Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Says Days of 1000x Growth Are Gone
If cryptocurrency enthusiasts are eagerly waiting for the market to rise from the abyss and shine again, Vitalik Buterin has some advice for you! In his recent interview with Bloomberg at the Ethereum Industry Summit conference in Hong Kong, Buterin said that the days of explosive growth are gone.
He said: “The blockchain space is getting to the point where there’s a ceiling in sight. If you talk to the average educated person at this point, they probably have heard of blockchain at least once. There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.”
Buterin says that growth in Bitcoin and other digital currencies in the past few years is an outcome of better marketing to persuade users for wider adoption. “That strategy is getting close to hitting a dead end,” he said.
The Ethereum co-founder says that the next step should be is to retain cryptocurrency enthusiasts in a in-depth way. “Go from just people being interested to real applications of real economic activity,” he said. In a broader sense, Buterin meant that it time for crypto developers to provide better infrastructure, decentralized applications and systems. Hence the industry should now focus more on the usability aspect instead of just promotions.
Most of the blockchain networks today are facing issues in terms of scalability and inefficiency to cater to a huge user base. Hence, to replace the already existing and efficient centralized systems, dApp developers will have to stretch an extra mile further. For e.g. blockchain solutions are still not robust compete with the payment processing speeds of the like of Visa and Mastercard.
Additionally, the decentralized digital economy seems bleak at the moment considering that an average user faces several technical difficulties and challenges while dealing with them. The developer team at Ethereum is working on Plasma and Sharding solutions to improve the scalability of the Ethereum network.
Moreover, developers are also experimenting with other concepts like Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and others in order to keep the decentralized nature of blockchain technology intact.
When asked about the participation of institutional players in the crypto market, Buterin said: "I honestly don’t think this stuff matters much. There’s honestly a part of me that would be happier if institutional trading of cryptocurrencies did not happen at all for another five years. Ultimately if all that cryptocurrency is, is this thing that millionaires keep buying and selling to each other, then what have we really accomplished?"