At the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Vitalik Buterin, unsurprisingly, brought up the age-old question: What exactly should Ethereum become? For the past few years, the crypto industry has been accustomed to using performance metrics to discuss public chain competition—for example, whoever has higher TPS, faster confirmation speed, lower gas, etc., is more easily understood as the "next-generation infrastructure," etc. However, by 2026, whether it's Ethereum or new public chains, the challenges they face are no longer limited to internal issues like DeFi, NFTs, L2 scaling, and on-chain finance—AI Coding is rapidly absorbing everything, and progress in formal verification and zero-knowledge proofs is also evident. All of this means that the world facing public chains is undergoing a new transformation. So, do we still need a public infrastructure that everyone can verify, exit from, self-manage, and is not controlled by a single point of failure? So how exactly did Ethereum think about and prepare for this? I. What is Ethereum actually used for: Bulletin Board and Computation? "Ethereum is not meant to compete with high-frequency trading platforms, Ethereum is not meant to be the fastest chain, Ethereum aims to be a secure chain, a decentralized chain, a chain that will always be online, a chain you can always rely on," Vitalik explained in this speech, reinterpreting Ethereum's value with two very basic concepts: First, Ethereum is like a "public bulletin board"; second, Ethereum provides "computation" capabilities. These two simple concepts not only summarize the new positioning direction of Ethereum that we have been discussing recently, but also almost encapsulate the fundamental reason why Ethereum differs from ordinary internet services. The so-called public bulletin board is not an abstract metaphor; it means that applications can publish messages on Ethereum, and everyone can see the content and order of these messages—these messages can be transactions, hash values, encrypted data, or other information that needs to be publicly committed to, ordered, and verified. This is also the most fundamental difference between Ethereum and ordinary servers. Servers can be faster, cheaper, and more efficient, but they typically require users to trust that the operators will not tamper with records, refuse service, or shut down the system at critical moments; Ethereum aims to provide this capability. Computation, on the other hand, refers to Ethereum's ability to allow people to create shared digital objects controlled by code. These objects can be ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, ENS names, or even DAOs, on-chain organizations, financial protocols, or other more complex applications. Therefore, **by 2026, if we still understand Ethereum solely in terms of "performance," or compare new public chains only using TPS, gas costs, and confirmation speeds, we'll easily miss the real problems Ethereum needs to solve.** The focus of public chain scaling in the coming years will no longer be just "making the chain faster," but rather how to maintain verifiability, decentralization, and user self-sovereignty in more complex application scenarios. In other words, scaling isn't about transforming Ethereum into another centralized, high-performance system, but about enabling more applications to run without sacrificing the underlying trust assumptions.** This is also a key reason why Vitalik has reconsidered L2 since the beginning of this year. In short, he believes the market has historically viewed L2 as a scaling tool for Ethereum, migrating more transactions to L2 when the mainnet becomes expensive or congested. However, L2's historical mission is now complete, and it shouldn't just remain at the level of "transaction diversion," but rather become the forefront for Ethereum's expansion into more application scenarios. This judgment is particularly important for the Ethereum ecosystem today. In the past few years, the market has often simplified L2 to "cheaper Ethereum." But in Vitalik's framework, L2 is not a simple replacement layer, but a functional extension built around Ethereum's public infrastructure layer. L1 undertakes the most critical roles of commitment, settlement, data publication, and verification, while L2 and off-chain systems provide higher-frequency, more flexible, and more privacy-friendly execution capabilities around specific application scenarios. This is why Vitalik is unwilling to make "fastest" Ethereum's primary goal. Speed is certainly important, but if the cost of speed is that ordinary users cannot run nodes, verify states, or protect themselves when the system malfunctions, then the chain will gradually become a less efficient centralized service. For Ethereum, speed is merely a matter of user experience; security and decentralization are the reasons for its existence. II. In the AI Era, Ethereum's Value Will Be Amplified Again The most noteworthy point of this speech is that Vitalik did not treat AI merely as an external hot topic, but rather placed it within the technical context of Ethereum's future roadmap. For example, the Ethereum community has already begun to experiment with using AI to generate code proofs to demonstrate that the software version running Ethereum possesses the characteristics it should have. Two years ago, this would have been difficult, but the rapid development of AI is making software security verification much easier. This corresponds to a very real problem: as the assets, identities, organizations, and rules carried by the blockchain increase, the cost of code vulnerabilities also rises. If AI can help developers discover vulnerabilities, generate proofs, and assist in formal verification, then it will not only be an efficiency tool at the application layer but also become part of protocol security engineering. However, the deeper impact of AI on Ethereum is not only on the development side but also on the user side, especially changing the way ordinary users interact with digital systems. As we all know, human-computer interaction has undergone several changes over the past few decades. Initially, users interacted with computers through command lines, and only a few technically savvy individuals could truly use complex systems. Later, with the popularization of graphical interfaces and mobile apps, ordinary users could complete operations through buttons, pages, and menus. Now, AI is pushing interaction methods towards natural language. Users no longer need to understand every step of the operation; they only need to state their goal, and the system may automatically break down the path, call tools, and complete the execution. This change will have an even greater impact on Web3. Today, for a user to complete a cross-chain DeFi operation, they often need to choose a network, confirm the gas, authorize the contract, execute the swap, bridge assets, and then deposit into the protocol. Each step requires a signature, and each step is prone to errors. In the future, if AI agents become an important entry point for wallets and on-chain applications, users may only need to say, "Exchange some of my ETH for stablecoins and deposit them into the yield protocol according to a low-risk strategy." The remaining path planning, protocol selection, transaction simulation, and execution may all be handled by intelligent agents. This sounds like it would greatly lower the barrier to entry, but problems arise as well. When users no longer manually click through each step, and when an AI agent understands user intent, invokes contracts, and initiates transactions on their behalf, how can users confirm that it hasn't overstepped its authority? How can they know that the path it chooses isn't malicious? How can the capabilities of reversal, verification, and self-protection be preserved without sacrificing the user experience? This is precisely where Ethereum's value is being amplified again. AI can make operations more natural, but natural language itself doesn't bring trust. A smarter interface, if still backed by an unverifiable black box system, means that users have simply shifted from "trusting the platform" to "trusting the model." Ethereum, on the other hand, provides more like a trust infrastructure for the AI era. Extending this further, it also makes the role of wallets more important. Therefore, future wallets may no longer be just "signature tools" or "asset lists," but will gradually become the permission management layer between users and AI agents, on-chain applications, identity systems, and payment networks. This is because users need to set boundaries through their wallets, such as which operations can be executed automatically, which operations require secondary confirmation, which assets cannot be accessed, and which authorizations need to be checked and cleaned up regularly. Interestingly, just before Vitalik reinterpreted Ethereum from the perspective of the protocol roadmap, the Ethereum Foundation also released the EF Mandate, which can be considered a formal confirmation of this roadmap at the value level. This Mandate document states that the ultimate reason for Ethereum's existence is to protect users' self-sovereignty—users can independently control their own assets, identity, behavior, and choices, without relying on any centralized intermediaries. Regarding this point, the EF Mandate proposed an acronym "CROPS," an acronym for Censorship Resistance, Open Source, Privacy, and Security. In the foundation's statement, Ethereum must first maintain these four attributes; without them, Ethereum loses its reason for being used, built, and protected. Objectively speaking, the terms censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security are not new in the Web3 context; they have been repeatedly discussed since the very beginning of the crypto industry. However, the re-emphasis on them today carries a significantly different meaning. After all, early discussions of these values in the crypto industry were largely aimed at opposing centralized platforms and financial intermediaries. Now, these values face new challenges in the AI era. EF Mandate points out that **future centralization may not necessarily manifest as a platform forcibly controlling you; it could also manifest as you having no idea how the system (especially AI) makes decisions for you.** For example, when recommendation algorithms determine what you see, when AI assistants filter information for you, when smart agents execute transactions for you, and when identity, assets, and data are all encapsulated in interfaces, user sovereignty may be implicitly diluted with each "more convenient" experience. Therefore, **Ethereum's decentralization cannot be understood merely as the number of nodes, client diversity, or consensus mechanisms. It should be understood as a decentralized system where no single entity can easily change the rules, where users can verify the system state, developers can build freely, applications can be publicly audited, and assets and identity do not have to be completely entrusted to the platform.** Vitalik also emphasized that decentralization is not a feature of Ethereum, but rather the reason for its existence. Without decentralization, Ethereum would simply be a less efficient centralized service. This statement also explains why the Ethereum community consistently emphasizes that "everyone is a Builder." In the Web2 era, most users are merely consumers of the product. Platforms define rules, and users accept those rules; platforms change their interfaces, and users adapt to them; platforms shut down services, and users can only migrate or abandon them. However, in the Ethereum ecosystem, builders are not just a small group of core developers, but also wallet developers, DApp developers, node operators, researchers, educators, auditors, community contributors, and even every ordinary user who diligently manages their private keys, learns about on-chain security, and participates in governance discussions. This means that CROPS should not remain just a slogan; it needs to be implemented through concrete products and actions. Taking a wallet like imToken as an example, security is not just a prompt, but a complete experience encompassing mnemonic phrase management, risk alerts, DApp authorization management, transaction parsing, and phishing detection. In conclusion, returning to Vitalik's speech at the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, it superficially outlined the technology roadmap for the next five years: scaling, zkEVM, post-quantum security, formal verification, privacy, block building, account abstraction, zkVM, and so on. But at a deeper level, it was actually answering a value question: When the entire industry is pursuing faster and cheaper performance, what should Ethereum optimize for? The answer isn't to sacrifice performance or user experience, but rather to make on-chain applications more accessible to ordinary users, and this must serve self-sovereignty, security, verifiability, and fair participation, rather than trading these for short-term efficiency. The AI era will make this question even more acute. From this perspective, what's truly important for Ethereum in the next phase may not be whether it can become the fastest chain, but whether it can continue to be the most trustworthy, most verifiable, and least reliant on a single point of authority in public infrastructure.
Kikyo
Alex
Clement
Catherine
Joy