Vitalik's New Year Address: Ethereum will continue to uphold the core mission of "open internet infrastructure" and build decentralized applications

On January 1st, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a New Year message on social media, stating: “Ethereum will have a fruitful 2025: gas limit increases, blob counts rise, node software quality improves, zkEVM performance milestones achieved. With the advancement of zkEVM and PeerDAS, Ethereum has taken its biggest step toward becoming a new and more powerful blockchain form. But Ethereum still faces challenges: more effort is needed to achieve its set goals. This is not about chasing the ‘next narrative hype’—whether it’s tokenized dollars or political meme coins, nor about forcibly convincing people to fill block space to reshape ETH’s deflationary properties, but about fulfilling its core mission—building the world computer as the fundamental infrastructure of a free and open internet. Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum is building decentralized applications. These applications can operate without fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. They pass the ‘exit test’: even if the original developers disappear, the system continues to operate. As users, they might not even notice if Cloudflare goes down; their stability surpasses corporate success or failure, ideological shifts, and political changes. At the same time, they protect users’ privacy. All of this will support the financial system and extend to identity verification, governance mechanisms, and other infrastructure necessary for human civilization. To realize this vision, two major conditions must be met: (1) scalable usability; (2) true decentralization. This requires simultaneous progress on two levels: the underlying blockchain—software that runs and accesses the blockchain; and the application layer, all of which need improvement—they are already improving, but must accelerate evolution. Fortunately, Ethereum developers hold powerful tools, and now it’s time to fully utilize them. All of this will be achieved.”