Vitalik Buterin Reveals Ethereum's Path to Building the "World Computer"

In recent commentary, Vitalik Buterin outlined Ethereum’s fundamental mission: transforming into the backbone infrastructure for a freer and more open internet. The vision hinges on creating a platform where decentralized applications can operate with inherent resistance to fraud, censorship, and external control—applications that remain functional even when their creators step away.

Technical Milestones Accelerating the Vision

Ethereum has made substantial progress on multiple fronts to realize this ambitious goal. The network expanded its gas limit and increased blob capacity throughout 2025, boosting transaction throughput significantly. Beyond capacity improvements, the development team achieved breakthrough performance gains in zkEVM technology, marking a critical step forward.

These advances represent more than raw speed improvements. They form the foundation of Ethereum’s dual-layer scaling strategy: zkEVM handles computational efficiency, while PeerDAS addresses data availability challenges at the consensus layer. Together, these innovations are reshaping how the network processes information and validates transactions.

The True Challenge: Achieving Scale Without Compromise

However, technical milestones alone cannot fulfill Ethereum’s promise. The real hurdle lies in synchronizing three simultaneous achievements: dramatically improving usability to handle mainstream adoption, maintaining genuine decentralization across both the blockchain and application ecosystems, and ensuring the infrastructure can support a true “world computer.”

Scalability means nothing if decentralization erodes. The network must enable millions of users to participate directly without relying on centralized intermediaries. Applications built on Ethereum must operate according to their code, immune to manipulation by any single entity or authority.

This balance—combining scale with decentralization while preserving security—remains Ethereum’s defining challenge as it progresses toward becoming the foundational layer for an internet designed around user autonomy rather than corporate gatekeeping.