The Ethereum co-founder was bashed for saying the internet had lost its way around decentralization in 2025. However, he responded by daring critics to build and use tools that protect users’ self-sovereignty and freedom.
In a brief statement on X late Thursday, Vitalik Buterin said that 2026 should be the turning point for digital autonomy, arguing that freedom requires the world to make active choices towards “computing self-sovereignty,” beyond the blockchain.
One member of the Ethereum community accused him of running away from the community to niche tools to avoid being approached by other developers, and that he would eventually alienate Ethereum’s users.
Vitalik made changes to fuel his decentralization agenda
The Ether developer mentioned several changes he made last year, including an “almost full” switch to Fileverse for document sharing, and a move from Telegram to decentralized messaging applications Signal, Simplex, and Session.
This year, Buterin said he was shifting from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap and OrganicMaps, propounding that local mapping tools would effectively limit the number of entities that are tracking his physical location. He also replaced Gmail with ProtonMail, although he admitted it was best to use “proper encrypted messengers.”
Speaking on AI and local large language models, the Ethereum founder reckoned it was one area that still needed a lot of work. He noted that many capable local models exist, including phone-friendly versions, but lack cohesive interfaces.
“There isn’t a good “Google Translate equivalent” UI that plugs into local LLMs, transcription, audio input, search over personal docs. Comfyui is great, but we need Photoshop-style UX, and I’m sure that for each of those items, people will link me to various GitHub repos in the replies. But the whole problem is that there are various GitHub repos and not a one-stop shop,” he stated.
Even with its shortcomings, Buterin continued, local AI had advanced significantly over the past year. His ideal approach to solving the issues is to combine local processing with cryptographic techniques to limit data exposure when cloud resources are required.
Developer claims Buterin is running away from accountability
Responding to Buterin’s post, the pseudonymous founder of DeFi staking platform SharedStake ChimeraDefi.eth suggested the community should “bully him again” for pushing them to abandon services everyone uses for “esoteric tools.”
“He’s moving away from tools everyone uses to esoteric tools no one uses, so we’ll have to use Fileverse to read his work? Drastically lowering distribution? Why, bro?” they asked.
The developer also mocked Buterin’s switch from Telegram to Signal, and accused Ethereum leadership of poor communication compared with other blockchain figures who are actively communicating with users.
“Yes, all my drug dealers are on signal. All the bad small ones. The big Chinese ones aren’t… It’s ok, it’s not like you were very approachable or easy to talk to or helpful and communicative with the Ethereum community before anyway, so 0 times 0 is still zero. While other chains have leaders that try to be all of the above,” the staking platform engineer complained.
ChimeraDeFi.eth continued to say that Ethereum is successful because decentralization does not need individuals or founders to make decisions for the whole internet. Buterin responded by warning the community against using tools because of their popularity and not their principles.
“This is the mentality that created Liberty Reserve, which ultimately failed,” he pushed back, adding that resisting the need to chase mass-market tools that could be “slurping up all your data” is the “mentality that created Bitcoin.”
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