Ethereum, Milady, And The Return Of The “World Computer” Vision
As 2026 began, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used a symbolic but pointed gesture to reset the conversation around the network’s purpose. He restored a Milady-style avatar as his X profile picture and accompanied it with a manifesto-like post titled “Ethereum Must Deliver The World Computer,” signaling a return to Ethereum’s earliest and most ambitious narrative: to become the programmable backbone of a freer, open internet.
Rather than simply celebrating past achievements, Buterin’s message read like both a status report and a wake-up call. He highlighted 2025 as a year of tangible technical progress: higher gas limits on the mainnet, an increased blob count to support data availability, significant improvements in node software quality, and major performance gains in zkEVM implementations. Together with PeerDAS, he argued, these advancements represent one of Ethereum’s biggest steps toward becoming “a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain.”
Yet the post was deliberately not a victory lap. Buterin’s central point was that Ethereum still has not fully lived up to its foundational mission. Technical milestones, he implied, only matter if they serve a clear long-term purpose—one that is being obscured by short-lived trends and opportunistic narratives.
Against “The Next Meta”: Re-centering Ethereum’s Mission
Throughout his message, Buterin drew a sharp distinction between Ethereum’s long-term goals and the hype cycles that dominate crypto discourse. He criticized the impulse to “win the next meta” at all costs, whether that meta is tokenized dollars, political memecoins, or new forms of speculative activity designed mainly to fill blockspace and reinforce memes like “ultrasound money.”
In his view, this mentality risks turning Ethereum into a platform optimized for whatever generates the most attention and fees, rather than a robust, neutral infrastructure layer. The mission, he reiterated, is not to maximize speculation but to “build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.”
That framing is both aspirational and corrective. It suggests that while experimentation and narratives are inevitable, they must remain subordinate to Ethereum’s original reason for existing: to host applications that are meaningfully different from what is possible in traditional, centralized systems.
What “World Computer” Actually Means In Practice
Buterin went beyond slogans and attempted to anchor the “world computer” idea in concrete properties. In his view, applications running on Ethereum should be:
– Resistant to quiet manipulation or shutdown
– Able to function even if the original developers walk away
– Usable despite failures or attacks on conventional infrastructure providers
He described Ethereum as a platform for building “applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference” and that pass what he called the “walkaway test”: they continue to operate even if their creators disappear. In a truly robust Ethereum-based ecosystem, a user should barely notice if a service like Cloudflare goes offline—or even if something as extreme as a full compromise by a hostile state actor occurred.
This is an ambitious bar. It implies a world in which critical digital services do not depend on any single web host, company, or jurisdiction, and where users can rely on code, cryptography, and decentralized consensus rather than institutional goodwill.
Beyond Finance: Identity, Governance, And Civil Infrastructure
Buterin also stressed that this vision is not limited to finance or trading. While DeFi has been Ethereum’s most visible success, he explicitly extended the world computer mandate to areas such as digital identity, governance, and “whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.”
This broader framing places Ethereum as a potential backbone for:
– Tamper-resistant identity systems that do not depend on a single corporation or government
– Governance frameworks for communities, organizations, and even public services
– Long-lived registries and records that can survive institutional churn or political pressure
He underscored privacy as a core requirement, not an optional add-on. In a world computer context, privacy is not just about hiding balances—it is about enabling people to participate in digital life, governance, and commerce without pervasive tracking or profiling.
No Trade-Off Excuse: Usability And Decentralization Together
A recurring theme in Buterin’s thinking is his refusal to accept a simple trade-off between usability and decentralization. Many projects in the broader crypto ecosystem implicitly choose one at the expense of the other: either they prioritize user experience and scalability while centralizing infrastructure, or they cling to purity at the cost of mass adoption.
Buterin rejected this dichotomy. To truly function as a world computer, he wrote, Ethereum must be both “usable, and usable at scale” and “actually decentralized.” That requirement applies not only to the base layer protocol, but also to:
– Node software and clients
– Wallets and interfaces
– RPC and infrastructure providers
– The design of dapps themselves
In other words, decentralization cannot stop at the consensus protocol while everything else consolidates into a handful of companies. Nor can Ethereum hide behind the excuse that “real” decentralization is impossible at scale. The challenge, he implied, is precisely to prove that a global, user-friendly computing platform can remain credibly neutral and resistant to control.
Pressure On Every Layer Of The Stack
Buterin’s framing puts pressure on multiple groups simultaneously. For core protocol developers, it reinforces the urgency of:
– Maintaining and expanding client diversity
– Continuing to improve performance and resilience
– Reducing the hardware and bandwidth requirements for running nodes
For infrastructure providers, it is a call to avoid ending up as gatekeepers of access to Ethereum, even unintentionally. Reliance on a small number of RPC endpoints, hosting platforms, and analytics tools can turn a decentralized protocol into a practically centralized experience.
For dapp builders, the message is that architecture matters. Smart contracts, upgrade patterns, admin keys, and off-chain dependencies all influence whether an application can survive the “walkaway test” and endure without trusted intermediaries. If a dapp goes dark the moment its web2 backend fails, it is not living up to the world computer promise, regardless of how advanced its tokenomics might be.
The Role Of zkEVMs, PeerDAS, And Scaling
The manifesto also implicitly positions recent technical work—particularly zkEVMs and PeerDAS—as foundations for this next phase. zkEVMs aim to provide high-throughput, low-cost execution environments that are still compatible with Ethereum’s tooling and security assumptions, while PeerDAS tackles data availability, a key bottleneck for rollups and scalability.
These tools are not just about cheaper transactions or more throughput for its own sake. In the context of Buterin’s post, they are enabling technologies for a world computer that is:
– Affordable enough for everyday use across the globe
– Powerful enough to handle complex, real-world applications
– Secure enough to serve as critical infrastructure
If these scaling solutions mature and are properly integrated, Ethereum could host applications that feel as responsive and cheap as web2 services while retaining the integrity and openness of a public blockchain.
Privacy As An Infrastructure Requirement
By insisting on privacy as a “core property,” Buterin sharpened a point that often gets sidelined. Many systems today treat privacy as something niche, reserved for advanced users or special cases. The world computer perspective flips that: if Ethereum is to underlie identity, governance, and social infrastructure, it cannot rely on permanent public exposure of every interaction.
This suggests a future where:
– Zero-knowledge proofs and encrypted state are deeply integrated into mainstream applications
– Users can verify correctness and integrity without revealing sensitive details
– Regulatory debates evolve from crude transparency vs. secrecy into more nuanced discussions about verifiable yet private systems
Such a shift would move Ethereum beyond the simple public ledger model into a more sophisticated computing environment where users can trust outcomes while retaining meaningful control over their data.
Social Signaling: Why The Milady Avatar Matters
The return of the Milady-style avatar may appear cosmetic, but in crypto culture these symbols carry weight. Milady has become associated with a certain strain of internet-native, chaotic, and unapologetically on-chain culture. By choosing that imagery while posting a serious and technically grounded manifesto, Buterin was blending two worlds:
– The memetic, grassroots, often irreverent crypto culture
– The sober, research-driven effort to build robust global infrastructure
The underlying message is that Ethereum’s future is not about abandoning culture, memes, or experimentation. Instead, it is about ensuring that all of that energy is anchored to a coherent mission rather than drifting from narrative to narrative purely in search of attention.
The Market Context: Price vs. Purpose
At the time of his post, ETH was trading around 3,030 dollars—respectable, but not at speculative-mania levels. Buterin’s tone deliberately downplayed price, emphasizing that Ethereum’s success should be measured by the resilience and usefulness of what runs on it, not just market capitalization.
This is a subtle but important recalibration. While price inevitably influences sentiment and funding, the world computer idea ties Ethereum’s value to its role as infrastructure: if the network becomes indispensable to critical digital systems—financial, social, and civic—its relevance and, over time, its economic value will be rooted in utility, not just market cycles.
What This Means For Developers, Users, And The Ecosystem
For developers, Buterin’s manifesto can be read as an invitation and a challenge:
– Design applications that can survive without you.
– Minimize reliance on centralized components.
– Treat privacy, resilience, and neutrality as first-class goals.
For users, it is a reminder to look past short-lived trends. Choosing tools, wallets, and platforms that embody these principles—self-custody, open-source software, decentralized access—helps nudge the ecosystem in the direction of the world computer, rather than back toward familiar forms of platform dependence.
For the broader ecosystem—validators, infrastructure companies, researchers—the post is a call to align incentives with the long-term health of the network. Convenience and profitability in the short term should not come at the expense of concentration, fragility, or silent forms of centralization.
From Tools To Transformation
Buterin concluded on a note of determination rather than detailed roadmaps. He acknowledged that many of the necessary building blocks already exist, but insisted they must be pushed further and applied more deliberately. Ethereum, in his telling, has “powerful tools” on its side; the unfinished work lies in integrating them into a coherent, user-ready, and genuinely decentralized computing platform.
If that integration succeeds, Ethereum could evolve from being perceived mainly as a financial and speculative network into something closer to its original promise: a world computer—a neutral, programmable substrate for the next generation of internet-native institutions, communities, and applications.
The renewed Milady avatar, then, is more than a nostalgic callback. It is a visual reminder that Ethereum’s most compelling future lies not in chasing the latest meta, but in finishing the long, difficult job of building infrastructure that can outlast trends, companies, and even its original developers.