Vitalik: Ethereum itself must pass the 'abandonment test' with the goal of possessing long-term self running capabilities BlockBeats news, on January 12th, Ethereum founder Vitalik recently stated that the Ethereum network itself must pass the "Walkaway Test" - that is, even without continuous core development or "vendor" maintenance, the network can still operate for a long time, securely, and decentralized. Vitalik stated that Ethereum's mission is to become the infrastructure for trustless and least trusted applications, whether in finance, governance, or other fields. This requires applications to be more like "tools" rather than "services": once deployed, they can be used for a long time without being invalidated by developers stopping maintenance, being attacked, or turning to value extraction. To achieve this, the underlying protocol itself cannot rely on continuous upgrades to maintain availability. He emphasized that Ethereum must reach a stage where its core value proposition remains valid, even if it chooses to ossify the protocol. It is not a requirement to stop upgrading, but to ensure that future upgrades are a 'icing on the cake' rather than a survival necessity. Vitalik further listed the key goals that Ethereum needs to achieve, including: ·Comprehensive quantum resistance capability, achieving century level cryptographic security as soon as possible; ·Sustainable and scalable architecture design, achieving long-term scalability through ZK-EVM validation, PeerDAS data sampling, and limiting future upgrades to parameter adjustments as much as possible; ·A state architecture that can run for decades, ensuring long-term high TPS operation through partial stateless and state expiration mechanisms; ·Universal Account Model (Complete Account Abstraction), freeing itself from protocol layer dependencies on ECDSA; ·A secure and DoS resistant gas pricing system that takes into account both execution and ZK proof costs; ·A decentralized PoS economic model that can be maintained for the long term, supporting ETH as a trustless collateral asset; ·A block construction mechanism that is resistant to centralization and has strong censorship resistance. Vitalik stated that ideally, in the coming years, the aforementioned 'hard engineering' should be systematically completed, allowing the vast majority of innovation to occur at the client-side optimization level and reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. He emphasized the need to avoid compromise solutions and 'do the right thing at once' in order to maximize Ethereum's long-term resilience in terms of technology and society. 「Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei.」