Appearing at ethereum's central conference, Devcon, Vitalik Buterin explained his vision for the long-term prospects of the blockchain network ethereum. He identified scalability as the primary issue currently facing the network and explained that he is putting a lot of effort into possible solutions for reducing storage costs. Since ethereum nodes are designed to contain all activity that happens on the network, the sheer amount of virtual space required to store this information could grow out of control as the network expands.

Buterin believes that the solution to this problem is a process called "sharding", a technical solution that involves each node on the ethereum network storing its own part of the total network. All shards will not be created equal, however, as Buterin envisions a main shard that contains what is known as the ethereum network today, accompanied by smaller shards called "universes". If this kind of solution is executed correctly, ethereum will maintain a stable platform while allowing developers to experiment on the different "universes". While these concepts might sound nebulous, they could become reality sooner than you think. At the conference, Buterin stated the following: "Basically, we’re just inches away from a proof of concept in python."