Co-founder and the leading developer Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum stated that the Ethereum community needs to innovate further beyond the confinement of decentralized finance (Defi).
During his keynote at the Ethereum Community Conference held in Paris, Buterin urged the Ethereum community to bring innovation, and expand further beyond than DApps for Defi. He described non-financial utilities as a part of a general-purpose blockchain and lamented that financial applications are dominating the Ethereum space.
Buterin outlined numerous non-financial applications for Ethereum, these included decentralized social media, retroactive public goods funding, and identity verification along with attestation.
He made it clear that innovating beyond Defi did not mean being against Defi. He also added the potential of Ethereum applications could combine financial and non-financial elements.
Vitalik Buterin has already started to work on public goods funding. In a blog post published on Wednesday that Buterin acted as a co-author, he wrote about layer two scaling solutions. According to Buterin, Optimism, the scaling solution, swore to fund open-source development via backdated rewards protocol, thus committing profits through a sequence to the initiative.
Buterin spoke about the community’s preoccupation with Defi for two major reasons. The first reason according to Buterin was that finance offers a larger domain for decentralization, unlike other centralized industries. He also emphasized the prevalence of high fees that pushed the sector towards financial applications, noting it won’t work on a decentralized social media platform with low fees.
Buterin revealed that the issue with high transaction fees is being solved by Etehreum’s layer-two networks. Since mitigating the transaction costs on Ethereum is underway, Buterin stated this was the right opportunity to explore Ethereum’s potential in solving other issues, stating the network has to expand beyond making and trading tokens.
