The Ethereum Foundation has made one thing clear this week: it is not backing just any DeFi project with a token and a dashboard.
In a series of posts outlining its direction, the Foundation said it wants to see decentralized finance thrive, but only if it lives up to core principles. As one member put it, DeFi is not just another niche inside crypto.
“DeFi isn’t a speculative bet on the future. It’s the inevitable evolution of finance,” adding that “financial autonomy is a right, not a privilege.”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin doubled down on that message.
“DeFi is a central part of the value that Ethereum provides,” Buterin wrote. “Financial empowerment is a central part of what it means to have agency and freedom in our current world.” He said that Ethereum does far more than finance, but stressed that permissionless access to savings, risk management and payments remains one of its strongest contributions.
Buterin was direct about where the line is drawn. The Foundation is not interested in supporting “on-chain finance” indiscriminately. Instead, it wants “permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that maximizes people’s control over their own assets, minimizes centralized chokepoints and trusted third parties.”
One concept he stressed is what he called the “walkaway test.” Protocols should keep functioning even if the founding team disappears or turns hostile.
Ethereum, he reminded readers, is permissionless. Anyone can deploy anything. But that does not mean the Foundation will stand behind projects that rely on unnecessary centralization or what he described as “dopamine-maximizing gambleslop.”
Buterin also called for a revival of the early DeFi mindset. “Ethereum’s early DeFi era was great because it dared to dream and innovate,” he said, pointing to breakthroughs like automated market makers.
Instead of simply building “a better stablecoin,” he requested developers to dig deeper into core problems such as risk management and hedging future expenses, and to design solutions that traditional finance cannot replicate.
Hence, Ethereum wants DeFi that could not exist without Ethereum. Not a copy of traditional finance with a blockchain label, but something structurally different.
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