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Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin Believes That Terra Should Focus On Protecting the Small Investors

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Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, believes that any suggested payment strategy for the ailing Terra project should favor tiny hodlers.

As previously reported, the Terra ecosystem went into a death spiral on May 9, resulting in Terra (LUNA) losing its US dollar peg and the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin losing its US dollar peg, which was valued at $0.16 at the time of writing.

With LUNA and UST investors suffering significant losses, the community is now seeking methods to repair the ecosystem and provide financial assistance to many who have been harmed.

Terra’s proposal to refund all UST holders

If the UST dollar is finally stable, one community idea is to repay all original deposits (not yield) of small UST holders initially in order to “greatly enhance overall morale and attitude” while figuring out how to segregate debtors and bigger investors afterward. It is projected that the payoff will cost between $1 billion and $1.5 billion.

On Sunday, Buterin expressed support for the proposal on Twitter, saying that the focus should be on the smaller investor who needs the money, before adding that the whale hodlers should bear the loss:

“Coordinated sympathy and relief for the average UST smallholder who got told something dumb about ‘20% interest rates on the US dollar’ by an influencer, personal responsibility and [sorry for your loss] SFYL for the wealthy.”

While the Ethereum co-founder did not advocate for regulation, he did mention that potential safeguards like bank deposit insurance may be valuable in certain situations.

It’s uncertain at this point if the project will be able to recover or whether it will attempt a brief rebound to recoup investor losses, however tough that may be. It’s also worth noting that the proposal linked to Buterin’s statements has been amended this week, and it now considers paying out all users up to a $50,000 per-wallet maximum.

Another proposal floating around the internet is to create a “TERRA 2” hard fork for the Terra blockchain, as well as a liquidity pool to restore UST back to its peg.

Do Kwon, the creator of Terraform Labs, has suggested a reorganization of the Terra blockchain in order to reset “network ownership” and give 1 billion LUNA tokens to the community.

Popular players in the crypto world, such as Dogecoin (DOGE) co-founder Billy Markus, have criticized Kwon’s planned “Terra Ecosystem Revival Plan” and have asked for him to quit the industry.

Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin Still Believes That the Layer 2 Fees Are Expensive

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In response to a tweet about layer-two costs, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that many of the networks are still excessively costly.

Ryan Sean Adams, an Ethereum supporter and industry expert, shared a snapshot of the top layer-two platforms and their network fees on May 3.

Arbitrum One had the highest fee of $0.85 for sending ETH and $1.19 for a token swap, while the Metis Network had the lowest fee of $0.02 for sending ETH and $0.15 for a token swap. Buterin responded to the tweet with the following:

“Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we’re definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!”

Ethereum fees still at the top

Buterin has maintained his position in a 2017 interview that “the Internet of Money should not cost 5 cents per transaction.”

Buterin introduced Proto-Danksharding with EIP-4844 in February as a way to enhance the Ethereum Consensus Layer sharding method. The update allows a new form of transaction known as a “blob-carrying transaction,” which carries additional data that the Ethereum Virtual Machine does not have access to (EVM).

According to L2fees, the current cost of transferring ETH on the major layer-two networks is between $0.02 and $1.96, indicating that there is still a long way to go before the average reaches the level that Vitalik considers acceptable.

Nonetheless, they are all less expensive than transferring on layer-one Ethereum, which, according to Etherscan, costs roughly $2.50 on average.

On May 3, BitInfoCharts reported an average transaction price of roughly $16, indicating that Ethereum remains prohibitively expensive for everyday use.

When Yuga Labs started their newest NFT collection on May 1, average gas fees soared to an all-time high of over $200, eliciting even more indignation from the crypto community.

The total value locked across all L2 networks has decreased to a little over $6 billion, according to the L2beat layer-two tracker. Since the beginning of April, when it was at an all-time high of $7.4 billion, it has dropped 18 percent.

With 57 percent of the TVL, Arbitrum is the market leader, which is remarkable given that it is one of the most costly L2 networks to utilize.

The dYdX exchange is in the second position with a 16 percent market share and just under $1 billion in TVL locked up, while Optimism is in third place with a ten percent market share and roughly $622 million in TVL locked up.

Vitalik Buterin Attains Crypto-Friendly Montenegro Citizenship

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The Montenegrin government has allegedly made Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin its newest citizen as part of its ambition to become a center for blockchain innovation.

Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapi proposed Buterin for the honor to assist the southeastern European nation in promoting its ambitions to become a blockchain innovation hub, according to Montenegrin news site RTCB.

Although there appears to be no official notification, Minister of Finance and Social Welfare Milojko Spaji apparently shared this photo with Buterin when he obtained his passport.

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Vitalik Buterin Attains Crypto-Friendly Montenegro Citizenship 2

Vitalik is now a Montenegro citizen

On April 7, Minister Spaji hosted the Ethereum (ETH) co-founder at the Future Now panel discussion in Montenegro.

Vitalik Buterin was one of the panelists who discussed the legality of blockchain identification and smart contracts in government and other issues.

According to the local news site Mina, Prime Minister Krivokapi, Vitalik Buterin, and numerous other government officials met on April 4 to explore Montenegro’s choices in the blockchain business. One of the most crucial points raised was how to regulate cryptocurrency for his countrymen.

Minister Spaji noted that while he would like his country to be tougher on criminals in the business, he believes that fairness would help to boost growth and “eliminate the grey economy in all areas.”

He also added that “Montenegro strives to become a center of innovation in blockchain technology, emphasizing all the advantages of a legitimate industry that will bring attractive regulations.”

The government of Montenegro is now delving into the complex regulatory entanglements that come with incorporating blockchain technology into its numerous institutions.

The presenters at the Future Now event focused on how individuals may legally build a community using blockchain, as well as legally verify their identity and protect themselves from identity theft.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) might provide DAO tokens for users to validate their membership while maintaining their anonymity, according to Mamlyk. Buterin, on the other hand, stated that “there is no miraculous one-line concept” for dealing with bad actors.

Buterin responded to Wyoming when asked if Montenegro should allow corporations to register as DAOs. He believes that implementing decentralized government in this way is a “good first step” and “a good place to start” for Montenegro.

Vitalik Buterin Equates BAYC to Gambling in Time Magazine Interview

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Time magazine’s latest cover featured Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as the most influential person in crypto. The publication termed Buterin as the “The Prince of Crypto”, where he gave his insights on the blockchain and the broader crypto industry. Throughout the 80 long minute interview, Buterin delved into how crypto can go wrong if not properly implemented.

He cautioned against overconfident investors, the exorbitant transaction fees, and the brazen displays of wealth that have now come to be associated with crypto. Turning his attention to one of the most talked-about nft projects – the BAYC, the Russian Canadian programmer equated them to gambling which he claims, has reduced to a mere “status symbol for millionaires.”

“The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling,” he says, “There definitely are lots of people that are just buying yachts and Lambos.”

One of the major turning points for the ecosystem has been during the infamous 2016 DAO Hack that led to the creation of a hard fork to fix the project’s vulnerability. The fork was approved after receiving an overwhelming vote from the community, which in turn helped towards Ether’s price recovery. To Buterin, the DAO hack epitomized the promise of a decentralized approach to governance, the article read.

Vitalik Buterin fears Ethereum’s transformative power is at stake

Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all kinds of social projects. Most importantly, he wants the platform to be a force to reckon against authoritarian governments and centralized institutions. Fearing the “transformative power'” of Ethereum is at risk, he admitted to being hesitant to take on a bigger public role.

But Buterin stressed being vocal is of utmost importance, adding “If we don’t exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable. And those are often far from what’s actually the best for the world.”

The EF, better known as Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit established to safeguard Ethereum’s infrastructure and fund research and development projects. As per sources, its research team is currently working on two key technical updates. One of them is the “merge” which transforms the blockchain from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.

At ETHDenver, the EF researcher Danny Ryan announced that the merge would happen within the next six months, unless “something insanely catastrophic” happens.

Vitalik Buterin slams Putin’s actions as a crime against the people of Ukraine and Russia

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On Thursday, Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian co-founder of Ethereum, lashed out at Russian President Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. He called his vicious actions as a “crime against the Ukrainian and Russian people.”

Buterin expressed his displeasure with the Kremlin’s decision on Twitter. Just minutes after Putin stated he had launched a “special military operation” in eastern Ukraine and different media reports of explosions in towns around the former Soviet republic.

There have been words of up to 40 deaths so far as a result of early morning strikes by the Russian army and naval forces, which targeted cities including the capital Kyiv.

“Putin’s choice to forgo the chance of a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine conflict and instead go to war has angered me much. This is a crime against the people of Ukraine and Russia.”

Vitalik made a tweet, “I want to wish everyone safety, even though I know there won’t be any. Ukraine is to be praised.”

He later stated that, although Ethereum is neutral, he is not.

Buterin has been outspoken in his opposition to rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine. He posted a tweet earlier this month that he hoped the Kremlin would “choose wisely” in its Ukraine policy.

He wrote on Twitter, “An assault on Ukraine can only hurt Russia, Ukraine, and mankind.”

“Whether the situation will return to a peaceful path or if a conflict would break out is now up to @KremlinRussia, not Zelensky or NATO. I hope they make the best decision possible. “

Vitalik who co-founded Ethereum in 2014 after getting interested in Bitcoin as a teenager, is one of the few notable corporate executives to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine thus far.

Crypto sheds tears amide Russia-Ukraine tension

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies dropped to a one-month low in the hours following the start of Russia’s invasion on Thursday.

Bitcoin dropped 7.9% to $34,324 (€30,570), its lowest level since the end of January.

Other cryptos were affected by the all-out invasion of Ukraine, which was dubbed “the worst attack in Europe since the end of WWII.”

According to Coinmarketcap data, the whole cryptocurrency market has lost more than $150 billion (€133 billion) in the previous 24 hours.

Vitalik Buterin views crypto winter as beneficial to the digital asset industry

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Ethereum’s Co-founder Vitalik Buterin feels that the current market downtrend which is being viewed as another crypto winter might be in fact favorable for the digital asset industry as a whole. Referring to the ongoing price slump in the crypto market since achieving record highs in late November, Buterin believes long-term market players welcome the bear market.

But then it also invites a lot of very short-term speculative attention, he added. The recent sharp sell-off has spooked both investors and speculators who are predicting a reduction in the amount of stimulus in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Ether for one has tanked by nearly 40% during the same period. 

Since the last “crypto winter” in 2018, the sector has boomed, attracting a massive amount of investments. Besides creating overnight millionaires and billionaires, the industry has also seen several market manipulation schemes such as pumps and dumps.

For the initiated, these are a form of securities fraud that involves inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements, in order to sell the cheaply bought stocks or security at a higher price.

Buterin thinks winter as the determining factor for projects

Buterin in the Bloomsburg interview said that winters are the time to determine the survivability of crypto projects in the long term. Still, the 27-year-old crypto billionaire expressed surprise over how the market has evolved since last year, isn’t sure whether crypto has entered another winter or the sector is just mirroring the volatility in broader markets.

“It does feel like the crypto markets kind of flip the switch from being this niche group that’s controlled by a very niche group of participants and it’s fairly disconnected to traditional markets into something that behaves more and more like it is part of the mainstream financial markets.”

He further added that a crypto winter can also help those who are building projects in crypto focus on improving the technology.

Not all share the same with some experts even believing that the crypto market is headed towards something worse. This is what Invesco’s global head of asset allocation research, Paul Jackson told in a recent interview. The exec warned that the crypto seems to be heading for an “ice age,” where prices stay low for a prolonged period and many investors eventually lose interest.

Here’s How Vitalik Buterin plans to deploy the $100M of Donated SHIB Funds

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced via Twitter that India-based Covid relief fund CryptoRelief is sending back $100 million of the SHIB funds that were previously donated to the charity and outlined his plans to deploy these funds in some ‘higher-risk higher-reward covid science and relief projects worldwide’.

The move comes as the Indian government is preparing to present the nation’s budget on Feb. 1, 2022. The country’s lawmakers have been exploring new crypto regulations. Nailwal hinted that the country’s vigilant outlook towards crypto has influenced in the decision to return the amount in stablecoin to Buterin.“

Taking into account the fund’s foreign origin and laws of India, Crypto Relief followed a systematic, controlled & robust approach in disbursing funds mandated to be utilized for India,” tweeted Polygon’s founder Sandeep Nailwal who oversaw the donation. “But being an Indian citizen [NRI], I have to be extra cautious in any of the projects being donated to,” he added.

In a series of tweets, Nailwal stated that CryptoRelief still reserves 302 million USDC [Apart from 70 million that it has already deployed] that would be disbursed in different initiatives across India as and when required.

Previously on May 2021, Vitalik Buterin contributed 50 trillion in SHIB tokens which were worth about $1.2 billion at that time, an amount that the creators of Shiba Inu sent him free, to the CryptoRelief fund. He burned the rest of the tokens.

This is how Vitalik Buterin dump SHIB tokens

In a recent podcast episode of  UpOnly Podcast, Buterin recalled how he managed to sell billions worth of SHIB tokens that were sent to him unsolicited by the meme coin creators. That’s what drove the asset for a massive price rally and reaching the top 10 positions for the first time.

Describing the ordeal as fun and exciting as well as scary, Vitalik Buterin likened the whole process to a James Bond movie. He said the experience was both hair-raising and amusing given that it was more money than he had ever had. “It was scary and involved a procedure that would probably make a good plot for a James Bond movie eventually,” Buterin said.

Vitalik Buterin Reveals How He Burned Over $7 billion in Shiba Inu

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Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum blockchain’s co-founder, recently revealed how he burned $6.7 billion in Shiba Inu.
Buterin stated in a recent interview with the UpOnly Podcast that unknown devs donated him 505 trillion SHIB tokens in May 2021, which were worth $8 billion at the time.

The developers did this, according to Buterin, because they assumed delivering the tokens to him would essentially burn them, reducing supply and rising demand. Buterin donated SHIB and other crypto donations to different organizations throughout that month, including 50 trillion SHIB ($1.2 billion at the time) to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund.

Vitalik narrates the hazzles he went through

He mentioned in the podcast that it was scary and fun at the same time. He said the frightening part was that it was more money than he ever had. He added that he had to follow a complicated technical procedure to get rid of it because initially, the funds were all in a cold wallet.

He had paper backups in the form of two separate numbers, where if you add the two numbers, you will get the private key. One of the two papers was with his family in Canada, where he had to call them up and ask them to read it out to him.

He input the numbers into a $300 PC he bought at Target to finalize the transaction. He also created an Ethereum transaction to transmit ETH from the wallet. He then downloaded a QR code generator application and scanned the transaction’s QR code with his phone, copied it to his PC, and pasted it into etherscan.io. He then began the process of burning the tokens.

Vitalik expresses his views on the future of Ethereum

In addition, Vitalik stated that Ethereum is still aiming for a transaction fee of $0.05 and that rollups and sharding are the best ways to scale without losing security or decentralization. “Within a few years,” he expects transaction costs to fall below $0.05. He also mentioned that the ZK-rollup Ethereum Virtual Machine is progressing nicely and that within a couple of years, Ethereum fees will be back under 5 cents.

On the podcast, they also conversed about Vitalik’s life outside crypto, his family, and his future plans outside of Ethereum.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin unveils the Roadmap for ETH 2.0

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Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his vision on the future of ETH 2.0 and provided a detailed roadmap on how to revamp the platform by making it acceptably trustless and censorship-resistant. Revealing more on the blog post dubbed Endgame, Buterin offered his insight on the plausible strategy of transforming a big blockchain that is denoted by its high block frequency, equally high block size, and thousands of transactions per second, into highly decentralized in terms of block validation and preventing the block operators from censoring.

Even though Buterin’s blog does not explicitly deal with the issue of centralization of block production, it still provides a work plan for its implementation. At first, the founder writes about a second-tier staking solution, which requires fewer resources to execute distributed block validation. On the security aspect, Buterin suggested the implementation of fraud proofs or ZK-SNARKs to enable users to check the validity of the block directly and in turn, save cost. In addition to that, he mentions introducing data availability sampling to led ‘users check block availability and add secondary transaction channels to prevent censorship’.

Ethereum’s Rollup-focused roadmap

With respect to the block production remaining centralized, Buterin opined that it would still persist even after the implementation of Rollups. For the uninitiated, rollups are basically layer-two protocols that execute transactions outside of the main chain of Ethereum.

According to Buterin, decentralization may not be long lasting due to the possibility of cross-domain Maximal [formerly Miner] extractable revenue [MEV]. As the name suggest MEV refers to the maximum amount of value that can be earned by the miners from creating block apart from the standard block rewards and gas fees. Explaining in detail, the founder noted,

There’s a high chance that block production will end up centralized: either the network effects within rollups or the network effects of cross-domain MEV push us in that direction in their own different ways. But what we can do is use protocol-level techniques such as committee validation, data availability sampling and bypass channels to regulate this market, ensuring that the winners cannot abuse their power.

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Summing up, the Ethereum co-founder said that the advantage of this rollup-centric roadmap is ‘open to all futures, and does not have to commit to an opinion about which one will necessarily win.’

Ethereum co-founder labels El Salvador’s Bitcoin move “reckless”

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El Salvador became the center of attraction soon after it passed its Bitcoin law. However, Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin does not seem to understand the hype behind El Salvador’s move and even went on to label it a “reckless” one.

While the entire globe was on a crypto adoption spree, El Salvador joined in on the ride. The country’s crypto-friendly move was lauded by the entire crypto community. Despite garnering angst and hesitation from several international monetary authorities the country did not stop. The law even mandated the need for businesses to accept Bitcoin. However, a significant majority weren’t happy with this decision. Protests disregarding this law took place across the region, however, the government remained untethered and wanted to persist the existing laws.

Commenting on the same, the Ethereum network’s co-founder, Buterin suggested that it wasn’t right to force or mandate businesses to accept crypto. While crypto was started out as a tool of financial freedom to people, forcing individuals to accept it would drive out the essence of the crypto-verse, Buterin noted.

Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin talks about El Salvador

Buterin went on to leave a comment on the largest cryptocurrency-related subreddit, r/CryptoCurrency. This comment became quite controversial as he called out El Salvador for their latest crypto move. He pointed out that forcing BTC down people who have no experience in the industry was a “reckless” move.

This certainly got the Ethereum co-founder in trouble as Bitcoin maximalists gathered up against him and went on to call him out on his “salty” behavior. One such member tweeted,

Furthermore, he suggested that the citizens of El Salvador would be bound to encounter hacks or scams as they do not have the required knowledge about crypto.

Additionally, speaking about Bitcoin maximalists Buterin added,

“Bitcoin maximalists are a very easy community to get to praise you: you just have to be in a position of power and do or say nice things about them and their coin.”

El Salvador has been going all-in on crypto. From mining operations via volcanic energy to exorbitant BTC purchases, Nayib Bukele, the President of the region did not seem to be steering away from the crypto-verse.