Vitalik Buterin urges the Ethereum ecosystem to be bolder about what it builds on top of the chain, while drawing a hard line against the core guarantees of the base layer and arguing that the next phase of Ethereum may require a first principles reset for applications, wallets, and even culture.
In a post to
“We must not compromise on our core attributes: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security (CROPS),” Buterin wrote. “We shouldn’t have the type of ‘open-mindedness’ that leaves people unsure of what security properties L1 will have a year from now.” He added that Ethereum should not raise questions about fundamentals such as whether “light clients” should “verify the correctness of the chain without trust.”
In his frame, the place that needs to be reexamined is the interface between Ethereum and its users. Application stacks, assumptions, and social conventions that shape what builders consider “serious” work.
Ethereum AI wallet but with guardrails
Buterin lumped some of the shift to AI into a scenario in which “wallets as browser extensions and mobile extensions die within a year.” In Farcaster, he put the point more directly: “It’s very clear that the next version of the wallet will feature AI heavily.”
Nonetheless, he emphasized that the use of higher values cannot simply outsource trust to the model. “I wouldn’t trust an LLM with millions of transactions or funds,” he said, explaining the “optimal workflow” for large transfers. “AI proposes a plan, a local light client simulates it, and the user checks it manually by looking at the actions and simulation results.”
The reward is that moving away from today’s dapp-centric interaction model reduces risk. Buterin argued that removing the dapp UI “completely” could eliminate “a lot of attack vectors (for both theft and privacy)” if done “conservatively, with a lot of emphasis on security.”
‘Tear off your suit and tie’
Buterin pointed to privacy as a recent example of Ethereum changing its priorities at the application layer. He described last year’s “shift toward thinking about privacy as a top consideration,” which he argued means “a fundamentally different Ethereum application stack because the entire stack has not been built around privacy until now.” This year, he said, “there is increasing work on the networking aspects of privacy, both within and outside of EF.”
He also sketched out more provocative app-layer thought experiments, including whether “the rest of DeFi is basically a universal futures market on top of a good decentralized oracle and allowing users to organize their own organizations on top of it,” and even “whether the ideal decentralized oracle is a SNARK to M-of-N small LLM to zk-TLS from some major news site.” In his view, AI can push “applications” away from individual products with individual UIs and into a continuous space, extending the pattern of “building fewer apps and relying on users to self-organize around them.”
When it comes to scalability, he said Ethereum is “rethinking from the ground up the role of L2 and what kind of L2 is actually the most synergistic and adds to Ethereum,” characterizing this as another area where past assumptions may no longer hold.
Buterin viewed culture as a non-technical constraint that could quietly narrow the scope of what to build. He referred to “every ladyly thing” and claimed that its subtext was “ripping off one’s suit and tie”, depicting a deliberately irreverent departure from “respectable” posture. “Write down your preconceived notions of what you consider ‘respectable’ on paper, smash them, and burn them. This psychological baptism leads to an intellectual baptism that unleashes greater creativity and expands your window of exaggeration.”
He closed his X post with a challenge to builders. Stop iterating one step at a time in today’s usage patterns and instead imagine Ethereum’s application layer as if it were starting from a blank page. “If you had to write a section of the 2014 Ethereum white paper describing the application… what would you write?” He urged people to “zero out all path dependency problems” and see what new designs emerge.
At press time, ETH was trading at $2,050.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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