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Vitalik Buterin stated at the BUIDL Asia conference in South Korea that centralized stablecoins like USDC and USDT will become crucial determining factors for future contentious hard forks.
The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, suggested that centralized stablecoins like Tether (USDT) and Circle USD (USDC) could be "important determinants" for "future contentious hard forks."
On August 3, during the BUIDL Asia conference held in Seoul, Buterin, along with Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of Near Protocol, discussed the upcoming Ethereum merge.
The Ethereum co-founder believes that centralized stablecoins might play a crucial role in deciding which blockchain protocol the industry will "maintain" during a contentious hard fork.
A hard fork occurs when the protocol of a blockchain network undergoes fundamental changes, effectively resulting in two versions. Typically, one chain eventually becomes more popular than the other.
Buterin explained, "Because by that point, there will be $100 billion of USDT on one chain and $100 billion of USDT on the other chain, and they (Tether) need to stop maintaining one of them."
However, Buterin mentioned that he has "not seen any signs" indicating such a dispute would be an issue in the upcoming Ethereum merge, noting that the problem with centralized stablecoins is more of a concern for future hard forks.
"I think in the farther future, this will definitely be a more worrying problem. Basically, the question of which chain USDC decides to consider as the fact Ethereum might be an important determinant for future contentious hard forks."
He added that Ethereum might experience more contentious hard forks in the next five to ten years, with the role of centralized stablecoin providers gaining more significance.
He stated, "By then, maybe the Ethereum Foundation will be weaker, maybe the ETH 2 client teams will have more power, maybe companies like Coinbase, which both operate stablecoins and acquire one of the client teams, [....] a lot of these things could happen."
Vitalik suggested opting for different types of stablecoins as a means to counter potential influence from centralized participants:
"The best answer I can think of is to encourage people to adopt more kinds of stablecoins. Basically, people might use USDC, but they might also use DAI. At this point, I mean DAI has taken this very strong stance of saying, 'We are not going to be purely crypto-economic; we are going to be a wrapper around many real-world assets.'" |
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Post time 2-2-2024 04:56:56