Vitalik Buterin is a free thinker and he doesn't limits himself as a Ethereum founder. And it would not be a surprise if he joins another project or a new one.
But for waves, he did once met with waves founder but that's it. It's funny even to think Vitalik Buterin to join Waves Platform. If he goes for something new, it would be better than Ethereum not inferior.
Waves Platform launched not long after Ethereum. Amongst the reasons why it was conceived were the perceived shortcomings of the Ethereum Platform. Namely;
Consensus algorithm - POW is defunct legacy and, increasingly, derided by environmentalists. Ethereum POS is untested. Waves is the only
decentralised general purpose public platform with effective POS (Leased Fair Proof of Stake).
Network and Userland - Ethereum is not able to support mass use/transactions effectively. Possibly this may improve in future - but it's an unknown quantity. Waves was developed from scratch from the ground up to be a mass user platform. Included in this philosophy is the consumer grade ease of use and it's current standing as the Worlds Fastest Public Decentralised Blockchain Platform.
ERC20 and DAPPS - Waves has implemented it's own unique DAPPS and contracts ecosystem having learned a great deal from the position with Ethereum. There is no GAS or similar construct and the team at Waves really took their time with development of their on-chain computation system. Whilst, in the short term, fully Turing computation is not featured in the RIDE specification, the implementation is imminent and will be the most intuitive, secure and transparently costed computation available to date.
Ethereum does have the advantage of being first mover in this sphere - but then so was NCA Mosaic on the Web.
