vitalik

In response to Vitalik's suggestion that Ethereum should prioritize strengthening its positioning as a value storage, DeFi researcher Ignas published a statement claiming that ETH may be more suitable as a value storage asset than BTC and ZEC. The advantages he mentioned include native staking rewards, privacy features in the roadmap, and potential deflation achieved through transaction fee burning.Ignas also stated that using BTC or ZEC as collateral to obtain loans typically requires reliance on wrapped assets or trust in banks and centralized exchanges, while ETH can achieve native collateralization and asset exchange on the same chain. He also expressed hope that Vitalik would shift towards the value storage positioning, not because he believes that Ethereum L1 will never generate enough transaction fee revenue to drive ETH deflation; scaling will reduce transaction costs, but the key still lies in whether market demand can grow in sync and whether the Ethereum community can drive demand enhancement.

According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, he believes that instead of positioning ETH as a fee-burning token, more emphasis should be placed on its value storage function.Vitalik stated that the role of the fee-burning narrative is not as strong as it seems, and optimizing around this goal may struggle to balance decentralization and resistance to capture; positioning it as a value storage aligns with Ethereum's advantages such as decentralization. He believes that the stability brought by these advantages has practical value for asset holders and will also be valued in an era of transformation brought by AI.He supports retaining EIP-1559 and its burning mechanism but believes that even if fee burning remains below the breakeven level of 10% in the long term, there is no need to feel disappointed, as the value of ETH comes from other aspects.

Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform expressing disagreement with the recent strong negative reactions against the anti-data center movement, believing that the overall benefits of slowing down the massive expansion of computing power outweigh the drawbacks.Vitalik pointed out that with continuous advancements in algorithms, the AI capabilities that will require larger-scale data centers in the next two years may be achievable through existing data centers in about four years or even a shorter time. Therefore, even if the anti-data center movement achieves significant results, it may not necessarily lead to catastrophic consequences.He further stated that the world needs more time to address the already evident cybersecurity threats and potential future risks such as biosecurity. At the same time, scientific research is constrained by many factors beyond AI, so a one-year slowdown in AI development may result in a practical delay in scientific progress that is much less than a year. He emphasized that this judgment does not rely on the controversial AI doomsday risk theory.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his disagreement with the strong emotional reaction against the anti-data center movement this week. The core logic is based on algorithmic advancements; now larger and more data centers are needed to complete tasks that could be done in two years with existing data centers in four years (or even sooner). Therefore, even if the anti-data center movement achieves extreme success, it will not trigger any apocalyptic catastrophic consequences.Vitalik pointed out that slowing down the expansion of computing power can buy humanity more time to strengthen responses to the already emerging cybersecurity issues and potential biological risks in the future. At the same time, scientific applications are constrained by many factors beyond AI, so if AI development slows down for a year, the degree of scientific progress slowdown will be much less than a year. Overall, the slowdown in the massive expansion of computing power seems to have a net positive effect, and this judgment does not rely on controversial arguments such as "apocalyptic theories" or recursive self-improvement (RSI).

On October 29, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin reflected on his experience investing in DOGE and donating to SHIB during an interview on the Silicon Valley 101 podcast. He revealed that he had spent $25,000 to buy DOGE, which later increased in value to over $10 million.He also recalled that the SHIB project team had transferred half of the total token supply to his public wallet. He sold part of the tokens, exchanging them for approximately $70 million worth of ETH, but due to insufficient market liquidity, he still held a large amount of remaining tokens, which he later donated to an organization fighting COVID-19 in India and the Future of Life Institute (FLI).He initially thought that the recipients could cash out a maximum of over $20 million, but the amount reached several hundred million dollars, far exceeding expectations. He stated that if he had foreseen this outcome at the time, he would have made very different decisions.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in an interview that there has been a concerning trend in the industry's security situation over the past period. Security vulnerabilities and attack incidents at the smart contract level are decreasing, while most major hacking attacks that occurred in the past year and a half have been more focused on the user interface layer and centralized components. Hacking attacks are still ongoing, but the underlying core parts that truly need to be secured are actually improving in security, and the range of infrastructure that can provide high security guarantees is also expanding.Vitalik believes that more and more people have realized that the top priority in the next two years is not to achieve victory, but to ensure their survival, and the entire industry is thinking about how to achieve this goal. He expects that relevant institutions, large trading platforms, custodians, and other financial institutions will also take action as soon as possible. He believes that Binance's previous launch of BNB Chain was a correct decision, as users deploying their business on-chain and executing related operations through smart contracts can also benefit from the high security guarantees provided by on-chain infrastructure, and more institutions will develop in this direction in the future.Vitalik stated that the only real solution is to effectively raise the security level of the entire industry. The range of operations that can be completed securely is expanding, but if someone does not pay attention to security, the efficiency gains may ultimately be used to conduct more and more aggressive business, rather than further enhancing security. He anticipates that if security issues develop to a certain extent, regulatory agencies and industry leaders in various countries will begin to require companies to take on more responsibility and adopt more prudent business strategies. The Ethereum Foundation has been providing support, including writing relevant code and tools, providing quantum-safe signature-related code, and supporting the construction of wallets protected by quantum-safe technology, but users still need to actively be aware of risks and choose to enable these security measures.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in an interview that Ethereum will undergo a series of changes in the coming years, aiming to fully leverage the latest technologies, especially various cutting-edge technologies including graphics processing capabilities, and push these technologies to a new stage of development, enabling Ethereum to handle multiple tasks in parallel while maintaining decentralization. He mentioned that Ethereum is changing its past development model, as previous goals were difficult to achieve due to technical complexity, high risks, and implementation challenges. With significant advancements in technology, these obstacles are no longer as hard to overcome.Vitalik stated that Ethereum itself adopts very conservative, hash-based cryptographic technologies, while the idea for applications built on top of it is to innovate starting this year based on maintaining the underlying security, trying different technological routes rather than simply replicating Ethereum and smart contracts. He noted that performance protocols and various privacy protocols have emerged with different exploratory directions. Taking enterprise applications as an example, companies can record and manage supply chain data on their own servers and then submit relevant data and its proofs via blockchain to demonstrate that all parties involved comply with established rules. This approach neither compromises privacy nor affects efficiency.Vitalik also mentioned that other developers can build more applications on this foundation, such as splitting related assets or launching loan products supported by asset collateral. Some clear and noteworthy categories of applications have already emerged. He is concerned about the extent to which these applications can provide security guarantees when facing various potential threats and stated that the final choice lies with the application side, which can opt for a conservative technological route or try more radical solutions. He believes that the strategy of the Ethereum Foundation is to focus on what it is currently doing, leaving areas beyond its professional capabilities for users and the community to explore independently, and when able to provide support, to help developers improve their technical levels, enhance security, privacy protection, and openness from a technical perspective, without attempting to control all areas.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned at Devcon 8 that AI poses new threats to security and privacy, while also helping to discover vulnerabilities. He questioned the security of hardware wallets and cautioned against making cryptocurrency investments based on social media posts filled with bots and manipulated content.Vitalik called for the adoption of decentralized, verifiable technologies and zero-knowledge proofs to protect personal data, and suggested that businesses avoid collecting unnecessary information.

Vitalik emphasized trusted hardware and privacy protection in his keynote speech at Devcon, and the Ethereum Foundation outlined related goals such as open chips.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that India accounts for about 17% of the global population and has a large number of developers working on Ethereum, zero-knowledge proofs, and other secure, privacy, and open technologies. However, the previous 11 Devcons or Devconnects have not been held in India.Vitalik expressed his anticipation to engage with the local community.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin today published an article titled "Digital Minimalism," suggesting that in the age of AI, people should consciously reduce their reliance on social media, mobile internet, and website interfaces, regaining control over their digital lives.Vitalik shared three practices: first, reducing direct use of X and instead managing X, Bluesky, Farcaster, and Lens simultaneously through Firefly to avoid information interference caused by algorithmic recommendations; second, he kept his phone in airplane mode by default for 100 consecutive days, connecting only via Wi-Fi to reduce location data leakage and cultivate offline living habits; third, he reduced reliance on websites and web applications, opting for command-line tools to handle some on-chain operations and leveraging AI to lower the usage threshold.Vitalik believes that websites and web applications pose privacy and security risks, while the development of local AI, offline applications, and modular tools enables users to operate computers using natural language, reducing dependence on complex platform interfaces. He refers to this trend as digital minimalism and believes that AI can not only enhance people's efficiency in using the internet but may also allow people to no longer need the internet in more scenarios.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded to Ruxandra Teslo on X, stating that he believes AI is extremely knowledgeable and can excellently identify quotes in almost any content, but it is not wise, and therefore can only make the most superficial judgments about the viewpoints a piece of writing attempts to express.Vitalik Buterin noted that this situation is particularly evident when AI analyzes text it reads for the first time, as opposed to analyzing text that already exists in the training data, which comes with a lot of analyses from others. He also mentioned that the knowledge of AI is more easily seen than its limited wisdom, as wisdom may be something that is difficult to verify easily, which is different from intelligence.This reply was directed at Ruxandra Teslo's post. Ruxandra Teslo expressed that the related post made her feel pessimistic about humanity and believed that the discussions of large language models regarding her article are still low-quality content; she was responding to Sichu Lu's statement that AI is better suited than humans to discuss classics at that time.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, Vitalik Buterin (0xfEB...03B2) transferred 1 million USDC to his charitable project Kanro Fund, equivalent to approximately 1 million dollars.

Vitalik Buterin stated that he supports Kimi 3.1's active exclusion of top offensive cybersecurity capabilities in training data, believing that "limiting use cases" is far better than "limiting users." He pointed out that society still needs time to prepare for more powerful AI cyberattack capabilities, including strengthening system security, reviewing old code, and conducting rigorous formal verification of new code.Vitalik warned that if the first wave of significant AI risks is mishandled, the future may lead to a situation of highly closed models, comprehensive KYC thresholds, and mass surveillance, where different users may receive different levels of model access based on identity, qualifications, or nationality.

Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform stating that he does not predict that defense will automatically lead over offense, but believes that cybersecurity will ultimately trend towards a favorable outcome for defense, although the transition process will be very difficult.He pointed out that "good people discovering vulnerabilities in released software before bad people" does not belong to a game where defense has the advantage. To truly tilt the game towards defense, a deeper methodological shift is needed, including formal verification, radical reduction of the Trusted Computing Base (TCB), etc., and currently, these shifts have only just begun. He also stated that this is an important reason for his friendly attitude towards slowing down or pausing AI development, and called for investing more than 1% of GDP into cybersecurity, biosecurity, and the fortification of the physical world.

Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) posted that the ideal path for supporting various cryptographic algorithms is through EIP-8288: users generate arbitrary signatures locally, then prove them through STARK, and aggregate them on-chain via STARK, without occupying calldata on-chain, thus Ethereum does not need to add new precompiles. He also mentioned that if lattice cryptography is proven to have security against AI attacks, it can still be used in scenarios such as accounts and wallets through precompiles in the future.Previously, Starknet co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson expressed disagreement with a16z's related views, stating that lattice cryptography has a rich mathematical structure that is vulnerable to AI attacks, and that a simplified version based on modular SIS only appeared in 2012 and lacks maturity. He suggested waiting another 3-5 years until AI has been thoroughly tested before using it for custody of large assets.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared that the cost of Bitcoin mining is roughly half derived from capital expenditures on computing power equipment and the other half from electricity consumption; in contrast, the cost of AI inference is almost entirely dominated by capital expenditures on computing power. This difference reflects the distinct cost structures of the two computing businesses. Bitcoin miners need to continuously pay for electricity and determine their profit margins based on mining machine efficiency, coin prices, and network difficulty changes; AI inference, on the other hand, relies more on investments in expensive hardware like GPUs, as well as equipment utilization and computing efficiency.The industrial boundaries of both are also changing. As the demand for AI computing power grows, some Bitcoin mining companies are beginning to shift their existing electricity resources and data center facilities towards AI and high-performance computing businesses, hoping to transition from pure mining to computing infrastructure services. Some mining companies are leveraging previously allocated electricity capacity for mining to enter the AI data center market. However, transformation does not mean that cost pressures disappear: mining operations are more directly exposed to fluctuations in electricity prices and Bitcoin prices, while AI computing businesses must bear risks related to GPU procurement, depreciation, and underutilization. Both types of businesses compete for electricity and computing resources, but ultimately, profitability depends on how these resources are converted into revenue.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform that he has integrated zkAPI, Tor, additional obfuscation traffic, and local LLM prompt rewriting into a daemon compatible with the OpenAI interface, and created a "paranoid mode" wrapper for his AI agent tool pi. The relevant code has been open-sourced on GitHub.The main mechanism of this solution is as follows: each conversation uses a separate Tor line, with requests mixed in random obfuscation traffic; zkAPI is used to prevent identity leakage through payment links; all prompts are first rewritten by a local model, which the user can choose, with Vitalik himself using qwen3.8-flash-next. The outer layer of the proxy tool is wrapped in a bwrap sandbox, and then another layer of torsocks is added, ensuring that all network operations go through Tor.Vitalik stated that this solution is already quite usable, but the latency has significantly increased, especially slow when starting a new conversation. He pointed out that Tor is far from the best privacy solution in this scenario: obfuscation traffic can prevent passive eavesdropping, but if the LLM service provider colludes with the Tor entry node and actively manipulates timing, the protective effect will be greatly weakened.

According to on-chain intelligence platform Arkham, the total value of on-chain assets held by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is approximately 530 million USD, of which 527.81 million USD is in ETH, distributed across multiple addresses (including vitalik.eth).The remaining assets include 1.76 million USD in Aave LUSD, 478,000 USD in ZCHF, and 346,000 USD in WHITE.

Vitalik posted on the X platform to congratulate the @zksync Airbender team for achieving this milestone. He believes that the speed competition of zkEVMs has achieved a decisive victory, and the primary focus should shift entirely to security.Vitalik stated that this means there is a need to formally verify the equivalence of arithmetic and Ethereum specifications, the hard upper limit of the ratio of prover costs to total block Gas, and the security of the proof system itself.