Ethereum co-founder and Consensys founder Joseph Lubin highlighted the importance of enterprise capital (VC) funding in the event of the world's largest smart contract network, despite growing industry concerns concerning the influence of investment funds on Ethereum.
The primary goal of VCs like Paradigm is to “extract as much value as possible from Ethereum and the broader ecosystem,” while their secondary goals include “evolving systems toward rigorous decentralization,” Lubin wrote in a post on Monday X, adding that there was “no must worry.”
Lubin's comments got here shortly after the departure of two key Ethereum researchers, raising renewed concerns concerning the potential influence of centralized funds on Ethereum's development.
On Friday, longtime Ethereum Foundation researcher and developer Dankrad Feist announced his departure to hitch Tempo, a layer-1 payments and stablecoin blockchain developed by Stripe and Paradigm.
According to his LinkedIn page, former Consensys researcher Mallesh Pai joined Paradigm in January as a research consultant before joining Tempo in a full-time role in September.
Despite industry criticism over Paradigm's growing influence on Ethereum, Lubin saw Paradigm's latest hires as one other signal of the blockchain industry's growing mainstream adoption.
“The corporate chain gold rush validates the normal economy and signals our mainstreaming,” Lubin added within the X post.
Source: Joseph Lubin
According to Lubin, crypto needs VCs “for now” to fill the worldwide capital gap
Despite growing concerns about VC's influence on the blockchain space, the industry still relies on traditional investment funds to draw more mainstream capital for sustainable development.
“We need VCs for now because they supply a convenient bridge for the influx of world capital into our ecosystem,” Lubin wrote, adding:
“Very soon, higher, fairer and more widely accessible on-chain investment platforms with healthy tokenomics might be so mature that VCs could have no selection but to ascertain themselves on these platforms in the event that they wish to stay in the sport.”
VC involvement stays needed to bring concerning the “progressive decentralization” needed to create a “secure global information infrastructure,” Lubin explained.
Paradigm's Tempo blockchain builds a network with a curated set of validators essentially controlled by Stripe, marking a major departure from Ethereum's open-source, decentralized ethos.
Paradigm first announced plans for the payments-focused blockchain network in September, citing a “growing need for optimized infrastructure” that may scale for global payments.
