Vitalik Buterin Called for “Ossification” of Ethereum

• Vitalik Buterin believes that Ethereum should “ossify” and innovations should move to L2.
• In his opinion, a stable and less flexible network is “healthy”.
• In addition, he warned that quantum computers could hack the blockchain by 2028.

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the basic level of the blockchain should gradually move to a state of stability and minimal changes. This is reported by DLNews with reference to his speech at the Devconnect conference in Buenos Aires.

He emphasized that the network should focus on predictability and security, even if it reduces the speed of internal innovation.

According to him, there are now “a much lower rate of surprises,” and this is an advantage, not a disadvantage. These statements came as a surprise to more than 500 people in the audience, as Ethereum has long been positioned as a protocol that is actively changing and supporting new experiments.

Now, the priorities are different: stability is more important than flexibility, and a “boring” base level is the key to the secure operation of a network that provides hundreds of billions of dollars.

Buterin stressed that “ossification isn’t binary.” Different parts of the protocol can become stable at different times. For example, the consensus level may become completely fixed, while the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) remains open to change.

The main idea is not to stop innovation, but to move it from the base level to the wider ecosystem: to the level of rollups (L2 solutions), wallets, privacy tools, and user applications.

Already, the majority of transactions are processed on second-tier solutions, which helps to offload L1 solutions and strengthen its role as a secure settlement layer.

At the same time, Buterin acknowledged that Ethereum’s evolution has its costs. The early years of the network were a period of experimentation and a “spirit of exploration.” Now, the ecosystem is increasingly moving towards copying trends, in particular due to the influx of memecoins and institutional players.

As a reminder, on May 7, 2025, Ethereum rolled out the Pectra update.

Meanwhile, the launch of the Fusaka hard fork in the mainnet, which was activated on the Hoodi test network in late October, is scheduled for December 3.

In his opinion, this “harms the imagination of the space.”

At the end of his speech, Buterin warned of a crucial technological challenge. Ethereum’s core cryptography, elliptic curves, could be cracked by quantum computers sooner than expected.

This means that Ethereum has only about four years to transition to quantum-resistant cryptography — provided that the development of quantum computers does not slow down.

According to Buterin, such changes will require the coordination of the entire ecosystem chain, but — according to his vision — will take place not in the already “ossified” protocol cores, but on their periphery.

It is worth noting that IBM has already presented the Nighthawk processor and the Loon experimental model, aimed at achieving quantum superiority by the end of 2026 and fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2029.