Vitalik Buterin: “A blockchain can’t be evil”

Buterin walked onto the main stage in dark Willy Wonka–style sunglasses and a wrinkled Moo Deng T-shirt, put a giant portrait of Bankman-Fried up on the screen and opened his talk with one of SBF’s old quotes about “global good.” In Vitalik’s words, if you take Ethereum’s core ideas and flip them 180 degrees, you end up with FTX.

“Ethereum in one sentence is definitely not this,” he said, pointing at the slide with the former exchange boss.

The core of his comparison is simple. FTX was a centralized exchange that demanded blind trust from its users and offered almost no transparency about what was happening inside. In the end, clients found out that their funds had secretly been used to plug the losses of the trading firm Alameda Research. That story ended in collapse, years of litigation and a 25-year prison sentence for Bankman-Fried on charges of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.

Ethereum, Buterin stresses, is built on the opposite logic. The protocol is not a company but an open network that is effectively governed by a community of developers and users. Changes are introduced through upgrades that are discussed and tested in advance, and the core idea is that people shouldn’t have to take anyone’s word for it — they should be able to verify how the social contract is enforced in code.

That is where his slogan game comes in. In Buterin’s view, FTX lived in the “don’t be evil” paradigm, where everyone simply hopes a centralized player will behave itself. He describes decentralized systems differently: a well-designed blockchain “can’t be evil,” because there is no single point of control that can quietly rewrite the rules.

His Devconnect talk fits neatly into a broader story. As GNcrypto wrote earlier, Buterin’s dislike of centralized systems goes way back. As a teenager he watched a World of Warcraft update wipe out his character’s hard-earned abilities just because the game developer decided so. Since then he has consistently argued for systems where a user’s fate doesn’t depend on an admin’s whim.

In his blog, which GNcrypto summarized as a “fresh take” on Ethereum, Buterin suggests putting in order not only the base layer, but the entire landscape of L2 solutions. He compares the ecosystem to a city where every neighborhood still lives by the same basic rules. To explain that, he introduces the idea of “alignment” — projects staying in sync on core values.

In his interpretation, “public good” means open-source code, real, not nominal, signs of decentralization, hard stress tests against potential attacks and a focus on shared benefit instead of quick wins. Against that backdrop, the contrast between Ethereum and FTX looks like a natural continuation of a long-running argument.

For Buterin, the crypto infrastructure of the future should look less like a corporation with a charismatic leader (the role SBF tried to play) and more like a city where many independent actors with equal rights follow common rules. In that picture, the FTX story works as a very visible warning of what happens when the industry drifts away from its basic principles and builds a personality cult around a single company.