Vitalik's Rare Self-Criticism: Ethereum Has Missed the Truly Important Battlefield
- Core Viewpoint: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin suggests that the Ethereum community should move beyond purely financial applications and pivot towards building a "refuge technology" ecosystem centered on resilience. The goal is to provide individuals and communities with digital spaces for freedom, privacy, and security in an increasingly centralized and surveilled digital world, rather than attempting to reshape the entire world.
- Key Elements:
- Vitalik points out that despite global issues like surveillance, war, and corporate power, Ethereum's practical impact on these core societal problems has been limited over the past few years, failing to effectively improve key dimensions such as freedom and privacy.
- He opposes the view that finance is the only main arena, arguing that even a perfect open financial system cannot address people's deeper anxieties about the world. Ethereum needs to become part of the solution to broader issues.
- The proposed "refuge technology" framework aims to build a free and open-source technology ecosystem, optimized for resilience against external pressures, to help people live, work, and collaborate. Its core is "de-totalitarianism," reducing the stakes of conflict.
- Ethereum's role is to create enduring "digital spaces" (such as currency, multi-signature wallets, market structures) that serve as a neutral foundational layer for cooperation and interaction between different entities, rather than merely being a communication channel.
- He calls on the community to more proactively build a full-stack ecosystem, extending upwards to applications and AI interfaces, downwards to hardware and physical security layers, and to optimize applications like payments, DeFi, and social for users who genuinely need "refuge technology."
Original Author: Vitalik Buterin
Original Compilation: TechFlow
Introduction: This is a rare instance of public self-criticism from Vitalik. He directly points out that Ethereum has been largely absent from various social issues in recent years and proposes a new framework—"sanctuary tech".
This post represents one of the most valuable internal discussions within the Ethereum community: what exactly are we building, and for whom?
Full text is as follows:
Over the past year, many people I've spoken with have been worried about two things:
First, the direction the world is heading: government control and surveillance, war, corporate power and surveillance, the degradation of technology and corporate waste, social media becoming an information battlefield, AI and its entanglement with all of the above...
Second, a more painful reality: Ethereum doesn't seem to be tangibly improving people's lives in these areas, even in the dimensions we care most about—such as freedom, privacy, security in digital life, and community self-organization.
It's easy to empathize with the first problem; we can all lament together about the fading beauty of the world, the advance of darkness, and the ruthless elites in high places pushing it all forward. But acknowledging the problem is easy; what's hard is truly pointing a way out, proposing a concrete plan that can improve the situation.
The second problem has weighed on my heart, and on the hearts of many of the smartest, most idealistic Ethereum minds. I've never personally felt anger or fear about political meme coins on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling apps running on some chain with 250ms block times. What truly unsettles me is this: in the low-intensity online information wars, the international overreach of corporate and government power, and various real-world problems of the past few years, Ethereum's role has been extremely limited. What are the technologies that truly bring liberation? Starlink is the most visible one, locally run open-source large language models are another, Signal is a third, and Community Notes tackles the problem from yet another angle.
One response is to say, "Stop dreaming, we need to be realistic, finance is our home turf, just focus on that." But that is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security are, of course, critically important. But clearly, a fully free, open, sovereign, and inflation-resistant financial system, even if built, can only solve part of the problem. Most of our deeper worries about the world would remain unresolved. It's fine for an individual to focus on finance, but we need to be part of something larger, able to have a voice on other issues too.
At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the entire world. Ethereum is a "tool of the wrong shape": beyond a certain boundary, "fixing the world" implies a projection of power, more akin to a centralized political entity than a decentralized technology community.
So what can we do? I believe the Ethereum community should position itself as part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary tech": these free and open-source technologies that allow people to live, work, communicate with each other, manage risk, accumulate wealth, and collaborate around shared goals—all with resilience to external pressures as the primary optimization goal.
The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, not to disintermediate all finance, have all governance done via DAOs, and have everyone receive blockchain UBI into social recovery wallets. The goal is precisely the opposite: de-totalization. It's about lowering the stakes of this heavenly war by preventing winners from winning everything (i.e., total control over others) and preventing losers from losing everything. Creating islands of digital stability in chaotic times. Making interdependence impossible to weaponize.
Ethereum's role is to create "digital spaces" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communication channels enable interaction, but a communication channel itself is not a "space": it doesn't let you create a unique object that can normatively represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is a key example, a multi-signature wallet with changeable members is another—it exhibits a persistence beyond any single individual or public key, various market and governance structures are a third. There are many more.
I think it's time to double down with clearer awareness. Don't try to be Apple or Google, treating crypto as a tech track for efficiency or polish. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem—that "ownerless shared digital space" that supports open finance and more. More proactively build a full-stack ecosystem: extending upwards to the wallet and application layer (including AI as an interface), and downwards to the operating system, hardware, and even physical and biological security layers.
Ultimately, technology without users is worthless. But we must seek out users who genuinely need sanctuary tech, whether individuals or institutions. Optimize payments, DeFi, decentralized social media, and other applications precisely for these users and these goals—these are exactly the places centralized technology has no intention of going. We have many allies, including many outside the "crypto space". It's time to collaborate with an open mind and move forward together.
Reply Addendum
@MarkSmitb Yes, but it has indeed given people more freedom.
The answer isn't to oppose Starlink, but to support ten or more institutions with different stances, each building Starlink-like alternative systems. Ideally, at least one should be open-source, using open protocols...
@deuce897 Friend, I'm posting on X via Firefly, which publishes to all major social platforms simultaneously.
@hashdag Good question.
There are two vectors for influencing global events:
1. Influencing the structure of the world in a way that is agnostic to specific situations, yet has a clear bias towards desirable outcomes (e.g., empowering those who originally...)
@PingChenTW How to understand?
