In a recent interview, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), stated that his influence on Ethereum has decreased over the last several years. He also added that he needs to address people’s concerns to get his proposals accepted.
Ethereum is an open-source, decentralized blockchain with smart contract capability. It was released by Vitalik Buterin and other co-founders on July 30, 2015 (6 years ago), with ETH as its cryptocurrency. ETH is the second most popular and valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin in market capitalization.
In an interview with Haseeb Qureshi and Naval Ravikant, an American digital entrepreneur and investor about life, Ethereum, and blockchains, Vitalik Buterin, an elder statesman of smart contract blockchains and a co-founder of Ethereum, said that his influence on Ethereum is diminishing.
During the interview, Naval asked about Vitalik’s his current influence on Ethereum compared to the DAO fork time. Vitalik claims that he has less influence than he did six months ago. According to him,
I feel like my influence in Ethereum keeps decreasing every six months. I have less now than I did six months ago. Six months ago, I had less than I had a year ago. And a year ago, I had less than I had 18 months ago.
Why does he think he believes his influence on Ethereum is decreasing?
In comparison to the DAO fork, when he was more involved, Vitalik mentioned that he had to convince many members of the Ethereum community to push on a particular path. He expressed disappointment that some of the Ethereum Improvement Proposals he promoted were not accepted, stressing that he must try hard to address everyone’s concerns. EIP-4488 is an example of one of his EIP proposals that was not accepted. According to him,
EIP-4488 is one example. If I had more control, it would have been in Ethereum already.
In the interview, Vitalik also admitted that it is becoming more challenging to make significant modifications to the Ethereum protocol because so many stakeholders have a role in the decision-making process; protocol decisions are made through an all-core dev call. He asserts that,
all of the core developers come online and talk about all the proposed protocol changes. Everything that people agree on gets accepted. And if people disagree, then it doesn’t get accepted. So there’s this fairly complicated pipeline that changes have to go through
Possible Effects of Vitalik Diminishing Influence on Ethereum
As Vitalik’s influence on Ethereum diminishes, some investors may become less optimistic about the future of the cryptocurrency, according to proponents. The ETH market is closer to the bottom than the peak at this point. As of April 25, 2022, the ETH price had not changed positively but instead decreased despite the Ethereum foundation disclosing that 80.5% of its $1.61 billion treasury fund is held in the blockchain’s currency.
