Vitalik Buterin on the two goals Ethereum must meet to become the ‘world computer’

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used a New Year’s message on Thursday to reflect on a year of major technical progress — and to argue that the network’s real test lies in fulfilling its original mission, not in chasing the latest crypto narratives.

In his New Year’s post on X, Buterin said Ethereum made meaningful progress in 2025 by becoming faster, more reliable and better able to handle growth without sacrificing its decentralized design. 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 operating.

Taken together, he said, those changes move Ethereum closer to becoming a new kind of shared computing platform rather than just another blockchain.

But Buterin was clear that technical milestones alone are not the end goal.

“Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals,” he wrote, cautioning against what he described as efforts to “win the next meta,” whether through tokenized dollars, political memecoins or attempts to artificially boost network usage for economic signaling.

Instead, Buterin returned to a long-standing vision of Ethereum as a “world computer” — a shared, neutral platform for applications that can operate without reliance on centralized intermediaries.

That vision, he writes, centers on applications designed to function without fraud, censorship or third-party control, even if their original developers disappear. Buterin pointed to the “walkaway test,” the idea that systems should continue running regardless of who maintains them, as a core 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 succeed, 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 depend 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 further. His message was less a road map for a single upgrade than a reminder of why recent technical work matters at all: to position Ethereum as durable infrastructure for finance, identity, governance and other foundational internet services.

Whether Ethereum can meet those ambitions will become clearer as the network’s next phase shifts from upgrades to real-world use, testing how its ideals hold up under scale.