Ethereum
|3 min ReadVitalik recasts low-risk DeFi as Ethereum’s search engine
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
The turn: from speculation to steady power
The split inside Ethereum was real. Hype apps moved value. Purposeful apps moved hearts. Vitalik Buterin says we can have both. The path is low-risk DeFi. Think payments, savings, synthetic assets you can explain fast, fully collateralized lending, and clean asset swaps. He argues this can be to Ethereum what search is to Google. It funds the house so the culture can build.
Vitalik owned his past skepticism. DeFi looked like a game of trading speculative tokens and chasing 10 to 30 percent liquidity mining. At one point, Ethereum’s biggest single-day fees came from a messy BAYC otherdeeds land sale. It felt circular. People borrowed to lever ETH because ETH was going up, and ETH went up because people borrowed to lever ETH. That loop is not the future.
Google builds many things. Chromium, Pixel, AI work, the Go language. The revenue still comes from search and ads. Vitalik wants Ethereum to do better. Keep the mission. Let low-risk DeFi pay the bills without selling user data or values. Align doing good with doing well.
Why it matters now
Two forces shaped the early DeFi mess. Regulation punished clarity. Gary Gensler and others set a tone where the less useful your app looked, the safer you felt. Early tech risk was high. Bugs, oracle failures, unknowns. Only loud yields could overcome fear. That pulled in subsidies and speculation.
Time changed the baseline. Core protocols hardened. Attacks still hit, but they live on the edges where gamblers play. The center got stronger. Tail risk exists in banks too. With global instability rising, some people now see bigger risk in borders and bank rails than in transparent contracts. In the long run, automated execution and open auditing can beat opaque finance.
Low-risk DeFi fits Ethereum’s culture. It uses ETH as collateral and pays gas. It offers permissionless access to global assets for people and businesses that cannot get clean service from local channels. That is real utility. It does not push the L1 toward centralized, high-frequency tricks better suited to L2. It gives the ecosystem an income stream that is not embarrassing. If the biggest app were a political meme coin, the story would collapse. This story holds.
What builds next
Start simple. Dollars, major currencies, stocks, bonds. Hold, pay, hedge. As more life moves on-chain, add zero-knowledge identity so reputation works. Then low-collateral lending can include more people without blowing up risk. Let prediction markets mature. Use them to hedge real events when they move equities. Keep the dollar on-ramp, then expand. Currency baskets. CPI-based stable value. Personal tokens. Experiments like Circles push that edge.
Vitalik’s point is direct. Focus on low-risk DeFi now. Make it Ethereum’s search business. Fund the builders and the weird experiments around them. Keep values intact. The boring rails create the beautiful outcomes. That is how you power a $500 billion economy with purpose.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.