Paradigm CTO sparks debate over the future of Ethereum's 'problematic' Solidity programming language

Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos' recent remarks on the Ethereum programming language Solidity have sparked a debate in the community over its future — questioning if it should be abandoned, if current alternatives should be more widely adopted, or if a new language is needed.

Solidity is the primary programming language for developing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, used for building decentralized applications and other onchain functionality.

"How should we program Ethereum?" Konstantopoulos posted on X late Wednesday. "Solidity is in a problematic state right now, IMO. Do we make Solidity good? Do we drop Solidity? If we drop Solidity, do we do Vyper or do we do a new language?"

In response, some community members argued that a simpler, new language could help developers avoid costly mistakes — particularly in a DeFi ecosystem that now manages billions of dollars in total value locked.

DeFiLlama founder 0xngmi's " unconventional opinion " is that a new language could rethink how smart contracts are written by focusing on states and transitions rather than just instructions, which could help prevent mistakes and make the code safer.

"If the present value of the continued problematic state is more expensive than the switching costs to a new language, we should hold an industry wide campaign to find a language that makes sense, starting with the two next most adopted smart contract languages — Rust and Move," former Head of Ecosystem at Aptos Labs, Neil Harounian, said .

The call for Rust, a programming language used extensively in the Solana ecosystem, was echoed by many — though some questioned its current suitability for Ethereum smart contracts.

On the other hand, many developers said they would prefer to stick with and " fix " Solidity rather than abandon it entirely. They suggest adding more robust tooling and improving the developer experience — arguing that it's "too late to pivot" and that there are "far more important areas to work on than the language itself" right now.

Curveball

Vyper, conceived by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in November 2016, was another popular alternative suggested by many, with the decentralized exchange Curve Finance being one of the programming language's main proponents. 

"Really unexpected take from Georgios from Paradigm," Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov wrote on his official Telegram channel on Thursday. "TLDR — Solidity compiler development is in a bad state (I suspect that it sunk under loads of technical debt), another compiler or language is needed for development on Ethereum. What makes it more spicy — Paradigm did a lot to popularize Solidity by building Solidity-specific tools."

Egorov encouraged developers to consider using Vyper, arguing that its compiler is in a good state by comparison. "Just check if Vyper is close enough. You'll save a whole bunch of work!" the official Curve Finance account responded to Konstantopoulos on X.

Egorov started using Vyper in 2019 when he first began building Curve and "fell in love" with it. "Vyper has made a long way since then, and (not without my contributions) it was so much improved and reviewed that I think it's probably the best way to write safe smart contracts for the Ethereum ecosystem," he said in November, drawing an analogy between Python and PHP/Java for Vyper and Solidity, suggesting the former can also overtake the latter in popularity.

For now at least, Solidity remains the most widely used smart contract language in the crypto ecosystem by a wide margin, helping to protect over $132.1 billion in TVL, according to DeFiLamma data . Rust accounts for $13.4 billion and Vyper $1.8 billion.