Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has issued a powerful reaffirmation of the network’s original, foundational vision, arguing that the long-awaited promise of a truly decentralized web is no longer a distant dream but an emerging reality.
In a comprehensive post on X, Buterin detailed how a maturing technology stack—comprising Ethereum, Waku, and IPFS—is now capable of supporting the permissionless applications first envisioned over a decade ago.
Buterin took the crypto community back to 2014, a time when the roadmap for Web3 was built on three core pillars: Ethereum as the “world computer” for shared state, the Whisper protocol for off-chain messaging, and Swarm for decentralized file storage. He acknowledged that this core vision had at times become “obscured” by the industry’s shifting “metas” and “narratives,” but insisted it never died and is now entering a new phase of fruition.
“The core technologies behind it are only growing stronger,” Buterin stated, pointing to a series of landmark advancements.
He highlighted Ethereum’s successful transition to proof-of-stake and its aggressive scaling roadmap as foundational to this progress.
“Ethereum is now scaling, it is now cheap, and it is on track to get more scalable and cheaper thanks to the power of ZK-EVMs,” he wrote, adding that the combination of ZK-EVMs and PeerDAS is effectively realizing the long-held “sharding” vision.
The original Whisper protocol has since evolved into Waku, a more robust and performant decentralized messaging network that Buterin noted is already powering applications like Railway.xyz and Status. On the storage front, he praised IPFS for becoming “highly performant and robust” for decentralized file retrieval, though he noted that the challenge of persistent long-term storage remains an area for innovation.
As a tangible example of this vision in action, Buterin championed Fileverse, a decentralized alternative to Google Docs and Sheets. He lauded its architecture for using Ethereum and Gnosis Chain for their strengths—names, accounts, and permissioning—while relying on decentralized messaging and storage for the documents themselves. Most importantly, he stressed that Fileverse passes the “walkaway test,” ensuring users retain access to their data even if the service itself shuts down.
Buterin contrasted this resilient, user-owned model with what he scathingly termed “corposlop”—modern products that require subscriptions, corporate accounts, and can be rendered inoperable by political whims. He cited recent real-world examples, including a dishwasher requiring a subscription for full features and smart devices with excessive surveillance, to underscore the urgency of the decentralized alternative.
“In 2014, decentralized applications were toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in web2. In 2026, fileverse is now usable enough that I regularly write documents in it,” Buterin observed, highlighting the dramatic leap in user experience.
Buterin ended with a rallying cry to developers, builders, and creators to return to Ethereum’s roots—and double down on building applications that are open, censorship-resistant, and truly user-owned.
“The decentralized renaissance is coming, and you can be part of making it happen.”