Vitalik Buterin Urges More People to Support Ethereum for Payments – Here’s Why

384
Advertisement
   

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently remarked that Ethereum offers many benefits, and urged more people to support ETH for payments.

“More people should support Ethereum for payments. The nice thing about supporting Ethereum is that you’re just not accepting ETH, you also get support for MK, UNI, WBTC and every stable coin for free.  And there’s already like three working layer-2 scaling solutions on Mainnet.”

Vitalik made the remarks in response to a post by Spencer Noon, CEO of DTC Capital Crypto-Native Investment Fund, who pointed that Square Bank is making a bad corporate decision for failing to support Ethereum for payments, in addition to Bitcoin.

“No one will ever be able to convince me that @Square refusing to support Ethereum (in addition to Bitcoin) isn’t dumb. It is the most head-scratching crypto strategy we’ve ever seen from a big corporate and that’s saying something.”

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, the CEO and Chairman of San Francisco-based Square cofounded the payments company to make payments convenient, fast, inclusive, and cheap. Square’s biggest product Cash App, allows people to directly send or receive money on a peer-to-peer basis with no hidden charges and offers a free visa card, Cash Card. Cash App also doubles as a Bitcoin exchange, allowing users to buy, sell, deposit, store, and withdraw bitcoin.

In August 2020, Square reported that its Cash App revenue from Bitcoin surged in the second quarter by 600% to $875 million, making the company a profit increase of 711% at $17 million.  The company attributed the bitcoin revenue and gross profit to an increase in bitcoin trades and growth in customer demand.

Currently, Cash App has been dubbed as the fastest-growing digital wallet in the US, accounting for up to 72% of total revenue on Square, and with an estimated 30 million monthly active users.

Advertisement  

Ethereum vs. Bitcoin’s Preference on Cash App

Ethereum is widely used as a payment method with its biggest support from small to medium-sized businesses and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). The EEA brings together organizations from around the world to adopt, develop, and participate in growing the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem.

However, unlike Bitcoin which is primarily used for sending and receiving payments, ETH is also a utility token that supports the development of Decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are based on the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm which makes transactions slower and more expensive when network activity surges.

However, Bitcoin has several solutions built to circumvent scalability limitations, while Ethereum is yet to launch its new Proof-of-Stake network (ETH 2.0) that will not only solve scalability but also boost investors’ confidence in ETH’s value.

The latest development on ETH 2.0 is the launch of the Spadina testnet on 29th September to allow onboarding stakeholders a final run before the official launch which is expected any time before November 30th.