Ethereum’s Buterin Stakes Only a Small Fraction of His Holdings

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his hesitation about committing a significant amount of his Ethereum holdings to staking, due to concerns surrounding security and infrastructural complications. In an appearance on the Bankless Podcast, Buterin revealed that the necessity of exposing keys to a public system, as well as the complex setup of multi-signature keys for staking, were deterring factors.

Buterin elucidated, “Probably the biggest reason why I personally am not just staking all of my ETH, that I’m instead staking a fairly small portion, is because if you stake your ETH, it has to be all out, like the keys that access it have to be public on some system that’s online, and for safety it has to be a multi-sig, and multi-sigs for staking are still fairly difficult to set up, and it gets complicated in a bunch of ways.”

This comment led to Charles Hoskinson, Cardano (ADA) creator and a former Ethereum colleague, expressing his surprise on Twitter. Noting that all of ADA’s holdings are staked, Hoskinson indicated his belief in this approach as a key feature of a well-structured proof-of-stake protocol. He confessed, “I had to listen to this a few times. I’m just at a loss for words. All of our ADA is staked. Guess what that’s how it’s supposed to be for a properly designed proof-of-stake protocol.”

Additionally, Buterin has been in the news for his thoughts on the United States’ regulation of cryptocurrency. With the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) targeting leading crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase in recent lawsuits, a variety of tokens, including Cardano, Solana (SOL), and Polygon (MATIC), were identified as “crypto asset securities.” Surprisingly, Ethereum was not classified as a security, a circumstance that Buterin finds unjust for his competitors.

Speaking on this matter, Buterin stated, “The one comment I’ll make is that I feel bad that Solana and other projects are getting hit in this way. They don’t deserve it, and if Ethereum ends up ‘winning’ through all other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that’s not an honorable way to win, and in the long term probably isn’t even a victory. This is especially true since the real competition is not other chains, it’s the rapidly expanding centralized world that is imposing itself on us as we speak. I wish all honorable projects a fair outcome in this whole situation.”