Coinspeaker
Vitalik Buterin Speaks of Future Built on Ethereum
Speaking to the attendees of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) event Permissionless which was held in Austin, Texas, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed his enthusiasm towards a progressive future for the Ethereum network. He strongly believes that the network will keep pressing forward, adopting new ideas and offering innovative solutions to existing challenges.
Though Vitalik has begun to see signs of a promising future, he opines that even the newest of the new is “not imaginative enough”. Explaining further, the crypto innovator acknowledged that DeFi is cool while also stating that Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a new primitive as well as “an extension of something that has a history”.
He displayed no enthusiasm towards leveraging cryptocurrencies for payments citing that the solution is already familiar. According to Vitalik, all of these solutions are “individual pieces that are designed to fit into an ecosystem that’s otherwise the same as before”.
Rather, his excitement was geared more towards decentralized social, repeatedly name-dropping Farcaster, a Twitter-like protocol built on the OP Mainnet with a companion Warpcast mobile app that is currently in invite-only alpha release. It is worth noting that Farcaster and other similar social experiences utilize crypto tools and solutions to compete with centralized platforms.
“Let’s see how far we can push things in that direction,” he said. “But where I see the longer term future here is it really can plug into all of the other stuff that we’ve been doing as a space.”
Vitalik Buterin on Ethereum Open Tech Stack
Crypto-based solutions are generally recognized for their capacity to be more decentralized and their potential to preserve privacy while ensuring that users are secured. This is not the case with the current Web 2.0 landscape.
Ultimately, the Ethereum co-founder is looking forward to a future where developers can leverage an independent open tech stack. He hopes that when this eventually happens, the solution will be similar to existing tech giants like Google and Twitter, but different from closed and centralized systems like China’s tight integration of WeChat, Alipay, and notably, the growing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) concepts.
In addition, Vitalik looks forward to a time when new Web 3.0 users will create an Ethereum address via a gradual on-ramping process. Moreso, he feels like the process should be initially controlled by a familiar service like Gmail, but using account abstraction.
By adopting this strategy, ownership will be placed in the palms of the people to enable them to stay equipped enough to take on more crypto-native approaches.
“Basically, give people the opportunity to slide down the decentralization ladder and then, at the end of it, really properly be in this totally independent stack that actually works together – all the different pieces inside it,” he said.
