Peter Szilagyi

Peter Szilagyi is the team lead for Ethereum and a senior developer for the platform. He is a multifaceted personality with contributions in other fields. He is the creator of the messaging app called Iris Cloud Messaging. There is some controversy in the cryptosphere about Peter and Coindesk, the cryptocurrency and blockchain publisher. It appears they have wrongly interpreted his stance on the upcoming proposal EIP-999. We will look into this controversy in details.

The EIP-999 Proposal

EIP-999 is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal coded and drafted by Afri Schoedon. This proposal was drafted to unlock the Parity wallet (wallet owned by Parity Technologies) which was frozen in November 2017. The Parity wallet had $150 million worth of ETH in them during the freeze. The wallet got frozen due to a serious bug in the Parity Software.

The bug was first reported by an anonymous Github user with the pseudo name ‘Devopps99’. He found out when he tried to test functionality in the multi-sig wallet library contract. Devopps99 announced that the wallet was compromised and 580 wallets holding 513K ETH were locked in them. The value of the funds locked at the time of the event was around $150 million.

The EIP-999 proposal would require a hardfork on the Ethereum network. Afri Schoedon stated that the proposal could be activated during the next Scheduled hardfork of Ethereum rather than doing a separate hardfork for unlocking Parity wallet alone.

Coindesk Article on EIP-999

Some in the cryptocurrency space claim coindesk has been biased in their reporting when it comes to Ethereum. It has been said in some circles that Coindesk used the EIP-999 issue to paint a picture of an Etherum community divided over the proposed hardfork.

Coindesk interviewed Peter Szilagyi regarding the EIP-999 issue in their article published on 25th April. The title of the article could be considered deceptive. “Ethereum’s Top Developers Think A Blockchain Split Might Be Inevitable.” was the caption.

Here, the article quotes Peter Szilagyi saying:

“We’re talking about exactly the same networks and we’re basically starting a tribalism war. I don’t think we’ll reach a consensus.”

Peter in response, tweeted his original response to Coindesk and stated that some of his answers were ignored in the article. In the response, he mentioned that the Ethereum team was trying to reach consensus on the proposal and not destroy themselves. Below is his exact answer to a question from Coindesk author.

Coindesk: If a split happened, would it be a clean parity-Geth divide? Peter: I think this is a horrible question and completely misses the point. We’re trying to reach consensus here, not destroy our work.

He added that it was either Coindesk completely ignored his answers or it might have been too late for them to incorporate them in their article.

Below is his tweet:

He expressed his frustration here in another tweet.

Vitalik Supports Peter Szilagyi

Vitalik, co-founder of Ethereum, is not a fan of Coindesk himself. He supported Peter and expressed his concerns over Coindesk’s biased approach towards Ethereum. Below is his tweet criticizing Coindesk for not incorporating Peter’s feedback into their article on the upcoming EIP-999 proposal

Below is his exact tweet

Vitalik came out strongly against the Coindesk article and called it “Terrible”. He added that they published a sensationalist article claiming that the Ethereum chain would split when it was very clear that the EIP 999 was far from acceptance.

He also stated that he would not be attending Coindesk’s Consensus 2018 conference this year and asked others to do the same.

Below is his tweet

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain publishers should be cautious and unbiased while publishing a sensitive article like the above one because this space reacts quickly and news spreads like wildfire across social media. One needs to be careful in dealing with a sensitive topic to avoid panic among the community