Ethereum co-founder questioned the possible success of blockchain projects launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter Jack Dorsey. In his opinion, their projects lack the necessary functionality to work with DeFi.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Vitalik Buterin made several high-profile statements about the blockchain projects of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. According to Buterin, Jack Dorsey's plan to create a blockchain platform for DeFi is untenable because bitcoin has limited functionality and is unable to become an effective solution for decentralized applications.

“I’m skeptical about decentralized finance on top of a Bitcoin type of project… On Ethereum, there’s native functionality that allows you to essentially directly put either [ETH] or Ethereum-based assets into these smart contracts, into these lockboxes, where there’re then arbitrary conditions that can then govern how those assets get released. Bitcoin does not have that functionality to the same extent. Jack is basically going to have to essentially create his own system that enforces those rules, and then on the Bitcoin layer, the bitcoins will just have to be owned by a multi-sig wallet controlled by either Jack or the participants in the system. It looks similar but it will end up being something with a much weaker trust model. This is the whole reason why Ethereum started as an independent system in the first place. There’re technical limits to your ability to graft new functionality onto a system that’s not powerful enough to support that new functionality.”

As for the Diem blockchain project of Facebook, Zuckerberg wants to turn the social network into a metaverse, intelligently predicting that the future of the Internet lies with decentralized technologies, Buterin admits. But according to Buterin, Diem tokens should be launched on an existing blockchain, rather than trying to create its own blockchain.

Buterin also mentioned the advantages of the Ethereum blockchain, such as the ability to launch smart contracts and thoughtful mechanisms for managing tokens. Buterin is confident that Ethereum will become a powerful ecosystem in the next 10 years.

In mid-July 2021, Jack Dorsey revealed plans to create an open source TBD blockchain platform to launch decentralized financial services. He clarified that it is planned to build it on the basis of the bitcoin blockchain.