Vitalik: Ethereum itself must go through a "deprecation test," with the goal of achieving long-term self-sustainability

On January 12, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined in a new post that the Ethereum network must pass the **"Walkaway Test"** — meaning it can operate long-term, securely, and in a decentralized way even without ongoing core development or "supplier-side" maintenance. Buterin noted Ethereum’s mission is to serve as infrastructure for trust-minimized applications across finance, governance, and other fields. This requires apps to act more like **"tools" than "services"**: once deployed, they should work reliably long-term without failing if their dev team stops maintenance, is attacked, or shifts to value extraction. To hit this, the underlying protocol can’t rely on constant upgrades to stay available. He stressed Ethereum must reach a stage where *"even if it chooses protocol ossification, its core value proposition still holds."* This doesn’t mean halting upgrades — but ensuring future updates are **"icing on the cake" rather than essential for survival**. Buterin also laid out key goals Ethereum needs to achieve: - Full post-quantum capabilities to reach century-level cryptographic security as soon as possible - A sustainable scaling architecture (via ZK-EVM validation, PeerDAS data sampling, and limiting future upgrades to parameter adjustments where possible) - A state architecture that can run for decades (via partial statelessness and state expiry, enabling long-term high TPS) - A generalized account model (full account abstraction) to eliminate the protocol layer’s rigid ECDSA dependency - A secure, anti-DoS gas fee system balancing execution costs with ZK proof costs - A long-term sustainable PoS economic model for decentralization, supporting ETH as a trustless staking asset - A block-building mechanism resistant to centralization and strong censorship Ideally, Buterin said, most of these "hard engineering" milestones will be met in the next few years. Most innovation will then happen at the client optimization level, with changes reflected in the protocol via parameter tweaks. He emphasized avoiding trade-offs and *"doing the right thing the first time"* to maximize Ethereum’s long-term resilience (both technical and social). His closing line: *"Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei."*