During the recently concluded 4th Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC 4) held in Paris from July 20-22, #VitalikButerin (creator of Ethereum) shed some pretty amazing insights. He feels Ethereum is designed more than just to cater to the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

This entire blog post revolves around what he shared during the conference and if you don’t want to read, simply scroll below and watch the video.

Vitalik said, Ethereum was originally designed to do more. Institutional investors, retail and mainstream media feel that Ethereum has finally found some ground to be associated with DeFi because the entire DeFi platforms are built on Ethereum (at least for now). They all feel this is where lies the biggest advantage for Ethereum.

During the EthCC conference, Vitalik did stress there are notable flaws and holes in traditional finance and that blockchain powered DeFi and DApps (Decentralized Applications) will become the next ‘big’ thing.

He further said…

“Ethereum being defined by DeFi is better than it being defined by nothing!

Time for Ethereum To Go Further?

I think the Ethereum development team should really segregate tasks based on where the demand is. Right now, its DeFi, tomorrow could be “DeAu” (stands for Decentralised Audit – btw I created that:)

Vitalik says that right now developers are focused on solving the high transaction fee or “gas fee” issue. Then there is more work being poured in to alleviate Ethereum’s network from high congestion, Optimistic Roll-ups, Looprings, Arbitrum, and Sharding to scale up Ethereum from PoW consensus mechanism to a PoS version with increased scalability.

NFTs, ENS

Vitalik also mentioned that NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens) is a great usecase for Ethereum due to its sheer pull factor to get artists, musicians, content creators and others to utilize the network. Its all about doing something around what people want.

Then there is another interesting (fairly new) concept of ENS (Ethereum Naming Service).

An ENS is a type of NFT. Its simply a service that works as an identifier of its holders which will allow them to be in full control. Not even Google or Facebook can interfere. We’re talking about true decentralization here.

He said…

“Hopefully we’ll have more and more interesting types of NFTs in the future”.

Decentralized Social Media?

Then Vitalik also mentioned from a personal perspective that the entire Social Media scene needs to be revamped and believes Ethereum can play a major role in ensuring a more transparent social media.

He said, if you take a loot at companies like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc, they are plagued with so many issues especially based on jurisdictional restrictions, scams, data loss, privacy, identity theft etc. The list goes on.

Vitalik personally feels its time to take Ethereum beyond DeFi and work on these use cases too.

Closing Thoughts

I think we need to see a more robust Ethereum network, one which is able to give the power to the community and not to greedy and biased companies.

More than half (50.64%) of the world’s population is on Social Media. How will a decentralized social media platform using “cryptocurrency technology” function, is yet to be seen. For starters, the whole community has to understand that there will come a time for change. The potential of what decentralized systems can do for social media is going to be truly amazing.

It’s no surprise then why companies like Twitter have appointed an in-house team to build their own blockchain protocol.

Watch This Video

Vitalik shares his thoughts and vision during the EthCC[4] Conference

Share your thoughts below.