Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is calling on the blockchain’s community to rethink its ultimate purpose, urging developers to abandon the pursuit of Big Tech “shininess” in favor of building a refuge against growing global authoritarianism and corporate overreach.
“Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem,” he said.
Buterin outlined his concerns regarding “the way the world is going,” citing government surveillance, tech monopolies, and social media manipulation.
Most notably, he expressed deep frustration that Ethereum has not played a larger role in combating these issues.
Ethereum’s missing impact
Buterin has noted that Ethereum has so far played “a very limited role” in making people’s lives better, which is a source of frustration for him.
“I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond blockchain strikes their fancy,” Buterin wrote. “But it does weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people’s lives better.”
He pointed to tools like Starlink, Signal, and locally-running LLMs as actual “liberating technologies” making a tangible difference today.
To address this gap, Buterin pushed back against the idea that the cryptocurrency industry should limit its scope strictly to decentralized finance (DeFi).
“One response is to say ‘stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that’,” he explained. “But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical… but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed.”
However, Buterin conceded that Ethereum is the “wrong-shaped tool” to completely fix the world, noting that enforcing global change requires a level of centralized power projection that contradicts the network’s ethos.
Buterin proposed that Ethereum should act as a defensive perimeter. He urged developers to build what he coined “sanctuary technologies.”
