Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin Is Skeptical Of Jack Dorsey's DeFi Bitcoin Business: 'It Will End Up Being A Much Weaker Model'

What Happened: Vitalik Buterin, known for his role in bringing Ethereum ETH/USD to life, isn’t convinced by Jack Dorsey’s plans to build DeFi on Bitcoin BTC/USD.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Buterin said: “Im skeptical about these decentralized finance on top of Bitcoin type of projects.”

Last month Dorsey unveiled thata a new project being developed by his digital payments company, Square SQ.

Its main goal would be the facilitation of the creation of non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services, except, instead of building on top of the Ethereum blockchain, Dorsey intends to create a fintech platform on the Bitcoin network.

However, when speaking to Bloomberg, Buterin cited Bitcoin’s innate lack of functionality as a challenge to truly achieving this.

“On Ethereum there’s native functionality that allows you to essentially directly put ETH or Ethereum-based assets into these smart contracts, into these lock boxes, where there are then arbitrary conditions that can govern how those assets get released,” said Buterin.

“Jack is basically going to have to essentially create his own system that enforces those rules.”

Buterin also noted that although it may look similar, it will ultimately end up being something with a “much weaker trust model.”

“There’s technical limits to being able to graft new functionality on to a system that’s not powerful enough to support that new functionality,” he said.

Last week, Dorsey himself appeared to troll a few members of the Ethereum community. The Twitter Inc TWTR posted a series of tweets where he seemed to indicate that “Ethereum is a scam.”