Vitalik Buterin Says He Only Stakes a ‘Fairly Small Portion’ of His Ethereum (ETH)

Vitalik Buterin says that he’s not ready to stake a large part of his Ethereum (ETH) holdings due to the current infrastructure built around the service.

In a recent interview with the Bankless Podcast, the Ethereum founder says he’s still concerned about staking a large part of his ETH trove due to security reasons.

“Probably the biggest reason why I personally am not just staking all of my ETH, that I’m instead staking a fairly small portion, is because if you stake your ETH, it has to be all out, like the keys that access it have to be public on some system that’s online, and for safety it has to be a multi-sig, and multi-sigs for staking are still fairly difficult to set up, and it gets complicated in a bunch of ways.”

Cardano (ADA) creator Charles Hoskinson, who worked with Buterin on the early stages of Ethereum, says on Twitter he was speechless about the ETH founder’s staking comments.

“I had to listen to this a few times. I’m just at a loss for words. All of our ADA is staked. Guess what that’s how it’s supposed to be for a properly designed proof-of-stake protocol.”

Buterin also made headlines this week when he was asked on Twitter about his opinions on the US regulatory approach to crypto.

In lawsuits launched against top crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase in June, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) listed numerous tokens it considers “crypto asset securities,” including the Cardano and fellow Ethereum competitor Solana (SOL), as well as the blockchain scaling solution Polygon (MATIC).

Ethereum, however, wasn’t listed as a security, and Buterin says it’s not right that his competitors are dealing with those issues.

“The one comment I’ll make is that I feel bad that Solana and other projects are getting hit in this way. They don’t deserve it, and if Ethereum ends up ‘winning’ through all other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that’s not an honorable way to win, and in the long term probably isn’t even a victory.

This is especially true since the real competition is not other chains, it’s the rapidly expanding centralized world that is imposing itself on us as we speak. I wish all honorable projects a fair outcome in this whole situation.”