Chainfeeds Summary:
Ethereum's underlying narrative must change.
Article source:
https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/61176
Article Author:
BlockBeats
Opinion:
BlockBeats: In the crypto industry, which can hardly be called a technology sector anymore, Vitalik Buterin is one of the few who continues to think about the long-term direction of blockchain technology. Since the second half of 2025, he has been publishing lengthy articles on social media with an unusual frequency, length, and breadth of topics. Rather than a successful founder's sermon, he seems more like a thinker trying to rekindle a sense of direction in the ruins. A review of his public statements over the past two years reveals that he is not only concerned with Ethereum itself, but also with almost the entire power structure of the digital society, from underlying consensus, cryptography, and privacy to AI, social governance, and geopolitics. In 2025, he repeatedly emphasized that Ethereum must complete a shift in its underlying narrative: no longer trying to be the world computer that runs everything, but retreating to a more fundamental and neutral position, becoming an internet-level public infrastructure like Linux, BitTorrent, and TCP/IP. It does not control upper-layer applications, nor does it pursue maximum commercial efficiency, but rather trades power for neutrality, censorship resistance, and long-term stability. This shift means that Ethereum's value should no longer be measured by company valuation logic, but rather by how much value it can accumulate and how much permissionless global collaboration it can support. With the launch of Bitcoin ETFs, traditional finance rapidly converged on Ethereum in 2025. Institutions like BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase were no longer just allocating assets, but directly entering the on-chain infrastructure layer. This brought legitimacy to Ethereum, but also touched its decentralized soul. Vitalik's attitude towards this was not rejection, but welcome, not pandering. He repeatedly warned that excessive institutionalization would bring two fundamental risks: first, alienating the core technical community, turning Ethereum into a tool only serving financial capital; second, forcing the protocol to make incorrect technical compromises, such as sacrificing node accessibility for high-frequency trading, leading to geographical and hardware-level centralization. The original solution was a clear layering: L1 maintaining extreme decentralization and censorship resistance, while institutions built compliant applications on L2. But reality was not ideal. In early 2026, Vitalik directly criticized most L2 blockchains for still relying on centralized orderers, making them more like databases disguised as blockchains. He also explicitly stated for the first time that the illusion of viewing L2 as a sharding of the Ethereum brand should be abandoned. With L1 scaling progressing faster than expected, L2 must shift towards differentiated value, exploring truly irreplaceable functions in areas such as privacy, AI, social networking, dedicated application chains, and low-latency ordering. If the technological roadmap is the skeleton, then privacy is the core value that Vitalik has prioritized most in the past two years. In 2025, he explicitly elevated privacy to Ethereum's top priority, pointing out that whoever controls information controls power. On a completely transparent blockchain, transactions, voting, and collaboration can all become tools of pressure, rendering permissionless blockchains meaningless. The significance of zero-knowledge proofs and privacy pools lies in achieving "selective disclosure," finding a technological solution between compliance and freedom. This privacy priority is also highly relevant to the rise of AI. Vitalik has repeatedly warned that centralized AI is becoming a new tool of superpower, and the crypto community cannot avoid it but should proactively set boundaries for AI using decentralized identity, payment, and auditable mechanisms. Explorations such as ERC-8004 are attempts to establish a verifiable reputation system for AI agents. Ultimately, this logic extends to social networks: platform monopolies, algorithmic incentives, and speculative tokens have not led to better public discussion. Vitalik believes that the real solution lies not in financialization, but in competition between shared data layers and multiple clients, regaining control of the human digital public space through decentralization.
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