Ethereum Merge, which has been eagerly awaited by the Ethereum community and the crypto world, finally took place successfully. 15 distinguished crypto CEOs and founders share their views on what Ethereum Merge means for the crypto world.
What does Ethereum Merge mean for the crypto world?
He Yi, co-founder of Binance and chairman of Binance Labs
Infrastructure remains a bottleneck in the crypto industry. Ethereum Merge is a bold effort to lay the groundwork for the scalability and sustainability of Web3. It also provides the security needed to achieve mass adoption. There is still a lot of work to be done to offer greater scale. Merge will allow Ethereum to make significant progress by switching to a PoS consensus mechanism. This is a great foundation for developers to build on. The future is built through continuous efforts to iterate and improve.
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs
Merge doesn’t address scalability at all. It won’t make blockchain any cheaper, any faster. But their progress towards PoS is great. Because, in my opinion, PoW spends a lot more energy just keeping the blockchain secure than anyone needs. PoW is so energy intensive it hurts me to see it work as an engineer. It hurts my soul. I don’t think they are environmentally sustainable in any way. So I’m really excited about this aspect.
I think the really important thing about Merge is that it will put an end to conversations as PoS is less secure. There is still a lot of talk about this. When I talk to people about NFTs and stuff like that, I still have to spend 30 minutes explaining to them that there is a difference between PoW and PoS, and that the NFTs in Solana are green. All these conversations will eventually be heard. So I’m excited for the field in general.
Blockstream’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. Adam Back
If you look at gold as a historical example and you think about why people choose gold as a currency, I think it’s mainly because it’s scarce, durable and so on. To be scarce, it would naturally have an unavoidable cost of production. It would take real work to get it off the ground. So if you think about it from that perspective, gold is a PoW system. The only way to get more gold is to dig and refine it. So you say this with Bitcoin. You know, PoS is like this: we don’t like to do business, how about we get together with friends and issue tokens, do a lot of mining beforehand, and we tune the system.
It really looks more like a private company or something that issues shares. To me, it’s pretty unreasonable to consider this as a basis for a global currency or stablecoin. It’s actually just a copy of a company organized by stock. But a company has no government and accounting and transparency obligations. So you get the worst of the worst. Thus, you get a kind of moral hazard coinage phenomenon. However, you do it without oversight and no professionalism.
Avery Akkineni, president of Vayner3
Merge will be the Ethereum evolution we’ve all been waiting for. We are excited to witness this transformation. More decentralization, increased stability, and most importantly, reduced power consumption and burden on nature. It will also certainly expand the opportunity for organizations to strategically evaluate their Web3 programs. Ethereum Merge will help overcome one of our biggest challenges with the legacy system. The PoS protocol that ETH 2.0 uses makes it infinitely more environmentally friendly. It will drastically reduce Web3’s carbon footprint now and in the future.
Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of the board of Animoca Brands
cryptocoin.com Ethereum Merge, which you follow closely from , is a win for crypto. A win for decentralization. It’s also everything web3 stands for. It may seem like there isn’t much we can agree on in society. But the successful Merge proves that we can come together, build consensus, and build trust to run something great.
John Wu, president of Ava Labs
As an operator in this space, the success of the event will create greater awareness and adoption for Blockchain technology. That’s why I support Merge. In a multi-chain future, this development will help all Tier-1s. It will also enlarge this space together.
Will Szamosszegi, Founder and CEO of Sazmining
Ethereum is already dangerously decentralized. As of August, over 57% of Ethereum has been staked by just four sources. The move to PoS will only support this trend. Without decentralization, the protocol will always be vulnerable to attacks or unwanted changes.
Nikos Andrikogiannopoulos, CEO of Metrika
This third upgrade will help the Ethereum community get the next billion users to join Web3. It will also enable a faster, more efficient and reliable Blockchain.
Greg Beard, CEO of Stronghold Digital Mining
Ethereum Merge is a meaningful experiment for Blockchain. It’s also a noble approach to reducing the industry’s energy consumption. However, Merge will effectively decentralize the system. Moreover, it will make a significant security sacrifice. The ETH Blockchain will be forked so that some miners will continue to work on PoW, while others will work on PoS.
Marshall Hayner, CEO of Metal Pay
It is always an advantage for the industry when a big player like Ethereum takes action to become more sustainable, scalable and interoperable. However, Merge still does not solve the problem of Blockchain silos. Also, the existing solutions for putting them together are cumbersome and vulnerable to hacking.
Jason Lau, COO of OkCoin
Given that the broader crypto markets are stuck in headwinds with a momentary lack of catalyst, Merge has become the focus of the industry. It has been a big change for ETH miners. Also, although some developers have waited years for it, in reality Merge has no practical use for the average end user. Despite potential price fluctuations, individual users will not notice any difference after Merge.
Kosala Hemachandra, Founder and CEO of MyEtherWallet
The current upgrade simply eliminates miners and allows validators to prove their blocks. However, Merge will not add any extra features to the Ethereum Blockchain. That is, it will not cause significant differences for users. However, I believe that in the next few years we will see Ethereum implement various new features and solve problems such as scalability. This will definitely bring more developers and users to the Ethereum ecosystem.
Andy Bromberg, co-founder of Coinlist and CEO of Eco
Ethereum Merge is a big change for the space. It creates the largest PoS Blockchain and influences how products are built on top of the largest smart contract platform. How this change is received will likely determine much of the on-chain innovation over the next few years.
Stani Kulichov, Founder and CEO of AAVE
I’ve been waiting for this for years. So I’m pretty excited for the event. This is definitely a big transition. There is some kind of value at stake right now. What’s also fascinating to me is that you have actually reduced the need for the Ethereum network, which is now focused on electrical mining and effectively using capital as a way to confirm and verify transactions.
That doesn’t mean you’ll only see accessibility. You no longer need to have specific hardware to verify transactions. You can actually join a specific pool or start verifying yourself. So it democratizes it a little more. Accessibility is invaluable for verifying Ethereum transactions. It also means that a lot of Ethereum sitting on protocols like AAVE can be borrowed to effectively support this Ethereum staking.
Kirill Gertman, co-founder and CEO of Conduit
Despite not having a strict hierarchy overseeing its development, Ethereum managed to migrate seamlessly to a new system. It reduced global electricity consumption by 0.2% overnight. This great achievement is testament to the resilience and power of decentralization.
