Vitalik Buterin talks about the future of Ethereum and two other blockchains on Mainnet 2022.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, one of the most recognized minds in the blockchain industry, spoke about the future of Ethereum and two other blockchain networks, which could be the next to abandon the consensus Proof of Work and follow Ethereum towards consensus Proof of Stake, to be more efficient and scalable in the future.
Speaking at the Mainnet 2022 conference hosted by Messari in New York City, Buterin said that The Surge, Ethereum's next phase on its path to scalability, will be much less than a single event. “(The Surge) will be carried out in stages”, Buterin noted during the blockchain conference.
The arrival of The Surge is expected in 2023. In this phase, Ethereum developers will introduce the sharding or sharding the blockchain, to divide the network into smaller subchains that allow developers to increase their performance and scalability. These subchains will be known as “shards.”
On the other hand, regarding the Proof of Stake consensus, Buterin bets that two other blockchains could be about to make a major change and migrate towards this consensus protocol, to improve their energy efficiency and scalability. According to the Ethereum co-founder, Zcash and Dogecoin could be the next blockchains to migrate to PoS.
“As PoS matures, I would expect it to increase in legitimacy over time. I hope so. Zcash will move and I am hopeful (that) Dogecoin will move to PoS soon.”, Vitalik Buterin commented on Mainnet 2022.
In this regard, Zooko Wilcox, founder and CEO of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, the company responsible for the Zcash protocol, had commented in 2018 that he would wait to see Ethereum's migration from PoW to PoS in order to learn from it and see what could go wrong. Since then, there has been talk of a possible change in Zcash's consensus protocol to PoS.
Scalability, privacy and censorship resistance
In addition to scalability and Proof of Stake consensus, privacy and censorship resistance were also discussed by Vitalik Buterin and Zooko Wilcox during the Mainnet 2022 conference.
Regarding privacy, Zooko commented that the Zcash community has a very important role to play in the blockchain technology industry.
The founder of Zerocoin stressed the importance of privacy in the crypto industry, emphasizing that for the Zcash community, privacy is already normal. “That will make the difference”, he said.
For his part, Buterin stressed that in addition to privacy, scalability is one of the biggest goals of Ethereum developers, to ensure that the blockchain is viable and sustainable in the long term. According to Buterin, the difference between a transaction costing $3 and another transaction costing 3 cents, although it seems to be just a number, is a big problem and “It is the difference between blockchains being viable as a conventional technology.”
On its path to scalability, Ethereum still has 4 more phases to go. After the successful Implementing The Merge on Mainnet On September 15, developers are preparing for The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. It is possible that these next phases will take a few years to become a reality on the web.
At press time, Ethereum (ETH) and Zcash (ZEC) are trading with a weekly gain of 0,29% and 6,8%, respectively.
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