Ethereum-co-founder Vitalik Barterin wants the crypto industry to grow up quickly that the industry is at a “bending point.”
Bars, who spoke in front of a packed space at the Ethereum Community Conference, in Cannes, used buttin his keynote speaker to deliver a clarified reality check: Decentralization, he argued, must develop from a captive phrase to a specific set of user guarantees or risk becoming another hollow promise.
As the industry has gone mainstream with endorsements from larger companies and political figures, builders have to return to the ecosystem’s central ideals of decentralization and building for users’ needs, Barterin said.
In his typical jeans and casual dark T-shirt uniform, butterin laid out practical “tests”, which he said that any crypto project should pass. These include 1) Walk-Away test. If the company behind an application disappears, do users keep their assets? And 2) Insider attack test: How much damage can junk insidents or compromised frontends cause? And 3) Whether it has a trusted computer base: How many code lines have to trust to protect users’ funds or data?
He warned that too many LAG-2 networks, defi-projects and “decentralized” frontends depend on hidden back doors, immediate upgrade buttons or uncertain interfaces that can be manipulated and hacked.
Even identity and privacy solutions came under his critical eye. Zero-knowledge proof, he noticed, can strike back if users still reveal their entire transaction history when they log in with centralized providers. Privacy, he added, must turn from being treated as an optional feature to something that reduces data leaks by default.
It will be 10 years this month since Ethereum Blockchain became live, and Barterin has come under pressure over the past few months from the community to tackle core protocol questions. If not, blockchain could lose its edge to competitors.
For butterin, this next phase in Ethereum’s history means building systems that consist of the walk-away test, shrinking the trusted code base and resisting insider attack. This includes balancing technique with simple, robust solutions.
“If we lose it,” he concluded, “Ethereum inevitably becomes just a generation thing, and it goes inevitably, like a lot of other things have gone before.”
Read more: Vitalik Butterin suggests replacing Ethereums EVM with RISC-V
