worldcomputer

📅 January 1 | Ethereum Ecosystem
As the crypto market enters 2026 obsessed with ETFs, institutional flows, and new short-term narratives, Vitalik Buterin decided to look in the opposite direction. In his New Year’s message, the Ethereum co-founder made it clear that the network’s true challenge is not to win the next trend or capitalize on current hype, but to fulfill the original promise that gave meaning to its existence.

📖In his New Year's post on X, Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that 2025 was a year of substantial technical progress for Ethereum. The network improved its ability to process large volumes of activity, reduced bottlenecks, and made progress in making node operation more accessible, all without compromising its decentralized design. Taken together, these advancements bring Ethereum closer to something more ambitious than a simple blockchain: a resilient and open shared computing platform.
However, Vitalik Buterin was emphatic in warning that technical milestones are not the ultimate goal. He criticized the temptation to “win the next market goal,” whether through tokenized dollars, political memecoins, or strategies designed to inflate network usage as an economic signal.
For him, this approach distracts from Ethereum’s core mission and risks turning it into yet another infrastructure dependent on fragile incentives and dominant players.
Vitalik Buterin thus returned to an idea he has championed for years: Ethereum as a world computer, a neutral platform upon which applications can be built that operate without censorship, fraud, or centralized intermediaries.
Within this framework, he reintroduced the concept of the “walkaway test, a fundamental test that measures whether a system can continue functioning even after its original developers abandon the project. If an application cannot survive without its creators, he argues, then it is not truly decentralized.
Resilience is the second pillar of this vision. Vitalik Buterin maintained that users should not notice if critical infrastructure providers go down, are attacked, or disappear. Ethereum, in its ideal form, should behave like the basic tools of the pre-subscription digital era: always available, permissionless, and independent of any specific company. In its own words, Ethereum ($ETH ) is a rebellion against the closed platform model that dominates the internet today.
To achieve this, the network must fulfill two simultaneous objectives: be usable on a global scale and remain genuinely decentralized. This challenge lies not only with the core protocol but also with the software, clients, interfaces, and especially the applications built on top of it, many of which still rely on centralized services despite operating on a decentralized blockchain.

Topic Opinion:
Becoming the “world’s computer” is not just a slogan; it’s an extremely high bar that demands sacrificing convenience, shortcuts, and opportunistic narratives. If Ethereum manages to scale without losing decentralization, and if its applications learn to survive without central gatekeepers, it will have created something deeper than a financial asset: a foundation for the next era of the internet.
💬 Is Ethereum truly getting closer to its original mission?

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