Vitalik Buterin Declares ’No Longer’ - Demands Ethereum Stop Compromising Its Core Value

Ethereum's co-founder just drew a line in the digital sand. Vitalik Buterin is calling time on the network's internal trade-offs—the technical concessions made for scalability that, he argues, now threaten its foundational promise of decentralization and security.

The Developer's Ultimatum

Buterin's manifesto isn't a gentle suggestion; it's a demand for architectural integrity. The era of 'scalability at any cost' is over. His critique targets layer-2 solutions and consensus tweaks that might dilute Ethereum's sovereign value proposition to chase transaction throughput. For Buterin, the chain's soul isn't negotiable.

Balancing the Trilemma on a Knife's Edge

Every blockchain juggles the infamous trilemma: security, decentralization, scalability. Pick two. Ethereum's journey has been a tightrope walk, but Buterin insists the balance has tipped too far. The push for lower fees and faster finality is creating centralization pressures and smart contract vulnerabilities—risks that could make the network just another efficient, but trust-heavy, database.

The Ripple Effect for Builders and Hodlers

This isn't just philosophical. Protocol-level pivots change rules for every dApp, validator, and investor on the chain. A harder line on decentralization could mean recalibrating staking economics, reassessing rollup security models, and a potential short-term headwind for metrics that traditional finance loves to watch—like daily active addresses and fee revenue. Expect some venture-backed scaling projects to suddenly reframe their roadmaps.

Ethereum's Identity Crisis—Solved by Fiat?

The subtext is a battle for Ethereum's identity: world computer or digital gold 2.0? Buterin's stance leans powerfully toward the latter, prioritizing censorship resistance and robust settlement guarantees over becoming a cheap payment rail. It's a direct challenge to chains that optimized for transaction volume first. After all, what's the point of a 'global computer' if a handful of entities control the plug?

One cynical finance jab? Wall Street might finally get the 'hard money' narrative they've been trying to force onto Bitcoin, only to find it's been building quietly inside Ethereum all along—if the developers can resist the siren song of quarterly user growth charts.

The path forward is technical, political, and deeply financial. Buterin isn't managing a product; he's steering a belief system with a market cap. The next upgrade won't just be about gas fees—it'll be a referendum on what Ethereum values most.

Technical Roadmap Targets Node Accessibility and Privacy Infrastructure

Buterin’s plan centers on making full node operation practical again through zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines and Block Access Limits, reversing years of rising hardware requirements that pushed verification off personal computers.

“Full nodes: thanks to ZK-EVM and BAL, it will once again become easier to locally run a node and verify the Ethereum chain on your own computer,” he stated.

The roadmap also prioritizes Helios to “actually verify the data you’re receiving from RPCs instead of blindly trusting it,” alongside oblivious RAM and private information retrieval protocols enabling users to “ask for data from RPCs without revealing which data you’re asking, so you can access dapps without your access patterns being sold off to dozens of third parties all around the world.“

Social recovery wallets with timelocks will provide “wallets that don’t make you lose all your money if you misplace your seedphrase, or if an online or offline attacker extracts your seedphrase, and also don’t make all your money backdoored by Google.”

Privacy features will integrate directly into wallet interfaces to “make private payments from your wallet, with the same user experience as making public payments.“

Application interfaces will shift toward onchain hosting via IPFS to avoid “relying on trusted servers that WOULD lock you our of practical recovery of your assets if they went offline, and would give you a hijacked UI that steals your funds if they get hacked for even a millisecond.”

Buterin warned that “over the last ten years we have seen serious backsliding in Ethereum,” with nodes going “from easy to run to hard to run” and dapps shifting “from static pages to complicated behemoths that leak all your data to a dozen servers.“

Long-Term Vision Beyond Immediate Protocol Upgrades

Buterin acknowledged the transformation will not arrive quickly but emphasized its necessity.

“Every compromise of values that Ethereum has made up to this point – every moment where you might have been thinking, is it really worth diluting ourselves so much in the name of mainstream adoption – we are making that compromise no longer,” he declared.

“It will be a long road. We will not get everything we want in the next Kohaku release, or the next hard fork, or the hard fork after that. But it will make Ethereum into an ecosystem that deserves not only its current place in the universe, but a much greater one,” Buterin wrote.

He concluded that “In the world computer, there is no centralized overlord. There is no single point of failure. There is only love.“

Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum solved blockchain's trilemma with ZKEVMs and PeerDAS technology now running on mainnet after decade-long development.#Ethereum #Buterinhttps://t.co/cUzlhhO6Xr

The manifesto comes as Ethereum achieves breakthroughs on the blockchain trilemma through ZKEVMs and PeerDAS technology.

The network has activated its second Blob Parameter-Only hard fork, raising the blob limit from 15 to 21 and expanding data capacity to support rollup scaling while maintaining low base-layer fees.

Network growth has also accelerated sharply, with new active addresses climbing from just over 4 million to around 8 million in the past month and daily transactions hitting a record 2.8 million, roughly 125% higher than year-earlier levels.

Glassnode data shows that month-over-month activity retention has nearly doubled in the newest user cohort, indicating that new participants are staying engaged rather than churning after initial interactions.