Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is making a case that the most valuable upgrade for the world’s second-largest blockchain may be learning how to stop upgrading.
Last November, Buterin reportedly argued that locking down parts of the base layer can reduce bugs and lower the odds of “surprises” for a network that secures hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of value.
This month, he sharpened the same message with a new framing: Ethereum, he argued, should be able to keep running safely and usefully even if the people who maintain it disappear.
That standard, which he has described as a “walkaway test,” is meant to make the base protocol behave more like the trust-minimized tools Ethereum was built to host.
Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools – the hammer that once you buy it’s yours – than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive).
That pitch lands as a cultural pivot for a network that has spent much of its history selling change as a feature. Ethereum’s roadmap has been defined by major, coordinated upgrades, from its early recovery after the 2016 DAO crisis to the move to proof-of-stake in 2022.
Buterin’s argument is that maturity looks less like constant reinvention and more like an architecture that can survive without continuous structural overhauls.
Borrowing Bitcoin’s best moat
Buterin’s push is easiest to understand as a form of “Bitcoin-ification,” not in the sense of copying Bitcoin’s feature set. Instead, it borrows what has become BTC’s strongest institutional moat: credibility built on low rule-change risk.
Bitcoin’s base layer has long been treated as a conservative settlement system where major changes are politically expensive and rare.
That slow-change social contract has become part of its product: fewer surprises, fewer governance shocks, and a simpler story for custodians, risk committees, and long-horizon holders.
Ethereum’s problem is that it can’t get there by cultural minimalism alone.
The chain is designed to host general-purpose applications, which creates different long-term failure modes. This is because state growth can price out ordinary node operators, transaction markets can be gamed, and complex block-building dynamics can concentrate power.
Buterin’s response to this is to try to “engineer” the conditions that would make stability defensible: do the hard work now, then reach a point where Ethereum could stop making structural changes without losing its core value proposition.
That is what he and some observers have called making Ethereum “ossifiable,” a network that can freeze without breaking.
Ossification isn’t paralysis
Buterin argued that ossification need not be an all-or-nothing proposition.
“Ethereum must get to a place where we can ossify if we want to. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum’s value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already.”
This means different layers of the network can slow down at different speeds. For context, the consensus layer could become more locked down while the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which runs smart contracts, stays more flexible, or vice versa.
Essentially, the practical goal is to redirect innovation away from the base protocol and into the surrounding ecosystem: layer-2 rollups, wallets, privacy tools, and user-facing apps.
Those systems can iterate faster, fail in more contained ways, and compete on design, while Ethereum’s base layer increasingly behaves like a stable settlement and security substrate.
Notably, that “move fast at the edges, slow down at the core” model is already visible in Ethereum’s scaling strategy. A significant share of the blockchain’s activity sits on layer-2 networks that batch transactions and post proofs or data back to Ethereum.
For Buterin, that division of labor is not a temporary hack but the long-run shape of the system: rollups innovate; the base chain becomes boring on purpose.
Still, Buterin’s call for stability also reads like a critique of the broader crypto culture, including parts of Ethereum, that he said rewards fast followers and favors copying what already works.
In that sense, “ossification” is not only a technical preference. It is also an attempt to protect Ethereum’s legitimacy: if the base layer is perceived as a moving target, the chain begins to look less like neutral infrastructure and more like a vendor-managed product.
Ethereum’s checklist for credibility
Considering this, the walkaway framing turns Buterin’s ideas into a checklist of conditions that would remove the biggest reasons Ethereum might later be forced into high-stakes upgrades.
On Jan. 12, Buterin highlighted milestones that include quantum resistance and a scalability architecture that can expand over time through technologies such as zero-knowledge validation and data availability sampling.
He also pointed to the need for a long-term state design that avoids unbounded growth, plus a more general account model that can move beyond enshrined signature schemes and gas pricing resilient to denial-of-service attacks.
He added that Ethereum needs proof-of-stake economics that can remain decentralized and a block-building model that preserves censorship resistance even under future political and economic pressures.
Under that view, the goal is not to end change, but to change the type of change the network undergoes.
Instead of frequent “BPO-style” forks that fundamentally alter the chain’s structure, future evolution would increasingly come from client optimizations and parameter adjustments. Those changes would tune throughput or efficiency without rewriting the social contract.
So, if Bitcoin’s rule-change risk is minimized primarily by governance culture, Ethereum is attempting to minimize it by closing off entire classes of future emergencies. It is a bet that a more engineered stability can, over time, become as underwritable as Bitcoin’s social stability.