ETH’s Péter Szilágyi says, “Ethereum is losing the plot”

Péter Szilágyi, the Ethereum Team Lead, expressed doubts regarding the future of the blockchain network Ethereum. Szilágyi’s viewpoint included the ETH PeerDAS proposal, which would, among other things, raise the size of Ethereum blobs to 32 MB.

 Szilágyi says, “That’s fun, but are we aware that local block production is collateral damage that the PeerDAS authors are willing to take?”

Szilágyi claims that the PeerDAS update would prevent home stakers, who often have simpler computing equipment, from participating in the ETH network, which contradicts the blockchain’s decentralized spirit.

Ethereum is very strict on the timings, you have about 4s to get your block out to the entire network. PeerDAS splits that across subnets, but it’s still 32MB that you need to ripple across in 4s. The numbers – I think – will murder all home stakers.

Péter Szilágyi

He continued, “At this point I’d be happy to proven otherwise, but I feel Ethereum is losing the plot. The research team fully embraced the idea to centralise everything as long as it can be verified. Which is a cute charade: decentralised validation but centralised control.”

Ethereum blobs provide short-term network storage and were introduced in March of this year as part of the Dencun upgrade through EIP-4844. Szilágyi adds that 

The fact that certain members of Ethereum research also – allegedly – run their own MEV relays is an extremely messed up incentive, where the protocol designers can directly profit off of centralizing their designs.

Péter Szilágyi

Péter says, “As I see it, Ethereum is being taken over live, and the Ethereum research team is either completely oblivious to it (which I find unlikely), or they are playing their own game (which I find more likely with the past advisorship reveals and infra they coauthor/run).”

To him, ETH has been sold out. He argues, “As I said before, at the end of the day, numbers will probably go up, and many people will be happy. I’m just wondering when we’ve sold out.”

At the time of writing, ETH is worth $3,252.20, down 0.7% from an hour ago but up 2.9% in the last 24 hours. The value of ETH today is 7.7% lower than it was seven days ago.