In late December, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin stated that if all the cryptocurrency community achieves is memes and immature puns, he will leave the sector for good.
“If all that we accomplish is lambo memes and immature puns about ‘sharting’, then I WILL leave. Though I still have a lot of hope that the community can steer in the right direction,” said Buterin, emphasizing that the developer community of Ethereum should focus on innovation and product development.
Buterin also added that he will not stop blockchain and Ethereum development solely due to price memes and immature jokes, as long as the Ethereum developer community is making progress and developing innovative applications. He stated:
“To be clear, the operative word here is ‘all’. No, I won’t stop or slow working on crypto just because price memes and stupid jokes exist – as long as there’s also real social value that the ecosystem is working toward.”
The statements from Buterin came after prominent developers and analysts within the cryptocurrency sector such as Augur founder Joey Krug complained that the Ethereum community lacks developers working on non-profit and open-source scalability solutions, as CoinJournal previously reported.
Projects like Plasma, Sharding, and the introduction of Casper, which are expected to significantly improve the Ethereum blockchain network’s transaction capacity, are not being developed at a fast pace because many developers have opted to work on initial coin offerings (ICOs) and commercial projects.
Krug noted:
“Ethereum really needs more developers on problems like sharding, proof of stake, and plasma, right now there simply aren’t enough. It should also hire some more operations people to help orchestrate it all, for instance, Solidity is just now being formally audited. Ethereum would be 100x more kickass with these things [and around] 10 developers each working on all three of those hard problems above.”
Given the lack of developers working on necessary scaling solutions to improve the Ethereum network and the increase in popularity of decentralized applications that are further congesting the network, Buterin’s frustration in regards to constant mockery and memes is understandable.
Over the past few months, the user activity of decentralized applications has increased rapidly, achieving some commercial success. CryptoKitties and EtherDelta have started to process hundreds of thousands of transactions on a daily basis, rendering Ethereum transactions more expensive to process.
These decentralized applications spend many more transactions and gas in contrast to other applications. EtherDelta, in particular, is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, wherein users send requests to the main Ethereum blockchain network to process orders at the same rate as commercial platforms.
The lack of scaling solutions and failure to improve the transaction capacity of Ethereum significantly restrict the ability of decentralized applications to address the demand from users and seamlessly process transactions.
Consequently, the transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain network have started to increase at a rapid pace, even though the Ethereum protocol is processing more than 1 million transactions per day, more than the daily transaction volume of all of the cryptocurrencies in the market combined, including bitcoin.