Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin says that his influence over the blockchain network, which is approaching the much anticipated Merge, has been decreasing over the past two years as many new developers are taking over multiple roles.
In a recent interview with Noah Smith, an economic blogger, Buterin expressed that it has been his wish for quite a long time for Ethereum to evolve into an ecosystem “where my influence can decrease just because so many other amazing voices start to grow and express themselves.”
He also said that in 2015 he was doing 80% of the ‘research’ in Ethereum, and a large portion of the Python coding. Buterin says in 2017 he “was doing much less of the coding, and maybe 70% of the research.”
However, by 2020 he says that he was “doing perhaps only a third of the research, and very little coding. But I was still doing most of the ‘high-level theorizing’. But over the last two years, even the high-level theorizing is something that has been slowly but surely slipping away from me,” he said.
New Ethereum researchers such as Polynya have been gradually taking over a significant share of thought leadership related to Ethereum scaling solutions, according to Buterin.
Buterin said, “People like [barryWhiteHat] and Brian Gu have taken the mantle of zero-knowledge proof technology, and Justin and Dankrad, originally hired as researchers, have been asserting themselves more and more as thought leaders too.”
He also expressed interest in his current interest in biotech and AI. Buterin said, “We’re starting to understand what both the politics and the technology of the 21st century is going to look like, and how each of the pieces of what we’re working on are going to fit into the picture.”
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