For years, a fundamental dissonance has echoed through the crypto ecosystem—a conflict between the noisy, high-stakes casino of meme coins and speculative DeFi, and the quieter, more profound mission to build a truly global, accessible financial system. The two have often seemed mutually exclusive, creating a reliance on unsustainable hype cycles. But in a foundational September 21 blog, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues that a bridge between revenue and purpose has finally emerged, charting a new, more sustainable direction for the entire industry: low-risk DeFi.
In Brief:
Buterin begins by diagnosing a core tension that has long defined the crypto space: the conflict between applications that generate immense revenue (often speculative NFTs and meme coins) and those that serve the ecosystem’s foundational mission.
Historically, he wrote, these two categories were “very disjoint,” creating “a lot of dissonance in the community.” His proposed new direction is to reframe the role of DeFi.
He draws an analogy to Google, whose entire empire is financially sustained by the reliable engine of search and advertising. Low-risk DeFi, he argues, can play this exact role for Ethereum.
By providing a stable, high-volume source of economic activity, it can “economically sustain the ecosystem” while freeing up more experimental applications to pursue their goals without the pressure of generating revenue.
A key part of Buterin’s thesis is that this new direction is only now becoming viable. He acknowledges that he was previously more “suspicious of DeFi” because it was dominated by unsustainable yield farming and speculation on tokens from events like a “badly designed digital monkey sale.”
He attributes this to the fact that the technology was simply too new and risky. But over time, he argues, a “stable core of applications is forming that is proving remarkably robust.”
For a growing number of people worldwide, he suggests, the tail risks of traditional finance, with its geopolitical instability, may now be greater than the maturing risks of established DeFi.
Ultimately, Buterin’s argument for this new direction is not just economic but philosophical. He contends that an ecosystem cannot be truly successful if its largest application is “something that is at least not actively unethical or not embarrassing.” Low-risk DeFi, he wrote, serves a “clearly valuable and honorable purpose.”
This vision provides the lighthouse, the clear destination on the other side of the fog. It is a future built not on the shifting sands of hype, but on the bedrock of real-world utility.
The path to this destination, however, is not a short one. It requires a collective shift in mindset, a move away from the instant gratification of speculation and toward the patient, methodical work of building and supporting lasting value.
The lighthouse is now visible. The question Buterin’s essay leaves for the entire ecosystem is not whether the destination is worthwhile, but whether its community has the discipline to navigate the long, foggy journey required to reach it.
