Compass Investments

– Buterin criticized the common approach of launching fresh EVM-compliant networks and connecting them to Efirium using optimistic breeches with a one-week withdrawal delay.

He draws a parallel between this practice and forks of early DeFi protocols like Compound for management – a scenario that once seemed profitable but has since stifled creativity.

If you create an EVM network without an optimistic bridge with Efirium, it will be even worse, Buterin noted, adding that the ecosystem doesn’t need multiple copy-and-paste EVM chains or additional tier-one networks.

In his opinion, the base tier of Etherium is already scaling and will provide much more EVM blockchain space in the future. While that space won’t be limitless – especially as AI-based applications will require lower latency and more bandwidth – Buterin believes that Etherium can accommodate a wide range of scenarios without spilling over into multiple L1s.

Instead of copying existing structures, Buterin urged developers to focus on systems that offer fundamentally new capabilities. He highlighted privacy-enhancing projects, application-focused runtime environments and ultra-low-latency systems as examples of innovations that significantly expand blockchain’s potential.

His remarks reflect a common concern that infrastructure development has become evolutionary rather than breakthrough, as teams optimize it for familiar and rapid deployment rather than long-term gains.

The second important aspect of Buterin’s post is the mismatch between how projects announce their connection to Efirium and their actual technical depth of integration.

He favors application chain architectures where the link to Efirium is primary, not secondary.

As an example, Buterin described a possible scheme for prediction markets where issuance, settlement and user accounts are based on Ethereum L1, while high-frequency trading takes place in a rollup or L2 that directly reads the state of L1.

In contrast, he criticized projects that are essentially independent networks but add minimal integration with Efirium for the sake of beauty-for example, deploying a basic bridge just to meet community expectations.

Buterin also touched on a different category of application chains designed for entities such as government registries or social media. These systems can publish cryptographic evidence, including verified Merkle STARK roots, on the blockchain to prove the transparency of algorithms, even if they are not trustless or trust-neutral in the spirit of Etherium.

Although such blockchains are not Efirium, Buterin believes they still promote a similar concept, allowing for verifiable systems, and can maintain synergies with Efirium.

Buterin boiled his message down to two tenets: create something that truly adds value, and ensure that the public positioning of the project adequately reflects its actual technical relationship with Efirium.