Author: Vitalik Buterin
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide's Guide: This is a rare public self-criticism from Vitalik. He directly points out that Ethereum has been almost absent in 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 are we building, and for whom?
Full Text Below:
Over the past year, many people I've interacted with have been worried about two things:
First, the direction of the world: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, the degradation of technology and corporate waste, social media becoming an information battlefield, AI and its entanglement with all of the above...
Second, a more painful reality: Ethereum doesn’t seem to have tangibly improved people’s lives in these issues, even in the dimensions we care about most—such as freedom, privacy, digital life security, and community self-organization.
It’s easy to empathize with the first problem; everyone can lament together about the fading beauty of the world, the advance of darkness, and the ruthless elites in high positions pushing it all forward. But admitting the problem is easy; what’s difficult is truly pointing a way out and proposing a specific plan to improve the situation.
The second problem has weighed on my mind, as well as on many of the smartest and most idealistic Ethereum minds. I’ve felt angry or fearful about political meme coins on Solana or various zero-sum gambling apps running on some chain with 250ms block times. But what truly unsettles me is: over the past few years, in low-intensity online information warfare, international overreach of corporate and government power, and various real-world issues, Ethereum’s role has been extremely limited. What are the technologies that truly bring liberation? Starlink is the most obvious one, locally run open-source large models are another, Signal is a third, and Community Notes approaches the problem from another angle.
One response is to say, "Stop dreaming, we need to face reality, finance is our home turf, just focus on that." But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security are, of course, critically important. But clearly, even if a fully free, open, sovereign, and inflation-resistant financial system is built, it can only solve part of the problem; most of our deep concerns about the world remain unresolved. It’s fine for individuals to focus on finance, but we need to be part of a larger whole that can also address other issues.
At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the entire world. Ethereum is a "tool of the wrong shape": beyond a certain boundary, "fixing the world" means a projection of power, more like a centralized political entity than a decentralized technology community.
So what can we do? I believe the Ethereum community should position itself as part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technology": free and open-source technologies that allow people to live, work, communicate with each other, manage risks, accumulate wealth, and collaborate around common goals—all optimized for resilience to external pressures.
The goal is not to reshape the world in Ethereum’s image, not to disintermediate all finance, have all governance done through DAOs, or have everyone receive blockchain UBI into social recovery wallets. The goal is precisely the opposite: de-totalization. It is to lower the stakes of this heavenly war by preventing winners from taking all (i.e., total control over others) and preventing losers from losing everything. To create digital islands of stability in chaotic times. To make interdependence impossible to weaponize.
Ethereum’s role is to create "digital spaces" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communication channels can facilitate interaction, but communication channels themselves are not "spaces": they cannot let you create unique objects that normatively represent a social arrangement that changes over time. Currency is an important example, a multi-signature wallet that can change members is another—it exhibits a persistence that transcends any single individual or public key, various markets and governance structures are a third. There are more.
I think it is time to double down with clearer awareness. Don’t try to be Apple or Google, treating encryption as a tech track for improving efficiency or adding gloss. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary technology ecosystem—that "ownerless shared digital space" that supports open finance and more. More proactively build a full-stack ecosystem: extending upward to the wallet and application layer (including AI as an interaction interface), and downward to the operating system, hardware, and even physical and biological security levels.
In the end, technology without users is worthless. But we must seek out users who truly need sanctuary technology, whether individuals or institutions. Precisely optimize payments, DeFi, decentralized social, and other applications for these users and these goals—these are precisely the areas centralized technology has no intention of serving. We have many allies, including many outside the "crypto circle." It is time to move forward with an open mind, cooperating hand in hand.
Reply Addendum
@MarkSmitb Yes, but it does give people more freedom.
The answer is not to oppose Starlink, but to support ten or more institutions with different stances, each building Starlink-like alternative systems. Ideally, at least one should be open-source, using open protocols...
@deuce897 Friend, I am posting on X through Firefly, which publishes to all major social platforms simultaneously.
@hashdag Good question.
There are two vectors for influencing global events:
1. Influencing the structure of the world in a way that is non-positional regarding specific situations, yet has a clear tendency leading to ideal outcomes (e.g., empowering those who originally...
@PingChenTW How to understand?
