By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
Co-founder of Ethereum Foundation and Bitcoin Magazine Vitalik Buterin shared his insights into the blockchain and Ethereum’s future, further dispelling rumors about his appointment at Google.
Co-founder of Ethereum Foundation and Bitcoin Magazine Vitalik Buterin took part in a small, private event that was held in San Francisco last week. In the framework of this event, speaking to Crypto Congressman Jason Hsu, Buterin revealed his thoughts about the future of blockchain privacy and Ethereum, also commenting the recent situation with Google that wanted to hire him.
According to Ethereum co-founder, now he is actively working on the proof-of-stake and charting protocols, which are the two main points that the Ethereum research community is now focusing its attention on. The company believes that proof-of-stake and scaling are really crucial aspects and it has already been done a lot on enhancing the algorithms and addressing the existing limitations.
When asked about the progress on the Ethereum Casper protocol, Vitalik enthusiastically shared the results of their work. He said:
“I think that there has been a lot of frameworks for state channels coming out recently. The Casper protocol is getting much closer to being finalized at this point. It’s just pending review on academic analysis.”
Buterin also expressed his worries about the fact that today the level of sustainable application of blockchain is very low. Though quite a lot of people understand the existing value of cryptocurrencies, the potential of the technology hasn’t been fully realized yet.
Moreover, he is quite preoccupied with the lack of necessary privacy on the blockchain and effective ways to ensure it:
“Currently, there are no good ways to use blockchain while preserving privacy. There have been good efforts to solve this using Zcash for example, along with research on top of Ethereum. However, there is still a way to go in terms of preserving privacy on the blockchain.”
The discussion also touched on the regulatory issues. Though some smaller countries as, for example, Malta, are trying to create crypto-friendly environment for traders and investors, the world’s power such as United States still hasn’t found its clear position. Buterin believes that the authorities should focus their work on finding ways that would facilitate the usage of small sums of cryptocurrency for people.
Speaking about the recent developments of Ethereum, Buterin said that he’s quite satisfied with them, especially with progress of state and plasma channels. As for the future plans, he said that their foundation is going to authorize scalable properties and work on achieving high levels of consensus.
It is obvious, that there were some questions about the rumors that Google had offered Buterin a position in one of the company’s mysterious projects. “I hope we all realize that this was a joke. Some random HR person from Google emailed me, most likely because some machine learning algorithm analyzed my GitHub and saw that I had some high score in the international Olympiad. Apparently, I fit the blueprints as a great candidate to hire at an intern salary,” Buterin commented.