Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin hopes that the cryptocurrency industry will grow rapidly – emphasizing that the industry is at a “turning point”.
Speaking In front of a packed room At the Ethereum Community Conference in Cannes, France, Butling used his keynote to provide a clear reality check: He believes that decentralization must be transformed from a slogan into a set of concrete guarantees, or at the risk of becoming another hollow promise.
Buterin said that as the recognition of major companies and politicians in the industry becomes mainstream, builders need to return to the key ideals of the ecosystem, built around decentralization and for the needs of users.
In his typical jeans and relaxing dark t-shirt uniform, Butling proposes a practical “test” that he says every crypto project should pass. These include 1) Walking test. If the company behind the app disappears, will the user retain their assets? 2) Internal attack test: How much damage will a rogue insider or front-end be damaged? 3) Does it have a trustworthy computing basis: How many lines of code must be trusted to protect users’ funds or data?
He warned that too many Layer 2 networks, DEFI projects and “decentralized” front-ends rely on hidden backdoors, instant upgrade buttons or unsafe interfaces that can be tampered with and hacked.
Even identity and privacy solutions have been criticized by him. He noted that zero-knowledge proof can backfire if users still disclose their entire transaction history when signing with a centralized provider. He added that privacy must be flipped from what is considered an optional feature to something that reduces data leakage by default.
This month will be 10 years since the Ethereum blockchain went online, buterin Under pressure Over the past few months, the community has addressed core protocol issues. If not, blockchain could lose an advantage to competitors.
For Buterin, the next phase in Ethereum’s history means building a system that passes walking tests, narrowing down a trusted code base and resisting internal attacks. This includes balancing engineering with simple, powerful solutions.
He concluded: “If we lose that, then Ethereum will inevitably become a generation, and it will inevitably pass like many other things in the past.”
Read more: Vitalik Buterin proposes to replace Ethereum’s EVM with RISC-V
