Author: Vitalik Buterin

Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: This is one of the rare occasions where Vitalik publicly critiques himself. He directly points out that Ethereum has been nearly absent in addressing various social issues over the past few years and proposes a new framework - "sanctuary tech".

This post represents one of the most valuable internal discussions in the Ethereum community: what exactly are we building, and for whom.

The full text is as follows:

Over the past year, many people I’ve encountered have been concerned about two main issues:

One is the direction of the world: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and monitoring, technological degradation and corporate waste, social media becoming a battleground of information, AI and its entanglement with all of the above……

The second is a more painful reality: Ethereum seems to have made no real improvements to people's lives regarding these issues, even in the dimensions we care the most about—like freedom, privacy, the security of digital life, and community self-organization.

It is easy to empathize with the first issue; everyone can lament how the beauty of the world is fading, darkness is advancing, and the ruthless elites at the top are pushing all of this. But acknowledging the problem is easy; the hard part is genuinely pointing out a way forward, proposing a concrete solution that can improve the situation.

The second issue has weighed on my mind, as well as the minds of many of the smartest and most idealistic members of the Ethereum community. Political meme coins have moved to Solana, and various zero-sum gambling applications are running on chains that produce blocks in 250 milliseconds. Personally, I’ve never felt anger or fear. But what truly disturbs me is that in the past few years, amid those low-intensity online information wars, the international overreach of corporate and government power, and various real-world issues, Ethereum's role has been extremely limited. What technologies truly bring liberation? Starlink is one of the most conspicuous, locally run open-source large models are another, Signal is the third, and Community Notes approaches this issue from another angle.

One response is to say, "Stop dreaming, we need to recognize reality; finance is our main field, so let's just focus on this." But this ultimately feels hollow. Financial freedom and security are undoubtedly crucial. However, clearly, a fully free, open, sovereign, and anti-inflationary financial system, even if constructed, can only resolve part of the problems; most of our deep worries about the world remain unsolved. Focusing on finance as an individual isn’t a problem, but we need to be part of a larger whole and be able to voice our opinions on other issues.

Meanwhile, Ethereum cannot fix the entire world. Ethereum is a "misaligned tool": beyond a certain boundary, "fixing the world" means a projection of power, more like a centralized political entity rather than a decentralized technical community.

So what can we do? I believe the Ethereum community should position itself as part of building a "sanctuary tech" ecosystem: these free and open-source technologies enable people to live, work, communicate with each other, manage risks, accumulate wealth, and collaborate around shared goals—and all of this optimizes for resilience against external pressures.

The goal is not to reshape the world with Ethereum's image, not to make all finance become decentralized, not to have all governance completed through DAOs, or for everyone to inject blockchain UBI into social recovery wallets. The goal is precisely the opposite: to de-totalize. It is to lower the stakes of this heavenly war by preventing winners from achieving total victory (i.e., complete control over others) and preventing losers from suffering total defeat. Creating digital stable islands in times of chaos. Making interdependence unweaponizable.

Ethereum's role is to create a "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communication channels can facilitate interaction, but the channels themselves are not "space": they do not allow you to create the unique object that can normatively represent some society's arrangements that change over time. Currency is an important example, a multi-signature wallet that can change members is another—it demonstrates a durability that transcends any single individual or public key, various market and governance structures are the third. And there are more.

I believe it is time to invest more clearly and decisively. Do not try to become Apple or Google, viewing crypto as a technology track for improving efficiency or adding gloss. Rather, we need to build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem—the "leaderless shared digital space" that supports open finance and much more. More proactively building a full-stack ecosystem: extending upwards to wallets and applications (including AI as an interaction interface), and down to operating systems, hardware, and even physical and biological security aspects.

Ultimately, technology without users is worthless. But we need to seek those who truly need sanctuary tech, whether individuals or institutions. To optimize payments, DeFi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for these users and goals—these are precisely the areas where centralized technology inadvertently falls short. We have many allies, including many people outside the "crypto circle." It is time to cooperate and move forward with an open mindset.

Reply and Supplement

@MarkSmitb Yes, but it has indeed brought more freedom to people.

The answer is not to oppose Starlink, but to support more than ten organizations with different positions, each establishing alternative systems similar to Starlink. Ideally, there should at least be one open-source system using open protocols……

@deuce897 Friend, I am posting on X through Firefly, which will simultaneously publish to all mainstream social platforms.

@hashdag Good question.

There are two vectors that influence global events:

1. Influencing the structure of the world in a way that is neutral towards specific situations, but simultaneously has a clear tendency, guiding towards ideal outcomes (such as empowering those who were originally……

@PingChenTW How to understand this?