Vitalik Buterin Urges Ethereum to Develop ‘Sanctuary Technology’ to Protect Digital Autonomy

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes the community should redesign the application layer while preserving core principles such as decentralization, openness and censorship resistance. He is exploring combinations of AI agents, zero-knowledge proofs, or ZK, and prediction markets that could reshape how wallets, DeFi, stable assets and oracles operate.

As of July 19, 2026, Buterin had outlined three directions: replacing traditional wallets with AI agents, using ZK to protect API calls and user behavior, and turning DeFi into a general-purpose futures market. He also envisioned using AI, prediction markets and large language models to create customized stable assets and strengthen decentralized oracles. The proposals remain conceptual, with no implementation date or investment amount disclosed.

Ethereum nodes must run both consensus-layer and execution-layer software to validate transactions and track the state of the Beacon Chain. Each program has its own configuration and data interfaces, increasing the maintenance burden. Vitalik Buterin argues that making nodes easier to operate would enable more ordinary users to verify the network themselves, reduce reliance on third-party providers such as Infura, and strengthen decentralization and censorship resistance.

Buterin recently proposed integrating the backend software that connects nodes to the Beacon Chain with Ethereum's execution layer in a unified code structure, simplifying installation, synchronization and maintenance. The idea remains a technical proposal, with no formal activation date, version number or funding amount announced. Ethereum core developers must still assess its specifications, compatibility and implementation timetable.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues that the network's central public value lies not in putting every problem onchain, but in serving as a decentralized digital bulletin board. In that role, it would allow different crypto systems to store, verify and share data over the long term, providing a reliable form of “shared memory” that does not depend on any single institution.

His latest proposal focuses on scaling technologies such as PeerDAS, which uses distributed data-availability sampling to increase network capacity and reduce the burden on each node to download complete datasets. Buterin also urged developers to choose onchain use cases carefully. The available reports did not specify a publication date, the scale of any capacity increase or any investment amount.