{"id":75329,"date":"2026-03-07T06:31:35","date_gmt":"2026-03-07T06:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=75329"},"modified":"2026-03-07T06:31:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-07T06:31:35","slug":"buterin-says-ethereum-must-rethink-its-future-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=75329","title":{"rendered":"Buterin Says Ethereum Must Rethink Its Future: Here\u2019s Why"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vitalik Buterin is urging the Ethereum ecosystem to get bolder about what it builds on top of the chain\u2014while drawing a hard line around the base layer\u2019s core guarantees\u2014arguing that a first-principles reset on applications, wallets, and even culture could be necessary for Ethereum\u2019s next phase.<\/p>\n

In a post on X, the Ethereum co-founder said \u201cit\u2019s healthy for us in the Ethereum world to have a more bold and open mindset,\u201d especially on the application layer and \u201chow we see ourselves in the world.\u201d That openness, he argued, should not drift into ambiguity about what Ethereum\u2019s L1 is supposed to protect.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should not compromise on core properties: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security (CROPS),\u201d Buterin wrote<\/a>. \u201cWe should not have \u2018open mindedness\u2019 of the type that leaves people with no confidence of what security properties the L1 will still have one year from now.\u201d He added that Ethereum should not backslide into questioning fundamentals like whether \u201clight clients\u201d should \u201ctrustlessly verify correctness of the chain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where the rethink should happen, in his framing, is the interface between Ethereum and users: the application stack, its assumptions, and the social conventions that shape what builders consider \u201cserious\u201d work.<\/p>\n

Ethereum AI Wallets, But With Guardrails<\/h2>\n

Buterin tied part of the shift to AI, floating a scenario where \u201cwallets as browser extensions and mobile extensions are dead within a year?\u201d On Farcaster, he made<\/a> the point more directly: \u201cPretty obvious that the next iteration of wallets will heavily involve AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, he stressed that higher-value usage can\u2019t simply outsource trust to a model. \u201cI would not trust an LLM with multi-million transactions or funds,\u201d he wrote, describing what he sees as the \u201coptimal workflow\u201d for large transfers: \u201cAI proposes a plan, local light client simulates it, you see the action and the simulated outcome and manually confirm it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pay-off, he suggested, is that moving away from today\u2019s dapp-heavy interaction model could reduce risk. If done \u201cconservatively with lots of emphasis on security,\u201d Buterin argued, removing dapp UIs \u201cfrom the picture completely\u201d could eliminate \u201ca large number of attack vectors (for both theft and privacy).\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Rip Off The Suit And Tie\u2019<\/h2>\n

Buterin pointed to privacy as a recent example of Ethereum changing its priorities at the application layer. He described last year\u2019s \u201cshift to thinking about privacy as a first-class consideration,\u201d which, he argued, implies \u201ca radically different Ethereum application stack\u201d because \u201cthe entire stack so far has not been built around privacy<\/a>.\u201d This year, he said, that has expanded into \u201cgrowing work on the networking side of privacy, both inside the EF and outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also sketched more provocative app-layer thought experiments, including whether \u201cthe rest of defi is basically just universal futures markets on top of a good decentralized oracle<\/a> and letting users self-organize on top of that,\u201d and even whether \u201cthe ideal decentralized oracle is just a SNARK over M-of-N small LLMs over zk-TLSes of some major news sites?\u201d In his view, AI pushes \u201capplications\u201d away from discrete products with discrete UIs and toward a continuous space\u2014making \u201cbuild fewer apps and rely on users to self-organize around them\u201d a pattern that could expand.<\/p>\n

On scaling, he said Ethereum is also \u201crethinking from zero the role of L2s<\/a>, and what kind of L2s are actually most synergistic and additive to Ethereum,\u201d framing it as another area where past assumptions may no longer hold.<\/p>\n

Buterin framed culture as a non-technical constraint that can quietly narrow what gets built. Referencing \u201cthe whole milady thing,\u201d he argued the subtext is to \u201crip off the suit and tie,\u201d describing a deliberately irreverent break from \u201crespectable\u201d postures: \u201cTake the preconception that you are \u2018respectable\u2019, write it down on a piece of paper, crumble it up and burn it. The psychological baptism of doing this leads to the intellectual baptism of unlocking greater creativity and expanding overton windows.\u201d<\/p>\n

He closed his X post with a challenge to builders: stop iterating one step at a time from today\u2019s usage patterns and instead imagine Ethereum\u2019s application layer as if starting from a blank page. \u201cIf YOU had to write the section of the 2014 Ethereum whitepaper that talked about applications\u2026 what would you write?\u201d he asked, urging people to \u201cmark all path-dependence concerns down to zero\u201d and see what new designs emerge.<\/p>\n

At press time, ETH traded at $2,050.<\/p>\n

\"Ethereum<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vitalik Buterin is urging the Ethereum ecosystem to get bolder about what it builds on top of the chain\u2014while drawing a hard line around the base layer\u2019s core guarantees\u2014arguing that a first-principles reset on applications, wallets, and even culture could be necessary for Ethereum\u2019s next phase. In a post on X, the Ethereum co-founder said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-75329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}