Vitalik Buterin is urging the Ethereum ecosystem to be bolder about what it builds on top of the chain while drawing a hard line on core guarantees in the base layer, arguing that the next phase of Ethereum may require a first-principles reset of applications, wallets, and even culture.
In a post about X, the Ethereum co-founder said that “it’s healthy for those of us living in an Ethereum world to have a bolder, more open mindset,” especially when it comes to the application layer and “how we see ourselves in the world.” He argued that its openness should not lead to ambiguity over what Ethereum’s L1 protects.
“There should be no compromise on core properties such as censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security (CROPS),” Buterin wrote. “We shouldn’t be so ‘open-minded’ as to make people mistrust what security properties L1 will still have a year from now.” He added that Ethereum should not revert to fundamental questions such as whether “light clients” should “reliably verify the correctness of the chain.”
In his framework, the place to rethink is the interface between Ethereum and users: the application stack, its prerequisites, and the social conventions that shape what builders consider “serious” work.
Ethereum AI wallet, but with guardrails
Buterin connected some of the transition to AI with a scenario: “Will wallets as browser extensions or mobile extensions disappear within a year?” With Farcaster, he made the point more directly. “It’s clear that AI will be heavily involved in the next version of wallets.”
Still, he emphasized that trust cannot simply be delegated to the model for higher value uses. “I don’t trust LLMs that handle millions of transactions and funds,” he wrote, explaining what he considers the “optimal workflow” for large-scale transfers. “The AI proposes a plan, a local light client simulates it, and you manually review the actions and simulated results.”
In return, he suggested, moving away from today’s dapp-heavy interaction model could reduce risk. Buterin argued that if done “security-minded and conservatively,” removing the dapp UI “completely from the picture” eliminates “a number of attack vectors[for both theft and privacy].”
“Tear off the suit and tie”
Buterin cited privacy as a recent example of Ethereum changing its priorities at the application layer. He described the “change to thinking about privacy as a first-class consideration” over the last year, arguing that this means “a fundamentally different Ethereum application stack” because “the entire stack so far is not built around privacy.” This year, he said, that expanded to “expanding our efforts on the privacy networking side within and outside of EF.”
He also sketched out more provocative app-layer thought experiments, such as “Is the rest of defi basically just a universal futures market sitting on top of a nice decentralized oracle and allowing users to self-organize on top of it?” and “Is the ideal decentralized oracle just a SNARK over M-of-N mini LLM over zk-TLS on some big news site?” In his view, AI could push “applications” away from discrete products with distinct UIs and into a continuum space, leading to a growing pattern of “building fewer apps and relying on users to self-organize around them.”
Regarding scaling, he said Ethereum is also “rethinking from the ground up the role of L2 and what kind of L2 is actually most synergistic and additive to Ethereum,” framing it as another area where past assumptions may no longer hold true.
Buterin framed culture as a non-technical constraint that can silently narrow what is built. He referred to the “whole ladyship,” which consisted of “ripping off the suit and tie,” and described a deliberately irreverent departure from “respectable” posturing, arguing, “Throw away your preconceived notions of being ‘respectable,’ write them down on paper, crumple them up, and burn them. The psychological baptism of doing so will lead to the intellectual baptism of unleashing greater creativity and widening the windows.”
He concluded his X post with a challenge to builders. Stop repeating today’s usage patterns one step at a time and instead imagine Ethereum’s application layer as if you were starting with a blank page. “If you had to write a section in the 2014 Ethereum whitepaper describing your application… what would you write?” he asked, urging people to “mark all path dependency concerns to zero” and see what new designs emerge.
At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $2,050.
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