On Saturday (April 13), Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, responded to a critic of the Ethereum “team” by commenting about Ethereum’s progress and explaining that betting on the success of Ethereum was much more about betting on all those people working in the Ethereum ecosystem than betting on Vitalik himself or a few of the more prominent members of the Ethereum community.

It all started after Reddit user “yagan” made the following post (titled “Vitalik”) in the “/r/EthTrader” subreddit:

“The amount of fud toward ethereum has been incredible over the past 12-16 months. Yet for some reason dispite [sic] all the ridicute [sic], insults, etc etc Vitalik has proven over and over he is determind [sic] to move forward as a person and as a leader. Cheers to Vitalik and cheers to his supporters. Cheers to ethereum and cheers to the community that can see the 'bigger picture'. Congrats on all you have accomplished Vitalk and thank you for being an inspiration to many.

Eth 2.0 yo!”

This post resulted in the following reply from user “dont_hate_scienceguy”:

“Yup. Hope he reads what you wrote.

The day Vitalik leaves ETH is the day I market sell. I have never had less faith in the 'team' than I do after this dothereum nonsense.”

If you are wondering what “dothereum nonsense” refers to in the above post, here is some background information.

Dothereum is a new independent blockchain project that sounds like an Ethereum competitor being built as a Polkadot parachain, and according to EthHub Founder Eric Conner and SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani, the person behind this project is none other than former Ethereum core developer Afri Schoedon (who was also working on the Polkadot project while working at Parity Technologies):

This was Vitalik’s reply:

“'The team' is larger and broader than you think. While I get frustrated with the antics of the “chattering classes” myself, it's important to keep in mind that Prysmatic, lighthouse, the eth2 research team, etc etc are all continuing work right on schedule, and the recent governance noises, while loud and annoying, did not delay the progress of eth2 by even a single day. State channel and Plasma and ZK rollup devs are similarly steadily moving forward, as are the 1.x rent proposals. The existing 1.0 clients are being tirelessly upgraded to better handle the load of the current chain, with a huge victory a few months ago in dropping uncle rates as well as constant improvements in block propagation. When you're making a bet on the ethereum ecosystem, it's those silent armies you are betting on.”

One member of the “silent armies” that Vitalik is talking about is PegaSys (Protocol Engineering Groups and Systems) researcher Ben Edgington, who talked to Decrypt at the second annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), which was held in Paris in early March. Here is what he said at that interview:

“Given the scope of what we’re building, progress is as rapid as anyone could expect… Effectively, we’ve designed a brand new blockchain from the ground up in eight months or so, which is an amazing achievement… I don’t see any hazards to delivering 2.0 within the next couple of years, as a full package.”

“This process has been done very openly by a large community of people and it can look chaotic, but that’s R&D—it’s a process of exploration, and back tracking and testing of various solutions.”