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Paradigm Says Ethereum’s Future Is at Risk Due To Slow Updates

In a blog post, the venture capital and research firm said deliberately slowing change to protect decentralization prevents Ethereum from staying competitive.
By: Leo Jakobson • January 30, 2025
Paradigm Says Ethereum’s Future Is at Risk Due To Slow Updates

Venture capital firm Paradigm has called on Ethereum developers to move faster and push non-controversial updates out the door quicker than the current pace of one per year.

In a lengthy blog post, Paradigm CTO and General Partner Georgios Konstantopoulos, Managing Partner Matt Huang, and General Partners Dan Robinson and Charlie Noyes argue that by deliberately slowing updates, Ethereum endangers its ability to stay competitive.

“It’s easy to forget that the first version of the Ethereum protocol shipped in less than two years—a pace that drew many of us to the project as a developer platform in the first place,” they write. “But today, we think Ethereum’s core protocol could be improving much faster… without sacrificing its values.”

The first step, they write, is for Ethereum to decide to do more than one major upgrade per year.

That means setting more ambitious goals. Right now, they see two big obstacles to this: Inertia and ossification, or deliberately slowing output to preserve decentralization.

Of the two, they see the latter as the biggest and most difficult obstacle to overcome.

“We think ossification is too risky for Ethereum,” they said. “It prevents Ethereum from staying competitive as a platform, as applications and users move toward more centralized alternatives.”

Jesper Johansen, CEO and founder of Northstake, which builds tokenized staking for institutions, agreed with Paradigm that “shipping faster would benefit Ethereum—regardless of one’s vision for the protocol.”

“This will also reinvigorate it for the degens on crypto Twitter while positioning Ethereum as the primary blockchain for institutional adoption,” he told The Defiant in an email.

Low-hanging Fruit

Arguing that there is “low-hanging fruit” that the community could adopt without controversy, the authors point to three examples. These are scaling and security solutions for Layer 2 blockchains, scaling Ethereum’s Layer 1 without overburdening node operators, and improving the user experience and security of wallets.

However, there are also challenges to overcome, starting with getting rid of what they call an “either/or” attitude toward prioritization. Instead of asking, “Should we do X or Y first,” they argue that the answer should be “both.”

Beyond that, they argue that it’s too easy for developers to get bogged down in arguments about values, such as whether the community cares more about Layer 1s or Layer 2s, decentralization versus efficiency, or financial versus non-financial use cases.

Discontent at Ethereum

Paradigm’s call comes as Ethereum’s leadership faces a crisis of confidence.

Core developer Eric Conner walked away from Ethereum last week, citing discontent over Vitalik Buterin’s leadership.

“Perhaps some day those in leadership roles will realign with the community, but for now, I am out,” Conner said.

Conner’s departure drew a comment from Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, who wrote, “Isn't it rare to see a defection like this in crypto? I've never seen one, altho I'm just a tourist, but it seems like a bad sign; replies would indicate he's not alone either.”

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