The platform that hosts many of the world’s NFT and cryptocurrency trades has just completed one of the most difficult upgrades in modern technology.
Crypto underwent its major upgrade. Even greater ambitions await.
The shift, known as Merge, will save huge amounts of energy and prevent carbon from spewing into the air. As a result, it will also expand Ethereum’s transaction capacity, from a paltry 15 per second to as many as 100,000, a change developers hope will make ethereum a bigger part of modern life.
But for all the crypto world hype about the merger, it’s just the latest step in a grand plan Buterin has been planning for years. In Buterin’s future, digital life isn’t just more immersive—it’s a hierarchy-free place where ethereum enables people to socialize differently, free politics from governments, and borrow money without the hassle large intermediates.
“If the merger fully works, then I think we will really be able to build ethereum into a tool for a more democratic and more equalized society,” said Merav Ozair, a former professor at Rutgers who recently started crypto consulting firm Blockchain Intelligence. “With many ideas,” she added, “that can make the world a better place.”
The merger’s long-term success is not guaranteed. Ethereum’s new security system relies on the squishiness of human behavior, making it vulnerable to exploitation. Many crypto critics are also skeptical of Buterin, questioning whether his ideas limiting the influence of large institutions can really be implemented and worrying about the potential for abuse.
That hasn’t stopped Buterin, a 28-year-old crypto prodigy, from having a number of lofty plans.
Buterin had a Doogie Howser-like early start on advanced research tools. Coming from Russia to Toronto with his father at the age of 6, he quickly showed a childhood fondness for Excel spreadsheets. At just 19, Buterin published a groundbreaking white paper that laid the groundwork for ethereum and NFTs — the unique digital creations that would become a speculative bubble — that expanded far beyond what bitcoin did.
He has since cultivated a sense of the rootless idealist. Despite much wealth from holding ETH – essentially Ethereum’s version of bitcoin – Buterin lives nomadically, hopping from one friend’s couch to another. (He counts 360 flights in nine years.) Buterin was not available for an interview for this article.
Buterin has long filled his blog with his own academic-style papers, and this month he and crypto academic Nathan Schneider curated them into a book titled “Proof of Stake,” following Ethereum’s new human-centric protocol.
In one paper, Buterin and Glen Weyl, a Microsoft Research New England economist, propose a new way of voting that they say better captures preferences: by allowing people to record not just a simple yes-or-no vote on a ballot, but how strongly they feel about their yes and no.
“The ultimate impact of these schemes rolled out in their full form could be as profoundly transformative as the industrial age’s emergence of largely free markets and constitutional democracy.” Buterin wrote.
Another of his ideas has him are slowly complementing or even replacing NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens,” with SBTs, “soulbound tokens,” a term borrowed from games where digital assets are forever tied to only one person. So instead of tokens that can be auctioned off for large amounts of money, as NFTs often are, soul-bound tokens could not be acquired by the highest bidder. An SBT can represent a diploma, for example, or attendance at a historic concert.
“A common criticism of the ‘web3’ space as it exists today is how money-oriented everything is,” Buterin writes in the book, using the term for the world of crypto and blockchain. “People celebrate the ownership, and outright squandering, of large amounts of wealth. Making more items in the crypto space ‘soul bound’ could be a path towards an alternative, where NFTs can represent much more of who you are and not just what you can afford.”
But Molly White, the well-known crypto critic, said in a message to The Washington Post that she was concerned about Buterin’s approach.
“He seems to have given very little thought to real-world use and the potential for abuse — even suggesting that criminal records could be uploaded to the blockchain,” she said of SBTs.
“One thing I’ve found about Vitalik is that his new ideas often don’t seem to explain human behavior or potential abuse,” she added.
Another Buterin proposal would allow a city’s residents, not politicians, to make governance decisions directly, with algorithms in place to keep things summarized and fair. Human beings would be given digital tokens they could use to formulate policy on everything from zoning to traffic laws.
All this is made possible, he claims, by ethereum, which records transactions with high levels of sophistication.
Those who work with Buterin say he wants to rethink web3 and ethereum before they become even more entrenched as get-rich-quick schemes than they already are.
“Vitalik’s goal is to find solutions to what he sees as profound problems in our social fabric and apply them to the ethereum ecosystem,” Weyl said. “Then he will take what he learns in ethereum and apply it outside the ecosystem.”
But if the skeptics are right, he may have no effect at all.
“I’m deeply convinced that some of these ideas are worth something, because they seem made without reference to anything that people who aren’t weird cryptoancaps want,” said cryptoskeptic author David Gerard, referring to anarcho-capitalists.
Gerard said the soul-bound idea was “already literally a Black Mirror episode.” The dystopian Netflix show once had social status points next to people. Gerard said he has no problem with Buterin, who he believes is well-intentioned, just with his ideas.
And for all the benefits of the merger, there’s little evidence yet that even an improved Ethereum can help Buterin’s ideas flourish in the real world. Simply accommodating more users does not guarantee a shift from an economic to a social tool.
Even Weyl, Buterin’s partner, is not convinced. “The merger expands the reach of ethereum, no doubt. But it won’t change the distribution of activities,” he said. “We’re going to need other proposals for that.”
It would look different than in a traditional company. There are few hierarchies on ethereum; ideas come from developers and community members. The nonprofit ethereum foundation is overseen by a three-person board that Buterin sits on, but does not lead.
However, some experts believe he can still change the world. Jaron Lanier, the Silicon Valley pioneer and contrarian, said in an interview that he was sold.
Noting that he liked Buterin because “unlike so many tech billionaires, he doesn’t have ‘mogul brain,'” Lanier said those who dismissed Buterin missed an opportunity.
“I don’t agree with Vitalik on everything,” he said. “But I think we can have a society in the future that works better than it would otherwise, and that makes people happier than they would otherwise be.”
He said he was encouraged by the amount of time Buterin spends wrestling with these questions.
“In fact, it’s kind of surprising that everyone in technology doesn’t think this way,” Lanier said.
