Vitalik believes all Blockchain networks should follow in Ethereum’s footsteps and move to Proof-of-Stake
Key takeaways:
- At the 2022 Messari Mainnet event, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin called for PoW networks like Zcash and Dogecoin to adopt Proof-of-Stake
- Buterin’s comments come about two weeks after the Ethereum network successfully transitioned from PoW to PoS
- Ethereum’s co-founder believes scalability is the biggest challenge facing the crypto industry in the next 18 months
Ethereum co-founder hopes Zcash and Dogecoin choose to move to PoS soon
As one of the panelists at Messari Mainnet in 2022 last week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed that he believes that blockchain networks should ditch the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm in favor of the much more energy-efficient Proof-of -Stake (PoS) mechanism.
Buterin’s claim came in response to Messari founder and CEO Ryan Selkis’ question about whether all networks should move to PoS. In his statement, Buterin highlighted two prominent blockchain projects that currently rely on PoW mining – Zcash and Dogecoin – and said he hopes they will transition to PoS “soon”.
Selkis: Should all networks move to PoS?
“I would say should … as PoS matures, I would expect it to increase in legitimacy over time. I hope so @zcash moving over and I’m hopeful @dogecoin moving to PoS soon,” — VB#mainnet2022
— Messari (@MessariCrypto) 23 September 2022
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn was also one of the panelists at the event, along with Buterin. While he did not offer a direct rebuttal to Buterin’s call for Zcash to switch to PoS, he alluded to a previous conversation the pair had in 2018. At the time, Zooko said so he would wait to “see Ethereum go Proof-of-Stake first to see what goes wrong.”
It is worth noting that Zcash developers Electric Coin published a roadmap in November 2021, which called for further focus on Proof-of-Stake and cross-chain interoperability in the future. In addition, Zooko wrote in his August 2021 blog post that “PoS is more decentralized, attack and capture resistant, and egalitarian,” making it clear that he supported the technology.
Scalability is the most pressing issue, according to Vitalik
As a reminder, earlier this month, Ethereum’s mainnet switched from PoW to PoS via the long-awaited Merge upgrade. Prior to the upgrade, the Ethereum Foundation claimed that the transition would reduce the network’s energy consumption by up to 99.95%, reducing worldwide power consumption by 0.2% as a result.
Unlike the PoW model, the PoS consensus algorithm relies on network validators to fulfill the role of verifying transactions and producing new blockchain blocks. This drastically reduces the computing power needed to keep the network operational and secure. But since network validators are chosen based on the amount of their staked tokens, some argue that the PoS model ultimately leads to more centralization. In addition to his thoughts on PoS, Buterin highlighted scalability as the main challenge facing the blockchain community in the next 18 months.
“The difference between it costing $3 to send a transaction and 3 cents to send is the difference between blockchains being viable as a mainstream technology at all,” Buterin said.
Although PoS consensus does not directly solve the scalability problem, it lays the foundation for scalability-focused upgrades. The next step in Ethereum’s roadmap, The Surge, will bring sharding functionality and play a major role in enabling the network to reach its ultimate goal of 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). For context, popular traditional payment networks Mastercard and Visa can facilitate up to 5,000 TPS and 24,000 TPS respectively.
