Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used a New Year’s message on Thursday to reflect on a year of significant technical advances and to argue that the network’s true test lies in fulfilling its original mission, not chasing the latest crypto narratives.
In his New Year’s post on He pointed to improvements that allow the network to process more activity, reduce bottlenecks and make it easier for people to run the software that keeps Ethereum operational.
Together, he said, those changes bring Ethereum closer to becoming a new type of shared computing platform rather than just another blockchain.
But Buterin made it clear that technical milestones alone are not the end goal.
“Ethereum needs to do more to achieve its own stated goals,” he wrote, warning against what he described as efforts to “win the next meta,” whether through tokenized dollars, political memecoins, or attempts to artificially boost use of the network for economic signaling.
Instead, Buterin returned to a long-held vision of Ethereum as a “world computer”: a neutral, shared platform for applications that can operate without relying on centralized intermediaries.
That vision, he believes, focuses on apps designed to work without fraud, censorship or third-party control, even if their original developers disappear. Buterin pointed to the “retirement test” — the idea that systems should continue to function regardless of who maintains them — as a critical benchmark. He also emphasized resilience, arguing that users should not notice if major infrastructure providers go offline or are compromised.
These properties, he suggested, once described everyday tools before the rise of subscription-based digital services that lock users into centralized platforms. “Ethereum is the rebellion against this,” Buterin wrote.
To be successful, he argued, Ethereum must meet two requirements simultaneously: it must be usable on a global scale and it must remain genuinely decentralized. That challenge applies not only to the blockchain itself, including the software people use to run nodes and interact with the network, but also to applications built on top of it, which often rely on centralized services despite using decentralized protocols.
Buterin acknowledged that progress is already underway and noted that powerful tools now exist to push the effort even further. His message was less a roadmap for a single update than a reminder of why recent technical work matters: positioning Ethereum as a durable infrastructure for finance, identity, governance, and other fundamental Internet services.
Whether Ethereum can deliver on those ambitions will become clearer as the network’s next phase moves from upgrades to real-world use, testing how its ideals hold up at scale.
