Why Ethereum’s Creator Vitalik Buterin Believes It Should Expand Beyond DeFi

Vitalik Buterin spoke at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) on how the network can grow beyond its most popular use case, Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Buterin highlighted that the project originally was supposed to go to areas beyond this use case.

The different projects that comprised the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum have seen great interest from institutional investors, retail, and mainstream media. Many have argued that this is where the project has its biggest potential.

Vitalik Buterin attributed this increase in popularity due to the poor efficiency of centralized entities in the finance sector. In that sense, Vitalik Buterin said that Ethereum being “defined by DeFi is better” than it “being defined by nothing”.

However, the inventor of this network does believe that “it’s time to go further” and proposed to follow a roadmap guided by two goals build something that most of the developers want to work on and build something that most people need to use.

Buterin believes that the platform has enough tools to go beyond DeFi because developers are working on solving the high transaction fee and congestion issue on Ethereum. Several teams are working on Optimistic Roll-ups, Looprings, Arbitrum, and sharding will increase Ethereum’s scalability. Buterin added:

So, basically now it’s a good time to start thinking “Can we go beyond finance?” And start actually building all of these other things that we have wanted build.

A Scalable Ethereum To Build A New Social Media

Later, Vitalik Buterin explores some use cases that could meet the criteria to be developed further. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and a stronger effort to attract the art sector interest in these assets could be a possibility.

Buterin also discussed the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and classified it as an “amazing application for fascinating reasons”. This service operates as an identifier for its holders that allows them to maintain control without the intervention of a third party, such as Google, Twitter, or Facebook.

With an ENS users can partake in multiple use cases, from sending ETH to messages between users, and more. The inventor of Ethereum said that ENS is a type of NFTs. Therefore, this sector could offer developers and users many opportunities. Buterin added: “Hopefully we’ll have more and more interesting types of NFTs in the future”.

One of the areas that caught the attention of Vitalik Buterin is social media platforms. The crypto space has had a troublesome history with Facebook, YouTube, and even Twitter due to restrictions, bans, scams perpetrated with stolen identities, and others.

For a long time, the inventor of Ethereum has been calling for the implementation of a decentralized solution, the type that will take the network beyond DeFi. He believes that existing social media “sucks” for their arbitrary and manipulate practices and “low quality of discourses”. Buterin said:

I need better social media too. This is a use case that I perceive as being important very personally.

In addition, the inventor of Ethereum said that there is demand for social media based on “crypto technology” with many potential pathways that could be explored with a community focus approach.

At the time of writing, ETH trades at $2,025 with a 2.5% profit in the daily chart.