Vitalik Butellin Said His Influence on Ethereum was Weakening

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), claimed that his influence on Ethereum was “decreasing” and said that his influence today was smaller than it was six months ago.

Vitalik Buterin’s Influence on Ethereum

“I think my influence in Ethereum decreases every six months. I’m less influential now than I was six months ago. Six months ago, I was less than I was a year ago. A year ago, I was less than I was 18 months ago,” Butlin said in a recent interview with naval Ravikant, an American technology entrepreneur and investor.

He further pointed out that there were many people in the Ethereum community, and even he had to “persuade them to move in a specific direction”.

When asked what was the biggest initiative he promoted, but it was never adopted, buterin provided eip-4488 as an example. He said, “if I had more control, it would appear in Ethereum today”.
Eip-4488 is described by Butlin as “a quite technical change”, which will lead to the decline of rolling cost in the short term.

Scrolling is a technology that executes transactions outside the basic layer of the network (layer 1), and then publishes data to layer 1 where consensus is reached.

Difficult to Change

Butlin also admitted in the interview that it is becoming more and more difficult to make major changes to the Ethereum agreement because many stakeholders have a voice in the decision-making process.

According to Butlin, today’s agreement decisions “tend to be made” through a two-week conference call called the “all core developer call”, where everyone must agree on a proposal to move forward.

“Even at the beginning, the research team must agree. Then at a later stage, the core developers, who actually write the code, must agree,” Butlin said.

He added that the process of realizing things on Ethereum is “definitely more censored” than three years ago. “It is definitely much more than six years ago. At that time, we can make a change accepted and it will be incorporated soon.”

“Even now, I feel that the window of substantive things is closing.” Ethereum co-founder said: “even today, it is becoming more and more difficult to do great things.”.