From November 13 to 19, the DevConnect conference was held in Turkey, bringing together the world's leading Ethereum developers. There, Vitalik Buterin, one of the creators of the network, surprised when he spoke of his intention to promote a "redesign" of Ethereum.

In an interview with The Defiant, Buterin said hat centralization in some staking pools is not healthy and independent staking is difficult. He said  that “It is an opportunity to redesign staking that alleviates these problems a little.”

The growth of Lido is such that it poses a serious risk of centralization in Ethereum. The advantage of this staking pool is that it provides users with a synthetic token, stETH, in exchange for staking their ETH. In this way, users do not lose liquidity to carry out other operations, while they collaborate with the functioning of Ethereum by being validators through Lido, which today controls 31.4 % of the validators .

Buterin questioned other foundations that Ethereum has today. Regarding the Proof of Stake, a consensus algorithm he said that returning to the Proof of Work is “politically unfeasible.” However, he did not close the door on changing it for a better proof of stake. 

He also pointed out the need to make the algorithm more efficient, for example, reducing more than 65% the number of signatures per slot needed for certain transactions. In addition, he assured that part of the community is not "emotionally linked" with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), which enables the processing of smart contracts on the network. By this, Buterin meant that certain technical issues are negotiable for the community in order to keep existing applications working and reduce complexity.

The changes are not considered a problem for this developer. From his perspective, the Ethereum roadmap has changed because new problems appear. "You have to respond to threats and make sure you take care of security and decentralization." Now, I think it's important to figure out what we do with staking centralization

The future of Ethereum reassures Vitalik

The comments don't suggest that he is worried about the future of Ethereum. When asked about the issue, Buterin said that "see the light at the end of the tunnel" in the face of the various issues that have worried him recently. 

Also, he is reassured by the arrival of dank-sharding or the second layer network Plasma, which he publicly supported a few weeks ago. “Only one of the two will be necessary for Ethereum to be scalable enough.” He also noted that at least five privacy solutions have been created for the network "that are sufficiently compliant with regulations and will be widely accepted, but without backdoors so governments can see everything."

Centralization on Ethereum clients

Just as it is dangerous for a few staking pools to accumulate too much power on Ethereum, the same is true for clients. Clients are the software that allows nodes to connect and interact with the Ethereum network and, therefore, with other nodes.

This centralization in customer choice presents two risks, according to Buterin. "The first is technical, and is the existence of bugs that could generate the wrong chain," he said, referring to possible vulnerabilities or failures in a specific client. On the other hand, there is a "political" problem. This is the possibility of a single team of client developers having too much influence on Ethereum's agenda, he explained.

Complexity and experience for users

Among many other details regarding the operation of the network,  Buterin spoke in detail about the difficulty of using applications on Ethereum safely for many users. Regarding this, he considers that the objective should be "to improve the experience of using the protocols safely, so that your APR (annual interest return) is not 100% negative the following year."

He also referred to the possibility of using existing tools, such as emails, as "Guardians" in an account that uses AA. Ultimately, he opined that something that wallets should improve is the description of the signatures that a user is about to approve , in order to avoid hacking through false airdrops, a methodology widely used today to steal cryptocurrencies.