Over the years, Ethereum has grown to become a global settlement network that handles an average of $9 billion in a day. The network is also home to a vast array of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, smart contracts, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, despite this success, Vitalik Buterin, one of the project’s co-founders, has some deep regrets.
Buterin went on Twitter yesterday and decided to answer random questions from the 268 people he follows. When Sunny Aggarwal, the co-founder of Osmosis, asked Buterin what his biggest non-technical regret on his Ethereum journey was, the 27-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer said the whole “8 cofounders” thing still bothers him. He also pointed out that he regrets choosing the co-founders so quickly and non-discriminately.
Responding to a similar question by Emin Gün Sirer, the CEO of Ava Labs, Buterin said,
“People are harder to tightly coordinate in small groups than I expected. You can’t just get everyone to sit around in a circle, see each other’s inherent goodness and get along, especially when huge incentive conflicts are at play.”
Varying sentiments
The eight co-founders in question are Buterin himself, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Jeffrey Wilcke, Charles Hoskinson, Amir Chetrit, Joseph Lubin, and Gavin Wood.
Reportedly, the co-founders debated whether Ethereum should be a non-profit or for-profit organization. As a result of this contention, Charles Hoskinson, who preferred to commercialize Ethereum, left the group in 2014 and went ahead to become Cardano’s founder.
Nonetheless, Buterin acknowledges that both he and Hoskinson have changed over the years. According to him, people close to Hoskinson believe that he has progressed and matured in a lot of ways since leaving Ethereum. Buterin further noted that in as much as he and Hoskinson took different paths, he believes the IOHK team is doing some interesting things.
Of Cardano being Ethereum’s killer
Like Buterin and Hoskinson, Ethereum and Cardano have different approaches. While Ethereum launched on a Proof-of-Work (PoW) network, Cardano started as a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network. Although Ethereum is on a path that will see it leverage a PoS consensus mechanism, it will only be able to process 100,000 transactions per second. In contrast, Cardano’s can process up to 1 million transactions per second.
With Cardano gearing up to launch support for smart contracts this month, experts believe it has the potential to become Ethereum’s killer.
Ethereum (ETH) is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by capitalization, with a market cap of $445,927,048,455. ETH is also on its way to retake the $4,000 level after gaining 1.92% in 24 hours and 21.92% over the past seven days to change hands at $3,803.22.
On the other hand, Cardano (ADA) is the third-largest cryptocurrency. However, it has a long way to go before it can overtake ETH, seeing as its market cap currently stands at $94,674,181,837. At the time of writing, ADA is trading at $2.95 after losing 2.10% over the past 24 hours.
