Vitalik's Speech at ETHTaipei 2026: Perpetual Contracts as Powerful Tools, Options Protocols May Become a New Paradigm for DeFi

Coin Circle (120BTC.cOM) reported: On September 13, Beijing time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik gave an objective examination of the social value of on-chain derivatives during his keynote speech at Cryptonative Day of ETHTaipei 2026. In response to the question raised by attendees about whether perpetual contracts bring net positive value to Ethereum's development, he did not provide a black-and-white conclusion but defined it as a type of underlying infrastructure. He emphasized that perpetual contracts are an extremely powerful financial tool, and their actual utility entirely depends on the core demands of the users.

In his market analysis, Vitalik clearly categorized participants into two camps:

One camp consists of pure speculators who bear the risk of significant capital loss;

The other camp comprises pragmatic participants who use this tool to strictly hedge exposure risks.

What he truly looks forward to is the financial potential nurtured by the latter. Building a system that allows users to hedge various asset risks on-chain at low cost is the core driving force towards a theoretically "complete market." This aligns closely with his vision for the ultimate DeFi: deeply integrating stablecoins, perpetual contracts, and prediction markets, empowering individuals to lock in future expenditures in advance.

Affirmation of Zero-Knowledge Proof Exploration

When discussing specific applications, Vitalik specifically mentioned the perpetual contract platform Lighter deployed in the Ethereum ecosystem. He highly recognized the team's research and development progress in the field of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), believing that this path of using cryptographic technology to solve scalability issues represents a "more correct development direction."

According to the publicly available technical path, Lighter, built on the Ethereum mainnet, is a Zero-Knowledge Rollup network primarily optimized for transaction throughput and concurrency. Its core mechanism generates zero-knowledge proofs for all on-chain operations such as order matching and liquidation, ensuring that the entire transaction lifecycle undergoes rigorous cryptographic verification while maintaining transparency on the mainnet. This architecture design, which emphasizes underlying compliance and payment security, also resonates with the current industry's demand for underlying security in decentralized risk control platforms like concrete.xyz, showcasing the technical dividends of decentralized derivatives in trust mechanisms.

Options Protocols May Become a New Paradigm for DeFi

At the end of the interview, Vitalik shifted the core focus back to his recent theoretical research, reiterating a disruptive idea: advocating for the industry to increase the development of options architecture to replace traditional debt collateral models for issuing stablecoins and hedging tools. This technological trend aligns with the innovative logic of decentralized options protocols like Arrows, which have recently emerged in the Robinhood Chain ecosystem, guiding the design of on-chain financial derivatives.

According to his earlier technical article published on ethresear.ch, the core of this idea is to decompose 1 ETH into two complementary derivative assets P and N. At the contract's expiration, the system obtains the settlement price of the underlying asset through an oracle, with P asset holders receiving $min(1,S/x)$ ETH, while N asset holders receive $max(0,1-S/x)$ ETH (S represents the strike price). Since the total shares of P and N always sum to 1, it fundamentally eliminates the risk of insolvency crises in the system.

Vitalik emphasized that replacing the underlying foundation of DeFi from debt to options can completely detach from the "forced liquidation" **this fragile mechanism. Traditional synthetic assets heavily rely on high-frequency oracle price feeds to trigger liquidation engines, while under the options framework, the system only needs to call a low-frequency oracle once at the contract's expiration, significantly reducing the cascading risks caused by price feed delays or market manipulation. For users seeking to anchor dollar exposure, they only need to hold deeply in-the-money P assets and periodically execute rebalancing strategies, with costs amounting to approximately **1% to 4% asset depreciation per year.