What Vitalik Buterin Wants To Change In Ethereum

What Vitalik Buterin Wants to Change in Ethereum

One of the most striking aspects of Vitalik Buterin’s recent writing on Ethereum and blockchain technology is not the technical depth, but the tone. It reads less like advocacy and more like revision — pragmatic, experience-driven, and occasionally skeptical of assumptions that once defined the space.

Buterin remains one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in crypto. Known for his philosophical framing and long-term commitment to decentralization, he has often articulated what blockchain should become. The question now is whether his recent posts reflect a new realization: that many early ideals collide hard with the realities of how systems — and humans — actually behave.

Sustainability: Decentralization Must Survive Failure

In a post earlier this year, Buterin focuses on what he calls the “hidden stones” of decentralized infrastructure — the parts that fail quietly but decisively.

Peer-to-peer networks stall. Latency spikes unpredictably. Third-party services disappear. Tooling decays. And when the default response to any failure mode becomes “call the devs,” developers themselves turn into the ultimate point of centralization.

His now-famous Roman metaphor — DEVS as DEUS — is not rhetorical flourish. It is a warning. Operational dependence, even in open-source systems, is a form of centralization. A blockchain meant to last decades cannot rely on a small group of maintainers to intervene whenever reality diverges from design assumptions.

Complexity Requires Trust

In an earlier post, Buterin explores the same problem from a different angle: protocol complexity.

Cutting-edge cryptography and sophisticated design are often treated as unquestioned positives in crypto. But Buterin argues that complexity itself introduces dependency — again, on a narrow class of experts.

A protocol can be highly decentralized on paper and still fail at being:

• Trustless, if only a technical priesthood understands its guarantees
• Forkable, if new client teams cannot realistically emerge
• Self-sovereign, if even advanced users cannot inspect or reason about it

This reframes decentralization away from node counts or fault-tolerance metrics and toward cognitive accessibility. If users must trust specialists to explain what the protocol does, trust has not been removed — it has simply been relocated.

DAOs Don’t Scale Human Attention

Buterin’s writing on DAOs extends this critique from code to people.

Two structural problems dominate DAO governance:

• Privacy
• Decision fatigue

Without privacy, governance becomes a social signaling exercise. Votes turn into identity statements, alliances harden, reputations calcify, and dissent carries real social cost. What emerges is not decentralized governance, but politics without institutions.

Decision fatigue is the quieter failure mode. Frequent votes feel empowering at first. Then participation drops. People stop reading proposals, stop voting, and eventually disengage — leaving governance to:

• activists,
• insiders,
• or professional delegates.

The apathy is statistically stark; a 2025 study of major DAOs revealed an average voter participation rate of just 6.3%, with the top ten holders frequently controlling over 76% of the effective voting power.

The uncomfortable implication is that maximum participation is not sustainable participation.

Buterin is not rejecting DAOs outright. He is arguing against constant governance as a virtue. Sustainable systems minimize required decisions, enable delegation without social capture, and preserve privacy — even from fellow participants.

Layer-2s Are Not About Scaling Anymore

In his most recent writing, Buterin revisits Layer-2 blockchains. Long a vocal supporter of L2s, he now argues that Ethereum no longer needs scaling in the sense it did in its early years.

Instead, he suggests that Layer-2 projects should define distinct value propositions, such as privacy, oracles, identity and social coordination.

In this framing, L2s begin to resemble application layers rather than pure infrastructure — a subtle but meaningful shift in how Ethereum’s ecosystem is expected to evolve.

Institutions Are Neither Friend nor Foe

Against this backdrop of critique, Buterin’s changing tone toward centralized institutions is especially striking.

Early crypto culture treated institutions as adversaries by definition. Buterin’s recent writing is more nuanced. He speaks of cooperation — while still aggressively pursuing Ethereum’s interests.

Read charitably, this is an admission that institutions have won early battles:
KYC regimes, centralized stablecoins, and Bitcoin’s institutional adoption are now facts, not hypotheticals.

Rather than rejecting them, Buterin suggests using institutions to advance decentralization’s goals:

• prediction markets designed for institutional risk and hedging, not just gambling
• DeFi integrating centralized stablecoins for liquidity and arbitrage
• zero-knowledge KYC preserving privacy while meeting regulatory demands

The objective remains unchanged: building a financial, social, and identity layer that protects self-sovereignty and freedom. The means, however, are more pragmatic.

Is Self-Sovereignty What Users Actually Want?

This raises a deeper question — one that Buterin circles without fully answering.

Full control over assets does not just remove intermediaries; it removes buffers.

• Lost keys are final
• Mistakes are irreversible
• Physical coercion — the “$5 wrench attack” — becomes rational when assets are bearer-based

Self-custody is not just empowerment. It is responsibility under threat.

The data suggests users are struggling with this responsibility: 69% of all crypto value lost in early 2025 stemmed from direct wallet compromises and lost keys rather than protocol failures, reinforcing the reality that for most people, total self-custody is a liability, not a feature.

This reality challenges the simplistic narrative of “ultimate control.” Many users may not want absolute sovereignty at all times. Instead, they prioritize recoverability, safety, and plausible deniability — properties historically provided by intermediaries rather than pure self-custody.

Taken together, Vitalik Buterin’s recent posts do not signal a retreat from decentralization, but a reassessment of its objectives. Ethereum emerged at the forefront of an idealistic phase of the movement; it may now be positioned to define a more mature one, grounded in operational resilience, human limits, and pragmatic trade-offs.