Vitalik Buterin is calling on the Ethereum ecosystem to be bolder about what it builds on top of the chain — while drawing a hard line around the basic guarantees of the underlying layer — arguing that a re-establishment of first principles in apps, wallets, and even culture may be necessary for Ethereum’s next phase.
In a post on X, the Ethereum co-founder said that “it’s healthy for us in the Ethereum world to have a more bold and open mind,” especially at the application layer and “how we see ourselves in the world.” This openness, he said, should not lead to uncertainty about what Ethereum’s L1 should protect.
“We must not compromise on the core features: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security (CROPS),” Buterin wrote. “We shouldn’t have an ‘open mind’ that leaves people wondering what security features L1 will have a year from now.” He added that Ethereum should not give up on dubious grounds, such as whether “lightweight clients” should “verify the validity of the chain without trust.”
Where the revision needs to happen, in his framework, is the interface between Ethereum and users: the application stack, its assumptions, and the social conventions that shape what developers consider “serious” work.
Ethereum AI Wallets, But with Guardrails
Part of the transition to AI, Buterin floated a scenario where “wallets as browser extensions and mobile extensions die within a year?” At Farcaster, he made this point more precisely: “But it’s clear that the next iteration of wallets will heavily incorporate AI.”
However, he emphasized that using a higher value cannot rely on just one model. “I don’t trust LLM with transactions or multi-million funds,” he wrote, describing what he sees as the “optimal workflow” for large deployments: “The AI suggests the plan, the local light client simulates it, you see the action and the result of the simulation, and manually validate it.”
The reward, he suggested, is that moving away from today’s heavy-handed collaboration model can reduce risk. Buterin argued that if done “conservatively with a strong focus on security,” removing the dapp UI “from the picture completely” could eliminate “a large number of attack vectors (both for theft and privacy).”
‘Drop the suit and tie’
Buterin pointed to privacy as the latest example of Ethereum’s shifting priorities at the application layer. Last year, he described a “shift to thinking about privacy as a first-order consideration,” which he said would mean “a completely different stack of Ethereum applications” because “the whole stack is not yet built around privacy.” This year, he said, it has expanded to “increasing work on the privacy networking side, both within EF and beyond.”
He also shared some more thought-provoking application layer thought experiments, including whether “the rest of defi is basically just universal futures markets on top of a good decentralized oracle and allows users to self-regulate on top of it” and even whether “the ideal decentralized oracle is just a SNARK over M-of-N small LLMs from important zk sites?” In his view, AI will move “apps” away from discrete products with discrete interfaces and push them into a persistent space – “create fewer apps and rely on users to self-adjust around them” is a pattern that can be scaled up.
As for scale, he said that Ethereum is also “rethinking the role of L2 from the ground up and how L2s are really the most synergistic and complementary to Ethereum,” presenting it as another area where previous assumptions no longer hold.
Buterin described culture as a non-technical constraint that can quietly constrict what is made. Referring to “the whole naughty thing”, he argued that the subtext is “tearing off the suit and tie”, which describes a deliberately irreverent break from “respectable” positions: “Imagine that you are “respectable”, write it on a piece of paper, tear it up and tear it up, which burns psychologically. opening more creativity and expanding the overton windows. “
He closed his X post with a call to builders: stop repeating the same steps from today’s use cases and instead imagine the Ethereum implementation layer as if starting from a blank page. “If you had to write the section of the 2014 Ethereum white paper that talked about applications… what would you write?” He asked and urged people to “zero in on all road-related concerns” and see what new designs emerge.
At press time, ETH was at $2,050.
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