Vitalik Buterin has been urging the Ethereum community in early 2026 to widen its ambition beyond DeFi and build what he calls “sanctuary technologies,” positioning Ethereum as infrastructure for digital resilience in a world of growing surveillance and centralized control. The thesis is that Ethereum shouldn’t only optimize for financial rails; it should also help people and communities keep autonomy when states or dominant corporations control identity, cloud, AI, and distribution channels.
The strategic implication is a reframing of what “success” looks like for the ecosystem. Buterin is effectively saying 2026 should be the year Ethereum reverses centralizing drift—especially the quiet dependence on centralized RPCs, hosted wallets, and corporate-controlled compute that undermines practical self-sovereignty. That is a big directional statement because it shifts priorities from “more DeFi throughput” to “more trustlessness in real usage.”
Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:
* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 3, 2026
What Buterin means by “sanctuary technologies”
He describes sanctuary technologies as open-source tools that let individuals and communities operate resiliently under pressure. He points to examples like Signal for private communication, Starlink for alternative connectivity, and open-weights language models for decentralized AI as inspirations. The common theme is that these tools reduce single points of failure and resist capture, and Buterin wants Ethereum to be the coordination and verification layer they can build on.
He ties the need for this shift to two forces. The first is expanding state surveillance, enabled by centralized digital identity and transaction monitoring. The second is concentrated corporate control over cloud infrastructure, app distribution, and datasets—especially in AI. In his framing, the internet becomes a “memetic warzone” when a small number of actors can dictate what runs, what is seen, and what is blocked.
Buterin’s philosophical anchor for the whole agenda is “de-totalization.” He wants systems where no single winner can exercise total control and no loser can suffer total defeat, which is a design goal aimed at reducing the blast radius of geopolitical or corporate dominance.
The two-directional roadmap: up to UX and down to hardware
Buterin sketches an expansion in two directions at once. Upward, he wants Ethereum to feel usable by normal people: better wallets, secure social recovery, account abstraction, and AI-assisted transaction management that hides complexity. This is the “make self-custody survivable” agenda—reducing the cognitive load that pushes users back to centralized platforms.
Downward, he wants a deeper infrastructure layer: privacy-focused operating systems, open-source hardware, dedicated signing devices, and local verification primitives. This is about making sovereignty tangible: if verification and key management live on devices people control, then autonomy is no longer a theory dependent on third-party cloud services.
The enabling technologies he points to include ZK-EVMs to reduce proof-generation costs and BAL—bridges and local verification—so ordinary devices can verify state without relying on centralized RPC providers like Infura or Alchemy. That’s the crux of the “reduce reliance on intermediaries” thesis: move trust back into local verification, not remote endpoints.
Why the ecosystem is split on the idea
The reaction has been mixed, which is predictable given the scope. Supporters see it as a return to Ethereum’s cypherpunk roots and a corrective to creeping centralization. Critics argue non-financial blockchain services still lack large-scale product-market fit and caution against spreading focus too broadly. Some voices emphasize staying anchored on financial primitives, while others highlight that few non-financial blockchain services have achieved truly mass adoption.
Operationally, the call still has a clear effect even if not everyone agrees with the framing. For developers and infrastructure providers, it pushes investment toward privacy, local verification, and hardware integration. For users and custodial services, it implies reducing dependence on centralized RPCs and third-party data layers, which changes how systems are built, monitored, and secured.
If ZK-EVM and BAL progress as outlined, the practical upside is meaningful: ordinary devices could take on more verification workload during 2026, shrinking the role of centralized intermediaries and improving real-world self-sovereignty. Whether the ecosystem can execute on that while still delivering mainstream-grade UX is the execution challenge that will define whether “sanctuary technologies” become a category—or remain a compelling manifesto.