EY and author of the upcoming Ethereum for Business: A plain-English guide to doing business on the worlds largest blockchain.

Brody is a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a CoinDesk contributor, and has done stints at IBM and McKinsey. He also has a soft spot for Swedish Fish.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

So youre writing an Ethereum book?

Im getting there. I started in December. I wrote like 10 chapters, and it was really, really tough. And now, theres, like, six chapters left? The format of the book is how Ethereum works and whywhy public blockchains are so important for businessspecifically why theyre more important than private blockchainsbusiness use cases, procurement, supply chain management, tokenization, carbon footprint, and why it takes so long for enterprises to adopt technology.

When you were at IBM you did some Internet of Things stuff, and some other projects that were cutting edge. Is this sort of a pattern for you, where you want to do the cool new thing? Is that just whats most appealing to you?

The thing is, I am very driven by intellectual curiosity. I dont necessarily go after every single new thing, but when I find a thing thats really, really important, I go after it. When I was in collegeIm dating myself hereI was like, Wireless! Wireless is the thing! I went to work as a summer job at the first mobile network operator in Africa, in Nigeria, and I took an entire year off to work for them before I came back and went to work at McKinsey, where I can remember just telling colleagues, Mobile data, youve got to invest in mobile data.

The best perk of being a VP at IBM was you had access to IBM research. And I had a couple of amazing products, and before I did the one that got me into crypto, I did another one, which was immensely fun, around 3D printing. A lot of people do these corporate white papersthey just do a survey, they present it like its subjective data that nine out of 10 executives think that not burning down the planet is a good ideathey present it as if its factual data, and its not really. What I love to do is get a couple layers below that, and what's really fun is, for instance, wed ask, Okay, 3D printing will transform manufacturing, but how will it transform manufacturing?

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What happened with thatthe 3D printing?

We picked three productsa smartphone, an electric razor, and a washing machineand we tore them down, literally one piece at a time, evaluated every single component, scanned them in 3D, and then tried to remanufacture as much of the product as possible using a 3D printer. And that was amazing. We came back with specific data on the carbon footprint of 3D printing, the cycle time with 3D printing, we built the economic model of what your manufacturing scalesit's quite transformational. And the next project I did after that was IoT.

How did that lead you to Ethereum?

So I'm out at Samsung, talking to the head of the multimedia solution center, and hes like, Paul, we are going to go broke, the cloud is going to bankrupt usyouve got to come up with a better plan. I thought to myself, this is really bizarre. Imagine a really smart light bulb with the brains of an iPhone, and its connected to WiFi. What is your iPhone processor doing? Like nothing, 99% of the time! So why on earth are we paying all this money to maintain massive cloud data centers, when your refrigerator could be providing cloud services, or your phone? So I called a bunch of guys and was like, We should be able to make a cloud of computing devices that manage themselves, right? The cloud should be in the devices.

Halfway through this project, colleagues were like, I want you to think about using this thing called Bitcoin, because its distributed computing. And weve had lots of debateson the one hand, its very computationally intensive, but then on the other hand, its not like these machines are doing anything else. So John Cohn, an IBM distinguished engineer, comes and says, Paul, Ive met this guy, I think youd really like him. His name is Vitalik [Buterin]. And he wants to do Bitcoin, but instead of for money, for computing. So we built this thing called ADEPTAutonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry, sort of this decentralized cloud infrastructurefor Samsung, with help from Vitalik. And we showed it at CES in January 2015. Thats how I got into Ethereum. Thats how I got into blockchain. And at that point, I was like, this is going to be absolutely revolutionary.

What important lessons or ideas from other projects or jobs have you applied to ones on the blockchain?

We're heading toward this world where the marginal cost of almost everything is zero. One of the most brilliant things that I heard when I worked at McKinsey was if you want to think about the future, try to imagine some important process or input is free. Just imagine, like, what if electricity was free? What if airfare was free? What if phone calls were free? Like 25 or 30 years ago, this idea that phone calls would be free, it was ridiculous. And yet, we sort of forget. One of the reasons we liked Ethereum was it comes with account payments and smart contracts. And we used to joke that we dont know what anybody will actually pay for in the Internet of Things, but, eventually, someone will figure out how to monetize it. And when they do, theyll be so glad this architecture has payments and contracts built in.

Has embracing the blockchain helped EY from a competitive standpoint?

In the world of audit, we only have three competitors. So my fair share of any sort of global audit market is 25%, but it's actually been better than that because I don't think any of our peers have taken this space quite as seriously as we have.

So where is this leading? Can you tell me more about plans for the blockchain?

A lot of tech systems are natural monopolies. That's just how they are in a world where the marginal cost is zero for products. And then with Metcalfes lawthe value of a network grows along with the number of participantsat a certain inflection point, your network becomes so valuable youre effectively a natural monopoly. And thats hugely shaped our strategy here because it led me down the path to believe there can be only one winning blockchain. There cant be 50, cant be 100, and it almost certainly will be a public blockchain. All paths lead to a dominant chain. And when you look at the history of computing platforms, that dominant chain usually becomes clearly visible within a decade of an ecosystem starting.

And Ethereums that winner?

Ethereum was really the only programmable smart contract chain out there that was really dominant. So I said, Okay, we're making a play. It's a theory, a bit of the GE mentality where if I have a limited budget, am I going to spread it around, am I going to be okay with a bunch of different blockchains? Or am I going with the best?

What prevents the rest of the Big Four from just copying what youre doing at some point?

Obviously, in a decentralized system, you can't do that. And thats really tough. I've long accepted that. Even if we win this race, there will be no moment where we can just put our feet up and say, Well, we're a monopolist now. Great. We will have to keep running hard.

When clients come to EY, is it more often, Oh, hey, by the way, we hear you have this blockchain guy? or do they walk in like, Were here because of the blockchain guy?

It comes in both forms. All the time, Ill sit down with clients, and theyll come over, like, We had no idea you guys knew how to do this stuff. And that's great. I love that. And it makes me very happy. And, absolutely, you know, our senior people, it's great when somebody writes to the chairman and says, I just had this guy, Paul Brody, come in and talk to my clientstotally blew their minds. Like now they think of UI differently.

So whats nextboth on your end, and more generally when it comes to the future of finance?

If you were to boil down all of our aspirations into a single sentence, it would be this: We believe that blockchain will do for networks and enterprises what ERP did for organizations. It was transformational. Before ERP, the left hand and the right hand didn't really know what was going on.

With smart contracts on the public blockchain, I can create tokens that represent all the assets, that connect the buyers and the sellersand that automatically enforce the processes. Like if you have a volume discount rule, when you achieve your targeted volumes, it automatically gives you a discount. This sounds like a small thing, but, actually, it just happens. No one has to remember. And think about an insurance contract, like in health care, and how after your deductible expires youll be referred to specialists, and then the logic just gets more complicated, more challenging. So my goal is to get to the point where we can take any arbitrarily complex business agreement and run it on the public blockchain.

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Future of Finance: EYs Brody on why tech history shows there can be only one winning blockchain - Yahoo Finance