The Ethereum co-founder outlined alternative stablecoin models that he says better align with DeFi’s original promise of risk decentralization. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin drew a clear boundary around what he considers “real” decentralized finance (DeFi), pushing back against yield-driven stablecoin strategies that he says fail to meaningfully transform risk. In a discussion on X, Buterin said that DeFi derives its value from changing how risk is allocated and managed, not simply from generating yield on centralized assets. Buterin’s comments come amid renewed scrutiny over DeFi’s dominant use cases, particularly in lending markets built around fiat-backed stablecoins like USDC (USDC). Read more
Base’s Jesse Pollak says L2s can’t be “Ethereum but cheaper” as builders respond to Vitalik Buterin’s call for specialization. Several layer-2 builders responded after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the original vision of L2s as the primary scaling engine “no longer makes sense,” calling for a shift toward specialization. In a Wednesday post, Buterin argued that many L2s have failed to fully inherit Ethereum’s security due to continued reliance on multisig bridges, while the base layer is increasingly capable of handling more throughput via gas-limit increases and future native rollups. The comments prompted responses from Ethereum layer 2s, who broadly agreed that rollups must evolve beyond being cheaper versions of Ethereum but diverged on whether scaling should remain central to their role. Read more
Vitalik Buterin warns that Ethereum’s push to add new features while preserving backward compatibility is inflating protocol complexity, calling for a “garbage collection” process. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is urging developers to confront the protocol bloat driven by an endless push to add new features while rarely removing old ones. In a Sunday post on X, Buterin argued that true trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend less on raw decentralization metrics and more on simplicity. “Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails,” he claimed Read more
Vitalik Buterin argues DeFi still lacks resilient decentralized stablecoins, highlighting benchmark risk, oracle design flaws and staking-driven incentives. A decentralized stablecoin aims to maintain a stable value while being issued and managed onchain, without relying on a single company to mint or redeem dollars. Stablecoins are already central to decentralized finance (DeFi). Because fiat money is not native to blockchains, stablecoins perform the day-to-day role of moving value between protocols and acting as collateral. Read more