Best of x.com/vitalikbuterin on Kiwi News
@vitalikbuterin on X · Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
35 stories by @vitalikbuterin on X have been shared on Kiwi News since 14 June 2023, with 106 upvotes and 24 comments in total. The latest was shared on 8 October 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Vitalik on “this cycle’s celebrity experimentation”
Vitalik Buterin expresses unhappiness with the current cycle of celebrity experimentation, arguing that financialization is acceptable as a means to a worthy end but objectionable as the final product. He contrasts this with Ashton and Mila's Stoner Cats, which he calls more honorable than anything from the 2024 celebrity memecoin era because it funded an actual show. He closes by asking how things can be pushed in a better direction.
- vitalik not investing in L2s in foreseeable future
Vitalik Buterin is not investing in L2 projects in the foreseeable future, saying that a clear public stance currently seems worth more than the financial gains of such investments. He notes that money given to a company could instead be exchanged for commitments to be positive-sum toward Ethereum or humanity, and that such a commitment can easily be worth more than 0.14% of a company. He says a clear stance sets an example and increases confidence that he is not part of a plot to twist the Ethereum protocol toward benefiting L2 and infrastructure tokens he holds.
- @VitalikButerin: Europe should take Pirate Party approach, not totalitarian
Vitalik Buterin argues that European governments should take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment rather than pursue an environment free of disliked content, which he calls totalitarian and anti-pluralistic. He says a free society must accept that some people will sell products and voice views others consider dangerous or false, and that the real goal is to keep such content from dominating, not to remove it. He supports incentives for social platforms to be more open and transparent, including his proposal that algorithms be published with a one- to two-year delay alongside zk-proofs that the live algorithm matches the published one. He also says Taiwan has done something similar, as @audreyt has described, and opposes banning anonymity for individual posters.
- Ethereum Foundation restructures leadership to support ecosystem growth
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is restructuring its leadership, a process that has been ongoing for close to a year, with some changes already made public and others still in progress. The stated goals are to raise technical expertise within EF leadership, improve two-way communication with users, app developers, wallets and L2s, bring in fresh talent, and better support app builders in protecting privacy, open source and censorship resistance. EF explicitly rules out an ideological pivot, aggressive lobbying of regulators and politicians, becoming a vehicle for vested interests, or becoming a highly centralized organization. EF says people seeking a different vision are welcome to start their own organizations.
- Vitalik only to publicly mention L2s that are stage 1+, starting 2025
Vitalik Buterin says that starting next year he plans to publicly mention in blogs and talks only layer-2 (L2) rollups that are stage 1 or higher, with a possible short grace period for new projects he finds genuinely interesting. He says this applies regardless of whether he has invested in a project or is friends with its team. He notes that multiple ZK-rollup teams have told him they are on track to reach stage 1 by year end. He describes stage 1 as requiring a 75% council threshold to override the proof system, with at least 26% of council members outside the rollup team, and calls it a reasonable moderate milestone while stating that training wheels should not be removed until the proof systems are confident to be secure.
- @VitalikButerin: revealing country without opt-out is wrong, privacy rugpull
Vitalik Buterin says that revealing a user's country without consent and without any opt-out, not even an option to stop using the account, is wrong. He says that while revealing country leaves a very large anonymity set in most cases, some people for whom a few bits of leakage are risky should not have their privacy retroactively removed with no recourse.
- @VitalikButerin: Ethereum was created to set people free, not for efficiency
Vitalik Buterin argues that Ethereum was created to set people free rather than to make finance efficient or apps convenient, and that its primary game should be resilience. He describes resilience as minimizing the chance of catastrophic loss, such as a deplatformed user, a bankrupt developer, a Cloudflare outage, or a cyberwar, so that the network keeps working as intended. He says efficiency and convenience are games that large corporate players will always be better at. He concludes that Ethereum must first be decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace, and only then make that blockspace abundant.
- No, I do not feel good at all hearing these things
The author, writing in a short personal post, says that hearing crypto Twitter and VC voices defend a PvP "degen casino" product as crypto's best achievable product-market fit, or hearing outsiders with no knowledge of Ethereum Foundation internals demand who should be removed and added within two weeks, does not feel good. Each time it makes them want to quit, but they say they are reminded that the fight is worth it and urge readers to find things worth fighting for within themselves.
- @VitalikButerin: Best L2s lean into L1 security
Vitalik Buterin argues that the best L2s should rely more heavily on Ethereum L1's security, censorship resistance, proofs and data availability, reducing their own logic to acting as a sequencer and prover over core execution. He says this combines the trust minimization and efficiency that 2010s enterprise blockchain projects sought but never achieved. He also states that L1 features have already protected users' rights when problems occurred on an L2.
- Vitalik: „A uniswap chain or even rollup makes no sense“ (2022)
- @VitalikButerin: We stand for human dignity above political teams
Vitalik Buterin argues that human dignity should take priority over political team loyalty. He says the bottom line in resolving disputes over individual situations must be a shared commitment to protecting the dignity of all people, and that this matters more than political teams. He also says people on one's own side whose actions show indifference to dignity, such as opportunistic users of appeals to freedom and life, should be opposed too. The post lists conflicts it names, including Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and North Korea, and rejects labeling advocacy for these peoples as antisemitic or Russophobic.
- @VitalikButerin: Fight Chat Control, privacy without backdoors needed
Vitalik Buterin urges opposition to Chat Control, arguing that society cannot be made secure by making people insecure. He says everyone deserves privacy and security for private communications without backdoors, which he describes as inevitably hackable. He also points to a report linked in the post that EU interior ministers want to exempt themselves from the proposed bulk scanning of private messages, which he calls telling.
- @VitalikButerin: Protocols are not vibe-code garbage, they are works of art
- Vitalik's message to CT about EF
Vitalik Buterin rejected public pressure over Ethereum Foundation (EF) leadership, stating that he is currently the person deciding the new EF leadership team until the planned reform gives the EF a "proper board." He says such pressure makes the environment toxic for top talent, and that some of Ethereum's best developers have messaged him to express disgust with the social media climate. He adds that this pressure makes his job harder and reduces his willingness to do what critics want.
- Vitalik: do not scramble wallets, but treat AI math as a cryptography risk
Vitalik Buterin argues that people should not rush to move funds to new wallets today, but that the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math should be taken seriously, including exposure to AI-vulnerable cryptography alongside quantum-vulnerable cryptography. He says lattice-based schemes such as ML-DSA, FHE and lattices in general may face serious attacks from the next two years of AI math, which is why Ethereum's lean roadmap is moving toward hash-only signatures. He notes that public-key encryption cannot be built from hashes alone, so he recommends multiplying lattice key sizes by 10 for long-term security, and he says hash-based constructions beat lattice-based ones on efficiency wherever they are possible.
- @VitalikButerin: EF cutting budget 40%, shifting to endowment model
Vitalik Buterin says the Ethereum Foundation is cutting its budget by roughly 40% this year as it shifts to an endowment model, a change set out in last year's Treasury Management Policy. The EF plans to reduce annual spending from about 15% of its remaining funds before 2026 to a post-2030 target of about 5% per year. Buterin says the cuts mean real losses, including fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects, PSE winding down as a unit, and a smaller, less lavish Devcon. He also says the EF will rely more on AI-assisted formal verification than on client redundancy for security.
- Vitalik on risks of political coins
Vitalik Buterin argues that politician-issued coins are a risky vehicle for bribery and threaten democracy. Buyers can increase a politician's holdings simply by buying and holding the coin, without sending the politician any money directly. Holding a coin also gives deniability, since its financial effect mixes donating to the issuer with gambling, so a buyer can claim the speculative motive. Buterin says the economic case for markets in ordinary goods does not extend to markets for political influence, and he recommends that politicians not pursue this path.
- Updates on EF spending
- Updated Ethereum Roadmap
- @VitalikButerin: El Salvador's multi-address Bitcoin strategy is quantum-smart
Vitalik Buterin argues that El Salvador's approach of spreading its Bitcoin across multiple unused addresses is smarter than critics on CT assume, though he states low confidence in the guess. His reasoning is that addresses already used to spend coins expose the ECDSA public key and are therefore vulnerable to quantum attack, while unused addresses secured by hashes are quantum-resistant. He says splitting funds into multiple unused accounts is mainly a convenience, since it allows spending from one account without leaking the public key of the others. He notes that deterministic wallets with fresh change addresses are the standard approach, but that generating addresses from a master public key lets an attacker recover child private keys once one is known, and cold-storage generation makes onchain accounting hard, so pre-generating a fixed set of addresses is simpler.
- @VitalikButerin: Twin goals for Ethereum's future and resilience
- Ethereum has gotten stronger
Ethereum's fundamentals are described as "actually crazy strong right now," with the author listing improvements across the network. Layer 2 transaction fees are now under $0.01, and Optimism and Arbitrum are both at stage 1. Other claimed gains include more mature zero-knowledge tooling, early second-generation privacy tools such as 0xbow, and clearer roadmaps for account abstraction and block construction. The post also says staking decentralization has remained stable and that the claim that proof-of-stake is more centralized than proof-of-work has proven false.
- "Modern economics assumes that we can get people to NOT coordinate"
Modern civilization rests on the assumption that people can be kept from coordinating with one another, and that assumption is becoming harder to sustain. The article lists examples including the separation of church and state, antitrust rules against corporations in one industry colluding, secret ballots, and witness independence. It argues that a century ago non-coordination held largely because communication was hard, while today executives, politicians, or other leaders could form a strategy in a chat group within minutes. The author says the main remaining barriers are personal morals and the fear that a collaborator might inform on others, and suspects the alternative is messy and still being worked out.
- Vitalik says that Saylor's Big Bank BTC custody comments are batshit insane
Vitalik Buterin calls Michael Saylor's comments on Bitcoin custody "batshit insane" and says the approach is not what crypto is about. He says Saylor is explicitly arguing for a regulatory capture approach to protecting crypto, quoting Saylor's point that when regulated public entities such as BlackRock and Fidelity hold the asset, lawmakers and law enforcement become invested in those entities. Buterin says there is plenty of precedent for how this strategy can fail.
- @VitalikButerin: building cypherpunk principled Ethereum as bolt-on layer
Vitalik Buterin describes an ambitious plan to build a "cypherpunk principled non-ugly ethereum" as a bolt-on layer to the current Ethereum system, integrated and interoperable with it and grown over time. He says Ethereum itself should also gain system-wide properties such as censorship resistance, zk prover friendliness and consensus properties. He estimates that within five years, or possibly much sooner with AI coding and verification, an open pathway could exist to turn the existing system into smart contracts written in the new system's language. He notes that Ethereum has already changed course mid-flight once with the Merge, and says it can make about four more such changes, listing the state tree, Lean consensus, ZK-EVM verification and a VM change.
- @VitalikButerin: why cash resilience matters for crypto infrastructure
- „But we are building the future.“
- @VitalikButerin: my $500M SHIB donation to FLI, their pivot, and d/acc approach
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says he donated a large share of SHIB tokens he received in 2021 to the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which later cashed out for roughly $500M, far more than he expected. He says FLI has since pivoted toward cultural and political action, justified by the view that AGI is coming soon and that such action is needed to counter AI companies' lobbying funds. Buterin states he worries that large-scale coordinated political action can backfire, citing biosafety guardrails as fragile and national security exemptions as a source of risk. He says his own approach centers on d/acc, building and open-sourcing defensive technology, and that he has shared this disagreement with FLI while also praising its pro-human AI declaration.
- @VitalikButerin: why I speak on some political topics and not others
Vitalik Buterin explains his framework for when he speaks on hot political topics: he rejects both total silence and speaking on everything, and instead speaks mainly on conflicts that relate to him personally, such as Russia, Ukraine and Canada, plus the United States given its global influence. He also says he tries to judge whether a distant situation resembles an internal conflict or a global issue like public health. He then gives his own views on Iran, calling the regime's crackdown on protests and internet restrictions unambiguously awful, and on Israel and Gaza, saying the scale of the response to the October 7 attack exceeds reasonable bounds of self-defense and that the ICC was right to charge both sides.
- @VitalikButerin: L2s should stop being "branded shards" and find new value adds
Vitalik Buterin argues that L2s should stop being treated as "branded shards" of Ethereum and instead find new value propositions, since L2 progress to stage 2 has been slower than expected and L1 is now scaling directly, with fees very low and gas limits projected to rise greatly in 2026. He suggests L2s pursue value adds such as specialized non-EVM VMs, application-specific efficiency, or non-financial designs, and that any L2 handling ETH or Ethereum-issued assets be at least stage 1. He also favors a native rollup precompile that verifies ZK-EVM proofs, which would auto-upgrade with Ethereum and enable trustless interoperability.
- @VitalikButerin: True liberty means challenging power wherever it sits
Vitalik Buterin argues that true liberty means challenging abuses of power from the highest seats of authority, whoever holds them, rather than staying permanently aligned with or opposed to any one political team. He distinguishes "the regime," meaning the people in power, from "the state," meaning the organization with the guns, and warns against using those terms as bywords for an enemy to keep pressing a group after it has lost power. He frames securing the balance of power as necessary to keep the world, and each individual in it, free and secure. The post links to his essay "balance_of_power" dated December 30, 2025.
- @VitalikButerin: Network states aren't colonialist, exit is safer than takeover
Vitalik Buterin argues that people who call network states "colonialist" are wrong, and that the exit approach is safer than attempts to take over existing governments. He says almost none of the large-scale colonialist harm in recent years has come from network state exit libertarians, while much has come from former libertarians who decided to seize government control. He calls "if you disagree with how things are run, go start a new thing" a robust-to-error position, since its potential negative consequences are localized and bounded. He says the community should update its view and be kinder to the exit position, while noting that libertarian lobbying for harmful deregulation, such as opposing the deregulation of AGI/ASI, is a separate problem.
- „show some respect“
- Happy 9th birthday, Ethereum!
- Tax the congestible, subsidize the increasing returns.