Vitalik: The growth of the application layer is the period when a good social philosophy is most needed

2025-04-13 01:39:02
On April 13, Vitalik Buterin responded to the statement that "Ethereum's self-renewal requires generational/talent replacement. And the next generation needs to be rooted in Ethereum values (e.g. cypherpunk) ". Vitalik Buterin replied on Warpcast: "I actually think the growth of the application layer is the period when a good social philosophy is most needed. For example: let's say C++ was developed by a totalitarian racist fascist. Could it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is universal, there is not much room for bad social philosophy to destroy it (or for good social philosophy to improve it). Ethereum Layer-1 isn't exactly like that: people who don't believe in decentralization don't add light client side, FOCIL, or (well-formed) account abstractions; people who don't mind energy waste don't spend five years migrating to PoS... but anyway, the opcode for EVM is probably about the same. So maybe 50% of Ethereum is generic. And about 80% of applications are dedicated. What kind of application you build largely depends on what you think an Ethereum application (and Ethereum in general) will do for the world. So it becomes critical to have good ideas on the topic. "
In addition, Vitalik listed some of the applications that he believes are good applications such as Railgun, Farcaster, Polymarket, Signal, and bad ones such as Pump.fun, Terra/Luna, FTX. He believes that the difference in application functionality is due to developers having different beliefs about what they want to achieve.