Author: imToken

If you have been following the recent Devconnect conference held in Argentina, you may have noticed an intriguing signal:

Among the many technical agendas concerning Rollup, EIP, and account abstraction, perhaps the most eye-catching was not a protocol upgrade, but a topic specifically set aside for an independent day—d/acc day.

d/acc, which looks like a code symbol abbreviation, is actually a new concept that Vitalik Buterin has strongly advocated since 2023. This article will take you deep into the context of d/acc thinking and how Ethereum is accelerating the reshaping of its underlying narrative based on this.

1. Starting from e/acc, what is d/acc?

To understand d/acc, we must first grasp the historical context it reflects: the frenzy of e/acc (Effective Accelerationism).

If you have been tracking the thoughts in Silicon Valley's tech circles, you may have heard of e/acc and perhaps have a deep impression of the wave of "e/acc" suffixes that surged in 2023:

At that time, many tech entrepreneurs and investment moguls, including a16z founder Marc Andreessen and YC incubator CEO Garry Tan, adopted this as a suffix for their social media accounts.

As an abbreviation for "Effective Accelerationism," e/acc is a philosophical thought that integrates biological, physical, economic, and social theories, emphasizing adaptability, evolution, intelligence, and acceleration as universally present principles in the universe.

In simpler terms, "e/acc" emphasizes technological supremacy, extremely praising the role of technological innovation in driving and transforming society, and can even be seen as a creed of a group of tech enthusiasts—advocating for the acceleration of technological development at all costs, believing that the market and technology itself will solve all problems.

Thus, it was once regarded as a utopian vision of technology until the wave of AI ignited by ChatGPT at the end of 2022 gave many e/acc proponents tangible hope, which is why the concept gained such widespread traction in 2023.

However, this one-sided rush towards technological supremacy has made many people uneasy, especially as AI approaches the singularity, biotechnological risks increase, and centralized power expands.

It is against this backdrop that Vitalik proposed a path that leans towards "reformism" in a certain sense: d/acc, which advocates for a defense-first approach to technological development.

On November 27, 2023, he published an article titled "My techno-optimism," offering a cautious reflection on technological acceleration.

Here, the "d" not only represents Defense but also Decentralization and Democracy. It is not about hitting the brakes but about changing direction to accelerate—accelerating technologies that make us safer, more autonomous, and better able to withstand systemic risks.

Interestingly, a year after publishing this article, in January 2025, he further deepened his thoughts on d/acc in another article titled "d/acc: one year later," proposing a core worldview model: Defense-Dominant vs. Offense-Dominant.

The core logic is that "the darkest moments in human history often occur when offensive advantages significantly outweigh defensive advantages":

• When creating viruses is easier than developing vaccines;
• When launching cyberattacks is cheaper than patching vulnerabilities;
• When centralized AI can easily generate massive amounts of Deepfake content that ordinary people cannot distinguish from reality.

In these moments, human society is in a state of systemic vulnerability.

Currently, the technological landscape is precisely tilted towards "offensive advantages"—large tech giants monopolize AI computing power, and centralized institutions hold data hegemony. Therefore, from the perspective of d/acc, if we continue to accelerate blindly, we may create an extremely efficient yet extremely fragile, even highly centralized dystopian world.

Thus, the core assertion of d/acc is that we must consciously intervene through technology to reverse this situation, allowing the "defensive" attributes of technological development to once again outweigh the "offensive" attributes.

2. Why does d/acc appear in Web3?

It can be said without reservation that although e/acc (Effective Accelerationism) is highly praised in Silicon Valley, it is essentially a form of alienation of technological capitalism, carrying a strong elitist color: because it does not care who gets left behind in the process, only the overall efficiency improvement.

In Vitalik's view, although the global tech narrative over the past decade has largely revolved around "acceleration," in the context of AI, crypto, energy, and national competition all reaching a peak, simple "accelerationism" can no longer answer a fundamental question:

Where exactly are we accelerating towards? For whom are we accelerating? What is the cost?

The emergence of d/acc provides a calibration of direction, shifting the focus from elitism to a broader sense of "democracy"—it cares about inclusivity, pursuing selective acceleration, especially in explosive innovations involving risk stacking, power concentration, and regulatory gaps, which should not be accelerated blindly.

This also naturally binds d/acc deeply with the future of Web3. After all, the core value of Web3 has never been as simple as "a faster global computer," but rather gradually extracting power, wealth, identity, and control from centralized systems back into the hands of users.

In fact, taking several major development lines of Ethereum as examples, we can clearly see its deep resonance with d/acc:

• Decentralization must accelerate: ensuring the number of L1/L2 nodes and resistance to censorship;
• User sovereignty must accelerate: promoting account abstraction (AA) to popularize defensive features like social recovery and gas payment;
• System resilience must accelerate: deploying technologies like ZK-SNARKs to defend against privacy breaches and surveillance;

This is why d/acc has become the core narrative of the Ethereum community, because blockchain technology is essentially one of the most powerful defensive technologies invented by humanity.

In simple terms, a future dominated by technological supremacy is not about being fast for the sake of speed, but about continuously accelerating on the right and safe track: accelerating decentralization, accelerating individual defense, accelerating system resilience—this is the new mission that d/acc imparts to Web3 and the crypto world.

3. AI and Web3: Building Defensive Accelerationism for Future Civilization

I have always believed that AI and Web3/Crypto are a set of mirrored comparisons of "productive forces and production relations" in the new era.

If we view AI as a powerful "spear" (enhancing productivity but also potentially used for evil), then Crypto is a solid "shield," and from the perspective of d/acc, this shield primarily defends against three dimensions of threats.

First, it defends against "abuse of power."

In the Web2 world, your digital identity and assets do not belong to you but are "rented" from tech giants; platforms can ban your account at any time, and banks can freeze your funds. Blockchain constructs a mathematical defensive wall through cryptography; with your private key, no centralized power can deprive you of your assets.

This is an ultimate defensive mechanism that protects individuals' right to exist in the digital age.

Second, it defends against "manipulation of truth."

With the explosion of AIGC, the internet is flooded with false information. In the future, we may not be able to distinguish whether the person on the other side of the screen is human or AI, or whether a video is a real recording or algorithmically generated.

From this perspective, community verification on the blockchain and public key signature systems provide a "trust anchor" for information; we can fully verify the source of information through cryptographic signatures and defend against the flood of false information through decentralized consensus.

Finally, it defends against "privacy invasion."

After all, in the era of big data, since data itself needs to be verified before it can be used, we are forced to expose ourselves, while the ZK-SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs) that d/acc strongly advocates represent the pinnacle of defensive technology.

They allow us to prove facts without disclosing privacy (for example: proving I have enough money to pay without revealing my balance), which not only protects privacy but also mathematically eliminates the necessity of "Big Brother."

Ultimately, d/acc is not a form of passive conservatism; on the contrary, it requires a high intensity of technological innovation:

• We need faster public chain service networks to support a global defensive financial network;
• We need more user-friendly account abstractions so that defensive tools are no longer limited to geeks;
• We need more powerful post-quantum cryptography to defend against future computational brute force attacks.

Therefore, events like the d/acc day at this Devconnect are not just technical discussions; they remind us that technology itself is neither good nor evil, but the direction of technological development is.

In this era of uncertainty and accelerated rush, "safer" itself is the highest form of "more advanced."

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