Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum Is Not Ready For Direct Mass Adoption

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum ETH/USD, said the layer-1 blockchain is not ready for widespread adoption in its current form.

What Happened: In a Jan 3 interview with the Bankless podcast, Buterin addressed the need for Ethereum to scale and gas fees to be lower.

“In order for blockchains to actually be something that people are going to adopt for mainstream applications, it has to be cheap,” he said.

“It has to be cheap by the standards of people who are coming into the system today and who are going to be putting $20 or $40 into crypto if they put in anything at all,” he added.

The average gas fee to perform a token swap on protocols based on Ethereum ranges from $60 to $90 at the time of writing.

“Ethereum today, the layer 1, is not a system that’s ready for direct mass adoption by users,” he said. 

“But that’s exactly why we’ve been harping the drum of scalability and layer twos and all these things, pretty much since 2014.”

The introduction of EIP-1559 in 2021 was meant to address the issue of high gas fees, in part, by bringing a fee-burning mechanism to the network.

While the base fee continues to be burned every time gas spikes after network activity rises, the blockchain still doesn’t appear to be operating at the capacity required for an even higher level of user adoption.

But Buterin sees the ecosystem of layer 2 scaling solutions, together with sharding — a process that will reduce network congestion on Ethereum — as a way to take the network back to an era of “really low fees” last seen in 2015.

“But to get there, we do need to solve all of these hard technical problems,” said the Ethereum co-founder.

Price Action: As of Wednesday morning, Ethereum was trading at $3,800, down 1.44% in the last 24 hours.

Photo by DrawKit Illustrations on Unsplash.