On August 25, Vitalik Buterin wrote on X: We should all agree that finance is "not enough". There are too many rapidly growing centralization points and threats in the technology of today's world, such as:
* Ongoing political attacks on encrypted messaging
* Centralized identity system and credit scoring
* Bugs/backdoors in insecure/proprietary operating systems
* Social media - government censorship of platforms, and the opacity/centralization of the algorithms of the platforms themselves
* Choke points in a few powerful countries gaining more and more power, enabling people on the other side of the world to be unblocked from half the internet
* Risks of surveillance, de-platforming, and economic domination brought by centralized AI
* Similar concerns about mind-reading technology (BCI) are coming
Even if you could make finance completely perfect, the world would still be pretty screwed if we got these other issues wrong, along all the philosophical axes we care about that brought us to crypto in the first place. At the same time, finance is a critical part of any strategy to drive these trends. Your VPN is not anonymous unless the way you pay for it is privacy-preserving, so I’m grateful that the RAILGUN project gives me a way to do that. 0xbowio is committed to expanding privacy while minimizing the ability of bad actors to benefit from such protocols, all without backdoors). Polymarket is part of finance, but not just finance. Farcaster is social, but uses a financial component to fight spam, and I suspect a sustainable monetization strategy for decentralized social will involve decentralized finance (ads are inherently more limited when anyone can build a client, so you have to try other approaches)
As a result, I think the crossover between DeFi and other decentralized technologies is going to be very important. “Other decentralized technologies” is a sector that doesn’t naturally get $100 million in venture capital, so I think it needs a high level of explicit support today, although my ideal scenario is that we can find a stable feedback loop to allow it to grow.
