Ethereum doesn’t have a bigger proponent than co-founder Vitalik Buterin, with the developer always attempting to highlight its worth over Bitcoin.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, the entrepreneur expressed his skepticism about the blockchain plans pushed forward by the CEOs of social media giants Twitter and Facebook. The former, in particular, is of major interest, especially in light of its affinity for Bitcoin.
During the same, Buterin doubted Dorsey’s plans to expand his payments business, Square Inc., into the world of decentralized financial services. In fact, the proponent’s criticism primarily stemmed from the decision to use Bitcoin for the same.
According to Buterin, Bitcoin does not possess the ability to execute these functionalities. It is largely designed to be the “currency of the house,” he added.
The Ethereum co-founder went on to explain that,
“On Ethereum, there’s native functionality that allows you to essentially directly put ETH or Ethereum-based assets into these smart contracts, into these lock boxes, where there’s then arbitrary conditions that can govern how those assets get released. Jack is basically going to have to essentially create his own system that enforces those rules.”
While such a project might look similar to Ethereum’s network, it will give DeFi a “much weaker trust model.”
Mark Zuckerberg too came under the engineer’s critical radar for his idea to turn his Facebook Inc. into a “metaverse company.” This is nothing more than an attempt to keep Facebook relevant before the Internet moves in a new direction, he claimed.
In fact, Buterin also threw shade at Facebook’s previous blockchain venture, Libra, now called Diem. Buterin concluded by stating that Zuckerberg should stick to building on the existing blockchain rather than trying to create a new one.
Back in July, Dorsey had revealed his plans to “build an open developer platform” that would also include non-custodial wallets and other DeFi services.
Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD.
— jack⚡️ (@jack) July 15, 2021
Back then too, these plans were criticized by some, with Polygon’s co-founder claiming,
1. This is not possible to build on Bitcoin, especially in a non-custodial, permissionless manner.
2. This already exists on Ethereum. We have hundreds of DeFi apps, secure L1, tools, wallets and scaling solutions like @0xPolygon (you recently used it to sell your first tweet).
— Mihailo Bjelic (@MihailoBjelic) July 16, 2021
Finally, in the Ethereum co-founder’s opinion, it poses a threat to companies like Facebook and Twitter. Especially since the latter can be uprooted by promising blockchain startups gaining ground in the industry.
