Vitalik Buterin has cautioned against abandoning Ethereum’s chosen path in favor of profit-driven models like those seen in Solana.
Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin warns that profit-driven models, like those in Solana (SOL), could mess with Ethereum’s principles, stressing how important it is to keep the network decentralized and socially grounded, calling it a contrast to what he calls the “Wall Street greed-is-good mentality.”
In a blog post on Jan. 23, Buterin highlighted Ethereum’s decade-long mission to create a “global, censorship-resistant permissionless blockchain” and how it’s rooted in open-source values, much like projects like Linux and Mozilla.
“The goal of Ethereum is the same as what it has been from day 1: building a global, censorship-resistant permissionless blockchain,” Buterin says. He also points out that the network’s scaling strategy, which focuses on layer-2 solutions, is key to keeping its decentralized social and technical foundation intact.
The Ethereum co-founder also seems to be not buying into calls for a shift toward high-gas-limit layer-1 scaling, something some rivals are pushing. He argues that “this approach compromises too much of the benefits of Ethereum’s current social structure.”
“One possible shortcut for scaling is to give up on L2s, and do everything through L1 with a much higher gas limit (either across many shards, or on one shard). However, this approach compromises too much of the benefits of Ethereum’s current social structure, which has been so effective at getting the benefits of different forms of research, development and ecosystem-building culture at the same time.”
Vitalik Buterin
Instead, he’s pushing the community to double down on accelerating layer-2 improvements, like scaling blobs, boosting interoperability, and upping security.
Buterin’s warning comes on the heels of the Ethereum Foundation catching some heat for constantly selling off ETH to cover costs. As crypto.news reported earlier, a lot of people in the community are questioning whether that’s in line with Ethereum’s original vision.
