Author: Vitalik Buterin
Compiled by: TechFlow TechFlow
TechFlow Dive: This is one of Vitalik's rare public self-criticisms. He directly points out Ethereum's near-absence in addressing various social issues over the past few 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 are we building it?
The full text is as follows:
Over the past year, many people I've met have been worried about two things:
First, the direction of the world: government control and surveillance, war, corporate power and surveillance, technological degradation and corporate waste, social media becoming an information battlefield, AI and its intertwining with all of the above...
Secondly, there is a more sobering reality: Ethereum does not seem to have made any real difference in improving people's lives in these areas, even in the dimensions we care about most—such as freedom, privacy, security of digital life, and community self-organization.
It's easy to empathize with the first problem; everyone can lament that the beauty of the world is fading, darkness is advancing, and the ruthless powerful in high positions are driving it all. But acknowledging the problem is easy; the difficulty lies in truly pointing out a way out and proposing a concrete solution to improve the current situation.
The second question has been weighing on my mind, and on the minds of many of the brightest and most idealistic Ethereum enthusiasts. I've never personally felt anger or fear about political meme coins being listed on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications running on chains with 250-millisecond block times. What truly troubles me is Ethereum's extremely limited role in the low-intensity cyber warfare, international overreach of corporate and governmental power, and various real-world problems of the past few years. What technologies truly bring liberation? Starlink is the most prominent, a locally running open-source model is another, Signal is a third, and Community Notes approaches the issue from yet another angle.
One response is to say, "Stop dreaming, we need to face reality. Finance is our domain, so let's focus on that." But this is ultimately empty rhetoric. Financial freedom and security are certainly crucial. But clearly, even if a completely free, open, sovereign, and inflation-resistant financial system were built, it would only solve part of the problem; most of our deep-seated anxieties about the world would remain unresolved. Individuals focusing on finance is fine, but we need to be part of a larger whole, and have a voice on other issues as well.
At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the entire world. Ethereum is a "misshapen tool": beyond a certain boundary, "fixing the world" means a projection of power, more like a centralized political entity than a decentralized technological community.
So what can we do? I believe the Ethereum community should position itself as part of building an ecosystem of “shelter technologies”: free and open-source technologies that enable people to live, work, communicate, manage risk, accumulate wealth, and collaborate around common goals—all with resilience to external pressures as the optimal objective.
The goal isn't to reshape the world with Ethereum's image, nor is it to disintermediate all finance, have all governance done through DAOs, or have everyone integrate blockchain UBI into their social wallets. The goal is quite the opposite: de-totalization. This means lowering the stakes in this heavenly war by preventing the winner from achieving total victory (i.e., complete control over others) and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. It's about creating stable digital islands in chaotic times, ensuring that interdependence cannot be weaponized.
Ethereum's role is to create a "digital space" where different entities can collaborate and interact. Communication channels facilitate interaction, but the communication channel itself is not a "space": it cannot allow you to create a single object that can regulate and represent a social arrangement that changes over time. Currency is a key example, multi-signature wallets that can change members are another—exhibiting persistence beyond any single person or public key—and various markets and governance structures are a third. And there are many more.
I believe it's time to double down with a clearer understanding. Don't try to be Apple or Google, treating crypto as a tech track for efficiency or prestige. Instead, build our share of the sheltered tech ecosystem—that "ownerless, shared digital space" that supports open finance and much more. Proactively build a full-stack ecosystem: extending upwards to wallets and applications (including AI as an interface), and downwards to operating systems, hardware, and even physical and biometric security.
Ultimately, technology without users is worthless. The key is to find those users, whether individuals or institutions, who truly need sheltered technology. Optimizing payments, DeFi, decentralized social networking, and other applications precisely for these users and these goals—this is precisely where centralized technology fails. We have many allies, including many outside the crypto community. It's time to collaborate with an open mind and move forward.
Reply Supplement
@MarkSmitb Yes, but it does give people more freedom.
The answer isn't to oppose Starlink, but rather to support more than ten organizations with different stances each building a similar alternative system. Ideally, at least one should be open-source and use an open license…
@deuce897 Friend, I posted on X via Firefly, which will simultaneously publish to all major social media platforms.
@hashdag Good question.
There are two vectors that influence global events:
1. It influences the structure of the world in a way that is impartial to specific situations, yet simultaneously possesses a clear tendency to lead to ideal outcomes (such as empowering those who would otherwise…).
@PingChenTW How should this be understood?
