Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has urged the ecosystem to elevate oracle design and decentralization to the forefront of DeFi security concerns. In a post outlining how the Ethereum Foundation envisions DeFi, he framed decentralized finance as a central part of the value Ethereum provides and argued that its next phase must pair renewed innovation with a tougher stance on security and centralization risks. At press time, ETH traded at $1,912.
Buterin laid out two main angles. First, he said DeFi should return to inventing new primitives rather than iterating on the same product shapes, pointing to AMMs as a paradigm shift and urging developers to tackle underlying financial problems such as risk management and hedging future expenses with new mechanisms. Second, he framed the Foundation’s stance as selective: the goal is permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that minimizes centralized chokepoints and untrusted intermediaries while broadening access to risk management and wealth-building, as well as payments.
A key standard for that vision is operational resilience. He argued ecosystems should prefer protocols that pass the walkaway test—continual operation even if the founding team disappears or becomes hostile or compromised—because governance keys, upgrades, and off-chain dependencies often concentrate power even when a project markets itself as decentralized. The loudest alarm, he said, is on oracles—the link between on-chain logic and off-chain reality—and he warned that there are “a lot of skeletons in the closet” in this area that require careful scrutiny given their central role in lending, stablecoins, derivatives, and liquidations.
Buterin described DeFi as a complex toolchain that combines on-chain components with user-side and other off-chain elements, such as wallets and local agents. His roadmap emphasizes traditional security work—audits, standards, and wallet safeguards—alongside newer ideas like AI-assisted formal verification, user-side safeguards, privacy for payments and sophisticated positions, and open-source licensing and forkability. The Ethereum Foundation said it will actively collaborate with builders aligned around minimizing intermediaries and maximizing user control to make a version of DeFi that is not only Ethereum’s best option but a globally compelling way to manage funds for anyone who values those properties.
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