In this crypto field that is almost no longer defined as a tech sector, Ethereum founder Vitalik is a rare figure who is still concerned about the direction of blockchain technological advancement.
Starting from the second half of 2025, he began to post long texts intensively on Twitter. The frequency, length, and breadth of his posts were rare in his public expressions over the past decade. It did not seem like a successful founder preaching, but more like an anxious thinker trying to reignite something amidst the ruins.
We have combed through all of his public tweets since 2025 and found that his interests are extremely broad: from the underlying consensus mechanisms to upper-level social governance, from cryptography to AI ethics, from geopolitics to social media, there are traces of his in-depth thinking.
Among these complex topics, we try to distill the keywords he most frequently mentions and the core propositions he cares about most. These thoughts are not only about the future of Ethereum, but also seem to be an answer to where the entire crypto industry should go.
Shift in the Underlying Narrative
In 2025, Vitalik repeatedly emphasized that Ethereum's underlying narrative must shift. It is no longer the "world computer" trying to run everything, but rather should become an "internet-level public infrastructure" like Linux and BitTorrent, or so to speak, the "TCP/IP of finance."
TCP/IP is the underlying communication protocol of the Internet. It belongs to no company, yet supports the operation of the entire network. It achieves absolute neutrality and robustness by giving up control over upper-layer applications.
This is exactly the new direction Vitalik has found for Ethereum. A more mature, more pragmatic decentralization: a neutral base layer that cannot be controlled by a single entity, a cornerstone that allows all financial activities to operate without permission.
"Ethereum should operate like Linux or BitTorrent: open, decentralized infrastructure, owned by no one, yet powerful and trustworthy enough for the entire world to build upon."
This means that the valuation logic of Ethereum is also changing. Its core value cannot be measured by the price-to-earnings ratio or user growth of a commercial company. Its value does not lie in having as many users or generating as much profit as Facebook or Amazon, but rather in serving as infrastructure, capable of carrying how much value accumulation and supporting how many applications' construction.
This narrative shift means that Ethereum must face a harsh reality: when "tokenization" itself can no longer provide emotional premium, it must return to value creation. The acceptance of Ethereum by Wall Street and traditional finance is both a recognition of its value and also brings challenges.
Wall Street is coming
Following the Bitcoin spot ETF, giants such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Fidelity began intensively positioning themselves in Ethereum in 2025. They are no longer satisfied with simple asset allocation, but are delving into the infrastructure level. BlackRock has launched tokenized funds based on Ethereum, and JPMorgan's Onyx platform processes billions of dollars in transactions on-chain daily.
The influx of institutions is like a double-edged sword, one side being the endorsement of legitimacy, while the other side directly questions the decentralized soul of Ethereum. As BlackRock and Bitmine gain more and more Ethereum, will the influence of the founders decrease? How can Ethereum balance institutional demands with its decentralized spirit?
Vitalik's attitude is: welcome, but not obsequious.
In a post on Farcaster, he described the relationship between institutions and cypherpunks as a complex one that needs to be properly understood, stating that "institutions (whether governments or companies) are neither necessarily friends nor necessarily enemies."
But he believes that unbounded institutionalization brings two major risks, both of which directly target the foundation of decentralization.
First is the alienation of the core community. Vitalik stated directly in an interview: "It's easy to drive others away. If Ethereum only pursues commercial practicality and ignores its technical and social attributes, then it would result in a 'greed above all' mentality like that of Wall Street, and that's exactly what many of us came here to escape."
This is essentially a decentralized crisis at the community level: if the original builders leave, Ethereum will lose its source of ideas and vitality.
Second is incorrect technical choices. Institutional pressure could lead Ethereum to make decisions that undermine its accessibility.
For example, to meet the demands of high-frequency trading, the block time is reduced to 150 milliseconds. This means that only institutions with professional data centers and low-latency networks can operate nodes, and ordinary users will be completely excluded, which could further lead to the centralization of node operations in financial hubs such as New York, undermining geographical decentralization.
Faced with these risks, Vitalik's initial solution was clear division of responsibilities: the L1 base layer remains absolutely decentralized, focusing on global characteristics such as censorship resistance that Wall Street cannot replicate.
"Layer 1 should remain strong, open, and directly accessible. It should allow individuals, companies, and governments to build upon it without relying on any centralized entities."
Institutions can build their own "compliant" applications on L2, but this "L1 censorship-resistant, L2 compliance-seeking" approach has encountered new challenges in practice.
L2's new positioning
On February 3, 2026, Vitalik posted a long article on X, making an important revision to Ethereum's L2 strategy.
Ethereum's original scaling roadmap positioned L2 as "Ethereum's branded shards," which should inherit Ethereum's security and decentralization properties, becoming an extension of the mainnet.
But the reality is disappointing. Vitalik directly criticized that most L2s are still in the stage of relying on centralized sequencers, which are essentially more like "centralized databases dressed in blockchain clothing."
These L2s have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, with valuations often reaching tens of billions, yet they refuse decentralization for commercial interests (MEV revenue, regulatory compliance, rapid iteration). After the token launch, the high valuation is accompanied by low circulation, and the token price plummets and never recovers.
These general-purpose L2s actually align very well with the term Vitalik often uses to criticize products from centralized giants—"corposlop" (corporate slop).
The term "corposlop" coined by Vitalik can be understood as: corporate garbage dressed up in a shiny exterior. These are companies and their products that possess strong business capabilities and sophisticated brand packaging, but actually engage in unethical behaviors in pursuit of profit.
Vitalik's comments about this L2 are merciless:
"This may be correct for your clients. But it's obvious that if you do this, you're not 'scaling Ethereum'."
While the progress of decentralization in L2 has been slow, the expansion progress of L1 itself has unexpectedly accelerated. Fees are already very low, and the gas limit is expected to increase significantly by 2026. The core value of L2 as a "scaling tool" is being diluted.
Therefore, Vitalik has pointed out a new path for L2:
"We should stop viewing L2 as Ethereum's 'branded shard.' L2 can no longer just be content with being 'a bit faster than L1' and must instead find its own unique value."
He believes that the value of L2 in the future lies in specialized functions and innovations. For example, innovations around non-financial areas such as privacy, AI, and social; efficiency optimizations for specific applications (application chains); or providing ultra-low latency transaction ordering.
He even proposed that L2 could explore some "non-computational verification" functions, meaning those functions whose results cannot be proven solely by on-chain computation, but instead require external world information (such as oracles) or social consensus (such as decentralized courts) to adjudicate.
This pushes Ethereum's scalability blueprint into a new phase: a more powerful L1 serving as the foundation of security and trust, complemented by a more diverse, feature-rich, and imaginative L2 ecosystem.
Privacy as the First Priority
If we count the concepts Vitalik mentioned most frequently in 2025, "privacy" would definitely rank among the top. His emphasis on privacy also points to a core centralization issue in today's society—information control.
In October 2025, Vitalik elevated privacy to a "top priority" for Ethereum. He admitted that the early neglect of privacy was a necessary compromise due to immature technology at the time. But now, with the maturation of zero-knowledge proof technologies like ZK-SNARKs, privacy can no longer be postponed.
"Privacy is an important guarantee of decentralization: whoever owns the information owns the power, so we need to avoid centralized control of information."
A blockchain without privacy, where every transaction and every vote of yours is exposed to everyone. When power can exert pressure by tracking on-chain data, the "permissionless" nature of blockchain becomes an empty promise.
The struggle for control over information is particularly evident in the stablecoin sector. Stablecoins represent the largest intersection between the crypto world and traditional finance, with tens of billions of dollars flowing through the blockchain daily. Whoever controls the pegging, issuance, and circulation of stablecoins effectively controls the lifeline of the crypto economy.
In response, Vitalik pointed out that the core struggle in the crypto industry today is no longer "innovation vs regulation," but rather "control vs independence," and stablecoins are precisely the main battlefield of this struggle.
On the technical path, Vitalik has pointed out a direction for privacy: achieving "selective disclosure" through ZK-SNARKs and privacy pools (Privacy Pools): users can prove the legitimacy of the source of funds to regulators while protecting transaction details, without exposing all information.
From this perspective, privacy is a necessary condition for Ethereum to become a true "global digital public infrastructure." It ensures that Ethereum is not just a transparent financial ledger, but also a digital society that protects individual freedom, resists censorship, and allows users to safely "stand together."
Only when users have privacy protection can they safely participate in collective actions, express dissent, and support sensitive causes without fear of being tracked or retaliated against. This is a fundamental requirement for true decentralization.
Building Trust for AI
The high priority given to privacy is also closely linked to the rise of AI. The rapid development of AI has significantly enhanced the data collection and analysis capabilities of tech giants, causing the risks of "surveillance capitalism" to grow exponentially.
Vitalik's concerns are not groundless. Palantir provides large-scale data monitoring services for the U.S. government and intelligence agencies, Worldcoin collects iris data from hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and Meta uses user chat records to train models.
AI that is controlled by a few giants, opaque, and unguided by values is becoming the most powerful centralized tool in human history.
As early as November 2024, Vitalik used OpenAI as an example to warn about the risks of centralized AI:
"OpenAI has now become CloseAI. The first step was sacrificing open source for safety; then this year, they sacrificed safety for profit."
But Vitalik believes that the crypto community cannot ignore AI and must actively get involved, using the power of decentralization to guide the development direction of AI.
"AI must be used with care: we must never let a large language model take control of a DAO... Instead, AI must be placed within a larger, human-driven system and function as one component within it."
This is exactly why the Ethereum Foundation established the dAI (decentralized AI) team and launched the ERC-8004 protocol. ERC-8004 provides AI agents with on-chain "identities" and "credit records," making the behavior of AI traceable and auditable.
The core issue it aims to address is: when AI agents increasingly replace humans in performing tasks, how can they trust each other?
In the centralized model, this issue is resolved by the platform. You trust OpenAI, so you trust its AI. But this means that all trust is concentrated in the hands of a few big companies.
ERC-8004 provides a decentralized path: through on-chain identity and behavioral records, AI agents can establish verifiable reputations without relying on endorsements from centralized platforms. This allows the AI ecosystem to potentially operate on a decentralized basis, similar to DeFi, rather than being monopolized by a few giants.
Vitalik's thinking is clear: since AI is an unstoppable trend, rather than passively accepting a powerful tool controlled by a few giants, we should actively use Ethereum's decentralized system (identity, payment, privacy, security) to set boundaries for it, ensuring that it serves an open and free society, rather than becoming a new era of nuclear weapons for centralized power.
Decentralized social media
After building a decentralized system of checks and balances for the two centers of power, finance and AI, Vitalik turned his attention to the core domain of human digital life: social networks.
He believes that the current centralized social platforms have fundamental problems. Their algorithms sacrifice the true value of content in pursuit of short-term engagement rates and advertising revenue, ultimately leading to information cocoons, declining content quality, and the platform's absolute control over users.
In January 2026, the decentralized social sector experienced a series of "earthquakes." The X platform banned APIs targeting "traffic boosting" projects, Farcaster was acquired, and Lens Protocol transferred its leadership to Mask Network. This series of upheavals highlighted the fragility of the existing model.
Against this backdrop, on January 21, Vitalik published a long article announcing his "full return to decentralized social," and delivered a profound critique of the SocialFi model of the past decade.
"Crypto social projects often go down the wrong path. We in the crypto space far too often think that if you insert a speculative token into something, it's called 'innovation'."
He hit the nail on the head, pointing out that the crypto industry has had little success in content incentives in the past, and the root cause lies in the lack of an effective "quality screening mechanism," not insufficient incentives. The value of tokens reflects popularity and hype, not content quality. Friend.tech, which became a hit in 2023, is a typical example; its token price plummeted by 99%, and the platform was almost abandoned.
Vitalik appreciates Substack's model because it demonstrates that it is entirely possible to build a healthy economic system around high-quality content, with the core being "subscribing to creators" to push high-quality content, rather than "creating a price bubble for them."
Based on this, he proposed a novel solution: establishing a non-tokenized, small-scale curatorial DAO.
This DAO filters high-quality creators through member voting and uses part of its revenue to repurchase its tokens. In this way, the role of speculators shifts from "hype pricing" to "predicting the DAO's choices," thus directing market forces toward the discovery of quality content.
But in Vitalik's view, the key to solving the problem is not to create more complex speculative tools, but to return to the technology itself and break platform monopolies through decentralization.
"There are no simple tricks to solve these problems. But there is an important starting point: more competition. Decentralization is the way to achieve this: a shared data layer on which anyone can build their own client."
To this end, he leads by example. Vitalik claims that since early 2026, all of his social activities have been conducted through Firefly. Firefly is a client that aggregates multiple platforms such as X, Lens, and Farcaster. It does not rely on the API of any single platform, but instead, through the concept of a "shared data layer," allows users to seamlessly transition toward a more open and free decentralized social environment while retaining their existing habits.
Embers in the Ruins
After going through Vitalik's thoughts on various fields over the past year, a main thread gradually becomes clear: what he cares most about and wants to uphold is returning to the original decentralization principles and maintaining a stance beyond financial speculation.
Whether it's the confrontation with Wall Street, establishing identity profiles for AI, defending privacy, or rebuilding decentralized social networks, each issue points to the same core: in an era of expanding centralized power, how can technology be used to protect individual freedom and sovereignty?
In 1993, Eric Hughes wrote in the Cypherpunk Manifesto:
"We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, anonymous organizations to grant us privacy out of goodwill. They talk about what is in their interest, and they will do it. ... If we expect to have any privacy, we must defend it ourselves."
Thirty years later, we understand the weight of these words more than ever. Tech giants are building information weapons with data and AI, and geopolitical conflicts make any centralized system potentially a tool for power struggles. In today's world situation, the value of a truly neutral and open digital public infrastructure has never been more evident.
While the entire cryptocurrency industry is still searching for the next hundredfold coin, in the days of declining industry innovation, at least some people are still guarding the spark among the ruins.
Such persistence may not necessarily "win" in the end. But at least this industry still has such thinkers, who don't peddle illusions of quick wealth, nor cater to short-term noise, but simply practice that ancient creed with thought and action:
Cryptography anarchists write code.
And by taking action to build a more open and fair future for this increasingly divided world.
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