The core concerns for Williams as he criticizes Ethereum are centered on the impediment to the mass adoption of blockchain and DeFi related offerings owing to a poor user experience.
Dominic Williams, the founder and Chief Scientist of Dfinity’s Internet Computer (ICP) protocol, in a recent move, criticizes Ethereum and Polkadot network’s fast-growing layer two solutions. According to a report by Cointelegraph, Dominic believes the broad ecosystem of layer two solutions on both decentralized finance (DeFi) centric blockchains exposes users to counterparty risks as well as churning out applications that offer a complex user experience.
For Ethereum, Dominic said the world’s most used blockchain network is now resembling a “Rube Goldberg machine” of “layer-two cloud applications.” He posited that about half of Ethereum’s functional nodes are hosted on the Amazon Web Services, exposing them to various risks.
“A lot of these Proof of Stake networks today that people invest in are really just layer-two applications of cloud – we find that pretty disappointing. Blockchain shouldn’t be running on Amazon Web Services where they can steal the validator keys and do all sorts of bad stuff.”
To make use of a DeFi application, wallet apps such as Metamask must be downloaded from an App Store. Dominic argues that these downloads make it easy for the apps to be tracked. In contrast, he compared this to the Internet Identity protocol that he claims “can’t track you” or any blockchain user.
Williams Speaks about Mass Adoption as He Criticizes Ethereum
The core concerns for Williams as he criticizes Ethereum are centered on the impediment to the mass adoption of blockchain and DeFi related offerings owing to a poor user experience.
“If you want mass adoption of blockchain, you can’t require people to install MetaMask and then have to buy some Ether from Coinbase – that’s ridiculous. People need to interact with blockchain without having tokens – tokens come later. That’s a really big problem,” he said.
He pointed out that attempts to creates transactions on apps like Metamask are not easy, especially for first-time users. “On a traditional blockchain, you’re sort of fiddling around creating these transactions through MetaMask or something like that – that’s just not a good user experience.”
While many see the upcoming sharded parachain ecosystem for the Polkadot blockchain, Dominic compared the upgrades’ relay chain as a “centralized toll-fee hub” that links different blockchains. He also criticized the lack of fungibility of smart contracts or the interoperability that is peculiar to the Ethereum network.
“DeFi is so successful on Ethereum […] because these smart contracts exist in a seamless universe and they can all plug into each other – everybody can extend everybody else’s system,” he added.
The Internet Computer protocol is relatively new, as it launched officially in May. While the majority have not yet acclimatized with the network like other older blockchain networks, Dominic is convinced the platform will outgrow other competitors by the number of users by December. This is bound to be aided in part with the $220 million in developer funding earmarked to develop its DApp ecosystem.
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