Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Must “Pass the Walkaway Test”

Vitalik Buterin told the Ethereum community today that the network itself must be built so it can be abandoned without breaking, a standard he called the “walkaway test.” The co-founder’s message, posted on X, argued that Ethereum should be a platform you can treat like a tool you own rather than a service that stops working when its maintainers walk away, and that the chain’s core design must reflect that ideal.

Buterin’s thread laid out a roadmap of technical and economic goals that, in his view, would let Ethereum “ossify if we want to” while still allowing optional improvements. He said the protocol should not rely on ongoing vendor updates to remain usable and listed specific priorities: full quantum resistance; an architecture that can scale to thousands of transactions per second via technologies like ZK-EVM validation and data sampling (PeerDAS).

He also mentioned a state design that can endure for decades through partial statelessness and state expiry; full account abstraction that moves beyond ECDSA as the enshrined signature method; a gas schedule hardened against DoS vectors; a proof-of-stake economic model robust enough to stay decentralized and serve as trustless collateral; and a block-building model that resists centralization and preserves censorship resistance.

Buterin’s Vision for Ethereum

The tenor of the post was deliberately long-term. Buterin urged the community to “do the hard work over the next few years” to make future innovation predominantly a matter of client optimization and protocol parameter changes rather than repeated, risky social engineering. He framed those changes not as sudden hard forks but as parameter updates similar to how the gas limit is adjusted today, and he urged avoiding half-measures in favor of careful, durable engineering.

Reaction across crypto media and developer channels was immediate. Commenters picked up on the quantum-resistance line in particular: Buterin warned against deferring cryptographic upgrades “until the last possible moment” and said the protocol should aim to be “cryptographically safe for a hundred years,” a stance that shows his push for long-lived guarantees rather than short-term efficiency gains.

Technically, some of Buterin’s goals are already the subject of active research and implementation work in the Ethereum ecosystem, from account abstraction efforts to ongoing zk-related scaling research. Still, the scale and scope Buterin describes, especially around state longevity and economic resilience, would require coordinated research, client work, specification drafting, and community consensus stretching across multiple years and teams. His message reads as both a checklist and a philosophy: prioritize features that make the chain independent of continual centralized stewardship.

He closed with a bit of bravado that will be familiar to regular readers of his threads: “Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei.” For now, the announcement sets a public, technocratic bar: build an Ethereum that can keep working even if the people who built it stop showing up. Whether the community will marshal the resources and patience to meet every item on that list remains to be seen, but the roadmap makes clear which direction Ethereum’s most prominent technical voice wants the ecosystem to move.