Vitalik Buterin: Web3 Vision ‘Blurred’ by Rising Transaction Fees.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said Web3's initial vision of a more open Internet stack “has somewhat faded into the background.”

In a lengthy blog post, Buterin singled out rising transaction fees as the “number one culprit” in the move away from Web3 concepts. He argued that ENS is the only non-financial application that can be used at scale, but an “ideological rift” has opened between the crypto world and non-blockchain decentralization advocates who now see crypto as a “distraction”.

Buterin also “talked a little bit about consumer crypto payments,” and that when people use crypto to trade or save money, “it's usually through centralized methods” like exchanging accounts or trading stablecoins. USDT on Tron.

Rising transaction fees, he said, have excluded all but “Deggon Gamblers” from the “Blockchain” as transaction fees increase. As that subsidized community dominates the blockchain user base, he says, “This will shape public perception and the internal culture of the crypto space,” with negative consequences.

But it's not all bad news. Buterin pointed to positive developments over the past year, including package solutions, the ERC-4337 token abstraction standard, and light clients. Ethereum.

It also zeroed in on privacy solutions like Train and Nocturne and devoted a large portion of its text to zero-knowledge proofs, which are used to prove that something is known without directly exposing the known data.

“Being able to program zero-knowledge verifications means we can bypass the false binary of ‘anonymous but risky' vs ‘KYC'd so safe' and at the same time get privacy and multiple forms of authentication and verification,” he points out. A physical authentication system that enables voting and identification.

Buterin has previously advocated for “privacy pools” to ensure that users don't use criminal blockchain addresses by maintaining the anonymity of their transactions using zk-proofs.

Also build out Ethereum‘s technical stack, Buterin held on the importance of its “social layer”, he said, “which enforces its values ​​strongly in places where pure incentives cannot.” He pointed to the challenge of integrating “recalcitrant gamblers” who come to the crypto ecosystem out of a desire to get rich, but who have been turned into “enthusiastic believers” by Web3 and the ideas of decentralization.

That, he believes, can be achieved through a mix of incentives, community and “strong neutrality rules, open source and anti-censorship”.

For Ethereum to succeed, Buterin said, “we need not only the technical stack view, but also the social parts of the stack where the technical stack can be built from the beginning.”