On January 12, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article stating that the Ethereum network itself must pass the "Walkaway Test"—meaning that the network can still operate securely and decentralizedly in the long term, even without continuous core development or "supply-side" maintenance.
Vitalik stated that Ethereum's mission is to be the infrastructure for trustless, minimally trust applications, whether in finance, governance, or other fields. This requires applications to be more like "tools" than "services": once deployed, they should be usable long-term and not become ineffective if developers stop maintaining them, they are attacked, or they turn to value extraction. To achieve this, the underlying protocol itself cannot rely on continuous upgrades to maintain availability.
He emphasized that Ethereum must reach a stage where "even if it chooses to freeze the protocol (ossify), its core value proposition will still hold true." This does not mean stopping upgrades, but ensuring that future upgrades are "icing on the cake" rather than essential for survival.
Vitalik further listed the key goals that Ethereum needs to achieve, including:
• Comprehensive quantum resistance, achieving cryptographic security at the level of a century as soon as possible;
• A sustainable scalability architecture design, which achieves long-term scalability through ZK-EVM verification and PeerDAS data sampling, and limits future upgrades to parameter adjustments as much as possible;
• A stateful architecture that can run for decades, ensuring long-term high TPS operation through partial statelessness and state expiration mechanisms;
• A universal account model (complete account abstraction) eliminates the rigid dependency on the ECDSA protocol layer;
• A secure, DoS-resistant gas pricing system that also takes into account execution and ZK proof costs;
• It can maintain a decentralized PoS economic model in the long term, supporting ETH as a trustless collateral asset;
• A block building mechanism that is anti-centralized and has strong censorship resistance.
Vitalik stated that ideally, the aforementioned "hard engineering" should be systematically completed over the next few years, allowing the vast majority of innovation to occur at the client-side optimization level and be reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. He emphasized avoiding compromises and "doing the right thing right the first time" to maximize Ethereum's long-term resilience at both the technological and social levels. "Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei."
