Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published a detailed manifesto titled "Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again" on his personal blog, urging the crypto community to recommit to the early ideals of decentralization, censorship resistance, and open-source collaboration. He reminisced about the Bitcoin Kiez in Berlin (2013), where dozens of shops accepted Bitcoin and served as community hubs, and the PorcFest libertarian gathering where Bitcoin was both a political statement and a daily payment tool.
The Original Vision and Its Drift
The term “Web3” was coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood to describe a stack of technologies — Ethereum for decentralized state, Whisper/Waku for messaging, and Swarm/IPFS for storage — forming an open internet foundation. However, around 2017, soaring transaction fees (peaking over $100) pushed the ecosystem toward speculative use cases. Degenerates dominated, while non-financial applications like ENS remained the only widely used non-financial dApp. Buterin explicitly blames high fees for this cultural shift.
2023: A Turning Point
By late 2023, key technologies have matured: rollups are live, second-generation privacy solutions (Railway, Nocturne) emerge, account abstraction gains traction, light clients become real, and zero-knowledge proofs are now developer-friendly and nearing consumer deployment. These advances create an opportunity to realign Ethereum’s trajectory with its original cypherpunk values.
Core Cypherpunk Values
Buterin lists seven principles: open global participation (permissionless), decentralization (surviving without core developers), censorship resistance, auditability, credible neutrality, building tools not empires, and cooperative mindset. He warns that projects deviating from these principles risk becoming inefficient Web2 clones.
“Only Sewers Can Produce Ninja Turtles”
Using the dark forest analogy (MEV exploits, hacks), Buterin argues that crypto’s high-stakes environment forces innovation in open security methods — ZK proofs, formal verification, hardware-based key security, and on-chain social graphs. This experimental ground lets these technologies mature and eventually benefit the broader internet.
Ethereum as Part of a Wider Tech Stack
The vision goes beyond Ethereum alone: whisper/Waku for messaging, Swarm/IPFS for storage, plus ZK proofs. The Zupass system (developed at Zuzalu) demonstrated ZK-based identity for event access and anonymous voting at Devconnect. Buterin imagines a seamless cypherpunk world: low-cost L2 payments, decentralized social media using ENS and CCIP, ZK-proof based voting with diverse credentials, and smart contract wallets that protect both funds and identity roots — a real alternative to centralized Web2 stacks.
Social Layer: Balancing Incentive and Community
Buterin acknowledges that pure on-chain incentives are insufficient; a social layer is necessary to enforce values. Ethereum’s community has pioneered public goods funding (Gitcoin Grants, Optimism RetroPGF), creating revenue streams for developers who lack traditional business models. He advocates a blend of incentive alignment and community norms — welcoming new entrants who initially seek profit but stay for the ideals. The goal is to achieve a unique equilibrium where Ethereum remains open, neutral, and censorship-resistant while fostering collaboration.