Vitalik Buterin used the opening keynote at Hong Kong Web3 Festival to restate Ethereum’s priorities in blunt terms: security first, decentralization second, performance last. At a time when Layer 1 networks are competing on throughput and low fees, he said Ethereum is not trying to become the fastest chain.
Ethereum’s design order was stated without ambiguity
Speaking on April 20 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Buterin drew a sharp contrast with the current L1 race. Solana, Sui, Aptos, MegaETH and Monad have all leaned on high transaction capacity and performance claims to win users and developers. Ethereum, by comparison, is framing its base layer around durability and trust rather than raw speed.
Buterin’s argument was that performance can keep improving on top of a secure and decentralized foundation, but the reverse does not hold. A chain that trades away security for higher TPS is swapping out the hardest thing to restore for a metric that competitors can copy. He said Ethereum has already addressed the scalability ceiling at the technical level through data availability sampling (DAS) and ZK-EVM implementation, leaving long-term protocol resilience as the harder problem.
The walk-away test was presented as a real standard
The central framework in the speech was the “walk-away test,” which Buterin had previously outlined at EthCC Cannes in July 2025. In Hong Kong, he elevated it into a broader statement about Ethereum’s priorities. The test asks a simple question: if the development team disappeared tomorrow, would users still keep their assets and continue using the chain?
He paired that with the “insider attack test,” which asks whether user funds would remain safe even if the core team turned malicious. Taken together, the two tests push decentralization away from branding language and toward something measurable. For Buterin, multiple nodes alone are not enough if users still depend on an active team to keep the system trustworthy.
Refusing the TPS race is being framed as a deliberate choice
Buterin described the long-term goal as “ossify by choice,” meaning a protocol intentionally hardens into a form that can keep operating for decades without developer intervention. In his framing, that is not a temporary phase. It is the end state Ethereum should be moving toward.
That message stands apart from a market narrative that has rewarded faster and cheaper chains. For ETH holders, it reinforces a long-horizon thesis. For dApp teams, it suggests that chain selection may increasingly include a harder question than fees or speed: can the protocol survive if its main contributors step away? From the stage in Hong Kong, Buterin was not only speaking to Ethereum supporters. He was setting a benchmark for the broader L1 sector.