Vitalik's New Year Message: Ethereum Will Continue to Uphold Its Core Mission of Being the "Open Internet Core Infrastructure" to Build Decentralized Applications

On January 1st, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a New Year’s message on social media: “Ethereum made significant progress in 2025: higher gas limits, more blobs, improved node software quality, and a milestone breakthrough in zkEVM performance. With advancements in zkEVM and PeerDAS, Ethereum has taken the biggest step toward becoming a new, more powerful form of blockchain. However, Ethereum still faces challenges: more work is needed to hit its established goals. This isn’t about chasing the “next narrative hype”—whether it’s dollar tokenization or political meme coins—nor is it about convincing people to fill block space to reshape ETH’s deflationary properties. It’s about living up to its core mission: building a world computer as the core infrastructure for a free, open internet. Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum is building decentralized applications (dApps). These apps can run without fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. They pass “off-chain tests”: even if original developers disappear, the system keeps running. As a user, you might not even notice if Cloudflare goes down—their stability transcends company booms and busts, ideological shifts, and changes in political parties. At the same time, they protect user privacy. All this will support the financial system and extend to identity verification, governance mechanisms, and other infrastructure human civilization needs. To achieve this vision, two key conditions must be met: (1) scalable availability and (2) true decentralization. This needs to advance at two levels simultaneously: the blockchain base layer—including software running and accessing the blockchain—and the application layer. Both are in urgent need of improvement; they’re already getting better, but they need to evolve faster. Fortunately, Ethereum developers have powerful tools at their disposal. Now, they just need to fully leverage them—and this will definitely happen.”