In his latest social media post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues the network must now pass the "walkaway test" and avoid becoming just another subscription service.
He claims that the network must focus on resisting censorship and centralization after a year of successful scaling.
The network has to be both usable at scale and decentralized, he stresses.
Such improvements must occur at both the "blockchain layer" and the "application layer."
Beyond "winning the Meta"
In 2025, Ethereum saw significant performance boosts, which include increased blob counts and the maturation of zkEVMs. However, he warned the community against resting on these laurels.
He urged developers to abandon "the quest of 'winning the next meta' regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins," and to stop "arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again.
Instead, Buterin reaffirmed that the network's original ambitious goal to build the world computer for a freer and open internet still stands.
The "walkaway test"
A rigorous standard for what constitutes a truly decentralized application (dApp) is central to the prodigy's vision.
The 31-year-old Ethereum co-founder has come up with the concept of the "walkaway test" that would make it possible to distinguish genuine crypto infrastructure from traditional Web2-style services.
True dapps, as Buterin argues, must be "applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear."
He contrasted this with the current state of the internet, where users are accustomed to "subscription services" that consign them to "permanent dependence on some centralized overlord." He explicitly noted that decentralized applications must be robust enough that a user would not "even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea."
Dan Burgin
Alex Dovbnya
Denys Serhiichuk
Caroline Amosun
Godfrey Benjamin