The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, shared his predictions for Ethereum and Bitcoin, saying that he is skeptical about Jack Dorsey’s plans in decentralized finance and Mark Zuckerberg’s ambition to turn Facebook into a “metaverse company.”
Mr. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and payment company Square, had developed a plan for the company, which was to create a new business focused on decentralized financial services that would be using Bitcoin.
Casting doubt on Square Inc. and Dorsey’s plan, Buterin said that the crypto network does not have the necessary functionality to do that as it was designed largely to be a “currency of the house.”
Buterin, who is one of crypto’s most well-known developers, said, “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.”
The crypto mogul, Buterin, even expressed his skepticism about Zuckerberg’s idea to turn his Facebook Inc. into a “metaverse company”, saying that Zuckerberg was clearly trying to anticipate the next phase of the internet “before the rest of the world goes in some different direction and Facebook is sort of left in the dust.”
Regarding the term “Metaverse”, it refers to a vision of an internet-enabled virtual world where people have avatars and interact with digital assets and even corporeal objects via augmented reality. And so, Facebook hopes that a fully-grown economy with interoperability between apps and services could be developed this way.
Moreover, Buterin noted that Zuckerberg had also been involved with the widely scrutinized Facebook-backed cryptocurrency project Libra, now called “Diem.” To which he said that there’s “just a huge amount of mistrust” about Facebook, and so constructing its own platform at such a stage could prove to be ill-fated.
He went ahead and recommended Zuckerberg to build on the existing blockchain instead.
However, regarding his own company, Buterin continues to have big plans for the Ethereum network, stating that in five to 10 years, Ethereum will be “hopefully running the metaverse.”
Furthermore, this is not the first time that Buterin has poured cold water on the plans of billionaire CEOs. Even in May, he had called Elon Musk’s notions of scaling Dogecoin “fundamentally flawed” after the SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that Dogecoin should speed up its blockchain and increase the network’s capacity tenfold.