Vitalik Rare Self-Criticism: Ethereum Missed the Truly Important Battlefield

Author: Vitalik Buterin

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: This is one of Vitalik’s rare public self-criticism. He directly points out that Ethereum has been almost absent from various social issues over the past few years and proposes a new framework—“Sanctuary Tech.”

This post represents the most valuable internal discussion within the Ethereum community: What exactly are we building, and for whom?

Full text below:

Over the past year, many people I’ve spoken with are worried about two things:

First is the direction of the world: government control and surveillance, war, corporate power and monitoring, technological degradation and corporate waste, social media becoming information battlegrounds, AI and its intertwining with all of the above…

Second is a more painful reality: Ethereum doesn’t seem to have made tangible improvements in people’s lives regarding these issues, even in the dimensions we care most about—such as freedom, privacy, digital life security, and community self-organization.

It’s easy to empathize with the first concern; everyone can lament the retreat of a beautiful world, the advance of darkness, and the ruthless elites pushing all this forward. But admitting the problem is easy; the real challenge is to identify a way out and propose concrete solutions to improve the current situation.

The second issue has always weighed heavily on my mind, as well as on many of the smartest and most idealistic Ethereum people. Political meme coins on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling apps running on chains with 250-millisecond block times—I’ve never felt anger or fear about these. But what truly unsettles me is that, over the past few years, Ethereum’s role in these low-intensity information wars, cross-border corporate and government power plays, and various real-world problems has been extremely limited. What are the technologies that truly bring liberation? Starlink is the most prominent example, open-source large models running locally are another, Signal is a third, and Community Notes approaches this issue from a different angle.

One response is to say, “Don’t dream anymore; face reality—finance is our main arena, focus on that.” But that’s ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security are indeed crucial. But even if a fully free, open, sovereign, and anti-inflationary financial system is built, it can only solve part of the problems; most of our deep concerns about the world remain unresolved. Personal focus on finance is fine, but we need to be part of a larger whole, able to speak out on other issues too.

Meanwhile, Ethereum cannot fix the entire world. Ethereum is a “mis-shaped tool”: beyond a certain boundary, “fixing the world” means a form of power projection—more like a centralized political entity than a decentralized technical community.

So what can we do? I believe the Ethereum community should position itself as part of building an ecosystem of “Sanctuary Tech”: these freely open-source technologies enable people to live, work, communicate, manage risks, accumulate wealth, and collaborate around common goals—and all of this with resilience against external pressures as the primary goal.

The aim is not to reshape the world with Ethereum’s image, not to make all finance decentralized, all governance through DAOs, or everyone’s social recovery wallets with blockchain-based UBI. Quite the opposite: de-totalization. It’s about reducing the stakes of this “battle of heaven”—preventing winners from achieving total victory (full control over others) and losers from total defeat, thereby lowering the risks of this heavenly war. Creating digital stable islands in chaotic times. Ensuring interdependence cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum’s role is to create “digital spaces” where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communication channels facilitate interaction, but communication channels themselves are not “spaces”: they cannot create unique objects that can regulate and represent social arrangements that change over time. Money is a key example; multi-signature wallets that can change members are another—they demonstrate persistence beyond any single person or public key. Various markets and governance structures are a third. And there are many more.

I believe it’s time to invest with clearer understanding and greater intensity. Don’t try to be Apple or Google, viewing crypto as a tech race to improve efficiency or enhance gloss. Instead, build our part of the Sanctuary Tech ecosystem—the “ownerless shared digital space” that supports open finance and more. Proactively develop a full-stack ecosystem: extending upward to wallets and applications (including AI as an interface), downward to operating systems, hardware, and even physical and biological security layers.

Ultimately, technology without users is worthless. But we must find those who truly need Sanctuary Tech—individuals or institutions—and optimize payments, DeFi, decentralized social, and other applications specifically for these users and goals. These are areas that centralized tech does not serve well. We have many allies, including many outside the “crypto circle.” It’s time to collaborate openly and move forward together.

Additional responses:

@MarkSmitb Yes, but it indeed brings more freedom to people.

The answer is not opposing Starlink but supporting more than ten institutions with different stances, each building alternatives similar to Starlink. Ideally, at least one should be open-source and use open protocols…

@deuce897 Friend, I posted on X via Firefly; it will simultaneously publish across all major social platforms.

@hashdag Good question.

There are two vectors influencing global events:

1. The structural influence on the world, in a stance-neutral way but with clear tendencies, guiding toward ideal outcomes (e.g., empowering those who are inherently marginalized…)