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- Vitalik Buterin has cast doubt on whether Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg's crypto-related projects can fulfill their promise.
- Dorsey's DeFi project based on bitcoin for payments company Square is functionally impractical, the co-creator of ethereum said.
- A "huge amount of mistrust" in Facebook could hamper its future crypto-related projects, Buterin said.
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Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin poked holes on Thursday in Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg's attempts to break digital-asset ground for their companies Square and Facebook.
Square and Twitter CEO Dorsey said in July that the digital payments company will launch a decentralized finance, or DeFi, business focused on bitcoin. The project will enable non-custodial, permissionless, and DeFi services for bitcoin, Dorsey said.
But Buterin told Bloomberg that bitcoin, the world's leading cryptocurrency, doesn't have the functionality to power such a project since it was largely designed to be a "currency of the house."
"On ethereum, there's native functionality that allows you to essentially directly put ETH or ethereum-based assets into these smart contracts, into these lock-boxes, where there's then arbitrary conditions that can govern how those assets get released," Buterin said in a video interview released Thursday.
"Jack is basically going to have to essentially create his own system that enforces those rules," he added.
There has been a surge of interest in DeFi, which promises to shake up financial services by eliminating the middleman and central oversight. Of the hundreds of projects launched, DeFi apps based on ethereum have proved the most appealing. But bitcoin DeFi will likely benefit from the Taproot update due later this year.
Buterin, who recently joined the dogecoin foundation as an advisor, was skeptical too about Zuckerberg wanting to transform Facebook into a "metaverse" company.
The metaverse is a virtual-reality space, representing a 3D internet that spans both the physical and virtual worlds. Facebook has already invested heavily in virtual-reality since its the technology that "delivers the clearest form of presence," Zuckerberg told The Verge.
Buterin said the tech mogul is clearly trying to anticipate the next stage of the internet "before the rest of the world goes in some different direction and Facebook is sort of left in the dust."
He said a "huge amount of mistrust" in Facebook prevented its digital currency project Libra from taking off. It could prove ineffective for the social media giant's future crypto-related projects, such as building its own blockchain, he argued.
Buterin recommended that Facebook and Square use existing blockchain networks instead as "there are already multiple projects trying to do that."
When he was quizzed about his plans for the ethereum network in the next five to 10 years, Buterin said: "hopefully running the metaverse."