Vitalik Buterin says he will become more and more political and less neutral, and that he is not afraid of what measure will make people abandon Ethereum.
Coming out on the cover of “TIME” is a sort of seal of approval for the status of fame and relevance in the United States and around the world. Now Vitalik Buterin , creator of the Ethereum blockchain , is part of this select group.
The Russian-Canadian programmer received a long profile , in which he told his trajectory, his vision of where he would like Ethereum to go, the challenges of decentralization versus control and assumed for good that he will have a more political and less neutral role in the face of various social issues.
“If we don't use our voice, the only things that will be built will be things for immediate profit. And those are often far from being in the best interest of the world,” Vitalik said.
The “Prince of Cryptocurrencies ”, as he was called by the magazine in the cover call, poked with special emphasis the obsession with the NFTs and, specifically, with the very expensive collection of the Bored Apes.
Talking about the use of cryptocurrencies to help Ukraine's army in the war against Russia, the programmer said that the situation served to remind that this class of assets has much more important uses than “playing a game with images of millions of dollars of monkeys”.
At another point, Vitalik points out that very greedy investors raise transaction fees and show society an image of excessive ostentation. "The danger is you have $3 million monkeys and that becomes a different kind of bet."
The price of gas (the name for the transaction fee on the network) is a constant complaint and the creator of Ethereum is not only aware of this, but also sees it as a big problem: social projects (blockchain voting, universal basic income, education) are sidelined in favor of financial projects that are willing to pay a lot for their transactions to be validated first.
Among several topics covered, the interview with TIME was more than anything Buterin's moment to become politicized: “One of the decisions I made in 2022 is to take more risks and be less neutral. I'd rather Ethereum offend some people than become something that doesn't stand up to anything."