In 2025, Vitalik Buterin made a judgment on the X platform: in high-value, highly reliable scenarios like blockchain, if reliability is prioritized over functionality from the very beginning, the reality of "zero-bug code" in practical engineering is expected to emerge in the 2030s. This judgment directly challenges the long-standing consensus in the software industry that "bugs are inevitable," and pushes formal verification and high-security engineering methods to a new temporal anchor.
Core of the Event
On December 24, 2025, at 8:00 AM UTC+8, Vitalik Buterin expressed his latest views on software reliability through the X platform, with the core idea being: for high-value applications on blockchain, as long as reliability is clearly prioritized over functionality during the design phase, it is technically feasible to "write bug-free code" in the 2030s. He also emphasized that this judgment is only applicable to specific high-value, highly reliable scenarios, and does not make a universal promise for all software.
In this statement, Vitalik also made a clear distinction between "formal verification" and "provably bug-free," reminding developers not to mistakenly treat existing tools as absolute guarantees of safety. He pointed out that formal verification addresses the question of "whether the code conforms to formal specifications," rather than "whether human intentions are correctly expressed." From a factual perspective, this is a discussion about the boundaries of software engineering in the next five to ten years, and more importantly, a reshaping of expectations around the security baseline of blockchain.
Breakdown of Views
Surrounding Vitalik's judgment, there are two distinctly different positions within the technical community. Some security engineers and protocol developers tend to support this kind of "directional optimism": they believe that in high-value scenarios such as underlying public chain protocols, cross-chain bridges, and large asset custody, the cost of a single bug can reach hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, making it economically reasonable to invest higher costs to pursue near-zero bugs.
On the other hand, some developers remain cautious or even opposed, with their reasons concentrated on three dimensions: first, formal verification itself has a very high threshold and is often only used in limited-scale critical modules; second, highly rigorous engineering processes will inevitably compress product iteration speed, conflicting with the mainstream internet paradigm of "rapid launch and quick trial and error"; third, many security incidents do not stem from explicit bugs at the code level, but rather from errors in "specification layers" such as business rules, incentive designs, and governance mechanisms. The divergence between support and opposition reflects a rebalancing of security costs, innovation speed, and product competitiveness.
Interwoven Narratives
The discussion about "zero-bug code in the 2030s" is not an isolated technical topic, but rather a convergence point of multiple narratives.
From a technological evolution perspective, blockchain, due to its decentralized and immutable design, inherently lacks the "hotfix" and centralized rollback mechanisms common in the Web2 world. Once an on-chain contract goes wrong, the impact can often be amplified through the composable DeFi stack: from basic lending protocols to derivatives, yield aggregators, and cross-chain bridges and custody services, a single bug can penetrate the entire system.
From an economic perspective, on-chain assets are gradually penetrating institutions and traditional finance, and the risk tolerance for high-value custody and settlement layers is decreasing. The "rigid investment" in security budgets is becoming a default premise for infrastructure-type protocols.
From a regulatory expectation perspective, regulatory agencies in various countries are increasing their focus on on-chain financial infrastructure, and future requirements for provable security attributes, audit depth, and compliance of development processes are likely to be higher. Under the convergence of these narratives, Vitalik's proposal of "zero-bug code in the 2030s" appears more as a high-security baseline set for the industry rather than a simple expression of technical optimism.
Deep Game Theory
The debate over "zero-bug code" is essentially a layering of three games.
The first layer is the paradigm struggle in software engineering: the traditional internet world exchanges "rapid iteration and tolerance for defects" for market speed, while high-value scenarios in blockchain increasingly lean towards "sacrificing functionality for extreme reliability." Behind this is the institutional difference between rollback systems and non-rollback systems.
The second layer is the tension between the practical constraints and potential of formal verification. Some sources indicate that complete formal verification is currently common in relatively limited-scale (e.g., thousands of lines) critical modules, and large-scale complex systems still require significant manual decomposition, abstraction, and modeling, making this method in practice more like a "point high-investment tool," mainly used in consensus cores, cryptographic primitives, and key financial contracts. Meanwhile, the increasing automation of tools, the development of language-level built-in safety features, and standardized reusable component libraries are continuously compressing verification costs and broadening application boundaries.
The third layer is the gap between mathematical proof and the real world. Vitalik pointed out that "formal verification does not equal 'provably bug-free,' because the latter requires no gap between human intention and program execution." The most challenging part in reality is often not the proof itself, but how to correctly write complex business rules, incentive structures, and governance logic into specifications. Therefore, even in the 2030s, the so-called "zero-bug code" should be understood as: under clear and complete mathematical specifications, there are no errors proven to violate these specifications, rather than "absolute safety" in the real-world sense.
Outlook
Looking back at this discussion from 2025, Vitalik's "2030s" time anchor is not a definitive timetable, but a directional judgment about technology and engineering paths: in high-value, highly reliable on-chain scenarios, if projects are willing to sacrifice some flexibility and performance for safety, the progress of toolchains, upgrades in engineering processes, and component reuse may make "near-zero bugs" feasible in the 2030s.
In the short term, it is expected that market focus will concentrate on several aspects: first, whether the budgets and depth for formal methods and security audits in core public chains and cross-chain bridge protocols continue to increase; second, whether the new generation of security-oriented languages, verification frameworks, and IDEs can significantly lower the barriers to use; third, whether the frequency and impact of major security incidents in the coming years can significantly converge at the high-value infrastructure level.
If these conditions are gradually met, "zero-bug code" will no longer be just a technical utopia, but will become a seriously pursued engineering goal in a few key infrastructure modules. For developers, this is a proposition of upgrading toolchains and capability structures; for projects and capital, it is a redistribution of security budgets and release rhythms; for the entire industry, it is a long-term migration process from "post-remediation" to "pre-proof."
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