The founder of Singapore and Vietnam-based Tomochain has taken on Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin for allegedly criticising some blockchain projects that claim high transaction speeds describing them as “centralized pile of trash”. Long Vuong claims in a media statement that it is not Buterin’s call to hint at any blockchain project as a trash.

Vuong’s beef with Ethereum

“Vitalik and Ethereum is in difficult place. On one hand, they are disrespected by the Bitcoin maximalist camp, on the other they cannot seem to solve performance issues efficiently,” Vuong says. “There are trade-offs in most systems. But Vitalik won’t be the one who makes the call about what’s trash and what isn’t. This year won’t be a good one for Ethereum.”

Buterin was reportedly quoted as saying at the Blockchain Connect conference in January that some projects which claim high transaction speeds are more centralized than the Ethereum network. He added in his comment at the conference that: “A lot of the time when a blockchain project claims ‘we can do 3,500TPS because we have a different algorithm,’ what we really means is ‘were a centralized pile of trash’ that only works because we have seven nodes running the entire thing.”

Afterwards, several reports suggest that Buterin may have cast aspersions at rival blockchain projects like NEO, Tron or EOS. Vuong could have viewed his Tomochain, whose network claims 1,000TPS over Ethereum’s double digit speeds, in the same category. Featuring 150 masternodes with a PoS voting consensus method, Tomochain seeks to be an innovative solution to the scalability problem facing the Ethereum blockchain. As an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible (EVM), every contract written in Ethereum can be seamlessly ported to TomoChain.

Ethereum to PoS

Truly, more decentralized applications (dApps) activities are currently being run on the TRON and EOS blockchains but Ethereum still hosts more dApps, according to DappRadar ranking. Only three Ethereum-based dApps are in the top 50 (30th, 40th and 49th spots) in terms of a 24-hour user basis. Despite the downward market trend and the reduced number of new ICOs, the Ethereum platform still leads as the most popular platform by a very wide margin. A reform of the platform’s setup is expected to make it more active and attractive.

The Ethereum network is working to switch to a Proof of Stake protocol. In a 2013 article, Buterin notes that the PoS system could help alleviate much of the difficulty and wastefulness some coins experience today and could also be used to secure a cryptocurrency’s network in decentralized anti-spam systems.

Going PoS has always been touted as the best way for Ethereum. However, the move seems to take longer than expected. As its network’s Constantinople fork date gets closer – around Feb. 28, some factors have been highlighted as slowing the switch. They include the view held by some that there’s a misconception about what a correct PoS is. They claim that changing to PoS is a lot more complex than many think regardless of how some blockchain projects have made it seem. It is also worth noting that Ethereum did not start with a PoS system and now that it has grown to be a large-sized project, there’s a need to be extra careful security-wise to get the switch done.