Vitalik Buterin and Coinbase CTO Talked About Technologies Within Crypto Space
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Prior to the weekend, on 5 October, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin alongside Chief Technical Officer of California-based Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan were in a position to answer the questions addressed by the audience during the event called ETH San Francisco.
During the ETH San Francisco event, which is also known as the “world’s largest Ethereum hackathon”, Vitalik Buterin and Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan were among the few crypto personalities who answered at the intriguing questions received from the audience.
One of the best questions addressed to Ethereum founder was: “What are the cool things in other blockchains that Ethereum should adopt?”
Here is what Vitalik Buterin answered:
“On the community side, one of the things I love about Zcash (ZEC) is this kind of separation between Zcash Foundation and Zcash Company, and Zooko is part of one and not the other… Another one of the interesting ideas that, I think, Zooko came up with up is this idea of practical control over protocol development and control over trademark ownership should be maximally separate, and that is an interesting idea that Ethereum and probably other public blockchains should consider adopting because unfortunately there really isn’t a good way to have a trademark not belong to anyone, but this seems like a pragmatic approach that does kind of minimize the centralization harm that can come out of that issue particularly…”.
The audience went on asking what the crypto personalities think about the technology integrated into the crypto ecosystem.
Speaking about zk-SNARKs, here’s what they claimed:
Vitalik: “I’d say about correctly rated at this point. They are very powerful, and I think general purpose zero-knowledge proofs are a really huge advancement in cryptography… The fact that we are fairly close to making privacy-preserving protocols for very large classes of things involving abstract programming languages is huge. And I do think the community recognizes that.”
Balaji: “zk-SNARKs are still underrated. People in this audience know what they are, but after Sapling [the next major upgrade of Zcash] comes out in a few weeks, I think it just gets mainstream to a much greater extent… And with ZK-STARKs and bulletproofs, it’s going to go to the next level because we’re going to get rid of the trusted setup, and we have even vaster transactions, and possibly smaller proof sizes. So, I think all those technologies are underrated relative to what the general population knows about them.”
Speaking about the stablecoins, Vitalik Buterin and Balaji Srinivasan expressed their vision as followed:
Vitalik: “Globally speaking, I’d say underrated. I still think a lot of people don’t realize the extent to which stablecoins solve one of people’s biggest concerns with the cryptocurrency space, which is that in order to use these applications, you have to expose yourself to a lot of the volatility, and with stablecoins, a lot of that goes away, and you can actually use applications that look like regular applications involving dollars… In the long run, these kinds of tokens are a way for traditional financial systems to upload themselves to crypto land if they want to.”
Balaji: “I’d say that stablecoins are underrated today… If you can have a stablecoin that people trust and that doesn’t have redemption risk, then, I think in the medium term we’ll think of … FinTech before stablecoin is like mobile before iPhone in the sense that every FinTech company if you could just have a digital dollar… if you didn’t need to do a banking partnership or something like that, you’d just go and program right away with the digital dollar, based on the blockchain, and I think that’s a really important medium term thing that could happen if we could get a functional stabecoin.”
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