Vitalik Buterin argues that Ethereum’s base layer cannot depend on constant developer involvement to remain usable.
Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum ETH $3 111 24h volatility: 0.3% Market cap: $375.32 B Vol. 24h: $17.78 B must be able to survive even if its core developers walk away.
In a recent post on X, he argued the base layer cannot rely on constant human intervention to remain usable.
If applications are meant to be trust-minimized tools, the chain they run on must meet the same standard, Buterin said.
The test is simple: Ethereum should still function safely, predictably, and usefully without ongoing protocol changes.
That does not mean upgrades stop. It means Ethereum’s value should not depend on future promises.
“Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum’s applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test,” the entrepreneur said.
Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.
Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools – the hammer that once you buy it's yours – than like…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 12, 2026
Ossification Is a Feature, Not a Risk
Buterin argues Ethereum must reach a point where it can “ossify” by choice. The protocol should already contain everything needed to operate securely for decades.
Further changes should be optional optimizations, not survival requirements.
That includes full quantum resistance, so today’s cryptography remains trustworthy for decades. It also means scaling designs that rely on parameter changes rather than constant hard forks. PeerDAS and ZK-EVM validation are significant for this plan.
As per Buterin, Ethereum should be able to support thousands of transactions per second without breaking sync, storage, or hardware limits over time.
Long-Term Design Over Short-Term Gains
The walkaway test also applies to Ethereum’s internal mechanics. Buterin points to the need for durable state management, full account abstraction, and gas pricing that resists denial-of-service attacks, including in zero-knowledge proving.
Proof-of-stake economics must remain decentralized while keeping ETH useful as trustless collateral.
Block production must resist centralization and censorship, even under unknown future conditions.
The goal is to do the hard design work once, correctly, instead of patching weaknesses later.
Last week, Buterin also stated that Ethereum has effectively solved the scalability, security, and decentralization trilemma through live implementations of data availability sampling and ZK-EVMs.
What remains, he says, is safety and long-term robustness.
Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.
These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 3, 2026