Ethereum developers have been working on shifting their focus to scale the network after the coming upgrade – The Merge.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes crypto payments will “make sense” again following The Merge, which involves the network’s upgrade from the proof-of-work to the proof-of-stake consensus model. The Canadian programmer The Merge will make crypto payments better as transactions cost less.
While delivering his Keynote speech at the Korea Blockchain Week 2022 conference, Buterin said crypto payments have become less popular since 2018. He discussed the cause for the less popularity and the light at the end of the tunnel. In his opinion, high transaction fees are one of the reasons for the slowdown in crypto payments and The Merge would help. Buterin added that the rollups and their efficacy would cut transition costs to as low as fractions of a cent.
“So today with roll ups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with roll ups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, more affordable, and a complete game changer,” said he.
The Merge to Rejuvenate Crypto Payments
Ethereum developers have been working on shifting their focus to scale the network after the coming upgrade – The Merge. According to the network’s co-founder, the last testnet before The Merge, the Ropsten testnet, is next week and crypto payments should reset by then. He said the mainnet merge would happen in mid-to-late September if everything goes as planned. Although Bitcoin functions as a speculative store of value, Buterin explained that its uses are beyond that. He referred to its key use in its white paper from 2008, which is to offer a P2P electronic cash system, cheaper than traditional payment methods. He added that the narrative changed in 2013 due to increased adoption and expensive blockchain transactions. The Ethereum network executive said the Bitcoin vision has been forgotten “basically because it got priced out of the market.”
Furthermore, he stressed that low-income countries where the existing financial system is not working would benefit from cheap crypto transactions. Buterin also mentioned that cheap transactions would trigger higher adoption of domain name system (DNS) services in the context of Ethereum. He added that it would ramp up Web3 account management services and humanity proof of attendance protocols.
“You need to actually send a transaction to create a DNS name, you need to actually send the transaction to recover your account, you need to actually send a transaction to meet some of these adaptations, if doing each of those operations costs like $11, then people are not going into it.”
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