Vitalik Buterin drew attention to an altcoin class in his speech at the BUIDL Asia conference in Korea. The Ethereum founder says stablecoins will play a decisive role in the upcoming hard forks.
Vitalik Buterin says stablecoins will be decisive in hard forks
According to Buterin, stablecoins such as USDT and USDC will play an important role in future hard forks. The remarks came from the BUIDL Asia conference in Seoul on Wednesday. At the conference on August 3, Vitalik Buterin and Near Protocol (NEAR) Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin talked about the upcoming merger.
According to the Ethereum co-founder, centralized stablecoins will play an “important” role in determining which Blockchain technology the business will “comply” with in the event of a hard fork. A hard fork occurs when a Blockchain protocol undergoes a major change that splits the network into two versions. In most cases, one Blockchain is preferred over the other.
“Tether needs to stop honoring one of them,” Buterin says, as there are cryptographically equal numbers of USDT on each blockchain at the time. According to the Ethereum founder:
Because at that point you will have 100 billion USDT on one Blockchain and 100 billion USDT on the other Blockchain.
Vitalik Buterin answers concerns about hard forks
Buterin countered that the central stablecoin issue is more of a concern for possible hard forks. He also said that he “sees no indication” that such a conflict would be a problem in the merge:
I believe this will become a bigger concern in the future. In essence, the choice of blockchain that USDC considers to represent Ethereum could play a crucial role in future contentious hard forks.
In the next five to ten years, Ethereum may face more controversial hard forks where central stablecoin providers may gain more dominance. Buterin adds that Ethereum will see contentious hard forks in the coming years, where it will carry more weight:
At this point, maybe the Ethereum foundation will be weaker, maybe the ETH 2 client teams will have more influence, and maybe someone like Coinbase will both run the stablecoin and buy one of the client teams by then… A lot of this sort of thing can happen.
Vitalik proposes the use of various stablecoins as a possible countermeasure to central actors:
The best solution I can think of is to encourage the adoption of more diverse stablecoins. In essence, you know, people can use USDC, but they can also use DAI, and at this point, I mean, it’s like DAI took that strain. We will not be purely the crypto economy, we will be a packer for a bunch of real world assets.
Ethereum network awaits September 19
Merge, when Ethereum moved from PoW to PoS method, is one of the most important technological advancements of the network. After the successful integration of the Goerli testnet in mid-August, the date of the merge became clear. Ethereum developers are waiting for September 19 as the permanent date for consolidation from existing PoW Blockchain to PoS.
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