Key facts:
On his visit to Argentina at the end of 2021, Buterin highlighted Proof of Humanity and Kleros.
He has participated in the governance of other projects and has shares in development companies.
In addition to being the visible face and the maximum referent of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of this network, is a person with a fairly high public profile. The Russian-Canadian developer often gives interviews and does not dodge the question when asked for his opinion on the projects that interest him the most.
Several of the ideas that have caught Buterin’s interest have a social purpose. Instead of being merely instruments to make money or to favor those more affluent people, These are applications or platforms that seek to improve various aspects of people’s quality of life. Next, we will list some on which he has spoken.
The projects that attracted Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum is an open source network that, thanks to features such as the ability to create smart contracts on it, offers many alternatives for developers. Thus, a large number of projects have emerged around this blockchain, but only a few were the subject of public interest by Buterin.
1.Proof of Humanity
Proof of Humanity (PoH) is one of Buterin’s favorite projects within the Ethereum ecosystem, as CriptoNoticias reported after his visit to the country in December 2021. In fact, he himself has a verified profile and bought at the time the equivalent of 50 ethers (ETH) in the native PoH token to burn it, which made its price fly in a few minutes.
Proof of Humanity is a project that it is based on the confirmation of the identity of the people and links them with Ethereum addresses. To do this, the user requesting registration must provide personal information, which must then be supported by another already validated user. With this, it is confirmed that it is a real person.
In addition, the platform has a native token called UBI (Universal Basic Income or “basic universal income”) that is distributed at the rate of one per hour among registered users. Ideologically, this is based on the concept that all individuals deserve to have an income, however minimal, for the sole reason of being human. At the Buterin conference in Buenos Aires, one of the moderators of the talk was Santiago Siri, the Argentine creator of the UBI token.
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“Proof of Humanity is one of the necessary pieces of infrastructure that can make Ethereum kind of a more inclusive place,” the developer said in the Argentine capital at the time.
2. Cleros
Kleros is a decentralized mediation protocol of which Buterin declared himself a “fan” in his talk in Argentina. Kleros shares founders with PoH, and they are the Argentinian Federico Ast and the French Clément Lesaege.
As this medium explained in a publication on the subject, Kleros seeks to democratize justice from the introduction of anonymous and incommunicado juries. These experts are the ones in charge of making decisions on specific issues.
To ensure their performance is honest and responsible, they are required to stake Pinakios (PNK) tokens; if their vote coincides with that of the majority, they receive a reward, and if not, they lose the deposit. Your votes are recorded on the blockchain through a signature with your Ethereum wallet.
Kleros has as its main objective to resolve “new economy” disputes, as highlighted in your website. This highlights the idea recently expressed by Vitalik Buterin on the real impact blockchain should have, that should make life easier for people and not only serve to exchange assets of little use beyond making money.
3. Loot Project
In English, loot It means “loot”. And that is precisely what Loot Project offers, 8,000 bags of non-expendable tokens (NFTs) containing items for RPGs (role playing games) and can be used in today’s very popular NFT or P2E (Play-to-Earn) games.
Depending on the items it contains, a bag may be more valuable or rarer than the others. The curious thing, however, is that these are displayed only in text format, as seen in the image below.
Loot Project, being an ERC-721 or non-fungible token development project, is based on a smart contract on Ethereum. Beyond this, it also has a shared “philosophy” with the blockchain. As one of its developers explains On twitterthe basic premise is that it is not the creator who is in charge of increasing the value around an NFT, but the collector himself.
To be more specific, this developer who identifies himself as tandavas.eth explains that with the traditional scheme, the creator would sell a house (the NFT) and take charge of improving the neighborhood (the ecosystem) so that it is worth more. With the Loot model, what is sold are bricks (NFTs) so that each user can build whatever they want with them.
Basically, this is compared to the Ethereum network, according to the author of the tweet. The blockchain created by Buterin is open source and allows anyone to build applications, protocols, platforms, and more on top of it. That is, it provides the bricks (or even the foundations) to build on it.
What Vitalik Buterin remarked in a Tweet in September 2021 is precisely that “philosophy” of Loot. In this regard, the co-founder of Ethereum explained that “practically everything someone invents ‘exists’, but what matters is to what extent other people can build on it.”
4.Starware
In the case of Starkware, there is no statement from Vitalik Buterin about his interest in the project. However, he has manifested it not through words, but through actions, since the Russian-Canadian has a corporate stake in the companyas he himself told in an exchange of questions and answers with Reddit users in February 2018.
And what is Starkware? It is a company that offers scalability and security solutions for applications developed on Ethereum. The flagship projects of this company are the ZK type rollup called StarkNet and the StarkEx scalability engine.
Use cases for these solutions include cryptocurrency spot trading, NFT minting and trading, derivatives trading, and automated market makers, among others, described in the website from Starkware.
Vitalik Buterin has spoken on several occasions about second layer solutions (layer 2 or L2) in the Ethereum network. Already since 2020, the co-founder of the network I saw in these L2 solutions a way to scale the main layerat least until the completion of Ethereum 2.0.
Later, as reported by CriptoNoticias, he proposed the idea of migrating NFTs to these second layers, in order to avoid problems such as the great congestion that the network had in 2021, at the height of these tokens.
5.Uniswap
Uniswap is an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange (DEX). Its creation and putting online dates back to 2018, and as detailed in the project site, arises from an idea by Vitalik Buterin described in a publication on your blog.
Again, there is no public appearance of Vitalik in which he openly expresses his “fandom” for Uniswap, but there is time has been taken to publish in the DEX governance forumso it is understood that it is a project that not only endorses, but is also interested in improving and promoting.
On that occasion, in May 2021, this medium reported that Buterin suggested that the Uniswap token (UNI) become an oracle. That is, a system that feeds real-world data, such as the value of a currency or an asset, into a blockchain protocol.
Ultimately, Uniswap claims to comply with all the basic principles of Ethereum, as described in the article cited on its blog. Among these, they highlight that it is decentralized, resistant to censorship, safe and does not depend on permissions to operate on the exchange. This last point, however, has had its gaps, since some tokens were removed from the Uniswap website —not from its protocol— due to a decision by the company that develops the DEX.
6.MakerDAO
MakerDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that is responsible for the stablecoin DAI, It is the main reference in terms of decentralized finance protocols in Ethereum.
In accordance with DeFi Pulse datain this protocol there are USD 16,530 million deposited, a statistic that is called total value locked or TVL, for its acronym in English. Its dominance in this market exceeds 20%, according to the same source.
Taking this into consideration, it is impossible to think that Vitalik Buterin has not expressed himself on the matter. In a interview published in August 2020, said he was “truly impressed with MakerDAO,” which he described as “a smart contract system that issues a cryptocurrency tied to the value of the dollar, but is absolutely not dependent on any bank or anything like that.”
The remarkable thing about this, Vitalik said, is not the idea, which had already been circulating for years. “The important thing is that they really did it and it works, and it’s been working for over a year,” he said at the time.
In addition, he mentioned the possibility of extending this stable cryptocurrency model to have exposure to other assets, consumer price indices and real estate indices, among others. That, finally, was finalized and today DAI is a multi-collateralized stablecoin.
Finally, in a Twitter exchange, Vitalik even defended MakerDAO when a user criticized decentralized apps. “MakerDAO works great,” he wrote.
Vitalik Buterin, always aware of projects in Ethereum
The co-creator of Ethereum has also left his opinion on other topics, such as NFTs. In this regard, he stated that he is happy that these tokens are so popular with artists. For Vitalik, art is a public good, but it is very difficult to find a business model for it, and NFTs provide this model.
However, to that vision expressed during his conference in Argentina in December 2021, he also added that NFTs “cannot claim victory yet”, since they have not yet passed a full market cycle. They have lived their bull market, but they have not yet reached the bear market, when prices could go down “50%, 80% or 90%, we don’t know.” It is important, for this, to see that they have more features than “buy them and show off” them.
Almost like a father who seeks to know what friends his son hangs out with, Vitalik Buterin is always informed about what is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem. His opinion is always heard and valued by the community, and he will surely remain committed to making his “creature” grow even more, which will soon celebrate its seven years of life.