Vitalik Buterin Talks About Ethereum’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined his idea of ​​hardening the Ethereum blockchain as a base layer to an estimated 1,100 attendees at a developer conference in Brussels today.

Buterin spoke about the strengths and weaknesses of the largest smart contract blockchain by volume and its expanding ecosystem during his presentation at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), including concerns about transaction censorship and a proposal to raise the “quorum threshold” from 75% to 80%.

Buterin said he believes the strengths of the Ethereum ecosystem are that it is a “large and reasonably decentralized staking ecosystem” and includes a highly international and intellectual community.

Buterin emphasized that the blockchain’s weaknesses need to continue to be addressed, including the difficulty of individual staking and the technical complexity of running a node, given that the requirement for being a validator for the blockchain is 32 ETH.

Buterin also mentioned a series of technical improvements that aim to fix various weaknesses in Ethereum and allow for “protocol simplification,” saying:

“If you want a resilient ecosystem, it needs to be as simple as possible.”