In the fog of a market oscillating between institutional adoption and retail speculation, Vitalik Buterin’s latest post, “Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google,” lands not as a proposal, but as a declaration of an achieved reality. To interpret this piece as a mere suggestion for future focus is to miss its profound significance. It is the intellectual framework laid over a new equilibrium that has been slowly, methodically materializing for years, forged in the twin crucibles of a maturing market and a relentlessly evolving protocol.
This analysis will not re-litigate Buterin’s arguments at length; they are elegant and self-evident. Instead, we will treat his thesis as a lens through which to examine the powerful, tangible forces that make his declaration not just plausible, but inevitable. We will argue that Vitalik’s post is the capstone on a structure built by the market’s “flight to quality,” and made possible by a technical roadmap that is aggressively shaping Ethereum into the global settlement layer for both human and machine economies.
Concisely, Buterin posits that the long-standing tension between Ethereum’s revenue-generating applications (often speculative) and its value-aligned ones (often unprofitable) has been resolved. The synthesis is “Low-Risk DeFi” — a suite of foundational financial tools like payments, savings via fully-collateralized lending, and exchange. He analogizes this to Google’s economic model: just as Search and Ads provide the stable revenue that allows Google to pursue its more ambitious goals, Low-Risk DeFi can and should be the boringly profitable engine that funds Ethereum’s security and allows its experimental applications to flourish. This model works, he argues, because it provides irreplaceable value in a world of rising traditional finance risk, and it is culturally and technically congruent with the L1’s mission of decentralized security.
Before the market could embrace Low-Risk DeFi, the rails had to be laid. Buterin’s thesis is only viable today because the underlying technology has been deliberately engineered to support it. The Ethereum roadmap of 2025–2026 is a masterclass in strategic infrastructure development, focused on three pillars: enabling mass-market scale, perfecting the user experience, and expanding the very definition of “settlement.”
1. The Scalability Endgame: Pectra and Fusaka
The core of Buterin’s argument is that Low-Risk DeFi requires a robust L1 for security, but its user-facing activity must occur on Layer 2s to be economically viable. The 2025 hard fork schedule is a direct and aggressive execution of this vision.
2. The Settlement Layer Expands: From Crypto Assets to Bank Deposits
Perhaps the most potent validation of the thesis is the successful cross-bank payment test conducted on the Ethereum mainnet by UBS, PostFinance, and Sygnum Bank. Using deposit tokens — fully regulated, 1:1 backed digital representations of commercial bank money — they achieved compliant interbank settlement without traditional payment rails. This proves that Ethereum’s utility is not confined to its native assets. It is being actively tested as the neutral, programmable infrastructure for the tokenization of all forms of value, positioning it as a potential backbone for the future of the entire banking system.
3. The Next Frontier: Ethereum as the Settlement Layer for AI
Looking further ahead, the newly formed DAI (Decentralized AI) Team within the Ethereum Foundation signals the next logical evolution. Led by core developer Davide Crapis, its mission is to make Ethereum the premier platform for the burgeoning machine economy. Proposals like ERC-8004 (Trustless Agents) aim to create on-chain standards for AI agents to interact and transact. This radically expands the potential user base beyond humans, ensuring that the Low-Risk DeFi infrastructure being built today will serve as the financial bedrock for the autonomous economies of tomorrow.
With the technical rails in place, the market has responded. The character of demand in the current cycle is fundamentally different from the speculative frenzies of the past. Ethereum’s trajectory — recovering from post-bear market lows around ~$1,350 to over $4,400 by August 2025 — is underpinned by a structural “flight to quality” and a demand for sustainable, native yield.
1. The ETF Effect: Institutional Capital Seeks a Productive Asset
The initial spot Ether ETFs were just the beginning. The financial innovation of 2025, such as the Defiance Leveraged Long + Income Ethereum ETF (ETHI), demonstrates a deeper integration. This product, which uses complex option strategies to generate income, treats ETH not just as a commodity, but as a versatile, productive financial primitive. This deepens institutional demand beyond simple spot exposure and creates a feedback loop, requiring more on-chain liquidity and strengthening the core DeFi protocols.
2. The Primacy of Native Yield: Staking and Re-staking as the Gravity Well
The yield that matters in 2025 is the sustainable, protocol-native yield from staking ETH. This has become the “risk-free” rate of the crypto economy. Platforms like Lido and, more critically, re-staking protocols like EigenLayer, have become behemoths not by creating artificial incentives, but by providing more efficient access to this fundamental, low-risk yield. Billions of dollars in ETH are locked for a long-term, sustainable return, representing a structural demand for ETH as a savings and collateral asset.
3. Collateral Demand in a High-Rate Environment
ETH serves as the primary asset used to borrow stablecoins on platforms like Aave, Compound, and MakerDAO. Users are borrowing to gain liquidity without selling their core holding, a classic financial maneuver. The health of these overcollateralized lending markets — the very heart of Low-Risk DeFi — is a direct driver of demand for ETH. The more utility these platforms provide, the more ETH is required as collateral, creating a powerful, reflexive demand.
In summary, the 2025 bull market is quieter, more structural, and driven by a demand for the very things Buterin highlights: secure savings, reliable collateral, and institutional-grade access. The market itself has voted, and it has voted for Low-Risk DeFi.
Given this alignment of market demand and technical readiness, the “Stable Core” Buterin refers to comes into sharp focus. These are the entities that are both the cause and the effect of this maturation.
These are not the flashy, high-APY protocols of yesteryear. They are the emerging financial utilities of a new, more stable on-chain economy. They are the concrete manifestations of a system that has found its gravitational center.
Vitalik Buterin’s latest post is powerful not because it charts a new course, but because it provides the definitive map for a course the ship is already on. The convergence of institutional demand for a productive digital asset, a technical roadmap focused on creating a secure and scalable modular system for all forms of value, and the battle-hardening of a core set of financial protocols has created a new reality.
Low-Risk DeFi has become Ethereum’s economic engine out of strategic necessity and market evolution. It is the most logical and sustainable use case for a credibly neutral, globally accessible settlement layer. By articulating this so clearly, Buterin has not only given the Ethereum community a proud and honorable narrative but has also sent a clear signal to the wider world: the era of chaotic speculation is giving way to an era of profound, sustainable utility. The search for a viable economic model is over. The era of building a truly global financial system on top of it has just begun.
The Gravity of a System: Decoding Vitalik’s Thesis in an Era of Technical and Market Maturation was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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