Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the network needs to be expanded beyond its current state and urged the community to help with its growth.
At the EthCC conference in Paris, the lead developer stated that the network needs to evolve and innovate beyond decentralized finance (DeFi). Buterin outlined his vision for the future of the network with his words: “Always beyond finance”.
He added that some people believe that financial applications are dominating the Ethereum space. Still, Buterin pointed out the obvious shortcomings of the centralized banking system, such as high costs and slow money transfers.
“The decentralized space just is a bigger delta from centralized finance than it is from centralized other things.”
The Evolving Ethereum
Regarding the excessively high transaction fees the internet has suffered this year, Vitalik indicated that this is good for DeFi farmers, but not regular users:
“Transaction fees have been high … so when it costs $5.22 to do anything, the degens can pay for it, the apes can pay for it, the orangutans can pay for it.”
He continued to use decentralized social media as an example, where each tweet becomes a non-fungible token (NFT), adding that this won’t work if the cost of each transaction is $5.22.
The good news is that rollups and Layer 2 now solve this problem, sharding is designed to further improve scalability.
Commenting that DeFi token holders only care about price, Buterin added that this confuses him as the purpose of these projects is not price, but utility.
“Price is nice, but price should only ever come as a consequence of utility.”
The programmer advocated a more practical ecosystem, adding, “Ethereum, which is defined by DeFi, is better than Ethereum with no definition, but we have to go further.”
DeFi TVL Update
Although Vitalik describes DeFi as a close thing, it’s still growing at an alarming rate. According to DappRadar, the total value of all DeFi agreements listed is $84 billion at the time of writing.
While it’s below its May high of $140 billion and a 1,800% increase over the same period last year, it’s up 278% so far this year.
At the same time, Ethereum has regained the psychological barrier of $2,000 with a gain of 6%.
