In late December, Vitalik Buterin made clear his patience has limits. The Ethereum creator said he would walk away from the sector if the community's output amounts to nothing more than memes and imma
In late December, Vitalik Buterin made clear his patience has limits. The Ethereum creator said he would walk away from the sector if the community's output amounts to nothing more than memes and immature jokes about crypto wealth and bodily functions.
"If all that we accomplish is lambo memes and immature puns about 'sharting', then I WILL leave. Though I still have a lot of hope that the community can steer in the right direction," Buterin said. He insisted the Ethereum developer community needs to concentrate on shipping real innovations and building products that matter.
Buterin added he won't abandon blockchain work over memes and stupid jokes. What would make him quit is a complete absence of substance. "To be clear, the operative word here is 'all'. No, I won't stop or slow working on crypto just because price memes and stupid jokes exist – as long as there's also real social value that the ecosystem is working toward," he said.
Other prominent voices in crypto development share Buterin's frustration. Joey Krug, who founded Augur, has said the Ethereum ecosystem lacks developers willing to tackle unglamorous infrastructure problems. If developers deployed Plasma, Sharding, and Casper, they would expand Ethereum's capacity to handle transactions. Instead of working on these critical scaling solutions, many engineers have chased ICO paydays and commercial projects.
Krug's assessment: "Ethereum really needs more developers on problems like sharding, proof of stake, and plasma, right now there simply aren't enough. It should also hire some more operations people to help orchestrate it all, for instance, Solidity is just now being formally audited. Ethereum would be 100x more kickass with these things [and around] 10 developers each working on all three of those hard problems above."
Core infrastructure teams face a developer shortage. CryptoKitties and EtherDelta, a decentralized exchange, now process hundreds of thousands of transactions a day each. Users on these platforms submit far more transactions than comparable traditional applications. On EtherDelta, traders submit orders to the Ethereum blockchain at speeds comparable to traditional exchanges. Ethereum can't keep pace.
Ethereum processes more than 1 million transactions each day—more volume than every other cryptocurrency combined, including Bitcoin. Yet developers haven't expanded the network's capacity to match this demand, rendering every transaction more expensive. Fees will keep rising until the core developers deploy Plasma, Sharding, Casper, and other scaling solutions that remain months away at best.
