The 23-year old co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, gave an interview to two of the largest news reporting companies in South Korea, JoongAng Daily and JoongAng Ilbo, expressing his thoughts on the future of Ethereum, ICOs and the cryptocurrency merits, as reported by Cointelegraph.
Vitalik spoke about the issues that Ethereum is currently facing with scaling. In another interview with the CEO and Founder of AngelList, Vitalik shared that the major purpose of Ethereum is to operate as a decentralized platform. So, because of the very nature of Ethereum’s purpose, Vitalik shared the following, as given by Cointelegraph:
“I would say two to five, with early prototypes in one year. The various scaling solutions, including sharding, plasma and various state channel systems such as Raiden and Perun, are already quite well thought out, and development has already started. Raiden is the earliest, and its developer preview release is out already.”
It appears that Vitalik is planning to optimize how Ethereum is structured and how it can be improved upon in the near future.
Buterin also talked about some of the issues with ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings. According to the co-founder of Ethereum, while ICOs are built on decentralized platform, they themselves are very centralized, run by many people with huge amount of funding.
In his words, as reported by Cointelegraph:
“However, they also have their flaws, and I think many of these flaws arise from the fact that even though the ICOs are happening on a decentralized platform, the ICOs themselves are hardly centralized; they inherently involve many people trusting a single development team with potentially over $200 mln of funding. There are also not very good incentives for people to produce information to help people determine which projects are worth participating in. I think in the medium term, getting funds with ICOs will get harder, regardless of whether or not regulation is implemented.”
The cryptocurrency industry is now getting a lot of scrutiny from regulators, especially in China and India. It is somehow difficult to predict the future of Bitcoin, Ethereum and all other digital currencies, but it is sure that there are important issues to be resolved within the near term with how cryptocurrencies are relied upon and managed.