The Infinite Machine

by Camila Russo

There was also Dfinity, Stellar, Tron, NEO, Steem, Loom, Waves, Tezos, and others, vying to become the dominating decentralized applications platform, or at least the preferred platform for a specific use case. Ethereum developers and fans would scoff at most of them, pointing out how they compromise on security, decentralization, or both to increase throughput.

Vitalik was actively trying to diminish his role in the Ethereum community. He didn’t want to be seen as a larger-than-life, charismatic leader. Instead he wanted to gradually blend into the background and become one of many researchers focusing on proof-of-stake and scaling solutions, so that the network didn’t need him for its survival.

Later that month, when Ethereans were getting ready for yet another upgrade, called Istanbul, Vitalik pointed out that the code changes for the hard fork “happened with *zero* involvement from The Great Dictator™.”

Serenity would allow Ethereum to become “the world computer” as it was meant to be, “not a smart phone from 1999 that can process 15 transactions per second and maybe potentially play snake,” Vitalik said. Serenity will be “even more decentralized than today,” and have “hopefully about 1,000 times higher scalability.” He didn’t set a date for the launch of Serenity, but reassured the assembled that it was “really no longer so far away.”