Ethereum at 10: Vitalik's Evolving Vision

By TechFlow

Translator: June

On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum mainnet went live.

Bitcoin emerged like a myth: self-generating, depersonalized, beyond revision. Ethereum, in contrast, resembles an unfinished play whose author has never left the stage.

Vitalik Buterin, a young prodigy and technological idealist, spent the next decade pouring his personal philosophy, values, and struggles into code.

From the early dream of a "world computer," through governance debates in the aftermath of The DAO crisis, to The Merge and restructuring of the Ethereum Foundation, every stage of Ethereum's evolution carries traces of Vitalik's thinking.

Ethereum's ten years are, in many ways, a chronicle of Vitalik's intellectual transformation.

The Utopia of a Young Genius

In 2008, the global financial crisis sent shockwaves through the world.

As banks collapsed and trust in the system faltered, Bitcoin emerged as a rebellious banner raised against the old order. This new technology not only drew in cypherpunks and cryptography enthusiasts but also changed the life of a teenage boy named Vitalik Buterin.

At seventeen, while most teens were discovering first loves, Vitalik discovered Bitcoin.

In 2011, he first heard about Bitcoin from his father, a computer scientist. After quitting his beloved game, World of Warcraft, Bitcoin became his new obsession.

He scoured online forums, until someone offered to pay him in Bitcoin for writing articles. Back then, each blog post earned him five BTC.

His writings soon caught the attention of Romanian Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie. The two began corresponding, and by the end of 2011, they co-founded Bitcoin Magazine.

By 2013, using Bitcoin he had earned through writing, Vitalik traveled the world, visiting Israel, London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, meeting local Bitcoin communities. When he returned to Toronto, he became convinced that everyone's vision of "Blockchain 2.0" was fundamentally flawed.

They were all trying to build complex applications on Bitcoin, but Bitcoin's scripting capabilities were far too limited.

Vitalik realized that if he could design a Bitcoin-like network with a Turing-complete programming language, it could support all forms of digital services, recreate social networks, restructure stock markets, and even form fully digital companies beyond the reach of governments and centralized control.

In November 2013, at 19 years old, he turned this vision into a whitepaper. He called it Ethereum.

The paper spread like wildfire. For the first time, people saw that blockchain could be more than just money; it could be a decentralized global platform.

Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and other future co-founders joined him. Lubin famously called him a "genius alien bringing the gift of decentralization."

Back then, Vitalik was an uncompromising idealist. In interviews, he was refreshingly candid about holding a binary worldview, attributing most societal problems to centralization: "I viewed anything involving government regulation or corporate control as pure evil."

However, ideals rarely survive untouched by reality.

The first cracks appeared within the founding team. Some wanted Ethereum to be a profit-driven business. Vitalik insisted on a non-profit, open community model. He even proposed reducing his own token allocation to prevent future concentration of power.

By June 2014, tensions boiled over.

Vitalik asked Charles Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit to leave the team, and later that year, he founded the Ethereum Foundation (EF) to formalize Ethereum's non-profit governance. Gavin Wood left as well after clashing with Vitalik on development priorities and vision, eventually founding Polkadot in 2020.

In a TIME interview, Vitalik admitted Ethereum's vision risked being hijacked by greed:

"If we don't exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable. And those are often far from what's actually the best for the world."

On July 30, 2015, a small group of young developers in a Berlin office watched as Ethereum's mainnet came to life. There was no grand ceremony, no major media coverage, only a few idealists staring at blocks scrolling across a screen.

The "world computer" had stepped out of the whitepaper and into reality.

However, behind the glow of innovation, a young Vitalik was unprepared for the complex and brutal world that lay ahead.

The Fracture of Ideals

In Ethereum's early years, Vitalik embodied a pure form of technological utopianism. He believed the ultimate purpose of blockchain was decentralization, that anyone, anywhere, should be free to build applications on Ethereum without the blessing of central authorities.

At Devcon 1 in 2015, he repeatedly highlighted Ethereum's openness and trustlessness, sketching a future where code, not power, ruled the world.

But decentralization did not automatically lead to harmony. Vitalik opposed centralized control, yet found himself the ultimate arbiter of community disputes, a paradox of power that exploded during the DAO crisis.

In 2016, The DAO launched as the world's first decentralized investment fund on Ethereum, raising over 12 million ETH worth $150 million. In June, a hacker exploited a vulnerability, draining around 3.6 million ETH.

Vitalik was only 22, at the height of his rising fame, and had just been crowned "God V" among the Chinese community. During the crisis, he barely slept, spending days coordinating with the community, drafting proposals, seeking solutions.

The urgency to protect investors clashed head-on with the principle of immutability. Ultimately, Vitalik chose a pragmatic compromise: advocating for a hard fork to restore the stolen funds, putting the decision to a community vote.

The choice stabilized the ecosystem but split Ethereum forever into ETH and ETC.

Vitalik lost more than sleep. His belief in the flawless execution of smart contracts was shattered. His saint-like image as a leader dimmed. The 100% tech-faithful idealist vanished, replaced by a more pragmatic builder.

After the crisis, in his blog post Thinking About Smart Contract Security, Vitalik admitted the gap between ideals and reality. He called for stricter audits, formal verification, and began emphasizing "community coordination" over technological absolutism as the key to Ethereum's success.

The crisis prompted reflection, but the market moved on to speculation mania, leaving the network buckling under its weight.

In 2017, ICOs exploded as a new fundraising phenomenon, with projects like EOS, Tezos, and Bancor effortlessly pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars on Ethereum. By the end of the year, the NFT game CryptoKitties overwhelmed the network as user activity surged, sending gas fees soaring past 800 Gwei. It became clear to Vitalik that without addressing scalability, Ethereum's vision of universal accessibility would remain out of reach.

He openly criticized the speculation, remarking, "Many projects look decentralized, but it's just rebranding. We have to prove blockchain exists for reasons beyond what an Excel spreadsheet can already do."

The frenzy didn't last. The 2018 market crash wiped ETH from $1,400 to $83, leaving most ICOs dead.

Amid the rubble, Vitalik thought hard about steering blockchain toward meaningful impact. That year, he co-authored Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design For Philanthropic Matching Funds with Harvard's Zoë Hitzig and Microsoft's Glen Weyl, proposing quadratic funding to better allocate resources for public goods instead of speculation.

He pushed for EIP-1559 to redesign gas fees, and championed Ethereum's shift from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, aiming for lower energy use and higher scalability.

The DAO crisis, speculative bubble, and brutal crash marked a turning point. Vitalik evolved from a "tech saint" chasing pure decentralization to a builder grappling with safety, governance, and social value.

Ethereum was still his utopia, but no longer a pure technological paradise. It had become a rugged path through reality, one that demanded compromise, careful balance, and a broader vision.

Through it all, Vitalik carved out a new philosophy: one rooted not just in ideals, but in pragmatism.

Beyond Code: A New Battleground

If the years 2015-2019 marked Vitalik's transformation from pure technological idealism to pragmatic builder, then 2020-2022 saw another key turning point in his philosophy. He began confronting the complexity of the real world, moving from a purely technical vision toward a multidimensional approach that embraced social governance, public responsibility, and even political engagement. The Russia-Ukraine war, in particular, pushed him to leverage his influence beyond code.

In August 2020, Vitalik wrote in his blog post Trust Models that blockchains can never be truly "trustless." Social contracts and power structures in the real world cannot be fully replaced or erased by code. This stood in stark contrast to his earlier dream of replacing human consensus entirely with algorithms.

In 2021, he published Moving Beyond Coin Voting Governance, criticizing token-weighted voting as the sole governance model. He argued that wealth alone should not determine decision-making power and called for multi-layered consensus and "soft governance" mechanisms to make blockchain governance more aligned with human social logic.

The once pure technologist was beginning to step further into reality.

2022 brought perhaps the biggest challenge for both Ethereum and Vitalik — the Merge.

Transitioning Ethereum's consensus from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) was far from smooth. Critics argued that PoS would centralize power in the hands of large stakeholders. Some miners and node operators opposed abandoning PoW after years of investment in infrastructure. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson even accused Vitalik of running "a dictatorship," claiming Ethereum's governance concentrated too much power in his hands.

Despite this, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation pressed forward. On September 15, Ethereum completed the Merge, retiring PoW forever.

Vitalik highlighted that this upgrade wasn't just about slashing energy usage by ~99.95%. It laid the foundation for future scalability solutions like sharding and rollups, potentially boosting Ethereum's throughput to thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions per second.

As for being called a "dictator," he replied that Ethereum's governance relies on community consensus, not a single person's decisions. Major changes are proposed through EIPs, core developer calls, and open public discussions.

Earlier that year, in February, the Russia-Ukraine war broke out.

Vitalik, born in Moscow to Russian parents, broke his usual stance of neutrality. In a rare statement on Twitter, he condemned Putin in Russian, calling the invasion "a crime against both the Ukrainian and Russian people." He famously wrote: "Ethereum is neutral, but I am not."

Weeks later, he donated 1,500 ETH (around $5 million) to humanitarian and military aid in Ukraine through Unchain Fund and Aid for Ukraine. In September 2022, he traveled to Kyiv himself to attend the Kyiv Tech Summit and ETHKyiv hackathon, showing solidarity with the local Web3 community.

"I wanted to see firsthand the Ethereum projects thriving despite the war, to meet the builders behind them," he said. "Ukraine could be the next Web3 hub."

Criticism followed, saying, "Just focus on building Ethereum. Why involve yourself in politics?"

Vitalik was unfazed. In an interview with TIME, he admitted:"One of the decisions I made in 2022 is to try to be more risk-taking and less neutral. I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing."

His willingness to "offend" only expanded from there. Social impact became central to his vision. Even the NFT boom, which boosted Ethereum's popularity, drew his sharp criticism: "Ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys."

After Terra Luna's collapse and FTX's implosion, Vitalik argued that blockchain's biggest challenges were no longer about base-layer security or scalability, but about delivering genuine social value at the application layer.

He urged developers to focus on decentralized applications that improve public governance, fund public goods, and offer transparent financial tools.

In his blog post What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me, he highlighted his top priorities:

• Layer 2 and rollup-based scalability solutions

• Zero-knowledge proof technology for privacy protection

• DAOs designed for public goods funding

• Prediction markets and stablecoins solving real-world problems

After the disputes over the Merge, the turbulence of war, the frenzy of speculation, and the industry's collapse, Vitalik was no longer just a geek working quietly behind the code. For the first time, he stepped into the spotlight, engaging in public debates not only as a developer, but also as a thinker and an active participant in societal issues.

His vision of a decentralized utopia began to take on new contours, evolving into a multidimensional experiment where governance, freedom, and public value could coexist.

Dawn in the Dark

Post-Merge, Ethereum's technical roadmap entered a period of stability.

NFT mania had cooled, DeFi's hype faded, and the crypto industry entered a phase of "no new narrative." During this time, Vitalik doubled down on advancing public goods funding and the concept of "information finance":

• Supporting open-source development and community governance via Gitcoin and quadratic funding

• Exploring prediction markets and data-based financial tools that treat information as an incentivized, valuable asset

• Advocating for decentralized applications that tackle real societal problems instead of serving as pure speculation tools

Meanwhile, ChatGPT sparked a global AI wave, with Silicon Valley's tech faction embracing "effective accelerationism" (e/acc), the belief that technology and innovation should advance as rapidly as possible while maintaining an optimistic and welcoming attitude toward AGI.

Vitalik, however, took the opposite stance, proposing an alternative cautious path called "defensive acceleration" (d/acc). This approach argues that technological development should prioritize defense, protecting democratic and decentralized order, a philosophy that aligns closely with Ethereum's original vision. In his blog My techno-optimism, he warned about the dangers of concentrated AI power: "A government of 45 people could hold the fate of billions in its hands."

This caution toward AI intertwined with his Ethereum vision. In his blog post Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again, he urged Ethereum to return to its cypherpunk roots: privacy, open collaboration, and resisting centralization of power.

He reiterated in interviews that Ethereum should not become an institutional tool. It exists to empower individuals and protect freedoms, not to form a new centralized order.

Yet ideals and markets rarely align.

By 2024, the market ignored Vitalik's calls. Privacy and Layer 2 narratives were overshadowed. ETH's price stagnated while meme coins and Solana's high-speed ecosystem captured the spotlight. The market became rife with claims that "Ethereum had grown stagnant" and "the Foundation had lost its innovative edge." Chinese communities were particularly harsh, launching a barrage of criticisms: the Foundation was accused of frequently dumping ETH, neglecting developer support, researchers having conflicts of interest with external projects, and Vitalik being surrounded by nothing but yes-men and flatterers.

On X, Vitalik didn't hide his frustration: Crypto Twitter and VCs treat "KOL gambling schemes where 99% of users lose money" as the industry's best products; outsiders who know nothing about the Foundation's internal situation demand that he carry out complete reforms within two weeks. These voices once made him consider quitting, but whenever he was on the verge of giving up, some signs would remind him it was "worth fighting on."

"Don't cancel yourself. Become uncancellable," he wrote.

Criticism continued, but change followed.

In January 2025, Vitalik announced a major leadership restructuring of the Ethereum Foundation. By March, EF confirmed significant personnel changes:

• Aya Miyaguchi transitioned from Executive Director to Chairwoman

• Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak became new Co-Executive Directors

• Core researcher Danny Ryan launched a new experimental organization, Etherealize, to accelerate technical progress

Then, as Circle went public and stablecoins along with tokenized real-world assets (RWA) gained traction, Ethereum's role as critical infrastructure regained attention.

Consensys founder Joseph Lubin launched an "ETH reserve" strategy via SharpLink Gaming (SBET), dubbed Ethereum's version of MicroStrategy. Companies like BitMine, Bit Digital, and GameSquare followed, triggering an ETH accumulation race.

ETH's price doubled from April onward, climbing 40% in July alone. Just months after harsh criticism, Ethereum was back in the spotlight.

Vitalik neither endorsed nor opposed the "MicroStrategy playbook," but at EthCC in early July, he issued another industry-wide warning: Web3 is standing at a crossroads, and unless developers anchor their work in freedom, decentralization, and privacy, the industry risks betraying its founding principles.

"Ethereum is at a critical juncture," he said. "The decentralized dream that sparked the blockchain revolution is fading, diluted by corporate interests, political pressures, and convenience."

On July 30, Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary.

On X, Vitalik reposted a message from EF member Binji reflecting on the milestone: "While banks fail, clouds go dark and servers get patched, Ethereum keeps going. We keep going. Ten years online, forever to go."

Interestingly, Vitalik recently retweeted one of his favorite lyric excerpts from Starlight, a 2005 song by S.H.E (a popular Mandopop girl group).

The lyrics mean: If we never go through darkness or hardship, beautiful dreams would not feel so worth longing for. The arrival of dawn is the reward for those who never give up or back down in the night. With perseverance, hope and success will eventually come.

This seems to perfectly encapsulate Ethereum and Vitalik's turbulent journey over the past two years: through the darkest nights, he held his ground, waiting for the dawn to break.