The CEO of the FTX exchange, before the transition of Ethereum to PoS, noted the promise of this decision and warned of potential inevitable losses for the crypto industry.
Sam Bankman-Fried stated that while the merger will be beneficial for Ethereum in the long run, it is reasonable to expect some turbulence when it happens.
“In the long term, the merger will significantly speed up and reduce the cost of transaction processing. But the merge, like all big transitions, is going to be a little bumpy in the beginning. There will be some dirty game. I think this is inevitable both in the long term and perhaps even in the medium term,” Bankman-Fried warned.
The businessman said that he expects some confusion among the community members, which at first may cause some technical difficulties. The FTX CEO predicts that some protocols will fail the transition and a market cleanup will be needed:
“I think there will be a number of Ethereum forks. Many miners want to keep proof-of-work (PoW) Ethereum. And yet, the main part is ready to switch to the proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm. Obviously, a lot of people in the ecosystem will have to update the software to start processing the new chain.”
The expert added that many will be ready for this as soon as possible, and some will not:
“I expect APIs to break in ways that people aren’t quite prepared for. Bugs must be fixed, at least in centralized objects.
When this happens in the market, especially when it is not done by one company, but by a large decentralized ecosystem in which all elements are trying to move simultaneously to the PoS algorithm, some companies will not survive the merger and leave the market, Sam Bankman-Fried is sure.
Bobby Ong, head of cryptocurrency aggregator CoinGecko, warned that the mining community is capable of creating a lot of “useless PoW ETH”, referring to the history of Bitcoin forks.
