FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried Makes Prediction for Ethereum (ETH) Merge, Warns of Potential Rough Transition

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is giving his thoughts on what could happen when Ethereum (ETH) completes its highly anticipated merge to proof-of-stake (PoS).

In an interview with CNBC, the crypto billionaire says that while in the long term the merge will be beneficial for Ethereum, it’s not unreasonable to expect some turbulence when it first occurs.

“I think long term it’s probably going to exciting for the Ethereum community. I think it’s going to allow substantially faster and cheaper processing and transactions… 

I do think that it’s going to be – as all big transitions are – a little bit rocky at the beginning. I think there’s going to be some messy activity around when it happens. I think that’s sort of inevitable, both long term and probably even medium term.”

Bankman-Fried says he expects a certain amount of confusion and lack of preparedness among those in the Ethereum community, which could cause some technical difficulties in the beginning. The CEO predicts some protocols will “flub” the transition, and a cleanup will then be necessary.

“I think that first of all, there are going to be some forks of this. As you look at some people who want a proof-of-work (PoW) variant on it, although I think everyone is expecting that the bulk of the activity in transition to be a proof-of-stake Ethereum through this merge. Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of people in the ecosystem that will have to update software that have to start processing the new chain.

Many of those are going to be promptly ready to do it, some of those probably are not. I expect that APIs are going to break in ways that people didn’t quite predict, and there’s going to have to be bug fixes at least on centralized entities…

It’s a big transition, and anytime that happens, especially when it’s just not one company doing it, when it’s an entire decentralized ecosystem and all the decentralized and centralized entities in it try to transition all at once, some people are going to flub the transition and take some time to clean it up.”

[embedded content]

I

Don't Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get crypto email alerts delivered directly to your inbox
Check Price Action
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram
Surf The Daily Hodl Mix

Featured Image: Shutterstock/FlashMovie