Vitalik: centralised USDC and USDT are cool

This Wednesday was one of Vitalik's most powerful speeches of the past year. It was in Seoul, South Korea, where Vitalik and Ilya Pololokhin (the co-founder of Near Protocol) said that the centralisation of USDT and USDC will play a significant role in the future of crypto.

It's about solving the very controversial, as Vitalik stated, hard forks of Ethereum. A hard fork is a branching of one significant crypto into two, with differences in protocols and operating mechanisms if a fork is a regular token based on a more prominent cryptocurrency with its blockchain.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash were the hottest and probably the first in this regard.“I think in the further future, that will become more of a concern. USDC’s decision of which chain to consider as Ethereum could become a significant decider in future contentious hard forks.” Vitali fumed Ethereum's much-talked-about move to a proof of stake, which as usual, will create two separate blockchains.

The merger is set to occur following the successful integration of the Goerli test network in mid-August. Ethereum developers have set September 19 as an open-ended date to merge the current PoW chain with the PoS chain.