After 10 years of coming of age, Vitalik explores the value of Ethereum’s existence

In previous years, Vitalik focused on discussing technology, but this year he shifted to exploring the "existential value" of Ethereum, reflecting that Ethereum is transitioning from the infrastructure stage to defining its influence on-chain.

Written by: Chloe, ChainCatcher

On Monday, the Ethereum Devconnect developer conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his keynote, Vitalik Buterin elevated the technical framework to discuss Ethereum's value within the entire crypto industry. Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Directors Tomasz Stanczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang focused on Ethereum's role during its transitional period, emphasizing reliable operation, community collaboration, and continuous innovation. Former core researcher and now Etherealize co-founder Danny Ryan highlighted Ethereum's key role in decentralization and institutions from an institutional application perspective.

Heading into the Fusaka Phase, Foundation: Achieving Seamless Upgrades

In his speech, Tomasz Stanczak reviewed Ethereum's development trajectory over the past decade. He pointed out that this period successfully established a solid foundation for consensus mechanisms, diversified clients, and privacy-related tools. However, he also warned that future challenges will lie in strengthening user privacy, maintaining decentralization, and enhancing personalized autonomy, requiring the broad inclusion of more contributors. Stanczak specifically illustrated the diverse participants in the Ethereum ecosystem from different fields, believing that these distributed contributions are key to ensuring network security and operation.

"Ethereum has achieved seamless operation during every upgrade, thanks to the efforts of these long-term contributors."

Hsiao-Wei Wang interpreted the foundation's management philosophy by describing "Ethereum as a ladder," using "step compounding" as a metaphor for ecosystem evolution—starting from research, to clients, to applications, and finally expanding to the community, with each step becoming a new rung for the next generation of builders.

She stated, "This year marks a new chapter for Ethereum. Since the Ethereum Foundation completed a new round of leadership transition, Tomasz and I have set our first responsibility as ensuring the stability and smoothness of this transition, because Ethereum is entering a new stage."

Regarding next month's Fusaka upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet, she explained at the conference that entering "Fusaka" requires focusing on three core capabilities: first, maintaining 100% block continuity during major upgrades; second, flexibility to allow space for diverse technological paths within the ecosystem; and third, stewardship governance, where the foundation cares about Ethereum but does not control it.

Wang emphasized that Ethereum's decade-long accumulation comes from countless trials and persistence. The network has maintained 100% availability during all major updates, which is a testament to this reliability and allows users to build without fear.

Additionally, Danny Ryan, as a former core researcher at the foundation, shared his experience transitioning from protocol development to institutional applications. Ryan criticized the inefficiency of traditional finance, such as severe market fragmentation, T+1 settlement for stocks, T+2 for bonds, which is far inferior to Ethereum's instant settlement. He described traditional institutional systems as outdated, layered with legal and paper-based processes.

However, Ryan was surprised by institutions' strong demand for decentralization. From their perspective, decentralization at the infrastructure layer, 100% uptime, security for trillion-level asset classes, mature application layers, and privacy are all essential needs. Ryan also emphasized that once the cognitive gap is bridged, institutions will realize the necessity of Ethereum.

Ethereum Is Repositioning: Vitalik Explores Its Existential Value in the Crypto Industry

At the developer conference, Vitalik's keynote has always used "Ethereum in 30 Minutes" as a framework, outlining Ethereum's current status and future in just 30 minutes. Comparing the content from Devcon SEA 2024 to Devconnect ARG 2025, Ethereum is repositioning itself, from technical blueprints to its value on the blockchain.

Last year, Vitalik mainly focused on the technical details of the "world computer," that is, how L1 serves as a trust anchor and how L2 acts as a complementary function like a GPU. "The reason Ethereum's world computer can unite is that every GPU is connected to the most trusted machine through various technologies such as optimistic proof systems, zero-knowledge proofs, SNARKs, STARKs, Jolt, Plonk, etc."

These systems actually ensure that L1 can trustlessly verify what happens inside L2, and L2 can trustlessly read what happens on L1. There is an important interaction between these two components. Vitalik stated, "Together, they form today's Ethereum."

Last year, he emphasized the technical practice of decentralization, such as the fault-tolerant design of multi-client architecture and the diversity of staking pools. He reviewed the journey from the 2013 white paper to the Merge transformation, and then to the initial achievements of the Surge phase, especially the significant reduction in fees and the improvement in transaction confirmation times (from minutes to milliseconds), highlighting Ethereum's breakthroughs in scalability.

In contrast, the 2025 speech is more of a principled reflection, beginning with FTX as a negative example. Vitalik criticized FTX as a centralized exchange lacking solvency, emphasizing its fundamental difference from Ethereum—how trust shifts from centralization to mechanisms verifiable by anyone. He extensively incorporated cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and introduced the concept of "cosmolocal" (local-global), stressing that Ethereum is a global network not designed to please any particular company or superpower, but to protect the freedom of people worldwide.

This year, the overall technical focus is more future-oriented, centering on the return of full nodes for ZK-EVM and quantum-resistant upgrades. Last year, Vitalik mentioned "wanting to SNARK-proof the entire chain," and this year he clearly announced that ZK-EVM has entered the Alpha stage. At the conference, Vitalik stated, "According to ethproofs.org, there are now provers capable of using dozens of consumer-grade GPUs to prove Ethereum blocks in real time."

It is evident that while Vitalik previously focused on technology, this year he has shifted to exploring Ethereum's "existential value," reflecting that Ethereum is moving from the infrastructure stage to defining its influence on-chain.

Perhaps Ethereum is completing its own coming-of-age ceremony, just as Vitalik said at Devconnect ARG: "Ethereum can become a banner, leading a freer, more open, and cooperative world supported by permissionless open technology and decentralized security."