Besides Self-Doubt, What Else Is Vitalik Thinking About?
Besides Self-Doubt, What Else Is Vitalik Thinking About?
In today’s Crypto market, it’s increasingly hard to tell where “technology” ends and where pure financial spectacle begins. Yet Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin remains one of the few public figures who still treats blockchain as an engineering discipline: something that should become more verifiable, more private, more censorship-resistant, and ultimately more useful than its token price chart.
What’s striking is not just what he argues, but how often he’s been arguing it. From 2025 onward—especially as Ethereum shipped major upgrades and the industry doubled down on short-term narratives—Vitalik’s public writing and long-form threads became noticeably denser and more wide-ranging. Reading across his posts, you can see a pattern: he is not simply “defending Ethereum.” He is stress-testing the assumptions that got Ethereum here, and asking what must change for Crypto to deserve its own promises.
Below is a structured map of the themes he keeps returning to—from scaling architecture to privacy, from identity to self-sovereign computing—and why they matter to builders and users in 2026.
1) Scaling is not a fee story. It’s a security guarantee story
For years, the easiest way to explain Ethereum scaling was “L2s make fees cheaper.” Vitalik’s 2025–2026 framing is sharper: scaling only matters insofar as it expands blockspace that inherits Ethereum’s credible neutrality—meaning valid transactions can be included without needing permission, and without relying on a small committee’s goodwill.
Two concrete technical anchors show up repeatedly:
- Ethereum L1 should still scale (carefully). In February 2025, Vitalik argued that even in an L2-heavy future, increasing L1 gas limits has long-term value for censorship resistance, cross-L2 asset movement, and “mass exits” when something breaks. That argument is laid out in his essay, “Reasons to have higher L1 gas limits even in an L2-heavy Ethereum” (link).
- “Rollup-centric” doesn’t automatically mean “trust-minimized.” By early February 2026, Vitalik publicly questioned whether the original “L2s as branded shards” vision still makes sense, given how slowly many L2s have progressed toward stronger decentralization guarantees (as summarized in reporting that quotes his thread) (link).
This isn’t a rejection of L2s; it’s a demand that the ecosystem stop treating “transactions happen somewhere off-chain” as equivalent to “Ethereum scaled.”
The practical user takeaway
In 2026, users increasingly need to ask: what am I trusting, exactly? Not just “is this an L2,” but how upgradeable is it, who can intervene, who can censor, and how do exits work?
A useful public baseline is the L2 maturity “Stages” framework maintained by L2BEAT (link), which tries to make “training wheels” more legible. Vitalik also contributed a quantitative perspective on when moving between stages is rational in “The math of when stage 1 and stage 2 make sense” (link).
2) Pectra (May 2025) made “wallets as software” a first-class roadmap item
Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade activated on May 7, 2025 (link; also summarized on ethereum.org: link). Among many changes, one headline-level shift matters for everyday users:
- EIP-7702 introduced a path toward EOAs gaining programmable behavior (often discussed as a stepping stone toward account abstraction-style UX) (link).
Why does Vitalik care so much about this category? Because if self-custody remains “memorize a seed phrase and never make a mistake,” mainstream usage will continue to drift toward custodians and “Web2.5” wallets—undermining the entire point of blockchain verification.
In other words: wallet UX is protocol UX now.
3) Simplify the protocol so it can survive the next decade of complexity
A founder who is “just marketing” doesn’t publish essays titled “Simplifying the L1.” Vitalik did—on May 3, 2025 (link).
Two messages stand out:
- Consensus should get simpler, not more baroque. He discusses directions like shorter finality and cleaner designs that reduce the number of moving parts.
- Execution complexity is real technical debt. He openly critiques how the EVM accumulated complexity, and floats more radical long-term ideas (including the possibility of new VMs) as a way to get meaningful gains rather than endless incrementalism.
This is the “self-doubt” people notice—but it’s not self-negation for its own sake. It’s a specific engineering instinct: if Ethereum becomes too complex to reason about, verification becomes performative—and then decentralization becomes theater.
4) Privacy is not optional; it’s the condition for freedom (and safety)
Vitalik’s privacy writing in 2025 is less “crypto privacy as a feature” and more “privacy as a civilizational default.”
A key reference is “Why I support privacy” (April 14, 2025) (link). The argument is broad, but the blockchain-specific implication is concrete:
- If every transaction, balance, interaction graph, and identity link is public-by-default, then financial autonomy collapses into permanent surveillance—by companies, governments, and anyone who can pay for analytics.
That lens also connects to wallet design: privacy isn’t only about mixers or “advanced cryptography.” It can start with simpler defaults—like minimizing address reuse and separating activity contexts—ideas he previously explored in “What I would love to see in a wallet” (link).
5) ZK identity: “ZK-wrapped” does not mean “risk-free”
As ZK tech matured, the industry narrative often became: “Just add ZK and identity becomes safe.” Vitalik pushed back.
In “Does digital ID have risks even if it’s ZK-wrapped?” (June 28, 2025) (link), he argues that even perfect privacy proofs do not eliminate:
- edge cases and exclusions,
- issuer failures and compromise,
- incentive attacks on “one-person-one-ID” systems,
- and governance problems that are not cryptographic in nature.
This matters for 2026 because onchain identity keeps expanding (airdrop gating, proof-of-personhood, reputation systems, compliant access layers). Vitalik’s message is: don’t confuse cryptographic privacy with overall social safety.
6) “Self-sovereign computing” is the bridge between Crypto and the real world
A subtle shift in 2026 is that Vitalik increasingly frames Ethereum not merely as a financial network, but as part of a broader push for user-controlled computing—reducing dependence on centralized intermediaries in messaging, documents, and software.
That theme surfaced in January 2026 discussions around “computing self-sovereignty,” as summarized by industry coverage referencing his long-form post (link). Whether or not every tool he mentions succeeds, the strategic point is consistent:
If Crypto cannot help users own keys, verify systems, and preserve privacy in daily life, it risks becoming a niche financial game—regardless of market cap.
What this means for users in 2026: a simple checklist
If you condense Vitalik’s 2025–2026 arc into user behavior, it looks like this:
- Prefer systems you can verify (or that are moving toward verifiability). Treat “trust me” admin controls as real risk, not a footnote. Use public frameworks like the L2BEAT Stages page to sanity-check assumptions (link).
- Assume privacy leakage is a default failure mode. Build habits that reduce linkability: separate accounts, avoid address reuse, and use wallets that make privacy-preserving flows easier.
- Adopt account-safety primitives, not just “better passwords.” Social recovery, transaction batching, and safer signing flows are not luxuries; they’re what makes self-custody survivable at scale—exactly the UX direction enabled by upgrades like Pectra (link) and proposals like EIP-7702 (link).
Where OneKey fits (when “self-sovereignty” stops being a slogan)
If the industry is indeed moving back toward self-verification and self-custody, then key security becomes the foundation, not an afterthought.
A hardware wallet like OneKey is designed around that premise: keeping private keys isolated from networked environments, supporting transparent verification practices (including open-source components), and providing a practical way for everyday users to participate in onchain systems without turning “one bad click” into total loss.
Vitalik’s recent emphasis on rebuilding self-sovereignty makes the logic simple: you can’t seriously talk about trust minimization while signing high-value transactions on a permanently online device.
