Vitalik: Low-risk DeFi is to Ethereum what search is to Google

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote that the Ethereum community has long struggled to balance economic sustainability with idealistic goals. Previously, high returns were primarily generated by NFTs, meme coins, or high-risk DeFi, while applications that truly aligned with Ethereum's vision lacked sufficient economic support. Now, as protocols mature and security improve, low-risk DeFi is becoming a core growth driver for Ethereum. Focusing on payments, savings, synthetic assets, and fully collateralized lending, it offers significant transaction fee contributions and inclusive value, providing transparent, stable, and permissionless financial services to users worldwide. This can be compared to "search for Google": while search and advertising underpin Google's business model, low-risk DeFi has the potential to provide long-term, robust economic support for Ethereum. Furthermore, it avoids speculation and cultural misalignment, aligning closely with Ethereum's decentralized ethos. In the future, low-risk DeFi will not only provide fair savings and payment channels for more people, but may also evolve into more innovative applications such as reputation-based mortgages, prediction market hedging tools, CPI-linked stablecoins, and new forms of value carriers. Its stability and scalability make it the most promising "pillar application" in the Ethereum ecosystem.