Bankless Interview with V-God: The Merge Hasn't Been Priced Out of the Market Yet Bear Market Brings Crypto Back to Its Original Purpose
Bankless Interview with V-God: The Merge Hasn't Been Priced Out of the Market Yet Bear Market Brings Crypto Back to Its Original Purpose
Bankless Interview with V-God: The Merge Hasn't Been Priced Out of the Market Yet Bear Market Brings Crypto Back to Its Original Purpose
Editor's note: Ether founderV-God Interviewed by David Hoffman, founder of Bankless, during EthCC, the following is compiled from Bankless, with the text sorted and abridged.
How do you feel about winning the EthCC Best Styling Award?
Vitalik.I wore the Unisocks and the unicorn t-shirts and the kitty watches and they were fun and I wish we had more fun socks and t-shirts. I only have about eight (maybe one more) t-shirts, but I really like these unicorn slim t-shirts.
Note: There is no such thing as the best styling award.
What are your thoughts on the current state of the crypto space?
David Hoffman.After jumping out of the madness of 2021, we're back in the more depressed crypto space (bear market), and depression is usually a negative word, but for a lot of people who got into crypto before 2021 (including me), it's like, "Gosh, it's finally getting a little calmer. And halfway through the year, have you observed anything?
Bear market brings crypto back to its original purpose
Vitalik.I'm definitely also feeling a bit relieved that everything (with the bear market coming) has quieted down. I think it's important to remember the lessons learned during the bull market bubble cycle, and it's great that the crypto space has attracted a lot of attention in the past year, but some things backfired, like.
- The established impression of the crypto space over the past year is that it 'promises very much'.
- Too many promises, the greater the public expectation, the greater the disappointment.
- It attracts too many unpleasant people.
- Attracted the attention of more regulators.
So I think it's good to let the crypto space return to its own space and prepare well for the next time it breaks out of its cocoon.
Vitalik's Technology Vision
Vitalik.Blockchain scalability is still far from adequate, but we have seen a lot of progress with developments such as Rollups, sharding, Volidium, ZK-Rollups, zkEVM, etc.
A lot of the things I've been raving about for the past few years seem to be slowly starting to be taken seriously. Things like Optimism, theArbitrum The implementation is underway, and we're basically expecting Rollups to reduce transaction fees by a factor of five if we introduce more data compression mechanisms, and the account abstraction proposal, ERC-4337, which I've mentioned several times on this show.
Note: ERC-4337 is mainly used in recovered wallets, where the user loses the private key and can contact the relevant private key guardian to sign a special transaction to recover the wallet.
Does the development iteration of Ethernet seem to be getting faster and faster?
David Hoffman.The iterations of Ethernet seem to be getting faster one at a time, with many updates being deployed in parallel at the same time and almost too fast for me to fully understand the content of each update, I would like to hear your ratings, views on the deployment of the updates.
Ethernet development is both fast and slow
Vitalik.I think there are two different pressure sources pulling on it. Ethernet as a community keeps emerging with more awesome researchers, developers, and working to solve problems, which forces us to accelerate the progress of development.
On the other hand, we had to avoid errors, such as deploying updates to different clients, taking into account the infrastructure, etc., which put pressure on us to slow down.
These two pressures exist simultaneously and to some extent are healthy, prompting Ether to accelerate development, make some disruptive construction and radical changes in the coming years, such as changing consensus mechanism, introducing sharding, etc. At the same time, we also hope that Ether as a public chain will settle down, move towards static development, and be technically and security oriented for updates.
What is the morale of Ethernet developers?
The Merge is not yet priced into the market
Vitalik.People have definitely been a bit frustrated in the past while going through the 2018 bear market, The DAO fork, but I think the morale people are showing now is real and as The Merge gets closer to happening, the thinking will be a bit like "Is this thing really going to happen?" : The Merge
I also think that not only from a market perspective, but from a psychological and narrative perspective The Merge is not yet priced into the market, so when The Merge does happen, I expect it to further boost morale significantly, and at that pointEtherOnly then will it be really Priced In.
Note: David Hoffman cautioned Vitalik to be careful with his choice of words, this one might get a lot of press headlines. vitalik replied: oh well, I'll have to think of something more interesting to say: "everyone should go buy Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV)".
Blockchain-related applications alerted
David Hoffman.Coming to the ethereum application layer, I think we've learned a lot of lessons in this space, including the ICO mania, DeFi's food farms, etc., so what do you see as the lessons for the ethereum application layer in 2021?
Terra frustrates principle thinkers
Vitalik.If you were a principle thinker, you would say that anything above 10% APY would be unsustainable at best and a fraud case at worst, because nothing in the fiat world can consistently deliver 10% returns at very low risk.
So why on earth would we think that cryptocurrencies offer higher returns? Especially since there is no real economic activity behind these APYs. We've also seen high APY, increasingly frenzied liquidity mining in the past, and I'm sure it's made people start to wonder.
Wait, these may be completely new paradigms, but they may also just be a place of bias against the Web2 fiat world?
I hope Terra crashes sooner rather than later.
Vitalik.Terra's sudden collapse was like (these high APY projects) saying to everyone, "Oh, no, no, no, the principles are still important to us, we still have to get back to the real side.
And I'm really glad that Terra crashed in time, I actually wish it had happened a few months earlier, it probably would have only blown up $5 billion instead of $50 billion, but it's better to have it happen now than later, it's a situation like.
If only $5 billion had blown up, it would have been a bunch of rich geeks playing around and it would have been their own problem; $50 billion would have added to everyone's fears and made the crypto space more difficult.
Let's just say it's good that Terra crashed before it got too big, and it made everyone realize the importance of the principle again and understand that it's far better to keep giving 6% revenue for two years than to go to zero.
Bitcoin, Ether does not deserve to be issued ETF
Vitalik.These high APY activities, and the reason I haven't been too enthusiastic about bitcoin, ethereum ETFs, it seems like the crypto space takes a longer time cycle to develop, part of it can be blamed on self-inflicted, the whole ecosystem looks like the so-called Wild West where you can literally lose everything you've invested.
Expectations for the community
David Hoffman.What do you expect from the broader ethereum community, like the core, beyond the protocol developers? What do we need to do to become a better community? Also, how do you deal with an event like EthCC, where you may have hundreds of people on stage trying to sell you products and apps?
Do something meaningful
Vitalik.I think my advice has never changed, which is to build things that make sense. For example, the account abstraction proposal ERC-4337, where the development team has no coins to issue and no confusing marketing department, I think they are developing something that could be revolutionary, dramatically improving wallet security and tripling L2 speed, and these people deserve some love.
How to deal with the warm sales pitch?
Vitalik.It's good to talk to people to find out what they care about and what they are working on, but it's best not to have too many people. Assuming they are developing a community platform, the focus should not be on issuing tokens, but rather on having an interesting vision, such as what mechanisms can be used to reduce harmful and unproductive content.
But I think all of this is part of the ethereum community, and sometimes they need attention, funding, or help finding people who are working on the same pain points, and sometimes they need some encouragement, and all I can do is help in any way I can.
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