Controversy and confusion about Vitalik Buterin has recently arisen after news of his departure from the Ethereum community quickly spread.
In May of this year, the rumor spread for the first time. At the moment, Buterin himself posted an image on his Twitter account, which showed a Google recruiter asking him if he would prefer to work in the aforementioned tech giant at that time or in the future.
Not satisfied, Buterin did a survey among his followers, to which he asked “¿Should I drop Ethereum and work for Google?” As expected, almost everyone voted no and the Ethereum co-founder did not leave the company back then.
Now, a new confusion rises among Ethereum followers. As part of a debate in social media Twitter, in which different topics were talked about, Buterin said that the Ethereum project could continue even if he could no longer contribute.
“I think Ethereum can absolutely survive me spontaneously combusting tomorrow at this point” he stated in a thread on Twitter this week.
Furthermore, during the debate he was asked if he intended to detach himself from the project. Buterin, minutes later, replied that the measure was already in progress, adding that much of the research was being done by Danny Ryan, Justin Drake and Hsiao-Wei Wang.
Many interpreted Buterin words as the developer’s way to confirm he was indeed walking away from Ethereum.
Clarifying the Controversy
It is important to explain that during the debate held by Buterin on Twitter, numerous topics were brought up. Among them was his support of Ethereum-based altcoin projects.
So when the Russian-Canadian programmer referred to a separation measure already in progress and to the advances in the research carried out by the team he mentioned, he spoke exclusively about the Ethereum-based altcoin projects, and not about leaving the platform.
To clarify the commotion produced among Buterin followers misunderstanding, he decided to once again use Twitter to assert it was not among his plans to move away from the Ethereum foundation.
“To be clear, “detaching” meant detaching from *needing* to participate. No actual plans to disappear any time soon.” he explained in his tweet.
During the debate, Buterin also asserted that a 15 months massive change phase had gone through Ethereum. Later, in another publication he spoke of the 4 characteristics that show its evolution:
“1. Casper/sharding spec roughly finished, now in refinement stages.
2.4+ implementations of the spec well underway.
3.Many implementations of plasma well underway.
4.ZK-SNARK-based layer 2 scaling and privacy well underway. It’s a night-and-day difference from 2017,” said the tweet.
