Vitalik Buterin Wants Ethereum Builders to Stop Thinking in Small Steps

Vitalik Buterin posted a lengthy thread calling on the Ethereum community to adopt a more radical and open mindset toward application development, while drawing a clear line around the core properties he says must never be compromised.

The Line That Does Not Move

Buterin opened by separating what is negotiable from what is not. Censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, what he grouped as CROPS, are off the table. No amount of experimental boldness justifies weakening the security guarantees of the base layer. He was specific: the community should never find itself asking whether light clients actually need to trustlessly verify the chain. That question should not be open.

Everything outside those core properties is fair game for rethinking from scratch.

The Application Layer Question

The challenge Buterin posed to builders is pointed. If you had to write the applications section of the 2014 Ethereum whitepaper today, starting from zero with no existing ecosystem and no path dependence, what would you actually build? He suggested treating the Ethereum chain as if it had zero users today and asking what the most valuable things to build would be given current tools and knowledge.

That framing is a direct challenge to incremental thinking. The current default, take the existing ecosystem and identify the logical next step, produces iteration rather than invention. Buterin is arguing for something closer to reinvention.

Specific examples he raised include the possibility that AI makes browser and mobile wallet extensions obsolete within a year, that the rest of DeFi could be rebuilt as universal futures markets on top of a decentralized oracle, and that the ideal decentralized oracle might be a SNARK over multiple small language models pulling from verified news sources. These are not product roadmaps. They are invitations to question whether the current architecture is the right one at all.

Privacy as the First Example

Buterin pointed to privacy as a case where the mindset shift has already produced results. Treating privacy as a first-class consideration equal to other security properties implies a radically different application stack, because the existing stack was not built around privacy. Rather than adapting the current stack incrementally, the community is now building a different one. That willingness to accept the full implication of a new principle rather than bolt it onto existing work is the behavior he wants to see applied more broadly.

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The Culture Underneath the Argument

The post ended in unexpected territory. Buterin connected the intellectual argument to what he called the core subtext of the milady meme, a provocation to shed respectability concerns and reclaim creative flexibility. The specific framing involved imagining spilling wine on a formal suit to force yourself to take it off. The point underneath the image is that the psychological need to appear respectable is itself a constraint on the overton window of what ideas can be seriously entertained.

Whether or not that cultural argument lands for every reader, the intellectual argument it supports is serious. Ethereum’s next phase of growth, Buterin suggested, depends on builders willing to ask questions that the current ecosystem’s success makes uncomfortable to ask.

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