Interview: Vitalik Buterin on Scaling Ethereum, Its Popularity in Asia and ICOs

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin discussed some of the scaling issues Ethereum is currently dealing with, the rising interest in Ethereum in Asia and his thoughts on the ICO ecosystem in general.

In late May, developers from the Ethereum-based job market platform Ethlance introduced an issue its freelancers were struggling to deal with. Twelve months ago, when the price of Ethereum's token Ether was around $14, a smart contract to set up a freelancer profile on Ethlance cost less than $1.

As the price of Ether started to surge beyond $250, Ethlance freelancers were required to pay around $8 to set up their profiles. Issues of Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps) and the rising fees on Ethereum led the community and supporters of Ethereum to express their concerns over the platform's scalability.

Discussions on Etheruem's scaling issues intensified as Buterin's interview with Epicenter, conducted in December of 2014, resurfaced, during which he characterized Bitcoin's $0.05 fee as "absurd." Currently, Ethereum's average fee is over $1 and its median fee is around $0.05, close to the level Buterin described as absurd.

Bitcoin Magazine spoke to Buterin to address some of these scaling issues Ethereum applications are currently dealing with, the rising transaction fees on Ethereum and the ICO ecosystem.

Scaling Issues of Decentralized Applications and How They Can Be Resolved

In regards to the issues that Ethlance and other DApp developers are facing, Buterin explained, "There are a lot of applications and contracts even now that are being built inefficiently. One major example is that there are a lot of applications that make one separate contract for each user which means that for every single user, it adds several kilobytes of data that cost a few million gas."