The $55 Million Mistake That Vitalik Buterin Made With Ethereum

Ethereum’s permanent blemish

Image by DonkeyHotey from Flickr

Ethereum is the most successful blockchain in existence. There, I said it.

I wish I’d been the first, but Bloomberg writer and author of “Out of the Ether” Matthew Leising beat me to the punch.

It’s not just Ethereum’s lofty goal of creating a radically new decentralized internet that makes it better than Bitcoin. It’s what it’s already been able to accomplish in six short years:

• Ethereum pioneered Smart Contracts (digital transactions that can eliminate middleman services like Uber, Airbnb, and lawyers, to name a few).
• Ethereum created a successful dApp (decentralized app) ecosystem. The most important altcoins and NFT ecosystems are built on Ethereum’s blockchain today.
• Ethereum created ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) as a means for developers to fund their own projects. This is how an ICO Works: Create a dApp, give yourself and other creators your own cryptocurrency (e.g. Chainlink), and if the project is a success the value of that crypto will go up paying you automagically.
• It’s spawned competition with cryptocurrencies like Polkadot, Cardano, and Tron, to name a few.
• Ethereum — more specifically a group of…