Ethereum Must Move Faster or Risk Losing Its Edge Says Starkware Founder | Markets Outlook

Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder of StarkWare, argues that Ethereum holds a significant moat as the first general-purpose smart contract platform where most activity is rooted, but warns that its three-to-four-year roadmap timeline is a serious concern. Plans of that length typically slip further, potentially stretching to five years, which he calls far too long given the urgency of building financial infrastructure capable of changing the global economy.

Ben-Sasson broadly supports Vitalik Buterin's roadmap, describing it as good, ambitious, needed, and timely, but calls for greater prioritization, faster execution, and more transparent governance. He says Ethereum's decision-making process appears opaque from the outside, with an unclear governing body that occasionally announces plans without visible broad collaboration from core teams.

Ben-Sasson notes that several elements already on Ethereum's new roadmap, including recursive Starks and a new virtual machine, have been live and open source on StarkNet for approximately three to four years. He says StarkNet has offered to help Ethereum multiple times and is willing to do so again, arguing Ethereum should draw on existing ecosystem resources rather than rebuilding from scratch. If Ethereum does not accelerate, he warns that a more modern platform could eventually overtake it, and that centralized corporate chains could become the default rails for traditional finance, an outcome he describes as contrary to the visions of Vitalik, Satoshi, and himself.

Ben-Sasson raised quantum computing as a distinct and serious risk, stating that a quantum computer capable of breaking current cryptography would allow an attacker to seize or steal nearly all tokens on both Ethereum and Bitcoin, collapsing their value to zero. He noted Ethereum has a quantum readiness plan with a governance mechanism and timeline while Bitcoin does not, but said Ethereum's timeline may not be aggressive enough. StarkNet has already deployed step one of its own quantum readiness plan, replacing certain hashes with quantum-safe alternatives. Ben-Sasson predicted that as quantum computing advances, investors and retail users will progressively reduce exposure to non-quantum-safe blockchains, making this a competitive differentiator over time.

On programming environments, Ben-Sasson said Cairo, the language underlying StarkNet's recursive Starks, offers a Rust-like environment that is safe and ergonomic. He warned that if Ethereum adopts an EVM-like virtual machine instead, it would represent an older-generation approach with lower scale and efficiency, framing the choice of virtual machine as consequential for Ethereum's long-term competitiveness.

Ben-Sasson's broader philosophical argument is that the core promise of crypto is to recreate peer-to-peer transacting layered on global digital infrastructure, reducing the role of banks and financial institutions from all-controlling surveillance entities to service providers in a distributed economic system. He emphasized that privacy must be delivered through smooth and usable user experience for this vision to be realized, not just as a technical feature.

Tokenized equities saw record on-chain trading activity in June, with overall on-chain trading volume jumping 145 percent from May to 3.86 billion dollars according to CoinDesk data, driven largely by blockchain-based versions of SpaceX following its IPO. Backpack's SPCX token alone generated 1.08 billion dollars in on-chain trading volume, and an X-Tox version generated 852 million dollars. Armani Feronte of Backpack said the platform built its tokenized stock offering so assets can move freely between traditional finance and Solana DeFi at the speed of a token, with plans to expand symbol by symbol toward a 24-hour, seven-day global capital market for securities on-chain.