The developer and co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, wants Ethereum to become cypherpunk again, as it was in 2017 before financial applications took dominance over the network.
In his latest blogpost shared on December 28, Vitalik said that Ethereum was originally introduced as a “decentralized shared hard drive,” which ought to serve peer-to-peer messaging and decentralized file storage.
He amplified that Ethereum’s vision faded in 2017 after it saw a variety of DeFi applications boom and “financialization.”
“Having lived through that era, the number one culprit that I would blame as the root cause of this shift is the rise in transaction fees,” said Vitalik, adding that “When the cost of writing to the chain is $0.001, or even $0.1, you could imagine people making all kinds of applications that use blockchains in various ways, including non-financial ways.”
When the transaction fees go up, it’s only used and essentially fueled by “degen gamblers” who are willing to play more and more as coin prices go higher and “they are getting richer.”
Vitalik also noted that Ethereum has advanced in other ways, which include innovations such as rollups, zero knowledge (zk) proofs, account abstraction, and more. He also reminded everyone of the core values on which the foundation of Ethereum is built.
Furthermore, he also noted developments on Ethereum that address internal as well as outside-ecosystem issues, claiming that while Bitcoin is trying to solve two or three problems, Ethereum has many communities that focus on different visions.
Also Read: Vitalik Buterin’s Three Solutions for Ethereum’s PoS
