Vitalik: Ethereum itself must go through a "deprecation test," with the goal of achieving long-term self-sustainability

BlockBeats News, January 12th: Ethereum founder Vitalik's latest post stated that the Ethereum network itself must pass the "Walkaway Test" — meaning that the network should be able to sustainably, securely, and decentralizely operate in the long term even without ongoing core development or "supplier-side" maintenance.

Vitalik stated that Ethereum's mission is to become the infrastructure for trust-minimized and minimally-trusted applications, whether in finance, governance, or other areas. This requires applications to be more like "tools" than "services": once deployed, they should be usable in the long term without becoming obsolete due to the developer ceasing maintenance, attacks, or turning to rent-seeking behavior. To achieve this, the underlying protocol itself cannot rely on continuous upgrades to maintain availability.

He emphasized that Ethereum must reach a stage where "even with a protocol freeze (ossify), its core value proposition still holds." This does not mean stopping upgrades, but ensuring that future upgrades are "icing on the cake" rather than a survival necessity.

Vitalik further listed key goals that Ethereum needs to achieve, including:

· Comprehensive quantum resistance, achieving century-level cryptographic security as soon as possible;
· Sustainable scalable architecture, achieving long-term scalability through ZK-EVM verification, PeerDAS data sampling, and minimizing future upgrades to parameter adjustments;
· Decades-long state architecture, ensuring long-term high TPS operation through partial statelessness and state expiry mechanisms;
· Generalized account model (full account abstraction), reducing reliance on ECDSA at the protocol layer;
· Secure, anti-DoS Gas pricing mechanism, balancing execution costs with ZK proof costs;
· Long-term maintenance of a decentralized PoS economic model, supporting ETH as a trustless staking asset;
· Decentralization resistance and strong censorship resistance block-building mechanism.

Vitalik stated that ideally, in the coming years, the aforementioned "hard engineering" should be systematically completed, with most innovation happening at the client optimization level and reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. He emphasized avoiding trade-offs and "getting things right the first time" to maximize Ethereum's long-term resilience at both the technical and social levels. "Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei."