In the Crypto field, which is almost no longer defined as a technology sector, Ethereum founder Vitalik is a rare figure still concerned about the direction of blockchain technology advancement.

Starting in the second half of 2025, he began to publish long posts on Twitter intensively, with a frequency, length, and breadth of topics that are rare in his public expressions over the past decade. This does not resemble a successful founder preaching; rather, it feels like an anxious thinker trying to reignite something in the ruins.

We have compiled all his public tweets from 2025 to the present and found that his interests are vast: from underlying consensus mechanisms to upper-level social governance, from cryptography to AI ethics, from geopolitics to social media, all showing traces of his deep thinking.

Among these diverse topics, we attempt to distill the keywords he mentions most frequently and the core propositions he cares about. These reflections not only concern the future of Ethereum but also seem to provide answers to the entire crypto industry's direction.

The Shift in Underlying Narrative

In 2025, Vitalik repeatedly emphasized that the underlying narrative of Ethereum must change. It is no longer the "world computer" that tries to run everything but should become an "internet-level public infrastructure" like Linux or BitTorrent, or in other words, "the TCP/IP of finance."

TCP/IP is the underlying communication protocol of the internet; it does not belong to any company yet supports the entire network's operation. By relinquishing control over upper-level applications, it gains absolute neutrality and robustness.

This is precisely the new direction Vitalik has found for Ethereum. A more mature and pragmatic decentralization: a neutral foundational layer that cannot be controlled by a single entity, a cornerstone that allows all financial activities to operate without permission.

"Ethereum should operate like Linux or BitTorrent: an open, decentralized infrastructure that no one owns, yet is powerful and trustworthy enough for the whole world to build upon."

This means that Ethereum's valuation logic is also changing; its core value cannot be measured by the price-to-earnings ratio of commercial companies or user growth. Its value lies not in how many users it has or how much profit it generates like Facebook or Amazon, but in how much value it can carry as infrastructure and how many applications it can support.

This shift in narrative means that Ethereum must confront a harsh reality: when "tokenization" itself can no longer provide emotional premiums, it must return to value creation. The acceptance of Ethereum by Wall Street and traditional finance is both a recognition of its value and a challenge.

Wall Street Arrives

Following the Bitcoin spot ETF, giants like BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Fidelity began to intensively lay out Ethereum in 2025. They are no longer satisfied with simple asset allocation but are delving into the infrastructure layer. BlackRock launched a tokenized fund based on Ethereum, and JPMorgan's Onyx platform processes billions of dollars in transactions on-chain daily.

The influx of institutions is a double-edged sword; on one side, it provides legitimacy, while on the other, it directly questions the decentralized soul of Ethereum. As BlackRock and Bitmine accumulate more Ethereum, will the influence of the founder diminish? How should Ethereum balance institutional demands with its decentralized spirit?

Vitalik's attitude is: welcome, but not to cater.

In a post on Farcaster, he described the relationship between institutions and cypherpunks as a complex relationship that needs to be understood correctly. He believes that "institutions (whether governments or companies) are neither necessarily friends nor necessarily enemies."

However, he believes that unrestrained institutionalization brings two major risks, both of which directly target the foundation of decentralization.

The first is the alienation of the core community. Vitalik candidly stated in an interview: "It can easily drive others away. If Ethereum only pursues commercial practicality and ignores its technical and social attributes, it will adopt Wall Street's 'greed above all' mentality, which is precisely what many of us came here to escape."

This is essentially a crisis of decentralization at the community level: if the original builders leave, Ethereum will lose its source of thought and vitality.

The second is poor technical choices. Institutional pressure may lead Ethereum to make decisions that undermine its accessibility.

For example, to meet the demands of high-frequency trading, block times could be shortened to 150 milliseconds. This means that only institutions with professional data centers and low-latency networks can run nodes, completely excluding ordinary users, which may further lead to node operations being concentrated in financial centers like New York, undermining geographical decentralization.

In the face of these risks, Vitalik's initial solution was a clear division of responsibilities: the L1 foundational layer must maintain absolute decentralization, focusing on global, censorship-resistant characteristics that Wall Street cannot replicate.

"The Layer 1 foundational layer should remain strong, open, and directly accessible. It should allow individuals, companies, and governments to build on it without relying on any centralized institution."

Institutions can build their "compliant" applications on L2, but this "L1 censorship-resistant, L2 compliance-seeking" solution has encountered new challenges in practice.

The New Positioning of L2

On February 3, 2026, Vitalik published a long article on X, making significant revisions to Ethereum's L2 strategy.

Ethereum's initial scaling roadmap positioned L2 as "Ethereum's branded shards," which should inherit Ethereum's security and decentralization attributes, becoming an extension of the mainnet.

However, reality has been disappointing. Vitalik directly criticized that most L2s still rely on centralized sequencers, essentially resembling "centralized databases dressed in blockchain clothing."

These L2s have raised hundreds of millions in funding, with valuations often in the tens of billions, yet refuse to decentralize for commercial interests (MEV revenue, regulatory compliance, rapid iteration), leading to high valuations and low circulation after token launches, with prices plummeting.
These generic L2s closely align with the term Vitalik often uses to criticize centralized giant products—"corposlop."

The term "corposlop" created by Vitalik can be understood as: corporate garbage dressed in a shiny exterior. Companies and their products that have strong commercial capabilities and exquisite brand packaging but engage in unethical behavior to pursue profits.

Vitalik's comments on such L2s are unrelenting:

"This may be right for your customers. But clearly, if you do this, then you are not 'scaling Ethereum.'"

While the progress of decentralization in L2 has been slow, the expansion of L1 itself has unexpectedly accelerated. Fees are already low, and the gas limit is expected to increase significantly in 2026. The core value of L2 as a "scaling tool" is being diluted.

Therefore, Vitalik pointed out a new path for L2:

"We should stop viewing L2 as 'branded shards' of Ethereum. L2 can no longer be satisfied with 'just a bit faster than L1' but must find its unique value."

He believes the future value of L2 lies in specialized functions and innovations. For example, innovations around privacy, AI, and social non-financial areas; efficiency optimizations for specific applications (application chains); or providing ultra-low-latency transaction ordering.

He even suggested that L2 could explore some "non-computably verifiable" functions, which are those whose results cannot be proven solely through on-chain calculations but require information from the external world (such as oracles) or social consensus (such as decentralized courts) for adjudication.

This pushes Ethereum's scaling blueprint into a new phase: a more robust L1 as the foundation of security and trust, complemented by a more diverse, functionally varied, and imaginative L2 ecosystem.

Privacy as the Top Priority

If we statistically analyze the concept that Vitalik mentioned most frequently in 2025, "privacy" undoubtedly ranks at the top. His emphasis on privacy also points to a core centralized issue in today's society—information control.

In October 2025, Vitalik elevated privacy to a "first-class priority" for Ethereum. He candidly admitted that the early neglect of privacy was a reluctant choice due to immature technology at the time. But now, with the maturity of zero-knowledge proof technologies like ZK-SNARKs, privacy can no longer be sidelined.

"Privacy is an important guarantee for decentralization: whoever has information has power, so we need to avoid centralized control over information."

A blockchain without privacy exposes every transaction and every vote to everyone. When power can exert pressure by tracking on-chain data, the blockchain's "permissionless" becomes an empty phrase.

This struggle for information control is particularly evident in the stablecoin sector. Stablecoins are the largest intersection between the crypto world and traditional finance, with hundreds of billions flowing through the chain daily. Whoever controls the anchoring, issuance, and circulation of stablecoins essentially controls the lifeblood of the crypto economy.

In this regard, Vitalik pointed out that the current core struggle in the crypto industry is no longer "innovation vs regulation," but "control vs independence," with stablecoins being the main battleground of this struggle.

On the technical path, Vitalik has pointed out the direction for privacy: through ZK-SNARKs and Privacy Pools, achieving "selective disclosure": users can prove the legality of their funds to regulatory agencies while protecting transaction details without exposing all information.

From this perspective, privacy is a necessary condition for Ethereum to become a true "global digital public infrastructure." It ensures that Ethereum is not just a transparent financial ledger but also a digital society that can protect individual freedoms, resist censorship, and allow users to "stand together" safely.

Only when users have privacy protection can they safely participate in collective actions, express dissent, and support sensitive causes without fear of being tracked and retaliated against. This is the essential foundation for true decentralization.

Building Trust for AI

The reason privacy has been elevated to such a high priority is closely related to the rise of AI. The rapid development of AI has greatly enhanced the ability of tech giants to collect and analyze data, leading to an exponential increase in the risks of "surveillance capitalism."

Vitalik's concerns are not unfounded. Palantir provides large-scale data monitoring services for the U.S. government and intelligence agencies, Worldcoin collects iris data from hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and Meta uses user chat logs to train models.

AI controlled by a few giants, which is opaque and lacks guided values, is becoming one of the most powerful centralized tools in human history.

As early as November 2024, Vitalik used OpenAI as an example to warn about the risks of centralized AI:

"OpenAI has now become CloseAI. First, they sacrificed open-source for safety; then this year, they sacrificed safety for profit."

However, Vitalik believes that the Crypto community cannot turn a blind eye to AI and must actively engage, using decentralized power to guide the development direction of AI.

"AI must be used carefully: we must never let a large language model control a DAO… Instead, AI must be placed within a larger, human-driven system and act as a component within it."

This is precisely the intention behind the Ethereum Foundation's establishment of the dAI (decentralized AI) group and the launch of the ERC-8004 protocol. ERC-8004 provides on-chain "identity" and "credit profiles" for AI agents, making their actions traceable and auditable.

The core issue it aims to solve is: as AI agents increasingly replace humans in performing tasks, how can they trust each other?

In a centralized model, this issue is resolved by the platform. You trust OpenAI, so you trust its AI. But this means that all trust is concentrated in the hands of a few giants.

ERC-8004 offers a path to decentralization: through on-chain identities and behavior records, AI agents can establish verifiable reputations without relying on centralized platform endorsements. This allows the AI ecosystem to potentially operate on a decentralized basis, like DeFi, rather than being monopolized by a few giants.

Vitalik's thinking is clear: since AI is an unstoppable trend, rather than passively accepting a powerful tool controlled by a few giants, it is better to actively set boundaries using Ethereum's decentralized system (identity, payment, privacy, security) to ensure it serves an open and free society, rather than becoming a nuclear weapon of centralized power in the new era.

Decentralized Social

After building decentralized checks and balances for the two major power centers of finance and AI, Vitalik turned his attention to the core domain of human digital life: social networks.

He believes that current centralized social platforms have fundamental problems. Their algorithms sacrifice the true value of content in pursuit of short-term interaction rates and advertising revenue, ultimately leading to information bubbles, declining content quality, and absolute control of users by the platform.

In January 2026, the decentralized social sector experienced a series of "earthquakes." The X platform banned APIs to crack down on "traffic manipulation" projects, Farcaster was acquired, and Lens Protocol handed over control to Mask Network. This series of upheavals highlighted the fragility of the existing model.

Against this backdrop, on January 21, Vitalik published a long article announcing a "complete return to decentralized social" and profoundly criticized the SocialFi model of the past decade.

"Crypto social projects often go astray. We in the crypto space too often think that if you insert a speculative token into something, that counts as 'innovation.'"

He pointed out sharply that the past crypto industry has seen little success in content incentives, rooted in a lack of effective "quality filtering mechanisms," rather than insufficient incentives. The value of tokens reflects popularity and speculation, not content quality. The 2023 sensation Friend.tech is a typical case, with its token price plummeting by 99%, and the platform was almost abandoned.

Vitalik appreciates the Substack model because it proves that building a healthy economic system around high-quality content is entirely possible, with the core being "subscribing to creators" to push quality content, rather than "creating price bubbles for them."

Based on this, he proposed an innovative solution: to establish a non-tokenized, small-scale curatorial DAO.

This DAO filters quality creators through member voting and uses part of the revenue to repurchase its tokens. In this way, the role of speculators shifts from "manipulating prices" to "predicting the DAO's choices," thereby guiding market forces toward discovering quality content.

However, in Vitalik's view, the key to solving the problem is not to create more complex speculative tools but to return to the technology itself and break platform monopolies through decentralization.

"There are no simple tricks to solve these problems. But there is an important starting point: more competition. Decentralization is the way to achieve this: a shared data layer on which anyone can build their own client."

To this end, he leads by example. Vitalik claims that since the beginning of 2026, all his social activities have been conducted through Firefly. Firefly is a client that aggregates multiple platforms like X, Lens, and Farcaster. It does not rely on any single platform's API but uses the concept of a "shared data layer" to allow users to seamlessly transition to a more open and free decentralized social environment while retaining their existing habits.

Sparks in the Ruins

After reviewing Vitalik's thoughts across various fields over the past year, a main thread gradually becomes clear: what he cares about and wants to uphold is a return to the original intention of decentralization and a commitment to transcending financial speculation.

Whether it is the confrontation with Wall Street, establishing identity profiles for AI, defending privacy, or rebuilding decentralized social, each topic points to the same core: in an era of expanding centralized power, how to use technology to safeguard individual freedom and sovereignty.

In 1993, Eric Hughes wrote in the "Cypherpunk Manifesto":

"We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, nameless organizations to grant us privacy out of goodwill. It is in their interest to talk about it, and they will… If we expect to have any privacy, we must defend it ourselves."

Thirty years later, we understand the weight of these words more than ever. Tech giants are using data and AI to create information weapons, and geopolitical conflicts make any centralized system a potential tool for games of power. In the current world order, the value of a truly neutral and open digital public infrastructure has never been more pronounced.

While the entire crypto industry is still searching for the next hundredfold coin, and during the days of dwindling industry innovation, at least there are still those who guard the sparks in the ruins.

Such persistence may not necessarily "win" in the end. But at least this industry still has thinkers who do not sell illusions of wealth, do not cater to short-term noise, but simply practice that ancient creed through thought and action:

"Cypherpunks write code."

And actively build a more open and fair future for this increasingly fragmented world.

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