vitalik buterin

‘Green ETH’ narrative to drive investment and adoption, say pundits

Post-Merge Ethereum has now detached itself from the “crypto mining is bad for the environment” narrative, following its transition to proof-of-stake.

The shedding of Ethereum’s energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) system is expected to see Ether (ETH) “flow into the institutional world,” according to a number of fund managers and co-founders.

On Thursday, Ethereum officially transitioned to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which is expected to cut energy consumption used by the network by 99.95%, according to the Ethereum Foundation.

The upgrade effectively ended the need for the Ethereum network to rely on miners and energy-guzzling mining hardware to validate transactions and build new blocks, as these functions are now replaced by validators who “stake” their ETH.

In a statement to Cointelegraph, Charlie Karaboga, CEO and co-founder of Australian fintech company Block Earner, said the network’s transition to PoS would “drive the future of money to be more internet-based.”

He said that Ethereum would become “the settlement layer that everyone will accept and trust — especially when the spotlight is shining brighter than ever on the issue of sustainability in crypto mining.”

Markus Thielen, chief investment officer of digital asset manager IDEG, said that he had been in discussions with sovereign wealth funds and central banks to help build their digital asset portfolios, but direct investment had often been “voted down due to energy concerns.”

But, now that the Ethereum network has transitioned to PoS, this issue is much less of a concern, he said:

“While demand has been strong, the missing link has been an underlying zero-emissions, financial infrastructure. With Ethereum moving to PoS, this clearly solves this last pillar of concern.”

Henrik Andersson of Apollo Capital told Cointelegraph that ESG had become a “big factor” behind institutional investment decision making in the last few years.

Andersson said he believes the 99.95% energy consumption cut on Ethereum would dramatically improve ETH’s ESG score, which in turn would “make it more appealing for institutional investors” over the long-term.

Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz told his 92,900 followers on Sept. 15 that “Green ETH” will be the “best narrative” in crypto’s history, with crypto mining and PoW long plaguing the industry.

Related: How blockchain technology is used to save the environment

Yanowitz noted that until now, the “Bitcoin is bad for the environment” narrative has been “so impactful,” adding it spread like wildfire” and “has probably had the most negative impact on the asset’s performance.”

“Most large institutions now have ESG mandates,” said Yanowitz:

“Fidelity, BlackRock, Goldman, etc… whether or not they like it, they now have to consider the environmental impacts of their portfolios.”

But, that is now old news for Ethereum, with Yanowitz adding that the most important takeaway from the Merge is that “Ethereum becomes green” which becomes highly appealing to large corporations who have ESG mandates to comply with:

“This will be the best narrative crypto and ETH has ever seen. It will flow into the institutional world, where investors will buy ETH because it satisfies their ESG mandate.”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin celebrates the Merge: ‘Dream for years’

Moments before the big Ethereum Merge took place, co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his excitement and PoS vision with the community.

As the clock counted down to the final moments of the big Ethereum Merge, co-founder Vitalik Buterin joined the Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party livestream hosted by the Ethereum Foundation to share his final thoughts.

When asked if he was excited about the Merge, Buterin responded that he is “absolutely excited about being exited from the proof-of-work era.”

The co-founder went on to say that the historic transition of the network from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) has been on the agenda for years:

“[It] has obviously been a dream for the Ethereum ecosystem since pretty much the beginning. We started the proof-of-stake research with that blog post on Slosher back in January 2014.”

The Merge can be seen as reinventing the laws of physics, according to Buterin. PoW operates with the usage of real-world functionalities such as electricity, hardware and computers. Whereas with PoS, everything is virtualized, “basically letting us create a simulated universe that has its own laws of physics.”

Buterin said that among the biggest motivations for the switch are the high costs and the massive amount of energy usage. The Merge is said to drastically reduce energy consumption by 99.95%.

Related: The ‘launch of a rocket’ — Observers on the future of Ethereum post-Merge

He also pointed out that not only will this be good for the environment, which has been a hot topic among environmentalists toward the crypto space, but also for “non-environmental externalities.” The example was given of the GPU price hike due to Ether (ETH) mining.

Shortly after Vitalik’s mini spotlight in the livestream, the Merge finally occurred on Thursday at 06:42:42 UTC at block 15537393. The merging of the Ethereum mainnet execution layer and the Beacon Chain’s consensus layer took place at the Terminal Total Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000. After the Merge, the network no longer relies on a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

Buterin congratulated the community and ushered in the next era of Ethereum via Twitter:

These new optimizations allow developers and users to scale the network in ways not possible or that were unsustainable in the past. This is an important step in pushing the mass adoption of decentralized technologies and onboarding the next billion into the ecosystem. 

The challenges with building a reputation in Web3 — and how to solve them

Right now, we lack full control of our data — and it’s siloed. But in the months and years ahead, decentralized identities and reputations could change that.

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Amazing things are being built in Web3 — often by pseudonymous individuals who prefer to keep their real-world identity private.

In some ways, this is liberating. It means that anyone can have a chance to get involved in a project and deliver value to the community — irrespective of their background.

But as decentralized identities proliferate, there’s one issue that cannot be ignored: Ensuring that there’s an easy way for us to verify the reputation of others.

This matters… for many reasons. If you’re about to start using a DeFi project created by someone pseudonymous, you’d like a way to know that they’re trustworthy and dependable.

If you’re reading an article that someone has written online, there should be a way of checking that their past works have been truthful and well-received.

And if you’re buying an item from a fellow user on a peer-to-peer marketplace, it’s crucial to check that they’ll deliver what you’ve asked for — and on time.

All of this has made reputation in Web3 a hot-button topic. Now, multiple crypto enthusiasts are exploring this concept in great detail — giving us the evidence we need to trust other people without knowing their name and background.

This could be a refreshing antidote to the status quo, where not everything we see online can be believed. Fake testimonials for products are a long-running problem, while bots on Twitter can distort reality and our perceptions of people and companies. We’ve even seen experiments where fake restaurants have shot to the top of TripAdvisor rankings.

Understanding decentralized identities

As a concept, DIDs remain at an early stage. But one day, your crypto wallet could store far more than altcoins and NFTs. Instead, they could be a rich background of what you’ve accomplished — open for all to see. And whereas the profiles that some of us carefully cultivate on Facebook and LinkedIn are centralized, we would see in full control of all of our data.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently explained how this could work in practice when he unveiled proposals for “soulbound” NFTs. Known as SBTs, he paints a picture of how these digital assets could be used to represent everything from a college degree to a drivers’ license — and even provide a modern alternative to credit scores.

Buterin pointed to a proof-of-attendance protocol as an example of technology that could also show promise. POAP NFTs can be used to show that someone was present at a particular event — such as a conference or a concert. While this could have a plethora of exciting use cases in the future, there’s one problem that needs to be confronted: Because NFTs can be easily transferred, someone could just buy a token that says they achieved something instead — but products are hitting the market that prevent this.

As we find ways to dutifully record the achievements and attributes that form our reputations online, Buterin argues that a non-transferable type of NFT needs to be created — and this could also deliver tangible improvements to the way governance is achieved in decentralized autonomous organizations.

Moving away from the technical limitations, you may be wondering why digital reputations are necessary in the first place. Well, a big motivation relates to how our data is currently fragmented across a number of social networks and websites — and it’s difficult to transfer from one place to another. If you’ve got a five-star rating on eBay after selling 50,000 items, this stellar reputation cannot easily be transferred to Etsy.

Reputation is power

Metis is one of the projects that is focusing on these challenges. The platform has established Reputation Power, which is earned through on-chain achievements. Users can accrue RP by contributing to protocols, DApps and decentralized autonomous companies — whether through deploying smart contracts or minting NFTs.

In the years to come, its vision is creating an environment where someone’s reputation can easily be viewed on just one profile — bringing together all aspects of life, from your loved ones and colleagues to the friends you share hobbies with. It’s the ultimate way of showcasing your credibility, engagement and trustworthiness — as well as the contribution you’ve made to the causes you care about.

The project told Cointelegraph:

“Metis’ Reputation Power is a portable and composable reputation, unique to users’ specific achievements and on-chain history. Reputation Power (or RP) can be collected by users performing on-chain actions such as interacting with smart contracts or voting in governance.”

A $100 million was recently established to help cultivate projects that want to build on top of Metis — including DeFi protocols, NFT collections, metaverse platforms and games. And doing so could be appealing for developers, not least because this platform has some of the lowest fees of any layer-two blockchain — helping to make microtransactions affordable.

At the beating heart of this ecosystem is a “solid, scalable, cheap and decentralized” technical infrastructure called Smart Layer 2 — a secure environment that can cope with growing demand from users, with the robustness that the Web3 economy deserves.

There’s so much to be excited about — and plenty of work to ensure that Reputation Power becomes valuable for businesses and consumers alike.

Focus remains on mass adoption, and creating infrastructure that’ll be used for generations to come.

As the project recently said: “Although the market is going bearish, may the builders never stop!”

Learn more about Metis

Disclaimer. Cointelegraph does not endorse any content or product on this page. While we aim at providing you with all important information that we could obtain, readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company and carry full responsibility for their decisions, nor can this article be considered as investment advice.

Vitalik Buterin impersonators ramp up ETH phishing ahead of The Merge

Cointelegraph identified over six Twitter accounts with a “verified” mark that replicates Buterin’s profile picture, name and profile description.

The hype around The Merge has attracted a swarm of scammers that are actively using verified Twitter accounts to impersonate Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and dupe investors.

Prominent entrepreneurs, including one of the world’s richest man Elon Musk, pointed out numerous times the biggest problem of Twitter — bots. However, scammers have evidently amped up efforts to go unnoticed of their ill intentions by using verified profiles.

Fake and verified Vitalik Buterin impersonators carrying out phishing attacks. Source: Twitter

Cointelegraph identified over six verified Twitter accounts that currently replicate Buterin’s profile picture, name and profile description. The accounts have been actively promoting fake Ether (ETH) giveaways and misleading investors into getting access to their crypto wallets.

The easiest way to identify the fakes is by paying attention to the Twitter handle, also known as the username of the profiles. Recently, fake Twitter profiles impersonating Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao have increased, forcing Musk to publicly call out the problem, as shown below.

Occasionally, scammers have also been found to impersonate Ethereum Foundation, trying to gain credibility among the masses. Especially during bull runs and significant events like network upgrades, bad actors find it easy to dupe investors that are typically unaware of scams amid hypes.

This article comes as a warning to crypto investors to help them avoid falling for targeted scams and attacks that threaten to drain funds.

Related: Ethereum ready for The Merge as last shadow fork completes successfully

Equally excited for The Merge, Google added a countdown timer displaying the time remaining for the Ethereum blockchain to transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

Cointelegraph previously reported on recent Google search data, which revealed that searches for the term “Ethereum Merge” generated a score above 50 several times over the last 30 days, reaching a peak of 100 on Sept. 3.

Ethereum domain names top Bored Apes on OpenSea’s weekly chart

Ahead of the upcoming Merge, ENS domains have reached the top of OpenSea’s seven-day chart in trading volume.

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain names have surpassed Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) as the most traded asset on nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea over the last seven days — seemingly ahead of the Ethereum Merge. 

According to OpenSea data, the weekly volume of the Ethereum domain NFTs eclipsed 2,249 Ether (ETH) at the time of writing, beating out RTFKT Clone X at 1,992 ETH and Bored Ape Yacht Club at 1,777 ETH.

ENS domains are a distributed, open and expandable naming system on the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to turn a long string of keys for a crypto address into a single ENS domain such as “vitalik.eth.”

This simplifies the complexity of copying and pasting a lengthy wallet address to send and receive crypto, as users only need to share their domain name like any other ordinary address.

These domain names can be bought, sold and traded between users in the form of NFTs.

The recent spike in ENS trading volume has seen the average price of ENS items increase 167% to 0.3895 ETH, or $641 at the time of writing, while daily volume has risen from 120.7 ETH to 1044.6 ETH.

There are now over 2 million ENS items on OpenSea spread among more than 508,000 owners, with total sales now sitting at 2,682 ENS domains sold.

60-Day Average Price Change For ENS on OpenSea. Source: OpenSea.

According to OpenSea, some of the most expensive ENS domain names are 000.eth, which was bought for 300 ETH and is on sale for 5,000 ETH, along with opensea.eth, crypto.eth, google.eth and nike.eth.

The strong start in September follows an impressive ENS sales month in August, which saw more than 300,000 new “.eth” registrations and monthly revenue of 2,744 ETH, the third-highest month since ENS was founded in 2018.

The spike in ENS domain name demand comes a little over a week before the scheduled date of the Ethereum Merge, which is scheduled for around Sept. 15.

Related: Ethereum Name Service registrations surge by 200% amid lower gas fees

On Sunday, Vitalik Buterin asked his 4.2 million followers what price tag a five-letter ENS domain name should hold over a 100-year period:

The poll found that 49.8% of the 91,130 voters went with “Under $100,” while 18.9% of voters thought “$10,000 or more” could be considered a fair price.

According to OpenSea, the average price of an ENS domain is 0.3207 ETH, or $533.71. 

Buterin and Armstrong reflect on proof-of-stake shift as Ethereum Merge nears

Two influential figures in the cryptocurrency space unpack their individual journeys to understanding the promise of proof-of-stake as The Merge approaches for Ethereum.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believe that a gradual mind shift and important community contributions led to their backing of Ethereum’s upcoming move from a proof-of-work (PoW) to aproof-of-stake (PoS) consensus.

The two industry titans joined Coinbase protocol specialist Viktor Bunin on the Around the Block podcast for an enlightening discussion centered on The Merge, which is set to take place in mid-September 2022.

Buterin reflected on his history of considering proof-of-stake as a potential consensus mechanism for the Ethereum blockchain, which was initially met with skepticism due to a number of unsolved problems that made it seemingly unviable.

According to the Ethereum co-founder, one of the project’s first blog posts in 2014 proposed an algorithm called slasher, which introduced the concept wherein a node would be penalized for voting for contradicting actions:

“This was my attempt at making inroads in solving what proof-of-stake critics call the “nothing-at-stake” problem. In proof-of-work if you want to build on top of two blocks you have to do double the work but in proof-of-stake you can just sign as many things as you want.”

Buterin believed that introducing an explicit penalty for signing contradictory actions would be a viable option. Research continued through 2014 to explore the security assumptions that Ethereum would have to rely on with PoS and if it could be more secure than PoW by making slashing penalties eat into staked deposits rather than staking rewards.

Buterin then reflected on a concept introduced at the end of that year called “weak subjectivity.” He explained that for a PoS network to benefit from the full security guarantee of the mechanism, a node has to be online at fairly regular intervals.

Related: Lower costs, higher speeds after Ethereum’s Merge? Don’t count on it

This could be every week, month, or year, with longer time periods becoming more inconvenient for stakers from a liquidity perspective. Buterin believes this was the critical consideration that set his mind on the transition to PoS:

“Ironically enough for me, it was realising that that was an unavoidable tradeoff that actually made me comfortable with it. It made me realise that this is the weakness and at the same time I felt confident that it’s all that there is.”

Armstrong entered the conversation, admitting that he had reservations about PoS when he first heard about it and it took a couple of years to change his perspective:

“When people started talking about a Turing complete language on a blockchain, I was like this sounds so easy to attack and so I was initially just skeptical.”

The Coinbase CEO began to explore the concept again after explaining that his initial belief that Bitcoin would serve as the main blockchain in the ecosystem had its limitations. The success of decentralized applications (DApps) running on Ethereum led Armstrong to have a more open mind around the transition to PoS:

“Just seeing Vitalik make progress on it and the DApps that were coming out, we eventually came round to the idea at Coinbase that we’re going to have to be agnostic to every chain and token that is coming out, we can’t sit here in our ivory tower only focused on one asset.”

Buterin went on to unpack his belief that PoS is more robust and decentralized than PoW, with the ability for an Ethereum validator to be set up anywhere in the world. An individual only needs a computer and an internet connection to do so.

The pair also weighed in on the United States Treasury’s move to sanction USD Coin (USDC) and Ether (ETH) addresses connected to Tornado Cash, while also noting that Coinbase would rather stop its staking operation to preserve the integrity of the overall network in the hypothetical situation that it was required to censor transactions.

Ripple CTO lashes back at Vitalik Buterin for his dig at XRP

David Schwartz compared crypto miners in the Ethereum and Bitcoin ecosystems to shareholders of eBay, which he believes makes BTC and ETH securities as well.

In a discussion that started around two Ontario crypto exchanges’ recent 30,000-Canadian-dollar limit on altcoins purchases — which excluded Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin took a dig at XRP, which Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz didn’t take very kindly.

Buterin, in a response to a tweet, lauded the Ethereum community’s pushback against regulations that privilege ETH over other cryptocurrencies. David Hoffman, founder of decentralized media and education platform Bankless, responded to Buterin and said he wouldn’t have minded if they had restricted XRP.

Buterin joined in on the XRP bashing, claiming, “They already lost their right to protection when they tried to throw us under the bus as ‘China-controlled.’” The response from Buterin created a storm among XRP followers on Twitter, and the debate was later joined by Schwartz himself.

Buterin was referring to Ripple’s defense in its ongoing court battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, in which it claimed XRP shouldn’t be deemed as security since Ether and Bitcoin (BTC) are similar in nature, and it even called the top two cryptocurrencies Chinese-controlled. Ripple is currently fighting a lawsuit from the SEC over the alleged unlicensed sale and issuance of XRP tokens.

Schwartz reiterated Ripple’s earlier claims that ETH and BTC are securities and compared miners in the ecosystem to shareholders of eBay. He said:

“I do think it’s perfectly fair to analogize miners in PoW systems to stockholders in companies. Just as eBay’s stockholders earn from the residual friction between buyers and sellers that eBay does not remove, so do miners in ETH and BTC.”

Schwartz concluded his tweet with a question to Buterin, asking him whether the government or the market should settle the security debate.

Ether’s potential status as a security has become a hot topic during the ongoing lawsuit proceedings, with Ripple claiming that the SEC has a clear bias against them and favors Ethereum. In an interview in 2021, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse contended that the SEC helped ETH overtake XRP as the No. 2 cryptocurrency.

Related: Alchemy and Infura block access to Tornado Cash as Vitalik Buterin weighs in on debate

Whether cryptocurrencies are securities has been a longstanding debate due to a lack of regulatory guidelines. The majority of regulators around the globe consider Bitcoin an asset, while there is still an ongoing debate over the status of ETH due to its pre-mine and initial coin offering.

Vitalik Buterin proposes stealth addresses for anonymous NFT ownership

“You would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is,” said the Ethereum co-founder.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested there may be a “low-tech approach” to incorporating privacy features into nonfungible token, or NFT, transactions.

In a Monday post on the Ethereum research channel, Buterin implied Merkle trees and Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge, or zk-SNARKs, were a more complicated method for stealth addresses for ERC-721 tokens while proposing his own solution. The Ethereum co-founder suggested instead that smart contract wallets could include a method that would allow the sender to essentially mask their address to third parties.

“You would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is,” said Buterin.

Buterin posited that using this method, senders would need to include “enough ETH to pay fees 5–50 times” through the transfer chain. However, he added that “maybe there is a better generic solution that involves specialized searchers or block builders somehow.”

Related: Vitalik: Centralized USDC could decide the future of contentious ETH hard forks

Finding the balance between semi-anonymity and transparency on the blockchain has been a challenge for many as the crypto space continues to grow. In January, Cointelegraph reported there were cases of users swiping IP addresses off of NFT marketplace OpenSea as well as MetaMask.

Buterin will be speaking at Korea Blockchain Week from Sunday Aug. 7 through Sunday, Aug. 14.

Buterin: Layer-2 scaling will make crypto payments ‘make sense’ again

“It’s a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” Vitalik Buterin said.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that crypto payments will once again “make sense,” as transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent due to layer-2 rollups.

The Cointelegraph team currently on the ground at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) quoted Buterin as stating that the final hurdle to getting transactions down to fractions of a cent at scale is blockchain data compression. 

He pointed to “solid work happening” with rollups at the moment such as Optimism’s layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which has worked to get the size and cost of data in blockchain transactions down by introducing zero byte compression:

“So today with roll ups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with roll ups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable, and a complete game changer.”

Despite primarily functioning as a speculative store of value, Buterin emphasized the key use case of Bitcoin (BTC) presented in its white paper from 2008 was to provide a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that was cheaper than traditional payment methods.

While that was true up until 2013, according to Buterin, however, this became no longer the case in 2018 when adoption increased and blockchain transactions became too expensive.

“It’s a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” he said.

In the Ethereum co-founder’s view, BTC and other assets will soon be able to provide this use case once again as scaling solutions — such as the Lightning Network in the case of BTC — gradually bring the costs down to fractions of a cent.

Crypto payment use cases

Buterin outlined a couple of different areas that cheap crypto transactions will be particularly important. Firstly he pointed to “lower income countries or places where the existing financial system is not very effective,” as it will give citizens access to vital payments structure over the internet, something which is already adopted despite the cost of international remittances.

Related: 60 million NFTs could be minted in a single transaction: StarkWare founder

Secondly, he noted that in the context of Ethereum, cheap crypto transactions will also help ramp up adoption for non-financial applications such as domain name system (DNS) servers, humanity proof-of-attendance protocols and Web3 account management services:

“You need to actually send a transaction to create a DNS name, you need to actually send the transaction to recover your account, you need to actually send a transaction to meet some of these adaptations. If doing each of those operations costs like $11, then people are not going into it.”

“Scalability isn’t just like some boring thing where you just need like cost numbers go down scalability, I think actually enables and unlocks entirely new classes of applications,” he added.

What are the long-terms goals for the Ethereum blockchain? Vitalik Buterin explains live at EthCC

For Buterin, building a better-decentralized ecosystem requires short-term pain for long-term gain.

On Thursday, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, shared his long-term vision for the namesake blockchain live at the annual Ethereum Community Conference, or EthCC, in Paris. As told by Buterin, Ethereum is currently at an inflection point, or period of rapid change, before the ecosystem’s capability will eventually settle down. 

Currently, the foremost priority for Ethereum is building an easy-to-use light client for the consensus layer, execution layer, and layer-2 solutions by default. Next is better support for home stakers or those looking to validate network transactions when Ethereum transitions to a proof-of-stake blockchain but possess less than the required 32 Ether (ETH). Finally, Buterin believes it’s critical that Ethereum can eventually be run on a full node with lighter hardware.

As for the long-horizon roadmap, Buterin plans to upgrade Ethereum with better cryptographic technologies, potentially for quantum resistance, if they come out and additionally further integrate with zero knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines, or zk-EVMs, should they work out. “We also need to keep an open mind,” says Buterin. “We don’t know exactly what the needs of 2032 will demand.”

But the Ethereum co-founder also shared his skepticism about a few other potential opportunities. These include adding support for multiple, complex virtual machines, getting too comfortable with black box technologies such as zk-SNARKs or making the protocol so complex as to render it incomprehensible without the aid of specialists. Ethereum is on the verge of its proof-of-stake transformation dubbed the “Merge.” Despite being over two years in the making, some developers are still skeptical about whether there will be a safe transition. 

Vitalik Buterin speaking at EthCC | Source: Cointelegraph Events Manager Maria A.