Vitalik Buterin Calls Ethereum Privacy a Core Network Value
Vitalik Buterin wants Ethereum to stop thinking incrementally. The co-founder took to X calling for a full mental reset on how the network builds applications, handles privacy, and sees itself in the broader world. Not a soft pivot. A hard rethink.
In a post on X, argued that the Ethereum community should hold firm on what he called CROPS, which stands for censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. Those properties are non-negotiable. Everything else, he said, is fair game for radical questioning.
The Ethereum application stack has never been built around privacy. Buterin made that point plainly on X. "This implies a radically different Ethereum application stack," he wrote, adding that the entire layer needs to be rebuilt with privacy as a first-class consideration rather than an afterthought bolted on later.
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One question Buterin put directly on the table: what if AI makes browser and mobile wallet extensions obsolete within twelve months? That is not a rhetorical thought experiment. He listed it as a live technological direction the community needs to take seriously now, not after the shift has already happened.
He also raised the prospect of DeFi collapsing into something far simpler. His phrasing on X pointed to "universal futures markets on top of a good decentralized oracle" with users self-organizing around them. The decentralized oracle itself, in his framing, could be a SNARK running over multiple small LLMs fed through zero-knowledge TLS proofs of major news sites. That is a very different DeFi than the one being built today.
The AI angle connects directly. As AI moves applications away from discrete categories with fixed UIs toward a continuous space, building fewer apps and letting users self-organize becomes a natural direction. Buterin said that pattern will only grow.
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Ethereum L2 Role Gets Questioned From the Ground Up
Buterin also flagged L2s. The Ethereum co-founder said rethinking the role of Layer 2 networks from zero is now active work in 2025. What kinds of L2s are actually additive to Ethereum, rather than just adjacent to it, is a question the community is being pushed to answer without assuming the current structure is correct.
The cultural dimension of his X post drew attention too. Buterin referenced the Milady meme in a longer argument about shedding respectability politics. The core message, he said, is dropping the suit and tie. Taking preconceptions about being "respectable," writing them down, and burning the paper. The psychological shift, in his view, leads directly to intellectual creativity and a wider range of acceptable ideas.
He described the old Ethereum algorithm as: take the existing ecosystem, find the logical next step, make it one step better. The new one should be: start from the most valuable things to build, knowing everything available now, inside and outside the ecosystem. Pretend for a moment the chain has zero usage. What would you build first?
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Networking-side privacy work is also expanding, both inside the Ethereum Foundation and through external contributors. Buterin named that as one of the concrete developments of this year, separate from the application-layer privacy rebuild that he described as the major shift of last year.
Privacy as a first-class network value. AI threatening the wallet layer. L2 roles under active reconsideration. The Ethereum Buterin is describing looks very different from the one being built today.
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