Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Can Only Be Truly Decentralized If It Stops Depending On Me

It is no news to anyone following the crypto ecosystem closely that Vitalik Buterin has been the chief influencer for decisions made about Ethereum. However, the young innovator imagines a future where this is not the case.

In the recently held Devcon, Buterin, in an interview with MIT Technology Review, said that he feels its the time for him to take the back seat from the leadership position of the community.

Idealistically speaking, a truly decentralized system cannot have any single point whose decisions can lead the entire system to collapse, however, Vitalik has had that kind of power. This has been constantly changing because of the growing community. In fact Vitalik is already out of most of Ethereum Foundation’s decision-making processes.

Notably, this development in the Ethereum community is happening at a time where its technical developers are facing difficulties in making the product available for long-term adoption. Pressing issues in for the developers currently is the need to switch away from Proof of Work to a Proof of stake system. Buterin, in particular, was leading a research project whose objective was to accomplish this task as soon as possible.

He has also spearheaded projects that lead to sharding the birth of sharding and plasma, which are supposed to be solutions to Ethereum’s scalability issues. In the next installation of the blockchain, deemed Ethereum 2.0, these improvements would be made. Although in the upcoming iteration, Vitalik has a significantly smaller role to play than he used to a couple of years back.