round Sept. 15, the blockchain Ethereum will make a crucial software update known as “the merge,” which will significantly reduce Ethereum’s energy usage and set the stage for the network to become faster and cheaper.
On Ethereum, you can have a random 12-year-old in India with a clever idea and some coding skills, and they can start single-handedly building with these Legos. I find that pretty exciting: Removing intermediaries that take a fee or gate-keep, or operate in a single country as opposed to the whole world.
And the merge dramatically increases the security of Ethereum. An attacker needs 51% of the blockchain’s value to [take control]. With Proof of Work [the previous mechanism that powered Ethereum], you need on the order of $5 billion, which allows you to buy enough computers and transformers, connect all of them to the grid, and then carry out an attack.
Whenever you have a boundary between two systems, you have to play by the rules of both systems simultaneously. Coinbase, for example, straddles the nation-state and network state, so they have to play by the rules of both. We’ve seen huge amounts of innovation around Uniswap, which is now a building block for vast swaths of decentralized finance. I think what will happen as a general trend is that just as we have decentralized exchanges, we will have decentralized everything.