Founder of Adamant Capital says Ethereum is a “Science Experiment”

By Debarun Gupta

The cryptocurrency industry’s third-largest currency by market cap, Ethereum (ETH) has recently come under the spotlight due to the strongly negative comments made against the project by Adamant Capital’s Founder, Tuur Demeester. According to him, the valuation of the currency at $13 billion is too high and that it “is at best a science experiment.”

Demeester has recently expressed his opinions of the currency through his Twitter handle, where his opposition to the project drew quite a significant amount of attention from many big players in the crypto industry. He stated that although Ethereum technically offers the same solutions as Bitcoin does (decentralization, smart contracts, and immutability), the architecture and culture surrounding ETH is completely the opposite of BTC.

He called the currency a “crypto blue chip” to describe the cryptocurrency, a term that is generally reserved to describe something that colors the perception of uninformed newcomers – a practice that is generally looked down upon in any business.

Following the ups and downs of the cryptocurrency market since the early days, Demeester said that he felt that he had a responsibility to share his concerns, which he did through a series of 50 consecutive Tweets describing in detail how and where he felt the currency fell short. He also later shared an articulated form of the so-called “Tweetstorm” on his Twitter handle.

Additionally, the Founder also pointed out the criticism made against Casper’s white paper, stating that “it does not live up its own claims”. Peer reviewed by developers such as Vlad Zamfir, where he says that the white paper does not result in “either theoretical sound nor practical useful treatment of Byzantine fault-tolerance,” and that the white paper simply points out the vagueness of its applicability to scale Blockchains.

Additionally, Demeester said in one of his Tweets that,

On the 2nd layer front, devs are now trying to scale Ethereum via scale via state channels (ETH’s version of Lightning), but it is unclear whether main-chain issued ERC20 type tokens will be portable to this environment…In 2017, more Ethereum scaling buzz was created, this time the panacea was “Plasma”

He further went on to say that,

However, upon closer examination it was the recycling of some stale ideas, and the project went nowhere: 13/ The elephant in the room is the transition to proof-of-stake, an “environmentally friendly” way to secure the chain. (If this was the plan all along, why create a proof-of-work chain first?)

It is evident that some comments online had ticked him off and he had decided to answer them and clear off any doubts about his standing on the matter at the same time.

His followers are still divided over his rant, though. Some criticized his Tweets comparing it to “tribalness”, while some welcomed his comments, calling it “masterful.”