Vitalik Buterin outlines plans to ‘make Ethereum cypherpunk again’

The Ethereum (ETH) blockchain needs to revive the “cypherpunk” revolution envisioned for the network in its early days.

The co-founder of the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalization, Vitalik Buterin, published a new post on his blog entitled “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” that lists several ways to improve the network.

According to Buterin, Ethereum was originally intended to be a “public decentralized, shared hard drive” that could use peer-to-peer messaging and file storage. However, this vision began to fade in 2017 with the turn towards the “financialization” of the protocol, Buterin states.

Decentralization, open participation, resistance to censorship, and trustworthy neutrality are among the “cypherpunk” ideals Buterin wants to see in the future of Ethereum. He emphasized that rollups, zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and second-generation privacy solutions that have become more common on the network, tenets that support the core cypherpunk values.

Buterin also said he was impressed by some of the developments created to solve the industry’s biggest problems. He called decentralized exchanges (DEX) that provide improved tools for protection positive industry developments, mentioning Cowswap, Flashbots Protect, and MEV Blocker that helped limit “sandwich attacks” on Ethereum users.

“Ethereum is a dark forest where on-chain traders are constantly vulnerable to getting exploited […] This is also true in other ways: smart contracts regularly get hacked, users’ wallets regularly get hacked, centralized exchanges fail even more spectacularly, etc.”

Vitalik Buterin

Some X users were encouraged by Vitalik’s plans, especially regarding cryptocurrency payments for retail clients. One of the users noted that practically no attention has been paid to this issue.

Another user compared Vitalik’s statement with the election campaign of former U.S. President Donald Trump and proposed creating a new token with the ticker MEGA (Make Ethereum Great Again) in support of Ethereum.

Influencer Ignas from DeFi Research posted a photo of Buterin in front of a poster with Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron network, joking that the place of the most decentralized ecosystem has already been taken.

According to Buterin, “the early vision of ‘web3’ […] is a different way of thinking about what Ethereum is: […] a set of technologies that could together form the base layer of a more open internet stack.”