Joey Krug, the founder of Augur, the decentralized prediction market build on top of the Ethereum protocol, believes there is a shortage of talented developers working on Ethereum scaling solutions.
In September, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin noted the lack of incentives for core developers working on improving the Ethereum blockchain network and fixing scalability issues.
To contribute to the open-source development of Ethereum, Buterin vowed to allocate all of his advisor shares earned from projects including OmiseGo to fund open-source projects which are working on providing scaling solutions for the network.
I’m announcing that 100% of my @omise_go + @kybernetwork *advisor shares* will be either (i) donated to charity (AMF, GiveD, SENS etc) or…
– Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) September 22, 2017
Still, as Buterin emphasized in a previous interview with South Korean finance publication Joong Ang, effective scaling of the Ethereum network to power decentralized applications with millions of active users is expected to take at least two to five years of development, depending on input from developers.
Krug shares a similar belief to Buterin, firmly believing that simply not enough developers are focused on improving the Ethereum, tweeting that the network would be vastly improved if there were more developers working to address issues including scaling:
#Ethereum really needs more developers on problems like sharding, proof of stake, and plasma, right now there simply aren’t enough
– Joey Krug (@joeykrug) November 2, 2017
Most of the core development work on Ethereum so far has been funded by the Ethereum Foundation, led by some of Ethereum’s early founders including Buterin. However, as the Ethereum Foundation is also operated by core developers and founders, it lacks the funding needed to maintain a large group of developers, unlike funded commercial projects where developers are more likely to be incentivized.
One of the criticisms that have mounted from the emergence of the booming initial coin offering (ICO) market is that projects which can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a relatively short period of term are more attractive for some developers, leading to a shortage of those who are willing to focus on open source development.
Luis Cuende, the co-founder of Aragon, stated that he does not know of any Ethereum developer who is not a millionaire, primarily because the vast majority of developers have moved on from core development work to commercial ICOs.
“I don’t know any good Ethereum developer that isn’t a millionaire, and it’s only a matter of time before it will become a gold rush among developers to learn the technology. After all, it’s the programming language of money”, said Cuende.
Experts including Coinbase co-founder and former Goldman Sachs trader Fred Ehrsam emphasized that for Ethereum to support a decentralized application with 1 to 10 million users, it needs to improve by 100-fold in terms of scalability and transaction capacity.
