When Web3 collides with digital/accelerator: In an era of accelerated technological advancement, what can Crypto do?

If you followed the recent Devconnect conference in Argentina, you might have noticed an intriguing signal:

Among the many technical agendas surrounding Rollup, EIP, and account abstraction, perhaps the most noteworthy is not a protocol upgrade, but rather an issue dedicated to a separate day—d/acc day.

d/acc, which looks like an abbreviation of code symbols, is actually a new concept that Vitalik Buterin strongly advocated as early as 2023. This article will take you to understand the ideological context of d/acc and how Ethereum is accelerating the reshaping of the underlying narrative based on it.

1. Starting with e/acc, what is d/acc?

To understand d/acc, we must first understand the historical context it reflects: the frenzied pursuit of e/acc (effective accelerationism).

If you've been following the trends in Silicon Valley's tech scene, you might have heard of e/acc, and you might even have a strong impression of the overwhelming wave of "e/acc" suffixes in 2023:

At the time, a host of tech startup and investment heavyweights, including a16z founder Marc Andreessen and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, used this as the suffix for their social media accounts.

As an abbreviation for "Effective Accelerationism," e/acc, according to the standard definition, is a philosophical concept that integrates biological, physical, economic, and social theories, emphasizing adaptability, evolution, intelligence, and acceleration as universal principles in the universe.

In layman's terms, "e/acc" emphasizes the supremacy of technology, extremely admires the driving force and transformation of society through technological innovation, and can even be regarded as the creed of a group of technology fanatics— advocating to accelerate the development of technology at all costs, believing that the market and technology themselves will solve all problems.

Therefore, it was once regarded as a utopian vision of technology. However, the wave of AI ignited by ChatGPT at the end of 2022 gave many e/acc a real hope, which is why the concept had such a huge spread in 2023.

However, this one-way rush towards technological supremacy still makes many people uneasy, especially as AI gradually approaches the singularity, biotechnology risks intensify, and centralized power expands.

It is against this backdrop that Vitalik proposed a path that leans towards "reformism" in a certain sense: d/acc, which advocates a defense-first approach to technological development.

On November 27, 2023, he published an article titled "My techno-optimism," in which he offered a careful consideration of the acceleration of technology.

The "d" here not only stands for Defense, but also for Decentralization and Democracy. It's not about putting on the brakes, but about accelerating in a different direction— accelerating those technologies that can make us safer, more autonomous, and more resilient to systemic risks.

Interestingly, a year after publishing this article, he published another article in January 2025, "d/acc: one year later," which further deepened his thinking on d/acc and proposed a core worldview model: Defense-Dominant vs. Offense-Dominant.

Its core logic lies in the fact that "the darkest moments in human history often occur when offensive advantages significantly outweigh defensive advantages":

• When creating a virus is easier than developing a vaccine;
• When it's cheaper to launch a cyberattack than to patch vulnerabilities;
• When centralized AI can easily generate massive amounts of Deepfakes that ordinary people cannot distinguish between real and fake,

At these moments, human society is in a state of systemic fragility.

The current technology tree is tilting towards "offensive advantage"—large technology giants monopolize AI computing power, and centralized institutions control data hegemony. Therefore, based on the logic of d/acc, if we continue to blindly accelerate, we may create an extremely efficient but extremely fragile, or even extremely centralized, dystopian world.

Therefore, d/acc's core argument is that we must consciously intervene through technology to reverse this situation and allow the "defensive" nature of technological development to once again outweigh its "offensive" nature.

II. Why does d/acc appear in Web3?

It is no exaggeration to say that although e/acc (effective accelerationism) is highly regarded in Silicon Valley, it is essentially an alienation of technological capitalism with an extremely strong elitist character: because it does not care who is left behind in the process, but only cares about the improvement of overall efficiency.

According to Vitalik, while the global technology narrative has largely revolved around "acceleration" over the past decade, in the context of AI, encryption, energy, and national competition all running at full speed, simple "accelerationism" can no longer answer a fundamental question:

Where exactly are we accelerating towards? For whom are we accelerating? And at what cost?

The emergence of d/acc provides a directional calibration, shifting the perspective from elitism to "democracy" in a broader sense—it is concerned with universality and pursues selective acceleration, especially for explosive innovations involving stacked risks, centralized power, and widened regulatory loopholes, which should not be blindly accelerated.

This naturally and deeply binds d/acc to the future of Web3. After all, the core value of Web3 has never been as simple as "a faster global computer," but rather the gradual removal of power, wealth, identity, and control from centralized systems and their return to the hands of users.

In fact, by taking Ethereum's major development trends as examples, we can clearly see its deep resonance with digital/accurate data structures:

• Decentralization needs to be accelerated: ensure the number of L1/L2 nodes and their resistance to censorship;
• User sovereignty needs to be accelerated: promote account abstraction (AA) and make defensive functions such as social recovery and gas payment on behalf of others more widespread;
• System resilience needs to be accelerated: deploy technologies such as ZK-SNARKs to defend against privacy leaks and surveillance;

This is why d/acc has become a core narrative in the Ethereum community, because blockchain technology is essentially one of the most powerful defensive technologies invented by humankind.

To put it simply, a future where technology reigns supreme is not about speed alone, but about continuous acceleration on the right and secure track: accelerating decentralization, accelerating individual defense, and accelerating system resilience—this is also the new mission that d/acc has given to Web3 and the crypto world.

III. AI and Web3: Defensive Accelerationism for Building Future Civilization

I have always believed that AI and Web3/Crypto are a mirror image of the new era's "productive forces and relations of production".

If we view AI as a powerful "spear" (enhancing productivity, but also potentially used for evil), then Crypto is a sturdy "shield," and from d/acc's perspective, this shield primarily defends against threats in three dimensions.

First and foremost is to defend against “abuse of power”.

In the Web2 world, your digital identity and assets don't belong to you; they are "rented" from tech giants. Platforms can ban your accounts at any time, and banks can freeze your funds. Blockchain, however, builds a mathematical defense through cryptography. With your private key in hand, no centralized power can take away your assets.

This is an ultimate defense mechanism that protects individuals' right to survival in the digital age.

Secondly, defend against "the truth being distorted".

With the explosion of AIGC (AI-generated content), the internet is rife with misinformation. In the future, we may not be able to distinguish between a human and AI on the other side of the screen, or between a video being a real recording and an algorithmic composite.

From this perspective, the on-chain community verification and public key signature system provides a "trust anchor" for information. We can verify the source of information through cryptographic signatures and defend against the flood of false information through decentralized consensus.

Finally, defend against "privacy invasion".

After all, in the era of big data, since the data itself needs to be verified before it can be used, we are forced to operate without data, and ZK-SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs) which d/acc strongly advocates are the pinnacle of defensive technology.

It allows us to prove facts without compromising privacy (e.g., proving I have enough money to pay without revealing my balance), which not only protects privacy but also mathematically eliminates the necessity of "Big Brother".

Ultimately, d/acc is not a form of passive conservatism; on the contrary, it requires extremely high levels of technological innovation.

• We need a faster public blockchain service network to support a global-scale defensive financial network;
• We need a more user-friendly account abstraction so that defensive tools are no longer limited to geeks;
• We need stronger quantum-resistant cryptography to defend against brute-force attacks by future computing power.

Therefore, events like the d/acc day at Devconnect are not just technical discussions, but also a reminder that technology itself is neither good nor evil, but the direction of technological development is.

In this era of uncertainty and rapid progress, "safer" is itself the highest level of "more advanced".