Beyond DeFi: Buterin Urges Ethereum to Build ‘Sanctuary Tech’ Against Digital Control
Vitalik Buterin has proposed positioning Ethereum as part of a larger “sanctuary technologies” ecosystem.
He described these as free and open-source tools that allow people to live, work, communicate, and collaborate in ways that are resilient to outside pressures.
Buterin’s Vision
The Ethereum co-founder outlined in a social media post that the goal is to create digital islands of stability, reduce the stakes of power struggles, and interdependence that cannot be weaponized. This is in response to concerns brought to him over the past year about growing government control and surveillance, wars, increasing corporate power, the decline in quality across major technology platforms, social media turning into a memetic battleground, and the rise of AI and how it interacts with these forces.
Buterin also shared that people feel like Ethereum has not meaningfully improved the lives of people facing these pressures in areas the community cares about, such as freedom, privacy, digital security, and community self-organization.
In response, he has proposed sanctuary technologies as a practical solution to the situation. Instead of trying to dominate existing systems, these tools would allow individuals and institutions to operate in ways that are not vulnerable to outside pressure. In this vision, Ethereum would contribute by providing a shared digital space without an owner, where people can coordinate and build lasting social and economic structures.
However, he clarified that this approach is not about remaking the world in the network’s image, nor is it going to force all finance onto blockchains or move all governance into decentralized structures.
Instead, Buterin described the aim as “de-totalization,” which means reducing the risk that any winner in a global power struggle gains total control over others while also lessening the chance that any loser faces total defeat.
Ethereum’s Limitations
The post also addressed the idea that Ethereum should focus only on finance. As much as Buterin acknowledged that financial freedom is important, he said it alone cannot solve broader issues like power, surveillance, and social fragmentation.
He added that the chain cannot fix the world on its own, and that trying to do so would require a level of centralized power that contradicts the principles of a decentralized community. Its strength lies in enabling persistent digital structures, which form the basis of his idea for sanctuary technologies.
The Ethereum co-founder gave examples of what he sees as liberating technologies, including Starlink, locally running open-weight large language models, Signal, and Community Notes.
He concluded by calling for clarity and coordination across the full technology stack, from wallets and applications to operating systems and hardware, while focusing on users who genuinely need sanctuary technologies and working with allies inside and outside the crypto sector.
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