Update: Binance CEO Responds to Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin: ‘Let’s Have a Bigger Heart’

The CEO of Binance is pushing back against Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s recent comments on centralized exchanges.

During a discussion with Tech Crunch, Buterin described why he’s not a big fan of centralized exchanges:

“I definitely personally hope centralized exchanges burn in hell as much as possible. First of all, clearly I think on the fiat-to-crypto side it’s very difficult to decentralize because you ultimately are interfacing with the fiat world, and the fiat world is one that only has basically centralized gateways. So I do think that there’s valuable services that are being provided there that are very hard to decentralize.

On the crypto-to-crypto side, I do think that it’s still early days and the technology is going to become more and more efficient over time. And at some point we are going to see a world where it becomes much easier to fairly quickly turn a token of one kind into a token of any other kind.

Basically, with the decentralized exchanges available today, one of the nice things is they already have a nice usability gain, which is that you don’t have to register, log in, create an account, go to some stupid web interface. All you do is you just send tokens of one type to one address, and then you immediately get tokens back from another address. From a user experience point of view, it’s great. That is obviously something that needs to be refined a lot more around the edges, but I think it’s something that we are going to start seeing more and more of.”

After receiving a number of requests for comment, the CEO of the leading centralized cryptocurrency exchange Binance responded on Twitter. Here’s his full response:

“Got asked a few times, re: “Vitalik’s burn in hell”.

Let’s not wish others to “burn in hell”. Let’s have a bigger heart, and appreciate the fact that we are part of an eco-system, not independent projects. Realized that, if it was not for fiat (and centralized) exchanges:

1. all coins will have far less liquidity (and market cap/price/influence/impact etc).
2. the industry will be smaller
3. the industry will develop slower

Probably all by more than 10x. Just because someone else is doing the lowly grunt work, doesn’t make them dirty. 

Also:

1. Decentralization is a means, not an end. The goal is to increase freedom, and choice. Let people choose what they want. At the moment, more people seems to choose centralized exchanges over decentralized one, and there are good reasons for it.
2. There is no absolute decentralization. Projects with core teams still have centralization. Today, Vitalik probably has more king-like powers than anyone else in the industry, and has used it, by serving as advisors for projects, therefore helped to decide their fate, at least fate of their ICOs to a large extent.
3. “Decentralization” is not safer by default. Why do we have ETC vs ETH today?
4. Effectiveness and adaptability is a consideration. A small step towards decentralization/freedom that can be adopted by 1.2 billion people is more impactful than a big step that can only be adopted by a dozen people.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for blockchain/decentralization/freedom. But I would not wish “burn in hell” on anyone or anything. That’s just not a nice thing to say, even if it was said by Vitalik. I don’t bother asking him yet, I assume he just meant he don’t like centralization, which is fine.

We need to keep a view of moving the entire eco-system forward, not just one part of it or another. CZ”